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By Alan Morinis I went back to prison last month. I had visited the Mussar group at the California Women’s Prison a year ago, and now I had the opportunity to visit again, thanks to an invitation from Shayna Lester, prison chaplain, Mussar student and neshama extraordinaire. The first time I went behind bars, I really had no idea what to expect. I had never set foot in a prison (thank God!), and in my anxiety about what my interaction with the inmates would be like, my mind reverted to stereotypes. These were women in prison, after all, and that brought up television and movie images of tattoos and exotic body-piercings. But I also knew that the people I would meet identified as Jewish, and in all my travels, I hadn’t come across that tribe of tough Jews who went in heavily for tattoos and body-piercing. When I actually did pass through the multiple gates and checkpoints and met the women in the prison last year, I saw and heard from a diverse group of people who did not fit any of my stereotypes. After that visit, I thought long and hard about what I had heard and seen when I spoke with them and listened to them, and I came to the realization that the women I had encountered in prison were nothing but a group of “souls in special circumstances.” That was it. Not stereotypes, not even a uniform group, but a collection of unique souls in special circumstances. This year, when I went back to the prison, that’s what I had to share with them—I told them the story of my anxiety about meeting them the first time, and the conflict that arose in my mind when I tried to bring together the irreconcilable stereotypes I was holding of women in prison who were also Jewish women. Those ideas had all arisen before I had met them, and I also told them what I had come to think after I met them, which is that I realized that women in prison are nothing but souls in special circumstances. That realization about the women’s Mussar group in prison led me quickly to another thought. Yes, they are indeed souls in special circumstances, but so are we all. Their circumstances are surely very different from people outside prison, but the difference between an inmate and a non-inmate is not necessarily greater than the difference between a homeless person and someone with a reliable roof over his or her head, or a healthy person and a sick one, or a married person embedded in a family and a solitary person, or perhaps even a person who is deeply involved in his or her work and someone who suddenly finds him/herself without a means of financial support. We are all souls in special circumstances. Each of us is a unique soul, and the life circumstances in which we find ourselves are totally unique as well. No life could be remotely like that of another person, as no two people are even close to identical in their inner world. One of the biggest gifts available to us from the Mussar tradition is the insight that life presents us with a curriculum. We need not be in prison to find ourselves in very special life circumstances at this moment. It is possible to spend quite a lot of time analyzing the route that brought us to this place, but the reality is: here we are. Mussar picks up the challenge, though not of figuring out how we happened to get here, but rather of plotting our course forward, into the future. It appears to me that there are two choices: either you find in your special life circumstances a personal curriculum for growth, or you don’t. If you do see the challenges and tests that appear in your life as revealing a personal curriculum of soul-traits (middot) calling out for attention, then you also see the possibility of working on those traits and—through learning and practice—growing in exactly those areas, so that ultimately you deal differently with the situations that you previously found so trying. If you do that work and experience that growth, then the test you used to face is no longer a trial for you. On the other hand, if you do not acknowledge the curriculum for growth that is showing up right before you in the tests of your present circumstances, then there is no way forward, except to blame everyone else for those trials. Me? I’m not impatient. It’s just that everyone in the world is moving too slowly. Me? I don’t have a problem with lust. It’s just that people dress too provocatively these days. Me? I’m not a miser. It’s those people who don’t even lift a finger to support themselves that are the scourge of the economy. And so on. Me? I’ve got nothing to learn and no growing to do. It’s the world around me that is such a mess. If you realize that your life is reflecting your curriculum for growth, you have the potential to learn, practice, grow spiritually, and get beyond the particular tests of this moment. And if you don’t, you just keep getting the same test, over and over and over again. As I like to point out, it is no mystery why impatient people find long line-ups wherever they go. On the other hand, as the Book of Proverbs (Mishlei 15:31) tells us: “The ear that hears the reproof of life lives among the wise.” May that be all of us. |
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