This past week, I gave talks in England. I arrived in London on Thursday and on Friday led a workshop for 20 rabbis and cantors, then gave an evening sermon in synagogue. On Shabbat, I led a class before services, gave a sermon during services, did a session in the children’s program, and that was followed by a 4-hour workshop that lasted all afternoon.

By the time we had made Havdalah and the program was over, I was exhausted. My hosts offered to drive me back to the AirBnB where I was staying but I preferred to walk, to stretch a bit and get some fresh air.

It took only 20 minutes to get to the door of the apartment. I punched the code into the keypad and it flashed green. I turned the doorlatch, but the door would not open. I tried again. And again. I then looked closely and could see that the door was secured by a mechanical deadbolt. I had no way of getting in. A resident of another apartment in the building must have inexplicably set the deadbolt.

I was standing on a dark street in London banging on a door with absolutely no Plan B. And because it was just after Shabbat, I did not have a cell phone nor even a wallet in my pocket.

And no one answered the door. I banged so loudly and insistently that people passing on the sidewalk asked me if I needed help.

I’m being tested, I thought. But what’s the test?

Now what? I didn’t know a soul the people I had met at shul, and I didn’t know where any of them lived. Well, except for one, maybe. I had had dinner Friday evening with a couple who lived nearby. I had walked over to their flat with the rabbi and so I had paid little attention to where we were going; I just followed him. But I had no better idea.

I could easily find their street because the rabbi had commented on a construction project going on where that street met the main one. The plastic sheeting cued me to turn up that street. And I also remembered the side of the street where their building was located, but there were four apartment buildings on that side of the street.

I knew the people’s names and went up to the first building hoping there was a directory I could scroll through to find them. No such luck. The directory listed only suite numbers. I wracked my brain. The only one thing to fall out was: #53

That building did not have a suite 53 and I actually thought that might be hopeful. What if all 4 of the buildings had a #53? I went to the second one, scrolled through the suite listing, and found that this one did have a 53. I buzzed. After a moment, the lock on the door to the building clicked open and as I grabbed and pulled, I heard a woman’s voice over the intercom saying, “It’s the rabbi!” Meaning me.

I couldn’t believe it. I was saved. I was off the street and with friendly people who had cell phones. Let’s call the rabbi, I said. We don’t know his number, they replied. Well, actually, not saved quite yet.

The couple that had hosted me were being visited by a cousin and his wife, and at that point the wife piped up to ask which synagogue the rabbi in question was at. When we answered, she said that she knew the former rabbi from that synagogue. She got out her phone and texted that person. He replied immediately and, sure enough, he had the rabbi’s cell number!

This was all happening on Saturday night. At every step, the people who held the key to the next step might have been out for the evening, or gone to bed early, or been on holiday, or ….

My host called the rabbi. It rang a few times … and then went to voicemail. Oh no!

I was about to ask for a whisky when he called back. He said he would phone the owner of the flat. Now I was praying that the owner wasn’t having a nice Saturday evening down at the pub.

After a short while, the rabbi called back to say that he had spoken to the owner who told him that there was a key in a lockbox outside the flat that would open the deadbolt. Thank God! The landlord gave him the code, which the rabbi passed along to me.

I thanked my hosts profusely and the man of the couple insisted on walking back to the Air BnB with me so we (meaning, I) would have a cell phone in case something else came up. Unlikely, I said. Anyway, he said.

He was right. When we got back the locked door, we found three lockboxes on the door post. We tried the code in one, then the next, then the third and none opened. He tried. I tried. We tried.

He got out his phone and called the rabbi who called the owner who just repeated what he had told us before. No help. My companion said, “This is like being in an escape room!”

We searched high and low on the face of the building, and it is good thing we searched low because at the foot of the wall, at the farthest corner away from the door, was another small box. My saviour got down on his hands and knees and identified that it was, indeed, a lockbox! He tried the code. It opened. It contained a key. Why had the landlord not been more specific?

We quickly fished out the key, fit it into the lock, turned, and the door opened. I was reunited with my luggage, my wallet and my cell phone. Halleluyah! What a relief!

OK, I asked myself (once I started breathing again), what was the Mussar lesson? Patience? Not really. Resourcefulness? Is that a middah? Persistence (a branch of zerizut)? What choice did I have? Bitachon(trust)? Not really; if you had asked me if I trusted that I would get through the locked door eventually, I would have said, who knows? I definitely felt tested but couldn’t easily see the middah.

Then I read something by Rabbi Reuven Leuchter, an influential contemporary Mussar teacher, in a recent newsletter from his organization, Mei HaDa’as. He wrote:

We have noted more than once a principle that applies to nearly every endeavor: it is the process itself that builds a person’s stature, not the end result. Along the way, a person encounters many obstacles and variables that compel him to think differently and adjust his course. Once the end result is attained, however, resistance disappears and nothing further needs to change.

Through that lens, I could see that, in reality, this whole episode had been addressing the middah of bitachonafter all. The point was not to evaluate how strong or weak my bitachon had been while in the midst of that whole experience. It is that the experience compelled me “to think differently and adjust my course.” And having had that experience, the next time I encounter a situation with that “many obstacles and variables,” it is inevitable that I will remember this situation, and my bitachon will be stronger.

That’s the Mussar lesson I draw. But I’ll admit that it is provisional. Do you see anything different to highlight? I’d love to hear.

Going back to Oxford will bring back many memories because I did my post-graduate training at that university. I’ll be giving a talk at Rhodes House, which is the headquarters of the Rhodes scholarship, which is what took me to Oxford in the first place.

That talk is titled “Character in an Age of Performance: Lessons from the Jewish Tradition of Mussar”

I will be addressing young people – possibly future leaders – and I want to impress on them that, despite the apparent success in public life of people who seem to have few or no scruples, there are good reasons that they should make matters of character a high priority in their life-choices and behaviour.

A story from my own experience supports that idea.

In 2016, I was invited to attend conference sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and held at “The Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing” at the University of Oklahoma. The topic of that entire conference was “humility” and the book that was published that collected the presentations is titled with that one simple word: “Humility.”

It was a very interesting conference, and I have lots of stories, but the one thing I want to point out to the young students at Oxford is that among the dozens of presenters at the conference, I was the only one who came from a religious tradition. All the others were psychologists, philosophers and people from schools of business.

It was surprising to me, as it may be to you, to find out that business schools are increasingly taking an interest in humility in particular, and character in general. That turns out to be an unexpected point of overlap between business studies and Mussar.

But it should not come as a surprise that business schools are looking at the impact of ego on leadership, organizational behaviour, management ethics and executive development. They are recognizing that the humble leader – someone who is able to listen and take suggestions, who values the contributions of others, who does not seek personal aggrandizement and is open to learning – is more likely to bring an enterprise to success than the stereotypical macho leader who leads by fiat and projects ambition, authority,competitiveness, and strength.

None of that was surprising to me, coming as I do with knowledge that the Torah proclaims Moses to be the most humble person on the face of the earth. Humble, yes, and also an unparalleled leader. We have long known that the two are far from incompatible, despite what we see on the daily news.

That’s a story about humility that I hope will strike a chord with the students. Another I will tell is about my own personal experience that taught me the importance of being true to yourself.

I got to Oxford because I was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. And though anyone who has seen me recently will be hard pressed to believe it, at one time I had shoulder length hair. I had gone to a quite repressive high school, and so for the 3+ years between entering university and the scholarship interview, I did not cut my hair.

My long hair created a dilemma for me. I knew that I would be interviewed for the scholarship by a panel of illustrious, establishment types: the chairman of the selection committee was George Gale, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario and sitting beside him were six luminaries from business, law and academia.

Knowing that these 7 men would be judging me and determining my fate, I had to decide whether or not to cut my hair. Would making my appearance more conventional improve my chances of getting selected, or should I not pander to conventions and just come as I was, let the chips fall where they may?

In the end, I decided not to cut my hair but not because of any high-minded principle. I actually had decided that I had very little chance of winning the scholarship. Neither of my parents went beyond high school and in the year that I was applying for the scholarship, my father was working as a traveling salesman representing manufacturers from other cities in our home territory of Toronto. At that time, his primary client was a manufacturer of women’s under-garments and the joke in our family was that if anyone asked, what does your father do for a living, the answer was “Oh, he’s in women’s underwear.”

And I thought to myself that they didn’t give Rhodes Scholarships to men whose fathers were in women’s underwear, and so there was likely nothing to gain from cutting my hair. And, on the other hand, there was a lot to lose. If I cut my hair but did not get the scholarship, then every day I’d be looking in the mirror and the image looking back would shout out both my failure and the futile compromise that cutting my hair represented.

So I did not cut my hair and I got the scholarship.

I can’t claim that I had been high minded and made my decision based on principle. I was motivated by not wanting to be reminded on a daily basis that I had reached for a brass ring and missed. Nevertheless, this episode taught me a lesson that informed my life and that I want to convey to the students I’ll be addressing.

Be yourself. It’s such a cliché, but that does not mean it is not true. As one of my primary teachers had posted on her filing cabinet: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

When we present ourselves as someone other than who we are, we create a division between the truth of our inner life and the pretense of our outward behaviour. That flies in the face of an injunction taught in the Talmud (Yoma 72b) that says, “One’s inside should be like one’s outside” (tocho ki baro):

Rava said: “Any Torah scholar whose inside is not like his outside is not to be considered a Torah scholar.” Abaye said, and some say it was Rabba bar Ulla: “He is called loathsome.”

I hope that these and some other stories will support my contention that integrity of character remains crucial despite the fact that we live in an age when performance – by political leaders, celebrities, social media influencers, public intellectuals and even some business and religious leaders – is in the ascendant. Those prominent people are concerned not with being who they are, but with how they appear to others. They are actors in an economy of attention.

How different is the motivation to monetize eyeballs (i.e., making money by attracting attention) from the message we get in scripture that what matters is living a life of integrity, referred to as shem tov, a “good name”:

Proverbs 22:1: “A good name is more desirable than great riches.”

Ecclesiastes 7:1: “A good name is better than fine oil.”

But the most powerful statement appears in Pirkei Avot (4:13):

Rabbi Shimon says: “There are three crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of kingship. But the crown of a good name rises above them all.”

What do you think? Is there any possibility of influencing young people to turn away from the performing influencers and their materialistic goals, and to turn instead toward their own souls and the pursuit of integrity?

Since then, the genre has grown exponentially. Dale Carnegie published his enormously influential book How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936. The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) were other landmarks in the field.

In the Venn diagram, Mussar and self-help overlap in their shared recognition that our individual human character is malleable and can be shaped by choices, behaviour and practices we take on. Although the neuropsychology would have been unknown to preceding generations, what both self-help and Mussar were hitting on is what we now call “neuroplasticity.”

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change and reorganize itself in response to experience, learning, and repeated practice.

When we think, feel, or behave in a particular way, the stimuli we encounter trigger neural connections in the brain, and the more we experience repetition of the stimulus, the stronger and more efficient the neural pathways become.

As the saying goes, the neurons that fire together wire together.

And the converse is also true: connections that are used less weaken.

You will have experienced this phenomenon if you ever tried to learn a new language or develop a new sport or craft. At the beginning, every motion is awkward and needs to be directed as an act of conscious intent. But as you do the same motions over and over, they become more fluid and even automatic. That change reflects neurons being triggered over and over, so that the pathways of transmission become solidified and strong.

And, if you stop speaking that language or playing that sport, the neural pathways gradually decay.

If practice and change are the place that self-help and Mussar overlap, that is but a small part of the entire picture. When we ask “Why? What for?” we get radically different answers.

