That Curriculum of Yours

Imagine four people, each of whom is walking down the street and right there on the sidewalk they come across a big, fat, leather wallet. Each of them responds differently.

One gets out a tissue, picks up the wallet with care, and looks for the nearest shop where they can report having found it, both to the shopkeeper in whose hands he or she will leave it, and to the police.

One bends over, pretending to tie a shoe, snatches the wallet and slips into their pocket with minimal fanfare to attract attention.

The third sees it, but chooses not to get involved because they are late to an appointment and “getting involved” would take them out of their way.

And then there is the one who walks right by, oblivious to what’s right in front of their nose.

What’s the difference? From a Mussar perspective, each of these people is displaying middot (inner traits; soul traits, if you will) in different measure.

In the first case, we see honesty and a trait that does not seem to need to be cultivated because it is there in good measure.

About the second person we can say that there is evidence of deficient honesty, and that would identify honesty as being on that person’s personal spiritual curriculum.

That third very busy person, are they so consumed by their own agenda that they have lack of compassion or responsibility to care for the person who is feeling such distress at having lost their wallet?

And in the case of the unaware person who is not even alert to their surroundings, we can say that lack of awareness is a deficiency they are likely to trip over in many aspects of their life, because it is squarely on their curriculum.

That thought experiment can be duplicated to focus on all kinds of middot.

You are in the driver’s seat of your car and a homeless person bearing a cardboard sign comes up to the window.

You read the newspaper and are infuriated by a government policy that shows no human caring.

Your intrusive neighbour who provokes you at every turn is at your door with a bouquet of flowers.

From one perspective, these and the myriad comparable scenarios like them that we face every day are just circumstances that need to be navigated so we get to where we want to be going and not somewhere else.

But from a Mussar perspective, these sorts of situations are tests. Wherever life presents a choice you have to make, you face a test that can reveal to you (and very often to the world) something about the middot that feature on our personal spiritual curriculum.

If this perspective takes root in you, you will find yourself looking into your own experiences to see what lessons you might be able to learn about the pathway for growth that is fundamental to the life of the soul you are.

I’ll give you an example from my own experience.

I sometimes go to a synagogue near where we stay when we are visiting Toronto and there is a person at that synagogue who serves as gabbai, which means that he has a lot of responsibility for how the service runs, including deciding who gets called to Torah for an honour, etc. I have an unusual tendency to arrive at synagogue in time for the beginning of services (is being OCD on my spiritual curriculum?) and this gabbai, despite his responsibility to the community, tends to show up just before the Torah is taken out, after so much else has gone on in the service.

I found myself judging this man, and grumbling to myself about his laziness, or was it his lack of responsibility, or maybe he just didn’t have enough faith to realize the importance of the services, and the like.

Then one Shabbat, I went downstairs to the bathroom and saw this man in the kitchen cutting vegetables and getting things ready for the communal kiddush lunch that would follow the service.

I was floored, not because he did this but by seeing how quickly and how almost viciously I jumped to judge another person. There is a middah called dan l’khaf zechut which is very hard to translate into English but which comes into play when you see behaviour that you almost instinctively judge to be unworthy, but then, instead of condemning the person, you allow that there may be other factors at work that account for why the person is doing what they are doing and, you know what, you are not omniscient. Some of the texts on dan l’khaf zechut encourage us to get creative in coming up with a scenario that explains or excuses the behaviour, rather than indulging our primitive instinct to condemn everyone who doesn’t do things the way we think they should.

Add dan l’khaf zechut to my personal spiritual curriculum.

In truth, that trait was clearly already on my curriculum, only it took a life test to reveal to me the fact that I had more potential to grow in this area, and now I was aware of what was there.

One of the great things about being a Mussar teacher is that I don’t assign any curriculum. You’ve got your own curriculum right now and my job is to make you aware of it, both what shows up on that curriculum and the very fact that it is a curriculum!!

Take a look at the tests that life keeps throwing your way and seek out what they reveal about some inner trait in which you have the potential to grow. Then you will become familiar with the qualities that are already written into your life curriculum, and based on that awareness, you can develop those traits, and then those tests will not come around anymore.

Embedded in this discussion about becoming aware of and then working on your personal spiritual curriculum, is the fundamental importance of maintaining a stance of curiosity about your own life. Curiosity provides the right lens for examining your experiences for the lessons they contain.

I’ll give you another example from my synagogue experience. Yesterday, I got called up to the Torah for an aliyah and, as I have hundreds of times before, I recited the blessing that precedes the reading. Then the reader finished that section and it was my turn to make the blessing at the end of the reading, and I simply forgot. Someone else on the bima at the time prompted me, I slapped my forehead, and then quickly recited the blessing.

What a lapse! I could have been embarrassed. I could have got down on myself for my stupidity. I could have reacted in so many ways. But this was a very unusual slip for me, and so that triggered my curiosity. I had lots to look at to figure out what that misstep could teach me, because maybe in this little flub lay the key to many other similar flubs I make in my life – some maybe with bigger consequences than this one. (It only happened yesterday; I haven’t yet processed it enough to say what middah I can identify that is the focus for my lesson here.)

That’s an example from me. Do you have one to share in which your own life experience had a lesson for you that revealed something about your own spiritual curriculum?

Note that there is an important general principle at play here: small tremors and big earthquakes happen along the same fault lines. If you learn from the tremor, you may well be sparing yourself an earthquake. Fostering an attitude of curiosity about the small tremor might save you a lot of pain from a big one.

The Mussar teachers have a name for this attitude that sets us looking at our life experience to see what lessons we can find there that are revealing about deep-set patterns that we have the potential to work on and change. They call it hitlamdut, which literally means, “to teach yourself,” and the implication is, “from your experience.”

That precious attitude of hitlamdut is where we will pick up next time.