I was 15 when the Israel Scouts decided to send me to America for the summer. I spoke English well, which was an advantage, but you didn't really need more than a brief chat to realize that I was what kindly older people at the time described as a very troubled young man. My father had been arrested two years earlier for robbing some banks, and I looked at his sudden absence as a theological crisis: What kind of world was it, I asked, in which the rock upon which our family was built could one day just crumble? It was a lot to take in, so most of the time I avoided the question with sex, drugs, and scouting.
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