No, not spam, just me hoping someone who knows more about Beit T’shuvah than I do would answer.
So, a couple disclaimers here: this is a transfer of a Twitter thread I did almost 5 years ago. My conversation with my rabbi where she talked about visiting Beit T’shuvah was a long time ago and was basically a jumping-off point for me into what I intended to be a deep-dive into non-Christian, and especially, if I could find info, indigenous approaches to dealing with addiction.
Unfortunately, I started by trying to better understand AA and the 12-step approach, and rabbitholed so hard and was so outraged that this is something that courts mandate that people do that I didn’t end up learning much about indigenous approaches.
So. I can tell you what I remember about what my rabbi told me, and I can tell you about Jewish attitudes and beliefs about alcohol to illustrate why the 12-step approach feels Christian rather than universal, but I’m not an expert on either Beit T’shuvah’s approach or alternative approaches in general.
If you’re looking for we should just be doing THIS instead, you’re going to find this discussion disappointing. (I mean, the point of the original post was that there aren’t one-size-fits-all approaches and it’s a problem to treat a single approach as universally applicable.)
There’s an argument to be made that culturally, we’re behind the ball in figuring out how to deal with alcoholism because we’re prone to seeing alcohol addiction as a gentile problem.
In our defense, gentiles also have historically seen alcohol addiction as a gentile problem. Old medical and psychiatry textbooks straight-up will tell you that Jews don’t get addicted to alcohol.
I took a swing through the two volumes of the 15(?)-volume Recent Developments in Alcoholism series, a survey of current research on alcoholism, that seemed most likely to talk about Jews and booze: Volume 1, which covers genetic factors and social mediators, and Volume 18, on AA and spirituality. Volume 1 mentioned Jews once, just to say that our culture doesn’t really approve of heavy drinking. Volume 18 mentions us once to acknowledge that we exist as a formal religious classification, and again to mention that we use alcohol in rituals. It also claims that “active surrender” is a part of “conservative Judaism” just as it is in Christianity, but cites no sources for that claim.
The idea that Jews are somehow immune from alcoholism is, of course, not actually true, but we do seem to have lower rates of alcohol addiction than most other groups, and that’s fascinated a lot of researchers for a long time, as this Forward article describes.
There was some relatively recent research that suggests some genetic reasons:
Flash forward half a century, and science presents an answer: Genetics. It appears that many Jews — nearly 20% — have a DNA mutation linked to lower rates of alcoholism. The variance is known as ADH2*2, is “involved in the way the body breaks down alcohol in the bloodstream,” and is thought to produce more of a toxic chemical byproduct when persons with the gene drink heavily.
This is both good and bad news for Jews. Those with the gene had more unpleasant reactions to alcohol, and predictably drank less. “Almost all white Europeans,” on the other hand, lack the gene, and “thus drinking tends to be more pleasurable, increasing the risks of alcoholism.”
I happen to have that genetic mutation. I can sometimes do two drinks with food, spaced out, but if I’m not careful, I get an instant migraine and gastrointestinal distress. If I haven’t eaten recently, a sip can make me miserable. So yeah, it would probably be pretty hard for me to get addicted to alcohol.
However, not everyone’s satisfied with this explanation, since it’s only 20% of the Jewish population.
Back in the day, before they discovered the genetic thing, non-Jews used to speculate that it was religious prohibitions on drinking too much. But:
It’s also interesting to note that “religious service attendance is associated with lower rates of binge drinking in non-Jewish college students, but not in Jewish college students.”
So if you’re Christian, going to church makes you less likely to get drunk often. But if you’re Jewish, going to shul doesn’t have that same effect. (Hell, we have a holiday on which we’re commanded to get drunk, much to the scandalized horror of the church ladies from the Methodist church my shul used to rent space from.)
But culture may be at least a factor–specifically, what we drink:
Also, when it comes to the norm, Jews seem to have chosen a favorite drink: wine. Jews tend to drink wine more often than any other group. According to a study on Jews and alcohol problems conducted in 1980, “Virtually the entire [Jewish] sample drank wine more than any other alcoholic beverage. In contrast …few alcohol abusers concentrate on wine.”
