July 20 - Kennes Day 2 - Ben Gurion's vision

Date: July 20th, 2015
By: Hannah Rosenberg


We started off the day, bright and early as usual, with a session inspired by David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister. After an amusing presentation involving some fake hair made of cotton balls, we split off into colour groups to determine the future of the State of Israel, much the same as DBG did with his team 67 years ago. This included the name of the state, the official language of the state, the choice to include God in the Declaration of Independence, and the borders of the new state. As it must have been in real life, this was very challenging to agree upon, but at the end of the day each group was able to come to a consensus.
Our next activity got us into the mindset of thinking about our impact projects coming up in the fall. We had a presentation on a project done in a past year. This was followed by individual discussion groups on a topic of our choice. I chose to attend a discussion on the many problems that are facing the elderly in our communities. This is an issue that I feel connected to as I have volunteered at Baycrest since I was in grade nine. We conversed about the multitude of problems including high levels of poverty, the lack of infrastructure to support the aging population, and the prevalence of loneliness and depression among seniors. In the afternoon, we had a presentation that was essentially a crash course on how Jews became scattered across the globe. It was conducted by the President of Diller Teen Fellows International. Personally, I felt that iit was a lot of detail to go over in the short time. Although, I can understand how someone who has never studied Jewish history in the past could have found it useful. After this, we learned the stories of the first Jews to come to North America and South Africa. We were then tasked with trying to select the cities in North America with the largest Jewish populations and then order them by size. Interestingly, my colour group listed Toronto significantly higher on the list than its true position. We speculated that this could be because the Toronto Jewish community feels larger since its Jews tend to be more involved and more likely to identify as Jews than in most American communities. Our last session of the day involved listening to the song "Rak Po" (Only Here) by a famous Israeli band called Hadag Nahash. The theme of the song revolved around the positive and negative aspects that make Israel feel like home to them. After listening to the song, we each wrote a couple verses of our own about our home. It was very fascinating to hear the unique aspects of everyone's experiences that make them feel at home. In the evening, we were very lucky to get to hear from Molly Livingstone, an Israeli-American comedian. A good laugh was a really great way to end an overall interesting and meaningful day.