Hats Off

Gedalya was a gentle British fellow and Brisker talmid who had been learning in a serious kollel for a number of years. He and his wife were happy living in Jerusalem and especially grateful that they could raise their own children near his elderly grandparents, who had moved to Eretz Yisrael nearly two decades before.

For this G-d-fearing yungerman, life was good when he was sure he was doing the right thing — giving honor to his bubby and zeidy, being makpid on the chumros he’d established for himself and his family, not wasting time in kollel so that there was no issue of not deserving his stipend. Yet even his compulsive need to say “bli neder,” his chronic fear of throwing magazines with divrei Torah in the trash, and his obsessive thoughts regarding kavanos while reciting Shemoneh Esreh were all things I’d seen before.

Gedalya’s attribution of his symptoms to chumros and to his need to work on bitachon had helped him dig himself quite a hole. He was simply unwilling to commit to help for too many years and his obsessions and compulsions had gotten progressively more debilitating. Sure, he’d tried meeting with a psychiatrist a few times at the urging of his rosh kollel, but he was frightened off by the doctors — especially the bareheaded ones. Even a meeting with a highly acclaimed OCD therapist that his wife had scheduled was canceled when Gedalya found out that the fellow’s name was Edward.

“How could I sit with someone who calls himself Edward instead of Ephraim?” he asked his wife sincerely, because for a Yid like Gedalya, this was a deal-breaker.