Mussar Institute - Through a Mussar Lens

By Alan Morinis

This column may not win me many friends. It just might succeed in rubbing both the Jewishly observant and non-observant the wrong way. But I will speak truthfully and I ask you to apply the test of truth to filter your own thoughts as you consider what I have to say.

I wrote in Everyday Holiness that we have each been assigned a personal spiritual curriculum. That’s true for every single human being. You have already been assigned your curriculum, and you have already been running into it, though you might not have realized that it is, indeed, a curriculum. It has been right there all along, showing up as your impatience, laziness, greed, anger, passivity, anxiety, or whatever traits happen to provide the testing challenges in your life.

The gift of Mussar practice is to help us recognize and embrace that curriculum, and then to work on it, so that the obstacles where we are challenged are transformed into the stepping stones on our journey of spiritual ascent.

The point of it all is to guide our steps as we ascend spiritually. Rabbi Yechezkel Levenstein, the Mussar supervisor of the Mir Yeshiva in the past generation, said it so well. “A person’s primary mission in the world,” he said, “is to purify and elevate the soul.” That’s it. That’s what we are here for.

But do you have to be an observant Jew to go on this journey and to benefit from Mussar learning and practice? Absolutely not. I asked that question of my own Mussar teacher, Rabbi Yechiel Yitzchok Perr, and I quoted his answer in Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, where I wrote:

“Just because Mussar developed in a frum context,” he asked rhetorically, “does that mean it has no significance outside of frumkeit [Orthodox observance]? That is absolutely not correct. For instance, if a gentile were to come to me for direction, I would teach him Mussar, but not frumkeit, because frumkeit doesn’t apply to him.”

You should know that Rabbi Perr read the manuscript of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder before it was published. He stood behind his words.

That Mussar applies and can be effective in the life of a non-observant Jew, or even a non-Jew, is a fact that has been confirmed by the experiences of my students, many of whom are not observant of the commandments, and a number of whom are not even Jewish.

As a result, I believe that Mussar teaching should be available to everyone, without regard for their religious or denominational orientation. Not everyone agrees. There are Mussar teachers active today who reject students because they are not sufficiently mitzvah-observant. This appears to me to be a clear breach of the commandment to love others, putting religion ahead of concern and care for the purification and elevation of souls.

But then you might ask where I stand on the question of how halachah (Jewish law) fits into the picture of spiritual life? An observant Jew lives daily life according to the wide range of mitzvot (commandments) that govern every aspect of life, mundane and religious. Does my view of Mussar mean that halachah is irrelevant to Mussar practice?

There are certainly some people to whom halachah does not apply. These are non-Jews. As for Jews, halachah does apply and in my view, halachah is a form of Mussar practice. It shares with Mussar the goal of purifying and elevating our inner lives—our souls—and it provides a pathway that guides that ascent.

Take, for example, the commandments that show up several times every day that govern eating. Prominent among these are the laws of kashrut that determine whether certain foods are edible in themselves and in combinations. There are also laws governing handwashing before eating, and blessings that must be said before and after certain foods are eaten.

Every one of these practices has at its core concern for elevating and purifying the soul. Eating is an activity we share with animals, but do we want to eat as they do? I observe kashrut, I wash my hands, I say the blessings, and in so doing I see myself to be cultivating a higher sensibility around something as mundane and physical as the act of sustaining life through eating.

This form of observance appears to me to be Mussar practice in another way as well. When I forego certain foods, I sometimes find myself experiencing the challenge of dealing with the force of my own desires. My commitments bring me into an encounter with myself which would simply never happen if I had an “anything goes” frame of mind. That encounter is a pathway for personal growth and makes me stronger, and prepares me to face life’s tests in the myriad ways they do show up in my life.

This is an idea related to what we read in the Sifrah (Parshat Kedoshim): “Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel said ‘A person should not say, “I do not like to eat meat and milk together; rather, he should say, “I would like it but what can I do? My Father in heaven has decreed upon me (not to partake of it).”’”

I am clear that it is important and valuable for a Jew to be halachically observant. Will the practice of Mussar be valuable without that observance? Undoubtedly. Will Mussar have more impact on the soul when combined with mitzvah-observance? Undoubtedly as well. Am I personally mitzvah-observant? To the best of my ability.

And the counterpart question: is halachic observance a full spiritual path? No, it is not. I have been in many situations where the food has been meticulously kosher, the blessings said in every detail, etc., and the food stuffed into overflowing mouths that were braying loudly and spluttering at the same time, to be gulped thoughtlessly into vast and spreading bellies and followed up with a thunderous belch. The Ramban identified the same problem about 900 years ago when he wrote of a person who was a “scoundrel with the permission of the Torah” (naval be’reshut ha’Torah). These I have seen.

The Orthodox world has become increasingly dominated by intolerant leaders whose sole concern is behavioral conformity. There is no evidence that they are concerned about the spiritual life or personal growth of individuals as much as their own political power, secured through intimidation. Their intolerance reveals that they do not love nor care sufficiently for other people.

When we look back only one or two generations, we see a different picture. For example, men in those days did not dress to a code of black and white as is obligatory today. Rabbi Perr has told me that when he studied at the influential Lakewood Yeshiva as a young man, no one had a black hat. “What was your hat like?” I asked him. “It was a Panama straw hat with a red hat band,” he replied. Unimaginable today. Look at the pictures of the members of the great European yeshivas of the pre-war era and you will see clean-shaven men in all sorts of suits and hats.

Whether they recognize it or not, Orthodox Jews desperately need a renewed commitment to Mussar as personal transformative practice in order to develop the sensitivity, consideration, poise, self-restraint, generosity of spirit and many other traits that are integral to the vision of the whole person that the Mussar masters articulated. These traits are in short supply in that world today.

And by the same token, the non-observant do themselves a major disservice by exempting themselves from the spiritual benefits of halachah. If nothing else, stepping around the practice of halachah is the biggest favor a person can do for their yetzer ha’ra [i.e. inclination to behave negatively].

Those are my views, and they explain why I teach Mussar as I do and to whom I do, as well as how I lead my own life.

Comments? Join the conversation in our Mussar group on Yahoo.To join the list and post your comment to add to the discussion, send a blank email to mussar-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

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