I cut straight to the chase. “So, you’re pretty much high all day, tzaddik?”
Levi Yitzhak was a bochur who was slowly killing himself,
yet he wasn’t particularly interested in what I was offering to help extricate him from the pit he’d crawled into.
He’d had a tough childhood, having started out life with the challenge of a mother who was hospitalized with a postpartum manic episode shortly after his birth. Her subsequent diagnosis of bipolar disorder and his father’s exodus from the family didn’t make his toddler years any easier.
From the age of five, Levi Yitzhak had been raised by a loving aunt and uncle whose own children had already grown up and married. Uncle Boruch and Aunt Frumy cared for her sister’s son like their own, but no amount of varmkeit could keep Levi Yitzhak from rebelling. By the age of 17, he’d been kicked out of a number of institutions and finally landed in an open-style yeshivah, bringing along his significant substance-abuse prob