Looking Up to our Youth

We arrived in Israel in the evening of August 22nd, and it took me a while to realize we weren't in North America anymore. The first clue was the soldiers at our youth hostel, carrying their M-16s. I remember my last time in Israel, in April of 1999. I was 16 then, and all the soldiers I met were larger than life figures, impressive, heroic, tough. I looked up to them, they were my superiors, people I admired to no end. I still admire them, but I look at them now, and it's absolutely jarring how young they are, sometimes five years younger than I am. I think of freshmen in college, boys and girls, not men and women, I laugh at for their eagerness, awkwardness and immaturity. The freshmen class of Israel comes in each year to do the dirty work, or should I say, the real work, the honorable work of Zionism. They are so young, but they are not standing outside bars with fake IDs and gettting too drunk drinking shitty beer at keggers. They are protecting Israel. Their age humanizes them, for I remember being that young, but our experiences are so different that my admiration for them only grows. This is the biggest change in my Israel experience thus far.