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April 19, 2002
The message of mussar
Vancouver writer shares his discovery of tradition.
PAT JOHNSON REPORTER
Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: One Man’s Journey to Rediscover
a Jewish Spiritual Tradition
By Alan Morinis
New York: Broadway Books, 2002. 25 pages. $35.95
Vancouver writer Alan Morinis has created a beautiful book on the
little-known spiritual tradition called mussar. In Climbing Jacob’s
Ladder: One Man’s Journey to Rediscover a Jewish Spiritual
Tradition, Morinis brings readers along on his journey for spiritual
fulfilment.
His quest began when his business career, in which he produced feature
films, documentaries and television programs, failed. He spiralled
into an emotional and spiritual crisis, from which he emerged when
he began exploring mussar. Having studied the Hindu concept of pilgrimage
and other aspects of spirituality, Morinis was open to alternative
ways of looking at the world, but he found his experience of Jewish
tradition to be rote and lacking the sort of ritual that spoke to
his soul.
As a social anthropologist, Morinis acknowledges the discipline’s
tendency to stand back from the world, rather than participate in
it. His academic dedication to such processes as Hindu pilgrimage
probably tipped his hand that he was a determined seeker, rather
than a passive observer. Yet it was only in midlife, when he was
a husband and father, that he discovered the path which would give
him spiritual fulfilment. And he found it right in his own backyard,
so to speak, in that it is a Jewish tradition after all, the tradition
into which Morinis was born.
Nevertheless, the seeking was not simple. Mussar was founded in
the 19th century but based on Orthodox morality lessons going back
1,000 years. Like so much, mussar was almost lost during the Holocaust,
when most of its practitioners and greatest teachers perished. So
when Morinis happened upon the practice in a book, it was not easy
to continue his quest. Mussar is not the sort of thing, he wrote,
that one finds a great deal about on the Internet. He laid his hands
on the seminal works of mussar, titles such as The Path of the
Just, The Duties of the Heart and The Palm Tree of
Deborah. “As I continued my reading, a new (and very old)
world opened up before me. I learned that mussar is a path of spiritual
practice that had developed within the Orthodox Jewish tradition
over the last 1,000 years. It tells us that, at our core, we are
all holy, and it shows us ways to change those qualities within
us that obstruct the light of our holiness from shining through.
It assures us that we are not condemned to live forever with every
aspect of the personality we happen to have right now, but that
we can make the changes that will set free the radiance of our inner
light. And it provides a toolbag of personal, introspective and
transformative practices that will lead us, step by step, along
the path of purification and change.”
Once he learned all he could from what limited books he could find,
he sought out one of the few teachers of mussar, a rabbi in the
unlikely location of Far Rockaway, N.Y., on Long Island. Rabbi Yechiel
Yitzchok Perr helped Morinis continue his quest, introducing him
in very tangible ways to the ancient tradition.
Mussar is illuminated to its students through some hands-on lessons.
For example, Morinis writes of an exercise in which yeshivah students
are given a one-way ticket 200 kilometres away and no money, left
to their devices – and God’s help – to find their
way home. It also involves practices such as meditation.
Morinis struggled with the question of whether mussar could be part
of a non-Orthodox Jewish life. Is it possible for it to exist in
a more assimilated setting, he questioned. This book is a lesson
that concludes it can. Essentially, mussar can go hand in hand with
halachic law, but it provides, Morinis posits, a bedrock for uncharted
waters, in which one relies on one’s inner sense of what is
right, as learned through the various lessons of mussar. The constant
questioning of whether one action is moral and another immoral is
at the heart of mussar, but while conventional Jewish tradition
says the answer is in halachah, mussar contends that it is also
within ourselves. Morinis explains the lesson he received from Perr,
which assured him that all this introspection is not selfish, but
rather a means to make oneself a better person and thereby more
capable of performing acts of goodness.
It is difficult to reproduce the subtle beauty of Morinis’s
rich discoveries in a review, but the experience he shares is an
inspiring one. Morinis launches his book at the Norman Rothstein
Theatre April 25, 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $5-$8. Call 604-257-5111.
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