Jerusalem Therapy

25/10/2026

You Can't Plan Your Way Out of Uncertainty

Planning is useful, but sometimes it's anxiety wearing a business suit. You don't need to anticipate every possibility before moving forward. Confidence isn't knowing everything will work out; it's trusting yourself to handle things when they don't.

To Reach Out:
📱: 053-808-0435
📱: +972-53-808-0435
📧: [email protected]
ℹ️: www.jerusalemtherapy.org

- Bio -
Yonasan’s a graduate of Hebrew University’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare. He completed post graduate training in a wide array of therapeutic approaches from CBT at The Beck Institute, behavior and emotion focused therapies, to various Psychodynamic theories. Before Hebrew University, he studied at Washington University in St. Louis and Drake University majoring in philosophy and ethics. He received his rabbinic ordination from Rav Yitzchak Berkovits.

Yonasan is a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, researcher at the VIDA Research Lab on values and identity at Hebrew University, and a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist skills trainer. He has collaborated with Machon Dvir and has been a group leader for the National Educational Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder Family Connections program.

He specializes in treating anxiety, depression, anger, poor self-esteem, insomnia, autism, eating disorders, psychosis, problems in parenting, sexual dysfunction, marital conflict, and infidelity. He has an extensive background working with individuals, couples, families, and children in his therapy practice.

23/10/2026

The modern injunction to "find yourself" misses the entire point getting everything backwards. Apparently, somewhere beneath our obligations, disappointments, and unfortunate career decisions, there's an authentic self waiting patiently to be discovered, like a misplaced set of car keys. The assumption assume we already possess everything necessary to become who we're meant to be; all that’s left is to remove whatever society has imposed upon us. L**h L**ha teaches a far less flattering view. God tells Avraham to leave his country, his birthplace, and his father's house, but doesn't tell him where he's going. More than that, He promises to make Avraham into a great nation when the man hasn't managed to produce a single child with Sarah. This isn't a journey of self-discovery in the fashionable sense. God isn't asking Avraham to uncover some magnificent personality already hiding beneath his upbringing. He's asking him to become someone he isn't yet capable of being.

The journey itself does little to flatter Avraham's existing sense of self. He arrives in the Promised Land just in time for a devastating famine. He flees to Egypt, where fear for his life leads him to place Sarah in a morally precarious position. Later, he struggles with Lot, fights a war to rescue him, and watches his household descend into misery when the attempt to secure an heir through Hagar goes disastrously wrong. If this is God's method of personal development, it's unlikely to attract many customers. Yet the narrative captures something important about real psychological growth. Research on identity development suggests identity isn't really discovered so much through introspection; it's built and revised through commitments, experiences, and changing roles. Likewise, research on psychological flexibility shows meaningful action requires tolerating uncertainty rather than waiting for it to disappear. Avraham doesn't become faithful to Hashem because he finally feels secure. He is called on to repeatedly act without that sense of security, sometimes badly, and confront the consequences. His transformation isn't a triumphant unveiling of his authentic self. It's the slow, frequently embarrassing education of a man whose existing instincts aren't initially adequate to the life he's chosen.

Coming off the back of the story of Bavel, where humanity tried to build a tower to heaven because its inhabitants wanted to "make ourselves a name" and avoid being scattered (Bereshis 11:4), Avraham is commanded to do precisely what they feared. Leave everything familiar and accept the uncertainty of your future. Yet God promises him, "I shall make your name great" (Bereshis 12:2). The builders of Bavel desperately try to preserve their identity while Avraham works to build a new one. Even his name changes before the promised future materializes.

This view is a rather devastating lesson for our culture's obsession with authenticity. We often treat fidelity to ourselves as the highest virtue, forgetting the self we're being faithful to may be frightened, selfish, immature, or simply unfinished. Sometimes the person we're trying so desperately to discover is precisely the person we need to outgrow. Avraham's greatness didn’t lie in remaining true to the man who left Charan. It was in allowing the demands of something greater than himself to change who he was. The purpose of life isn't to discover who you really are. It's to become someone your present self would, with any luck, admire and wonder at the question, “how the heck did he become that?”

To Reach Out:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 053-808-0435
International: +972538080435

- Bio -
Yonasan’s a graduate of Hebrew University’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare. He completed post graduate training in a wide array of therapeutic approaches from CBT at The Beck Institute, behavior and emotion focused therapies, to various Psychodynamic theories. Before Hebrew University, he studied at Washington University in St. Louis and Drake University majoring in philosophy and ethics. He received his rabbinic ordination from Rav Yitzchak Berkovits.

