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A Jewish spiritual tradition reborn

On a Saturday night amidst another war in Ukraine a century ago — the larger Russian civil war — Rabbi Joseph J. Hurvitz found himself in a synagogue with shooting and explosions all around. It was time for Havdalah, the closing ceremony of the Sabbath under candlelight and wine. The rabbi’s students could not help but note that even in these circumstances, as the rabbi stood, held the goblet and recited the blessing over the wine, not a drop spilled. Rabbi Hurvitz represented a Jewish spiritual tradition that was all but wiped out during the Holocaust, but which in recent decades has undergone a revival. It is the tradition of Musar, a spiritual method for attaining inner tranquility, no matter the circumstance, alongside sacrifice for people and G-d.

The Musar movement, founded as an Orthodox Jewish response to modernity in mid-19th century Eastern Europe, has grown in ways that its leaders, such as Rabbi Hurvitz, could not have imagined. Students and practitioners of Musar are now to be found across the American Jewish spectrum, spurred mainly by an unlikely extension of the influence of the few European-rooted adherents who survived the Holocaust. No longer is Musar expressed only in Yiddish and practiced only in yeshivas.

What is this spiritual tradition? Musar is a unity of inner peace and ethics. It is a recognition that the human being is governed by unconscious forces, such that introspection and other methods for countering self-deception must underlie religious commitment. A religious person must work to acquire a keen understanding of his own biases to be a servant of G-d rather than a servant of himself.

What differentiates modern Musar from its antecedents is its focus on empirical methods for implementing the ideals that were articulated as far back as the 11th century in the first Musar work, Duties of the Heart. At the National Prayer Breakfast last February, Sen. Charles Schumer cited Leviticus, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” When one falls short of a norm such as this, how is it to be realized, not only in a change in behavior but in a change in heart? This was the question addressed by the founder of modern Musar, Rabbi Israel Salanter, eight centuries after Duties of the Heart.

Among modern Musar’s empirical methods: singing or chanting a single Scriptural verse or phrase that articulates a spiritual or ethical ideal. Rabbi Hurvitz’s students deployed even a single pregnant Hebrew word: “Hishtaveisi. Have I reached equilibrium such that I am indifferent to both praise and blame?” How I am, not only how I act, is the ultimate goal. To concentrate on a pithy expression of a religious norm is to reach deeper into one’s motives and wellsprings of action. Another method, a necessary complement to introspection, is to gather a small group of colleagues for a mutual evaluation of each other’s character traits and spiritual progress. Introspection alone cannot surmount personal biases. As for loving one’s neighbor, Musar insists on the likes of repeatedly doing acts of kindness for a person one does not like.

Repetition is necessary, since the goal is not just to mend a relationship but to reshape the inner self.

In the Musar dialectic, one trajectory is the focus on self. The other is the focus on ethics. Stories are legion about Rabbi Salanter’s insistence on the latter as well as the former. He once arrived in a town and chose to spend the night in a grossly neglected homeless shelter. The next morning the town elite was scandalized.

A eminence such as this surely belonged in one of their homes, wined and dined. The rabbi said he could accept their hospitality only if they renovated the shelter. Against the background of this type of role modeling, the word musar has entered the modern Jewish lexicon as a metonymy for a higher ethical standard, getting the right thing done, comfort level notwithstanding.

Rabbi Salanter, a brilliant Talmudist, was ahead of his time in many ways. (He proposed the translation of the Talmud from Aramaic to Hebrew to widen its accessibility, a project realized only a century later.) He insisted that the obligation to study and practice Musar did not follow the traditional demarcation of gender roles, though he upheld the demarcation. Musar, however, was different, he said. Refinement of character and spiritual ascent are equally incumbent on every person. Judaism’s twofold classification of the commandments of the Torah are those “between oneself and one’s fellow” and those “between oneself and G-d.” Rabbi Salanter added a third category, “between oneself and oneself.”

To preclude egotism, a hazard of the focus on oneself, Rabbi Salanter inverted the golden rule. He said: Treat others the opposite of how you treat yourself. Honor others, seek no honor yourself. Attend to others’ material needs, get by on a little yourself. Rabbi Salanter’s ultimate dialectic: “Spiritual matters are more important than material matters, but meeting another person’s material needs is my spiritual obligation.”

Amidst a typhus epidemic in 1919, Rabbi Hurvitz was urged not to care for his students, lest he become infected and die. He did not listen. While focused inward, on his duties of the heart, he reached out to care for his students, came down with typhus, and died. Schooled in this Musar model, I see its echo in the countless heroes in Ukraine today, risking their lives, caring for the stricken.

Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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IJN Executive Editor | [email protected]


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