There are only 800 full time residents on Hornby, who are served by a basic medical clinic. Bev is a (now retired) palliative care physician, and over the years, the nurses and doctors of the clinic have called on her for help with patients who were reaching the end of their lives. This summer, they asked her to give a talk on end-of-life issues and this past week she offered a large gathering her practical wisdom and wise spiritual insight, under the title “Living to Die and Dying to Live.”

Drawing on her decades of experience and basing her teaching in first-person stories of deathbed spiritual awakenings, she shared her experience of seeing people who were facing death come to recognize essential truths about life that tend to remain hidden from us in our hectic, earthly, seemingly unending lives. Dying people offer us those lessons and we can enrich our lives by choosing to apply them to our own lives, even before we find ourselves facing our own end of days.

I was reminded of a classic story that is told about Yosef Yozel Horwitz who was the founder of the Novardok school of Mussar but who, prior to that, involved himself in commerce to support his family. On a business trip in eastern Europe, he ran into Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, founder of the 19^th century Mussar movement, and his disciple, Rabbi Yitzchak Blazer, known as Itzele Peterburger. The two rabbis challenged him about why he was not devoting himself more fully to his Jewish life.

Horwitz responded:

“Doesn’t a person need with what to live?”

And they answered:

“And doesn’t a person also need with what to die?”

That response pushed him into his decision to leave business and devote himself to Torah and Mussar. His first step toward becoming the Alter of Novardok was to have himself bricked into a small room where he devoted himself to study, prayer and meditation for two full years.

The truth is that throughout our lives, we are given many opportunities to develop “with what to die.” From one perspective, life can be framed as a battle against death, as Dylan Thomas captures so well:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But from another perspective, the end of earthly life is just one in a series of transitions we got through, beginning with our own birth and continuing through the many births and deaths we experience all throughout our lives.

Every new relationship, new business or career change, project or development, and new home is a birth. The birth of a child creates a parent; your child’s child births a grandparent.

And on the flip side, every loss, disappointment, betrayal, failure, bereavement and the like is a death. Even decisions we make can be seen to embody the same phenomenon: the word “decide” shares a Latin root with words like “homicide” and “suicide” because when you make a “decision,” one or more other options need to be cut off, to die.

The essential lesson is that we have the opportunity to cultivate “with what to die” by looking for the lesson in every circumstance that life delivers us into. This is the attitude that Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe called (drawing on earlier teachers, back at least to the Rambam) hitlamdut, or as he would have said it, hislamdus, which he saw to be a central tool of Mussar.

Hitlamdut is a stance of approaching yourself, other people and all life experiences with an attitude of curiosity, openness, and a willingness to grow – and this literally until one’s last day. Rav Wolbe wrote: “When one reaches the day of death, one won’t be dying—one will be learning how to die.” And he concluded: “This is the way of one who toils in the work of Mussar.”

It’s ironic that this focus on death – the final one as well as all the ones we experience along the way – turns out to be the path to thriving in life. That was the point Bev emphasized in her talk. When we truly internalize the conviction that our time is finite, and when we bring that curious, learning attitude to all the births and deaths we go through in life, we will find ourselves living like there is no tomorrow. And maybe there won’t be. Maybe today is all we’ve got.

I usually end my blog with a question. This time, I welcome your comments and reflections.

The “seven empirically tested strategies for developing character” that Wake Forest teaches are:

1. habituation through practice

2. reflection on personal experience

3. engagement with virtuous exemplars

4. dialogue to increase virtue literacy

5. awareness of situational variables and biases

6. moral reminders, and

7. friendships defined by mutual accountability.

They say that they developed these seven techniques through a process of rigorous synthesis of research across multiple disciplines, especially philosophy, psychology, education, and related fields. They reviewed and integrated evidence from:

• Classical virtue ethics (especially the Aristotelian tradition)

• Contemporary psychology of habits, moral development, and behaviour

• Educational research on learning and personal growth

• Case studies from university-based character education programs, particularly the Oxford Character Project and Wake Forest initiatives.

Not done yet! The researchers then tested and refined the framework through practical educational programs. Wake Forest describes these as evidence-based strategies and uses them as the foundation for its leadership and character curriculum.

Wow! So much work! But when we rephrase their list (“WF”) in terms of the practices that we have inherited from the Mussar movement of the mid-19^th century (“MM”), we find:

1. WF: habituation through practice
   
   MM: kabbalot, the Mussar practice of taking on specific practical exercises in order to work on a character trait or spiritual practice.

2. WF: reflection on personal experience
   
   MM: cheshbon ha’nefesh, the process of soul accounting that features in the 11^th century book Duties of the Heart that includes journalling.

3. WF: engagement with virtuous exemplars
   
   MM: a rebbe, a personal teacher; or a mashgiach, the name given to the Mussar supervisor in a yeshiva.

4. WF: dialogue to increase virtue literacy
   
   MM: the va’ad (small group) is an essential part of the Mussar process, and the discussions in that intimate setting are crucial to the work of personal change.

5. WF: awareness of situational variables and biases
   
   MM: hitlamdut; seeking and extracting lessons from every situation we encounter in our lives.

6. WF: moral reminders
   
   MM: hitpa’alut; the daily recitation of phrases to imprint awareness of our spiritual agenda.

7. WF: friendships defined by mutual accountability
   
   MM: chevruta; a committed partnership for the purposes of learning, companionship and accountability.

Very similar, no? And it is, as far as effective methods are concerned. What the Wake Forest people discovered through “a process of rigorous synthesis of research across multiple disciplines,” the Mussar masters discovered through experimentation and acute empirical observation. Or as the punchline goes on a famous Mussar story, the bottom line for them was, “Does it work?”

But a big difference shows up in terms of goals, the why of the programs.

The aim of the Wake Forest program is “to help students develop good dispositions (‘virtues’) that foster individual and communal flourishing and to avoid bad dispositions (‘vices’) that inhibit flourishing.”

This notion flies right in the face of both the Mussar tradition and common sense because both tell us that there are, in fact, no “virtues” and no “vices.”

Characteristics that make it onto the reviled list of “deadly sins” sometimes earn praise in the Jewish world. What’s so bad about envy, for example? When I pose that question to audiences, they immediately get that envy can have the positive value of being a motivator. The Talmud tells us that “The envy of the Sages increases wisdom” (Bava Batra 21a).

Or, to take another example, pride also makes it onto that blacklist, but the Talmud says, “A Torah scholar should have one-eighth of one-eighth of pride” (Sotah 5a). Many sources emphasize the importance of self-esteem to humility.

And on the other side of the ledger, is it possible to do harm with a “virtue” like generosity? Yes, of course it is, like spoiling a child, creating co-dependency or enabling destructive behaviours.

Or patience? Is there such a thing as too much patience? If your patience amounts to inactivity in the face of your responsibilities and the needs of the moment, then that patience is no virtue.

Mussar would have us pay attention not developing good dispositions but to calibrating and recalibrating those inner traits in which we have the potential to grow. We may be seeing the same practices in the Wake Forest program as we find in Mussar, but the paradigms are very different.

And the goals are even more different. The Wake Forest program elevates the humanistic vision of “flourishing” to be the ultimate goal of the work we do on ourselves. In its drive to be empirical and scientific, a university program is bound to ignore the spiritual dimension of life, thereby falling out of step with reality.

Believe me, I have nothing against flourishing; it’s a wonderful ideal. But the Jewish tradition would have us aim even higher than that, not just to flourish or to thrive but to be holy. For the Mussar masters, the reason to work on yourself is to fulfill the injunction the Torah lays out for us, which is to become holy people.

In a famous quote, the Alter of Slabodka cautioned: “Don’t aim to be better; aim to be higher.”

Or as we say in The Mussar Institute, “Working on yourself but not for the sake of your Self.”

I find it very validating that the methodologies developed in a scientific way correspond to Mussar practices that evolved through empirical methods practiced in real life. But we part company when it comes to the spiritual and divine. I don’t expect a university to be able to contend with an undefinable notion like holiness. But I can’t see the world through any other lens. Can you?

I would love to read your comments!

Somebody asked me if I had learned anything on that tour and my first response was, “Yes: I learned that I am not as young as I used to be.” It was gratifying, even exhilarating at times, but also very tiring, especially the travel. For example, one of my last stops was Cleveland, where my flight going to that city was cancelled. And when it came time to depart on a different flight, that flight was also cancelled. I had to scramble to get there, and then scramble some more to get away, all of which is exhausting.

Two other (more substantial!) lessons stand out for me.

I met hundreds of people, many of whom I got to speak with, if only for a few minutes, and the cumulative impression I have from those encounters is that the yearning for authentic Jewish spirituality is strong.

That message was conveyed to me in the numbers of people who attended my talks. Commonly, it would be 100 people or more. The question period was lively and sincere, as people asked questions that were genuinely important to them.

I also saw that the demand currently outstrips the supply. Many people are clamoring for guidance for their inner lives that has strong roots in the Jewish world. But because there are not yet enough teachers, materials or group leaders to meet that demand, I encountered people who were filling that void with practices and ideas that have no Jewish roots, like mindfulness meditation and various self-help approaches.

I – and I hope you join me in this – feel an obligation to keep working hard to give people access to Mussar teachings and guidance that we who grew up as spiritual orphans were not able to access early in our own searches.

There was a second lesson as well, which is that people are reaching the point of despair over the debased culture that slaps us in the face no matter which way we turn.

Listen to the foul-mouthed and demeaning politicians, starting right at the top, who clearly hold any idea of respect to be a sign of weakness and who have raised the cult of arrogance to new heights.

This phenomenon comes right down to street level. I’ll share an experience I had on the way home from the last talk on the tour. That was in Tacoma, WA, which is not far from Vancouver where I live, and so I drove down. When I set out for home the next day, I had three stops in mind before I hit the highway: synagogue for morning prayers,

Trader Joe’s, and coffee.

I finished the first two stops and then looked on my phone for a nearby café. The nearest one that popped up was called “Ladybug Espresso” and that seemed good to me because the word “espresso” implied a serious attitude to coffee. My phone guided me the few minutes to the café, and I arrived to find a kiosk, not a cafe. Even better! I can get coffee and be on the road even sooner.

I pulled up to the kiosk to find the door closed and the place looking desolate. Dejectedly, I start to drive away when the door sprung open, filling my eyes with the sight of a woman wearing nothing but a string around her waist from which hung a gauze triangle that hid nothing, while on top she had the same completely transparent cloth over her breasts, leaving everything in plain sight. Not even thinking for a second I exclaimed, “You’re naked!” to which she replied, “Yes. That’s how it works here. You didn’t know?” We talked — I stayed in the car — and it turns out that my phone had omitted one key word from the name of the place. It is actually called “Ladybug Bikini Espresso” and their thing is having virtually naked women serve the coffee. Or, as their website says, “Kickstart your morning with our Beautiful Baristas serving Beautiful Coffee!” There are several branches.

