Making It Personal

Before taking the position, Reb Yisroel had questioned whether a ben Torah like himself belonged in a girls’ high school, so he turned for guidance to Rav Alster, who gave him two inviolable rules to observe: First, the day he begins to feel comfortable in the school is the day he has to leave. He needs always to feel like the boy who walks into the ladies’ section in shul and isn’t sure whether he’s gotten too big to be there anymore. And, when he no longer instinctively flinches upon hearing nivul peh, that too is a telltale sign it’s time for him to go. That day hasn’t yet come, because he simply doesn’t tolerate unclean talk, and as a result, doesn’t hear it.

One look at BCA’s current enrollment of 23 students is enough to show they don’t look anything like the girls in a typical Bais Yaakov, but when Rabbi Grossberg looks beyond the surface, he sees important commonalities between the two groups. In fact, he says, “in a certain way, I’m less nervous about the girls here in BCA, because their issues are all out on the table, unlike a girl in a regular school who may just be biding time until she’s 18 and then she’s out of there, with the clueless parents having no idea what hit them. And these things are unfortunately happening.”

In identifying worrying trends in the mainstream schools, Rabbi Grossberg knows of what he speaks. He has become, solely by word-of-mouth, an address to which yeshivah and Bais Yaakov students and their parents turn for what he calls “ruchniyus tutoring” for their struggles in Yiddishkeit. He meets with up to 150 families in the course of a year.

Rabbi Grossberg is quick to preface his remarks by saying that he’s the last person to “knock” the mainstream school system, which continues to produce thousands of very successful boys and girls. But, he adds, we shouldn’t be ready to give up on a single child, and the unfortunate reality is that many of our children are floundering.

If we divide a typical class into three groupings, we’ll find that the top ten to twenty percent are doing great, while the bottom ten to twenty percent are struggling and not making it either academically or religiously, mostly due to circumstances beyond their control. That leaves the large middle section of the class — an entire 60 to 70 percent of it — that is, in Reb Yisroel’s words, “up for grabs. And not enough is being done for them.”

The problem, as he sees it, is the same one the BCA girls manifest: A profound lack of connection to the Divine, of an understanding and a feeling that “when I’m doing mitzvos, they’re Hashem’s mitzvos and when I’m davening, I’m davening to Hashem, and when I have a problem, I’m reaching out to Hashem. There are people who can go through an entire Elul and Rosh Hashanah with all of the davening and mitzvos, and the Ribbono shel Olam never even entered into the conversation.” With a sad smile, he recalls that after speaking to a group of mainstream girls about making their own personal relationship with HaKadosh Baruch Hu, he overheard one of them say to another, “Oh, he must be a baal teshuvah.”

When a child is taught to go through the motions of an Orthodox life that’s devoid of true ruchniyus, he may end up thinking there’s nothing more to Yiddishkeit than the hollow facsimile he’s familiar with. Rabbi Grossberg offers an all-too-common conversation: “A girl will say, ‘I hate Shabbos,’ so I’ll say, ‘Okay, describe Shabbos at home.’ Best-case scenario, she’ll describe a situation where her father and brothers sit and say divrei Torah to each other while the girls serve the meal. Worst case: the father comes home from shul drunk. So I tell her, ‘You don’t hate Shabbos, you hate dysfunctional families. G-d is just an easy target because He can’t talk back.’ And I try to get her exposed to a functional Shabbos experience. Just last week, a girl came to me and said she hates tefillah. It turns out that her mother used to lie in bed reading romance novels while screaming at her, ‘Go daven, go daven!’ I said, ‘It’s not tefillah you hate.’ ”

No One Blames Cancer on Parents

The young people with whom Rabbi Grossberg meets outside the framework of BCA come from every kind of school and background. A girl may be a GO head or have the lead role in her school production, but she’ll talk to him about staying up texting an entire Friday night. One boy told him, “I ate something not kosher and no thunderbolts came down to strike me. What am I supposed to do?” And this boy’s father was one of Rabbi Grossberg’s rebbeim.

Rabbi Grossberg is not a trained therapist, and every person who walks into his office signs a statement declaring they’re aware of that. The role he does play varies with the situation. Sometimes, parents will come to him having no idea what’s wrong or what’s going on with their child. One couple called up saying, “We have no idea why we’re calling you and it’s a waste of our time, but the school said we have to call.” Yet upon meeting their daughter, Rabbi Grossberg found out she had a boyfriend with whom she was planning to elope to Thailand.

