How trauma-based psychology reshapes Jewish ideas of choice, responsibility, and power

Trauma has become one of the dominant moral languages of our time. We use it to explain anger, addiction, violence, and even political conflict. This shift has helped many people feel understood. It has softened harsh judgments and made room for compassion. But it has also changed something deeper: how we think about responsibility.

No one has done more to popularize trauma-based thinking than Gabor Maté. Thoughtful and sincere, Maté has become the most trusted public voice of a psychology that explains behavior largely through early injury and nervous-system conditioning. His work has helped countless people make sense of their pain. He has also become one of the most prominent Jewish critics of Israel, often invoking his own Holocaust history as part of his moral narrative.

My concern is not with his intentions, which are plainly humane, but with what his framework leaves out. When trauma becomes the final explanation for human behavior, agency quietly shrinks. Choice becomes conditional. Responsibility feels premature.

This matters, because Judaism begins from a very different place.

For much of the twentieth century, psychology borrowed its assumptions from an older scientific worldview. Reality was seen as mechanical. Cause led to effect. If you could trace the past clearly enough, the present would make sense. Freud’s theories fit neatly into this picture and naturally grew out of that way of thinking, as did many of the schools that followed him.

But science itself moved on. Physics began to describe reality not as a machine, but as a process. Uncertainty replaced certainty. Systems replaced parts. The world no longer looked fully predictable.

Psychology, for the most part, did not keep up. Instead, it remained focused on explanation. The past continued to dominate the present. Words, memories, and narratives became the basic building blocks of the mind. Therapy became a way of understanding what caused suffering, rather than a way of opening something new.

It was precisely this lag that some psychologists and psychiatrists tried to address.

I encountered this alternative path through my own training. From 2004 through 2017, I studied with psychiatrist Gerald Epstein, MD, the editor of Studies in Non-Deterministic Psychology, both for personal development and to expand the therapeutic........

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