Path of The Soul Discovering Mussar

November 15, 2018
GooD News
Path of the Soul #1:
Discovering Mussar
Jul 19, 2003 | by Dr. Alan Morinis
How to close the gap between the high ideals we hold in mind and
the living truth of how we act in life.
This new series explores Mussar, a traditional Jewish spiritual

discipline that offers sound guidance to help you cultivate the
qualities of your soul. Rabbi Elya Lopian, a contemporary master,
defines Mussar as "Making the heart feel what the intellect
understands." Mussar's teachings and practices help us work a
radical inner transformation by showing us how to close the gap
between the high ideals we hold in mind and the living truth of
how we act in life.
That's just what Mussar did for me. I discovered Mussar at a time
when I badly needed its guidance. But first, a bit of background.
I haven't always taught Mussar. In my first career, I was an
anthropologist, having received a doctorate from Oxford
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University, where I went on a Rhodes scholarship. My studies took
me to India where I lived for three years, learning two Indian
languages and studying with a yoga master and meditating in the
Himalayas. I wrote books and published articles and eventually got
a tenure-track job at a good university.
But the routines of university life did not satisfy my soul, and so I
made a leap to making films. That work kept me for 15 years,
always in the independent film community, where I developed and
produced my own projects.
My film work crashed to an abrupt halt in 1997 when my company
hit the skids. That's not such an uncommon occurrence in the
tenuous project-by-project world of independent film, but my
problems were actually not the typical ones that plague that
insecure industry. What ultimately backfired on me were choices
and decisions I myself had made. I hadn't been nearly as honest as I
should have been or as I saw myself to be. I thought I was being
practical and pragmatic, even effective. But one day what I can only
call my crookedness caught up with me and I was brought face-to-
face with a painful vision of who I had become at that time.
I had suddenly been handed a very meaningful curriculum: my
mission was to redo my life, from the inside out.
Confronting my dark side set off a crisis, though I didn't
completely fall apart. In a strange way, I actually felt energized by
my unmasking. I had suddenly been handed a very meaningful
curriculum: my mission was to redo my life, from the inside out.
My task was to make very real changes that would reach into the
foundation of my deepest being
But where to get the guidance I so obviously needed? My own
inner compass had clearly let me down, so I couldn't rely on that.
Nor was I much of practising anything at that time. Though born a
Jew, most of my life I lived as if I were only "Jewish on my
parents' side" (to quote my friend and teacher Ram Dass, a.k.a.
Richard Alpert). I was a lapsed yogi and an inactive meditator.
I started reading. I read books on Hassidism and Kabbalah. I read
on the Jewish festivals and the teachings of the Torah. I read
spiritual biographies. Then one day I happened on an article on
Mussar as it erupted in 19th century Europe in the form known as
the Mussar movement. Everything I read on Mussar spoke directly
to my soul's longing for practical yet deeply transformative
guidance.
The Mussar approach to living offered me two great things. One was
that the rabbis who observed human life and recorded their findings
developed a very acute understanding of our inner selves and how
we function. Their map of the soul lined up very closely with my
own experience and helped me understand the way my own life was
going. And second, they had developed a discipline of transforma-
tive practices meant to help people like me and you adjust the
specific inner traits that are stumbling blocks to living as the
beautiful and luminous souls we all have the potential to be.
In my youth I had been drawn to the spiritual disciplines of the
East. In Mussar I found a path of personal practice laid out and
expressed in Jewish terms. In that encounter my soul came alive
and I wanted to know and do more. I read everything I could find.
Eventually, I sought a teacher and was fortunate to find a wise,
compassionate, creative guide in Rabbi Yechiel Yitzchok Perr, Rosh
Yeshiva of the Yeshiva of Far Rockaway on Long Island. My
encounters with Rabbi Perr form the basis for my recent book,
Climbing Jacob's Ladder.
What I have learned from Mussar is that each of us comes into life
with a curriculum. We are free to ignore or even deny that curriculum,
as the prophet Jonah tried to do, but we are wiser to embrace it,
because it describes the path of growth our soul is meant to follow.
The Mussar masters knew that, and the tools they have handed
down to us are the best guidance the soul could ever want.
Their insights and teachings are what we will be exploring in this
series. My prayer is that through this exploration, you will gain some
new (and yet time-tested) insights and tools that will help you
walk the path of your personal spiritual curriculum as it lies before
you, embedded in your middot ha-nefesh, the traits of your soul.
The Way of the Soul

Mussar teaches that in our essential nature, each of us is a soul.
Through the centuries the Mussar masters evolved an accurate,
insightful map of the interior world that has at its center the soul.
We're not so familiar with the soul today, but Mussar teaches that
in our essential nature, each of us is a soul. If we do talk about
soul at all, we are more likely to say we "have" a soul. But that
way of putting it implies that the soul is somehow a possession or
appendage of the "I."
Mussar sees it differently. Identity is not the main feature of our
inner being, despite the ego's insistent and noisy protests to the
contrary. The ego claims to be king, but I liken its true role to that
of valet. When it is put firmly in that role, serving the soul of
infinite depth as its master, our lives become aligned in a profound
way we could hardly previously imagine. Each of us is a soul.
That's who we are.
With only limited exceptions, everything that exists in our inner
world is an aspect of soul, including personality, emotions, talents,
desires, conscience, wisdom, and so on. Even the faculties we
ordinarily assign to the "mind," like thought, logic, memory and
forgetting, are features of the soul.
But not all facets of the soul are accessible to conscious thought.
Well before Freud introduced the notion of the unconscious, the
Mussar teachers were working with an understanding that there is
a dark inner region that is the source of all that appears in the
daylight of our lives. These interior dimensions of the soul live
within us at depths that are not accessible to the rational mind.
The Mussar teachers speak of different aspects of soul but they
insist that in reality, the soul is an undivided whole. Their
template is holistic and sees no divide between heart and mind,
emotions and intellect. All are faculties of the soul.
This topography of the inner life has been developed for a practical
purpose. Mussar's goal is to help us transform so that the light of
holiness shines more brightly into our lives and through us into
the world. Making that journey of change is how we fulfil the
promise and also the charge of the Torah, "kiddoshim tihiyu" – you
shall be holy.
All the holiness we could ever hope for already exists within us, at
the core of the soul.
We don't have to go far to find the light of holiness we seek. All the
holiness we could ever hope for already exists within us, at the core
of the soul, called neshama. This deep inner kernel is inherently
holy and pure and is the seat of the "image and likeness of God" in
which we are created. The neshama cannot be tainted, not even by
evil deeds. We acknowledge that reality in the daily liturgy when we
recite, "God, the neshama you have given me is pure."
So what is it that blocks the light of our holy neshama from
shining constantly in our lives and into the world? Mussar points
here to another dimension of the soul called nefesh. While the
neshama is always stainless, the nefesh is the dimension of the
inner life that houses all our recognizable characteristics, named
the middot ha'nefesh, the traits of the soul. The neshama is
unchanging but in the nefesh we find traits that can be in or out
of alignment in ways that can be helpful or obstructive.
Each of us has some inner traits that are perfectly aligned but we
also have certain inner qualities that are not as refined as they
could be. Maimonides says that each character trait that is out of
alignment creates a veil that screens the light of holiness. It is
these unbalanced soul-traits that obstruct the flow of inner light.
These traits define our spiritual work.
The issue is never the inner qualities themselves – Mussar tells us
that all human qualities, even anger, jealousy and desire, are not
intrinsically "good" or "bad." It's when we have too much or too
little of a trait that our spiritual problems arise. Everyone has
some anger in his or her soul but only too much anger is a
problem. Desire is natural and healthy, but lust is an excess of that
soul-trait. And so on with all the traits.
The Mussar classic Orchos Tzaddikim was written in the 16th
century but the people it describes are still with us today:
One man is wrathful and always angry, and another even-tempered
and never angry. Or, if he is, it only very negligible over a period of
many years. One man is exceedingly proud, and another exceedingly
humble. One man is lustful, his lust never being sated, and another
exceedingly pure-hearted not desiring even the few things that the
body needs... One man afflicts himself with hunger and goes
begging..., and another is wantonly extravagant with his money.
And, along the same lines, the other traits are found, such as
cheerfulness and depression, stinginess and generosity, cruelty and
mercy, cowardliness and courage, and the like.
A soul-trait can be set at too high a level – like rage in the place
of anger, and hatred in the place of judgment, or too low – like
self-debasement in the place of humility, or indifference in the
place of equanimity. A soul-trait that is out of alignment whether
in excess or deficiency creates a veil in the nefesh that blocks the
inner light of the neshama. Through introspection and self-
examination each of us can identify the handful of traits that are
operating as hindrances in our own inner lives, and thus we
pinpoint the curriculum for our personal transformative work
Where does this route lead? Toward holiness, we are told, though
that's a mysterious and ineffable notion. One thing I do know is
that this can't mean that we all aspire to reform ourselves to come
out looking and being identical, squeezing ourselves into a mould
of ideal qualities. The goal of Mussar practice is not to take on pre-
ordained characteristics, but to become the most refined,
perfected, elevated version of the unique person you already are.
To do that, we must first come to know and embrace our soul
curriculum, which means tackling each one of our personal middot,
traits, that hang as thick veils blocking the holy inner light from
entering our lives.

