December 15, 2013
December 16, 2013
We woke up to another amazing day of snow, only this time we opened the curtains and the snow was piling up to the window. It snowed all night and later, we discovered that it was shin deep! We still couldn’t go out anywhere so we just had another chilled day which I think we all still needed from our hectic schedule. We had the chance to finally sleep in a bit, so wake up was at nine and prayers at nine-thirty. We were once again overwhelmed with an amazing breakfast and then it was time to start the day.
After breakfast we had a bit of free time, then made our own challahs. Personally, I have never made a challah at home so I needed a bit of help but I got the hang of it. We sent them off to the ovens to enjoy later for shabbas. After challah baking the madrichim said that we had the chance to either make an igloo with Shlomo, Krav Magah with Ari or learn with Yaakov. I chose the igloo building. I have been in snow several times but I have never built or even seen an igloo. Everyone walked out the doors of the hotel with their long pants and jackets except for one person. Shlomo, being the tough Israeli that he is, went out in sandals and short shorts. However he didn’t complain of the cold once. We found a nice spot and started forming bricks of snow to build with. Jezza and Shlomo were the main constructors, and we were their helpers. The igloo was definitely the highlight of my day. After coming back inside without feeling in our fingers, we had lunch. We then had a couple more hours free time, in this time a few of us went outside and had an intense snow fight where eyes, arms, legs and backsides were hit but all in the spirit of the snow fight.
We completely lost track of time and came back 20 minutes before we had to be upstairs for shabbas. The Kabbalat Shabbat service was really nice and the dinner was indescribably delicious, the best meal we’ve had in this hotel. After dinner we had the usual tish but before this we had a program run by the madrichim, Gabi read us an extremely interesting philosophical theory about the soul, we all closed our eyes with confusion and listened to her slow, clear voice. The theory was that what if everything we see and think about in this world is only our perception then that means that the person next to me is completely different. She asked us questions like, “what if her voice at that moment was a figment of our imagination?” Honestly I have thought about this before but it was really clear the way she talked about it. It made us think about our presence in this world and how we chose to interact with it.
After this intriguing talk we continued with a tish. In between each song people made speeches and one which stood out to everyone was Benji Musrie’s talk. He proclaimed that our whole year group is ‘clicky’ and that we are all in our own circle of friends groups but we should all open up and create one big, unified circle of friendship which we all thought was really nice. We proceeded with beautiful tish songs and then a not really needed sleep.
Overall today was a very nice, relaxed day where we did fun, relaxed activities with the beautiful Jerusalem snow outside our windows.