“The Source of Our Strengths”
by Alan Morinis
The Omer program draws on a teaching of Rav Yerucham Levovitz, the legendary mashgiach of the Mir Yeshiva, which I paraphrase as:
“It is important for a person to know their areas of weakness, so they know what they must work on. But it is even more important to know one’s strengths, because those are the tools a person can utilize to do that work.”
Rav Yerucham’s teaching guides us to give primary attention to the strengths we already have so we know and appreciate what we have in our toolkit – and that teaches us something very important about the Mussar path of personal transformation.
There was a time when Mussar developed a reputation as a harsh and confrontational practice that called on you to focus not on your strengths but on your personal weaknesses. You were expected to be hard on yourself about your deficiencies and you had permission to be equally hard on other people about theirs. The phrase “giving mussar” was equivalent to “telling off” and someone who didn’t want to hear your criticism would brush it off by saying, “Don’t give me your mussar1.”
The time when this was a part of the nature of Mussar ended in the early 20th century. Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, a primary Mussar teacher of our time who died in 2005 and who was a direct student of Rav Yerucham, has said that spiritual work and guidance in our generation can’t be like what people did in the past. At that time, he pointed out, Jews in Europe lived in the closed worlds of shtetls and ghettos. When you confronted another person, even if they wanted to escape your harsh verbal assault, there was nowhere for them to go because the outer world was closed to them. They had to stand and take it from you.
It was in that situation, Rav Wolbe said, that it was considered absolutely acceptable to discipline a child by hitting them. But no more. Now the Jewish world and the wider world are completely open to one another and today there is an easy escape for someone who doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of any act of physical or verbal violence.
I once asked my own Mussar teacher, Rabbi Perr, zt”l, about that sort of mussar, which makes a big appearance in the Yiddish novels of the writer Chaim Grade, who was exposed to fierce mussar in his own growing up.
“I believe,” Rabbi Perr began, “that a harsh word, a direct confrontation, giving it to another person straight and direct, is a very effective method. I believe it can act like an axe that chops right through to the person’s core and that can move them forward like nothing else. I believe that. But I have been teaching for 35 years now, and I have not found quite the right opportunity in which to use that technique.”
Rabbi Perr was being careful not to criticize the methods of the previous generation but, at the same time, he was saying that they had no place in our community today.
He likened himself, as a Mussar teacher, to a gardener. “There are some gardeners,” he said, “who like to prune, prune, prune. I’m more the kind of gardener who likes to fertilize and water.”
That was his way of saying something that Rav Wolbe articulated directly, which is that in our generation, everything must be done with love. You must guide other people with love, not harshness, and that goes for ourselves as well. You must guide your own spiritual work from self-love, and there is no better foundation for that than knowing and focusing on your own inner strengths, just as we are doing in this Omer program.
One of the key disciples of Rav Yisroel Salanter was a man named Rabbi Naftoli Amsterdam (1832-1916). One time, Rav Naftoli said to Rav Yisroel, citing some famous texts written by great rabbis of the past:
“Rebbe, if only I had the brain of the Sha’agas Aryeh,2 the heart of the Yesod V’Shoresh HaAvoda,3 and your middot, then I could serve God properly!”
R’ Yisroel answered, “Naftoli, your job is to serve God with your brain, your heart and your middot. With what God gave you, you can be Naftoli Amsterdam. That is all you have to be.”
So, the question you have to ask yourself is, what did God give me? With what strengths have I been endowed that I have in hand right now to do the spiritual work that lies before me?
Rav Yisroel held by the general principle that,
“Every individual must serve God by drawing upon one’s own powers of intellect, emotion, and character,”
and then he revealed what is so significant in our own individual inner powers, saying:
“a person’s abilities represent a degree of hashra’at ha’Shechinah,” which means the manifestation of the Divine Presence.”4
This is a powerful idea that not only elevates our strengths from being aspects of mundane to the spiritual, but it also reveals the source of our strengths to be nothing other than the presence of the Divine within us.
We might not automatically associate “strengths” with “Divine Presence” but that is what Rav Yisroel is urging us to see. And he is on solid ground in saying so because, as the Torah informs us, every one of us is formed b’Tzelem Elokim, in the image of God, and so there exists within us what is frequently called a chelek Eloka mi’ma’al, a Godly portion from on high.5
Every individual is made in the very same Divine image and that is the source of our strengths, yet each of us is unique. The rabbis comment on this apparent contradiction by pointing out that when a human king mints coins, they all come out looking the same, but when the King of Kings makes human beings, they all come out looking different.6 That goes for our strengths as well.
You are a unique being and with that uniqueness comes your own set of strengths that equip you to lead the life you are meant to lead.
Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe lucidly describes how each of us must see ourselves:
There was never a person like me; nor will there ever be a person like me throughout history. I, with my special character strengths, the child of my particular parents, born in a specific time period, and in a particular environment – certainly there is a unique challenge that is placed upon me. I have a special share in the Torah, and the entire world is waiting for me to complete my challenge. For my mission cannot be exchanged with anyone else in the world!7
As was explored in our first essay, the strengths you have right now are just what you need to reach that goal – once you recognize what they are, and believe in the power they contain.
How did you get those strengths? The Mussar classic, Orchot Tzaddikim, addresses this question directly:
There are some [characteristics] that a person has from the moment of their creation according to their physical nature. And there are also characteristics which the nature of this particular person is more prepared and more ready to receive quickly in the future than other characteristics. And there are those qualities that do not belong to a person from the beginning of their creation but that are learned from others or one turns to them oneself according to an inclination that occurs to one’s mind.
This is truly a remarkable teaching when you consider that it dates to the 16th century. The anonymous author observes that some of our strengths are inborn and are evident right from early childhood. Others are proclivities that we quickly pick up and make our own. Still others have been acquired through deliberate practice and habituation. This formulation is so much more nuanced than the binary of “nature vs. nurture” that has been used to account for strengths in modern psychology.
Yes, some of your strengths were obvious in the type of child you were. But there are others that you have worked hard to acquire, and that have become implanted in your inner nature. And then there are talents and leanings that only become strengths because circumstances brought them to the fore. All of these need to be recognized and acknowledged.
This is the truth about the human soul that is the locus of the image of God within. Its form is heavenly but in the way it expresses itself in our lives, it is not immutable but earthly and malleable. Some strengths are givens; others exist within us as talents or proclivities; still others are only potentialities that we can endeavour to actualize to maximize our strengths and to achieve our unique life mission.
The strengths within are the source of blessing in our lives. We learn that from the first book of the Torah, which ends with Yaakov facing the end of his life and giving each of his 12 sons a different blessing. The wording the Torah uses is curious and enigmatic:
“This is what their father spoke to them and blessed them; each person, according to their blessing, he blessed them.”8
What does it mean that “according to their blessing, he blessed them”? A blessing extended to another person is naturally meant to benefit that person’s future. When we look at what Yaakov actually said to his sons, however, we see that in many cases, he was simply naming what he saw to be that person’s personal strengths. He points out that Yehudah has “the strength of a lion,” Benjamin “the rapacity of a wolf” and Naphtali “the swiftness of a deer.” Where is the blessing in that?
Rav Yerucham explains that, indeed, the greatest “blessing” one can confer upon another is to reveal their unique strengths.9 The message to us is that our natural individual predispositions and temperaments – unique to each of us – whether we were born to them, or they developed within us, they constitute the tools we need to put to work to create the future we are aiming toward. Utilized to their fullest, our strengths become the source of our blessings.
Yaakov had the gift of prophetic insight from which to inform each of his sons of the strengths that were the unique attributes of each. We are not so lucky. While the situation is the same for us, in that our strengths are the source of our blessings, we have to look within ourselves and our interactions with the world with clear eyes to identify what is true for us.
When we do that, we will be modeling our behaviour on that of Jacob, except that in his situation he was blessing his sons, while in our case, it is ourselves we will be blessing.
Operationalizing These Ideas:
Is there a blessing you would like to have in your life? Look deeply, past superficial things, and reflect – If I had one blessing that I could bring into my life, what would it be?
Now consider, which of my personal strengths could have a role in bringing about that blessing? You must have some strength that could be brought to the fore – at the least in awareness, but perhaps more manifestly than that – that would be your contribution to inviting that blessing to emerge as you would hope.
Finally, what can you do to foster and enhance that strength of yours? Waiting passively for a blessing to descend is like waiting for a miracle, and it is a Jewish spiritual principle that we do not rely on miracles. Taking steps to strengthen your strength can be the action “below” that triggers the blessing from “above.”
[1] Even today, mussar is often translated as “rebuke” or “reproach,” based on this assumption.
[2] A brilliant work on Jewish law written by Rabbi Aryeh Leib Ginzburg (1695-1785).
[3] “Foundation and Root of Service” by Rabbi Alexander Ziskind of Horodna (1735-1794) is a guide to serving God through prayer, Torah study, and mitzvah observance.
[4] Quoted in Baderech, Rabbi Judah Mischel, Mosaica Press, p.10.
[5] Job 31:2. There it is asked as a question, and the traditional answer is that this is a metaphor point-ing to the soul, because God is indivisible.
[6] Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5.
[7] Alei Shur, Vol. I, p. 168.
[8] Genesis 49:28.
[9] Da’at Chochma U’Mussar, Vol. 1, p. 340.
Alan Morinis is widely considered to be a leader in the resurgence of contemporary Mussar. Born into a culturally Jewish, non-observant home, he studied anthropology at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. He teaches, writes curriculum, and speaks frequently. His books include Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, Everyday Holiness, and With Heart in Mind.