“Are you also going to tell me I’m crazy, like my brother?” he asked me. “Don’t take sides here. You have no idea what’s going on.”

As told to Fayga Pearlstein

For years, typical Sunday mornings in kollel would find me at my regular place on the bench, nose buried in my Gemara, waiting for my chavrusa Simcha to show up. He’d eventually waltz in and flash his trademark smile, lighting up the room with his presence.

I was a stickler for punctuality, Simcha was blessed with an easygoing personality. He was an energetic go-getter who had trouble sitting still, I was soft-spoken and diffident. He always wanted to be involved in the latest hock, I preferred to lurk on the sidelines. His mind was sharp and quick, I took the methodical and thought-out approach.

Our contrasting natures made us perfect chavrusas. We would always chat for a couple minutes, open our Gemaras to the place where we’d left off the day before, and before we knew it, morning seder was over.

Simcha and I went back a long way. We’d been chavrusas ever since yeshivah katanah, and we were still together in kollel, both newly married and shteiging away.

Simcha was always on the lookout for lucrative business opportunities. But because he was prone to rash decisions, he often ran his ideas by me; I could often bring to his attention a specific angle of a deal that he hadn’t thought of. I was more than happy to offer my advice whenever possible.

One day after seder, Simcha told me with a sparkle in his eyes that he and his brother Nachi would be partners in a new printing press business. Simcha had not asked me beforehand for my opinion, and since I was not one to offer unsolicited advice, I could only wish him luck.

While I thought highly of both Simcha and Nachi, I did not think they were a good match for business. They were both high-strung balls of fiery energy. It’s better for a business to have partners whose strengths and weaknesses balance each other — if one is zealous and ambitious, it’s helpful if the other is calm and level-headed. But Simcha and Nachi, being brothers, shared a lot of the same strengths — and weaknesses.

When their business took off, I was relieved that my intuition had apparently been wrong. Soon they had accumulated lots of capital and began investing in real estate. Although I again felt a sense of foreboding about this, I attributed my uneasiness to my risk-averse nature. Maybe Simcha and Nachi would end up like all the other families I knew who went into business together for whom everything turned out fine. And for a time, Simcha was floating on air from his success.

Then one Sunday morning, when Simcha stormed into kollel with bloodshot eyes and a pale countenance, I knew trouble was brewing.