But when Tuesday rolled around everyone seemed confused. “We’re going on a tour of the Old City? But we live here, we see it every day!” I was so confused that I asked Rav Moish about it. “You don’t understand how much there is to see in this place. You haven’t even seen most of it,” he responded with a huge smile on his face. With those words in mind I got ready for the tiyul – my hat on my head and my one-liter bottle at my side.

To my surprise, Rav Binny announced that he was going to be our tour guide. As he instructed us to bring chairs and form a semi-circle on the roof, one thought crossed my mind: it’s time for some midday singing. But when I got up to the roof, there was Rav Binny, sans guitar, waiting for our tour to begin. He started by talking about the circle of history, describing the similarities between the way Jews entered the Old City in King David’s time and the way Israeli soldiers marched to the Old City after the Six Day War. He taught us about Har Ha’zeitim (Mount of Olives) and the road that bisects it. And we learned about how Roman soldiers lined up on Har Ha’tzofim (Mount Scopus) before surrounding the walls of Jerusalem. How history has changed; Hebrew University now rests on that mountain, where students learn about the fall of the Roman Empire and the independent Jewish state. 20 minutes on the Yeshiva’s roof and I’ve learned more than I expected to for the whole tour.

We then went to the courtyard of our building complex. A huge tree stands in the middle of the courtyard, easily the most noticeable sight of the area. But tucked away in a corner are two large stones. To a normal tourist, these stones go unnoticed – just another old stone in the Old City. But, looking closer at the stones, one notices inscriptions that have been carved by Jewish slaves. After the fall of the Second Temple, Jews were reduced to nothing. “But look where we are now in comparison to the Romans,” Rav Binny said, reemphasizing his point of the circle of history.

We walk by an old English mailbox – two tons in weight – used to prevent the mailing of letter bombs during the time of the British Mandate (1917 – 1948). While we were standing there, a little girl walks up to mail a letter; she has trouble because the slot is so thin you need to put the letter in perfectly. We stop in an alleyway and hear about how Agrippa (King of Judea in the generation before the destruction of the 2nd Temple) turned it into a private sidewalk for the Kohanim so they could avoid becoming ritually impure when they walked to the Beit Hamikdash. During the War of Independence in 1948, it was used as a Hagganah machine gun post to ward off the opposing armies.

And then we came to the remains of an old street leading to the Cardo. I walk by this every day, on my way from the dorms to the Yeshiva building. Not once have I given it more thought than “why are there always so many tourists taking pictures of this”. We sit down and Rav Binny begins to discuss its significance. There was a time when 200,000 Jews lived in the Old City. “To put that into perspective,” he says, “today there are 6,000 Jews and 90% Arabs. And the Old City today is bigger than it was 2000 years ago!” When the walls were broken, the Romans took their time looting and pillaging the Jewish homes. They ransacked the whole area before making it to the Temple three weeks later. Titus called the road we were standing on “The Cardo” and made the road we were looking at prohibited for Jews to walk on. Today, it is a major tourist attraction and you can see kids playing games with the columns – another testament to our resurrection as a nation.

Our final stop on the tour was in a large courtyard in the back of a school. Next to the jungle gym lie the remains of a 2700 year old wall. During the time of Hezekiah, the wall stood eight meters tall and protected the Jews from their enemies. The Assyrians, led by Sennacherib, amassed a 150,000 soldier army (easily, the largest army in the history of warfare – equivalent to a 45,000,000 soldier army today), and surrounded the wall. It wasn’t a matter of if the wall would come down, but when it would. The Jews prepared themselves for their death. But, miraculously, the Assyrian army died in a plague and the Jews broke down the wall. We were staring in awe at the remains of that wall.

I thought that I knew a lot about the place that I am living in for the year. I thought I had seen every corner of the Jewish quarter. And while I may have walked by everything, I never even came close to understanding why some things are important. The Old City is a place unlike any other. Around every corner lies another piece of history – be it a single stone or an entire wall. Only by seeing these things first hand can one truly comprehend how special this city is. Hopefully, I’ll have the chance to learn about everything the Old City has to offer. But for now, it’s back to choiref zman.