How Much Space Do You Take?
Aug 2, 2003 | by Dr. Alan Morinis
Being humble doesn't mean being nobody, it just means being no

more of a somebody than you ought to be.
Your interior world is the realm of soul, and the soul-traits that
are turned up too high or too low define your spiritual curriculum.
But where to start? Rabbi Bahya ibn Paquda wrote the classic
Mussar text The Duties of the Heart (in Hebrew Hovot ha-levavot) in
Spain in 1080. He helps direct our attention by posing a question:
on what do the virtues depend?
His answer is clear: "All virtues and duties are dependent on
humility." This is a principle all later Mussar teachers have
endorsed -- the first leg of the spiritual life involves the
cultivation of humility -- called anivut or shiflut in Hebrew.
Unfortunately, "humility" sounds so much like "humiliation" that
it's easy to get a very wrong impression of this soul-trait. In the
traditional Jewish understanding, humility has nothing to do with
being the lowest, most debased, shrinking creature on earth. Rav
Kook says it well:
Humility is associated with spiritual perfection. When humility
effects depression it is defective; when it is genuine it inspires
joy, courage and inner dignity.
Mussar teaches that real humility is always associated with healthy
self-esteem. Lack of self-esteem leads to unholy and false feelings
of worthlessness.
Being humble doesn't mean being nobody, it just means being no
more of a somebody than you ought to be. After all, Moses, who is
considered the greatest of the prophets, is described in the Torah
as "very anav [humble], more than any other men who were upon
the face of the earth" (Numbers 12:3).
If a leader as great as Moses was so humble then there is surely
more to humility than the shrinking meekness we ordinarily
associate with the term.
Too little humility -- what we'd call arrogance or conceit -- is easily
seen as a spiritual impediment, but the opposite is also true. Too
much humility also throws a veil across the inner light of the soul.
The rabbis in the Talmud make this point very forcefully through
the following story. The passage in the Talmud begins: "The anivut
[humility] of Rabbi Zechariah son of Avkulas caused the
destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem" (Gittin 55b-56a). This was
a cataclysmic event in Jewish history that is still mourned today.
How could a virtue like humility cause so terrible a catastrophe?
To understand, we have to enter the story a little earlier, when a
man named Bar Kamtza sought revenge on the Jewish leaders of
Jerusalem by going to the Romans to claim that the Jews were
rebelling. To prove his point, he told the Roman leadership to send
a sacrifice to the Temple. Normally such a sacrifice would be
offered up, but Bar Kamtza caused a minor blemish on the animal
that was unnoticeable to the Romans but which he knew the
rabbis would see, and as a result of which they would be bound to
refuse to accept the offering. This refusal would be "proof" that
the Jews were in rebellion against Rome.
When the sacrifice came before the rabbis in the Temple, they
noticed the hidden blemish, and they understood immediately
what was going on. One suggested that they offer the sacrifice
anyway. Zechariah ben Avkulas, however, argued that if they did
that, people would draw the incorrect conclusion that it was
permitted to offer blemished sacrifices.
The rabbis then suggested that Bar Kamtza be killed to prevent
him from telling the Romans and endangering the Jewish people.
Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas responded saying, "If we do so,
people will incorerctly think that those who inflict blemishes on
sacrifices are put to death."
As a result of the priest's unwillingness to accept either course of
action, Bar Kamtza succeeded in his plan. The sacrifice was denied,
and as Bar Kamtza had planned, the Romans assumed the Jews to
be in rebellion. The Romans attacked and ultimately destroyed the
Temple. The Talmud concludes, "the anivut of Zechariah ben
Avkulas caused the loss of our home, the burning of our sanctuary,
and our exile from the land."
There is no understanding this statement if anivut meant humility
as we usually understand the term. What can we learn of the Jewish
concept of humility from the story of Zechariah ben Avkulas?
Zechariah ben Avkulas showed humility because he did not act
with presumption -- either by offering a blemished animal that
contravened the rules, or by condoning murder -- but he actually
manifested too much humility, because he shrank from the task he
had been handed. He held the fate of the Temple and his people in
his hands, yet he seems to say, "Who am I to make such
unprecedented decisions that will potentially mislead the people as
to the law?" This was his excessive humility. His sense of himself
was flawed because he saw himself as less capable of solving a real-
life dilemma of great consequence than he actually was.
To clarify the picture even more, let's add for consideration
another enigmatic reflection on humility from the Talmud where it
says: "Anyone who sets a particular place for himself to pray in the
synagogue, the God of Abraham stands in his aid, and when he
dies, people say of him, 'this was a humble person'" (Brachot 6b).
Where is the humility in sitting in
the same place in the synagogue Humility is limiting oneself
whenever you come to pray? The to an appropriate amount
answer is that by fixing yourself to of space while leaving
one spot, you thereby free up all room for others.
the other space for others to use.
This example helps us frame a Jewish definition of humiliy as
"limiting oneself to an appropriate amount of space while
leaving room for others." Sitting in a predictable place, you make
room for others to occupy their own spaces too. Zechariah ben
Avkulas gave up too much of his "space," considering that the
space a person can occupy can be physical, emotional, verbal, or
even metaphorical.
This definition also fits Maimonides' concept that humility is not
the opposite of conceit, which would be self-effacement, but
rather stands between conceit and self-effacement. Humility is not
an extreme quality, but a balanced, moderate, accurate
understanding of yourself that you act on in your life. That's why
humility and self-esteem go hand-in-hand.
When you understand humility in terms of the space you occupy,
it's important to clarify that we are not all meant to occupy the
same amount of space. Some people appropriately occupy a lot of
space, as would be the case with a leader -- think of Moses again.
But if a leader laid claim to even more space than was appropriate,
they would be a Pharaoh. And we have already learned from the
case of Zechariah ben Avkulas that for a leader to shrink from his
responsibilities -- to take up less space than appropriate -- can
have disastrous consequences.
At the other end, it may be entirely appropriate for a more solitary
person to occupy less than an average volume of space. Were a
person of this nature to force
themselves to speak up more, be Humility is the first soul-
more outgoing, etc., -- in other trait to work on because it
words, to fill more space -- the entails an unvarnished and
consequences could be negative at honest assessment of your
the level of soul. Nor would they strengths and weaknesses.
be serving the soul to withdraw
themselves even further from what is already suitable to them.
All Mussar teachers stress that anivut is the first soul-trait to work
on because humility entails an unvarnished and honest assessment
of your strengths and weaknesses. Without this accurate self-
awareness, nothing else in your inner life will come into focus in
its true measure -- and it is not accidental that the Hebrew word
for soul-traits, which is middah (pl. middot), literally does mean
"measure." Without humility, either you will be so puffed up with
arrogance that you won't even see what is really needing some
work, or you will be so deflated and lacking in self-esteem that
you will despair of being able to make the changes that are lit up
so glaringly in your self-critical mind.
Is humility a soul-trait you need to work at? The questions to ask
yourself are these: do you leave enough space in your life for
others, or are you jamming up your world with your self? Or is
there space you rightfully ought to occupy that you need to
stretch into? Your answers are the measure of your humility.
We began with the teaching of Rabbi Bahya ibn Pakuda that
humility is the root of all the other virtues. Most of us need help to
become appropriately humble and Bahya provides a tool to help us
work on that crucial soul-trait. He offers a group of contemplations
that are designed to help develop humility. There are formal ways to
do these sorts of contemplations but it is enough for you just to
spend a few moments thinking on each one of them long and hard
enough to make some impression. You'll know that you
contemplated them deeply enough when thoughts along these lines
pop into your head at unexpected moments during your day.
Take a few moments to focus our thoughts and imagination on the
following subjects:
1. the transience of life, and the uncertainty of the moment of
death, along with its finality, and how none of a person's
possessions or even body will accompany him or her.
Really think on that for a moment. Do you accept everything
he says? How real is death to you? Do you live as if one day
you will really die? Think on this.
Then spend some time on these two additional
contemplations:
2. the grandeur and might power of the Creator - the sun,
moon, stars and the celestial sphere, the earth and all that is
on it, inanimate objects, plants and animals.
…and…
3. the upheavals in this world - how swiftly kingdoms and
governments disappear, how people are moved from one
predicament to another, one nation is destroyed for the
benefit of another, and the end of all is death.
"When a person's thoughts are never free of one of these points,"
ibn Pakuda concludes, "he will be humble and uninflated at all
times, until humility becomes second nature to him and inseparable
from him."
Path of the Soul #3: Gratitude
Making something of beauty out of what we do have, incomplete as

