The past month has been full of dozens of blog-posts-worthy of stories, and yet here I am, my first night living in Jerusalem, just beginning to scratch the surface. What happened? Well, I was busy, to put it bluntly. For better or worse, just too busy to have time to sit down and write anything worthwhile. But I haven’t given up — in my mind, I’ve got a running list of stories and adventures that, at some point, I’ll commit to writing down. To name a few: My first Thanksgiving in Israel; an all-night desert rave; a week hiking Makhtesh Ramon; b...

Yom Kippur, as most Jews observe it, has just never been my thing.

I understand the concept — to skip food and the fun luxuries of life like electricity in order to focus on how we screwed up in the past year and hopefully, through hunger and near-constant prayer, successfully repent. If that sounds at all sarcastic, it shouldn’t; for many, if not most, Jews, this method works, and come the break fast, they feel they’ve ‘completed’ another quality Yom Kippur. If that floats your boat, so be it. It’s just never done it for me.

I’ve long been a fan...

I’m sitting inside an bus barreling through the Negev desert, straight south to Kibbutz Ketura, deeper and deeper through endless hills and mountains of raw and arid earth. The region is unlike anything I’ve seen; from some vantage points, the dunes seem to stretch on forever — looking more and more like an old woman’s wrinkled cheeks as they shrink into the horizon. There are trees here, but they don’t thrive so much as survive, each a small, determined spot of life in a hot, blinding landscape. The air here is crisp and clean (many asthmatics c...