Celebrating Seven Years of Sobriety with a Tattoo and My First Trip to Germany

Finding my Judaism in the un-Jewish

The Return of the Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation to His Family Still Living in Accordance with Old Customs by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1833

Leviticus 19:28’s instructions are clear: Ye shall not print any marks upon you. And yet there I was, this past March, sitting on a plane to Europe, to get a tattoo that would cover half of my right arm. Though surnamed “Olshonsky,” I never waved the Jewish flag too highly. Perhaps I never had to. So, it felt deeply symbolic to travel to Germany, for the first time, to mark my seventh year of sobriety.

But I’d be lying if I said I felt fully confident about the decision. As I was researching tattoo artists, I experienced waves of emotional dissonance. On one hand, I was elated to honor the recovery that literally saved my life; on the other, I doubted my choice of commemoration. I felt, perhaps, I was deluding myself into a romantic truth that felt right, but merely served as some species of ceremonial self-harm—like an addiction.

It might sound a little thing: to get a tattoo or not, to get inked in Germany or elsewhere? But this was my hard-earned sobriety we were talking about. This was my heritage, my blood. This was Germany. To do it there would be too much, too literal, too ironic.

I feared what my parents would say of a decision to visit the Land-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named to violate our people’s law. The dread of my parent’s disapproval was hardly new, as I’m Jewish. So, equally Jewish, I put my mind to work and found a middle path. I’d spend a week in Berlin to absorb the culture, then take a quick flight to Amsterdam, where I’d get my long-desired tattoo over two days with Denis Verba, the brilliant artist who specializes in highly-evocative spiritual tattoos.

My relationship with Germany had always been fraught and defined by avoidance. It was, quite literally, verboten. Honest to God, Germany was a countrified Voldemort in my household. My grandparents fled the Third Reich, and their story loomed large in my upbringing, becoming part of my own narrative, often reminding me of the power of hate, the human spirit in the face of adversity, and the fact that a good Jew would never buy a German automobile. I won’t forget the moment I told my grandfather I had been accepted into an Ivy League college, an accomplishment that a middle-class family like mine was, naturally, quite proud of. He didn’t congratulate me. Instead, he asked two simple questions.

“Are there Jews there? Is it safe?”

A part of me hoped this pilgrimage to the “Fatherland” might gyroscopically rekindle my connection to Judaism. I was committed to place the tattoo on my right forearm, the same exact location where several of my ancestors were marked against their will by the Nazis. Still, my family has often reminded me that tattoos will prevent burial in even some of the most relaxed Jewish cemeteries.

And yet, despite earnest albeit unintentional efforts to prematurely end my life through years of drugging and drinking, where I’d be buried was the least of my concerns. Almost everyone thinks this of themselves, but I wasn’t a “typical” child. Certainly not a typical Jewish boy—so embarrassed by what I perceived as the cultural “obnoxiousness” of my religion, I’d lie and tell friends I was only “part Jewish”—hedging against the part of myself that was shameful and dangerous. It’s a comi-tragic quirk of fate, perhaps, that in this way, as a Jew, I was better prepared to be an addict. Prepared to hedge, to hide, to run, to imitate, to blend—ever-scanning the horizons for threat or foe.

My parents insisted on driving me thirty minutes to the posher part of town for my Jewish education. I’d flee these lessons (and my people) to run off adventuring into the woods, rebelling somewhat consciously from the Holocaust lineage I was frequently reminded of. My internalized anti-Semitism howled at the “JAPiness” (Jewish American Princess) of both the boys and the girls at my Hebrew School. Only later it occurred to me that it wasn’t the Jewishness of my peers that I found so objectionable; it was the effect of their parents’ wealth and neglect. That they happened to be Jews was an inevitable consequence of it being a Hebrew School, no more or less.

Thusly I became an intellectual atheist devouring Sam Harris’ End of Faith at eighteen. (I’d later discover this was an ironically archetypical Jewish Boy thing to do.) It took me a decade of shenanigans to learn that an impassioned defense of the absence of God is hardly an ethos, let alone one by which to live—or strive.

But no one can live their ethos truly, any ethos, while under the dominion of drugs.

At the core of severe addiction lies profound shame. It feels like your body, your personhood, is possessed of a fundamental wrongness. Limned with a defect so offensive, you must apologize for your very existence—a laughably Catholic notion actually. But one that Jews came to far earlier than they: the difference is that Catholics have offended their God, while we have offended our Mothers. What we share is that our existence is the issue.

I am, however, careful not to “trauma-mine” and declare my addiction to be the causal result of intergenerational Jewish wounds from the Holocaust. Certainly, some of that complex PTSD-induced neuroses were inevitably passed on to me. (Those who have met me concur ; ) But my identity crisis cut far deeper than religion.

