Mishpacha contributors share accounts of those special summers disconnected from the grind

Location: Lakewood, New Jersey

Year: 2021

Off the Grid

This is the story of how I spent a summer sleeping in a storage closet next to a mikveh in the basement of a shul in Lakewood with almost zero connection to the rest of the world. But my story doesn’t begin here. It actually begins almost a full year earlier....

The summer I returned to America after learning for two years in Eretz Yisrael was a tough one. Aside from the Covid pandemic wreaking havoc on all our lives, I was experiencing my own personal misery: At my parents’ insistence, I had returned to America to attend college for a degree in psychology, and I was struggling to regain my footing.

I was also at a crossroads. Until this point, my life followed the natural progression of middle school, high school, yeshivah in Israel with my friends — but now, graduate school or work should have been the next step, but my heart and mind remained firmly in yeshivah.

This was the backdrop that had me leaning on old rebbeim and friends from America for support. On a near-daily basis, I spoke to my head counselor from back in my hometown day camp. As per his rule, though, our conversations could not be solely about me; we needed to end every conversation dedicating several minutes to finding a shidduch for his daughter. (This former head counselor would later become my father-in-law, but that’s a different story about a different daughter.)

And so it went for several weeks, my friend/rebbi/former boss offering me suggestions for chizuk and me offering him suggestions for shidduchim, until one day I mentioned someone just out of the Lakewood freezer. This idea really seemed to be on point, with only one hitch — I had been warned by several friends that I’d need pull to get a suggestion to his mother.

I called this friend out of the blue to reconnect, and we set up a biweekly phone chavrusashaft. My brilliant plan was that after several weeks, I would suggest the shidduch. My plan worked to perfection — at least, the learning and getting close part. After a few days, I totally forgot about the shidduch; I never even sent him the résumé.