Daniel stops, swigs down a mouthful of water, and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. Zach takes off his T-shirt and wraps it around his head like a kaffiyeh. White writing peeks out: “Live now, Live—” The rest of the slogan is obscured in forest green folds.

They heft themselves over the lip and onto the top of the fortress and stand, catching their breaths and quietly taking in the view: the strata of color climbing up the rock face. A haze of blue in the distance — the Dead Sea. The sun burning away any lingering whiteness and transforming the sky into a bright blue haze.

Daniel stares without blinking. He’d wanted to spend the year in Israel, in yeshivah, and his rabbi had encouraged him to do so, but after the fiasco with his choice of courses — he’d applied to study sociology, his father had launched an unceasing campaign of silent and vocal disappointment, until he’d transferred to architecture — he didn’t have it in him for another battle.

However, this trip he promised himself; he’d wanted to spend three weeks in yeshivah, but Max had torn him down with his syllogisms. And now he insists on referring to their little group as the Fellowship, an ironic reference to one of these yeshivah summer programs. Every time he says it, Daniel cringes. A lost chance. Another time he’s laid himself open to his friend’s persuasion.

The five of them stare silently for a few moments, until Max continues his campaign. Neurology. Thinking. Truth.

Daniel grows impatient: he came here to escape pseudo-intellectualism and swim in the history of his people and country. “All this argument.” He waves it away with a hand. “It’s not the point.”

“Huh?”

Daniel points at the fortress, ripe for exploring. “It’s about courage. Courage is the thing.”

Max turns on him. “Ah, an emerging Gryffindor?”

“Seriously. Without courage, a person will twist the truth into whatever he wants.”

“Define courage.” Max being Max. It’s like he’s compiling a dictionary of concepts. Define Truth. Define Courage.

Daniel holds his hands together and looks out over the horizon. Courage is… So many things come to mind. The people at the homeless shelter, where he volunteers. His Aunt Sharon, coaxed out of her home to join them for a Yom Tov meal. His mother, looking his father in the eye and telling him, Leave it, please, Daniel heard you, you’ve said enough.

Max scoffs. “Who needs courage when you have Wi-Fi?”

“Excuse me?”

Max pulls his knapsack back on his shoulder and begins to head into the mountain: “Meaning, courage is virtually defunct. Pun unintended. Physically, you’ve got people, police, help, connection. Morally, you’ve got the conscience of the world peeping into your social media accounts, holding you accountable for anything that smacks of bigotry or falsehood. Seriously. Who needs courage?”

Zach types “courage” into Brainyquote. He angles his screen away from the sun, and begins: “Plato sees courage as perseverance — through suffering, pleasure, and fear.”

Daniel strides ahead, impatient, trying to cut through the thoughts that swirl through his mind.

They trail around the edge of the fortress, taking in the view, Max still chewing on the conversation. There’s a place on the top, Zach tells him, reading from a review on his phone, called Echo Valley.

They inch around to it, and lean on the metal barrier at the edge of the cliff. “Hello!” they call. A second’s pause. Two.

Then a sound comes back to them: “Hello!” It’s faded and swampy, the word, but it’s there.

Max calls out. “Are you there?”

A second, two. Three.

Then the sound bounces off the cliff face, and returns to them.

“Are you there?”

They shout the question into a gorge and never once think about asking it to the heart that beats inside each of them.

“I’ll tell you what courage is,” Daniel says, knocking Max on the shoulder. “It’s asking that question to yourself.”

Max snorts. “Go on then. Ask. But why bother, if you can ask Google? Do you know the most frequently asked question on Google?”

Daniel is filled with anger. “Go on.”

“Well, after, how do you play Pokemon Go, how do you lose weight, and, how do you make slime. It’s Am I going to die?

“Of course, the answer is yes, man is by definition mortal.”

By definition.

“Just not necessarily now, of this stomachache–headache–ingrown toenail. Better off going to visit your family doctor than throwing questions out to cyberspace.”

He looks around and Daniel knows what he’s looking for; Max is transparent like that. Admiration. Of his wit that points to an incisive intelligence.

It comes to Daniel then: They’re all just performers — or colluding with a performance. He sees that in each of them, him too, for Heaven’s sake. His father sometimes winks at him as he soothes Daniel’s mother, as if to say, Women, they’re all the same and they all need to be humored. And his mother looks up at him as she sets a plate of steak in front of his father, as if to say, Well, give a man a steak and he’ll be easier to manage. Where was the truth in all of that? Where was the courage to be genuine, to be really there for someone, to opt out of the elaborate puppet show?

