American Mussar

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

Mussar Awe Practice To Gain Strength in These Times

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mussar awe practiceHave you ever had something show up in your life at the exact moment when you need it? This happens to me all the time when it comes to the soul trait I am practicing. I must say this happened to me less often the last few months, as I sank into and then emerged from the fog of grief. But I was thrilled to experience it again a few days ago.

I was meeting with my study partner Henri, when out of the blue, the book we are reading started to cover Awe, which is our topic for this Thursday. Duties of the Heart is itself a source of Awe for me. It was written in the 11th century in Judeo-Arabic, hundreds of years before the printing press. Yet we still read this first full book on Mussar today, and it’s lessons are spot on. 

ibn Paquda wrote that one who knows how to calculate the cycles of the stars but does not, is like one who drinks and listens to music at a party but does not notice the wonder of creation. This reminds me of the people who are going to bars, or listening to conspiracy theories and ignoring the perils of Covid-19. Most of these people have sufficient education to understand what is happening, yet they choose not to. Which brings us to a Mussar practice.

**********************Here’s the Mussar Awe Practice*******************

What are you missing? The Baal Shem Tov founder of the Chasidic movement taught the following:
The world is full of wonders and miracles, but we take our little hand and we cover our eyes and see nothing

What is it that you are not seeing? Do you see the wonder of Covid? It is horrible, yet as a scientist part of me is fascinated that a virus can jump to humans and then infect all kinds of tissues in the body. Sometimes it kills healthy people, and more often than not our immune system fights it off. (Notice how close Awe and Fear come, as we covered last week.) The world is bigger and more powerful than humankind, and if we keep ignoring the threats of this disease and global warming, we are going to pay for it.

My suggestion is to start with something small. For example, once I was out walking, ruminating on something, and I decided to just stop and take a breath. Suddenly I heard birds singing. They had been singing all along. What is a small miracle that you are missing?

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Please give this practice a try, and then let me know how it goes. If you do, you’ll have an opportunity to experience how much energy we can gain from experiencing Awe. As always, I answer every email and comment.

This post was a lead in for the July 30th Jewish Wisdom For Coping with a Pandemic gathering on Zoom. You can watch the video here.

Mussar Lessons From Hadestown

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Mussar Lessons From HadestownWhen I finally listened to the Hadestown soundtrack, I didn’t know whether to dance or cry. 

Hadestown is a retelling of the story of Orpheus, who walked into the underworld to get back his wife Eurydice. Hades agrees to let her leave with him, as long as she walks behind him on the journey, and he never looks back. Unfortunately, he looked back right at the end, nervous that she wasn’t following him and she slipped back into hell.

The musical really played up the psychological aspects of the journey out of hell. When told they could leave as long as he did not look back, Orpheus says: “It’s not a trick?”

“No, it’s a test,” answers Mr. Hermes. He goes on to explain that we need to dread “the dog that howls inside your head.” The song of the walk is filled with Orpheus’ doubts – who am I to get this deal from Hades? Would he really let us go?”

Does this sound familiar to you? Have you ever had a clear path, littered with obstacles of your own creation?

In the show, Orpheus is depicted as an extraordinary person, who could see the world as it ought to be, not as it is. And, he could make others see it that way as well. Has there ever been a time with a bigger gap between the way the world is, and the way it ought to be? I suspect there has been, but not in my lifetime.

This is what Mussar is all about, looking within to see the way we ought to be, and working to close the gap step by step. And as we come toward wholeness ourselves, we are better positioned to heal the world along the way.

If you haven’t hear it before, give Hadestown a listen. The beauty of the music, and the vision of a world of all of us standing together made me want to dance and cry at the same time. Because now we need beauty, and a vision of what the world could be, even as we keep our eyes open to the world as it is today.

What are the Mussar Lessons From Hadestown that you are walking away with?

This blog post is the lead in for the weekly Jewish Wisdom for Coping with a Pandemic zoom gathering.

Owning My White Privilege: A Silence Mussar Practice

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Owning My White PrivilegeIt was poignant coming out of Shavuot,  the holiday that we celebrate the giving of the Torah, to find the world still so incredibly broken. The Torah as so much wisdom for living a moral life, yet we are mired in patterns of white supremacy. The United States has done little to acknowledge of legacy of slavery, lynchings, and discrimination that continues today.

Rabbi Alan Lew taught that in a recurring catastrophe, we ask how we are complicit and accountable. Systematic racism against people of color, aka white supremacy, is absolutely a recurring catastrophe. And now we are a country in crisis.

What is the mussar response?  I was asked to address the murder of George Floyd before a previously scheduled Mussar teaching on Sunday morning. I declined, because to do so would have asked each of us to own our white privilege, and how we have contributed to bias against people of color. Why, because Mussar is a practice of personal transformation, guided by Jewish Wisdom. First and foremost, we have to own who we are, and our mistakes. 

The next day, after watching the protests, I made a video owning my white privilege.  It was scary, and I feel vulnerable putting it out there. But it is what I need to do to take accountability for where we are. But now that I have, I feel a bit better.

Owning My White Privilege covers a lot of ground

I explain that  white privilege is as simple as having the privilege of not being afraid of being murdered by the police. 

