Abraham J. Twerski

His father, Rabbi Jacob Israel Twerski, descended from Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twersky, the founder of the Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty and a student of the Baal Shem Tov. His mother was the daughter of the second Rebbe of Bobov. Twerski graduated high school at sixteen, was ordained at Hebrew Theological College in 1951, and then did something few rabbis had done: he enrolled at Marquette University’s medical school, graduating in 1959. Psychiatric training followed at the University of Pittsburgh. The move wasn’t a departure from the rabbinate. As he later explained, people had stopped going to rabbis for counsel the way they once went to his father. He wanted to be the kind of rabbi his father was, so he became a doctor.

That combination shaped everything he did. He spent two decades as clinical director of psychiatry at St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh, a Catholic institution, and in 1972 founded Gateway Rehabilitation Center, where he served as medical director emeritus. He was a vocal advocate for Alcoholics Anonymous, finding its twelve steps compatible with Hasidic thought despite the program’s Christian origins. In 1996 he published The Shame Borne in Silence, one of the first public interventions by a major Orthodox leader on domestic violence. It cost him respect in some circles. He didn’t stop.

There’s something worth sitting with here. A man in full Hasidic dress presenting at secular psychiatric conferences, writing self-help books illustrated with Peanuts cartoons, treating nuns and priests in Pittsburgh: that’s not contradiction, that’s range. The soul doesn’t care much about denominational walls, and Twerski knew it.

His colleague Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb observed that despite writing dozens of books, Twerski had really written one book, on one subject: self-esteem. That thread runs through I’ve Gotta Get Out of My Way, Mastering Relationships, and A Formula for Proper Living alike. He died on January 31, 2021, at Hadassah Ein Karem Medical Center in Jerusalem, aged ninety, while battling COVID-19.