Jog

I went jogging this past shabbat, late in the afternoon.  I jogged past a street minyan (prayer group) at one of the intersections and was able to hear them reading the Torah from a Torah scroll on a small table on the street corner.  The participants were not ultra orthodox, they were just random people, some with their kids, dressed in normal clothes, nothing fancy. As I ran by, I just stared as long as I could, thinking some combination of: “wow, you don’t see that everyday,” “only in Israel…” and “this is definitely our home.”

I jogged a little farther up the street and for some reason noticed the street sign on another corner. The street I was jogging on was called HaHayil החי״ל, which means “the soldier” (or in biblical Hebrew, someone with valor.) The cross street was called Ha’Lamed Heh הל״ה. That is a numerical term which means 35. 

“The Thirty-Five” is instantly recognizable in Israel as referring to the 35 Palmach soldiers (one of the precursors to the IDF in pre-state Palestine) who tried to bring supplies during the night to the beleaguered settlements in the Gush Etzion bloc on Jan 15,1948 but were discovered and massacred before they could reach their destination. (literally massacred, some of the bodies were so badly mutilated they were unrecognizable). Later that year, the settlement bloc fell in the 1948 war of independence. The fighting in that area, just south of Jerusalem, is thought to have provided protection to Jerusalem itself and allowed the nascent state to successfully hold the western part of Jerusalem at the end of the war. It is such a recognizable term, The Thirty-Five, that many of the schools here do field trips where they hike the exact path up the hills between Jerusalem and Hebron where the soldiers had been. 

I had jogged this route many times before but had never noticed the street signs, and certainly not that corner, the corner of “Soldier” and “The Thirty-Five.” There is so much to learn and see and feel here, just in everyday life. It’s a real privilege.