This is just an example of the unabashedly sordid things that are filling the public square these days.

I draw a link between these two lessons. The hunger for Jewish teachings to guide the inner life is fueled, in part, by the degradation we experience in public life that leaves many of us feeling soiled and dejected. And who wants to live a soiled and dejected life? Guide me out of here, please!

So, even though my book tour is done for now, I come away with a firm sense that there is still a lot of work to do on behalf of the Jewish people. Your partnership in that effort is precious to me.

Let me ask you: Do you think ethical and cultural standards in public life have sunk as much as I have portrayed? What have you experienced?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this….

With Gratitude,

Alan

One of the realities about being a spiritual orphan – the plight of most Jews of our generation, me included! – is that we were never introduced to our own Jewish spiritual lineage. Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz stands tall in that lineage and is a major ancestor who is well worth getting to know.

Rav Yerucham, as he is called by all who were not his direct students – they called him simply “the Mashgiach” – was born in Belarus in 1873 and died in 1936. This Wednesday, June 3^rd, marks the 90^th yahrzeit(anniversary of the death) of this great Mussar teacher who merited the privilege of studying at two of the primary centers of 19^th century Mussar learning and practice, the famed yeshivas of Slobodka and Kelm. His teachers were Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel (the Alter of Slobodka) and Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv (the Alter of Kelm), two of the three second-generation leaders of the Mussar movement that emphasized what has been so absent in our generation, which is awareness and cultivation of the inner life in a Jewish context.

Rav Yerucham joined the yeshiva at Mir, in Belarus, in 1908 and served as the Mussar supervisor (mashgiach) there until he died, 28 years later. His son Simcha Zissel Levovitz (named after the Alter of Kelm) gathered together and published his lectures and helped extend the Mussar heritage into the post-Holocaust worldwhere they are available to us still today, though only in Hebrew.

I have been learning my way through Rav Yerucham’s Daat, Chochmah u’Mussar for a number of years now, meeting consistently with my loyal and wise chevruta, Robert Barris. We meet for an hour every week and work our way through several paragraphs of the book, translating, discussing and applying what we are studying. As soon as our session ends, I sit down to write out the translation in English, with footnotes and sources. We are currently on page 226, just over halfway through.

I try to get as close to an accurate translation of Rav Yerucham’s thought as I can. I try to capture the p’shat, the straightforward meaning of the words on the page. After all, what I am interested in and will benefit from is Rav Yerucham’s thought, and so I strive to be as true to his ideas as I can get, with Robert as a partner in this endeavour.

This seems to me to be a very fitting approach to learning from him, since his thought centers on living with da’at, which he understood to mean perceiving reality honestly as it is. He pointed out that we tend to live superficially and reactively, and from habit, and as a result, we might see only the surface of life, without recognizing the deeper spiritual processes that go on and with which we can engage, to the benefit of ourselves and the world.

Rav Yerucham’s Mussar talks were not abstract sermons. His students described them as revealing “maps of the human soul.”

Here are a few of the gems I have encountered in studying his teachings:

• “The greatest danger is that a person becomes accustomed to everything.”

• “Most people are asleep, though their eyes are open.”

• “The yetzer ha’ra does not first seek to make a person wicked. It seeks to make them inattentive.”

• “A person can know something with complete clarity and yet live as though they never heard it.”

• “The inner world of a person is built specifically in silence.”

My favourite teaching of his, though, is one I have already shared on this blog. He said that if you see a baker who is baking matza and you ask that person “What is your work?” and the baker answers, “I’m baking matza,” that’s the wrong answer. It reveals that the person is conscious of worldliness but not of the corresponding internal reality where we also have to work. The correct answer, says Rav Yerucham, would be, “I am working on caution and alacrity, precision and patience,” or the like.

Steeped in Mussar, he understood profoundly that the pursuit of a spiritual life involves cultivating the inner traits [middot] and so no matter what worldly activity you find yourself engaged in – baking matza or driving a car or protesting in the streets or raising a child, or whatever – the eyes of your consciousness should always be focused inwardly, on whatever traits you are working on that could be honed or strengthened in that moment, within that context.

I’ll give the final word to Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe (1914 – 2005), who saw his years studying under Rav Yerucham in the Mir yeshiva as the central formative influence of his life. He said that a single Mussar shmuess(discourse) from Rav Yerucham was so powerful that it became the source of the strength and fortitude that allowed him to survive the terrible years of World War II.

May that influence live on, growing stronger as we probe and cultivate his teachings in our time. And may hisneshama have an aliyah.

I’ll ask a question: Do you identify with the idea with which I began this post, that Jews of our generation are, by and large, spiritual orphans? Is that true of you, do you think?

I was in Cleveland for Shavuot, which coincided with Shabbat this year, and an older man with whom I shared the Shabbat dinner table told a tale of his woes. He was still practicing as a dentist. But he was suffering, and it was painful to hear how difficult it was for him to master all the new technologies, not only in his care for his patients but in all the administration he was now having to do by computer. Although he loved what he did and was good at it, he was about to throw up his hands and retire.

That’s where he was focused. But other people at the table were engrossed with political events that explode in our faces in such rapid succession, and environmental initiatives that are attacking preservation of habitat and setting back the timetable for the inevitable move to sustainable energy, and wars nobody voted for, and the rapidly spiraling cost of living, and the proliferation and mainstreaming of antisemitism, and division over Israel, and…. I am sure you are living in the same conversations as I am.

As I sat at that table, I struggled. All the issues are real and important and how great it is that people care and are passionately engaged. But we had just lit candles, sanctified the day with kiddush, and welcomed the Sabbath bride. I wanted to park all those issues at the door. It was not my table and not my place to direct the conversation, but silently to myself, I drifted away from the conversation because I was reaching to savour the taste of the world to come that Shabbat offers.

No doubt the needs of the moment are pressing, but it seems to me that giving 6/7ths of my life to the struggle to build a better world is quite enough. I know exactly what would happen if I gave all my days to the affairs (crises?) of the world and I allowed Shabbat to be just another day of worry, complaint and pursuit. The world would be no better off, and all I would succeed in doing is exhausting myself.

I’m underlining my need for rest on Shabbat, not because I am exhausted, and not even to help me avoid becoming exhausted which would bring along with it the depression and despair that inevitably accompany such depletion, but because Shabbat offers an opportunity to realign myself with the deeper truths of cosmic reality that are pummeled and buried under the welter of assaults everyday life throws my way.

It is true that I am a small creature on a planet circling its sun, and when I light Shabbat candles at the designated moment, the small light of those candles brings me in line with the light of the sun, the position of the earth in relation to it that creates the season, and the rotation of the earth on its axis that delivers up evening. Six days a week of electric lights, mental agitation and frantic busyness obscure this truth. Once a week, I realign.

That realignment reminds me of the truth of my place in Creation. Finite, mortal, small – vital, aware and capable.

The great Mussar teacher, the Alter of Slabodka, tells us that what got created on the six days of creation were the elements of the universe, but only when the seventh day came into being did the full set of days take on their purpose and meaning (their form, their tzurah). And pointing to how much pleasure a person gets when they finish some project or inquiry they have been long working to complete, he says Shabbat offers a much greater pleasure, though of the same type:

How much pleasure and delight there is in finishing the complete form of the entire creation. A person is united with this pleasure through rest on the Sabbath day which has in it the completion of the form of the creation. Even sleep on Shabbat brings a person to this pleasure. And although sleep is one sixtieth of death (Berachot 57b), and “the beginning of one’s fall is sleep” (Genesis Rabbah 17), and there is something to confess before sleep like one confesses before death, and they say: “Enlighten my eyes lest I sleep in death,” (Psalm 13:3),but on Shabbat there is a virtue in sleep, because a person unites through the rest of sleep with the complete pleasure of the form of creation and one elevates and rises to a higher level.*

And so, come Sunday, I re-enter the world of struggle and battle, not just refreshed and renewed, but – much more importantly – realigned with that higher level in me and with the world through the rest and pleasure I gave to myself on Shabbat. Rest on any day is good for body and mind. Rest on Shabbat is also good for the soul, and so I have no guilt about having taken TWO naps this past Shabbat. Now, when I rejoin the world as a person who has reconnected to living in tune with the soul within, I can expect that everything I do will be more worthwhile for being informed and infused with that higher wisdom. That’s the Shabbat effect.

I would love to hear if any of this resonates with your own experience, whether of exhaustion or renewal?

* Ohr HaTzafun, “The Rest of Shabbat”, Part 2, page 120.

You have to wonder how you could possibly develop these sorts of inner attributes without taking action to clear away the soiled mundane that is the essence of a Shabbat practice. (The word shabbat itself comes from the root that means “to cease.”)

This week I want, seemingly, to digress. Everything I write and teach has been put through the wringer of my own life experience, and while it might originate in teachings from previous centuries, if I have not put it through my own test of living the teaching, I can’t offer it up with conviction, so I don’t. And there is something from my own experience that I do want to offer up this time that, at first glance, seems not connected to Shabbat or Mussar, but you may be surprised.

This past week (May 14^th, to be exact) marked the 230^th anniversary of an event that took place on that date in 1796. Edward Jenner, an English physician, vaccinated 8-year-old James Phipps in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England, with material collected from cowpox lesions that had erupted on the skin of milkmaid Sarah Nelmes. Later, on July 1^st, Jenner exposed Phipps to the human smallpox virus, and the child did not get the disease. This experiment demonstrated the protection conferred by vaccination.

Of course, vaccination is in the news these days because irrational thinking has taken hold in some segments of society and the direct result has been an increase in cases of measles, polio and malaria and other infectious diseases.

But as I said, there is something in this topic that is related to my own personal experience, and I will focus there.

In 1974, Bev and I decided that when I finished my master’s degree at Oxford, we would drive our car to India. It was possible to do something like that in those days. Turkey was not restive, the Shah was in power in Iran, Afghanistan had not yet been invaded by Russia or the US, nor taken over by the Taliban. Pakistan was safe. And so, we made the trip over several months and drove into India.

It was largely a pleasant, interesting and uneventful trip. There were some surprises – like Greece and Turkey going to war over Cyprus on the day we were driving across the border between those two countries. That was harry! But we made it across without incident and proceeded to traverse Turkey by making our way from one hammam (traditional Turkish bathhouse) to the next.

