Returning to my old Kibbutz

Yesterday, I went to a kibbutz in southern Israel where I lived over twenty years ago. It was my first visit back since then so the odds that I'd find anyone I knew from way back were against me. The good news is that one of my kibbutz mentors, now 72, is still alive, healthy and has a garden to die for. The quarters where I lived is under serious construction; sadly I missed seeing it in close to its original form by only six months.

20'ish years ago, my journey through Israel was a 'coming of age' story as much as it was a journey to understand the complexities of the Middle East and what it meant to be an Israeli. The mission of this journey couldn't be any further from my first mission, yet some of the stories I heard from my former kibbutzim colleagues and others I met in this process ended up taking me full circle. So much so, that there is far too much to capture here, at least now.

The experience? Intense. Historical. Emotional. Energizing. Inspiring. And yes, life changing.

I plan to write about the experience in great detail but to give it justice, recapturing what I heard and saw will take some time. It will be a story of three people's journeys, one of them an entrepreneur whose family made it to Chile safely in 1939, the second of a woman whose parents were taken by the Holocaust and mine, because the full circle of our lives met at this intersection and its frankly, why we're all here.