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By Alan Morinis We come from a tradition that tells us over and over that character is the key to a happy and fulfilling life. Take, for example, something written by Rabbi Menachem Meiri, a scholar and commentator on the Talmud, born in Provencal in France in 1249:
His message is that we see the results of our characters in the circumstances of our lives. There may be a final, heavenly reckoning, but we don’t have to wait that long to get our mid-term grades. Life is giving us feedback all along the way, if we pay attention. Now apply this idea to your own life. Think of traits that you tend to embody to one extreme or the other (to excess or deficiency). Do you have too much anger or arrogance, generosity or compassion, worry or craving for pleasure? Or too little of some traits? You don’t have to be a genius to see which traits figure on your personal spiritual curriculum — you just have to be brave and honest enough to connect the “errors and embarrassments” you suffer in your life to your character. Please don’t mistake this for saying that you are responsible for all the bad things that may happen in your life. That’s just not true. But Meiri is wise to single out “errors and embarrassments” because those sorts of painful experiences do tend to come about as a result of choices we have made, and our choices do tend to reflect our character. The quote from Meiri comes from his comments to tractate Kiddushin. In the section of the Talmud that he is addressing (40a), the rabbis discuss a quote from the prophet Isaiah that gives us an enormously useful guideline about our characters. Isaiah says:
At least, that’s what the rabbis say Isaiah says. The verse from the Book of Isaiah literally reads: “Say to the righteous person that it is good [ki tov], that they will eat the fruit of their labors.” The rabbis substitute “who is good” for “it is good” in order to refocus the issue of goodness from “it” (something outside ourselves) to “who” (which refers directly to ourselves). And they do that because they have an important point to make to guide our footsteps in life. In the Gemara’s discussion, the sage Rava looks closely at the verse and notes that it addresses “a righteous person who is good.” He then muses, “Is there a righteous person who is good and a righteous person who is not good?” He gives an answer that he learned from another sage, Rav Idi, who taught: “One who is good toward heaven and to his fellow creatures — this is a righteous person who is good.” In other words, a person who is attentive to prayer, ritual and religious observance and to how he or she deals with the other people who show up in the course of life, this is a righteous person [tzaddik] who is good. I think here of Rabbi Aryeh Levin, who was the Chaplain to Jewish prisoners in the Jerusalem jail under the British mandate. His life story (see A Tzaddik in Our Time: The life of Rabbi Aryeh Levin by Simcha Raz) tells of a man who was equally devoted to heaven and to the soul of every person he met. As he spoke with the prisoners, Rav Aryeh took each inmate’s hand and would rub and squeeze it lovingly as he spoke soft and soothing words of encouragement. Even the most hardened and secular prisoners succumbed to his simple, untainted love for his fellow Jew. Rav Idi also notes the other possibility too: “one who is good toward heaven and bad toward his fellow creatures — this is a righteous person who is not good.” How many evils have been done in this world by people swearing faithful allegiance to a higher power. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter had a homely way of making the same point. He said that when a man puts on his tallis [prayer shawl], he should be careful not to whip his neighbor with its fringes. The point is that a person who is very devoted to religious observance, but is not good to other people is still a tzaddik, but a tzaddik who is evaluated as not good. That’s how heavily interpersonal relations weigh in the assessment of character. Rav Idi then brings another verse from Isaiah: “Woe to the evil person who is bad, for the payment of the deeds of his hands will be done to him” — and asks, “Is there an evil person who is bad and one who is not bad?” We’ve already looked at the righteous person who is good and the one who is bad. Now we have in focus on the other permutations: an evil person [rasha] who is good, and an evil person who is bad. Aren’t all evil people bad? Not according to this teaching. Someone who neglects religious duty and is good to other people — this is indeed judged an evil person, but one who is actually not so bad. But if you neglect your responsibilities to heaven and are also neglectful in interpersonal matters, then you are an evil person who is bad. This is the worst possibility of the four that have been considered — neglecting what is above you as well as what is around you. We could get hung up at this point in a discussion of whether it is evil to neglect religious duties, but that would distract us from the real point. What I am called to focus on in this teaching is the strong endorsement given to the notion that a person of good character fulfills the obligation to be good both to the divine and to other people. To be good is not a matter of either-or, but of both. So if you are willing to be brave and honest enough to extract the lessons for living that are embedded in the “errors and embarrassments” that crop up in life, then you will learn something valuable about your own personal spiritual curriculum. It would be a shame to suffer those errors and embarrassments and not learn the available lessons, so I invite you to look at experiences you have had of slipping up one way or another, to see what those slip-ups can teach you about your own character. It takes bravery and honesty to examine your own experience in order to learn about your spiritual curriculum. And then it takes wisdom and compassion to want to do something about it. The guidance we have received here is that addressing your spiritual curriculum involves looking toward heaven and taking stock of what and how you are doing in that relationship, but also looking toward the woman sitting next to you, your child who lives far away, the slow driver in the car ahead, the next person you meet, someone holding out their hand to you, and taking stock there too. To be good is not a matter of either-or, but of both. |
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