Yonasan is a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, researcher at the VIDA Research Lab on values and identity at Hebrew University, and a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist skills trainer. He has collaborated with Machon Dvir and has been a group leader for the National Educational Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder Family Connections program.

He specializes in treating anxiety, depression, anger, poor self-esteem, insomnia, autism, eating disorders, psychosis, problems in parenting, sexual dysfunction, and marital conflict. He has an extensive background working with individuals, couples, families, and children in his therapy practice.

20/10/2026

Purpose is intimidating. It’s supposed to be. Nothing awe-inspiring ever left anyone feeling bored. Purpose is beautiful, powerful, and demanding. It asks two things of you. First, look deep within yourself and ask what truly troubles you. Not the petty irritations of everyday life, but the suffering, injustice, or personal struggles you can’t simply ignore. Second, decide what you’re going to do about it. Purpose demands a vision, and vision begins when you turn what troubles you into something worth pursuing.

“But how can I possibly do that when I’m barely managing my own life?” Perhaps anxiety has made answering the phone terrifying. Perhaps depression has robbed you of hope. Perhaps your marriage is falling apart, your children are struggling, and you’re exhausted. Yet hidden within these struggles is the beginning of a vision. Anxiety points toward courage. Depression reveals the importance of hope. A struggling family calls for love, sacrifice, and personal transformation. These are values, and here’s the remarkable thing about them: the bad news is you’ll never fully achieve them. The good news is you’ll never fully achieve them. Nobody arrives at courage, love, or wisdom and declares the job finished. Their greatness lies precisely in their inexhaustibility. They give you something worth moving toward for the rest of your life. But values alone aren’t enough. Without a plan, even the noblest vision remains a beautiful fantasy.

The mistake is trying to become tomorrow’s person today. You reach for the finished product, discover it’s beyond your grasp, and mistake that distance for failure. Instead, start small. If courage is your goal, spend a week noticing what frightens you, what you avoid, and what you tell yourself when fear takes hold. Then make a plan. This week, answer the door once instead of hiding. This month, start a conversation with someone unfamiliar. This year, join that gym you’ve been avoiding. Your goals should be modest, specific, and achievable. Not things you’ll vaguely try to do, but things you’re genuinely prepared to do. Each week, month, and year should move you a little closer to the person you want to become. You don’t need to conquer your fears, repair your marriage, or transform your life overnight. You need to take the next meaningful step. Values give your life direction. Goals give that direction legs. And purpose is what happens when you start walking.

To Reach Out:
📱: 053-808-0435
📱: +972-53-808-0435
📧: [email protected]
ℹ️: www.jerusalemtherapy.org

- Bio -
Yonasan’s a graduate of Hebrew University’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare. He completed post graduate training in a wide array of therapeutic approaches from CBT at The Beck Institute, behavior and emotion focused therapies, to various Psychodynamic theories. Before Hebrew University, he studied at Washington University in St. Louis and Drake University majoring in philosophy and ethics. He received his rabbinic ordination from Rav Yitzchak Berkovits.

Yonasan is a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, researcher at the VIDA Research Lab on values and identity at Hebrew University, and a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist skills trainer. He has collaborated with Machon Dvir and has been a group leader for the National Educational Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder Family Connections program.

He specializes in treating anxiety, depression, anger, poor self-esteem, insomnia, autism, eating disorders, psychosis, problems in parenting, sexual dysfunction, marital conflict, and infidelity. He has an extensive background working with individuals, couples, families, and children in his therapy practice.

19/10/2026

One of the more disturbing facts about human beings is we rarely have to stop feeling virtuous in order to behave badly. We can be just as vindictive and cruel in the name of pleasant sounding virtues like honesty. Ask someone why they humiliated their spouse, and you are more likely to receive a passionate lecture on the importance of respect as opposed to anything sounding remotely like a confession of frailty. Carl Jung understood something profoundly uncomfortable about this peculiar talent. He called it the shadow. Those parts of ourselves we refuse to recognize because they contradict the flattering portrait we've painted of our own character. We prefer to imagine our darker impulses as something monstrous, lurking beneath the surface. But that's rather convenient. Monsters are easy to condemn precisely because they're nothing like us. The more troubling possibility is our cruelty doesn't always emerge despite our virtues. Sometimes it emerges because of how fiercely we believe in them.

