(Photos: Moshe Oiknine)

I

t’s early evening as Elchanan Schwarz, director of crisis intervention at BINA Stroke & Brain Injury Assistance, parks his car outside the studio on 33rd Street in Flatbush.

He goes in, and within minutes, he’s wearing the earphones and completely in character as Fiveish, Oorah’s lovable mascot, and saying things like “Give me a high-Fiveish” and imitating every single frum voice and quirk you know in the span of one sentence.

The next morning, he’ll be back at work, sitting with parents whose child has sustained traumatic brain injury and trying to help them adapt. He will speak about a course of treatment and help them with their own confusion. He will speak in professionally low tones, gentle and empathetic.

He will treat patients and monitor their progress, and later at night, if he’s not lecturing at Touro College, he might go back to the studio and sing “It’s Not Easy Being Green” in a Kermit-the-Frog voice.

Just Do What You Do

Before Elchanan Schwarz left yeshivah in Eretz Yisrael, his rosh yeshivah called him in for a farewell discussion. Rav Yaakov Rappaport looked at the personable talmid and said, “You should know that we all have contradictions inside of us, different middos and characteristics that compete with each other. It’s called being human.”

“At the time, I found it strange,” Elchanan reflects as we sit against the far wall of a restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. “Our relationship had never been heavy. He was very serious, though, so I listened — and years later, I finally understood. He was telling me that the funny guy could also have a thoughtful side, and that’s fine. He got me.”

It’s something the therapist sees in his private practice as well. “The wider frum community likes to go for labels, and often, even when we’re trying to do the right thing. We’re not sure how to identify ourselves, and that leads to some of the issues we’re seeing in chinuch, in shidduchim. So this is a crucial piece of advice: People have contradictions, so do what you do and stop trying so hard to identify yourself.”

He quotes 19th-century poet Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Then, because he’s Elchanan Schwarz, he laughs out loud. “That’s pretentious, right? To sit here and quote Whitman? Sorry.”

Over the following weeks of conversations, he will make me laugh and cry as he moves seamlessly between humor and poignancy.

Elchanan grew up in Cleveland, then followed a fairly predictable yeshivah route through Telshe, Riverdale, and South Fallsburg.

“I was sort of restless. Let’s just say that my outstanding talent — the ability to go through the mizrach-wall in Telshe and imitate every single voice and nuance — wasn’t always appreciated in yeshivah. Camp Agudah Midwest was my place, because there, my sense of humor was a big asset. Lots of people say camp was their happy place, but for me, it was where I shone.”

When all his friends went to Eretz Yisrael to learn in Mir or Brisk, Elchanan went along — but found a smaller, newer yeshivah. Lev Aryeh was out of the way in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Neve Yaakov, and much smaller.

“My parents, who’d always been very easygoing and supportive, actually pushed me to find a smaller yeshivah where I could have a real connection with the rebbeim, so I broke off from my friends and went off on my own. I would go to Geula for Shabbos, hang out in one of the dirahs, but then go back to Neve Yaakov and learn. It was a special time,” he remembers.”

And it was along with the rest of his chevreh that Elchanan traveled home. “Everyone applied to Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood. Almost everyone got in.”

He continues with the ease of a man who wants me to understand that there’s no shame in admitting disappointment. “I didn’t get in, and at that point in my life, it was devastating. But it taught me a lot about myself.”

So Elchanan Schwarz went back to Eretz Yisrael, back to Lev Aryeh.

“The rebbeim were amazing — they knew I was hurt, and they treated me sort of as a staff member. They charged me with saying a bekius shiur. They let me taste something new, and at the same time, they gave me a sense of empowerment, that I could do this.”

Covering His Pain

The next zeman, Elchanan was accepted in BMG, but he’d already learned something about himself. After a while, he texted his cousin Rabbi Moti Rappaport, who was teaching in Toronto. “Got anything for me?” he wrote.

“Yes, come,” wrote back the popular rebbi at Toronto’s Yeshiva Darchei Torah.

