Sometime in between acting out suicide bombings with his Playmobile
In between sneaking into his grandparent’s house to try to masturbate to a nipple on Fashion TV
In between hoping his parents had seminary girls over for Shabbos meals so he could talk and look at girls
In between browsing porn at 14 for an hour every day between morning prayers and class
In between reading every chapter he ever learned 24 times
In between struggling to memorize endless pages of Mishanic non sequiturs
In between the daily hour of study he had every evening to supplement the 10 and a half hours of school
In between sneaky peeks at the censored pages of National Geographic magazines for glimpses of African boobs and prehistoric man
In between his monthly forays out of the city walls to visit his Orthodontist
In between getting tutored every evening in Gemarah to make sure he was ready for “a regular school”
In between daily existential struggles about the meaninglessness of his study and why he sucked so much at it
In between the daily dread of new study material which would need to be understood and memorized with sheer brute force
In between wearing teffilin every class and removing them for every break
In between the struggle to understand the words coming out the Rebbe’s mouth even though he could have sworn he understood the language
In between being the only one in class who could speak English or care about math
In between the guilt of not going to school on Shabbos and the boredom of having nothing better to do
In between fighting with his nine siblings over noise and personal space as they tried to share four tiny bedrooms
In between the continuous struggle to fulfill the indiscernible word of God
Shalom Tzvi found time to be himself
