so many crystals

something that I've noticed in neo-pagan/polytheist spaces is this focus on one or a few deities. while this is a valid approach and seems to be working amazingly for many people, i wanted to write a short defence of a different form of polytheism that, while maybe less visible on social media, is equally viable.

the poly in polytheism necessitates the belief in multiple gods however modern forms of worship take many different forms on top of that. from my years being in pagan spaces on social media I have noticed that to many, being a polytheist means worshipping one or a handful of gods and having very close relationships with them. which deities someone chooses to have this kind of relationship with stems from multiple possible sources, for example, personal interest, the deity's domain being somehow related to a person's life or an inexplicable draw to them.

to me, this seems to be the dominant view on social media of the form that neo-paganism takes, however, after years of exploring my spirituality and practice, I have come to the conclusion that this is not how I want to worship. I am writing this post for more people like me, who are interested in exploring this often less mainstream approach.

For example:

My Danish friend, describing what a fylgia is: “Oh, it’s like an ancestor in your mind that protects you and guides you. It’s both you and not you at the same time, and it also has an animal shape.”

Now, here’s where things get freaky: Unless you’re connected and attuned to your midbrain, you won’t be able to detect the underlying “felt” story at all, let alone what Snorri is doing. All you’ll get is the Christianized narrative, and no amount of language-based deliberation will actually yield the story that sits underneath.

But if you are well-connected to your midbrain (and connection can be restored if you’ve lost it, by the way), then the differences between the two stories becomes luminously obvious. As in “the triangle goes inside the triangle-shaped hole” levels of obvious. The words and allegories generate a sense of movement inside your body (a neurochemical movement, I’m guessing, since that’s the language the midbrain “speaks” in), which reveals a further dimension of information to the text. (It’s like how adding color to a world that’s otherwise grayscale would provide further information about the landscape around you.)

I have fun describing the information I get this way, but I have to admit it also comes from a…sense of desperation, I suppose? The fact is, I went from being unable to perceive this layer of information at all to being able to perceive it again after working extremely hard to basically defrag and reboot my physiology, and I wonder just how many people around me are in a similar predicament.

i made this anon in spore [2008]

it is very much in game, here’s it being attacked by bees

2) oxalis

3) bindweed

4) white clover

5) smartweed

6) quickweed

7) pigweed

8) pokeweed

9) knotweed

10) poison ivy

"It's like in the great stories, Mr Frodo," Sam says. "Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the Sun shines it will shine out the clearer."

"What are we holding on to, Sam?" Frodo asks.

"That there's some good in this world, Mr Frodo… and it's worth fighting for," Sam replies. [1]

Origins of Hopepunk

In 2017 author Alexandra Rowland (@ariaste) made a post on Tumblr saying: "The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on." [2]

From Wikipedia: "Grimdark is a subgenre of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, and violent. The term is inspired by the tagline of the tabletop strategy game Warhammer 40,000: "In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.""

Other examples of grimdark are A Song of Ice and Fire, Breaking Bad, the darker Batman worlds, and the Walking Dead. [3]

2016 was a rough year, with an even bleaker outlook (although now writing this in 2024 we knew nothing, lol). People were growing weary of the grimdark worlds in media when the world around us was already so dark and left us feeling hopeless. It was time for a change, which Alexandra Rowland brought with their one, according to her own words, off the cuff post on Tumblr.

A few hours later, people were reblogging it and hopepunk found it's way to the people. Now, it's a literary genre, an aesthetic, and a philosophy that inspires people all over the globe.

[1] The Two Towers movie, based on the LOTR by J.R.R. Tolkien

[2] Original tumblr post

[3] Wikipedia page for Grimdark

Part 1: Intro and history

Part 2: Philosophy of Hopepunk

Part 3: How to practice hopepunk and further reading

One thing the occult is very good at is coming up with systems to categorize and conceptualize things. These can be incredibly useful to us in various ways. But we also have to remember that these systems we come up with are mere constructs, and the actual world itself probably doesn't conform to them as we might like. As the saying goes, all maps are wrong. But as the saying also goes, some maps are useful, and some are more useful than others.

