In the Air

When I was living in Israel, I led a double life. In the mornings I taught in the Derech program of Ohr Somayach, a clean-cut rabbi in a dark suit and white shirt. But I’m also a certified substance abuse counselor, and in the afternoons and evenings I ran a program I had founded with Rabbi Shmuel Rosenberg. We called the program Second Chance.

Shmuel was also a rebbi and drug counselor, and he and I would get countless similar phone calls: My kid (or my student) is in a mainstream yeshivah but he was caught doing drugs, please help me get him into a program that can help him. The problem was that many of these boys were first-time offenders, or only “social substance abusers.” It was still a severe problem, but the standard rehab program wasn’t the answer — it would only serve to educate them about things they had no thought of doing (yet). So we created Second Chance, where we worked together with the schools to keep the kids in their current environment while receiving one-on-one drug counseling, testing, and evaluations. We also provided a curriculum schools could use to educate their staff and students about substance abuse. Second Chance enabled us to treat the problem without making it worse.

Both my jobs involved quite a bit of travel between Israel and the States. On one such trip a meeting ran overtime and I found myself stuck in standstill traffic on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn with the clock ticking mercilessly toward my flight. Of course, it was Thursday, which meant if I missed the flight I was stuck in the States over Shabbos — and I was scheduled to speak at a Shabbaton in Yerushalayim. I channeled my inner Israeli cab driver and swerved in and around other cars. Then my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Yossi, it’s Simcha” — a friend of a friend.