Stanley Milgram's notorious obedience experiments is an excellent example of this, in which ordinary people administered what they believed were painful electric shocks to strangers. Subsequent research has complicated the familiar explanation that participants were simply obeying authority. Some may have continued precisely because they believed they were serving the noble cause of scientific progress. It's a frightening thought that people can participate in wrongdoing not because they've abandoned their moral convictions, but because they've placed those convictions beyond criticism. Jung's insight offers a valuable corrective. Pay attention when your honesty begins to defend itself against the pain it inflicts. Recognizing this impulse doesn't make you a terrible person, nor does it excuse acting upon them. It makes you someone capable of taking responsibility before the damage is done. The person we should trust most isn't the one who confidently declares, "I'd never hurt you," but the one who understands exactly how they could, and has the humility to make sure they don't.

To Reach Out:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 053-808-0435
International: +972538080435

- Bio -
Yonasan’s a graduate of Hebrew University’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare. He completed post graduate training in a wide array of therapeutic approaches from CBT at The Beck Institute, behavior and emotion focused therapies, to various Psychodynamic theories. Before Hebrew University, he studied at Washington University in St. Louis and Drake University majoring in philosophy and ethics. He received his rabbinic ordination from Rav Yitzchak Berkovits.

Yonasan is a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, researcher at the VIDA Research Lab on values and identity at Hebrew University, and a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist skills trainer. He has collaborated with Machon Dvir and has been a group leader for the National Educational Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder Family Connections program.

He specializes in treating anxiety, depression, anger, poor self-esteem, insomnia, autism, eating disorders, psychosis, problems in parenting, sexual dysfunction, marital conflict, and infidelity. He has an extensive background working with individuals, couples, families, and children in his therapy practice.

18/10/2026

When Your Possessions Possess You
Some things in your home aren't possessions. They're unfinished conversations with your past. Tolkien's Hobbits had a wonderful name for things they couldn't use but couldn't bear to get rid of instead using them as presents hobbits gave out to others on their birthday: mathoms. It's a considerably more dignified term than, “that box in the garage I haven't opened since 2007.” In The case of the Sackville-Baggins, Bilbo’s distant relations, they were bequeathed a set of spoons that the couple tried to steal from him ages ago.

There's something bittersweet about our attachment to useless things. Your father's old watch, your grandmother's chipped teacup, the clothes your children outgrew fifteen years ago. We tell ourselves we're preserving memories, but sometimes we're doing something rather more complicated. We're preserving relationships in the only form still available to us. Perhaps, somewhere beneath the sentimentality, there's a fear throwing away the object would somehow diminish the love. As though the dead might return to inspect the premises and find our devotion wanting.

In trying to preserve what mattered, we stop allowing it to matter. Grandmother's beautiful china sits untouched while the family eats off disposable plates. Father's tools rust in a cupboard while nobody builds anything. The old photographs remain boxed away, their stories untold, their faces slowly becoming strangers. The greater challenge isn't letting these things go. It's preserving them so carefully that the life they represented disappears altogether. Use the good china. Tell the stories. Give the tools to someone who'll build something beautiful. Keep what deserves keeping, but don't confuse a shrine with a relationship. The people we love didn't live so that we'd become the curators of their belongings. They lived, and loved, and gave us something of themselves so that we might carry it forward.

To Reach Out:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 053-808-0435
International: +972538080435

- Bio -
Yonasan’s a graduate of Hebrew University’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare. He completed post graduate training in a wide array of therapeutic approaches from CBT at The Beck Institute, behavior and emotion focused therapies, to various Psychodynamic theories. Before Hebrew University, he studied at Washington University in St. Louis and Drake University majoring in philosophy and ethics. He received his rabbinic ordination from Rav Yitzchak Berkovits.

Yonasan is a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, researcher at the VIDA Research Lab on values and identity at Hebrew University, and a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist skills trainer. He has collaborated with Machon Dvir and has been a group leader for the National Educational Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder Family Connections program.

He specializes in treating anxiety, depression, anger, poor self-esteem, insomnia, autism, eating disorders, psychosis, problems in parenting, sexual dysfunction, and marital conflict. He has an extensive background working with individuals, couples, families, and children in his therapy practice.

16/10/2026

God's Disappointing Opinion of Perfection
It's difficult not to sympathize with the builders of the tower of Bavel. Having survived the collective trauma of humanity's near-extinction, their descendants decide to build something permanent. One city, one language, one magnificent tower. Their ambition was driven by the motto “never again” will humanity be helplessly scattered at the mercy of forces beyond its control. Earlier, the generation of the Flood had pursued the opposite experiment, allowing individual appetite to run riot until the earth was filled with violence. Now humanity tries solidarity instead of selfishness and anarchy. And God, being hard to please, objects to that too. The tension here becomes more interesting when we notice what both civilizations have in common. Neither can tolerate the inconvenience of being human. The first refuses to accept that other people have rights. The second refuses to accept that other people might have different minds. One wants freedom without obligation, the other security without uncertainty. Both would prefer a world in which the difficult business of living with other human beings could somehow be avoided.

