When Aaron Lipkin looks out, he sees biblical history all around. There is Bethel, where two bears mauled the hooligans who heckled Elisha. Across the way, near a radar station, is quite possibly the place where Abraham and Lot parted ways millennia ago—avoiding further conflict by dividing the land.
When I visited the Holy Land last month, I heard Aaron Lipkin give a hilltop talk behind the guarded gates of Ofra, the first Jewish settlement in the West Bank. At our feet were the broken remains of several houses deemed illegal and demolished by the Israeli government in 2015. While Lipkin lamented that chapter, the mood in the rest of the settlement was largely optimistic. When Israeli soldiers passed a playground bustling with children, their presence was a source of calm, not concern, for the many parents in this Jewish enclave of 3,500.
In 1964, David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of modern Israel, personally answered a letter from Avi Lipkin, the teenage boy who would become Aaron's father. That correspondence set the Lipkins on the path from being a modestly observant New York City family to becoming "complete Jews" in the land of the Bible, as Ben Gurion put it. Today, Aaron is proud to be one of the orthodox Jews now repopulating what he calls "Judea and Samaria"—what others call the "occupied territories."
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