Abraham J. Twerski - Twerski On Twelve Steps and Jewish Ethics

Twerski On Twelve Steps and Jewish Ethics

Twerski's clinical career specializes in addiction, much of his popular writing concerns self-improvement and ethical behavior. He merges the Mussar Jewish ethics and morality movement with the Twelve-Step Program and with ideas from clinical psychology.

Andrew Heinze explains Twerski's attraction to the Twelve Steps this way:

The significance of the religious dynamic in Alcoholics Anonymous was captured in Abraham Twerski's comment that he discovered in AA meetings the kind of sincere and even selfless fellow-feeling that was often absent from synagogues. He was moved by the example of men and women who would willingly be awakened in the middle of the night to go out and help a fellow alcoholic. Recovering alcoholics, Twerski observed, "will often exhibit a sense of responsibility far superior to that of the non-alcoholic in relationship to their families, friends, and God."

...

He was attracted as well by the pragmatism of the Twelve Steps.... he AA system offered a practical non-analytic therapy that resonated with traditional Judaism much more than conventional psychoanalysis did. In treating addicts, Twerski discovered limitations of the psychoanalytic emphasis on understanding the origins of one's behavior. Patients would continue to drink while they inquired with their therapists into the possible reasons for their drinking. The Twelve Step program took the opposite approach, demanding that the person start his or her transformation by stopping the bad behavior. "There is an important similarity between the Torah approach to behavior and the Twelve Step program approach," Twerski realized.

One does not enter into a discussion or argument with the yetzer hara. Whatever reasons you can propose for one position, the yetzer hara will give several logical reasons to the contrary....

Heinze gives the following example of how Twerski introduced Twelve Steps, a movement with Christian origins, to the Jewish audience, which according to Heinze perceived alcohol addiction as a non-Jewish problem:

....Twerski cleverly presents the theme of alcoholism not as a modern American phenomenon but rather as part-and-parcel of rabbinic discourse. He refers to Rabbi Chaim Shmulevitz, who cites Midrash Tanhuma on the drunken man whose family escorts him to witness an obviously drunk and degraded man. To his family's dismay, he bends over the fallen man and whispers in his ear, "My good man, where did you get such fine wine?" To those who would claim that the problem of addictive behavior is secondary or even peripheral to the observant Jew, Twerski answers, "one cannot consider oneself to be truly observant if one neglects mussar." And for Twerski mussar entails dealing with "the psychological mechanism of denial can blind a person to even the most obvious self-destructive behavior."

Twerski's reinterpretation of mussar "depends fundamentally on psychological categories in spite of his rejection of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic tool." Heinze writes:

Much as it is impossible for a psychologist to ignore or overlook obvious psychological problems, so Twerski's training in the biochemistry of the brain inevitably led him to abandon the strict and often austere moral economy of traditional mussar. He cannot simply exhort, in the ancestral way, about human laziness. If a person seems incapacitated by depression, Twerski must investigate the possibility of a biochemical problem before resorting to the conventional prescription of mussar---the performance of mitzvot.

And further:

"In my earlier days of doing psychotherapy, treating persons with a negative self-image was most distressing," recalled---"I would become angry because it seemed to me that the patient preferred to wallow in the mire of his fantasied worthlessness...." ... "The trick in therapy," he concluded, using the English equivalent of the word mussar employed (tachbulah) to describe both the evil urge and methods to defeat it, "is to remove the distortion" of view that hindered psychological and moral growth. Starting out with an old-fashioned moralism that emphasized the stubborn will as chief stumbling block to self-improvement, Twerski ended up with the premise that psychological blocks were essentially involuntary and therefore tantamount to physical disabilities, albeit ones subject to remedy.