By the time I hit my early teens, I wasn't much for letting my parents make choices for me. How I longed for, would have welcomed a community that treated me as an adult. Well, times have changed. The drugs of choice are far more dangerous, and it's far easier to make very wrong choices. Joyrides take place at gunpoint.
Schools are even more irrelevant.
AIDS joins pregnancy as a risk of normal adolescent sexual experimentation. And we have little control over any of these forces. But we do have Judaism. Today I am a Mensch. The discovery was made three weeks before he was to become a Bar Mitzvah.