Self-help is fundamentally instrumental. The whole point of the books and the groups and the methods is to help you develop the capacities to get what you want. It asks: How can I become happier, more successful, confident, productive, or richer? In self-help the work we do on ourselves is motivated by the desire to get something for ourselves—happiness, better relationships, wealth, success, recognition, a sense of control over our lives, and the like.

To underline just how different Mussar is in this regard, note that one of the slogans of The Mussar Institute is “Working on yourself but not for the sake of yourself.”

We draw that idea from Mussar sources that tell us that life is all about service to the other. Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, the Alter of Kelm, built his entire school of Mussar on the notion of nosei b’ol im chaveiro – bearing the burden with one’s fellow, which means helping other people carry the loads life has deposited on them.

Rabbi Shimon Shkop explains that our care for others is how we manifest holiness:

All of our work and effort should constantly be sanctified to doing good for the community. We should not use any act, movement, or get benefit or enjoyment that doesn’t have in it some element of helping another. … Then, anything one does even for oneself, for the health of one’s body and soul, one also associates to the mitzvah of being holy, for through this he can also do good for the masses. (Introduction to Shaarei Yosher)

And in a conversation I had with Rabbi Yochanan Zweig, rosh yeshiva of the Talmudic University of Florida, he said to me that the definition of holiness that he likes is “The absence of self-interest.”

Does this mean that Mussar practice is all about squashing yourself and always giving everything to someone else? Not at all.

Here we find the fundamental difference between Mussar and self-help.

Self-help adopts the view that you really do exist as a separate, discreet, bounded individual. The person who inhabits your skin is separate from and distinct from every other individual, living within their physically bounded bodies. You relate to others across that boundary of separation.

Mussar, being a spiritual tradition, sees the world in non-materialistic terms. No doubt my body ends at the outer level of my skin, but my spiritual being, which is the essence of who I am, knows no such limitation.

Rav Kook expresses this idea in a beautiful, poetic image in his piece, The Fourfold Song:

Some sing the Song of their Soul. Within their own soul, they discover everything, their entire spiritual fulfillment.

Others sing the Song of their People. …

Others allow their souls to expand beyond their people. They sing the Song of Humanity. …

And some reach out even higher, until they unite with the entire world, with all of God’s creatures, with all of existence. With all of them, they sing the Song of the Universe.

So what about the title I gave to this post? I introduced Samuel Smiles early on as the founder of modern self-help. And Rav Avraham? He was Rabbi Avraham Grodzinski, a leading figure in the Mussar movement of the late 19^th-early 20^th centuries. He served as mashgiach ruchani (spiritual supervisor) of the Slabodka Yeshiva in Lithuania where he was a close associate of the Alter of Slabodka, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel. He was one of the great Mussar teachers who was murdered in the Holocaust, a loss that contributed to making us the spiritual orphans that we are.

His son reported that Rav Avraham spent two years practicing his smile in the mirror in order that his expression would genuinely express happiness at meeting another person. He was actualizing the teaching of Shammai in Pirkei Avot (1:15):

“Receive every person with a pleasant countenance.”

If Rav Avraham had been a follower of Dale Carnegie, his smile would have been a way to win friends and influence people. It would have been instrumental, a tool to gratifying personal desires or achieving personal goals.

But in Rav Avraham’s world, every human being embodies the image of God. If you truly have that vision of yourself and the other, how could you not greet another person in a pleasant way? In that case, your smile is an expression of your recognition that you share a spiritual connection to the other. The goal is not to be superficially cheerful nor to deny difficult human feelings nor to manipulate the other. It is to ensure that we give precedence to our recognition of the kavod – the divine glory – that stands before us in the form of another person.

If you perceived infinite spiritual radiance before you, might you smile?

That sense I have that the natural world in its complexity, order and variety seems to have “Creator” written all over it was only heightened by a visit I made this past week to an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum called “Bees: a story of survival.”

The show was all about bees, largely from a bee’s-eye view of the world. It brought to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Humble-Bee, a paean to bees, that includes the memorable lines:

Wiser far than human seer,
Yellow-breeched philosopher!

To be accurate, however, we have to acknowledge that sometimes those philosophical insects change their wardrobe. Those yellow breeches are not to be found on the official bee of Toronto (!), for example, which is a metallic green variety.

Emerson’s “yellow-breeched philosopher” showed up in the show in a remarkable range of colours, from brilliant metallic greens and blues to black, brown, red, orange, yellow and white. Again, just citing Toronto because it is where I happen to be, there are 300 species of bee in this city, a tiny slice of the 25,000 species of bees that have been identified around the world, so far.

And “around the world” is accurate. The only places on earth where bees are not found is Antarctica and the high Arctic.

I went to see that show with awareness that Rav Yerucham Levovitz was renowned for his fascination with the natural world. In his book Da’at Chochmah u’Mussar (vol. I, p. 97) he recalled:

Once, when I was in a zoo of animals and birds, I grasped many things which I never would have grasped otherwise – and yet all of that is as nothing compared to what we can discern from the great zoo that is the whole of creation.

And on that topic, there is an older source, the Talmud (Eruvin 100b), that says:

Even if the Torah had not been given, we would have learned modesty from the cat, [which covers its excrement], and that stealing [is objectionable] from the ant, [which does not take the food of another ant], and forbidden relations from the dove, [which is monogamous], and proper relations from the rooster, which [first] appeases [the hen] and then mates [with it].

Although no one (including the Noah story), seems very interested in insects, there is no doubt that bees are an extraordinarily revealing element of that creation. The more we look into the world of bees , the more astonished we become.

Just look at the honeycombs many bees build. With neither ruler nor pencil, bees create cells that are precisely symmetrical hexagons. The cells share walls, thereby conserving wax while creating efficient storage. Marvel at their ability!

Honeybees are able to navigate in flight by combining visual landmarks, the position of the sun and their internal sense of direction. They can learn to recognize the appearance of landmarks along a route—trees, buildings, hedges and patterns in the landscape. They use remembered views to determine what direction to fly next.

Worker bees regulate conditions in the hive by fanning their wings to move air, helping regulate temperature and humidity and assisting with water evaporation during cooling.

Bees rely on sensory organs to detect odours and navigate, and they use specialized structures on their legs to clean their antennae. This helps keep their sensory organs in good working condition.

To my knowledge, Rav Yerucham never commented on bees, but if he had, here are some Mussar lessons he might have taken:

1. Yirat ha’romemut

Not so much a lesson as a treasured experience, the encounter with bees in the remarkable details of their complex lives swept me away into deep awareness of the infinite creativity and wonder to be found in the natural world. It was a small step – or maybe no step at all – to awe and reverence for the Source of all that gave rise to this wonder.

2. Precision in the smallest things

A bee’s work consists of myriad small acts: gathering pollen, shaping wax, tending larvae and maintaining the hive. This resonates with Rav Yerucham’s teaching that spiritual practice is built more from small details than grand deeds.

3. Fulfilling one’s distinctive purpose

A bee’s role depends on its place in the colony and its stage of life. There are drones and queens, worker bees and others. The same can seen to be true of us as well, as each person has distinctive capacities and responsibilities to discover and develop that are relevant to their particular context and stage of life.

4. Turning knowledge into instinct

Bees do not merely possess information about flowers and navigation; their learning shapes their behaviour. Rav Yerucham emphasized that what we learn about life must penetrate deeply enough to become part of our own lived nature, rather than remaining an intellectual abstraction.

5. Serving something larger than myself

A bee gathering nectar and serving in other ways contributes to the colony’s survival. The work it does is not selfish but a contribution to the larger good. This echoes with Rav Yerucham’s emphasis on nosei be’ol im chaveiro: bearing the burden with one’s fellow that he placed at the centre of spiritual practice.

What other lessons can you see that we can learn from bees or, for that matter,from any creature in “the great zoo that is the whole of creation”?

Alan

We just passed the third anniversary of the October 7^th massacre.

And on the subject of anniversaries, the Taliban celebrated 25 years since they first took power, still securely in control.

Universities should be known for academic excellence, not rape.

Who in a Nepali village could have foreseen the destructive flood of debris set off by a rock-and-ice avalanche that killed a reported 1,300 in Nepal alone.

This is no catalogue, just a random taste of the sorts of events that happen all the time that give validity to the question whether it’s just insane to put our trust in God.

And yet, as I have stressed many times, our generation with its disasters is not fundamentally different from previous generations, which featured maybe a plague in one place, an invasion somewhere else, a volcano, a bomb, a decree, an earthquake ….

And despite all that, we read in Psalm 84:13

יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת אַשְׁרֵי אָדָם בֹּטֵחַ בָּךְ׃

“Lord of Hosts, happy is the person who trusts in You.”

And this is far from a solitary instance. Psalms is full of verses that direct us to put our trust in God:

יוֹם אִירָא אֲנִי אֵלֶיךָ אֶבְטָח׃

“When I am afraid, I put my trust in You.” (56:4)

הַבֹּטְחִים בַּה׳ כְּהַר־צִיּוֹן לֹא־יִמּוֹט לְעוֹלָם יֵשֵׁב׃

“Those who trust in God are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.” (125:1)

… and more!

In the Mussar literature, bitachon made its debut as one of the main qualities Rabbi Bachya ibn Paquda profiled in the 11^th century when he explored Jewish teachings on the inner life in Chovot HaLevavot – Duties of the Heart.

Rabbi Yosef Yozel Hurwitz (1847-1919), the Alter of Novardok, who was not only a major figure in the Mussar movement but also the great-grandfather of my Mussar teacher, Rebbetzin Shoshana Perr, elevated bitachon to the level of being an essential trait that everyone needs to work on, that and humility.

So it’s important, not peripheral, not secondary, to cultivate trust in our hearts, and specifically trust in God. And yet it is so difficult for us, especially in this post-Holocaust world. How can we embrace and achieve what the tradition directs us to pursue?

Yet, in reality, the question ought to be asked the other way around: How can we not put our trust in the Source of all that is? Because if not there, where?

Not in yourself, that’s for sure. We know that we do not control the circumstances of our own lives, and less anything beyond ourselves. Did you create yourself? Did you endow yourself with your capabilities? Did you form the circumstances of your life? Are you to blame for the diagnosis? For being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

But not in other people, either, even the most “trustworthy” who endeavour to do what they say, nor the powerful, because even the most powerful person in the world can’t determine the course of history, let alone natural forces.

When I was studying a section of Rav Yerucham Levovitz’s Daat Chochma u’Mussar with my chevruta, Robert Barris, we were both stumped when we read and translated a section that read:

When the great and famous Breitbart became so weak that he was not able to grasp a pen in his hand, an author then expressed: “The same hands that broke iron rods trembled from a small and light pen”! People think that holding a pen is a simple and natural thing that requires no strength at all, and only the strengths of Breitbart were given by God, but in truth the power to hold a pen is a gift from the Holy Blessed One, like the power to break iron rods, and when God does not give strength, it is impossible to grasp even a pen.

Who was this “Breitbart” to whom he was referring? A little digging on the internet turned up Siegmund Breitbart (1893 – 1925), also known popularly as Zishe Breitbart, who was a Polish-born circus performer, vaudeville strongman and Jewish folklore hero. He was known as the “Strongest Man in the World” and Eisenkönig (”Iron-king”) during the 1920s.

So Rav Yerucham’s audience would immediately have understood his image, that even Breitbart, strong as he was, was operating on powers that were given to him, not created by him, and that could be taken away as easily as they were given.

So that’s point #1: No individual controls the way things go in their life, and no queen or president runs the world, yet at the macro level, we see that there is order, meaning and forward development in the world at large. Put your trust in the Creator.