it may be.
The Mussar teachings on the attitude of gratitude are tough,
because they don't let us feel sorry for ourselves, no matter how
little we may have. One Mussar master began a talk with a thump
on the table and the words, "It is enough that a human being is
alive!" Then he ended his talk right there.
There is a story -- maybe an urban legend, but full of truth
nonetheless -- concerning the famous violinist Itzhak Perlman.
One evening, Perlman was in New York to give a concert. As a child
he had been stricken with polio and getting on stage is no small
feat for him. He wears braces on both legs and walks with two
crutches. Perlman crossed the stage painfully slowly, until he
reached the chair in which he seated himself to play.
As soon as he appeared on stage that night, the audience applauded
and then waited respectfully as he made his way slowly across the
stage. He took his seat, signaled to the conductor, and began to play.
No sooner had he finished the first few bars than one of the
strings on his violin snapped with a report like gunshot. At that
point Perlman was close enough to the beginning of the piece that
it would have been reasonable to bring the concert to a halt while
he replaced the string to begin again. But that's not what he did.
He waited a moment and then signaled the conductor to pick up
just where they had left off.
Perlman now had only three strings with which to play his soloist
part. He was able to find some of the missing notes on adjoining
strings, but where that wasn't possible, he had to rearrange the
music on the spot in his head so that it all still held together.
He played with passion and artistry, spontaneously rearranging the
symphony right through to the end. When he finally rested his bow,
the audience sat for a moment in stunned silence. And then they
rose to their feet and cheered wildly. They knew they had been
witness to an extraordinary display of human skill and ingenuity.
Perlman raised his bow to signal "Sometimes it is the artist's
for quiet. "You know," he said, task to find out how much
"sometimes it is the artist's task beautiful music you can still
to find out how much beautiful make with what you have left."
music you can still make with
what you have left."
We have to wonder, was he speaking of his violin strings or his
crippled body? And is it true only for artists? We are all lacking
something, and so we are all challenged to answer the question:
Do we have the attitude of making something of beauty out of
what we do have, incomplete as it may be?
The Hebrew term for gratitude is hikarat hatov, which means,
literally, "recognizing the good." Practicing gratitude means
recognizing the good that is already yours.
If you've lost your job, but you still have your family and health,
you have something to be grateful for.
If you can't move around except in a wheelchair but your mind is
as sharp as ever, you have something to be grateful for.
If you've broken a string on your violin, and you still have three
more, you have something to be grateful for.
When you open up to the trait of When you open up to the trait
gratitude, you see clearly and of gratitude, you see clearly
accurately how much good there is and accurately how much good
in your life. Gratitude affirms. there is in your life.
Those things you are lacking are
still there, and in reaching for gratitude no one is saying you
ought to put on rose-colored glasses to obscure those
shortcomings. But most of us tend to focus so heavily on the
deficiencies in our lives that we barely perceive the good that
counterbalances them.
There is no limit to what we don't have and if that is where we put
our focus, then our lives will inevitably be filled with endless
dissatisfaction. This is the ethos that lies behind the great biblical
proverb, "Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their own lot" (Pirkei
Avot 4:1).
When you live charged with gratitude, you will give thanks for
anything or anyone who has benefited you, whether they meant to
or not. Imagine a prayer of thanks springing to your lips when the
driver in the car next to you lets you merge without protest, or
when the water flows from the tap, or the food is adequate?
When gratitude is this well established, it is a sign of a heart that
has been made right and whole. Gratitude can't coexist with
arrogance, resentment, and selfishness. The Hasidic teacher Rebbe
Nachman of Breslov writes, "Gratitude rejoices with her sister joy
and is always ready to light a candle and have a party. Gratitude
doesn't much like the old cronies of boredom, despair and taking
life for granted."
To what and whom should we feel thankful? In the Torah, when
Moses brought the plagues onto Egypt, he wasn't the one who
initiated turning the Nile River into blood and bringing frogs from
the river. His brother Aaron invoked those plagues. The medieval
commentator Rashi explains that since the river had protected
Moses when he was an infant, he could not start a plague against
it. God was teaching Moses a powerful lesson in gratitude: we can
open in gratitude even to inanimate objects.
Whenever Rabbi Menachem Mendel, the Kotzker Rebbe, replaced a
pair of worn out shoes, he would neatly wrap up the old ones in
newspaper before placing them in the trash, and he would declare,
"How can I simply toss away such a fine pair of shoes that have
served me so well these past years!?" I felt the same way when I gave
away my 1984 Honda that had ferried me so reliably for 18 years.
The Mussar teacher Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian (1872 - 1970) was once
talking to a student after prayers, and at the same time was
folding up his tallis [prayer shawl]. The tallis was large and he had
to rest it on a bench to fold it. After he had finished the folding,
Reb Elyah noticed that the bench was dusty, and so he headed out
to fetch a towel to wipe it off. The student to whom he was
speaking realized what Reb Elyah was doing and ran to get the
towel for him. Reb Elyah held up his hand. "No! No! I must clean it
myself, for I must show my gratitude to the bench upon which I
folded my tallis1."
If we can be grateful to rivers, shoes, cars, and benches, which help
us involuntarily, how much more so to human beings who have free
will and who help us consciously out of the goodness of their
hearts? Or to the mysterious source out of which our lives have
come? When Leah, wife of the patriarch Jacob, had her fourth child,
she named him "Yehudah," which means, "I am grateful," to reflect
her gratitude to God for the gift of another son. The name Yehudah
is the source of the Hebrew name of the Jewish people (Yehudim),
revealing the very direct tie between Judaism and gratitude.
Gratitude opens the heart and that's why it provides a fine
orientation equally to the inanimate, human and divine
dimensions of the world.
A simple and effective way to practice gratitude is by making
giving thanks part of your everyday life. For example, it is an
established Jewish practice to recite 100 such blessings a day. The
term for "blessing" in Hebrew is bracha, which comes from the
same root as the Hebrew word for "knee." When you say a blessing,
it is as if you have bent your knee in an act of gratitude. The habit
of saying blessings can remind you to be thankful when you hit a
green light, or the salad is fresh, or the garden is getting the rain
it needs, or your child came home from school as usual.
Can you see how such a practice might slowly but insistently
change your orientation to the world and your life?
Path of the Soul #4: Patience
The root of impatience is the erroneous belief that we are the

masters of our fates.
Every day I face some sort of frustrating delay or obstacle, and too
often my response is to strain against how things are. Those
feelings sneak up and overtake me while driving the car, or as the
water fills the tub ever so slowly, or as I wait as a child struggles
with clumsy fingers to master the complexity of a shoelace, or on
those days when nothing -- not my internet server, not my spouse,
not the postman, NOBODY!! -- does things when or how I want.
Impatience never makes things happen faster or better, and instead
only causes agitation, pain and grief. It serves up failure, because
most often the things we pursue take time and effort. It is divisive,
separating friends, straining marriages, and breaking hearts. It's also
a short step from impatience to rage and we all know what harm
can come from uncontrollable anger. Impatience is like an inner
blaze that burns us up without giving off any warmth.
So who wouldn't be delighted to "Woe to the pampered one
deepen their ability to meet life's who has never been trained to
challenges with more patience? We be patient. Either today or in
get very clear support for doing so the future he is destined to sip
from Torah, where it tells us that from the cup of affliction." --
we should "walk in His ways" (Deut. Rabbi M. M. Leffin, Cheshbon
8:6, 19:9, 26:17). In practical terms, ha-Nefesh
we emulate God by practising virtue
or, as I like to call it, living in "virtuous reality." As God is
merciful, we too should be merciful to those around us. As God is
forgiving, so too should we strive to be forgiving. And so on with
all the other qualities of goodness, including patience.
There is no doubt that the ultimate source of life is patient,
especially when compared to us. Think of the pace of earthly eras,
creeping along as slowly as glaciers advancing and retreating. The
Mussar tradition offers as evidence for God's patience the fact that
our lives are sustained even when we do wrong. It's not hard to
imagine a universe where there is absolutely no margin for error,
where punishment is instantaneous and total, but that isn't the
world we live in. God is patient, and preserves our lives even when
our actions hit way off the mark, so we have time to come to
deeper realizations, make amends, and return to a straighter way.
If we understand that the highest way to live is to bring the divine
virtues down to earth through us, then we should be patient. The
question is, "How can we cultivate patience?" One of the great
gifts of the Mussar tradition is the instruction it gives on how to
foster divine qualities like patience in our lives.
The Hebrew word for patience is savlanut, which also means
"tolerance." The same root gives rise to words that means "suffer"
(sevel) and "burdens" (sivlot). We learn from this that patience is
not a necessarily a pleasant experience. We should expect patience
to be the hard work we usually find it to be. That may mean
enduring and tolerating, and the experience may even mean
bearing a burden.
We only need patience when we are already impatient. If you are
standing in line in the bank and it is taking forever but you are
cool as a cucumber and whistling a happy tune, you have
equanimity and don't need patience. It's when you are fuming and
about to boil over that you need to be able to call on the soul-trait
of patience.
We get into trouble with impatience because of our reactivity.
Sure, the issue may be real. You're late. You need it now. There
will be consequences. But whatever the problem, no matter how
great or how small, it is one thing to face those life issues just as
they are, and quite another to slosh impatience all over the
situation. Reactivity like this only increases our burden by adding
a whole extra dimension of inner suffering to an already difficult
experience.
I have heard this distinction used to clarify the difference between
pain and suffering. Pain is the sensation caused by a stimulus;
suffering comes from our reaction to the pain.
It usually takes only a split second for the first glowing embers of
impatience to ignite and send flames coursing through us. Before
you know it, you're leaning on the horn, or you're going hoarse
yelling at your child, or cursing the postman. At that point we
don't even recognize ourselves, and there is little to be done but
to try to rein in those feelings enough to minimize any damage we
might do.
It's so much better to be able to catch our impatience as it is
arising, and to nip it in the bud. We make a first move in this
direction by developing more awareness of the telltale signs of
impatience right in the instant that they begin to stir. We
experience impatience through these physical indicators, and need
to become sensitive to them so we can identify them as they first
arise in us, before they take charge.
The practice is to witness and name the feelings just as they come
up. Tell yourself that at the first appearance of signs of impatience
in you, you will say to yourself, "I'm feeling impatient," or,
"There's impatience." Just by forming those words, you will hold
open at least a tiny crack through which the light of consciousness
can still shine, and if you can do that, impatience is suddenly no
longer so certain to rule, despite the fact that the triggering
problem remains. It's an illusion to think that we
The real root of impatience is the control very many of the
erroneous belief that we are the factors that shape our lives.
masters of our fates. The truth is
otherwise. We are actually wired into all kinds of larger circuits
and systems, from the molecular to the social to the spiritual, and
it's an illusion to think that we control very many of the factors
that shape our lives. Least of all can we expect to rule the
timetable according to which life takes place, which is usually the
focus for our impatience.
The Mussar teachers encourage us to contemplate these truths,
because when we realize a deeper understanding of our rightful
place in the universe, that helps us avoid getting all worked up
when things don't go just precisely as we'd like. Really, why should
they, considering how small we are, and how many other agendas
and needs are always involved? Even though we often have our
eyes focused so directly in front of our noses that we don't
perceive these truths, all our lives are actually integrated within
grand schemes of time, space, spirit and matter, moved by hands
that are not our own.
Of course we are not totally powerless, but it is important to sort
out what is actually within our power and what is not. And as the
cliche goes (and just because it is a cliche doesn't mean it isn't
true), the remarkable thing is that in both cases, we are better off
to be patient -- patient with the things that are within our control
to change, and patient with those that aren't.
Nor does patience mean we become passive. We still make a
genuine effort to set the pace and trajectory of our lives, but we
just don't react to every delay or deflection as if it were a denial,
whether that means a denial of our selves or a denial by God.
In those moments when I am good at being patient, I restore
myself to the here and the now despite pressures to go somewhere
else. I reduce my straining against reality. I return myself to a
middle path, not leaning to the one extreme of being inactive and
fatalistic -- because that way I err by negating the powers I have
been given, limited though they might be -- nor veering to the
other extreme, where impatience, chaos and destruction reign.
Path of the Soul #5: Giving Honor
We seek honor, yet withhold giving honor to others. In truth, we've

