 1798, one of the great leaders of the Hasidic world, Roshnir Zalman of Liyadi, who was the first Lubavitch Erebi, was denounced by religious opponents. He was denounced by the Nisnagdim to the government and he was imprisoned in St. Petersburg. We're told that the prison guards were very enamored with him. They saw in his face, he was a very spiritual and holy person. They saw him spending his days meditating and praying and studying. They tell stories that they were tremendous miracles that took place in the prison cell. And one day the head of the guards approaches the Rebbe and says, Rabbi, I see that you're a very holy and spiritual person. I'm wondering if I can ask you a question. The Rabbi says, for sure, by all means. And the jailer says, you know, I see that you're studying the Bible a lot and you're studying. You must know a lot about our holy scriptures. And he says, I've been studying the Bible my whole life. And the Rabbi said, that's wonderful. And he says, but I don't understand something. Right in the beginning of the Bible, he said, we read the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and God gives them a command that they shouldn't eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And they disobey God and they're embarrassed by what they do and they run away and they hide. And the jailer says to the Rabbi and God says to them, where are you? Now, the jailer says, God created the entire world. God is omnipotent. God is omniscient. God knows everything. So if God knows everything, why does God have to ask them? Where are you? So the Rabbi says to the jailer, that's a very, very great question. And he says, do you believe that the Bible that was given to us was written for all people at all times? And the jailer said, of course, it's got a message for all of us. And the Rabbi said, that's correct. He said, really, when God is asking Adam and Eve, where are you? It's not just Adam and Eve. He's asking that question too. God is asking that question to every single human being who will ever live. And God is asking us all, where are you? God is asking us, I've put you in this world for a purpose. You're here to accomplish things in life. And every single day, God calls out to man and says, where are you in your world? Your life is supposed to be a journey. How far along are you on your journey? He said to the jailer, you've lived 46 years now. How far along are you? Now when the jailer heard the Rebbe nail exactly how old he was, he stood up straight. He put his arm around the Rebbe's shoulder. He said, bravo, Rabbi. But inside his heart trembled because he knew this question that God was asking Adam and Eve, where are you? Was also a question for him as well. The truth is that this question that God asked Adam and Eve, Iyeka, Iyeka, where are you, is the first question in the Bible. And as we know, the first time anything happens in the Bible is very, very important. So as the first question in the Bible, what we're learning is that this is supposed to be the primary question. And it's supposed to be the primary question we ask ourselves every day of our lives. Not just waiting to have God ask it because really when God is asking it, it wells up in our mind, it comes up in our own thoughts. It's a question we should be asking ourselves. It's life's most important question to ask ourselves, where are we? I believe it was Socrates who said the unexamined life is not worth living. That if we go through our lives without thinking about our lives and how we're doing and how we're progressing and what we've accomplished, he said it's not a life worth living. Now it's true that we understand why this is a very important idea. It's not difficult to understand why it would be important to ask ourselves, where are we? But we become very busy people and very distracted in our lives. We live our lives on automatic pilots and we rarely stop to think about where are we? We rarely start to stop to think about how our lives are really going. Our Moshe Chaim Lutsato in his famous work, the Mesozi Shahrim, wrote that this was Pharaoh's strategy in Egypt, that he kept us very busy. He overworked the Jewish people. He exhausted us and drained us. So that we wouldn't reflect on our situation there in Egypt. We wouldn't be able to think about our plight and our suffering and maybe begin to plot a way of getting away. And that's the reality that we all face. We all become very busy in our lives and distracted. And we don't bother asking ourselves this very vital question, where are we? The truth is that Judaism begins as a journey. The very first two words in the Jewish story is when God says to Abraham, go to yourself. Journey to yourself. Life is all about this journey. Judaism is supposed to be a journey. For example, we have this image of Jacob's ladder. This ladder that connects heaven to earth and we're supposed to be on this ladder. We speak about, the Bible has this expression and much of our literature speaks about something called the Dera Chachayim, the path of life. We call Jewish law halacha, going. So all of Judaism speaks about this journey and this trip. And the question is where are we? And one of the great tragedies is that many people practice Judaism but seem to not really get anywhere. There's a famous story where a young rabbinical student boasted to his rabbi. He said to his rabbi, rabbi, I've gone through half of Shas. I've gone through half of the Talmud. And the rabbi turns to him and said, yes, but has it gone through you? And that's what Musar is concerned with. Musar, which means instruction or correction or sometimes rebuke. But Musar is basically a technology to ensure that Judaism takes us to where it is supposed to take us. Again, if Judaism is a journey and Judaism has goals, so Musar is interested in ensuring and making sure that we arrive at those goals. At least we move in that direction. What are the central goals of Judaism? What are the goals? We could say as one overarching concept that the goal of Judaism is something we can call in Hebrew, Shlémut. It's in the word Shalém, which means complete or perfect. And so the goal of our life is to become complete, complete human beings, complete Jews, perfect to self-actualize, to realize our potential. That is what we might call the ultimate goal of our lives. Now the Ramchal, when we think about this idea that our goal is to become perfect, to complete ourselves, that again assumes that we're not complete now. And Rav Bozhe Chaim Lutsato wrote that God was certainly capable of creating people who were complete and perfect. God could have made human beings complete and perfect, the same way he made everything else in the world. After everything else was created, God said he saw that it was good. He creates the trees and he sees that it's good. He creates the animals and he sees that it's good. But God never says, key tov, that human beings are good. There's no appreciation of the perfection of the human being. So the Ramchal says that God could have certainly created people who were complete and perfect. This would have made sense because since God is perfect, his creation should also be totally perfect. However, in his great wisdom, God decided it would be better to let people complete their own creation. This is a type of tsimtsum, a type of constriction that God engaged in where he restricted his own perfection by making us less than perfect. Rabbi David Aaron, who now lives in Israel originally from Toronto, writes about what he calls our perfect imperfection, meaning the fact that we are imperfect is really the perfect state for us. And that human beings should really be called human becomeings because ultimately we are trying to become who we can really be. I often joke with people when they ask me, what is your denomination? I say I'm part of a movement called under constructionism. Now the question is why would God see that it's important to let us finish the job? Meaning why didn't God create human beings as a finished product? And our sages really suggest a number of reasons. Number one, the Kabbalists describe something called the na'amad-i-kisufah, the bread of shame, that when you get something as a free gift that you didn't work for, you don't value it, it's not really pleasurable. And that really we only have real pleasure and true pleasure when we've worked for something, when we've really engaged in the process of earning it by our own efforts. And that's when we appreciate it. And since God wants us to ultimately appreciate this world and what we can accomplish, by just giving it to us, we wouldn't really fully appreciate it. Secondly, if part of our self perfection is to resemble God throughout the Bible, we're told to resemble God, to attach ourselves to God, to