The Mussar sources are clear in saying that putting your trust in the Source of all does not mean that things will go the way you want, nor will you necessarily get what you seek. It’s not all about you, after all. The commentary on Duties of the Heart known as the Pas Lechem by Rabbi Chaim Avraham HaCohen (1740-1815), for example, says as much: “Certainly it cannot be taken literally, that for one who trusts in God, no bad things will ever happen to him, since what our eyes see contradicts this.”

But if there is any meaning and order in the world, it must come from somewhere other than ourselves, and even though we don’t see or understand the big picture, we can and should incline our hearts to trust that generative Source.

This point argues that it makes sense to trust the Director of the play in which we are but bit players.

Point #2 stresses the benefit that comes to us from putting our trust in the One Above.

We learn something in that direction from the 16^th century Mussar text, Orchot Tzaddikim. When I am introducing Mussar to people for the first time, I often hand out the Table of Contents of this book because it contains chapters on humility and pride, generosity and miserliness, worry and anger and compassion and cruelty, etc., making the point that there is a long history of Jewish sources focusing on the inner life.

Surprisingly, Orchot Tzaddikim has no chapter on trust. We would not expect such a comprehensive study of inner experience to overlook such a fundamental trait as bitachon and, indeed, it does not. Where is the discussion of trust in Orchot Tzaddikim to be found? In the chapter on simcha / happiness!

That connection was already made in Duties of the Heart where, in the “Gate of Trust,” we read:

But one who trusts in God … whatever comes to him or her from God will be accepted with joy and gladness and his livelihood comes to him peacefully, quietly, and happily, as written ‘God causes me to lie down in green pastures, and leads me beside still waters’ (Psalms 23:2).

The effect of bitachon is not going to be found in the outer world so much as felt in the chambers of your own heart. Bitachon is a pathway to inner tranquility and happiness no matter what changing life circumstances you find yourself in at the moment. Hence, as I quoted above fromPsalm 84:

Ashrei adam boteach bach – Happy is the person who trusts in You

This point informs us that practicing and strengthening our bitachon should not be expected to erect an impregnable anti-missile defense system around you and your house. What it will do is uplift your heart, fill it with happiness, give you hope and optimism and put you out into the world as a positive force, as the Psalm says:

בְּטַח בַּה׳ וַעֲשֵׂה־טוֹב

“Trust in God and do good.” (37:3)

As I would interpret: Trust in God and that will give you the capacity and resources to do good.

Alan

It is pretty well impossible to imagine the extreme turmoil and fear the passengers must have felt. I get a little queasy when an ordinary flight drops down to come in for a routine landing. What must they have felt, as the plane lost almost half its altitude in just half a minute?

In our ordinary lives, we tend to be heavily invested in ensuring that everything in our immediate sphere is predictably secure. We go to great lengths to eliminate any sort of vulnerability that might threaten our comfort and strive for lives in which nothing unexpected intrudes.

It’s an illusion of security, of course, like fastening your seatbelt on a crashing flight. No matter how stout the lock, thick the walls and ample the furnishings, illness, loss, economic upheaval, accidents and death gain easy access.

If you have ever experienced an earthquake, you will know what I mean. In an instant, the normally stable floor begins to gyrate beneath your feet; walls shake, windows rattle, furniture shifts, and familiar objects jump out of their ordinary resting places and crash to the floor. The ordinary rules of reality are suddenly totally disrupted.

The sukkah is built on the same premise. We erect a flimsy hut with an incomplete roof and thenleave the security of our permanent homes – with their solid walls, roofs, locks, and familiar comforts – and enter a fragile dwelling that exposes us to the uncontrollable elements.

The difference, of course, is that the disruptive events that come at us in ordinary life that unsettle our sense of security are thrust upon us beyond our control, whereas a sukkah is a choice. In this way, the sukkah functions as spiritual practice that can prepare us to live through the moments of insecurity that pierce the fortress we diligently build around our lives.

Stepping into a sukkah is symbolic acknowledgement that the sense of security we derive from our possessions and structures, the bank account and the life insurance, is actually an illusion of security because it offers no certainty. On Shmini Atzeret we read the book Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, where in verse 6:2, it says:“God sometimes grants a person riches, property, and wealth, so that person does not want for anything his appetite may crave, but God does not permit that person to enjoy it; instead, a stranger will enjoy it. That is futility and a grievous ill.”

The sukkah reminds us that all we do to create security and safety in our lives does not guarantee that outcome. Despite our efforts, and despite the extended periods of time when it might not seem so, the truth is that at any moment, our life can be buffeted and even upended by forces beyond our control.

That reminds me of a story about a teacher who was very poor but nonetheless too proud to accept charity. When students would come to his house for lessons, they would see how impoverished he was and they wanted to help, but he rebuffed their every offer.

In the end, the students resorted to subterfuges to help support their teacher.

They would go to a store, buy cans of tuna, scuff and dent the tins, and then sell them to their teacher for a fraction of the actual cost, telling him there had been a trainwreck and these cans were being sold off as salvage.

The teacher often could not afford to buy lightbulbs and so they were frequently burned out. One student developed the habit of tucking a new lightbulb into his pocket and when during a lesson the teacher would step out of the room for a moment, the student would climb onto a desk, quickly unscrew the dead bulb, screw in a replacement, and then jump back to his seat.

One time, just as he was unscrewing the burned-out bulb, the teacher walked back into the room. “What are you doing,” he asked?

“Oh,” stammered the student. “I saw that this bulb was burned out and I happened to have a replacement with me, so I ….”

“You don’t have to do that,” the teacher admonished. “When a light stops working, you just leave it to rest for a while and it gets refreshed and starts working again.”

The teacher didn’t know that the student had been changing the lightbulbs for some time, just as we can’t see all the forces that go into creating the reality of our lives at any given moment. There is always a curtain, and things happening behind that curtain, that affect and sometimes even uproot all the predictability we so diligently invest in building for ourselves.

The sukkah offers training for living in vulnerable circumstances, but additional to that, thesukkah gives us the opportunity to practice bitachon [trust], which is the spiritual capacity to live with full awareness of our vulnerability while trusting that our lives are taking place within a larger trustworthy order that we can’t fully see or grasp.

Bitachon is not the absence of vulnerability but the ability to inhabit vulnerability with trust.

The mitzvah of sukkah transforms this idea into an embodied practice: we experience directly what it means to loosen our grip on the illusion of control and to discover security in something deeper than transient, unreliable material means. In this sense, the sukkah is a training ground for bitachon — a place where we practice trust and strengthen that trait in our souls.

When I was 24 years old, I had a meditation teacher in the Himalayas named Geshe Ngawang Dargey who, like the Dalai Lama himself, was a student of Trijang Rinpoche. Geshe Dargey taught a small group of westerners how to meditate, and every morning we would walk up the hill to the Tibetan Library and sit for hours while he instructed us (through a translator, of course).

Although I have left Tibetan meditation far behind in my life, one lesson he taught is firmly stuck in my mind. Time and again he would tell us young people: “Do spiritual practice now so you will have it when you need it.” He drilled that into us, “Do spiritual practice now so you will have it when you need it.” That was his mantra.

Because when you need it – like when the pilot takes an axe to the other pilot of your flight, for example, or the market crashes, or your car won’t start, or your business partner absconds, or you sustain any other shock to the system coming from left field – the only resources you have to call on are those you developed when you didn’t actually need them.

In the sukkah, the structures that ordinarily make us feel secure become visibly fragile. Yet precisely through this experience, we learn that our deepest security does not rest in material protections, but in trusting the One in whose hands our unpredictable lives ultimately rest.

This was the realization of Adam Polovincik, one of the passengers on that FlyDubai flight, who said that although he was not religious, he could not escape the feeling that the fate of the flight and its ultimate survival “was in the hand of God.”

That’s an insight we can practice now, so we will have it when we need it.

A good example is food. What is “Jewish food”? Well, it depends on which Jewish community you belong to. Moroccan Jews don’t eat matza balls and Yemeni matza is unlike what we Ashkenazi Jews know. Iraqi Jews don’t eat cholent; they have their own t’beet. I was once at a Shabbat lunch in Cochin, in south India, and when the distinctively Indian-inflected food was served, a young Israeli woman at the table burst into tears. “This is my grandmother’s food,” she cried.

We see this phenomenon playing out in our world right now. It’s almost impossible to attend a bar or bat mitzva or Jewish wedding and not be offered sushi. There is no disputing that sushi is Japanese food, but it can easily be made to conform to the rules of kashrut and it has been wholeheartedly adopted across the broad range of Jewish diversity.

Young Jews growing up today would be entitled to consider sushi to be “Jewish food,” considering that they run into it at every Jewish event they attend. I can just imagine two generations from now when someone will eat a California roll and reflect, “I miss my Bubie’s sushi. It was sogeshmak.”

The same thing is actually true of Jewish spirituality. The book Duties of the Heart [Chovot HaLevavot] is revered as the source-text for the entire Mussar tradition. The author, Rabbi Bahya ibn Paquda, writing in the 11^th century, was the first to address the question of how cultivating the inner life fits within the paradigms of Judaism. Yet many of the ideas – and even the stories – found in the book are known to have roots in the Islamic spiritual tradition of Sufism. Diana Lobel, Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Boston University, has published an entire book, called A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue, that traces the Sufi roots of the ideas in Duties of the Heart. It’s undeniable that ibn Paquda was drawing on Sufi sources in developing his Jewish thought.

That was common in his day. In fact, the famous geniza (sacred storage room) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo that contained roughly 200,000 manuscripts that were deposited over nearly a thousand years preserved actual Muslim Sufi writings, copied in both Arabic script and Hebrew characters, indicating that some medieval Egyptian Jews were reading – and by the evidence, were influenced by – Sufi literature directly.

And not just in the Muslim world. Another classic Mussar book, Sefer Cheshbon HaNefesh (Book of Spiritual Accounting), was written by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Lefin of Satanov (1749–1826) and first published in Lviv in 1808. Lefin adapted his character development system from the writing of none other than Benjamin Franklin who describes his practice of composing a list of thirteen traits he wanted to improve, focusing on and tracking one per week. Lefin adopted that technique but transformed it into a thoroughly Jewish Mussar practice grounded in Torah, service of God, and refinement of the inner life.

So why do I think that the practice of mindfulness that has become very popular in the contemporary world and that has spilled into the Jewish world is not a valid adoption? I tend to deride the adoption of non-Jewish practices into Jewish circles and then offering them up as “Jewish spirituality.” I call it dressing up non-Jewish practices in tallis and tefillin – at heart they are still not Jewish, with no integration into the deep paradigms that connect all things Jewish to its central foundation. And I do know about mindfulness practice. Ask me about the 10 days I spent in silence on a mountainside in Sri Lanka.

To explain why, I’ll begin with a riff on Ecclesiastes: “There is a time to adopt and a time to refrain from adopting.”

In 11^th century Spain, as in Ukraine in the 19^th century, the Jewish community was religiously and spiritually intact and vibrant on Jewish terms. Adopting elements from non-Jewish sources meant absorbing them into a well-functioning and sound system. The system could eat and digest these bits from other places without becoming unsettled.

That is not the condition of Jewish life today.

The majority of Jews today are highly assimilated. We are orphaned from our spiritual traditions. We are highly intermarried. The overwhelming majority are not adept in Hebrew and so are handicapped in liturgy and literature. The commandments that have been the backbone of Jewish life are reinterpreted as “good deeds.” The rupture of the Holocaust is still unhealed.