So it appears that most Jews’ drink of choice is not most alcoholics’ drink of choice, a noteworthy difference.
That association between wine and meals is itself pretty thoroughly ingrained.
All this aside, when the test subjects were asked about drinking, many talked about food. In the words of a Conservative schoolteacher, “Drinking has just never entered as an activity. It’s part of a thing like eating. It’s OK with foods. It goes, to me, along with eating.”
She was not the only one. Several interviewees spoke as though the two were “inseparable.” More importantly, alcohol accompanied food — not the other way around. While the consensus does in fact indicate that Jews have lower rates of alcohol dependency, that doesn’t free Jews from addiction problems.
There’s also a lack of mystery around alcohol, as this Vancouver Sun article notes.
I’ve since learned that Kiddish cups, used for drinking sacred wine, are often given to young Jewish children. In Hebrew tradition wine is the “king of beverages.” Certainly, it can be a source of destruction. But it is more often associated with joy. That is part of why children are introduced to wine at young ages — so they will not associate drinking with rebelling against their parents or their religion.
As the quote above about alcohol and food discusses, drinking by itself isn’t traditionally an activity or a form of entertainment for Jews.
There are also a lot of community habits and attitudes that probably insulate us, as discussed in this article on addiction researcher and psychotherapist Stanton Peele’s website:
Sociologists Barry Glassner and Bruce Berg found that Jews avoid alcohol problems by relying on several cognitive techniques both associated with their Jewish identity and independent of it:
thinking of alcohol abuse as a problem that non-Jews have (“people like us don’t do that”)
learning moderate-drinking habits from childhood on through religious and nonreligious rituals
associating primarily with other moderate drinkers
developing techniques to avoid drinking excessively under social pressure
As a group, Jews don’t believe that alcohol makes people lose control. On the contrary, they believe that people are responsible for their behavior, whether or not they are drinking. Moreover, the role of alcohol in rituals like the Passover Seder and Sabbath candle-lighting ceremony gives drinking social and spiritual meanings that insulate Jews against antisocial drinking.
Peele is an outspoken critic of both the disease model of addiction and the 12-step approach. I’m not necessarily advocating for his views–he’s gotten awards from legit institutions, and he’s also gotten criticism from other addiction researchers, and I suspect both that his pushback to the disease model and the 12-step approach is a necessary corrective and that his position is extreme–but his summary here is useful, and it’s worth reiterating the following, because I’m going to come back to it:
As a group, Jews don’t believe that alcohol makes people lose control. On the contrary, they believe that people are responsible for their behavior, whether or not they are drinking.
So, on one hand, we’ve got a lot of factors helping insulate us against alcohol addiction, so much that Jews have traditionally seen alcoholism as a problem we don’t have.
And yet, Jewish alcoholics exist.
Which means that Thing #1 for an actual Jewish approach to treating alcoholism is almost certainly addressing the sense that alcohol addiction is un-Jewish. (Some addiction researchers theorize that part of the reason for lower Jewish rates of alcoholism is just that Jewish alcoholics are closeted.) Most generic (that is, in the US at least, Christian-normative) 12-step programs are probably not equipped to deal with the specificity of that.
The criticism section of the Wikipedia article on the 12-step approach is amazingly brief, but does note the following:
Another study found that a twelve-step program’s focus on self-admission of having a problem increases deviant stigma and strips members of their previous cultural identity, replacing it with the deviant identity.
So, “not equipped to deal with this cultural specificity” might actually be “attempting to eliminate (non-Christian) cultural specificity.”
To quote the book the Wikipedia article cites as a source for this claim:
First, compared to other treatment approaches such as Alcoholics Anonymous and some rehabilitation programs, behavior modification treatments probably do less damage to the cultural identities of the individuals receiving treatment. Alcoholics Anonymous, in particular, implicitly requires members to give up their cultural identity and adopt instead the identity of AA member or recovered alcoholic. Behavior modification treatments, since they often have specific treatment goals aimed at specific behaviors, are most likely to leave a person’s cultural identity intact following treatment.
