Shaanan Gelman & His Son: When a Child Becomes Addicted

Transcripts are produced by Sofer.ai and lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections. 

David Bashevkin: Hi friends and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore a different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host David Bashevkin and this month we are exploring intergenerational divergence, the series we do each year before Passover, exploring how parents and children and families cope with our differences. Thank you so much to our series sponsor once again my dearest friends Danny and Sarala Turkel, I am so grateful for your continued friendship and support. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas so be sure to check out 18Forty.org that’s 18Forty.org, 18Forty.org where you can find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails.

For those who grew up in the nineties and remember all of the public service announcements not to do drugs, if you do drugs you’re a turkey, I remember that commercial. There used to be all sorts of public service announcements reminding people don’t use drugs, don’t fall into peer pressure, don’t try it even once or you’ll get addicted etc. etc. all of which are good advice which of course I am not minimizing. However, if you grew up and remember that world, then you probably also have a feeling and an inkling that that is not necessarily the best barrier, that is not necessarily the messaging that actually prevents people from falling into addiction. Addiction is an extraordinarily serious topic, one that requires professional intervention and guidance.

I am not that professional though I certainly have experienced the difficulty of addiction both something that I’ve seen and that I’ve experienced. There is something that people talk about in addicts’ personality, somebody who is prone to addiction. I think the book that really helped me understand the nature of addiction and whether that’s addiction to narcotics or nicotine or eating or just vegging out and watching reels and YouTube for hours upon hours, we have all forms of addiction, some which are pathological and dangerous, some which people just manage to live the entirety of their lives with. But there is a book from a former 18Forty guest Rabbi Shais Taub, someone who I am privileged to consider a very dear friend and in his book which is entitled God of Our Understanding: A Jewish Spirituality and Recovery from Addiction, he presents a very basic but very powerful theory for what addiction is all about that rings incredibly true.

Rabbi Shais Taub explains that addiction is not about the pleasure of the drug, it is not about the high, but what is the actual catalyst for why people seek the escapism of addiction? It’s the pain of existence itself. It is the pain of being alive. It is feeling separate, feeling isolated, feeling alone, feeling that lack of cohesive unity with relationships, with loved ones, with family, to the rest of your world. When we feel this acute pain, and it’s pain that certainly I have felt and I know so many people have felt even if it has never been acute enough to lead you to, chas v’shalom, try serious narcotics, there is no question that we’ve all felt that pain of anxiousness, of anxiety, looking for something to distract us.

Sometimes it’s a meal, sometimes it’s a drink, sometimes it’s a movie, but we look for distractions in life and that underlying pain very often if you dig deep enough, it is the pain of existence itself, it is the angst of existence, what’s sometimes called the trauma of everyday life. Being alive and not knowing what is the right path, how do I feel at home in my life, in my world, in my own skin? And because of this, because of how central family is to kind of creating the space where we feel at home in our lives, being the entry point of how we make sense of the world, when, chas v’shalom, a child falls into addiction, it is not an isolated incident but it turns families upside down completely. A family with a child with addiction is not a regular family with an asterisk, the entire nature of all of the relationships with the siblings and the parents and the siblings to each other can be turned upside down because of. The underlying problem is finding peace, finding a home in life itself, and that is nearly impossible to do without the help and healing that comes through family.

And that is why I thought it was so important in our annual exploration of intergenerational divergence, in our annual exploration of how families cope with differences, how family heal from differences. Some of those differences that we’ve explored are religious, some of them are sociological, some of them are just generational; every generation has its own style. But the reason why we talk about this now is because that pain of existence, that pain of being on a journey and not quite knowing or feeling or being able to experience that sense of being at home in your own life, the place where we return to to actually find and construct that home for ourselves, for our families, for the Jewish people, is the Pesach Seder, is Passover itself. Passover is the celebration of the formation of the Jewish people.

It is when we became an immutable family, and it is in that collective family of the Jewish people, it’s in that beginning of knowing that everyone has a seat, everyone has a place at the Passover Seder, everyone has a beginning on Passover. Passover is, so to speak, our collective childhood where we’re able to go back and almost access our own inner child and reimagine that we could reach out, touch, and heal our beginnings. And I was thinking quite a bit more about addiction, particularly this past year when there were headlines, really across Hollywood, about a family being destroyed from addiction. And after the headlines of this story about a child who had dealt with addiction and then did the unspeakable to his own parents, there was an article that I found incredibly moving, somebody who themselves had struggled with addiction, somebody who themselves came from a prominent family and was talking about his reaction of watching another family suffer and struggle with addiction.

And that article is by Kevin Jack McEnroe. That is the child of former tennis professional John McEnroe. And I wanted to read at least the beginning of it because it touches into the unknowability, the conversation of addiction usually begins, any parent, anybody who sees a family, there’s finger pointing, there’s blame, whose fault, why would they fall into this? And this story really changes your perspective, at least my perspective on what addiction is all about. I’m not going to read the whole thing.

The article is called “Being Kevin, Watching Being Charlie” and it was published on The Small Bow. And this is how the article begins. Once my father came to my house when I was still using. We were supposed to have lunch and I showed up and cancelled without much notice.

I probably went back to sleep as I usually did on days like this. But then my phone began ringing over and over again. It was face down, but after a few times, I could see the light coming up from my side table. After I looked at it, assuming he was mad, I turned it off.

I’d deal with it later; I’d apologize again, just like I always did. And then the buzzer began to go off, and off, and off. I had a railroad apartment, so I went to the kitchen and looked out the window to see my dad scrambling around my Brooklyn side street, looking desperate. We caught eyes and he knew I was there.

I didn’t have time to clean, so there were bottles everywhere and it was disgusting. I was ashamed of myself, but I didn’t know what to do. The jig was up, as they say. My dad would be furious, and I would deserve it.

Something about that made me open the door. When he came in and saw everything, I just sat down, expecting to hear some version of what I told myself every day: you’re a piece of garbage, what’s wrong with you, how could you, why? Instead, he motioned for me to stand. He gave me a hug with tears in his eyes and told me he loved me. And then he left.

I didn’t stop using that day; I’m not sure I even cleaned. But I’ve never forgotten it. I think that’s when I realized that it wasn’t his fault and maybe it wasn’t anybody’s. This is an extraordinary article of a child reflecting on what it was like to grow up with a little bit more spotlight than other kids, what it was like to find some sense of comfort and being at home in his own life, and what it’s like watching somebody else struggle with addiction when you know the real mechanics of the disease and how it picks apart our sense of place and our sense of calmness and turns families and individuals upside down.

The article continues to talk about what it was like watching this film called Being Charlie. Being Charlie was a film that was created by Rob Reiner and his son Nick Reiner before Rob’s ‘s murder and it reflected on the parent-child relationship and it was how Rob Reiner kind of knew it was the language he knew to try to bring healing to his son Nick and why he made the movie. And this article by Jack McEnroe, another child of a famous star reflects on what it was like watching this movie. And I wanted to read a little more of how he kind of processed the film.

So what I felt watching, he writes, watching the father of Charlie which is based on this real life parent-child relationship, the father of Charlie as he runs for office is that the writer of this film who had openly based it on his own experiences had never trusted his father’s intentions as to why he was sending him away to these places in the first place. He felt that he was the black sheep and he saw that he was damaging his father’s legacy. He thought that this is what made his father angry, not how much his son hurt. His father’s life would be easier if he didn’t exist, he thought, and I thought my parents were better off without me too.

The saddest part about that statement in retrospect is that it’s true. If I stayed that way they were better off if I were gone. Everyone is. One of the things he writes that’s become clear to me since I got sober is that at some point you have to make a decision that you want to be sober.

And the more somebody tells you that you should before you’ve made that decision yourself, the more you resent that person for doing so. However, Charlie is a heroin addict and this is likely seemingly before fentanyl and a lot of people don’t get a chance to make that decision anymore because they’ve already died. So many addicts today don’t even get a chance to feel their bottom, the desperation that’s often required for change. And I think this paragraph is incredibly profound of where he kind of reflects of his own identity in the home that he came from.

It can be and has been embittering to encounter people who think this way. He’s reflecting on somebody who was upset at him for not telling him that he came from a famous home. And it helped foster a feeling, and I love this phrase, of terminal uniqueness that took me some time to overcome. Terminal uniqueness.

What a powerful phrase. In many ways I suppose my family situation is objectively unique. Not a lot of people’s parents are actors and tennis players but the longer I’ve been around the more I’ve come to think that everybody’s family is crazy and also how dangerous fitting out can be. Many of us feel alone, a self-nurtured sense of standing apart, but I always thought my feeling was worse and impossible.

I thought my problems were in my genes. My mom’s a drug addict and her mom before her and they never stop so we’re stuck. We’re defined by who we’re from and there’s nothing we can do about it and then the only thing left is escape. But even though this wasn’t my choice I still get to choose it if I want to.

That part is up to me. I get to accept my family for who they are and in doing so recognize that I’m lucky to still be here. It’s obvious to me how fortunate I am now but that’s only because I pushed everyone away and almost killed myself drinking and using. It’s not in spite of my issues but because of them that I’m happy today in a way that I wasn’t when I was younger.

