God of Our Understanding: Jewish Spirituality and Recovery from Addiction

by Shais Taub

Like all stereotypes, they don’t have to be true. They just have to satisfy our expectations.

What this book is, really, is a collection of insights, observations, and even some humble suggestions based on the personal experiences of many people who have begun to relate more meaningfully to God and how that newfound consciousness and the lifestyle that accompanies it has changed their lives.

Yet, by the same token, it’s not about specific addictions or the different kinds of behaviors that we use to destroy ourselves. It’s about our spiritual awakening and the kind of relationship with God we have found.

But why all this talk about God? Is this a rabbi’s attempt to conjure up a spiritual angle on a problem that is truly the domain of medicine or psychology? Hardly. Recovery from addiction is an inherently spiritual topic.

So we know that the Twelve Steps became wildly popular, even world-famous—at least in name, if not in content—but what is the program all about? What does it do? Or, more aptly stated, what does it say ought to be done? This is an introduction, and we have already said we would be terse. So, in a single word, the program is about spirituality.

In Chapter 1, we will speak at length about the nature of addiction and why exactly a spiritual solution is uniquely effective;

To put it simply, the Twelve Steps help people get better by teaching them how to be spiritual.

So, in summary, just so there will be no mistaking, let’s recap. The Twelve Steps outline a spiritual approach to treating addiction; members of Twelve-Step groups are, as such, spiritual practitioners; the modern social phenomenon known today as “recovery” is a spiritual movement.

Religion, say the Twelve-Steppers, is for people who don’t want to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who’ve been there.

Others take these words to mean that God is inherently a subjective concept and as such, I suppose, no more than a philosophical construct. In other words, you can believe in whatever makes you feel good—just don’t take it too seriously; it’s just “your understanding.”

Chuck C., a beloved AA sponsor and circuit-speaker of the previous generation, whose teachings about recovery are considered by many to be almost canonical, had this to say (recorded at his legendary “Pala Mesa Retreat” in 1975 and hence transcribed in the book, A New Pair of Glasses). “The phrase ‘as we understood Him’ makes no reference to the understanding of the infinite. What it does mean is the necessity of personal experience.” In other words, when we talk about the “God of our understanding,” we are not really speaking of God but of our relationship with Him.

Mine or My Father’s? After God split the sea for the Jews coming out of Egypt, Moses led the people in a song of praise in which it is stated: “This is my God, and I will glorify Him; the God of my father, and I will exalt Him” (Exodus 15:2). What is the difference between “my God” and “the God of my father”? “The God of my father” (or mother, for that matter) means that which others have taught me about God. It is a relationship with God that I have been born into. I learn about it by being educated by and about the people who came before me. “My God” means that which I have discovered by myself. It describes my personal relationship with God based on my direct experience of His active role in my life. It is what I know about Him because of what has happened to me. Both are indispensable. Both complement and complete each other. But which does the verse mention first? Although it would seem that the normal progression would be that one first learns about God from others and then later develops a personal relationship with Him, the opposite order is given in Moses and the Israelites’ song. First “this is my God” and then “God of my father.” The basis to recovery is that we first and foremost discover this personal “God of our understanding,” which is really a God of our own experience.

If twenty years ago, the rabbi would have spoken to me about all of this, I would have laughed at him. What does he know? That’s all bubbe-meises, fairy tales. I grew out of that a long time ago. Even ten years ago or five years ago I would still have been skeptical. I had to get sober and work the Steps all these years to be ready to go back to the God I knew in my childhood. Now I pray like my grandfather did. I’m doing the mitzvahs that he used to do. And I feel him watching over me and being proud. Isn’t it crazy? I had to become a drunk and an addict so I could get into recovery and find a God of my understanding before I could return to the God of my ancestors.

The Problem Addiction destroys more lives than any other disease that is completely treatable. The most insidious quality of addiction is that its true nature is so widely misunderstood.