In my early sobriety, amid daily recovery meetings, I was invited to pause and explore the parts of my personality that I had rejected and repressed, with the guidance of psychological professionals, Buddhist meditation instructors, and sober men in AA. Recovery taught me how to open myself to Spirit, which like so many others, I immediately channeled into an obsession with Eastern religions—namely, Buddhism, Hindu tantra, and other yogic traditions. Still no Judaism (nor Germany, for that matter). But at a time in my life when it was all about situating the Self, I was still too ashamed to be Alexander Olshonsky. I needed to first accept the soul that I was before I could accept its place in the world.

Through my recovery, after losing everything the secular version of myself once worshiped—career, wealth, not to mention matrimony—I was forced to search for the part of myself that was never born and perhaps will never die. When I was exactly a year into my sobriety, I summoned the courage to ignore my sponsor’s warning and drank ayahuasca, a psychoactive tea indigenous to the Amazon basin. I won’t be the first to say it or the last, but this experience was so otherworldly, thunderously explosive, and imaginative, that I never looked at life the same again. It was as though my need to direct anger and judgment towards myself had dissipated. I could see me without condemning me and that unlocked what I consider recovery’s greatest gift: a trait of open-minded humility.

It was only at this stage that I began to revisit my Jewish spiritual roots. By no means did I consider myself religious—I didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays, attend services, or do anything other than listen to a few podcasts and skim a book about the Kabbalah.

Yet—something inside me had shifted. I no longer felt shame for being Jewish. In fact, I even freed a tinge of pride, especially for being the descendant of grandparents who came to America with literally nothing, the hounding of the Nazis at their heels. The American Dream, then real, lay brilliantly before them.

Once arrived in Berlin, I was blessed with the opportunity to connect with the local culture thanks to my wonderful hosts. One such unforgettable moment was attending a Shabbat service at the city’s oldest synagogue, a place of worship that, of course, had once been destroyed. It was my second Shabbat service in a decade (the first being at Burning Man three years prior, which, yes, is funny). If you told a younger version of myself that I would skip a run and a river’s cold plunge to attend a Shabbat service, he would have scoffed. But sitting in that gorgeous place of worship, I felt … yes, that was it, I felt!

I sat beside the Unnamable God of my people. Of course, there was sublimity, there was lightness, buoyancy, there was a suspension of time, there was irrelevance of position and place—but none of that described the Unnamable God I now, perhaps for the first time, knew as a neighbor. I was Jewish that day, and it was good.

By the time I got to Amsterdam, I was riding a high from such an unexpectedly excellent week across the Rhine. During the tattoo process itself, I had a vision for what I wanted, but also the intention to surrender control and allow Denis to make his art. The thing about surrender, however, is that it’s rarely as graceful as imagined.

“Everyone has a plan … until they get punched in the mouth.” —Mike Tyson (gentile, but not wrong).

For the first few hours of the eight-and-a-half I spent under the needle, I meditated and practiced the path of non-rejection (tantra), deriving pleasure from the pain. Then, one moment about halfway through, I looked at the messy, half-completed work.

My equanimity vanished in an instant. My tuchus was suddenly ready to make diamonds out of coal. I was tense, fighting, resisting, asking myself why do I continue to subject myself to such agony? All the negative emotions and shame I usually bury while rushing through life were resurfaced. Trained in somatic psychology, I recognized this geyser of torment as my “core material.” The unconscious attitudes, narratives, and values one has carried since childhood. The crash was all the more felling as it immediately succeeded the rushing spiritual peaks of my time in Berlin.

I thought of my parents. I knew that no matter the tattoo’s design, they were not going to be happy. (I’d even considered including the Star of David in the design as a pre-emptive rebuttal.) I worried my grandfather was rolling in his grave, laughing at my notion that including Germany in this journey somehow redeemed the endeavor. That such a “pilgrimage” could metamorphose a violation of my body as well as the mores of my people into something meaningful, even elevated—yes, my grandfather must be ashamed of me.

So now I’ve got this bloody, Saran-wrapped arm aching on the thin armrest of my twelve-hour flight back to SFO. A few things I then knew to be true, though I still don’t understand how they can all be true at the same time: my grandfather would be ashamed of me; my parents are going to kill me (my sister forbade me from telling them until after she’s given birth, for literal fear of my mother having a heart attack); the tattoo was the right decision to honor my recovery; and finally, I am Chosen.

It was never about drugs, tattoos, Nazis, or, necessarily, Judaism. It was about saying to the mirror: “I can work with this.”