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NUMBERS — 19:2 distance

NUM242 Recall the definition of humility we developed in the chapter on that soul-trait: humility means occupying your appropriate space, neither too much or too little. The Torah provides a story about order that links clearly to humility. It describes how the people of Israel were told to organize themselves in formation for camping and traveling in the desert: "The Israelites shall camp with each person near the banner, under the flag of their ancestral house. They shall camp at a specified distance around the Tent of Meeting" [this verse]. We read in a midrash that when God told Moses that the Jews were to be arranged in this specific formation, Moses complained that if he specified such an organization, there would be protest. "If I tell Yehuda to camp in the east, they will say they want the south, and so it will be with each and every tribe" (Midrash Rabbah). This story underlies the human tendency to rebel against imposed order. It doesn't matter if the order that is being forced to foisted on us is good, right, useful, or sensible. As long as our "rightful space" is being imposed, we don't want it: "If I tell Yehuda to camp in the east, they will say they want the south." Not that the south is necessarily better than the east or the north, it's just not what you told me to do, and that's the point. Sound familiar? Disorder is often the child of a rebellious ego that resists humbly occupying a rightful space. All that it whispers in your inner ear can be reduced to "I want" or "I don't want." I want to have fun, cleaning up after myself is no fun. I want to keep accumulating stuff, and organizing it is not something I enjoy. I want my leisure, and setting things in order is work. Or… I don't want to take responsibility for my stuff. I don't want to do that. I don't have to. No matter what follows the word "I," there is no mistaking that the subject is "me." Hence the antidote here it would be humility. All the methods for cultivating humility that the Mussar Masters have formulated over the centuries come into play here. … Order is, after all, a kind of a submission of will, and humility fosters submission in place of the ego's self–assertion.

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DEUTERONOMY — 4:29 seek

DEUT125 In my life, I am in danger of getting lost, deflected, and confused in the complex web of demands, responsibilities, and desires I carry with me. Shabbat is when and how I check the map. You would be right to see the honoring of Shabbat as an act of faith, since the source of its observance is God. "God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because He abstained from all His work that God created to make," (Genesis/Bereshit 2:4) and "It will be a sign between me and the people of Israel forever, for in six days God made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day God abstained from work and rested" (Exodus/Sh'mot 31:17). To me, though, Shabbat observance is more the opposite, actually a pathway to faith. Although doing can arise out of faith, faith can also arise as a result of the doing. If I waited until God was more of a presence in my life to be convinced to observe the Sabbath, I would likely not get there. Because I observe shabbat, my faith grows. Although I am focusing here only on the spiritual hindrance that is busyness and its antidote, which is Shabbat, you need to ask yourself what it is that stands in the way of your opening to faith, and what you can do about it. There are many sorts of actions that can be undertaken as a result of faith, and that in the doing can also become a source of faith. This is true of the classic acts of love and kindness, like giving charity, visiting the sick, clothing the naked, and burying the dead. The same is true of prayer. It is logical to think that living a life by the Commandments would demand that faith be in place first; my experience is that living by the Commandments fosters and nurtures faith as well. In the end, what is important about faith is that you seek. The psalm says, "When You said, 'Seek My face,' my heart said to You,' I will seek Your face, Hashem'" (Psalms/Tehillim 27:8). And the Torah reassures: "From there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find Him," though there are conditions: "If you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul" [this verse]. Rabbi Zev Brodie, who was the son of Rabbi Simcha Zissel, the Alter of Kelm, asked before his death that he be eulogized by only one person, and that the eulogy consist of only one tribute -- that "he had the desire to advance toward faith" ("Haya lo h'ratzon l'hitkarev l'emuah" -- Rabbi Dov Katz, Tenuat ha/Mussar (The Mussar Movement), vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Avraham Tsiyoni, 1967), 106.). We learn from this to emphasize the search for faith over the fruits of that search, yearning over finding. "The body needs air. What is the air of the soul? Faith."--Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian, Lev Eliyahu, 3.

