Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
From time to time, people ask me what emotional wellness has to do with religion. I'm supposed to be a rabbi, not a social worker or psychologist, so why am I talking about emotional wellness?
My belief is (and this is something that developed over many years) that all truths are found in our Torah. I like to say that there are two ways that people, so to say, synchronize Torah and science, or Torah and mental health.
One approach is that someone trains in college for many years and earns a doctorate or other type of degree. Then, after he is finished clarifying all of his approaches, he stumbles onto a Gemara, a Rashi or a Rambam, and says, “Wow, that Rashi (or Rambam) fits perfectly with what I learned in college!” Sometimes they even put all together and write a book. That's approach number one.
Approach number two, which is the approach that I took (not because I chose it, but that's just the way it evolved), is that you go to Yeshiva your whole life and learn in kollel and hear classes in Musar from great rabbis like I was zoche to hear from Rav Wolbe, Chacham Ben Sion Abba Shaul, Rav Yehida Ades…and it all impacted me greatly in this area. So you have everything worked out in a Torah approach, and then you stumble onto something that has a secular source and you say, “Wow, look at that.”As the Midrash Eicha says, Chochma B’Goyim TaAmen! Goyim have wisdom.
They were able to find something with their wisdom!
While we don't deny that the goyim have wisdom, there is difference between the Torah and their wisdom (maybe we will discuss this is the future).
What really hit me was a book by Stephen Covey, called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s actually one of the top five bestselling self-help books in history and has sold tens of millions of copies.
Covey once spoke at Torah UMesorah. He was respected in the Orthodox camp. He was a wholesome fellow. I actually took a course in the Seven Habits at a Torah Umesorah principal’s conference that I attended. A wonderful Rabbi, Shlomo Goldberg, from California was the presenter. That’s how I was introduced to the book. I'd like to quote something from the book, which shows why a rabbi can talk about mental health, and the source for this:
“Let me share with you the catalytic story of Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a determinist, which means he believed that people's lives are predetermined either by their genetics (it's called genetic determinism), by psychic determinism, which basically says your parents did it to you or by environmental determinism, which says that your boss, your spouse, or the economic situation is doing it to you.
All determinism says that it's things outside of you that make it happen. And that's what Frankl was raised on-in the tradition of Freudian psychology.
Frankl was also a psychiatrist and a Jew. He was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany. His parents, his brother, and his wife died in the camps. Frankl himself suffered torture and innumerable indignities.
One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called "the last of the human freedoms" -- the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Viktor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him.
Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.
He had more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.
And this is the tremendous hiddush of Frankl, which is the basis of the entire book of Stephan Covey- That between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose. We have independent will -- the ability to act based on our self-awareness, free of all other influences. Even the most intelligent animals have none of these endowments.
Earth shattering. As we said, Viktor Frankl was a Jew, was impacted by his Jewish, religious surroundings. As was Freud and all the early German psychologists. They were impacted. They cannot deny the fact that their grandfathers shared Chumash with them. They say it in their own diaries. So, when they come up with this great chiddush, we don't know where they got it- it could have come from their grandmothers. Regardless, they're all excited over Viktor Frankl's chiddush for humanity. Be Proactive. You don't have to be reactive. You don't have to react to your situations. You can choose.
Where is this in our religion? Let's read from the Rambam in Hilchot Teshuva, chapter five.
ודבר זה עיקר גדול הוא והוא עמוד התורה והמצוה
This is an important principle, it’s the pillar of the Torah and Mitzvot …
And he quotes a pasuk
ראה נתתי לפניך היום את החיים וכתיב ראה אנכי נותן לפניכם היום
I put life in front of you, Today I am putting in front of you blessing and curses. What does that mean?
שהרשות בידכם
It's up to you.
וכל שיחפוץ האדם לעשות ממעשה בני האדם עושה בין טובים בין:Whatever you want to do, you can do, whether good or bad…
The Rambam tells us this is the principle of our religion. The principle of our religion is freedom of choice. And this predates Stephen Covey and Freud by 800 years.
And the Rambam says, Don't allow it to go through your minds, this that the foolish goyim, and many Jews, say,
שהקב"ה גוזר על האדם מתחל ברייתו להיות צדיק או רשע אין הדבר כן אלא כל אדם ראוי לו להיות צדיק כמשה רבינו או רשע כירבעם / That “That Hashem, from the beginning of his creation, created man to be either righteous or evil. It's not so. Any man can be righteous like Moshe or a Rasha like Yerovam.
When I started reading this book of Stephan Covey’s, I was amazed that it was something that is so basic and so fundamental in our religion; that we can control ourselves, we have freedom of choice. We're not born a certain way. We're not predetermined. We know that. That comes from the Torah. It's a pasuk.
(And now for my point)
So of course rabbis have a right to speak about mental health. It doesn't mean that they're diagnosticians, or that they're going to cure clinical depression or anxiety, but the fundamentals of what I like to call emotional wellness- meaning what do you have to to do be healthy? Of course, there are points when a person needs medicine and therapy. But good old mental health, that's something basic, it’s the fundamentals that we're taught in our musar in our yeshivot. These are things that could help people. I did not come into this ‘business’ with any preconceived secular notions. I came in with what I was taught in Yeshiva. And if I see something in the secular world that can develop it and bring it down in a more palatable way, I love to share it.
For some reason, people get excited and say, “Wow, the Rambam said the same thing as Viktor Frankl!”
I say, “Wow, Viktor Frankl said the same thing as the Rambam!”
To me, that might be exciting.
I get excited not by proving our Torah, because I found it in science. I prove science because I saw it in Torah. That's the approach that we're taking throughout these classes. If something doesn't fit with the Torah approach, I discard it. If something does, and if, as I said, it makes it more understandable because our minds somehow work better when we hear something like the marshmallow test, versus just hearing good old self-control, okay I’ll share it. But again, these concepts predated modern psychology. Rav Yisrael Salantar, as Rav Wolbe said, revealed the subconscious way before Freud. And as we mentioned in the past, Rav Wolbe said it was not a subconscious, which is something deep and dark, living in the basements of man, but a superconscious, it's a higher conscience. It's something that comes from our soul.
So this is our back story, to help answer the questions that might have been bothering some people.
Have a wonderful day.