Inside Beit T’Shuvah

Text by Malina Saval

It was a soul sickness that 26-year-old Noah Jashinski (top photo) says he was suffering from. It stemmed from a failed attempt at rock ‘n roll stardom after stints playing back-up for Smashing Pumpkins and Fountains of Wayne turned up nothing in the way of a recording contract. He returned to college at NYU, sank into a deep, dark depression and turned to heroin. “Where have you been my whole life?” This was Jashinski’s first thought when a friend of his turned up with that introductory $20 waxy bag of powder. “‘I’m doing this every day.’ That was my plan, to have fun for a couple of months and die.” By the end of the first week Jashinski, then 22, was snorting between forty and sixty dollars’ worth of heroin a day. Within months, his habit was costing him upwards of $200 a day.

Ultimately, Jashinski’s family discovered his drug habit and paid his way into the Sierra Tucson treatment center in Tucson, Arizona, but he knew that his sobriety would never last. “None of those places ever work,” he claims. “It’s easy to stay sober when you’re in the middle of the desert and you can’t go anywhere.”

He got out, moved to Los Angeles to live near his brother and started shooting up. He was shooting H for three, four months. He had tracks marks everywhere. He couldn’t wear short-sleeved t-shirts.

When his parents found out that he was using again, they begged him to move back east. When Jashinski refused, they cut off any further financial help. “I was like, ‘I gotta do this for myself,'” he remembers. “I needed to find a place that would take me for free.”

After a week of detoxing on his couch with Suboxone, an opiate blocker that abates the severity of detox symptoms, a doctor at UCLA suggested that Jashinski call Harriet Rossetto, founder and Director of Beit T’Shuvah.

Beit T’Shuvah is a West Los Angeles addiction rehabilitation center with a treatment philosophy that incorporates both Jewish spirituality and the 12-Step Principles of recovery. Jashinski turned up that Friday night for the weekly Shabbat service—his body still reeling from the harsh flush of heroin.

“This place is a fucking circus,” he remembers thinking. He’d gone to Hebrew day school until the age of 16 but was cynical when it came to any sort of Jewish theological adherence. He pretty much hated every bit of it. “I was like, ‘Dude, I can’t take this.’ So I left and got high.”

Conflicted, Jashinski called Rosetto the next morning. He knew that he needed help. He asked if he could come back and check out the facilities, but that there was still the issue of money to discuss.

“What is there to discuss?” Rosetto said to him. “You don’t have any. When do you want to move in?”

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Rabbi Mark Borovitz is the chief spiritual leader of Beit T’Shuvah. For years he was a con artist, a crook and a jailbird who logged time at California Institute for Men in Chino for forging bad checks and other sundry white-collar crimes. Twenty plus years ago, Borovitz (not yet a rabbi) was in his mid-30s, flitting through life with no real direction.

“I had a spiritual awakening in prison,” recalls Borovitz. “I realized that my life was going nowhere and that I had to do something.”

With the help of a rabbinical chaplain, he began to study Torah. The story of Jacob made Borovitz realize that change really was possible.

“I finally understood what it meant to wrestle with God,” explains the balding, full-bearded Borovitz, reddish-brown facial hair giving way to shades of grey. “It was revolutionary, this Jewish concept that nobody is perfect and even our heroes have clay feet. I really saw the beauty of our tradition and what we do and who we are. From that I learned how to change the way I act, not the way I thought. Because the truth is, God never cares about how we feel—God cares about what we do.”

While in prison, Borovitz met Rossetto, who often visited the prison as part of Beit T’Shuvah’s prison outreach program. She’d talk about Beit T’Shuvah, and Borovitz would impart unsolicited advice on how to more effectively run the center. “He was questioning my street cred,” remembers Rossetto of their thorny interactions. “He was the convict. I was the social worker. What did I know about prisoners?”

“She thought I was arrogant,” laughs Borovitz, now married to Rossetto. “I thought she was defensive. She said, ‘If you’re so smart come and help me when you get out of here.'”

And Borovitz did, working every job at Beit T’Shuvah from janitor to administrative assistant to, ultimately, head rabbi, after receiving his rabbinical ordination at age 50 from the University of Judaism in the year 2000.

Today, Beit T’Shuvah (literally “house of return”), or BT, is, in many ways, not your typical residential addiction treatment center.

