The Emperor’s New Clothes: A Rosh Hashanah Reflection on Jewish Mental Health

As I celebrate Rosh Hashanah from the vantage point of renewed interest in my own Jewish faith, I have been thinking about teshuvah.

Teshuvah is often translated as repentance, but its meaning is closer to return: turning back, taking account, examining where we have been and how we want to live. The shofar is traditionally understood, in part, as a call to awaken, I think to see what has shattered. For me, that makes this season less about asking, What is wrong and how do I fix it? and more about asking a quieter question: What am I being asked to see clearly?

But Rosh Hashanah does not arrive in the Jewish calendar from nowhere.

Several weeks earlier comes Tisha B’Av, the great communal day of mourning for the destruction of the Temples and, over centuries, other catastrophes in Jewish history. It concludes the period known as Bein HaMetzarim—“between the straits”—during which Jewish tradition deliberately turns toward rupture, destruction and grief.

And then something important happens.

We do not move directly from mourning into renewal. The seven Shabbatot following Tisha B’Av are known as Shiva d’Nechemta, the Seven Weeks of Consolation. Their prophetic readings carry the community gradually from destruction toward comfort. Then comes Elul, with its increasingly explicit work of self-examination and teshuvah, preparing us for Rosh Hashanah.

There is a psychological wisdom built into the calendar: first we make room for what has broken. Then we allow ourselves to be consoled. Then we turn and return.

As a psychologist, I find the sequence compelling. Suffering that can be acknowledged and mourned does not have to disappear before joy becomes possible. We can arrive at Rosh Hashanah carrying what happened without requiring the new year to erase it.

Rosh Hashanah itself holds that complexity. It is both serious and celebratory: judgment and renewal, introspection and the possibility of beginning again. In Jewish mystical traditions, teshuvah takes on an additional dimension of return toward the Divine. The movement is not simply toward becoming a “better” version of ourselves, but toward restoring relationship—with Gd, with others, and with what has become estranged within ourselves. To see what can be learned from what has shattered in the previous year.

For some reason, this intentional contemplation brought me back to The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The part of the story that interests me is not that the child possesses some special truth. The child simply says what they see. Everyone else has learned to mistrust their own perception because the social environment tells them something different.

There is something in that story that resonates with many of my experiences since October 7.

Many of us have found ourselves trying to understand experiences of antisemitism while simultaneously wondering whether we are interpreting them correctly. Is this antisemitism? Is this political disagreement? Is my own history influencing what I see? Why does something that feels so obvious to me seem invisible to someone beside me?

Those are not trivial questions. They are psychological ones.

And increasingly, research suggests that the distress surrounding them is real. Studies following October 7 have associated antisemitism-related stress with poorer mental-health outcomes among Jewish students. Research with Jewish mental-health professionals has documented shifts in identity and safety, experiences of antisemitism within professional environments, and increased burnout and compassion fatigue. Jewish therapists can therefore occupy an unusual position: holding the distress of Jewish clients while navigating some of the same collective events themselves.

Dr. Shira Fishman recently described Jewish mental health as a “blind spot” within psychology. Her argument is straightforward: psychology has rightly learned that culture, history, discrimination, identity and community shape mental health, yet Jewish identity, antisemitism and Jewish historical experience remain inadequately represented in many multicultural frameworks and training programs.

This is where The Emperor’s New Clothes becomes useful to me—not as a claim that Jews are always the child who sees correctly and everyone else is wrong. That would simply replace one form of certainty with another.

The lesson is more modest.

Can I say what I am experiencing safely?

That is also a question for psychotherapy.

Culturally competent care does not require a therapist to confirm every interpretation a Jewish client brings into the room. Nor should a therapist reflexively reinterpret an experience of antisemitism as anxiety, trauma, politics or distorted perception. Good therapy makes room for something in between: curiosity.

Tell me what happened. What did you experience? What did it mean to you? What did it evoke in your history, your family, your Jewish identity, your sense of safety and belonging?

Then we can think and feel and break what has shattered together.

This matters for therapists as well. Research after October 7 describes clinicians simultaneously managing their professional responsibilities and their own experiences of collective trauma, antisemitism, disrupted assumptions, compassion fatigue and questions of belonging. The traditional idea that the therapist stands entirely outside the client's cultural experience becomes particularly difficult when therapist and client are living through the same historical moment.

Perhaps this is where I return to Rosh Hashanah.

The Jewish calendar has already given us a remarkable progression for negating these difficulties, and we do it every year.

Tisha B’Av: mourn what has been shattered.

Shiva d’Nechemta: allow consolation.

Elul: examine and begin to return.

Rosh Hashanah: wake up and turn toward what we want to become.

Yom Kippur: take responsibility and seek repair.

Sukkot: step back into vulnerability, community and joy.

Its power is precisely that Jews have been moving through versions of this cycle for generations. But this year it offers me a way of thinking about culturally competent mental-health care for Jews.

We cannot begin with repair if people are still struggling to have the rupture recognized. We cannot ask someone to regulate an experience we have not first been willing to hear. And we cannot offer meaningful cultural competence while asking Jewish clients—or Jewish therapists—to leave the Jewish meaning of their experience outside the room. Asking them to see the Emperor's Clothes in order to receive some level of care.

To provide culturally competent care does not mean abandoning clinical curiosity or critical thinking. Quite the opposite. It means creating enough safety to examine experience honestly. A Jewish client should be able to say, I think this was antisemitism, without the therapist either immediately confirming it or explaining it away. A Jewish therapist should be able to acknowledge that the same historical moment affecting a client may also be affecting them.

The Jewish calendar intentionally reminds us to make time to reflect on these ideas so that we don't become stagnant in our thinking. Complacent in our beliefs and actions. But to instead turn toward all experiences with interest, curiousity and humility. There is a time to mourn what has been shattered, a time for consolation, and a time to turn toward life again.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to turn. For Jewish mental health after October 7, culturally competent care may begin by helping people turn and to allow themselves to name what they see and explore what it means without first having to defend the legitimacy of seeing it.

Which brings me back to the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The child does not explain, diagnose or repair what is happening.

The child simply says what they see.

Perhaps before teshuvah, before repair, and before return, we need a place where it is safe to do exactly that.