Sunday, September 21, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
Walk into any therapist's office today, and the conversation will likely begin the same way: "What brings you here? What's wrong? What symptoms are you experiencing?" The entire therapeutic enterprise is built on a medical model that treats emotional and moral struggles as pathology to be diagnosed and fixed.
But what if this approach has it exactly backwards? What if the problem isn't that people are broken, but that they've lost connection to their own moral compass? What if healing doesn't require fixing what's wrong with someone, but helping them rediscover what's right about them?
Modern therapy inherits its framework from medicine: identify symptoms, diagnose conditions, apply treatments. Depression gets treated with cognitive restructuring. Anxiety gets managed with coping strategies. Relationship problems get addressed through communication skills.
But when these problems are looked at through a derechological lens, the idea is that they are rarely suffering from cognitive deficits. They're suffering from moral drift.
They've lost touch with their core values. They can't navigate competing obligations. They don't know how to make decisions that align with who they actually are, rather than who they think they should be.
When you look at values as atomic to human nature itself, as fundamental to our being as language or consciousness, it changes the entire model of healing. Moral confusion isn't a character flaw or psychological disorder. It's more like being lost without a compass. The solution isn't to diagnose what's wrong with your navigation system - it's to help you reconnect with your internal moral GPS.
The question isn't "What's wrong with you?" but "Where are you on your derech (moral path,) and what might growth look like from here?"
I worked with my AskHillel AI to develop a system for therapy. It suggested practical tools like:
Moral Compass Scan: Helping clients identify their most trusted internal signals, whether they are somatic sensations, behavioral patterns or recurring thoughts, that indicate alignment or misalignment with their core values.
Derech Drift Map: Instead of treating disorientation as failure, this tool helps people understand where they are in their moral journey: whether they're in a period of rupture, wilderness wandering, return, or transformation.
Teshuvah as Moral Version Control: Change isn't about erasing the past or achieving perfection. It's about making the next "commit" in your moral development - iterative growth rather than binary success/failure.
The therapist's role becomes fundamentally different too. Rather than diagnosing disorder, the therapist becomes a derech witness - a mirror for the client’s moral motion, not a mapmaker; a partner who offers models rather than mandates for ethical response.
The system treats people as inherently worthy moral agents rather than broken systems needing repair.
This isn't just more compassionate - it's more accurate. When you start with the assumption that people have intrinsic moral dignity and are capable of ethical growth, you create space for the kind of healing that actually transforms lives rather than just managing symptoms.
And there's a deeper implication here. If this values-first approach proves more effective for individual healing, it suggests something profound about human nature itself. It validates the core insight of Derechology: that morality isn't something imposed on humans from outside, but something that emerges from our fundamental nature.
People want moral clarity. They want to know not just how to feel better, but how to live in alignment with who they actually are.
If therapy could offer that - if it could help people reconnect with their intrinsic moral architecture rather than just managing their psychological symptoms - it might finally address the deeper crisis driving so many people to therapists' offices in the first place.
To my understanding, this is similar to the approach used in ACT therapy, but it is more oriented towards morality and moral path more than just values.
It is important to emphasize that while these insights come from my work on Jewish ethics, the moral path discovered does not have to be Jewish at all. Everyone has their own "ethical gravity well" that comes from their upbringing.
The question isn't whether people are broken. The question is whether they remember who they are.
And that's a question worth building an entire therapeutic framework around.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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