Readers Respond

A Note on Letters To The Editor:

We welcome your responses to our articles. Send your letters to the editor to letters@tikkun.org. Please remember, however, not to attribute to Tikkun views other than those expressed in our editorials. We email, post, and print many articles with which we have strong disagreements, because that is what makes Tikkun a location for a true diversity of ideas. Tikkun reserves the right to edit your letters to fit available space in the magazine.

Addiction and Stress

Your two articles on addiction (Tikkun, Fall 2011) were of great value but could have been strengthened by addressing root causes of addictions to chemical substances, sex, gambling, shopping, overwork, and other compulsions. Dr. Gabor Mate’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts presents a strong case that many or most addictions stem from the brain’s inability to produce chemicals necessary to react to stress. This inability is closely related to a failure to provide infants with the gentle and long-term nurturing necessary for their brains to develop normally. Lack of nurturing is itself influenced by socioeconomic demands on both parents to work. Child abuse also has a powerful impact on brain development and function.

Barry Karlin
Boulder, CO

Thoughts on Twelve-Step

Thank you to Nicholas Boeving for his article on addiction (Tikkun, Fall 2011). For me, the idea that addiction is a disease that I could put into remission with the help of a relationship to a Higher Power saved my life. It was an entry point of understanding that I could use to do whatever it took no matter how unsavory the task. At the time, prayer and self-inquiry were extremely unsavory to me. But as years passed, I became dissatisfied with the twelve-step model as it is full of the language of conquest. As I learned about meditation (which could be construed as listening), I became turned off by the idea of prayer (it seemed too simplistic to think that God is some guy in charge who really has time to listen to the pathetic requests of all these “sinners”). Eventually, my search for a means to stay out of addiction in ways congruent with what felt right brought me to some powerful practices, all related to ways of creating a shift in perception, a shift in consciousness.

Gabrielle Pullen
Browns Valley, CA

Michael Lerner replies

It is a mistake to seek one single cause for drug addiction or one single solution. But if we did want to prioritize, the first priority should be to create loving and supportive communities that seek to provide material, psychological, and spiritual caring for everyone. This is what Tikkun means when we call for “The Caring Society—caring for each other, caring for the earth.” Short of that, and when faced with the dynamics of the competitive marketplace and the ethos of materialism and selfishness of global capitalism, it’s astounding that more people aren’t addicted to drugs. The call for an end to the addiction to various substitute gratifications like drugs, alcohol, television, money, sex, food, etc., is the call for an end to the conditions that require illusions and substitute gratifications.

The Challenges of Peace

I am a citizen of Israel, a mother of three children, and a nurse by profession. I listened to Rabbi Lerner’s moving words as expressed in the Chicago interfaith conference shared with the Dalai Lama in July 2011. Many people in Israel love all mankind regardless of religion, race, and nationality. All we want is calm and peace. We want to live. It is our basic human right. Unfortunately, my parents, my children, and I have been literally fighting for our existence since we were born. I am of second generation to the Holocaust, in which all my father’s family perished. My mother was born in Jerusalem, from which she was deported during a war that killed her brother. I grew up carrying with me the Holocaust and the scars of countless wars. Today, the reality is that I live...