Everyday Holiness: A Conversation with Alan Morinis

Rabbi Lizzi sits down with Alan Morinis, author of the enormously popular and profound "Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar."

Read more about Alan and purchase his latest book "The Shabbat Effect" at the link below.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/shabbat-effect-9798881807870/

****

For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar, and see our Accessibility & Inclusion page for information about our venues. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook for more updates. To support Mishkan's important work of creating radically inclusive, down-to-earth, inspired Judaism, we invite you to join as a Builder or donate today.

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/support/be-a-builder/

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/support/makeyourgift/

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

All right, so I'm, I'm thrilled that we get this morning to welcome Alan Marinus to our minyan and to talk about. I'm hoping you'll talk about your new book, The Shabbat Effect, and also about moussaka in general.

00:02:36:21 - 00:03:00:08
Unknown
You should know in our minyan. So we have at least one person who learns with you. Shari Cohen's over here. Oh, and Heather's over here. And so the question of what is. How does it work? You know, how does a person learn more about it? So I'm hoping you will talk about some of these things in addition to your book.

00:03:00:10 - 00:03:42:17
Unknown
And just so that everybody knows who Alan is, he is an accomplished and really excellent writer and received his doctorate from Oxford, where he went on a Rhodes Scholarship. He is one of the leading lights in the revival of the Jewish tradition of Musar, which we're going to talk about. He's written a few books and many, many, many blog posts and articles, which you can drop in the chat all of the various links to find his work, but his books are called Climbing Jacob's Ladder Everyday Holiness with Heart in Mind, and his most recent book, The Shabbat Effect.

00:03:42:17 - 00:04:05:14
Unknown
He's the founder of the Musa Institute and a student of Rabbi Yitzchak Peer. And so I know you've been on a book tour with the Shabbat Effect. And, you know, there are a lot of different directions this conversation could go. And by the way, I want to say thank you to Judith Golden for facilitating bringing you to Chicago.

00:04:05:16 - 00:04:30:17
Unknown
You're, you know, you I think. Did you speak last night at Macomb Solo. And tonight you'll be at Jeremiah. Great. Correct. All correct. So there's this conversation could go a lot of directions. Right. And. Well, where do you like to start? Well, I don't assume that anybody knows anything about my general field, so it makes sense to say, what the heck is Musa?

00:04:30:18 - 00:04:59:12
Unknown
And sometimes when I do a scholar in residence weekend Friday evening, I begin with What is Musa? And why should I care? Let's start there. That's great. It makes a lot of sense because it's actually not just introducing my subject, it's introducing the context of my subject. Because I came from a very, very assimilated, non Jewish but totally not engaged background.

00:04:59:12 - 00:05:48:09
Unknown
That was the way my family was for all kinds of reasons and in various different ways. But the upshot was no religion and no spirituality in the house. Lots of Yiddish kite, but not the other stuff. And as I have gone on my own Jewish journey over the last 25 years, I've come to see how much of a role assimilation has played in not just creating the the nature of our Jewish world right now, but indeed spiritualize it, that what had been in our world central, that the idea of being a spiritual person, a soul having a human experience, was just knocked out of the Jewish world in the second half of the 20th century,

00:05:48:09 - 00:06:23:23
Unknown
so that the inner life was not a subject of Jewish interest. Israel build the synagogue, schools, anti-Semitism, you name it, every communal activity, even to the point that in the reform movement, tycoon became almost a defining feature which is entirely outwardly focused. And where was the inner life? And so when I myself stumbled on the Mr. Tradition, I realized that, you know, Judaism had not sustained itself for 4000 years on responsive reading.

00:06:23:23 - 00:06:53:09
Unknown
And the the inner life was really quite central. And of course, then I came upon the fact that in the tradition, you can date it back easily 1100 years and the roots go back much further. But in the 11th century, 1080 Rabbi, back in a book called duties of the heart, and that says it all, you know, duties of the heart.

00:06:53:10 - 00:07:18:17
Unknown
It's all about the inner life. And of course, our lives are all about the inner life. Even what you're interested in in the outer life is a feature of who you are and your inner life. So that was a real revelation to me, and I began to see that I had been orphaned from my own spiritual tradition, and I did what any good Jewish boy would do.

00:07:18:18 - 00:07:54:00
Unknown
You know, I went to India and I spent three years in India, and I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Hindu pilgrimage. I mean, it's so typical in a certain way. It's such an image of the era of the second half of the 20th century where if somebody was interested in questions of the inner life, they didn't have much place to go in the Jewish world to, to express that and to find a doorway to knock on, but I did I mean, I was so fortunate.

00:07:54:01 - 00:08:21:11
Unknown
It's like, who can account for it? Why? It would be that I had the fortune to stumble over the tradition, which really lit up for me the first time I read the first article, which was written by historian Emanuel Atkins of the Hebrew University, writing about the Muslim movement that took place in 19. In the 19th century in Eastern Europe, where the whole idea of the inner life became a movement within the Jewish world.

00:08:21:11 - 00:08:40:06
Unknown
So contrary to what somebody at one of my talks referred to as Chandelier Judaism, you know, which was really what I grew up with, the suburban temple, the the whole idea of the edifice, the whole idea of, like, I did have a bar mitzvah. Why did I have a bar mitzvah? Why did my parents send me for a bar mitzvah?

00:08:40:08 - 00:09:05:04
Unknown
Largely for the social gathering for the party that they were reciprocating the communal aspect of having been invited? They invited the family came together, the women all got their hair done and, you know, bouffant style and new dresses and the big cake and the candle lighting. But but that's why so many people didn't, didn't persist with Judaism in the end.

00:09:05:05 - 00:09:36:15
Unknown
And and there it was that there is this old tradition. And then I had the good fortune, as you mentioned in your introduction, to find a teacher for myself. And that was there was no accounting for that. I mean, the fact that that happened is enough to to make you believe. But divine providence and God's intercession in the world, because here I was coming from I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, which, you know, is not the Yerushalayim of North America.

00:09:36:15 - 00:10:03:20
Unknown
And to find a teacher for myself in this obscure little tradition was amazing. But he was a wonderful person in my life, and very much he was. He died two years ago and he was 89 when he died. So he's even, you know, as old as I am. He was older and he was a mentor to me and guided me along this path within the Jewish world that I certainly knew nothing about.

00:10:03:21 - 00:10:26:16
Unknown
And he he was perfect for me because he had a great sense of humor. He was very broad in his interests and his awareness. He was also deeply steeped in Mozart. His father came from the school of Mozart, one of the 19th century branches, and his wife's family came from the Nevada school of Mozart, another one of the three.

00:10:26:17 - 00:10:39:04
Unknown
There were only three schools, and he represented both of them. And just to put in a nutshell.

