So now that the holidays are over, the question is: where's my dorm, and where's my home? I spent Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at home, at traditional Orthodox services, in the company of family and high school friends, and I am sorry to say so, but I didn't feel at home. It was like I was on display, behind a glass wall where everyone was staring at my nonexistent "living on campus" sticker, and, truth be told, all I wanted to do was to be out of the public scrutiny.

Let me take a step back. When I got to Yale, I was terribly afraid that, as the lone freshman Orthodox Jew in my residential college, I would be some sort of oddity with no other identity besides my religion. It didn't turn out that way, and I find myself fitting in quite well with Conservative and Reform Jews and others. Sure, I still get questions about how to observe Shabbat, but they're all from spirited, friendly, curious people.

The irony comes into play because I expected zero scrutiny in my own house. Because of all the confusion with the Yale Five's rejection of dorm life as inconsistent with living as an observant Jew and the media circus on campus, people I've known all my life at home are looking at me more closely than anyone up here ever does.

The questioning never ended. Everybody wanted to know the real dirt about on-campus life. Of course, everyone had his or her own opinion. Fine for its own sake, but problematic for me because everyone felt a dire need to tell me his or her opinion, as though telling it to a Yalie would validate it. At my family's synagogue, eyes followed me during services.

Even if I could put aside both the messiness of the dorm question and the fact that I choose to live on campus, it wouldn't change the fact that I didn't feel at home over the holidays. In the short month and a half that I've been here, Yale has usurped that place in my mind that I call home.

My 3 a.m. chess games, Directed Studies study breaks, and how-to-observe Shabbat conversations have become a part of my routine. As nice as it was to be in a place where everyone wore a traditional head covering, that place no longer had the same friendliness.

I was dorming at home for the holidays. But don't tell my parents-they'll stop sending me money.

Saul Nadata is a freshperson in Ezra Stiles College.