I also share a painful memory, of a time I was biased and hurtful to a black person. It came from a place of irrational fear. I did not call names or the police, but what I did was unacceptable, and I apologize.

And I offer three Mussar practices, following that soul trait of Silence, that we can do if we want to be part of the solution:

Owning My White Privilege
Jewish Women of Color – from Twitter

1. Own your white privilege if you are white presenting
2. Reach out to people of color to ask how they are. And be ok if they don’t want to answer. It is particularly important to recognize and see Jews of Color.
3. Speak out about your own bias. This could be telling a friend, or just writing in a journal,  But we all can and must own our own complicity and hurtful actions in the past.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs taught that Jews cannot solve anti-semitism. We are the victims of anti-semitism. It needs to be solved by the perpetrators of anti-semitism. Similarly, people of color cannot solve white supremacy. It needs to be solved by people with white skin.

The first step is to admit that having white skin gives us a privilege, if only the privilege of not being killed by the police.

The soul trait of Silence governs when we should speak, and when we should not. To learn more, join us for this week’s Jewish Wisdom for Coping in a Pandemic. The free zoom gathering will focus on Silence.

Originally, this post had an image from Wikimedia commons, showing  a postcard of the lynching of three black men in Duluth, MN on June 15th, 1920. It captures the horror I feel about what is happening to people of color in the United States.

This Mussar Practice Can Help With Isolation

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Mussar Practice Can Help With Isolation
This old school practice can bring joy to you and others

I don’t need Rabbinical school to guessing that the plague has completely disrupted your normal routine. Whether you are still sheltering at home, or are just missing new movies and live sporting events, it seems like nothing is the way it was. And so it is fitting that Order is next up in our rotation of soul traits. (Order is covered in Chapter 13 of The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions.)

The Hebrew word for order is Seder, which you probably recognize from Passover. The Seder is an ordered and organized meal. Order brings with it a sense of stability and predictability, two things sorely lacking in the world right now. When we don’t have them, we feel stress.

Many people, including my family, are using the extra time at home to practice Order by finally cleaning out that overstuffed closed. My wife is organizing our boxes of old photos, which has allowed us to revisit some wonderful memories.

As the same time, we don’t want to try to stuff too much Order into our lives when we are reeling with trauma and stress. You don’t need to be productive – this is not necessarily the time to finally write that novel. We need to get through, which is why I recommend the following Mussar practice that has the right amount of Order. And, this Mussar practice can help with isolation.

*************Here’s the Mussar Practice******************
Schedule times to call other people. Put a time on your calendar every day to reach out to someone else. It can be a short check in, or a long catch up of 15-45 minutes. This will help you feel less isolated. And if you aren’t feeling isolated, it can help someone else feel less isolated.
After all, Mussar is about bearing the burden of the other. Right now, we all need each other to get through this.

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What can I tell you, I’m an old school guy who misses the spontaneous phone calls of years gone by. It has been really wonderful getting calls from old and new friends, checking in to see how I am. Together, let’s emulate Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, who made it a practice to greet others in the market before they could greet him (Talmud Berachot 17a). In a similar way, let’s be the ones to proactively reach out and connect to others.

I am going to make my phone calls at 4PM time. How about you? Please leave a comment below. Scheduling a time, and publicly committing to it makes it more likely that you will follow through. 

And please join us Thursday at 4 PM Pacific for our weekly Jewish Wisdom For Coping in a Pandemic Zoom call. No prior anything required.

Image by tommyzwartjes from Pixabay

How To Cut Your Hair Like a Mensch In a Pandemic

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Cut Your Hair Like a Mensch
This is the haircut I need today, not the one I had pre-covid.

Would you have gone back to Egypt on the shore of the Red Sea? On a recent Judaism Unbound podcast, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie shared that some Israelites did indeed people wanted to go back to Egypt, to the way things used to be.  Others wanted to move forward into a scary unknown, and jumped in the water to cross the sea. He suggested that we are in a similar place now., in a moment of uncertainty. Do we want things to go back to the way things were, or will we exit this crisis looking to make a better world?

My perspective is that things will never go back to the way they were, even in the best of circumstances. Many flaws of the old way are being exposed by this crisis – the lack of healthcare and wages for many, and structural inequalities to name a few. It is my hope and desire to build a better world.

This became apparent to me in a small but real way over the weekend, when I unpacked my hair clipper. For 20 years I’ve gotten the same haircut – a number two clipper on the sides, and cut short to blend it in on the top. (Number two means 1/4 inch in length.) At first, I thought that I could replicate this on my own, by using a combination of a 2 and 3 clipper. But the clipper didn’t have a #2, only a #3 at 3/8 of an inch. And it had some fancy attachments to give a fade on the sides.

Thinking back on what Rabbi Amichai said, I realized that this was not the time to try to go back to a haircut I could not possibly achieve on my own. I realized that what I needed was to make my hair neat and presentable. So, I just cut it with the longest length, and it looks just fine. That is my haircut for the present. In the future, who know’s what I’ll decide to do? So to “cut your hair like a mensch” is to figure out what it is you need, and then to do it.

What is it that you really need right now?

This act of looking at what you need is critical when we then look to the needs of others. This weeks American Mussar Community Gathering will focus on the soul trait of  Honor.