00:10:39:06 - 00:11:06:18
Unknown
Mozart stands in the place in the Jewish world of saying all of us are very unique, individual human beings. This also was something that appealed to him. By the way, when I first stumbled over, Musso said, wow, it's not about communal life. It's not about the community. It is ultimately about the community. Because being Jewish, it's not about this is for me as a as a soul on my own.

00:11:07:00 - 00:11:30:02
Unknown
And we say in the Institute, you're working on yourself, but not for the sake of yourself, because we're meant to contribute to the world, not draw ourselves out and go find ourselves a nice cave in the desert and work on our own personal enlightenment. That's just not the goal. But we do have to work on ourselves and go inward.

00:11:30:02 - 00:11:55:21
Unknown
And the idea is to become the best version of the person you already are, not somebody else. But all of us know. And this is what the teachers were picking up on very strongly going back 1100 years and never being the line, never being broken is that we have certain areas of our inner life which have not we have not brought to full ripeness yet.

00:11:55:22 - 00:12:32:16
Unknown
And for each of us they're different. There may be one quality in you and a different quality in me, and a different quality in a third person, and in most cases, for all of us. It's not just one quality that where we're where we have more potential than we have realized. And so in the tradition, I find myself in my mind saying, oh, you said this, or, you know, the ram said that because we have a spiritual lineage of people who looked at these questions and this and tried to understand life and say, I'm going to contribute.

00:12:32:16 - 00:12:58:23
Unknown
They didn't say they each one would like, give an answer, but I'm going to contribute to developing a path to lighting a path so that all of us who are stumbling along, trying to make the best of it, will have some guidance based on the experience of dozens of generations that came before us who may have lived in worlds different from ours, but not in terms of human nature.

00:12:59:00 - 00:13:25:18
Unknown
They didn't have iPhones, they found other ways of being distracted. And but human nature is the same. And so they tried to light a path, and they recognized that each of us possesses all the inner traits they focused in, on the traits of character as the pathway for personal spiritual growth. Each of us has all of them. Nobody is exempt from anger.

00:13:25:19 - 00:14:06:07
Unknown
Nobody's exempt from falsehood. Nobody is exempt from kindness or generosity or miserly or we got them all. But each of us has a curriculum. Each of us has certain inner traits that just have not. We have not developed that trait nearly as much as we have potential not to be like someone else, because it's our potential. So I mentioned rub, rub your room was the supervisor of the Mirror Yeshiva in the 1930s, and I studied something of his recently where he said, we're all born as raw material, and our work in life is to create finished goods.

00:14:06:12 - 00:14:25:01
Unknown
And then he went so far, as he said, initially writing in the 1930s, you know, in Russia they make really good cowhide, but they don't have the technology to create finished goods. So they ship it to Germany. And in Germany they make leather goods, fine leather goods and everyone prizes and pays a high price for the leather goods.

00:14:25:02 - 00:14:54:04
Unknown
And he was building out this whole analogy of us being raw material, and we should make German leather goods out of ourselves. We should make expensive products, we should refine ourselves. And and that is that's the whole notion that we have capability. But we are unrefined. We are like raw material. We are like or and we haven't extracted the gold and the silver, but to some extent we already are gold and silver.

00:14:54:08 - 00:15:30:06
Unknown
It's in those areas where it's buried in the other materials. And, you know, the word for refine in Hebrews, which also gives rise to the word for jeweler because a jeweler refines, separates the the valuable metal from the dross. And that's all what there is. That's all it is. And using real life as the laboratory. So that I'm going to say one more thing, because I know this is not meant to be a monologue and I but no, but this is a great foundation.

00:15:30:06 - 00:15:46:09
Unknown
This is a great overview to be a foundation. I say it's the problem of having an 1100 year old R&D department. They said a lot, and a lot of it is a lot of is worth relating. So I end up like running on. But.

00:15:46:11 - 00:16:18:21
Unknown
You know, one of the important pieces here, what makes it Jewish? If I'm talking about developing patients or kindness or everything else I talked about, where's the Jewish piece? Come in. I already mentioned one way it comes in working on yourself, but not for the sake of yourself. Many spiritual traditions about I want to be enlightened. You know, I this is spiritual work for my soul in isolation of community, responsibilities and the fact that we are not solitary individuals but actually blended into collective souls.

00:16:18:21 - 00:16:42:22
Unknown
And so that's that piece is very Jewish. The other thing is why? What's the goal? Where does the goal come in? And the goal is a very Jewish thing, which is holiness. And as you mentioned, Lizzie, when you were talking internet, you said, maybe our guest will talk about holiness. And I can only talk a little bit about holiness because I know nothing about it.

00:16:43:00 - 00:17:10:03
Unknown
And in that I'm not alone, despite having written a book with holiness in the title to do, because you didn't mention that there's a book every day, Holy Day, which is another. But I'm in good company because Ralph Cook, who was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of, you know, Mandate Palestine and a great mystic poet leader, unbelievable individual.

00:17:10:03 - 00:17:42:00
Unknown
Rob Cook, his secretary, once asked him, said, Rabbi, what is what is holiness? And Rob cook said, holiness is the quality of the holy. So you're not allowed to define a word using the word you. But you can't also define holiness, because where we're told to be holy in the Torah, we're we're tripped up right away because it says, you shall be holy, you shall be holy.

00:17:42:00 - 00:18:04:18
Unknown
This was two weeks ago in the Torah portion of kiddo. Shame. In Leviticus you shall be holy. But then the verse continues on the other night, because I, the Lord your God, am holy. What the heck are we supposed to do with that? Like, how do you become godly? That's almost what it's saying. But we know that's not a Jewish idea.

00:18:04:19 - 00:18:32:06
Unknown
There's a huge separation. We cannot be godly. That's one of the differences where Judaism parts way with Christianity, because, you know, the Son of God, we don't hold by that. We're human. We gotta live in a human world. We just have to accept our humanity. It's so beautiful. It's so liberating. It's so sweet. And yet the verse says, the reason you should be holy is because I got him holy.

00:18:32:09 - 00:18:58:15
Unknown
Now what? What can we know about the quality of that? Whatever created us? Like, what can we know? And of course, in Jewish theology. The answer is clearly nothing. God, whatever that means, lives in a dimension, whatever that means. That's very different from the dimension we are in which we know. So we know this dimension, but we don't know any other dimension of the cosmos or reality.

00:18:58:16 - 00:19:28:11
Unknown
How could we? We're in this dimension, and so we can't talk about the quality of God. Yet the Torah gives us this crazy instruction, and then it repeats it ten times. The instruction to be holy in the torus repeated ten times. And and as my granddaughter said when she gave her Torah two weeks ago at her bad mitzvah, where I was extremely joyful and helped her with her devotee, there I am with my granddaughter, talking about holiness.

