Mussar Practice - American Mussar

Mussar Practice For Moderating Enthusiasm

September 10, 2020 By Greg Marcus Leave a Comment

I often get signals from the universe when I am embarking on the right soul trait, and the upcoming Enthusiasm practice is no exception. This weekend someone asked a question on the Enthusiasm practice page about the following passage from Proverbs 24:

“A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest-and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.”

It reminded me of a mantra I created for myself when I was younger: “Too much is never enough.” I liked to live 100% all the time. I was studying, working, dancing,, partying. Something had to be going on all the time. Is it a wonder that I became workaholic? There is never a right time for that mantra – it nearly led to disaster in my life.

As Ben Zoma said in Pirkei Avot 4:1 “Who is wealthy? The one who is happy with their portion.” All this go go go was to distract myself from low self esteem. When I became content with who I was, I recognized the abundance in my life and let go of the “always on” lifestyle.

Today when practicing Enthusiasm, I much prefer the mantra “Run to do good.” Yes, we want to proactively look for ways to make the world a better place. But it does not say “Always run to do good.” There are times when we need to rest and recover.

The Jewish holidays offer a great opportunity to slow down, look within, and allow yourself to recover. With that in mind, I’m going to cancel the Jewish Wisdom For Coping with a Pandemic gatherings on September 17, 24 and October 1st go give myself time for rest, recovery and a little more grief work.

What is it that you will focus on during the High Holidays? Is this a time for you to put some things on pause? Reply below – I’d love to know.

Image by Ralf Designs from Pixabay

What Do You Need to Park in Order to be Present?

August 27, 2020 By Greg Marcus 2 Comments

What do you need to park right now in order to be present for the next hour?

The question was asked by my new Mussar teacher Rabbi Janet Madden, and it struck my like a lightening bolt. For me the answer was obvious – I need to stop checking the air quality on my phone. Right now those of us living in the Bay Area are surrounded by fires, and depending on the wind the air quality ranges from “not bad” to “totally unhealthy” from the smoke. I have been checking my phone all the time, not just for my town but for various towns around the area. A place 20 miles away can have very different air quality.

And this helps me how? Not at all really. In fact, it had become an obsessive habit, even when I wake up at night. So, I decided then to stop checking my phone, and “park” the need to check it.

“Park” is an interesting word to come up, given that we have been practicing humility, and “Park considerately” was one of our possible actions. The AQI (Air quality index) checking was very much invading my space, and I needed to park it to be in the moment.

Of course it was not so simple. Checking was an obsessive habit, and not checking in the short term caused more stress and distraction. That is where this week’s soul trait was helpful: Patience.

Patience is not about being calm, but rather enduring an uncomfortable situation. I invoked Patience to help me weather the transition from “checking” to “being present.” While I was not completely free from the impulse to check the AQI, it was lessened and overall I could be more present.

What do you need to park in order to be more present? To help you keep it parked, remember the Patience mantra: This too shall pass, and I have the strength to get by until it does.

To your own Patience practice, please join us for Jewish Wisdom For Coping with a Pandemic, which meets every Thursday at 4 Pacific over Zoom. No background is needed for these drop in calls – people of any age, gender and religion welcome.

Mussar Awe Practice To Gain Strength in These Times

July 31, 2020 By Greg Marcus 1 Comment

Have 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.

This Mussar Practice Can Help With Isolation

May 27, 2020 By Greg Marcus 1 Comment

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

Judaism Unbound Listener Survey – A Deep Dive

March 5, 2020 By Greg Marcus Leave a Comment

When it comes to living a meaningful Jewish life, what is the biggest problem, challenge or situation you are facing?

This is the question we asked in the Judaism Unbound Listener Survey in 2018. The results and details of the survey were published recently in an eJewish Philanthropy article, that I co-wrote with Estee Solomon Gray. You can read here.

The Judaism Unbound Listener Survey helped us identify 5 primary challenges that prevent people form living a meaningful Jewish life. In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at the five buckets, categories that together capture over 80% of the challenges shared by the respondents.

