A two day Etgar bonding hike: We played assassin and I nearly won. I killed Jefferey, Dan, Jake, Becca, and Liz. But Jeff traitored and helped Dan Ratan kill me. I was sad. I had never wanted anything more than to win assassin.
All of a sudden the Etgar flat was filled with people. The amount of different accents flying from room to room, floating on the gentle breeze from the air conditioner that heats up or apartment, was almost disconcerting. We would all have to pay a little more attention to try and understand eachother. The main basis of our time living as a community in Jerusalem, and in the Etgar flat.
Community.
When we (The Southerners from South Africa and Australia) first met the Northerners there was a nervous, excitment around the group. In every situation such as this, one can never quite shake that feeling, no matter how confident you pretend to be. We spent the first weekend, our Shabbat Beyachad (Together) learning a little more about eachother and exploring our respective choices of Etgar vs. Machon. As well as running interesting peulot to learn more about eachother, we also had challenging tasks and activities where we not only exersised our bodies, mostly walking to Downtown Jerusalem to get lunch. We were thrown into the deep end, right off the bat: How we deal with our ideology as Netzer when faced with the task of explaining it to people who might not understand, or agree that we are infact Jewish in the first place.
Then we were split up. For a few of us, the first time we had been without our friends, or people in the same sniff (branch), or even people from our home country. Again the slightly disconcerting, yet just as excited feeling set in.
Etgar had begun. We split up the rooms, boys and girls. As we are a community, and that is a big part of Etgar, we were provided with an adventure. A chnace to step out of our comfort zone, of the flat and Jerusalem into the great unknown of Absailing (Repelling) down a 30 meter rockface, and hike up and down the great mountain Masada.
As the anticipation of the coming months builds up, we hope it'll be filled with more fake celebrity adventures, hikes, murder games, theme nights, and arbeh (a lot) sprite. We will build our little Netzer Etgar comunity, each adding our own little piece of humour, extravegance, humility, inspiration and love to our environment. Hopefully we'll learn new things, try new things and have the compassion to understand what it really means to be a unit.
