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Humility
— The
Master Key to Teshuvah
Shanah Tovah and Good Yontif to everyone.
I’d like to begin with what may sound like a fairly
heretical statement coming from a rabbi at the outset of the ten days of
repentance: Which is that it often feels to me as if this period of time
in the Jewish year arrives in a flurry of high hopes for change and
movement in our lives, but that we discover, when the dust settles, and
the sukkot have been taken down and put back into storage for
another year, that we are not in a significantly different place from
where we had been before the High Holy Days arrived.
On one hand, we talk about the process of teshuvah or repentance
in ways that can be beautiful and inspiring. Consider for example, the
following descriptions that appear in our very own High Holy Day prayer
book: From the contemporary Talmudic scholar and mystic, Rabbi Adin
Steinsaltz we learn that, "Teshuvah/repentance is one of the ultimate
spiritual realities at the core of Jewish faith. Its significance goes
far beyond the narrow meaning of contrition or regret, and it embraces a
number of concepts considered to be fundamental to the very existence of
the world. Certain sages go as far as to include repentance among the
entities created before the world itself."
And from the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Rabbi Mordecai
Kaplan, we hear the following: “the efficacy of atonement is nil and its
symbolic power of no value, unless our sense of sin leads us to seek
nothing less than the reconstruction of our personalities, in accordance
with the highest ethical possibilities of human nature; only then can we
experience teshuvah, the sense of returning to God."
Now I would not want to deny that there are moments in some people’s
lives when such powerful language would be an appropriate description of
their experience of personal transformation, either as part of the
formal process of teshuvah or at some other point in life. However, I
imagine that for many of us, most of the time, such elevated imagery
concerning the nature of repentance can seem to set the bar quite high,
and make it difficult for us to feel a connection on a personal level.
On the other hand, for those of us who’s expectations for what we might
be able to extract from these Days of Awe run in a more pedestrian and
practical direction, we can always turn to the ancient tradition of
engaging in the process of heshbone ha nefesh or doing an accounting of
our soul, which typically takes place throughout the Hebrew month of
Elul which immediately precedes Rosh Hashanah, and extends into the
first ten days of the new year culminating at Yom Kippur. There is a
very clear map laid out in various Jewish legal writings of how to go
about this practice.
It involves acknowledging any wrongs done, seeking forgiveness from
those we have hurt as a result, and successfully resisting the
temptation to repeat the transgression the next time we are confronted
with such an opportunity.
This time honored practice has certainly proven its
validity over the course of the centuries when it has been used with
apparent success. Still, speaking personally, I can also acknowledge,
that more often than not, as I go through this process of heshbone ha
nefesh, I find that many of the same items and issues end up on my list
year after year. And as a result, I have begun to wonder if there might
be something different or additional that I could be doing during this
period of time. Something that would more effectively help me to gain
access to what I am still convinced is the potential for growth and
deepening that these days have to offer.
Part of the answer to this question has come to me over the past couple
of years as I have begun to learn more about an ancient Jewish approach
to spiritual growth called Mussar. The essence of this approach involves
the recognition that each one of us carries embedded within our own
souls from the moment we are born, what the contemporary Mussar teacher
Alan Morinis calls, a spiritual curriculum. By this he means that each
of us comes into the world with the full range of human traits and
characteristics, but that we each possess these traits in a unique
configuration such that certain characteristics are from the start in
balance, while others are not. He argues that many of the challenging
experiences we have in our lives grow directly out of the unhelpful ways
in which our out-of-balance characteristics tend to express themselves.
In his model, we will continue to meet the same types of
challenges and difficulties over and over again until we begin to see
exactly how our own trait imbalances are contributing to their
recurrence.
This awareness will then lead us to be motivated to bring these out of
balance traits into more of an equilibrium with one another and with our
identity as a whole and in that way, we will truly begin to make
progress in our efforts to move ourselves in the direction of wholeness,
goodness and satisfaction.
One dimension that the Mussar perspective adds to other traditional
Jewish views of individual development is that there is recognition of
the need to focus on changing the internal characteristics that drive
our actions and attitudes rather than focusing primarily on external
behavioral changes.
This perspective provides an explanation for how someone who has made
successive attempts, over many high holy day seasons, to change
something about their lives could still end up feeling stuck in a
spiritual rut. For example, let’s say that one of my recurring
intentions when I go through this teshuvah process each year is to stay
in closer touch with out of town family and friends who I fear sometimes
wonder if I have fallen off the edge of the world. The Mussar approach
would have me reflect on where the soul trait imbalance might be that is
preventing me from keeping this commitment.
It would not take a huge amount of insight for me to recognize, or for
my family to point out, that the trait that emphasizes creating order
and organization is not so prominent in my psyche and thus, making time
for an activity or a task that is not urgently demanding my attention
does not come so easily.
A mussar teacher might say that I would need to spend some focused
energy on cultivating that trait internally before I would even begin to
think about changing my behavior around communicating with my loved
ones.
