Last Saturday night I was walking through the streets of Jerusalem with a bunch of friends, deciding which bar to sit at. The entire area was packed—mostly with energetic, loud and occasionally drunk teens—and I was hard-pressed to find any of them speaking Hebrew.

Are you fearful of the challenges that lay ahead of you in college or worried about the stress you’ll face in the coming school year? While these and many other feelings are rational and normal concerns for a teenager to have, consider this: Toward the end of September, 18-year-old Josh Pankin will be traveling to Israel to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), committing himself to three years of service to protect the Jewish homeland.

I am sitting in John F. Kennedy International Airport surrounded by a group of strangers and ready to depart from everything that is familiar to me. Standing in line to get my baggage checked, I nervously try to make conversation with the people around me. I am asked questions. I ask questions. They are all the same generic curiosities of people who have never met each other, but anticipate spending a great deal of time together.

My recent trip to Israel was the best experience of my life. The juniors at my school, the American Hebrew Academy, spent 10 weeks at the Israel-based Alexander Muss High School, attending classes every day except Fridays. Aside from secular studies, we spent four hours every morning studying Jewish history. Four hours seems like such a long time to spend on one subject, but we covered almost everything, from Abraham to present-day events.

You may have caught Yonatan's latest article in the July/August issue of JVibe. He gave us the lowdown on what it's really like being in the Israeli army where dating is forbidden. Here, read another Israeli teen's thoughts on how teens get around this rule, why the rules were created, and the expectations Israeli teens have going into their army service.