I’ve noticed that many addicts, be it to alcohol or drugs or porn, can get sober through 12-step meetings but turn quickly into sexual predators when given half a chance.
There’s no good thing that can’t be perverted. Not Orthodox Judaism and not 12-step meetings.
From TheFix: The young people’s meetings I went to all over Los Angeles featured a revolving cast of men that I would call perverts. They weren’t the obvious kind of creeps, either, with windowless white vans and long trench coats. They looked like everyone else at the meetings: tattooed and cool and smoking cigarettes.
These men swarmed me, as they did every other newcomer too young and inexperienced to distinguish between the loving hand of AA and the clammy hand of a predator. They welcomed me to the meetings, they gave me over-long hugs, they offered me smokes when I was still too young to buy my own. I felt absolutely enveloped by the program. I had never had so many people pay attention to me in my life.
But what I thought of as harmless flirting—and all flirting is harmless when you’re 17 and your curfew is 10 pm—these men rightly interpreted as vulnerability.
There was J, who asked me to his house to “read the Big Book.” When I arrived and asked what we were going to read, he laughed and showed me to his bedroom. I let him kiss me and grope me because I didn’t know I was allowed to say no. He was a grown-up; I was a kid. He’d been sober 15 years; I’d been sober a few months. He was in his 30s; I was 17. My parents had taught me to respect adults, and that’s what I thought I was doing. It can’t be wrong or immoral if J is doing it, I thought; he has a million sponsees and he’s a grown-up.
There was C, who was 36 and also had double-digit sobriety. He had a daughter a few years younger than me. It’s strange to look back and call it rape—because I’ve been assaulted under much less ambiguous circumstances—but that’s absolutely what it was.
Rabbi Shais Taub tells TheFix: Addicts have the existential pain many of us do, but they feel it more acutely. Normal people have the luxury of being able to live in a state of spiritual laxity and get away with it. They can get through life not taking care of their spiritual fitness, or go years without prayer or meditation and remain relatively unharmed. It’s easy for someone in recovery to know they are on the right spiritual path because they can see the results of their behavior really quickly. Recovering addicts are the most spiritually fit people, but if they spend a week or a month not seeking conscious contact, others will notice the differences in their behavior. Look at an athlete. If you’re in great shape physically, you’ll notice major changes after sitting on the couch for a month. If you’ve spent 30 years on the couch, an extra month won’t do anything.
The only way you’re never going to use again is if you find the relief you got from using. Spiritual awakening is that relief. If I’m in recovery for a year and still crazy and still want to commit suicide, I would question whether the steps are being used effectively. Then you see a person who’s gaining the freedom from self-obsession. It’s easy to notice. When religious people make claims about the veracity of their dogma, it’s impossible to verify. When I die, I’ll go to heaven? Sure, call me when you get to heaven and let me know. But the spirituality of recovery is easy to verify. You simply can’t fake it.
Posted inAddiction, Rabbis|Comments Off on Shais Taub – The Recovery Rabbi
A lot of people call me a f***-up. One woman I dated called me a chronic under-achiever. I’ve never earned more than $50,000 in a year.
From TheFix: For those eye-rolling readers ready to dismiss compulsive under-earning as yet another wannabe addiction, listen up: compulsive under-earning is a disease with specific characteristics and a specific solution. It’s a way of using money (or lack, or fear of money) like a drug—a subconscious strategy for keeping yourself at zero, thereby avoiding taking full responsibility for yourself and for not facing life on life’s terms. “While the most visible consequence [of under-earning] is the inability to provide for one’s needs, including future needs, under-earning is also about the inability to fully acknowledge and express our capabilities and competencies,” the Under-earners Anonymous (UA) website reads. “It is about underachieving, or under-being, no matter how much money we make.”
Like all addictions, under-earning is cunning, baffling, powerful. And like all addictions, it’s toward death: a true pathology, based on shame and fear, that leads if nothing else to spiritual death, and in many cases—as with, for instance, people who are unable to bring themselves to see a doctor—actual death. Here’s under-earning at its starkest: I once heard a guy describe his job of 30 years—rodent exterminator. He said, “I’m maxed out on my credit cards, I’m in terrible financial insecurity, and I just don’t understand why my business keeps going down. I have the most reasonable prices in the market. I try to be kind to my clients, often spending a few extra hours talking to an old lady or a guy in a wheelchair.”
Posted inAddiction|Comments Off on Under-Earners Anonymous
I knew Andrew well. He was a big drinker. He was up on the drug habits of many people in our life. He talked about encountering journalists high on cocaine.
