I have been home from Israel for almost three days. In that time I have spent a lot of time looking at and sorting through the more than 5,000 photos I took on my Canon DSLR, iPhone 6, and handy-little powershot S100. So many things jumped out at me. This was a trip unlike anything I have ever done. Ever. I have been trying to figure out how to summarize it. This is my first take at it.
Going to Israel was way outside of my comfort zone. I am talking thousands of miles outside of it. Forget the fact that I do not like flying (a miserable experience in the 14 years since 2001), this was going to a country in one of the biggest hot spots of the world, where just seven months ago a war was going on. So, Israel was way out of my comfort zone, yet going there somehow resulted in considerably expanding my comfort zone. There was not a single moment when I was in Israel or on the West Bank when I felt unsafe. I never had a panic attack, I was totally comfortable with my inability to understand more than a handful of words in either Hebrew or Arabic. It simply did not matter.