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DEUTERONOMY — 8:6 ways

DEUT370 Walking in God's Patient Way. Who wouldn't be delighted to deepen their ability to meet life's challenges with more patience? We get very clear support for doing so from the Bible, where it tells us that we should "walk in His ways" [this verse, Deuteronomy 19:9, 26:17]. This simple but forceful idea--sometimes called imitatio dei, emulating God--is the ultimate blueprint for the spiritual life and tells us that we should model our lives on Godly virtues. That's how we move ourselves closer to the highest potential we have from birth, and when we act with heavenly virtue in our personal lives, we help to make this world a little more like heaven. In practical terms, we emulate God by practicing virtue or, as I like to all it, living in "virtuous reality." The sages tell us: "as God is called merciful and gracious, so you be merciful and gracious; as God is called righteous, so be you righteous; as God is called holy, so be you holy" (Sifra 85a). As God is forgiving, so too should we strive to be forgiving. We are guided to emulate God in all the divine attributes of mercy and righteousness, though not the attributes of severity and justice that we can also find in the Torah. Because we want the world to be infused with qualities of goodness, we have a responsibility to become vessels for those same virtues. That prescription includes the trait of patience. No matter how you may conceive of God or the creative force that stands behind the universe, there is no doubt that this ultimate source of life is endowed with patience, especially when compared to us. Think of the pace of earthly eras, creeping along as slowly as glaciers advancing and retreating in an ice age. Stars and galaxies are born, mature, and pass away. And as for us, what the Mussar tradition offers as evidence for God's patience is the fact that our lives are sustained, even when we do wrong (Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, Tomer Devorah [The Palm Tree of Deborah], trans. Rabbi Moshe Miller (Southfield, Mich.: Targum/Feldheim, 1993), 6-8.) It's not hard to imagine a universe where there is absolutely no margin for error, where punishment is instantaneous and total, but that isn't the world we live in. God is patient and preserves our lives even when our actions happen to hit way off the mark, to give us time to come to deeper realizations, make amends, and return to a straighter way. "From this, man should learn to what extent he, too, should be patient and bear the yoke of his fellow" (Ibid, 8). Since God is patient, then we, who are encouraged to guide our lives by "walking in His ways," should also be patient.

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DEUTERONOMY — 10:12 revere

DEUT417 Merged within the word yirah are two human experiences that are linked in the Hebrew but separated in English. One is fear. The other is awe. Experience shows us that these can be totally distinct qualities--you can be terrified of the bear, and in awe at the sunset. But experience also justifies linking them together. Imagine standing right at the lip of the Grand Canyon, looking down into the vast and rainbow-colored canyon. Fear and awe merge into one exuberant inner experience.

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DEUTERONOMY — 10:16 cut

DEUT435 God as our model. Because we more easily perceive our separation then our oneness with others, we slip in the judgment more easily then we rise to compassion. We need to be told to walk in God's footsteps by acting to cultivate compassion in our hearts. Imitating the divine trait of compassion is not just a lovely idea. We are assured that it is within our grasp to do so, however, because "he will bestow upon you [the attribute of] compassion and show mercy to you 26 the capacity for compassion is in it within us. But to bring that quality from potential to actuality, we need to take steps to confront the obstacles to compassion. … The primary barrier to being compassionate is the sense that you and I are separate from each other.… Compassion can come into existence only when you lower the barriers that ordinarily while off and isolate your own sense of self. … And draw closer so that we can feel within us the truth of that other person's experience, and so sees with her with eyes of compassion...

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DEUTERONOMY — 10:16 cut

DEUT436 It is a fact that your life embodies a curriculum. Why? Because life is set up so you will be challenged, and through the experiences you have dealing with the challenges, you will grow as a person ... none of us has a choice about that. LIfe makes us grow. You do have a choice, however, of whether you just let your curriculum play out in any way it will, without preparing yourself through study and with guidance, or whether you will seek to uncover pathways for living and growing that prior generations already marked and illuminated to help you engage with your curriculum and grow in a conscious, directed way. That important choice is in your hands. Because this book tracks a Jewish spiritual path, it is useful to see that the Torah acknowledges this primary choice that confronts us. In the book of Deuteronomy were told: "You shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart" [this verse]. That enigmatic image occurs only one other time in the Torah (in the narrow sense of the Torah as being the Five Books of Moses; the metaphor shows up as well at Jeremiah 4:4), in the variance: "And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart" (Deuteronomy 30:6). I understand circumcision here to be a metaphor for spiritual initiation--removing the obstacles to having an open, sensitive, initiated inner life. In the first quote, we are offered the option of initiating ourselves. The second quote tells us what God will do it. The second verse begins with the Hebrew letter vav, which can be translated "or." Initiate yourself orGod will initiate you. The Torah gives no third option. Unguided in how to initiate themselves, too often people go after the wrong things, or, if they get it right, go about it in the wrong way. They stumble after false answers to the questions on their cirriculum: "If only I were rich." "Nip and tuck by the plastic surgeon might do it." "Defeat that enemy." "Support that cause." "Join that club." Resorts to those sorts of answers to your inner challenges is equivalent to turning yourself over to God to be wisened up, which unfortunately usually happens through bitter experiences of loss, failure, and brokenness. Those experiences do cause us to grow, with certainty. It seems a pity, though, that entire lives are spent fumbling blindly, in personal suffering and at the cost of an increase of evil--yes, evil--in the world, when each of us has another choice as to how we can grow. The Torah states very clearly that you have the option to take steps to initiate your own heart.