go in God's ways. So if part of the human perfection is to become more and more and more like God, well, one thing God was, was a creator. And so God allows us to assume the role of creators, we don't create the world at large, we create this world, this small world called the human being. And that's why in the creation story, I've often mentioned this, that when God creates the human being, God does not say, let, I'm sorry, God does not say, let there be man. Everything else was created unilaterally by God saying, let there be life, let there be animals, let there be trees. But God does not create human beings with a unilateral statement. God says, let us make man. Ma ase adam, let us in the plural make man. And the Vashem Tov explained, who is God speaking to? He said, God is speaking to us. God is basically saying, I cannot create you. All I can do, I mean, all I'm deciding to do is I'm giving you the raw ingredients of a human being. I'm giving you a body and a soul. But what you will become ultimately is a function of what you do with those raw ingredients. And that's why, for example, we're called Adam, Adam. We're called Adam, Adam. The Bible says, because we came from the Adam ma, we came from the earth. And the Maralphan Prague explains that just like the earth is pure potential, if you have a big field, what is the field going to produce? It depends. If you plow it and you fertilize it and you plant properly and you water the plants and you take care and you maybe prune and you have to do many things to cultivate land properly, it can produce an orchard. But if you don't properly exploit the potential within that field, it might lay barren and nothing will happen. So we're called Adam because we're compared to the Adam ma and every human being is basically pure potential. Each one of us can become a masterpiece, but it's our work that will make that masterpiece. So our goal is to achieve self-perfection, completion, shleimut. Now we speak about shleimut basically in three areas of life. One is our relationship with God. One is our relationship with other human beings. And one is our relationship to ourself. Bein' adam la makom, bein' adam la chaveiro, bein' adam la atzmo. For example, when it comes to our relationship with God. So we know that in the Bible, one of the primary relationship factors, features, is something called b'itachom, to have trust in God, to have faith in God, to rely upon God. So the Bible always speaks about that. There are many verses in the book of Psalms and other places in the Bible that speak about the fact that your life will be blessed if you have b'itachom, if you have trust. But the question is, well, how do you develop that kind of trust? It's one thing to throw it out there as a platitude or throw it out there as an important thing, a menu item, which the Bible does, but the Bible doesn't seem to have a well-developed and well-articulated program on how do you develop that kind of trust in God? How do you cultivate it? So Musar program, our Musar program is there to help us achieve that kind of perfection and slaymut in our relationship with God by giving us the tools to actualize all the elements in what it means to have a relationship with God. What does it mean to have love of God? What does it mean to have fear of God or be an awe of God? All of these aspects of our relationship with God are things that the Bible speaks about almost in passing but there's no specific program to help us really take hold of these ideas and to make them part of ourselves on deeper and deeper levels. Ben-Adam Lechaveiro, our relationship with other people. So we know that Hillel, the great sage Hillel put this at the centerpiece of his definition of the summary of Judaism. When he was asked by someone that was thinking of converting, can you please teach me all of Judaism while I stand on one foot? Hillel said, what annoys you don't do to someone else. If it really bothers you, don't do it to someone else. And then Hillel goes on to say, and the rest of the Torah is a commentary to this idea, now go and study it, really. The rest of the Torah is a commentary to this idea about getting along with other people. You mean the laws of Shabbat and the laws of keeping kosher? Is it really so easy to understand how every part of the Torah is really a commentary to getting along with other people? So where do we see that? And Musar technology tries to help us understand that. For example, the Talmud says that every human being, unfortunately, engages in Lashon Harah, evil speech. To some extent, we all violate the prescription against speaking negatively about others or demeaning others. It's something which is a universal affliction. But we know we're not supposed to do it. There's a verse in the Bible that says, don't do it. So the question is, how can we improve? How exactly do we improve in this very, very important issue where the Talmud says that, you know what, Lashon Harah, evil speech is worse than the three cardinal sins of murder, idolatry, and sexual immorality. It's a terrible crime. And yet all we're told in the Bible is, don't do it. Mazel tov, how do you not do it? If it's such an alluring, tempting thing that everybody gets tripped up in. So you had a great rabbi, like the Hafeitz Chaim, who dedicated his whole life to teaching people how to conquer and get control over this area of their lives, their speech ethics. The Torah demands, for example, very high levels of personal integrity and absolute honesty. That's a very consistent theme of the Torah. They were obligated to be perfectly honest in our business dealings to high levels of personal integrity. But how do we achieve this? It's easier said than done. The Torah urges us not just to do chesed, not just to do acts of love and kindness and to be nice to people. The Torah encourages us to be people who are people of ahavat chesed, that we love doing chesed, our souls yearn to do chesed. Well, how do you cultivate that? How do we work on developing that kind of inner trait where we become people who desire to do chesed? These are all the areas that Musar deals with is one last field, which is the field of Dain Adam-la-Atsmo, where I would say passively, this is the specialty of Musar, man's relationship with himself. Musar focuses on trying to understand who we are, understanding the self, understanding our inner lives. For example, what are our deepest aspirations? What are the deepest aspirations of our heart? For example, do we primarily identify with our bodies, our temporal bodies, or do we primarily identify as a spiritual soul? Who are we? And you could argue that for many people, they are primarily identified with their bodies, not so much with their souls. For example, if you asked people, would it bother you if you lost your iPhone? Yeah, people would not just be bothered, I just heard last week that they wanna have some kind of a new classification in the, well, I don't know what it's called, the book that classifies mental disorders, they wanna have a new classification for people that have severe anxiety if they can't find their cell phone. So imagine if someone was to think about, would it bother me if I lost my cell phone? Probably big time. Would it bother me if I missed going to my Torah class that I'm supposed to be going to? If I missed going to my class, would that bother me? Which would bother me more? And I think that when we think about, really what is going on inside of us? Am I primarily focused on my body or my soul? These are the kind of issues that Musar tries to get us to think about. What truly motivates our behaviors? Why do we do what we do? What are our inner blocks? These are all the kind of issues that Musar seeks to help us understand. For example, in his masterpiece called the Chobosolavavos, the duties of the heart, Abenubachi ibn Pakuda explains in his very lengthy introduction, he explains ultimately why he hesitated writing this book. And he said to himself, even though when he goes through an introduction, all the reasons why it was important to write such a book. He then says, but I began questioning myself, who am I? Am I such a great scholar? Do I have the requisite knowledge? Do I know enough? Am I on a high enough level? He began having self-doubts. Maybe I'm really not the person to do this. Maybe I'm not qualified. But then on the very next page, in a moment of honest self-reflection, he says, you know what? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that that was a cop-out. And that's really not why I'm thinking of dropping the project. He said, I came to realize that what's really making me hesitate going ahead with writing this book. And it was a very massive project. You have to imagine, again, he wrote this in the 10th century, 11th century. There were no word processors or computers. You had to write by an oil lamp with a quill. And it's a massive volume. So it's a lot of work. And he said he came to realize that was really the obstacle was just a sense of laziness. He didn't want to go through the pain and the effort of working on a book like this. So what he originally thought was humility. I'm just, that's my humility is getting in the way. He realized, no, it wasn't that. It really was inner laziness. And the verse we say in our prayers in the evening, we say in the evening prayers, in the prayers for the Shema, we say, We ask that God remove the Satan. Remove the Satan from before us and from behind us. What does that mean? The Satan, this adversary that tries to obstruct our spiritual growth. So the Hafei Tchayim explained one way of looking at it. The Satan in front of us, we understand that pretty simply. The Satan, the adversary that stands in front of us is always the classical tempter or temptress. It's always beckoning us to do the wrong thing. So we understand that, all the things in life that tempt us that we shouldn't be doing. And we understand them quite well, each of us according to our own life situation. But what does it mean the Satan behind us? So some people try to explain what it means is that you have this force that's behind you, meaning after you've passed the test, there's a force that behind you tries to get you to feel good about it. Oh, look at me. And it's very easy to begin to feel puffed up and maybe even a little bit arrogant about your spiritual successes. Maybe that's what's going on. The Hafei Tchayim said, it means something else. He said what it means is that each one of us has obstacles to doing the right thing. That's the Satan that stands in front of us. It wants to block us. But he said the Satan behind us is pushing us not to do the wrong thing, it's pushing us to do the right thing. But you know what? Sometimes we have this inner voice which tries to get us to do too much, too soon, too fast. It's saying, you know what? You have to be a big saddic. You've got to get up every morning at four o'clock and then pray and then go study Talmud. You know that there are things that we can be encouraged to do. We can have an inner feeling to take on more than we're ready for. If you find people, for example, that are new to Judaism, either they're converts or they're Balachua and they want to do everything. And the truth is that you have to learn to walk before you run. And this spiritual force that's pushing us sometimes not to do the wrong thing, to do good things, but too much and too soon, it sets us up for a failure. And when we fail, we haven't accomplished these noble aspirations, then we begin to feel terrible about ourselves. And then we say, what's the use? And then we get discouraged from doing anything in the first place. So we have these inner forces that work on us. They basically shape our lives. They drive us. They inhibit us. They move us along. And Musar tries to get us to understand these inner forces that work inside of our lives. Aside from getting to know who we are, one of the major interests of Musar is refining and perfecting our me-dos, our character traits. The word me-dos means measures, a measurement. And the truth is that when it comes to our character traits, we're each given different measurements. For example, they fall along a continuum. So for example, some people are too generous. They just give away everything. They can't say no. And some people are on the exact opposite end of that spectrum, they're too stingy. Or a person could be too humble, could be too humble and end up maybe not doing what they should be doing because they say, oh, who am I? Or a person could be on the other extreme too arrogant. Or a person can be too patient. They're so patient they will even put up with evil and they won't raise their voice. Or a person could be too impatient. So when it comes to our personality traits, there are dozens and dozens of parts of our personality. And they're called me-dote because they fall along a line on a continuum. Each one of us gets a certain amount. We're born in a certain way. There are some people who were just born just very laid back. We see this in children, in babies. They're very laid back. And we see other kids, they're totally wired and off the wall. So people have different personality makeups. And we're here to basically calibrate them. The Rambam, my manatee says something about the Shvilhazahab, the golden mean. Meaning that we're all supposed to basically find the center point. Where is it where we are perfectly balanced in our me-dote? When we've perfected them. Where we're not too much to this extreme and not too much to that extreme, but we've reached the center point, we've reached the balance point. The rabbis teach us that the essential reason we're put into this world is to work on these character traits. The Vilna Gong, for example, in his commentary to the book of Proverbs writes, the essential purpose of life is to constantly keep on improving one's character traits. Every moment that one is not conquering them, he is wasting his life. That's how important this aspect of our life is. The Hasidic great master Limelech of the Gent's wrote, a person is only born in order to keep improving his nature during his entire lifetime. The more one is spiritually perfected, the more they will see they have more work to do. It's a lifetime of work. Let's just briefly mention the history of the Musar enterprise. The truth is that there's a very long history of Musar going all the way back really to the Bible. There are parts of the Bible. For example, the book of Proverbs is an example which deals directly with Musar topics. Then going back to the Talmud, a work like Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, deals again with the kind of topics to try and perfect the human being. But then there were writers who focused on it more directly. So I mentioned, for example, 1,000 years ago in 11th century Spain, Rabbi Bach Ibn Pekuda wrote his Tovah Silevah, the duties of the heart. And he was concerned that most of what he saw in Judaism only focused on the duties of the limbs. What do you do? What do you not do? But he didn't see a well-developed literature in Judaism dealing on our inner world, love and trust and faith and appreciation and gratitude. So he wrote this book to help people really perfect themselves in terms of their inner life. And then in the 16th century Spain, an anonymous author who wrote Orcho Tzadikim, The Pathways of the Righteous, which again is a work that goes through many, many different medot, perpetrates and tries to help people understand how they can grow in these different areas of their personality. And then I mentioned probably the most famous work, the 18th century book by Rav Moshe Chaim Uzzato, the Mesihot Y'Sharim, The Pathways of the Just, written in 1740 in Italy. Again, a masterpiece, it's considered to be the Bible of the Musar world. But the Musar world did not become a social movement until the 19th century. Until then, it was just disparate works that were written and certain people felt it was important to study these works. But in the 19th century, it would be Esmeralda Lipkin of Salant, we call him Esmeralda Salantar. He was born in 1810. He began to see serious challenges the Jewish people were facing as a result of social forces that were impinging on Jewry at that time. He saw Jews as being spiritually exhausted through the persecutions of the Zars and economic woes and the rising popularity of secular movements within Judaism, social movements. He saw two things that really bothered him. He saw what seemed to be religious Jews, but who were not very spiritual Jews. And then he saw what seemed to be religious Jews who were not very ethical Jews. And he said, this cannot be. And so he dedicated himself to propagating a movement that became known as the Musar movement to try to help Jews grow spiritually, both ethically and spiritually, our relationship with other human beings, our relationship with God, our relationship with ourselves, and just like Hasidut was a movement of, you could call revival, spiritual revival for Eastern European Jewry in the 18th century. So Musar became a revival movement for non-Hasidic Jews in the 19th century, mainly Western European Jews and Jews in Lithuania. Rabbi Salantar used his credibility as a great Talmudic scholar to spread his Musar teachings. First of all, he published and distributed many Musar works, magazines, booklets, tracts. He did a lot of preaching and lecturing, and he developed disciples to spread his teachings. Now, initially he was working with the elite. He was working with students