Curled up on a cramped blue airport chair – bound to 10 others just like it – I'm atypically quiet. A habitual extrovert who's no stranger to strangers, I find myself strikingly intimidated in the midst of so many to whom I am circumstantially connected; in what way will the next 10 days electrify the silence between all of us, as I have so repeatedly been promised by birthright veterans? I'm a Jew in my mid-twenties living in New York, bound to 40 others just like me.