“Awareness of Your Strengths – Tools for Success”
by Avi Fertig
When Moses received the Torah at Sinai, he stayed on the mountain for forty days and forty nights. Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra1 in his monumental commentary to Torah2 says that foolish people – or, in his more potent literal phrase, “people with empty brains” – are baffled why it took so long for God to teach the Torah to Moses. With his usual force and clarity, Ibn Ezra explains:
They don’t understand that if Moses stood there with God for many multiples of this time, even for years, it would still not be enough time to know a fraction of God’s ways or the depths of all the mitzvot. That’s because they mistakenly assume that the physical ritual is the essence [of mitzvot], and this is not true. Rather, it is the combination of heart and soul together with the physical ritu-als, which comprise the infinite depth of the mitzvot described in the Torah. The root of all mitzvot is to love and cleave to God with our complete selves – with all our souls.
He then adds a line which informs and guides us on the path to Sinai we are walking this Omer period, and indeed, should inform our spiritual path in life:
We cannot know God if we do not know our inner selves, our bodies and our souls.3 Because if one lacks knowledge of their inner selves, what wisdom can they possibly attain?
Knowing ourselves is the foundation for leading our lives with true wisdom. And so, much of our Mussar learning and practice is designed to open pathways for us to get to know ourselves – so that we can live our lives with wisdom, in the most elevated way.
We can readily appreciate how negative traits, or misaligned values prevent us from living a life of true wisdom. An abundance of impatience, or arrogance, or worry is bound to interfere with a life of elevated values and wisdom. To deal with those obstacles, Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz directs us to focus not on knowing our weaknesses but rather on knowing our strengths. This forms the focus of our Omer program this year:
Woe unto a person who is not aware of their [character] defects, and who does not know what they must correct. But much worse off is the person who does not know their strengths, and who is therefore unaware of the tools they must work with to advance themselves spiritually.4
Reb Yerucham expands:
Only through guarding one’s naturally good attributes can a person achieve wholeness because in truth, the entire foundation of a person’s spiritual work is through the good attributes that they naturally possess. If a per-son guards these traits and holds on to them properly, never veering from these naturally good traits, one will reach the height of wholeness (shleimut), even one’s naturally negative traits will completely change to the good…
Each person naturally possesses a unique positive quality and trait through which they can change their entire being to the good. This is their spiritual work, and it is in this way that a person achieves wholeness (Da’at Chochma U’Mussar volume 1, p. 340, my emphasis).
There is a lot to unpack in this teaching. To begin, let’s open three aspects:
1) What defines a strength?
2) How might we identify our strengths?
3) How are our strengths also our “tools”? Or, in Reb Yerucham’s words, how can our strengths be used to change our entire being to the good?
Of course, it’s impossible to answer these questions definitively in the space of one essay, and so my intention is to open some of the essential pathways for you to engage in the life-long process that Mussar practice requires.
Defining Strengths
Each of us has a positive trait or attribute in which we are naturally strong. We are gifted that strength at birth and usually it is also cultivated, learned and reinforced at an early age. The Mussar Masters suggest that by the age of maturity, or early adolescence, our middot and our personalities are mostly fixed. It’s not important to assess how much our strengths are inborn versus learned but it is crucial to the process to identify that strong positive middah. When we talk about positive strengths, it’s also less important to distinguish between what we would call a character trait or a value or a virtue. In Mussar parlance, positive middot encompass all these aspects.
Identifying Strengths
An important lesson in Mussar wisdom is that we must always remain on a path. Spiritual growth, elevating ourselves, must always be seen as a path we are on, just as we are currently on a path to Sinai. Growth and change occur when we actively seek. The moment we think we are done, or that we have come to the end of the path, we shut ourselves out from the wisdom we seek to live by. Knowing ourselves and knowing our strengths is no different. As we gain more clarity, we are better able to use our strengths to navigate life and to elevate our entire beings, as we shall see, but the essential truth is to keep ourselves on a constant path towards greater self-knowledge. This is also why focused questions are such a powerful way to lead us on the path. Questions lead us to seek and this itself is the goal. To identify your unique strength, begin to consider the following questions:
· What do you think is your strongest positive middah? How would others who know you well answer that question?
This question is the simplest way to start your journey as we usually really do know our natural strengths. Asking others who know you well is helpful, as it’s difficult to be completely objective about ourselves.
· What do you remember from your childhood; which positive middah was most important to you?
Mussar wisdom and practice is generally focused on the present and on setting goals for the future. Yet, knowing our natural strengths is one area where Mussar directs us to investigate our past, even into our earliest memories of childhood.
· Which positive middah comes most naturally and easily to you? What is your natural paradigm, or the first middah that repeatedly comes into play in a given situation?
We all see the world through specific lenses. Each of us has our specific positive middah through which we view and interact with the world. Becoming more aware of these unique paradigms is the greatest way to identify our natural strengths.
A corollary to this question is:
· What is your passion? What value or values speak to you most? Which middah would you never allow to falter in your life? Which would you sacrifice most for?
These questions require a lot of introspection. The rewards are endless, as we shall see.
Perhaps the most practical question we can ask to uncover our natural strengths is:
· When you are faced with challenges, which middah do you rely on most? We will explore this point in the next section where we discuss using our strengths to change our entire beings to good.
Finally, a question that might seem counter-intuitive:
· Where do you feel most lacking… what negative behavior upsets you most about yourself?
