He looked fondly at the peeling walls with their sagging bookcases, the chipped wooden chairs and tables, rubbed to a fine patina by the hands and bodies of his fellow students over decades. This had been his home for so many years. He had progressed from cheder to yeshiva to mesivta to the bais midrash, landing finally in kollel. While many of his fellow students had dropped out along the way either from disappointment in their progress or financial constraints, he had had the good fortune to be burdened by neither. For over twenty years, he had been part of the elite of this community, learning full-time, and was well on his way—or so he had always told himself—to becoming a respected rosh yeshiva. It was in this conviction that he had heretofore invested the entire value and meaning of his life, believing wholeheartedly that only this had earned him the respect of all those who knew him: his children, parents, former in-laws, neighbors, the parents of his children’s friends, as well as the butcher and the grocer, who waited patiently each month to settle his bill. It defined him to the world. It defined him to himself.

How could it be otherwise? From his earliest almost toddling steps into cheder, where the kindly rebbe had smeared honey over Hebrew letters and allowed him to lick it off, impressing him with the sweetness of learning the holy alphabet in which God’s word was written, it had been drummed into him that learning was the highest form of living and serving God. Doing anything else was a mistake, a failure, a sad burden. At the very least, it was settling for second-best. Not the smallest factor in this feeling was the way all the women in his world looked up to Torah scholars and how they looked down upon everyone else.

And so it was that he had gone step by step down that path, almost without being conscious of making a choice. It was what everyone else in the community was doing; what all his friends were doing.

And now, suddenly, it was over.

Despite the fact that this, too, had been his own choice, he found that devastating. It was the heartbreaking relinquishment of his lifelong dreams.

His eyes smarted as he weaved through the crowded rows, avoiding the eyes of others. The sensation of coldness, of being shut out, was not new. It had begun simultaneously with his secular night studies. He couldn’t help but notice that his voiced opinions, insights, questions—once regarded as extraordinary, the epitome of intellectual vigor—were suddenly less interesting to those around him. Whereas before, people were eager to engage with him, they now seemed to sigh and look restlessly over his head as if he had not spoken at all. Or so it seemed to him.

“How are you, my friend?”