Max reads his face. Just for a second they see each other stripped of masks. It shutters away and Max suddenly turns against him. “Well, why stay in the area of opinion? Let’s see some empirical evidence. If courage is the most important thing, prove it.” His face is mocking.

Daniel bites his lip. “Gladly.”

Max turns to the group. “Come on, Fellowship. What’s the most courageous thing you can think of?”

They shrug. “Throw your phone over into this gorge,” Zack says.

Daniel shakes his head. Phones cost money. Contracts cost money. “Wasteful.”

The sun is getting hotter. Daniel lifts a bottle of water to his lips.

They all wait, all of them wanting to prove themselves, show Max that they, too, can be witty and original and creative. Eventually, Max himself comes up with the answer. “Stay here,” he says.

Daniel stiffens. “Meaning?”

“Here. On Masada. Alone. We’ll come back to you on our way back up to Jerusalem. Didn’t you always long to study sociology? Let’s see what happens to one particular homo sapiens, alone on an ancient fort in the desert, cut off from society for three days. You might even be able to write it up afterward, an essay for the course you didn’t take.”

There’s a tightness inside as he grapples. He raises his eyes and stares Max in the eye, but Max refuses to drop his gaze. “All right, then,” he says quietly. “I’ll do it.”

Max gives a cheer, but the guys just look on, quietly. Daniel turns and begins walking over to the crumbling remains.

*

Twice, Yoni and Zach corner him and try to talk him out of this. “Forget truth. Forget courage. Let’s just talk sense,” they say.

They’re right, of course. But something inside wants to do this.

“I’ll be fine,” he tells them. “What’s three days? And I’m not really cut off from civilization. There’s water here. Bathrooms. Even a snack bar.”

They study him, unsure. He’s a big boy now, he reminds them.

“Yeah, but we’re your friends.”

“It’ll be dark here at night,” Zach tells him, looking around. “Find a place to settle down, and don’t go stumbling around near the edges, okay?”

Daniel nods. “What do you take me for?”

“Okay, okay. It’s just that… I’m not sure what all this is about, but I wouldn’t do it if I were you.”

“You’re not me.”

Maybe to prove something to his father, maybe to himself. Maybe it’s so that when he tells the guys in the shelter, You can do it, you’ve got it in you, he’ll know he’s not expecting more from them than he demands from himself, in all his privileged, rich-boy splendor.

Maybe so that he learns all those echoes of self: his father’s conspirator, his mother’s confidant, his rabbi’s zealous congregant. The guy in the shelter’s rock, his tutor’s dutiful student. Without ever having the courage to say, feel, want.

Before the others climb into a cable car, they empty their bags of supplies and hand them to him: rolls, sweating from the heat. Cheese bourekas. A warm yogurt, which he resolves to dump as soon as their backs are turned. He’s strangely touched.

They wave. They’re heading straight down to Eilat, then working back up: Red Canyon, Mitzpeh Ramon, Ein Gedi. Three days and they’ll be back. When the white cable car disappears down the cliff, it’s almost a relief.

He returns to Echo Valley.

“I am here,” he yells.

Three seconds and the words are returned to him.

“I am here.”

Three days.

*

Night One

It’s laughably easy to dodge the security guards doing a sweep of the place at closing time. And then, all of a sudden, the crowds and noise are gone, replaced by the echoing silence of the Judean Desert. He sits, cross-legged, watching the sun set, then hurries to find a place where he can settle for the night.

Near the observation point are the ruins of the synagogue. A guide had said that it was originally a stable: the Jews who had taken over the fortress added benches, brought their sifrei Torah there. He hunkers down.

The silence echoes through his ears. He crouches down, hugging his arms around his knees for warmth. Who would have thought it could get so cold here at night? This morning, it was over 100 degrees.

He closes his eyes, tries to doze off, but his ears are alert to every wind whisper, every insect buzz. Even his heart seems louder than usual. He shivers.

Why have you done this, Daniel?

What are you trying to prove?

*

Day One

He’s barely slept, but Daniel is grateful for the cheers that reach him just before sunrise, from the climbers who have made it to the top. He was never an early riser, but now he stretches, pulls himself up, and looks around to locate the water taps, so he can wash.

There’s a bar mitzvah group over there: a round-faced boy standing in the middle of a group, confused by the attention. He stares for a moment: The easy camaraderie. The father’s affectionate squeeze of his son’s shoulder. A younger sister who pours a bottle of water over her brother’s head. His joking shake of the fist.

A web of family.

He turns on his phone, goes on to Waze, watches the cars moving along the highways and roads: circle with sword, daisy, circle with smile. He wonders which one is Max and Zach and the guys. Somehow, seeing the little icons moving in a circle around the fortress makes him feel less alone.

Eventually, he turns it off, and thinks of the people who populate his own world.

