I am thrilled to be February blogger of the month, as today was a very blog-able day. Since moving here, I’ve found myself saying yes to things I would normally say no to. Do you feel like getting up at the crack of dawn to run a race? Of course not. Do you feel like getting up at the crack of dawn to run the lowest race on earth? Sign me up! And so, this morning, about 10 classmates and I awoke at the wee hour of 4:30am to drive to the Dead Sea to run the Ein Gedi Dead Sea half marathon (or for the less bipedaly inclined, myself included, a 10K).
As we rolled out of Beer Sheva in the dark, four friends and I sandwiched into our clownishly petite Nissan Micra rental, we felt like deviant children sneaking out of the city we love to hate, as if it were a stern and disapproving parent. As we drove up past Omer, and eventually down through the Wadi as the sun crept slowly up behind burnt red mountain plateaus, we munched on nuts and banana chips and talked about the improbability of the Israelites wandering here for 40 years, in terrain so inhospitable to human life.
The race itself (my first ever) was pleasant and pretty uneventful. I don’t think I can say the same for the half-marathoners as the sun was surprisingly unforgiving at 10am when they were finishing up. After the race we walked (some of us hobbled) to the Ein Gedi spa where we took a tractor ride to the Dead Sea for some mud, sun and sea bathing.
In reflecting upon days, it often holds true that the sweetest and most meaningful parts are the spaces in between, or the moments of unfolding after the action and excitement have peaked. As we drove back to Beer Sheva, tracing the Green Line through Bedouin and Israeli villages, we found ourselves winding through miles of grass, trees and hills spotted here and there with flocks of sheep grazing, interspersed with an odd camel or two. We dubbed this secret area ‘Israel’s Ireland’, as the trees and greenery were so shocking and so welcome to our eyes now so accustomed to the stony and dusty Negev.
As we went in search of an area supposedly rich in February wildflowers, Joey and Jamie told us the story of how Abraham and Sarah settled in Beer Sheva and the sad story of when they banished Hagar because of Sarah’s jealousy over her ability to bear Abraham’s child. Jamie said it is the first instance where God shows compassion in the Bible. At some point I made a bad joke about how the problem with Beer Sheva is that they replaced the 7 wells with 7 malls (Beer Sheva literally means seven wells, and is now known as the mall capital of Israel).
When we finally did roll back into town, the temperature was ten degrees cooler, and I remember thinking, as I watched the boys next door kick a soccer ball around, and heard the rooster across the street crow, and saw the plump lemons fermenting on the ground beneath the tree, that sometimes it just takes a day away to allow you to have compassion for where you are. - February blogger of the month, Sarah Humphreys
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