From The Fix: Breitbart lead a fairly privileged life. Adopted by a well-to-do Jewish couple in LA, he attended two of the city’s most exclusive schools before decamping to Tulane University in New Orleans. According to a 2010 profile in Salon, it was in college that he honed his drinking and journalism skills—as well as his contempt for cultural liberalism. “His first piece for the Tulane Hullaballoo was a field analysis of Tulane’s most notoriously debauched hookup bar, complete with annotated floor diagrams and submitted on 19 cocktail napkins,” reported Chris Beam. Breitbart recalled, “When I told my parents I was an American studies major, they were like, ‘That’s fantastic! Did you read Mark Twain?’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ ‘What did you read?’ ‘Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Michel Foucault.’ ‘They don’t sound American!’ ‘They’re not.’” Luckily, said Breitbart, “I was too drunk to be completely indoctrinated by it.”
Last May, during an appearance on C-SPAN to promote the publication of his memoir/manifesto Righteous Indignation, host Peter Slen asked Breitbart what he had learned at college. “I learned to drink,” he quipped. Later, Slen asked Breitbart to describe his current relationship with alcohol. “Why do you ask?” said Breitbart. “You write in your book that you had an alcohol problem at Tulane,” Slen replied. Breitbart brushed off the question: “I didn’t have an alcohol problem.”
But as C-SPAN noted, Righteous Indignation suggests otherwise. “I thought I could drink when I came to Tulane,” Breitbart writes. “I had some hard-and-fast rules to prevent becoming an alcoholic, such as: don’t drink during sunlight hours. By the end of my time at Tulane, I was going to bed so early in the morning and waking up so late in the afternoon that this rule was almost impossible to break. Thank God I wasn’t developing a drinking problem.” Breitbart also mentions growing into his fraternity brothers’ Hollywood-native image of him as a “hard-living, cocaine-fueled man of a thousand lovers.”
But there has been some public speculation that Breitbart’s drug use didn’t end in college. A source close to the blogger told The Fix on condition of anonymity that he’d done cocaine with Breitbart as recently as last October. On the day after his death, Anthony Cumia, of the radio show “Opie and Anthony,” said of Breitbart, “I went out drinking with him, and boy, can he party.” “He liked to stay awake,” added Anthony. “That’s all I’ll say.” Other friends maintain that Breitbart regularly took high doses of Adderall and other stimulants to counteract his lifelong ADD. (Both cocaine and Adderall, an amphetamine, can increase the risk of a heart attack. The FDA even warns that Adderall can cause “sudden death in patients with heart problems or heart defects.”)
I naturally have a weak sense of self. The sure sense of self is one of the advantages of joining Orthodox Judaism. Many of life’s questions are settled.
I can look at a guy who spends much of the weekend watching sports and realize that’s not me. I can look at a guy taking a boot camp in how to seduce women and I realize that’s not me. I can see a guy spending his evenings in a bar and realize that’s not me. I can see a guy who doesn’t like to join communities and realize that’s not me. I can see a guy who screams and yells at work and realize that’s not me. I can see a guy who uses everyone in his life for his writing and realize that’s not me. I can see a guy who’s on his third marriage and realize that’s not my path. I can see a guy who consistently puts work ahead of his family and realize that’s not the way for me. I can see a family that has no rituals binding them together and see that’s not the way for me. I can see a guy who spends hours playing video games looking at porn and realize that’s not me.
An Orthodox Jew should live with dignity. He has a full life. He has many demands on his time. He lives in community.
As Exodus 15:26 says: “I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians; in any of the plagues inflicted on them…”
Jews at the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office run into the pork ceiling when they try to advance. It’s not a good working environment for Jews. Not sure if this will change with a new DA come November. The race is between Alan Jackson (the Jewish favorite) and Jackie Lacey (Steve Cooley’s favorite).
Posted inLos Angeles|Comments Off on The Pork Ceiling
Chaim Amalek suggests these book projects for me: GADOL HADOR: My Struggle Against Judaism’s False Teachers
DREIDEL THIEF: Why the Secular Jewish Woman Will Not Date Me and will Die a Spinster Because of Her Foolishness
What I Learned From Alexander that AT Does NOT Want You to Know
Jews, Homosexuals, and Scientology: The Secret Links
My Evening with Rabbi Rabbs: What Really Happened
REPUBLICAN JEW: The Haj that led me from Christianity and Liberalism to Orthodox Judaism and Contemporary Republicanism
You don’t even need to write the book first, just pitch the title and it will sell itself to a publisher. Then they pay you a stipend to write the damn thing. What could be better? And if they balk, tell them I will write the Forward.
I’m never surprised when Jews avoid the burdens of Orthodox Judaism. It is a difficult religion and only an elite are ever going to be able to shoulder it. Most people would rather do easier things, get easier spiritual highs by going to yoga or watching Lord of the Rings.
