In the early morning hours, I am often out running, hiking, or riding through the hills. I love that time of day – the rising sun, the scent of spring flowers on the breeze, the quiet. No matter how dark it still is, no matter how tired I am, I find myself drawn out the door before the rest of the world is awake.
And I’m not the only one.
On my solitary jaunts through the Gush Etzion hills, I meet other creatures. The birds sing me off on my way as I step out into my yard. And the red fox greets me the moment I leave the edge of my town and find the trails where civilization gives way to brush and stone.
Lately, the foxes have been everywhere.
It turns out there’s a reason for that. Foxes mate in late winter, and their cubs are born by the beginning of March. By late April, the kits are starting to emerge from their dens for the first time, small and curious about the world above ground. Both parents are out hunting harder than at any other point in the year, trying to keep up with a litter of four or five hungry mouths. So when I see a red fox crossing my path in the early morning, I’m watching a parent on the job. April and May are the most visible weeks of the entire fox year.
Some consider the fox to be wily and cunning. Between children’s fables and Jewish folklore, you might come away thinking this cute, fluffy creature is somehow inferior to other mammals – clever, perhaps, but not quite to be trusted. And it’s true that no fox I’ve ever met on the trail has seemed particularly friendly. They are solitary creatures, never roaming in packs. They dart away the moment they sense me coming. Jewish tradition tends to be wary of solitary pursuits too. We value the community, the minyan, the group.
But then again, I’m the one who’s out by myself before sunrise.
The truth is, foxes aren’t solitary because they’re antisocial. They’re solitary because of what they eat. Wolves hunt big prey, so they hunt in packs – many mouths to take down a deer. A fox eats a single mouse, a single lizard, a single small bird. There is nothing to share. The fox’s aloneness isn’t a character flaw. It’s the shape of a life lived close to the ground, taking small things, one at a time.
These particular foxes have been here a long time. Fox fossils in the land of Israel go back more than a million years. The red fox of Gush Etzion isn’t an introduced species or a recent arrival – its ancestors watched the patriarchs, the kings, the destructions, the rebuildings. When Lamentations describes foxes walking on Mount Zion – the Hebrew shu’al can mean fox or jackal – the animal in the verse is the same animal slipping along the edge of my morning.
Foxes in the Jewish tradition
Jewish tradition is also more layered on the fox than it first appears. Yes, foxes show up in unflattering company – Ezekiel calls the false prophets “like foxes in the ruins.” Pirkei Avot says it’s better to be “a tail to lions” than “a head to foxes.”
But Rabbi Meir, one of the great sages of the Mishna, was famous for his mishlei shu’alim – “fox fables” – moral tales in the Aesop tradition, in which the fox is often the clever protagonist rather than the villain. The Talmud says he knew three hundred of them. A despised animal doesn’t get to be the hero of three hundred parables.
And the most famous biblical fox passage of all – the verse from Lamentations – gets turned inside out in the Talmud. Walking with his colleagues past the ruins of the Temple, Rabbi Akiva sees a fox emerge from the Holy of Holies. His friends weep. Akiva laughs. If the prophecy of destruction has been fulfilled, he tells them, then the prophecy of restoration will be fulfilled too. The fox becomes the proof that the story is still being written.
I think about this often on my morning walks. Growing up in the American South, the small mammals of my childhood were squirrels and the occasional raccoon – animals that show up exactly nowhere in the texts I read in synagogue. The fox is different. The fox is in the text. The shu’al of Song of Songs, of Lamentations, of Pirkei Avot, is the same red-coated animal disappearing into the brush ten meters in front of me.
This is one of the quieter gifts of living here. The Torah’s nature stops being abstract. You pick olives instead of apples. You count the omer as the barley harvest gives way to the wheat harvest in the fields all around. And early in the morning, when no one else is up, you meet the fox of the prophets – small, alone, beautifully indifferent to your existence – and you go on your separate ways.
The writer is the author of From Southerner to Settler: Unexpected Lessons from the Land of Israel and the founder of Hiking the Holyland.