Sheinit Metzada Lo Tipol
Trip Start
Feb 26, 2007
1
10
15
Trip End
May 22, 2007
Desert, Israel
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
youth hostel
Yesterday morning we woke up at 3 am and enjoyed a brief breakfast before our dark trek up the snake path at Masada. All 100 of us made it up the mountain in just under 45 minutes. Apparently, that's pretty average timing, but oh believe me, we pushed and pushed to make that time. Even though we were near the lowest point on Earth the altitude was still getting to many of us. Our ears ached and it was difficult to breathe, not to mention the burning of our calves with each step up the rocky stairs. Each time we raised our faces from navigating the rocky narrow path the mountain became more and more visible with the increasing sunlight, as did the Yam Hamelach (Dead Sea) below us. The trip has been extremely cold so far, but this morning the wind was particularly harsh. It didnt bother us as we schvitzed our way up the mountain, but we began to feel it more and more at the top.
All of us prayed shacharit with the sun rising behind our backs revealing the ruins of our last ancestors to stand up to the Romans before us. All fit in whatever sweatshirts and pants we could scrape together from the collection of clothes some of us thought to store in our backpacks we began our 4 hour experience atop Masada. We saw palaces, cisterns, a synagogue, a kosher (by today's standards even) mikveh, and walked in the footsteps of some of the bravest Jews of two thousand years ago.
Before we walked back down the mountain we took one more stop at a perch of the mountain. All of us squeezed onto a long narrow platform on the edge of a cliff. I am particularly scared to the bone by heights which made it difficult, not to mention the ferocious winds that threatened to throw someone off (well at least that's how my irrational mind was thinking at the time). We screamed four words, word by word, after our madrichim. Sheinit! Metzada! Lo! Tipol! MASADA WILL NOT FALL A SECOND TIME! silence. a voice resembling ours was thrown back at us. you might call it an echo. or you might call it the voice of a Jewish community laying in waiting for two thousand years. waiting for a generation to liberate them from the bondage of surrender. Liberate the nation that they lived and died for. we shouted three more words. AM YISRAEL CHAI! The nation of Israel LIVES!