Housed in a beige concrete building on the edge of affluent West L.A., BT’s campus lodges over 100 residents (roughly 95% Jewish). Started in 1987 as an outgrowth of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community for Personal Service, BT, with its mandated Jewish curriculum, subsists on private donations and grants. (Ironically, the unltra-orthodox Chabad boasts a rehab program with no required Jewish component, making it eligible for federal funding.) Approximately 15-percent of BT’s residents pay full room and board while a majority pay a significantly reduced rate of $400 a month.

The remaining residents are treated free of charge.

“They actually care,” says Jashinski of the BT staff. “Other places, it feels like a business. You’re like an inmate. No trust, no wiggle room, no warmth. They have your money and that’s that. [At Beit T’Shuvah], you know that there is nothing in this for them. They have faith in you, no matter how down you are in the dumps. You can believe that their actions are genuine.”

Whereas most rehabs rely on a “you use-you lose” approach, at BT an addict is always given a second—or third, or fourth—chance, provided he owns up to his behavior. “At other places, if you relapse they kick you out and keep your money,” notes Jashinski who, after completing a 5 and a half month stretch at BT, relapsed. Soon after, he returned to the center for a second go around at sobriety and was welcomed openly by its staff. “Here, you can mess up. It’s OK. That is really the biggest thing that makes Beit T’Shuvah different.”

In fact, notes Rossetto, at BT a self-acknowledged slip can often be viewed as the beginning of recovery. “Telling the truth is more important than what the behavior was,” she says. “We have amnesty. Here, it’s about staying out of the traditional medical model of ‘We’re well and you’re sick.'”

To that end, BT’s clinical staff consists of social workers, drug counselors, associate rabbis and specialists in addiction medicine, many of whom are former addicts or prison inmates themselves. While this is a trend found at many rehabs—recovering junkies can often get through to an addict better than anyone else—at BT the overarching philosophy is that everyone is a wounded soul, whether you’re an addict or not, and staffers are encouraged to share their personal struggles with residents. “We are all in recovery from something,” asserts Rossetto.

Where many addiction recovery centers adhere to the standard 28-day residential model, the average stay at BT is anywhere from six to nine months. Because the center receives zero government funding and there are no insurance companies dictating what level of treatment BT can provide and for what duration of time, there is no definitive limit to how long a patient can stay in the program.

“We have people that have been on site for four or five years if that’s what they need,” explains Rossetto, admitting that securing funds for the program is a constant source of pressure. “Then again,” she adds, “it would be more pressure for me if I had to say you can’t come because you can’t pay.”

Occasionally, life at Beit T’Shuvah becomes so comfortable, some residents—dubbed “lifers”—never want to leave.

But unlike other rehabs where a pothead with two days clean might room with a coke addict who hasn’t snorted a bump in weeks, BT living arrangements are divided by level of sobriety and time spent in the program: Level One (first thirty days), Level Two (first sixty days), Level Three (first 90 days). There’s a fourth level, sober and independent living, where residents with at least four months of sobriety can gradually resume work and off-campus activities while simultaneously taking part in the program’s myriad therapeutic offerings. It’s rare to find such a set-up that nurtures addicts through every stage of their recovery under one building.

“We do a lot of things that people aren’t doing,” asserts Borovitz of Beit T’Shuvah. “We are truly revolutionary.”

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A typical weekday at Beit T’Shuvah begins with 7 a.m. Torah study. Because addicts thrive on repetitive behavior, daily structure is critically important (for this reason, many rehabs present jam-packed schedules). Classes stress an interpretive approach, with rabbis and residents drawing comparisons between biblical passages and their own paths of addiction. All residents are required to attend.

“It’s a book of how to live life well,” explains Borovitz of Torah, according to Beit T’Shuvah’s philosophy. “It’s a book of eternal wisdom and eternal truth.”

Borovitz believes that the core of all 12-Step programs is rooted in Torah. “The first step is ‘I’m powerless,'” he cites as an example. “That means God is in charge. That’s Jewish.”

But for Jashinski, Torah study required a heavy suspension of disbelief. Though he entered the program with a more expansive background in Judaic studies than most of its residents, he found most of it folkloric at best, boring at its worst. “I’d rather die than sit through synagogue,” he admits. Still, he recognized these classes as a way to get back into a daily functioning routine.

“It’s about reshaping the Torah in a way that’s relevant to everyday life,” says Jashinski for whom the Torah study sessions became, if nothing in which he put any theological stock, a way to restore a sense of faith in himself.

