The Edge of Bethlehem

Rebbe, did you know that I ran in yeshiva? Most nights, when seder ended, I’d return my Talmud to my makom in the beit midrash, change from ironed khakis and a starched button-down shirt into gym shorts and a t-shirt, loop my headphones into my ears, and set out.

Running was one of my greatest joys when I lived in Alon Shvut. The streets were always empty after 11 p.m., and the freshness of the nighttime air was a welcome change from the musk of the beit midrash. Like many West Bank settlements, ours was carved directly into the rocky hillside; in the spring and summer I could stand at its highest point, where the eagle-shaped yeshiva sits, and see the lights of Jerusalem, only twenty kilometers to the north.

But the hilly terrain also made for a hard run. After all, the settlements were not built for convenience, but to take up as much land as possible. As a runner, one had to learn the topography of the roads, and how to recover from one uphill stretch in time to face the next. The key was to find small sections where one could coast just long enough to catch one’s breath.

My favorite of these was Migdal Eder. At first, the street drew me for the reprieve of its relative flatness, but I continued to return because of one house, several in from the curb, whose residents ran laundry late at night. As soon as I was on the street, there was the floral scent of detergent, just sweet enough to induce a pleasant sense of nostalgia. Every time I passed the house, I imagined its laundry room: the bottles of detergent and the piles of folded laundry — the flowing skirts and long-sleeved shirts of the women, and the well-worn undershirts and tzitzit of the men. I’d inhale the fragrant air and think, this is exactly where I belong.

In the final week of my shana aleph, you invited the students of your original shiur to your house for one last meeting. By then almost none of us were still your students. We had spent the better part of the year under your tutelage, learning how to “break our teeth” over lines of Talmud, and many of us had finally taken the leap from your shiur into those conducted in Hebrew for Israeli students. I had made the switch upon returning from pesach break, with just a few weeks left in the year, and although I struggled to follow the lectures, I was proud to learn alongside men for whom Hebrew was the mother tongue.

As we sat around your table, you asked each of us to share one way we’d grown that year. We’d arrived ten months earlier, just weeks after graduating from high school, charged with the same task facing thousands of other Americans arriving for their gap