Psychology offers a rather unflattering explanation for this ambition. Research on intolerance of uncertainty has consistently linked the need for certainty with anxiety, while studies of psychological avoidance show how attempts to escape discomfort can gradually make life smaller. Control is particularly seductive because it works, at least initially. Avoid disagreement and you'll have fewer arguments. Avoid intimacy and nobody can break your heart. Surround yourself with people who think exactly as you do and you'll rarely suffer the embarrassment of discovering you're wrong. Bavel is this strategy elevated to urban planning constructing a world in which nobody need ever leave. Yet the very conditions that make life psychologically safe can also make it intellectually sterile and morally suffocating. The generation of the Flood couldn't restrain itself; Bavel couldn't bear difference. Noach himself offers a third possibility, surviving wickedness by shutting the door of an ark. It might have been necessary at the time but is hardly a complete philosophy of living. He emerges into a renewed world, plants a vineyard, and ends up drunk and exposed in his tent. The man who knew how to survive the end of the world seems considerably less certain what to do with its continuation.

The most surprising moment in the parashah, however, comes after the Flood, when God promises “never again” to destroy the world in that manner, explicitly acknowledging humanity's inclination remains troubled from youth (Bereshis 8:21). Nothing fundamental has been repaired. The creatures responsible for the catastrophe are still here, equipped with the same appetites, fears, and remarkable capacity for making a mess of things. And God decides to live with them. That's an extraordinary reversal of our usual religious instincts. We imagine holiness as the elimination of imperfection, whereas the covenant begins with God's refusal to make perfection a condition of continued existence. The Torah then slips straight to Avraham, who'll leave home without knowing his destination, welcome strangers, and eventually argue with God over the fate of a wicked city. Unlike Noach, he'll engage the world rather than survive it; unlike Bavel's builders, he'll venture into uncertainty rather than attempt to abolish it. The real spiritual danger isn't human imperfection at all. It's our determination to construct lives in which imperfection can no longer trouble us.

To Reach Out:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 053-808-0435
International: +972538080435

- Bio -
Yonasan’s a graduate of Hebrew University’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare. He completed post graduate training in a wide array of therapeutic approaches from CBT at The Beck Institute, behavior and emotion focused therapies, to various Psychodynamic theories. Before Hebrew University, he studied at Washington University in St. Louis and Drake University majoring in philosophy and ethics. He received his rabbinic ordination from Rav Yitzchak Berkovits.

Yonasan is a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, researcher at the VIDA Research Lab on values and identity at Hebrew University, and a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist skills trainer. He has collaborated with Machon Dvir and has been a group leader for the National Educational Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder Family Connections program.

He specializes in treating anxiety, depression, anger, poor self-esteem, insomnia, autism, eating disorders, psychosis, problems in parenting, sexual dysfunction, and marital conflict. He has an extensive background working with individuals, couples, families, and children in his therapy practice.

Call now to connect with business.

15/10/2026

Sometimes “experience” isn't wisdom but is really a respectable sounding word some folks use to excuse the mistakes they can’t own

Oscar Wilde took humanity's talent for self-deception seriously. In his The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde tells the story of a beautiful young man whose self-portrait mysteriously ages and becomes grotesquely disfigured while he himself remains eternally youthful. Dorian indulges every appetite, betray every affection, and progressively commit increasingly terrible acts without his face revealing a thing. His portrait, on the other hand, bears the consequences while he enjoys the pleasures. Hovering over his moral deterioration is Lord Henry Wotton, a charming aristocrat who dresses up base temptation as if it were a philosophy and the cruelty of corruption as an entertaining form of education. It's the same Lord Henry who, in a moment of accidental honesty, declares, “Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.” It's a devastating observation, particularly coming from a man who's made an intellectual career out of encouraging other people to make them.

It's sensible to regard experience as a kind of moral currency. The older we've become, the more we've suffered, the more mistakes we've made, the wiser we supposedly are. Unfortunately, psychology research provides sobering limits to this commonly held belief. Research on hindsight bias shows how readily we reconstruct the past to make ourselves appear more perceptive than we were. Cognitive dissonance research also shows our remarkable ability to rationalize away conduct that threatens our self-image. It is not enough to live through an experience. Much more is needed. Studies on experiential learning suggests that experience only becomes instructive when a person actively reflects on their experiences, receives feedback from others, and consciously outlines alternative behaviors to try the next time a similar situation rears its ugly head. Without that, Lord Henry is spot on. A person can survive three disastrous marriages and emerge not with wisdom but with three impressively elaborate explanations as to why everyone else was impossible. Suffering alone doesn't produce insight. It just gives a person the opportunity to make their ignorant resentment sound enlightened. Experience is just the dimly lit past. Wisdom is the result of casting light on that past in order to confront how we contributed to it.

