Apple Pizza

We were sitting at Apple Pizza last nigh, and my Middlest needed to use the bathroom. The bathroom is located upstairs, and as we walked up I wondered if I would see the same graffiti that covered those walls back in '91. As we neared the top of the stairs I saw a sign asking patrons to refrain from writing any graffiti on the walls, as the upstairs had been recently redone.

The walls were unmarked, and the bathroom was actually clean. While we were upstairs, my middlest wanted to look out the windows and yell down. Looking through those windows reminded me of one of the last times I was at Apple Pizza. Boomer was the Mercaz spy, and any Mercaz student caught anywhere neat the Midrachov would be instantly kicked out of Yeshiva.

Looking out the window, I could still picture Boomer walking past Apple Pizza, where I was sitting with some friends in the upstairs area to avoid detection.

I started to wonder if my belief system had changed since that time. Obviously, back then, I was against the Mercaz spy, and the constant threat of being kicked out of Mercaz for not following the rules. Had fifteen years and becoming a parent changed my attitude toward the way Mercaz went about enforcing the rules.

I didn't have to think about it very long. I haven't changed that much since then. I still think the Mercaz spy was a horrible misuse of Mercaz resources. Instead of working with students, they created a zero tolerance policy and used valuable human resources to walk through forbidden areas to catch wrongdoers. They refused to work with students in the yeshiva, preferring to get rid of any potential problems rather than work them out.

Instead of squelching student's desires to hang out, they forced students to find alternative places to hang out, places that were more private, and potentially less safe than a public street in the middle of a city.