Kefitzat Haderech (, lit. "contraction of the road") is a Hebrew term, used in Jewish sources, referring to miraculous travel between two distant places in a brief time. Etymology In modern Hebrew the root kafatz (קפץ) means to jump, suggesting that the traveler has "jumped" to a distant location. However, in the original Talmudic context, the root means "to clench" or "to contract": that is, the route itself is shortened. In Jewish sources The Torah has the first reference to kefitzat haderech during the story of Eliezer's (Avraham's non-Jewish manservant) travels to Ur Kasdim to find a wife for Yitzchak from among Avraham's family, where he eventually finds and leaves with Rivkah (Genesis, 24:42). When Eliezer speaks to Bethuel and Lavan, the father and brother of Rivkah, he states: "I came today to the spring, and I said: O Lord, God of my master Abraham, if You would indeed grant success to the errand on which I am engaged". Rashi states that the usage of "I came today" indicates that "Today I started on my journey and today I have arrived here. Hence we may infer that the earth (the road) shrunk for him (i.e that the journey was shortened in a miraculous manner)" and uses the literal phrase קפיצת הדרך to reference this phenomenon. The Talmud lists several biblical stories in which, it claims, kefitzat haderech occurred. The Babylonian Talmud writes that astrologers told Sennacherib "If you go and conquer them now, you will overcome the Jewish people; and if not, you will overcome the Jewish people. He walked and traversed in in one day a road upon which one must walk for ten days in order to traverse it". (Talmud Sanhedrin, 95a) The Jerusalem Talmud tells the story of a farmer who, chasing his runaway ox, managed to travel from Israel to Babylonia in a single day. It is implied that the farmer accidentally followed a hard-to-find physical shortcut (of a kind not possible according to modern science). When Natronai Gaon was rumored to have used kefitzat haderech to travel from Babylonia to France and back, Hai Gaon rejected the possibility, and suggested instead that an impersonator may have claimed to be Natronai. In early stories of the Chasidic movement, wonder-working rabbis are ascribed the ability to reach destinations with unnatural speed. In Agnon's work Shmuel Yosef Agnon, an Israeli writer who won the 1966 Nobel Prize for