Israel Education has something about which most other kinds of education can only dream.
It has the “real thing” – it has the Israel Experience.
In this third millennium, we have e-tickets, airplanes, tour buses, hotels, youth hostels, dogs and cats that understand Hebrew, walls and hills that tell ancient stories, and real people living in a thriving modern Jewish country.
It is inconceivable to imagine an effective and thoughtful Israel Education process that does not contain, or at least aspire towards, a direct experience of Israel itself – a visit to the place in which a young person can see, feel, hear, taste and touch the reality that is the State of Israel. And if there is one facet of Israel Education that has achieved consensus, it is that the power of an effective Israel Experience is unmatched and irreplaceable.
Over the past generation, organized travel to Israel for children, teens and young adults has developed into a well-established, sophisticated and highly effective field known as The Israel Experience. Hundreds of thousands of young Jews have had the privilege and pleasure that their parents and grandparents never knew, and through their visit to Israel they have been enriched, educated and transformed in ways that will undoubtedly affect them and, through them, the broader Jewish (and maybe non-Jewish) world in the coming generation.
Responses
Clare Goldwater and Michael Soberman invite us to reflect on the ways in which "the Israel trip" has already become institutionalized. What parts of an Israel experience are classical, even required? (The Kotel, Masada, the Jerusalem Tayelet, the Negev, all come to mind.) How can these experiences be framed and re-framed in light of the criteria they outline? Can the Kotel experience, for instance, lead to a conversation about the complexities of holiness--a debate between, say, Heschel on the one hand (the Kotel is a wonderful thing) and Leibowitz on the other (the Kotel is dangerous)? Are we willing to engage students in such complexities? I hope so.
Goldwater and Soberman articulate a brilliant vision for the future of the Israel Experience, but what will affect that vision? What made Taglit-Birthight Israel so "groundbreaking" was it's volume and sheer audacity to change the status quo. There is a proposal here that the status quo be changed even further to reacher wider audiences and to create richer experiences - but what do we need to do as a Jewish community to rally around this message? Unless we answer this question, I fear our efforts will be fragmented and minimally effective.