Here were my principle difficulties in converting to Judaism.
* It’s hard for somebody to move from a non-ritualistic religion (Protestantism) to a ritualistic religion (Judaism or Catholicism). When I grew up, it was drilled in to me that rituals were meaningless man-made tradition. What God wanted primarily was the heart and religion should be a spontaneous response to God’s love. This is not the Jewish approach. Rather than relying upon faith and spontaneity and intention, Judaism mandates hundreds of specific behaviors. It can feel stultifying. And takes up a lot of time. Just fulfilling your prayer requirements each week day for the Jewish man takes about an hour and on Shabbat and holidays, it takes up many hours. Most people find it hard to pray with conviction for longer than 20 minutes.
* I find it easy to get bored with all the Jewish rituals, so I have to make an effort to keep finding things in Torah study that excite me and breathe new life into the rituals. For my first ten years in the religion, the teachings of Dennis Prager excited me. For the past ten years, I’ve been inspired by the scholarship of historian Marc B. Shapiro. Whenever I read a Shapiro essay or book or listen to one of his lectures, I get enthralled by the intellectual life of Orthodox Judaism.
* As you become more Christian, your world expands. You want to bring the world to your faith. You want to reach out to the poor and homeless and lost and lonely. As you become more Jewish, your world dramatically constricts. You spend all of your spare time with fellow observant Jews. The Jewish dietary laws make it difficult to socialize with anyone not an Orthodox Jew. (Pointed out in a salon.com review of David Klinghoffer’s autobiography)
I can’t reconcile this. I want to be able to mix with people in the wider world and to have success in the wider world and to go to all the places I need to go in the wider world to have success. I have no desire to eat trayf, but is eating vegetarian food in a non-kosher restaurant so terrible?
Becoming Orthodox is like shackling yourself. You walk around in chains. It’s stifling. It’s claustrophobic. Everybody knows your business.
I remember going to LimmudLA at the Costa Mesa Hilton and most of us did not leave the hotel for three days. We just went to classes and ate.
As you become religious Jewish, you lose your spare time. Orthodox Judaism takes up a ton of time. You spend an hour a day davening and then you visit the sick and help people out and try to study Torah and the lifestyle is so expensive and you’ll tend to have a lot of kids. Jewish day schools will cost about $20,000 per year per kid and the little nipper will be at school from 8am to 5pm. No wonder kollel guys did so little for Trayvon Martin.
* I’ve found it impossible to constrict my writing and speech to the dictates of the Chofetz Chaim (who gave an extreme though popular presentation of Judaism’s laws of speech by taking aggadata (stories) and turning it into halacah (law)).
* Nothing could prepare me for peoplehood. Growing up a Seventh-Day Adventist, I knew about joining a religion. My parents, including my mother and step-mother, had converted to Adventism in their teens. I didn’t know about joining a people.
Peoplehood is much tighter and more challenging than just religion. As an Adventist, you don’t see your pastor every day. You don’t turn to him for help with work or business or housing or medical matters. The pastor is there to help you find salvation to the next world, but your rabbi is at shul with you every single day, morning and evening.
* Perhaps the hardest part of my conversion was realizing that the way I was doing it was not affecting my character. That my addictions were just as strong and still distorting all my relationships. So as I journeyed into Judaism, I lost my illusions that by practicing the religion to the level I wanted to practice it, it would mold me into a good man. That didn’t work.
* I was attracted to Judaism because Jews weren’t always going on and on about God and how God loves us and how it is essential to have faith in God and to walk with God. All that God talk in my Christian childhood, it made me sick. So I thought Judaism was this rational behavioral based religion. Of course it was based on God but if I went to shul, I wasn’t going to get overwhelmed with beautiful words about God. I never took davening seriously so the siddur (Jewish prayer book) never spoke to me. Then I started 12-stepping because my exploitive ways to meet my addictive emotional needs had been unchanged by two decades of practicing Judaism in my limited way and in 12-step work, I discovered that having a vibrant relationship with the God of your understanding was essential. That without God, we would fall into our addictions, but that God was a power who could restore us to sanity and enable us to give up our character defects.
* It was disconcerting to find out how Orthodox rabbis were just as likely as the next group to molest kids. I’ve written so many stories about Orthodox rabbis taking advantage of their position to fulfill their addictive sexual needs. I thought rabbis would be better than regular people in this regard.
* As Dennis Prager says, it’s hard to love God and to love people. If you really care about people, you’re going to be angry at God for the world he created. If you’re love with God and feel in union with God, you’re not going to be as affected by human suffering.