The reality is that, on the whole, our Jewish community is not religiously and spiritually intact nor vibrant in Jewish terms. In our situation, rather than borrowing from others, what is needed is that we take on the harder task of digging down into our own soil to retrieve and reinvigorate ideas and practices that have deep Jewish roots, not because they are necessarily “the best,” but because they are integrated with and based upon many other fundamental aspects of Jewish life.

When you study Mussar, you learn Jewish values.

You also inevitably learn Talmud and midrash because the texts of the tradition are built on and frequently quote those sources.

When you pray from the siddur, you learn Hebrew.

When you make blessings, you burnish your relationship with the divine.

When you study Torah, you learn how to bring the heart into the study and not just the mind.

Yom Kippur teaches personal responsibility.

It seems to me that going up and down the aisles of modern life, picking and choosing whatever goods appeal to us, will not cause us to thrive as Jews, individually and collectively. What we need to do is shine light into our own dark storerooms of wisdom to tap into and draw out Jewish ways of living that are integrated into the fundamental paradigms of our peoplehood.

Does what I am saying mean that there is no place for mindfulness in Judaism? Of course not. Jewish practice actually stresses the importance of being mindful. But the Jewish way of cultivating mindfulness does not involve sitting on a cushion and watching your breath. Jewish mindfulness is the inevitable outcome of doing mitzvot. It develops when you sharpen your awareness of the needs of the sick, the elderly and the stranger. When you have a Shabbat practice, at every moment that you are paying attention to the do’s and don’ts that are unique to that holy day, you are sharpening your mindfulness. There is no area of Jewish life that does not depend on, and contribute to honing, mindfulness.

Is this a better path to mindfulness? I can’t say, but I can say that mindfulness developed in this way integrates with all the other spheres of Jewish life, present and past. It draws from them, it contributes to them, and that’s why I see this to be the way that leads to thriving, individually and collectively.

Does this resonate with you?

Alan

I just shared the remarkable teaching of the remarkable Alter of Slabodka that emphasized the role of sensory experience in spiritual life. It’s such a good illustration of the gap that opened up when we became spiritually orphaned. This is exactly the kind of spiritual teaching that most of us never heard from a Jewish source in our early life. And wouldn’t our lives have been so different if we had.

Mining the rich vein of Jewish spiritual teachings and making them accessible to our generation has been my mission for the last 25 years. When I first explored Mussar, it was for my own spiritual needs and growth. I could have left it at that. But for a number of reasons, I felt that I should share what I had discovered. I know from long experience that so many people have been able to gain benefits in their lives because they engaged with Mussar, and if that is true, then how can I not put effort into giving as many people as possible the opportunity to benefit from what our wise and compassionate ancestors passed down to us?

The same is true for this blog. There is so much mishigas in the world, and here I am with access to very sane teachings. How can I not want to reach as many people as possible, who just might suffer less and who just might be more effective in the world, if they had access to Mussar?

I would like to ask you to help me in that mission by restacking my last post, or reposting it elsewhere on social media. You can help spread the wisdom of Mussar by sharing it with people to whom I am not yet connected. We can reconnect to our spiritual lineage and the people who inhabit it by enlivening their presence in our generation. It might just change the world. I’ll be very grateful.

Alan

Like me, the several dozen people who attend this shul are Jewish spiritual orphans, Jews who came of age in the post-Holocaust Jewish world with little or no inkling of our Jewish spiritual ancestry. Me, I had a Jewish family, good Jewish home, a bar mitzvah, but no access whatsoever to the guidance for inner living we call spirituality, not from Jewish sources. In that, I am typical of the post-Holocaust generation of North American Jews who are, by and large, spiritual orphans.

Because of that, few of the people in shul will have heard the name Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel. Nevertheless, we have all seen his influence. He led a small yeshiva in Lithuania in the 19^th century that produced the founders of almost all the yeshivas that have achieved prominence in the modern world, including Ner Yisroel, the Chofetz Chaim yeshiva, Lakewood, the Mir and many others.

The Alter of Slabodka, as Rabbi Finkel came to be known, gave regular talks that have been collected and published as the book Ohr HaTzafun (The Hidden Light). In one of his essays that I learned recently, he talked about the difference between the generation of Moses and later generations. The key factor that he isolates is that in the generation that received the Torah at Mt Sinai, they heard and saw the presence of God with their senses – b’chushim – while that was not the case for later generations, who were therefore distanced and differentiated from the generation that stood at Mt. Sinai.

But there were exceptions, and he draws from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 20a) to single out the 2^nd century generation of Rabbi Yehuda bar Illai for special mention. He says:

Very many generations passed from the time of the giving of the Torah and the sensory feeling of receiving it was much duller [and in] the generation of Rabbi Yehuda bar Illai – we find them in exile and many pains and much suffering were upon them … Nevertheless, the students of Rabbi Yehuda bar Illai were not ruled over by the pain and poverty and by all the spiritual decline, and they overcame all the difficulties and the afflictions and … they engaged in Torah to the greatest extent, that there was in [that generation] a renewal of the sensory acceptance of the Torah.

You hear what he is saying? Here was this generation that was distant in time from seeing and hearing the experience our people had at Mt. Sinai, but who worked hard and cultivated sensitivity and awareness to the point that “there was in it a renewal of the sensory acceptance of the Torah.”

Their lofty spiritual level is defined by their ability to reawaken the direct experience of the past.

This is a lesson that applies to Yizkor. The word Yizkor (יִזְכּוֹר) means “May [God] remember” and in the service, worshippers call to mind the members of their family, community, and our people, who have moved beyond this world, and pray for their souls.

But in Jewish tradition, memory is not meant to be invoked merely as a nostalgic backward glance to the past, frozen in amber. Our goal, as we say in the El Maalei Rachamim prayer, is that those whom we are remembering should be tzror b’tzror ha-chayim (צרור בצרור החיים) – bound up in the bonds of life.

The Alter of Slabodka gives us the key for how to accomplish that. He teaches that the highest way to remember the past is through re-enlivening the sensory experience.

The point is not just to remember those who have left us by reciting their names or nodding to their role in our lives. The point is to relive the experience of being in their presence.

When we call to mind the image of someone’s face, or their hands, or other visual features that are strong for you, or focus on hearing their voice, feeling the touch, smelling the scent, those sensory experiences bring back to life your loved ones who have passed beyond.

The generation of Rabbi Yehuda bar Illai has taught us that reawakening sensory experience defeats the effects of time – and even death itself – because when we re-experience the feelings in our senses, that person has come to life within us, and we will have succeeded in binding up our loved ones in the bonds of life.

This is the central thrust of these days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur where we find ourselves right now, which are universally referred to as the Aseret Yemei Teshuva – the Ten Days of Return, whether we understand that to be a return from wrong turns we have taken in our lives, or a return to a closer relationship with the divine, or a return to our true personal nature.

Rambam^[1] underlines the focus on teshuva at this time of year, saying: “Although teshuva and crying out to God are always appropriate, during the ten days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur they are especially appropriate and are accepted immediately.”

The Talmud^[2] comments on the verse from Isaiah (55:6) — “Seek the Lord while God may be found” – saying, “These are the ten days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.”

And in the prayers, we repeatedly come back to the phrase from the Book of Lamentations (5:21): “Hashivenu Adonai elecha vena’shuvah; chadesh yameinu k’kedem” – “Restore us to Yourself, O God, so we may return; renew our days as of old.”

But here’s the question: If correcting our behaviour and our path is so central to the High Holy Days, where does prayer come in? Why does each day of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur laden us with a 700-page book? Shouldn’t the facts about our behaviour speak for themselves? What benefit can come from the advocacy we might do for ourselves in prayer?

The answer I would offer begins in 1936, when Rav Yerucham Levovitz died and the Mir yeshiva in Belarus lost its guiding spiritual light. Rav Yerucham had served as the mashgiach ruchani – the spiritual supervisor and educator – and was the person who defined the inner character of the Mir from the day he arrived in 1908 until his death. It was Rav Yerucham who had established a serious program of character development and spiritual growth at the Mir and transformed it into a Mussar-oriented institution.

And then he died. The Mir’s leadership, headed by Rav Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, the son of the Alter of Slabodka, sought someone who could continue to guide the yeshiva in the spirit of the previous mashgiach. They turned to Rav Yechezkel (Chatzkel) Levenstein, who at the time was serving as mashgiach of the Lomza Yeshiva in Petach Tikvah in pre-state Israel.

Rav Chatzkel had been a student of Rav Yerucham and had been deeply influenced by him. Like Rav Yerucham, he was a product of the Kelm tradition of Mussar. The graft took, and Rav Chatzkel provided spiritual leadership through the period of the Mir’s legendary escape from Europe and its reestablishment in Israel, leaving the post in 1949.

I mention this history to put in context Rav Chazkel’s teaching about prayer and teshuva that I want to share with you. I make what I think is a reasonable assumption that you, like me, grew up orphaned from our Jewish spiritual traditions like Mussar, and so delving into one specific teaching brings with it the additional dimension of forging connections to our own spiritual lineage, in the form of the teachers and also the teachings. Like this, we overcome our orphan status.

Rav Chatzkel gave a talk titled, “Prayer as a way to Teshuva”^[3] at the Ponevezh yeshiva in Israel where he filled the position of mashgiach (spiritual advisor) from 1949 until his passing in 1974. In his talk, he opens up the question of how and why the process of teshuva that is so focal at this time of year is linked to and supported by prayer.

Rav Chatzkel’s says clearly: “Davening [prayer] does not take the place of doing teshuva.” He is cautioning us not to think we can pray away our transgressions or misdirection. Why not? Because “one must have regret and feel remorse for their wrongdoings.” Here he is referring to the second stage of the traditional teshuva process. Having recognized that we have gone off course, the next step is to embrace sincere regret, which is not a matter of prayer but of cultivating a mindset and emotion in ourselves.

Rav Chatzkel continues, “but proper tefillah [prayer] can be an essential part of the teshuva process.” Prayer does not replace teshuva, but it can play a significant role as an adjunct to the main process.

What he goes on to say about prayer is significant in and of itself, but it also begins to answer the question of what prayer can do for us in the process of returning to the straight path after our slips and failures. “The first and foremost requirement of tefillah,” he says, “is that the heart must hear what the lips are saying.”

Prayers are words. Words are susceptible to being said without feeling, thought or intention. In Rav Chatzkel’s view, that would be vocalization but not prayer because the meaning of words of prayer needs to penetrate the heart of the person saying them. In essence, we don’t only need to say the words, we need to understand them, and then we need to go even beyond that to feel the meaning of the words with our emotions.

When we race through the prayers, thinking about lunch or work or somebody, we can’t expect the performance to have much of an impact on ourselves. As Rav Soloveitchik said once, “People today don’t like to daven; they like to have davened.”

Yet when we invest ourselves in saying the words with meaning and opening our hearts to feel the messages the words convey, then, Rav Chatzkel says, “At the time of tefillah, the person purifies their soul from whatever occurred until then and corrects it for the future.”

Prayer purifies the soul by drawing our attention, our words and thoughts into the orbit of our higher nature. The teshuva process aims for the same effect: focusing on clearing away all the detritus and accretions that have accumulated and obstruct that same higher nature.

Prayer then helps fulfill the deepest purpose of teshuva, which is not so much looking back into the past but working on inner change that will be effective in the next stretch of life that lies ahead.

Rav Chatzkel cites his teacher, the Alter of Kelm, who underlined the transformative power of prayer. The Alter would often say, “Tefillah is like Mussar, as it trains and corrects the person’s ways.”

