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By Alan Morinis The week before I spoke at Temple Beth El in Riverside, Calif., last month, the temple was picketed by neo-Nazis. How could people know they were neo-Nazis? It wasn’t hard to tell because the picketers were carrying banners with large swastikas emblazoned on them. And the day after I spoke in Riverside, a synagogue in Sacramento, where our friend, student and colleague Nancy Wechsler-Azen is rabbi, was desecrated with anti-Semitic graffiti. Among other things it said: “Kristallnacht lives.” A fire was lit under the synagogue sign, which touched a nerve because it wasn’t long ago that another temple in Sacramento was firebombed. Unfortunately, there is nothing particularly new in those two offensive events. Nor will we be surprised by the response we can expect from the institutions, which are defenders of our community. Jewish leaders will spring into action to hold meetings, to round up politicians from all levels, to speak through the press and to affirm our strength in the face of these threats. I’m quite sure that none of the community leaders who will be leading the response to those anti-Semitic events will have had the benefit of learning and practicing Mussar. I can be so certain of that not because I know anything about the individuals involved, but because our Jewish spiritual traditions were almost entirely absent from any corner of the Jewish world in the second half of the 20th century, and so these individuals are not likely to be different from any other adults today, who grew up in a de-spiritualized Jewish world. That leads me to wonder how the response to situations like I have described would be different if the person responding had a firm base in Jewish spiritual thought and practice? The main thing that Mussar provides to inform a response to an offensive event is to introduce a question into the space between the provocation and the response. The question is: What qualities in me can I observe getting triggered that will color my response? It is evident that different people will respond to the same event in different ways, and the Mussar masters explain the difference by pointing to the differing calibration of their inner traits. N doubt, the leaders who spring into action to deal with assaults on the community are motivated by love for the community and a desire to serve to the best of their abilities. And at the same time, their response will reflect not just this high-minded motivation to serve, but also the ingrained tendencies of their inner life. The person who has a tendency to get angry will respond to provocation by exploding in rage. Someone who serves the community but is, at heart, an arrogant person, will not only want to lead, but will want to make sure everyone sees them leading, and will be sure to put themselves in just the right location to show up in the picture in the newspaper the next day. The worried person will be fretful. The lazy one won’t make it to the counter-rally. To a large extent, this is inevitable. When we act in any way, our actions are always going to be colored by our inner traits (our middot, in Hebrew). What is not at all inevitable, however, is that people act out their personal inner lives with no conscious awareness that it is happening, or that, as the Mussar masters teach us, the trials we face present opportunities for personal learning and growth. A student of Mussar responds to a provocative event by opening a space for self-examination between that event and his or her response. My Mussar teacher, Rabbi Perr, calls this “opening a space between the match and the fuse.” When a person responds without this step of self-examination, he or she simply lets their habitual tendencies guide their response. But wait a moment. Will expressing that middah be the best contribution you can make to the situation, or is it just your ingrained habit? Is your anger exactly what is needed from you? Are you speaking up because you have something valuable to say, or is it because you envy the people who get quoted more often than you do? Taking action without the step of introspective self-examination means that our actions will be unconsciously tainted by our habits, patterns and self-interest. In contrast, if we do engage in self-examination before responding, we are likely to be more effective in our action because there is a chance that exercise will uncover inclinations within ourselves that are influencing our preferred course of action, tendencies that are actually geared to satisfying ourselves and our personal spiritual curriculum rather than serving our own espoused public goals. Besides making us more effective actors, there is another cost to springing into action without pausing for introspection, and that impact registers in one’s own spiritual life. Trying situations highlight the personal middot that are there to be worked on, where you have the most potential to grow. When a person feels anger in response to a situation, he or she is being given an opportunity to examine the place of anger in their life, just as the person who responds to every situation with perfect equanimity may well benefit from taking a look at his or her lack of passion. The fact that we do tend to respond to situations in personal ways is not a negative if we take the opportunity to learn something about ourselves from our response, and then put that learning to work in the interest of our ideals and our personal growth. The Mussar teachers tell us that the profound reality of being a human being is that we are all souls on a journey in the direction of holiness and wholeness. Many of the situations we face in life try us so severely not because the situation is objectively a trial, but because it is difficult for us personally due to the configuration of our inner traits. If another person with a different inner configuration of middot were to be put in exactly the same situation, it may well not test him or her at all. Our response to a situation tells us at least as much about ourselves as it does about the situation, if we care to pay attention. Failure to introspect not only reduces effectiveness, it is a missed opportunity for personal spiritual growth. When Rabbi Nancy told me that her synagogue had been defaced, in that very email she identified two middot that she saw being invoked in her and in the community. I added two more for her consideration. You may be curious to know which middot we pointed to, but more important than naming them is recognizing the value in the process in which we engaged. Mussar provided us with a paradigm and tools to reflect on the situation to consider which traits would be the best ones to emphasize and strengthen in the situation, and which might be ineffective, or even self-serving and tainted. Mussar provided Nancy with the gift of tools that helped her be a more effective community leader. At the same time, this difficult situation was just one more stage in her soul-journey toward holiness, with lessons to teach and opportunities to practice and grow. |
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