00:19:28:16 - 00:19:49:20
Unknown
Talk about a holy moment and talk about narcos. Like there we're talking she's 12 and I'm here. And I say, well, well. Violet, why do you think kids who is stated in the plural? Because kids is the plural form of kudos. It's you shall be holy ones. I didn't give her that clue, but that was the answer. And she got it.

00:19:49:20 - 00:20:26:15
Unknown
I was very I was delighted, you know. Delighted is only a Zeta can be delighted. And it's in the plural, because it's meant to apply to all of us individually. Individually, it could say. And it says in other place, like a holy nation or am. But here it's saying shame. Each of us has a path where the ultimate goal is this mysterious, divine quality of holiness, which the Torah is telling us that we should be.

00:20:26:17 - 00:20:55:06
Unknown
But it then gives us a stumbling block of saying it's a divine quality. And so we're left with a goal that I think can't be known intellectually. And that was Rob Cook's answer. I can't answer you intellectually, but I can tell you when you see or feel or encounter or believe in something holy, there is a quality there that you can't know intellectually, but you can know.

00:20:55:08 - 00:21:23:23
Unknown
And one of the impacts of being a generation of spiritual orphans is that we live in an environment which highly prizes the intellect and completely downplays and almost ignores or denies any of the other ways in which we know. And yet we do. We know in many, many different ways, and Judaism summarizes them as the knowledge of the heart, the knowing of the heart.

00:21:24:00 - 00:21:59:12
Unknown
It's not just emotional, it is emotional, but not just the motion, intuition, soul things you brought into this life. All the different things that are just not rational. That's who we are. And if we if we try and live a life that's purely rational, well, how do you fulfill kudos to kick on the I don't know it. It broadens out the the human to be more holistic and it corresponds closer to our, our experience.

00:21:59:14 - 00:22:25:19
Unknown
Because I know for myself and I know I'm not alone, I don't experience the entire world and my relationships and my love and everything else purely rationally. That's a that's a horrible thought to be, actually to to dry it out and stamp it down to being purely rational. My, my being is three dimensional, four dimensional, and rationality is two dimensional.

00:22:26:01 - 00:22:55:17
Unknown
So we're given this goal. And that's again, I was just running with that. But the point was where is this Jewish? Because the whole enterprise of cultivating ourselves in this life and refining ourselves is not to win friends and and influence people. It's not to advance economically. It's not to. It's none of that. It's to be holy. And along the way, there's many other things we have to do.

00:22:55:17 - 00:23:22:11
Unknown
So what it really amounts to is that we're given this goal of holiness. And I've dealt deeply into Jewish writings, the Slonim and Shari and Rob cook. That's how I stumbled on this piece about Rav Cook that I quoted, because I was looking at the Jewish teachings and the holiness. And what I found is that our teachers, our ancestors, acknowledged our journey towards holiness.

00:23:22:11 - 00:23:42:00
Unknown
And then they spoke very little about it. They spoke little about the quality. What they did is that you're on a journey, on a path that is winding up a mountain. And at the top of the mountain there is this quality called holiness. Now look at your feet because you're on, you're on a journey, you're on a path.

00:23:42:00 - 00:24:03:21
Unknown
And every step of that path is your whole experience of this moment. If you take a wrong step, you're going to fall off the mountain or get on the wrong path or start heading down the mountain. And so you have to pay attention to the step by step by step progression. You know, kind of somewhere in your mind, you know, there's a goal here, there's a goal here.

00:24:03:21 - 00:24:53:08
Unknown
But I'm not thinking about it. I'm not fixated on it. I have to watch the path. And that circles back to why the inner traits became so significant. Because are you going to get to holiness if you're a compulsive liar? Are you going to get the holiness? If you're cruel, are you going to get the holiness? If you're dishonest in business and go on all the human traits, everything that you can stumble over is related, directly related, crucially related to this idea of holiness and this goal that set for us in our life in real terms, not theoretically and and just to say one more thing and then I want I want you to direct

00:24:53:08 - 00:24:56:06
Unknown
me.

00:24:56:08 - 00:25:29:20
Unknown
Like, like a path up the mountain. Most of the time you're in the trees and you're watching your feet because those rocks that are right in front of you, or the root of the tree or whatever it is that's really of concern to you, you're going to stumble and fall. So you're looking down. Every so often you come to a vista point and you stop and you look out from the top of the mountain or wherever you are on the mountain, whatever level you're at in the moon, and you look out and you get a view of life, you get a whole perspective, broad perspective, and you're walking up the path and you get another

00:25:29:20 - 00:25:53:17
Unknown
vista point, and it's higher up and you see the same landscape, or you see it from a higher vantage point and you experience life with more of the blueprint revealed, more of the map. Because as you go higher, you see the there's a river there. I couldn't see that from below. Oh, that road joins that road. I didn't see that from below.

00:25:53:20 - 00:26:26:07
Unknown
And sad to say, sometimes you're looking at the vista point, and it's lower than the vista point that you looked at previously, and you have to see that too. And that's part of the path. And so I'm talking about the first occurrence of the word musar that we have recorded in our tradition is the opening verses of the Book of Proverbs, where King Solomon says, I am Shlomo, son of David, King of Israel.

00:26:26:07 - 00:27:00:05
Unknown
And I have come to teach you wisdom and Mozart. Now it's amazing. It's right there at the beginning of the book of Proverbs, the introductory line. But what's more curious is that King Solomon is known as the wisest of people, the wise King Solomon. And he's come to teach us wisdom. And Mozart. Well, why not just wisdom? Why didn't Solomon just come to teach us wisdom?

00:27:00:05 - 00:27:27:02
Unknown
That's what he's known for. And the answer is, you can't teach wisdom. You can't teach wisdom, you can't. You give people information, but that doesn't make them wise. Wisdom is a developmental process. It's an internalization. It is a ripening. It is a maturing. Sometimes my teacher, I would say, I would ask him a question. You would say, in time and with experience you'll know.

00:27:27:04 - 00:27:51:20
Unknown
He didn't answer the question. But he was right. That's that's wisdom. Wisdom is what evolves so that your inner nature, who you are, has incorporated the experience of your life. And it's become informative to you. And you look at the situation as you look out from the vista point on the mountain, and you have more deep understanding of the whole big picture.

00:27:51:21 - 00:28:29:03
Unknown
That doesn't come from wisdom, that comes from walking the path, and the path that goes back to the book of Proverbs, goes through the Mishnah and the Talmud and starts getting codified in in the 900, and then gets passed to and gets passed on to Shlomo and gets passed on to, you know, a Jiroft. And it goes on and we have this corpus, this canon of insight into our in our lives and into human living.