At other times, he’s there to be an advocate for a kid who’s having difficulties in school with peers or teachers, or to help him open up to his parents about what’s going on in his life — “Moishy has something he wants to tell you,” he might say to the parents, after which the case can go to a therapist. Rabbi Grossberg observes that when the topic of abuse comes up, everyone automatically focuses on the most extreme forms. But in his experience, there are real psychological scars left when, for example, a child who was part of a chevrah is suddenly excluded from that group, or goes through a school year being emotionally roughed up by a teacher.

There are also situations in which after speaking with a youngster, Reb Yisroel realizes it’s not she who needs the help, it’s the parent; and if the latter can learn better parenting skills, the kid will be okay. Above all, he tries to remain keenly aware of his own limitations, referring people to a professional when the help they need is beyond his expertise to provide.

Most parents who seek his counsel are those with kids on or nearing the edge, still in the school system but in danger of falling through its cracks. But the need for guidance is at least as great for parents whose children have already fallen away from observance. Rabbi Grossberg calls this “the next frontier,” because parents are desperate for guidance and find themselves in a “very, very lonely place.”

He recalls a list a father once composed entitled “Five reasons why I wish my child had gotten cancer instead of going off the derech,” with entries like, “No one ever blamed a parent for his child having cancer,” and “When the father is with his child in the hospital because she OD’ed, there’s no organization that’s going to help care for the kids he left at home.” Reb Yisroel says he would never, chas v’shalom, rate people’s tzaros, but the fact is that for those with illness in the family, there are weekends and events of various sorts, but not for parents challenged with a wayward teen.

He first began to realize how adrift and isolated these parents feel when, at an evening for BCA parents, he tried unsuccessfully to get them to sit down and listen to the featured guest speaker, but all they wanted to do was to schmooze among themselves. Then one parent explained it to him: “We finally have each other to talk to about what’s going on in our lives. I can’t talk to my neighbor about what’s going on with my kid, it’s too embarrassing.”

Another mother added, “When I sit with my friends, this one says, ‘My daughter got into this seminary,’ and that one says, ‘My daughter didn’t get into seminary.’ But what am I supposed to say? ‘My daughter’s been off marijuana for two weeks’?! There’s no one even to celebrate things with.” The next time the school held such an evening, there was no program, and the parents just got together to talk.

But because the need for guidance is so acute, parents may follow well-intentioned but specifically inappropriate approaches to dealing with their children. The idea, for example, that at-risk teens must be showered with unconditional love is one Reb Yisroel likens to a power tool: Give it to a parent who knows what he’s doing with it, and it’s a wonderful thing, but give it to someone who doesn’t and it becomes dangerous in the extreme. No two situations are the same, which is why it’s so important for parents to speak with a source of daas Torah to find the method appropriate for them. Reb Yisroel follows the clear guidance of Rav Matisyahu Salomon on these issues.

He turns passionate when speaking of parents who’ve been counseled to affirm and even enable their child’s open transgression of serious aveiros in the home. “I just had a girl come to me Monday morning very upset. In a typical school, everyone comes in Monday morning refreshed from the weekend; here, we pick up the pieces Monday morning, after a girl has spent the weekend with her family. She said, ‘My parents have given up hope for me.’ I asked her how she knew. ‘I asked my parents for the car keys Friday night and with a big smile, they gave them to me.’ Now, I know they were following someone’s guidance, and thought they were doing a mitzvah. But in her mind, they had given up hope. Kids aren’t stupid. She’s thinking, if you’re so proud of me even though I’m being mechallel Shabbos, then clearly my shemiras Shabbos never meant that much to you in the first place.”

Rabbi Grossberg has overheard students telling each other to convince their parents to follow the “love above all” parenting approach because “then they’ll let you do whatever you want.” But one BCA student told him her parents’ permissiveness with her at-risk sibling contributed to her own downward spiral, because “when I was in Bais Yaakov, I asked my mother for money for a Yom Tov outfit and she said she didn’t have money for that, but then they went out and bought booze for my brother. For booze they have money, but not for me for Yom Tov? Why should I bother?”

An overly severe home atmosphere with zero tolerance for deviation is also harmful, of course, and Reb Yisroel advocates that parents communicate acceptance and love but not carte blanche approval. To illustrate, he relates what a good friend of his told his daughter: “I’m not here to tell you whether or not you should wear pants. You’re old enough to make that decision for yourself. But I’m asking you, for my kavod, not to do so in the house. If I were allergic to peanut butter, would you bring it into the house? This is what I’m allergic to.”

Some months later, as this father was driving, he spotted his daughter walking down the street, attired in pants. He honked and waved to her, but she didn’t acknowledge him. So he texted her, “You don’t return my greetings?” and she replied, “I’m like a little child who’s hoping that if I didn’t see you, maybe you didn’t see me… I didn’t want to hurt you.”

