The third one is Yehuda Farber and Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard buries him on a Tuesday in May, which is his day off, and he does not think about that until afterward.
Four hundred people at the chapel on Venice. The word heart gets used six times from the podium. His brother in law says it. The rosh yeshiva who flew in says it. Grossbard says it once, at 11:20 in the morning, in the phrase a heart that gave out too young, and it is the only sentence he has said in public in nine years that he would take back if he could.
Yudi Farber was thirty one. He went to a yeshiva in Baltimore for two years and did not finish and came home and nobody ever said out loud why. He sold merchant services, then he did something with solar rebates, then he had a medical billing operation that received a letter from a state agency in 2024 that his father in law handled. He married Bracha at twenty two and they have three kids and the apartment on Sherbourne is in her father’s name.
He was funny. That is the thing that goes in first and stays longest. He ran the kiddush club. He did an impression of a certain rosh kollel that was the best thing at any table he sat at. Everybody in that building liked him and none of them respected him, and he knew that, at close range, every Shabbos for nine years.
He has two unmarried sisters, nineteen and twenty two. His older brother learns in Lakewood and has six children of his own coming up.
That is the whole story and Grossbard could write it in the car.
He has a number and he has had it since March.
It comes from Zalman Fried, who has been on the chevra kadisha since 1994 and who is at the table for most of the men in this city who die young, and who has never in thirty two years told Grossbard one thing about any body he has washed.
The number for calendar year 2026 stands at twenty as of the beginning of May. Twenty men between twenty three and forty one in the Orthodox community of Los Angeles. Three at the Barn. The certificates say cardiac in some cases and say nothing in others because the family declined the autopsy, and there is no line item anywhere for what actually happened, which is that a young man used cocaine that had fentanyl in it, alone or with one other man who was also using and could not help him.
Grossbard can describe the type without notes.
He is not the top of the shiur. He is not a doctor or a lawyer or a CPA. He went through eighteen years of a system that sorts boys by one measure and he came out on the wrong end of the sort and got married anyway at twenty two because that is what the system does next. His father in law bought the apartment. He works in something that is a little sideways, and the sideways part is not because he is a criminal but because the clean lanes require a credential he does not have and the sideways lanes require a personality, and personality is the one asset he owns.
He carries a status wound that opened at seventeen and has never once closed, and he sits in a room every single week with the men who beat him, and he makes the room laugh, and he goes home.
Grossbard has been watching this type since 1996 and he has never had a good answer for it and he does not have one now.
He writes a hesped for Yudi Farber on the Monday night that says it. Six paragraphs. It says the word. It says that a man died of a poisoned drug and that we are going to say so out loud in this room right now because there are forty young men sitting in front of us and some of them use and one of them is next.
He reads it twice at the kitchen table and puts it in a drawer.
He does not give it, and the reason is that the last twenty minutes of a man’s life above ground belong to his widow and his mother and his three children, and a rabbi who takes that podium and uses those minutes for a campaign has stolen something from six people to buy something for the room. He has watched other men do it and he has despised them for it.
Reb Simcha Farber comes to see him on Thursday morning anyway.
“I want to ask you something and then I want to explain it, and I want you to let me explain it, because I know what you think of me already.”
“Ask.”
“Don’t say it. Not from the bimah, not at the sheloshim, not in an interview, not ever. Not with his name near it.”
“I already decided that.”
Farber sits down.
“You think it’s my honor,” he says. “It’s not my honor. My honor went in the ground on Tuesday. I have a daughter who is twenty two and has been out five times in two years and a daughter who is nineteen who has not started. I have a son in Lakewood with six children. I have a nephew going into shidduchim in the fall. The word gets attached to this family and it is attached to eleven young people for twenty years, and there is no undoing it, and everybody in this room knows exactly how that works because everybody in this room does it to somebody else’s family every single week.”
“I know how it works.”
“Then you know I’m not being vain. I’m doing arithmetic.”
“You’re doing correct arithmetic,” Grossbard says. “That’s what makes it a catastrophe. Every family in this city runs the same correct arithmetic and the sum of twenty correct decisions is that no one has ever heard the word and the twenty first kid dies in a bathroom with nobody in the house who knows what to do.”
“So what do you want from me.”
“Nothing. I want nothing from you. You’ve buried your son and you get to protect your daughters and I will not touch your name.”
The rabbinic meeting is in June and there are nine men in the room and it takes ninety minutes to die.
