Rabbi Abraham Joshua Twerski, MD, is sitting in the front row of the Arnstein Jewish Community Center gym in Knoxville, Tennessee, holding court before giving a talk on spirituality and health. He's doing one of the things he does best: telling a story.
It's about his experience making aliya.
With his flowing white beard, long black coat, and kippa, the descendant of the Baal Shem Tov relates that, upon his arrival in Israel several years ago, authorities asked him for proof of his Jewishness. Did he have a ketuba? Were his parents Jewish?
Twerski, whose father was a hassidic rebbe, did have a ketuba. But after more than 40 years of marriage, he didn't know where to find it.
So at 6 a.m., he called Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, asking the rabbinate to send a fax attesting that he was Jewish. A colleague on the other end of the line said, "You're joking, right?"
Having produced the right papers, Twerski now holds Israeli citizenship and keeps a home in Efrat. But the 68-year-old psychiatrist and substance-abuse expert primarily divides his time between the haredi haven of Monsey, New York, and Pittsburgh, where he founded the Gateway Rehabilitation Center in 1972.
The multiple residences mirror the different sides of Twerski.
The great-grandson of the Rabbi of Hornostipol, Twerski has written 31 books as diverse as a Pessah haggada, From Bondage to Freedom, and collaborations with Peanuts-creator Charles Schulz, such as That's Not a Fault...It's a Character Trait.
His latest, Visions of the Fathers (Shaar Press), was published in May.
"Ethics of the Fathers/Pirkei Avos and Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, MD go together naturally," proclaims the jacket. "The book is the Talmud's repository of advice and guidance. Its lessons have been the foundation of Jewish character and personality, of morality and ethics."
"Twerski is unique," it continues. "An original. He has helped over 40,000 people in his long and colorful career. As hassidic scholar, he offers the spirituality and rich lode of stories that elevate, enlighten, and entertain."
Twerski even weaves his views on addiction into Visions of the Fathers, writing this, for example, on judgment: "We are capable of ingenious rationalizations to justify whatever it is we may desire. One recovered alcoholic said, 'In all my years of drinking I never once took a drink unless I had decided that it was the right thing to do at the time.' King Solomon stated this principle, 'All of a person's ways are right in his own eyes' (Proverbs 16:2)."
His Efrat residence also expresses Twerski's deeply Jewish heart.
He and his first wife, Goldie, had hoped to retire in Israel, where she'd spent her childhood. She died of cancer in 1995.
He still returns for several weeks, three times a year, with his second wife, Dr. Gail Bessler-Twerski, whom he met at a convention of Orthodox Jewish psychotherapists. "Both of us have our children and grandchildren" in the United States, explains the great-grandfather of five.
Pittsburgh is a secular world where Twerski moves with ease. Often his name comes up in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings there.
They talk about "this weird little guy with a beanie" who helped them understand what addiction was about, says Barry Z., a 53-year-old Jewish businessman who withdrew from heroin addiction at Gateway in 1973 and has remained clean ever since.
Tina C., 47, a recovering alcoholic, worked closely with Twerski during her years as public-relations director at Gateway. "I would see tattooed bikers, heroin users, just sobbing in his arms," she says. "He was able to get through people's defenses. It was remarkable how he could combine two different worlds."
An Episcopalian, Tina slowly learned "his rules."
She knew enough to feel shocked, for example, when she was on a plane with him - an aisle apart, of course - and a buxom blonde flight attendant sat on the arm of his seat.
"She put her arm around his chair, and he blanched, recalls Tina. "I just saw him stunned. I don't even think he knew what to do."
To a stranger, Twerski seems unflappable. During his talk at the JCC and subsequent telephone interviews, he comes across as controlled - amiable yet impenetrable.
He segues from story to story. There's the one about Isabelle, a woman in her 60s who introduced Twerski - then a newly-minted graduate of Milwaukee's Marquette University medical school - to Alcoholics Anonymous. Twerski had chosen a road less traveled after his ordination as a rabbi. He wished to be a counselor or comforter rather than a functionary at life-cycle events.
