Q&A: Character Refinement
Character Refinement
Question
Hello Rabbi Michael,
Rabbi, in your view today is there such a concept as refining one’s character traits, like anger, lust, laziness, and so on?
If so, how does one work on that? Do you read ethics / morality books of the kind associated with the Mussar movement—Israel Salanter, Slabodka, Kelm—or do you use some kind of psychology books?
Regarding weakness of will, which you speak about: in a case of weighing value ↔ impulse, do bad character traits have weight in influencing decisions when fulfilling a commandment or committing a sin? Or is that a purely philosophical discussion, unrelated to character traits?
2) Regarding free choice: if you claim there is choice, then seemingly by that very fact you are implicitly assuming there is recompense after our lives, in the World to Come—is that not so? That would be a reason to conclude that there is reward and punishment; otherwise why would He give us this? Or at least that this world is a test to examine whether we obey His commandments or not.
Answer
It is definitely important. I don’t know techniques for working on it. I don’t use books, because I haven’t found anything that speaks to me, but that doesn’t mean you won’t find something. Awareness and reflection themselves are important, along with self-examination every so often. If you can get help from someone (like the groups suggested by the author of Alei Shur), perhaps you can make use of that.
The question of what is right to do is philosophical and ethical. The question of whether you will do what is right is also connected to your psychology and to the degree of pressures and impulses in various directions, and that is where character traits come in.
2. I don’t agree. We have choice because the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted our products and actions not to be done deterministically. That is not necessarily connected to tests and recompense. For example, Rabbi Kook’s explanation for the need for creation—that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot perfect Himself and therefore had to create imperfect beings who could perfect themselves on His behalf—offers a model that explains why choice is required, with no connection at all to tests and recompense. See my column 170 on this.
Discussion on Answer
I already answered this, and I don’t see what is so deep here.
Why obey moral commands if there is no reward? Reward is not a value-based reason to do something, but an interest-based calculation.
What value-based reason is there not to sort on the Sabbath or not to eat pork?
I have no idea. But if the Holy One, blessed be He, commands it, then apparently He has a reason. I’ve explained more than once that we are not talking about moral values but about religious values. These are values whose purpose is not improving society but improving the world.
Maybe improving the upper worlds, because it isn’t clear what improvement such actions bring to this world.
In my opinion, the question is deeper than why there is choice. The real question is: “Why keep the commandments and not sin, if in the end both the sinner—who sinned all his life, murdered, ate camels, and desecrated the Sabbath—and, by contrast, a Lithuanian yeshiva head who dedicates his whole life to Torah and is careful about every tiny detail, both end up in the same place (‘for dust you are, and to dust you shall return’)?
What answer would you give to, for example, a secular young man who wants to repent, and as a result will have to abandon his previous life, his status, and his non-Jewish beloved, and stop eating many of the foods he craves? So even if the Torah is true and God exists, what does all this have to do with him? By what force exactly is he obligated to heap all these difficulties on himself?
In short, my question is: by what power exactly are we obligated to keep commandments if there is no doctrine of recompense?