And so a grateful alcoholic I suppose I am even though my God that line used to make me crazy. This is an extraordinarily powerful article as I think all memoirs from addicts are because the memoir of an addict is somebody who is really reclaiming their identity, their narrative and their story. There’s a great line from this book called The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison where she writes, “Yearning is our most powerful narrative engine and addiction is one of its dialects.” We yearn for something better, for something more, for something more whole, for a better life for ourselves and one of the dialects that we get caught into wanting that more, wanting that something else is the dialect of addiction that takes us to that escapist place rather than that whole place. But our ability to tell our story is a part of the healing.

Our ability to find a peacefulness and at-homeness in our own narrative. How did we get here? Being at home in our own lives is the beginning of recovery and that is why it is such a privilege to introduce two incredible people, Rabbi Shanan Gelman and his incredible son Zerachya or Ziggy as we call him, who explore Ziggy’s story with addiction, how it affected their family, how it affected their community where Rabbi Gelman serves as the rabbi of Kehilat Chovevei Tzion in Chicago. These are two courageous people who opened up their own personal story in the hopes that it would provide some measure of healing, some measure of hope to others, to other families, to other individuals, to the Jewish people that we have the power to bend the arc of our narrative and find healing. So with Without further ado, here is our conversation with Rabbi Shanan Gelman and his son Ziggy.

You went through a really powerful and I’m sure painful story together. When did you first realize that kind of the normal path, and I’m using air quotes for normal, but when did you realize that that path was not working for you?

Ziggy Gelman: In hindsight, it’s a lot earlier than in the moment. In the moment, the first time I realized that was not until much later, like even Shana Bet in yeshiva about three four years ago.

David Bashevkin: What was going on in your life that you realized that kind of the normal process of taking somebody from high school to your year in Israel, then back to your handful of Jewish universities or places with a vibrant Hillel, when did you realize plan A is not working for me?

Ziggy Gelman: I think it was when I saw all of my friends in yeshiva kind of moving towards a certain path and I felt like lagging behind almost.

And then more than that, all those friends of mine, all those peers were being encouraged and the future steps being laid out for them by the yeshiva were like laid out and given to them, and for me I felt like that wasn’t the case and I felt like it was more confusing. It threw me off to see everybody else have those steps laid out for them and I didn’t feel that way.

David Bashevkin: So many people if not everyone experiences confusion at some point in their life. When did kind of the normal ambiguity of what is my future going to be like, where am I going to build a family, all the questions that occupy us in our late teens and early twenties, when did the world of addiction even come in into the picture as a way of assuaging or addressing some of the pain that you were feeling?

Ziggy Gelman: I think I would say relatively early in the times that I was using substances.

I started realizing it felt in the moment this is more of a priority to me than all the other things that I was told was a priority or were supposed to be a priority in my life such as learning in school or having a family, very quickly when I was using substances that became the priority and that became the thing that my daily drive was to use those substances and focus on my addiction rather than my future.

David Bashevkin: I want to speak a little bit more plainly. We’re talking very generally about addiction, substances. Many people now have some experience especially with marijuana as a recreational drug.

I’m not commenting one way or the other about whether or not that’s dangerous or a good idea, but for many people they are able to kind of live in that world, maybe drink on Shabbos or have a drink or two here, maybe smoke or have edibles recreationally. How far was it in between kind of recreational drug use and the realization that I am dealing with a much more serious addiction?

Ziggy Gelman: I think it was also relatively early especially I mean comparing to other friends of mine in recovery and other people I know that are not in recovery. I came to the realization that I was not doing this in a normal way probably a year into having first tried substances I started realizing that I don’t do this like any other person. It became more of an excuse in my mind.

I was like oh I’m an addict, like this is how I am and this is what I’m going to do forever. I didn’t really understand that there were answers for that sort of thing. I thought it was like oh this is just going to be my story now that I’m an addict and I use drugs.

David Bashevkin: I want to turn over for a moment kind of this story from your father’s perspective.

What’s your timeline for when you realized that plan A was not working for Ziggy? Was this happening in real time? The realizations were happening the same moment that Ziggy realized it? Or was there kind of like a lag in your own discovery that your child was suffering?

Shaanan Gelman: It certainly happened over the course of time, both for myself and my wife. We were initially aware of some use and I’ll just share a little background. Ziggy spent the entire senior year, year 2020 also COVID, more or less in the hospital. Three major surgeries, he had his colon removed, he had an ostomy, he had a new surgery called J-pouch where they basically recreate an artificial colon.

He missed much of school, nobody could visit him, there was a lot of hospitalization infections, isolation from peers. You could imagine all of those things combined and this is going on during COVID. We have other children, we have a kehilla, we have our lives, my wife has her business, and our priority then was really keep this kid alive. I mean there were times it was a frightening version of ulcerative colitis that nothing was working.

Absolutely no medication. He was in so much pain. And one of the things that happens when you’re dealing with a medical emergency is you prioritize sort of in hierarchy is stay alive and then you worry about sort of the mental health which is important but it’s certainly on the side. Sometime after that, and I don’t know if Ziggy’s timeline matches up exactly like the way I understand it, to manage with whatever he had dealt with he procured a medical marijuana card legally.

He’s a smart kid, he figured it out. Illinois is one of the first states to legalize this. And so he was always a creative kid. He moved from solving Rubik’s cubes in five ten seconds to this.

It was such a strange year. You know he interviewed for Yeshiva from the. Nobody could visit him. His friends would visit him with pizza, and they couldn’t come inside, so they stood outside, eight floors down, in the middle of the city, holding a pizza and a sign saying, oh, we’re going to eat your pizza for you, Ziggy.

Here we go. I can’t imagine what that was like. And we’re running on fumes, we’re trying to survive. At some point, he procures this card, and I start to smell in the house something.

I said to my wife, I’m pretty sure that’s marijuana. We’re not familiar. My familiarity with drugs, I went to an MTA Frisch game once, years ago, to watch a basketball game, and I accidentally walked in the wrong door and behind the gym there were three really tall seniors and they were smoking some pipe and there was a blue light glowing, this was before vaping. I have no idea what I saw, but I was frightened.

I’d never really touched this stuff. I knew people who did, but it wasn’t really part of my life. And so he went to this, and it was for us, there was initially anger, but we thought it was contained. He saw a therapist, he said this is like, you know, someone normal, goes through a trauma.

It was intense. There were a lot of paraphernalia, we kept finding more and more and more drugs and more and more things and it was like an endless cycle of lying that developed, but at the end of the day, we shipped him off to Israel. It was like he came out of third surgery, he recovered, we have no idea what was really going on, but the therapist said I think he’s ready to go, he’s fine, this is perfectly normal. And as far as we know, he was in yeshiva and now he was going to be fixed.

David Bashevkin: So at that point, you know, you send him off to Israel, he’s a high school student, you’re probably not the only parent who has concerns of their high school child’s marijuana use. It’s not that unusual. We wish it was more unusual, but it’s not wildly unusual. When you go off to Israel for the year, is that like front and center, like we need the drug use to stop, or is it just like we figured it’ll peter out?

Shaanan Gelman: We thought this was his first time in a long time being normal, right? He’s healthy, physically healthy, some infections as a result of his surgeries, but he was healthy, he was in a holy environment, he was with Talmidei Chachamim, he was with other people who hopefully were like-minded.

We thought, and as a result of consulting mental health professionals, that he was in good hands. And in consultation with Ziggy over the course of the phone and FaceTime and speaking to Rebbeim in Yeshiva, sounded like things were going well. In fact, we visited him halfway through the year, and he looked like your typical kid in that Yeshiva, right? He took on all of the hanhagos of that Yeshiva and really, we went to shiurim together and he gave us a tour of the campus. We went out to eat.

It was a lovely visit. I was so thrilled, I thanked Hashem, we’re past this medical emergency, it was a blip, that little marijuana use, every high school kid does it. He’s now found his sam hachayim, his holy drug, and it’s Torah and it’s the Yeshiva, and we were just, we were good. We were pretty good.

David Bashevkin: Toggling back to Ziggy at that point, you’re a few months into your first year in Israel, your parents visit. When they came to visit you, did you feel like you needed to hide that your drug use was continuing? Had it already escalated past marijuana at that point? What are you doing to ensure that your father walked away, your parents walked away from Israel being like, he’s doing great. How did you manage that? Did it not escalate so high, or were you kind of already, had a system and a process to hide it really, really well?

Ziggy Gelman: Well, first I’ll say that when I went to Israel, I’d say the first five months of being in Yeshiva there, I actually was not smoking marijuana and in my head, I was actually pretty much on the same page with my parents, like, oh, I found this new system, you know, Chicago and the high school there, and I had a hard time fitting in because I missed my whole senior year, I felt like I missed out a lot. I came to this, this new environment with all these new people and I really did feel like I found a good place.

So on that front, I wasn’t lying, but by the time they had come, I would say about a month before then, I had started smoking again here and there, and I remember vividly, I had told myself like, oh, two weeks before they come, I’m going to stop. I’m going to stop smoking. This was my own head. And I remember that it got down to the point where there was one week before they came, and I was like, okay, now I really got to stop.

And I ended up, I think two days before they came, I ended up like putting everything away and throwing everything out, which is interesting because I don’t know what was my mindset, like what was I thinking? Like, oh, those two days, what was my concern if I was still smoking? You know, I had hid it from them all the other times. Realistically, I think I was scared they were going to show up with a cup to pee in, you know, like, hey, take a test, like which wasn’t the case. It was not an aggressive visit, didn’t feel like one, and it felt very nice and in a lot of ways I wasn’t putting up a front. I really did feel like I bought into the Yeshiva and at the same time, it wasn’t as intense as it was back in Chicago yet.

