When I was 21 I went to Israel. I didn’t really mean to go, and I never meant to stay so long, but that’s how it is sometimes, especially right after college.

I was traveling on a strict budget with two pals: my close friend Ellen (a brilliant non-secularly religious individual), and our mutual friend Liz (a lovely soul with a hard-partying heart).

We knew we were headed for Europe, and I was aimed for Greece if anywhere, but Episcopalian Ellen had done a Cal year-abroad in Jerusalem. She wanted to re-visit, and a number of the guys she met that year were then in rabbinical school, reform variety, which required a first year in the holy city. In other words, Jerusalem would be familiar and contain friends, so we figured we’d start there. But it was odd, me being the only Jew and the one least interested.

We arrived in late September. We spent a bit of time in Jerusalem, at the reform rabbinical dormitory of course, and then signed up for a kibbutz. We were sent to a small poor one near Hadera (which is halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa). It cost us almost nothing to live there; we were paid a little less than a quarter a week, and usually we spent more than that, on bus fare to Hadera where we bought ice cream or cookies. With the occasional jaunt back to Jerusalem, my money lasted into January 1972. Then I had to head home. Cheaply.

Ellen opted to come part way with me. We took an Israeli luxury liner (oxymoron, at least then), but we had to buy the cheapest tickets, so our interior cabin was just above the stabilizers and cars.

We disembarked in Marseilles, traversed France in a tortuous train (one of the two most uncomfortable nights of my life), crossed the channel at Dunkerque, and made it to London and relative luxury at the Green Park Hotel, where Ellen’s dad happened to be. From there I took a charter flight home. I was surprised by the tears that filled my eyes when I glimpsed our East Coast from that plane.

When I got back it was early February. I had been away from home, out of the country, for over four months. And I didn’t have a camera with me. Neither did Ellen or Liz. Really: we lived an amazing adventure and we don’t have a visual record of it. Which may be why some of my memories are so vivid.