When cabin fever hits, some of the most surprising excursions aren’t too far from your own backyard

As Israel went into lockdown after Purim, my world shrank. Gone were work trips to different corners of the country; Pesach with family overseas was canceled; and when the 100-meter rule came into force, the extent of my universe stretched two buildings in each direction.

The sheer restrictiveness of that Seder night under curfew was crystallized by some anonymous joker, in a play on words familiar to most Israeli schoolchildren learning Mah Nishtanah: “When Abba comes back from the beit knesset… he makes Kiddush right away” became a reference to the balcony, “When Abba comes back from the mirpesset…”

But then one day I’d had enough of being hemmed in. Armed with my Israeli press card, I headed out. I could have reported breathlessly from sealed-off Bnei Brak, goggled at the COVID wards mushrooming outside Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek hospital or roamed the length and breadth of the land.

Instead, drawn by the spring fragrance wafting in from the countryside, I went for a series of long walks around Beit Shemesh’s perimeter.

Heading downhill out of Ramat Beit Shemesh Alef, I toiled up the steep ascent to the new Gimmel neighborhood and continued past it on the road that winds around the vast building site known, with bureaucratic blandness, as Daled, another town in the making.

It turned out to be far more than a walk past a building site. Because there, at the end of the perimeter road, lay a view of Jewish history.