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By Modya Silver - Co-President Welcome to 2010. The Board and all those involved in The Mussar Institute hope that it is a wonderful year filled with everything that you want and perhaps a few pleasant surprises too. There is a tendency in some Jewish circles to not acknowledge January 1 as the beginning of a new year. However, I think that this is a missed opportunity. While we have four “new years” within the Jewish calendar year, I think that any opportunity to stop and reflect on time gone by and time to come is worthy of attention and celebration. In the “Path of the Just,” Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto says we should do an accounting of our soul (cheshbon hanefesh) “at the time you are about to engage in an action and at times that you aren’t.” In other words, any time is a good time to see where we are on our growth path and where we might want to make course corrections. We learn from the founder of the modern day Mussar Movement, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, that the reason for constant reflection is so that we don’t slip into habit and allow habit to dull our spiritual striving. R. Salanter asks of each one of us to break our heart open (shivron halev) so that we can more easily connect the heart with the intellect (seichel) and have the two, together drive our destiny. It is with this thought that I entered January. For me, I am using the time to reflect on how my life has progressed from Rosh Hashana until now. I have my annual life plan taped to a bookcase in my study, making it easy to look at throughout the year to see how I am measuring up to my goals. So far, I’m about 60/40, with most of my shortcomings being around Torah learning. It is interesting for me to explore where my heart-centered habits meet the excuses concocted by my intellect. I see that I have some good room for improvement between now and next Rosh Hashana and will redouble my efforts to merge mind and heart for growth (and not for procrastination in my case). At The Mussar Institute we can view our community in a similar way. As an organization and a community we have goals to achieve that require strong intellect from many people. However, we do better to keep remembering that success also requires an integrated heart. Having a community of nearly 4,000 is a wonderful achievement. Launching new courses and programs, as we hope to do within the next two months is also a great accomplishment. However, the measure of success is not only in numbers, but in the quality of those numbers and that requires the heart to be engaged and to be working with the intellect. We need our communal heart to properly appreciate and honor the large number of people who volunteer to help provide so much to so many. We need our communal heart to balance financial needs of running an organization with the sensitivity of including those without means. Each decision we make requires us to break our heart open, connect it to our intellect and then make a “whole decision”. In 2010, may we all merit to make more of those complete decisions and through that may our cup overflow.
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