We were not in India long before we realized we’d be staying for a while. The option of drifting from ashram to ashram in a cloud of smoke did not appeal, and so we began to look around for something useful to do. We soon got a recommendation to check out the WHO smallpox eradication program that was ramping up at that time.

We showed up at the smallpox office in southern Bihar state (now Jharkhand), volunteered, and soon found ourselves being part of the effort to wipe out a disease that had been a scourge on humanity for millennia.

The year we joined the program – 1974 – was an epidemic year. Those came around roughly every 7 years. The disease would rage through the population and infect most of the people who were not vaccinated or had not survived the disease itself (which provided natural immunity), and it took about seven years for a new pool of vulnerable people to accumulate that would sustain the next epidemic. Since most of the people who newly entered that pool did so by means of being born, epidemics overwhelmingly affected children. The mortality rate was 30%.

Of course, the year after an epidemic – in our case, 1975 – saw a real dip in the number of smallpox cases. And because the disease was transmitted person-to-person by airborne water droplets, the dry summer season within that year of minimal infection would be the period when incidence of the disease would be at its lowest. That one season of that one year came into focus as our golden opportunity to stamp out smallpox, before the rainy season came, the number of cases started to rise, and we entered the next epidemic cycle. If we could interrupt transmission for just 21 days, the virus would be vanquished.

And we did it! People from around the world, from Brazil and Canada, from the US and Russia, Slovakia and Poland and, of course, India, and elsewhere, put aside differences and came together with the common purpose of benefitting humanity. We each made a small contribution, adding our drop to the bucket that eventually snuffed out a disease that had killed millions.

And therein lies a lesson that applies both to Mussar and to Shabbat, and that is: Don’t belittle the little. Every change, whether a small improvement in our personal lives or a monumental transformation on the global stage, is ever and always the culmination of many small steps.

Rav Yerucham Levovitz, the revered Mussar mashgiach [supervisor] of the Mir yeshiva in pre-war Belarus, wrote:

A person must always think, what did our ancestors do that caused God to desire them? A person should know that all the success of the holy ancestors, and all the great ones of the world, was in this: That they did not … distinguish big from small. Rather, they would snatch and utilize everything. A person who contemplates the holy Sages will see that all their work and engagements were in small matters, and for such a thing they sacrificed themselves.

And so, it was in the smallpox eradication program, and so it is in our work on ourselves in the way of Mussar, and so it is as we look to stretch and grow through evolving our Shabbat practice. Edward Jenner jabbed some virus into the arm of 8-year-old James Phipps in England, and today, 230 years later, no one anywhere in the world needs to be vaccinated against smallpox.

Never belittle the little. Every small act has the potential to change global history.

I would love to hear about one of your small actions that you recognize as important for both yourself and others. Please write about it in the comment section of this post.

With Gratitude,

Alan

(The joke doesn’t work with Ashkenazi pronunciation where the parsha is called Bechukosai.” Oh well. Sigh?)

There is much in this parsha, a lot of it emotionally fraught. The section known as the tochechah – “the rebuke” – offers an escalating series of calamities that are sure to befall the people if they persist in separating themselves from sincere service to God and they fail to walk in God’s ways. The details are graphic, but they can be summarized as:

• Fear, panic, and insecurity

• Environmental and economic collapse

• Wild animals and social disruption

• War and plague

• Famine and starvation

• Destruction and exile

What is extraordinary about this ominous list is not the terrible aspects themselves but that the primary behaviour that the Torah says will bring on these terrifying events is designated by the Hebrew wordקרי (keri) (Leviticus 26).

Rashi defines the term keri, saying that it refers to happenstance, accident, or an unplanned occurrence or, to sum it up in one word, casualness. The message is that when we treat our spiritual life with a casual attitude, we are on the path to disaster.

The Mussar teachers teach us that keri is not merely an event. It is a worldview. It is the spiritual danger of living as though life is random and doesn’t call for much deliberate commitment or engagement. All we need to do is drift along with a casual attitude and we put ourselves on the slope to catastrophe.

The Torah’s list of negative outcomes is horrific – subjugation, loss, war, collapse, terror, and even abominable things like being driven by starvation to eat your own children. And to think that all that is being linked to living a very casual life that does not recognize true priorities!

The graphic lesson for us is that living in a casual way is spiritually corrosive and an affront to life. Every encounter, challenge, interruption, and disappointment carries the potential of growth and divine encounter. Living with an attitude of keri undermines that awareness. It encourages passivity instead of responsibility. A person says, “Things just happen. It doesn’t mean anything,” rather than asking, “What is this moment asking of me? Or teaching me? Or offering me?”

The great Mussar teacher of the mid-20^th century, Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, emphasizes that spiritual decline rarely begins with open rebellion. More often it begins with indifference. A practice becomes mechanical. Prayer becomes habit without conscious intention. Moral failures are dismissed as insignificant. This emotional numbness is the essence of keri.

In our era, keri has become so pervasive that it actually characterizes the dominant culture. We are invited and induced to live in perpetual distraction. Things of no consequence are elevated to major (though fleeting) significance. What was it she wore on the red carpet? Did his statistics beat what he got last year? The bombardment of constant stimulation leads to what the Alter of Novardok called pizzur ha’nefesh – a scattered soul. He was writing in the late 19^th century. He had no idea of the extent to which social media could scatter the inner life of the majority of people, for whom it is now the normal way to live, though deeply unsatisfying.

And, when you review the list of disasters that the Torah says keri will bring about, it is a pretty accurate reflection of our broken world.

Overcoming a disastrous life of distraction and casual living begins by cultivating the opposite quality: awakened intentionality. Nothing should be approached casually. Eating, speaking, working, studying and even playing are all arenas where we can work to refine our inner beings and move ourselves closer to wholeness and, ultimately, holiness. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, founder of the 19^th century Mussar movement in eastern Europe, taught that the smallest action can reveal the deepest truths about a person’s character. Treating life casually casts us into a spiritual slumber. But when we live with reflection and discipline, we see clearly that every moment is laden with spiritual opportunities.

Yet Mussar never views the human condition with despair. The recognition of keri is itself the beginning of transformation. To cite Rabbi Yisrael Salanter again, he designated the first steps on the path of Mussar as hergesh, which means “feeling.”

If you notice your own feelings of numbness, distraction, or moral laziness, then you are already on the path to awaken from your own state of keri. On the Mussar path, we don’t seek instant enlightenment, quick-fixes or leaps to the peak of holiness, but only small acts of renewed consciousness: pausing before speaking, giving charity thoughtfully, listening carefully, blessing with attention, restraining anger. These are the sorts of acts that reflect a life led with purpose and intention. These are the steps that respond to the tochecha and that counter a casual lifestyle. There is no other path to wholeness or holiness.

Does the state of keri need some attention in your spiritual curriculum?

===================================================

That’s no longer the case. That came clear to me this past week when, adjacent to my book touring that took me through Connecticut and on to Minneapolis, I recorded two podcasts, though only one is ready to share with you at this time. That one captures me in conversation with Ryan Lambert on his podcast, Bridge Builders Forum.

As that organization says about itself, “The Bridge Builders Forum Podcast aims to help Jews and Christians better understand their faith, the Bible, and each other.”

Frankly, when Ryan first contacted me, I was skeptical. I’m very alert to missionizing and I had never heard of Bridge Builders. In the recent past I was in touch with someone from The Mussar Center in Jerusalem, which says on its webpage, “If you could trade five or ten minutes a day to feel truly alive, happy, and free, would you do it? That’s exactly what this ancient Biblical path of inner work, character development, and healing will do for you.”

Sounds good, no? You have to dig hard to find out that one of the goals of this organization is to bring Jews to Jesus. When I confronted its leader on this buried fact, he answered that he was not a missionary. “I’m non-binary,” he said.

But the website of Bridge Builders was reassuring. They repeat there many of the ideas that exist in the Christian world about Jews, and then say, “These divisive ideas are not only polarizing. They are incorrect both historically and theologically.” And I happened to run into a professor of Jewish Studies who vouched for them. So, I agreed.

Then when I met Ryan and did the podcast, I was completely reassured. He had done his homework, was sincere in his questioning, and was genuinely interested in my work. He truly is a bridge builder.

See for yourself. You can watch the show here:

YouTube:

Apple:

After that, my book tour took me to Minneapolis where I was the guest of Julie Dean, who I knew had started an organization in that city called “Living Mussar.” That much I knew, but nothing beyond. So, it came as a big and pleasant surprise to find myself addressing over 200 people and signing 150 books in events co-sponsored by six local synagogues.

Turns out that Julie and her team have been very busy over the last few years. In 2024, they founded Living Mussar “to reflect what we had become: a vibrant, growing community dedicated to bringing Mussar to life wherever people are seeking meaning. Today, Living Mussar offers small groups, facilitator training, educational partnerships, and resources that open the door for anyone to walk this timeless Jewish path.”

I’ll share the link to the podcast I did with Julie when it becomes available.

Ryan’s interest in Mussar and the expanding network of Living Mussar activities in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area were two points on a map that has been taking shape in my mind as I tour with The Shabbat Effect.

I have to add more points for Buffalo, NY, Bloomfield, NJ, and West Palm Beach, FL, where stops on my tour revealed vibrant communities of Jewish (and some non-Jewish) seekers who were sincerely pursuing spiritual growth in an authentically Jewish way. I am sure this will be how it is elsewhere as well.

This is a very encouraging development because what it says to me is that Mussar has developed a life of its own within the Jewish world. There were only sparks of Mussar when I began my own journey on this path, and now there are steady fires burning in many places.

On the Living Mussar webpage it says, “Mussar is more than study—it is practice. It is not only about who we are, but who we are becoming. At Living Mussar, we are committed to walking this path together: deepening our connection with Judaism, nurturing our souls, and becoming builders of a better world, one choice at a time.”

What I have discovered – to my delighted surprise – is that there are many people in many places who have not only come out to join in this journey, but who have been independently contributing to the formation and growth of a modern Mussar movement. May we all go from strength to strength and may our varied efforts bring more light and wisdom to ourselves and to our world.

When my wife and I were in our late 20s, we were among the founders of an organization called Seva Foundation that is still going strong today providing an enormous amount of service and leadership in the area of blindness treatment and prevention.

One of Seva’s other founders was an ophthalmologist from Michigan, who, when she turned 50, joined an order of Catholic nuns that maintains constant silence. As far as I know, and if she has been true to her vows, our old friend has not uttered a single word since she entered her convent over 25 years ago.