got it backwards.
The Talmud (Megillah 3b) presents a hypothetical scenario: It's the
evening of the festival of Purim and you are walking to the synago-
gue hear the reading of the Megillah. On the way, you come across a
corpse lying in the road. Jewish law obligates us to bury a dead
body, but of course that takes time, and if you stop to fulfill this
commandment, you won't be able to fulfill the other commandment
to hear the Megillah reading. What to do -- bury the body, or
continue to the synagogue?
The Talmud says that you bury the body because of the honor due
to a human being. What the Sages are teaching is that every
human being -- even a dead one -- is due honor. And if the
obligation to honor the humanity in a corpse is so compelling, how
much more so a living person!
The rabbis often encourage us to do positive acts which we are not
naturally and easily inclined toward. We don't need much
inducement to eat, wash, beautify ourselves, or gratify our needs,
but for many of us, honoring other people doesn't come easily.
Being critical and harshly judgmental of others comes much more
easily. When we see only their flaws and failings, what's to honor?
We focus on the soiled garment, ignoring the divinely inspired
being within.
We walk into a room and immediately scan the crowd, putting
everyone who is there through an instantaneous evaluation. It can
get pretty ugly, and few of us would likely ever verbalize the sorts
of things that routinely run through our mind.
She wore that?
Just look at the stupidity in that dumb face!
Such a slouch. Stand up straight, why don't you?
She still smokes?
I'll stop and let you continue. What sort of things do you say
(inwardly to yourself, of course) when that judgmental frame of
mind exerts its grip, and you are moving through life as if
someone appointed you chief judge, assessing whether or not
people measure up to your expectations?
Does this judgmental attitude ever lead to anything other than
disappointment and dissatisfaction in everyone around us?
Where is there even a hint of honor in that attitude?
Honor, respect, dignity and love are due to each and every human
being, not because of the greatness of their achievements, but
because they are home to a soul that is inherently holy. Nobody
created his or her own soul; everyone has been gifted with a
rarefied essence. This is a teaching of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, a
forerunner of the Mussar movement, who explains that one should
honor all people simply because they are the handiwork of God.
(Ruach Chaim on Pirkei Avot)
We need tradition to draw our attention to this deep reality
because it isn't readily evident to us. Our eye easily catches the
flaws in the trappings. Imagine someone sent you a painting by
Picasso or Chagall, and all you could see was the dirty, tattered
packaging in your hands?
So why do we do it? Why do we set up standards against which to
gauge others -- and then spend so much of our mental energy
appraising how they measure up? I What drives us to be so
believe it's because we have anxiety critical of others is our own
about how we ourselves are stacking
search for honor.
up. We judge others, find them
wanting, and thus appear less so to
ourselves. What drives us to be so critical of others is nothing
other than our own search for honor, especially in our own eyes.
There is a profound and sad reality in this. Many people just don't
love themselves enough and in the right way. In the Mussar work,
we are always looking for soul-traits that we can elevate and
improve, and that means we are awake to our imperfections. But
even that self-awareness and effort ought to happen in an
atmosphere of self-love.
We deserve to honor ourselves -- not because we are perfect, or
even great, or even good, or so-so some of the time. Your
greatness is not attached to your accomplishments, but rather to
your soulful essence that is a gift of incomparable beauty and
majesty.
The Mussar teachers are insistent that we distinguish the honor we
accord our own soul (as we ought to show respect to all souls)
from the desire of the hungry ego to slurp up every bit of honor it
can possibly get a hold of. This tendency of the ego is the
archenemy of humility. "Flee from honor," they warn us. Yet in
their wildest dreams they never could have imagined the extent to
which our modern culture elevates personal honor, and sends us
off on an endless and misguided search for pedestals onto which to
hoist ourselves.
It's not hard to see the direct connection between the ego's
insistent but unquenchable craving for honor and that critical
state of mind in which we stand ourselves in fierce judgment over
others. We mentally judge and criticize other people when all we
really want is love and honor for ourselves. The wisdom of
tradition tells us that when we act that way, we've got the whole
thing backwards. Ben Zoma asks: "Who is worthy of honor?" And
he answers: "The one who honors others" (Pirkei Avot 4:1).
This is a cornerstone teaching. We "Who is worthy of honor?
merit honor by giving honor. And The one who honors others."
our tendency is to withhold honor
because we want honor. Could we get it any more wrong than that?
To turn things right way round, we have to develop the habit of
offering honor to others. The first step in that direction is to catch
yourself whenever you're being inwardly judgmental and critical. If
that's your tendency, then equip yourself with a short phrase that
you can call into mind right after you've caught yourself in a
judgmental put-down, a phrase like "before me is a holy soul" or
"this one too was created in God's image." The idea is to refocus
your attention toward the essential and away from whatever trivial
detail your judging mind may have seized on.
Once you've reoriented your thought process, you can cultivate a
positive in place of the negative. For example, one form of
honoring about which tradition has a lot to say is the act of
greeting people. Pirkei Avot (4:20) urges us to "take the initiative
in greeting any person you meet," and the Talmud relates that no
one ever greeted Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai before he greeted them,
not even a stranger in the marketplace.
This is a practice any of us can do. When you encounter another
person, say, "Hello, nice to see you." And we call this spiritual
practice! How sensible. I urge you to try it. When you are the first
to honor another, you come forward from humility, and for this,
others will honor you, too.

Giving from the Heart

Generosity is a movement of the soul that erupts when you are
pierced by the recognition of your direct connection to another soul.
The soul-trait of generosity is named "nedivut" in Hebrew. Mussar
clearly distinguishes this type of generosity from another kind,
called tzedakah, which means obligated giving, such as tithing.
Nedivut-type generosity comes not from obligation nor rational
thought, but out of an irresistible feeling that stirs deep within.
Your heart compels your hand to dig into your pocket. It's a
movement of the soul that erupts when you are pierced by the
recognition of your direct connection to another soul. I give to
you because your need is my need, your suffering is my suffering.
I feel one with you and respond as freely as if for myself.
The overall goal of Mussar practice is to help us fulfill our
potential to really live as the holy souls we are. To move toward
holiness, one must yearn for it. One must be propelled by a
spiritual willingness -- nedivut ha-lev -- a generosity of the heart.
Because we live in a money-centric culture, we tend to think of
generosity only as a question of reaching into our wallets. But as
with all character traits, generosity is a trait of the soul and so it
can find expression in many ways, including how you share your
time, your energy, and your possessions. When your heart is
guided by an open, trusting, voluntary, inspired, internal
motivation that overflows from the depth of your caring in
response to the needs of, or love for, another, you will always find
a way to respond.
If you have money in your pocket, you give money. If you have no
money but there's food in your home, you give food. If there's no
food in your home but ideas in your mind, you give helping words.
If there are no words in your mouth but love in your heart, you
offer your heart itself.
We are naturally inclined to give like that, but we can act on that
inclination only when our heart is open. That isn't always the case.
When our hearts are closed or walled off, we are suffering from a
spiritual ailment that the Mussar teachers have called timtum ha-
lev, literally meaning a stopped-up heart. Think of Pharaoh.
Instead of being open, flowing, and generous, we are sluggish,
constipated, and unwilling at our core.

