Jessica Peterson, a junior at Johnson State College, is an experienced traveler, having gone to Australia, New Zealand, London, Spain, Costa Rica, and spent from September 2012 to June of 2013 in Kiryat Shmona, Israel where she learned basic Hebrew. Raised Jewish, she went to synagogues and was trained for her bat mitzvah and although she never had the sense of truly believing in God, takes pride in her heritage.

You’re very well-traveled – are you from Vermont?

No, I’m from California originally. We’ve kind of been on the move all the time. We started in California, then went to Arkansas, then to Kansas, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

I chose Johnson State College because of the Wellness and Alternative Medicine program.

You’ve gone to Israel. You must have had a unique perspective as American going there because of your cultural background. Did you find you related to people differently?

On what level? On the level of being Jewish or the level of being human? Because they are two different, but similar things. On being Jewish, I met a lot of people who were very similar in their religious practices and their not belief in the God but still claiming themselves as Jewish.

I had always thought there was something kind of fundamentally wrong with me for not believing in God and still calling myself Jewish. I had friends in high school that would jokingly call me a “bad Jew” because I ate bread on Passover or didn’t keep Shabbat. I got shamed and I know it was never meant intentionally. I didn’t realize how angry it made me for someone to tell me whether or not I was a good or bad Jew because how could anyone else know, who wasn’t Jewish, what being a Jew meant?

What does being a Jew mean?

You could go by how the Israeli government defines you as Jewish: It’s a matriarchal line so they would define you as Jewish depending on how far back you could trace your Jewish lineage. We made a friend who had made Aliyah- which is getting your citizenship to Israel – she had made Aliyah and her father was Jewish, but her mother was not. She had been raised a Jew and she had always held the Jewish faith and really considered herself a Jew. When she moved to Israel, she was not considered a Jew. She had to go through a conversion class and had to spend a few months, maybe even a year and a half, taking a course before the government would consider her Jewish.

What was Israel like?

I was with a group of Americans and when we first got there, one of the first days they were telling us, ‘Ok – here’s the apartment and there is the bomb shelter. If we get bombed, you have eight seconds to get from here to there and we’ll be having a drill…’ So when we were getting ready to go volunteer they were telling us that every place had a bomb shelter and be aware of where your bomb shelter is. They just spoke matter-of-factly about the whole idea of getting bombed because it’s something they’re always under the threat of and it’s something that happens every day.

What was the most poignant thing that happened while you were there?

Before I went I had been suffering from depression severely. We were on a group trip in Tzfat … in the Old City, where they said the birthplace of Kabbalah is. Kabbalah is the Jewish mysticism and spirituality and the study of that.

The first night we were there one of our group programs was to do this short art-therapy project. She told us to put on the paper whatever we were feeling. I painted out all the dark, horrible things I had been feeling forever and couldn’t get away from.

The next morning, still in this awful mood, we did a guided meditation. In the midst of this meditation I couldn’t concentrate; I couldn’t hear or take in anything that was going on. I tried going back to my reiki training to ground myself.

I am visual and if this all sounds really funny, I am sorry, but this is exactly what I envisioned happening – I put roots into the ground and out of nowhere, without me thinking of it, they built themselves up around me and encased me and I felt myself in this total darkness.

I saw this horrible picture and awful things, but I just tried to take it into myself and accept it rather than try so hard to push it away. There was a moment when all of the sudden everything just clicked; the depression was gone and lifted. I didn’t want to interrupt the meditation but I just wanted to scream and be like, “I’m free!”

It was the most amazing thing in my entire life, to be free from that burden… I opened my eyes feeling balanced and everything was brighter… it was the first time in five or six years that I actually felt present in my body and that I was actually looking through my own eyes and thinking thoughts through that person who was here.

Kabbalah – do you mind talking about that?

It goes a lot into the meaning and events of the Torah. We had a one-hour session about the whole meaning of just the creation of the universe in God’s name, in the way it is spelled and written out. No one except for the Messiah will know how to pronounce God’s name the way it’s spelled. The guide went into how the shape of all the letters meant the contraction and the expansion of the universe into what it was.

What were some of the volunteer jobs you did?

They wanted us to do a lot of teaching English in schools … I worked with elderly people in a center, and I worked with disabled kids and adults doing outdoor activities that you would never think of people with disabilities doing.

We would bike around a lake in the valley. For people in wheelchairs they had bikes they could peddle with their hands. They were great, everyone lit up when they came. People were so friendly and happy to be doing something outside; which is what the purpose of the group really was, just to get people moving and to not keep them confined in a wheel chair under someone’s constant care.

Volunteering is a huge part of your life – where else have you gone to volunteer?

All my volunteering has been done in the US. I went with breakaway to Catalina Island off the coast of California for an environmental trip. We only did a cleanup one day, and the other days we were pulling invasive weeds.

We were helping build a better trail on a hillside that was too steep for people riding horses. We climbed down and removed fences from a valley where they were trying to re-grow plants species. Deer are invasive species and were eating all the natural plant life.

I really like doing environmental work, but I always feel iffy about the things we are doing. I question what the lasting effect is and how to best accomplish something that would help over time.

What would you change?

I would make a lot of the environmental volunteering teaching-based. We’d educate people. Instead of picking up garbage for an hour every day, you’re telling people, “Look, this is why it’s bad to leave garbage and it’s really easy to just carry trash to a bin, and please be aware of that.”

A lot of the volunteering and environmental stuff that I was doing in Israel was just picking up trash and cleaning up parks so people would want to come… But we’d come back a few days later and it would be just as bad. It was frustrating. It came to a point where I questioned what were we doing. We’re spending our time not fixing a problem, but fixing a symptom.

You’re going to Nicaragua to help put in water pipes next week. Why is serving so important to you?

I’ve always been a quiet person, and volunteering was a quiet way to be in the world. I’m not sure I’d be a good activist because I’m not always good at speaking on the spot and I wouldn’t know how to counter arguments if people were challenging my point of view.

I also can’t really conceive of the idea that there are people who don’t have water, food, or a place to live. I see homeless people and I feel awful, but also powerless; I wondered what I could do to change their situation. So it helps to be going on a trip where you are really doing something that you know is making a lasting effect, an immediate change, and really improving the quality of someone’s life.

What would be your dream volunteer trip?

I don’t know. I just go where things take me. There are issues I am passionate about, with things I’d like to change, but there are other people with much better ideas than I have. Falling into their groups may be the thing that means the most to me.

If I felt there was really a way to change the anti-gay laws in Russia – if I felt that I could really make a difference there, right now, with my resources, then I would. But I don’t have the resources, or the knowledge of politics to really go challenge the root of the problem. I can speak out against it and the people who bash homosexuals or those who are different… but I don’t have the resources to go to another country and truly change something like that.