To Reb Yisroel, the best message parents can convey is a balanced one of “I fully accept you, but that doesn’t mean I have to approve of everything you do. To the contrary, if I approve, I’m confusing you. If I give you everything you want, it’s not a relationship.” He stresses that he’s “not a hardliner. Just the other day, I suggested to a chassidish guy who came to see me to take his kid to a ballgame. But there’s a very big difference between that and helping your child violate very serious issurim. We have to ask, ‘Is the Ribbono shel Olam happy with this?’ ”

Craving for Structure

It’s that sense of healthy balance between flexibility and accountability that makes Rabbi Yisroel Grossberg the right man to run a school like BCA. On his desk, he keeps framed photographs of three great figures — all named Shlomo. One is Rav Shlomo Freifeld, whom he calls “the rebbi I never had.” He has read and listened to everything by or about the unforgettable founder of Far Rockaway’s Sh’or Yoshuv community, viewing him as a model of someone completely devoted to understanding his students, whereever they were holding.

Then there’s the Bobover Rebbe, Rav Shloime Halberstam, whose tish a young Yisroel Grossberg would sometimes attend while spending Shabbos at his grandparents’ home near Bobov’s Boro Park headquarters. He has fond memories of walking into Bobov on Friday nights, “a little all-American kid from Staten Island” whom the chassidim would push up to the front, where the Rebbe would talk to him, telling him, “Don’t watch TV.”

The third picture is that of the man most responsible for where and what Reb Yisroel is today: the legendary mashgiach, Rav Shlomo Wolbe. Reb Yisroel learned in Eretz Yisrael at the yeshivah dubbed “Lakewood East,” headed by the mashgiach’s son-in-law, Rav Yaakov Eliezer Schwartzman, and when his parents insisted he come home for a cousin’s wedding, Rav Schwartzman suggested he discuss the matter with Rav Wolbe, who served as the yeshivah’s mashgiach. Ultimately, Reb Yisroel did attend the wedding, but the marriage only lasted six months, and he still wonders if perhaps the point of the whole episode was for him to develop a close kesher with Rav Wolbe.

When I ask what enduring lessons he gained from his time with the Mashgiach, he answers with one word: “Normalcy.” Having grown up in a more typical “balabatish” home and environment, he strove to reconcile aspects of his upbringing with the yeshivah outlook he had come to embrace. Rav Wolbe helped him learn how to be a ben Torah without denying the influence of one’s background, and how to be more accepting, too, of ups and downs as an inevitable part of life. He recalls times when Rav Wolbe would give him money and tell him to go out to eat with a bochur in the yeshivah whom he felt needed the break.

Ultimately, it was Rav Wolbe who empowered him with the mission he’s still pursuing so many years later. Before leaving Eretz Yisrael for Lakewood to begin shidduchim, Reb Yisroel had asked the Mashgiach whether he could choose to date only someone who would want to live in Eretz Yisrael for the long term, which was his plan. But the unequivocal response was, “And who’s going to teach Torah in America? Me? You speak a better English than I do. Stay in America and teach Torah there.”

Growing up, he’d hear people say that kids crave structure and rules and he’d think, “Yeah, right, another tired clich?.” But, says Reb Yisroel, “they really do. We have demands of these girls, some of whom haven’t been in school for two years, and they crave it. Our school day starts at 10 a.m., but if they’re two minutes late, they can’t come that day, the idea being that if we’re starting that late, you’d better be here on time. And they appreciate it, because if you show enough love, the foundation to build on is there.”

Before he arrived at BCA, there had been an effort to make it a looser, less academic environment, but Rabbi Grossberg, together with a staff he describes as “incredibly talented and dedicated,” changed all that, turning what was called “Fun with Numbers” back into a regular math class and reintroducing New York State Regents exams. And it worked, because the girls themselves wanted it to be more of a real school.

The school has a serious academic program, albeit with a shortened day into which a staff of 12 teachers pack a full slate of two limudei kodesh and four secular studies subjects, plus art, music, and gymnastics. But at 23 students, the school is still small enough for the principal to declare on a whim, “Perfect attendance today? We’re going to Aviator for ice-skating!”

Most of the students graduate with a Regents diploma, although, to be sure, the BCA graduation is an experience like none other in the frum community. At one such ceremony, a girl got up and said, “Most girls graduating say things like, ‘Wow, I didn’t think I’d make it.’ Well, I say, ‘Wow, I didn’t think I’d be alive.’ ”

The school has a rolling enrollment, with tracks instead of grades, because the student body tends to be fluid. If a girl is expelled from her previous school in November, she can’t wait until the next September to apply — she needs a school now. And just as there are new girls frequently coming in, there are also girls who leave midyear, as two students did just recently — one for two months in drug rehab, and the other for a mental health facility.

