From Death to Life

A little over a week ago, I spent Shabbat at a JACS retreat. JACS is an organization led by volunteers that connects Jewish alcoholics, chemically dependent persons, and their significant others to each other and to resources, so that they can help support each other through the ongoing process of recovery in a nurturing Jewish environment. Part of that is also sharing knowledge about alcoholism and addiction with the wider Jewish community. Unfortunately, denial that alcoholism exists in the Jewish community is still fairly common.

It was an emotionally difficult and incredibly valuable experience for me to attend this retreat as a "Rabbi observer." In order to educate religious leaders about this population of people, JACS invites Rabbis, Cantors, and similar religious leaders, including students of the above, to visit this private community that gathers a few times a year.

I was introduced to the retreat with the description: "Here you can really see T'chiyat HaMeytim in action." Listening to people's stories of struggle, despair, and recovery, I found this to be true. A few individuals said that they entered a 12-step recovery program with such low expectations that they would have considered it a success if it only helped them not want to die every day. To then be here today, in recovery, with a job, a family, a normal life, this, they said, was beyond their wildest imaginings.

I have been thinking about the theme of T'chiyat HaMeytim "Giving life to the dead" and what we mean by that when we say it in our prayers many times a day.

The Reform movement is coming out with a new siddur, and one of the most controversial things that is going into this new prayerbook is re-introducing the option of saying M'chayei HaMeytim, of describing G!d as One who resuscitates/resurrects/gives life to the dead. It was removed decades ago, when the Reform movement felt that the irrational belief in a future Resurrection had no place in their Judaism. It was replaced with the phrase M'chayei HaKol, acknowledging that G!d is the source of life for the living, without making any promises about the dead. In the course of developing the new siddur, they found that many Reform Jews find meaning in the phrase M'chayei HaMeytim, perhaps in non-literal ways.

A combination of that liturgy discussion and the JACS retreat partially inspired the midrash that I wrote that you can read here: http://bloggadah.blogspot.com/2007/11/sprouting-salvation.html