The Hole in the Sky

From the desert, we had driven to a youth hostile, where we spent the night preceding our morning hike. For the sake of common decency I will avoid detailing the events of the night in the hostile, but in a word I think "male-bonding" is the best descriptor.

We were woken at three in the morning to the sounds of a very belligerent alarm, at which point we groggily rolled out of bed, gathered our belongings, and assembled in the lobby for a breakfast of shrink wrapped fruits and bread. We slowly filed into the parking lot, on the brink of despair at the heat, hotter then in the dark of morning than we had yet experienced, as we hypothesized that the heat would only climb as the sun raised in the sky.

We began our ascent on the rocky trail, many of my dorm including myself easily surpassing the majority of even the group ahead of us. In the first twenty minutes I had already downed half a liter of water and made considerable progress on my second bottle, trying to lighten the load of the bag strapped to my back. We raised higher and higher, almost never losing sight of the hostile where we had stayed the night before even as it shrunk to nothing but a dollhouse at the distance between us. The dessert had no texture, no green to block the view of any of its vast expanse. We could see all the way to the dead sea and past that on to Jordan.
I made a futile effort to capture the moment on camera, but even though, in absence of the sun, the light was now enough to see well, the camera could not grasp the majesty of the view. Its weak facsimile was dark and without definition, capturing only a pinprick of the detail or expanse of the landscape.

I looked up at the long, drawn out line of people preceding me, a line of Jews working their way up a desert mountain in a long, twisted line. The image evoked memories of old religious stories, the Jews walking through the desert on the way to the parting of the sea, on the way up the mountain to receive the Torah, walking for forty years through a wind blasted craggy terrain that I could barely stand for forty minutes.

To my grateful surprise, as we climbed the wind began to pick up and it became cooler. The heat was more crisp and defined. Its rays were harsh, but nowhere near as suffocating as the heavy, suppressive, dark heat of the morning. Nevertheless, I was sweating profusely from every inch of my body, the liters of water I had guzzled coming back and being released. It felt fantastic, I could practically feel myself becoming lighter, more limber, freer of the toxins pervading my system. I wiped my forehead again and again to prevent it from dripping down my face and holding longingly to my nose or my eyelids but to no great effect. The top of the mountain was nearing.

Higher and higher and higher, we were nearly at the top and the entire stretch of mountain was now laid out beneath us, illuminated by the blue pre-dawn glow. Finally, in one push of victorious effort, we rounded the last corner of the trail and stepped out into the crumpled fortress of Masada.

We explored the ruins to some degree, finding vantage points over the edge of the mountain where we could ogle at the view and take a few obligatory photos. Then we made our way up to Akiva on yet a higher ridge of the mountain. He had wrapped himself in a Tallis and Teffilin. He told us to face to the East, off the side of the cliff, and began to daven quietly, rocking back and forth to his own diatonic chant. We waited for the sun to rise.

I sat on the wall of the fortress, feet dangling out over a twelve foot drop, classmates on either side, looking straight out at the distant mountain range. Then, ever so tentatively, yet oh so determined, the first sliver of white peeked over the cliffs. And then it was out, rising steadily and actually quite quickly, pulling itself hand over hand to escape from the rocky turf. In less than five minutes, its whole circular glory could be made out, removed from the ground. The sun was whiter than I had ever seen. It was a hole in the sky, completely blank, as if someone had punched through the grey-blue material of the sky with a perfectly clean cut and through it we could see some other reality, surpassing the physical world, incomprehensible but for its clear white purity.

My neighbor gasped and said "Just think, four hours ago this was setting on the east coast." Suddenly I could see the turn of the Earth beneath my feet, I could feel us rotating, our face turning towards the light of this fiery burning ball thousands of miles away. I held in my minds eye a picture of the entire planet. I could see where I stood. I could see my Mom, my Dad, and my brother seven thousand miles away. We were united. Time was absolutely relative. In that moment, we both indisputably existed in that moment no matter when that moment was in our lives. Day and night were a fiction.