There is an old Jewish saying—“Knowing the disease is half the cure.” (Yes, the rabbis have been saying that for centuries already.)

If addiction were chemical dependency, then the solution for addiction would be detox. Once you can get through the drying-out period, you’re home free. However, if this were the case, rehabs wouldn’t have so much return business, and drunk tanks would sober-up people for life.

But addiction doesn’t work like that. Addiction stays with a person—indeed, it works even harder—even when the body is no longer physically dependent on his or her drug of choice.

Addiction is their problem. Addiction, not chemical dependence; addiction, not mental illness (although they certainly may suffer from both of these as well.)* Addiction, and not even lack of willpower; an insidious, misunderstood, mysterious syndrome called addiction. Addicts may be addicted to a substance or to a behavior. Their drug may come in a bottle, a syringe, over the Internet, or in many other forms. Nevertheless, what all addicts have in common is the incomprehensibility of their seemingly willful descent into oblivion.

What is this overlooked aspect of addiction? It is the fact that the addict’s drug of choice is not, as we would think, his or her problem; it’s a solution. Yes, it sounds strange. So we’ll say it again. For an addict, his or her drug of choice is not a problem but a solution. If it were their problem, they would eventually give it up. But because it is their solution—as a matter of fact, their only solution—they haven’t any real choice of going without it.

An addict, on the other hand, does not use his or her drug of choice for pleasure. Yes, in the very beginning, the addict settles on a particular drug of choice because of the pleasurable effects that it provides, but indulging for pleasure does not set someone apart as an addict. Seeking pleasure is normal. What makes addiction “abnormal” is that the addict no longer uses his or her drug of choice for fun or recreation but from necessity.

The addict uses his or her drug of choice because it serves a crucial, even vital function. It actually allows them to live, just as food, air, and sleep allow normal people to live.

Life and Death A teacher of mine once told us a story about a group of Jews assembled at a farbrengen, a typically informal Chasidic gathering where stories are told, songs are sung, and there is almost always a bottle of shnaps to go around. At this particular farbrengen, which took place in Russia many decades ago, the participants had carried on late into the night. As they were about to toast each other l’chaim, they noticed that their bottle was empty. It was late and the stores were closed, so they went out into the street to look for someone from whom they could buy liquor. It wasn’t long before they spotted a drunken peasant, bottle in hand, hobbling down the street. “How much for that bottle?” they asked. “What, this?” asked the drunk. “Yes, we’ve run out of vodka. How much for yours?” “Money?” the drunk cried, sounding very much offended. “No one pays Ivan to save a life!”

The addict is not out to have fun. The addict is trying to stay alive the only way he or she knows how, by using the only thing he or she has found that works. Pick Your Poison But why can’t the addict live any other way? What is the problem that the addict cannot find any other way to solve? What condition is it that the addict is so desperately trying to treat by self-medicating with his or her drug of choice? The condition is addiction. That’s right. Addiction. Using does not cause addiction. Addiction is a pre-existing condition that drives a person to use. The addict actually uses in order to relieve the symptoms of addiction.

What are the symptoms of addiction? They are many and varied, but they can be summed up as an overall and pretty much constant feeling of extreme discomfort and uneasiness. The addict is someone who just doesn’t feel right in his or her own skin. The addict feels isolated, scared, frustrated, and hurt. These feelings are the addict’s default setting. This is how an addict goes through life. Then, one day, the addict finds a “medicine” that will make those feelings go away for a while. This wonderful medicine does for the addict what nothing else can do. Once the addict has discovered the medicine, he or she can no more discontinue its use than a diabetic can go off insulin.

As a longtime member of OA (Overeaters Anonymous) once told me, “I don’t qualify for OA membership because of all the problems that food caused me. I qualify for OA because of all the problems I fixed with food.”

Of course, you can’t really fix a problem with food or with booze or with drugs or with gambling or with sex. However, for the addict, the momentary relief from existential suffering is the closest he or she can get and is a great enough payoff to justify any and every expense.