We’ve spent the last two millennia of resisting Christian attempts to erase our culture, so you can, I assume, understand why this might be a problem for Jews.
Clashes with the 12 steps
It’s also worth noting that Jews are a pretty communitarian culture. Traditionally, people’s problems are also community problems. The Torah continually, emphatically insists that we’re responsible for each other, and the Talmud thoroughly legislates that we’re responsible for each other.
Despite alcoholism being a thing that Jewish communities have traditionally kinda seen not our problem, it actually has come up as an example in literally every Torah study group I’ve studied with (as well as from rabbis I’ve studied with individually) in one context:
לֹא־תְקַלֵּ֣ל חֵרֵ֔שׁ וְלִפְנֵ֣י עִוֵּ֔ר לֹ֥א תִתֵּ֖ן מִכְשֹׁ֑ל וְיָרֵ֥אתָ מֵּאֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ אֲנִ֥י יְהֹוָֽה׃
You are not to insult the deaf,
before the blind you are not to place a stumbling-block:
rather, you are to hold your God in awe;
I am YHWH!
Every single time we hit this verse and discuss what sort of obligations it places on us, one of the first examples someone brings up is “You don’t serve alcohol to an alcoholic.”
I’ve always found that interesting, because underlying that example as a go-to seems to be an insistence that if there is alcoholism in our communities, we have a communal responsibility to the alcoholic. We’re on the hook to help protect them from harming themselves or others.
From the get-go, we’re kind of in conflict with the very idea of Alcoholics Anonymous. (At least in theory–the idea that alcoholism is un-Jewish might necessitate anonymity for the individual to avoid shame getting in the way of recovery.)
So let’s talk about the 12 steps. (And disclaimer: there are as many Judaisms as there are Jews, so of course some Jews are going to disagree with me about this.)
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
So, one of the weird things about AA for me is the idea that AA doesn’t fail people–people fail AA. That diet culture mentality of “if this doesn’t work for you, it’s because you did it wrong,” which I think is very closely related to the universalism of Christianity–the idea that there’s One Right Way for all of humanity. If you fail, that’s on you. You’re responsible.
So my immediate reaction is which is it? Are you powerless, or are you responsible?
Jewish law is pretty clear that you’re not responsible for that over which you have no control.
But again, let’s go back to that quote:
As a group, Jews don’t believe that alcohol makes people lose control. On the contrary, they believe that people are responsible for their behavior, whether or not they are drinking.
Our tradition doesn’t hold that anyone’s powerless in the face of alcohol. That doesn’t mean it’s completely on us as individuals–there’s that communal responsibility piece, the idea that we are, in fact, our kinspeople’s keepers–but we’re rarely completely powerless.
Now, what happens when these Jewish traditions run up against the modern disease theory of alcoholism? I had one client who was forced into alcoholism treatment because of one incident in which she had a slightly elevated blood alcohol level when she was tested at work. In treatment, she could never accept the basic precepts of the disease theory. A counselor analyzed her problem, “Jews are too ashamed to admit they are alcoholics.” The counselor insisted that this woman was not responsible for her drinking behavior since she had a disease. This was a bizarre idea to her — she had been taught to recognize when she had done wrong, accept responsibility, and correct her own misbehavior. When she expressed such feelings and beliefs in treatment, she was told to “stop intellectualizing” because critical thinking interfered with “recovery concepts.” As a result of her “denial,” she was sentenced to perpetual aftercare — which might be some Jews’ idea of hell!
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
So one of the enduring Christian criticisms of Jews is that we believe we can earn our way into heaven, which is pretty silly because “getting into heaven” isn’t really a Jewish concern.
But again, just turning whatever is wrong with our lives over to G-d is not really a Jewish thing. We’re partners with the Absolute both in healing the world and in healing ourselves.