When you pray with sincerity, it takes you away from ordinary life and back into honest dialogue with your deepest self. Its repetition strengthens and clarifies connection to that essence. This process replicates the aim of teshuva – purifying and elevating the inner self – and, indeed, Rav Chatzkel says in this essay, “The purpose of a human life is to purify and elevate the soul.” Both prayer and the process of “returning” contribute to that goal.

[1] Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance (Hilchot Teshuvah) 2:6.

[2] Rosh Hashana 18a.

[3] Sichos Mussar: Chodosh Elul and Yomim Noraim. Brooklyn, NY: Israel Bookshop Publications, n.d.

His point is that this season of rectification needs to focus not only on deeds but on inner traits, attitudes, thoughts and ideas – because this is soil from which deeds sprout, and therefore more fundamental.

In that regard, I have in mind issues of anger, because there is a lot of anger in my environment right now. I was born in Canada, live there now, and have spent all but a few years living in this country and so I joined the vast majority of my country-people in being incensed by the attacks coming from our erstwhile friends and partners to the south. It’s not so much the trade-related maneuvers, it’s the crass insults and barbarism that riles people up because, as we all know, Canadians are generally pretty even-tempered and polite. I am paying attention to my anger, trying to steer it so I have less to repent for.

I know I have been manipulated into the anger. It’s a sideshow, a distraction. Every good magician needs to master the art of distraction and if this one is going to get on with his self-enriching and destructive agenda, he has to hide the main event by ensuring that we are all good and distracted.

Making someone angry about something irrelevant is a very good way to get them not to pay attention to the really important thing that is going on. From this perspective, what takes place on the world political stage plays out on the stage of our own souls. When something makes me angry, I am challenged to deal with that anger, because anger so easily and quickly overwhelms clear thinking. About anger, Path of the Just cautions (chapter 11) that it flares in a person “Until one’s heart is no longer with him, and one’s judgment is destroyed.” At the point that I give free rein to my anger, I am no longer acting from sechel —discernment—but from the anger itself.

This is true for all strong emotions. If something happening around me stimulates a desire or envy or indifference or worry, those raging inner responses become my reality and my life at that moment. Not only will external events create unpleasant and unproductive inner turmoil, those emotions roiling within me will cloud my vision and influence the response I give to the world around me.

I have been watching my inner anger and standing back to examine it. Being able to do that is the fruit of my Mussar practice which, as my late teacher Rabbi Perr would say, opens up a space between the match and the fuse. Like any inner trait, anger is not all bad; it has its good uses. But when there is no space between the match and the fuse, anger is explosive and destructive. We have all seen and felt the consequences of letting anger loose.

Feeling anger is part of being human, and spiritual practice is what gives us the ability to stay sane and thoughtful even while feeling strong emotions. I would dearly love to get through life without being singed by the fires of emotion that can flare within me, harming me and those around me, but I have come to see that to be an unrealistic and unattainable objective.

That’s the lesson I take from a story in the Talmud (Shabbat 88b-89a) that describes what happened when Moses ascended to heaven to receive the Torah. The angels see him and object: “What is a human being doing among us?” They ask God: Why should the Torah be given to human beings?

God then tells Moses to answer them, but Moses protests that he is afraid they will destroy him. Eventually he does mount an argument, but focusing in on his fear, I figure if our greatest prophet at the highest spiritual moment ever in our tradition, right in the presence of God who summoned him, experiences the very human emotion of fear, then what hope do I have of transcending the human condition? We are stuck with being human and it is fantasy to think we will ever get so lofty that we will be “beyond” anger, envy, greed, lust and the like.

Better to learn how to deal with our emotions, to put their power to good and positive use as I try to keep my feet walking on the path toward holiness and, at the same time, endeavor to be an effective member of my society.

When I feel myself starting to get riled up about something, I consider those first sparks of emotion to be an early signal announcing something I need to pay attention to, and the first question I ask is, is this something consequential or inconsequential.

If the issue is consequential, my anger can be destructive, but it can also be a source of motivation and power. You probably do not recognize the name Kailash Satyarthi, but I think you have heard it. Remember the young Pakistani woman, Malala, who fought for women’s rights after having been shot by terrorists? She won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts, but in fact, though remembered by few, she shared that prize with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian children’s rights activist who led peaceful protests against the exploitation of children and child labour in India.

I mention Kailash Satyarthi because he came to my city at some point and gave a talk about his work that was titled, “Everything I did, I did out of Anger.” Later I found that he had given a TED talk called “How to Make Peace: Get Angry.”

It’s so counterintuitive, but as Kailash teaches, constructive outrage can be a catalyst to action. He warns that anger not given a positive outlet will find a different one, either through destructive action or by eating away at us and fostering sorrow and depression.

But if the issue is not consequential, I have to recognize that I am over-investing in something of lesser significance. Does it really affect me if the American people want to give the name Lake America to Lake Ontario? In truth, that is no skin off my back. I don’t think the people of Deutschland are insulted that we call their country Germany, are they?

I have noticed that Canadians have responded to this present situation with a lot of mockery. The Mussar teachers steer us sharply away from mockery [leitznut]. “The mocker is arrogant, a person of pride… whereas the wise person is humble and lowly… and therefore does not mock other people” says the 16^th century Orchot Tzaddikim.

Even older, Proverbs (14:6) cautions: “The mocker seeks wisdom, but finds none.”

Yet in truth there is no middah that does not have the potential to be used in a positive way. Just as anger has its uses in our inner universe, so too can mockery be an effective tool, if used wisely.

In retaliation for renaming Lake Ontario, we are renaming Canada Geese as Donald Ducks. Not only that, we are renaming Lake Ontario itself: it will now be known as The Strait of Our Moose.

This form of humour calls out the inconsequential as inconsequential and so it undermines the distraction. Instead of getting angry, we laugh. And when we laugh like this, we join generations of Jews (especially in Russia) who contended with tyrants through humour and mockery.

These two examples – anger and mockery – show us something important. There is no inner trait that cannot be put to good use. Mussar does not buy into the idea that there are Deadly Sins, including anger, envy, desire, etc. In the right hands, applied with wisdom and discernment, every inner trait can be put to good use.

I have quoted Orchot Tzaddikim a few times already. I’ll give that anonymous 500-year-old work the last word. “The culmination of a person’s wisdom is that one can master their anger.”

The point is not to become something we are not. The point is to become masters of what we actually are. What was true in the 16^th century is equally true today.

May Rosh Hashana be cleansing for your soul, and a renewal of your heart, your spirit, and your connection to what truly matters. See you next year, God willing!

Alan

A recent survey found that:

• 49% of people who owned home fitness equipment said they used it only irregularly.

• 13% said it was never used at all.

• Another 5% reported that they had effectively converted it into a clothes/laundry rack.

I wrote about the spiritual issue of acquisitiveness in The Shabbat Effect in the chapter on “enoughness,” in Hebrew histapkut. Because all forms of acquiring and building are avoided on Shabbat, the day of rest gives us the opportunity to step off the merry-go-round of buying, returning and ultimately acquiring (whether we need it or not; whether we use it or not). It is a core Shabbat practice to lead ourselves into the space of being content with what we already have. That is a remarkably countercultural idea and practice.

Whether you are after goods, food, art, ideas or experiences, we are now able to get more, faster and easier than ever before. And yet it is well proven that acquiring more does not satisfy us nor make us happy. There is a hint of the problem in the name of the Chinese version of Amazon that launched in Europe this spring: it is called “Joybuy.” The message is that they are selling not just products but a joyful commercial experience as well. From their perspective, the person who is content with what they have is a poor consumer: they have no need to try to buy joy.

Wendell Berry, the American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic and farmer writing recently in Harper’s magazine commented on this issue:

To have some is to need more, and after that, more and more. To have more and more than you need is now a form of common sense, and so we have developed a sort of vogue of billionaires, when the model of citizenship is set by such people as Elon Musk and Donald Trump. To be successful now is to achieve the satisfaction of one’s greed, which of course is enlarged by every additional prospect of satisfaction.

Progress forbids us to stop when we are satisfied. We must go on, adopting the changes of technology, whatever the cost may be to ourselves and our children. But to know how much is enough, and to be satisfied with enough, makes possible an economy and a society properly suited to the world and to our place in this world. It is to be civilized. The idea of enough is alien to capitalism, which respects no limit.

The notion of enough may be alien to capitalism but it is fundamental to Jewish spirituality. It gains center stage on Shabbat, when tradition dictates that we step away from anything even remotely related to commerce, but it is more fundamental even than that. Pirkei Avot, that book of first principles compiled almost 2,000 years ago, captures the idea in its answer to the question, “Who is rich?” The answer it gives is: “One who rejoices in their portion” (Pirkei Avot 4:1). Beyond content; rejoices!

It’s a small and quiet voice calling out “enough! Be satisfied!” That message is all but drowned out by the bellowing of the people and organizations wanting us to fuel the acquisition machine.

How can the wise whisper contend with the “maxxing” movement, an online subculture that is built around the idea of maximizing or optimizing one particular aspect of your life—tracking your “stats” like your life is a sort of fantasy football or video-game. Whether you sign on for Looksmaxxing (maximizing physical attractiveness: grooming, fitness, clothing, skin care, etc.) or Sleepmaxxing, Moneymaxxing, Statusmaxxing, Socialmaxxing or any other version of this popular phenomenon, we can ask, could any of that possibly make a person happy and fulfilled? Not a chance. When the goal is to be the best at something, and especially something that has no real standards, the outcome is much more likely to be nothing more than perpetual anxiety. And anxiety is the perfect motivator to push us to collude in someone else making money at our expense.

I invite you to join me this Shabbat in buying nothing, returning nothing, acquiring nothing – and not just that, but in rejoicing in what you already have. Let’s be spiritual billionaires together!

It begins with a headline in the Washington Post that reads: “Tariff shock pummeling your 401(k)? Here’s what to do.”

Then the sub-heading reads:

It’s understandable to feel anxious when Wall Street turbulence affects your investments. But be careful about letting your fear dictate your financial decisions.

That’s standard advice for staying on course through the ups and downs of economic waves. You work out an investment strategy that has a long-term perspective and then you stay calm and do not let yourself get derailed by short term market gyrations.

Mutual fund investing may be a surprising source for an analogy for the spiritual life, but I think it works. For Jews, the Torah, as interpreted in rabbinic sources over the millennia, has provided a full-fledged “mutual fund” of values that Jews have invested in and that has sustained individuals and communities through all the many ups and downs that we have lived through over the centuries.

We don’t have telecoms and mining and banks in our mutual fund. Instead, we have chesed/loving kindness and nedivut/generosity and savlanut /patience. This is a perspective that is especially pertinent in this month of Elul when we are invited and called upon to do a portfolio review (otherwise known as cheshbon ha’nefesh, a prelude to teshuva.)

A financial mutual fund pools the contributions of many investors. No single person creates the fund’s value alone; it grows through collective participation over time. Similarly, Judaism embodies a shared repository of moral insights accumulated across centuries. Every generation inherits this “portfolio,” adds to it through interpretation and practice, and passes it forward, hopefully a little enriched.

With a mutual fund, the wise strategy is to invest and then stick to the plan despite and through whatever twists and turns happen to be playing out in the market on any given day. The same can be said about our Jewish “mutual fund” of ethical values. We are in it for the long term. Don’t panic; stick to the formula. Don’t let the winds that are buffeting this particular historical moment blow us away from our committed course.

And to clinch the argument (having wrung the analogy just about dry), we have to say that the spiritual mutual fund of Jewish values has delivered a very good rate of return over the long run. It has been a sustaining force that has helped the Jewish people survive and even thrive despite our checkered history.

