Limmud 09 - The Teens: Day 2 (Monday)

I apologise for not giving daily updates as i said i was going to do. I was not returning to my room before 1:00am each night and was too tired to form proper sentences.
However I am going to write the blogs now, so just pretend that it is still the week of limmud. Next update will be tomorrow.

After finishing breakfast with my dad, I walked over to the building in which Teen Limmud was being held. Once the majority of teens were present, we started our first daily session on Israel, ran by Niv and Inbar (our Israeli madrechim). We all sat in a circle and went round saying what we thought of when told 'Israeli Society' (food, culture, humus, busy, Jewish, and so on...). We were then numbered and spit into groups. Each group was given a picture of a person (differed groups had different people) and we had to come up with a name, occupation, hobbies and a life story for our person. My group named our man Shloimi Ben Avraham who was married and raised by camels and whose hobbies included water colour painting, model train building and riding camels. When that was over, we were given the choice of 4 sessions being ran especially for Teen Limmud (as i mentioned in the last blog), which included: Gilad Shalit - At Any Price? - This was based on the issue of Israel releasing terrorists in exchange for a life (or dead body); Theft from a Thief - this was a discussion about why people steal, if it is the amount that matters or the principle, whilst considering modern situations and a story from the Talmud; Wham, Whack, Parsha Plays - people were given a chance to act out the week's Parsha using quotes from the Torah; Social Action – The world is changing.

I attended the Social Action session which was a lot of fun. There were six of us and we were split into 2 groups of 3 and given £1000. There were 5 different companies (car, computer, engineering, chocolate and oil) out of which we had to choose one to invest all our money in. Each 'decade' the companies would present themselves to us again and we had to choose whether we wanted to stick with the company we had originally invested in or change. We would then find out which companies had made a profit or loss and why. My group ended up with about £7000 whereas the opposing team finished with about £200. I really enjoyed that session and would like to congratulate Steeno on his one man performance of 5 different people.

After Lunch, the madrechim recommended sessions taking place in the main conference which they thought we would enjoy, or we had the choice of volunticipating. For the fist half of the afternoon I went to a session by the author of 'Cool Jew - The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe-, Lisa Alcalay Klug, which was about her book. Personally I did not find it as funny or interesting as we were told it was going to be. For the second half of the afternoon I chose the volunticipating option. Our project was to raise awareness about Fairtrade and encourage more people to buy fair trade as it only costs about 10 or 15p more that non-fiar trade products and can make such a difference to so many lives. We spent the session coming up with, and putting forward, ideas on how to go about doing this.