Creating light from darkness
by Paula Levin
Ever heard about the pseudoscience of alchemy? Practitioners used science, philosophy, and mysticism in their quest to transform base metals into precious gold. It was an obsession that began in 300BCE ancient Egypt, enduring all the way into mediaeval Europe, capturing the imaginations of people across China, India, and the Islamic world. Practitioners built complex laboratories and devoted their entire lives to cracking the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme. But no one ever succeeded. Contrast this exercise in futility with the real alchemists – people who’ve turned their darkest, ugliest, shadiest and most shameful moments into lives that radiate with purpose, contribution and goodness. Now that’s impressive! And if they can perform alchemy – if they can create gold from gunk, perhaps we too can transform our past failures, our weakest moments and our worst choices into something more than forgiveness, but into greatness. Let’s meet them.
Stasia always drank a little more than others, but never saw herself as actually having ‘a drinking problem’. Teen experimentation and partying had given way to regular social drinking but she had always been able to get up the next day, and function as an employee, wife and mother. When her 24-year-old sister was killed in a tragic car accident, the pain and trauma became too much to bear and alcohol became the answer. What followed was several attempts to stop drinking. “We call this white knuckling because you’re holding on so tight to stop yourself from falling. I was a ‘dry drunk’, I wasn’t drinking, but I hadn’t really looked at healing the anxiety and dysfunction that kept pulling me back. I hadn’t given myself any of the structure or support to stay sober – what is called ‘emotional sobriety’. So it was only a matter of time before I started drinking again,” says Stasia. Rock bottom was the night she had way too many and got into her car on a Friday night, desperate to escape the pain and agitation. “I remember reversing down the driveway in a hurry and crashing into the gate, whilst my child sadly looked out at me from the front door, with a face full of innocence and confusion. I will never forget that moment. I knew I had gone too far. I didn’t even know where I was going when I got into that car.” But what Stasia did next was the beginning of her recovery. She drove straight to her Rabbi’s house on Shabbos and rang his bell. “I know and he knows that he saved my life that night. My story also could have ended in a car crash, like my sister’s life had ended.” Stasia started attending AA meetings whilst in a rehab centre and met another recovering alcoholic named Brett Saevitzon. “Brett used to visit prisons, he used to attend meetings in Lenasia and he had started a WhatsApp support group called ‘yids in recovery’. He had learnt that the tribe of Dan, one of the 12 tribes, had always travelled at the back of the camp, picking up the lost and found and the stragglers who had not kept up with their respective tribes in the 42 journeys made over the course of 40 years in the desert. He decided to use his experience to create a comprehensive support system for Jews in recovery – called Dan’s Tribe. Brett suddenly and tragically passed earlier this year, but Dan’s Tribe is continuing his legacy, working to educate the community about addiction, run meetings twice a week and offer social support for Jews battling any addiction, whether alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, food or anything else,” Stasia explains. “The 12 steps are all centred on spiritual growth. The final step in the 12 steps is to help others who are still suffering. When I learnt this, it ignited a need in me to use my experience to help others. In October I will complete a counselling course and my goal is to run an educational schools programme for Dan’s Tribe. Dan’s Tribe is a safe space for any Jew to come and connect without shame, stigma or judgement. Research has shown that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It’s connection. When you realise you’re not alone, and that you don’t have to face this alone, healing can begin – and sobriety is the outcome of this.” Day by day, course by course, hour by hour that she invests in Dan’s Tribe, Stasia is turning the lowest moments of her life into a lighthouse for others. Pure alchemy.