“The point of the Torah classes is to understand that people do bad things, but that doesn’t make them a bad person,” proffers Jashinski, who, after 30 days back in the program following his relapse, landed a paid job in Beit T’Shuvah’s prevention program speaking to teens across the country on the pitfalls of drug use. He held the post for a year before accepting a job at an L.A.-based graphic design firm. “The way we study Torah helps illustrate that one mistake doesn’t negate anything good that we’ve done. It doesn’t mean we can’t come back. If you can get back in touch with your faith you can get back in touch with what it’s all about which is forgiving yourself and realizing that you’re not a lost cause. At Beit T’Shuvah you walk in with the benefit of the doubt. With other places, you walk in a piece of shit.”

To be sure, there are other faith-based addiction recovery centers, such as the Scientology sanctioned one. But there, the underlying mission is conversion to Scientology. At BT, there is no such agenda. BT is not out to make you more Jewish, but rather to make you a stronger-willed individual that, though the study of Jewish text, can carve out a path toward a life free of addiction.

As Rossetto assures, “Here, helping people nourish their souls is the intention.”

In that vein, the center holds interpretive Shabbat and Havdalah services, residents pen their own prayers set to Jewish music, and a special “Gratitude” service is conducted during Yom Kippur. During Sukkot, the women build a sukkah out on the patio and hold a sleep-over. There are art therapy classes, Jewish meditation workshops, spiritual therapy sessions, and a career center to encourage job placement (many residents work in the on-campus kitchen, or help out in its affiliated thrift store). There’s even a “Surf Therapy” class led by one rabbi where residents hit the waves for sunrise, wrap tefillin and then pray on the beach.

To an outsider, it might all seem silly, ridiculous even—a bunch of addicts bobbing up and down in the water, sleep-overs, sing-alongs. But for addicts so used to emotional and physical tumult, such moments of serenity are what gets one through the week.

Of course, BT is likely the type of place that could only thrive in Los Angeles, with its encouragement of all things new age-y and mystical. It would be hard to picture such a place existing in, say, tweedy Cambridge, Massachusetts. While the center draws patients from such far-flung communities as Miami, Detroit, Memphis and Virginia Beach, attempted start-up centers mirroring BT’s methodology in cities outside of L.A. have thus far failed. “There’s a lot of competition for charity dollars,” Rossetto points out. “In today’s shaky economy, this is not at the top of anybody’s list. It takes a missionary kind of zeal to keep [Beit T’Shuvah] front and center. And maybe part of that is the atmosphere in Los Angeles, because this is the place where it took root.”

And yet, at BT’s core are the fundamental self-modification tools to which addicts all over the world respond. Because the truth is—and all addicts know this—it’s virtually impossible to rewire an addict’s desire—but rather the object thereof. As an addict you can reach a point of such abysmal desperation that you are willing to cling to whatever else can become your addiction. The idea, however, is to find a substance that edifies life, not destroys it.

If prayer and a hang-ten do the trick, so be it.

Not surprisingly, BT’s creative theological approach resonates with non-addict Angelenos as well, many of them self-help junkies seeking to make peace with the world through some positive spiritual gain that doesn’t reflect their staid Hebrew school experience. All of Beit T’Shuvah’s services are open to the public and on any given Shabbat you’ll find upwards of 300 congregants from outside the community (including alumni, family members and those simply searching for a more inspiring synagogue) gathering in prayer. Here at BT, residents and guests often stand-up to offer words of wisdom to the crowd. Many celebrate their sobriety birthdays with a cake and candle during Kabbalat Shabbat.

“We’re supposed to talk to people in a way they can hear,” remarks Borovitz of this tailored-to-fit brand of Judaism. “I’m doing what has to be done. I’m looking to reach out and save souls.”

An additional example of BT’s unorthodox treatment philosophy is that, unlike at most addiction recovery centers, rehab romances are not prohibited. Rather, BT residents who do become romantically involved are required to attend couple’s counseling. Jashinski, who met his current girlfriend, a recovering meth addict, at Beit T’Shuvah, found the sessions enormously valuable.

“We believe in dealing with what is,” declares Borovitz. “Our deal is to have a response, not a reaction to what’s going on in the world.”

For many addicts, Beit T’Shuvah is a last-ditch resort after several failed attempts at other rehabilitation centers.

Jennifer Berger (photo above), 30, had been in and out of various detox centers (she was kicked out of six) and had completed numerous jail sentences for illegal possession of drugs and a string of DUI’s before finding her way to Beit T’Shuvah. The Encino, California native smoked marijuana for the first time when she was thirteen. By sixteen she was slamming dope, snorting meth, popping Xanax, and sampling hallucinogenics like acid and mushrooms. Her parents had divorced before she was born, and amidst their ongoing custody battle and her back and forth living arrangement that included a year on a kibbutz with her mother, Berger found escape through drugs, the wrong types of boys and following the Dead around the country.

