My first trip to Israel was when I was 11 years old. My pre-bat mitzvah gift was a trip to a country I already loved, even though I had never visited it. More than 20 years later, I can still remember the texture of that visit: my first sight of the Western Wall bathed in the soft afternoon light, vending machines stocked with kosher food, climbing up Masada and thinking about the people there holding out under the Roman siege, and eating falafel that tasted fresher than anything I'd eaten in Melbourne.
