You Don’t Have to Be an Addict to Be in Recovery, Excerpt from an Essay

The following is an essay I wrote in December 2013 for the Jewish Book Council Website.

Thir­ty years ago I was drawn to a clas­si­fied ad in the LA Times look­ing for a Social Work­er with an MSW to vis­it Jew­ish con­victs in coun­ty jails, state and fed­er­al pen­i­ten­tiaries – the per­fect posi­tion for a nice Jew­ish girl addict­ed to bad boys.

I ​“fell in love” with the process of trans­for­ma­tion and became addict­ed to redemp­tion. It has become a par­al­lel process – becom­ing whole with­in myself as I expe­ri­enced the extreme dichotomies as the ​“bad boys and girls” in jail.

I found a teach­ing in Judaism that defined my mission:

A great Rabbi’s dis­ci­ples asked him how he could so read­i­ly under­stand the prob­lems of gam­blers and thieves and oth­er trou­bled men and women who came from the dark­er places of life. The rab­bi explained: 

“When they come I lis­ten hard to them. I look deep into their eyes and I dis­cov­er that their weak­ness­es are reflec­tions of my own. It is not that I have done what they have done but I sense with­in me their lusts, desires, weak­ness­es, temp­ta­tion. I find in them, myself… Once there was a man who came to me with con­fes­sions of his trans­gres­sions and though I lis­tened atten­tive­ly I could find noth­ing what­so­ev­er that I had in com­mon with him. There was noth­ing of his sins that were in me. Then I knew the truth: I must be hid­ing some­thing with­in myself of which I was not ful­ly conscious.”

I, too, alter­nat­ed between extremes. I vic­tim­ized myself, impris­oned in a repet­i­tive cycle of sav­ing the world or destroy­ing myself. I start­ed and aban­doned projects, ideas, Gurus and rela­tion­ships. I was fat or thin, grandiose or self-pity­ing, in love or in bed.

My spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing was my con­scious deci­sion to hear the call to mis­sion as Divine­ly ordained. My chal­lenge was to sus­tain the ordained. I have done that for 30 years, one day at a time. In 1985 I wrote to the Fed­er­al Emer­gency Man­age­ment Act (under the aus­pices of Gate­ways Hos­pi­tal) for a one-time grant to buy an old house in down­town Los Ange­les for men and women com­ing out of prison who were oth­er­wise home­less. I called it Beit T’Shuvah – the House of Return and Redemp­tion. Today it is a thriv­ing faith-based recov­ery com­mu­ni­ty for peo­ple addict­ed to sub­stances, dan­ger­ous behav­ior and all the rest of us recov­er­ing from the human con­di­tion of bro­ken­ness. From my point of view – you are either in recov­ery or denial.

My pro­fes­sion­al train­ing and expe­ri­ence taught me to diag­nose and pathol­o­gize the nec­es­sary exis­ten­tial angst of the search for whole­ness and mean­ing. We med­icate essen­tial suf­fer­ing with pills or the dis­trac­tions of quick fixes. 

My search for whole­ness, answer­ing the ques­tion, which is the real me and how do I get rid of the oth­er one? was answered by the Jew­ish wis­dom tra­di­tion. Judaism teach­es that humans are cre­at­ed with oppos­ing incli­na­tions – yet­zer tov and yet­zer hara. The ​“AHA!” moment was the belief that both are from God. The Good Incli­na­tion is Good, and the Evil Incli­na­tion is VERY Good. The key to whole­ness is action. Action is the igni­tion switch – one sacred action at a time, no mat­ter what you feel.

My first sacred action was mak­ing my bed as an anti­dote to exis­ten­tial despair – what’s the point? why both­er? Sacred liv­ing is choos­ing life, one action at a time – choos­ing to bless and not to curse life. What I have learned in the last 30 years is that every­thing that mat­ters requires main­te­nance – your health, your appear­ance, your envi­ron­ment, your rela­tion­ships, and your thoughts and feelings.

I wrote a book and called it Sacred House­keep­ing. It is a spir­i­tu­al mem­oir, my search for whole­ness. It car­ries the mes­sage that we are all BRO­KEN by Divine design and need to recov­er our whole­ness. Peak moments and epipha­nies evap­o­rate quick­ly. Holi­ness is found in tack­ling the mess, clut­ter, and imper­fec­tions of life. That is Sacred Housekeeping.