One thing that often comes up in esoteric and occult systems are various forms of binaries or polarities. This often makes sense; for example, without light, you have dark. Without heat, you have cold. One party gives, the other takes. Creatures are born, and eventually they die.

But we can run into problems when we start trying to lump all apparent forms of polarities and dualities together. Here's an example: Life/Death, Masculine/Feminine. In doing this, we create an association that might lead us toward some terrible ways of thinking about real people. If we associate masculinity with death, we can find ourselves thinking that waging war and inventing weapons of death is just what men and masc people do, but women can always be counted on to be diplomats and peacekeepers. Or if we associate femininity with death, we might find ourselves more inclined to think that women and femmes have a natural desire to commit infanticide and tear apart societies, and they must be carefully watched and their freedoms limited so they don't upend civilization and endanger the human race.

These are of course extreme examples, but they are real ways that some people think. And you might think to yourself, "well, I don't polarize genders this way, I think people should try to be a healthy balance of masculine and feminine." And if this is you, I want you to ask yourself why you're so attached to categorizing traits as "masculine" and "feminine" at all.

If you're like most people, you probably just came across this in some form of occult or spiritual literature and just adopted it without really asking yourself too many questions about it. When we see something framed as ancient or higher wisdom, it's pretty easy to take it fairly uncritically, especially if it aligns with our unconscious biases in some way. It often doesn't cross our minds to ask where these terms really come from, and what they signified in their original contexts.

You may have heard that male/female stuff has roots in alchemy, which is true. But the thing with alchemy is that it was using familiar terms and concepts to describe chemical processes and reactions. Think of it a little bit like how we use terms like "male plugs" and "female plugs." While old-time alchemy did have a spiritual component to it, it was more about believing that you had to be spiritually pure to make your desired alchemical reactions happen. When alchemy gave way to chemistry, and people began to realize that your spiritual condition had nothing to do with your ability to make things happen in the lab, certain people began to seek more mystical meanings in the works of alchemists, and this idea of masculinity and femininity as transcendent mystical forces unto themselves really started to emerge. It was an incredibly easy concept to project on all kinds of mythologies, because a lot of myths have male and female figures interacting in various ways.

Now the thing is, having myths with male and female figures doesn't mean seeing masculinity and femininity as discrete forces or powers unto themselves. It can mean that they simply personified various figures as male or female depending on what their own experiences and cultural biases suggested to them. For example, straight men tend to think of love and lust as something they experience when they see a beautiful woman. In a patriarchal society, where men are calling most of the shots in conceptualizing the divine, a love deity is thus likely to be personified as a beautiful woman. Straight men can also see beautiful women as a source of discord and strife, so it makes sense that love goddesses would have war aspects to them.

A society where men are sent to war while wives are left behind to raise the children and tend the farm is going to produce an association with men and violence, while the act of nurturing will be associated with women. Men who deny higher education to women are going to produce a society where intellectual pursuits and higher abstract reasoning are associated with masculinity, and intuition and practical knowledge are associated with women. A society where men are seen as bringers of social order and upholders of civilization while women are viewed more like forces of nature than rational actors will associate men with civilization and women with natural, wild spaces.

In continuing to associate these characteristics with the "divine feminine" and the "divine masculine," we preserve and perpetuate the implicit biases created by these patriarchal societies. And while there is absolutely value in saying, "hey, these 'feminine' things are actually valuable and worth respect actually," framing them as intrinsically feminine in any sense - physically, psychologically, or metaphysically - will undermine any effort to dismantle patriarchy and bring true equality.

So what can you do? I would suggest being more specific.

Do you mean passive/active? Then just say it.

Do you mean giver/receiver? Then just say it.

Do you mean harmonizing/disrupting? Then just say it.

We're approaching Samhain so a good time to resurface this one because every year people ask - but what if my ancestors were terrible people?

So a quick rundown of other types of ancestors that we can work with. (The terms aren't mine but rather used in the community. They should help if you want to find more info on a specific type to work with.)

