American Mussar

21st century Jewish spiritual practice for an authentic and meaningful life

Three Mussar Practices To Get Rid of Mom’s Stuff

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get rid of mom's stuff
My Mother’s Jewelry

My mother died on May 9, 2020 of Covid. Although she lived on the other side of the country, we were close, speaking several times a week. She was my spiritual mentor, and constant supporter. I was not able to travel home to visit her grave or take care of her things until over a year later. It was not easy to get rid of mom’s stuff.

This week marked an important milestone, when I had to dispose of her jewelry. After my wife and daughters picked what they wanted, there was a lot left. Mom loved to dress well, and loved her jewlery. After we are gone, most of the things we leave behind have no owner, and no purpose. The thought made me sad. I had no attachment to these things of hers. I felt bad getting rid of them, but keeping all this stuff didn’t seem like the right thing to do either. Three Mussar practices helped me get rid of moms stuff.

Mussar Practice 1: Honor

The Ten Commandments teaches that we should Honor our parents. But it does not say that we need to Honor their things. As important as these things were to my mom, I don’t need to keep them just because they liked them. At the same time, I would not be honoring her memory to just throw them away, or to have them cluttering my house. In fact, it would be giving her too much Honor to keep something I do not like. 

Mussar Practice 2 Gratitude

Decluttering expert Marie Kondo teaches that when something does not spark joy for us, we should thank it for its service, and give it away.  And in that sense, I am immensely grateful to my moms jewelry for giving her so much joy over the years. That was her joy, and not mine. The best way I could honor her memory is to find someone else who would wear and love her things. I lovingly packed her jewelry back into its box, put my hands on top of it, and thanked it for all the joy it brought her.

Mussar Practice 3: Generosity

Alan Morinis describes generosity as “a movement of the soul that erupts when you are pierced by the recognition of your direct connection to another soul.” When donating moms jewelry collection, I tried to do so wholeheartedly, imagining someone finding a necklace and bracelet that they absolutely loved. While I will never meet this person, we will still be connected. 

get rid of mom's stuff
Elaine Marcus, fashonista till the end

Nothing can replace the people we’ve lost. Judaism provides a good structure for grief, but as far as I know there are no direct teachings on what to do with your parents stuff. 

I hope these three Mussar practices are helpful to you in your own grief journey.

How did you approach this issue? Let me know below. I answer every comment. 

Jews and Asians Were Both Shocked By Atlanta

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jews and asians
Whether or not we speak up is a choice point.

Last week I asked an Asian friend of mine how she was after the racist killings in Atlanta. She was in shock. “I never thought I had to join a Facebook group to stop racism against Asians because I thought the racism against black Americans was a much bigger problem. But just week an Asian woman was attacked in San Francisco, and a car stopped to yell at me because I was walking on the wrong side of the road. It felt racially motivated.”

I was reminded of the story of Leo Frank, a prominent member of the Atlanta Jewish community, who was convicted of murdering a 13 year old girl who worked in his factory. The evidence was more than flimsy. The papers ran inflammatory anti-Jewish rhetoric. After the Governor commuted his sentence from death to life imprisonment, a mob broke into a hospital where he was recovering from an assault, and lynched Mr. Frank. (You can see a horrible picture of his body on the link above), It was a terrible shock to the Atlanta Jewish community, who had thought themselves fully accepted. “After Frank’s lynching, Jews who had lived in Atlanta since its founding felt their sense of security was destroyed.“
I really felt for my friend, her sense of shock that she too could be targeted. I think she is feeling what members of the Atlanta Jewish community 100 years ago after Leo Frank’s lynching. White supremacy destroys lives, and it is trying to destroy our sense of safety and community. Jews and Asians, people of color and allies live with this reality.
All of this brings us to the topic of this week’s Jewish Wisdom Gathering: The Choice Point. A choice point is an opportunity to exercise free will, to choose in the direction of doing good, or doing not good. When it comes to the anti-Asian racism, we have two choices. We can take action, or we can ignore it.
Doing nothing is the status quo – we may feel bad about what happened, but we have bigger fish to fry. Perhaps you feel that now is a time to circle the wagons, and take care of our fellow Jews or just our family. This is not the Mussar way, and it is not the Jewish way. We are instructed to proactively look for opportunities to create a just world. But what to do? The size of the problem is overwhelming.
Here are a few simple choices you can make to support the Asian community or to be an anti-racist:
  1. Reach out to Asian friends or acquaintances. A simple text saying “I”m thinking of you with all the racism directed as Asians going on. How are you doing?” I can’t begin to tell you how appreciative my friend was that I asked last week. This option has the added bonus of building relationships and community
  2. Don’t be silent if someone talks about how sexy or exotic Asian women are. That stereotype helps perpetuate violence against Asian women.
  3. Raise up stories about Asian Jews. Here are six examples from the Jews of Color Initiative.
What choice will you make?
Do you agree with the comparison I’ve made?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Join us for Jewish Wisdom For Coping with a Pandemic each Thursday at 4 Pacific time for free on Zoom. Please sign up to get the password.
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

I Woke Up and Thought “I’ve lost my faith.” Mussar helped me recover it

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I woke up and thought “I’ve lost my faith.”

It was a few days after the January 6th insurrection, and I just felt useless. So many people I know seem to think it was ok, or not a big deal. A minority, but enough to shake me.

I didn’t even realize I had faith until it was gone. What a lonely and alienating feeling. 

