By Courtney Cooperman ’16, Feature Editor

As I pulled my hair into a messy ponytail, a blaring sound cut through the morning conversation in our hotel room. My roommates and I peered out through the window at the small city of Arad, looking for a possible source of the sound. There were no ambulances or police cars in sight. We opened our door and glanced down the hallway. As we tacitly expected, bleary-eyed, pajamaed people were making their ways out of bed, down the stairwell, and into the bomb shelter. That strident sound was the sound of sirens.

Casually, I slipped on my flip-flops, grabbed my cell phone, and headed down the six flights of stairs to the basement. Our group congregated, waited a few minutes, gently taunted our towel-wrapped peers that had started their mornings with showers, then counted off and headed back upstairs for breakfast. The stress level of the situation was about equal to that of a school fire drill. The most powerful emotion of the whole experience was not fear, but rather pride when I got an update from an Israel news site that our group had come to follow more religiously than Instagram: “8:07 am, sirens sound in Arad region.” That was us! I took a screenshot.

The most challenging task of the morning was phrasing the text message to notify my parents what had happened, to tell them the truth without giving them a heart attack. Throughout my three weeks in Israel, they worried constantly. Every phone call, every

videochat, every email, I was always the one comforting them. After some careful consideration, I sent what they would read, in shock, seven hours later: “8:21 am: Just heard a siren and spent a few minutes in the hotel bomb shelter…no one scared even at all and everything resuming as normal.”

Although the nonchalance of our personal situation was difficult to convey across continents, it was even more challenging to explain that the rest of the day was one of the best days of the trip. Starting with a siren didn’t even feel like getting off on the wrong foot. Once we resumed getting ready, it was business as usual. Speakers blasted Miley Cyrus as we rode the bus to a gas station in the Negev, where we boarded Jeeps for an up-close desert tour. As I stood up on the seat and grabbed the sides of the car for dear life, sand coated my face, filled in every crevice of my ears, and slapped the lenses of my sunglasses. We screamed, feeling the purest of joy, the most untainted sense of freedom, soaring through the sand dunes and never wanting the ride to end.

Describing the disconnect between my experiences and the chaos shown on the news is especially complicated because of our emotional ties to the events. Each day’s activities were unaffected by the horrors only a few hours’ drive away. Yet detachment is not synonymous with indifference. We constantly carried with us the hope for peace. Of course we climbed Masada, a staple of all Jewish teen tours, but we did not begin the standard history lesson after taking our plethora of sunrise pictures. Instead, we went into a cistern to sing “Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu,” our plea for the serenity of that exquisite sunrise to cast its light over the nation and the world. I got the chills as I sang the Hebrew and Arabic in harmony, looking at the graffiti of the early Zionists who trekked to this fortress to discover their Jewish identities. At Havdalah services, with every inhalation of the spices and wordless syllable of the nigun, we sensed our fulfillment of an inherited quest. Israel fights so everyone can be as lucky as we are, able to form a circle on a grassy square and light a braided candle.

We dunked the flame in the grape juice when the stars came out. It sizzled as we finished our blessings, signifying the new week. We didn’t know what it would bring for our group, for our families, for the country, for the world. Yet even with all the uncertainty I felt a wholeness inside; I am part of a people that sings its songs on top of mountains while missiles are fired to obliterate us. Our faith and pride could not be crushed by the perils facing our nation and the conflict in which we were entangled, because our three weeks in Israel were a blessing, a blessing that Israel fights to perpetuate.

On my first night in Israel, when we got our safety briefing, the main focus was hydration, not emergency situations. Sirens seemed as improbable as a real school evacuation seems when we discuss drills. Of course our perspective instantly changed when the blaring sound sent us to the stairwell, but besides the initial shock, we never felt afraid. Nothing could make my friends and family at home understand Israel’s power of fortification. At home, I would be perpetually worried if faced with constant risk. If there were a chance I would need to dash to a bomb shelter sopping wet and soapy, I would fear taking a shower. Yet in Israel, I didn’t consider the possible threats every time I stepped out the door. The country had enveloped me in the protective shell of a heritage that withstands and overcomes all obstacles.