Your Personal Spiritual Curriculum

I hope I have made the case that the Jews of our generation are, to greater and lesser extents, spiritual orphans, cut off from the traditional teachings that the Jewish world developed to help us navigate this journey through life in the best possible way.

Now we are going to fill in some key pieces of what we have lost because of that rupture. To do that, we now turn to look inward, into your inner life, seen through the lens that was developed by Jewish teachers over millennia. Maybe you gained some insight from seeing yourself framed as a spiritual orphan; I am hoping you will also get a new view of yourself from seeing that you, like every human being, has a unique personal spiritual curriculum which defines the central task you are meant to do in your life.

In my last post, I used Yiddish words as an analogy for Jewish values. Just as words like shmo and shlemiel show up in the Meriam Webster English dictionary despite the fact that the people who deploy those terms are very likely not to know Yiddish, we find Jews of our generation espousing Jewish values without being familiar with the structure or framework (the “language”) that developed and sustained those values throughout our history. Jewish values running on autopilot is one symptom of the reality of our status as spiritual orphans.

“Jewish values” is actually not a good translation for what I have in mind. There is a broad collection of inner qualities that get grouped under the heading of the word middot in Hebrew. The category of middot is, in fact, so broad that “values” doesn’t actually capture what links qualities like anger and stubbornness, generosity and laziness, trust and faith, kindness and humility, and more, which are all middot.

The term middot is often translated as “traits of character” and that is closer to accurate than “values,” but the Hebrew word itself points to an important dimension of this category of inner traits that is not conveyed in the English. Middot comes from the Hebrew linguistic root that means “measure.”

The notion of “measure” shows up in two ways in reference to the inner life.

First, the word “measure” conveys a notion of evaluation. The way you experience and express your anger, generosity, patience, love, strictness, kindness, and so on, are the measures of you as a human being. How you perceive the world around you, and especially how you act, reveals important truths about your inner life.

This was understood 2,000 years ago and noted in the oral tradition, because in the Mishnah (Sotah 1:7) we find the saying, “Ba’middah sh’adam moded, ba modedin lo” – “by the measure that a person measures, they measure him.”

The Mishnah was elaborated into the Talmud, and there (Eruvin 65b) we find the same idea expressed in a pithy soundbite: “By three things is a person’s character recognized: b’koso (cup), b’kiso (purse) and b’ka’aso(anger). And some say, b’sachko (laughter).” This means that we get a very good idea of a person’s character by seeing how they act when they drink, how they spend their money, how they get angry, and what makes them laugh.

When it comes to evaluating a human being, it doesn’t matter how tall or beautiful they are, the quality of their skin or their teeth, not what language they speak or religion they practice, not even which political party they support; the true measure is in the inner qualities they hold and express in their everyday behaviour.

And “measure” applied to traits of character has another important nuance as well. The word “trait” sounds fixed whereas “measure” is relative. You can have more of something or less of something according to a measurement, and you can add or subtract to change the measurement.

That idea is crucial to spiritual practice as our Mussar teachers conceived it. When it comes tomiddot, we all have the full set of all of them. Even if you are the most tolerant of human beings, you will still have at least a trace of anger, and if you are among the most miserly, some smidgen of generosity. The laziest person still has to take action to keep themselves going, and the most hyperactive needs to be able to take rest, and so on through all the middot.

The 16^th century Mussar text, Orchot Tzaddikim, captures the importance of measuring the inner traits by casting the inner life to be akin to a dish prepared from a recipe:

There is a certain trait that one must use in many places and there is a trait which one should use only sparingly. And all of this is like one preparing a dish for which one needs vegetables, meat, water and salt and pepper. Now one must take from all of these ingredients a certain measure: from this ingredient a little and from this ingredient much of. If one puts in too little meat the dish will be thin, and if too much salt then the dish cannot be eaten because it is too salty. And thus it is with all traits; if one puts in too little of what one requires much, and puts in too much of what one requires but little, then the food will be spoiled. And the expert is the one who can take of every ingredient the proper measure. Then the food will be pleasant and sweet to those who eat it. In a similar manner are the human qualities. There are qualities of which one ought to take much, for example, humility, abashment, and their like. And there are qualities of which one must take only a little, for example, pride, impudence, and cruelty. Therefore, when a person weighs their qualities in the balance of the scales, let them take from every quality its proper measure. One should not take less and not more. In this way, one will reach the ultimate good.

The Mussar teachers through the centuries identified dozens of inner traits, and I guarantee that you have all of them. But what makes you you and not me, and me me and not you, is not which traits we each have – because we all have the full set of them – but the measure of the traits that are present within us at any given moment.

But Orchot Tzaddikim says something else as well: the measure of the trait can be changed. And not only “can” be changed but in some cases “must” be changed, if you are to fulfill your potential as a human being:

In regard to the qualities, the good and the bad, the wise person can make good ones of bad ones, but the fool can make evil qualities out of good ones. As for one who walks in the darkness, and does not consider the improvement of their qualities, it is possible that one quality will destroy all their merit. For example, one who takes great pride in his deeds and boasts and preens always trying to shame one’s companions, and seeks to obtain honor through one’s companion’s disgrace, such a person is like one who fills a barrel with fine wine, but there is in the bottom of the barrel a little hole. There is no doubt that all the fine wine will be lost because of the small hole, if he does not stop it up. So, even though this arrogant person is filled with Torah, they will lose everything through this evil quality if they do not hasten to repair it.

This is a shockingly modern idea considering that it comes from a book written 500 years ago. Its message is that your inner traits can be the source of success in life if you do the work to bring them into the right measure, just as they can be the source of your failures if you don’t.

If you wonder what role values and emotions play in spiritual life, here is the answer.Middot cannot be divided into good traits and bad traits. In Jewish thought, there are no “deadly sins” – envy is understood to have the potential to be a positive motivating force, for example, and Torah scholars are expected to exhibit some measure of pride.

Every inner quality can play a positive role in our lives – in the right measure and at the right time. It’s by recognizing which inner traits currently do not measure up – what I was pointing to when I introduced the idea of “your personal spiritual curriculum” – and then working to “take from every quality its proper measure,” in the words of Orchot Tzaddikim, that propels us toward “the ultimate good.”

That is to say that working on our inner traits is how we move ourselves toward the ultimate good in life, and that working to recalibrate our inner traits is how we walk the path toward that goal.

If you are able to see that your impatience, or untruthfulness, or harshness, or anger, or haste, or lust … is something on your curriculum, you can embrace it as a challenge, work on it, and bring it closer to your ideal potential. And if you don’t see the inner challenges that you trip over time and again as a curriculum to work on and master, then you will just keep encountering the same tests in your life, and tripping on them over and over and over again.

Next time, we’ll go deeper into the idea that what goes on in your inner life is a curriculum. To help us do that, I will be really grateful if you would submit a comment on how you see one or two of your middot showing up in your life – and especially the “measure” of those qualities, whether abundant or scarce.