Where have you gone?

Tonight I ran into a bochur that I've known since I was a kid. He was putting on tefillin a few minutes before shekiah in a basement shul somewhere in Crown Heights. Instead of a har and jacket, he was wearing the most ridiculously low shorts I have ever seen-another inch and they would have been too-small pants. He also had a grey t-shirt on (no tzitzis), and lacked the large beard which used to accompany his face. The last I saw of him he'd been a relatively normal bochur. What happened?

I suppose there's lots of blame to spread around when a bochur leaves the path of his comrades. His mother for pushing him too hard, convinced her son was a genius and constantly trying to get him into the higher class, the better yeshiva? Or how about his friends, more interested in guitar than gemara, preferring Coltrane to Chassidus and F sharp to Farbrengens. Or maybe it's the fault of his teachers, who took him in expecting a genius and, discovering a very normal boy, never recovered from the shock and treated him as such?

Some would argue that in fact nothing terrible, nor even abnormal, happened here. Kid grows up, realizes it's easier to live life if you don't have to serve the G-d of the ancient hebrews, and there you have it-kid fries out. Pleasant thought, eh? So maybe it's the kid's fault. I don't know. I'm no expert on the matter in general, certainly not in this particular case. But you should know that it bothered me.

Oh, of course, it was a beautiful thing. Reb Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev would be proud. But does that mean we have to be proud? After all, what Reb Levi saw when he beheld those Jews smoking on shabbos was not what the rest of the people saw. Do the rest of the people have an obligation to sacrifice their and their children's religious affiliation because an ex-Lubavitcher has decided to park himself in Crown Heights? Or do we always have to strive to look for the good and positive?

I don't know.