As the first night of Passover approaches, we once again contemplate our ancestors struggle to be released from slavery.  I venture to say that all of us have lived lives free of the kind of indentured servitude that plagued the Israelites.  And, yet, we do experience a kind of slavery in our modern existence.

A habit is an acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary, to the point that we become enslaved by our habits.

We all know that habits can be formed around actions like eating, exercising, drinking alcohol and taking drugs, but our tradition also tells us that acting without thought, by rote, is an obstacle to the formation of good character and, ultimately to our spiritual growth.

In his book, the Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg says that habits aren’t our destiny, and that by harnessing the power of our brains we can create new, more productive habits that allow us to improve our behavior, and even the world.

While based on modern science Duhigg’s idea isn’t new.  In 1989, Stephen Covey taught about the powerful role that habits have in forming our character in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

But, The Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Eliyahu Kramer,  who lived from 1720-1793, preceded them both when he said, “Character requires habituation, and habit rules all things, and all beginnings are difficult.”

In his essay, Through a Mussar Lens:  Tree of Light, Rabbi Avi Fertig tells us that the numbing effect of habit comes from the physical aspect of our beings and the physical world in which we live.  He says that the Hebrew word for habit is hergel, related to the word regel, meaning foot. The foot represents our physical nature—the lower half of our bodies. Walking is perhaps the most habitual thing we do. We never stop to contemplate the myriad processes that must come together perfectly so that we can take the next step. The nature of the physical is that it gets old, moldy and stale. Habit is when our hearts and minds are closed and we are governed by the lower half, the “foot,” so that we go through everything in the way we walk, devoid of conscious thought or focused will.  In essence, we become like a slave, performing our duties, under the domination of a habituated mind. 

The orthodox practice of Mussar, originating in the 10th century, but reaching its height in the 19th century, gives us a prescription to free us from our brain numbing bondage.  What Mussar seeks to accomplish is to counteract the pernicious effects of habit as it slowly creeps into our spiritual practices. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter defined Mussar as the Torah’s antidote to what he called timtum ha’lev, the closed heart that is no longer sensitive and supple. Mussar is meant to re-awaken us to the truths we know well but have “forgotten,” as they have become habitual features of our day.

I’d like to introduce you to one of those Mussar practices.  It is called the Cheshbon Hanefesh practice and it is outlined in Alan Morinis’s book, Climbing Jacobs Ladder, and can also be found on The Mussar Institute website.  The exercise is designed to promote positive character building habits.  And, it is a practice that all of us can easily introduce into our daily lives.  Each month we focus on one of 13 prescribed traits, or middots.  For that entire month we commit to noticing how that trait manifests in our life.  Each night, we journal about how we experienced that trait and we attempt to cultivate the most positive aspect of the behaviors which are:

Minucha/Equanimity
Savlanut / Patience
Emet/Truth
Sh’tikah/Silence
Chesed/Lovingkindness
Anavut/Humility
Nedivut/Generosity
Hoda’ah/Gratitude
Bitachon/Trust
Seder/Order
Da’at/Mindfulness
Kavod/Reverence
Yirah/Awe

Consider inserting the instructions for Cheshbon Hanefesh practice into your seder as a new way to contemplate modern day slavery.  For by focusing on one of these ideals over the course of a month, year after year, we are forming new, more positive habits, and releasing our slave plagued minds from anesthetizing barriers that obstruct the flow of inner light in our lives.

Chag Sameach!

Recently, I read a new book by author Kate Atkinson called Life After Life.  In this unusual novel, the main character, Ursula, dies and is re-born dozens of times.  Upon each re-birth she enters the same life again and again.  And, each time, through pure instinct and déjà vu, she tries to fix previous mistakes that led to her death and to the death of friends and family.

The premise of Life After Life, led me to think about our opportunities for remedying mistakes in the life we are currently living.  Surely, we can’t go back in time and prevent things from occurring, but, on the other hand, might we somehow shift our memories and the memories of others?

In his book, The Thirteen Petalled Rose, Adin Steinsaltz says that “with regard to repentance, that before man was created, he was given the possibility of changing the course of his life….Man can extricate himself from the binding web of his life, from the chain of causality that otherwise compels him to follow  a path of no return….However, even though the past is “fixed,” repentance admits of an ascendancy over it, of the possibility of changing its significance in the context of the present and future.  In a world of the inexorable flow of time, in which all objects and events are interconnected in a relationship of cause and effect, repentance is the exception:  it is the potential for something else.”

What I interpret Steinsaltz as saying is that by making an apology or participating in an act of tikkun, you can actually shift the energy of the negative event.  In the movie Atonement, we witness a little girl fabricate a story that results in her sister’s boyfriend being arrested.  The event causes their lives to be forever changed and both the sister and her boyfriend end up being killed in World War II.  The little girl becomes an author.  The last novel she pens before she dies is a re-writing of her misdeed and the ultimate happy ending of her sister and her beau.  She says that the story is her apology and her attempt to let her sibling live out the life she would have lived had the transgression not occurred.

In this week’s Torah portion, Aharei Mot, God tells us, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have assigned it to you for making expiation for your lives upon the altar; it is the blood, as life that effects expiation.  What is interesting is that much earlier in our Torah we are told that the breath is life.  But, what I think is being said is that when God breathes us into living, our soul enters our body.  However, the blood is actually the life-force of the physical.  In this parshat, we are told that blood is crucial for expiation, and interestingly enough, one of the meanings of the word expiation is correction.  In essence, these lives we lead, in the flesh, with blood flowing through our veins, affords us the ability to learn from our mistakes and make course corrections during the length of our existence.  The blood is the glue that keeps our bodies functioning so that the soul, or life force, may carry out this mission.

Ursula in Life After Life is born on February 11, 1910 only to die moments later due to strangulation by the umbilical cord.  Then, in the next scene she is re-born again, only this time, the cord is loosened and she lives.  Later, she and her sister drown at the beach, but when she is born again, her instinct prevents the drowning.  With each passing life, her ability to be aware in the present moment increases, allowing her to make alternate choices.

Because her lifetimes included so much suffering in WWII, Ursula returns to kill Hitler in one of her incarnations.    And, though, in our one life that we are living now, we can’t have such dramatic impact on the past, we can choose a different response in the present.  We are repeatedly confronted with scenarios that ask us to choose kindness instead of anger, to choose generosity over hoarding to choose growth of character instead of stagnation.  And each time we are presented with these choices, we have the opportunity to be awake and to select a better avenue, affecting both the past, the present, and the future.

Rabbi Alan Lew, of blessed memory, said that “stretching before us from this moment are the infinite consequences of our present action.”  We can let go of the pain of the past by covering it over with new intention and then allowing that intention to ripple out soul to soul until it has filled all of time.