When I speak of investing in our Jewish “mutual fund” of ethical values, I am really talking about Mussar. The portfolio of values is a collection of definitions; for these values to take root and play an active role in our lives requires the perspectives, practices and inspiration that we can draw from the 1,100-year history of Mussar. That’s where we find the means through which to invest in that portfolio and gain the stability in our lives that a steady rate of return delivers.

Let’s take an example that we would all agree is extremely challenged and unstable in our era, and that is the area of “truth” which brings into focus as well, of course, its partner, “falsehood.”

We have all been exposed to the brazen lies of political leaders. We have also all seen their most common response when exposed as deceitful, which is not to apologize or show remorse, but to double-down on their falsehoods. Provable facts have lost influence on a large part of the populace, who derive their convictions from emotion, personal beliefs, biases, uninformed “influencers” and identity. It has gone so far that our era has been described as being “post truth.”

The post-truth mode of social life produced Brexit in the UK, which the majority of people in that country now regret. It has given shape to public health policies in the US, which I am quite sure we will also come to regret. We are all experiencing the consequences of climate change, sometimes with devastating impact, but misinformation and selective use of data issuing from vested interests have influenced public policy away from renewables. The list is very long, and it all draws from the same wellspring, which is weakness in the middahof emet / truth.

Living in an era in which truth has been “thrown to the earth” (Daniel 8:12) can have many effects and the one that concerns us most as students of Mussar is the destabilization of our own personal middah of emet. I mean, if the political leaders can get away with all their lies, why shouldn’t I follow their example? Or even worse, they must be lying because it works for them; I guess I need to do the same.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Telling the truth is inherently a stabilizing influence because what you say will never be disproven. It has long been recognized that the Hebrew word for truth – emet / אמת – is composed of the first, middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and three legs are the ideal number needed for stability on an uneven surface.

Contrast that image of stability with what we see in the letters of the Hebrew word for falsehood – sheker / שקר – which we find crowded together at the very end of the Hebrew alphabet, as if standing on one leg.

That analogy of instability shows up in the letters themselves. All the letters of the word emet (אמת) stand on broad bases while the letters of sheker (שקר) all have narrow bases, again as if standing on one leg.

Considering truth to stand on a stable, 3-legged base as opposed to falsehood’s one leg may be the source of the dictum we find in the medrash, “Sheker ein lo raglayim” – falsehood has no legs, which itself is based on the older saying from the Talmud, “Truth stands; falsehood does not stand” (Shabbat 104a), in the sense of “endures.”

When we invest in being truthful in our own lives, what we are doing is aligning our speech, deeds and character with reality as it actually is. That alignment delivers stability because reality will never be disproven. But more profoundly, when we align ourselves with reality, we are becoming a person whose inner and outer lives are consistent. Tocho ki baro, the Talmud says (Yoma 72b): the inner is like the outer.

Since reality cannot be anything but the will of God, when we align our inner with the outer, we are aligning ourselves with the will of God. Could anything deliver more stability than that?

We certainly are living through an era in which truth is being repeatedly hurled to the ground. As long as we guard ourselves from becoming participants in that debacle, then our lives will be more stable, and we strengthen our sense of hope, in line with the words of Psalm 85:11: “Truth shall spring forth from the earth.”

I’ve been discussing truth only to illustrate my broader point that Mussar can be a source of stability in unstable times. If we turned our attention to humility, or generosity, or compassion, or many middot, we would find the same thing to be true.

The lesson is, when we pool our inner resources and invest in this proven fund that Judaism has been managing for millennia, we are bound to reap riches beyond whatever might be dangled before us by a more expedient strategy.

The questions you need to ask yourself, especially at this time of year, are “Where am I in all of this? What holds true for me?” Take time for a portfolio review and be rewarded.

Alan

In the religious framework, Rosh Hashana is the day on which we are judged and found worthy or unworthy to continue our earthly journey. Spiritually, it is an opportunity to review and reset our trajectory in life. In either case, the days of the month of Elul are an opportunity to review, go deeper, take responsibility, and make resolutions that will help us elevate our lives closer to our potential, the process known as teshuva.

The word teshuva means “to return” and, classically, that has been presented to us as an injunction to return to God, from whom we have become separated over the year.

In the Talmud (Rosh Hashana 16b) the Mishnah says: “On Rosh Hashana, all the inhabitants of the world pass before God like sheep [being counted].” And the Gemara continues “Three books are opened on Rosh Hashana….”

The righteous and the wicked are immediately inscribed in their respective books, while the judgment of people who are not so clearly one or the other remains suspended from Rosh Hashana until Yom Kippur. Most of us are neither saintly nor evil and, for us, the process of judgment begins on Rosh Hashana. That gives impetus to do teshuva during Elul: why wait for the court to convene before putting one’s affairs in order?

Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz (1873-1936), the famed and revered Mussar mashgiach [spiritual supervisor] of the Mir Yeshiva, framed the teshuva process in terms of spiritual growth:

Teshuva is the highest and most exalted level [a person can attain], since it is the level of humanity itself. This means to say that [when we do teshuva] we are returning to our true selves. The “self” is the highest and most exalted level of a human being…. This is the meaning of the Talmud’s statement (Yoma 81a), “How great is teshuva, for it reaches the Throne of Glory.” (Daat, Chochma U’Mussar, vol. 3, letter 161, pg. 171)

Rav Yerucham is interpreting the Talmud by drawing on the traditional notion that the human soul, the neshama, is hewn from the Throne of Glory. For him, rather than returning to God, the process of teshuva means returning to our true inner selves. Somehow, over the year, we have wandered away and lost sight of and connection to what we know deep inside to be our true desire and responsibility in life. Teshuva is the process of reconnecting to the real you and exposing the pure, good, inner essence that is your truest self.

At the core of Mussar teaching and practice is the understanding that our deepest essence is pure and holy, but this inner radiance gets obscured when our thoughts, emotions, desires or actions are out of line with our true selves. This misalignment creates a blockage called timtum ha’lev, meaning “a stopped-up heart.” This is the obstruction that prevents us from being in touch with our true selves.

It is our natural desire to want to connect deeply with others and with God. It is our unbalanced state that distances us – from holiness and Godliness, from other people, and from our true selves.

This is the call that issues on Elul. Teshuva is the process of becoming aware of and knowing our true selves, and realigning our lives with our true goals. The work before us is to remove the barriers that prevent the radiant light of our pure souls from shining through, to return ourselves to the sensitive inner condition that is our true nature. Then we are truly alive.

The Talmud says (Berakhot 18a–b): “The wicked are called dead even in their lifetimes.” There is more to life than a beating heart and even the firing of neurons.

This seems to me to be an especially important time to be hearing these ideas because it is so evident that the majority of people in leadership positions – in politics, business, the arts, education, and even religion – are not focused on the ailment we call timtum ha’lev nor on doing what it takes to become sensitive people. Indeed, being sensitive is portrayed as weakness. Far from it. It takes incredible strength to be true to our tender hearts and remain feeling people in the face of the brutalization of life taking place all around us in the name of profit and privilege.

Again, we can draw guidance from Rav Yerucham. When he heard about the scientific invention called the seismograph, which is so sensitive that it can register the smallest, imperceptible earth tremors occurring thousands of miles away on the other side of the world – as well as those happening right under your feet that you can’t even feel! – he immediately recognized the analogy to the human heart. The heart is like a personal seismograph, registering every tiny spiritual influence, moral choice or emotional nuance, even those we might not be aware of.

We have to be careful here. The goal is not to become so sensitive that we are immobilized. But we do need to lean in the direction of sensitivity to counter the distorting influences of contemporary life that almost exclusively work in the opposite direction, desensitizing us, stopping up our hearts, and rendering us the walking dead.

This is the work of teshuva that is embedded in the month of Elul. Of course, it should be our work all year long. When someone asked the Chofetz Chaim (Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan) what the best time was to begin teshuva, he did not give the expected answer of “on rosh chodesh Elul,” but rather “right after Neilah,” which is the closing service of Yom Kippur.

We well know that as we go about our lives, most of us wander, lose our way, forget. Then comes the blast of the shofar on rosh chodesh Elul, calling us to wake up, to remember, to seek out the true path again, to return – to our true and sensitive selves. Do you hear it?

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The same distinction applies to Judaism. In the recent past, and continuing into the present, there are many ways in which Jewish thought and practice over-emphasizes the intellect at the expense of other dimensions of human life. No doubt the intellect is great and hugely influential, but when it is given an outsized role in life, other essential human qualities are sidelined, and life turns out not to be satisfying, nor do individuals and communities flourish.

The “blame,” so to speak, can be laid at the feet of Rambam (Maimonides), who viewed the intellect (sekhel) as the highest human faculty and the means by which a person comes closest to God. His argument that the perfection of the intellect is the ultimate purpose of human life has had an enduring influence in the Jewish world.

And yet we have all run into very intelligent people of highly developed intellect who are obnoxious and ethically foul.

Another model is conveyed in a story that is told about Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. He was a great scholar of Talmud, which is perhaps the most intellectual activity that our species has ever developed. And yet when he learned the section of the Talmud (Gittin 45a) that rules that, “Captives are not redeemed for more than their [actual monetary] value, for the betterment of the world,” he suddenly burst into tears.

Rav Yerucham Levovitz, the Mussar supervisor of the pre-War Mir yeshiva, quotes that story and gives a pithy interpretation. What he wants to say is that Rav Yisrael had internalized the Torah and its values to such an extent that he responded to its laws not just intellectually but emotionally as well.

The Torah places extraordinary emphasis on life and redeeming captives saves people from mortal danger. Yet here the law states that we should not save a captive at any price. What’s the reasoning? Well, if we pay an exorbitant ransom to redeem one person, it will only make the business of capturing Jews more lucrative for our enemies. Ultimately, that will lead to even greater suffering for more people in the future.

Rav Yisrael learned this law and his heart cried out for the poor captive individual who might be killed because the community refused to pay an excessive ransom. But it broke as well for the potential future victims who would suffer on account of the opposite decision.

Between the urgent duty to rescue a captive right now and the risk that paying too high a price would endanger others in the future, there was no good option. Either way lay suffering. The intellect was of no help. Confronted by having to choose between two painful outcomes, weighing one person’s real suffering against other people’s possible suffering, his heart burst and tears flowed.

This is the extent to which Rav Yisrael felt other people’s suffering, something we can take to be characteristic of his flourishing as a human being. His heart was alive and intensely sensitive.

Once, when I was scholar in residence at a synagogue, the rabbi of the congregation introduced my sermon with a few words of his own. He asked, “What is the most important question asked in the Torah?” No one, including me, had an answer to that question and so he continued. We were in the week of parasha Vayeshev. Joseph was imprisoned in Egypt, where he meets the Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker. One day, seeing their troubled faces, he asks: “Why do you appear sad today?” (Genesis 40:7).

“That,” said the rabbi, “is the most important question asked in the Torah.” He explained that it was in answer to that question that the cupbearer and baker told Joseph their dreams, which he then interpreted, and because of that, the men recommended him to Pharaoh to interpret his dreams, which in turn resulted in Joseph not only being freed from prison but elevated to a high position in Pharaoh’s government, so that he was in a position to receive and help his brothers, and that ultimately led to the redemption of the slaves from Egypt and the establishment of the Jewish people in their own land.

And it all began with attention to and awareness of the suffering of two individuals. History turned on “Why do you appear sad today?”

This sensitivity to others became a hallmark of Mussar.

