Course 001: Former espionage agents teach the tricks of their trade: people skills

After a difficult childhood and divorce, Psychotherapist Batel Vaknin teamed up with 001 — a specialized seminar on confidence and communication created by former Israeli intelligence and security personnel from the Shabak — to bring the course to the chareidi world

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t’s a truism that emotional healthiness finds and begets more healthiness. But in order to learn this, Batel Vaknin needed to experience the reverse.

Life hadn’t been easy for Batel. Her parents’ divorce when she was young hit her hard, and later, she struggled when her mother remarried. While her mother and stepfather raised a large blended family, she felt unmoored. Her teen years were tumultuous, and she struggled to fit into her family, to make sense of her tremendous emotional pain, to find her place.

“But even amid the deepest moments of pain,” Batel recalls, “I felt something — a presence, a calmness. Hashem? ‘There’s a purpose to all this,’ I’d tell myself. Even then I knew my pain had a purpose, that one day I would channel it.”

Batel married young. She soon realized that her marriage wasn’t healthy, but it was a catch-22, as remembering her parent’s divorce, Batel resolved that she’d never go down that path. Eventually, though, it became clear to her that she needed to end her marriage.

“My world was crazy for a long time and after the divorce I had a lot to process. I went on a long journey to get to know myself,” she says. “A journey of healing, which taught me to become emotionally independent, to have healthy self-love.”

Batel went to college, studied psychology and became a psychotherapist. “I studied the soul, the human emotional world and its connection to healthy relationships,” she says. She surrounded herself with supportive people and looked for mentors who could guide her on this new path. She also looked for courses that would help her strengthen her self-awareness and relationship skills — and there was one unlikely course that proved life transforming.

The course, 001 — a name meant to evoke codes used by the intelligence department — was created by a group of personnel from the Shabak, the Mossad, and the police force, people who had served in interrogation and espionage roles. It focuses on developing confidence and better communication skills, and it teaches real-time truths about humans, motivation, interests, and results.

Former intelligence agents seem unlikely candidates for the creation of this type of  course. But while it’s the daring action and exploits that often get the spotlight in thrillers and spy novels, the real strength of intelligence agents lies in their psychological knowledge: of themselves and of humanity, and in using that knowledge to assess motives quickly, to react decisively and correctly in tense and dangerous situations, when the stakes are huge.

Through on-site exercises and homework, Batel and the other course participants essentially used their own lives as a training ground to implement what they were learning, all under the guidance of mentors.

“This isn’t therapy where people delve deeply into their stories,” Batel explains. “It’s not personal. It’s universal psychology. It’s about understanding how people work, how you work, how you can play to your advantage, show up as your best self, and give yourself a really good shot at a crucial opportunity.”