On a Mission to Save Teen Addicts - An Interview with the Times Square Rabbi

Originally published on JewishFamily.com, written by Adam Katz-Stone

His adolescent body ravaged by drugs and disease, the boy turns to the rabbi with pleading eyes. “I’m so stoned, so dirty, so sick I don’t even turn tricks,” he says. “Nothing’s good. I can’t remember anything going right. I’m scared. You gotta help me.”

A few hours later the boy is asleep in a homeless shelter. He’s out of immediate danger, and perhaps on the road to recovery. It’s all in a night’s work for Yehudah Fine, the man they call the Times Square Rabbi.

For over a decade, Fine has roamed the alleys and tunnels of New York City—a dismal, sunless world he calls “The Way Beyond”—trying to bring hope into the lives of the thrown-away children who populate this terrifying region. The scene described above occurs in his new book of reminiscences, Times Square Rabbi: Finding the Hope in Lost Kids’ Lives, published recently by Hazelden press.

A trained family therapist, the 50-year-old Seattle native lives with his wife and three children in the Catskill mountains. He explains that his work with troubled teens began almost by accident—except that he does not believe in accidents. It was the mid-1970s, and he was studying agriculture at the University of California at Davis in preparation for a move to Israel, when he answered an ad for a part-time job working with the children of migrant farm workers. There he found his calling.

“I’m a spiritual emergency guy,” he says. “I’ve always felt that wherever the greatest pain is in society, that’s where I want to be helping. The places that are the most forgotten are the places that need the most healing.”

THE STEPS TO HEALING

By day, the rabbi directs the Jewish Family Institute in New York City, and serves as a counselor at Yeshiva University. By night he visits with the street kids—teenagers who most people see as hopeless cases. They are homeless and jobless; they live by their wits and by crime until their lives are claimed by the drugs, disease and violence that permeates their lives.

Few people are able to succeed as counselors to these kids, but Fine has been able to touch their lives “because he has a warmth and an openness that you just don’t see today,” explains Dr. Efram Nulman, Yeshiva University dean of students, who has worked with Fine for over a decade. “He’s not selling any program. His agenda is just one thing: the person he is talking to. As a result, he can communicate in any world.”

“With people in crisis, you have to be authentic and honest, because they pick up on that, and that’s what Yehudah does,” says Dr. Kirk Barton, a psychology resident at Harvard Medical School who has known Fine for over 10 years. “It shines through that he really cares for people, not caring about how much money they have or what kind of status they have, but relating with them in a deep, spiritual way.”

Nulman describes his colleague and friend as “a spiritual, psychological and intellectual genius, a one of a kind in today’s world,” and adds that Fine seems to possess “a very clear sense of himself and his mission in life.”

Part of that mission, it seems, is to awaken people to their own infinite capacity for change. It’s a message that many kids on the street are ready to hear.

“Crisis opens people up to change,,” the rabbi explains. “If you have had so many terrible things happen to you, you want to know that somehow, on some level, there is some kind of sense to be made out of this. These people want to know: Why me, why did this happen? They want to be able to recover and rebuild their lives.”

Over the years, the rabbi has developed an eight-step system for this kind of recovery, based on the Hilchos Teshuvah — the Path to Meaning and Hope — as described by the 12th-century Jewish luminary Maimonidies. At its heart, the system is all about meaning: it’s about finding answers to the impenetrable “why” of life.

In building a universe around the fundamental belief in God, Fine explains, Judaism offers a world where there is purpose and intention behind every circumstance. “Either there is going to be some kind of meaning in suffering, or there is going to be chaos, and I would rather choose the path of meaning,” he explains. “I would rather walk the road of inspiration, than walk the road of desperation.”

And when he brings this message to the teens—when he tells them that they are part of a universe that has structure and order and purpose—they very often are willing to believe him, and to let that belief change their lives for the better.

“Everybody needs to know that they come from somewhere and something, and even more so for young people who feel that they came from nothing,” he explains. “To have somebody say that not only are you a something, but you are an eternal something—that your life has meaning and value that has been spoken about for centuries—well, it is very, very profound.”

At the same time, the rabbi insists that people on the road to recovery change not just their beliefs, but also their behaviors. “When we talk abut change and transformation, people have a mistaken notion that that is some kind of spiritual thing,” he says. “But really it is all about what we do: how we get along with our children, how you get along in your marriage. Those things are an underpinning of spiritual growth.”

Rabbi Fine has established a web site—www.timessquarerabbi.com—where those seeking inspiration can connect with each other in the “Hope Forum.” The site also offers a detailed explanation of Maimonides’ eight steps to personal transformation.

SIDEBAR

Rabbi Yehudah Fine bases his work with troubled teens on the eight steps of spiritual awakening as put forth by the 12th-century luminary Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, known as Maimonides or the Rambam. The steps are, in brief:

STEP ONE: Hurling Out the Pain—An individual must confess to his or her iniquities.

STEP TWO: Recognizing That You’ve Changed—We forsake our misdeeds and remove them from our thoughts.

STEP THREE: Standing Up for Yourself—Keep yourself far away from the things that caused you to sin.

STEP FOUR: Moving Forward—We know we have truly changed when, given the opportunity to stray, we refrain from repeating our mistakes.

STEP FIVE: Straightening Out Personal Business—We need to reconcile with those we have wronged, asking forgiveness from those we hurt.

STEP SIX: Confessing in Public—It is “exceedingly praiseworthy” to confess in public and acknowledge our sins known to others.

STEP SEVEN: Living Your Forgiveness—When someone who sinned against you asks you for forgiveness, forgive them willingly and completely.

STEP EIGHT: Falling in Love with Life—People must “walk in the pathway of wisdom” not out of fear, nor in the hope of winning profit, but rather out of boundless love for God.