There is no such practice in Judaism. From a Mussar perspective, anything that aligns us with an extreme pole in our behaviour is seen as unbalanced and a distortion of our human natures. That’s not to say that the Jewish tradition does not recognize and value silence. Elie Weisel affirms: “Judaism is full of silences … but we don’t talk about them.”

But even more deeply than that, one of the things I have observed in my years of study and teaching is that Judaism has been sustained not by a king or a pope or a high priest or even a single dogma but by dynamic tensions built into the structure of the tradition.

One principle pulls against another and the point is not to have our gevurah [strength] defeat our chesed[lovingkindness] or our chesed win out over our gevurah, nor for our spontaneous prayer to be our sole form at the expense of formal, fixed prayer, nor vice versa, nor for religious practice to take precedence over spirituality, or spirituality to rule over religion, but for the two opposed forces to pull against one another within us, and instead of canceling each other out, their interaction actually creates movement, growth, balance and long term stability.

This principle applies to speech and silence.

In our generation, our inner realm is flooded with a tsunami of speech that leaves no room whatsoever for silence. That speech is often loud, bombastic, deceitful, offensive and corrupt, and we are challenged time and again to know how to respond, whether with more speech or with silence.

This then becomes an issue in the bein adam l’atzmo sphere – that is, between you and yourself.

There is obviously a difference between own capacity to speak and to be silent, but we should wonder whether that difference holds any significance. Maybe these two modalities are just two alternating aspects of one process, no different than seeing darkness as an absence of light. Is it maybe just like seeing dryness as an absence of wetness?

What triggered my thought about this issue is something that Onkelos said when he translated the Torah into Aramaic, where he does not give what seems the most literal translation to the verse in the Torah that refers to the creation of Primordial Adam. The verse (Genesis 2:7) says:

And the Lord God formed the human from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living soul.

Onkelos translates “and the human became a living soul” as “and the human became a speaking spirit.”

The implication of Onkelos’s translation is that the words we generate come out of and represent our origins as a creature brought to life by the breath of God, and since we are the only creature that practices sophisticated speech, speech becomes the defining feature of our species, and that seems to make a silence no more than the shadow of speech.

Or is it? As I said earlier, Judaism has been sustained not by political leadership or a single dogma but by dynamic tensions. Speech may define us but at the same time, we need to search for the ways in which we are also defined by silence.

About speech, we know how important that is because the story of Creation says over and over that God created this and that by speaking it into existence. Creation was generated by speech. From that perspective, speech is generative, in the sense that it has the power to generate an impact in the world.

It’s interesting that modern linguistics also finds language to be generative. We know that some other animals do communicate verbally, but linguists point out that only human language is highly complex and infinitely expressive, and those characteristics are what allows us to produce and understand sentences we have never heard before.

Without this power of generativity, it would be impossible to build cities, send humans to the moon, develop mRNA vaccines, and find soothing meaning in lullabies.

Calling speech creative or generative expresses no value judgment about whether what comes out of our mouths has benefit or does harm. Jewish tradition explicitly recognizes that the great generative power of speech can be applied to doing great good but equally, to the cause of enormous destruction.

In the Book of Proverbs (18:21), we read: “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.” Words possess this dual power; they can heal, encourage, and create and, at the same time, they can wound, kill and destroy.

Judaism deals with this dual power in a typically Jewish way, which is by establishing a code of conduct. In the 19^th century, Rabbi Yisrael Meir haKohen Kagan, known as the Chofetz Chaim, produced a book called Shmirat HaLashon, literally, “Guarding the Tongue,” in which he codified the Jewish laws of speech.

There are grounds for saying that speech defines us as human beings, but silence is also a defining feature of humanity. We find many references to silence in our sources, though not so many as to speech. In Pirkei Avot 1:17, for example, Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel says:

All my days I grew up among the sages and did not find anything better for the body than silence.

And in Pirkei Avot (3:13) we find “Silence is a protective fence for wisdom.”

And there are more.

We can look around and see that human speech far exceeds the capacity of any other type of animal and so can be given the status of being a defining feature of our species. But when it comes to silence, every species has this capability. What makes it an especially human quality?

Rav Kook, (1865–1935; the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel) points out that “Some silence means cessation of speech.” That’s the dimension of silence we share with other species. A human can stop talking and a rooster stops crowing and a dog does not bark all the time. We have no special claim in that area.

But Rav Kook goes on to say: “Another silence means cessation of thought” and with that comment he is pointing out the ability we humans have to make free-will choices about what goes on in our minds.

Mostly, we don’t. Mostly, we let the choo-choo train of thought roar down the tracks with green lights flashing and our inner awareness filled with an unrelenting babbling of words, ideas and judgments.

But it is not necessarily so. To demonstrate, if you hold yourself perfectly still, you can call a halt to the flow of thoughts, and you can direct your inner awareness to be filled with direct sensory perceptions, if only momentarily. Even if the experience is fleeting, it informs you that it is possible to be present, awake and aware without any thinking taking place.

Great. So now you have had a glimpse of what it is like to be in a coma. But no, that’s not it at all.

Rav Kook keeps going, “That silence,” he says, referring to cessation of thought, “arrives together with the most hidden, beautiful, and exalted thought.”

Cessation of thought, or inner silence, is not just a blank space. My teacher, Rabbi Perr, zt”l, said something similar. “If you are never silent,” he said, “you will never hear the thoughts that come min ha’shomayim – from heaven.”

We learn from this that a stream of exalted wisdom is flowing in our direction. But we will only be able to pick up what is being broadcast by opening the inner receiver, which we do by interrupting the inner discourse and becoming silent within.

Having a direct connection between our inner beings and the divine wisdom is also a defining feature of our humanity. In one way, it may be even more defining than speech. How so? Because not every human being can speak, maybe because they are an infant, or injured, or disabled, or demented. But everyone can be silent.

And if silence is a capability of every human being, then each of us has the ability to tap into the constant flow of divine wisdom that permeates the universe. All we need to do is to stop filling our inner receiver with our own noise, to quiet to the point of stillness, and to listen.

If my contention is correct, that the dynamic pull between opposite forces is a deep structure of Judaism, then silence and speech and the tension between them is not something we should seek to resolve. Neither is the defining feature of our species and we need them both.

And the central challenge that we face in this area is knowing when to let each of these forces exert just the right pull on our thought, words and deeds, so that the tension in the cables holds up the bridge, rather than pulling it down.

By way of conclusion, I want to point to the fact that the first recorded usage of the term “mussar” shows up at the very beginning of the biblical Book of Proverbs, which opens with the words:

The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel; to know chochma u’mussar [wisdom and Mussar].

Why both? Why did King Solomon, who is known as “the wisest of all people,” not just come to teach us wisdom? And the answer is that you cannot teach wisdom. Wisdom is something you can develop, but no one can teach it to you.

As a result, we need something in addition to wisdom that will serve as a path that leads to wisdom, and for that, Shlomo says, we have Mussar.

Following the path of Mussar brings about the development of wisdom.

And wisdom is what tells us when to speak and when to remain silent

How does speech or silence emerge in your spiritual curriculum?

Yesterday, as I pulled up to the airport, I got a text that my flight was cancelled. Of course, I stepped in to find a very long line of people at customer service. I was marooned at the airport for 4 hours until the next flight.

Today, I had my eye on his map and watched as the Uber driver made a wrong turn, making it much tighter for me to make my train. I jumped out of the car, ran through a train station unexpectedly (to me!) under redevelopment, and arrived on the platform to find that the train was an hour late.

These are just the daily realities that are showing up in front of me because I happen to be on a book tour. If I were settled at home, the anecdotes would be about the grocery store and the package delivery, or the boss and the deadline. This is what the ups and downs of mundane life are like.

Of course, all of it is a rich opportunity to work on myself. I watch the driver make the wrong turn and immediately the projected arrival time at the train station jumps from 10:55 to 11:02 and the train is scheduled to depart at 11:23, and I think to myself, here is where the middah of bitachon, trust, comes into play. It’s not that I trust that I am sure to make the train, it’s more that I know there will be another train and I will arrive how and when I can. It is my obligation to muster the best possible effort on my own behalf, but I need to recognize that I am not in charge of the show and it is not within my power to control the outcome.

And sometimes, on my travels, an experience takes me beyond my narrow focus on my own plans, delays and achievements.

The Uber I was sitting in when I got word that my flight was cancelled was being driven by a woman who answered my question about her place of origin by saying, “Iran.” The war in Iran has been raging and so my immediate response was to ask if she had family there. Yes, she answered, her mother and her father and siblings. But then, she added, they are not so important as the 11-year-old daughter she left behind when she emigrated three years ago.

“I’m so worried about my daughter in Tehran,” she said. And then she began to cry.

I’ve been worried about a flight that was cancelled by an airline that has 8 daily flights on that same route. Call that a problem? She, on the other hand, described what her parents had to do to get her daughter out of Tehran to a place in the countryside that was much less likely to be bombed.

And here I find myself in another situation that is pointing toward a middah. My heart is brimming with unquestioned empathy and compassion for this woman; there is no Mussar issue there. No, the middah that I find coming into sharper focus is discernment / tevunah. This human being, who happens to be driving an Uber that is taking me to the airport, is crying. And I struggle to discern for myself, is it ok to offer a hug to an Uber driver? Or even to put a comforting hand on her hand that is holding the steering wheel?

These are a few incidents from my recent days that bring into high relief the opportunity that exists in every encounter, every endeavour, every moment. Each situation is not just something that calls for action to solve the problem it contains; it is also an opportunity to learn something about myself and to put that lesson into practice in relation to the middah that I have come to see is implicated in the situation.

Have you run into any situations recently that summoned you to recognize and work on a middah that you could see was being challenged in that situation?

The debt we share is enormous.

One day, when I was hoping to spend some time with Rabbi Perr, our meeting was delayed because he wanted to visit some bereaved people who were sitting shiva. I was waiting for him when he returned, and he told me that when he hears of someone who had passed away, his practice was to consider that person’s middot (character – or soul – traits) to see if he could identify any middah in which that person excelled beyond his own level.

Once he had identified a quality in which the deceased outshone him, he undertook to practice that trait for a period of time. That way, even though the person had died, their superlative characteristic would continue to live on in the world, now in the person of Rabbi Perr.

When I adopt that practice in regard to Rabbi Perr, there are many middot that fit the bill, but to highlight one that everyone who knew him remarked on, it was that he was endlessly curious, far beyond my level of that trait.

His curiosity (Hebrew סַקרָנוּת /sakranut) led him to enjoy fixing clocks because he was enthralled by their movements.

