Michael sat up, and his voice rose: “My parents! No! They’ve had it with me, so they’re happy to give me enough each month to pay for this place and keep me in food and joints. I guess I’ve seen to that, just like I made sure I’d get kicked out of MJA. I’ve got a terrible temper, but I let it loose even more when I was there for those few weeks so my parents would have to take me out. I am what they call in the Orthodox community OTD.”
I must have looked confused because I had never heard the term before.
“Off the derech,” he explained.
derechI knew a decent amount of Hebrew, so I asked: “derech, meaning the path?”
“Uh-huh, I am considered off the righteous path. There’s a bunch of us, you know, a whole underground of us. Some are unhappy, some are angry, some—not me, although I’ve exp
