That summer he had booked a visit to Europe with his family that included a tour of his old Oxford college, Magdalen, with its president Tony Smith. “When he took us around the college, one thing stood out from any other thing he showed us, which was that he had caused to be built within the college walls a new residence building.”
To Dr Morinis, the new Grove Buildings inside the walls of the 500-year old college struck him with symbolic power “as actually a model for living - because my model had been to innovate and create something absolutely new, and his was to add a link to the chain.
“I thought to myself, if I were going to add a link to a chain, what chain do I have? And the only thing I could come up with was that I was Jewish. That started me looking into the Jewish world for something that would satisfy my own personal spiritual search.”
And it was in the course of that search that he “stumbled across” the mussar tradition.
“I had long been interested in the inner life. And I had not found any attention in the Jewish world to the inner life. In Judaism, did we have a spiritual tradition? Or did we just go through the motions?”
His previous experience had been of routine ritual which “didn’t have vitality. There was no real spirituality that I could find. And in the mussar movement and in the mussar sources, I found a really wise, deep venerable tradition of living from the inside.”
While Salanter is commonly portrayed as the embodiment of mussar, the movement, Dr Morinis says, is much older, going back a millennium. He points to works like the anonymous Orchot Tzaddikim (“the Ways of the Righteous”) from around 1540 with chapter titles such as the Gate of Humility, the Gate of Love, the Gate of Shame.
“It’s an illustration of how focused an element of the Jewish world was on pride, humility, shame, arrogance, love, hatred, mercy, cruelty, joy, worry, regret et.” It was “not about mitzvot, Torah study, Talmud analysis, theology” but about “living a life as a human being. And that’s what I was looking for.”
He found a personal tutor, a New York yeshivah head called Rabbi Yechiel Yitzchok Perr, to deepen his
In the mussar tradition, “they did exercises which were experiential exercises”. He offers some “legendary” examples “which are not necessarily things we would practise - in cultivating humility, one of the branches would send their students into a hardware store to ask for bread, or into a bakery to ask for nails. Or they would send them out into the Polish countryside 200 kilometres with no money and a one-way ticket.”
But a more manageable exercise that Rabbi Perr set him when he asked was “he gave me a rubber band to wear on my wrist. The exercise was directed towards patience. The practice was for me to be aware that I was becoming impatient and then to twang this rubber band on my hand.”
The movement also developed visualisation techniques.
What mussar understood and built on in its practice was that “ ideas don't change people, experiences change people”.
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Now in his mid-70s, he has been spreading the word about mussar for more than 20 years since the founding of the institute. He may convey its ideas in his own language but he remains “big on taking from the tradition. In spirituality now, you see a lot of things that are being peddled as Jewish, which are really not Jewish - they’re dressed up in a tallis and tefillin and they're being brought into the world as if they were Jewish.”
He believes firmly that “our generation needs to be more connected to our own tradition. I think we should be strengthening our own identity by drawing and bringing forth from our own tradition.”
One of his sources is Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, the head of the Gateshead Kollel during the War, who in his time had to interpret the mussar tradition for English students.
While there is a practical element, there is also learning too. The Jewish concept of humility may be different from what we understand by the English term, he observes.
And one of the features that attracted him about the movement was that “it comes out of an analysis of what is the right thing for the individual. My experience of the Jewish world had been that it was very collectivised.”
Take patience, for example. “There are people who are too patient. There are people who are too impatient. You can't have a generalised approach because the needs are different for each individual according to what I call their spiritual curriculum.” For some, too much patience can prove a form of procrastination.
His institute is not the only one promoting mussar to new audiences across the community. He was in the UK last week on a short tour teaching in Leeds, Oxford, Edgware and Hendon Reform and Leo Baeck College, hosted by SoulBalance, a mussar outfit run by Rabbi Marcia Plumb, the now Boston-based former rabbi of Akiva School, and student rabbi Anna Dyson from Leeds. SoulBalance will be running two retreats in Yorkshire next year.
