Rabbi Epstein didn’t steal that line from me, I stole it from him
ne of the greatest experiences of my professional career was working in the Yesod program. Yesod was a gap-year post-high school program in Israel for boys who needed a small program with lots of individual attention. For many of our boys, it was their chance for a fresh start: They hadn’t done well in high school and most of them struggled with issues like trauma or substance abuse. What made Yesod so incredible was the staff, many of whom have become legends in their fields: Rabbi Yitzchok Kornblau, Rabbi AM Nussbaum, Rabbi Jacob Banning, Rabbi Shmuel Rosenberg, Rabbi CT Goldsmith, Rabbi Ely Bayles, Rabbi Shalom Eidelman, Rabbi Mordechai Levine, and Rabbi Liberman, among others. We weren’t just colleagues but close friends, which I believe strongly influenced the degree of success our talmidim experienced. A therapist at Retorno Rehab of Beit Shemesh once told me that, “Yesod is not a yeshivah or a program, it’s a family.”
One morning the door to my office swung open to admit Rabbi Kornblau, who was wrapping up a phone call. “Okay, see you at one,” I heard him say. He ended the call and filled me in. “Kid coming for an interview with his dad.”
It was November, way too early to be interviewing for the next year. I just looked at him.
“For this year,” he clarified.
At Yesod we had a rule. We didn’t accept guys in middle of the year. We started the program each year with a new group and ended it with the same group. It lent a certain cohesiveness to the program, a flow. Introducing new people in the middle could be very risky. Among the rebbeim, I was personally one of the more vocal about keeping this rule.
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