American Mussar

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

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.

15 Minutes of Gratitude Could Change Your Life

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gratitude could change your life
Gratitude could change your life

“Things are good”

So said one of the participants in last week’s Jewish Wisdom For Coping with a Pandemic gathering. We were focused on Truth, and with a partner, we tried to look at the Truth of our lives, with an eye out for what is good. 

She acknowledged that she had not touched another human being for months because of the pandemic, and that she missed her community. Yet she was ok and could do what she needed to from her home. The realization was on empowering for her, and an inspiration for all of us. (You can see it here).

As we approach Thanksgiving, there are invited to look for the good in our lives. 2020 has been one of the hardest and saddest of my life. I lost my mother to Covid, and yet I’ve tried not to lose the whole year. There have been real moments of joy, community and connection. 

This Thanksgiving, will you join me in taking the 15 minute Gratitude challenge? Carve out 15 minutes for yourself, and sit with a journal or a piece of paper. Start a timer, and write down everything in your life that you are grateful for. When I first did this in 2016, it was absolutely transformative. Before I started, I reviewed some key teachings about Gratitude that helped me a great deal.

Mussar teaches that Gratitude is the ability to recognize the good in any situation, and to give thanks. Thus, we are enjoined to be grateful for both good and bad things that happen to us. The latter can be a challenge. For example, when we are in shock over unexpectedly losing our job, and the mortgage payment is coming due, it may be hard to feel grateful. With the fullness of time we may end up with a better job, or being home may allow us to reconnect with our friends and family. Thus, in the moment, we can be grateful that we have an opportunity to spend our time doing other things. In addition, Mussar teaches us to be grateful for inanimate things. For example, right now I am Grateful to the nice lazy boy that supports me in comfort as I write to you. Not only that, I nap regularly in this chair with a cat on my lap.

In the 11th century Mussar classic Duties of the Heart, Rabbi   ibn Paquda teaches that there are three things that keep us from being grateful.

  1. We become too occupied with material things. For example, we want the very latest iPhone, and forget how useful the version we already have is.
  2. We take things for granted. Here, we fail to recognize the bounty of everyday blessings, like a comfortable bed, a safe neighborhood, and being alive.
  3. We focus on the negative. We tend to focus on mistakes people make, and the small hurts we receive from loved ones, and don’t notice the positives they do for us.

Before you start, write the three barriers to gratitude at the top of your paper. Then write down the three categories of things we should be grateful for. As a reminder they are:

  1. Good things
  2. Bad things (by finding the good in them)
  3. Inanimate things

Then, start the clock and write your list of things to be grateful for. As you are working on your list, try to overcome each of the objections, and remember to write down things in each of the categories to be grateful for. Don’t stop writing until the timer reaches 15 minutes. Some people find it very hard to write for the entire time. Frankly, this is what I expected to happen to me the first time I tried it.

In contrast, I was quite amazed to discover that at 15 minutes, I wasn’t done. I kept writing for another ten minutes! In those final minutes, I started to feel a sense of calm, peace, and fulfillment. I was amazed, because prior the the exercise I was feeling a bit restless and fretful. When I was done, I was filled with energy and confidence. I still feel the residue of the experience a day later.

So did that change my life? Heck Yah! Even had I only felt those positive feelings for part of a day, that in itself is life changing. Yes, making your today better is life changing. And I have the opportunity to keep making my today better each and every day. Beyond that, I know that I filled almost four pages in my journal of things to be grateful for. When I have such abundance in my life, it is hard to worry about even the big things that can be overwhelming. May this wealth of things to be grateful for give me strength and help me through these challenging times.

So, do you agree that 15 minutes of Gratitude could change your life?

Will you join me? Comment below me and let me know how it goes.

Ready to start your own Mussar journey? Take the Soul Trait Profile Quiz now. 

An earlier version of this post was published in January 2016 and again in December 2018.