NEWS FEATURE: Ex-Con Rabbi Leads a Congregation of Those Struggling With Substance Abuse: With optio

c. 2006 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly LOS ANGELES _ At first glance, it seems a typical Friday evening Sabbath service, with the music and singing creating a festive mood. But when one member introduces himself with the words, “Hello, I’m Brian, a grateful resident of the house and a recovering alcoholic,” a visitor knows something […]

c. 2006 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

LOS ANGELES _ At first glance, it seems a typical Friday evening Sabbath service, with the music and singing creating a festive mood.

But when one member introduces himself with the words, “Hello, I’m Brian, a grateful resident of the house and a recovering alcoholic,” a visitor knows something different is going on.


It is a Sabbath service of Beit T’Shuvah, Hebrew for “House of Return,” a congregation at the crossroads of Judaism and substance abuse. It is housed in an addiction treatment facility and grounded in Jewish spirituality as a key component of its rehabilitation method.

“The worst crime that anyone can commit is to rob a human being of their dignity,” Rabbi Mark Borovitz told his congregation.

Borovitz, the congregation’s spiritual leader, has committed his life to using the Jewish faith to save Jewish addicts.

“Addiction is a malady of the body, it is a malady of the mind, and it is a malady of the soul,” Borovitz told the PBS program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.”

“So we take the language of the soul of the Jewish people. We go back, we help them return to the language that their soul understands and to (the) knowledge that they have. And we bring it together, and we bring a community together,” he said.

Addicts seeking treatment at Beit T’Shuvah come from all segments of the Jewish community _ rich and poor, old and young, religious and secular. Much of the help it offers, such as 12-step programs and group therapy, can be found at other treatment facilities.

What’s different here is the centrality of Jewish religious activities, such as regular 6 a.m. Torah study sessions led by Borovitz.


Borovitz has firsthand knowledge of the problem.

“I’m 161/2 years sober, and 161/2 years out of prison,” he said.

Before he became a man of God, Borovitz was an alcoholic, a con man and a thief who sometimes carried a gun.

“There were times when I was hanging out with Mafia people,” he said. “… I was a bad guy. I was a nightmare.”

Borovitz didn’t begin that way. He came from a stable, middle-class, religious family in Cleveland. But by the time he was in high school, he was fencing stolen goods. “I was the guy who could get you anything,” he said.

After moving to California in 1980, Borovitz got into insurance fraud, check kiting, even, he says, armed robbery.

“I was a really good con man,” he said. “So I could convince somebody that I was just helping out, and I’m just this nice guy, all of this kind of stuff. And then all of sudden, I’m stealing. And you’re like, `What happened? I thought this was my friend.”’

Borovitz was caught and sentenced to prison twice in the 1980s, spending a total of four years behind bars. It was during his second jail term that he began to re-embrace his childhood faith.


“I started praying again, and I started studying the Torah, and I read the story of Jacob,” he said, “and Jacob was a con man, a thief. He was a liar and a cheat. I loved him! I loved him!”

But Borovitz said that he could also see that Jacob could change “because he has this wrestling with his soul. And at that moment I knew that change was possible.”

After his release in 1988, Borovitz made his way to Beit T’Shuvah, which was smaller than it is now. It ran a halfway house for Jewish ex-cons, and when Borovitz arrived, he asked Beit T’Shuvah founder Harriet Rosetto for help.

“He needed a job, and I hired him,” she said. “I hired him first to run our thrift store. And then I hired him as my secretary. And then I noticed that he’d begun teaching Torah to the guys and that he was getting some real attention from them.”

In the years that followed, Borovitz got clean and sober and became an ordained rabbi in the Conservative movement. In 1990, he married Rosetto.

Rosetto said her husband’s personal story gives him a special authority among the recovering addicts at Beit T’Shuvah.


“He can talk to them in their language, you know,” she said. “And it’s not put on and they know that, you know. And he represents the hope that you can be where he was and become a credible, respected person.”

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Stan Coleite, a member of the congregation, says the stress on reconnecting to the religion helps a person reconnect to himself. “I can be a whole person,” he said.

“I can be with others who understand me, who know me,” he added. “And that means a lot to me. That isolation, that separation that addiction puts all of us into, is upended.”

Borovitz said his commitment to working with addicts is part of his own redemption but acknowledges he is not a completely changed man.

“I’m still a hustler,” he said. “I’m using all of those skills. It’s what we call in Judaism `tikkun.’ What you used for negativity, you use to repair. So I use all of those skills _ to listen to people and to convince and manipulate and to cajole and to move.

“And all this stuff, all those tools _ I use them right now. I am in action all of the time,” he said. “I love it! I love it! And I’m using everything that I have in me. And instead of hustling and using it for myself, I am using it to serve God.


“That’s freedom. That’s really action,” he said.

(A version of this story first appeared on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.” This article may be reprinted by RNS clients. Please use the Religion & Ethics Newsweekly credit line.)

Editors: To obtain photos of Mark Borovitz, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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