And so, 25-year-old Elchanan Schwarz moved into the basement of his uncle and aunt, Rabbi and Mrs. Shlomo Noach Mandel, and got right to work.

“They gave me a smaller group of bochurim to work with at Darchei, but you know how it is, I was the rebbi with no wife and children, I had free time. So I was doing a lot of mentoring, hanging out with the boys at night and on Motzaei Shabbos.”

He taught there for one year, another year, then a third year.

Elchanan Schwarz had turned into a cliche, the entertaining, life-of-the-party camp guy who makes everyone else smile while covering up his own pain.

“Get married, get married, just get married, you should really just do it,” he mimics. “People mean well. They feel compelled to help and they’re unsure of what to say. But it’s not the most effective advice, you know.”

The rosh yeshivah in Darchei Torah, Rabbi Eliezer Breitowitz, had a tremendous impact on his newest staff member.

“Rabbi Breitowitz has this ability to speak to 15-year-old bochurim like they’re adults. He shares deep concepts and makes them so simple. He would quote Tanya, or Sfas Emes, and it would be so clear. I remember hearing him talk about the middah of emes, and he started to discuss a book called The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. He just has this way of engaging students, keeping their minds and hearts open. I loved listening.”

But then Rabbi Breitowitz fired him.

“Look, you’re busy and fulfilled here, so you’re always reluctant to go back to New York to date,” the Rosh Yeshivah said. “I feel like I’m enabling you to stay single by keeping you on staff.”

That was it. Elchanan Schwarz was 30 years old, single and jobless.

“I was upset at the Rosh Yeshivah’s decision. I didn’t appreciate it. But a year and a half later, he was mesader kiddushin at my chasunah.”

Brain Game

That post-Toronto year in New York, ostensibly to “get married, get married, get married,” also allowed Elchanan to take a deeper look at a world he’d only observed from a distance.

“Working with teens, I’d been seeing mild mental health issues, some disorders I’d learned about. But I didn’t know enough about them to actually help. So I registered at Touro’s clinical mental health counseling program and started to learn — and what I saw amazed me.”

Along with immersing himself in this new world of mental health, diagnosis, and treatment, Elchanan got busy with something else.

“The shadchan, the one who introduced me to Chaya Goldstein, was actually a talmid from Toronto, a teenager. He thought we were a good match.”

These days, Elchanan often speaks to groups of older singles, and he mentions this point. “The fact that the suggestion came from a kid, not a formal shadchan, made it easier, because there was really no pressure. The shadchanim are doing great work, and they are necessary, but at times, pressure can really be destructive.”

The young couple settled in Flatbush, where Elchanan graduated with a degree in mental health counseling. He’d hoped to use his new degree between the walls of a school, but one day, he noticed a newspaper ad that seemed intriguing: “Work as a rebbi for kids at risk.”

“I saw this notice for an expo by an organization called BINA — Stroke and Brain Injury Assistance, and I wanted to be there. I wasn’t a caregiver or vendor, and, baruch Hashem, I wasn’t looking for help. But I’d always been intrigued by the world of medicine. As a child, I would read the Merck Manual, I loved it. My parents actually took it away from me when I started screaming from the couch that the pain in my foot wasn’t just a bruise, but it was likely African Hoof Disease. When I was at Touro, I’d become entranced by the interface between medicine and psychology — Professor Richard Waxman had introduced us to the world of neuroscience, the role the brain plays in every human act and sense. So I wanted to know about BINA.”

His in-laws told him about a family friend who worked there. “I remember thinking, ‘Ah… I always thought she worked for Binah magazine.’ I called her and she told me all about what they were doing.”

Elchanan Schwarz asked if he could join.

Drowning in Pain

Mrs. Chavie Glustein had been living the dream as a young kollel wife in Jerusalem — until her husband endured a stroke. The couple was completely bewildered, cast into raging waters with nothing to hold on to. They returned to America, where the devoted young wife started the process of figuring out her husband’s road to recovery. Along with attending to the needs of her family, she had to figure out medical care, insurance, rehabilitation, and a course of treatment — but the established medical askanim had little experience with brain injury.