On a trip to America to raise funds, Rabbi Dovid Budnik, rosh yeshiva of the Novardok yeshiva in Dvinsk, Latvia, addressed a group of distinguished rabbis just before Rosh Hashana. He asked them:

“Do any of you have anything to repent for?”

No one responded so Rav Dovid continued:

“You are eminent rabbis and you won’t have sinned. But you get up in the morning, you daven, then you have a cup of coffee and read the newspaper. There you see the suffering, the poverty, the tragedies, the troubles of other people—and what do you do? You have a sip of your coffee and turn the page. You have become accustomed to human suffering. You have allowed yourselves to become indifferent. For that you should repent.”

He was chastising them for being emotionally numb. A person can be exposed repeatedly to the pain of others and gradually lose the ability to feel that she or he has any sort of responsibility for the wellbeing of the other.

In Mussar thought, that loss of sensitivity undermines flourishing. Not only that, it is also a serious spiritual failing because it is an impediment to becoming holy. It’s another reflection on the limits of the intellect that we are unable to define holiness, since the Torah tells us that it is a quality of the divine (“You shall be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy”), yet we can sense how unavoidable it is that holiness entail exquisite sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others. Could holiness possibly reside in the heart of a cruel or even an indifferent person?

How remarkably important to underline this in an era when hatred is rampant.

Alan

And with my child’s eyes, I sometimes saw another reality bound up in this one. Not yet inured to wonder, all it would take is the flight of birds, the croak of a bullfrog, or the stars in the night sky to capture my mind and connect me to something other than the physical reality I encountered. Later, I got words for that experience: “The whole world is filled with Your glory” (Isaiah 6:3).

Rav Yerucham Levovitz, the Mussar supervisor of the Mir yeshiva in Europe in the 1930s, spoke about “nature” [teva] and “a quality above nature” [ma’alah min ha’teva], and he insisted that they were entirely one and the same. You can look into the world and see only “trees and rocks,” he said, even though, right there within that, there is another shimmering reality that is the spiritual presence within the natural.

Nature has become in our eyes “trees and rocks” only because of stupefaction and material-mindedness, which weakens the connection, and there became for us a separation, and we closed our eyes from seeing the light of God in nature (Da’at Chochmah u’Mussar p.233).

Think of the implications.

When nature is only “trees and rocks” and nothing more, then the world is but a warehouse of commodities to be plundered for maximum profit. Among the many consequences of that contracted worldview is the unabating crisis of global heating that year after year is wreaking havoc in floods, heat waves, fires and other catastrophes.

That was the attitude of the hunters who exterminated the sea otters along the coast of where I live. There was money to be made. But with the otters gone, the population of their major food source, the sea urchin, exploded. Sea urchins eat kelp and with no restraint on the growth of the urchin population, they decimated the kelp beds – underwater forests that shelter and feed diverse marine wildlife, buffer shores from strong waves, and, crucially, absorb massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The lush underwater world became a desert. Now that the otters have been reintroduced, the kelp is beginning to recover.

When we attune to perceiving the glory of God in the rocks and trees, our approach to nature will embody reverence [yirah], restraint [histapkut], and responsibility [achrayut].

“Nature” then becomes not only something to use, but also something to honour. And “nature” in this perspective is not just what we encounter in the charming world of a park but anything that lives and breathes, and that includes other human beings.

My spirituality is not divorced from socio-political reality and when I see refugees losing their protected status and being hunted down, or Jewish businesses being destroyed by arson in my own country, or West Bank settlers seizing land by force, or the killing of civilians defended as the cost of peace, or the exclusion of non-binary people from public life, and so much more, I hear the voice of Pharaoh: “Who is God, that I should obey his voice …? I know not God.”

That quote shows up in the Book of Exodus in verse 5:2. It’s soon after that we learn about the hard heart of the Pharaoh, and God gives Moses instructions for initiating the first of the plagues. The devastation of Egypt follows.

That’s where we are in our world right now. The many forms of hard-heartedness that we see and experience are not just emotionally lacking in compassion, they echo loudly, “Who is God, that I should obey his voice …? I know not God.” And they deny “The whole world is filled with Your glory.” Thus we have no basis for expressing surprise as we see plagues multiplying in our world and appearing right on our doorstep.

What situates what I am thinking within the Mussar perspective is the necessity that I turn the lens back on myself. I can’t just point to the hardheartedness and spiritual insensitivity of the world out there and moralize; I am obligated to interrogate myself in search of my own hard-heartedness and spiritual insensitivity, and then make effort to change. I have miniscule influence over global realities, but I do have full responsibility for what goes on within the four cubits of my own personal life.

I’ll close with a story that I have told many times but bears repeating.

In 1923, the Chafetz Chaim was asked to be the keynote speaker at the first Agudath Israel convention in Vienna. He was asked specifically to speak on the subject of how he became the renowned sage that he did. The Chafetz Chayim said that he saw the deficiencies in the world, and he decided he had to make effort to change it, but he failed. He then focused his attention on changing the Jewish world and he had no impact. So, he said, he then sought to change the Jews of his country, Poland, and he again failed. Now, he said, he would focus on changing the Jews of his town, Radin, but to no effect. So, he said, he decided to work at changing the Jews of his own synagogue, and that, too, came to nothing. So, he put his attention on changing the members of his own family but he couldn’t. It was then that he said, “Let me change myself.” And when he changed himself, he became the “Chafetz Chaim” and he changed the world.

Which brings us to: How do you perceive the divine glory infusing the reality all around you?

I would love to hear your comments.

Alan

Many others on both sides of the border are not so lucky. The fires are so threatening in some places that 26,000 people in Canada are currently evacuated from their homes.

The smoke has blown down to the US and worsened air quality over a broad swath of the north of the country. And at the same time, France and Spain are experiencing major fires.

This is an emergency and how someone responds to an emergency is very indicative of their character.

If your neighbour’s house was on fire, you would have two choices: grab a bucket or call your lawyer. Which choice you make says a lot about who you are.

Of course, what I am not saying directly is that the response of the president of our neighbour to the south was very indicative of the man. “Filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air,” he complained. “This is a big cost” for the U.S. he said and “Canada should pay for the damage.”

I’m not saying he is wrong. I am only reflecting on the kind of man he is and, especially, on what we can learn by comparing his response to what Jewish tradition teaches.

The best starting place for insight into this issue is Pirkei Avot, that book of the Mishnah compiled around 200 CE. I mentioned in an earlier post that the correct translation of that title is “Chapters of First Principles,” and here we have a question that is clearly about a first principle: self-interest vs. selflessness.

The question itself shows up in Pirkei Avot (1:14) when Hillel asks, “If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?”

Such a good phrasing of the issue, showing that there is wisdom and merit in both directions. That seems consistent with the Mussar principles of balance in all things.

But further on in Pirkei Avot we come to a different answer, one that was much more actively embraced by the teachers of the Mussar movement.

Mishnah 6:6 introduces itself as the 48 ways to acquire Torah. (Interestingly, this happens to be the 48^thinstalment of this blog!!) I wrote a whole book on this one Mishnah (With Heart in Mind) and in the Introduction to that book, I said:

Had the rabbis wanted us to make learning Torah the goal they would have said just that. When they direct us to acquire Torah, they are informing us that there is a stage beyond learning where the truths we have learned get worked into the very core of our being, into our hearts, so that truth will be the guiding light of our thoughts, feelings, words and deeds.

And to back that up, the first of the 48 methods is “talmud,” meaning “learning.” That’s the essential first step, but it is not sufficient on its own. There are 47 additional steps or factors involved in internalizing the teachings of the Torah in a transformative way.

Further down the list comes another one of these crucial steps to reaching the spiritual heights on a Jewish path, which isnosei b’ol im chaveiro. That phrase translates as, “bearing the yoke with one’s friend,” and more idiomatically as: “bearing the burden with another.”

Pay careful attention to the wording that says, “bearing the burden with,” not “for.” We do not acquire Torah and so develop ourselves spiritually through enabling behaviour or creating co-dependency in another person. Each of us must carry our own “yoke” but how good and how satisfying and how human it is to lend a shoulder to help carry the load.

The great leader of the Mussar movement Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, known as the Alter of Kelm, made this practice the cornerstone of his teaching. He encouraged his students to be the kind of people who helped other people, not just because that is an ethical imperative, but because making the effort to help another person bear their burden causes us to develop the sensitivity to notice another person’s struggles, the compassion to want to take on a portion of the load, and the humility to do it for the sake of that other person, not for reasons of self-glorification or even for the thanks.

You can see that the Alter of Kelm saw that the practice of helping other people to bear their burdens as an effective way to refine one’s own character. This was his answer to Hillel’s question: If I am only for myself, what am I?

The Alter of Kelm died in 1898 and here we are, 130 years later, still learning from him. I wonder if in the year 2156 people will be aspiring to be the kind of people who don’t respond to their neighbour’s difficulties with offers of help but with grievance and threats? Since Pirkei Avot teaches first principles of human life, and has been a revered text for 1,800 years, my money (literally and metaphorically) is on “bearing the burden with another.”

Tradition, scripture and experience attest to that choice.

Each of us needs to find our own ways to bear the burden of the other. For some, that will take the form of caring for your own family. For others, their community, or their nation, or for creation itself. There is no hierarchy here.

What opportunities are calling to you to step up to helping others and, in the process, to refine your own soul?

I invite you to share your thoughts.

Alan

Other catastrophes are also said to have happened onTisha b’Av, including the defeat of Bar Kokhba‘s rebellion against the Romans, which led to the razing of Jerusalem, the declaration of the First Crusade in 1095, the edict expelling the Jews from England in 1290, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

Even World War I broke out on Tisha b’Av!

The ninth of Av is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar and is marked by a fast that is as stringent as Yom Kippur.

Most people do not like being sad and tend to make their escape back to the land of Happy as quickly as they can. And here we find a Jewish tradition directing us to turn to face sadness and walk right into its dark cloud, to immerse ourselves in feelings of grief and loss. The message I take away is that sadness – atzvut in Hebrew – has its place, both on the calendar and in our spiritual lives.

What a contrast to a world that is infatuated with happiness. Disneyland markets itself as “The Happiest Place on Earth” and happiness has come to be so cherished that there is a movement to replace Gross Domestic Product as a measure of a country’s success with an evaluation of Gross National Happiness. GDP has been criticized because it only looks at what generates economic activity, and by that measure, if someone gets cancer or has a car accident, that might actually boost GDP. A scale based on happiness does not focus strictly on quantitative economic measures but takes into account a mix of quality-of-life factors.

Mussar perspective has nothing against being happy, but is guided by what Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, the founder of the Mussar movement in 19^th century Lithuania, wrote, that a Mussar student’s goal should be to master both “a trait and its opposite.” The goal is not to try to eliminate anger, envy, sadness or any other inner trait from our experience, if for no other reason than because that is actually unrealistic and unattainable. Who gets through life without some measure of anger, envy, and sadness? Rather, the goal in the Mussar approach is to become an expert in a trait and as well as its opposite: sadness plus joy, anger and also equanimity, envy as well as contentedness.

Tisha b’Av focuses particularly on the pain of loss and invites us to explore and process the feelings of longing and grief we have all experienced when a parent passed, a business collapsed, a proposal was rejected by every publisher or foundation, an exam was failed or whatever form of loss you might sustain in life, as we all do.

Experience sadness, but with a caution not to go so far as to descend into depression or despair. Those dark depths can be very destructive and must be avoided. The word in Hebrew for depression is dika’on, stemming from the word ledake which means “to suppress” and that is surely not what we are after.

