MTV, eat your hearts out.

Pick 10 Jewish strangers (even two Jews who went to the same college for four years and never met each other once), forced to live in a house for five months, film their lives, and see what happens. That’s not a premise for a reality show (like the small house from the Geico ads), but it is something real, and I’m part of it.

On my five-month stay in Israel, our lives will be documented just like the popular reality shows in the United States. My ultimate goal is to write a book or a single-spaced, 10-point-font story to send to all of my friends, The Idiot’s Bible: Israel Adventure (or IB: Real World Ramla).

Just like the MTV reality show, we have a luscious mansion (a five-bedroom “palace,” one of our girls said when she first toured it), have neighbors who all know who we are but have been slow in meeting us and talking with us, are filmed every day (by video cameras or just digital snapshots)and have done hardly anything but drink and sleep and talk.

In addition to my irregular updates (I have to write as many details as possible to explain a situation, thus never getting anything finished), two others are writing blogs, and the rest have some kind of personal journal. To view our updates, check out iscramla.com, or beninramla.blogspot.com.

For those who prefer non-linguistic means of representation, a local high school where we may work volunteered to film us throughout our stay; they plan to make a documentary and propaganda video for future programs. Unlike our Taglit birthright trips, which try to fit thousands of years of Israel history and 20 cities of culture into a 10-day tour, our program director knows that we’ve been here before (and don’t need the birthright history lesson), and he knows that we need to pace ourselves and explore our neighborhood and each other—after all, we will be spending five months living under the same roof. During our first week we had only one or two activities a day, including tours or the city, swimming at the community pool, salsa dancing and a get-together with Israelis our own age—and that’s just our formal schedule. We start Ulpan (intensive Hebrew language study) in our second week, and by the third week we should start planning our volunteer work.

Who is the cast of Real World Ramla? We are the Pioneers, the “Cha-lo-steeym.” This is the first long-term volunteer program of its kind (we’re teaching English and working closely with bigwigs in the community, not just doing manual labor), and our organization’s founder, Momo, has a dream to build the Israel Service Corps to groups of 40 throughout all of Israel.

We have Ben, Nomi, Joey, Todd, Aaron, Jay, Daniel, Aliza, Zeek and me. Everybody is a leader, everyone has traveled the world, everyone is hardworking, and everyone is incredibly smart.

Ben reminds me of my brother: he is always full of energy and enthusiasm. Never fearing meeting new people, he makes friends with everyone. Also like my brother, Ben has entrepreneurial dreams every hour or so: a convenient store with shitty American snacks, a Mexican restaurant or fast-food burrito shop, make-your own hookah shop.

Ben and Nomi both attended the University of Arizona, and neither met each while they were there. Ben graduated with a perfect 4.0, and he was voted the top business student for the university. Meanwhile, Nomi was president of five different Jewish-related clubs. While all of her overachieving friends are getting ready for Americorps or the Peace Corps, she feels like this is her chance to take a break for a short while. Always on her cell phone, she knows so many Israelis. Although most of us don’t know what we want to do with our lives, Naomi is one of the few who wants to make Alli-yah (go up, or emigrate here).

Todd and Joey act more certain than Nomi that they want to make this country their permanent residence. Although both never attended college after they graduated high school, their formal education stopped not because they couldn’t succeed. Joey, a spiry kid with dark skin who looks 15 but is actually 22 (I was so surprised that he could legally buy a drink at JFK Airport before we left) graduated high school two years early and has spent the last six years traveling all across the world. While everybody else has been anxious about leading a group of leaders, Joey takes initiative on tasks without waiting for everyone else. On Friday he raked all of the leaves in our yard and front walkway, making our house actually look comparative to our neighbors rather than like a shithole frat house. Like Ben, Joey makes friends quickly and understands what people are trying to say even without knowing any Hebrew.

Todd is our technical expert. A retail manager, he ran a Radio Shack before joining the formal staff of Oranim, the umbrella organization for our trip. He created our Web site, set up our Internet connection and has been our direct link to Erez, our program director, in order to get everything we need, such as our schedule and approval to buy household items.

To borrow one of Ben’s observations: Joey and Todd are the smallest two, yet they share the biggest room (other than the girls’ master bedroom), while Aaron and Jay are the biggest or our group and share the smallest room.

Jay started his own business that is just starting to sprout. A Connecticut native, he goes to New York City every weekend and his deep voice and wide frame enhance his New York attitude and accent.

