 |
||||||||
|
 |
|
||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
|
By Shirah Bell, Director of Everyday Holiness Program It’s not necessary to take a Mussar course. Life presents us with innumerable opportunities for working on our soul curriculum if we pay attention. This morning I walked into my office, ignored my ‘to-do’ list, and started to clear out the tax receipts for 2008 so I could make room for 2009…two months late. As the receipts disappeared into neatly organized files and I had space for filing the accumulating 2009 receipts, I felt my heart expand and a weight lift. I hadn’t realized that I had been carrying around the weight. After all, it was just some tax receipts. “Seder” popped into my head and I saw how I had lulled myself into thinking I had that middah handled. I began to prepare for the va’ad I would be leading in the evening and noticed that I was agitated. I had sent an email request to the eight people in the group two weeks before and received two responses. It took two more emails until I heard from the other six. In the meeting, I asked them to look at their behavior and explore what middot might be off balance for them. They were stumped by the question and attempted to explain – the volume of email was really overwhelming, the computer wasn’t working, they faced higher priorities, and it took time to come up with the best answer. Each one had a reasonable explanation, but that’s not why we are doing Mussar. Their explanations can point in the direction of the middah that needs work. For example, the woman who responded to my email right away saw that the operative middah was kavod, both of herself (her response mattered) and of me. One of the people who was holding off until she got the best (right?) answer discovered that her perfectionism was masking too little humility. We began to see that we need nothing more than email to teach us about our soul curriculum. As Rabbi Salanter wrote, “Left to his own devices, man has an inescapable tendency to trap himself in a web of self-deception – each person according to his way.” [Ohr Yisroel] My husband received a note from a friend announcing that he was not going to fulfill a promise he had reiterated several times because he now concluded that my husband had done something to him a year ago that cancelled out his obligation. The “wrongs” cancelled each other, the friend said. My husband was annoyed and inclined to end the friendship without further conversation. When I suggested he ask for a phone conversation to understand what provoked the change, he responded with heat. “I have already spent too much time on this,” he said. “I have many important things to do to which I give much higher priority than this nonsense.” I chuckled. “Maybe Hashem just changed your priorities.” I reminded him about other circumstances in the past where he felt people had let him down and betrayed the friendship, and encouraged him to take the opportunity to see if he could discover more about what was behind his repeated victimization. (Caution: Don’t try this with your spouse without prior agreement.) I invited him to consider what middah was off balance and that perhaps it would reveal important things about other apparently unrelated situations. After a difficult conversation, he agreed to ask the about-to-be-former friend for a conversation. As the Alter of Novarodok wrote, “The only true index to the proper functioning of character is community service [devotion to others’ well-being], for in that area the situation itself calls for the implementation of certain traits, or their contraries….” [To Turn the Many to Righteousness] I encourage you to use what happens in your day – not only the obviously significant events, but the simple, ordinary, and perhaps mildly irritating, events – as opportunities to explore and grapple with your soul traits. |
|
|
||||
