FRACTURED LIVES, HONEST VOICES

 

Following our recent feature Broken Glasses and Fractured Lives, readers from across the community wrote in to share their thoughts, experiences, and perspectives. Their responses reflect the pain, the complexity, and the deep sense of responsibility this issue carries for all of us.

 

It’s in Your Hands

I read the article regarding kids at risk calling on everyone to feel a responsibility to help. However, the only suggestion on how to help was to be nice to them and donate money to some unconvincing solution. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that this will not solve the problem.

The underlying issue is that there’s no alternative for a boy or girl who isn’t successful in the yeshivah system. Every person needs to be productive and have a social circle of productive people. If not, they will deteriorate. The bottom line is that they need something to do. The solution is glaring and can happen if every person in a position to help will make it happen.

Who can help? Local business owners and managers. Not just storefronts. I’m talking about everyone from CEOs of healthcare companies, building contractors and subcontractors, insurance companies, online sellers, medical practices, nonprofits, mosdos, and everyone in between. These teens need to work in a productive role for a significant part of their day.

I know many of you think this is totally unrealistic, but please hear me out. I would like to preface my words by saying that I’m a business owner in town. I would happily take on a kid to help in my business, provided there was a realistic plan of how it could work with the proper support and the right kid for the job. Payment issues are a nonissue; I can solve that for you legally in a flash.

I truly believe this can happen. There are ways to solve the issues if we’re willing to commit to this. Yes, it will be a bit of an inconvenience in the beginning. Really, training any new worker is an inconvenience. But to save a kid no one else can save, can you spare that inconvenience?

One of the main problems is that we wait too long. Sometimes a kid as young as 12–14 needs such a framework already. If we wait too long, they get used to being unproductive and then they won’t be an eager productive worker anymore. Catch them at the right time, and you can change their life in this world and the next.

Any learning program can easily be set up around working hours. A yeshivah program full of productive people can be successful.

Please recognize that we’re all in a position to help. Please agree to meet with a program coordinator. Just like you’d be happy to meet with a business consultant on how to improve your business, agree to meet someone who can earn you and your business success in the next world too. Even if you don’t see how this can work, at least agree to discuss it. This is the only way something can happen.

Any business owner who is willing to commit to one meeting to see if there’s a way to make this work can email [email protected].

May Hashem help us all do what He wants from us.

A local business owner and father

 

 

 

Salt on Parents’ Wounds

I was disturbed by the article about struggling teens, which stated that the parents have to take more responsibility. The parents of these boys are going through enough. The point may be true, but there’s no purpose in rubbing salt on the wounds of these parents in public. Everyone’s feelings must be taken into consideration.

D. M.

 

Before the Violence

I read the article Broken Glasses and Fractured Lives, and while I understand the concern behind it, I think it focuses on the wrong part of the problem.

Yes, violence matters. Yes, crime matters. Nobody should have to live with fear, and nobody is saying that chaos should be tolerated. But the article frames teens in pain mostly through the damage they cause rather than through the damage that was done to them before anyone noticed them. That’s where it misses the heart of it.

Teens don’t just wake up one day and decide to become a problem. They don’t become angry, reckless, numb, self-destructive, or disconnected for no reason. Usually, there’s pain underneath all of it.

There’s shame. There’s rejection. There’s loneliness. There’s the feeling that once you no longer fit what people want from you, they stop seeing a person and start seeing a threat.

The article says these boys are hurting, but then it keeps returning to police, curfews, detention, tracking, consequences, and removal. Even when it tries to be compassionate, the focus is often: “How do we protect the community from these teens?” instead of asking the deeper and more uncomfortable question: “What’s happening inside these teens, inside their homes, and inside the community that keeps producing this level of pain?” That matters because once a kid feels unwanted long enough, he usually starts acting like it.

The problem isn’t only that some teens are breaking rules, breaking windows, stealing, fighting, or spiraling in public. The problem is that many of them were already breaking inside long before any of that happened. By the time the behavior becomes visible, the pain is usually old. The anger is old. The sense of being written off is old.

And too often, communities respond to that pain only once it becomes inconvenient.

It’s easy to rally around public safety. It’s harder to sit with the fact that some of these kids may have felt humiliated, misunderstood, pushed aside, or emotionally abandoned for years. It’s easier to talk about controlling them than to admit that many of them have learned that their pain makes other people uncomfortable. Once that lesson sinks in, a teen stops caring what happens to him because he already believes nobody wants him anyway.

A smile, a kind word, and some warmth matter. They do. But let’s be honest: this isn’t just about kids needing a little more attention or a better activity.

Some of these teens need serious mental health support. Some need real alternatives in education. Some need adults who understand trauma, shame, and emotional pain. Some need families to be supported instead of judged. And they all need to be seen as human beings before they’re seen as public problems.

The most powerful part of your article was the mother’s voice at the end because that’s where the conversation finally became real. That section wasn’t about optics, law, or control. It was about heartbreak. And heartbreak is the real story here.

If the community wants fewer shattered windows, fewer fights, fewer crimes, and fewer boys unraveling in public, then it has to start caring about fractured lives before they turn into broken headlines.

Sincerely,

A former broken teen in pain

 

 

 

 

Do for Others

Regarding the article in the Pesach edition about at-risk teens doing crime and the inability of the police to enforce the law:

In addition to the ideas mentioned in the article, please keep in mind that the federal government can step in when local law enforcement doesn’t. There have been situations when they did in fact mix in. Maybe we should invite them to Lakewood.

Parenthetically, when the Satmar Rebbe (Rav Yoel) asked R’ Leibish Lefkowitz (Satmar’s biggest donor) to become the rosh hakahal of Satmar, R’ Leibish turned it down because he had children in shidduchim and he needed to take care of that. The Rebbe told him that some good people have bad children and some shvache (weaker religiously) people have good children. The difference is that when you do for others, then Hashem does for you, and vice versa. R’ Leibish accepted the position, and his children did wonderful shidduchim, and he had tremendous nachas from his family.

In our time, I think that joining TorahMates is a good start in helping other people.

May we all have only nachas from all our children.

Sincerely,

Rabbi Eli Reit