Saturday 15 December 2018

Do You Really Need a Mussar Sefer to Learn Mussar?

originally published on Feb. 5, 2011

My friend was learning Shulchan Aruch and found it dry. Eventually that led him to R Nachman's Liqutei Halachos on the SA which added the dimension of Hassidut

In learning Kitzur SA, I have been able to find many valuable lessons in Mussar w/o having to read too far between the lines.
Of course having learned Mussar over the years helped to train my eye a bit. So after a while one can derive Mussar from Humash, Tehillim, Mishnah or Kitzur. It matters not the text so much as the approach to seeking the Mussar Heskel behind the text.
That doesn't necessarily obviate the need or desirability of engaging in a Mussar text. It just means that useful Mussar is independent of the classic Mussar texts and may be derived from many and various Torah Texts.

Shalom
RRW

1 comment:

Mr. Cohen said...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote:

I was born in Somalia but raised as a young child in Saudi Arabia, where rabid expressions of anti-Semitism were everyday occurrences. Many Palestinian refugees were our neighbors and in their eyes, Jews possessed extraordinary, Harry Potter-like powers, with the ability to cause death and destruction. “We can never defeat these Yahuds” was a common theme.

Evil conspiracy theories abounded.
If water didn’t come out of the tap, “Oh the Jews are at it again”.
If someone fell ill, “The Jews have poisoned him”.

On a tour in Belgium, when I was 23, the guide said we were in the Jewish quarter. All the Somalis froze. “Where are the Jews?” we asked. The guide pointed out an ultra-Orthodox man and his family walking past. “But they are people!” And then I cried. That was when I grew up mentally.

Anti-Semitism persists because scapegoating has served the West well for 2,000 years. It suits certain communities to blame others for their misfortunes. But Arabs are Semites, too, so the term does not really apply to them.

Muslims believe they are the recipients of God’s final words. Rabbinical Judaism can challenge the authenticity of the Qur’an and this is therefore seen as a threat. Arabs have adopted Nazi and communist thinking about Jews as their own, translating The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arabic.

The establishment of Israel was wholly alien to Arabs. Today Muslim countries are dictatorships, and the leaders use Israel to try and deflect criticism from themselves.

The populations want democracy, and women want equality. They compare life in Israel with their lives, and the only defense their leaders have is to tell their populations: “Jewish evil has got into you!”

Children from the age of two are inculcated and indoctrinated to detest Jews by their social, religious and academic leaders despite none of them ever having met a Jew. This is how easy it is to manipulate billions of people. Hatred of Jews is taught to ignorant people, and there is no campaign to counter such propaganda.

SOURCE:
Islam’s Eternal Scapegoat by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Moment Magazine, Anti-Semitism Symposium, Feb 2015, pages 5 to 6
MomentMag dot com, 4115 Wisconsin Ave NW Washington DC 20016

MICROBIOGRAPHY:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, President of the AHA Foundation and author of:
The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam.