Q&A: Character Refinement
Character Refinement
Question
Hello Rabbi,
What do you think about character refinement in the approach of the Musar masters, who focus for a certain period on one specific trait and work only on that? It always seemed to me a bit naively extreme and disconnected from life. Also, focusing on a particular trait seems to arouse it even more, as opposed to encountering certain situations incidentally in the course of life, doing the right thing, and gradually changing little by little.
Answer
I apologize for the delay. The question slipped past me.
This is a question in psychology, and I don’t have the tools to answer it. One would need to examine the effectiveness of each of the methods, and that is what should determine the answer. The Musar masters themselves, of course, also have no real way to answer this—unless they conducted an orderly experiment and arrived at empirical findings. I suspect that didn’t happen there.
Discussion on Answer
Hello Shai Zilberstein.
The alternative is as I suggested: not to focus specifically on character-trait correction, but rather to live life as it is, try to do good, and then over time naturally acquire good character traits.
And as for the comparison to psychology: as far as I know, cognitive-behavioral psychology mainly deals only with the visible behavior itself and the intellectual changes required for it. The Musar movement, by contrast, deals with an inner change in thoughts and feelings—what is called “breaking the traits”—and in my opinion there is no connection between them at all. (For this reason it is also proposed for healthy people, in fact for everyone, which also seems strange to me for the reasons above…)
Even in psychology that does deal with the inner psyche itself—I’m not a psychologist—but it seems to me that there is no reason for a normal person to begin all kinds of focused work on specific points in his soul.
The Musar movement claims that every person is obligated to engage in deliberate focus on the soul and its repair, and even to focus on specific traits in order to break them. That runs very strongly against my intuition.
This mode of action is also very popular in ordinary psychotherapy; those of the cognitive-behavioral approach (C.B.T.) also work with this method.
The patient chooses an area in which he wants to improve—say, fear of heights—and he and the therapist work only on that for 10 sessions until improvement is seen. Usually this method works.
What alternative do you suggest?
The Musar masters had many methods for emotional correction:
a philosophical approach, a behavioral approach, and so on. (You can see this in Breuer’s book The Lithuanian Musar Movement.)