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DEUTERONOMY — 11:2 lesson

DEUT493 The word mussar itself means "correction" or "instruction" (And sometimes the even stronger "rebuke" or "reproof" or "reproach." It appears first in [this verse] and occurs many times in the Bible) and also serves as the simple modern Hebrew word for "ethics." But Mussar is most accurately described as a way of life. It shines light on the causes of suffering and shows us how to realize our highest spiritual potential, including an everyday experience infused with happiness, trust, and love.

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DEUTERONOMY — 11:18 soul

DEUT525 … in Duties of the Heart, Rabbi Bachya ibn Pakuda provides several contemplations that he says will stimulate humility. One of these is to contemplate the inevitability of death and the ensuing decay of the flesh. If you think about and deeply contemplate the reality of your own mortality, any tendency to arrogance will be deflated. Chanting, visualization, and contemplation imprint notions so deeply within as to be written on our hearts, becoming part of our very flesh. Even things we learn intellectually require this sort of additional process if they are to really become integrally woven into our natures. The Torah alludes to this two-step process when it instructs us, with respect to God's commandments, to "lay up these My words in your heart and in your soul" [this verse]. The Alter of Novarodok reflects on this need for "sensory learning" to bring about real change and says that if a person toils only with his mind, then he will not really have fostered change, as will surely become apparent when he encounters a challenging real life situation…

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DEUTERONOMY — 13:5 hold

DEUT603 Our instincts for self-preservation run deep, as do our anxieties about having enough for ourselves, and so our hearts need to be trained to do chesed, in order that our lives reflect our higher selves more than our lower. The rabbis understood our resistance and so offer as practical guidance on how to do acts of chesed. They took as their starting point the biblical instruction to "Walk after the Eternal your God" [this verse]. ... When we imitate God's great traits in our own life, this doesn't make us more divine, it just elevates who we already are to the highest potential. Although the Torah tells us that we are made in the image God, some rabbis see this not as a statement of our present condition but of our potential.

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DEUTERONOMY — 13:18 compassion

DEUT647 Compassion is a deep emotional feeling arising out of identification with the other that seeks a concrete expression. Compassion flows between equals or from the more powerful to the less powerful, as we see in the Torah, where it never expresses human feelings for God. It does, however, apply to a human king caring for subjects (Genesis/Bereshit 43:14) and to God caring for humanity [this verse]. These defining features help us understand what touches and moves people to act as they do when they manifest compassion. … Compassion comes into being only by being put to use. It is like a skill or a tool that gains its full value only when used. And like a skill or the use of a tool, it can be cultivated. When the Rambam discusses the commandment we are given to emulate God by "walking in His ways" (Deuteronomy 28:98), he says, "Just as He is called gracious, so you should be gracious. Just as He is called compassionate, so you should be compassionate." We are enjoined to be compassionate, taking God as our model. Because we more easily perceive our separation than our oneness with others, we slip into judgment more easily than we rise to compassion. We need to be told to walk in God's footsteps by acting to cultivate compassion in our hearts. Imitating the divine trait of compassion is not just a lovely ideal. We are assured that it is within our grasp to do so, however, because "He will bestow upon you [the attribute of] compassion and show mercy to you" [this verse]. The capacity for compassion is innate within us. But to bring that quality from potential to actuality, we need to take steps to confront the obstacles to compassion. The primary barrier to being compassionate is the sense that you and I are separate from each other.… Compassion can come into existence only when you lower the barriers that ordinarily wall off and isolate your own sense of self. … and draw closer so that [you] can feel within [yourself] the truth of that other person's experience, and so see with eyes of compassion…

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