Why does that happen to us? If the heart is generous and ready by
its nature, how does its flow get to be so obstructed that we live
without being generous? And what can we do about it?
Sometimes we end up with timtum ha-lev, a stopped-up heart,
because we willingly blockade our own hearts. We build barriers to
separate ourselves from others.
In India, you hear disparaging stories about beggars -- that they are
professionals who earn a fortune off the unwary, or that mothers
mutilate their children so they will be more successful at begging,
and so on. These stories are likely untrue. In a population of a
billion people, a high proportion of whom are poor, it just isn't
necessary to create the physical ailments that make people into
beggars. But stories like these circulate because they are useful for
building a wall around the hearts of people who are confounded by
the demands being made on them. We fear the sensitive heart won't
be able to bear the full onslaught of the monumental suffering of all
of India's beggars. Drawn by the heart to respond, yet threatened by
fear of overload, how comforting it is to have a rationale for turning
away from that overwhelming pain.
Can you see any ways you build Can you see any ways you build
walls around your own heart? Do walls around your own heart?
you rationalize rather than commit
the effort it may take to be generous in a relationship? What
reasons do you give yourself to turn away?
Sometimes this blockage done to us. Life experience can play its
part in shutting down the heart. The heart wants to be open, but
sometimes it is just not capable of keeping its shutters open in the
face of the brutal battering it has been handed. In this case, we
can empathize with peoples' need to close off their hearts.
And yet if it is we who have been the victim, and we accept that
situation, we do a different kind of violence to the heart. When
your heart is closed, you are the first among those who suffer from
that closure. There may be good reasons why it feels too risky to
open up, but by tolerating that condition, we accept an imposed
timtum ha-lev. With a walled-off heart, our lives will be so much
less than they could be.
When you let your imagination run toward being spontaneously
generous, can you identify any fears that arise in you that cause
you to hold back? Can you see how these fears are walls and gates
that keep your own heart locked up and closed down? Can you see
how accepting these scars as unchangeable realities perpetuates
the damage done by the original offense?
More common than being abused in harsh and scarring ways is the
tendency to sacrifice the ways of the heart for the needs of the
ego. The ego sees the riches of the world as a fixed pie, and works
to get the largest slice, believing that somebody's only going to
get crumbs. All of this works against the heart's inclination to
spontaneous generosity.
Ask yourself: do I give spontaneously from the heart? If you are
aware that the condition of timtum ha-lev -- blockages obstructing
the heart -- applies to you, then one Mussar approach is to
identify the traits that are the source of the fear and clutching,
and to work on these specific soul-traits. The fears that restrain us
can be strong and the scars that constrain us can be hard, so you
can expect to have to be persistent (remembering to be
compassionate to yourself at the same time) as you look for and
then endeavor to adjust the levels of your middot, so the heart can
fulfill its role.
Another approach applies more for people whose hearts are being
enslaved to ego, where the inner voice says, "How can I give when
I don't even have enough for ME?" Here you might cultivate a
sense that what you do for others is actually a great gift to
yourself. No one loses.
Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, the founder of the Kelm school of Mussar,
explained how bearing the burden of the other is a profound
spiritual practice. He brings as his example the story of Moses, who
began his spiritual journey cocooned in Pharaoh's palace but
ultimately became the greatest of prophets by responding to the
suffering he saw around him. "He saw their suffering," the Torah
tells us, and what he felt had a formative impact on the
development of his soul.
In basing his Mussar on the idea of "bearing the burden of the
other," Rabbi Simcha Zissel was working out details of a spiritual
method pointed to by his own teacher, Rabbi Israel Salanter. In
one of his most memorable sayings, Rabbi Salanter comments that
"the spiritual is higher than the physical, but the physical needs of
another are an obligation of my spiritual life." In order that I can
follow my spiritual path, I have to pay attention to the needs of
others. Generosity would be one of the most accessible ways to do
that.
When an opportunity to be
The Hassidic teacher, Rebbe generous presents itself, no inner
Nachman of Breslov, teaches
debate is called for. Just do it.
that anyone who does not
practice generosity has "a heart of stone." Don't think about it too
much. Don't analyze. When an opportunity to be generous presents
itself, no inner debate is called for. Just do it. That's how you thaw
that frozen heart. Each act of generosity works to pry open the
heart a little, like clearing a blocked stream one pebble at a time.
The flow of spontaneity is then freed to follow.
It might seem paradoxical to aim to have your generosity impact
your own soul, since that would appear to give a reward to the
giver. Not so, because of the magic of generosity. It rewards all. In
Hebrew, the phrase "and they shall give" (v'natnu) is spelled vav-
nun-tet-nun-vav It's a palindrome, a word that is spelled the same
way whether you read it left to right or right to left. Such is the
flow of generosity.
It isn't enough just to give money or an object; God wants us to
give our hearts. Wrapped up in our hearts are the inner qualities
that can adorn our generosity. Will your gift be just a thing, or
will it be accompanied by empathy, commitment, love or other
soul-traits you have the power to cultivate in yourself? When you
undertake to give your heart, you change an element of yourself.
With each act of generosity you make yourself into a more giving
(or empathic, or committed, or loving, or...) person. And when you
change yourself, you change the world.
Ultimately, the reward we reap for generosity is that the presence
of God dwells among us.
Path of the Soul #7: Loving Kindness

Stretching ourselves in our caring for each other is central to our
spiritual job description.
The world is a vale of tears, no doubt about it. At the drop of a
simple "how are you" anyone can open their big book of loss,
disappointment and pain. It's true for all of us, though surely more
for some than others. Black threads are woven into the very fabric
of every life.
No wonder, then, that the Jewish tradition elevates deeds of

loving kindness (chesed) to the highest possible ranking among
soul-traits. Only some problems have solutions, but all are
alleviated by the loving response of those around us.
In Pirkei Avot (2:1) we learn that: "The world stands on three things:
on the Torah, on the service of God, and upon acts of loving kindness."
The fact that chesed is one of the three pillars on which the world
stands underlines how very important this soul-trait must be.
Chesed is a primary attribute of God. In fact, of the whopping 245
times this word appears in the Torah (telling you something right
there), about two-thirds of these instances speak of God's
character and actions. God is the Master of chesed, because, as the
Psalm states, "The world is built on chesed"(89:3). For God to have
created the world at all was nothing short of an act of chesed!
God is also constantly engaged in He has told you, O man, what
sustaining all of Creation through is good! What does your God
acts of chesed. So where is the ask of you, that you do justice,
chesed in the suffering and tears love loving kindness, and walk
that plague our lives? Even though humbly with your God.
it may be hard to see, there is
- Micah 6:8
great love extended to us at every
moment. We are weak, and we all stumble and fall. We transgress
against others, against ourselves and against God. And yet we are
not snuffed out like a feeble candle, as well we might be. We
persist in breathing, our hearts go on beating and we find the
strength to rise again because God sustains us. That's God's chesed.
We can learn from God's chesed that what we call loving kindness
involves acts that sustain the other. In the Mussar view, there is
little value in fostering unconditional good will in your heart and
wishing someone well. You have to tap those feelings to reach out
your hand with real sustenance to another, by way of money,
time, love, empathy, service, an open ear, manual assistance, a
letter written, a call made, and on and on. People can and do draw
sustenance from many sources.
Yet not all acts that sustain constitute chesed. We do some things
out of obligation -- paying taxes sustains programs that sustain
people, but it would be a big stretch to call paying taxes an act of
chesed. Or we might be repaying goodness done to us, or offering
sustenance with a plan of getting something in return. Those
motives don't reflect chesed either.
Here the notion of kindness comes back into the picture. Chesed is
sustaining action all right, but it has to come out of kindness and
compassion, no other motive. That means that acts qualify as
chesed only when they are motivated by a spirit of generosity. You
are not obligated to do it, you aren't repaying an act done for you,
you don't hope to get anything in return -- you are generously
reaching beyond those limited acts to give of yourself in a spirit of
honest and selfless generosity.
With these considerations in mind, I'd now translate chesed as
generous sustaining benevolence. That's more clumsy than the
already clumsy "loving kindness," but it conveys so much more
than just being nice and wishing well!
Giving in the way of chesed requires that we go beyond the
boundaries that are familiar and comfortable to us. We have to
stretch into chesed or it isn't chesed. That makes it sensible why
the Jewish tradition accords service done to the dead as chesed
shel emet, true chesed. Only with a dead body can we have
absolutely no hope or chance of a payback for our generosity.