Ancestors of Flesh and Blood are biological ancestors (shared DNA)

Ancestors of Milk and Honey are those who nourish us (adoptive ancestors)

Ancestors of Bone are the ancestors of the land (bones of the earth connection)

Ancestors of Breath and Bread are those we share a vocation, craft or interest with.

You’re allowed to be casually religious, a “Yule Pagan” if you want to steal “Christmas Christian” from the Jesus club. You’re allowed to dedicate a day or two to worship and just stare at the sky or ground and mutter the rest of the week.

(Reposted from Twitter)

So a rabbi I know came back from LA pretty jazzed about a Jewish addiction treatment facility there called Beit T'shuvah and so we talked about their approach and that got me curious about non-AA approaches to dealing with addiction which, my friends, was fascinating.

I’ll admit that almost everything I know about AA is more or less from The West Wing. I’m fortunate in that no one in my immediate family has dealt with substance abuse issues, and as far as I know, none of my close friends are alcoholics. My knowledge is pop culture knowledge.

But hearing about Beit T’shuvah was very interesting to me because:

I’d heard that a lot of people who aren’t Christian have a hard time with AA because it’s so Christian.

The difference in philosophy was subtle at first glance but actually paralleled a lot of the differences between Judaism and Christianity if you dug into it.

Anyway, I got curious about whether success rates were different for Christians vs. non-Christians and started googling. I didn’t find much in the way of the data I was looking for, but I did find something a lot more disturbing, which is that the whole 12-step thing is not science-based. At all. For example:

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse compared the current current state of addiction treatment to medicine in the early 1900s, when there weren’t a lot of standards for who could practice medicine. In order to be a substance abuse counselor in many states, you don’t need much more than a GED or high school diploma.

A 2006 survey found “no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or TSF approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems.”

And I want to make clear here that I’m not saying AA is bad–clearly it’s helped people. The problem is that it’s touted as a universal approach, which is a problem when it’s not based on any sort of actual science. 

AA claims that its success rates for people who “really try” are 75%. (And boy does that mirror gaslighting diet language.) But the most precise study out there that’s NOT coming from AA (https://amazon.com/dp/B00FIMWI1O) put actual success rates at 5-8%. One of the major textbooks on treating addiction ranks it at 38th out of 48 on its list of effective treatments.

So just like most fad diets, it fails for almost everyone who tries it, and then blames the individual for its failure.

A glaring issue is that the 12 steps don’t really acknowledge–or provide any guidance or structure for dealing with–other mental/emotional health issues. That’s a giant problem when people with substance abuse issues have higher than average rates of those issues. (Take a moment to consider how the victim-blaming approach of “if you didn’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough” is going to intersect with someone’s major depression.)

Now, if 12-step programs were just one available treatment approach out of many, this wouldn’t be that big of an issue.

But 12% of AA members are there because of court orders. Our legal system is requiring people to undergo treatment that is: 

Christian-based

Not scientifically supported

A failure for the vast majority of people

I mean, here’s a pretty comprehensive breakdown that talks about the lack of scientific support for it, alternative treatments (like those in Finland, and naltrexone), and the fundamentalist origins of AA. 

The founder was a member of the Oxford Group, an evangelical organization that taught that all human problems stemmed from fear and selfishness, and could be solved by turning your life over to divine providence, basically. Sound familiar? He based AA on those principles, and given that the only alternative was “drying out” in a sanatorium, and that AA members would show up at bedsides there and invite inpatients to meetings, it must have looked really enlightened to people. In 2022, it bears a queasy resemblance to evangelizing to people in prison, literally a captive audience. 