He once asked me, “Do you know how many stars there are?” and when I confessed that I didn’t, he said, “Billions of billions.”

Once when I joined him at the wedding of a nephew on his wife’s side, we were sitting together at a table, watching the bearded men in their black hats dancing joyfully. He leaned over so I could hear him over the din and asked, “Do you recognize that song?” I listened and realized that the dance band was playing a Mexican love song, “Besame mucho,” which begins with the words “Kiss me now, kiss me with passion — kiss me as if this were to be our very last night.” We both laughed out loud as we watched the Orthodox men twirl to the tune, and through the laughter he sputtered, “They think it’s a Chassidische niggun.”

And then I thought to myself, how do you know that song? He loved music and this was proof that he listened to all kinds of it.

When my wife and I went out to Far Rockaway to visit the Perr family after Rabbi Perr had died, one of his daughters told us that she had been his computer operator. He would call her and say, “Tzipporah, ask the computer …” and he would be curious to know how many eyes an ant had, or if the stripes on all zebras are identical. She told me that Rabbi Perr had no objection to using the internet; he had her do his searching only because he was well aware how curious he was and he was certain that once he started, he would get good and lost in the tangled, endless byways of the web.

Just last month, I made a trip out to Far Rockaway to give some dear people there copies of my book on Shabbat. One went to Rebbetzin Perr and another to Rabbi Shayah Kohn, the executive director of the yeshiva.

When I met with Rabbi Kohn, I asked him how the transition to the new rosh yeshiva had been going – the elder Rabbi Perr having been succeeded by his son, Rabbi Yisroel Moshe Perr. Among the many things Rabbi Kohn told me, he was emphatic that the new rosh yeshiva was a better fundraiser than his father had been. He described the difference:

Rabbi Perr the younger is focused and efficient. Equipped with some intelligence on what a person might be inclined to donate, he made a clear request for that amount and it usually did not take more than 20 minutes to conclude a meeting, most often successfully.

And his father? Rabbi Kohn would make sure the elder Rabbi Perr had the same sort of information as he now provided to prepare his son, but when they would walk into the prospective donor’s home or office, there was every possibility that the rosh yeshiva’s eye would be caught by some painting on the wall – “the play of light and shadow on the face is so expressive!” – or a bottle of wine on the table – “what’s distinctive about that vintage? – or he would ask about something else that sparked his interest, so that they were very likely to be leaving the meeting two hours later without him ever getting around to making the ask!

I can easily understand why the executive director of the yeshiva, who is responsible for the $3-4 million annual budget, would praise the executive skills of his new fundraising partner, but from my perspective, Rabbi Perr’s boundless curiosity was an admirable virtue.

Rabbi Perr wanted to know everything he could learn about the world around him. And he was equally – if not more – curious about the workings of the inner life. He was fascinated by human nature and was always probing to discover what it would take to cause a person to grow and blossom.

His curiosity led him to question me about everything I said to him, to ferret out the truth within the statement, or the question behind the question. That’s the place where I met him most intimately and that’s where he had the greatest impact on my life, and where I miss him most. In his memory, I will ask more questions.

And so I am curious: When you think about someone who was close to you who has passed away, is there one middah in which they excelled beyond your level of that trait that you could undertake to practice? What might that middah be, and how will you practice it?

Yet Pesach is also always a challenge for me. That’s because I am the only person on any side of my family who observes this holiday in a formal way. Yes, the families gather for two Seders, and people come from long distances to attend – this year from Boston, New York, Montreal and Regina, Saskatchewan – which tells me that it must be meaningful for them. But I am the only one who goes to synagogue on the festival, and both Seders begin at the usual dinner time, not according to the turning of the new day on the Jewish calendar, which this year happened at 8:33 pm here in Toronto.

Bev and I manage that by having a table in a room adjacent to the dining room, and when I get back from synagogue, we begin our own Seder. Family come in and out, and we continue to the end.

It’s not ideal, but it’s the kind of solution that doesn’t force anyone to capitulate to anyone else, and it does keep the family together.

The first Seder this year was held at Bev’s brother’s house. He lives in a Jewish neighbourhood, and there is a warm and welcoming synagogue about a 20-minute walk from his house that I attend on occasions like this. After the conclusion of the evening service that brought in Pesach, I walked the cold and windy streets from the synagogue to Bev’s brother’s house.

It seems that most families in that part of town were like mine in starting their Seders earlier than indicated by sunset (and Jewish law). I know that because as I walked along, I passed many houses where I could look into illuminated dining rooms where assortments of people sat around tables, candles burning, yarmulkes on some heads. Sometimes, the house would be dark, and I figured either those people were not Jewish, or they were having the Seder at someone else’s house this night.

As I walked along, unabashedly peeping into people’s dining room gatherings, it struck me that no one had drawn their curtains. The Seders were being celebrated in full view of the street. I found that remarkable. I read and hear so much concern about antisemitism these days, but at the domestic level, no one in this neighbourhood seemed concerned enough to hide their celebration of the holiday from public attention.

This gave me pause to consider. Surely there is more open antisemitism than we have encountered in many years, but despite the blaring headlines and enraged leaders, life for Jews is still very good. Very few of us are touched directly or even indirectly by the events we read about. House after house, no one felt they had to conceal their Seder behind closed curtains.

I’m glad and grateful for the organizations that rise up to counter every antisemitic incident that happens, but I’m not going to adopt their single-minded vehemence. The term the Mussar teachers use for gratitude is not usually hoda’ah, which literally means “thanks,” but rather hakarat ha’tov, which means “recognizing the good.”

Without minimizing that there are problems in the world, and a special set of problems for Jews, I’m not going to allow that to get in the way of recognizing that there are also abundant gifts and goodness that we get to enjoy in our lives. In fact, the more we invest in gratitude for what we have and the more we bring that into the center of our lives, the more each of us will thrive as people and as Jews, and the more the Jewish community will thrive. Doing that not only enriches our personal and communal life, but it is also a vibrant and effective response to antisemitism.

So let me ask you: What good do you recognize in your life right now that you feel called to shout out?

LOS ANGELES, March 25 (Reuters) - A Los Angeles jury found Alphabet’s Google and Meta liable for$3m in compensatory damages and an additional $3m punitive damages on Wednesday in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit.

I have been following this case closely, not so much because I am concerned about the social responsibility of the social media giants as for objective confirmation that social media is addictive. In truth, that’s hardly a surprise finding. All you have to do is sit in an airport departure lounge or stand in a supermarket lineup to see that almost everyone fills every uncommitted moment of the day with a glance at their phones.

The court case focused on the negative impact addiction to social media has on teens. My view takes in a larger field. I’m concerned with the impact addiction to cell phones has on our ability to tune into the holy dimension of life. The luminous presence of the holy is there – in every moment of every day, but we have no access to that radiant light of the divine when our eyes are filled with the glow of the screen in our hands.

That’s especially an issue on Shabbat. Or, should I say, on the holy Shabbat. Because when God created the seventh day, the verse says, “And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it.”

Shabbat is holy by its nature from creation, whether or not we acknowledge that or tune into it. But it also comes around every week and presents us with a recurring opportunity to tune into the holy. And in my experience, for that to happen, I need to tune out everything else that draws my attention to the more superficial level of the reality I inhabit.

And there in my hand is something designed to grab and hold my attention – I need to shut out the compellingly loud, coarse, colourful, flashing, base world that leaps out and grabs me from my screen in order that I can gather my attention to focus on a different dimension of life, one that is as delicate and beautiful as a butterfly’s wing.

Just like AA says about other forms of addiction, we need to acknowledge the carefully crafted power of the phone to demand our attention, along with our addiction to it. Of course, having made such a blanket statement, I need to acknowledge that there are some exceptional individuals who can take or leave their phones, but they are very much in the minority.

In my book and in the talks I have been doing based on it, I lean heavily on a medrash from the 5^th century (in Bereishit Rabbah) that says that the mitzvot were given in order to provide human beings with a way to refine ourselves. I respond intuitively and positively to the notion of “refinement” and have written about that in regard to the traditional Jewish concept captured in the Yiddish word “erlichkeit.”

And so I was surprised when I encountered pushback on the idea of “refinement.” As someone said to me, “When I hear the word refinement, I see very cultured English ladies with long white gloves sipping tea from fine china.”

Needless to say, that is not what our rabbis had in mind when they said that purpose of themitzvot is l’tzoref a person. That Hebrew word – l’tzoref – actually refers to smelting, and specifically to separating precious metals like silver or gold from impurities in the ore. You can see why it’s a good metaphor for personal refinement, though the pleasure of eating crustless mini-sandwiches does not come into it.

The 16^th century Mussar book Orchot Tzaddikim invokes a different metaphor that says basically the same thing. It refers to “throwing aside the husk and taking the fine flour.”

This is one of the subtleties of the Mussar tradition. Christians have a notion of “Seven deadly sins” but there is no such thing in the Mussar view. All traits are seen to be neutral in and of themselves. They only become positive or negative according to how they are put into play in our lives. As I have pointed out many times, you can do great harm with generosity (like when you spoil a child, or enable someone’s destructive behaviour) and, equally, make excellent use of a trait like envy (as a motivator).

That’s why I find refinement the right word for what a Mussar student does when they work on themselves. It is a process of cultivating traits so that the gold and silver is all that remains, because the dross has been purified out. Or to use the other metaphor, the fine flour is in hand, and the coarse husks have been blown away by the wind.

The Book of Proverbs (17:3) teaches: “Matzref lakesef ve’kur la’zahav ve’ish le’fi mahalalo,” which means, “The refining pot is for silver and the furnace for gold, and people are tested by their praise.” Rabbeinu Yonah explains that we can only assess the value of the gold and silver by smelting them, and in regard to people, we can gauge their “value” by observing what a person praises. A person’s choice of words, topics of conversation, and activities all reveal the state of their character. And, conversely, what we pay attention to, how we think and act, all have their effect on character.

Which brings us back to cell phones and social media. Anyone who is drawn to the notion of the holy, who is moved by the Torah’s insistent encouragement that we make holiness the north star of our lives, who understands that the world will not be redeemed except by our own acts of redemption, and who appreciates that the Jewish people will thrive only when individual Jews pursue their own thriving, will see the need to clear a period in their life that can be a receptacle for that holiness. Such is Shabbat.

Can social media be tamed? Will the court case cause changes of policy? Is a $6 penalty something the media giants will even notice? None of that is my primary concern. Rather, the conviction itself is cautionary. I encourage you to do your soul a favour and tune out, at least this one day a week, so that the vessel is prepared and ready to receive something totally different, something rare and precious, something paradoxically central yet seemingly alien to our world.

