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Oy, I’m hooked on
mussar! It hasn’t even been a week since our first class
(which I’m nominally teaching but also trying to participate in as the novice I
am,) and it’s already changing how I look at life – my own, anyhow.
- Rabbi
Margaret Holub © 2009
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Mussar is about cultivating positive middot –
measures, character traits, soul characteristics, plain old behaviors.
It’s about being the right amount of patient, steady, honest, kind and so
on. But, lest it sound like the Girl Scouts, it’s about turning a
telescope within to look at the mechanics of how we actually live. What do
I actually do all day? How do I decide whether to do this or that?
What effects to my actions have on everyone around me?
I remember, when I
was about eight, my friend and classmate, Mike Lingle – a guy who was just so
smart that the fun of thinking rolled out of him all the time – started making
flow charts of a day of life. Alarm clock rings. You can: get out of
bed / roll over and go back to sleep. Say you decide to get up. You
can: find your clothes and put them on / go into the kitchen and make yourself
some chocolate milk / pick a fight with your sister. Say you opt for the
chocolate milk. You can…
Who knew that Mike was teaching
mussar at age eight? Each of these nodes on his flow chart is a
bekhirah point, a place where a decision is made. Get dressed or
pick a fight? What if you are working on the middah of
zerizut – zeal, passion, showing up – and your sister is trying to talk
you into skipping school? Maybe it is actually better in this moment to
fight, to stand up in the face of temptation, than to be your usual acquiescent
and apathetic self. Maimonides counsels the middle path; you can have too
much humility, too much self-effacement, for example.
The classical
mussar teachings go back to the Bible and Talmud, certainly to the Golden
Age of Maimonides, Rabbeinu Bachya, the RaMCHaL and others. But the
technology – how you actually implement the teachings – is a more modern
enterprise. The mussar movement began in the mid-nineteenth century
in Vilna, flowered for a generation or two, then went dormant with much of
European Judaism. It is being revived these days by several contemporary
teachers and their students and has even made its way to the North Coast of
California. I’ve been passively interested in mussar for some
time. But it was the inspiration of Caroline Isaacs up in Eureka which
motivated a number of us to get serious about learning and trying these
practices.
In my beginning efforts, it seems to me that the heart of the
work is looking closely and realistically at how I actually operate. It is
in a sense looking at the flow chart of each day and noting which paths I have
chosen. Then it is a matter of thinking about the moral and spiritual
content of these little daily choices. The mussar-dik way to look
at them, at least according to some teachers, is not in terms of whether they
make me happy or not, but how they affect others. Do they, in the words of
Rabbi Simcha Zissel of Kelm, “bear the burden of the other?”
So,
let’s see, yesterday morning… It’s cold outside. I have plans in the
afternoon (to see the incomparable Ronnie Gilbert – fantastic!) The Sunday
Times has not yet appeared in our box, despite my sweet Mickey biking out there
three times to retrieve it for me. I’m bundled up in my big red
chair, drinking tea. And I find myself thinking about choices before
me. I could finish last week’s New Yorker. I could get up and get
moving, maybe clean things up a bit around here. I could make us
breakfast. I could make some phone calls I need to make.
Meanwhile I keep bouncing up and checking my e-mail, as though some message is
going to come and put me on my path.
Bechirah points. I can
see myself sliding reflexively towards the New Yorker option, as I kind of knew
I would. It’s like rolling over and going back to sleep. But some
new little part of me asks, ‘who does it serve?’ I get a glimpse of the
avoidant part of me duking it out with the part that cherishes those quiet
morning minutes. (I decide that a half-hour of reading and tea-drinking
will be plenty, to be followed by some more virtuous enterprises. I more
or less keep my bargain with myself. I think that in the tiniest possible
way it actually does allow me to do a bit of good with my morning.)
All
of this may sound obsessively minute, and I suppose it is. But somehow in
it all I feel a little sigh of relief. Because I, like all of us, actually
struggle all the time with these tiny little bechirah points – but
usually below the level of conscious choice. And there is something
exhausting and depleting about feeling like life is slipping by – another hour,
another day, and I really didn’t live it as fully as I would wish. Now,
mussar tyro that I am, I am trying to see myself in action (and in
inaction!) It’s like I am allowing myself to see the creaky joints of how
I move through daily life. And knowledge is power.
The next
step is to try to move in the direction of positive middot. But I don’t
know how to do that part yet…
Someone in our class posed the
fundamental question: why try to be better? And, even while I tried to
conjure up how the RaMCHaL or Maimonides or Rabbi Salanter would respond, my
wise fellow students began offering up their own answers: to let your soul shine
more brightly, to connect with God, to move in the direction of love.
It
seems clear to me, if not always easy to articulate, that life is precious and
brief, and there are choices in every moment that bring more radiance and
connection and love into life, or the opposite. At some level there are
much more important issues in life than whether I read a magazine or put the
toast in the toaster. But at some level, all of life is individual moments
in which we do one thing or another or another.
-- In the middle of
writing this I got a call from a friend and had one of those long chats about
the big picture, life choices, calling, passionate commitments and so on.
And now I return to Mike Lingle’s flow charts of daily life. What was
missing from his drawings were those occasional bigger, more impactful moments
in which we make decisions that significantly affect our lives (poor guy, he was
only eight…) At these bigger choice points we commit ourselves to
particular people, beliefs and practices, and these may at times call for larger
and more dramatic actions than are usually the material for mussar
reflection.
But even these are lived out moment-to-moment, in the details
of how one spends a chilly Sunday morning. And even these call for looking
at the bones of those decisions, which middot are in play, whether they
are balanced, how they affect and serve and bear the burdens of
others.
This morning, thinking a bit more about how I’ve been tending to
let time slip by, I decided to make a little schedule for the next couple of
hours. Just an experiment in the middah of seder,
orderliness, keeping on-track. Time for Megillah-writing is just about
up. And I think I’m just about at the end here.