The Greatest Mussar Teacher of All Time

Who is the greatest Mussar teacher of all time? You might be surprised to learn that it is none other than you!

That’s the implication of the teaching of Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, who was born to an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin in 1914 and died as a celebrated Orthodox rabbi and spiritual leader in Jerusalem in 2005. His life spanned all the turmoil of the 20^th century, and because he survived the Holocaust (taking refuge in Sweden), he has served as a major bridge between the pre-war world of the Lithuanian Mussar yeshivas and our own contemporary generation. His book, Alei Shur, which has not been (and may never be) translated into English, is a classic contemporary handbook of Mussar thought and practice.

Rabbi Wolbe’s grandson, Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe, teaches Torah and Mussar in Houston, and he once told me this story.

When his grandfather was already in his 90s, the senior Rav Wolbe gathered together a group of his closest students for a conference.

Rav Wolbe and his students sat around in the big meeting room, and he invited each student to stand and say what had been the greatest lesson that student had learned from him, their teacher. One stood and said that he had learned kindness – chesed – and another stood and said that he had learned compassion – rachamim– and a third stood and said that the main lesson he had taken away was on patience – savlanut – and so it went, all around the room.

When the last student had finished speaking, Rav Wolbe put his head in his hands and said, “Oy! I have no talmidim, [which is to say, “I have no students”]. Those are all important lessons, but they aren’t the most important one. What I wanted to hear you say that you had learned from me was hitlamdut” or, as Rav Wolbe would have said it, hislamdus.

Hitlamdut was a concept that was central to R’ Wolbe’s view of Mussar practice and spiritual growth. He constantly spoke to his students about hislamdus, distinguishing it from the more familiar limud, which refers to the study of Torah.

Hitlamdut and limud both build on the root notion of learning or teaching, with the distinction being that hitlamdut is the reflexive form of the root. “Reflexive” means that the term refers back to the subject, and therefore hitlamdut signifies not just learning, but teaching yourself or learning yourself. The best translation would be “self-instruction” or “reflexive learning,” and the clear implication is “from your own experience.”

Rabbi Wolbe wanted every student of his to be someone who not only has an experience, but who digs into that experience to seek out a relevant lesson (or two) that applies to his or her life, and then to learn that lesson. In other words, to teach it to yourself.

He was relentless in encouraging his students to adopt this posture in life, through which every situation is perceived not just as something to be navigated but as the bearer of a life lesson. He went so far as to say that:

…someone who wants to “work on oneself” must understand well the depth of these things, and must agree to establish one’s life, from now on, on this foundation of hitlamdut, that in all one’s dealings one will seek only to learn from the experience, and this literally until one’s last day: When one reaches the day of death, one won’t be dying—one will be learning how to die. This is the way of one who toils in the work of Mussar.

In this way, Rav Wolbe advocated for a very personal kind of learning. He applied this method to how we learn from texts by insisting that students seek not just an intellectual understanding of the text but also how the message of the text relates to me personally, and how it applies to where I currently stand in my own life and my development.

And this style of learning has a larger application as well because it guides us to learn all the lessons that life wants to teach us, if only we would pay attention. The essence of hitlamdut is to constantly compare the ideal you have learned in your Mussar studies with the reality of where you stand now. The essence of hitlamdut is to pay attention, to seek out lessons from your experiences, and then to apply those lessons to your own personal life.

And that explains why you are the greatest Mussar teacher of all time – as far as you yourself is concerned. Every one of us is unique. There are general principles, but the details are as unique as you are. You can and should learn the principles from others but when it comes to applying them in your specific situation, no one can teach you as well as you can yourself.

In Pirkei Avot (4:1), Ben Zoma asks: “Who is wise?” His answer is, “The one who learns from every person.” But elsewhere in the Talmud (Eruvin 100b) that principle is broadened because the rabbis point out that there are lessons to be learned from a cat, an ant, the dove and a rooster. And the fact is that there are lessons to be learned from every encounter and every experience you have in life. You just have to adopt a stance of being mitlamed – one who teaches themselves.

The lessons are there; you just need to be someone who commits to paying attention and learning.

These thoughts on hitlamdut connect to the thread I have been pursuing in this blog because paying attention to the lessons that are to be extracted from your life experience reveals to you what you need to know about your personal spiritual curriculum.

If you see the lesson, you can learn, and that’s what a curriculum is all about. But if you don’t have eyes (or the will) to seek out the lesson, the issue remains buried in your unlearned curriculum, and it is sure to surface again in time. The only issue is whether the next instance will be a tremor or a major earthquake.

I saw a living example of hitlamdut in action from my teacher, Rabbi Perr. There had been a scandal in his community because a kosher butcher had been found to be selling unkosher meat as kosher. The community was up in arms, and everyone was talking and roundly condemning the butcher. Of course, Rabbi Perr heard all the complaints, and in his weekly class with senior students, he addressed them.

“You know,” he said, “someone doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide to do such a thing. The roots go back far, starting with some tiny compromise or cut corner and then growing out from there step by step, decision by decision, until it gets to the point that the butcher is saying to himself that it is ok to sell non-kosher meat.”

“I wonder,” he went on, “if that is true for me as well. Was there some point in the past where I allowed some non-kosher ideas to slip into my teaching? Just a small, little, insignificant influence, nothing much, and then that seed grew and flourished to the point that …”

And here he took his face into his hands and began to cry, “… that today, Perr is selling treif [i.e., unkosher meat, metaphorically speaking]. Is Perr selling treif?” he asked aloud, as tears dripped down over his beard and onto the desk.

Everyone in the community was stomping around calling for the butcher’s scalp, and Rabbi Perr was seeking not vengeance but to learn a lesson that applied to him and his own life.

Rabbi Perr’s model here is not just for his community in that instance. Can you find a lesson for yourself in what’s going on in the world around you, whether close up or in the distant halls of power, that relates to your own spiritual curriculum? I’m really curious to see what you put into the Comments about that.

This is how a spiritual seeker pursues their personal spiritual curriculum. The butcher needs to face justice, and I need to learn something for myself from my own experience.

We’ll go one more step on the path of working on yourself in the next posting.