A Different Perspective

This past week has been a very different week for me. I am usually learning all day long but since we are on vacation for Passover I am helping people get ready for the holiday by cleaning their homes. This has made this week a very tiring and strenuous week, which consequently made this past Shabbat wonderful. I forgot what looking forward to Shabbot was like since every day here is usually like Shabbat.
This Shabbat I ate lunch at one of the Rabbis who walked with us back to the Yeshiva. On our walk back we spoke about the subtle beauty of Shabbat and Israel. Since our Yeshiva is opening a summer program for kids on trips from America and other countries, birthright trips have been talked about here lately. This is because the amazing success of birthright has had the unintended, but wonderful, effect of making kids on the trip rethink why they are Jewish and lead some of them on the path to frumkite. This was not the intended effect at all, but since people visiting Israel get drawn to the country they need to explain to themselves why. We spoke about how Israel does not have the most massive waterfall, or the highest mountain, or any other significant landmark that a person could rationalize to themselves saying, "The landscape is what drew me to Israel." Instead they have to say, "Judaism drew me to Israel," or better yet "Hashem drew me to Israel." Shabbat also has the same ability to subtly draw people closer to frumkite. Many people reading this will know what I am speaking about when I say, "Keeping Shabbat makes you feel like you are doing the right thing."
While we were walking back to Yeshiva we walked through a beautiful green area that you would see anywhere else in the world and it struck me for the first time that kids coming to Israel don't view the green living things in Israel as an open miracle. They come here and don't even notice that there are trees and plants because they expected to find them. Their picture of what Israel would look like is a picture with green in it. I could not believe it! It is amazing how Hashem can hide in plain sight! Israel only has green living plants because our Sages said, "The land will remain desolate until the Jews move back to the land of Israel." Mark Twain described his 1867 journey to the land of Israel in his book "The Innocents Abroad," "We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given wholly to weeds - a silent, mournful expanse... A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely... We never saw a human being on the whole route. We pressed on toward the goal of our crusade, renowned Jerusalem. The further we went the hotter the sun got and the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became... There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country. No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem... Jerusalem is mournful, dreary and lifeless. I would not desire to live here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land... Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes." (pgs. 361-362). Before the Jews came back home this land was a desert with nothing alive. When we came back plants just started growing and now Israel is the ONLY country in the entire world with more greenery than the year before. As I have re-experienced this week, It is truly amazing what one can see and experience when they step out of their normal way of living and look at the world from a different perspective.