Dear Shalom,
Thanks for the link to Seth Godin's materials. While I haven't read the whole thing, one excerpt reminds me of something Ramchal says at the end of his introduction to Mesilat Yesharim. Here's the quote from Godin:
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29. The other side of fear is passion
There really are only two tools available to the educator. The easy one is fear. Fear is easy to awake, easy to maintain, but ultimately toxic.
The other tool is passion. A kid in love with dinosaurs or baseball or earth science is going to learn it on her own. She’s going to push hard for ever more information, and better still, master the thinking behind it.
Passion can overcome fear—the fear of losing, of failing, of being ridiculed.
The problem is that individual passion is hard to scale—hard to fit into the industrial model. It’s not reliably ignited. It’s certainly harder to create for large masses of people. Sure, it’s easy to get a convention center filled with delegates to chant for a candidate, and easier still to engage the masses at Wembley Stadium, but the passion that fuels dreams and creates change must come from the individual, not from a demigod.
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I think the last premise - that change must come from the individual - resonates with Ramchal's statement that he's coming to write his book "L'lamed l'atzmi u'l'hazkir l'acherim". I heard from Rav Chaim Raff of Jerusalem that Ramchal means that he can't expect someone to simply read his book and effect inner change. Rather, he's just imparting the principles of musar to the reader in the hope that the reader will then 'teach himself' in the same vein that Ramchal is continuing to teach himself to apply the principles. Ramchal is saying that change must come from the individual.
Shlomo
Rabbi Shlomo Horwitz
Director, Jewish Crossroads
[
www.jewishcrossroads.org]
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