Little did I know it was going to get a lot more intense, but I had been smoking a little bit here and there, and I figured, you know, oh, I’ll put it down for a few days before my parents come to show them what I’m all about now.

David Bashevkin: And sometimes right before your parents come, you almost want to like show yourself that like I’m still in charge, you know, we could get through this together. But as you just mentioned, you know, it did escalate quite a bit after this trip. Where do you look at the transition point, Ziggy, where this escalated from what’s called…

all habitual marijuana use to something far more serious though that can also be serious into actual substance addiction? What are the steps especially in Israel? I have a hard time ordering a cab in Israel I would have an extremely difficult time procuring narcotics of any sort in Israel. We recently did a trip to Israel my son I think he had a croup cough like a certain bad cough. It took me half a day in Israel just to get a medication for him. How did recreational use escalate so seriously? You don’t have to be super detailed with the people and the spots and we don’t need people

Shaanan Gelman: sitting in yeshiva taking notes and listening saying

David Bashevkin: oh that’s where I can get it.

Correct. But we do want parents and people in yeshiva thinking about how it’s not a ten mile road between habitual recreational drug use and more serious addiction that you’re going to need third party help for. How did that escalation take place?

Ziggy Gelman: Not only is it not a ten mile road I think it’s a very very fine line. It’s such a fine line that even people who to everybody else are so obviously an addict and so obviously in this disease of addiction to themselves might not even be able to admit that.

And really that’s a very important differentiation is it’s up to the individual themselves to really admit that about themselves. It’s a hard thing to admit. That being said I think for myself it was around Pesach actually of that year that you guys had come to visit. I don’t remember exactly I found myself I found some apartment to perch myself up in for a day or a Shabbos or something.

I’ll say this if I wanted to living in Monsey now today I would never thank God but if I wanted to get access to hard substances here in Monsey I would have no idea what to do. I happen to think that in Israel it is significantly easier you’d be surprised it’s all over the place unfortunately it’s a Google search away so all it took was doing my own research like my father said like Abba said I’m a very resourceful person and I mean at 18 in Chicago I had a medical card because I went online signed up for a thing paid a doctor a few bucks and he was happy to give me access to that thing as an 18 year old. Something that’s a law it’s crazy. So I learned about other substances through the internet.

It wasn’t through any friends of mine or anything I was doing it all alone in the privacy of my room. I learned about all of it through the internet and ended up finding out about psychedelics and things like that and I went to the same resources that I found the weed from in Israel and managed to find the psychedelics too.

David Bashevkin: You obviously kind of reach a new plateau in your dependency on substances and whether it’s psychedelics or whatever other drugs you were using at the time at what point did you realize did you have a wake up call that this is no longer manageable for me? Was it a moment where you hit rock bottom or you hit some floor and you realized this is not manageable I do not want the rest of my life to look like this

Ziggy Gelman: as it is right now. Are you asking about the point in which I decided to turn things around and realize I have to stop and put a stop to it or the time I realized that I had to put a stop to it and then continued doing it for a while?

David Bashevkin: I’d like to hear both I’d like to hear about the process I’m sure it’s not one day you wake up and just go cold turkey and say that’s going to be in the past.

What were the signposts along the way that got you three steps closer then a couple steps back another three steps closer another couple steps back? What was that first wake up that you had the realization that this behavior my life right now I don’t want it to be sustainable as it is right now.

Ziggy Gelman: I remember it was Yom Yerushalayim in that first year in that Shana Aleph and my friends and I went to Yerushalayim the whole yeshiva went to Yerushalayim for the Rikud HaDegalim which was the flag parade all of Yerushalayim all the Jews go and with the Israeli flags and they do a whole march. And I remember I had a friend who was quite a politician I guess in his own head and he decided to before the parade started check out the Arab quarter and me having developed this issue I took a pretty high dose of LSD and was trying to find him in the old city on Yom Yerushalayim and I ended up finding myself in the middle of the Arab quarter there basically watching extremely high urban warfare in the country of my nation and people were beating each other up in the streets of the Arab quarter in the old city it was absolutely crazy and I was totally lost 90 percent of the people I saw around me were Arab not Jews. I ended up finding my way back to my friend somehow and from what I remember I found an Israeli guy and he helped me.

He barely spoke a word of English I barely spoke a word of Hebrew but we managed. And I think after that experience I realized that my decision making was being swayed by this substance and more than that it was leading me And it’s not safe. And I realized that I would not have found myself there and especially if I did, I would have been in the right headspace. And I definitely was not.

And so the day after that I got on the phone with my therapist and I told him what had happened and he basically told me that he thinks I should go to rehab. And longer down the line and more substance use later, I did end up going to that first treatment center. It was an outpatient treatment center in Chicago.

David Bashevkin: Now it’s escalated and you realize, even though it’s a little bit of a road between the realization and the actual seeking out of help, something that I’ve repeated many times from a friend of mine named Eli Shulman is that one of the real berachot that we need in life is the right amount of suffering.

To have the right amount of suffering is a real beracha, is a real blessing in life. Sometimes we have too much suffering and we’re incapacitated and sometimes you have too little suffering and like I could live with that. Coming back to your parents, we left it Abba the last time we spoke, you were visiting in Israel in you know that January winter break time, it goes great. He’s now fast-forwarded to his experience on Yom Yerushalayim.

In the interim have you found out anything? When do you and your wife discover that your child in Israel across an ocean and quite a bit of United States land is now really struggling and is kind of falling again into this world of addiction and it’s gotten far more serious?

Shaanan Gelman: We were mostly in the dark. Even when we found out that there was some relapse, we had no idea it was an escalation in terms of volume, frequency or the level of drug that was being used. We assumed maybe he had used weed once or twice. At some point when he was reaching out for help, he reached out to us.

We all encouraged our son as well as I think his therapist to reach out to his hanhalah, to reach out to the administration in the yeshiva and to let them know you’re struggling and to try to figure out what to do. While he was doing this we’re navigating so the fear of 7,000 miles away, not really knowing how severe this is as you said, and also not really knowing what was the best course. The myth that was now being exploded in our faces was that somehow if you send a kid to yeshiva that will heal all the problems and realizing that this wasn’t working and that even though as Ziggy admitted he enjoyed yeshiva, he was connecting at some point, these are his people, his land, it wasn’t happening. And he went on his own to check out some other options, other yeshivot, thinking maybe it was about just having a different approach, maybe less intellectual, something that affected more on that touched more on the heart, the Rachmana liba ba’ei approach.

And bouncing around and in discussion with rabbeim and administrators in different yeshivot, I realized I don’t have all the information. One of the rabbeim who he sat down with in another yeshiva evidently Ziggy confided in him that this was far more severe than he had let on. And he said to me, he said look I don’t have the reshut to tell you everything but it’s more serious than you think it is. And at that point we were like wow this is bad news.

But on the other hand he was determined to correct course. And at some point he discussed with his hanhalah in his current yeshiva and they came up with a plan. He would go through rehab on his own over the course of summer. This was in an outpatient facility in Chicago.

He would agree to periodic random drug tests as he came back the following year. Because he came forward, they were willing to work with him. Which I think speaks a lot for the yeshiva. What I will say, I don’t think any yeshiva was equipped or have the knowledge about addiction or about how to manage these things.

It’s not their forte. They’re not trained to do so. It’s only I don’t know 15 years ago or so that mandatory yeshivot now have a therapist on campus, you know working in the administration, but they had no idea. We had no idea what to do about it.

And we were kind of all going the flow trying to figure this out together. I sensed some anger on the part of his yeshiva and likewise we felt there was a mutual frustration. Like I give you my kid for a year, why is this happening, right? I couldn’t believe it, right? Like your child is on loan in a yeshiva for the year, that means they’re your children. If something’s off you should know.

And I don’t fault them in the end, right? It took me a while to get here. But I think there was a lot of secrecy, a lot of dishonesty and most of it of course, you know Ziggy managed that very effectively, but there was a lot of fear. We were just far away from it. We were angry, we were frustrated, we were upset at him, at the yeshiva, at our peers, at ourselves, at Hashem.

There was a lot of frustration, anger to go around and shock. How are things descending so rapidly? Right? We had so many questions and we didn’t have obviously any of the answers. We had no idea about the psychedelic use until maybe months, months later. This was when he went back to yeshiva Shana Bet when things truly escalated.

So we’re in the dark. We’re starting to learn about things. We have no idea that it’s this bad. We think it’s just now some marijuana use.

David Bashevkin: You come home if I’m following correctly, and you enter a rehab in Chicago. Are you living at this rehab or you’re still living at home? It’s an outpatient or in-? Ziggy, take me through that experience of just the first time that you go to rehab.

I mean even the term like he’s going to rehab holds a cultural memory. Did it feel strange for yourself that this is now what I’m doing? Did you go with begrudgingly, joyfully? What is your disposition this first stint when you’re at this outpatient rehab in Chicago?

Ziggy Gelman: Thinking back on it, surprisingly it didn’t feel weird. I didn’t feel like I was going begrudgingly. It almost felt on par in my head of, oh yeah, this is part of it.