“I hated to deal,” Berger explains, sipping a coffee at a Starbucks down the street from Beit T’Shuvah where we met. “I was just very curious.”

That curiosity included nine and a half years of steady heroin use and four of snorting meth. “It was my heroin use that really destroyed me,” she says. “My parents are just surprised that I’m alive.”

At Beit T’Shuvah since July 10, 2008, Berger now counts 60 days clean.

Berger’s roommate, Kristy Tapp (photo below), 27, a recovering junkie with a proclivity for crack cocaine and alcohol, has also been at the center since July. Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, Tapp led an ostensibly privileged life: She was a nationally-ranked cheerleader, had a football-player boyfriend, her father was a well-to-do doctor. But something still was missing. Her parents divorced when she was 11. She was 12 when she starting smoking pot with her older brother and was 15 when she first snorted coke.

“I remember thinking, ‘I want to feel this way for the rest of my life,'” Tapp recalls with girlish glee. “I was feeling above being human. It was a better me.”

It wasn’t hard to find coke in San Antonio. Before long, Tapp was doing it at school. She dropped out and left home. At one point she was living in an apartment with her drug dealer.

When her parents found out, they dragged her to a local hospital detox. “It was basically like a psycho ward,” describes Tapp. “They locked me down and gave me sedatives.”

Upon discharge, she returned to school, graduated, and enrolled at University of Missouri-Kansas City where she majored in political science. She wasn’t doing drugs, but she was drinking. A lot. When her brother, who was selling drugs at the time, was shot, Tapp moved back to San Antonio to help care for him.

She started doing drugs again. She went back into rehab, this time at a place in central Florida where her mother had moved and remarried. She did her 28 days, during which she met a rich guy with ample access to drugs. When they both got out, they spent every day together slamming shots of booze and doing crack, opiates, painkillers, pills—whatever they could get.

Eventually Tapp made her way through six different rehabs. It wasn’t until she started selling drugs to support her habit and got caught up in a local investigation that, upon her mother’s urging, she decided to try Beit T’Shuvah.

“I said, ‘OK. I’ll try it for two months,” she told herself. “So far, I’ve been here for three.”

Neither Tapp nor Berger were connected in any spiritual sense to their Judaism when they entered Beit T’Shuvah. Growing up, Berger remembers, “It was shoved down my throat.”

What both women do credit for keeping them on the right track is the close connection between BT staffers and residents of which Rossetto spoke, an intimacy that both Tapp and Berger found was lacking at all the other recovery centers. At BT, the staff members neither kow-tow to patients nor act self-righteous. Here, while patients are certainly monitored closely, in an intellectual and humanistic sense, everyone is viewed as equal.

“You’re allowed to challenge them,” says Tapp of the staff.

“They let us be us,” adds Berger. “They accept us.”

And while neither Tapp nor Burger are likely to become religious when they get out, it is the sense of Jewish community that helps both feel at home, especially now as they’re looking ahead to part-time employment opportunities outside of the BT program.

“It’s nice to have a safe place to come back to when you’re venturing out there in the world,” says Tapp. “I gave up a lot on people. But seeing the Jewish community working together, and understanding that not everyone is perfect has given me a renewed sense of faith in people.”

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An addict can never be sure if his sobriety will stick. Addiction is a lifelong struggle. But that’s precisely BT’s point. The idea isn’t to demand perfection of oneself— it’s to work toward a more profound acceptance of one’s weaknesses and faults and not excoriate oneself for such shortcomings.

Borovitz is the first to concede that in many respects he’s still the same mover and shaker con man that he once was.

“I’m still a hustler,” Borovitz admits, “but now I hustle for God instead of for myself.”

As for Jashinski, he’s formed a new indie/punk band called Feed the Night. He continues to work at the graphic design firm. And he’s been clean for over a year.

What happens tomorrow remains uncertain. And for now, that’s perfectly OK.

“Rabbi Borovitz says that you can’t expect to be perfect because the only one that is perfect is God,” says Jashinski, “and no one wants to live in a world where you’re God. I definitely don’t wanna live in a world where I am God—that much I do know.”

Noah Jashinski and Malina Saval will perform at Heeb Storytelling on Tuesday, January 27 at MBar.

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