in Yeshivot, rabbinical students and great rabbis, but then he started to work with just regular people, even people that were not yet religious. He was actually one of the first people to engage in what we call today, Kirov Rakhokim, reaching out to the Jews who would basically begin assimilating. But his main innovation, one of the great things he's known for, was realizing about 70 years before Sigmund Freud developed his theories of the subconscious, Rabbi Salantar discovered the same idea, and he did a tremendous amount of work explaining the need to sink the Torah deeply into our inner selves, to sink the Torah deeply into our subconscious, to bridge the mind and the heart. He felt it was not enough to know something intellectually because he saw that people can know something intellectually, but it won't change them. And he felt it was important for people to feel that which they knew, not just to know it, but to feel it. The Bible says, for example, in Dvarian chapter four, Deuteronomy four, the yadata hayom, you have to know it to this day, but then vahashevota el-abecha, you have to bring it into your heart. You've got to bridge this almost unbridgeable gap between our hearts and our minds. And that he saw as the major goal of the work that he was propagating. The need to embed the Torah deeply in ourselves because these inner obstacles we have are not easy to expose. We'll discuss in a few moments how we actually attack this. They tell a story that someone once came to his house in Lanter and said that I only have a half hour to study each day. What should I study? I mean, there's a lot of things I can study. I can study the Bible, I can study the Midrash, the Mishnah, the Talmud. What should I study if I only have a half hour of studying a day? And Yusuf Slantar said, study Musar. If you only have a half hour, study Musar. He says, because after you study Musar for a half hour, you'll see that you really have much more time to study other things as well. Now the truth is when Rabbi Yusuf Slantar began spreading his Musar movement, it became a very controversial movement, believe it or not. You would think that this would be something that would be universally accepted. However, the great Yishivot opposed the Musar movement. They felt that there was no need to have a specialized program to deal with these things. They said, look, if we're just studying Talmud all day long, that's all you should need. And they felt that too much of an emphasis on Kavanah and inwardness would maybe take away from the priority people have to place upon actually doing the Mitzvot themselves. There's always been this tension in Jewish history between the form and the content. And for so many years, the form of Judaism has been the focus, actually doing the Mitzvot properly and punctiliously. And the sages and the Yishivot felt that if you would put all this emphasis that the Musar movement wanted to place on our motivations and our inner life and the Kavanah and the content, it would take away possibly from the focus on studying the Torah itself and just keeping the Mitzvot loyal. So there was opposition to Yisro Solanter. The response that he would have given, I think he actually expresses it in some places, would be like this, I believe. You could argue that there's no need for people today to take vitamins or supplements. That ideally you should be getting all your nutrition from your diet. So if you eat enough vegetables and fruits and nuts and seeds and whole grains, whatever is supposed to be eating and dark chocolate, obviously, then you don't need to take vitamins or supplements. And that might be true. And there are people who actually say you shouldn't take vitamins and supplements. You shouldn't do it. However, it is known that if we're living in a world where the nutrients are being depleted from the soil because of various things, for example, the poisoning of the soil in many cases and the use of chemical fertilizers and many things that affect the quality of the soil and the quality of our environment and the stress levels we're living under, meaning that you could argue that ideally, in a perfect world, we should get all our nutrition from our regular food. However, it's been argued equally, I think successfully, that if we're not living in an optimal world where the nutrients are not really properly transmitted through the food and our stress levels are depleting our nutrients anyway, then you need to take vitamins and supplements. And that might be the response of the Musser movement to the critics. The truth is that history won anyway and the opposition died out pretty quickly and it became accepted into the mainstream in the Jewish community. What Rabbi Yisrael Solanter did was to obviously initiate a whole movement. His three major disciples, actually he had three major disciples, but they became three schools of Musser that followed after Yisrael Solanter. One was by his great student, Rabbi Sintka Zissel Ziv, who started a Yashiva in Kelm and he became known as the author of Kelm and he started what's called the Kelm School of Musser, a very deeply introspective style of Musser and his motto was take time, be exact and unclutter your mind. So it was a very inner kind of Musser approach. His student, Sintka Zissel Ziv's student was Ravnasen Svi-Thinkel of Slabotka and he started a famous Yashiva in Slabotka and he emphasized not so much the innerness but actually how you live as an inspired Jew and they emphasized in Slabotka something called Godlut Ha'adam, the majesty of man and for people to live as if they really were created in the image of God. And then there was the third school of Musser started by Rousseau, Yaisal Horowitz of Navardak, was considered the most extreme of the schools. They took an often radical approach to changing behavior and the teacher of Yosef Yosel said, don't just influence your soul, you have to storm your soul. We know that the Musser movement starting in the mid 1800s, basically was decimated in the Holocaust. Most of the Yashiva, all of them were destroyed. Many of the great teachers were killed but then there was a resurgence of Musser teaching and scholarship after the war. We had great Musser teachers like Yivir Rukham Levavitz, Yeliyahu Dessler, Yeliyah Lopyan, Yacheskel Levenstein, and Yashimo Levitz, especially in Israel, the great Yishivot that were developing in Israel attracted great spiritual teachers who were the teachers of Musser in those areas. Again, recently passed away with Shlomo Wolbi, one of the great proponents of Musser in our time. And then we've had a more modern Musser movement outside of the walls of the Yashivot. So for example, when the internet first started in the 1990s, there were individuals who began posting articles and teachings about Musser that were not being read by people that were in Yashiva full-time in Israel, but they were being read by the general public. And then you had modern teachers today who were really training and teaching, again, not the elite from the Yashivot, but the entire spectrum of the Jewish world, all across a denominational divide. So for example, in Israel, Reblav Keleman, who runs very intensive Musser programs, he comes to North America and runs them monthly in many cities, including Toronto. And Toronto's Alan Marinus, who now lives in Vancouver, probably responsible single-handedly for the revival of Musser in modern times. He discovered Musser in his mid-40s. He dedicated himself to studying Musser, reading everything to get his hands on, finding living teachers, finally writing about Musser, his famous book, Climbing Jacob's Ladder, in his second book, Everyday Holiness, really provoked a revolution of people today dedicating themselves to Musser practice. Let me just conclude by sharing with you how does Musser technology accomplish its goals? Meaning, what specifically does Musser train us to do in order to grow spiritually? The foundation of Musser practice is Musser studying, intense studying of Musser works, of Musser literature. The Havitz Chaim in his very important Code of Jewish Law called the Mission of Breua, says that we have a daily obligation to study Musser every single day. He says it's the most important thing we can study. It takes precedence over every other subject. So Musser demands every day we're engaged in Musser study. You know, there's a tendency people have to think that I don't need to study, I can figure out life by myself, by myself. You know, when you get a product, you buy, for example, a tape recorder or electric toothbrush, no one on the planet reads the instructions. I don't know of anyone in the world that ever read the 300 page instruction manual for their VCR or DVD player, whatever we have today. People figure, I'll