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Nov. 9, 2007
Try to reach your potential
At the book festival, Alan Morinis will lead a mussar workshop.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Many of the greatest discoveries in life are unexpected. And this applies even to the more spiritual aspects. At least this was the experience of Alan Morinis.
A Rhodes scholar, author, award-winning TV and film producer and the founder of the Mussar Institute, Morinis told the Independent that he "literally stumbled over" the tradition that has become a focus of his life.
Morinis has been a student of mussar since 1997, studying under Rabbi Yechiel Yitzchok Perr. He describes mussar as "a 1,000-year-old Jewish tradition, a spiritual discipline, a body of literature, a way of looking at the world and a practical ethical philosophy rolled into one." He discovered it at a time in his life where he was searching for "direction about how to live in a wholesome and well-intended way."
"I didn't have a strong Jewish background," he explained, "so I started reading and I stumbled on the mussar tradition, literally stumbled over it, and I kept reading and reading and reading and then I realized that I had come upon a traditional Jewish discipline of self-development, which I had never known existed and, over the years now, it's been 10 years that I've been involved in mussar, I've really found that it has enriched my life."
For Morinis, it's not simply a matter of spiritual development or seeking solace during a difficult period in one's life.
"It doesn't matter whether things seem to be going fine or not," he said. "The question is really about fulfilling potential and 'fine' may not be the highest standard one could set for oneself in life. If things were going fine, the question really would be how could you grow and in what direction and to what extent can you grow and, if things are going difficultly, how do you straighten things out, how do you move in the direction of thinking things into something closer to the ideal that you might hold? Most of my students are not people who have difficulty in their life, but are just looking for guidance."
While the mussar tradition was developed within the Orthodox world, as was kabbalah, they both have reached into larger segments of the Jewish world. "People are realizing it's really about being human," said Morinis.
Asked about the types of people who attend his classes, Morinis said, "I think that the biggest dividing point is [whether] people are self-reflective or not. Not everybody is self-reflective. Some people just live, but the kind of people who do better and get more out of mussar are people who are, as I said, self-reflective."
But there is more to mussar than self-awareness and thoughtfulness. Much of Morinis's latest book, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar, centres around Jewish religious teachings and God.
"There's a lot in mussar that's really just change mechanisms and, if you do the practices, they bring about change at the level of behavior," Morinis told the Independent. "I think, for me, and in terms of the origins of the tradition, that would be a little limited because it's really a Jewish spiritual tradition and there isn't an aspect of Jewish spirituality that doesn't connect in some ways to the Torah to Jewish beliefs, to Jewish law and so on. Now, you can take a piece of it and put it to work and find that it works, because it is meant to work and it does work, but that tends to bring it down to a more limited form."
Daily exercises and a conscious effort to overcome extremes of emotion and desire, as well as bad habits, are part of the commitment in mussar.
"One of the mussar teachers of the 19th century says that it's the work of a lifetime and that's why you're given a lifetime," explained Morinis. "That the idea of taking stock of who you are, looking at where you are right now, considering goals for [who] you might become and ... and the self-reflection that's going to lead to you becoming the kind of person that really is your potential and your destiny, then that's an ongoing process of growth and, within the vision of the condition, there is no point at which you say, 'OK, well I'm finished growing now.' As long as you're alive, you're growing and should be, and can actually stimulate and participate actively in that growing."
Morinis will help attendees at the Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival begin that journey of growth if they attend his workshop on Sunday, Nov. 25, 2 p.m., in the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver's L'Chaim Lounge.
"Mussar offers a perspective on life," said Morinis about the workshop, "and that's one of the things we will start with because once you have the perspective, you realize that many of the inner beliefs that are part of spiritual life are really for each of us.... We all have certain ones that we're challenged in and those constitute a kind of a curriculum and so the first stage of mussar work is to become aware of what's your curriculum. You've already been assigned it. You've already been running into it ... like the impatient person [who] has already been running into their impatience. No one assigned it to them saying, 'Hey, you need a curriculum.' You've got one and the second part of the workshop, that will be a kind of awareness."
Morinis said that mussar teachers have developed many techniques for doing the work of change because they recognize that, for example, just knowing that you're impatient won't change your impatience.
"It's like being told that your cholesterol is too high," he said. "What does that do to your cholesterol? Nothing. So they developed a whole range of mediations, contemplations, other sorts of practices in order to give a person the tools for change and that's what we will do in the second part of the workshop."
Tickets to the Reaching New Heights workshop are $20 in advance, $25 at the door. Register at the community centre or online at www.jccgv.com, code #7106.
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