I remember the moment so clearly; it has literally imprinted itself on my personality, and my priorities. Sitting in my study at the JCC of West Hempstead, Long Island, where I was then serving as rabbi, I heard a rapping at my door. Jumping up from my seat, I quickly opened the door and facing me was Alan (not his real name), a member of the shul with whom I davened every Shabbat. A thin man in his early 60's, he greeted me with a pensive smile.

He said he was there to discuss my Rosh Hashanah sermon and if I had a few minutes, he would like to share some thoughts about it. I was concerned because – as a young rabbi in my first solo pulpit – I had already learned that if someone took the time to see me in my office about my sermon, it was generally only to deliver negative comments.

Alan told me how moved he was by my sermon, which addressed the issue of addiction in the Jewish community. Highlighting some facts about the prevalence of drug abuse, alcoholism, and compulsive gambling among Jews, the talk had stressed our need to help a long-neglected segment of our population. The sermon resulted from my attendance in June 1991 at the first-ever training program for rabbis on the problem of addiction and recovery among Jews, sponsored by JACS, the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Alan noted that this issue had been bothering him for some time but he didn't realize that, as his rabbi, I was interested in discussing this matter, or that anybody in the "official" Jewish community cared. He continued after a pregnant pause, "My brother is an addicted gambler and I want to tell you what he has done to our family."

I know Alan and the wonderful family he has created. In the past, he told me about his Jewish growth, and I had witnessed his commitment to Torah study and the positive impact of his growing involvement in the shul. How could he have a brother who is a pathological gambler?

Alan described the chaos his brother had inflicted on his family. "He is a sports betting addict and has lost thousands, if not close to a million dollars on bets," he said. Alan's parents had bailed him out countless times, taking at face value his promise that he would not bet again. Now, he had again approached Alan for help. Alan was furious that he had to struggle with the issue of family loyalty and his sense that, if he were to give his brother money, it would only make the matter worse, not better.

I had been taught that most addicts are liars. If Alan gave his brother cash, it was more than likely that he would use the money to bet again, instead of paying off loan sharks. I also had learned that addicts use lying to manipulate the people with whom they live and work. I asked Alan to tell me about the last time his brother had asked for money. He responded that he had never paid back that loan.

The weeks following that Rosh Hashanah, I had many conversations with fellow congregants about their relatives and friends who were addicts. Some even told me of experiences they had being "Friends of Bill W.," a code phrase meaning that they were recovering addicts and that they will always be grateful to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 Step model of recovery. During these conversations, I developed a new mission: to reach out and share the pastoral concern of the Jewish community with this troubled and unacknowledged segment of our population.

These conversations led me to call together four rabbinic colleagues from Long Island, who had also taken the training course. Interestingly, each represented one of the modern movements in Judaism, and also included Rabbi Moshe Edelman, USCJ Director of Leadership Development, who was at that time a pulpit rabbi on Long Island. We organized the Nassau-Suffolk Jewish Recovery Group, which met monthly, rotating among our various synagogues. Our goal was to serve Jewish recovering addicts from all over the area. After about six months, the group began to meet weekly at my synagogue, because we had learned that the 12 Step groups met on a regular weekly schedule in the same place, a model with which our participants were quite familiar.

The experience of the regular sessions forced us to let go of our own "hubris" and the assumption that we had all the answers for these fellow Jews. What we learned to share is our willingness to listen and our profound sense of God's concern and love for those who are suffering and struggling.

Who were these people coming to our weekly Jewish spirituality sessions? Fellow Jews like us, some deeply involved in their synagogues, some hardly involved or not even members of a synagogue. Many of these Jews told terrible stories of difficult family situations, often caused by their past lifestyle, which included actively using drugs, alcohol, gambling or compulsively overeating. Often, I heard complaints from the participants that the Jewish community and synagogues didn't care about them. I already knew that many synagogues sponsor bingo games and Super Bowl pools as fundraisers, which are enticing to pathological gamblers, and provide kiddushim without a grape juice option for adults. However, I learned that, beyond these specific examples, addicts/recovering addicts and the rest of our fellow Jews traveled in different worlds.

This became apparent when I began to speak across Long Island on the existence of Jewish addicts and Jews in recovery. The community has been in denial for so long about the reality of addiction that members of our synagogues didn't believe me and demanded that I produce statistics. I responded that we were in a "Catch 22" – there were no statistics because the Jewish community would not fund the studies to produce them, believing the problem did not exist. However, we had anecdotal evidence galore from clinicians and from other sources.

A few years later, I was approached by the New York Board of Rabbis to serve as the part-time chaplain at the Nassau County Correctional Center. There were, on the average, 50 Jews in that jail. I was asked to serve because of those Jews incarcerated, 90% were there due to a crime they committed because of their addictions. I ran three Jewish spirituality groups – two for men, one for women – on a weekly basis. The inmates were in jail often because of DUI; stealing to pay for drugs; robbing their companies to pay gambling debts; and non-payment of child support because of addictions. I even had an inmate admit to me that he stole a shofar from a local synagogue before Rosh Hashanah, sold it at a Kosher Pizza restaurant to a patron, and used the money to buy drugs.

As my interest in this population grew, I realized that I needed to continue studying pastoral counseling and care. In the early 90s, there were few institutions in the Jewish community teaching more than one basic rabbinical school course in counseling. I turned therefore to the Blanton -Peale Graduate Institute in New York City, founded and housed at the Marble Collegiate Church and famous for its past leader, the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale. As the only rabbi in the program at that time, I was exposed to outstanding Christian scholars and clinicians who were light years ahead of the Jewish community in pastoral studies. Later, I attended the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, but by this time, the program was co-sponsored by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR).

I eventually earned my doctorate in pastoral counseling and care at HUC-JIR, writing about a Jewish spirituality group I ran for recovering Jewish pathological gamblers in my synagogue in West Hempstead. When I left that congregation in 1996, our synagogue was hosting a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, two Gam-Anon meetings for family members of gamblers, an Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book meeting and a Narcotics Anonymous meeting a few doors away from our weekly USY meeting.

Our community learned to welcome and love these fellow Jews and often appreciated that some of them helped us make a minyan at 8:00 p.m. We learned to stop advertising the Super Bowl pool in the shul lobby and to always have a grape juice option for adults and an alcohol-free haroset at Passover. We also learned most profoundly from Jews in recovery that recovery from addiction meant they had to turn their lives over to a Higher Power. Their search for a spiritual connection to Judaism was often a life and death issue, forcing the rest of us to reflect more deeply on our Judaism and what it means to us.

Rabbi Lankin is Director of Religious and Educational Activities, United Jewish Communities.