I spent my senior year in the hospital and my life was thrown off the rails and at that point I began seeing my future as in and out of rehab, substance use, and so it really didn’t feel like a strange thing to me. It felt like, oh okay, this is the part where I go to rehab. I saw this coming. How’s it going to go? What’s going to happen after?

David Bashevkin: And your experience inside of rehab, it’s sure to be a lot of group work, it’s a lot of one-on-one counseling, testing.

Was your experience through rehab a positive experience?

Ziggy Gelman: That was not the last rehab I ended up going to and I would say it wasn’t a negative one. Personally, I don’t believe that an outpatient rehab was what I needed at that point. I think some people it works for, some people it doesn’t. For me personally I needed a more intensive level of care.

What it did provide was this breaking into honesty, honesty with therapists. Up until that point I was seeing a therapist that I definitely know I was not completely honest with. Somebody would ask me sometimes like, have you been using substances and I would say, not really, and he would always say, what do you mean not really? That was my, so I was always blurring the lines with everyone because I was concerned who was talking to who. But that rehab definitely opened up the idea of fully being honest and also having, more importantly, and something that I hold dear to myself today is like having other people like me.

All of the people in that treatment center with me, the other clients there were also addicts, they were also people who had been struggling and were showing up to this treatment center. There were things, other things, such as like AA, 12-step stuff that treatment center didn’t really provide and that I definitely needed and I think I didn’t end up getting it right that time for a variety of reasons, that one being the main one.

David Bashevkin: In my own relationship with my parents, I always struggled with lies. Growing up it was much easier for me to lie than to take responsibility.

To this day, I don’t look at myself as still a liar but it’s an addictive defense mechanism to just say everything is fine. And I was so curious because you really harped on that as the takeaway from this first stint in rehab. Can you explain how did they impress upon you the importance of honesty in therapy? Did they have a specific approach or program to kind of center that like, we can’t do any work unless it’s built on a foundation of honesty? Do you remember how they imparted that to you?

Ziggy Gelman: So I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t say that I learned that from the treatment center or the facilitators in that treatment center itself. I would actually say that I learned it from the peers.

I learned it from the other people that they would have a smoke break and we would all go outside and hang out for a few minutes and during that like 10-minute period, 30-minute period we would all hang out and we would chat and I would hear from the other people what had been going on with them and how they ended up here. And hearing full frontal stories of, I was I think at the time 19 and hearing from 40-year-old men who could not stop drinking their entire lives are now deciding to get help and hearing from these people who have been through a lot worse things than I have was what showed me like, oh, I don’t need to necessarily be afraid to talk to everyone. Like there are some people who get it. I think it was more of a seed planted in my head because I definitely, if I’m being honest I was not honest and I still lied throughout that rehab experience.

I lied to them about being sober. I was not sober throughout that rehab. But I was honest with the other peers.

David Bashevkin: Okay, that really is illuminating.

And now I want to shift back to your father’s experience because all of a sudden this child whose issues were in Israel which creates a fair bit of distance. In some ways it can be very, even more alarming, you feel even less in control. But all of a sudden you bring a child, your child back to Chicago where you have your own, I don’t want to call it a kingdom, but you are a communal leader and now all of a sudden your son is living back at home. Was it hard to kind of reacclimate to having an adult child? It’s not a two-year-old who needs you at home because you need to change their diapers or because you need to feed them, which every parent goes through early in their career.

But you have an adult child who’s struggling and at the same time you have to serve as this role model for the community. Did you have any internal conversations when Ziggy was coming back about how you were going to talk about it with the rest of the community? Not talk… talk about it with the rest of the community or any sense and I’m deliberately using this term of like embarrassment, of like, shoot, now my child who’s not the perfect paragon of Modern Orthodox success story is now back in my home court and it could reflect on me and my ability to be a leader.

Shaanan Gelman: I think that that definitely took place, but it took place a bit later on.

Right now where we are in the timeline at least, this is the summer and we are under the impression because the way the story we’re getting from the day program and rehab, that things are going well and that he’s getting the help he needs, he’s going to go back to Israel again and continue to be reinforced by the hanhala there and he will be back on track and this was just a momentary lapse. But to address your question, once he returns to Israel for the second year and things do get quite a bit worse and we have to at some point check him into a full-time inpatient rehab, cut off, no phone, nothing, there are many powerful stories that we could share, at that point the contradiction, the inner stira between my role, my outer role and my persona as a rabbi and a public figure and the job I felt I was doing a poor job as a parent came crashing in. Most of it was internalized because we weren’t talking about it publicly at that point at all. But I’ll tell you a few poignant moments that just hit home.

First of all, there’s every single person who comes to you and says, oh, how’s your son at such and such yeshiva? When you say a prestigious yeshiva, to understand, one of my rebbeim said to me, to fall off a little ledge, a step, but to fall off of like the most prestigious yeshivas, it’s like a mountain that is so colossal and you’re at the bottom. And then every person who tells you, how’s your son doing at Harvard, right? Each time it’s a dagger in the heart. Each time it just it’s so crushing. I can’t explain to you how this expectation and this hope and this dream and every tefilla and that’s going on.

Two quick stories. Number one is the rosh yeshiva, huge gaon and talmid chacham comes to speak at our shul while this is going on and he’s in full-time rehab now in the second year. And I have to introduce him and I let him into my office and I give him some sefarim to open up the Rambam and this and that. And while it’s going on, people are saying, oh, and Rabbi Gelman, a proud parent of our yeshiva, and I’m like, well actually, he’s not in your yeshiva anymore.

And there was this total disconnect and I’m thinking, this is just so embarrassing. And how could it be, I’m such a failure. And my wife was much stronger than me. She understood this is the task at hand and we both struggled, but I think this was more of a struggle for me because as the man, you want to see your son thrive in yeshiva like you did and while this is going on, people are asking you continuously, oh, how’s it going, oh, how’s it going, he’s going to be a rabbi, he’s going to be this, right? And I’m like, well I hope he’s alive, and thinking that, right? And each of these conversations, it’s a further descent into that pain.

And then you watch other people in your shul, people who you shepherded for years, people you’ve guided the couples through sticky situations when their marriage was on the rocks. You’ve helped those children out throughout the years. You’ve written letters of recommendation for them. You’ve fudged the corners a little bit so you can help their kids get into schools and yeshivas and into summer camps.

And those kids are thriving and they come from the families you’re thinking about, I love these families with all my heart, I love my balabatim. But I’m the rabbi, I’m supposed to be the one whose kid is thriving. I’m supposed to be setting an example. And I’m watching and hearing the stories of success and it’s coming back from these other families and I’m thinking, this is just this is a very painful thing.

David Bashevkin: It feels like unfair, like the injustice.

Shaanan Gelman: Yeah, and that’s something that I’ve come full circle on that obviously, I don’t feel that way anymore. Not only am I not embarrassed, I’m so proud and I wouldn’t trade this relationship and this child for anything in the world.

David Bashevkin: I do want to hear from Ziggy, do you think the public nature of your family exacerbated or was that ever, maybe not front and center, but kind of in your mind on this journey of like, oh shoot, like my dad is like a communal leader, I need to like either sweep this really deep under the rug or figure out a plan B, go to a different state, country or whatever it is.

How did you relate through this process to the public role of your family?

Ziggy Gelman: It’s funny, I speak at schools about my story, like high schools and middle schools. The first thing that I mention when I’m like in the story part of the addiction talk is I grew up and my father is a rabbi, my father was a rabbi while I was growing up, and my mother was like a fitness instructor, guru, Instagram influencer person. My point being that my parents are very, very well-known people in the community. And I think, I wouldn’t say pressure is the right word, but I think that it definitely came with an unspoken thing in my head that what I’m doing not only has to stay private from my parents, but has to stay private from everybody else too.

I don’t blame any particular person for that really, but I would say that that definitely led to the lying and the manipulation of everything came from that place of fear of the judgment, fear of what are they going to think?

David Bashevkin: At what point in this second year do things really devolve?

Ziggy Gelman: I went back a little late for the second year. I came a little late because I had to finish the stint in rehab. I’d say I gave it about, I’d give it about. A week, a week before, and even that week was like, okay, I’m barely hanging on, I found some other alternative substances to try out that wouldn’t come up on the test or something.

I don’t know. Point is, it did not last very long. I recognized very quickly that the Yeshiva was only testing me for marijuana, for THC, and I was like, great, I can do everything else. And I had already found access to the LSD, and from that point everything was just at my fingertips.

I later found out that the person I was buying from was not a friend of mine, just a random guy who would show up on a motorcycle and hand me baggies. But he was putting other things in my drugs, which is a whole other crazy concern looking back at it, you know, who knows what could have been in there. I found that out because when I would take a tox later when I did, you know, eventually go to the inpatient rehab.

Shaanan Gelman: They found traces of fentanyl or other things, methamphetamines in whatever you were taking.

Ziggy Gelman: Fentanyl, meth, yeah, I didn’t ever intentionally take those things.

I can’t say I wouldn’t have ever, I can definitely say that had it progressed, who knows what could have happened.

David Bashevkin: When you’re in Israel and now you’re in your second year, you know, you go through a week, a half a day, do you have to reach a new rock bottom? What brings you to actually consider now I need inpatient serious help? What is the neon entrance sign that beckons you to get more serious help?