What has been most intriguing to me about the mussar approach is its
assertion that there is one fundamental trait that absolutely requires
attention in order to begin even thinking about working on any of the
other areas of our lives, and the trait that is identified as having
this prominent role in our psychic architecture, interestingly enough,
is humility.
As author Alan Morinis explains: "The Mussar teachers stress that
humility is the primary soul-trait to work on because it entails an
honest and unvarnished assessment of who we are. Without this accurate
self-awareness, nothing else in our inner life will come into focus in
its true measure. Without humility, either we will be so puffed up with
arrogance that we won’t even see what really needs some work or we will
be so deflated and lacking in self esteem that we will despair of making
the changes that are lit up so glaringly in our self-critical minds."
Now I’m guessing that many of us may associate the word and the
characteristic of Humility with individuals or situations that do not
have such a positive resonance for us. People often link humility to the
word humiliation and also with feelings of great lowliness and
worthlessness. Or our minds may be drawn to the thought that humility is
so often contrived or feigned that its apparent presence is a sure
signal that we should go running in the opposite direction.
This perspective is well captured in the old Jewish joke about the
Rabbi, the Cantor and the caretaker of a synagogue in which the lowly
caretaker hears the rabbi and cantor offering prayers to God before the
ark in which they confess their own unworthiness for their respective
positions in the community. The caretaker is so moved by hearing these
prayers that he decides to offer a similar prayer on his own behalf at
which point the rabbi turns to the cantor and remarks, "look who thinks
he’s nothing."
However, these negative conceptions of humility are actually
misconceptions, for when we explore traditional interpretations of this
trait, we see that they point in a very different and much healthier
direction. In the words of psychologist and student of Kabbalah, Estelle
Frankel, "with humility, we gain a sense of perspective, so that we
neither overestimate nor underestimate our own importance. It frees us
up to use all our gifts and talents to the best of our ability by
enabling us to accept our limitations and vulnerabilities as well as our
strengths."
And according to Alan Morinis, we must understand humility as a
characteristic that sits on the balance point of a spectrum that has
arrogance at one end and self-debasement at the other. Both of the
extremes on this continuum, seeing ourselves as nothing or as
everything, are forms of narcissism and distort the truth of our
identities. True humility on the other hand inherently includes space
for self and other.
Ironically and paradoxically, both self-abnegation and self-importance
contain the appearance of an orientation towards those outside oneself.
For instance, we see that people who inhabit these states habitually are
constantly referencing someone else as a measure of their own subjective
sense of self-worth either positively or negatively. However, it is in
the state of humility, where one’s self-worth is determined without
reference to an outside other, that we find the possibility of truly
being present to another person’s experience.
And in a parallel way, when we are able to ground ourselves in a
humility driven perspective, we are much less likely to fall into harsh
judgment of other people. This is due to our dual awareness that each of
us possesses talents and potential that we are trying to express and
each of us is surely dealing with our own limitations, wounds and
challenges that the vicissitudes of life and our spiritual curriculum
have for better or for worse forced us to confront.
If the benefits of deepening our connection to the trait of humility are
significant for us individuals, the affect is multiplied geometrically
when it is applied to an entire community. We have spent a lot of time
over the past several years exploring the meaning of the term sacred
community and explicitly stating our collective aspiration to raise Kol
HaLev to that level. It seems to me that this trait of humility is
absolutely essential to our goal of creating a sacred community
together. The more this characteristic is expressed within our communal
processes, the greater will be all our ability to instinctively respond
with compassion as often as we respond with judgment when a fellow KHL
member’s behavior rubs us the wrong way. The greater will be our ability
to appreciate and enjoy the range of strengths each one of us brings to
the table rather than worrying about whether we are good enough in
comparison.
The stronger will be our desire and the more effective will be our
encouragement if we notice another member who is not as clear as she or
he could be about what his or her particular talents are that could be
contributed.
In view of this, I don’t think it’s an accident that we have chosen as
our educational theme for this coming year Leadership and Wisdom, which
along with its subtitle, We are all learners and we are all wise,
conveys a sense of our vision of this community as one in which each
member of any age and any disposition is seen as possessing inherent
value. And it also underscores the reality that no person is ever a
finished product and that each one of us still has a lot to learn. For
me there is no doubt that we will collectively grow more humble, in the
best sense of that term, to the extent that we are truly able to enter
into this new theme over the course of the coming year.
As we together proceed down this road that will help us all to move in
the direction of the community that we aspire to become, I think it
behooves us to select as our first piece of wisdom to explore, the
teaching attributed to one of the early leaders of the Hassidic
revolution, Reb Simcha Bunam. Of him, it is said, that he always kept
two notes in his pants pockets. On one was written the words "I am but
dust and ashes." On the other was written the words, "for my sake was the
universe created." With the help of these notes, he was able to keep
himself balanced and grounded in the paradoxical truth of who he was,
which is a truth that is no less applicable to each one of us sitting in
this room today. May we all, in the year ahead, grow in our ability to
keep this truth about ourselves and each other present in our hearts and
souls as we proceed along the often difficult and mysterious, but also
deeply rewarding path that is at the center of our human becoming.
Amen and Shanah Tovah!
Rabbi Steve |