Also, the language of “sanity” here is kind of a big oof.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
G-d gave us free will–we can choose to try to live in accordance with what G-d wants for us, but we don’t get to just hand our free will back.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
This one’s good! We’re all supposed to be doing this all the time, and especially during the month of Elul.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Kind of? Like, there are a lot of Jewish names in the history of psychotherapy, because right there in the Torah, in the story of Cain and Abel, is the idea that talking about what’s hurting you, what’s making you angry, what’s eating at you, is good. Freud was wrong about a lot but I don’t think he was wrong about talking about things helping.
I mean, I could go into differences about the role of confession in t’shuvah and how it’s different from the role it plays in Christianity, but that would get super long.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
This is Christian salvation theology. G-d might help you work on yourself, but G-d doesn’t just… do it for you. We’re responsible for changing what we don’t like about what we do or how we think, not G-d.
Especially if it harms others. G-d can forgive wrongdoing against G-d, but G-d can’t forgive on behalf of other people.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Again, in Judasm, G-d doesn’t just magically remake your personality.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
This is good! Why isn’t it first? (I mean, I’m sure someone’s going to be like “uh, because you have to admit you have a problem before you can do anything else,” but like, the first step isn’t “admit you have a problem,” it’s “admit you’re powerless.”
In Hebrew, responsibility is acharayut. As the Mussar movement teaches, acharayut contains the root for acher, “other.” Responsibility exists in relationship to others.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
This is good too! It still seems like understanding and setting out to make amends to those one has harmed is pretty urgent and should probably be at the start of the process.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
So this is really the last personal step, and, like, what? There’s nothing in here about, I don’t know, understanding how to avoid harming people in the future? About understanding how you’re part of an interconnected community, and talking to that community (not just your AA group) about what’s going on? You know, so they don’t place a stumbling block in front of the blind without realizing what they’re doing?
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
And now you’re supposed to proselytize. Gross.
(Also, the whole “having had a spiritual awakening” thing sounds a lot like getting saved/born again, which is, again, a very specifically Christian thing.)
At last, the answer to your question, sort of
So, here’s what I remember my rabbi talking about with Beit T’shuvah. (And again, this is from five years ago, and is secondhand from my rabbi.)
Understanding addiction as woundedness rather than shortcoming
Text study (a Jewish answer to practically everything is study)
Focus on the context of family and community
A multiplicity of approaches, focusing on those with actual empirical support for their effectiveness
I think they actually use the 12 steps in addition to other approaches, and I have no idea of the effectiveness or anything else.
As I said, the discussion we had wasn’t “oh, they figured it out!” It was “AA is super-Christian and doesn’t work for a lot of Jews and now there’s a specifically Jewish program for substance addiction.”
And that was what sent me down the rabbithole of learning about the history of AA, since I had never really thought about it except as a trope on TV shows until that point, and I was surprised to hear that it was super-Christian.
The first bullet point, I think, is everything.
AA seems to frame alcoholism as sin. Something you’ve been doing wrong that you need divine intervention to be freed from.
The Beit T’shuvah approach, as I understand it, frames it not as being freed from sin, not as overcoming failures, but as returning to wholeness.
One of the things that literally made me physically flinch about reading through the 12 steps when I actually sat down and did it was that there’s no language in there acknowledging that the person undertaking in them has been harmed. It absolves them of responsibility–sort of–but also seems really focused on you are flawed, you have shortcomings, you fucked up. Your life is unmanageable.
But there’s nothing in there about you are being harmed. It’s also very all-or-nothing.
Like, what if you are unhappy with your relationship to alcohol, but your life isn’t unmanageable?
What if you haven’t wronged anyone?
What if you’re not completely powerless and abject and staring at a life in shambles? What if you recognize growing dependency and want to address it before it gets worse?
What if you understand that you’re self-medicating with alcohol because of pain, not shortcoming? (Like, alcohol is sometimes the most accessible solution to someone’s pain/fear/condition they can’t afford to get a diagnosis and medication for?)
My dominant impression in reading through the 12 steps was that they seemed really lacking in compassion, and also really flattened everything into you’re completely out of control and full of sin and no longer have any power over your actions so you need God to save you.
My understanding is that the difference in framing is about working toward wholeness rather than seeking divine salvation.
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