A Picture-Perfect First Week with Bus 14

By Miyah Lebofsky

During the first week of our trip, we traveled to Jerusalem. It was so picture-perfect that members of our group kept commenting on how everything looked almost fake, like the rocks and signs had been carved and painted to look the way they did rather than having naturally come to look that way with the passing of time. A lot of things in Israel were very different than how I imagined them to be, but Jerusalem lived up to my expectations in every way. At the Haas Promenade, there was a view of the entire city. As we stood at the lookout point, we watched the Dome of the Rock glimmering with the Kotel in front of it. We could see each quarter from this point; there were so many cultures in this one city. It looked like the pictures I had seen from family that have traveled to Israel but being there felt so different. Having amazing shawarma and falafel in the streets, tiny souvenir shops with endless Star of David jewelry, and the knowledge that I was surrounded by all the places I had spent my life learning about was incredible.

Later that day we walked through Hezekiah’s tunnel beneath the old city. As we walked through, the walls grew closer together and we went further away from any light source. Sloshing through the water with the tight pathway and the flickering flashlights, I started to feel disoriented. This was when the group decided to turn off our flashlights and we were guided only by the flowing of the water around our feet and the voices of our friends. While we walked through the darkness, I thought about how this group always makes me feel so safe, even in situations where I might normally feel anxious, and how grateful I was to be in this place with my favorite people, getting to share these new experiences in the homeland of our people.

The next day we went to the Western Wall, a place that always had felt vaguely unreal to me, like somewhere that only existed in stories. At the women’s section of the wall, I was truly touched seeing how people reacted to the wall. Women prayed and everyone tucked their notes and prayers into the cracks of the wall. I expected people to be writing notes, but I was surprised by the amount of people who instead were hugging each other, holding hands, and crying. It was very eye-opening to witness how something I had always thought of as simply a wall to stick notes into could have such a strong emotional impact on people. It helped me to understand how special that place is, and why I had learned about it so much.

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