Our lineage of Mussar teachers stretching back to Bahya ibn Paquda in 11th century Spain did not encounter what we call “self-help” in their worlds. The idea that a person is not finished as they are born or happen to be at any given moment, that character can be cultivated, is ancient. But “self-help” as we know it in our generation can be dated back to the writing of Samuel Smiles, who published a book by that name in 1859.
Since then, the genre has grown exponentially. Dale Carnegie published his enormously influential book How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936. The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) were other landmarks in the field.
In the Venn diagram, Mussar and self-help overlap in their shared recognition that our individual human character is malleable and can be shaped by choices, behaviour and practices we take on. Although the neuropsychology would have been unknown to preceding generations, what both self-help and Mussar were hitting on is what we now call “neuroplasticity.”
Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change and reorganize itself in response to experience, learning, and repeated practice.
When we think, feel, or behave in a particular way, the stimuli we encounter trigger neural connections in the brain, and the more we experience repetition of the stimulus, the stronger and more efficient the neural pathways become.
As the saying goes, the neurons that fire together wire together.
And the converse is also true: connections that are used less weaken.
You will have experienced this phenomenon if you ever tried to learn a new language or develop a new sport or craft. At the beginning, every motion is awkward and needs to be directed as an act of conscious intent. But as you do the same motions over and over, they become more fluid and even automatic. That change reflects neurons being triggered over and over, so that the pathways of transmission become solidified and strong.
And, if you stop speaking that language or playing that sport, the neural pathways gradually decay.
If practice and change are the place that self-help and Mussar overlap, that is but a small part of the entire picture. When we ask “Why? What for?” we get radically different answers.
Self-help is fundamentally instrumental. The whole point of the books and the groups and the methods is to help you develop the capacities to get what you want. It asks: How can I become happier, more successful, confident, productive, or richer? In self-help the work we do on ourselves is motivated by the desire to get something for ourselves—happiness, better relationships, wealth, success, recognition, a sense of control over our lives, and the like.
To underline just how different Mussar is in this regard, note that one of the slogans of The Mussar Institute is “Working on yourself but not for the sake of yourself.”
We draw that idea from Mussar sources that tell us that life is all about service to the other. Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, the Alter of Kelm, built his entire school of Mussar on the notion of nosei b’ol im chaveiro – bearing the burden with one’s fellow, which means helping other people carry the loads life has deposited on them.
Rabbi Shimon Shkop explains that our care for others is how we manifest holiness:
All of our work and effort should constantly be sanctified to doing good for the community. We should not use any act, movement, or get benefit or enjoyment that doesn’t have in it some element of helping another. … Then, anything one does even for oneself, for the health of one’s body and soul, one also associates to the mitzvah of being holy, for through this he can also do good for the masses. (Introduction to Shaarei Yosher)
And in a conversation I had with Rabbi Yochanan Zweig, rosh yeshiva of the Talmudic University of Florida, he said to me that the definition of holiness that he likes is “The absence of self-interest.”
Does this mean that Mussar practice is all about squashing yourself and always giving everything to someone else? Not at all.
Here we find the fundamental difference between Mussar and self-help.
Self-help adopts the view that you really do exist as a separate, discreet, bounded individual. The person who inhabits your skin is separate from and distinct from every other individual, living within their physically bounded bodies. You relate to others across that boundary of separation.
Mussar, being a spiritual tradition, sees the world in non-materialistic terms. No doubt my body ends at the outer level of my skin, but my spiritual being, which is the essence of who I am, knows no such limitation.
Rav Kook expresses this idea in a beautiful, poetic image in his piece, The Fourfold Song:
Some sing the Song of their Soul. Within their own soul, they discover everything, their entire spiritual fulfillment.
Others sing the Song of their People. …
Others allow their souls to expand beyond their people. They sing the Song of Humanity. …
And some reach out even higher, until they unite with the entire world, with all of God’s creatures, with all of existence. With all of them, they sing the Song of the Universe.
So what about the title I gave to this post? I introduced Samuel Smiles early on as the founder of modern self-help. And Rav Avraham? He was Rabbi Avraham Grodzinski, a leading figure in the Mussar movement of the late 19th-early 20th centuries. He served as mashgiach ruchani (spiritual supervisor) of the Slabodka Yeshiva in Lithuania where he was a close associate of the Alter of Slabodka, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel. He was one of the great Mussar teachers who was murdered in the Holocaust, a loss that contributed to making us the spiritual orphans that we are.
His son reported that Rav Avraham spent two years practicing his smile in the mirror in order that his expression would genuinely express happiness at meeting another person. He was actualizing the teaching of Shammai in Pirkei Avot (1:15):
“Receive every person with a pleasant countenance.”
If Rav Avraham had been a follower of Dale Carnegie, his smile would have been a way to win friends and influence people. It would have been instrumental, a tool to gratifying personal desires or achieving personal goals.
But in Rav Avraham’s world, every human being embodies the image of God. If you truly have that vision of yourself and the other, how could you not greet another person in a pleasant way? In that case, your smile is an expression of your recognition that you share a spiritual connection to the other. The goal is not to be superficially cheerful nor to deny difficult human feelings nor to manipulate the other. It is to ensure that we give precedence to our recognition of the kavod – the divine glory – that stands before us in the form of another person.
If you perceived infinite spiritual radiance before you, might you smile?
It would seem that our smile is the great connector, the Eureka that my current Mussar teacher talked about that creates a-ha moments, one after the other.
B. Kaplan