Back to the Trenches

Imet Kalman for the second time at a mosad that was a cross between a yeshivah and a rehab center, where he was a dorm counselor and had obviously developed a strong rapport with the bochurim. They called him their shrink. Part III

Kalman was about to start the final year of his degree in social work, when he called and asked if we could meet.

For Kalman, it was a milestone. Before he started, he was nervous about entering a rigorous academic program, considering his own less-than-stellar early yeshivah history — but now he was heading toward the finish line. We’d remained in touch since he made a decision to put his natural talents and hard-won personal victories into a professional field where he hoped to help others in their struggles. He was intimately familiar with the challenges of the street, of bochurim who felt disenfranchised and unable to make the grade in typical yeshivos, of young people who thought life would be better on the other side of the rainbow, only to crash headlong into the quicksand of alcohol and substance abuse and other illicit behaviors until someone would be there with a rope to pull the lucky ones out.

And he knew he was one of the lucky ones. We’d originally met in his yeshivah, when he invited me to give a talk about spotting the signs of falling into addictions. He looked the regular black-and-white part, but later revealed that he’d worked hard to rehabilitate himself following a bout with alcohol and depression. The following year we met again, when he was the dorm counselor at a program that was something between a yeshivah and a rehab outside Jerusalem.