As a resident at the University of Pittsburgh's Western Psychiatric Institute, he handled an emergency call about Isabelle. The daughter of an Episcopal priest, she had become a full-blown alcoholic by age 20, then worked as an escort for the social elite, who kept her in booze and diamonds. By 30 she was living in flophouses. Over the following decades she cycled in and out of detox centers at state hospitals.
Twerski never could figure out what the medical emergency was by the time he saw her. But he learned that Isabelle was enjoying her fifth year of sobriety thanks to AA.
The encounter opened the door to a new world. Twerski had led a fairly sheltered life - even though he had already grabbed national headlines.
Time magazine said upon his graduation from medical school in 1959, "To keep the Torah as an Orthodox Jew for six years of studies in Milwaukee's Roman Catholic Marquette University was something like running a sack race, an egg race, and an army obstacle course at the same time."
When lectures were held on Saturdays, for instance, Twerski had a friend put a sheet of carbon paper under his notes and hoped he remembered to use a ball-point pen.
His full, black beard presented a sanitary problem in the operating room and required special snood-like surgical masks.
After meeting Isabelle he attended his first AA meeting in 1961, not because he was an alcoholic, but "primarily to learn the secret of how they could do something psychiatry couldn't do."
He came away with two insights. AA embodied pure equality, he says, "in a way that I've never seen anywhere else." Affluence and prestige didn't buy any special privileges there. Suffering human beings were trying to restore sanity to their lives.
Also, Twerski recalls, "I saw an unbelievable willingness to help." Recovering drunks dedicated themselves to aiding their fellows.
The 12 steps of recovery extended far beyond keeping individuals off alcohol or drugs, he realized. They provided tools for character and spiritual development. "The 12 steps are a very Jewish program," he says.
Sometimes Twerski wishes he were an alcoholic. He identifies with patients and people in 12-step meetings. "I like to think of myself as an alcoholic or addict," he says. One wonders why. "The alcoholic or anyone who has had any of the addictions has paid a hard price for recovery."
Twerski believes nonaddicts and nonalcoholics are missing out. As he asks rhetorically, "How many people mess up their lives and don't surrender their will?" Addicts in recovery know they need to surrender to a higher power of their own interpretation. But nonaddicts stir up chaos, he says, and "there's nothing to make them realize their will is off the wall."
Twerski does the 12 steps on a regular basis. He says he works on turning his will and life over to God, facing his character defects and making amends.
Barry Z. knows that side of him. "Sometimes when he's feeling insecure and not feeling great, he'll go to an AA meeting," says the recovering addict and former jailbird. "He knows it's good therapy."
Twerski once admitted to a writer for Pittsburgh magazine, "When I'm in another city for a speaking engagement where I don't know anyone and there is nothing on the idiot box, I call up AA and find out where their meeting is and I go. There is nothing like it anywhere. You walk in, people are so open."
Owner of a printing business, Kiwanis Club-member, and family man, Barry is among the minions who place Twerski on a pedestal. Forbes magazine has cited Gateway Rehabilitation Center as one of the 12 best drug- and alcohol-treatment facilities in the United States.
"If it wasn't for Dr. Twerski, I don't think I would be alive," Barry declares. "When he calls me, no matter what it is, I do it."
Throughout the years the two have remained close. They end their phone conversations with "I love you." One day Barry came home to find flowers on his porch. The card read, "Happy 20th anniversary. Dr. Twerski." Barry marvels that with the thousands of people Twerski has helped across the globe, the good doctor would remember his anniversary date of sobriety.
Between meetings, consultations, interviews, lectures, writing, studying, and traveling, Twerski manages to touch many lives - even if only for a moment.
Psychologist Sharon Eakes, who worked at Gateway for 25 years, says her husband recently received an e-mail of congratulations on his 28th anniversary of sobriety. "I know that's his way of being affectionate," she says of Twerski.
Once someone called the psychiatrist on his "superficial" style of personal contact.