As you make Shabbat a vessel for the holy, so do you become a vessel for the holy.

For today’s blog post, I have invited a friend and student to share her experiences of a Shabbat – spent with me!! I think you’ll find what she has to say interesting, written from a perspective different from where I stand when I write these posts. Thank you, Diana!

By Diana Fisher

When I first ordered my copy of Everyday Holiness on Audible back on October 19, 2018, I knew very little about Judaism or how to live “Jewishly.” All I knew is that I was a Jew, and I knew this because my family and I had immigrated to the United States in the 1970’s as Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union. And although I was raised without either the cup of a Jewish religious container or the wine of a Jewish spirituality (as described in last week’s post), I knew I was somehow part of a Jewish “us.” I knew I was part of an “us” because there was an antisemitic “them” in the world. So, instead of rooting my Jewish identity in all the beautiful values and traditions of my lineage, I learned to define my Jewishness primarily by who I was not. This left me very spiritually lonely, almost completely unaware of Torah, rituals, mitzvot, prayer, and all the rich teachings of Judaism. Luckily, not all was lost because I was somehow still exposed to the joys of pickled herring (we pickled everything), the delights of dancing to Yiddish music, and the core Jewish expectation that we should succeed and learn for our entire lives. This was a good thing and eventually led me here to this blog.

Although it was always hard for me to feel comfortable in synagogues or “at home” in formal Jewish settings, I often longed to be part of a Jewish community. And though I wasn’t even sure I believed in God, after years of “spiritual orphanhood” I began exploring Jewish writings. One day, I came across an online article that described the meaning of “tikkun middot” and a spiritual practice called Mussar. After reading about it a bit more extensively, I learned that “repair of the self” and calibrating and refining the measures of character is a process that should be undertaken before (or at the very least, alongside) our pursuit of “tikkun olam” or repair of the world. Even with my minimal knowledge of Judaism, this made sense because there were plenty of social justice advocates (including myself) who were angry, cynical, unkind, impatient, and self-absorbed. That’s when I started reading a few books by this author named Alan Morinis. Little did I know that Mussar would soon become my gateway into the Jewish tradition.

Almost eight years have passed since my first exposure to that article and Mussar, which has helped me stop thinking of myself as a spiritual orphan. I now spend quite a bit of time learning in va’adim, studying Torah and midrash, taking various courses at The Mussar Institute and other Jewish organizations, working closely with treasured chevruta partners, and learning how to more fully participate in rituals such as Counting the Omer, Elul, Passover, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. In so many ways, studying Mussar has slowly connected me to my rich Jewish heritage. In fact, just this last week I was preparing to have my very first formal Shabbat, ever! It would include Challah, wine, candles, kosher food, and blessings. And guess who was coming to dinner to help me do it? Well, the One Above certainly works in mysterious ways because Alan Morinis was promoting his new book in Los Angeles and he would soon be sitting at my table—no kidding!

Although I was nervous, I had just finished reading The Shabbat Effect and felt excited to put into practice what was suggested in the book. I was intrigued to see if, as Alan had suggested, observing Shabbat could really transform the rest of my week and slowly help shape my character in significant ways. But as the time for his visit approached, I panicked that I wasn’t prepared to do this. Did I have contraband foods in my house? Proper utensils? Candles that fit the candlesticks that were gifted to me by a dear chaver from Canada? Why didn’t I make some flash cards with the blessings?! Ugh. My Jewish imposter syndrome was acting up, but as time ticked closer to Alan’s arrival, I summoned the courage that I could do this. Besides, Alan wasn’t judgmental, knew I didn’t have a kosher kitchen, and said he would be bringing all the food. What could go wrong? No problemo!

Once Alan arrived, I suggested we should walk to the liquor store to buy kosher wine and then go to Target to get paper plates. Great plan, except Alan reminded me that we should stay mindful of sunset and work backwards to make sure that the potatoes and yams would have enough time to bake and dinner could be properly warmed up before the start of Shabbat. He also asked if I’d be willing to tape the little button in the fridge that controls the light so he could use the refrigerator that evening. Oh, wow, I hadn’t thought of that, but of course. No wonder chapter one was about awareness…now I was starting to catch on. I might be new to all this, I told Alan, but for sure we would get back on time to put everything together. As we walked back to my home, he asked me where the stairs are since I lived on the 4^th floor. “Oh, we have an elevator, don’t worry,” I said. “Ah, but I can’t use the elevator once Shabbat starts,” Alan calmly said. “Ohhhh, of course,” I uttered while secretly hoping that I had the right key that would open the stairwell. As we continued to discuss the various considerations of observing a mindful Shabbat practice, I received a panicked text message from my teenage daughter Sasha. It said: “Our fridge is dead! There’s no light coming on.” I had to laugh.

With an hour left before sunset, Alan pointed out that electric window coverings should also be lowered or raised to the desired place since those aren’t meant to be controlled on Shabbat. Why didn’t I anticipate that? He also needed to print out a few things that he needed before Shabbat, which included the walking directions to a local shul in the morning. What, no google maps on Shabbat? Yikes, I hadn’t thought of that either. There were so many little details to take notice of. I gulped, finally starting to understand why “awareness” is a perfect place to begin (and keep returning to) for those of us who live mostly on autopilot. I knew I was capable of being in “shining mind” as opposed to “dull mind,” but how often and for how long?

Just as I paused to consider this important question, I remembered that I should check on the potatoes that were baking in the oven. With Alan standing at the kitchen counter, I enthusiastically picked up my knife and jabbed a potato covered by aluminum foil. “Hmm,” I said, “I can’t tell if they’re done.” Alan simply smiled as I reached into the oven and grabbed another potato out of the oven. I was getting ready to jab the second potato when Alan looked at me and said, “The knife, Diana.” Oops, I had been using a non-kosher knife instead of a plastic one to poke the potato. After seeing the sheepish look on my face, Alan graciously said: “It’s quite okay as long as you don’t stab them all so I can have one too!” How embarrassing, I had just failed the potato test in front of Alan Morinis… but I was determined to keep things going as sunset was fast approaching. I had to move quickly. The butter! I forget to take out the butter, which Alan had asked for a few minutes ago. Without paying attention to what I was doing, I instinctively grabbed the tub of butter out of the refrigerator and came only a few inches away from inserting the same non-kosher knife for spreading before I heard Alan’s voice gently remind me: “Uhm, the knife again, Diana.” I’m sure I turned four shades of red at that moment. What was I thinking?? Or was I not doing much thinking at all….

Only later that night, after the candles stopped burning and the delicious babka was eaten, did I go back to Chapter 1, page 18 of The Shabbat Effect to read:

“Only when consciousness is brightly illuminated will we be in a position to be vigilant about our actions rather than governed by our habits or unconscious forces.”

Thank you for this teaching, Alan. How very true, and how much more work did I recognize was on my spiritual curriculum on my very first ritual observance of Shabbat. While it’s now back to basics for me, at least I remembered to cut our evening’s orange with a plastic knife and was able to reassure my daughter that our fridge was not dead but simply resting for Shabbat…and that we should slowly learn to do the same.

What’s on your Shabbat spiritual curriculum?

I’ve been speaking to audiences across the Jewish spectrum, and I admit that I do not give the same talks in Orthodox circles as I do in the liberal Jewish world. The talks I give to both those audiences are very related, and both the difference and the relationship are revealed in the symbolism of the cup and the wine that are the key symbols in the kiddush ritual we do to sanctify Shabbat.

In the liberal Jewish world, I am emphasizing the importance of having not just spirituality but a vessel to hold it, which is the religious dimension of Judaism. And in the more observant world, I am cautioning against having an empty cup – all structure, no content.

The spiritual and the religious are both integral to lifting the cup of wine to sanctify the seventh day and, to my mind, both are integral to living a spiritual life. I’ve been emphasizing everywhere I speak that there is a big difference between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life, and Judaism offers us a pathway that emphasizes the spiritual life. After all, the blessing to sanctify Shabbat is entirely about the wine; the poor cup, essential as it is, doesn’t even get a mention!

There is another point that I stress in all my talks and that is the notion of personal refinement, which in Yiddish is ehrlichkeit.

The liberal world has been so consumed with tikkun olam as to make that a synonym for Judaism. There is good in social action, and it is evident how much it is needed, but when one’s focus is entirely set on the outer world, it overlooks the parallel track of the inner work we are called to do.

I adapt the teaching of Rav Yerucham Levovitz here, who said that if you see a baker baking matza and you ask, “What is your work?” the baker should not say that “I am baking matza” but that “I am working on caution, patience, alacrity” or whatever inner traits that person sought to refine.

Similarly, a person engaged in tikkun olam activities who only sees the social need they are trying to meet is failing in their obligation to refine themselves. There, too, the answer should be “I am working on patience, compassion” or whatever inner traits that person knows to be on their personal spiritual curriculum.

This same message plays out in the Orthodox world in the form of a critique of frumkeit, a term literally meaning “piety” but used as a measure of a person’s adherence to the letter of Jewish law, and not just the minimum law, but increasingly an aspiration to add stringency upon stringency (chumros) to the legal requirements.

Of course, no one is advocating for breaches to halacha, but this is calling out a Judaism that is all action and no heart. There is a saying attributed to many sources that says, “Frum iz a Galach,” which means that being pious is for the priest. But Jews, “A Jew is not meant to be frum – a Jew is meant to be ehrlich” – refined.

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe emphasized the same message. He pointed out that the word frumkeit is only one letter removed from krumkeit, a Yiddish word that means “warped,” “twisted,” or “crooked.”

You don’t hear the concept of ehrlichkeit / refinement being promoted in any corner of the Jewish world nearly to the extent you hear tikkun olam or frumkeit. I attribute that to the more general phenomenon that spirituality was pushed to the side everywhere in our Jewish world in the second half of the 20^thcentury, and so we who succeeded in finding our way to drink at the spiritual wells of our own tradition got there, for the most part, on a path of personal search and wandering. For us, the notion of being ehrlich is generally not intuitive. We must learn anew for our generation.

If you do a Google search of the words “ehrlich” and “ehrlichkeit” you will find, as I did, that the place they show up most commonly is in obituaries. Less than discussing refinement (which would be helpful to us), people get praised for having that quality (which is nice for them).