just use it, I'll figure it out as I go along. And we see this dynamic in the Garden of Eden. We know that God told Adam and Eve, there are two trees in this garden, two special trees. They're all the fruit trees, you can eat whatever you want. But there are two special trees. There's a tree of knowledge of good and evil. God says, don't eat for a minute, if you do, you're gonna die. That's pretty serious. And then there's a tree of life. In the middle of the garden, the tree of life. Now we know that Adam and Eve react exactly the way a three-year-old kid would react if you put them in a room with 5,000 boxes of beautiful toys and gifts. And there was one box, he said, but don't go into that box. So the child's gonna go through that box first. So God says to Adam and Eve, don't eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We know that's exactly what they do. But we know that there was a threat that if you do eat from that tree, you're gonna die. There's an obvious thing that it seems they should have done if they wanted to disobey God. Because God said there's a tree of life in that garden. So wouldn't it have made sense for them before they tasted from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, if you wanna do that and there's a risk of dying. So first, chop a bite from the tree of life, grab a bite of that tree, and then you'll live forever and then you could do whatever you want and you could eat the tree of knowledge of good and evil and you'll be immune to any possible consequences. Wouldn't it have made sense for them to first take a bite out of the tree of life before going for the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Obviously it would. And one of the lessons I think that we could learn from this story in the beginning of our Bible is that Adam and Eve again are all of us. And Adam and Eve are reflecting our tendencies and our syndromes. Because what is the tree of life? What is the eights high in he? What is the tree of life? She'd be right behind me. That we call the Torah the eights high in the tree of life. So what should they have done? They should have first eaten from the tree of life. They should have first taken the Torah. But what did they decide to do? I don't need instructions. The word Torah means instructions. Torah is God's defined instructions. So they say, we don't need to read the instruction manual. We'll go for the tree of knowledge of good and evil which means we'll figure it out by ourselves by trial and error. That's what it means. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, we'll see. We'll try it, it'll work, it won't work, we'll make adjustments. But that was their decision. To bypass the tree of life and go right for the tree of knowledge of good and evil just we'll learn by trial and error. So people have unfortunately this inner tendency going all the way back to our Alta Zeta and Bubba Adam and Eve that we don't need to study the Torah. We don't need the tree of life. And Musur says that, no, the primary foundation of a Musur practice is study. Studying of Musur texts. If you look in front of you, you should have a handout. If you don't have it, just listen, read it for you. But this is from the very beginning of the Mesilach Shariim, the Pathways of the Righteous by Moshe Chaim Lutsato. It's one of the most famous introductions to a Jewish book that you'll ever find. And he writes the following, very humbly actually. The writer says, meaning I'm saying this, he says, the author says, I've written this book not to teach men what they do not know, but to remind them of what they already know and is very evident to them, for you will find in most of my words only things which most people know. And concerning which they entertain no doubts. He's starting off his book by saying, you're not gonna read anything new in this book. It's not a great commercial for your book. Nothing new in here. But to the extent that they are well known and their truths are revealed to all, meaning to the extent that we know these ideas so well, to that extent, so is forgetfulness in relation to them extremely prevalent. Meaning there's a direct proportional relationship between the self-evident nature of these truths and how often we don't think about them and we basically overlook them. It follows then that the benefit to be obtained from this work is not derived from a single reading. Meaning don't read this book in order to just get information because you're not gonna learn anything new. But it is possible the reader will find that he has learned little after having read it that he did not know before. Its benefit though is to be derived rather through review and persistent study by which one is reminded of those things which by nature he is prone to forget and through which he is core to take to heart the duty that he tends to overlook. I mean there are many things that I know. I know it. I'll give you a very mundane example. Maybe it's a stupid example, but I thought of this recently. Last spring I developed a very bad pain in my knees and I had to go to many doctor appointments and it became very expensive to take cabs everywhere. So I signed up for elder, what is it? Some kind of a program where people over 55 or whatever can get rides. I forgot what it's called already. There were a few programs in Toronto like this. And so I knew that I had this option. I knew that instead of calling a cab I can make a reservation a few days in advance that get picked up by one of these vehicles. And I found often I would just forget to make the reservation and I have to the last minute call a cab. Now the reality is I knew about this service. I had used it once or twice. It wasn't something that was foreign to me. And yet because it wasn't something that I was that was saturated into my brain it wasn't a service that I was always thinking about I would often forget it. So Mushecha Moklato he was saying there are so many things in life that we know about them but we just don't think about them. And often we deny them. It's sort of a personal form of denial. I'm not paying attention to those things I know about. And he says the way that Musar study can help you overcome this internal block of forgetting those things that you really should be paying attention to is by taking a Musar text and reading it many, many, many, many times. So people for example might read a book like the Masila Chiarim. They might read a chapter, one chapter every day for three or four months. They're not learning anything new but what you're trying to do is pickle yourself. You're trying to saturate yourself. You're trying to make the knowledge so present that it's not in the back recesses of your mind it's in the front of your mind. It's accessible, it's always there and it will inform you because there are two kinds of knowledge. There are things that we know. I'll give you another example from a contemporary author. So imagine if you worked in a company and someone in your company won the $15 million lottery. So he says everybody in that office building is gonna know that Sam won the lottery. If you asked anyone three days later did you hear a won the lottery? Yes, Sam won the lottery, wonderful. A week later is everybody in the office still thinking about Sam's $15 million? Maybe people are still thinking about it. Three weeks later are people still thinking about Sam's $15 million, is three months later? Probably not. But if you were to ask them who won the lottery four months ago? Well, Sam won it. But do you think Sam is thinking about the $15 million four months later or six months later or a year later? Because for Sam it changed his life. Sam maybe in the past would take two buses and a subway to work. Now he's getting driven to work. Sam maybe in the past didn't have too many friends. Now friends from high school are calling him up. Hey, you remember me? So for the person who that $15 million really affected, it really occupies center stage in their brain. For everybody else in that office building they may know that Sam won the money, but who cares? They don't think about it. It's not important to them. It's already occupied the worst real estate in their brain you could imagine. And probably in three years from now no one even remembers who Sam was. So Rosh Hashem Uhtaco says that study is not just to gain information. It's to take these important ideas and to implant them into ourselves, to pickle ourselves with it, to soak it into ourselves. It's funny because when we study Torah in the morning the blessing we say is la asok b'divray Torah to engage in the study of Torah. But really what you're trying to do we're trying to soak in the Torah. We want to soak us to become saturated with it. However the great innovation of Raviasol