Yisachar
With his long peyot and dangling tzitzit, 23-year-old Yisachar seems like a typical member of the Lithuanian sect of ultra-orthodox Judaism. His backstory, though, is anything but typical.
He was born in Borough Park to charedi parents—parents, he underscores, who have always been loving, supportive, and understanding. He is the third of seven children.
In elementary school he was the class clown, garnering frequent laughs but rarely earning high grades. By tenth grade, he had gone from class clown to high school dropout. In that year, he was expelled from five different schools. He moved home after being kicked out of the dorms at a Far Rockaway yeshiva.
For his parents, the disappointment must have been acute: they had high expectations for their oldest son, and he seemed determined not to meet them. Nevertheless, they continued to cope as his drug use increased: alcohol, marijuana, painkillers, and pharmaceuticals. Early on, Yisachar had informed his parents point-blank of his habits; he felt they deserved to know, since he was living with them. Plus, it was growing obvious: by the summer before eleventh grade, “things were out of control.” He was “constantly messed up,” taking “lots of pills,” “willing to do any drug.”
He hung out with kids from the neighborhood: boys who had been raised religious but were now venturing into the larger community in their quest for illegal substances. At this point, the experience was still fun for Yisachar, who had no desire to get clean. He had also dispensed with virtually all vestiges of his charedi background. He would wear a baseball cap in his neighborhood out of respect for the members of his community, and sometimes attended Friday night dinners with his family, but his connection to Judaism had been, if not severed, then to a large extent disabled.
His parents became proactive in attempting to help their son, asking friends and acquaintances for support and advice. As a result, they learned of a boys-only “yeshiva-outpatient-rehab” center staffed by educators and drug counselors. (These days, Yisachar notes, there is a girls-only equivalent.) Yisachar disliked the curriculum and the staff, but he met a “good group of guys—fifteen or twenty, all twisted, all from similar backgrounds….We did a lot of drugs together.” The school helped him network, but it failed to curb his drug habit or address its underlying causes.
Yisachar left after a few months and “ended up doing nothing,” holding short-term manual labor jobs for a week or two, after which he typically quit or was fired. “Basically, I was a nonfunctioning member of society,” he recalls. Seventeen, not in school, unemployed, disaffected, unaware, and out of control.
And so, like many Crossroads teens, he wound up in Jerusalem.
Officially, he came on a program. It was organized by a rabbi who rented an apartment for his students and set up a learning schedule for them. In practice, though, Yisachar and his roommates “just did their own thing.” In this case, that “thing” involved heavy drinking and drug use: “That was my life,” he admits. Yisachar’s parents, though, were relieved, wrongly convinced that their son had found a stable, healthy environment in this rabbi’s program.
But in fact, the stable and healthy influence in Yisachar’s life was Crossroads. Yisachar isn’t quite certain how he first came to the Center—”through a friend, maybe,” is how he puts it—but once he started coming, he started doing better.
The Center, for him, was primarily a “chill-out, hang-out” sort of place in that first year. He could escape his roommates and his drugged-out living space. He began to attend weekly Center art classes run by a trained art therapist. “I came a lot for the art,” he remarks, “even though I’m not so great at it.”
When asked whether he was ever bothered by the fact that Crossroads teens come from varied religious backgrounds—ultra-orthodox, traditional, nonpracticing—Yisachar says that it makes him anything but uncomfortable. “The diversity is an unbelievable thing. Anyone who’s coming here has some sort of issue to deal with,” regardless of his or her background, and it is beneficial to see that “you’re not the only one here with problems.”
That summer, at age eighteen, Yisachar returned to Brooklyn. His parents soon realized that little had changed: he slept at home, spent his days doing drugs, and hung out.
When he came back to Israel the following autumn, it was a given that he would come back to Crossroads as well. He never sought out official social work or one-on-one therapy. But he did maintain a longstanding connection with two social workers and the Center director. They would talk for hours at a time in sessions focused either on “spewing”—intensive, expansive complaining—or on crisis control. One problem Yisachar presented to a Center social worker involved his best friend from Brooklyn, a son of charedim and a heroin junkie who had been kicked out of his yeshiva in Israel. Yisachar took in this homeless friend, allowing him to sleep in his dorm room—”I would wake up in the mornings and check to see if he had died that night of an overdose”—but it grew clear that Yisachar either would have to put his friend out on the streets, or be kicked out of yeshiva himself.
The staff at Crossroads didn’t make decisions for Yisachar. But they encouraged him to grow aware of the options he had, and to learn to make informed choices.
That summer, after his second year at Crossroads, Yisachar returned to Brooklyn again. But this time, he checked himself into rehab. (A counselor there diagnosed him as a nineteen-year-old alcoholic.) At the end of August, he came back to Israel clean and sober and much more observant, and enrolled at a yeshiva with which Crossroads has for many years been in close contact. A large percentage of its students have come through the Center.
With the support of various Crossroads staff members and resources, he spent the next few years reclaiming his life. The Center was “just a place where people would hear what I had to say and give me feedback….It was good for when things were getting out of control, when I needed help making decisions.” (Crossroads also came to his rescue when an acquaintance accidentally stabbed Yisachar in the neck: a staff member took him to the emergency room, where they waited together for five hours, and then ensured that he received proper treatment.)
Initially, Yisachar came to Crossroads three times per week. In addition to the art classes, he made use of the lending library—”I used to disappear into the books”—and met new people from all walks of life. As he sobered up and returned to a religious lifestyle, he stopped by less frequently. He would still come, though, to discuss things with the director: “I respected her input because of what she did for me in the past and for my friends….I outgrew Crossroads, thank god, but I still come here to hear what she has to say.”
These days, Yisachar does not return to Crossroads by himself. His wife, whom he first met at the Center, comes from a background similar to his. They visit as a couple, and also “freelance,” attempting to pass on to others what the Center gave to them. His wife maintains a connection with some of the girls who come to Crossroads; the two have even, on occasion, taken into their home Crossroads kids who have nowhere else to go.
The pair plan to remain in Israel, which means they also plan to remain in touch with the Center. Their story is, by all counts, a successful one. Yisachar hopes that in the future, more teens like himself will be lucky enough to be directed to Crossroads, and from there, to find the support they need to get their lives back on track.