Ziggy Gelman: I think I knew it, I was almost waiting to get caught basically, but something we didn’t really mention was that I had worked for many, many years, almost seven years at that point with the special needs community and in my yeshiva there was a group of special needs boys who would come and they would come for the year to spend a year in yeshiva basically. The head of that ended up offering me a job because he saw how I interacted with them the year prior. I remember when he mentioned my interactions with them, that interaction I had I was on obscene substances as well, but I guess it put me in a good mood.

So I started working with the guys from his program and it was, you know, in my yeshiva. What ended up happening was I was not sleeping at a certain point. I was up for probably three, four days straight. I was completely out of my mind.

I don’t really remember anything from that period.

Shaanan Gelman: You remember the phone call?

Ziggy Gelman: Yes, that I remember.

David Bashevkin: What’s that phone call?

Shaanan Gelman: So my wife and I get a phone call middle of the night.

Ziggy Gelman: It was the middle of the night for you guys too?

Shaanan Gelman: Yeah, maybe it was middle night for you, it was 2 a.m. for you or something.

He had been sending us pictures of things he’s been making recipes. Do you remember this? 

Ziggy Gelman: Yeah, Ithink I sent some pretty bizarre…

Shaanan Gelman: … and he was very proud of a recipe that he prepared. He always liked cooking, something he does now actually.

It was fluorescent colors, purples and greens, it looked like a dream out of some Grateful Dead concert. It was insane. And he said, isn’t this beautiful? I looked at my wife and said, who’s going to tell him that that’s not a good looking dish? It looks insane. And then a few days later he calls us and in tears, screaming and hysterical.

We just looked at each other, we said, this just got really bad. And we were on the phone with him for a few hours maybe, maybe an hour or two. And I don’t know if you remember the details, you know, Ima and I were just, we’re sitting there by the closet of our room and we’re just on the phone with you and we were just holding each other’s hands and we said, okay, we thought we had a win, he got hired to do this job to work with special needs kids. We have to call first thing in the morning and say absolutely not, he may not be working with anyone.

And we didn’t have to wait that long because it was within 12 hours that, you know, you were caught with substances in the room, right?

Ziggy Gelman: I think I woke somebody up in the middle of the night making a fool of myself and the head of the program. It’s funny that phone call that you mentioned, I honestly haven’t thought about it in years. I forgot. In my head up until that point was the first moment I got caught was when he approached me, but I realized that I pretty much busted myself on that phone call.

David Bashevkin: You called up your parents and just kind of poured out all of the brokenness that you were experiencing.

Ziggy Gelman: I think I couldn’t hold it in. Yeah, I think it was too much to keep in my own chest anymore. I had spent all that time building resentments and building confusion and thinking that I was on some power trip against them.

And against the world, more than just against my parents, against the whole world. At that point in my head, this world was not meant for me was the conclusion that I came to. And I was not cut out for it, and nobody was like me, and I’m going to stick to my thing and do my thing. And I think eventually it hit me very hard that that’s not the case and I need, I need my people.

I need Abba and Ima. And that’s what led me subconsciously because consciously there was no normal decision.

David Bashevkin: There’s nothing there, yeah.

Ziggy Gelman: But subconsciously that’s what came out.

David Bashevkin: It’s really remarkable that subconsciously your soul was screaming out for Abba and Ima for your mother and father, and you had a conversation that you didn’t initially include in this timeline and it obviously had a big impact on your parents. I was imagining myself having a tough conversation with a child holding a hand of a spouse when you’re trying to navigate it, and every parent has navigated things on a phone where if you’re not literally holding hands with… your spouse you want to just to face something together. So at this point, this is kind of the ultimate, the final escalation, the decision you go to in-patient rehab.

Is that done enthusiastically by you? Are your parents involved in that decision? What gives you the strength to step through the threshold to an in-patient rehab experience?

Ziggy Gelman: It wasn’t much of my choice if I’m remembering correctly. It was not my choice. I mean you’ll hear it a million times, one of the most famous things people say about recovery is that it has to be up to you. It has to be your decision.

You have to want it. I think I did want it. I think there was a very significant part of me that wanted it. I think that there was also the part that was controlling my life at that point that did not want it and I don’t think I fought back much but I’m sure you’ll remember better than me.

It was blurry.

David Bashevkin: Abba?

Shaanan Gelman: To fill in some of the picture that you lost and I’m glad we could do this for each other. So we received a phone call within 12 maybe 15 hours of that other phone call that we had with you before we were even able to call in the morning and say this young man is not fit to be working with anyone special needs or at this point something’s wrong, please go and help him. And he was called to the room.

One of the Rebbeim found the room, if I could say it was cocaine, there were other substances, a fair amount of it. He was trying to get you back to I guess a normal tone and emotional health but you were starving, you were eating and he was almost describing it in disgust and that was really hurtful for me also. Oh it’s kind of disgusting he’s shoveling food down his throat and he kept saying well I don’t really know what to do but you know he obviously can’t be here anymore. Now that’s true and of course we recognize you couldn’t be there anymore and of course we recognize we lost track of this and we were ultimately the most responsible but I was hurt and I said I’m six or seven thousand miles away and it’s nice that you’re going to pack him up now but where what am I supposed to do? I don’t know what to do.

I can’t bring him home. And the head of the program that was involved in special needs, I think he saved your life. He’s a real tzaddik. And they all were involved in their own way and he took you around with him for a good 24 hours watching those kids and watching you and then my brother-in-law and my sister who are in Israel they came and he picked you up and he also schlepped you around and we were making phone calls around the clock to mental health organizations both in the States, Jewish, non-Jewish, rehab centers.

We considered some extreme rehab centers in Israel that were considered too charif, too much of an army-like approach and then through one person another we heard about this place called Genesis which is in Yerushalayim, Nachlaot I believe.

Ziggy Gelman: They closed down.

Shaanan Gelman: Closed down since then but this place also that oasis that saved your life with all these little angels and my brother-in-law took him there. They had to determine at first whether he needed more intensive rehab depending upon the substances that were in his system or whether he can go right into this rehab a sober facility.

Detox is sometimes necessary when you’re dealing with more intensive substances, alcohol or opioids which were not the case. And I think while this was going on, 24 hours or so I believe you were still getting high, you had a little stash of weed on you while this is still happening. We can’t even get in touch with you. And they bring you to this facility, they did the intake and we arranged, we figured out the financial arrangements, that’s another story that parents have to know, lo aleinu when they go through this that as much as you complain about the cost of Jewish education you have no idea what rehab costs.

I mean fifty thousand sixty thousand would be conservative a month but they worked with us.

David Bashevkin: A month?

Ziggy Gelman: A month, a month.

Shaanan Gelman: A month.

David Bashevkin: Are there arrangements where insurance covers rehab?

Ziggy Gelman: In America and also Genesis closed down I’d be shouting them out like crazy I believe they were not that expensive.

No. But there is a place called the AZ house which is completely free English speaking rehab in Israel. There are options.

David Bashevkin: But you have to as a parent when we’re choosing a school you have open houses and you go to each school and you kind of know what questions to ask.

When you’re choosing a therapist you might go through the school and say who’s popular in the neighborhood. I mean I don’t know where I would turn chas v’shalom lo aleinu to find a rehab like where do you go? I mean there are some organizations like an Amudim that I guess might have a Rolodex of some. Where exactly who was running point for you as a family just to find like a rehab, figure out does it accept our insurance, like who runs point for that? Is there an organization or just a friend?

Shaanan Gelman: Right. So my wife and I were making phone calls around the clock.

We’re calling organizations, we’re getting referrals. There are Jewish organizations, Nefesh, Amudim, I don’t remember all the organizations that were involved but not only did they help us out but also there was substantial financial benefit assistance with therapy and other things that came along with it and people in the community who we had to turn to for both advice and financial assistance and we’re still keeping this pretty quiet and the shul doesn’t know about it but there were a handful of people who we had no choice. And so yes we’re making a decision within 24 hours that’s going to determine the fate of his life right? We’re also trying to figure out what’s affordable, what’s an option. Does he come back here? He’s not safe at home.

We recognize that we can’t provide that and it’s not because we’re too busy, we just don’t have the know-how, we don’t have the skill, we don’t have the environment, we don’t have the therapists. So it’s just speaking to a lot of people, but there is no one route. It’s an interesting question. When we were going through medical emergencies for a whole year, we had Chai Lifeline, and they showed up, and they made a petting zoo for the other kids, and they brought over Chanukah presents, and they had little socks that you put on your feet when you’re in the hospital.

There is not an organization that says, oh, let’s help out the family of the drug addict. It’s like a contagious, the only thing you could do worse than that in the Jewish community, I think, is lose all your money. That’s the most contagious that nobody wants to go near you. But drug addiction, which is a very real and dangerous and acute and highly escalating danger and disease, there aren’t like mefooresh organizations that are right there.

You have to make calls, you have to ask. And there are now, now Amudim and others and Nefesh and other organizations are stepping up, and in Chicago we have quite a few. Tikvah Center, there’s a few others that are dealing with this, and I work as a therapist as well, and so I’m well networked at this point. But this we were blind.

We were completely blind. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were davening and we just said, please help us. And they assured us that he’s going to be safe.

And so in the priorities, in your hierarchy, you said, okay, keep him alive. we’re going to take away his phone. We’re not going to have communication with him. And I gotta share with you this story.

Ziggy, do you remember the phone call right before you went in? Do you remember this call?

Ziggy Gelman: I do remember this phone call.

