The Journey of Milk and Cookies

By Mateen Zar

We got together for the first time in 2014 on Sunday, January 12. This meeting was different than most because, instead of going to the Westside JCC, we met up at Temple Judea in Tarzana. During this time we discussed time management and “The Journey of Milk and Cookies,” which is having missions, visions, goals, and objectives. The purpose was for us to learn how to manage our time better and think about, when having a mission, what we want the outcome to be and what expectations we have.

In order to explore this “Journey” our junior counselors placed Lego’s on the floor and told us to start building until they told us to stop. Of course, with such vague instructions, we were all aimlessly building wondering what the point of this all was. The irony is that that was the point of the exercise. They didn’t give us any specific instructions to show us how difficult it is to work on something without having a mission, vision, goal, and objective. 

building for no reason at all??

However, I learned that overtime while ones vision changes, their goal and objective may change as well. For example: let’s say you are driving in your car to get to a destination, and the destination changes, the route you take therefore changes too. It was very interesting to me to learn that Sony's vision, originally, was to repair Japan and the Japanese culture and is now to create exciting new digital entertainment experiences for consumers.

After learning about “The Journey of Milk and Cookies” we formed groups and each group had a task to fulfill for our upcoming Shabbaton. My group and I were given Shabbat. We decided to put all our Shabbat experiences into one so that everyone would experience something new on this very special Shabbat. It was challenging at first because some of us didn’t really do anything special for Shabbat, but we came up with good ideas, such as fun Shabbat songs (without instruments of course). I am very excited to hang out with my Diller Fellows and have another amazing Shabbaton! 

A favorite moment from out 1st shabbaton!