The greatest obstacle to this wisdom isn't actually the mistakes. It's when our genuinely beautiful need to seek meaning is hijacked to make those mistakes meaningful without the hard work of introspection. It's a wonderfully convenient philosophy to simply tell ourselves every betrayal taught us something, every failure made us stronger, and every foolish decision was somehow necessary for our personal growth. It transforms regret into achievement without requiring much in the way of accountability. Dorian Gray takes this temptation to its grotesque conclusion. He greedily grabs the pleasures of experience without the burden of their consequences, and when his portrait finally confronts him with the truth, he tries to destroy the evidence rather than change himself. Yet the portrait isn't a record of his sins that can be erased. It's his immortal conscience he's spent his life refusing to believe exists. His tragedy isn't exactly all of his terrible mistakes. It's that he can repeatedly stare at their consequences in his portrait and chose not to learn.

Wilde's quote is really about vanity. There's nothing particularly noble about accumulating scars from a hard life if we refuse to examine those wounds. Nor is wisdom a sadist who requires us to celebrate every painful chapter of our lives as some indispensable gift from the universe. Some mistakes are simply mistakes. Some suffering is painfully pointless. Some things actually would've been better left undone. And admitting that is the beginning of genuine maturity that leads to true wisdom. The wise person isn't the one who's made the most mistakes, or even the one who's suffered the most. He’s the one who can look at the past without needing to acquit himself of it. Experience is what happens to us. Gentle wisdom begins when a person stops defending themself against what it reveals.

To Reach Out:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 053-808-0435
International: +972538080435

- Bio -
Yonasan’s a graduate of Hebrew University’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare. He completed post graduate training in a wide array of therapeutic approaches from CBT at The Beck Institute, behavior and emotion focused therapies, to various Psychodynamic theories. Before Hebrew University, he studied at Washington University in St. Louis and Drake University majoring in philosophy and ethics. He received his rabbinic ordination from Rav Yitzchak Berkovits.

Yonasan is a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, researcher at the VIDA Research Lab on values and identity at Hebrew University, and a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist skills trainer. He has collaborated with Machon Dvir and has been a group leader for the National Educational Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder Family Connections program.

He specializes in treating anxiety, depression, anger, poor self-esteem, insomnia, autism, eating disorders, psychosis, problems in parenting, sexual dysfunction, and marital conflict. He has an extensive background working with individuals, couples, families, and children in his therapy practice.

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13/10/2026

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to make their life smaller. It happens gradually, through a hundred perfectly understandable decisions. You skip a difficult conversation because you don't want conflict. You turn down an invitation because you're worried about being judged. You abandon something meaningful because you might fail. Each decision brings a little relief but that relief is deceptive. Research on anxiety and avoidance shows escaping feared situations reinforces the fear, making your future feel even more threatening.

Think of something you've been avoiding and ask yourself three questions: What feeling am I trying not to experience? What has avoiding it cost me? What would I do differently if I were willing to feel uncomfortable? Then choose one small, manageable action that moves you toward that value goal. If you're avoiding a friendship, send a message. If you're afraid of criticism, share an idea. The goal isn't to eliminate fear before acting. It's to discover fear doesn't have to have the final say in how you live your life.

To Reach Out:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 053-808-0435
International: +972538080435

- Bio -
Yonasan’s a graduate of Hebrew University’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare. He completed post graduate training in a wide array of therapeutic approaches from CBT at The Beck Institute, behavior and emotion focused therapies, to various Psychodynamic theories. Before Hebrew University, he studied at Washington University in St. Louis and Drake University majoring in philosophy and ethics. He received his rabbinic ordination from Rav Yitzchak Berkovits.

Yonasan is a member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, researcher at the VIDA Research Lab on values and identity at Hebrew University, and a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist skills trainer. He has collaborated with Machon Dvir and has been a group leader for the National Educational Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder Family Connections program.

He specializes in treating anxiety, depression, anger, poor self-esteem, insomnia, autism, eating disorders, psychosis, problems in parenting, sexual dysfunction, and marital conflict. He has an extensive background working with individuals, couples, families, and children in his therapy practice.