Mussar Institute - Through a Mussar Lens

By Alan Morinis

Here it is, New Year’s Day on the secular calendar, a day on which many people participate in a very useless annual ritual. Today is the day when people resolve to lose weight, to be less busy, to exercise more, to call their mother at least once a week, to give up smoking (or chocolate or French fries), to do (or not do) this or that, starting right now. Despite the wonderful good intentions that move people to take steps clearly in their own best interests, it is common knowledge that New Year’s resolutions are generally doomed never to see the light of day in February. Why is that?

The problem with resolutions is that they are entirely the product of the conscious mind. Our behavior, on the other hand, is not. Knowing right from wrong has little bearing on whether we do right or wrong, as struck me recently when I visited a women’s prison. It’s not that the women there were taken by surprise to discover that other people thought what they had done was wrong. They knew. They did it anyway.

Does a state governor who seeks corruptly to profit from his office not know that selling a Senate seat is wrong? Does a stockbroker who perpetrates a $50 billion fraud, say after getting caught, “I thought it was okay to do that”? Does a meat processor who employs illegal immigrants at exploitive wages really think that such behavior adheres to both Jewish and state law? Can a rabbi who sexually abuses a congregant plead ignorance?

Our guides from the world of Mussar are not in the least bit surprised by this situation. They certainly wouldn’t put much stock in New Year’s resolutions or for that matter in any attempt to bring about change based solely on mental statements of intent. The Mussar teachers understood that our thoughts are generally insubstantial, fleeting and weak. Which is why they guide us not to rely on resolutions as a pathway to change. They haven’t wanted us to fail. And good enough was never really good enough, since the Torah sets such a high bar for us when it tells us that holiness is our mission. Kedoshim tihiyu, the Torah says. You shall be holy.

Let’s take a look at Mussar teachings that point to the real way to bring about change, starting with a statement made by Rabbi Yitzchak Isaak Sher (1875-1952), the Rosh Yeshiva of the Slabodka Yeshiva in the 1920-30s.

In his foreword to the classic Mussar text, Cheshbon Ha’Nefesh, Rabbi Sher advises that a person who seeks to bring change into their life must “fully understand processes of thought formation and the modes of thought development.” He later refers to “the mysteries of thought formation, how feelings and images have their source within the depths of the heart….”

Today we generally accept that our thoughts originate in a dark and inaccessible unconscious. That is exactly what Rabbi Sher is pointing to. Real change requires that thoughts and impulses be reworked at their place of origin, deep beneath the conscious mind.

Rabbi Sher was writing in the 1930s, when he might possibly have been exposed to ideas coming out of the new discipline of psychology. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, who founded the Mussar movement in Lithuania, could not possibly have had access to such sources when he was active in the 19th century. In the book The Mussar Movement (Vol. 1, Part 2, page 26 – 27) we read:

Here, according to R. Israel, lies the reason why one’s knowledge and consciousness fail to influence one’s actions. Intellectual cognition stems from man’s conscious and apprehended faculties, which are not ingrained within his inner self. Its power is insufficient to resist the obscure forces within his inner nature, beneath the threshold of his consciousness. To ensure that his conscious mind controls his conduct and not his natural tendencies—his conscious conceptions and his fear of G-d must be made to penetrate into his spirit's very existence, that is to say: to enter beneath the threshold of his conscious mind—to transform his conscious into subconscious drives, and to reinforce the latter to such extent that they will rise up against his natural, inner drives and overcome them.

I’ll stake a claim that the Mussar teachers based their understanding of the limited capacities of the conscious mind on their own observations, not on influence from psychology. A quote from the founder of the Novarodock school of Mussar, Rabbi Yosef Yozel Hurwitz, sounds much more like a traditional religious text than it does psychology, but when you grasp what he is saying, it is a profound and practical general statement that helps us understand why resolutions fail.

If he knows all this only with his mind and not with his senses, he will find that his mental effort yields only a mental [i.e. abstract] result, not a sensory [i.e. actual] one. Even though the mental effort enables him to quiet the ferment of human nature and evil attributes while he is speaking of moral ideals, he cannot at all master his predilections and forgo his passions and rejoice in the verdict of God. This is so because his effort was not to educate himself to actually put things into practice, but only to mentally comprehend the proper worldview, the whole way of life, the ‘how, what and where.’ (Alter of Novarodock, translated by R’ Elyakim Krumbein in Musar for Moderns)

To paraphrase, if it is nothing more than a resolution, it will fail you. The Alter here is highlighting emotional learning as an avenue to pursue to bring about real change. This, too, was a legacy of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, who advocated a range of non-intellectual techniques to bring about real and lasting change.

The roots of these ideas run much deeper still in Jewish thought. In the second blessing after the Sh’ma we say “V'samtem et d'varei eileh al l'vavchem v'al naf-sh'chem” which translates as “And place these words on your hearts and on your souls.”

Why the double injunction? Why are we being told to take this fundamental principle and learn it twice, in two ways, into two different dimensions of our inner lives—heart and soul?

What is referred to here as “heart” can be taken to refer to the mind, since there are many references to the heart as the organ of thought. Learn this in your mind, the Torah says. But you can’t stop there. If you only go so far as to know something as a mental idea, it won’t have penetrated deeply enough to have much effect. You need to take another step, the first to know these things in your mind and then a second to inscribe them more deeply, on your souls. Then and then alone will they be real for you.

I used the verb “to inscribe” to describe the process of registering ideas in a penetrating and powerful way, and I draw that image from Moshe’s interesting choice of words. Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate for him to have told the Jews to place these words “in our souls” rather than “on our souls”? But, no. We learn that deep learning is not a storage process, but one that lays something down, in the way that inscription makes an impression on a surface. Mussar methods like chanting (hitpa’alut, or hispailus), visualizations, and contemplations have just that effect. They leave their trace deep within, and the traces accumulate, and change results.
We have come a long way from New Year’s resolutions. In place of that commitment to lose 20 pounds, I’ve brought you to the doorway of chanting and visualization. And the truth is, I believe that you are much more likely to lose the 20 pounds by doing the right sort of contemplation or visualization focused on the middah (inner trait) that fuels the overeating than you are to “just say no,” as the equally ineffective anti-drug slogan puts it.

And though we have come a long, long way from New Year’s resolutions, perhaps we have traveled that distance only to draw close to a saying we find in the Book of Proverbs (Mishlei). “On your own intellect do not rely” (3:5). Clear enough?

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