00:28:29:05 - 00:28:33:11
Unknown
That is a treasure house.

00:28:33:13 - 00:28:53:07
Unknown
Of guidance for us human beings. And then we went through the last half of the 20th century. No one showed it to us. It was locked up and got dusty and cobwebs, and people like me went off to India. And you know, you can't do a Buddhist meditation retreat these days that isn't led by somebody. May, Kornfeld, Goldstein.

00:28:53:07 - 00:29:39:17
Unknown
Salzberg. Burstein. Schwartz. Rosenberg. Why? Because we didn't do our our tradition, our community, our leaders had other priorities and allowed the inner life to be so sidelined that people thought there was no tradition of awareness of, and attention to, and and cultivation of the inner life in the Jewish world. Judaism was all about latkes and, you know, dressing up on Purim, this this is this is I mean, I think you you describe the journey of a lot of people who are here in this room and who are listening later.

00:29:39:19 - 00:30:07:19
Unknown
I also, I you have so many great little gems that you could put on a bumper sticker, you know, I mean, like assimilation, Judaism. I think like, like you said that, you know, within the first 60s. Oh my God. You know, because as a rabbi, I am in the business of mining Judaism for the inner life, for the gold, for, you know, like that's what is relevant and meaningful for people.

00:30:07:21 - 00:30:39:15
Unknown
You know, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't find in this tradition the gold and want to share it. And and yet, I'm very aware of all the dynamics that you described about basically all that, all that shimmer being so buried underneath layers of, you might say, self-protection, you know, or the desire to desire to assimilate, to be safe, to to not have to worry that anybody was going to think we were weird or whatever.

00:30:39:18 - 00:31:19:20
Unknown
Yeah. And it didn't work. And it didn't work. No. That's right. Work that more amazing. So. Right. So it's like as long as people are going to not like us for being Jews here and there and throughout history, we may as well have the gold. We may as well mine the tradition for the gold. You know, one of the things that for me is one of the most I would I feel like grounding and important Jewish spaces for that self-reflection, and that the space for the inner life is the language of prayer and the practice of prayer.

00:31:19:22 - 00:31:44:00
Unknown
And as you were talking about Bahia Ibn Kakuta in like the 11th century for the first time, writing a book whose focus was the inner life, I was like going back in my mind to the Mishnah, to the rabbis who were talking about, you know, don't sit down to pray if you're like, all hyped up, like be Covid Rosh, like, have a serious mindset, you know, what does Covid Rosh mean?

00:31:44:00 - 00:32:07:18
Unknown
And then they go down this whole road of, well, what does it mean? Like what? What? How do you know if you're, you know, centered or focused or serious? Well, really, do you have to be serious? I mean, was King David serious? What? Hannah, was she, you know, and they're having these conversations 2000 years ago, and none of us were ever taught about that in Sunday school.

00:32:07:19 - 00:32:52:17
Unknown
You know, just that level of self-reflection and self-awareness as we approach Jewish practice. So I just I was relating to everything you were saying here. And I do have a question, but go ahead. Yeah. Let me just respond a little bit, because I think the point you made, you took what I said further, and I agree with it, which is that assimilation was, I think, a communal strategy to deal with anti-Semitism, that if we could melt in completely and it was a new thing that we could, because even in the United States prior to the Second World War and well after the Second World War, there were quotas on admission to medical schools and dental

00:32:52:17 - 00:33:17:07
Unknown
schools. Jews could not live in certain neighborhoods. Jews certainly could not join certain country clubs. And there was a whole expectation of even in this country of being oppressed, Europe was way worse. But it's not as if you came to America and it was, and we were free. But after the Second World War, we were. All those country clubs were forced to accept Jews.

00:33:17:07 - 00:33:40:00
Unknown
Those neighborhoods could no longer discriminate. We suddenly, for the first time in millennia, had the possibility of melting in. And we went for it with God. And boy, did we try. Yeah, I really tried. And it's so amazing that what's happened in the last. A lot of people are so shocked by anti-Semitism, like they were shocked by Covid.

00:33:40:00 - 00:34:04:23
Unknown
I thought we were done with epidemics. No, folks, this is a real world. Epidemics are part of human life. Anti-Semitism will outlive you and me as it has. And so it was. It's proven by our experience that assimilation didn't work for what its goal was. And we got a lot of goods out of it. You know, we got to go to the country club, we got to be elected to office.

00:34:05:00 - 00:34:23:02
Unknown
We got a lot out of it. But as you said, that's what I wanted to amplify what you said at a cost. And it's really worth looking at what the cost is. That's what brought me to write a book about Shabbat. I mean, amazing. All right, I want it like we have a couple steps. My gosh. All right.

00:34:23:03 - 00:34:52:04
Unknown
Yes, because actually, we're in the midst right now as we count the omer of this period of Kabbalistic informed self-reflection. Right. So the curriculum you talked about, like each one of us, has qualities. All of us have all the potentials for all the human qualities inside of us. But we each have because of our background, because of our education, because of the trauma that's happened to us, different, different strengths and weaknesses.

00:34:52:04 - 00:35:14:03
Unknown
And Moussa is a curriculum and individualized curriculum to help each one of us focus on and grow closer to the holy like. That's it. The Omer has us focus on these seven lower sefirot. We've been talking about this for the past couple of weeks. In minyan, I taught a class on practical Kabbalah, which, shockingly, I know more about than I do about Musar.

00:35:14:03 - 00:35:37:15
Unknown
So I'm really glad you're here because, like, now I can share, right? We have the quality of Chest of Loving Kindness. And over here, Dean or Guevara, you know, boundaries, rigidity, strength, you know, and these different human qualities, divine qualities that are amplified or reflected inside of each one of us over the 49 days of the Omer. We look at each one of them in combination with the other.

00:35:37:15 - 00:36:05:05
Unknown
We meditate. We ask ourselves, how am I doing with balance? You know, say to ferret, you know, like the balancing between these different things. And and so in theory, that 49 day journey is a comprehensive look at the entire kind of human composition through the lens of all of these sefirot. And, and we come out on the other side more self-aware, a little closer to our divine potential, you know, our, our best selves.

00:36:05:05 - 00:36:37:18
Unknown
And so for somebody who does not know a thing about the practice of Moussa, how does that curriculum work? How do you understand what those qualities are and how they show up in your life and how to work on them? You know, you probably have no idea how many neurons you just cause to fire in my brain, but quite a number of them, because there's a lot in what you said.

00:36:37:20 - 00:37:10:01
Unknown
Let me speak a little bit about why I practice musar and have only peripheral engagement with Kabbalah, because every time I step into Kabbalah, I find myself getting into my head because I find myself getting metaphysical and I start thinking in schemes and levels and diagrams and, and and I, I can say this, you know, that's my strength.