Job (2:4): “Only skin for skin, but a person will give everything for his life.” What was the Adversary saying? A person will only give up some skin, something superficial, to save skin, some other extraneous thing. For instance, if you are falling, you might put your hands out to break your fall and scrape the skin on your hands in order not to scrape the skin on your face. But you wouldn’t risk your life in order to avoid getting a scrape on your face. That’s what it means, “Only skin for skin.” That’s why a nonaddict with a substance abuse problem will stop using when the consequences become too costly. A nonaddict might be willing to make certain sacrifices for the sake of having a goo...

Of course, the irony is that the addict’s drug of choice is actually causing death. But for the addict, it doesn’t seem so. It seems the opposite. We mentioned this point earlier and said that it would be explained, so here is an explanation. Consider the following analogy. A person, God forbid, is suffering from an incurable disease of the body. The doctors say that they cannot make it go away but they may be able to force it into remission with chemotherapy. Now, the doctors admit that the chemotherapy has dangerous side-effects; it may even kill the patient before the disease does, but i...

Causes and Symptoms Now that we understand that for an addict, using is actually his or her best attempt at treating the real problem, we must ask: What is that real problem? In so many words, we have already said that the addict has a fundamental inability to live peacefully and contentedly and uses his or her drug of choice to induce a temporary state of relief from his or her deep, incessant discomfort with life. But that still doesn’t really answer the question. It still doesn’t tell us what the problem really is. What is it that makes the addict unable to handle life in the first place?

Rowland was in need of a vital spiritual experience, not ceremony and doctrine, but an actual encounter with the Divine.

Armed with this information, Rowland set out to effect a radical spiritual change within himself. He found eventual success toward this end by joining the Oxford Group, a popular religious movement of the day that stressed rigorously honest self-reflection, prayer, and meditation. The story continues. In 1934, Ebby Thacher, son of a prominent New York family, was about to be locked up because of his alcoholism. The presiding judge in the case had a son who was a member of the same Oxford Group and a friend of Rowland. The judge’s son, along with Rowland and another Oxford Group member, convinced the judge to release Ebby to their care, whereupon they prevailed upon him to seek a spiritual solution to his drinking problem as Rowland had done. Ebby pursued their path and found the results to be astonishingly effective. This same Ebby was a childhood friend of a man named Bill Wilson who was also a chronic drunk. Bill was out of work, depressed, and in dangerously bad health. One day, Ebby appeared in Bill’s Brooklyn home and transmitted to him the spiritual principles upon which he was managing to stay happily sober. Bill was put off by what he perceived to be his friend’s religious zeal, but Ebby assured him that he was not seeking to convert him. Ebby told Bill that theology and dogma were not necessary. All he needed to do in order to begin was to be willing to have a relationship with God and to live according to some basic spiritual principles. What’s more, all this cou...

La historia detras Bill W

Now we are in a better position to answer the question we asked earlier. What is the real problem the addict is attempting to treat by using? The real problem, as we can now understand, is a spiritual problem, as evidenced by the fact that the real solution is a spiritual solution.

[The patient’s] craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God. How could one formulate such an insight in a language that is not misunderstood in our days? (Letter to Wilson, 1961)

The addict is sick with a yearning for God and can only become well by having some contact with God.

All human beings have a deep-seated need for spiritual contact. But most people can also live their lives without it. Addicts are people who, for whatever reason, are unsettled to the core and cannot handle the business of life without maintaining a continual and acute awareness of the Divine. Absent such higher consciousness, they are miserable and sick. What makes their dilemma fatal is that their drug of choice will actually produce in them short-term effects that simulate the release and relief that can only really be had through spiritual consciousness. Consequently, the only real treatment for their condition is to make sure that they get the “real thing” instead of self-medicating with the fake stuff, for if they do not get the real thing, they have no choice but to take the fake stuff.

In other words, for most people, spirituality is a luxury, something to be sought after more “basic” needs are met. Addicts are somehow different in this respect in that for them, there can be nothing resembling a normal life if their spiritual needs are not met first.

