“If you want to get him an ice cream on the way home, I would not protest”
The seventh-grader had a difficult time in school.
Even the best schools have talmidim who don’t quite fit in the box, no matter how big the box is.
Our young friend began in the local yeshivah and tried a new school for a few years, and by seventh grade, he ended up in the same school he had begun in.
He preferred the great outdoors over the confining classroom. As someone who understood firsthand the pain of often being the outlier, he honed an acute sense of compassion for the nirdaf — the underdog. He felt for those more vulnerable and susceptible to ridicule — because he knew what it felt like to be on the fringe.
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