Salaunter, the great innovation when it came to studying was his realization that it's not enough to just engage the mind when it comes to studying. Because he understood that the human being is just not just a mind. We're a mind where we have a subconscious realm as well and a huge emotional side. And Yisrael Salaunter understood, again this is 70 years before Freud, he understood that if you really want to impact people you've got to have the studying engaging not just their brain, but it has to engage their emotions. It has to engage their subconscious. So how did Rabbi Yisrael Salaunter propose that studying will engage us more than on just an intellectual level? He proposed something called learning behit pa'alut. Learning with enthusiasm, what they would call learning with lips aflame. And he proposed that when you study you don't just read, but that you chant and you chant with a very, very impactful melody and that you engage the text in an emotional way. And he would urge people not just to read things but to chant them. So to take a phrase, if you find in a book a phrase, when I read the Masih Latisharim, if you see my copy of it, in the first two chapters I've underlined about 30 places because he had so many gems, so many passages that were so delicious. So Yisrael Salaunter would say, take those gems and chant them over and over and over again, not just read them over and over again but chant them with a melody and sing them and engage them on a very emotional level. And he felt that singing and chanting with a tune with a melody, he says that engages our inner being, our emotions, our subconscious. It's very interesting, all of you know that if you heard a song enough times and you were five or six years old, you still know it now, 50 years later. I can sing you the theme songs of television shows from 50 years ago. It's quite scary, quite scary. Things that I'd rather not even remember, they basically became saturated into my soul and that's why in the Talmud, by the way, people were recommended, don't just read the Talmud, you're supposed to sing the Talmud with a nighun. So you hear it, for example, on the Passover evening, ma nishchana halayla hazeh, niko halaylo. It wasn't just read, it was sung, it was chanted. And so it wasn't just according to Yisrael Salaunter chanted as a mnemonic, as a memory aid, it was chanted as a way of getting it to engage our kishkas, our emotions, our subconscious, to be able to feel the knowledge, to feel the knowledge, not just to understand it, but to feel it. So it's a repetitive chanting of Musur texts with emotion and with melody. And he proposed that this be done in a special place that he called a betamusar, because he thought that people wouldn't feel comfortable or safe doing this in a regular synagogue or a regular house of study. So he proposed that communities build a special place, a retreat center, maybe a small building where people could go and engage in their musar work. So for people who take this seriously, if they're not just dilettants when it comes to personal growth, but they wanna really dedicate time each day to doing this, to go to a special building, a special retreat center where you can do it in a safe and supportive environment where everyone is there for that purpose. You don't have to feel strange by chanting or singing because everyone is supporting each other. The study of musar texts was not just to study them, but to apply the lessons learned from these texts by transformative practices. This is another element of the musar approach, which is again, not just study, but by actualizing the studying with transformative practices. For example, one of the more popular forms of musar practice today, I'll just give you a brief outline, is from a book called Safer Kejbonan Effesh, the book of the internal accounting of the soul. It was written, I think, in the late 1800s. And what it proposes is that you have a program where you work on different nidot, different character traits for a specific period of time. So for example, you might have a list of, let's say, 10 or 13 or 15 or 20 personality traits that you want to work on. And you take one of them and you focus on it for a specific period of time. It could be for a month. It could be for two months. Rabbi Leib Kellerman and his musar vaad here in Toronto and elsewhere, he will work on a personality trait for between one to three years. That's how much time is needed. And he says, that's just the tip of the iceberg. But I remember when my wife was in his vaad and they were doing emunah, faith, they spent at least three years on that trait. So in current practice, what people will do is to take a trait such as generosity or gratitude or humility or patience or inner peace or whatever they feel is important. Part of the way you develop your curriculum is by going through a list and seeing which ones speak to you. If you have a problem with being generous, that's what you wanna have in your curriculum. If you have a problem with patience, you wanna be studying that. There are people we know that they never, ever, ever lose their cool. That may not be a priority for them. So you have to basically pick what are the traits that you will work on. And then what happens in this program is as follows. Number one, you find a key phrase. You find a key phrase that you write down. Maybe you post it on your refrigerator or you put it on your computer. And every day you meditate on that phrase. You may wanna chant it for a half hour. You may want to just sing a song about it. You wanna look at it frequently. But that phrase becomes the phrase that focuses you on that personality trait and it keeps you paying attention to it throughout the day. You may wanna have your phone send you reminders to think about your key phrase for today. And this phrase becomes a focus for the day. Again, through meditation, through chanting, through reading. And what you wanna do is during the course of that day pay attention to how you engage that meada, that character trait throughout the day. So for example, if you're working on generosity and you notice during the day you had encounters where you got a chance to exercise generosity or overcome your barriers to not being generous. It could be something as simple as someone that knocks on your door collecting for charity. But there are many other ways in which generosity affects our daily lives. Are we generous in the way we judge people? Are we generous with the way we drive? There are many ways in which we can be generous, not just reaching to our pocket and giving money. So what you were going through during this period of three weeks or four weeks or whatever it is, so you're gonna be paying attention to how you're engaging this character trait during the day. And then at night you do something called khashban anifesh. You think about how you did during the day. You try to recall how you faced your challenges, how you did, where you succeeded, where you failed. And many people engage in this kind of muscle practice, keep a journal. They do journaling and they wanna keep records of how they're doing over the course of a week or a month or two months or a year or three years in a particular media. Often this kind of personal spiritual work is done as part of a group, a group that is supportive, a group where you can have, for example, a partner that you check in with, a partner that you study texts with, a partner that can give you feedback. Often people will have a Musar mentor called a mashkiyach in Hasidic groups they call it a mashbiya. But it's important to have a guide because it's hard for most people to be objective with themselves. You need an objective person that can give you feedback and guidance when necessary. And a major part of this particular program is again, studying everyday Musar texts that deal with this particular media. And when we're studying these texts, there are different things that we can do to gain the most out of them. For example, one of the things that the Musar teachers speak about is visualizations. That one of the ways that we can implant this information in our minds and our subconscious and our emotions is by visualizing what we're learning. By actually seeing it, it becomes more concrete, it becomes more real. So for example, one of the most famous, my book is falling apart already, one of the most famous books that's been translated into English is called Strive for Truth. It's the Nektav Melyahu by Eliahu Desler. So he has in one of his chapters, explication of a teaching in the Talmud where the rabbis say the following. The rabbis teach that one hour of satisfaction, it's actually a bad translation. It's actually better translated as aroma maybe. That one hour of a satisfaction in the