The comment bothered Twerski enough for him to ask Eakes for a reality check. She admits he's scattered - "He could be reading a book while he's talking to you" on the telephone - but insists he's sincere. "He tries to reach and touch a lot of people," she says. "I think he's practically driven."
Twerski's mother had Alzheimer's, and didn't know him for many years, according to Eakes. She believes that piece of his life helps explain the incredible drive. "He felt if he didn't use it right now, he'd lose it. Getting old worried him a lot."
At the end of 1998, Twerski downshifted to a half-time job at Gateway. He works there every other week. Of course, low gear is all relative for someone who whips out books at the rate he does. He now wants to help young Jews out on the streets get off drugs.
And he aims to rally support for and help expand Shaar Hatikva (Gateway to Hope) in Beersheba, run by the Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority of Israel in consultation with Twerski. Shaar Hatikva offers ex-convicts a three-month intensive drug-treatment program, followed by supervision and monitoring in a residential setting.
"I suppose my strong suit is that I've been able to bring some self-esteem and self-worth to people who'd given up on themselves, especially the prison population in Israel who've spent half their lives in jail and then come out and become real menschen [good people]," Twerski says.
He tells another story. It's about Avi, an Israeli in his 30s who demanded, "How can you expect me to have any self-esteem? I have been a thief since childhood."
Twerski asked Avi if he knew what diamonds looked like when they came out of a mine: "A maven knows the dirty piece of glass is worth millions. Avi, I'm the maven. If you stay with us, I'll show you the beauty."
After graduating from Shaar Hatikva, Avi was helping to move donated furniture to a halfway house, when he found an envelope with several thousand shekels in a couch. Instead of pocketing the money, he called the donor, who said to give the money to the halfway house.
The next time Twerski saw him, he asked Avi, "Do you remember when I said we would find the diamond inside of you?" The storyteller pauses with emotion, then tells of a sign Avi made for the Shaar Hatikva door.
It said in Hebrew, "Diamond Polishing Center."
Eakes accompanied Twerski and an odd mix of goodwill ambassadors, including three recovering addicts, a Pittsburgh city councilman and his wife, to Israel in 1995. They went to see Shaar Hatikva and share Gateway's experience.
"Many of them had come over here," Eakes says from Pittsburgh, "and studied with us at Gateway and were anxious for us to see how they'd tailored it to Israeli culture."
Twerski and his little band visited tourist sites and treatment facilities across Israel. Goldie was still alive. As it turned out, this would be her last trip.
Eakes, who's said to know Twerski as well as anyone, kept a journal of their Israel adventures, then transcribed it and gave him a copy. She wrote she could see why "Abe" was so excited about the Israel program - because he was seen as a guru, as he once had been in America. As she recollects, he remarked, "I'm still a guru in the United States," only partly joking.
"On one hand, he really likes being a guru and having people treat him as if he walks on water. On the other hand, that's a lonely place to be," she observes.
She considered herself the "designated person" at Gateway to connect with him as just one human being to another.
A widow now remarried, Eakes continues, "When Goldie was dying he called me all the time, I think partly because talking about death was all right with me. I think this guy doesn't have a lot of places where his own neediness can be fed."
His wife of 43 years had served as one of his few confidants. They decided to marry two days after they met. Apparently they balanced each other out. He had the degrees, creative genius, and public spotlight. Goldie had a sense about people that went beyond what one might pull from books.
She had a sense about him, according to Eakes.
Barry Z. also has witnessed the vulnerable aspect of Twerski.
"I've seen him hurting. I know he relied on God like we do," he says. "He's just a for-real human being. He's been down in the trenches helping human beings for years."
Twerski talks about this in Visions of the Fathers. Chapter six says Torah is greater than priesthood or royalty, and is acquired by 48 qualities, including "sharing his fellow's yoke." The trait serves as the very basis of Torah and mitzvot, he says. "It is fulfilled only when a person feels another's pain as if it were his own."
[Published in the Jerusalem Post, July 30, 1999]