Something was strange about Shachna’s tears, however. It actually looked as though he was crying out of sadness and not laughter.
Rabbi Silver was a special mechanech who ran a great place for mainstream yeshivishe bochurim in Jerusalem.
I’d seen some of his talmidim as patients over the years — no terrible stories of overdoses, violence, or jail time. Rather some isolated cases of anxiety, OCD, and mild-to-moderate depression in “good kids from good families,” as Rabbi Silver described it. And while these conditions often go unnoticed and untreated, Rabbi Silver had his finger on the pulse of each of “his” bochurim and was highly astute when it came to decisions about intervention.
I’d once given a talk at his yeshivah about making sure to avoid “flipping out” — getting far too frum too fast — and then imploding from all the chumros and commitments like memorizing an unrealistic number of Mishnayos while refusing to return to their mothers’ homes in Flatbush over kashrus concerns.
I had ended the talk with an admittedly corny joke that was met by smirks and groans, and by Rabbi Silver urging me to “keep on being a psychiatrist and to give up the dreams of standup comedy.” We had a good laugh and called it a day.
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