Shaanan Gelman: I think Rabbi Bashevkin pointed this out earlier that, you know, you go back to parenting, he comes back to that instinctive sort of I need my Abba and Ima. You go back to parenting a baby. He’s an adult and he’s a baby again.

And I was on the phone with him, and my brother-in-law put the phone up to his ear and we used to play guitar, I used to play guitar for you when you were young. And there’s this song that I would play, a lullaby, I would play every night, it’s from Michal Shapiro. It’s on the album The Sparkle of Sunlight, one of his great albums. Waiting for Shlomo Katz and others to redo this album also.

So there’s a lullaby on that album. So the song’s a lullaby that Michal Shapiro wrote for his daughter, it’s called “Hannah’s Song.” The words are: when the sun goes down and the stars start to shine, it’s time to sleep, sweet child of mine. So climb into bed where it’s comfy and warm, and I’ll be right here to sing you this song.

And then the next line, and don’t forget when the music goes up, in the land of your dreams to bring home a sweet dream for Mommy and me. And I don’t know why I brought the guitar and I started singing that and I played that for you, and you were crying and I was crying. And I’m like, I’m passing you off to people who know how to do this better. I remember this moment like saying like just bring back something sweet, please.

In your dreams, bring something back for us that’s better than what we were able to give you.

David Bashevkin: One question I have is like now that you’re in an inpatient rehab, Ziggy, is there a moment in this experience where you feel like I crossed over a threshold where I can beat this? I can face this addiction. Was there either a specific form of treatment or type of treatment? What are they doing day to day that ultimately gave you the strength of conviction to know, I can beat this addiction?

Ziggy Gelman: I think it was two major factors that are really one factor, but two separate things that hit me. One was that this facility exists in Nachlaot, Yerushalayim, and it’s full of American Jewish boys like me who literally were either came out of Yeshiva or were living in Israel, not all boys, you know, some of them older, some of them younger, and came to this place for the same reason, for the reason of I cannot seem to get a grip on this.

Which the difference between that and the first place was that it was Jewish men like me. And the second thing that really hit me was when this treatment center, every night what we would do was on the schedule we would go to a place called Jerusalem AA, which is like regular AA, just in Jerusalem. And I remember when I went there, there I mean there must have been 80, 100 people, it felt like 200 people, it was probably more like 50, but it felt like 200 people in this room that were all sober for some of them a day and some of them 50 years, you know, all ranging, that entire range. All of them in Israel, not all of them Jewish, 99.9% of them Jewish, you know, but all of them there for the same purpose.

And I think like to this day, every single day that I live and choose to stay sober and choose this way of life, that is the thing, not Jerusalem AA specifically, but the fact that there are people like me and that I’m not alone ever. There’s nothing I’m going to do in my life that like I came up with and no struggle I’m going to face that someone hasn’t or someone doesn’t today, you know, and I can find those people. To this day, that’s what keeps me going every single day, knowing that, you know, someone gets it. Somebody gets it.

Because up until that point I was in this environment where that wasn’t the case, you know, it was like

David Bashevkin: Nobody gets it.

Ziggy Gelman: Nobody gets it. People spoke about, you know, in Yeshiva different mental health struggles, I remember I had a friend who had depression and I was like, wow, like no knocks against depression, it’s terrible, it’s terrible.

David Bashevkin: But you just felt very isolated, you’re having an experience that you’re looking around and you’re just like, I’m the only one who has this, they do not get it. They don’t get me and they don’t get it, and the it in that sentence is like life is the world.

Ziggy Gelman: Right, right. It was more than just they don’t get addiction, it was they don’t get any of this. They don’t get my struggles in the hospital, they don’t get what it’s like to have a dad as a rabbi, they don’t get what it’s like to have a mom. who’s all over Instagram and is like teaching Zumba.

Like, they’ll never get it, they’ll never get it. And the truth is is nobody lives the exact life I do and nobody really gets it, but people come pretty close to every individual issue. And as long as I have today, you know, it’s just a few a few select people that I can turn to on any given day, at any given time I have someone to call. I have someone to call.

And those are the people, you know, that I had to find in my life and I’m very, very lucky and grateful and fortunate to have found through that treatment center, through Jerusalem AA, even though the treatment center doesn’t exist, Jerusalem AA still very much does and I think it’s going strong.

David Bashevkin: Addiction as we know is a very hard story to put a definitive bow on, to say and now the story’s done. And you just said it now, you said every day you’re making a choice to stay sober. What gives you the confidence, if you have any of it, that like this isn’t going to happen again? We hear so often of people getting two years, five years, 10 years, 20 years where they’re sober and they’re good and then it could all come crashing down.

What is your relationship, Ziggy, with the prospect of relapse?

Ziggy Gelman: It’s a great question. I think my perspective is the same as AA’s. Just for today, I’m going to stay sober. I’m going to do what I need to do and I think that’s why I specifically said, you know, every day I wake up and I choose this because the fact is and the explanation, you know, I received and many others receive when they go to those rooms of AA is that this is a disease and you have this disease and it will never leave, you know, once you’re a pickle, you don’t go back to a cucumber.

You’re going to wake up with this disease every day and every day you’re going to have to choose not to give into it. Like a thing they always say is you’re in the meeting, your addiction is doing pushups in the parking lot. You know? And it’s to some extent true. I will also say it definitely gets easier.

It gets significantly easier as time goes on but at the same time I’m not going to, you know, the second I get cocky and say to myself like I’ve got this, who knows what can happen. Like oh I got this, like I don’t need my fellow recovered addicts, people in recovery, you know, I don’t need them anymore. That’s a scary thought that one day that can happen. But today I know that I’m here and I have what I have and if I focus with any issue that I have and I think many people can learn from this, with any issue in life on what’s going to happen in five years, you know, I get this great job, what’s going to happen in five years if I lose the job? What’s going to happen in a year if I lose the job? Or what if the job takes over my life? You know, I can’t think that way.

It’s too anxiety inducing. It’s too much. It’s too much to handle. Just today.

I can handle today. I can handle managing all the things I need to today and I think that’s like the most valuable lesson I’ve learned from all of this, or one of them. There are many valuable lessons to learn, but that’s one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from all of this, you know.

David Bashevkin: Abba, I’m curious from your perspective.

You weren’t the one with addiction but you watched your son and there is this something very special about your relationship and the faith that you have in your child. I’m curious for you, what gives you that confidence at this point in the story that Ziggy has genuinely turned a corner? That you are in a different stage of his life so to speak? What were the behaviors? What was the even the reconciliation that was needed to kind of bring you to this moment where we’re at now?

Shaanan Gelman: My wife and I spent many months in marriage therapy to deal exactly with this issue and how to address this new relationship we have with our son who is in recovery. And a therapist who knew a great deal about recovery and about addiction. And I went to a wonderful therapist myself to deal with my own issues that were not necessarily appropriate for the couples session.

So many hours dedicated to working on myself. And the first thing I’ll say is that the key is in any situation in parenting, you have to evolve as a parent. You’re not the same parent. So the expectation that parents have, and I’ve dealt with parents who have children in addiction, they believe they have a monopoly over the emes, over the truth, and that the job that must be done right now is the child has to evolve to meet the parents’ expectations and standards.

That’s not true in parenting bikhlal and certainly not true in the case of addiction. I had to modify my expectations. Number one, it doesn’t mean to lessen my expectations, but change my model of what does success look like. So I think this will illustrate it better than anything.

When you visit your kid in yeshiva and you say, ah, nachas, right? I get the bumper sticker. I can watch him interact with the rebbe, asking questions, struggling, he picks up the pencil at night, he takes notes, he does chazara and you can review with him and you can prepare for shiur. And I’ve spent time with Ziggy and with other children, one of my other sons in yeshiva, in shiur, preparing, and there’s a great deal of satisfaction there. Nobody ever says, I really want to spend time in yeshiva and visit my son with an AA meeting and in his rehab center.

But this is my son and we did that. And when I visited Israel, I spent not just a day, a five-minute thing and I went out for a burger afterwards. I spent days with him. Every day I stayed nearby, I came early, we spent the day in sessions with the group, we walked together to AA, numerous meetings.

And I have to tell you, it is frightening the first time. When your standard is that yeshiva, that beis medrash, the shiur, and you walk into an AA meeting and I think there were over a hundred people there when I went. These are open meetings. And just the characters and the colors and the walks of life, it looks like a Nickelodeon cartoon exploded in front of you.

I mean, you just have piercings and this and tattoos, it’s just so out of the realm of what you expect. And these people get up and they tell a story, and some of it’s cogent, and some of it’s not coherent, and some of it’s horrific and a nightmare. And you watch your son cheering these people on, saying, wow, way to go, a month, a year, five years, and you’re like, oh my gosh, is that the gold standard? Right? Is that going to happen? And this is not the beis medrash. And you learn over time, wait a minute, this is the holiest beis medrash in the world.

This is the holiest beis medrash in the world. A therapist told my wife and myself, do you know how hard it is every day for an addict to stay sober? That’s not lazy. Do you know how much work it is? And that changed my life.

David Bashevkin: I love that idea, just to emphasize that of AA rooms being the holiest beis medrash in the world, where we’re learning not from a text but from our own experiences, from our own lives.