Everyone agrees there is a problem. Two of them have buried one. One of them has buried two. A man from the Valley says the word out loud and the room gets very quiet and then moves past it. Somebody proposes a program on mental health for teenage boys, which is the proposal that always gets made, because a program for teenagers implicates no family currently sitting in any shul.
Grossbard says he wants a number published.
“Whose number,” somebody says.
“Ours. A count. No names, no shuls, no families, no ages, nothing that identifies one house. A number and a year.”
“Where would the number come from.”
“The men who wash them.”
Nobody wants to answer that, and the meeting ends with a working group.
He goes to see Zalman Fried on a Thursday afternoon in the coat room, which is where they have their conversations now.
“I want your number.”
Zalman does not say anything.
“No names. Not one, not to me, not to anybody. I don’t want to know who. I want how many and I want to say it out loud in front of six hundred people, and I want to say it every month until it stops going up.”
“It’s not a thing you say,” Zalman says.
“I know it isn’t. I’m asking you to change that one time.”
Zalman stands there with his hand on the table.
“Thirty two years,” he says. “I have never told my wife what I do on a Thursday. I have never told one person one name.”
“I’m not asking for a name.”
“You’re asking for the number and the number is made out of the names.”
“Yes.”
Zalman looks at the mop sink for a long moment.
“Twenty,” he says. “Through the end of April. If you say twenty I won’t correct you.”
He says it on the second Shabbos in July, on Devarim, in the twelve minutes before Tisha B’Av, and it takes him ninety seconds and he says no man’s name.
“Twenty men in this community are dead this year. Between twenty three and forty one years old. Married, most of them. Children, most of them. I am not going to tell you which shuls and I am not going to tell you which families and no one in this room is going to guess out loud, and if I hear you guessing at the kiddush I will come find you.
“They did not die of their hearts. They used cocaine that had fentanyl in it, which is now in most of it, and it kills a man in about four minutes, and none of them meant to die and none of them thought they were taking that risk because eight years ago they weren’t.
“Here is what I want from this room and it’s three things.
“Naloxone. It’s called Narcan. You buy it at the pharmacy on Pico with no prescription for about forty five dollars, it comes in a nasal spray, a child could use it correctly, and it reverses this in two minutes. There will be a box of it in the lobby by Sunday, paid for out of the discretionary fund, and you take it, and you don’t sign anything, and I don’t want to know who took it. Put it in the house. Put it in the car.
“Second. If you find somebody, call 911 and say the word overdose. California law protects you and protects him from prosecution for what’s in the room. Nobody in this community is going to jail for calling. The waiting is what kills them.
“Third, and this is the one that costs you something. If your son or your brother or your son in law is using, you have got two things to protect and you can only have one. You can protect his name or you can protect him. I have sat with three families this year who chose the name and I will sit with the next one too and I will love them anyway, and I’m telling you now, in advance, at a time when nobody in this room is in the middle of it, which is the only hour a man can hear it.
“That’s all of it. Go home and eat something before the fast.”
The response runs about how he expects.
A rabbi in the Valley says publicly that a bimah on Shabbos is not the place. Two families leave the Barn and one comes back. The Journal calls twice and he does not call back either time, because a quote in the Journal turns the number into his number and the whole value of it is that it belongs to nobody. A man tells him at the kiddush that he has made the community look like Skid Row and Grossbard says twenty and the man walks away.
Marla Feig, eighty two, takes two boxes.
Reb Simcha Farber sends a note in September, four lines, that says thank you for keeping your word, and does not say anything about the rest of it, and Grossbard puts it in the drawer with the hesped he did not give.
The box in the lobby empties eleven times between July and December and is refilled eleven times and Grossbard never learns one name.
In October a woman on Doheny finds her brother in law on the bathroom floor at 1:40 in the morning and gives him a dose of the thing she took out of a box in a lobby in August, and calls 911 and says the word, and he is alive and he is in a program in Arizona and nobody outside four people knows any of it. Grossbard hears about it in March from a nurse, secondhand, with no names in it, which is how he wants it.
The number keeps going.
Twenty three in June. Twenty six in July. He says it every Rosh Chodesh in ninety seconds and sits down.
The phone rings in the kitchen on a Sunday night at 9:15 and Grossbard looks at it and picks it up.
“Rabbi. It’s Zalman.”
“Twenty nine,” Grossbard says.
“Twenty nine,” Zalman says.