As practitioners of Mussar, our job is to, as Rabbi Ira Stone teaches, “bear the burden of the other.” These bucket descriptions do not capture the deep emotionality of the responses. As leaders and humans, we need to do better. For each bucket, there is a suggested Mussar practice to help us do just that.

Judaism Unbound Listener Survey Uncovered 5 Challenges:

1. Institution not working for me: My Jewish institution has a wall of no change, there are few people my age at events, or I am not taken seriously.

While there were people of many ages who fit into this bucket, there were so many people under 40 that we almost wrote “I am not taken seriously by the older generation.” It is not a secret that synagogue membership skews towards an older demographic, many of whom lament that more young people don’t join. The reality is that some younger people are just not connecting with the way things have been done, and when they make suggestions for change, they are not taken seriously.

One Soul Trait we can embrace to overcome this barrier is courage. Change is scary, and we should not let fear drive us to arrogant or dismissive behavior.

2. Minority within a minority: I don’t fit the shared criteria of what being Jewish is because of how I look, my gender identity/Queerness, my views on Israel or US Politics, or I just don’t feel Jewish enough.

There are really two parts to this bucket. Sometimes people feel like a minority because of what they believe, such as being the only Trump supporter in the conversation, or they are the only one who does not support Israel. The other people in this bucket are different because of who they are, a person of color or Queer. Yet the isolation and othering they experience is similar.

The solution to othering is to practice the soul trait of Honor. By focusing on the basic humanity of each individual, we can overcome differences that inhibit connection and community

3. Isolated: I am feeling isolated geographically, within my family, or as an unpartnered Jewish person.

This bucket was a bit of a surprise. Maybe it shouldn’t have, as there is a loneliness epidemic in the US. But because I live in an area with a large Jewish population and in a family where everyone is Jewish, this issue was not on my radar. Lex Rofeberg on the Judaism Unbound podcast is a big champion for people in small communities. For people in this bucket, perhaps the podcast is their biggest connection to other Jews. It has also made me recognize how many people come to the synagogue alone because their spouse or partner is not interested.

Note that the people in this bucket found that the isolation made it hard to live a meaningful Jewish life. As it says in the Torah “it is not good for a [human] to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18). The soul trait we can practice to help overcome this barrier is Generosity, giving our time to build relationships with people who are looking for community.

4. Entering or reentering: I am Jewish-adjacent, converting, or trying to discover what Judaism is about because I had a poor Jewish education.

So many people in this bucket said they did not feel Jewish enough. This is a terrible plague on our community. Another way this can come up is people feeling like they they are a “Bad Jew” because they don’t know something they think they should know, or because they do not participate in a ritual they think they “should” be participating in.

The reality is that Judaism is a practice of lifetime learning. The most learned Rabbi on the planet only knows a small fraction of what there is to know Jewishly.

The soul trait we can practice to overcome this barrier is Compassion. We want to remember what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t know what to ask. And similarly, we need to be compassionate with ourselves if we are concerned that we don’t know enough.

5. Multiple Jewish Spaces: My Jewishness is bigger than any label. I move in multiple Jewish spaces and sometimes feel caught between worlds. Even if I look and sound connected, I feel like I’m muddling along without community.

There are confusing times. Rabbi Benay Lappe teaches that Judaism is undergoing a crash; what has worked for a long time is no longer working. After a crash comes a time of wandering and experimentation. In fact, today is a golden age of Jewish experimentation. Many people are experimenting on the margins; some of whom in 100 years will be towards the center. I for one love to go to different Jewish spaces, but multiple spaces dilutes the opportunity to form deep community bonds at any of them.

The soul trait we can practice to help with this barrier is Gratitude. We can be Grateful for whomever shows up. And if we are lucky enough to have multiple spaces to occupy, we should “recognize the good and give thanks.” Recognizing the good in what we have opens the door to a greater openness to put down roots, even if each place itself is imperfect.

What do you think of the results of the Judaism Unbound listener survey? Which of these buckets resonate with you? What soul trait will you focus on?

Want me to do a survey for your organization? Learn more here.

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