It’s a different form of beis medrash, one that I think it’s a privilege to facilitate over here. To look at our lives when we’re learning from each other, it’s not a text in front of you, it’s not a Gemara, it’s not a daf, it’s not a Rashba. It’s another person. And to open your heart up to their experiences is the holiest beis medrash in the world.

Shaanan Gelman: Absolutely. You know the stories, the Chassidish stories we traffic in our professions. The stories of the schleppers and the misfits, and the punchline is always, and wouldn’t you know, he ended up being the head of the Lamed Vov.

David Bashevkin: The holiest, yeah.

Shaanan Gelman: And you know what? We don’t really believe that. We just say the stories. But I will tell you, I believe it now. I absolutely believe it.

These are the strongest people you’ll ever meet. And how many people, Ziggy, how many people do you know who’ve lost their lives to addiction? By age 22, you know far more people who’ve lost their lives to addiction than I’ll ever know in my lifetime. You’re operating at a much higher level of avodas Hashem and avodas hanefesh.

David Bashevkin: If you’ll allow me, what I find most remarkable about this conversation and really everything that has colored our interactions leading up to this conversation, and that is your relationship with each other.

The fact that there is so much love, there is so much respect after being through such a harrowing journey together. I really want to hear from each of you, what do you attribute the fact that your relationship did not just survive this ordeal with addiction, but it thrived? Teach us how to be a child and how to be a parent that the difficulties of life, which we each experience on our own level and our own way, to ensure that the storms of life never derail the relationship between parent and child. Ziggy, what do you attribute the fact that your relationship with your abba is so strong? How did you reach this point where you see this love and respect between both of you?

Ziggy Gelman: I think I’d say the first time I really felt it was actually when you came to visit me in rehab. I remember you said, from your perspective, I had this idea of what I wanted for my son and everything, all these expectations and everything I saw for you in yeshiva and what I wanted from your life.

And it came now to the point where we’re sitting here and I realized that you’re none of those things, but you’re so much better. And I don’t want to say that because it wouldn’t be true to say that was the first time I felt respect about my life and whatever from you. But it was the first time I felt really, really seen for something that I wouldn’t say that I am, this isn’t my entire identity, but in that moment, being in rehab, it was my life. It was everything.

It was my entire being was based around staying sober that day in rehab, going to meetings with my other rehab buddies. And I felt like you and Ima were there with me truly 100% in that moment, which was a very, very powerful thing to see. And also to emphasize, from that point going forward, there was a lot of work done on my part and on yours and Ima‘s part of maintaining such relationship and working on healthy boundaries and all of the things people talk about, figuring those things out is still something that every day there’s work put into it. But I will say this, and this is one of the things I thought about that I really wanted to mention on this podcast was that I’m incredibly lucky.

I’m incredibly lucky to have parents like you and Ima who are willing to put in work to grow with me. It teaches me lessons about one day parenting and that just because I’m a parent now doesn’t mean I have it all figured out and it’s my job to teach the kid all the things I’ve figured out. It’s showing up every day and learning from me and I learn from you and it’s really an amazing thing that I’m very lucky and I know that every day because there are people that I see, peers of mine, who don’t have relationships with their parents, or if they do, things are just not spoken about and, okay, my parents do their thing and I do mine, don’t ask, don’t tell.

David Bashevkin: Don’t ask, don’t tell.

Ziggy Gelman: Don’t ask, don’t tell or even ranging all the way to people who don’t speak, they don’t speak to their parents. It’s a very hard thing to see. It’s a very hard thing to see and on one hand I don’t know, I’m not trying to call people out by any means, but I can recognize from that that I’m incredibly lucky and then also the other side of it, which my father mentioned, is that I’m incredibly lucky to have just survived. Most people don’t even survive.

Some like two percent survive addiction in the world. That’s a crazy statistic, but unfortunately it’s very true and, you know, I feel very lucky to just be alive, even luckier to have the relationship I do with my parents every day that’s growing and, you know, maintaining.

David Bashevkin: That’s so beautiful. I was recently listening to an interview with Anthony, I forgot how to pronounce his last name, I think it’s Kiedis, who’s the lead singer for the band Red Hot Chili Peppers who dealt with a very serious heroin addiction.

It was that two percent that actually motivated him to get out where he showed up to rehab and the person said, you know, like, fifty of you are not going to make it, it’s probably one of you that’s going to be, and he was like, I want to be that one. I want to be a part of that two percent, that small minority who actually find their way out of this personal exile.

Shaanan Gelman: The Jewish member of his band who died of a heroin addiction, the very…

David Bashevkin: Israeli, yes.

His name is Hillel Slovak, who was the early guitarist for Red Hot Chili Peppers. There’s a certain part of their music that addresses addiction and the pain of addiction that I’ve always found very moving. I want to hear from you, Abba. Again, I’m so moved from your relationship.

What do you attribute the fact that your relationship did not just survive this ordeal, but it emerged even stronger and more resilient?

Shaanan Gelman: Number one is Siyata Dishmaya, obviously Hashem helps all along, and all of the wonderful messengers, the most important one is my wife, rock solid partner, someone lightyears ahead of me just in terms of her emotional wellness and what she would read and what she would speak about and how she would approach parenting and that our job, the message she would always give over is our job is to love our Ziggy, this is our child, and this is the one we’re going to put our maximum effort into, and it’s not a question of what we expect or where we’re disappointed, but rather just embracing him and absolutely accepting him and seeing him for who he is. I think that’s the number one thing and, you know, support network, family and friends and people who we could confide in who didn’t reject us outright when we opened up and encouraging us to do the right thing and to really connect to Ziggy. But I think it, I’d say it’s really less about, yes, my wife for sure, less about what I did, it’s more about his efforts. I mean, he could have said recovery’s a selfish activity, it really is, you’re focusing inward, you’re focusing on yourself.

He could have said, you know what, I don’t have time or space or my parents trigger me, or their job triggers me, or religion, this stuff, it all triggers me. He could have said that, but he didn’t. Instead, he makes space for us and connects to his siblings in such a beautiful way. They have a wonderful relationship, in admiration of him, which is amazing.

And it’s because Ziggy is the person he is. He is someone who makes you want to respect him and he has done so much work to be patient with us and to understand our expectations and our standards and to appeal to that. And not in an artificial way, not in a condescending way, he really cares about what’s important to us and we really care about what’s important to him and I think that’s we’ve met somewhere in the middle, that’s really where it’s happened.

David Bashevkin: If you’ll allow me, I just want to push a drop in a very gentle way.

In the before and after, it is very obvious what Ziggy had to let go of in order to reach this moment that he is at now. And I’m curious for you, explain to me the nature of the change. You know, you were not a drug addict, but you obviously needed to let go of something in order to reach this place of where you are as a parent. You needed to evolve, as you said.

How would you characterize that evolution? What did you have to let go of in order to create the place to really see your child and be there for your child in the way that he needed?

Shaanan Gelman: I think it’s about having a monopoly over the truth. I’m the biggest expert on the type of life he should be living, that I’m the biggest baki on what is success, and understanding the world is so much larger than my little daled amos. Expanding my mind to see different models of success, of spirituality, of growth. I’ll just share one other thing that Rav Dudu Moshe once said to me when I was talking to him about some of these issues, he said to me, remember the journey, he said, there’s three steps.

There’s healthy, there’s happy, there’s holy. And it has to go in that order.

David Bashevkin: First healthy, then happy, then holy, which I love. It was, I believe, first said on an 18Forty Podcast with Alex Clare.

Healthy, happy, holy.

Shaanan Gelman: And recognizing that, seeing him go to healthy, seeing him progress to happy. He’s a wonderful musician and over the course of a year, he became a real virtuoso on guitar, and he does some fantastic things. And seeing how he’s channeled that in his brand of spirituality, giving back, teaching, saving people’s lives yom valaylah, right? In his network where he works as a counselor, where he speaks to schools, and maybe he’s going to save a few kids from making some tragic mistakes or at least give them a little bit of an education.

Seeing that that’s a type of spirituality and communal outreach. I didn’t imagine, like I thought the only way to reach out to a community is to be a shul rav, right? But look what he’s doing, and seeing that as his crescendo of holy, we all, no matter who you are, we all have to go, human beings have to go from you’re born, you worry about not having a soiled diaper and eating your next meal. That’s healthy. Happiness doesn’t come right away.

Happiness is eventual, adolescents are looking for happiness, they’re looking for the next high in different forms. But holiness is something where he’s now embarked in that place. He sent me a few months back a piece that he did on guitar. I gotta send it to you.

Ziggy knows that my favorite song is Shlomo’s Mimkomcha, the old one, the one with all the different layers and pieces. Sure. And he sent me an electric guitar version, it was just the beginning of it, of him playing Mimkomcha, and I’m well aware that he’s not playing Shlomo Carlebach all day long, you know, whatever he’s playing is also great, I love all the music, but he played this piece for me and he said, Abba, I wanted you to have this, I wanted you to hear this, listen, it’s just the start. And I know he’s even better now, and he plays this thing, and it was like a guitar was crying a tefillah.

I can’t describe to you what a unique, he poured his soul into that. It was then I realized that this guy is, he’s now embarked into the third stage of holy, because he’s giving back, he’s helping people, I respect him. That was the final thing that changed for me, is that I’m not helping him or keeping him alive anymore. I’m not here to entertain him or keep him happy anymore.