00:37:10:03 - 00:38:01:07
Unknown
So why would I cultivate that? I'm already good at being in my head. How do I develop a different sensitivity to life that isn't governed by intellectual schemes? And when I find myself in the real world and I'm traveling and my flight is canceled, or the or, you know, I'm giving a talk and the executive director is like walking down the aisle, giving me the hook or, you know, or my wife pushes my buttons or or or when real life intrudes into it, I am being challenged in my in a different way, not about understanding life, but about walking my path.

00:38:01:09 - 00:38:29:05
Unknown
What I say is there are there are a variety of different paths in Judaism we haven't even mentioned. It is another spiritual path of the inner life, depending on where your strengths and weaknesses are. I would say go to a different one, go to a different path that the one is going to develop you. Because what the teachers centered, they said, we can't talk about holiness very much, but we can talk about becoming more whole.

00:38:29:06 - 00:39:05:08
Unknown
The idea of qaleh mute we as individuals, sometimes for healthy reasons, sometimes for unhealthy reasons. We're partial. We may be broken. We may have not developed something. There's just a sense of not being complete, not being whole. The movement towards wholeness is the process, and the spiritual path ought to be the one that strengthens your weakest characteristics. And for me, it's the it wasn't being able to grasp intellectual constructs.

00:39:05:08 - 00:39:36:21
Unknown
And so I shy away from that. And for me, it's much more about the living, breathing soul in front of me at this given moment. That's my work. That's where I feel really stretched into a whole experientially growth mode. And so that drew me to mussar because. Two things here. Again, just staying with your question, how do we know about these inner traits you mentioned given to Ferret and Kessen?

00:39:37:01 - 00:40:09:09
Unknown
What do we know? And the amazing thing is, I mean, give an analogy here. I read last week that you know, these online genetic genealogy testing sites, they're not good for Ashkenazi Jews because there was a point in history in Europe we can trace our as if we're Ashkenazi Jews. Almost all of us can trace our ancestry back to 350 people who were at one point a genetic bottleneck, they call it.

00:40:09:10 - 00:40:36:02
Unknown
I just read one article. I'm no expert on this. I'm just repeating what I read, that there was a genetic bottleneck, and then somehow we survived through that. And then the population has grown out from that. And in a way, spiritually, the same thing is true, that we have lived in a kind of, to a large degree, isolation because we've been that was the nature of Jewish life in in Europe.

00:40:36:02 - 00:41:10:13
Unknown
It was a ghetto. It was a schedule you didn't like. Have a choice. Oh, I'm going to go off to Warsaw and become Polish. You know, it's like we were in a very limited, bounded world, and we had ancestors who were incredibly intelligent and astute and compassionate and committed and wanted to understand and help us understand what this thing is called life, and how to live it in the way that is very consistent with the highest values of Judaism.

00:41:10:15 - 00:41:35:00
Unknown
So they studied us. I mean, we weren't, as far as we know, alive at that time. But all through these 11 centuries, they were studying human beings just like us and coming to an understanding what is patience and when do you need it? What is kindness? You know, we might think, because of the English that we work in and the Christian concepts that have pervaded our world.

00:41:35:06 - 00:42:00:00
Unknown
You might think kindness is a feeling, like a sentiment. It's I feel kindly, but in Judaism it's an action. It's acts of rest. It doesn't matter what you feel like. You don't feel like going to the shiva house. I don't want to go. I don't want to. But you do. You go and you comfort the mourner. And it may not be coming out of kindness in you.

00:42:00:02 - 00:42:37:05
Unknown
You may not have the feeling of kindness, but you do a kind act. You do kindness through action. So they studied all these inner traits. And just as one example, in the 16th century there was a book published called orgasm, which has been translated many times into English. And I think every single time the English title is given as or, but it means the path of the righteous ones, and the entire book is made up of, I don't know, 34 chapters or something, something of that number.

00:42:37:05 - 00:43:02:05
Unknown
And everyone is on an inner quality. That's all the book is. There's a chapter on patience and chapter on impatience, a chapter on generosity, chapter a miserly, a chapter on kindness, a chapter on cruelty. And it's an entire investigation. 16th century Jewish text, and one of many where the attempt was to say, what are we talking about here?

00:43:02:07 - 00:43:25:04
Unknown
And what they came to and said, we're the heirs to this is a recognition that traits are not positive or negative. You can't do it from the Jewish point of view. You can't do what the Christians did, which is say there are seven deadly sins. Envy. You know, the Jews look at envy and they say, it's not so bad.

00:43:25:06 - 00:43:50:02
Unknown
There's a positive side to envy, just as it's a negative side to generosity. It's just not so simple. And it comes down to us as individuals. It's how that quality plays in us as individuals, and it won't play in me the same way it plays in you or plays in the person next to you. That individuality, that recognition that we are souls, individual souls.

00:43:50:04 - 00:44:23:03
Unknown
And I have found that I do this every time, not every time. But like on my book tour, when I'm giving the introduction, I'll ask people what's patience? And I'll give two definitions. One was kind of like equanimity. You won't get ruffled. Patience is the ability to like, sustain, delay. You're thwarted and you're okay. However long it takes or you want to kill somebody and you don't, that it's a kind of self-restraint on acting out.

00:44:23:03 - 00:44:48:21
Unknown
And inevitably it divides down the middle. Well, it divides three ways. There are people who say it's number one, people who say it's number two, and people say it's both. And every out of every group breaks up like that. And then you look at the Hebrew sub la nuit. Patience is comes from the same root as the word civil, which means suffering.

00:44:48:23 - 00:45:15:01
Unknown
And another word that comes from the same root is sabal, which means a porter. So clearly in the Hebrew and through a Jewish lens, patience has nothing to do with equanimity. If you have equal, you don't need patience. What do you need patience for? You're fine. It's when you are roiled with energy and emotion and reactivity. Now you need patients.

00:45:15:02 - 00:45:49:23
Unknown
You have to be able to bear to be a porter of your suffering feelings. And that kind of insight is a Jewish lens developed in this, our little hothouse of Jewish life over the last millennium, insight into our lives, which is a particularly Jewish lens on something that is not particularly Jewish, which is human character. Do you want to give us a couple more examples of that, sort of like the corrective?

00:45:49:23 - 00:46:19:12
Unknown
So what I just heard you say, relative to patients is say you're working as a teacher with somebody who knows that they have a short fuze, they get angry quickly, and that that tends to interfere with their relationships. It tends to, you know, make their kids run away from them. You know, there's there's nothing good about it. Like even Maimonides says, if you need to pretend to be angry, to discipline a child or something, you better not be angry and then perform your anger.