I can already hear somebody saying, yes, but what of the inner
feeling people get when they know they are doing something
good? Isn't that a "reward" of sorts? There is a joy that comes from
doing a mitzvah. Unless you do the act specifically to get that
feeling, being joyful in chesed does not invalidate the fact that in
giving you had to stretch yourself beyond the boundaries of the
usual and the comfortable to offer benevolent sustenance to
another, which is how you enter the territory of chesed.
Mussar points out that some people are moved to acts of chesed
whenever they meet up with someone in need of their help. Others,
however, don't wait for the opportunity to come to them, but rather
search out any chance to act generously in ways that sustain others.
This is what the Sages meant when they wrote that the way of
those who do chesed is to run after the poor (Shabbat 104a).
Another way to understand this The demand is to not only do
distinction is to recognize that there acts of kindness, but to love
are deeds of chesed, and then there doing them.
are souls that are totally infused
with the spirit of chesed. That's the profound quality pointed to in
the quote from Micah: "do justice, love loving kindness, and walk
humbly with your God." We are not told that we fulfill our spiritual
destiny by doing acts of loving kindness but rather by loving those
acts. Of course if we love them, we will engage ourselves in doing
them, so the doing is still covered, but really only as a spin-off.
Our focus is not on the doing but on the quality of the heart that
lives within us. Love loving kindness! What a profound demand!
The words of tradition unremittingly remind us that life is not to
be lived every man for himself. Hillel puts it, "If I am only for
myself, what am I?" (Pirkei Avot 1:14). It is central to our spiritual
job description to stretch ourselves to sustain each other, and the
most important dimension of that behavior is bearing in your heart
love for the very act of caring for the other. Done for any other
motive and the act is not chesed and it does not sustain the world,
which is the outer mandate of chesed, nor does it move us closer
to realizing the very purpose of our souls, which is its inner
mandate. But when we get it right, our perfected chesed makes us
pious and righteous people (hence the linguistic relationship
between chesed and Chasidim).

Focus inwardly and then ask of your heart: enter joyfully into the
love of generously sustaining the other. Then put that spirit into
action. The heart and the world are called to connection, linked by
flowing loving kindness. Succeed there and your world will be
totally transformed, within and without.

Strength of a Hero
Surrounded by a culture that celebrates self-indulgence, the real

hero is one who practices self-restraint.
My wife keeps a cartoon stuck above her desk that is titled: "The
Surrendered Mom." The drawing is of a shell-shocked woman, and
the text reads:
"Drive you and six friends to the mall? Why, I'd love to!"
"You need $500 for a beanbag chair? Sounds like a plan!"
"You're quitting middle school? Well, you know best."
A parent like this is likely motivated by what seems to her to be
love, but she's in fact misdirected because she's missing the
necessary counterweight of judgment and restraint. Love without
judgment is like jello without the bowl; it's just a jiggling mess.
The converse is also true; strong judgment without loving kindness
is harsh and unfeeling. Power -- whether in the home, workplace
or government -- works best and is sustainable when tempered by
mercy and love. The ideal lies in the blending, though the point of
balance will be different for each of us. Where these traits come to
balance is called tiferet, a kabbalistic concept that implies balance,
harmony, and beauty.
A man who does not restrain his
The middah or soul-trait of own spirit is likened to a breached
gevurah means "strength." It city without a protective wall. --
shows up in many places and Proverbs 25: 28
many ways, and you can read an
entire newspaper as a commentary on the role of gevurah in public
and private life. Are the police using too much unrestrained power?
Should the government draw the line on certain things that are
happening in society? Was the family lax in discipline? Where's the
limit to the display of sexuality on television and advertising? Take
a look at the daily news from this point of view and you will see
what an important trait gevurah is and how illuminating it is to
bring this framework to understanding ordinary events.
In Mussar thought, the strength that concerns us is not the power
to move mountains but the strength you need to overcome your
greatest challenge: yourself. This is an especially important
concern for our generation because we live surrounded by a culture
that exuberantly celebrates complete self-indulgence, the very
opposite quality from self-restraint.
It's true that not everyone needs to develop self-restraint. Some
people are already masters of saying "no" to themselves and would
do much better to foster soul-traits that will help them loosen up
and unbind themselves. Still, everyone still has much to gain from
this exploration, even if gevurah is not a major subject on your
curriculum at this time.
Self-restraint works for us in a positive way when it helps us say
"no" to those desires that are not nourishing. Self-restraint is
negative when it keeps us from doing things that actually are good
for the soul.
Saying no to ourselves is not a hugely popular concept today. Look
at the significant portion of the population that is overweight.
Even among those who do want to hold their body weight within a
healthy line, many prefer diet pills to the disciplined act of
pushing away the plate. How can so many people continue to
smoke cigarettes in the face of all the proof that it is nothing less
than suicide? And among those who would stop, sales of anti-
smoking products boom because people can't simply stop
themselves from striking the match.
Exercising self-restraint has always been difficult. Perhaps that's
why the Hebrew word gevurah contains the Hebrew word for hero,
gibor. Exercising self-restraint is nothing less than a heroic act.
You can be a hero by saying no to that You can be a hero by saying
chocolate. (You can fill in your own no to that chocolate.
place of dynamic challenge here. Maybe
it's coffee, wine, television, lottery tickets, pulp fiction? Where in
your life do you have difficulty saying no to your desire?)
Casting the exercise of gevurah as a heroic act reveals something
essential about the Mussar view of life. We all face inner
challenges and it's foolish to condemn ourselves for our
weaknesses because we are actually supposed to have them. They
define our spiritual curriculum. Life is set up to challenge us to be
heroes who turn our weaknesses into strengths.
The Jewish tradition in no way condemns our desires per se. We
have no tradition of monastic or priestly celibacy. Wine is
sacramental. Feasting is more common than fasting. The issue is
not desire itself, because the rabbis recognize that desire is a
constructive force in life. We read in a midrash (Bereshit Rabbah
9:7) that the world would not exist but for desire, because without
it, "no one would parent a child, build a house, or make a career."
But the picture changes drastically when desire is allowed to go
unbridled. Without fences and limits, our otherwise healthy desires
become a source of enslavement. The Jewish tradition provides us
with many laws and communal guidelines to help us restrain our
desires -- you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not
commit adultery; you shall not covet -- though these
commandments for self-restraint are actually not enough to guide
a spiritual life. As soon as we encounter rules, it seems to be
human nature to start to get very clever about finding ways to
gratify our desires even within the parameters of the rules.
The great biblical commentator, Nachmonides, brings out this idea
very clearly in explaining the Torah's need for the all-
encompassing commandment, "You shall be holy." He points out
that "The Torah has... permitted sexual relations between husband
and wife and has permitted the eating of flesh and the drinking of
wine." But then he cautions against the unconstrained indulgence
in these permitted activities whereby a person with strong desires
can become"sordid within the permissible realm of the Torah!" No
laws are contravened, yet the person is "sordid." The only thing
that will save him or her is the development of personal self-
restraint. Nachmonides' call is to develop personal gevurah, which
means learning how to draw the line on our desires.
"How is a person to habituate himself to the trait of gevurah?"
begins a chapter in the kabbalistic Mussar book Tomer Devorah, by
Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, one of my favorite Mussar texts. He warns
us that gevurah is latent in the universe and that when we over-
indulge our desires, the consequence is that this background
"might" is stirred up, and we can expect to face severe judgment.
The way to avoid that external and severe punishing gevurah is to
exercise our own capacity for internal gevurah, in other words,
self-restraint.
This rule doesn't operate 100% of the time, as we well know because
wrongdoers do sometimes seem to get away with it in this life, but
it certainly describes some of my own experience of learning "the
hard way." Sometimes the results come in almost immediately: lips
that leak lies can set up instant disasters. Sometimes the severe
judgment takes longer: my wife treats people with lung cancer
secondary to smoking, and the punishment that arrives decades
later is severe and ugly in the extreme.
The kabbalistic insight tells us that the entire universe is
permeated with the quality of limitation and judgment. There is
absolutely no choice whether there will be gevurah in your life,
but where you do have major choice is over whether you prefer to
exercise internal gevurah, in the form of self-restraint, or would
you rather be subjected to external gevurah according to the
principles of justice God built into the universe?
Personally, at this stage in my life, I wholeheartedly opt for self-
restraint and I urge you to do the same. It is not only the less

painful choice; in the end we gain something positive through the
development of our own heroic qualities. We grow closer to the
ideal version of who we truly are.
Self-restraint depends on self-awareness. Knowing yourself
accurately reveals those areas where you may have the capacity to
exercise self-restraint. Desires can be very powerful, and so you also
need to have a sense of whether simple self-restraint is likely to be
feasible or not. The Mussar way is to set out very small steps for
yourself, because no one wins through failure. If you think you may
have difficulty holding back totally, try cutting the goal in half.
When Rabbi Israel Salanter, the father of the Mussar movement,
wanted to help the longshoremen of Danzig become observant of
Shabbat, he didn't ask them to stop working on that day, only to
stop smoking while they worked. Similarly, you may not be able to
go cold turkey on some habit, but it may be entirely within your
power every second or third day to pass up whatever currently has
you in its grip.
Path of the Soul #9: The Calm Soul
Tranquility doesn't spell the end of our spiritual struggles; it's the
inner quality that equips us to handle them.
How sweetly the velvety voice of tranquillity beckons:
In lush meadows He lays me down, beside tranquil waters He
leads me (Psalm 23).
Jewish sources use several terms to name the soul-trait of
undisturbed equanimity. The most descriptive is menuchat
ha'nefesh, calmness of the soul.
"A person who has mastered peace of mind has gained
everything." -- Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv
The calm soul is centered and rides on an inner even keel,
regardless of what is happening within and around you. I liken it
to surfing. Even as the waves are rising and falling, the calm soul
rides the crest, staying upright, balanced, and moving in the
direction you choose, though exquisitely sensitive to the forces
that are at work all around.
But before we surf off into this peaceful and beguiling garden, I
want to bring up one of the first Mussar teachings that caught my
attention and piqued my interest in this tradition. It was from
Rabbi Israel Salanter, the father of the Mussar movement, who
said:
As long as one lives a life of calmness and tranquility in the
service of God, it is clear that he is remote from true service.
Here we are being cautioned that "calmness and tranquility" are
contrary to spiritual service. That sentiment is echoed in a more
general way by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who writes in The Thirteen
Petalled Rose:
The Jewish approach to life considers the man who has stopped
going -- he who has a feeling of completion, of peace, of a great
light from above that has brought him to rest -- to be someone
who has lost his way. Only he whom the light continues to
beckon, for whom the light is as distant as ever, only he can be
considered to have received some sort of response.
These teachings tell us that the Jewish spiritual journey isn't
supposed to lead you to a station called peace and tranquillity,
and if that happens to be where you lodge at some point along the
way, then you better realize you've been traveling on the wrong
track. If you're living in a state of equanimity, you need to shake
yourself awake because clearly you've fallen asleep.
This is a very wise caution. It's so seductive to think of a total
escape from the storms and turmoil of life. Comfort, sweet and
soft, invites us to snuggle down and drift off to sleep, and that
can't be a spiritual goal. Imagine you're on a ladder. Would you
want to be asleep?
Comfort can't be a spiritual goal. Imagine you're on a
ladder. Would you want to be asleep?
So how can we square these cautionary teachings with a positive
appraisal of equanimity in Jewish spiritual practice?
The fact is that we can have both. Having the soul-trait of
equanimity doesn't spell the end of our struggles, but rather is an
inner quality that equips us to handle them.
Trying situations -- large and small -- crop up in everybody's life.
This is not accidental. Life is constructed to give the soul spiritual
trials (nisyonot in Hebrew) that score direct hits on the traits of
your inner life -- anger, compassion, greed, generosity, and on
through a long list -- where you yourself are particularly
vulnerable. That's what makes them tests! If you are a person
prone to anger and someone steps on your toe (literally or
figuratively), or you are sorely tempted to steal and someone
leaves an open purse right under your nose, or lust gets you every
time and the hotel desk-clerk is just your type, then here you
have a spiritual test.
What's the ideal? To rise to the test and to triumph with flying
colors, which would mean stretching into the middah (soul-trait)
in a way that is both difficult for you and good for the soul.
What's the reality? You could go either way. That's why the test is
real. If you pass a test, then that aspect of your inner being gets
strengthened and you earn the right to move on -- to face yet
another set of challenges. Otherwise, you are likely to encounter
the same test again at some future point.
I've seen this situation play out most clearly in the relationships
people take on in their lives. Once the honeymoon is over, the
relationship can look like nothing but tests. Too often people run
from these trials, get divorced, and then proceed to find another
relationship that tests their middot -- in exactly the same way.
When you think of tests along your curriculum for growth, they
are likely negative challenges -- lust, greed, rage, arrogance come
to mind. But there are positive challenges, nisayonot, as well.
Success, for example, can sometimes be more of a challenge than
failure. Arrogance and greed can feed on success even more
effectively than on failure.
So life keeps delivering tests to our doorstep, whether we happen
to be living through days of darkness or when things are going
well. We do ourselves a favor by embracing our struggles because
they are inevitable, woven right into the plan. In fact, if we are
committed to our own growth, we won't even want our struggles
to end.
When you see struggle as not only inevitable but as spiritual practice,
you are being true to the insights of Rabbis Salanter and Steinsaltz
about staying awake on the Jewish way. This says nothing,
however, about the inner attitude you adopt as you contend with
your challenges. Here's where equanimity comes into play.
ATTAINING INNER DISTANCE

What guidance does our Jewish tradition offer in the way of inner
calmness?
In his letter to his son, Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (the Ramban)
advises: "distance yourself from anger." And in the Orchos Chaim
[Ways of Life] of the Rosh, we are advised, "distance yourself from
pride." This phrase, "distance yourself," shows up elsewhere as
well. We are surely not being told never to be angry, proud,
jealous, etc., because Mussar teachers consistently assert that this
would be an unrealistic goal -- everyone experiences the full range
of inner states, and in and of themselves, every inner trait is
neither good nor bad. More important is how we respond to what
we feel.
"Distance yourself," then, can mean only two things. Either we are
to stay physically far from people who are angry, proud, etc., or
we are being directed to develop some kind of inner distance from
the experience of our own anger, pride, and other incendiary
middot.
Although there are definitely times when we ought to stand away
from powerful outer forces, we should be less concerned about
falling under external influences than we should the impulses that
arise in us. We are solely responsible for the powerful inner forces
that can lead us astray and so these are our first priority. The
guidance we are being given here is to cultivate an inner attitude
that creates some distance between the stimulus that comes at us
and our reactions to it. We make this space by cultivating an inner
stance as witness.
When you have a strong inner witness, outer influences are seen
for what they are and that will help you keep from being infected
by sentiments that swirl around you. That same inner faculty also
keeps you from being pushed around by the forces that arise
within you -- the distanced witness is not susceptible to the tides
of doubt, temptation, jealousy, etc., that wash through the
interior world.
Do we still face real struggles? Yes. Do the consequences matter?
Yes. Do we still feel the full range of human emotions and drives?
Yes. In other words, every aspect of your current life is real and
important. You would be wise to embrace it because it's your
curriculum. But cultivate the witness who will make you the
master of the inner realm and not the victim.
The most touted way to cultivate an inner witness is through
meditation. While sitting still and silent, many inner states will
arise, and over time you can get quite good at living in their
presence without feeling that you are a slave to any of them,
whether repugnant or alluring.
I'd like to offer another way to practice to the same end, one that
encourages the experience of the witness in every context in
which you might find yourself. Rabbi Steinsaltz describes the
Jewish spiritual experience as a constant beckoning to the light. If
we take that word "constant" seriously, then the light we seek
must be present at all times and in all situations, no matter how
murky or even dark they appear to us.
It is the job of the witness to keep an eye out for that light. When
you realize that, and assign this task to the inner witness, and
strengthen that practice, then over time you will grow to be
increasingly aware of the radiant Presence that is a constant in the
ever-shifting contexts in which you live.
An inner eye connected to the constant light won't give you a life
of fewer challenges and struggles, but it will give you equanimity
from which to engage and triumph. It's hard to imagine a better
way to be as you take on the trials that come your way. Perhaps
that is why the Alter of the Kelm school of Mussar tells us: "A
person who has mastered peace of mind has gained everything."
Path of the Soul #10: Trust
Once you recognize that the world is not meant to be comfortable,

