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Look to your left. Now look to your right.

You probably saw the comforts of home -- maybe the family moving from the Shabbos table to the living room, a quiet suburban street, or if you're in Highland Park a family of deer taking one of their strangely nonchalant weekend strolls across residents' front lawns.

I was recently given the same instructions, but at the time I was standing atop the water tower of Bet El, a town just north of Jerusalem.

My host, an old family friend, told me to look to my left, then look right. On my left, I saw the Mediterranean Sea in the distance; to my right was Jordan.

This is Israel's famously slender waist, though at times like these it feels more like a throat with adversarial hands closing around it. At a slightly higher altitude than Jerusalem, the hills of Bet El are good vantage points to see and feel the precarious nature of Israel's place in the Middle East.

Of course, since Bet El is located in the Binyamin section of Samaria, media reports would dismiss it as a settlement, and imply that it stands at the Israeli vanguard of vanity -- exclusionary, aggressive, selfish, even xenophobic.

Visit the town, however, and you'll witness the opposite: civilization at its finest. Bet El's landscape is breathtaking, but its diversity may be its most stirring feature. This is a truly colorblind society, with residents from every corner of the globe sustaining a community that evinces both an easy charm and meticulous self-awareness.

As told in the book of Genesis, on the run to avoid a confrontation with Esav, the patriarch Jacob stopped for an overnight stay in Bet El, where he dreamed of the ladder to heaven and of God promising him divine protection and the land on which he slept. God said to Jacob: "I will give to you and your descendants the land upon which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth. You shall spread out to the west, to the east, to the north, and to the south.... I will protect you wherever you go and bring you back to this soil."

Walking through Bet El last week, at times it seemed that every person we met spoke with a different accent -- an apparent fulfillment of the promise to Jacob that his descendents would be scattered, but will be returned to this land under the invisible but palpable blanket of God's guidance and shelter.

We visited Ramat Eshkol and Ramat Shlomo as well -- the latter, of course, was at the center of the recent controversy over the Obama administration's demand to cease Jewish building in Jerusalem. It was a very silly fight to pick -- so silly, in fact, that it inspired mostly head scratching by Ramat Shlomo's residents, who apparently didn't get the memo that since northern Jerusalem is still east of somewhere, it is considered east Jerusalem by this administration, despite the unanimous understanding that it would never be included in a future Palestinian state's East Jerusalem capital. (When reporters descended like locusts onto Ramat Shlomo after the controversy erupted, one local resident greeted the press with this line: "How did you all get up here without passports? Don't you know this is Palestinian territory?")

That quote was published in the Jerusalem Post in a story headlined "Ramat Shlomo residents don't understand what all the fuss is about". At the time, I wasn't sure if they believed what they were saying, but when we visited Ramat Shlomo last week, I had the same reaction.

What's next, I wondered? Will we behold the spectacle of Joe Biden wagging his finger and Hillary Clinton chewing out Bibi come September, as construction begins in this Haredi enclave on 2,000 sukkot after Yom Kippur?

Following Ramat Shlomo, we stopped in Ramat Eshkol for some coffee and cake. We laughed as we overheard the man at the next table speaking on his cell phone. "You also have the God-given right to vote," the man was saying. "You've got to get rid of Obama."

There was not a trace of anger in the man's voice, only bemusement and pity. The U.S. national debt, he was telling the person on the other end of the conversation, is unsustainable. His tone was affable; in fact, I didn't hear one resident of any of these neighborhoods raise his voice at the mention of Obama's name -- there was just disappointment, as if to say: he just doesn't get it.

John F. Kennedy once insisted to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion that the U.S. inspect Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona twice a year to be able to reassure the world that Israel was not working toward a nuclear bomb. "A woman should not only be virtuous, she should appear to be virtuous," Kennedy lectured Ben-Gurion.

My advice to anyone seeking to make such sweeping, sanctimonious judgments about Israel's Jewish communities: Stand atop Bet El's water tower. See the virtue for yourself.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.