Lara B was a ‘frum’ wife and mother of five children but she describes her life in active addiction 11 years ago as being defined by EGO – Edging G-d Out. “Eighteen years ago my father committed suicide. I was prescribed tranquillisers to cope with the trauma but I continued for six more years, adding more and more substances into the mix in an attempt to fill the awful void and despair I felt. My father was a functioning alcoholic and so I had that genetic vulnerability to the disease of addiction. I drove my children to school intoxicated on substances. I got divorced, abandoned my children and moved out of home into a commune, believing no one cared what I did. My family was devastated. When I ran out of money, I lived in my car. Within six months of leaving home my family stopped enabling me and put some tough needed boundaries and consequences in place. My rock bottom was being told I couldn’t see my children unless I was supervised. That’s when I finally agreed to go to a treatment centre where I was introduced to a life-changing 12 Steps programme. Working the 12 steps in action daily allowed me to find freedom from bondage of self and change my behaviour daily to the best of my ability. It gave me the opportunity to choose life. I began to face up to what I had done, amending my behaviour daily by taking a moral inventory. For the very first time in my life I began an authentic relationship with G-d. I had a spiritual awakening. I was taught not to say sorry but do sorry. I asked my husband for forgiveness – and we got remarried. I got a second chance to be a mother to my children. I decided to devote all my abilities and talents and passion to help others and became an addictions counsellor. I can only keep what I have by giving it away. I do family interventions, I meet with social workers and I accompany patients to treatment. I work the 12 steps daily, check myself before I wreck myself, and live in the moment one day at a time, with a G-d given blessing of full awareness. I no longer have cravings to use drugs or alcohol, but I do have a disease, a brain that wants to kill me. I don’t recover alone, I recover with my like-minded fellows in 12 Step meetings which I still attend regularly. By working my recovery I get to choose whether I will allow despair to win or allow trauma to define me. I’ve devoted my life & G-d given passion & purpose to help others and share my message of hope – I am no longer a victim I’m a survivor.” As Lara puts it, she uses her mess as her message – and if that’s not alchemy, what is?
Nikki Munitz’s children were in grade 1 and grade 3 respectively when she sat them down one night and told them she wouldn’t be there when they came home from school the next day. Mummy was going to prison for stealing money. It was 2016 and the crime had been committed in 2007. Although she seemingly had it all, great friends, good grades and a loving family, Nikki had experimented with drugs in secondary school. Since secondary school she had already been to rehab a few times and had met her then-husband at a treatment facility. Both clean and sober, they had married and had two children. But when financial difficulties hit and cracks began to appear in the relationship, both had turned to drugs again. Nikki had then committed fraud to finance a descent into madness – the insanity of attempting to solve their problems with drugs. Shortly afterwards, she had come to her senses, got divorced and was clean again. In 2008, she was arrested and charged. In 2011, still sober, she was sentenced to 8 years in prison. She appealed and lost but her second appeal in 2015 succeeded in reducing her sentence, and finally in 2016, still clean for 8 years, it was time to say goodbye to her children. “Ironically, it was my experience in prison that set me free,” says Nikki. “When everything was stripped away, my name, my own clothing, my dignity, that’s when I was forced to find something deeper to define me. I had always relied on external validation to feel OK, to feel that I was worthy of love, now that was all taken from me. I had to do certain courses in prison to be eligible for early release. Courses like anger management and an addictions course. But there was another course on offer about self-esteem and I decided to do it. The course literally changed my life. It forced me to get to know who I am, and to become my own best friend, confidante and ally and to stop looking for love and approval everywhere else. It was in prison that I realised that self-esteem was the missing piece in recovery, and low self-esteem is what drives all of us away from ourselves to all the things that are destructive.” Since serving her term, Nikki has devoted her life to helping others. She is the director of two treatment centres – one in Johannesburg and one in Cape Town, and also runs a coaching business grounded in the self-esteem work that has been so transformational for her. She also wrote a book entitled Fraud, How Prison Set Me Free. “My message is that there is no mistake so great that you can’t come back from it.” Nikki is proof that your worst mistake can be the very catalyst for your best life!
As unique as each one of these stories is, they revealed a pattern too precise to be coincidence – all these people achieved exponential personal growth not in spite of failure, but because of it. And if we look back at our most difficult moments, isn’t it really because of them that we accessed and actualised the very best parts of ourselves? As I began to dig deeper, I discovered that Judaism teaches that this fact is baked into the design of our world. It’s a concept known as ‘yerida letzorech aliya’, a descent for the purpose of an ascent which was first elucidated in the Zohar. The teaching illustrates that it’s the descent of the pristine and pure soul into this lowest of worlds (where it can choose closeness to G-d) that allows its return even closer to G-d.
The Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chassidus, emphasised that every spiritual fall, challenge, or concealment in life can be part of a divine plan that ultimately leads to a higher spiritual level. In his seminal work known as the Tanya, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the originator of Chabad Chassidus, discusses the soul’s descent into the body as a form of yeridah letzorech aliyah, suggesting that even suffering or spiritual struggle is not meaningless but serves a higher purpose.
And when you know what you’re looking at – it’s everywhere. In the bow that needs to be pulled all the way back for the arrow to fly forward. In the seed’s process of rotting and decomposition in the soil before the shoots can sprout. It’s the fact that Joseph needed to be sold into slavery to save so many – most especially his whole family – from starvation. It’s the fact that our descent as a people into the exile of Egypt is what set the stage for the miracles of Egypt and the splitting of the sea that led to Mount Sinai and the Promised Land. It means our current long exile is only for the sake of an inestimably greater redemption. This spiritual truth is the secret behind the incomparable light of survivors of the Holocaust like Edith Eger, Viktor Frankl, the Klausenberger Rebbe, Chief Rabbi Lau and so many others. And when the descent is in the form of sin – like it was for King David’s sin with Batsheva – what resulted was a spiritual greatness and a closeness to G-d that is palpable in every word of his Tehillim.
At this time of the year, when we experience the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, we are called upon to face up to our failings and return to G-d. The Talmud states in the name of Reish Lakish, “Great is repentance, for intentional sins become like unintentional sins. And when done out of love – intentional sins become like merits.” Bear in mind that Reish Lakish began his career as a gang leader, robbing and pillaging at will. At one point, he even worked as a gladiator. Later on in life, he became a great rabbi and the study partner of the famed Rabbi Yochanan.
Let’s understand what he is saying by means of a crude analogy. Imagine you’re in a horrible mood and to let off some steam, you decide to smash a hammer into your dining room wall. That is what we call sin. The wall is now pockmarked, cratered and damaged. Sin leaves its mark. Now imagine you’re sorry about it because you’re worried what your wife, husband or guests will think when they see the destruction and what consequences you’ll have to face. That’s teshuva out of fear. The Torah teaches that your teshuva – your admission of guilt, your remorse and your resolve to never do this again – means that whilst your wall is still a disaster, no one holds it against you — it’s as if some accident caused the damage and insurance (the atonement of Yom Kippur) will fix it up like new. Reish Lakish’s second statement goes even further. It says that when you admit your wrongdoing, feel remorse and resolve not to make the same mistake – not out of fear of consequence but out of love for the One who commanded that you not ‘ruin the wall’ in the first place – the wall does not go back to its original condition. It is now studded with diamonds! This is a radical – not magical – concept. But it demands work – as we saw with our stories above.
Only having experienced the intense feeling of distance, separation and disconnection from G d brought on by sin, can we experience a uniquely intense yearning and thirst for closeness to G d that is the catalyst to serving Him with all our heart and soul. Teshuva requires that we revise and transform our past, learn from our failings rather than simply abandoning them. Unlike fear, love doesn’t require us to discount or repress any part of who we are or have been. Love enables us to repair our past self and integrate the totality of who you are into an even stronger relationship with G d. The sin becomes the very source of closeness. Alchemy. And this is why Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev once said to a wanton sinner in his city, notorious for not leaving any sin uncommitted, “I harbour great jealousy towards you, for if you only so desired you could make yourself even more complete than I am. If you would only rue all your sins and return to G d out of love, your merits would be more numerous than can be calculated!” “In the place where a Baal Teshuva stands, even a completely righteous person cannot stand.” Their ‘wall’ is pristine and smooth, but it’s also encrusted with diamonds.
Reish Lakish explains: “A person doesn’t commit a transgression unless a spirit of madness enters them.” Sinful behaviour merely covers up the inner Divine light animating our every action; it does not extinguish or even alter it. A sin is what we do, not who we are. We are always, always, more than our worst choices. Teshuva allows that G-dliness to shine again. Yerida letzorech aliya means that our lowest points and darkest moments can lead to higher growth, refinement and closeness to G-d. So if you’re reading this right now at rock bottom, if you’re in a pit of pain, shame, hopelessness and despair – leave a tiny space in your mind open to the possibility that you too can turn it all to gold.