What might be helpful to us is to note that the modern Hebrew word for “refine” is צֹרַף – to be refined, to be purified, to be cleansed – shares its root with the word for “jeweler,” i.e., someone who refines metals. That word shows up in Isaiah 41:7 and in discussing it, Rashi gives two interpretations:

1. The tzoref is the one who beat gold to form a vessel.

2. It refers Abraham, who refined people to draw them close to the divine.

Our world is so coarse. The trend toward debasement in outlook, speech and action seems to accelerate and reach new depths every day. Against that background, the call to refine ourselves takes on the proportions of a major challenge, one that gives meaning to our lives and hope for our future, as individuals, communities and a species.

Does someone come to your mind as an exemplar of the quality of ehrlichkeit / refinement as I’ve been discussing it here? I’d love to read your description of such a person, and I am sure others would as well.

The first step is to recognize that the inner emptiness is calling to be filled by holiness, not by food or celebrities or internet “friends.”

The second step is to prepare a space in your life where holiness can come to rest. This is the essence of Shabbat. When the Torah says that God sanctified Shabbat, I understand that to mean that the seventh day is designated as a place in time where the divine dimension in life comes to the fore.

God created the seventh day, and “then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it.” We are called upon to repeat that consecration every week. In the Kiddush blessing that we make over wine, we recite the verses that tell of the creation of the seventh day and its sanctification and in so doing, we align ourselves with that original consecration.

It’s not like we are casting a spell. We are stating an intention to guard and keep the holiness of the day in our thought, speech and deed. Practical actions are the only way to create the vessel that might hold the holiness.

Most of the things that are traditionally prohibited on Shabbat are the types of activities that will spring leaks in the time-vessel for holiness. In our generation, there is no bigger culprit than the cell phone.

Even when what is coming in through your phone is not completely defiled and abhorrent (ok, that takes care of 50% of the content), it draws your attention to the coarse here-and-now world and when you are looking that way, you are not looking toward the subtle realm of the holy.

Holiness requires a vessel and that container needs to have strong boundaries or else the holiness will leak away, and cell phones are boundary busters.

I wrote about that in a previous blog post, and when I did, I received an email from someone who protested because she said she had recently saved the life of a neighbour who called her in medical distress and since she answered her phone on Shabbat, she was able to call 911 and the person survived.

On the surface, that sounds compelling. Jewish law certainly prioritizes saving a life above all else, and there is no question that Shabbat observance is (as the rabbis say) “pushed off” when a life is at stake.

There is even a notion of a chasid shoteh, a pious fool. That’s the term given to someone who gets their priorities so wrong that they fail to save a life because they are so busy being religiously observant. The example in the Talmud is of a man who sees a woman drowning in the river and he does not jump in to save her because that will mean making physical contact with a strange woman. A pious fool, the rabbis say!

(The Orthodox Union categorizes someone who does not vaccinate their children for “religious reasons” as another variant on the chasid shoteh.)

I challenged myself to think through how she could have acted on her laudable good intentions to serve (and maybe save) her neighbour, but do so without using her cell phone on Shabbat. My first thought was that if she planned to shut off her phone, she would have to coach her neighbour in advance that in case of an emergency, she should call 911 directly.

That thought made me realize that even without taking Shabbat into account, that would have been a good thing to do. In a life-threatening situation, seconds can make all the difference and calling her rather than directly to 911 wasted precious time. If her neighbour was able to call her, then she obviously had the ability to call 911 and it would have been most helpful to have coached her in advance to do that, Shabbat or no.

That’s how Shabbat works. It doesn’t just happen; it requires preparation. And its effect is to teach us the benefit of preparation.

Clearing the space for the holy requires that you take steps in advance to prepare. “On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, etc.” (Exodus 16:5). The verse is not talking only about preparing cooked dishes for enjoying on Shabbat, it is talking about the need to think through and to take steps to prepare in advance so nothing will breach the vessel for holiness we are able to create for ourselves on Shabbat. In this case, had she taken those preparatory steps, it would have served both her Shabbat and her neighbour’s life.

One of the major inner traits that a Shabbat practice requires – and, in turn, cultivates – is trust in God [bitachon]. There is a whole chapter on that trait in my book, The Shabbat Effect. Am I so important that the world needs me to be on-call 24/7 to solve everyone’s problems? Or is there healthy humility in taking preparatory steps to be responsible, and then turning away from the screen on the device, and toward the radiance that is only visible when we draw open the curtains that hide it in our regular lives.

If you do not (yet!) shut off your phone on Shabbat, for what reasons do you feel you need it?

This calls to mind the famous Talmudic debate when the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel argued for two and a half years over whether it would have been better had humanity been or not been created in the first place. Shammai argued it would have been better had people not been created, while Hillel argued it was better to have been created.

Ultimately, the sages voted and the conclusion went with Shammai – that it would have been preferable had humanity never been created at all.

The Talmud gives no reason why each side took the positions they did in the debate, why Shammai thought it better had we never been created or why Hillel defended humanity’s existence.

This record of this debate is found in tractate Eruvin on page 13b. I always find it interesting to look at the context in which the rabbis chose to insert a particular piece of teaching, and the story of the debate between Hillel and Shammai about human beings being created comes immediately after this:

Anyone who humbles himself, the Holy Blessed One exalts him, and anyone who exalts himself, the Holy Blessed One humbles him. Anyone who seeks greatness, greatness flees from him, and anyone who flees from greatness, greatness seeks him out. And anyone who forces the moment [expending great effort to achieve a goal], the moment forces him [to fail]. And anyone who yields to the moment, the moment stands by him [and he succeeds].

What’s under discussion here is the human tendency to self-glorify. Even the idea of “forcing the moment” is a display of arrogance. Despite the fact that the moment is not right, the person pursues their will. The universe be damned; I want it now!

If this depiction were to be acted out, it would fit perfectly to the paradigm of the struggle between Moses and the Pharaoh. The king of Egypt fashioned himself a god-king, exalted as the earthly incarnation of the sky god Horus and serving as the absolute political ruler as well as the high priest of the religion. Moshe, on the other hand is the paragon of humility. The Torah names him as “the most humble person on the face of the earth,” and his conduct backs that up. When God offers to destroy the children of Israel and start a new nation from Moses, Moses turns down the offer and says that if that were to happen, he would want to be completely wiped out of the Torah – or “Your book,” as he says.

In fact, this contest between egotistical and humble models of leadership is explicit in the Torah. Just before the plague of locusts is initiated (Exodus 10:3), Moses says to Pharaoh, “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?”

Interesting to see the same paradigm showing up in the struggle between Haman and Mordechai that is the political axis of the Purim story. Haman is all about self-interest and power, while Mordechai is the servant of his people.

This archetypal paradigm helps us understand the difference between the view of Shammai and that of Hillel. Almost 2,000 years ago, Shammai assessed the world he was seeing and drew the conclusion that humanity, on balance, was arrogant and self-serving by nature and would always be so, while Hillel saw the good side of humanity as dominant.

Although Hillel and Shammai debated for two and a half years, and even though they resolved the question in a vote for the negative view, they did not call for the destruction of this wayward species. Instead, they showed us how we who bear the burden of ego should conduct ourselves. They said:

Now that the human has been created, one should examine the actions [they have already done]. And some say: One should scrutinize [future] actions.

Yes, said the Sages, arrogant, egotistical and self-interested by nature, but not without the possibility of redemption. All we have to do is examine and learn from the things we have done, and think hard and critically before we take the next step.

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, in his 18^th century classic of the Mussar tradition, Mesillat Yesharim / Path of the Just (3:7) cites this Talmudic dictum and comments: “See how these two terms are two very good and beneficial instructions.”

He goes on: “This is analogous to feeling out a garment to ascertain whether it is good and strong or weak and frayed. So too, one should feel out their deeds to ascertain their nature through an absolutely thorough examination until they are left pure and clean.”

What do we learn? We can’t expect that our leaders will stop erecting monuments to themselves and trumpeting their own egos. So it is; so it has always been.

But what we can and should look for is the sense of conscience and introspection that would show that they are committed to the good of the populace, that they have the capacity to learn from their mistakes, and that they are thinking carefully and with consideration of public needs in plotting their next steps.

The leader who makes a mistake or is caught out in misbehaviour who then doubles down, blames others and takes no responsibility is the Pharaoh in thin disguise. The humble leader is a much rarer species.

And, of course, all the same questions apply to us. How do we act as leaders. How perfected is our own conscience and introspection? Are we ever guilty of “forcing the moment”? How often do we “feel out” our deeds so that we are more purified and cleaner in our actions?

I wonder how you would vote in the debate today…

Position 1: Human beings are by nature so selfish, egotistical and self-interested that it would have been better for all of creation had we never come into existence.

Position 2: Our ability to be humble, to scrutinize our actions past and present, and to cause ourselves to change for the better redeems our negative aspects.

I invite you to share more about your position by submitting a comment to this post.

Vote now!! And may all innocent people be safe.

The address emphasized that, in his view, what we need to do is stop letting our community be shaped and focused by the antisemites. Instead of persisting with its stance of self-defense, the community should shift priorities to focus on building, rather than just protecting, Jewish life, and instead should lean into Jewish values, culture, and community.

I agree with a lot of his critique of a Jewish community defined by those who hate us. But he never really gets to suggesting what it would take to create a Jewish community that thrives and flourishes. He calls for more funding for Jewish day schools but says nothing about any sort of investment in the adults of our community.

What I see is that his advocacy is based within the same paradigm that generated the priorities of the Jewish community that he argues against. As a result, his “solutions,” such as they are, are just more of the same of what the Jewish community has prioritized since the end of the Second World War, whereas thriving will only emerge if there is a paradigm shift.

If you have been listening to me or reading my writings you know that I hit hard on pointing out that the Jewish community in the second half of the 20^th century turned away for our own spiritual traditions in favour of assimilation, affluence, higher education, political engagement, tikkun olam, building palatial synagogues and the like.

The inner life of the individual got no attention and, in Bret Stephen’s perspective, shaped as it is by that very outlook I just catalogued, it still doesn’t. And yet can there be real flourishing without it being centered in the inner life of the individual? Can a community thrive without its members thriving? It’s significant that words like “soul,” “God,” “synagogue,” “prayer” and “holiness” do not get a single mention in his address. Neither does the word “Torah.”

It is valid to question whether money has been wasted trying to fight antisemitism in a way that maybe has no real effect. And while he calls for a refocusing, as a journalist and someone who is operating within the same secular paradigm as what he is critiquing, he has no creative ideas to offer in its place as a roadmap toward Jewish thriving.

