Last night, we got a sweet opportunity to attend Taglit Birthright’s Mega Event in Ra’anana. The event took place at a huge outdoor amphitheater, with a lawn and walking area behind it. Over 5,000 birthright participants from all over the world-Canada, Brazil, India, and the U.S. among others-gathered for the event.
The first hour consisted of getting dinner at some heavily, heavily crowded food stations in the back (I mean, you gather 5,000 hungry Jews and have only three people serving them falafel, it’s going to get a little crazy), socializing and mingling with other birthright groups, and getting situated for the event. After a while, the PA speaker kept urging the crowd to leave the lawn area and go down to the seats so they could start the program, but again: 5,000 people, three servers.
After a late start, the program was underway. It consisted of speakers, including Israel’s minister of education and the organizer of Taglit and musical performances (none of the ones I mentioned in the last post, go figure. Though, there was a Drake fakeout.) The spirit and energy all across the theater was high, and stayed that way. We got off to a slow start in our section, as it wasn’t exactly what we thought it was going to be, but once the music got going, so did we.
And in fact, our guard Shir became one of the night’s celebrities, as the emcee of the event came up to her and in front of the whole audience asked her who she was and where she was from, as he did with only two or three others. I was up on the grass with a friend from another group, so my cheers for her fell on deaf ears, but I was showing spirit any way I could.
The program’s live music continued for a while, and when the official program ended, a DJ took to the stage and the groups that stuck around had one big dance party in front of the stage. Mayanot stuck it out and was rocking out ‘til the very end, dancing the night away with each other (and still celebrating Kat’s birthday!)
It was an outrageous event. To borrow a phrase from the previous post, it was grandiose. I got to see a few close friend in other groups, got reacquainted with those I haven’t seen in a long time, and of course, got some quality bonding on with everyone else from 357.