Mrs. Faigy Myski, BCA’s math teacher since its inception, emphasizes that the girls aren’t special-ed cases, but that they have lots of issues that get in the way of their academic success. “With the help of our clinical psychologist, we’ve learned how to separate out the emotional issues they’re dealing with — trauma, relationships, and the like — and put them on the side to be addressed outside the classroom. We thought some girls had ADHD, reading disorders, and the like, but in reality it is gaps in education and emotional issues that are holding them back, and once recognized, they’re ready to learn. This is not a drop-in center — it’s a real school, with real learning going on.”

Staff psychologist Dr. Miller holds a weekly group discussion and coordinates between the school and each girl’s therapist, in addition to administering frequent drug testing. But, Rabbi Grossberg says, it’s a point of pride that all the girls know, “If we’ve got 23 students, there are 23 drug policies. Let’s say two girls come to our school: One had never tried drugs in her life, so if she tests positive, she may have to stay home until she tests clean. The other girl may have had numbers for marijuana use that were off the charts, so if on her latest test her numbers have dropped significantly, we’re going to let her know we’re proud of her accomplishments.”

We Specialize in Crumbs

By the time they arrive at BCA’s doorstep, the girls’ past experiences have made them hypersensitive to hypocrisy and artifice and they can be brutally honest with themselves and others. That’s why, Rabbi Grossberg observes, it takes special talent to teach here. “We have teachers come in here who are at the top of their game, with years of experience, but run out of here crying, and at the same time, we have girls coming in here to teach right out of seminary, and they just seem to know what it takes. Sometimes, a teacher will ask me how I think their class went, and I’ll tell her, ‘You know how it went, because if it wasn’t going well, they’d just walk out on you.’ ”

Once, when a teacher made the mistake of telling her class in all earnestness, “I’m here to help, I just want to help,” a girl shot back, “We’re not your chesed project. If you want to do chesed, there’s an old-age home down the block where you can do that.”

Every so often, Rabbi Wallerstein sits around a table with the girls to talk about where everyone’s up to in their personal journeys. Once, a new girl joined the conversation, and when it was her turn, she burst out crying and fled the room. When Rabbi Wallerstein went outside to check on her, she looked at him and said in disbelief, “Everyone’s honest here. I’ve never been able to be honest about my struggles or I’d be thrown out of school. But here we are, going around the room and each girl is talking openly about her individual challenges.” The most beautiful thing of all about these sessions is the way in which the girls celebrate each other. A girl might say, for example, “I kept Shabbos two weeks in a row,” and girls who are not at all up to that point will be clapping just as loudly as girls already keeping Shabbos.

Still, these girls’ emotional scars run deep, and one of the hardest things for a parent to hear is that change, if it comes, will be slow. One parent told Rabbi Grossberg that for years, what bothered him the most about his daughter’s conduct was her penchant for wearing multiple earrings. One day, after she had graduated from BCA, she came down to breakfast, and lo and behold, had just one earring in each ear. Her parents looked at each other, not sure of whether to comment, but she did it for them. “I know what you’re thinking… I just looked in the mirror today and thought to myself, What are you doing? You have a regular job, you’re a secretary in a nursing home. What’s with all the earrings?” And then the father remembered what Rabbi Grossberg had told him: “Sometimes, you just have to give it time.”

Rabbi Grossberg realizes that “it’s the most painful thing in the world to sit there and watch your kid do stupid things, dangerous things” and he tells parents, “We specialize in crumbs. We’re not going to be able to give you a whole piece of bread when it comes to nachas, but we’ll give you what we can.”

He makes sure to let parents know about even small steps forward and encourages his teachers to do the same. Once, a girl complained, “Rabbi, we’re not learning enough Chumash.”

Taken aback, he asked her, “Where’s that coming from?”

She said, “At the end of the day, someone’s going to have to help my kids with homework.”

When she left the room, he called the parents to share her words.

And then there was the time he was passing by a classroom and overheard a girl discussing which color her sheitel was going to be when she got married. Intrigued, he stopped in and asked if she was serious. She said, “Listen, I’m not anywhere near that point, but I know by the time it’s relevant, I’m going to be wearing a sheitel.”

Reb Yisroel remembers calling the father to tell him what he’d just heard his daughter say. “There was silence on the line. I said, ‘Hello? Hello?’ and then I realized he was crying.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 705)