Self-Acceptance vs. Teshuvah?
I read with interest Dr. Bin Goldman’s article (“In the Therapist’s Chair,” March 13) in which he declares that “self-acceptance” is one of the key unstated goals of psychological therapy.
It occurred to me that this runs counter to Jewish thinking!
Doesn’t Judaism, with its emphasis on teshuvah mitigate against “self-acceptance”? Don’t we devote an entire day – Yom Kippur – to exposing and admitting our faults?
Doesn’t the Mussar movement encourage cheshbon ha’nefesh by which we confront our shortcomings?
So what are we to conclude? That Judaism promotes an unhealthy psychological state? Or that “self-acceptance” is a fraudulent goal which only results in moral smugness and complacency?
Should we be buying ourselves flowers (as Dr. Goldman’s patient does) or seeking our faults as the root cause of our problems?
I would appreciate an elucidation from Dr. Goldman.
Danny Frankel
Washington Heights, Manhattan
Dr. Goldman replies:
I want to thank the reader for a fair and important question. Judaism absolutely takes sin, fault, accountability, and growth seriously. Teshuvah and inner work are central to what it means to live as a Jew. So if “self-acceptance” means complacency, moral smugness, or waving away our faults, then yes, Judaism rejects it. And frankly, so do I.
But that’s not what I wrote, and it’s not what the research found. The Lancet Psychiatry study I cited didn’t discover that people left therapy feeling smug. It found that people who did the hard work of looking at themselves honestly came to a place where they could finally say, “I think I’m OK as a person.” Still flawed, still growing, but no longer at war with themselves over being human.
And the flowers? Every Jewish woman is entitled to buy herself flowers for Shabbos. That’s normal. But this woman couldn’t, because somewhere deep down she didn’t believe she was worth the ten dollars. That’s a wound, not a character flaw that mussar would fix. Therapy helped her reclaim something she should never have lost.
Self-acceptance, as I understand it clinically and religiously, means facing myself honestly – my flaws, my failures, my unfinished places – without collapsing into shame, without exiling parts of myself from the possibility of repair. And that capacity is exactly what makes genuine growth possible.
Without it, what often happens isn’t teshuvah but its counterfeit. A person who can’t bear to see himself as he is becomes defensive, avoidant, performative in his frumkeit. He projects his own unacknowledged faults onto others, finding in them what he cannot face in himself. He confesses, maybe, but doesn’t transform. Real teshuvah asks something harder than self-accusation. It asks a person to tolerate the truth of who he is long enough to actually do something about it.
HaKadosh Baruch Hu Himself models the way. He doesn’t ignore our faults. But He created us unfinished – deliberately, by design – knowing our wounds, our limits, the precise weight each neshamah carries. He holds us to the standard we’re actually capable of, sees us with both din and rachamim, and still calls us to avodah. Truth held together with compassion.
Judaism asks for humble, honest self-knowledge in the service of teshuvah, growth, avodas Hashem, and our interactions with others – with enough compassion to do the work without being destroyed by it.