What makes an addict an addict is the combination of two factors: (1) they are profoundly disturbed and unsettled with their own existence as an entity apart from God; and (2) for reasons unknown, they can somehow briefly simulate relief from this condition by taking their drug of choice.

Really, the drug of choice becomes the addict’s God. This is not meant as mere rhetoric. Addiction is idol worship in the most fundamental sense of the term—turning to something other than God to do for you what only God can do.

As I started talking, I found myself speaking about what Jung described as “the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness . . . the union with God.” “Why do we yearn to be at one with God?” I asked. “What is it about us that makes us feel uncomfortable as an entity apart from God?”

I proceeded to explain what chasidus (the mystical teachings of the Chasidic masters) says about the very nature of separate consciousness being a painful delusion, an error in thinking that must be rejected in favor of the absolute truth that we do not really have an existence that is independent from the all-encompassing, all-pervasive Unity of All.

When God turned nothing into something, He completely changed its essence.

At any rate, if you exist, then you are a something. But that’s only because God is creating you that way at this instant. Your essence is to be nothing. Or, should we say, your true and natural state is to have no existence of your own and to exist only as He exists, within the totality and oneness of God. If that’s the case, then it explains the mystery of why it can be painful just to exist. Our somethingness is not our true essence. Oneness is our true essence. Not that it bothers all of us equally. Some people can live with it. Some people can’t.

Self-Obsession It should make sense now when we say that one way of describing the problem of addiction is to say that the addict is simply way too in tune with his or her own existence. Addicts are often described as being touchy or hypersensitive. It’s true. Hence, the insatiable urge to numb themselves into unconsciousness. Long gone are the days when they were actually enjoying their use. They are actually looking for the self-obliteration their use brings on.

I once heard an addict relate how when he first got sober, people told him that if he just didn’t drink or use, he would feel better. “Yeah, when you get sober, you feel better, alright. You feel anger better; you feel resentment better; you feel fear better.”

Cuando el adicto deja de usar pero sin una conexion con Dios, entonces vuelve a sentir con mas fuerza lo que con las drogas logro anestesiar

What the process of recovery does, in essence, is to allow the addict to find self-transcendence instead of self-destruction. The immediate effects of self-transcendence and self-destruction can feel quite similar. The difference is that with self-destruction, beside the fact that one drives oneself to a miserable death, it doesn’t really address the root problem. A person who is focused on blotting out his or her own self is still focused on self. The only solution is to start to rise above the self, to transcend it. This is the essence of spirituality and having a conscious relationship with God.

The oneness with God that Adam and Eve felt before the sin was automatic. The oneness of God that we experience must be the result of a conscious decision.

Early in human history, there was a great man who tried to reverse the effects of the Sin of the Tree of Knowledge. His name was Noah. After the Flood, he observed a new world and thought it the perfect time to introduce a new paradigm of human existence. If humanity’s fatal flaw was self-consciousness, it could be remedied, he thought, by destroying consciousness. Immediately after disembarking from the Ark, “Noah . . . planted a vineyard. He drank its wine and got drunk” (Genesis 9:20–21). The shameful results of Noah’s foray into wiping out his own consciousness were immediate. When Noah came to, he found that not only had he not been elevated but also that he was degraded and abused.

Sarah was not a weak woman. She was a strong woman. She was not timid. She was brave. And most of all, she was happy. She was happy because she had discovered the secret of living selflessly. Our mother Sarah is our role model for the power, the joy, and the freedom of the selfless life.

Sarah, ordering her husband to send away his other son was not a sudden departure from her selfless nature. It was the ultimate expression of it. Sarah had no problem setting boundaries. She had no hesitation to speak the truth. Because there was not one bit of self-consciousness involved in her assessment of the situation.

If only we could all be like Sarah—God-conscious rather than self-conscious; self-transcendent rather than self-indulgent or self-destructive.