00:46:19:12 - 00:46:40:13
Unknown
Fine. You know, if you to make a point. But like if you're operating from a place of reactivity, then like you need a music teacher who's going to teach you how to surveil, how to bear your the burden of that feeling of I need to respond, I need to react. So that's so I imagine that's part of the curriculum, right?

00:46:40:14 - 00:46:58:16
Unknown
Is your curriculum that's your personal curriculum. So do you. You got to sign that. And so this is really a two part question. One is is more generally like what are some like that I could imagine is a quality that a lot of people struggle with. And you come across frequently. And so a lot of people need to work on.

00:46:58:16 - 00:47:19:03
Unknown
I'm wondering what are some other common, you know, common traits that folks need to work on and like, what does that work look like? Do you read about it in a book like Everyday Holiness? Do you have to find yourself a teacher like Alan Marinus? How does that work? All of the above, all of the inner traits have Jewish understandings of them.

00:47:19:03 - 00:47:54:14
Unknown
The traits are themselves what we experience. But in several of my books, I have a chapter which has a title that is not translated into English, the chapter titles. Because in the Jewish world there is a inner trait which has a name which is consistently used, for which there is no English equivalent, because that word eurgh in a certain context will mean fear in another context will mean reverence in another, context will mean all.

00:47:54:16 - 00:48:24:07
Unknown
And there's a Jewish understanding. You can have all those things as one. There is one quality which merges or fear and reverence. And I use the example. You're standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and your toes are over the edge and there's no guardrail, and you're looking down fear or, and reverence because the the gorgeousness of life is revealed to, say, one, you know, it opens your heart.

00:48:24:08 - 00:48:55:06
Unknown
It's a transcendent moment. But we have that experience of that merger of three qualities in our in our lives and in English doesn't get named, but in Hebrew gets named. So all of these things are the Jewish lens. The the human experience is not specifically Jewish, but the lens is very Jewish and has as the path is defined and the practices are all meant to take us up the holy mountain.

00:48:55:06 - 00:49:22:06
Unknown
And that all is the Jewish construct about how to live a human life. And in so in the 19th century. So all we have from previous centuries up to the 19th century is books, because nobody kind of, you know, wrote spiritual autobiographies, or you didn't have journalists and we didn't know what went on between, say, teacher and student.

00:49:22:06 - 00:49:53:10
Unknown
We didn't have access to that. We have the books that the teachers wrote, and that turns out to be extremely valuable. But in the 19th century, when in the middle of the 19th century in Lithuania decided that the need of his generation so interesting, it was like almost 200 years ago, he looked at his generation and he saw that the inner life was also being neglected and Judaism had lost its spark.

00:49:53:10 - 00:50:15:15
Unknown
And people were following the Haskalah, which was kind of an assimilationist movement, or they were emigrating and giving up their Judaism, or they were becoming political activists. In the 19th century, Jews leading the communist movement and the socialist movement and the movement and the Zionist movement. And where was God, you know, and where was the heart? And so he saw that in his generation.

00:50:15:15 - 00:50:35:12
Unknown
And he picked up on the tradition that by that time was only about 900 years old. And he said, we have to bring this into the community in a more active way. It has to be part of the fabric of Jewish life, because it returns people to their own inner lives. And that's where we live. And it's not all about the outer life.

00:50:35:12 - 00:51:10:06
Unknown
And so he he innovated that he himself did not have much success. He had five disciples and he gave it up. After about ten years, he moved to Paris. He, like the least Jewish city in Europe at the time, very interesting individual. But those five five disciples he had were enough. You don't need an army, because out of those five came three schools of Mozart, and one of them in particular, codified and developed a kind of format.

00:51:10:06 - 00:51:33:10
Unknown
And and what emerged was what's called the Muslim movement. And within the Muslim movement, the 19th century Muslim movement, a great deal of focus went on practice that you first we have to know what it is. Then we have to know how to practice it. First, we have to know that I am an impatient person. I have to accept that that's my curriculum.

00:51:33:12 - 00:51:53:08
Unknown
Actually, I say we have to accept it. We don't have to accept it. If you don't accept it, you're not. Let's say you really are impatient, but you don't accept that you're impatient. You've got an answer. I'm not impatient. You're too slow. Everybody I meet is too slow. It has nothing to do with me. Just blame everybody else.

00:51:53:08 - 00:52:10:20
Unknown
And why does it have to do with me? And so you don't have to accept that you have a spiritual curriculum. Except, as you said, Laozi. If you don't, everyone's going to run away from you. Everyone's going to not like working with you. Everyone's going to find you a real pain. Your life is not going to work well.

00:52:10:20 - 00:52:32:04
Unknown
You're going to keep stumbling. You won't advance in your work. Your family will fall apart and has nothing to do with me. You're too slow. So this that they identified said there are three stages in the work of mustard. The first is to become aware and accept. This is where I am. This is where I am on the mountain right now.

00:52:32:04 - 00:52:58:06
Unknown
This is the fact. The second one is to start to work what he called Kovac, which means to conquer. Which means you've got the impulse. You don't have to act on that. You have to be aware I am impatient, which means that I know I'm reactive. So I have to be aware of a trigger moment and then do internal work to sort of broaden my vessel.

00:52:58:08 - 00:53:24:13
Unknown
I can hold this emotion that's conquering it because you have the impulse, you haven't changed yourself, but you've changed your response so that you're not being controlled by it. You're being able to control it and you're not acting out or you you push yourself. You don't. You're not a very kindly person in terms of action. Some would also go to the house.

00:53:24:13 - 00:53:49:01
Unknown
Someone else will visit the person in the hospital, somebody else I don't. That's not my priority. Well, you push yourself. I don't have a feeling to do. You push yourself. And that's also Kovic. So sometimes it's a restraint, sometimes it's a push. It's whatever it does that overcomes the impulse in action while the impulse still remains. And the third stage is tycoon.

00:53:49:01 - 00:54:11:06
Unknown
He called it tikkun. And it's, you know, often called the, the, the rectification of the trade itself. So you no longer have the impulse that, that the comes naturally, that you're just patient, you know, you're just it's not the work is done in a certain way, but at that stage there is work to do to cause the work to be done.

00:54:11:06 - 00:54:38:01
Unknown
It's not just that by restraining yourself or pushing yourself, that's it. That's a stage. Then you have to do inner transformative work. And in the 19th century, you know, if we had known what they were doing, if we had been exposed to it, we would have loved them from the get go. They were doing all kinds of meditations, contemplations, chanting.

00:54:38:04 - 00:55:07:17
Unknown
They were doing exercises in the real world, experiential exercises. I'll just mention the chanting. So what they cilantro innovated this 1850 Orthodox rabbi, yeshiva based Talmud scholar. He says, just because you know something, it's in your head. How do you get it to go down into your heart? That was the goal. And another Mr. Teacher of the 20th century, Ilya.

