When a rosh yeshiva speaks about the dangers of drinking culture, the entire community pays attention. But sitting across the therapy couch from your sons each week, I need to say something that hurts: the crisis is not Toameha. The crisis is us.

We can outlaw the Kiddush Club. We can close down every Erev Shabbos gathering, seal every bottle, and issue kol korehs until our printers run out of ink. And yes, people may drink a little less discreetly. But nothing real will change because the schnapps itself was never the source of the problem. The bottle is only the Band-Aid. The wound is deeper, and it was inflicted by the very society that now screams for solutions.

We built a culture obsessed with appearances. We engineered a lifestyle defined by competition, visual perfection, and social pressure. We created a world where simchas are not celebrations, but staged productions—where “mazel tov” quietly translates into debt, anxiety, and humiliation behind closed doors. The flowers wilt in the hall, but the bills stay for years.

In too many homes, a chasuna or bar mitzvah marks the start of financial suffocation. Parents take on loans they cannot repay. Mothers watch the bills pile up as collectors circle. Fathers internalize the stress and feel personally responsible for the disaster. No one sees it, because the pictures were gorgeous. The videos were dazzling. The guests were impressed. Meanwhile, sholom bayis erodes under the weight of a lifestyle that nobody can afford and everybody is expected to maintain.

Then the parents work more hours to dig themselves out. They spend less time with their children. Tension fills the home where joy belongs. And children—who always feel what adults try hardest to hide—internalize the fear, the strain, and the loneliness. They don’t understand debt, but they understand pain. They don’t know what a loan shark is, but they know when Tatty is scared and Mommy is tense. They feel neglected not because their parents don’t care, but because survival leaves no space for hugs.

So teenagers do what the adults do: they escape. Only they don’t need Toameha to find their coping mechanism. They search for validation in the only place they can find it—other kids who are just as hurt, just as neglected, just as desperate for acceptance. They form friendships not out of rebellion, but out of mutual, silent suffering. And together, they drown out the noise. First it’s alcohol. Then it’s stronger stuff… And yes, this is happening. Not in theory. In your neighborhoods. In your schools. In your shuls.

When we ignore the emotional needs of our young men, when we overwork their parents, when we replace connection with image, we should not be shocked when the next generation seeks comfort in liquids and powders that promise relief. It is not curiosity that drives them. It is pain.

And there is an even darker truth. In a community that prides itself on Torah chinuch, the average child has become invisible. A boy who isn’t a genius, who isn’t polished, who doesn’t make the yeshiva look prestigious enough, is quietly pushed aside. If he struggles academically, instead of being supported, he is labeled. If he doesn’t fit the mold, he is unwanted. If his existence threatens the “brand” of the school, he is denied a place. That rejection doesn’t just bruise a child—it cracks him. It tells him exactly where he stands in our value system.

So before you declare war on schnapps, ask yourself this: How many of these boys are numbing themselves because we never bothered to make room for them? How many parents are drowning not because they don’t care, but because our expectations choke them? How many families are slowly collapsing under the pressure to look perfect for people whose opinions mean nothing in the long run?

We don’t have an alcohol crisis. We have a crisis of values, priorities, forgotten children and exhausted parents and a community that has become more afraid of embarrassment than of suffering.

As long as we continue worshipping image over honesty, prestige over compassion, lavishness over sanity, and “standards” over the dignity of every single child, nothing will change. We can ban Toameha today and our sons will still be searching for ways to silence the ache tomorrow.

If we want to stop the drinking, the drugs, the emotional collapse of our youth, we must stop numbing ourselves first. We must build a community that supports families before they break, that celebrates modest simchas without shame, that treats average children with the same excitement we reserve for prodigies, and that measures success by the health of our homes—not the beauty of our tablecloths.

Until then, banning schnapps is nothing more than a symbolic gesture, a quick fix for our conscience, and a distraction from the truth.

And the truth is this: we are not losing our children to alcohol. We are losing them to the pain that we refuse to confront.

Signed,
A Therapist

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