world to come, in the next world, is greater than all of the pleasures of life in this world, think about that. You can read that in the Talmud, that one hour of the aroma, the satisfaction in the world to come is greater than all of the pleasures in this life. So Rabbi Desler felt it's important to actually break that down, to help people visualize what's actually being said so it can have a bigger impact. So he said the following. What is all the life of this world? I propose to reveal here something that I learned from my revered master and teacher, Rabbi Tzvi Hirsh Brody of Blessed Memory. He explained all the life of this world as follows. We all know that life is a mixed blessing, but during the course of a lifetime, everyone has some measure of joy and happiness. So let us collect those scattered hours and minutes of pleasure and enjoyment for a whole lifetime and concentrate them into one minute. We shall have an extremely intense experience of joy in that one minute. Now, let us collect all the hours of pleasure experienced by all of a person's friends and acquaintances throughout all of their lifetimes and imagine that we can concentrate them all into that same minute of that one person's life. The intensity of such an experience must surely be beyond description, but let's go further and concentrate into that same minute all the happiness and joy experienced by all the people in that city throughout all of their lifetimes. And more still, let us add all the happiness of all the people in all the cities of that country and of every country. That is all that is pleasant and delightful in the whole world during an entire generation. Let us add it all up, concentrate it into that one minute and give it to one person. But this would still not be all the life of this world. All the life of this world has arrived at only if we add together all the happiness experienced by all generations of men from the beginning of creation until the end of time. If we were to take all of this pleasure, all the good things of this world without any exception whatsoever, and give it all to one person at one time, then we should have achieved a degree of worldly happiness which is surely impossible to exceed. And nevertheless, a satisfaction in the world to come, a taste in the world to come exceeds it. And what is meant by this brief time of satisfaction? He says literally a cooling of the spirit in the world to come. So my revered father-in-law, Rabbi Nachum Velvul Sif used to explain that this refers to the lowest possible degree of satisfaction in the world to come imaginable. Something like the satisfaction derived by a poor man who passes by the kitchen of a great house where a banquet is being prepared and at least he's able to enjoy the aroma of the food. So in the world to come, a person who does not merit participation in the actual spiritual delights of that world, but who is allowed as it were to pass by on the outside and to enjoy the aroma of the world to come, this is what the mission refers to as satisfaction in the world to come, some slight satisfaction in that world, though not the delight of the world itself. This represents the smallest possible reward allocated for the smallest mitzvah imaginable. For every mitzvah has some reward in the world to come. And it is this minimal satisfaction in the spiritual world which the rabbis say cannot be equaled by all the accumulated joys and pleasures of this world from its beginning to its end. So this is the kind of writing that the Musur teachers would engage in to help people break down a concept and be able to see it and concretize it so it has more impact. I'll just show you with one other example is a book that was recently called Battle Plans by Jochebed Wiggler and Rebutz and Sipora Heller. So they cite in here an example where the Arizal, a famous Kabbalist, was teaching once about the concept of infinity, that the eternal life is an infinite. I remember when I was in ninth grade, our science teacher spoke about the universe being infinite that I remember I started crying because I was trying to picture going on to outer space and going and going and going. It doesn't end. So the idea of something that just doesn't end drove me crazy. So Rabbi Chaim Vitao was his student and he said that he couldn't understand this concept of infinity. So the Arizal said to him, come with me to Tiberius. Come with me to Tiberius, which is not far from the spot where they lived. When they got there, the Arizal led Rabbi Chaim to the shore of the Keneret and announced we're going swimming. Because the Arizal was younger and stronger, he was a better swimmer. After a while, Rabbi Chaim Vitao said, I can't swim any further. His teacher would not let him stop. Yes, you can, he insisted. Come further out. Several exhausted minutes later, Rabbi Chaim again protested he could go no further. He could hardly keep his head above the water. The Arizal asked his disciple, when you look around, what do you see? His head bobbing up and down in the Keneret, Rabbi Chaim answered, all I see is water. Now you have some concept of infinity, the Arizal replied. This is the difference between intellectual grasp and concretely experiencing the concept. So Musar was interested in having us not just know an idea intellectually, but to see it, to feel it, to experience it. One last piece. One of the most interesting features of Musar work is something that we call pi'ulot or kabalot. Exercises, that what the Musar teachers would urge people to do was to take on a concrete action and activity that would anchor the thing that we're learning. We share with you a teaching from some of the Hasidic and Musar masters. A few weeks ago in the synagogue, we read in Parshat Naso, two very strange areas of Jewish law. We had the passage in the Bible that speaks about the Sotah, the woman who's a suspected adulteress and she has to go through a very horrifying and humiliating trial or deal in the temple where she either be exonerated or she'd be convicted of what she's suspected of, but it was a very gruesome, horrible experience. And right after that, the Torah speaks about the Mazir, the person that takes an oath that for a certain period of time, they're not gonna drink wine or cut their hair. So the Talmud asked the question, why does one follow the other? And the Talmud says because anyone that sees a Sotah in her degradation will swear off wine. That's what the Talmud says that if a person sees this woman that's going through this ordeal, they're gonna say to themselves, you know what, this is horrible. Here is a marriage that's about to end. Here's a marriage that's possibly gonna be destroyed. Why suspected infidelity? And why do people often get involved in that kind of situation? Too much drinking. So the person is going to see this woman in her degradation and he's gonna swear off wine. So the Bali Musar, the Musar teachers ask a very simple question. Why does the person have to react by swearing off wine? You would think that the shock of seeing this ordeal in the temple, meaning that this would be a horrible thing to witness. You would think that the shock of seeing this would itself be a shock to a person to maintain purity in their relationships. The person's gonna say, I'm gonna be much more faithful to my spouse. I'm not even gonna look at other people that the person will go through this shocking experience of seeing a woman who goes through the sota experience and that should itself be the kind of wake up call that will totally change the way they relate to their spouse. So what's this idea that they're gonna stop drinking wine? So I'm not a mender of a tepsk, one of the great Hasidic masters says basically the following. That in ethics of the fathers in Pirkaya vote, it says the person whose wisdom exceeds their actions, their wisdom will dissipate. Meaning that if you're the kind of person that you know much more than you're doing, your wisdom itself will not really last. And he says the problem is this, that whenever in life you go through an experience that shakes you up. Let's say for example, all of us remember 9-11. Everyone was affected by that experience and everyone probably in the world said, you know what, after that experience of 9-11, my life will never be the same. It's gonna be a new ball game for me. How often do we have inspiring experiences? You go through a Yom Kippur and you say next year is gonna be a new ball game, I'm gonna be a new person. And there are so many times in life where you have an inspiring experience, something that really wakes you up and you say to yourself, I'm gonna be a new person. And if you ask people one year after 9-11, how did your life really change? Most people would have said, you know what, nothing's