The message I hear is that we are meant to engage with sadness but not wallow in it. That’s because any middah taken to the extreme becomes a spiritual obstacle, while at a more moderate measure is a feature of inner wholeness.

The starting point for understanding the place of sadness in our pursuit of wholeness is actually to understand and appreciate the middah of love – ahava – because where there is no love, there is no sadness. What kind of loss do we mourn? The loss of something or someone we have loved.

Love is notoriously difficult to define because it is, in essence, a spiritual experience and our ordinary, everyday English language defines things in psychological and material – but not spiritual – terms.

But look at what we find in the Torah about the love between future King David and Jonathan, son of the present king (1 Samuel 18:1):

As soon as he had finished speaking to Shaul, the soul [nefesh] of Jonathan was knit [nikshara] to the soul [nefesh] of David.

The key words here are nefesh – soul – and the word that describes what happens to the soul in love, which is nikshara – knit or bound together.

And then the verse says: “And Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”

We are learning something crucially important here. The Torah is not speaking in metaphors. It is telling us what happens when one person loves another. What might be unfamiliar to us is that the Torah includes the spiritual realm in its matter-of-fact discussion of our world. From a Torah perspective, the spiritual is as real as anything else, and it shows up in our real lives in real ways.

We only have trouble defining love when we try to do that in terms of the material world. When we include the soul in the picture, it becomes easy to define love: that’s what happens when the soul of one person knits together with the soul of another person.

The Torah’s definition of love makes loss more understandable. Upon hearing that Jonathan had died, David took hold of his clothing and tore it (2 Samuel 1:11). We see the same action being taken by Jacob when he received word that his son Joseph was dead (Genesis 37:34).

To this day, we model our own behavior on these precedents. Just before a funeral, the ritual of kriyah is performed. Kriyah means “tearing” or “ripping” and involves rending the clothing of a bereaved person.

When we understand that love means knitting together two souls, then we can see that death or loss is the severing of that bond. The ritual of kriyah gives physical expression to the spiritual reality. We tear the clothing because the soul of the bereaved person has had a piece torn away. Again, this is not a metaphor but an actual description of what happens on the spiritual plane when we experience loss.

Of course, this is not something uniquely Jewish. In popular music, love is a major theme. And where there is love, there is loss, which is often described as a ripping or tearing. And then there is country music, where nearly ALL the lyrics describe feelings of sadness and loss, and the perception of being torn apart that goes with it.

We are not solitary, independent, circumscribed beings but are spiritually united with other people, places, things, etc. This way of seeing ourselves – not as separate but as a composite of all the things and beings we love – is expressed by Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, the 16^th century kabbalist and Mussarist who wrote: “Yesh ba’zeh cheleq zeh” – there is in this one a part of that one. Our inner lives are an intermingling of all that we love.

And when we lose one of those things for whatever reason, the loss is experienced as a tearing away – not of it, but of a part of ourselves.

Our losses place us on the path of sadness, and soon we come to a three-way fork in the road.

One way leads to stoicism and rejection of feeling. That is the road to hardening and blocking the heart.

Another fork leads to melancholy and depression and every voice in the Jewish world cautions us not to take that turn.

The third one – the way of sadness – means accepting broken-heartedness and allowing tears to flow. This is the straight path according to both nature and spirit. When it is time for the heart to break, it is meant to be broken, and opening to that experience is both healing and a spur to personal growth, leading to renewal and wholeness.

Renewal is the gem that glistens in the shadows of sadness.

That idea is expressed so poetically in the psalm traditionally recited before grace after meals on Shabbat and YomTov. There we read in the image of the agricultural cycle:

Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. One that goes forth and weeps, bearing precious seed, shall come again with rejoicing, bringing one’s sheaves.

Have you had the experience of renewal sprouting from sadness?

Rambam says (Hilchot De’ot 1:5):

This path is the path of the wise. Every person whose traits are intermediate and equally balanced can be called ‘a wise person.’

But Rambam himself acknowledges that there are times when we need to act in ways that deviate from the middle way:

The pious of the early generations would bend their temperaments from the intermediate path towards [either of] the two extremes. For some traits they would veer towards the one extreme, for others, towards the other extreme. This is referred to as [behavior] ‘beyond the measure of the law.’

He calls bending toward the extreme not wise, but “pious.” Sometimes, a situation calls on us to abandon balance at the centre. And right now, I feel the need to be an extremist because what I see coming at me daily from the world out there is itself extremist, only in ways that I feel that I need to counter. My values are shaped by the legacy of Jewish values, and to defend them – within myself and in the world – against the onslaught, the world is demanding that I be an extremist.

If the world is going to be so unkind to the stranger, I need to be extremely kind to the stranger.

Because compassion is denigrated as weakness, I need to be extremely compassionate.

Because the world is as grim and dour as our politicians, I need to seek out joy.

If what I see around me is deceitful, I need to be scrupulous with the truth.

Because some leaders strut their arrogance, I need to strive to be as humble as Moses.

And so on. In this I feel I have no choice. It is not an exaggeration to say that every single value that the Jewish tradition has endorsed for millennia is being trampled before our eyes, and if we believe in the truth and significance of building a world infused with Jewish values, we need to defend them to the extreme, beyond the measure of the law, in piety, and starting in our own lives.

What we call “Jewish values” are better understood as the ideals that the Torah and our rabbis have identified as worthy to pursue in our own individual human lives. Think of being charitable not as a value but as a prescribed aspiration.

And why is it prescribed and why should we follow the prescription? I am influenced by the rabbis who, 1600 years ago, said:

The commandments were only given in order that people would be refined through them, because what does the Holy Blessed One care if one slaughters [an animal] from the front of the neck or if one slaughters from the back of the neck? We must say that the commandments were only given so that people would be refined through them.

In other words, it is in my interests to pursue Torah ideals because that process will have the effect of refining me, working down the negative and enhancing the positive.

An example: joy.

What a joyless world it appears to be. It’s all bad news. War after war. Politics is just transactional and morally deplorable. Being a convicted felon is no bar on public office, nor is profiting from that office. People have hundreds of online “friends” but few relationships and we are the loneliest generation. Public discourse is dead; it’s mostly divisive haranguing now. I don’t need to go on – you are living this reality, just like me.

I’m in danger of having the joy wrung out of my life. And if I want to prevent that from happening, extreme measures are called for. But first, I need to understand joy, which I equate to the Hebrew word gila [גילה]. Joy is not the same as happiness. In The Shabbat Effect I drew a clear distinction between the two:

Happiness is that transient feeling of uplift and ebullience that comes from fulfilling or experiencing something that you really want and like.

Joy is also a feeling of expansive and positive uplift, but it is very different from happiness because it is sparked not by getting something you desire, but by experiences that actually transcend anything you might personally want.

Happiness is an inner experience at the level of our personal self, with its wants and desires, while joy penetrates us more deeply, transcending our personal selves to touch us at the deeper, more spiritual, more eternal level of the soul.

Happiness gratifies the ego; joy transcends it.

Happiness makes you smile; joy makes you cry.

I’ve become an extremist in opening myself to joy. But how do I do that? My “effort” in that direction has meant taking steps to unencumber my heart. Turn off the phone. Slow down. Spend time in nature. Look for beauty. Connect with people. Savor the flavors of food and drink.

The world as we receive it dehumanizes us, and my search for joy is an attempt to undo the damage. The more extremely joyless the world appears, the more I reach for the antidote, extreme pursuit of joy.

A final anecdote. I travel around with a major league joy-generator: my dog, Dr. Pepper. He happens to be very cute and has the sweetest disposition. Anytime we go for a walk, people stop in their tracks. He doesn’t make them happy but joyful. He awakens their hearts and gives them a moment of transcendence that penetrates whatever happens to be on their mind at the moment.

Take a look:

What brings you joy?

Alan

As I did my collecting, I invoked the middah of חריצות (diligence) and our woods are now much more park-like than ever. It’s comical to see our little dachshund, Dr. Pepper, zooming around on the new trails that he has discovered in the woods.

But I’m now done with that task – for this year.

Still, walks in the forest are a major source of refreshment and exercise on this island. The size of the trees reflects our climatic zone, which is designated as Pacific temperate rain forest. Although the island has been logged at least twice, pockets of majestic old trees remain, and even in the logged areas, such as our own property, the trees grow so fast (1’ or more per year) that in the 30 years we have been on the island, we have seen the shrimpy trees around us grow into much more mature giant firs, cedars, balsams, hemlocks and the occasional spruce.

The climate as currently configured is ideal for trees to flourish: plenty of moisture, adequate sunshine, soil, and a year-round growing season. And they grow straight, true and tall. Douglas fir can grow to a height of 100 m. (330 feet). That’s the length of a football field (not counting the endzones).

Walking among the huge trees in the forest yesterday, we came upon a little cluster of Ghost Pipes, also calledIndian Pipe or, more descriptively “Corpse Plant,” because its flower is a sickly white. Its colour reflects the fact that this little plant completely lacks chlorophyll and gets its nutrients through a complex underground connection with tree roots and fungi. If you look it up on the internet, you will see that it is considered rare, though “it commonly grows on Hornby Island and throughout the surrounding Pacific Northwest coast.”

A Ghost Pipe typically stands from 10 to 20 cm (4 to 8 inches), quite a contrast from the surrounding trees.

Which gives me pause to think. A flourishing Douglas fir stands 100 m. tall; a flourishing Ghost Pipe .5 of a metre. There is a lesson for us in the contrast.

The word for “flourishing” or “thriving” in Hebrew isפורח (poreach), a word that shares its linguistic root with the word פרח (perach), a flower. There is a sense that thriving is a kind of blossoming, and what that tells us is that flourishing is not something an entity takes on or acquires; it is a bringing forth into full flower the potentialities that are already seeded within the living being.

Humans also have the potential to flourish, and we do that by a process akin to blossoming. I love that notion because it directs our attention inward rather than outward, and it invites us to measure ourselves not so much by what others have accomplished but by the seeds of possibility that are present within us.

It also tells us that the measure of flourishing is not necessarily size or grandeur. The little Ghost Pipe puts out a delicate, translucent flower that is, by some measure, as magnificent a creation as is the mighty fir.

The Douglas fir is primed to grow enormously tall and fulfills its potential way up in the forest canopy. Down below, the Ghost Pipe has the potential to reach its full capacity at a very different order of magnitude. Both thrive on their own terms, not on the terms of the other.

This message converts to the human realm in the recognition that we are all unique individuals and so the seeds of possibility that have the potential to blossom in you will be different from my own potential. We flourish by recognizing what is true for each of us in our own lives and then doing what it takes to water those seeds to grow to their full potential.

Rav Naftali Amsterdam (1832–1916) once said to his rebbe, Rabbi Yisroel Salanter: “Rebbe, if only I had the mind of the Sha’agas Aryeh,1 the heart of the Yesod Veshoresh Ha’avodah2 and your middot (character traits), then I could be a true servant of God. Rav Yisroel responded, “Naftali, Naftali! With your head, with yourheart, and with your character traits, Naftali Amsterdam can be a true servant of God.”

I am very interested in the notion of human flourishing, so, tell me: What gives you the feeling you are thriving?

Alan

1 Rabbi Aryeh Leib ben Asher Ginzberg (c. 1695 – 1785), known by the title of his most famous book, Shaagas Aryeh (“Roar of a lion”), a collection of rabbinic responsa first published in 1755.

2 “Foundation and Root of Service” by Rabbi Alexander Ziskind of Grodno (1735-1794) contains directions for the right use and comprehension of ritual, daily Jewish prayers, Shabbat and holidays.