Max, whom he doesn’t understand, not now, not ever. That now, in the year 2017, he could really think that politics — and economics, too — involve any kind of idealism mixed into their lies, makes him both more naive and more pernicious than Dan had ever thought. He’s not there to judge, but something about Max fills him with resentment. As well, Max studying philosophy…

It hurts Daniel too, because he’s the thinker of the group, he’d been the one urging and pushing the others to take a year out of life to study in a yeshivah in Israel. But after the whole university thing, when his father cottoned on to what he really wanted — sociology — and said that there was no way, no way on earth that he’d pay for a degree with zero prospects, and didn’t he want to get married and support a family, Daniel hadn’t found the courage to say a word about all the yeshivahs he’d contacted and spoken to, all the application forms he’d filled in, in cautious hope.

So he’s spent the year studying architecture — angles and lines — and studying the people who line up outside the homeless shelter each evening, a long line of neediness, and he spends the next two hours going from person to person, Hi, there, how are you. Sometimes they answer, sometimes not, sometimes they insult him. He tries not to walk in on people shooting up, though not because they don’t need the care. Just because before he can get the words out of him mouth, they’ve crossed over the divide to a different planet. He mentally corrects himself: doesn’t mean that they’re not someone’s brother or son or uncle. Blue anoraks, crusty beards, rheumy eyes, more often than not haunted by nightmares that only they can see.

Before he started volunteering in the homeless shelter, he used to think that people were like glass, breaking into a million shards, each one knife-sharp and ready to attack. But now he likes to think of people as the peel of a tangerine, taken apart bit by bit, torn down, and while surprising parts of their life are disconnected from each other, they’re still held together by that little green thingy at the bottom.

If his father knew about his volunteering, he would hit the roof. He thinks Daniel stays late studying.

But then he reminds himself that his father is still in the year of aveilus, that he’s mourning and finding himself again. What is a person when he is no longer a son? Doesn’t that require a reconfiguration of identity?

He picks up his phone again, looks at the blank screen, resists the urge to turn it on.

Shards of self. Or is it the tangerine peel again. Has a piece been torn off the orange peel, thrown to floor, still with its ripe, tangy smell? Or is this a segment of fruit?

*

Day Two

The cold has long gone from his body, now, and Daniel resolves to explore the place thoroughly, use the long hours that stretch out before him. He finds a tour group: all sunglasses and women in straw hats, one man in a white panama. The tour guide has a slightly Spanish accent: he is brown and wrinkled as if he has spent a lifetime in the sun, when he talks he bounces slightly on the balls of his feet.

Daniel follows as they walk around the North Palace.

“A grand and daring building, constructed by King Herod,” the guide says, script read from memory, an invisible prompt telling him to fling out his arms. They continue on, walking inward. The guide stops. “And this is the place where the lots were drawn,” he says. The group holds up cameras, they nod and smile.

“Josephus records the events, the night before they surrendered to the Romans.”

The guide holds up a laminated piece of paper, and reads aloud: “Miserable men indeed were they, whose distress forced them to slay their own wives and children with their own hands, as the lightest of those evils… They then chose ten men by lots out of them, to slay all the rest.”

He points to the ground. “On this spot were found pottery shards with names scratched on them, including the name Ben Yair.”

The group nod and listen. One woman whispers to her husband.

Daniel paws at the dirt with his foot, shards of pottery, names, ancient grandeur and horror buried beneath the mediocrity of remembering. Max’s words come to him: Who needs courage today?

Then he realizes that faces are turned to him, blackened lenses in place of eyes. The guide cocks his head and squints at Daniel. Daniel stares back.

“If you are not part of our group,” the guide says to him, “then please do not join us.”

Sometime in the afternoon, his phone blinks into blackness. He clutches it in his palm, surprised at how bereft he feels.

That night, alone under the vast emptiness of the night sky, he knows, suddenly, what he seeks up here in the loneliness. It’s what Max has got, what annoys him so, he realizes, jumping up and pacing around the ruins of the shul. His arms extend in front of him, so that he can feel the pillars in the thick blackness of night. He grasps hold of one, feels the gritty hardness in his fingers. The courage to want. To choose that version of himself, or even the many versions of himself, not because he’s a mellow kind of guy, easygoing, peace-keeper. But because that’s what he wants. It can be a pillar, uniting and solidifying all the versions of himself.

He eases down to the ground, rings the pillar with his arms and presses his cheek against it. It’s still faintly warm from the day’s sunshine. That is a comfort.

