The Cave

Part Four of the Jerusalem Series

We stayed that night in a youth hostile, leaving first thing in the morning for our second hike of the weekend. We arrived at the mountain early in the afternoon and began our descent. The first stop we made was an olive tree about four hundred meters down the path. Climbing has always been a favorite activity of mine, even more so among the desert climate trees of Israel, crooked and different from the high pines of Seattle, not to mention of course, the hit of admiration I could get by scaling a campus tree in three seconds flat. I arrived at the tree behind the group leader by a ways to find him already seated comfortably in the low branches. All the boys had been awaiting my arrival, eager to see me scale this new obstacle. Quickly scampering up the side, I took a seat on a stylishly twisted knot three feet above the teacher as he began his lesson. It was an olive tree, as he told us. Warped and overgrown by its five hundred years in the soil, but deceptively small for all its years. The branches were tightly interwoven above my head and I could not have climbed further.

When the lesson ended, despite my seat above the rest of my fellow arboreal dwellers, I lowered myself easily around them to the ground and resumed the walk to a nearby pond littered with a solid layer of thick green scum and plastered with trilingual signs forbidding drinking, diving, and swimming. Who the signs were for was a mystery, no one would touch the acrid water. Instead we found its source, a clear stream coming from a hole in the rocks just taller than my head. One by one we ignited our headlamps and delved into the darkness in single file.

We followed the tunnel for a few hundred feet into the bowels of the earth until it opened up into a cavern the size of a small living room illuminated only by our lamps. The group congregated into a circle around the room, and then, at Akiva's instruction, turned out our lights. one by one, the white gleam of our lamps were extinguished bringing the image to my minds-eye of stars blinking out to leave the night sky endless and unlimited in its blackness. I could not see my hands an inch from my face. I could not see my neighbors. I could not see the ledge on which I was perched. I could not see the walls or the floor or the roof. I could only hear Akiva's voice, slow and methodic, as he spoke and then let the cave fall to complete, heavy silence. The blackness weighed on me like a blanket. I felt like if I tried, I could punch through it into who knows where. I felt the presence of everyone around me. I felt unbelievably alone.

My eyes clawed at the darkness, desperately searching for some light, counter to the peacefulness I found in my mind. I could only find a faint patch of lighter blackness to my left where the sneakiest light from the long distant entrance had managed to wriggle its way past the long length of tunnel. I turned my eyes away to rejoin the blackness...

After a time, Akiva raised up a song. The cave filled with a rousing cacophony of slightly out of key high schoolers singing away the dark, and the lights were relit. As the class began lowering themselves down the entrance one at a time, posing for pictures and resuming their lighthearted conversations, a few of us hung back and found the back wall of the cave where water, filtered by 100 years of seeping through the dirt and stones of Israel, dripped off the rocks as pure as rain. We drank straight from the wall of the cave, letting it drip into our hands and our mouths. We were connected to its lifeblood. Then we turned and left, never to see it again for the rest of our lives.

Both Profound... and passing.