00:55:07:19 - 00:55:29:08
Unknown
And he said, mussar is making the heart understand what the mind knows. Fine, I know what patience is. Fine, I don't, I know I'm not good at it. I'm impatient. That's up here. How do you get it down into the core of your being so that it's internalized? It becomes part of your who you are, and especially in a transformative way.

00:55:29:14 - 00:55:51:15
Unknown
And would take a phrase that reflected the ideal he was trying to build into himself. And he would repeat it over and over and over again, sometimes for an hour or two hours, and then it would develop a melody, and it wasn't a fixed melody. It would he would just enter into the experience moment. And he taught his students to do this.

00:55:51:15 - 00:56:17:17
Unknown
And we've taken tours of students to Israel, where there's a place in Jerusalem called the Musar, not ours. It was it was founded like 60 years ago by disciples of the Muslim movement, the base Hamas. And we were led in there into a repetitive chanting exercise where the idea is you have the idea, you know, the ideal you're working for.

00:56:17:18 - 00:56:59:00
Unknown
It's there in the phrase, in the meaning. But then you excite the phrase you. You turn it into an emotional recitation with melody and emotion, and build it so that it becomes instilled in your heart. And it became characteristic that kind of chanting became characteristic of the Muslim movement. And I had never seen it. I'd never been exposed, even in the Orthodox world, which was at one time the only home, even into the music, continued into the postwar period in the Orthodox world, but really reduced and minimized.

00:56:59:01 - 00:57:29:12
Unknown
And I never saw that chanting. I was in Israel once. This was 2010, when the Olympics were in Vancouver and my wife and I were escaping. We went to Israel to get away from the Olympics, and I knew there was a person who was at the base of Musser. That was the first contact I had with it, who was a student of the who was a student of Riviera, who was a student of the altar of Kelm, who was a student of Rabbi.

00:57:29:14 - 00:57:55:11
Unknown
And I went to see him and I said, he was then was you who to Mendelssohn. And I said, Mendelssohn, will you demonstrate for me, Mr. Chanting? And he said, yes, and he did. And he chanted this way sometimes he did it a bunch of different ways. He did it by repeating the phrase kind of just drilling into it.

00:57:55:13 - 00:58:15:11
Unknown
And then did really melodically and really uplifting and just with a melody that repeated. He did a bunch of different ways. And then he said to me, how you do it doesn't matter. What matters is that it gets into your heart. And what will get into your heart may not get into somebody else's heart. You have to do it your way.

00:58:15:13 - 00:58:41:12
Unknown
So I said to him, well, if it's called his pilots or a lute, which has that sense of excited, you stimulate the emotions in the practice. And I said, well, what if a person's not musical or not verbal or but they're embodied, they're a dancer. What if somebody's form of prayer is dance? I say, could you do a his Pilates dancing?

00:58:41:14 - 00:59:10:22
Unknown
And I'm sitting in an Orthodox, you know, yeshiva building with a black hat. Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem in 2010. And he says to me, I don't see why not. So he was saying, you could dance your Jewish spiritual practice. And I think, had that one teaching been available in the in the 1980s, it might have been a revolutionary thing in our Jewish world instead of what we got.

00:59:10:23 - 00:59:38:04
Unknown
And there he was, and there it was. So they innovated practices and they understood the many other things. And so they did meditations, contemplations. Great story about hanging a dead fish from the rafters of a room, and the students sitting around and watching the fish decay. Story a mother story has a purpose point. But just look what they were doing.

00:59:38:06 - 00:59:58:01
Unknown
Like, can you actually that's a that's a great that that reminds me of the story of like in order to teach humility to kids who are too proud, like go into a hardware store and ask for a baguette, and then they're like, what are you talking about? This is a hardware store. But like, no, you know, just go in there and do something that will like make put you in your place.

00:59:58:03 - 01:00:18:13
Unknown
But then that's not what everybody needs are what was the point of the fish? What was what, what quality was that teaching? The point of this was, in a way, humility, but it was also mortality that we get so involved in life. We act as if we're immortal and we pursue worldly goals. The fact is, our flesh will decay.

01:00:18:15 - 01:00:49:05
Unknown
And so they were watching in order to have an experience. I can tell you, as I know myself, I will die and the flesh will decay up here. Right when you start to smell the decaying fish and you see the flesh decaying, then you get a sense of a reality because it comes through experiential learning. And it's so remarkable that these teachers, who were Talmud scholars, recognize the limits of the intellect.

01:00:49:06 - 01:01:15:17
Unknown
That's right. You're learning. Your deepest learning will not come through your intellect. Just amazing thing that they they got to that insight. And I believe they were right. I believe 100% they were right. So they did things that were experiential like that. The end of the story, which is kind of tying up everything we've been talking about except my book.

01:01:15:19 - 01:01:38:20
Unknown
Which we don't really need to talk about that much. I can say a little bit about it, but the the story is each of these schools of Muslim in the 19th century developed a different character, and the students who were sitting around watching the fish decay were from the Nevada School of Music, which was really quite radical. The Altar of Nevada didn't talk about cultivating the soul or developing the soul.

01:01:38:21 - 01:02:02:22
Unknown
He talked about storming the soul. He was really out there and one of the other schools which ended up having a bigger influence, based its teaching on the notion of the greatness of a human being. It really lifted up and said, if you are made in the image and likeness of God, and you accept that and internalize that, how does that affect your speech?

01:02:02:22 - 01:02:30:11
Unknown
How does that affect your dress? How does that affect your grooming? And you're eating? And they made godless Adam the greatness of the human being, their central teaching, and lifted people up in that way and then had a tremendous influence on the Jewish world, because to this day, all but a handful of the major yeshivas in the world came out of that one little yeshiva in the suburb of Kovno.

01:02:30:13 - 01:02:58:21
Unknown
Like the Lakewood Yeshiva, the mere yeshiva, the Shiva Vidot near Israel, these are. Shiva today have thousands of students in each one of them. And they came out of this little Shiva there, because that notion of building up the greatness of a human being turned out to be a really good pedagogical technique. And so the group of students came by and saw the Nevada sitting around the dead fish.

01:02:59:02 - 01:03:17:21
Unknown
That was not a bunch of practice. So they went back to their rabbi and they said, Rabbi, you can't believe what the Nevada crews are doing. They're sitting around watching a fish decay, and they expect there's going to be some kind of reproof on that. That's not our Derek. That's not our way. We don't do that. We are godless, Adam.

01:03:17:21 - 01:03:25:03
Unknown
We dress, you know, blah, blah, blah. And what the rabbi says is, does it work?

