The Elul program of The Mussar Institute is only available to monthly supporters (Chaverim) so only a few people who subscribe to this blog will have seen it. It offers a perspective on stability in a time of turbulence that I want to share with you.
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