Rabbi David Jaffe is the director of the Chanoch L’Na’ar initiative at Gann Academy. He is also the dean of the Kirva Institute for Torah and Spiritual Practice and a board member of The Mussar Institute.

Mussar is the area of Jewish wisdom dedicated spiritual and ethical growth. Mussar literature includes works as diverse as Pirkei Avot, the 10th century Duties of the Heart, the 16th century kabbalistic Date Palm of Devorah, the 18th century Path of the Just and the contemporary works of Rabbi Zelig Pliskin. The Mussar movement, founded by Rabbi Yisrael Salanter in the mid-19th century, generated specific practices for internalizing this wisdom. These practices, such as mussar groups (va’adim – described in this journal by Mickey Young), meditative techniques and special methods of text study flourished in mussar yeshivot in the first third of the 20th century. The study of mussar literature continues to be a fixture of the yeshiva world today. This article will explore the growth of mussar practice in North America over the past decade, the potential and obstacles for mussar practice in high schools, particularly community day schools, and an experiment to implement mussar practice as a way of cultivating character and Jewish identity development at a pluralistic community high school.

Until the late 1990s formal mussar practice existed almost solely in the Orthodox world. With the publication of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (2002) and Everyday Holiness (2007), Dr. Alan Morinis opened the world of mussar to Jewish audiences across North America. Morinis created The Mussar Institute (TMI) in 2004 to institutionalize the dissemination of mussar teachings and techniques. Hundreds of people study mussar through TMI each year and the Institute is spawning a rapidly growing network of mussar va’adim in synagogues and JCC’s throughout North America. Also in the last decade, Conservative Rabbi Ira Stone, author of A Responsible Life, founded the Philadelphia Mussar Institute and Mussar Leadership to train people in the theology and practice of mussar. Stone, a student of Immanuel Levinas and the Alter of Kelm, has introduced a generation of Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbis to mussar. Also in the last decade, Rabbi Micah Berger founded the on-line community AishDas to enhance the spirituality of Orthodox religious life in the United States. AishDas sponsors several mussar va’adim, discussion groups and offers numerous resources for individuals and communities wanting to develop more powerful spiritual lives.

How can mussar be used for teaching ethics in high schools? Limudei kodesh teachers can dedicate some time to teaching mussar texts, as many yeshivot already do. However, mussar teachings impact behavior when they are combined with actual practices and va’adim. One big challenge for high schools is that the level of reflection demanded by mussar practice works best when people volunteer to participate. A school can run a voluntary mussar va’ad, but unless it attracts formal and informal students leaders it will most likely not have a major impact on the overall school culture. Instituting mussar va’adim for all students runs into the difficulty of compelling people to reflect on their middot. The cynicism that such compulsion breeds can be destructive to efforts to build a character development culture. A combination of voluntary student practice and systemic emphasis on middot development could avoid these difficulties.

Gann’s Chanoch L’Na’ar mussar program

Gann Academy: The New Jewish High School is a pluralistic 9th -12th grade school in Waltham, MA. Through our Chanoch L’Na’ar initiative we are implementing mussar principles and techniques in an effort to develop the character and Jewish identity of our students. Experts agree that any effort to improve the middot of students must be comprehensive; a course in ethics alone will not change culture and will not provide enough reinforcement needed to help students become more reflective about their choices. Chanoch L’Na’ar will reinforce the messages of reflective behavior throughout the school system – on the sports field, at assemblies, in the lunch room and hallways and of course, in the classroom. Our starting point is the adults in the community; with the support of the Covenant Foundation we will create mussar va’adim among our key 9th grade faculty and advisors to reflect on our own middot in relation to our work with young people and to try out and reflect on various interventions with our students.

Our first step is to identify the key strengths and issues in our school community. Through conversations and surveys with parents, teachers and students we are seeing several strengths and issues emerge. Strengths include sensitivity to differences and caring for each other; issues include exclusive behavior, depression, entitlement, risk taking behaviors and cheating/plagiarism. I am sure these issues are common for many of our high schools to a greater or lesser degree. We will build our va’ad curriculum based on the middot/virtues related to each of these issues and strengths. Risk-taking behaviors are related to responsibility; entitlement to an unbalanced sense of humility; exclusivity to respect and cheating/plagiarism to honesty. While each of these issues is related to multiple middot, we choose to start with one to give us an entry point into the issue.

A typical va’ad session will include learning mussar texts about the issue/middah. We will progress through the key issues over the course of the year and then return to them in future years. Traditional mussar practice calls for cycling through middot and not dwelling on any one middah for too long a period of time. Teachers will share their personal experiences with the middah and any interventions with students since the last meeting. We will then role play or practice other interventions based on real-life situations with students. Interventions can include responding to unreasonable student complaints about grades, interrupting social exclusion in a classroom and valorizing responsible behavior outside of school. The session closes with each member setting goals for the next month. Between sessions, teachers will meet in pairs to learn more text and to share with each other about their own practices. Teachers will receive stipends to regularly record their process in journals. With the help of an outside evaluator we will build a rich record of practice.

We hope to answer a number of questions about how to develop character in a Jewish community high school. These include:

• What support and training do teachers need to effectively model positive middot?
• What interventions work best in different settings – e.g., the playing field, the classroom – to impact the student’s middot?
• What school-wide interventions will be most effective at creating a context for middot development?
• What might be the best way to involve students and parents in the creation of a school-wide character and identity initiative?
• How can we best involve non-Jewish faculty and staff in an effort that is based in Jewish texts?

The teachings and techniques of mussar are rich with possibility for our high schools. At Gann we are hopeful that this comprehensive approach to character will foster reflective students who take the words of Ben Zoma one step further and approach life as an opportunity to learn from everyone and everything.