Aaron, a 6-foot-4 University of Miami alum, is our resident cook. Although Ben always talks about his love for the kitchen, Aaron stays behind to make meat while everyone else plays soccer (ca-door regel–a game he tried once and got injured on the first play). Like me, he doesn’t know how to dance, but girls love him for his nice curly locks and his teddy-bear size. Aaron’s favorite activity is to sit in front of our television watching the news or reading books (The World is Flat). A world traveler, he also made sure to read the Economist every week while out in the world.

Like Aaron, Daniel shares a home in Florida and has traveled the world. A linguist with a Teacher of English as a Second Language certificate from University of Florida, Daniel is our reluctant but content link to everybody outside of our house. When he is not interpreting for us, he is talking in his second language to every Israeli he meets, making friends like Ben and Joey. On a cab ride back from Tel Aviv, he spent the whole 30 minutes leaning as close as he could to the driver. “That’s usually the best part (of a night),” he said of the conversation. He reminds me in sound and in context of one of my idols, Josh Curnett, a former Denver Post prep writer and now a high school English coordinator in Colorado. The resemblance is almost uncanny, even down to pauses before he speaks, the nods of acknowledgments, and the half-closed eyes.

Aliza is the baby of the group, a shy 18-year-old from Philadelphia. While all of her friends are starting college in a week or two, she is using the next five months to pause and think about her immediate future. She will either return to the United States for university (she asked if I could help her get into my alma mater, Northwestern, or my dad’s, Cornell), join the Israeli Defense Force for two years, or whatever else may happen.

When we chose roommates on the first day, I never thought that I would meet a somewhat lost soul in Zeek, another college delay-er. A quiet, quirky, independent mind, Zeek works with toddlers at his religious school in the Bronx, and he said he wants to teach first grade after this program. Zeek is the Michael Jordan of alcohol, an expert on the drink. Just like the time I got separated from everybody else in Boston when gravity pulled me toward the WB store (oh, the good old days when those existed) and a comic book store, Zeek cannot pass a store that sells alcohol without drooling over the merchandise. He is independent, his gears working with unique thoughts: on our leadership retreat, while everyone else was tying sticks for our boat, Zeek jumped into the water and swam across the little pond; I thought he was just taking a two-minute break to cool off and swim around, but he actually set up the rope that we used to pull us across (otherwise we would have been in a swamp without a paddle).

And then there’s me, Josh, the resident insomniac and grandpa (in age) of the group. As Batman said in Batman Begins, it’s not what you say, it’s what you do that makes you who you are. Observant and quiet, I get a rush out of playing ca-door regel (even though I played soccer for one season when I was six years old and was never athletic or a jock until recently), have returned my fraternity roots of doing the dishes, and stay up until sunup every day typing journal entries on whatever computer I can find. I have an omnipresent notepad with all of the Hebrew words I’m learning. Everybody laughs at me and my pad when I write things down while we’re hanging out with other Israelis, but the next morning they say in private that they are impressed with my use, learning and acquisition of the language. Unfortunately, the girls at the club would rather hear English. (I got rejected the three times I said, “Aht reetz-ah lirkod?”—do you want to dance?)

Our crew:

Momo, the executive director, a commander in the army whose main job is to finance community service. Oranim, the organization he owns, is the largest of the birthright (the free 10-day tour for any Jew) organizations, and when refugees from the North needed somewhere to stay while the war has been raging, he paid for hotel rooms for all of them.

Erez, our director. He is the one that had to talk with all of our American parents to convince them we would be safe and our program was legitimate.

Hava, our house mom or grandmother. To borrow another observation from Ben, Hava is the finest looking grandma any of us have ever met. She lives in Ramla and knows everybody here and where everything is in the city. She is optimistic about what we can do (when we went to the pool, she thought we would teach swimming, when everybody else who was there was having fun without our interference) and always eager to help us with anything.

The film crew. Two high school seniors, a boy and a girl (and the girl’s sister as the best grip) from the top school in the city. (Ramla has three high schools.) If they’re on summer break now, I am eager to know what they will be doing with us when they have to return to school. We see them every other day for about 30 minutes or an hour, at the most boring time of our day. They watched us talk with the mayor, and then sat in a park for another hour while Erez explained things in more detail. The boy knows only a few words in English, and they have looked more bored than we can get during our formal meetings. I hope that they can film us teaching and running after-school programs (with little kids screaming for our attention and speaking English we just taught them). That’s probably what they’re waiting for, rather than just watching us on mundane exhibitions, like shopping and running and sitting at the pool all day.