*

Day Three

Hunger gnaws at him. He has gone to the refreshment booth, eaten three bags of Bamba, on the basis that they might contain a miniscule of protein, somewhere, among all the chemicals and added vitamins. He added a bar of melting chocolate, which made him feel nauseous. Bamba and chocolate is not enough. Every half hour or so finds him at the water taps, scooping up water with both hands, drinking and pouring it over his head and neck.

He dreams of a sandwich. First, just a plain tuna sandwich. As the hours go by, the sandwich becomes more elaborate. The bread becomes his favorite: sourdough with olives. He adds vegetables: cucumbers, cherry tomatoes cut in half. Lettuce. Not just any lettuce, crisp iceberg.

Now he adds dressing: garlic mayo. For good measure, he layers a thick handful of chips on top, then puts on the second piece of bread. The sandwich is there, ready, just before him, just… just out of reach.

He cradles his head in his hand, and sits back in the shade of some ruin.

Who said they’d even come today?

Who knew?

He is hungry and tired, everything in him aches, including his heart. But as dawn comes, he rises and washes himself down. He goes to the synagogue and prays. His mind is surprisingly clear, the words seem to come from a place deep inside him, broken and tremulous, but free.

He thinks of his grandfather.

A week before Daniel had left, the rabbi knocked on the door. Always one for ceremony, he had drunk two cups of tea before he made a big song and dance of going to his car and presenting them with a rolled up piece of carpet. “I thought you might want to Keep it.” He punctuated his sentences with capital letters. He had dropped the carpet onto the floor and unrolled it with the tip of a carefully shined shoe.

A section of carpet from the shul: brown faded to mud, any pattern rubbed away years ago. When they had pulled up the old carpet, the rabbi told his father, there were two imprints, shoe imprints, where your father stood, may he rest in peace.

He’d brought it to show them. Two indented places on a muddy brown carpet. His father had sniffed politely, but Daniel had been moved, kneeling down and placing his palms on the footprints.

“All those hours where he stood in prayer.”

The rabbi began to drone on about how the prayers surely made more of an imprint in Heaven than on the carpet, and we can only imagine what that was. Through looking at the fine family he left behind, we can guess that G-d smiled on him.

He didn’t like the rabbi’s interpretation. It was facile, too easy.

His grandfather, stillness, prayer. The three elements weave in and out of his mind. He thinks about the shelter, a young boy he’d seen the week before, thrown out of his home in some drunken argument, determined to show his parents that he knows best. He had wanted to tell this boy that there is a stillness inside you that cannot be touched, something that can remain impervious to everything, even fathers, even while they sink into the fibers and leave a mark. He wanted to say something about his own grandfather, who was still even as the cars whizzed and the earth turned and the synapses in his brain frayed. Even as his selfhood disintegrated piece by piece. Instead, he had just patted the boy on the back and told him that everything looks better in the morning.

Was that true?

Today, this morning, his third day of aloneness, did everything look better?

Lightheaded and weak, Daniel returns to Echo Valley. He stands, staring at the blank sheet of rock opposite, waiting for every person’s inane message. That won’t be him, he promises himself.

Who is enough, being themselves?

Aren’t we a thousand different, swaggering things to a thousand different, swaggering beings? With the rabbi, appreciative. His father, diffident. His friends, posturing as soul-sensitive, slightly hard-done-by, all traits that earn him the right to an opinion, whether thought-out or no. His mother… Ah, that’s a hard one. His mother knows every version of him.

And what is he to himself?

He had thought he’d learn that under the stars, that in his aloneness, he could be the true Daniel Freedman.

But now he has doubts. Without any interactions with anyone else, who knows what he is and what he could be?

So here he is, the tangerine peel discarded, and what is left? What is meant to be is some fruit, juicy and sweet. But he doesn’t know anymore what is left, for without others around you, how can you measure yourself? Without others to define you, you are… maybe, like a windswept fortress standing in the middle of the desert, a distant memory of some battle.

I need them, he whispers to himself.

But more, I need me.

And then, all of a sudden, hands clap onto his shoulders, pummel his arms. He turns around, faces. He blinks, dizzy. Zach holds a bottle of iced tea to his lips, Yoni hands him a granola bar. He eats, drinks, though it is hard to swallow.

Even Max wears an expression of concern. “How was it, fellow? Survived?”

He nods.

They want to continue the trip, back to base in Jerusalem; they’re heading up north tomorrow: Banias, Gamla, Kinneret, Arbel, then heading over to the coast to see Acre prison, hike around Mount Carmel. But before they leave, there’s one more thing he wants to do.

He stands, leaning on the metal barrier, looking at the sheet of rock across. He swallows, summons up strength, summons up courage.

“I am here,” he yells.

Three seconds and the words are returned to him.

“I am here.” *

(Originally Featured from Calligraphy Succos 5778)