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hat’s a question many readers have asked in the past two months since my “disappearance” from the news pages, and from the masthead, where I held the title of news editor since Mishpacha’s English-language premiere in 2004.

There’s no need to dispatch a search party. Aside from a short family vacation in Florida, I have been spotted at neitz every morning, somewhere in Jerusalem. Ask all my steady chavrusas; they’ll tell you I haven’t missed a beat.

To answer the headline question:

When I was a budding journalist, I always admired Charles Kuralt, who gained fame at CBS News when Walter Cronkite anchored its nightly broadcast.

Kuralt covered the Vietnam War, among other harrowing assignments, and toiled in hard news for decades. Freely admitting he had grown weary of the relentless pace and merciless competition that characterized the news business, and waxing nostalgic for his days as a simple columnist in his native North Carolina, he asked CBS News to reassign him so he could pursue new, yet challenging professional interests.

Kuralt purchased a mobile home and hit the interstate, filing stories from out-of-the way places and profiling fascinating people off the beaten track. Kuralt’s On the Road series was a compelling feature on CBS for the next 25 years.

I reached my early retirement age of 62 just before Pesach, and the management and editors of Mishpacha were gracious and adventurous enough to grant a parallel request on my part for reassignment.

No, I haven’t bought a mobile home; You can drive anywhere in Israel and come home the same day. I’ve kept my nine-year-old Honda hybrid in top-notch condition, and it still has less than 80,000 miles on it.

While I won’t be precisely following Kuralt’s formula, I do plan to weigh in on the news twice a month, while still treating our growing readership to some new vistas and taking full advantage of the time that’s needed to develop stories from a long-range perspective. (Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 713)