To be fair–to their credit–they were some of the first people out there saying alcoholism was a disease, and not a moral failing. But they didn’t treat it like a disease when it came to testing treatment options:

Mann also collaborated with a physiologist named E. M. Jellinek. Mann was eager to bolster the scientific claims behind AA, and Jellinek wanted to make a name for himself in the growing field of alcohol research. In 1946, Jellinek published the results of a survey mailed to 1,600 AA members. Only 158 were returned. Jellinek and Mann jettisoned 45 that had been improperly completed and another 15 filled out by women, whose responses were so unlike the men’s that they risked complicating the results. From this small sample—98 men—Jellinek drew sweeping conclusions about the “phases of alcoholism,” which included an unavoidable succession of binges that led to blackouts, “indefinable fears,” and hitting bottom. Though the paper was filled with caveats about its lack of scientific rigor, it became AA gospel.

And then Senator Harold Hughes, who was an AA member, got Congress to establish the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which promoted AA’s beliefs, and sometimes suppressed research that conflicted with them:

In 1976, for instance, the Rand Corporation released a study of more than 2,000 men who had been patients at 44 different NIAAA-funded treatment centers. The report noted that 18 months after treatment, 22 percent of the men were drinking moderately. The authors concluded that it was possible for some alcohol-dependent men to return to controlled drinking. Researchers at the National Council on Alcoholism charged that the news would lead alcoholics to falsely believe they could drink safely. The NIAAA, which had funded the research, repudiated it. Rand repeated the study, this time looking over a four-year period. The results were similar.

The standard 28-day rehab stay, prescribed and insured:

Marvin D. Seppala, the chief medical officer at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Minnesota, one of the oldest inpatient rehab facilities in the country, described for me how 28 days became the norm: “In 1949, the founders found that it took about a week to get detoxed, another week to come around so [the patients] knew what they were up to, and after a couple of weeks they were doing well, and stable. That’s how it turned out to be 28 days. There’s no magic in it.”

The last sentence here (bolded for emphasis) is especially chilling. 

That may be heartening, but it’s not science. As the rehab industry began expanding in the 1970s, its profit motives dovetailed nicely with AA’s view that counseling could be delivered by people who had themselves struggled with addiction, rather than by highly trained (and highly paid) doctors and mental-health professionals. No other area of medicine or counseling makes such allowances.

There is no mandatory national certification exam for addiction counselors. The 2012 Columbia University report on addiction medicine found that only six states required alcohol- and substance-abuse counselors to have at least a bachelor’s degree and that only one state, Vermont, required a master’s degree. Fourteen states had no license requirements whatsoever—not even a GED or an introductory training course was necessary—and yet counselors are often called on by the judicial system and medical boards to give expert opinions on their clients’ prospects for recovery.

And, again, the idea that this is the One True And Only Way to deal with alcohol abuse leads to medical professionals ignoring research and treatment options that could be helping people. They are, in essence, taking all this completely on faith. 

There has been some progress: the Hazelden center began prescribing naltrexone and acamprosate to patients in 2003. But this makes Hazelden a pioneer among rehab centers. “Everyone has a bias,” Marvin Seppala, the chief medical officer, told me. “I honestly thought AA was the only way anyone could ever get sober, but I learned that I was wrong.”

Stephanie O’Malley, a clinical researcher in psychiatry at Yale who has studied the use of naltrexone and other drugs for alcohol-use disorder for more than two decades, says naltrexone’s limited use is “baffling.”

“There was never any campaign for this medication that said, ‘Ask your doctor,’ ” she says. “There was never any attempt to reach consumers.” Few doctors accepted that it was possible to treat alcohol-use disorder with a pill. And now that naltrexone is available in an inexpensive generic form, pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to promote it.

I’m not saying that AA is bad. I’m saying its hegemony is bad. It clearly is effective for some people–a minority of people. But it’s not for the majority of people, and that’s a problem when it’s being prescribed by courts (and doctors) as if it’s a one-size-fits-all approach.

It’s not an accident that a Christian approach to treating addiction presents itself as the One True Way For All Humankind, insists that courts and doctors privilege it, demands that people take its effectiveness on faith, and blames anyone for whom it doesn’t work for not believing/trying hard enough.

Hegemony is a problem. 

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.)

Jews and alcohol(ism)

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. 

As Peele notes:

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.

Sure. 

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.