certain, or easy, but rather an ideal training ground for the soul,
trust in God can begin to take root.
The soul wants to live in an atmosphere of trust since the
alternative is anxiety and worry. But people find it difficult to trust,
for so many good and valid reasons. This world is so unreliable.
Hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires and other natural disasters can
strike at any moment. Your life can suddenly be overturned by
illness or accident. And most of all, there is the unaccountable
cruelty, incompetence and stupidity of people. A level-headed view
of life seems to offer us every reason not to trust.
How and where could we possibly put our trust?
The Hebrew term for the soul-trait of trust is bitachon. To the
Mussar teachers the only place to put our trust is in God, therefore
bitachon means "trust in God." Including God in the definition may
offer you some help, or it may bring on an additional challenge,
depending on the role faith plays in your life. Growing in bitachon
is a very different proposition for a person who already has a
strong relationship to the divine as opposed to someone who has
no active sense of Who/What he or she is being asked to trust.
A person who tries to practice trust in God while leaving
himself a backup plan is like a person who tries to learn
how to swim but insists on keeping one foot on the
ground. - Rabbi Yosef Yozel Hurwitz
But who could possibly trust a God who allows a million children
to be killed in the Holocaust, who permits AIDS and smallpox and
ALS, who rains fire on the innocent and allows the guilty to die in
their comfortable beds? If this is the best that omniscient,
omnipotent divinity is capable of, then it seems you'd have to be
crazy to trust that God.
The fact that this is a difficult world is no accident or sign of bad
design. The Source of all has made our world just as it is so we will
not become complacent and lethargic, but instead be surprised and
challenged. The stretching and pulling -- by love as well as by
blows -- is what brings us to the threshold of growth that we
would likely never otherwise approach.
With your free will, you have it in your power to turn away from the
opportunity to grow, and instead to build thicker walls of anger,
hatred and despair around your heart. Or you can offer up your
heart for its initiation. The Kotzker Rebbe said, "There is nothing so
whole as the broken heart." Once you recognize that the world is
not meant to be nice, or comfortable, or certain, or easy, but that it
is set up to be the ideal training ground for the heart, you can trust
in God because the world is working just as it should be.
The suffering or difficulty in our lives almost never makes sense in
the moment, and only reveals its logic in time. Have you ever
looked back over a section of your life, or your whole life itself,
and only been able to see the storyline in retrospect? How many
people have you heard say something like "losing that job turned
out to be the best thing that ever happened to me" though at the
time it seemed like a blow to the solar plexus? Maybe you've
already had an experience like that yourself.
At the beginning of World War II, the Mussar teacher Rabbi
Yehudah Leib Nekritz, along with his wife and children, were
exiled from Poland to Siberia. The Russians had invaded the part of
Poland where the Nekritz family lived, and because Rabbi Nekritz
had been born in Russia, he was judged suspicious and was sent to
labor in the harsh north country. Of course everyone in the town
was distraught for the poor Nekritz family, since all the others
were allowed to remain at home while this one family was singled
out for the punishment of exile. "Terrible, terrible," they moaned,
and it was indeed terrible, except for the fact that remaining in
the town ultimately turned out to be an even worse fate -- the
Nazis rolled into that part of Poland and consigned all the Jews
who lived there to the death camps.
At the end of the war, the Nekritz family was released and made
their way to the United States. The exile to Siberia had been their
ticket to survival.
Who in the moment could have seen the big picture? No one in the
middle of a story is able to see how everything will work out in the
end. So our reactions to what unfolds in life are either pure
speculation or they reflect our clinging to a story we ourselves
generate from our unconscious.
This is true for personal events and for history as well. The Mussar
teaching is to call up trust to counteract our reactivity. When you
recognize the truth that you do not write the full script of your
life nor do you direct all the action, then it sinks in that there is
really nothing to worry about. Trust.
I am not saying that evil and suffering are not real. But it is
available to us to see everything that confronts us in life as a
challenge to our own soul-traits. We are meant to be good and
loving, generous and kind, but we can't make any of those
qualities take firm root in our inner soil unless we face the
challenge of rejecting their opposites. Only if these challenges are
entirely real will can we use them to help our hearts to grow in
positive ways. When Rabbi Nekritz would be asked by the peasants
in Siberia, "Why have you been sent here?" he would always
answer, "To teach you bitachon, trust in God."
Do we draw from all this that having strong bitachon means being
fatalistic? In its extreme form, the answer is actually yes. There is
a Hassidic story about a rebbe who saw a frantically busy man, and
he asked the man where he was running in such a frenzied rush.
"I'm chasing my destiny," the man answered. To which the rebbe
replied, "How do you know it isn't also chasing you? Maybe all you
have to do is to stand still for a moment to give it a chance to
catch up."
While our destiny is surely in the hands of God,
we are still obliged to make our own efforts.
But we can also find more measured voices telling us that while
our destiny is surely in the hands of God, we are still obliged to
make our own efforts. To rely exclusively on God implies that we
have absolutely nothing in hand to bring about change, when that
is seldom if ever the case. Everyone has some powers that are
gifted to them, like the ability to think, to speak, to write, to lift
objects, to move about, to care -- and even if you are lacking one
or more of these capacities, you should put what capabilities you
do have to work to bring about the outcomes you see to be the
best, rather than rely totally on God. God is the source of these
capacities, so wouldn't it dishonor those gifts and especially their
Giver not to put them to use?
When wise bitachon has taken root in you, you recognize how
important it is to act on your own behalf. Making genuine effort to
improve yourself, your relationships, and other circumstances in
the world is a sign that you understand and accept your real
responsibility for yourself and the world. It also reflects your
acknowledgement of the gifts God has already put into your
hands. Yet with bitachon, you also recognize that the outcome of
your actions is always beyond your control.
In short, Mussar's guidance is that you should try to make things
work out the way you think is best, and then be fully prepared to
accept whatever occurs.
It's easy to see that practicing trust in this way will inevitably give
rise to peace of mind. Effort combined with trust yields calmness --
because when you willingly accept whatever results come out of
your actions, what could there possibly be to worry about? Jewish
sources stress that through trust -- casting your burden on God --
you free yourself from worldly cares, bringing on the calmness and
tranquility so many of us long for and that we often try to find in
less-than-Godly ways.
Strong trust also makes you brave. Once you have developed the
attitude that you will be just fine with whatever comes out of your
actions, you will feel freer to speak out and take steps that reflect
your deepest convictions, without concern for consequences. In
this way bitachon helps strengthen soul-traits that are susceptible
to fear. For example, people (like me, though thankfully more so
in the past than today) often slip into saying things that are not
true out of fear of consequences, which means that a person with
strong trust is likely to find fewer challenges to being honest. And
so on for any other traits that might be knocked off their proper
measure by the force of fear.
When fear or worry strikes you, recognize the experience as a
signal calling on you to fan the inner sparks of your bitachon. Your
task is to become aware of feelings such as fear, anxiety, and
clinging right as they are occurring within you, and to respond to
them inwardly by identifying them as signs of not trusting. That
naming should not be confused with self-recrimination. By being
sensitive to feelings that imply a lack of trust, you call yourself to
be conscious of what is happening within you. From that
foundation of self-awareness, you can remind yourself of the other
option that lies before you in this situation -- to trust.
Bitachon is not a mere philosophical principle; it is an act that
requires practice. How do we practice trust? Let me prepare you
with a story adapted from the Chofetz Chaim.
There was once a man who was visiting a small town in Europe. It
was Shabbat morning, and he went to the local synagogue.
Everything was just as you might expect, until unusual things
started happening. There were well-dressed, obviously prosperous
people seated near the front, but all the honors for the Torah-
reading were given to scruffy men who stood clustered at the back
of the room. When it came time for the rabbi to say a few words of
wisdom, all he spoke about was the weather. After the prayers
were finished, lovely food was spread on the table and nobody ate.
The man was flummoxed by all these incomprehensible goings-on.
What kind of place was this? Was everyone here crazy? Finally, he
pulled aside one of the locals and asked, "What's going on here?
The men who got the Torah honors, the rabbi's talk, the uneaten
food… nothing makes any sense!"
The man explained, "Those scruffy looking men had been unjustly
imprisoned and the community worked long and hard to ransom
them to freedom. Isn't it wonderful that they are now free to come
to bless the Torah? The rabbi spoke only about the weather
because there has been an unusual drought this season and the
farmers have nothing on their minds but their crops, and the rabbi
knew and cared for their concerns. Why didn't anyone eat? One
Shabbat every month the community prepares its usual lunch but
instead of eating it, the food is donated to the local home for the
elderly."
"I can see how it might have looked to you," the local man told
the guest, "but when you can only see part of a picture, it's easy
to put together a faulty impression of what is going on."
This story offers a useful parable for our own lives. When you can
only see part of the situation -- and in the present moment, all
any of us can ever see is part of the picture -- then you can't
possibly know what is really going on. That will only be revealed
in the fullness of time.
But I introduced the story by saying that trust in God needs to be
practiced, and I had in mind suggesting a way in which you can do
that by making use of this story. Just by recognizing the truth in
this parable, and keeping it in mind, it is there to serve you
whenever you are shaken awake by something happening that
doesn't fit your expected story line. Maybe the disaster will turn
out to be a strangely packaged gift. Maybe in time it will be
revealed that what appeared to be a glorious boon was actually the
doorway to disaster. This happens, of course. Because at any
moment you can only see part of the picture, and because this
world and its Maker are ultimately trustworthy, you can trust.
Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haOlam, shehaKol eyeh bavaro

(Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, that
everything will be according to His Word.)
God Bless – Freddi

Jesus is the KING of Kings and LORD of Lords!
God intends us to do everything –TOGETHER!!

Path of The Soul Discovering Mussar

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Path of The Soul Discovering Mussar

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November 15, 2018

This new series explores Mussar, a traditional Jewish spiritual

The Way of the Soul

Path of the Soul #2:

Being humble doesn't mean being nobody, it just means being no

Path of the Soul #3: Gratitude

Making something of beauty out of what we do have, incomplete as

Path of the Soul #4: Patience

The root of impatience is the erroneous belief that we are the

Path of the Soul #5: Giving Honor

We seek honor, yet withhold giving honor to others. In truth, we've

Path of the Soul #6:

GooD News Scribe eBook Page 22 of 23

GooD News Scribe eBook Page 23 of 24

Path of the Soul #7: Loving Kindness

No wonder, then, that the Jewish tradition elevates deeds of

GooD News Scribe eBook Page 28 of 29

GooD News Scribe eBook Page 29 of 30

Path of the Soul #8:

Surrounded by a culture that celebrates self-indulgence, the real

GooD News Scribe eBook Page 33 of 34

Path of the Soul #9: The Calm Soul

ATTAINING INNER DISTANCE

Path of the Soul #10: Trust

Once you recognize that the world is not meant to be comfortable,

Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haOlam, shehaKol eyeh bavaro

God Bless – Freddi

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