Mrs. Glustein started to take notes, a chronicle of determination and diligence — not to publish a best-selling book, but so that she could use her experiences navigating a blizzard in which the usual landmarks had been covered by snow to help others.

People began to reach out to the young kollel wife for guidance — those conversations became a lifeline for them. And they eventually morphed into BINA, the Jewish community’s first resource created to assure survivors and their families that they were not alone.

“The risk of falling through the cracks of a complex and very-not-user-friendly rehabilitation system is real,” Elchanan says, “and this happens at a time when the family of the survivor — whether it’s a car accident, a stroke, or a sports injury — is already drowning in pain and confusion. I was amazed by what they were doing, with so little fanfare or noise.”

He got to know them at the expo, but the young mental health counselor stuck around afterward, wanting to be part of what he saw: real-world help, real-world guidance, real-world chesed. “And,” he points out, “real-world therapy. The crisis management for the families is crucial. It’s not like any other therapy, but it’s rewarding in a different way — it allows these families, whether they are children, parents, or siblings to the survivor, to adapt, to find the tools they need to give life to someone else.”

Within a short time, Elchanan Schwarz was part of the BINA family.

That Voice

Mascots are invented characters meant to represent a group or team, but they are very real in the sense that they embody identification and hope.

If the frum community has a mascot, then its name is Fiveish.

“It started during the summer before my wedding,” Elchanan says, leaning back in his chair and seemingly relieved to switch to a less intense topic. “I had some free time, school was off, and I wasn’t working. Rabbi Eliyahu Mintz from Oorah asked me to come by the office and give some life to the made-up character, Fiveish, which the organization had introduced as a means of pushing their Chinese auction in which a five-dollar bill is enough to enter. I started to play around with voices and personas for the oversized five-dollar bill.”

Like a true mascot, Fiveish sent forth a stream of personalities that were a celebration of an entire people, somehow going into places that were more amusing than politically correct, and getting away with it. He introduced an open-minded chassid, an uptight Litvak, a raucous Russian, and a self-satisfied Modern Orthodox intellectual — touching old stereotypes, but with the wink and smile of a brother.

“Look, funny is funny,” says the guy who grew up a self-admitted Shmuel Kunda junkie, happily entranced by the use of voices and accents on the Marvelous Middos Machine.

He remembers a summer afternoon in Camp Agudah Midwest: He was in his favorite place, in the main office cradling the PA system and doing voices. That day, his target was Rabbi Berel Wein. (After our interview, I get a voice-note from Elchanan in Rabbi Wein mode. It’s perfect enough that no one I played it for could tell it wasn’t the real thing.)

Someone hurried in and motioned for him to shut it down. “The Rosh Yeshivah is here — stop immediately!” The rosh yeshivah was Rav Avrohom Chaim Levin, a brother-in-law of Rabbi Wein. But as it turned out, there was no reason to stop. The Rosh Yeshivah was laughing.

Elchanan did his thing, giving Fiveish its appeal, its relevance, and its message. But sometimes, late at night when I can’t sleep, I find myself staring up at the ceiling and pondering the fact that the voice of Fiveish is also the voice of a professor at Touro College.

Worse Than an Orphan

The way Elchanan Schwarz speaks, you’re always sort of waiting for the punch line. But as he discusses the things he sees every day, the glint in his eyes is there, the radio-show host way of talking is there — but he’s not being funny.

He looks like a man who’s talking to himself, like a witness who’s seen horror and hasn’t fully processed it yet.

“Sometimes I see children riding bikes without helmets, and I think to myself, ‘That could, chas v’shalom, be the difference between a few weeks of headaches and a vegetative coma.’ ” Look, I don’t want be the preachy do-your-parents-know-you-have-no-helmet police, but it can save lives.

“Let me tell you a little bit about the world of a brain trauma survivor,” he continues. “You’re at work, you see a name on Yeshiva World News. There was an accident. You stop what you’re doing and say a kapitel. Baruch Hashem, you find out that he’ll survive. Great.”

Elchanan Schwarz is now a camp counselor sitting next to the bonfire. But this story isn’t funny or scary or suspenseful: There’s only pain. Lots of pain.

