From Hidden to Seen: Jewish Recovery Spaces Matter

“Mommy, what’s recovery?”

She asked it midway through the meal, leaning in close to me, her voice lowered in that way children use when they sense that a question might be important, even if they don’t yet know why.

We were seated at a long table covered in a white tablecloth, now creased and dotted with crumbs. Some challah rolls were still whole, others torn open, their centers soft and uneven. A few plates had been nudged aside to make room for elbows and hands. In front of each setting sat a small cup of grape juice, some still full, others half-drunk, their deep purple catching the light closely enough to wine that you might not notice what wasn’t there unless you were paying attention.

Around the table sat an eclectic group of Jews in recovery, gathered for a Shabbaton hosted by 14Y Selah at The Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. Some were from nearby, people whose paths might cross mine on an ordinary weekday without either of us knowing this part of the other’s story. Others had come from farther away, having rearranged their lives to be here.

I was there to offer a dvar Torah and to lead learning and workshops over the course of Shabbat. Three of us had brought our families. Children leaned into parents, slid in and out of their chairs, swung their legs under the table, asked quietly for more food, listened with that partial, porous attention children give to adult conversations that feel important even when they don’t fully understand them.

Earlier in the meal, one of the kids asked his father why there was no wine. His father answered simply, without lowering his voice or adding explanation.

“Because for some people at this meal, having wine isn’t a good idea.”

The child nodded, satisfied, and returned to eating.

My daughter listened as people talked. Stories moved around the table, some light, some carrying more weight, most spoken with the careful honesty that tends to show up when people feel safe enough not to perform. After a few minutes, she turned back to me with her question.

Mommy, what’s recovery?

I didn’t answer right away. Not because I didn’t know how, but because something in me recognized that this was a moment worth holding. The theme of the Shabbaton was from hidden to seen, and her question landed directly in that space.

I told her that recovery is when people are trying to heal from something really hard they’ve been struggling with. For many people at the table, it had to do with alcohol or drugs. I also explained that recovery can mean many different things, because people struggle in many different ways.

She thought about it quietly.

Then she said, “It’s kind of like when I had to heal from the stitches from the cut near my eye.”

I nodded.

“But for your soul,” she added.

Something settled when she said that, the way something settles when it has been named more clearly than you might have managed yourself.

In Orthodox Jewish life, we speak fluently about halacha, obligation, and continuity. We are less practiced at making visible the places where people struggle beneath that structure.

Addiction, trauma, and mental illness exist in every Jewish community. They always have. What differs is not prevalence, but visibility. In some spaces, recovery is treated as a private matter, something to manage quietly so as not to disrupt the surface of communal life. In others, it remains unnamed entirely.

What I witnessed that Shabbat was something different. Being in spaces like this invites parts of us that usually remain silent, not because they are unimportant, but because there is little room for them in the pace of everyday life. Most days ask us to function, to keep moving, to tend to what is immediately necessary. Over time, we learn which parts of ourselves are welcome in public and which are better kept folded away.

Standing in the workshop space on Shabbat afternoon, surrounded by people who had chosen to still be there, the difference was palpable. There was no urgency to get anywhere else. No pressure to compress stories into something tidy. The room itself felt more patient.

The sessions I led focused on reclaiming authorship, on the ways stories live inside us and sometimes direct us long before we have language for them. We spoke about how experiences of addiction, trauma, and mental illness can begin to feel like instructions rather than information. We paid attention to how those stories show up in the body, as tension, urgency, or familiar internal pulls. Much of the work involved staying present long enough to notice what was there without being overtaken by it. A memory surfaced for me from many years ago. I was sitting in a room like this one. Someone said a single sentence:

“You don’t have to do the thing it tells you to do.”

That sentence became a companion in my own recovery. Not a solution. A pause. A widening. Recovery, in this sense, is not about perfection or arrival. It is about relationship. It is about learning how to stay with your life without being ruled by the loudest or most familiar voice inside you.

Orthodox Jewish spaces are particularly well positioned to support this work.

Jewish life already understands ritual interruption. We sanctify time. We gather around tables. We know how to create containers where something deeper can emerge. Recovery spaces like those cultivated by 14Y Selah reflect one of Judaism’s most enduring truths: healing happens in community, not in isolation. This Shabbaton was supported by UJA-Federation of New York and the Educational Alliance, underscoring a growing communal recognition that recovery, mental health, and spiritual care belong within the fabric of Jewish communal life.

At the end of the final workshop, people remained seated, bodies angled toward one another, breath visibly slower.  When the Shabbaton ended, I stepped outside into a light rain. Just enough to be felt.

Meaningful connection grows slowly. It grows out of staying, out of listening, out of letting the space between people hold what needs to be held. This happens in workshops. It happens at Shabbat tables. It happens when a child asks a question and we choose not to rush past it.

Watching my daughter that night, I was reminded that children already understand what healing is. What they learn from us is whether healing is something we make room for.

Recovery, in any form, is a practice of choosing presence over appearance, community over isolation, and engagement over hiding. Moving from hidden to seen has a feel to it. It settles into the body. It shifts the energy of a room.

It can begin very simply, at a Shabbat table, with grape juice instead of wine, torn challah, and the courage to let what is real be welcome among us.