I felt like I was living inside of a book because it couldn’t actually be real. The walls surrounded me on all sides and I was covered up to my knees in water. My hands clenched the flashlight and my hands were being clenched from behind.  All of our voices rose up to sing familiar songs like Backstreet Boys and Journey and whatever else came to our minds. And you couldn’t differentiate our voices. We became a community when we all sloshed through the water, sang until our throats were sore, helped each other get to the end of a tunnel that was more than 2000 years old. I remember reading about the Hoopoe bird digging a tunnel like this in Michener’s book and I remember how impressed I was originally at all the architectural work that went into it (especially so long ago!) Hezekiah’s Tunnel (the one we trekked through) was built in 701 BCE and it’s hard to imagine someone having the intuition or the ingenuity to build one of such magnitude now, let along 2700 years ago. One of the most vital things to have in a civilization is a source of water and what the Jewish people did in Ir David (The City of David) was build their walls so the water source was outside, cover it up and build a tunnel from the inside out. This ensured the protection of their water in case there was an attack on the city. Just being around so much history made me appreciate how much there was to learn about the Jewish past, about my past. Instead of sitting at a desk in America, I was walking through the same tunnels that Jews relied on such a long time ago. I was in Jerusalem, the place every Jew turns to in prayer, I was there. לבי במזרח. My heart is in the east.

-Mil Dranoff