01:03:25:05 - 01:03:46:19
Unknown
That's the bottom line. That's the test. The test is not we do this. We don't do this. We do this. The test is does it transform you? Does it work on your curriculum? That's the issue. So if you dance a his Belus, does it work? If you chant his pilots, does it work if you do this meditation look now, does it work?

01:03:46:19 - 01:04:02:22
Unknown
And the whole Rabbi Shlomo Welby, who died in 2005, based all his teaching on the idea. He said, the best music teacher in the world for you is you.

01:04:02:23 - 01:04:27:13
Unknown
This is all really, really rich. As you've been speaking, some of your students who are here have given a little bit of, like, color and bolstering to things that you're saying. So something Judith chimed in with is that your book Every Day, holiness, actually describes 18 different character traits and different ways the most art teachers have approached them.

01:04:27:13 - 01:05:08:15
Unknown
And so for anybody who's wondering about that, that that's a great book to pick up. And that the book also talks about the chanting and experiential exercises. And, you know, something that I feel like we've just just scratched the surface of, like, learning about. And Cheri shared that, you know, part of the practice, yes, is learning from reading and having a teacher, but also having a VOD, having a group of people who you work on this stuff with that you know, you were talking before, like kids to you.

01:05:08:15 - 01:05:38:13
Unknown
It's an individual practice because we're all different. But actually doing this in community is really rich, is really valuable. It helps us, it moves us, it keeps us connected to other people. It gets us out of our heads and into our like, more just into the real lived experience of what it is to be a human. And and so just all of all of those dimensions of Mozart training are available to people who might be listening and wondering like, okay, but how do I do this?

01:05:38:14 - 01:06:13:02
Unknown
You know? And so folks should look up the Music Institute, which is your your school for teaching these traits and cultivating the better version of ourselves. Do you want to close with the particular transformational Jewish practice that is the subject of your last book? Yeah, please. It's appropriate. And it all ties together nicely, I think, because one of the things we gave up, I think, in assimilation for a lot of people was Shabbat.

01:06:13:04 - 01:06:53:23
Unknown
You know, for a lot of people, Shabbat is a Saturday. And we lost something of what is especially in relation to the inner life. And that my book is eight traits, eight dot that are particularly available for practice on Shabbat holiness, peace, rest. Trust, awareness, material satisfaction. These are all built into the structure of a traditional Shabbat, where those preoccupations of the other six days of the week are split, like the Red sea, that they move to the side.

01:06:53:23 - 01:07:19:13
Unknown
And we're not we're not denying them and not denying their importance. We're saying, I give six days of my life to social action, to political awareness, to material acquisition, to fixing things and to building the world. As I would like to see it. I'll give six days to that. But if I give seven days to that, where do I practice rest?

01:07:19:13 - 01:07:48:01
Unknown
Where do I practice peace? Where do I practice material satisfaction? And all the other eight characteristics that are the the focus of the book? So what I'm saying is it's typical practice because it's focused on cultivating inner traits, which I think happened to be particularly attractive. I haven't had any say, I don't want peace in my life. I don't want rest.

01:07:48:01 - 01:08:13:12
Unknown
I don't want awareness. You know, I don't want material satisfaction. These are like, I think there's a deep hunger in our pathological society for us. And there's such a hunger that there are more books written about the Sabbath by non-Jews these days than there are Jews writing about Shabbat. Like they they see what we've got. And they said, that looks nice.

01:08:13:12 - 01:08:35:19
Unknown
I'd like some of that. And we have moved away from it because of assimilation at a cost, at a huge cost. And so what I've seen and what I've evolved in my own life, I can only teach what I have walked on my path, and then I share what it's been for me and I have. I grew up in a completely non observant home.

01:08:35:19 - 01:09:03:09
Unknown
No Shabbat, you know, my father's Shabbat was lying on the couch watching bowling on television. We did not like Shabbat candles. I mean, really gone. And then my own life has been a process of seeing what a loss, what a terrible loss, and recognizing that I can't expect to have peace in my life unless I practice peace. I can't expect to have material satisfaction unless I practice it.

01:09:03:09 - 01:09:41:02
Unknown
And where am I going to practice it? And so the opening up of the seventh day gives an opportunity to bring into my soul these qualities that I see. I would like to develop more. And then I have found when you do that, the effect lasts the other six days of the week as well. And so as you learn to become the master of your work life, or the ability to not shop, or the ability to tune out politics, and it's not that you're becoming oblivious to it.

01:09:41:02 - 01:10:02:07
Unknown
You're developing the mastery to say, I do want to pay attention. I don't want to pay attention. I want to pay attention to this. I don't want to pay attention to this. It's like you're you're you have the ability not to be addicted to the culture that we have today, which has as part of its purpose, to make us addicted.

01:10:02:08 - 01:10:25:13
Unknown
We certainly know that about social media, but we know about acquisition as well, shopping and and thinking that we'll find satisfaction in life by having more stuff, etc.. So Shabbat is a great workout. It's a great laboratory. It's a great practice place for developing the inner traits that we, in fact, would like to see in the other six days of the week as well.

01:10:25:15 - 01:10:54:08
Unknown
That's it. And that book is called The Shabbat Effect. Yeah, well thank you. It's been a very it's been a deep, rich, fast moving our that we've been talking here and, and obviously there's so much more to, there's, there's this was scratching the surface. This is just a little bit of the wisdom and knowledge that you've accrued over the decades since you started to learn this stuff.

01:10:54:08 - 01:11:18:05
Unknown
And it's really it's incredible that you're making it available to so many people, and that if people want to go a lot deeper, there's a way for them to do that with the Art Institute, with you as a teacher. Yeah. And the tradition is there. You know, the institute doesn't own it. It is our heritage. And I did my my exploring by finding books and reading.

01:11:18:05 - 01:11:44:19
Unknown
And I'm happy that people should know there are doorways they can knock on. There are there are doorways, actually, another one that we've got, community members who are involved is the Curva Institute that, you know, the sort of wisdom from the inside out. Even. And I are close colleagues. And yeah, it's another door to knock on. Yeah, that's the beauty of it right now.

01:11:44:21 - 01:12:11:00
Unknown
Amazing stories again. Well, thank you so much. I know people have places to go. It would if I have places to go, sadly. Otherwise I'd love to keep the room open and folks could. Yes, but should folks on this Wednesday night that this podcast is going to come out tomorrow so the class will be over. But for those of you who are here now, you can hear Allen speak tonight at Jeremiah.

01:12:11:01 - 01:12:30:03
Unknown
At what time? Seven, seven. 7:00. All right. And thank you so much and looking forward to learning more from you in the years to come. Okay. Blessings to everyone. Thank you. Ellen. Thank you. Rabbi Lizzie okay. Bye bye. Bye, everybody.