American Mussar

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

Owning My White Privilege: A Silence Mussar Practice

By Leave a Comment

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

By 1 Comment

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.

*****************************************************************

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

By Leave a Comment

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. 

Balance Survival with Lovingkindness and Mussar

By Leave a Comment

balance survival with lovingkindness
Wholeness brings together animal instincts with human compassion

Right now many of us are angry and grieving and afraid, doing what we can to get by and are completely done with being at home.

And many of us, by choice or by necessity, are out there in the world risking infection to keep the rest of us fed and safe. Many, from medical professionals to grocery workers to my friend who works in the post office, do not have sufficient protective gear or sick leave. 

How do we balance our need for safety with the need to care for others?

The first mission is survival. It is a thought that has gone through my head many times over the years. I imagined saying it to my children as we lived in financial comfort. I wanted them to be prepared for a day when the world could change dramatically, to remember to take care of themselves first. 

Here we are today in a world dramatically different, and that part of my brain is saying “See, I told you so.” And while it is correct, in that we need to take steps to stay safe, this view of the world is incomplete. We cannot, for example, resort to hoarding in the name of survival, because…

We also need to “bear the burden of the other,” which according to Rabbi Ira Stone is the primary mission of Mussar. This point of view is equally true, especially now. We need each other to get through this thing. One of the most important soul traits to help support others is Lovingkindness. Pirkei Avot (1:2) teaches us that the world is built on acts of Lovingkindness. (Which inspired Menachem Creditor to write this amazing song). These are acts that go above and beyond to support others, without expecting anything in return. 

This brings to mind a Mussar practice to balance Survival with  Lovingkindness, because right now we need to do both, survive and support others without expecting anything in return. Each day, try to do one thing mindfully to support your own wellbeing, and one thing to support others.

For yourself, you could
  • take a bath
  • watch your favorite tv show
  • meditate
  • read for pleasure, spiritual inspiration or personal growth
  • ask for help
For others, you could:
  • take the first step to reconcile
  • Call someone who is isolated or sick
  • Make a charitable donation
  • Buy something extra from a local business
  • offer to help

During this time, many things that we normally do are extra hard. For example, it might take an extra effort to be polite or clean up after yourself. So right now, doing these extra hard things anyway can be considered an act of Lovingkindness because they support others, help create a better world, and are more than the minimum you could be doing.

What are you doing for self care, and to care for others?

This weeks Mussar community gathering will be focusing on Loving-kindness, chapter 9 in The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions. No preparation is necessary – just come! Details and video here.

Photo by Jonas Vincent on Unsplash

Trust in God But Tie Your Camel During the Pandemic

By 1 Comment

Trust in God But Tie Your Camel
Trust in God but Tie Your Camel

Do you find yourself worrying because of the pandemic? Maybe you are worrying about your health, the health of others, politics, the shape of society in the future… There are a host of things to worry about if we let ourselves. The spiritual challenge is to stay present, not to give in to worry, and to make good decisions.

As it says in the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer the Elder said, “He who has a loaf of bread in his basket but says, ‘What will I eat tomorrow?’ is lacking in faith.” [Sotah 48b] The passage goes on to say that one should Trust in the Divine that one will have food tomorrow. As one fortunate enough to have enough to eat, this is an important reminder about what is really important, and offers an important tactic to meet the spiritual challenge of these times. This lesson holds even if you are unsure of the Divinity.

In this week’s community gathering, we’ll return to a theme of Trust, following up on our discussion in the first post about the pandemic.

The mantra for trust is “Trust in God but tie your camel.” There is a lot of camel tying to be done these days, but we must not lose sight of Trust, for Trust is a cure for worry and fear.

As Rabbi Israel Salenter reminded us during a cholera epidemic:

At a time like this, our duty is clear: we must not fear [the cholera epidemic]- for what value is the life of a man [in this world] when we consider the overwhelming potential for spiritual failure? Who knows if a person will succeed in his path? Of course, this does not mean that we should fatalistically resign ourselves to dying and do nothing to protect ourselves. Rather, we must follow the regimen that the learned physicians have prescribed, to insure that we maintain our health. It is a Torah directive for us to proceed according to the light of their words, for our duty is to establish life in this world- for the benefit of ourselves, as well as others. – Ohr Yisrael – 23.

Mussar is a spiritual practice – something we do on a regular basis so that in times of crisis it is there for us. If you’ve read even one of my emails, you have taken a step towards this practice. The time of crisis is here, and we cannot allow ourselves to fail spiritually.
What would spiritual failure look like? Despair, selfishness, greed, denial, anger… Ok, I’ve dabbled in all of those, and sometimes I’ve even acted according to my worst nature. But Mussar has helped bring me back time and again. While Rabbi Salanter could get a bit fire and brimstone, we can be much more gentle with ourselves. Mussar is not about perfection. It is about process. 
The Weekly Mussar Community Gathering is open to anyone looking for a calming experience, a chance to connect to others 1:1, and to gain insights to cope with the current pandemic. No experience necessary. Just come and give it a try.
Photo by Scott Serhat Duygun on Unsplash