Asher Halberstam Of Treemily: How Journaling Helped Me Be More Calm, Mindful And Resilient

An Interview With Heidi Sander

Don’t expect perfection. No one is perfect. God created us with a tremendous potential with the purpose in life in reaching that potential. That’s literally the reason for existence — making ourselves and the world around us better each day. So as long as we are moving in the right direction, we are doing great.

Journaling is a powerful tool to gain clarity and insight especially during challenging times of loss and uncertainty. Writing can cultivate a deeper connection with yourself and provide an outlet for calmness, resilience and mindfulness. When my mom passed on, I found writing to be cathartic. When I read through my journal years later, there were thoughts that I developed into poems, and others that simply provided a deeper insight into myself. In this series I’m speaking with people who use journaling to become more mindful and resilient.

As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Asher Halberstam, CEO of Treemily.

Asher Halberstam is a Rabbi in 7th generation, descendent of a prominent Hassidic dynasty, artist, and an IT entrepreneur. In 2016 he founded Treemily — the first ever family tree visualizations platform.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story of healing. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?

I grew up in a family of 15 of children. Our father was Holocaust survivor, who made it his life’s mission to help people preserve their family histories. I was always artistic, and ever since I was a teenager my father asked me to draw visualizations of people’s family trees. Eventually I opened a printshop that focused on personalized gifts, and once again orders for family tree designs kept on coming. In those days I drew each and every visualization by hand, which made the process long and expensive for a lot of people. Over the years I experimented with various methods and modules to simplify the process and make it more affordable. And that was the main inspiration for creating Treemily — a platform where along with genealogy research, people can create simple family tree visualizations based on our templates.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about journaling. Have you been writing in your journal for a long time or was there a challenging situation that prompted you to start journal writing? If you feel comfortable sharing the situation with us, it could help other readers.

I am an Orthodox Jew, and we have an old tradition to journal daily events in order to assess one’s spiritual progress. Each evening I try to sit down and draft down key moments and interactions of the day, and give them an honest assessment — did I live up to my own expectation in dealing with people and my relationship with God. Was I honest in business? Was I empathetic with those who came to me with their problems? Was I sincere in my prayers? And if the answer to any of this is “no”, I ask myself how could I do better next time? Why didn’t I live up to my own expectations today, and how can I improve tomorrow.

How did journaling help you heal, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?

A lot of times it’s hard for us to be honest with ourselves when everything is kept inside of our minds. It’s almost as if it’s harder to admit to your own shortcomings while they are still a part of you. By keeping a journal, putting things on paper, I make the process more detached emotionally, and that helps to see my shortcomings not as an intrinsic part of me, but rather as a process at work. My faith is all about small daily improvements in who I am and how it reflects in my relationship with God and people around me, and the journal is a powerful tool to keep track of that process.

Did journaling help you find more self-compassion and gratitude? Can you share a story about that?

Part of my life as a rabbi of a congregation is helping people deal with hardship in their lives. Journaling helps me to stay in touch with my emotions, and in return it helps me to be much more attuned to other people’s needs. It’s clear that this practice has a huge impact on one’s capacity for empathy.

What kind of content goes into your journal? For example, do you free-write, write poems, doodle?

There is a book first published in 1845 by Rabbi Mendel of Satanov called “Cheshbon Hanefesh” or “Accounting of the Soul”. The system he suggests (and I use as a base) is outlining the basic character traits I would like to work on. Things like equanimity, patience, decisiveness, humility, calmness, etc. He suggests having a total of 13 traits, and dedicating a full week to each one, returning to each trait four times a year. For each trait I write out a summary of how I see an ideal of that trait, and then taking it a step further and codifying it in one word. Each day of the week I focus on the codeword in the mornings, meditating on it and praying that that day I will become stronger in that character trait in every situation I encounter that challenges it. In the evening I draft basic summary of each situation and how I showed that trait in real life, and revisit old notes on it to track my progress. It’s simple and is indeed similar to your basic business accounting, just a lot more meaningful and far more important.

How did you gain a different perspective on life and your emotions while writing in your journal? Can you please share a story about what you mean?

My wife also keeps a journal. Some years ago, she started drafting down every day a few things that she feels gratitude to the Creator for various things in our lives. She then suggested that we start a joint journal together, just for that. And since then, we sit down in the evenings together, and count the blessings in our lives. This practice is particularly powerful, because one might feel overwhelmed by the daily challenges, but when you focus on all of the good things in life, it’s hard not to feel like you can overcome any challenge.

In my own journal writing, I ended up creating poems from some of the ideas and one of them won an award. Do you have plans with your journal content?

I like to keep my journal private — this way it helps me keeping myself more honest. But I often have really great insights about patterns in human behavior while reviewing the journal, and those insights I always share sometimes with my family, sometimes with my congregants (aside from running Treemily, I am also a practicing rabbi).

Fantastic. Here is our main question. In my journaling program, I have found that journaling can help people to become more calm, mindful and resilient. Based on your experience and research, can you please share with our readers “five ways that journaling can help you to be more calm, mindful and resilient”?

1. Don’t make it personal. Try to always look at your actions through a detached perspective. As if you are observing it from outside, rather than living through it. By separating your essence from your emotions associated with any particular event in life you have a better chance of keeping the balance and a bigger picture.
2. Work on yourself in small bites. The Talmud teaches “one who has grabbed too much gained nothing”. Don’t start fixing everything in your life. Take one step, one character trait, at a time, and see where you go with it.
3. Don’t expect perfection. No one is perfect. God created us with a tremendous potential with the purpose in life in reaching that potential. That’s literally the reason for existence — making ourselves and the world around us better each day. So as long as we are moving in the right direction, we are doing great.
4. Expect to have setbacks. We are human and setbacks are natural. Yes, sometimes I feel deeply disappointed in myself, but I don’t let that define me. I am better than that, and the fact that I can admit to sometimes not living up to my own ideals helps me have the faith that, with God’s help, I will reach it one day.
5. Time-travel. I find that when I look back at my notes from 10, 20 years ago, I generally smile because I see that now I am doing better than before. I might not see the progress as clearly when I compare my actions from the past few months, but when you see your journal from a while back it really inspires you — the process is usually clear, and the sheer fact that you have been committed to working on yourself all this time gives so much inspiration and strength.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of peace to the greatest amount of people, what would that be?

That is one of the missions for Treemily. Building a family tree, creating visualizations — the process connects people to family stories. It also highlights the values of those families and connection to other stories. That builds stronger connections, understanding, introspection, and ultimately much more love, acceptance and peace.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)

My father was my main inspiration in absolutely everything in life. My family (I am a grandfather myself), my business — everything was inspired by him, his vision and his deep insights. He passed away several years ago, and I still feel that there is so much I could gain from him. So, if there was a chance to pick a breakfast or lunch, I would choose him over any amazing CEO.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

They can visit Treemily.com and use the tools we have built to develop closer and deeper connections to stories in their families, and through that find new meaning in what’s relevant to them today. Blogs

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued fulfillment and success with your writing!