“So now he made it, let’s plan the seudas hodaah, right?”

He taps the table. “Okay, now let me take you out of fantasy-land into reality. The accident survivor who’s off your Tehillim list may have had a traumatic brain injury. He isn’t the same person he was. This thing, that people wake up from comas and rip out the tubes and run off into the sunset laughing, that’s only in movies. It’s not very realistic. There’s something called ambiguous loss, which is a loss that leaves the family without closure or understanding, the patient himself doesn’t really know what’s wrong sometimes, it’s all so bewildering.

“Meanwhile, the neighbors who were delivering supper and trays of rugelach after the accident all get back to their own lives, and the family is left dealing with this survivor, who looks very much like someone they used to know, but isn’t. In a way,” Elchanan’s eyes narrow, “the child of a parent who experienced traumatic brain injury might have a harder time than an orphan, lo aleinu, and I know that sounds like a horrible thing to say, but think about it. The school knows when a child is missing a parent, and they adjust. But here, they’re thinking, ‘Okay, the accident was five years ago, what’s so hard to do homework together for ten minutes?’ ”

He tells me about an older man who, after a traumatic brain injury, seemed to be suffering from depression, and the children had been advised to take their father for electroconvulsive therapy. The family called Relief Resources for a referral, and Rabbi Babad stopped them. “Whoa, you can’t just shoot electric waves through the brain of a TBI survivor without calling BINA.”

Rabbi Babad, knowing when to pass a case off to another unit better suited to help, sent them to BINA.

At BINA, the elderly patient was referred to a neuropsychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed him with an executive function disorder, which can resemble depression, but which calls for a totally different course of treatment.

He Gets Them

A few years ago, the growing Schwarz family moved from Brooklyn to Lakewood, and along with his work for BINA, Elchanan started a private practice in his new town.

“Many of the people I met through BINA would end up seeking private therapy later on and I felt like I could help them. I see lots of people dealing with grief, adjustment to divorce or loss, and teenagers at risk.”

Additionally, his own experiences have made him the right person to work with older singles.

“I get them. I know what it does to you, the second-guessing and feeling that maybe you don’t know what you want. Frum society isn’t the easiest place for an older single. Or a younger single, for that matter.”

He remembers, as an older single himself, being in the audience when a well-known rav spoke about the mandate to suggest shidduchim. “And I felt two hundred heads turn to look at me, and I knew that the next day, my phone would be on fire, two hundred mediocre ideas, dutifully suggested. You know,” he grins, entertained by what he’s about to say, “for some reason, when you’re an older single, everyone thinks your life is their business.”

It’s a busy life, private practice, the public work at BINA, lecturing at Touro — and, of course, being Fiveish.

“My kids are getting older,” he says, “soon they’ll probably be embarrassed, and maybe I’ll have to stop.”

For now though, it works. “My family is what allows me to do this, to keep my balance. My wife, Chaya, has not only created a home in which I can recharge, but as a PT herself, she sees a lot of the same things each day — struggle, determination, a little bit of growth. She understands me.”

Rather than cause burnout, he says, his job at BINA gives inspiration. “We see people exceed medical expectations all the time, and without a doubt, this is because of the cheering squads, the families around them. The perseverance and determination of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, spouses and friends — they are the fuel that lead, b’siyata d’Shmaya, to miracles.”

Outside of the Avenue Grill in Elizabeth, the early winter sky is angry, with brushes of orange and black. But the people rushing by the low buildings, the crumbling movie theater and nail salon, don’t seem inclined to notice or to look up.

Elchanan Schwarz does. He sees the orange, he sees the black. He looks at me and laughs.

“Shalom,” he mutters, a mix of irreligious Jew touring Israel and exhausted yeshivah guy channeling new-age spiritual seeker, the language only Elchanan knows — the jokes and the sadness and the longing and hope.

There is this type of badchan who really gets people, who knows what hurts them, what scares them, what lifts them up.

He can joke about it. Or he can get out there and help them. Who could be better suited?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 741)