Not all of us have faith in the Divine, yet I hope we all have faith in something that makes us secure. As you’ll see below, this type of faith is the soul trait of Trustworthiness, which is what we explored in this meeting of Jewish Wisdom For Coping with a Pandemic. In the meeting, I shared the amazing experience I had just a few hours later that helped get me back on track. You can see for yourself in the video I shared.

Sometimes it takes just a little reminder to help us find ourselves, and sometimes we need help. I reached out to my friend and sometimes mentor Rabbi David Jaffe. He asked, “What do you need to focus on for your journey? Once you know that, you can share with your community from a place of authenticity.” He helped me focus on the soul traits of Trustworthiness and Anger for this weeks teaching.

It was a truly special gathering, which is why I am devoting a blog post to it. We covered:

  • What I saw in the Institute For Jewish Spirituality Daily Sit that helped me recover my faith
  • The connection of growing seeds to trustworthiness 
  • A secret teaching: when everyone was in break out groups, I shared an analogy about having a firm tent peg in the ground, a peg that was loosened for all of us on the January 6th insurrection
  • People shared the prayers they wrote inspired by a poem by Rabbi Pam Wax.

Yes, I woke up and thought, “I’ve lost my faith.” I’m so thankful for the American Mussar community that helped me process this experience.

You are heartily invited to watch the video, and share your reaction below. 

Mussar Hopes and Fears For 2021

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Hopes and Fears For 2021

2021 is here at long last. Like many of you I am feeling grateful that 2020 is over. And yet…

… what does it really mean to start a New Year? There is nothing intrinsic about a change in date that will make our world better. On the surface, our hopes and fears for 2021 are pretty straightforward. We hope that 2021 will be better that 2020, and fear that it will be worse.

It is easy to attribute the fear to the Evil Inclination, what Rabbi Alan Lew called ““the tumultuous whirl-wind of impulses and dysfunctions that prevents us from doing what we should be doing.” We can become paralyzed about all kinds of awful things that are happening and might happen.

Could the hope for a better 2021 also be coming from the Evil Inclination? Don’t get me wrong – hope is powerful, necessary, and good. In fact Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said “Never give up hope! There is no despair!”

However, the Evil Inclination will sometimes try to build us up to then attack when we let our guard down. I hope that my kids will be able to go in person to college classes in the fall. But if I pin too much on that hope, I am in danger of being despondent if that doesn’t come to pass. And, I might miss opportunities to appreciate the good in today. The Covid vaccine is a source of hope, yet the growing case numbers and deaths are a cause for fear.

Some of you may have heard the teaching from Rabbi Nachman that the whole world is a narrow bridge and the important thing is not to be afraid. The present is a bridge connecting the past and the future. Let us walk together on that bridge, drawing courage from one another.

We can be 100% certain that this pandemic will pass. How and when we don’t know. But whatever happens, lets do our best to have a better 2021 than 2020. There is much we can control, but whatever happens, we can face it together.

If you’d like a closer connection to the American Mussar community, please join us in our weekly gathering Jewish Wisdom For Coping with a Pandemic. This is a drop in group, for people of any age, religion or level of Jewish background. Just come and bring a friend. Click here to learn more and get the zoom link.

Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash 

For Hanukkah Choose Abundance Over Scarcity

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Hanukkah Choose Abundance Over ScarcityThis morning, Cantor Kerith Spencer-Shapiro shared a variant about the Hanukkah story that blew my mind. In the story most of us have heard, when the Maccabees wanted to rededicate the Temple, there was only enough oil for one day. Yet a miracle occurred and the old lasted eight days, until new oil arrived. As she presented in the Institute of Jewish Spirituality Daily Sit, she asked
What if the miracle was there always was enough,… and in their anxiety, those who saw the oil saw its meagerness instead of its abundance?
She rightly observed that we often get caught up in feelings that there is not enough. And she offered an alternative, that we can tap into the Shefa – an ever-flowing source of abundance. Now some of us might tune out if we get “too mystical” talking about Shefa. Yet there are two things that even the least mystical can take from this.

1.  It is undeniably true that humans have a tendency to feel scarcity when it doesn’t always exist. As it says in Ecclesiastes 5:9-11
A lover of money never has his fill of money, nor a lover of wealth his fill of income. That too is futile. As his substance increases, so do those who consume it; what, then, does the success of its owner amount to but feasting his eyes? A worker’s sleep is sweet, whether he has much or little to eat; but the rich man’s abundance doesn’t let him sleep.

2. Our Evil Inclination scares us into thinking that we don’t have enough, even when we do. My mother had very little money. But she always found a way to host people for snacks or lunch, and kept a bowl of candy on her coffee table for guests.
When faced with fears of scarcity, we are faced with a choice – do we clutch what we have close to us, or do we move forward and see what happens. The Maccabees moved forward and low it turned out they had enough oil for 8 days. When I left the corporate world, we though we could only afford it for a year. But ten years later, we’ve still had enough.

Finally, Cantor Spencer-Shapiro reminded us that there are many many people who don’t have enough. And it is our job to share with them.
Do you ever get trapped by fears of scarcity in your life? How do you deal with them? I’d love to know. As always, I answer every comment.
This post is a lead in to this week’s Jewish Wisdom For Coping with a Pandemic gathering, which will focus on the Soul Trait of Gratitude, which is chapter 12 in The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions. These drop in zoom sessions are open to people of any age, religion, gender or level of Jewish background. Please come join us, and bring a friend.