bechirah point - American Mussar

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:

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
Don’t be silent if someone talks about how sexy or exotic Asian women are. That stereotype helps perpetuate violence against Asian women.
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.

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Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

The Choice Point is a fundamental element of Mussar practice. It is the moment when we are balanced between doing the right or the wrong thing. When we are awake, we see the choices in front of us, and are better positioned to exercise our free will. This excerpt, from my book “The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions,” explains the importance of Understanding Mussar Choice Points.

Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler one of the foremost Mussar masters of the early 20^th century, describes the struggle between the Good and Evil Inclinations as a battlefront. Behind the front lines, our actions are firmly entrenched such that we act without thinking to follow either the Good or Evil Inclination. When we are at the boundary, however, we are faced with a choice, and feel the pull towards both positive and negative behaviors. Rabbi Dessler called this a choice point.[1] For example, stopping at a red light under ordinary circumstances is in the category of an automatic behavior in the area of the Good Inclination. However, if we are running late, we may be tempted to race through the intersection while the light is changing. Choice points are critical, since that is where we have an opportunity to exercise free will, and decide which way to go. We might make a decision to do right by our Soul, or to follow the Evil Inclination. It is only a choice point if the decision could go either way.

This picture of the confluence of the Rhone and Arve rivers illustrates the metaphor of the battle between the Good and Evil Inclinations. Imagine that you on a boat traveling towards the confluence of the clear and muddy rivers. In some parts of our life, we generally do the right thing and thus are sailing through the clear waters on the left side. In other areas, however, our weakness hold sway, and we are in the habit of following our base instincts in the cloudy water. In the middle, there is a grey area, where our spiritual challenges lie. The boundary is jagged, uneven, and in constant flux. There are places where the good juts out a bit or the Evil Inclination is starting to permeate under the Good Inclination. Each action we take influences our Soul, making it more likely that we will make a similar decision in the future. Thus when we follow the Good Inclination, the boundary is pushed to the right. When we follow the Evil Inclination, the boundary is pushed to the left. Dessler supports this conclusion by citing Ethics of the Fathers, which says “One sin leads to another,” and the Talmud, which teaches, “as soon as one has committed a sin twice, it is no longer a sin for him.”[3] In America, we call this phenomenon the slippery slope.

Rabbi Dessler teaches us that our choice points are a product of our education, environment, and state of spiritual development.[4] Two people with different spiritual curriculums will face very different choice points day to day. For example, lets compare the choice points between two men, one righteous, and the other a thief. For the thief, the choice point is whether to take the television but leave behind the Blu-Ray player. For him, that would represent a great step forward since he did not commit as big a crime as he usually did. The challenge for the righteous person is to give to charity with a feeling of Loving-Kindness instead of out of obligation.[5]

We all have issues. Mussar concerns the point of choice, that moment of conflict when we have to choose between being patient, or yelling at the kids to hurry up and get out the door. Choice? When I start yelling it doesn’t feel like a choice, it just comes out. While this is true, amazingly enough, two weeks after I began to focus on the Soul Trait Patience I experienced a dramatic change in my typical behavior. My kids were slow getting out the door in the morning, and I opened my mouth to yell at them. In that moment, I recognized them as little divine Souls, just playing around and not giving a fig about getting to the car. I closed my mouth and smiled.

In that moment, I chose to sail in clear waters.

“Excerpt from “The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions” by Greg Marcus, PhD © 2016 by Greg Marcus, PhD. Used by permission from Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., www.Llewellyn.com.” Order now on Amazon

Image credit: La Jonction used with permission from S. Brandt.

[1] Rabbi E. E. Dessler, Strive for Truth, reprinted on Torah.org, accessed August 7, 2015, http://www.torah.org/features/spirfocus/FreeChoice-point2.html.

[2] Go to http://americanmussar.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Figure-4.1-Mussar.jpg to look at this picture in more detail.

[3]Avot 4:2 and Talmud, Yoma 86b.

[4] Rabbi Eliyahu E. Dessler, Strive for Truth!, trans. Aryeh Carmell (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1978), 54-55.

[5] Derived from an example from Rabbi E.E. Dessler shared by Morinis in Everyday Holiness, 23.

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Jews and Asians Were Both Shocked By Atlanta

Mussar Practice Essential: Understanding Mussar Choice Points