I’m just sitting now and watching my son contribute and be involved in Yishuvo Shel Olam, those great Beis Medrashes that we spoke about that for far too long nobody paid attention to. He is an integral voice and will be an integral voice for many years to come in that world and we’re very lucky for that. That’s what kept us together is that I learned to respect him and not to pity him and not to pity myself.

David Bashevkin: That is incredibly moving.

Thank you so much, you’ve both been incredibly generous with your time. I always wrap up my interviews with more rapid fire questions. My first question for each of you, and we could start with Ziggy, is there a particular book, essay, or even a prayer that you think helped you reach kind of this place of recovery where you are now?

Ziggy Gelman: Definitely, I mean, the Alcoholics Anonymous book, and I know it’s a cop out, the Big Book, the big blue book. Yeah, the Big Book they call it.

It might seem like a cop out answer, but I would definitely, I would recommend everyone read it, everyone in the world. There is real, real wisdom in there, you know, I wouldn’t say completely modern day but like, converted into very similar things to wisdom in the Torah, a lot of amazing things to learn from that book. Specifically, if you want like a one part to read from there, I would read Acceptance is the Answer, which is, I think, page 417 of the big blue book.

David Bashevkin: I love it, because it’s a very Jewish Torah characteristic to memorize and to know the exact page, and there is something very sweet that you have taken kind of what daf something is on and now you have that mastery over the Big Book.

Abba, is there a particular book, essay, or even a prayer that helped you get through this journey as a parent?

Shaanan Gelman: So I’ll mention a few books that we dabbled in, my wife read and I’m familiar with and I’ve looked at, but then I’ll share I think a pasuk that pulls me through. One book that my wife really got a lot out of and I read it, some of it, it’s called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction by Gabor Mate. Now, I just want to caveat, Gabor Mate is not someone I look up to, he’s no longer a friend of ours on many issues, current events and politics in Israel and whatnot, but was to say he has a lot to say about addiction as a young child who survived, he was born in DP camps I believe, and really deals with the addiction as a response to pain and trauma, understanding people are running to addiction to solve a problem, not to create a problem. Number two, I think you interviewed Rabbi Shais Taub, G-d of Our Understanding: Jewish Spirituality and Recovery from Addiction.

Yes. And we have a couple copies in our house and he’s going to be a scholar in residence in our shul in two weeks, probably before this episode airs. There’s a book called Addict in the House by Robin Barnett, I think it is, and it’s a no-nonsense family guide through addiction recovery. It’s also an excellent book about how families live with that.

And so those are some books, but the pasuk that I’ll share that I always come back to for chizuk, this is a pasuk, v’od m’at v’ein rasha v’hisbonanta al m’komo v’einenu. So as a fan of Rav Tzadok, Izhbitzer, you know that he’s fond of quoting this. The Izhbitzer says that one day we’re going to look at the place that caused us harm, caused us so much pain, v’od m’at v’ein rasha v’hisbonanta al m’komo v’einenu. And the pain and the suffering is not going to be there anymore, but rather it’ll be a source of tremendous growth and of joy, connection, and that’s the life I feel like I’m blessed to be living right now.

The pain has been erased. The zidonos as’ zechuyos. I’ve seen it, and I attribute it to who Ziggy is and the work he’s done. And thank God I’ve a partner in my wife and others who’ve helped me be patient enough to wait and to see that corner be turned and to see now where we’ve come in a couple years of sobriety.

David Bashevkin: That is so beautiful, and that verse, which both Rav Tzadok and Rabbi Nachman places a central place in their thought, is in the thirty-seventh chapter of Tehillim. I know it’s the thirty-seventh chapter because I misquoted a different verse in Tehillim and said that was the thirty-seventh, and I know the This is actually the 37th chapter of Tehillim: ve’od me’at ve’ein rasha vehisbonanta al mekomo ve’ineinu. What an absolutely beautiful idea. I so appreciate that.

My next question is if somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever to go back to school and get a PhD in expertise in whatever subject of your choice, what do you think the subject and title of that dissertation would be? Let’s start with Abba.

Shaanan Gelman: I’m interested in the family process throughout Tanakh and Chazal. I’m very interested in the way families relate, adaptive, maladaptive responses to all sorts of experiences and backgrounds and childhood and parenting and marriages. I’m interested in all those interesting relationships, the in-laws and outlaws and sibling rivalry.

I’m fascinated by, you know, marriages that are atypical as the Netziv talks about Yitzchak and Rivka and I think that there’s a whole world to explore in Tanakh and Chazal that hasn’t been touched for reasons that are very good, it’s a delicate subject matter, but it’s also something that really needs to be explored because we have to learn to see our greatest role models through the lens of these are normal people who’ve lived extraordinary lives and that part of their gevurah, part of their strength is that they overcame those challenges that are happening to us as well. I am interested in that topic and I think that would be like the next step, the book that I’d like to write or the thing I’d like to study, yeah.

David Bashevkin: I love that. Ziggy, what would you study? Sabbatical, no responsibilities.

Ziggy Gelman: Well, I’m in school, but I guess if it was no responsibilities, that does change things. Think I would study, you know, right now in this moment of time what comes to mind is healing through music, which I think is already the name of a book, right? For sure.

David Bashevkin: And if it’s not, that could be yours. That’s beautiful.

Ziggy Gelman: Right, yeah, I’ll take that one.

David Bashevkin: When somebody says healing through music, what is the first song that comes to mind that you find most healing?

Ziggy Gelman: “Hannah’s Song.” No, by the way, not a joke, that song is very, very powerful. I’ve thought about it many times over the past few years, I even was humming it and a friend of mine was like, “What’s that song called?” and I’m like, “I don’t know, I have to ask my dad, he sang it to me right before I went to rehab.” That really is a very powerful song.

David Bashevkin: I do appreciate that. My final questions, I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules, what time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning? Ziggy, why don’t you take it first?

Ziggy Gelman: Well, I’m a counselor in sober living and so I work nights and I work till 11:00 PM and I would say I’m in bed, I try to be in bed by 11:30 latest, I rush to get into bed and I wake up around 7:00, 7:00 AM every morning. I like to sleep.

David Bashevkin: No, that’s great, that’s great.

We’re a pro-sleep podcast if you know anything about me or 18Forty. Abba, what time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Shaanan Gelman: Usually around 12:30 to sleep, around 5:00, 5:15 up.

Ziggy Gelman: How do you manage that? 

David Bashevkin: I waswondering the same thing. It’s not easy out there, but really for joining today, for sharing your story, for sharing your wisdom, both Abba and Ziggy, I am so grateful for your time, insight, and sharing your incredible wisdom.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Ziggy Gelman: Thank you, thank you for having me.

David Bashevkin: What I found so remarkable about the relationship between Rabbi Shannan Gelman and his son Ziggy is really the way that Rabbi Gelman, who’s a rabbi, a teacher, an educator, really looks towards his son for wisdom and teaching. He sees instead of somebody who is lower, who is baser, who is, you know, not as equipped, looking them as like the child who couldn’t make it, there is actually and it’s clear throughout the conversation, like a special wisdom that a parent is able to see in a child who has been through some very real struggle.

And it reminds me in many ways of the famous letter that Carl Jung sent to Mr. Wilson, who is the famous founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he wrote in this letter what it is that he thinks, what’s the underlying drive that drives people towards addiction, specifically alcoholism, and he famously writes, “You see alcohol in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as for the most depriving poison. The helpful formula therefore is spiritus contra spiritum.” Is developing that sense of passion and excitement and wholeness in our spiritual lives and how we make sense of our place in the world rather than the escape, which like Elliott Smith famously sang in his song “Miss Misery,” “to send the poison rain down the drain to put bad thoughts in my head.” And very often we try to numb that sense of lossness, that sense of where am I, what is my life for, what is the purpose of this, and we numb it with that other type of spirit, but that ultimate healing is taking with both hands responsibility for our story, even the part of our story that predates our conscious life here and connecting back. back to that beginning of knowing that every individual has a purpose, the Jewish people have a purpose, and it’s specifically through the narrative exercise of telling over our story on Passover that allows us to come back to that beginning. If yearning is our most powerful narrative engine and addiction is one of its dialects, then I would like to submit that perhaps the holiest dialect that we have developed to express our yearning is the Pesach Seder.

It’s gathering together with your family, reconnecting to our inner childhood, and channeling our yearning and that most powerful narrative engine for a better future for those around our table, for our families, for Knesset Yisrael, for the collective heart of the Jewish people. May we know no suffering and no pain and heal from all of our wounds. So thank you so much for listening. This episode, like so many of our episodes, was edited by our incredible friend Denah Emerson.

Thank you Denah, this was a Herculean feat and we are so appreciative. Thank you, of course, to our series sponsors once again, Danny and Sarala Turkel. We are so grateful for your continued friendship and support over all these years. If you enjoyed this episode or any of our episodes, please subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends about it.

You can also of course donate at 18Forty.org/donate. All of this helps us reach new listeners and continue putting out great content. So thank you so much to our entire listening community. You can also leave us a voicemail with feedback or questions that we may play on a future episode.

That number is 212-582-1840. Once again, that number is 212-582-1840. If you’d like to learn more about this topic or some of the other great ones we’ve covered in the past, be sure to check out 18forty.org. That’s the number 18 followed by the word forty F-O-R-T-Y, 18Forty.org, where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails.

Thank you so much for listening and stay curious, my friends.