Avi Anderson, Kedushah, Holiness, and Healing: Jewish Practice Beyond Shame and Performance
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/05/02
Avi Anderson is a rabbi and therapist whose work bridges spirituality, mental health, and human connection. Shaped by his own experience of anxiety and pain, he moved from a purely professional stance toward a more integrated practice grounded in presence, honesty, and relational depth. He helps clients face uncertainty, difficult emotions, and inner conflict with greater clarity and compassion. Drawing on both pastoral and therapeutic perspectives, Avi emphasizes growth through discomfort, authenticity, and meaningful connection. A parent of seven-year-old triplets, he brings warmth, directness, and realism to his work, grounded in the belief that people heal most deeply when they are able to show up as themselves.
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Avi Anderson about kedushah, holiness, and integration in Jewish life. Anderson describes holiness as presence, honesty, and growth rather than performance or purity. He distinguishes healthy spiritual discipline from shame-based control, reframes sexuality, consent, kashrut, work, money, and ambition through dignity and responsibility, and emphasizes that Jewish practice becomes healing when people bring their inner lives into honest contact with ritual, community, and God in daily life.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You describe moving from a split life into a more integrated one. Has that personal shift shaped your understanding of kedushah in everyday Jewish life?
Avi Anderson: Yes, profoundly.
For a long time, my spiritual life and my internal life existed in parallel but disconnected tracks. I knew how to function religiously, and I knew how to function psychologically, but they were not speaking to each other. What shifted was not my theology, but my willingness to enter my own inner world with honesty.
Once that happened, kedushah stopped feeling like something external that I was trying to live up to, and instead became something that emerges when a person is internally aligned.
Kedushah is often translated as holiness, but I experience it as deep, unfragmented connection—connection to oneself, to others, and to God. That connection is only possible when a person stops splitting off parts of themselves and begins engaging their internal world directly.
When a person is willing to face their emotions, their contradictions, and even the parts of themselves they would rather avoid, something opens. That opening is not just psychological. It is spiritual. That is where I encounter kedushah now.
Jacobsen: As both a rabbi and a therapist, how do you define holiness?
Anderson: Holiness is wherever real growth is happening.
There is a well-known teaching: “If I am here, everything is here.” I understand this to mean that presence is the gateway to transformation. When a person is actually here—not managing impressions, not avoiding discomfort, not performing an identity—something larger becomes accessible.
That is true in the therapy room, in relationships, and in religious life. Growth requires contact with reality, and holiness emerges from that contact.
Holiness is not primarily about place, ritual, or status. It is about the quality of presence a person brings into their life. It is what happens when a person is fully engaged with themselves and the moment they are in.
Jacobsen: Where is the line between healthy spiritual discipline and purity-based thinking?
Anderson: Healthy discipline expands a person’s capacity. Purity-based thinking constricts it.
Authentic spiritual discipline is not about suppressing desire, but about refining and directing it. It assumes that human drives are powerful and meaningful, and that the goal is to engage them wisely, not eliminate them.
Purity-based thinking operates differently. It is often driven by anxiety, shame, and a need for control. It creates rigid categories of “clean” and “unclean,” and it tends to produce a growing disconnect between a person’s external religious behavior and their internal experience.
Over time, that split becomes unsustainable.
A useful indicator is this: Does the system you are living in make you more honest, more grounded, and more integrated? Or does it make you more fearful, more rigid, and more disconnected from yourself? Healthy discipline leads to the former. Purity-based thinking leads to the latter.
Jacobsen: How can Jewish communities talk about bodies, sex, modesty, and consent?
Anderson: By shifting from a framework of shame to a framework of responsibility and dignity.
Jewish thought does not see sexuality as inherently problematic. It sees it as one of the most powerful forces in human life—capable of deep connection, vulnerability, and creation. The existence of boundaries is not because sexuality is low, but because it is significant.
The problem is that many communities communicate the restrictions without communicating the underlying value. What people absorb is that sexuality is dangerous or shameful, rather than meaningful and powerful.
A healthier conversation would acknowledge both sides. It would speak openly about desire, affirm the value of the body, and frame consent not just as a legal necessity but as a reflection of respect and moral responsibility toward another person.
Without that balance, the conversation becomes incomplete and, at times, damaging.
Jacobsen: What does kashrut look like when approached as an ethical practice tied to power, care, appetite, and self-awareness?
Anderson: At its core, kashrut is a discipline of interruption.
It interrupts the automatic relationship between desire and consumption. It inserts a moment of awareness between impulse and action. That moment is where choice, responsibility, and meaning enter.
Over time, this practice reshapes a person’s relationship to appetite. Instead of being driven primarily by impulse, one becomes more reflective and intentional.
From there, it naturally expands into broader ethical awareness. Questions about how food is sourced, how animals are treated, and how consumption affects the world become part of the same framework.
In that sense, kashrut is not only about what one eats. It is about how one lives with desire, power, and responsibility.
Jacobsen: You often emphasize presence over performance. How can rabbis, therapists, and educators recognize when holiness language is helping someone heal?
Anderson: The simplest answer is to observe what it produces.
When religious or spiritual language leads to increased honesty, emotional contact, and a greater willingness to face reality, it is serving a healing function.
When it leads to avoidance, performance, or a more sophisticated way of bypassing pain, it is not.
It is possible to use even the most elevated language to avoid one’s own internal world. That is not growth. It is defense.
The question I return to is this: Is the person becoming more real, or more polished? More present, or more defended? That distinction is often more telling than the content of what they are saying.
Jacobsen: What does it mean to sanctify work, money, and ambition in contemporary life?
Anderson: It means aligning them with purpose rather than allowing them to operate on autopilot.
Work, money, and ambition are powerful forces. Left unchecked, they tend to orient around ego, status, and external validation. That often leads to success without satisfaction.
Sanctification does not require rejecting these pursuits. It requires engaging them consciously.
A person has to ask, on a regular basis: What is this serving? What am I actually building? Who benefits from this?
When ambition is connected to contribution, responsibility, and meaning, it becomes a vehicle for growth. When it is disconnected from those things, it tends to become hollow.
Sanctification is less about changing what you do and more about clarifying why you do it.
Jacobsen: For people who seem capable and put-together on the outside while carrying quiet pain internally, what Jewish practices help them become more whole?
Anderson: The critical factor is not the practice itself, but the level of honesty brought into it.
Many people maintain a high level of external functioning while remaining internally disconnected. They show up, fulfill expectations, and even succeed, but their inner experience is left unexamined.
Jewish life offers meaningful structures—prayer, study, community, Shabbat—but none of them are inherently transformative. Their impact depends entirely on whether a person allows themselves to show up within them in a real way.
Wholeness is not achieved by adding more practices. It is achieved by allowing one’s outer life and inner world to come into contact.
That process is uncomfortable. It requires vulnerability, self-confrontation, and a willingness to relinquish the illusion of control. But it is the only path toward genuine integration.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Avi.
For more contact and information.
To learn more or get in touch, visit aviandersontherapy.com, call or text 702-483-7166, or email avi@aviandersontherapy.com.
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