He hadn’t davened Shacharis today, never even put on tefillin. He’d been so desperate to run, to hide, that he had forgotten who he was

The road shimmered with heat, and the hills on both sides were an endless parade of unchanging brown punctuated by the occasional scraggly bush or jagged crack. Benny wasn’t sure what had pulled him toward Midbar Yehuda after dropping off the kids at gan. He knew it wasn’t technically legal to ride his bike on an intercity highway, that he could probably get in trouble if a cop spotted him. But it wasn’t logic at work here; something inside of him craved surroundings that matched the desolate landscape of his soul.

The electric bike passed the exit to Mitzpeh Yericho, buzzing hard as the road curved and dipped. Benny turned right onto Route 90. The road stretched ahead, snaking relentlessly into the desert.

He kept riding and noticed a sign for the Qumran Visitors Center. Benny wasn’t a museum person, but he decided to check it out.

He paid the entrance fee — it was less than 30 shekel, nothing major — and wandered through the building. The museum was small, and most of its offerings revolved around explanations and depictions of ancient urns, parchment fragments, and ascetic scribes who had left civilization more than a thousand years ago to live in this hostile territory.

Benny understood why they had left polite society for these caves. You couldn’t rely on polite society when you were down and out. You couldn’t count on privileged people like Ephraim Grossman, who lived in Ezras Torah, probably in a million-dollar dirah that some rich grandfather had bought him.

Grossman could afford to work at Ner Olam; he didn’t need the salary to pay his grocery bill. Benny could just picture him bragging about it on his trips back to America, telling his admiring old uncles, “I work with bochurim, try to show them what learning is really all about.”