really changed. Because the problem is that when you react to some inspiration by making vague resolutions in your mind, just saying I'm gonna be a new person, I'm gonna be all different, it's gonna be a new ball game, nothing's going to happen. So the Balai Musur said, you know what you need to do? You need to actually take some concrete action. You need to do something that makes a vessel for that inspiration. Because if you don't build a vessel for that inspiration, it's going to evaporate. Because what happens is you're living with this inspiration, you're living with this wake up that you had in your life, you're living with this message that says, I've gotta be a different person, I've gotta be a different person. And you know what happens? You don't change at all. So what happens is you begin living with this cognitive dissonance, that I have all this inspiration bombarding me, and I'm looking at myself in the mirror and I'm the same person. So what happens with that inspiration? You don't want it staring you in the face and bothering you, so you begin to push the inspiration further and further and further and further away so you don't have to think about it anymore. So the Balai Musur, the Musur master has said, if you get inspired, if you see something that calls out to you, if you have an experience, don't say I'm gonna be a new person after that. Take some concrete action to make at least the beginning of a change, even if it's a small token action. So they say that's why the person who sees the sota in her degradation, he might do something like swearing off wine. It's not saying I'm gonna be a completely different husband, but at least he's taking something, some step, some action to express and concretize the inspiration. So the Ranban of Moshe of Nachmanides, Moshe Benachman says in his famous letter, it's actually one of the most beautiful Musur texts you can read. It was actually printed for centuries in prayer books. So in his Egeret, his letter that he wrote to his son, he says, whenever you finish studying some Torah, whenever you get up from learning, if you've been learning Mishnah or Bible or Talmud or Midrash, whatever you're learning, he said, think of some way that you can implement what you've learned, some practical lesson that you can now do on a concrete level in some small way, but put it into action. Don't let the inspiration just evaporate. So one of the things that he recommends as a pitullah, as a kabbalah, as an exercise, he says in his letter, accept upon yourself the practice of speaking in a soft voice to all people at all times. He says, never raise your voice. And he felt that this would stop people from getting angry and it would be a deterrent against arrogance and it would help people to become more humble, but he felt that just the practice of making sure that you always speak in a soft, calm voice would be very important. So much of Musur practice is built upon these kabbalot, these acceptances of particular practices to ground our Musur growth. For example, Rabbi Avigda Miller, one of the great Musur teachers who lived in Brooklyn until he passed away recently, he put out a list of what he considered to be 10 ways to grow every day. For example, he would say, every day encourage or compliment one person a day. Now, obviously, you're not gonna go to hell if you do it to more than one person a day. But he said, make this a acceptance. Say to yourself, every day I will make it a point of complimenting or encouraging at least one person a day. Because if you say I'm gonna do it all over the place, you're not gonna do it at all. So make it one person, at least do that. And make sure you do it every day. Find some opportunity to compliment someone, a real compliment, a sincere one, or to encourage someone once a day. Or he would say, give a full smile to one person every day. You'll find if you do this, by the way, it's transformative, not just for yourself, but for the people you're smiling to. So if you just greet someone and give them a full, real smile, it's a wonderful thing. He would say, bless some person each day out of their earshot every day. So if you see a mother with her baby in a carriage, just bless this woman that her child should be grown up to become a great person. Or bless, and you see a school, bless all the children in this school. But he said, get into the habit of giving people blessings. He said, do some secret act of kindness every day. Do something in your home that no one knows about. You didn't announce. You did some cleanup. You fixed something. But do something that's kind every day that no one knows about. Alan Marinus suggests as an activity, take upon yourself the commitment to make one phone call or personal visit to someone every day. Meaning every day, just say to yourself, I'm gonna call one person a day that I haven't spoken to. One person a day that's lonely. Send them an email or visit them. But if you do it every single day, it seems small. What's the big deal? It's five, 10 minutes. Well, you do it every day and you build the muscle and you build it into yourself. This is a story from Rabbi Shol Selanthor's magnum opus called the Aureus Ra'el. He has a story from the Talmud where a great, great rabbi got impatient with his wife. Apparently what happened was a poor person came to their door. Very, very poor family, by the way. The rabbi and his wife were very poor. But a very poor person came to their door on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Rosh Hashanah eve, asking for some money. And apparently the rabbi, I think, gave a coin to this poor person and his wife got annoyed with him. And that provoked him to get annoyed back at his wife. He felt upset with her, that she was upset with him. And the Talmud says that he went that night and he slept in the cemetery. Now you think that that's not the place that you wanna be, ever of Rosh Hashanah, to be sleeping in a cemetery. And the Talmud goes on to tell a very wild story that he hears these two disembodied spirits that they're talking about, what they experienced during the day. I'm not gonna go into the whole story, but the question that comes up is, why does he go to sleep in the cemetery? So Rabbi Shol Selanthor explains that when he got upset with his wife, he found himself wanting, when it came to the meadah of being patient and not getting angry. And he saw this as a very big problem. Because of all the meadot in the world, anger is one of the ugliest ones. And impatience is one of the ugliest ones. But his problem was, what do I do? It's Erev Rosh Hashanah. I mean, I can't embark upon a long period of Muser program to get over this problem with my personality. He said to himself, I need a crash course. I need a crash course in this meadah. So the Talmud says in Pirkei Avot, that a person should be very, very humble because the end of every person is worms. Meaning that the Talmud says, you know, there were spiritual, I think that, what was his name? The famous Jewish millionaire, he would go into his coffin every night. Who was it? Rothschild, I think. There were people who would do that. There were spiritual traditions where people would meditate on what it would be like to be dead. And they would sit and they think about the fact that you know, in 100 years from now, I'm gonna have a green worm coming out of my eyeball and a blue worm coming out of my nose. And to think about the fact that I'm not gonna be here in 100 years or 50 years. I'm gonna be decomposed. And people would actually meditate on this. So the Talmud says that a person should never be arrogant because the end of each one of us is to be eaten by worms. So this rabbi said to himself, I need an experience to teach me humility. Because what is it that led me to snap at my wife? What is it that led me to get angry with her and to lose patience with her? It's arrogance. It's a lack of humility. And it's Erev Rosh Hashanah. How am I gonna get a crash course in learning about humility? I'm gonna go sleep in the cemetery. So this is not the kind of pitullah that you want to engage in routinely. But it's an example from Yisrael Salantri's writings that sometimes Musso work requires that you actually go through an exercise, a real exercise to concretize and to experience what you're trying to change in yourself. Usually, thank God, we don't need to engage in crash courses. Usually, we're not facing terrible problems that we have to deal with at the last moment. Hopefully, most of us are able to plan ahead to do some constructive work in a more organized fashion. And with the tools of the Musso technology, each of us has a very powerful system for personal spiritual growth. I want to wish each of us success in doing this. Thank you all for coming tonight.