It’s 7:00 in the morning and I’ve been hiking up a mountain for about an hour. My breathing is heavy and my chest aches, I’m sweating through my clothes and my water is half full. The group pauses every so often to rest and drink, yet we cannot sit or our muscles will contract. We continue up until finally we hit the plateau of the mountain. All around us are settlements built from clay or stone. Yossi leads us to a crumbling building with a square foundation. There’s no ceiling and the stones look like Jerusalem stone. We all sit down on benches and, in unison, we start to pray. As we’re praying we follow Yossi to the edge of the mountain where more ruins lay, and watch the sun rise above mountains in the east and shine pink and orange into a sky that was a black and blue swirl only thirty minutes before. I climb on top of buildings that are 1,947 years old. I feel cold stone against my legs and see a canyon in the clear day. It felt like only a second that I was on top of the ruins staring at desert and mountains next to each other. Yossi calls class by a deteriorating wall. He describes King Herod’s intention for building Masada, how he left it to the Roman Procurators who reigned after Herod, and why the Succarri Zealots took control of the mountain. And then we walk back to a Beit Knesset that’s over 1,900 years old.

When you learn about your ancestors and the people who are your past, you feel an immense pride for their bravery. And then you travel to the place where they fought, and suddenly those emotions are much more real. No longer is it this fleeting sense that history could be wrong, because seeing is proof, and you get to see it all.

The sun is higher in the sky now; the back of my neck drips with sweat. I feel exhausted as we walk to the center of the mountain. Yossi leads us down huge stairs made from smooth rocks; I trip three times on the way down. We continue to climb down these bulbous steps into a cavern with a sand and dust floor. “Sit down.” We sit in a circle. All around us the walls are smooth, not jagged and rough like fresh rock. We hear about the 967 Jewish fighter and families that lived on Masada for four years and then are asked, what would you do if 10,000 Roman troops surrounded the fortress, and were about to take over the base? Do you die fighting? Do you surrender? Do you kill yourself? And your children? Could you kill them, or risk them being sent to torture by the Romans? Either forced to row a boat until it sunk and drown, or thrown into a mine to never see the sun again. And in that vast cavern we decided, one by one, if our families would die, fight, or surrender. What an honorable death would be. What a true Jewish soldier faced with the same decision was going to do. In the end, the real zealots chose death. Only seven lived to face the Romans, two elder women and five orphans.

We go to the sites of our history on this trip to fully immerse ourselves in components of our lives; whether we’re secular or orthodox or more Israeli or Jewish, we still have a history in Israel.