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

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

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

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

Alan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Rosh Hashana 18a.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan

A recent survey found that:

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

• 13% said it was never used at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the sub-heading reads:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This sensitivity to others became a hallmark of Mussar.

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

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

No one responded so Rav Dovid continued:

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

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

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

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

Alan

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

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

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

Think of the implications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would love to hear your comments.

Alan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tradition, scripture and experience attest to that choice.

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

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

I invite you to share your thoughts.

Alan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you had the experience of renewal sprouting from sadness?

Rambam says (Hilchot De’ot 1:5):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example: joy.

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

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

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

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

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

Happiness gratifies the ego; joy transcends it.

Happiness makes you smile; joy makes you cry.

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

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

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

Take a look:

What brings you joy?

Alan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan

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

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

As I do my work in the woods, the entire lifecycle of the forest is laid bare to me. A tree grew in the humus that accumulated from previous generations of trees, then it reached the end of its life, fell, and now young sprouts reach up for the light, their roots stretching into the flesh of the nurse log. And when we pull back to take in the other species that have woven their own lives around that central storyline – insects and spiders, ferns and creeping plants, birds, newts, and slugs, and forest mammals like deer and possums – we are witnessing a long-term, slow-motion performance of the dance of life, and I have my own part to play in the beginning and in the end.

The deeper I look and the more I learn, the more I appreciate the wonder of the natural world. Mussar teachers going back to Bahya ibn Paquda (c.1050–1120 CE) have emphasized the practice of contemplating nature. In his case, in his classic 11^th century Mussar work, Duties of the Heart, he encourages us to contemplate the workings of the natural world in order to awaken hakarat hatov – recognition of the good one has received.

He repeatedly asks us to consider how bodily systems just go about their work without our awareness, and how conditions – almost all of which we had no role in creating – make life possible.

For ibn Paquda, the goal of the practice is to move ourselves away from taking for granted all the gifts we have received, and replacing that feeling with heartfelt thankfulness.

It strikes me that what is involved here is more than just soaking in a feel-good emotion. For ibn Paquda, and Rambam after him, contemplating the intricate design, beauty and complexity of nature was seen as a way to awaken profound awe and love for the Creator. Like the contemplation of great art, this is an intellectual experience that goes beyond the mind to touch the soul in a deep and lasting way. Nature is a great teacher.

But if we pick up on ibn Paquda’s focus on gratitude, we can see how utterly valuable and needed contemplating nature is for our generation, at least in its current manifestation, when the politics of grievance have become a dominant force in public life. Gratitude is the diametric opposite of grievance.

Masses of people have developed a grievance mindset, the driving force in their lives being resentful protests about their perceived losses, slights, and unmet expectations. Donald Trump has been a relentless cheerleader for victimhood, targeting globalization, immigration, trade, political elites, and the media. His slogan of MAGA only makes sense to voters who feel the country has declined, making them the losers. But he is only one of many populist leaders beating the grievance drum. From the left, the grievances are different – concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a small elite, inequality and the influence of corporations and billionaires – but the focus is still on grievances.

The flavours change – it is still lemonade.

Grievance asks, “What wrongs have I suffered?” Gratitude asks, “What gifts have I received?”

There are, of course, grievances that are legitimate and ought to be addressed. What I am talking about here is not objective reality, but the glasses people voluntarily put on through which they perceive the world: the glasses of grievance versus the glasses of gratitude.

When you look at nature with an eye to recognizing the good, the gifts are abundant: air to breathe, a sun to warm the earth, water, delicious fruits, magnificent trees, nourishing crops … stop for a moment: What would you add to the list?

And another moment: How does your heart feel when you open to gratitude?

Contrast that with approaching the world from the place of grievance.

Gratitude is expansive; grievance is narrow and contracted. Gratitude is generous; grievance is mean. Gratitude directs us toward the benevolence; grievance sees a system rigged to work against me.

Gratitude connects; grievance is adversarial.

I’ll leave you with a question: How does your heart feel when you open to gratitude? And when you approach the world from the place of grievance?

And now it’s time for me to gratefully don my gloves and protective gear, pick up my chainsaw, and get back to my spiritual work in the woods.

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