This question sounds like a way of identifying a weakness and not a strength. But in fact, our desire to excel at our natural strength often causes us to feel lacking in living by it. A lazy person isn’t too upset when they oversleep or put things off indefinitely. A person who is naturally strong in zerizut (alacrity or enthusiasm) will always feel that they haven’t done enough or when they occasionally do oversleep, will be very upset.
Strengths as Tools for Success
Reb Yerucham’s essential lesson is that our strengths are tools we can use to change our entire beings to the good. There are two ways to do this: one is by striving to reach ever greater wholeness in our naturally strong middah; and the second is to lean on our natural strengths to overcome our weaknesses and life’s challenges.
Reb Yerucham said, “Only through guarding one’s naturally good attributes can a person achieve wholeness…” We use our natural strength to live our highest values by always ensuring that our strength is the guiding force of our behavior. To “guard”
our strength at all costs, we inevitably must overcome our weaknesses and so by guarding and nurturing our strengths we achieve greater shleimut / wholeness.
To illustrate, if loving-kindness or generosity is your natural strength, you must over-come your laziness or lack of discipline or your timidity or worry to act with loving-kindness. If truth is your natural strength, you must guard truth and overcome any natural weakness that stands in the way of living truthfully. The point is to guard your strength at all costs so that you live your highest value.
The depth of this approach is that each of us has our unique spiritual path in life. Our natural strength obligates us to live by that unique strength. It is our natural strength that helps us to define and achieve our unique path.
The second way we use our strengths to change our entire being to good is by leaning on and into our strengths to overcome and eventually change our weaknesses. Our weaknesses – our dominant negative traits – might remain, but they no longer animate our behavior, nor do they continue to define us.
I believe this to be one of the most powerful and transformative pieces of Mussar wisdom. We all face many challenges throughout our day. And many of our most difficult challenges stem from our naturally negative middot. One who is naturally strong in truth but weak at generosity can lean on truth to do acts of generosity. Truth demands that we help others where we can even if we are not naturally given to be generous. One who is naturally strong in loving-kindness but weak in discipline or truth can come to see that true acts of loving-kindness must often be measured with restraint. Chesed (loving-kindness) demands that we not harm the recipient by making them dependent and it requires that they receive exactly what they need (truth) and not what we imagine they need. Conversely, one who is naturally strong (gevurah / strength; discipline) but weak in chesed or truth can lean on their gevurah to appreciate the necessity of acting with chesed. One’s gevurah can cause him or her to realize that they cannot fulfill their responsibilities without acting honestly.
This approach based on Reb Yerucham’s teachings provides a framework for growing towards shleimut. When a challenge comes your way in your relationships or in something you want to accomplish, do you exercise and act with your strength – your naturally positive middah – or do you act based on your weakness – your negative middah or selfish desires?
Just as our strengths have the potential to change our whole being to good when we live our lives and act with our natural strengths, so too, when we act with our weaknesses, we can change our entire beings in the opposite direction. These defining moments in your inner life – these choice points – reveal and bring to light the true depth of Reb Yerucham’s teaching. This is the path we must take to Sinai and the path which leads to changing our entire beings to good.
For Focus
As you begin your seven-week journey to Sinai, choose from among the questions we have highlighted to do some serious introspection. Spend time journaling your thoughts and feelings and any insights you have as you go, and through your focused practice of identifying your strength over the next several weeks. The following are the questions we mentioned:
1. What do you think is your strongest positive middah? How would others who know you well answer that question?
2. What do you remember from your childhood; which positive middah was most important to you?
3. Which positive middah comes most naturally and easily to you? What is your natural paradigm, or the first middah that repeatedly comes into play in a given situation?
4. What is your passion? What value or values speak to you most? Which middah would you never allow to falter in your life? Which would you sacrifice most for?
5. When you are faced with challenges, which middah do you rely on most?
6. Where do you feel most lacking… what negative behavior upsets you most about yourself?
Practice / Kabbalah
1. Based on your introspection and the questions outlined above, identify a positive middah that you believe is your natural strength. For this practice, do not be overly concerned whether or not you have actually identified your unique strength, assume you are in the right ballpark.
2. When you are faced with a life challenge, lean on or into your identified strength as a way of approaching and navigating the challenge.
[1] Ibn Ezra was born in Tuleda, Spain and lived around the year 1100. He was one of the most distinguished bible commentators and Jewish philosophers of the time. His Torah commentary is considered second only to Rashi and Ramban (Nachmanides), the latter quotes him extensively throughout his commentary.
[2] Exodus 31:18.
[3] In Hebrew, “nafsho, nishmato, vgufo.”
[4] Paraphrased based on Daat Chochma U’Mussar, Vol. 1, pp. 340-3.
Rabbi Avi Fertig serves as the Chief Programming Officer at The Mussar Institute, where he has been guiding courses and programs since 2010. Avi's educational background includes studying at the Yeshiva of Ner Israel in Baltimore, followed by a move to Israel in 1997. During his time at the Mir Yeshivah in Jerusalem, he developed a close bond with Rabbi Reuvain Leuchter, a prominent disciple of Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, a renowned authority in Mussar. Since then, Avi has been studying, writing, and teaching Mussar to a wide audience, impacting thousands of students. He is also the author of two books on Torah and Mussar. Avi resides in Beit Shemesh with his wife, Estie, their children, and their recently born grandson, Ariel.