* I never had to pass a security guard to get into an Adventist church and yet I need to do this to get into all big Jewish events. Adventists aren’t hated by the world, they’re ignored by the world, while much of humanity is passionate about hating Jews. While I’ve not personally experienced anti-Semitism, I know it is big in the wider world and it could kill me and my kids.
* I encountered a lot of suspicion from Jews when I tried to convert to Judaism. I remember this beautiful blonde grandmother. About 50. I was a guest at her home with other Orthodox Jews on Labor day for a barbecue. And she said, “I don’t understand why you would want to convert to Orthodox Judaism. It only makes sense to be Orthodox if you have kids. I think you’re just going undercover to write bad things about Jews.”
* I’m surprised at the number of Orthodox Jews who’ve told me that they would never be Jewish if they had a choice, but they were born with this burden.
* I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship to work and Orthodox Judaism is hard work. Show me your work history and I’ll predict your future in Orthodox Judaism. I got fired from my first few jobs (from age 13-16). Kept showing up at my dad’s office and basically forced them to give me work at 17. I do best when I can do what I want ala blogging. When I started temping at age 28, I lost four jobs for inappropriate speech. When my boss asked me if he was keeping me busy, I said, “That’s what Himmler used to ask Anne Frank at Bergen Belsen.” I was accused of making fun of the Holocaust when I thought I was just making fun of my boss.
I have the sense that Jews are like me. They prefer to work for themselves. That makes it easier to keep Shabbos and the holidays.
* Stop me if I’m sharing too much, but I’m a serial enthusiast. I keep getting excited by changing things and getting convinced that they are the singular key to life. For a while it was marathoning and then it was the Dallas Cowboys and then it was Air Supply and Barry Manilow and then it was journalism and Marxism and Judaism and free-market economics and homeopathy and psycho-dynamic psycho-therapy and homeopathy and Alexander Technique and Kundalini Yoga and 12-step work. Some of these enthusiasms I maintained a behavioral commitment to even though for years the feeling was gone. I was not excited, for instance, between 2001 and 2010, by going to shul and practicing Judaism. I used to ask myself, what happened? I used to love going to temple to see my friends and the musical davening and the teaching and then I found myself for years going to shul and not having any friends there and not enjoying the davening nor the sermons, and I kept asking myself, what the hell happened? But I figured that if I just stuck it out, things would get better. And they have. That’s how I became the man of holiness you see before you now.
* One cool thing about Judaism is that you can talk in shul at all times, while if you try to pull that in church or mosque, you get shushed. I am annoyed when baalei teshuva (late adopters of Orthodox Judaism) come to an FFB (Orthodox from birth) shul and these former pig-eaters start shushing holy people like myself who’ve always desisted from trayf (unkosher food). Dude, ten years ago, you were deep in shiksas while I was studying in yeshiva, who the hell are you to shush me? Stay in BT shuls like Aish and leave the rest of us alone to yak it up in shul.
But I won’t cry for yesterday
There’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
A friend says I remind him of the Elton John song Rocket Man:
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
Posted inJudaism, Personal|Comments Off on Losing My Illusions About Religion
The Jewish Journal reports: About eight months ago, when Katsuji Tanabe agreed to display the Tav HaYosher certificate in the window of his one-year-old restaurant on Pico Boulevard, the head chef and owner of Mexikosher knew that the “ethical seal,” issued by the Modern Orthodox social justice organization Uri L’Tzedek, would inform customers that he treats his workers with respect and in accordance with California labor laws.
Tanabe didn’t know that in displaying the certificate he was also, in effect, choosing a side in a mostly covert battle between two segments of the Orthodox Jewish community.
On one side is Uri L’Tzedek, a four-year old nonprofit promoting social justice causes that has been supported by a handful of prominent Jewish foundations, including the Joshua Venture Group, Bikkurim, and the Jewish Federations of North America. On the other are an unknown number of individuals who are acting independently and largely anonymously.
At Mexikosher, the certificate hung in the window for between four and six weeks; during that time, Tanabe said he received phone calls from individuals identifying themselves as being from “different Chabads,” and threatening to boycott his restaurant if he didn’t take the certificate down.
Tanabe, who said he hadn’t changed any of his policies to earn the Tav, decided to remove it.
“I don’t talk about politics or religion in the restaurant,” said Tanabe, 31, who describes himself as “Mexican-Japanese-Catholic.” “We only talk about food.”
Although the pushback against the Tav appears to be coming primarily, if not exclusively, from individuals affiliated with the Chabad Lubavitch movement, there is no evidence that any official encouragement came from Chabad, according to the organization’s leaders and those involved in the anti-Tav efforts.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
