In Search of the Holy Life: Rediscovering the Kabbalistic Roots of Mussar

By Ira Stone and Beulah Trey

We began our Mussar journey by following the practice instituted by Rabbi Yisrael Salanter in Lithuania in the nineteenth century: a Mussar practice characterized by discipline and kibbush (restraint) as a path to self-improvement. We turned our inward-facing journeys outward and applied Mussar’s principles to the way we treated other people in our everyday lives. We would focus on the small but critical moments of human interaction and connection that make up our days and undergird our relationships. This prescription had the potential to serve as an antidote to the narcissism and isolation of our age, and in doing so, it could recast the very definition of the Divine for a contemporary audience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532069819

Ira Stone

Ira F. Stone, rabbi of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel in Phildelphia is a teacher of theology at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

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Copyright © 2019 Ira Stone,

Beulah Trey, Center for

Contemporary Mussar.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-6980-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6981-9 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 03/05/2019

CONTENTS

Tomer Devorah Chapter 1

Middah One: Sufferance

Middah Two: Tolerance

Middah Three: Forgiveness

Middah Four: Intimacy

Middah Five: Tender Curiosity

Middah Six: Kindness

Middah Seven: Compassion

Middah Eight: Transformation

Middah Nine: Radical Loving Equanimity

Middah Ten: Truth

Middah Eleven: Kindheartedness

Middah Twelve: Legacy

Middah Thirteen: Holiness

Acknowledgements

About The Authors

"Each soul in Yisrael actually contains a portion of all the others…"

Tomer Devorah, Middah Four

To the founding Board of the Center for Contemporary Mussar and board members to come.

Todah Rabah. Thank you.

Your enthusiasm for the Mussar Path we’ve charted together and your skill at building an organization that can sustain itself is a Mechayeh.

With gratitude we dedicate this book to you.

We wanted to live more meaningful lives; that’s where this story begins.

As is the case for increasing numbers of Jews today, our personal Mussar journeys began as a search for more meaning. We sought not only to undergird our Jewish practice with deeper spiritual roots, but were also drawn by the tug of our intuitions that at the very heart of Jewish practice is the practice of living an ethical life. We suspected that by living out that ethical practice — day to day, moment to moment — we could transform ourselves and our relationships with others.

We began our Mussar journey by following the practice instituted by Rabbi Yisrael Salanter in Lithuania in the 19th century: a Mussar practice characterized by discipline and kibbush (restraint) as a path to self-improvement. We turned our inward-facing journeys outward, and applied Mussar’s principles to the way we treated other people in our everyday lives. We would focus on the small but critical moments of human interaction and connection that make up our days, and undergird our relationships. This prescription had the potential to serve as an antidote to the narcissism and isolation of our age; and in doing so, could recast the very definition of the Divine for a contemporary audience.

For each of us, this traditional approach was transformative, at first. Yet over time, the don’ts of our Mussar practice began to feel confining, suffocating — a narrowing experience, rather than the broadening one we had hoped to achieve. We began to feel mired in the negative, and looked for a way to grow the part of ourselves that yearned to be transformed through actively doing good rather than through restraining our impulses.

Nevertheless, despite our frustrations, when we began teaching Mussar, all we knew from the tradition was kibbush. Thus that’s how we taught it for many years.

From the beginning we knew that Rabbi Salantar had talked about something called Tikkun, which we recognized as a specifically Kabbalistic term. Tikkun means repair, and it was among our first clues that Mussar could be enriched by Kabbalah – that indeed, the somewhat methodical Mussar we practiced has its roots in the intoxicating mysticism of Kabbalah. It was a startling discovery that started us on a different journey, one that led us to unearth the kabbalistic origins of Mussar and, eventually, to figure out how to enhance our Mussar practice in ways that were expansive, transformative — and, perhaps, the way Mussar was originally intended.

Some eight hundred years before the practice of Mussar was consolidated by Rav Salanter, the canon of Mussar literature began to take shape, infused with mysticism. As a genre of literature, its beginning is generally agreed to be the book Hovot Ha-Levavot, or Duties of the Heart, authored in the year 1040 by Rabbi Bachya ibn Pekuda. Written in Arabic in Saragossa, Spain, Duties of the Heart outlines a system of character development leading a person toward holiness. In Jewish ethical literature then, as now, ethics are understood to be part of the framework of obligations imposed by God upon human beings — obligations that, if met, will bring a faithful and diligent person into something akin to mystical union with the Divine.

Thus was forged a link between Mussar literature and Jewish mysticism that would remain essentially unbroken for the next thousand years. Almost without exception, all of the major works of Mussar written across the centuries, from Tomer Devorah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero; to the two books enthusiastically adopted by Rav Salanter, Mesillat Yesharim of Rabbi Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto and Heshbon HaNefesh by Rav Mendel of Satanov; to Mussar Avicha by the 20th century mystic Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, were written by Kabbalists. This Mussar-Kabbalah bond traverses both Ashkenazic and Sephardic traditions and bridges the divide between Hasidim and their opponents, the Mitnagdim. In some communities where Kabbalah was forbidden by rabbinic authorities, these authors could not bring Kabbalah explicitly into their texts, but there can be no doubt regarding their belonging to this tradition.

However, when in the 1850’s the Mussar movement finally began — that is to say, the practice of Mussar, informed in large part by its rich literature — Kabbalah went unacknowledged. It vanished from Mussar. How could such a thing happen, after having been woven into the very fabric of Mussar since its beginnings? For answers, we’ll start with the Mussar movement’s founder, the influential Lithuanian rabbi known as the Salanter Rav.

Rabbi Yisrael Lipkin of Salant came from an impeccable educational lineage — the Ivy League of the shtetl — that was steeped in Kabbalah. Rav Salanter was a student of Rabbi Yosef Zundel of Salant, who himself was a student of Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin — whose magnum opus, Nefesh Ha-Hayyim, articulates his complete and clear understanding of Kabbalah’s central ideas — who himself was the primary student of the incomparable Rabbi Eliyahu, the Gaon of Vilna. The Gaon, a consummate Talmudist, leader of the community and primary halachic authority, was also a Kabbalist, though he maintained the traditional prohibition against teaching Kabbalah publically. In fact, until the rise of Hasidism in the 17th century, Kabbalah was considered too dangerous spiritually for the masses, who lacked