In my view, the Jewish community will thrive when it returns to building the spiritual core that has been the central element of Jewish continuity for centuries and millennia, which has largely been abandoned across the spectrum of denominations. From the extreme dilution of Judaism at the far liberal anything-goes end of the spectrum, to the other end where we find an overemphasis on stringencies and frumkeit (meticulous observance of Jewish laws) – there is no significant focus on the inner life.

Historically, the core of the core of that spiritual life, the centre of centres, the holy of holies, has been practicing Shabbat (which also, by the way, does not get a mention in Stephens’ talk.) As the Yiddish writer Ahad Ha’Am astutely observed, “More than the Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.”

So, it turns out – surprise to me! – my new book has something to say on this issue. I wrote it to share my experience that observing a traditional Shabbat with its structures and boundaries has the potential to bring about a real inner transformation for the individual. But as I have thought about it more in the context of Stephen’s talk, I realize that the impact will not stop at the individual.

When one of us invests in creating a spiritual Shabbat, that shift will have a great impact on that person’s life. It will also have a small impact on the community because any change in a constituent element affects the whole. Are you familiar with what is called the Butterfly Effect – and does that idea apply here?

When two people make the changes that transform their personal lives, the impact on the community doubles.

When many of us consciously create a vessel in our week that is meant to hold holiness, rest, peace, joy, trust, satisfaction and the other qualities a Shabbat practice fosters – in other words, when we make it a practice to nourish our individual souls – then the combined force of the personal changes each individual brings about will elevate the spirit of the entire community. That is how we can bring about the thriving that is the ideal condition of a flourishing Jewish community.

** I could not find a full transcript of his talk online but Commentary magazine published an article adapted from his “State of World Jewry Address,” delivered on February 1, 2026, at the 92nd Street Y: https://www.commentary.org/articles/bret-stephens/jews-have-honor-of-being-hated/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

At that precise moment on Friday evening, my aspiration for the holy compels me to leave behind all the projects, responsibilities, cares and woes that have occupied me the previous six days of the week, and I step into a consecrated space.

Stepping over the line from the six days of doing to the seventh day of rest is often not an easy thing to do. We all tend to be deeply engaged and committed to the things that are on our plate, and we are firmly bound to those activities.

Maybe you are attached to what you have been working on because you are eager to see the fruits of that project. That’s desire.

Maybe the emotional bonds are from anxiety or even fear that something will go wrong with the thing you have been caring for. That’s worry.

Maybe your identity is so tied up in our worldly activities that it is scary to think of living without that familiar sense of self. That’s ego.

Maybe you are so used to being engaged with your worldly activities that a day without them just doesn’t appeal. That’s habit.

Maybe you are just dying to find out who won, or how it ended, or what someone said or did. That’s the thoroughly modern attachment of FOMO – fear of missing out.

When I was speaking to a group in Florida last month about FOMO and how things like that keep people glued to their phones when they would do themselves a big favour if they put them down for one day, a woman asked, “What about JOMO?”

I didn’t know what that was, so I asked her, and she replied, “The JOY of missing out.” She had a point. There is a kind of joy in detaching from the stuff that ordinarily fills our moments and our minds. We tend to get so wrapped up in what we do that we are almost enslaved to it. It may not be easy to say, “Let it go, come what may,” but if we empower ourselves to do just that, it can come to us as a liberation.

I am grateful to have tools that help me loosen the grip and set my burdens down on Friday evening, to free me up to welcome something different and more soulful into my space.

One tool that helps me is the ritual structures of Shabbat. Concerning the fact that Shabbat begins precisely 18 minutes before sunset, I wrote:

This concern for exact timing reflects a broader principle that shows up throughout Shabbat observance, which is that a structure with boundaries is extremely helpful, and, for most of us, essential, if we hope to achieve a spiritual day of rest. A web of precise lines we are meant to heed and not cross establishes the boundaries that distinguish and separate the holy from the mundane and thus serve to establish and protect the sanctity of the seventh day.

In Jerusalem, and even in Far Rockaway, NY, where I studied with my Mussar teachers, Rabbi and Rebbetzin Perr, and elsewhere as well, at the exact moment when Shabbat arrives, a loud siren sounds throughout the community.

Not a moment before, not a moment after. This is the moment.

Were it not for this precision, I know that the momentum I develop over the six days when I am doing the things I am attached to and identify with would keep me going well into Friday evening and likely beyond. There is always more to be done and a clear and loud announcement that I have come to a precise border helps me set down my incomplete burdens so that, unencumbered, I can cross over.

Truth is, the fact that there is a precise boundary, even one publicized as prominently as the start time of Shabbat, is no guarantee that we will be able to defy our attachments and put aside our labours even if that is our commitment. That marker is external to us, and while it is very helpful as we grapple with the internal dynamics that would have us checking the phone and continuing our efforts endlessly, it does not deal with those dynamics directly.

For that, we need Mussar. The Mussar teachers through the centuries have recognized that trust [bitachon] is one inner quality that is on everyone’s spiritual curriculum. I’ve joked that you don’t see any self-help guru offering workshops on how to worry. That’s because we are all already really good at worrying. But we are challenged to trust.

We tend to live as if we are fully in charge of our lives and all that happens within them, and we cling to control as if our life depended on it. But it is not true. What is true is that we are fully in control of very little that happens in our life.

Since Shabbat deprives us of the possibility of taking action to shape our world and its components, we are forced to live in a world in which it is explicit that we are not in charge. That quality of bitachon is the lever that pries open our hand so the weekday burdens can be set aside on Shabbat.

In the chapter on trust in The Shabbat Effect, I mention the story of the manna that fell from heaven to feed the Israelites in the desert. The Mussar teachers have seen this as the archetypal test of trust “because that God-given food could only be collected daily. If kept overnight, it rotted. Every day, the people had to put their trust in God that they would be fed. But on Friday, they needed to trust even more, because they were promised that they would be given an additional portion in order to be freed from the labor of collecting on the seventh day itself.”

Then I wrote that our test is even greater:

“If they went out to gather on Shabbat, they found that there was nothing to be had. We, on the other hand, could easily keep working, keep sending emails, go to the bank, go shopping to catch that item before it sold out, or before the sale ends, because in the society in which we live, Saturday is just another day.”

And the conclusion: “It takes a deliberately and purposefully chosen act of trust for us to be able to lay it all down.”

If you have read the chapter on the middah of bitachon in the book, I explore four explanations of what it means to trust God. I’d love to hear which of them lights up most for you, and maybe even why you think it does.

My concern is with the political statements in your recent blog post. I believe you are drawing conclusions based on sources that do not present a full or accurate picture of what is happening in the United States. The media landscape today is deeply polarized, and much of what is presented as fact is often incomplete, misleading, or simply untrue.

The comments in question from my last blog post went like this:

I am as concerned as anyone about the egotistical autocracy that has taken shape in Washington. And as a Canadian, the repeated threats to our sovereignty need to be taken as real because once raw power becomes the primary tool of diplomacy, the unthinkable becomes possible. ICE, the murder of American citizens followed by regime apologetics, rolling back all social justice and environmental initiatives.

As soon as I read his objections to my statements, even though they were couched in respectful terms, I felt my heart clench, as if through the politeness what I was hearing was, “You don’t know what you are talking about. I do.”

Despite feeling provoked, a little corner of my mind preserved just enough equanimity to tell me not to be reactive. Clearly, he had made an effort to be respectful, and he deserved the same. I took a breath and began a reply by thanking him for getting in touch, and then I explained why I disagreed with his positions.

He opened respectfully, I followed respectfully, and an email exchange followed that I am sharing with the permission of this other person. At one point I summarized it like this:

My views are closer to those of Bruce Springsteen and yours seem to me to align with the Trump administration.

My blog post had ventured into the realm of politics not with the agenda of advancing my own views on current issues but to explore how I see the spiritual intersecting with the everyday, and more specifically, how I justify investing in a Shabbat practice in the midst of a world that seems to need me much more as a social organizer or political activist than a seeker of the holy.

And so, when he wrote to me:

We are not going to see eye to eye on these issues. What I would respectfully suggest is that you avoid the subjects in your blog posts. And I know for you it is not going to be easy, but your news sources are simply biased. They are also unreliable. And I say that with 100% confidence,

I responded with:

My understanding of Mussar — and, in fact, of Judaism as a whole — is that there is no separation between the natural / social world and the spiritual world. They are one and the same. And if I am a spiritual seeker, then I must do my seeking in the midst of the regular world. Jews don’t have monks and monasteries. We live in society and pursue holiness within the world, not by stepping outside it.

And since he had 100% confidence that I was being misled by the media, I asked him a question that is of vital concern to me as a Canadian, regarding President Trump’s ongoing insult to the Canadian people and our leaders by consistently referring to Prime Minister Carney as “Governor” and laying claim to our country as the 51st state. I asked him: “Would you say that I am misled on that as well?”

His response was important to keeping our conversation going. He answered:

You are definitely correct that Trump disrespects Canada and again, his arrogance and attitude don’t do him any favors, or the country in general.

That was amazing to me. He held views opposite my own, but he was willing and able to concede that this was not a case of “I’m all right and you are all wrong.” He had not turned off his critical faculties for the sake of partisanship, as I believe so many people have.

From what I read and hear, the sorts of polarized differences of opinion we were expressing usually devolve into mutual verbal assaults, but what I want to share with you is the hopeful message that this person and I were able to disagree at length on almost every point AND we were able to do it in a respectful way. As I said to him:

We are already accomplishing something that is almost miraculous in this world of ours, which is that we are disagreeing respectfully. That is not an achievement to be minimized. I wish more people could do that.

He was listening and was able to acknowledge some things, just as I was striving to listen and to acknowledge the truth, wherever it lay. As I said to him,

I am grateful to you because I take your comments as tough questions I need to ask myself. I can’t just dismiss you because I don’t agree with you. For my own sake, I need to formulate my thoughts so I am comfortable with the foundation on which they stand.

I signed off by saying:

“I am glad that you took the time and trouble to explain your perspectives. I value that. I now have a clearer understanding of where we agree and where we differ and that is valuable to me. It is such an unfortunate failing of contemporary “communications” that people are not listening to one another but rather trying to hammer other people with their ideas. Too often people are listening only to other people who echo their own views. What a loss. Pirkei Avot asks, “Who is wise?” And the answer is, “One who learns from every person.” I have a clear feeling that because we are communicating on a foundation of respect and with an intention to listen and learn, we would be able to talk about these ideas. And, who knows, maybe you would convince me of something or I might convince you! A Mussar student has to be open to learning and change.”

And he had the last word, adding: “This email exchange with you made me put into practice Mussar and I am thankful for that. So thank you.”

I think there is hope. Do you agree?