Salanter Mussar Ethics Yeshiva Movement
Shalom!
This video is about Yisroel Salanter, the Mussar movement in Judaism. Yisroel Salanter was born in 1801. He is the founder of the spiritual movement in Judaism called Mussar. Now, the people called the word Mussar is often, used in the sense of moral instruction. But during the medieval period, the term Mussar gradually inquired the connotation of the moral principles. They tended to improve the relations between people.
Salanter’s primary concern in his own life and teaching was ethics. Fearing that the moral fiber of the Jewish community was weakening by external forces, he advocated that the curriculum in Jewish schools emphasizes the study of ethical literature. He devoted his life to contemplation, religious fervor and self-sacrifice. And, his students became called as Mussarnists. He became the head of a Yeshivah early in his life in Vilna and later he establish his own Yeshivah there. And, his fame soon began to spread that predetermines giving the expression to the doctrine of Mussar is a moral movement based on the study of traditional ethical literature.
He moved to Germany where he lectured university students on Judaism and then later went to France in 1880 to disseminate Judaism. He believed—and to some extent, he has anticipated Freud. That people have forces in their souls that lay beneath the level of the conscious rational mind. These forces really influenced people’s lives. He said, you can not just read, most of the literature, you have to do something within. So, he said he have to constantly, repeat the ethical themes. If a person, for example, is probably in vain and said you have to eradicate those trait. You have to repeat over and over and over. The verses of the followers is a pride. He believed by this repeated chanting in the forms of the undesirable traits became that became habitual, you could get rid of them and become more humble. He demanded that his followers rules was self-criticism leading to the sound of ethical conduct.
So, I want to give you just a few of his basic ideas of Mussar. Normally, we worry about our own material well-being and our neighbors so. You should never worry about our neighbors material well-being in our own souls. A rabbi who—they do not want to drive out of town is no __abiding the rabbi or lets himself be driven out of time is no man.
A person must not be discriminated if he fails to see any improvement in his moral qualities after much self-discipline. You must train yourself so that no one—you no longer obey the ethical teachings, or let that it be followed them quite naturally. The moral clear sightedness, commands man to struggle against temptation of essential desire and to be guided in his actions, not by immediate pleasures but they produce by their remote consequences. Without deep sincerity, we would find little to criticize in ourselves, self love would blind our judgment. The practice is not remorse, but a series of temporary profit and past mistakes.
And finally, the essential of desires in a person often makes some mistakes because you mistake monetary pleasure for the true happiness that you create. These succumb to the pressure of passion. Frequent yielding to essential desire produces an impure spirit that became our spiritual energy with a result that we become slave to evil habits.
So, this is a lot of Salanter’s ideas. He is one of the most active Rabbinic personalities and Lithuania, Russia in the 19th century. And, his lasting legacy was the founding of the Mussar movement, the setting up, with special ethical houses of learning and the publishing of journal to disseminate his ideas. That these Mussar movements remained an important influential forces, especially within orthodox but certainly it is worth it to highlight this important rabbinic figure and his ideas.
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