What Changed?

Early on in my study of mental health, I hit upon a confounding matter: What happened until now?!

To the best of my understanding, the practical and beneficial advancements in the mental health field at earliest started in the past 60 years or so, and didn’t impact the Jewish community in a significant way before 20 years ago. How did the great percentage of society who are now benefitting from some sort of coaching, therapy, or even self-help, manage 100, 200, or 3,000 years ago?

There are three options that first come to mind. One option is that they just suffered through it without the tools needed to live more emotionally healthy lives. Or possibly somehow, for the vast majority of history, mankind has been able to manage their trials and tribulations without any of the modern tools and techniques. A third option is that whatever is the cause of our own emotional distress was not present until recently, and therefore there was no need for advancements in emotional health.

The problem with the first option is clear - why would G-D put us through such a difficulty without the means to conquer and control it? And why now, after more than 5770 years, has mankind been granted the insight to meet these challenges head on?

If the answer is the second option, it behooves us to learn and investigate what tools our forefathers possessed that enabled them to rise above their challenges, and to see what we can implement into our own lives.

The third option, as well, would necessitate a study into what changes in society caused the shift, and how we can enhance our lives with this new-found knowledge.

I would like to share a thought I heard from a highly respected Rabbinical individual, with a lot of experience in the field of mental health (as well as from a good friend who is an eminent social worker).

He explained that in the past, people lived spiritually. Not just Jews, but all people lived G-D centered lives. When one lives with the knowledge that G-D is running the world and our lives specifically, life is manageable. Take for example some the great anxieties of the day, on a global level - climate change, nuclear war, an AI takeover, and the threat of global extermination. And on a personal level - health, financial security, and relationships. When one believes that he descends from a single-celled organism as one giant mistake over billions of years, he is faced with the conclusion that he has no control and is left to the mathematical statistics of catastrophe. If chances are that he will be hit by a comet in the near future, if he isn’t taken out by a nuclear strike first, or will end up homeless because of identity theft, how can he not be in a perpetual state of anxiety and depression?

However, for one who lives with the reality that the world was created and is continuously run by G-D, and He is running our lives on a personal level, there will be no worries of comets or AI takeovers. We know that whatever He orchestrates for us is for our benefit, and even what seems bad is a kindness, so automatically our mental well-being will be improved.

Based on this understanding, due to the tremendous shift in the world a large over the past 100 years, from a spiritual upward focused life, to an atheistic outward connected life, the world in general has taken a strong hit on the emotional level. B”H our community is light years ahead of the world and live spiritual lives, however, there can be subtle influences, and this may be a cause of some of our challenges.

I brought up this idea with a wise friend of mine, and his reaction was vehement. While he did admit that for those in the upper percentile of emotional health their struggle is in the spiritual, he fiercely believes, that for the common man, the struggle is self-worth. While the logic behind his argument and his explanation of the change over the past 100 years is deserving of an article in its own right, I would like at least to present his main argument against the forementioned idea. And that is, that the bread and butter of the contemporary mental health tools, do not address spiritual deficiencies, rather they focus on building up the self-worth. Stay tuned for a more in-depth exploration of this idea, and feel free to comment with your own.

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