Twenty years ago, I was in Israel and feeling homesick. Fresh out of high school, I’d set off for a year of study at an Israeli yeshivah. My parents had told me to call when I arrived and then not again until Friday, when we had scheduled our weekly conversation. But by the second morning, I was desperately fighting the urge to phone them, and in the afternoon I broke down. When my parents picked up, I quickly apologized for calling back so soon, then burst into tears.

During the first two months of yeshivah, I was homesick almost constantly. At least it was a busy time of year, punctuated by an inspiring High Holidays experience – I can still hear the plaintive cries of the rabbi who doubled as hazzan – and a camping trip with school and camp friends during Sukkot. After that, with the holidays gone, the days getting shorter and the rainy season begun, things seemed bleak. My parents had to dispatch a family friend, who was in the country to visit relatives, just to give me a little taste of home. We sat together on a park bench, and I cried again.

I never got over my homesickness that year, but there were moments when the haze lifted. I remember ditching evening studies one night with a few mates to catch a concert at Yellow Submarine, a club in Jerusalem. The room was filled with yeshivah and seminary students, while a bunch of bearded Carlebach acolytes intermixed classic nigunim with Grateful Dead tunes on stage. And then there was the kollel student at the yeshivah, an American with a young wife and a new baby, who was assigned to be my mentor. Once a week, I’d walk to the adjoining moshav and we’d study at his dining room table from Nefesh ha-Chaim, Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin’s treatise on the fundamentals of Jewish belief. I still have my copy – it’s on a bookshelf in my office here at The CJN.

To be honest, I prepared harder for those sessions than I did for all of my other yeshivah studies combined. When I realized there were zero consequences for skipping a shiur (or three), I spent as much time off campus as I could, hitching rides to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. That, I realized too late, was a tremendous disservice to myself, and especially to my parents. As consolation, I can only point to the fact that I started reading seriously for the first time in my life – from Jack Kerouac to Ayn Rand to Milton Steinberg – and even tried cooking (it was boxed mac and cheese, but you gotta start somewhere).

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Needless to say, when the yeshivah year ended, I couldn’t wait to get home. I booked my return ticket months in advance and then counted down the days on a calendar taped to the wall above my dorm bed. I must have been packed up and ready to go a week before my flight. But when the summer was over, I got back on a plane and went to yeshivah for another semester. Despite everything, there was no place I’d have rather been.