When Bracha* was 12, she got an older boy to buy her a bottle of vodka at Purim. For the girl from a religious home, it was a turning point. “I loved the feeling of getting drunk”, she recalls, “and thought, why I don’t I just do this all the time? Then, I was drinking in school, just to get through the day.”
At 15 she started “taking weed and pills and experimenting with other drugs”. Regularly downing ecstasy, MDMA, codeine, benzodiazepine, cocaine and ketamine, Bracha stopped observing Shabbat and dressing modestly, and dropped out of school. She realised her single mum and granny were “upset” – surely an understatement – and knew they would hide money, medication and valuables from her.
Drink and drug abuse is a problem in the Orthodox world, but a well hidden one. “When you get into the frummer communities where children get married off through shidduchs, having a child who is publicly known as a drug addict or an alcoholic affects the marriage prospects of the others,” says recovering addict Mark.
But in a world where breaking Shabbat by switching on a light is already seen as a serious misdemeanour, taking drugs also doesn’t feel a whole lot worse, he says. “They’re just considered bad kids, and therefore they do bad stuff.”
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that observant Jews have the same weaknesses as the rest of us, but it seems to. Recovering addict Kylie* made friends with another woman in synagogue on Yom Kippur. The new buddy wanted to meet for coffee, but Kylie kept cancelling. “I thought, I can’t go to meet this lady because I’m this type of person, and she’s obviously a religious one. I can’t go because I know what I’m doing.”
Then one day, on the way to her regular CA (Cocaine Anonymous) meeting, she spotted her new friend in the street. “I hid behind a wall because I didn’t want her to see me go into the meeting. The next minute, she walks past me and walks in to the same meeting. I was so surprised and asked her what she was doing there. ‘The same thing as you,’ she replied.”
It is a conventional wisdom that for a cluster of cultural and genetic reasons, alcohol abuse isn’t a Jewish problem. And while studies have shown that Jews have lower rates of alcohol dependency compared to other ethnic groups, it is a fallacy that we don’t also suffer from it. Rabbi Dovid Jaffe has seen the extent of this denial for himself. After working with addicts in Manchester for more than 30 years as a Chabad shaliach (emissary), he describes it as a “huge swept-under-the-carpet problem”. And one, you could argue, that our traditions sanctify. “We make kiddush. We get drunk on Purim. We have a l’chaim,” he says. “Stand back at any kiddush and you can see the alcoholics in two minutes.”
Moreover, distinguishing between alcoholism and drug misuse is to miss the point, he says. “A lot of people cross-addict. They’ll start with alcohol, and then realise they’ve got a weed problem. They have a gambling problem, a sex problem, and then they’ll find they’ve got an alcohol problem. Addiction is not about the substance. Addiction is about the person. It’s an illness.”
Mark, 53, started gambling as a teenager. His bus journey to school would take him via Piccadilly Gardens in central Manchester, with its amusement arcades. “When I was in the arcades all my problems were left outside. I would intend to spend a pound, and I would end up spending all my money and losing track of time. I knew that there was going to be trouble, but I didn’t care. Those flashing lights and being in that action lit something up inside me.”
At university he moved on to casinos as well as “smoking weed and doing pills”, building a trail of debts to be cleared by his father. But that didn’t stop him and after graduating, he set up a business.
“Everything looked all right from the outside,” he says, but in truth drugs were becoming an increasing part of his daily routine. “Before a customer meeting, I’d have a couple of lines (of cocaine). It would give me a pick-me-up. Then, when I was tired, it would sort me out as my superpower. It meant I could work all night, and I’d tell myself it’s not bad what I’m doing. I’m doing it for my business.”
After taking drugs socially, Kylie’s turning point came when she went out alone to buy them. “The fact that I had to send a message and go into a drug dealer’s car was horrific. I’ve never been so scared in my entire life. But although I was horrified by myself, I also couldn’t stop myself.
“After you take that first bit, you are forever chasing that feeling,” says the mother of three.
Her rock bottom, she remembers, was “sitting on the end of my bed crying, Googling ways of stopping and thinking about all sorts of things I could have tried, but which I felt just wouldn’t have worked.”
By the time he was in his mid-forties, Mark could no longer deny that things were falling apart. Prompted by a colleague and encouraged by his wife, he looked for help. There were several false starts, but after detoxing at a rehab centre, he and a friend set up a self-help group at a Lubavitch-run Aliyah centre in Salford, based on the 12-step peer support programme pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous.
Addicts refer to such groups as “the rooms”, and Kylie found help in one too. She recalls her first meeting vividly. “I cried the entire hour and a half. I couldn’t look at anybody, I had my hood up, and asked myself what I was doing there. But as soon as I walked out, I thought, OK, I need to go back there.”
Mark has now been clean for eight years and spends much of his time on the 12th step of the programme that saved him: helping other addicts. “That’s where the joy is, to see the light come back on in people’s eyes,” he says.
Bracha struggled with her addictions for a long time, despite constant support from Rabbi Jaffe’s son Mendel, who would pick her up in the middle of the night to keep her safe. She’s now been clean for three years, and after attending seminary in New York is planning to open a drug rehab for girls in Jerusalem.
Kylie supports other women and has spoken to her eldest about her problems. “I wanted him to know so that he can see the dangers.”
There are now 11 meetings a week at the Salford centre. They are open to all and the centre is registered with Cocaine Anonymous.
After a spike of teen drug deaths in the Manchester area, Rabbi Jaffe extended its services. He’s also set up the website Jewish Recovery, which, he says, has led to countless success stories for former addicts. Equally important, there are signs the community is beginning to realise it has a problem. At a Manchester shul on Simchat Torah he says, “This guy got up and said, ‘Hi, my name is Yankel, and I’m an alcoholic.’ And after sharing his story, he got a standing ovation.”
*All names have been changed
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