The teens are part of initiatives that aim to let the outdoors work its magic where the classroom has failed

Photos: Shlomi Trichter

UP and down Israel, small start-up nonprofits are joining established programs to get young people who have not found their place in mainstream chareidi frameworks into the worlds of welding, mountain bike instruction, shepherding, and tracking. The people running these projects are as diverse as their clientele, but they share one common motivation:

Happiness is a basic requirement for children to succeed

Like a Rosh Hashanah machzor come to life, the sheep wait at the gate on the edge of the Judean Desert, jostling to be first in line to file by the shepherd.

Dodge, a black an d white border collie, nips at their heels as they move down into a gulley bordering the farm next to Mitzpeh Yericho, half an hour from Jerusalem.

To soft commands of “sha’on” and “neged” — Hebrew for clockwise and counter — the dog darts right and left of the flock, steering it into the hills.

The sound of a thousand hooves fills the air. As the gulley widens, the sheep rush forward, their movement oddly like an undulating sheet of water.

They burst through a straggly clump of trees, teeth snapping at the tasty leaves overhead. Then, like the Light Brigade, they charge onward.

Suddenly, there’s a road ahead, and as the sheep surge across it, a bus comes to a halt, and out spill tourists, lenses flashing.

Arriving over the narrow mountain route from Palestinian Authority–controlled Jericho, they’re likely Europeans, expecting to see Bedouins herding their flocks over the harsh terrain.

Instead, the scene defies the neat stereotypes of the guidebooks they likely consult.

Because presiding over the 270-strong herd aren’t dusty nomads, but something more Biblical.

Two fresh-faced Jewish teens, black yarmulkes, swinging tzitzis and windblown peyos marking them as chareidi, act as shepherds — for all the world like something from the pages of Tanach.

As one of the shepherds picks up the sheepdog and lovingly cuddles it as he walks past the bus, the ooh-ing and aah-ing redoubles.

Then the flock is gone, a dust storm marking its progress into the mountains.