Loving The Land With My Feet

The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow. –Thoreau

Hiking is the unofficial national sport of Israel. On national holidays and during the summer, Israelis and visiting tourists swarm over the country, clambering up mountains and wiggling down waterfalls. Brown Israeli children splash each other in the country’s rivers. Arab boys catcall from the low branches of olive trees. Fathers shlep bonneted toddlers on their backs, teenage girls cover their heads with mitpachot so they look married, and 2.5 liter Ein Gedi water bottles litter the sides of trails.

I love it.

There is nothing so wonderful to me as hiking Israel. Forget the stupendous variety of landscape in the country, the sheer beauty of its cliffs and deserts and ocean and watering holes. A walk in Israel is a journey through history. I hike up the same mountain Avraham herded sheep on, scramble over Roman-era ruins, crawl through a trench from the ’67 war, and straighten up, my hand in the strong grasp of a chayal. Every puff of dust that my feet raise as I trek raises a corresponding gasp of appreciation from my mind. This is my land, I think. Each step I take cements it to me more firmly.

One of my most exquisite hikes was the week my father and I spent in Machtesh Ramon, in the Negev (Southern Israel). At first the stark, barren rockiness of the desert left me cold. But at the end of days of exhausting hiking, lying covered in the white dust, watching the sun set in golden veils over the reddening cliffs, I began to thrill to the beauty. The sonic boom of Israeli fighter planes practicing low over the machtesh jerked me out of my doze and reminded me that the allure of this country is all bound up in its people, its unbeatably plucky fight for survival and the pride I feel in its accomplishments.

Another heavenly ramble took me down near Eilat, by the Egyptian border. Instead of the worn rocky trails of the Ramon area, I swam through huge dunes of sand. My friends and I waded up the piles of endless sand, to run and roll and gasp down their sides. I took off my hiking boots, rolled up my pants to my skirt hem, and dashed off barefoot to seek solitude. After five minutes I’d left the group and our guard far behind. Only the little hollows of my footprints linked me to humanity. Just self, sand, and sky. Lying in my sand angel, flinging thought up to the heavens, I understood why Israeli tour guides always blather on about the prophets talking to G-d alone in the Sinai desert. If I were going to suddenly believe in G-d because of a landscape, this would be it.

Over the Sukkot break last year seven friends and I hiked yam l’yam, a three day hike from sea to sea. We started at the Mediterranean and ended at the Sea of Galilee. We followed the orange, blue, and white stripes of paint along nachal kziv, up har meron, past Tzfat, and down to Tiberias. (By the way, I love the symbolism of those stripes: orange for sand, blue for ocean, and white for sky). Families passed us, offered us food, gave us directions. Reaching the Kinneret late at night after three days of grueling beauty, we danced and dunked each other in exhausted triumph. On the tremp (hitchhike) back to Jerusalem, I thought of what I’d like to do next.

Shvil Yisrael, the national trail, runs from the most southern tip of the Negev up to the Northern border with Lebanon. It’s a three-month trek that takes in every piece of Israel. When I make aliyah, the first thing I will do is take three months off, a big backpack, and my tanach, and learn my country from head to toe. As they say, hiking Israel is like caressing the land with your feet.