Twelve essays on a Jewish ethical practice — one trait at a time, counted rather than judged, with the exceptions stated before the rule.
Mussar is not an old literature. It is a Jewish ethical practice taught now, in communities with their own teachers and their own arguments about how it should be done. I am outside the tradition and outside the religion it belongs to. Nothing here is instruction in it; it is one reader’s working use of a literature, and the closing essay sets out what that reading leaves out.
The material is older than the movement. Bahya ibn Paquda wrote in eleventh-century Muslim Spain; Moshe Chaim Luzzatto in 1740; Menachem Mendel Lefin’s manual of 1808 supplied the working method — and appears to have taken its structure from Benjamin Franklin’s chart of thirteen virtues, which the first essay says rather than hides. What Israel Salanter founded in nineteenth-century Lithuania was a movement to make the reading into a daily discipline.
Three of these traits are the ones most reliably used against the people they are taught to: patience, gratitude and joy. In each case the tell is the same — the instruction travels down the status gradient and never up it. That test is not in the sources; it runs through these essays because the alternative is a collection that hands an institution three useful instruments.
The sixth essay, on restraint in speech, puts the exceptions before the trait, because taught in the usual order it has a documented history of being used to keep people quiet about harm. The exceptions are the tradition’s own; losing them is a failure of transmission rather than of doctrine.
Every essay carries a section headed The case against, in the body rather than at the end. Two of them — on the nightly accounting, and on order — contain cautions that matter more than the practice they accompany.
A standing invitation. This is an outsider’s reading, and the place it is most likely to go wrong is where a useful adaptation starts to sound like a description of Mussar itself — particularly in the essays on speech, on trust, and in the closing accounting. If you practise or study this tradition and you find that happening, I would rather hear it than not: corrections of that kind have already improved this collection more than any amount of polishing. Write to me via the contact page at orionquin.com.