The first time I sat and learned with Jason*, it was impressive, but nothing special. We read a text from Abraham Joshua Heschel on the path of the righteous and penitent, and how they hold up the world. Jason was clearly a bright guy, maybe smarter than me. I mean, he had understood an advanced Jewish philosophical concept in about 3 minutes, without a ton of background or even a smidgeon of Hebrew. Hell, he wasn’t even Jewish. But there wasn’t anything unique or earth-shattering about the 30 minutes we spent learning a text. So it was impressive because Jason was clearly smart and capable and well-adjusted. But lots of people are smart and capable and well-adjusted. So it was, like I said, nothing special. Other than the fact that Jason was a drug addict.
During one week this past July, I found myself at Beit Teshuvah, the ‘House of returning’, a substance abuse recovery program on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles California. They bill themselves as the only program in the world that combines 12 step recovery, psychotherapy, and Jewish text learning. They have about 120 inpatient beds, plus an outpatient program that’s roughly the same size, and they take all kinds of folks, for between 90 days and a year. Drug addicts, drunks, white-collar criminals, strong-arm robbers, ex-cons, the homeless, prostitutes, gambling addicts, people with sexual compulsion, and various permutations and combinations of any and all of the above. If you’re in a bad way; if you have seriously screwed up, if you are one hit, one deal, one bet away from the end of your literal rope, Beit Teshuvah is where you end up.
I was there to learn how the spiritual counseling team - the five rabbis and rabbinic students on staff - does what they do. To be a rabbi, I know how to do that. To work with someone in pain or in need, I can do that too. But it takes a special kind of person to work at Beit Teshuvah.
For one, the rabbinic staff there tend to swear. A lot. You never heard a rabbi say the f-word so many times as you heard Rabbi Mark Borovitz, Rabbi and Spiritual Leader of Beit Teshuvah, say the f-word, as well as the various and sundry permutations of the f-word that might facilitate the delivery of his message to someone who was in his care. At his core, Rabbi Mark calls himself ‘a con man for God’. That’s because Mark did two years in the mens correctional facility at Chino for check kiting and fraud before a rabbi led him back to seeing himself in a divine light, and then he did another 5 years in rabbinical school at the same school I went to. Mark’s gift, besides his intellect and his commitment to both his own sobriety and those who come to him seeing help, is his ability to pick out BS from a mile away. Truly, this is a gift in a place full of people who have become extremely good at lying to themselves and to everyone around them. But we’ll come back to that.
So back to Jason.
It was the second time I learned with Jason that changed my understanding of teshuvah, and of addiction, and of my own relationship to the High Holidays.
We were learning another philosophic text that Rabbi Borowitz had selected for us, and at some point, as often does in chevruta study, our conversation veered into our own lives. Jason was raised and went to a well-to-do school in the valley in Los Angeles in the eighties and nineties. So did I. His parents struggled in their marriage and divorced when he was eleven. So did mine. Jason felt tremendous pressure from a society that expects material and personal success from its educated and affluent sons and daughters. So did I.
The big difference between Jason and I was that when his father was stressed out and overwhelmed by life, he smoked methamphetamine, often leaving the pipe and the drugs out on his bed. So when Jason felt overwhelmed by life at the age of 15, it seemed logical and acceptable to him to smoke meth. And it took the pain and stress away. But of course, it is also highly addictive and completely destructive. And thus began a catastrophic and life-long battle for Jason against substance abuse that landed him back at Beit Teshuvah, at the age of 37, for the seventh time.
Seven times. Stop for a second and reflect on how you feel about that. Because, if you were like me when I stepped into Beit Teshuvah, you’re saying to yourself: wait, he went through the same treatment program six times, and it failed, and he came back for a seventh time? Why? Clearly it doesn’t work. Yeah, that’s how I felt too.
Except that that’s not an accurate understanding of addiction. Addiction is, in the words of one of the rabbis at Beit Teshuvah, a relapsing, remitting, chronic, and fatal disease. It requires ongoing treatment, and in lieu of treatment, it progresses rapidly and even suddenly, until the patient is dead.
With this understanding, let’s go back and think about what being back at Beit Teshuvah a seventh time means. In the words of Rabbi Borowitz, you’re not a failure because you’re an addict and you fell off the wagon. You’re a success. Because you came back. The failures are the ones that are still out on the street, pipe in hand or bottle in bag, hurtling towards death.
The other thing that had come up in my mind when I thought of addiction before Beit Teshuvah is weakness - the sense that an addict fell prey to a force and lost. And that because they need help they are weak.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The person that says ‘I am flawed, I have made a mistake, I am sorry, and I need help.’ ? They aren’t weak. They are strong, because they can stand in a place of honesty and truth about themselves after eons of self-delusion and finally be real.
And our tradition agrees! The Talmud in Berachot tells us -
במקום שבעלי תשובה עומדים - אין צדיקים גמורים יכולים לעמוד.
In a place where a baal teshuvah - the penitent, apologetic person - stands, even the most perfectly righteous individual cannot stand.
Think about that - the person that errs and admits it and repents and comes back! That person is holier and more exalted that a flawless, blameless, perfectly righteous man or woman.
And you know this! Because it’s Rosh Hashanah, the beginning once again of the aseret yamai ha-teshuvah, the ten days of repentance and returning! And you’re here! You’re here in strength to say - I’m a screw up. I’ve wronged people, and let myself down and erred before God, and I need help. I’m going to turn to these ancient words and this sacred community, and I’m going to lift up my mistakes and try and fix what I’ve done wrong.
We say as much in the prayers we say on the High Holidays to introduce our confession before God, when we say :
אין אנחנו עזי פנים וקשה עורף לומר לפנך צדיקים אנחנו ולא חטאנו; אבל אנחנו חטאנו
We are not so obstinate and stiff necked to say before you that we are all righteous, free from sin. We’ve all sinned.
We are the addicts and the screw ups . We are back for our seventh, or our 40th, or our 87th time. This is our rehab. Because hurting others, and hurting ourselves, through sin and lying and self-delusion and materialism and anger and hopelessness are all diseases of being human. They too are a relapsing, remitting, chronic, and fatal condition.
And this is our treatment.
So, here’s the other thing about Beit Teshuvah. I don’t want to oversimplify relapse as ‘hey, great, you’re back!’ Because that’s not accurate. Nobody wants to be in rehab. You lose your freedom. You can’t work. You can’t see your family or your kids. And no matter how much Rabbi Mark wants to bolster you for being strong enough to make this choice, there’s a lot of shame that comes with being in rehab - and particularly in the Jewish community - which is a conversation worthy of another sermon entirely. It sucks to be in rehab. It’s also an artificial solution to drug or alcohol or sex addiction, because the facility controls or restricts your access to those things artificially. You can’t live forever in Beit Teshuvah. It’s not the real world. The goal of Beit Teshuvah is to give you the skills to be clean and sober of your debilitating addictions in the outside world.
So a person who is back in treatment needs to figure out - the last time I was here, what didn’t I get? What didn’t I internalize?
We are here to work on ourselves for the next 10 days. To apologize for the mistake we made in hopes of avoiding them for the next time. To keep our tempers. To not spread hurtful gossip. To respect our parents, and our children, a little more. Mostly so that we will get catharsis and come back, renewed. But also, to spend a little time reflecting on our mistakes so that we won’t make them again. The Mishnah in Yoma 8 states:
One who says, "I will sin, and then repent, I will sin [again], and then repent," will not receive an opportunity to repent; [for one who says] "I will sin, and Yom Kippur will atone," Yom Kippur will not atone. Yom Kippur atones for transgressions between a person and God, but for a transgression against one's neighbor, Yom Kippur cannot atone, until he appeases his neighbor.
The work done in prayer at synagogue is to say and hear words that go to our hearts, so that we can put them to work when we are not praying at synagogue. If we come here, hoping it’ll make all of our flaws magically go away, we aren’t practicing Judaism. We’re just throwing pennies in a wishing well. We are here to become mindful of our errors, not so that we can nod at them silently and go right back to committing them again, but instead so that we might truly change our behavior.
This is really hard. This requires taking an honest look at yourself, and what you do well, and what you don’t do well. Being young, or old, or rich, or poor, or married, or single, or going through good times, or bad times, does not change this reality in anyway. There are no excuses. You either screwed up this year, and you’re willing to put your big boy pants on and own it, or you’re not, and you’ll be back here next year, wondering: why do I still feel bad about my relationship with my sister? Why did I still spend so much time at work, and so little time with my family? Why do I spend money on things that make me temporarily happy, instead of giving generously to others?
We’ve got to commit to serious change. How much so? Maimonides in Hilchot Teshuvah says it in the strongest possible language. “We’ve got to shout before God in pleading tears, and give tzedakah with all our strength, and put real distance between us and our sins.” According to him, we’ve got to go so far as to change our names, as if to say ‘I’m a different person - I’m not the same man or woman that did that thing.’
It’s no small thing. It’s a heavy lift. It’s real change. For the addicts at Beit Teshuvah, though, it’s life or death. I met a lot of people at Beit Teshuvah in the week I was there. They’d lost jobs, or careers, where they weren’t welcome back into the industry because of the lying and scamming they took part in while they were using. I met people who’d destroyed their marriages. I met people who only get to see their kids once a month under court ordered supervision. I met people who’s addiction drove them to commit crimes, and they lost years of their lives in miserable prisons with bleak names. Like Chino, and San Quentin, and Lompoc.
For Jason, the great fear was in the failure to internalize it. The sense that his attempt to keep up his image - of a stable, handsome, successful, likeable guy - was inevitably going to mean that his own commitment to sobriety was also equally only skin deep. Jason is good looking, and smart, and he can convince anyone that he’s “working the program”, even when he’s really lying to himself.
Everyday when I left Beit Teshuvah, I was emotionally exhausted from all of the intense conversations I had taken part in - about both the residents and about myself. I was confronting my own emotional issues and my own mistakes and feelings all week too. Every day when I left, I found myself thinking about someone I’d met there. I thought about how much I liked them and how hard it seemed they were working on themselves. Usually, I felt a little afraid for them, and what would happen to them when they left, enough that it made me cry on the way home each night.
Some of them succeed, and stay clean on the outside while living healthy, productive lives. Others fail, and fail, and come back again after a relapse. And others relapse, and don't make it back.
I’m really pulling for Jason. I want him to put aside the toxic bad habits that suck him back down into a cycle of disaster. I want him to be happy enough with the positive things in life that give long-term meaning, and ditch the things that fill the hole temporarily, but ultimately corrode who he is and who he can be. He’s smart and capable and deserving of a loving and happy life.
Jason might be in a situation of substance abuse that we might not personally be familiar with. But we’re all familiar with the problem of not really being aware of our own failings, of ignoring our flaws and papering them over as they weren’t really there. But they are there. Now is the time to address them. As our prayers tell us -
אין אנחנו עזי פנים וקשה עורף לומר לפנך צדיקים אנחנו ולא חטאנו; אבל אנחנו חטאנו
We are not so obstinate and stiff necked to say before you that we are all righteous, free from sin. We’ve all sinned.
Rehab starts today. Be the baal teshuvah - the penitent person, the master of return. I’m really pulling for you.
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*Jason is not his real name - it has been changed for this sermon in order to protect his right to privacy.
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