By Madeline Budman
“So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar” (Genesis 22:3-4). This passage in Genesis describes the journey from Abraham’s home in Beersheba to Mount Moriah, where the sacrifice of Isaac is set to take place. Outlining the mundane details of the journey, this three-sentence passage easily gets lost in the larger saga of the binding of Isaac. However, at the beginning of our Shabbaton in Alon Shvut, the Nachshon Fellows zoomed in on these sentences. The sun beat down on us on a dusty mountain trail as we each read from our own Tanakh. As we sat next to an ancient mikveh, Jamie and Rabbi Zeff passionately argued to us that Genesis 22:3-4 could only be describing one thing: the path on which we were at that very moment.
The walk along Derech Ha’Avot was the most powerful hike that we’ve taken, among all of our hikes from this semester. Based on Biblical passages like the one quoted above, historians have come to understand that this spine of road in the West Bank along the top of a mountain has to be the path described in several different stories from the Tanakh. Abraham walked here to take his son to Mount Moriah, and Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah used this path to travel between Beit El and Hebron and Shechem. This Biblical speculation is confirmed by the existence of an ancient mikveh, where pilgrims would have cleansed themselves before arriving at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and the Roman mile markers along the trail, because Romans would have erected them on a pre-existing road system. As the 33 Nachshon fellows hiked towards Alon Shvut in the Gush Etzion, we trampled the same rocks that Abraham walked, and took in the same breathtaking views of the valley that Isaac saw.
As a politically left-leaning Jew who firmly believes in Tanakh, I had a lot of hesitations about spending a Shabbat in the Gush Etzion; however, our hike on Derech Ha’Avot provided me with a surprising amount of clarity. From my liberal perspective, I could not reconcile the fact that settlements, no matter the stripe, continue to be supported in the West Bank. I held this point of view despite knowing that the West Bank encompasses the majority of Judea and Samaria, where most of the events of the Tanakh occurred. I thought that I understood the pain that religious Zionists felt, being tantalizingly close to their Biblical homeland but unable to use the land to connect to their ancestors, that drove them to establish settlements. I simply thought that it was too bad, that they’d have to make due with crossing a border and visiting like tourists. However, my Shabbat at Alon Shvut, and specifically the walk on Derech Ha’Avot, gave me a profound and deep empathy for the residents of Gush Etzion. Seeing the path that my forefathers and foremothers took as they journeyed between the holiest sites of Judaism, my perspective shifted. Walking with my own feet along the dusty road and viewing the valley with my own eyes, I finally understood the powerful tug of the Biblical landscape.
