How are you? Compared to what?

The picture I have painted thus far of hitlamdut is incomplete. I described hitlamdut as a process or a stance in which you examine your life experiences in search of lessons that you then apply as guidance for working on yourself. Sounds good, but something very important is missing.

If that were all it was, how would you identify and understand the lessons?

I’ll give you an example. When I was an undergraduate in university way back when, I read a book on the Hells Angels biker gang by Hunter S. Thompson. One vignette in the book tells of one of the members of the gang who was visiting someone else’s house and went into the bathroom and proceeded to down every pill he could find in the medicine cabinet that he thought might get him high.

He passed out and nearly died, but he came around and then he said, “Well that taught me a lesson.”

You might have thought that the lesson he would have learned was to be more careful with what he consumed, but no, the lesson he drew was that he could swallow whatever pills he could get his hands on, and survive.

Clearly, he had a hierarchy of values and at or near the top was getting high. Staying healthy came much lower down.

That might seem like an extreme example, but it does raise an important question: When you examine your experiences looking for lessons – that is, when you practice hitlamdut – what scale of values or hierarchy of priorities are you invoking to discern the lesson?

We all have an internalized scale of values and the majority of people have no idea what it is and where it comes from. We learn behavioural guidelines at home, in school, from television and celebrities, from political leaders and influencers, from travel, from mentors.

Most of us carry around a patchwork of unexamined ideas that have landed in our internal in box and we live accordingly.

I remember reading a story in my local newspaper about the trial of a contract killer who had murdered someone and been caught. In his testimony, he described how he had followed the person for several days to figure out when and where would be the optimal time and place to make the hit. He noted that the man walked his child to school in the morning, so he couldn’t do it then.

Wait a minute. Think about that. This man is a hired killer who will murder someone for money. But not in front of a child, of course. I mean, what kind of person do you think I am?

He had his behavioural code, and it precluded violence in front of a child. Violence? That’s fine. In front of a child? Never!

I can assure you that you already have a code of conduct, and hopefully yours is more elevated and enlightened than those of the Hells Angel and contract killer I have mentioned here. But still, the question remains. What is your personal code of conduct and where did you get it from?

It is one more symptom of being a spiritual orphan that a Jew today is as likely, or probably even more likely, to model their conduct on what they see in the movies, in the news, or in advertising. Who I am describing may not be you, but it is certainly me. I grew up with parents who were very ethical but without any systematic or articulated values. Their values had been unconsciously internalized just because they lived immersed in a Jewish community, and as secular Jews in the early part of the 20^th century, they leaned far to the left, another source of values for them.

It’s only in my adult life that I have come question the code of conduct I had unconsciously adopted, which I came to see largely derived from the general society. And as I perceived the level of behaviour and ethics in the world at large continuing to slip lower and lower, the discrepancy between what I feel to be right and the world around became glaring.

This is the essential ingredient that has been missing from my discussion of hitlamdut. It is not just a matter of examining your life experience looking for lessons, the process involves examining your experience to find those lessons and then comparing what you see in front of you to some set of ideals.

It’s a long story I have told elsewhere, but in my own explorations that led me here and there throughout the world in search of guidance for living, I came to see that what our Mussar teachers taught – based as it is in the oral and written Torah – offers a reliable set of ideals to which I can aspire, and against which I can judge my own conduct.

Wise ancestors in such a wide range of contexts and under such varied living conditions considered what it takes to live a life that fulfills your human potential, and where people are prone to get it wrong, and then (fortunately for us!) they wrote down what they had learned and left that for us as a legacy.

That knowledge provides a time-tested yardstick for examining your experiences in search of lessons. Find the lessons and then, as the core part of the process, compare your behaviour and inner realities to the ideals that you have learned are set for us by the tradition.

In the next post, I’ll pick up from here with what I call “the Jewish mutual fund.” Before then, I’m very interested to hear an example or a story about something from your own code of conduct that you have used to guide your life. How do you think you came to acquire this particular outlook?