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By Alan Morinis Today as I write, I am aware that it is the 25th of Shevat, the 127th yahrzeit of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, whose leadership, insight and innovation gave us the Mussar movement that is a treasure to the generations that have followed him, including our own. I want to honor Rabbi Salanter (1810-1883) in this column, but only indirectly. I am in England today, and as I davenned at the East Marble Arch shul this morning, a more recent Mussar teacher, Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler (1892-1953) came strongly to mind. Rabbi Dessler was a thoroughgoing product of the Lithuanian Mussar yeshiva of Kelm, the leading dissemination point for the Mussar movement. But when, in 1928, he accompanied his father to England for medical treatment, he took the unexpected decision to remain behind in the same London where I am today. Rabbi Dessler found himself on very foreign territory in England, as someone who had spent his entire life in the yeshivas of Lithuania. In 1906, when he was 14 years of age, he had become one of the youngest students at Kelm, which was then being led by Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Braude, the son of the founder, Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv (the Alter of Kelm). With a brief interruption during the First World War, Rabbi Dessler spent a total of 18 years learning Talmud and Mussar at Kelm, where the spirit of the Alter remained strong. Rabbi Dessler’s father had been a close student of the Alter, and in 1920 Rabbi Dessler cemented the link to the Alter’s family when he married Bluma, the Alter’s great-granddaughter. That someone as steeped in the world of pre-Holocaust Lithuanian Mussar as Rabbi Dessler should find himself in London in the 1930s turns out to be a great gift to those of us who were born and raised in more recent times. For one thing, Rabbi Dessler was spared the fate of many great Mussar teachers by being sheltered in England when the Holocaust ravaged European Jewry. While in London, Rabbi Dessler served as a rabbi in the East End of the city and later in a northeast suburb called Dalston. It was while in Dalston that Rabbi Dessler began making some of his income tutoring young men, a practical decision that created a great legacy for us of a later generation. Rabbi Dessler’s students in Dalston were English, not products of a yeshiva world, and much more connected to the world at large than was anyone in the more isolated Jewish community of Lithuania. Aware of who he was addressing in his lessons, Rabbi Dessler undertook to explain Mussar concepts in terms that would be understood and appreciated by his audience, whose background and worldview was so different from those of the young men where he came from. The result was the creation of a body of letters, lectures and essays written with the goal of explaining Mussar to people who had not been raised under the tent of a yeshiva—people just like many readers of this Yashar newsletter. After Rabbi Dessler’s passing in 1953, his writings and correspondence were collected into six volumes that were published as “Michtav me-Eliyahu” (“Letter from Elijah”), later brought out in an English translation called "Strive for Truth!" Rabbi Dessler’s writings are wide-ranging, and mostly focused on Mussar topics, from how to study a Mussar text, to the ethical lessons of the Torah, to the topic where he has perhaps had his greatest influence, his “Discourse on Lovingkindness.” I’ll say a few words on this latter subject, to get beyond the biography to learn something from the soul of the man himself. Chesed [lovingkindness] is such a fundamental concept in Jewish thought that the Psalm teaches: “the world is founded on kindness” (Tehillim 89:3). When the Maharal offers his interpretation of the traditional image that the Torah is black fire written on white fire, he tells us that the white fire—the very background on which the letters appear—is chesed. The list of citations in praise of kindness is long and ancient. Could Rabbi Dessler possibly have added anything new to our understanding, writing as he was in the mid-20th century? Though innumerable sources and commentators have praised the virtue of kindness through the centuries, being kind remains an elusive goal for most human beings (me included), even as the idea appeals to us. How can I be kind when I am so often tired and stressed, when so many demands are being made on me, when my experiences in life fall so short of the hopes and the images I carry around? Why be kind to others in this unkind world, when I am so much more likely to encounter indifference, or even cruelty, not kindness? Rabbi Dessler answers some of these questions, and so strengthens the resolve of the heart to answer the call to kindness that we hear in tradition, and feel echoed in our own inner beings. But Rabbi Dessler’s real innovation is to offer us practical guidance in the how-to of kindness. Praising kindness in a world of hard-heartedness appeals, just as a call for light stirs those caught in a world of darkness. But that praise no more creates a kind heart than praising light brings on illumination. We’re still stuck in theory, words, concepts, tools for understanding that do not touch deeply enough within to transform. Here Rabbi Dessler offers his gift. He tells us that the personality infused with chesed is not concerned with what he or she can take from the world, but rather focuses exclusively on giving. The practitioner of lovingkindess may receive but does not take, and sees in his or her mission on earth the opportunity to give. A kind heart is brought into being by acts of generosity. Surprisingly, we do not transform ourselves in the direction of kindness by trying to do acts of kindness, but rather through practicing acts of generosity. Like many Mussar teachings I have encountered, I am certain I never could have realized this truth on my own. It has been a major gift in my life to receive guidelines for living and acting that embody the collective, accumulated wisdom of ancestors like Rabbis Salanter and Dessler. For that I am grateful in the extreme. I cannot imagine what my life would be like today had they not been practitioners – and not just theoreticians – of the generosity of spirit they described and praised. |
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