Salvaging Lost Jewish Souls

In a ramshackle home with peeling paint, lumpy sofas and a scruffy yard in painful need of water, a motley crew of hookers, scam artists, crackheads and thieves is talking about Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of solemn penitence that begins Sunday.

What do these lowlifes know about such lofty matters? Plenty: They live the spirit of Yom Kippur and t’shuvah, or repentance and return, not merely once a year but every day.

Here at Gateways Beit T’Shuvah, a halfway house off Alvarado Sreet in Los Angeles, a powerful spirit of penitence, healing and transformation is struggling to take root in the lives of lost Jewish souls. The program, created 13 years ago by Harriet Rossetto and Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Center, is said to be the only recovery program in the nation that integrates the values of the Torah with the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to lead Jews from the slavery of addiction to the promised land of liberation.

The program has graduated more than 500 people and boasts a 65% success rate, says Rossetto, a clinical social worker who began the program in an attempt to reverse the recidivism of addicts. The program relies primarily on funds from Gateways Hospital, the Jewish Federation and individuals, but residents also chip in what they can.

The residents here--more than 25 men and about a dozen women, housed in separate facilities--say that the Jewish aspects of the program make it more effective than the host of other recovery programs they have tried. At Beit T’Shuvah, there is daily Torah study, classes in Jewish ethics, weekly services and communal living with other Jews--giving many their first sense of belonging to a community.

“When I first saw this place, I thought, ‘What a dump!’ ” said Eric Greenstein, 28, who is struggling to break free from 15 years of addiction that began with marijuana at age 13 and escalated to heroin and crack cocaine within six years. “But within a few hours, I knew I was in the midst of something special. I felt more love and community the first day than I had in all the different places I’d lived all over the world.”

The program is an oasis of acceptance for many Jews who felt outcast in a community that has traditionally stressed success and high achievement, Rossetto said, or who somehow did not connect with the Christian flavor of many 12-step programs.

“There’s an old saying, ‘A shikker is a goy,’ meaning if you’re drunk, you’re not Jewish,” Rossetto said. “One of our main messages is that spirituality begins with the acceptance of our imperfections. Anyone who cannot recognize his flaws cannot be redeemed.”

In fact, one of the center’s favorite Tamuldic teachings is that not even the most saintly can enter the place where the truly repentant stands. That’s because the penitent have within their souls both the forces of good and the powerfully transformed forces of evil, according to Mark Borovitz, Beit T’Shuvah’s spiritual director.

Borovitz is a potent role model for those lessons. He is an ex-felon who received a certificate of rehabilitation from the Los Angeles courts in 1996 and is now enrolled in rabbinical school at the University of Judaism.

At the age of 14, Borovitz began selling stolen goods to help support his family after his father’s death. He progressed to insurance fraud, armed robbery and kiting checks of more than $2 million. From 1982 to 1989, he was in and out of prison.

It was at the Chino prison in 1987 that Borovitz made his turn toward coming home. His rabbi came to visit, and Borovitz glumly asked him if he was going to cut him loose too, like everyone else in his life.

“How can I cut you loose?” the rabbi exclaimed. “You are one of my own. You’re a Jew.”

Today, Borovitz gives his men and women the same message. Earlier this week, he gathered about two dozen of them into a circle beneath a stained tent in the backyard of Beit T’Shuvah for daily Torah study, and spoke to them about the two steps involved in the process of penitence. The first is to acknowledge the wrongs done and ask for forgiveness. The second, he said, is to recognize oneself as a pure soul in the spirit of taharah, the Judaic concept of purity.

“You are all pure, beautiful souls!” said Borovitz, a portly force of nature who puffs Marlboros and peers directly into the faces of his own as he paces around the circle. “Your actions only say what you’ve done. Your soul says who you are. If all you do is say you’re sorry and don’t change your image, you’ll do the same thing again and again.”

Not everyone buys it.

How do you know you’re a pure soul? someone asked.

“You just say it,” Borovitz replied.

“Whether you believe it or not?”

“The truth is,” Borovitz said, “you’re a pure soul. Now, you may have a lot of schmutz around it, but it’s down there.”

Residents Transformed

Eventually, many come to embrace the message. After even a few months, the residents say they find themselves touched, even transformed, by the combined power of spirituality, psychology, community and the larger-than-life personalities of Rossetto and Borovitz, who are married, and Elaine Breslow, the center’s assistant director.

Joey Davids, for instance, came to Beit T’Shuvah about three months ago. The son of a Hasidic Orthodox rabbi, Davids had studied at a yeshiva but rejected the community at age 14, riven by a sense of failure and guilt that he was more interested in women, drinking and music than in religion and God.

By age 15, he was popping pills, drinking and smoking. By 17, he was hooked on cocaine and, two years later, on heroin. Over the next decade, his turbulent life would include financial scams, time spent in a psychiatric ward, a divorce and a constant death wish as he lived under the boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J. Finally, teetering on the edge of life, Davids said he prayed sincerely to God for the first time, asking for help.

Through the fellowship at Beit T’Shuvah, Davids made his return this Rosh Hashana, when he read the Torah in Hebrew for the first time in 15 years. During the service, he told his community that his Hebrew name, Yosef, means “one who adds,” but that he had never felt he had added anything to anyone. That night, by sharing his skills in reading the sacred text, Davids said, he felt he had finally been of worth.

“It was amazing, overwhelming,” he said. “I felt through the reading of Torah, I was helping bring everyone closer.”

For Greenstein too, this holiday season has brought a breakthrough. He stayed at Beit T’Shuvah nine months beginning last year, but left without completing the process. How could he regard himself as a pure soul? In his mind, he had caused his parents’ divorce. He had been molested as a boy. He had been arrested 16 times, for everything from drug possession to armed robbery. He had violated the trust of everyone he had ever loved.

After being arrested again on robbery charges a few months after leaving the center, Greenstein returned--this time, he says, genuinely ready for change. A big one came during Rosh Hashana, as he and his community sang and danced, holding the Torah aloft. Overwhelmed with emotion, Greenstein said, he caught a glimpse of his pure soul for the first time. The high was as high as he had ever got on drugs.

Like the others, though, Greenstein must constantly struggle to turn such fleeting moments of grace into a lifelong pattern of new behavior. He knows it won’t be easy.

“The most important thing is that I stay in the here and now . . . that I fulfill the legacy that my parents and grandparents and Abraham and Jacob left for me, that I struggle with God--and that I don’t drink or use,” Greenstein said.