By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
He’s not sure why so many people showed up on a socked-in, snowy Christmas Day blanketed with snow and ice in the waning days of 2008, but Alan Morinis’s workshop on patience drew more than 50 people to the Seattle Kollel to see if Mussar, the traditional Jewish teachings about life and the state of our souls, could help them convert their road rage into the behavior of a sage.
It’s those agitated feelings that begin to surface when you’re standing in a grocery check-out line — in a hurry, of course — and you want to push ahead of the person who begins to search for his money after all of the items have been rung up. The tests of life can span from the everyday, routine annoyances to the truly disastrous, but the task is the same, says Morinis — pass the test and lean into life.
“Life has changed a lot, but human nature hasn’t,” said Morinis, a Vancouver, B.C.-based Mussar instructor for the last seven years. He made the treacherous trip to Seattle to spread the teachings of this revived Jewish wisdom that doesn’t want its adherents to “manage” their emotions, but instead shows how to transform them and create a better person.
“Patience is what you call on when you’re already agitated and you want to kill somebody,” Morinis said. “The Hebrew word for patience is saval. The word means a burden or suffering. To have patience means being able to bear the burden of your emotions. It’s not about being peaceful all the time — you can still be a spiritual person and get angry.”
Morinis is a Rhodes scholar who studied Anthropology at Oxford University, and published his doctoral thesis, “Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition,” after years of studying both Hindu and Buddhist thought. He returned to Judaism and found the Mussar tradition.
“I was carrying around this tension between who I was and who I was acting like,” Morinis told JTNews. “I wasn’t a Buddhist. I wasn’t a Hindu. I wasn’t a yogi. I’m a Jew.”
His book, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (Broadway, 2002) documents his transition back to the Jewish teachings. His other book, Every Day Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar (Trumpeter Books, 2007), is a practical guide.
Mussar was originated by a small number of Jews in the Orthodox community over a thousand years ago, but found a new popularity in Lithuania in the 19th century.
Through the use of familiar spiritual tools like guided contemplations and chants, Morinis says that we don’t learn to manage our impulses — we repair them on a very deep, unconscious level.
In early January, the Kollel, which sponsored Morinis’s talk, began a six-week Mussar class called “The Elevation of Man” which runs through Feb. 12.
“What we’re trying to do is to teach life wisdom,” said Rabbi Dovid Fredman of the Kollel.
In May, Morinis will return to Seattle for a Mussar conference featuring local educators that includes Rivy Poupko Kletenik, head of school at Seattle Hebrew Academy, Ira Stone, former rabbi at Congregation Beth Shalom, and others.
A local Mussar teacher, Shirah Bell, teaches introductory-level classes for Morinis’s Mussar Institute. She is a member of Congregation Beth Shalom in North Seattle and can be reached at shirah@mussarinstitute.org.
“I think there’s just more interest in Jewish spirituality and that more people are mining the authentic veins that exist,” Morinis said. “Judaism was communal, it was behavioral, it was Bubbe’s cooking — but it wasn’t the heart — it wasn’t the fullness of the spiritual life.”
A lot of attention has been given recently to more metaphysical Jewish traditions like Kabbalah, a philosophy and spiritual practice revived from the ancients who practiced it, to the historical, from Plato and Shakespeare, to pop culture icons, Madonna and Britney Spears.
Mussar falls in that category but requires constant action on the part of the person practicing it. While learning to manage your reactions and your emotions, it is only an interim step toward a more long-term goal of having new and different impulses, says Morinis. He teaches that the Mussar tradition is about transforming our impulses.
These impulses, he instructs, come from the unconscious — before we choose our actions — and this is how we can use the practice of Mussar.
Those in Seattle who came to learn the Mussar way were a very mixed group, according to Morinis. Some were clearly Orthodox, while others did not have as deep a background in Jewish thought and practice.
But, he says, anyone can use this system and should try it, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to muddle along when so many tools are available.
“What I hear from my students, periodically, is, ‘I’m not the same person I used to be,’” he says, “and that’s what Mussar is aiming for.”