Whether it’s a Jew struggling with a job loss, depression, or marital strife, Debbie Fox is there to offer help. The director of Aleinu Family Resource Center is also at the helm of a daring, nationwide battle against domestic violence and molestation. As she puts it, “I want our frum world to be unsafe for any perpetrator”
I bend down from a distance, so the outside of the laundry bag won’t touch my leg, and I put my clean hand into the bag, and I pull out one pair of stockings, but there are other things clinging to it, but I can’t use my other hand to help, because it turned off the shower with a tissue, so I have to shake out the stockings with one hand. And I see, but it’s too late, that my other pair of stockings is clinging to it, and it’s falling falling falling to the floor — the floor! — the carpet, which was never washed — and I have nothing else to wear tomorrow.
We all find ourselves, to some extent, under a constant deluge of the items we accumulate in daily life. Try sorting through your child’s notebooks and projects at the end of the school year. Even our email accounts are stuffed with photos and documents. But most of us manage to maintain equilibrium in our personal material worlds; we bring things in, but we throw out as well. Others, simply never throw out anything. Pathological hoarding is believed to affect as many as 6 million people in the U.S.
