Miki Young is a senior madrich with Mussar Leadership (http://www.mussarleadership.org/index.html) where she facilitates Mussar groups and is working on a new publication on Family Mussar.

As Jews we are charged with the central tenet, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But what does that really mean? How can we really make that tenet central in the lives of our students?

Mussar is the practice of Jewish ethics. With living ethically such a critical part of how we raise our children, it is important to craft a curriculum that allows school-age children to begin to see this as an important part of their responsibility from a young age. While some of the Mussar concepts are heady, they are not impossible for young children to get. In fact, in some ways, with less adulterated ego lines, it may be easier for children to actually experience these concepts than it is for their adult counterparts.

One of the most basic of Mussar concepts is understanding that as human beings we are held in the vise between the yetzer hara (evil inclination) and the yetzer hatov (good inclination). As defined by theologian and Mussar scholar Ira Stone, the yetzer hara is a worldview that is just about you, while the yetzer hatov is a worldview that holds you responsible for the others in your life. “By putting others welfare first, by understanding what they are burdened by and reaching out to relieve that burden, you find your own life transformed in ways that bring meaning and joy,” says Rabbi Stone. The yetzer hara, the “material force,” seeks to fulfill our ego needs over all other needs, while the yetzer hatov, the “spiritual force,” allows us to displace our ego fulfillment in favor of meeting the needs of the other.

For school-age students, the concept of the yetzer hara and the yetzer hatov lives in the space of the practical everyday experiences of life:

• Are you acting kind and caring towards others?
• Do you care about the feelings and concerns of people in your family? Your
  friends? Other students?
• Have you done anything on purpose which has hurt someone?
• Are you just thinking about yourself?

The very first act of Mussar is for the student to learn that in asking these questions, he or she has the power to make the choice to do good, to be holy. In practical terms, the goal is for school-age students to understand that their actions do not drive them but that they can control or drive their actions, that they have a choice. For example, that means understanding that when they are angry, they don’t just have to be angry. Rather, they can take control of their anger, understand if their anger hurts someone, and begin to look at the reasons behind their anger.

In the theory of Mussar, the yetzer hara starts from a legitimate beginning – some threat, fear or concern that probably has occurred to generate the anger. Despite the legitimacy of where the anger comes from, that does not legitimize where it goes to. Anger impacts others, and to the extent that students move beyond legitimized self-protection to hurt others, they have ventured into the wild and woolly land of the yetzer hara.

Studying Mussar requires teachers to understand the ways to get students to look deeply into the needs of the others as well as to look deeply into their own personal landscape.

There are three steps to accomplishing that goal. Each student:

1. studies a particular middah (value), i.e., patience, truth, silence
2. chooses a form of self-reflection
3. participates in a va’ad (small group) to discuss the ways he or she has benefited from or had difficulty with the particular middah in their relationship with others.

Studying a middah.

The lens of a particular middot can guide a student’s actions through daily life. For example, is he or she able to have patience when something is not going their way? And if they are impatient, what is the impact of that impatience on the person they have just “lost it with.” By reviewing a singular middah for anywhere from two to four weeks and using personal reflection, each student is able to build self-evaluation skills to see where he or she has been successful and, even more importantly, what could be done to act in even a more benevolent way.

Looking at behavior is the first step, which allows each student to begin to see the impact he or she has on the others in his or her life. Weighing our actions through the lens of a particular middah allows us to put our own behavior under a microscope. The way to do that is to begin to really understand how the middah feels when you are aligned with it and when you are not. Students can contribute to that understanding from the outset by sharing what the middah means to them, and what their experience of a particular middah is.

If, for example, the middah was “patience” some questions/discussion points to ask to engage students from that outset include:

• Describe what it feels like to you when you are patient. What does your body feel like?
• Describe what it feels like to you when you are impatient. What does your body feel like?
• What might it feel like to someone else if you talk to them with patience?
• What might it feel like to someone else if you talk to them with impatience?
• What are some things you need patience for? What are some things that take time to make (growing seeds, cooking, etc.)?

Through this conversation, students and teachers can develop a list of 15-20 different experiences of patience, which students will use in their middah study. Each student chooses several experiences to work on over the next two to four weeks. (The length of time studying a middah should be significant enough for a student to absorb its implications). After each experience, the student writes about it during self-reflection and shares about it in the bi-weekly va’ad work.

Examples of “patience and “impatience” experiences for students could include:

•  Cook instant pudding and real pudding
•  Ask your friend to make a face that looks patient and then impatient and draw both of them
• Use a color to make a picture that makes you feel impatient and patient
• Make a collage of things that you can do that take a lot of patience
• Plant seeds and draw pictures of the seeds as they grow
• Perform a dance that shows patience, then impatience, and then patience again

As students actually begin to experience the physical feeling that accompanies aligning with or not aligning with a particular middah they learn to have more control over the reactions. If a student, for example, can feel the tension that rises in his body when he begins to feel impatient, then he will be able to use that self-knowledge and awareness to pause before acting. This allows him to make the choice to act with patience or impatience, rather than being run by the emotion.

In addition to experiencing the aspects of a middah, school-age students can study text about a particular value such as patience. Mussar texts, such as Heshbon HaNefesh by Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Satanov, tells us that patience is a tool that allows us to take a moment to pause before our action or our speech when confronted by circumstances that we cannot control. In so doing we avoid the tendency to make matters worse, and by managing our own reactions we can actually reduce the negativity of the situation for ourselves and for others.

By simplifying study text such as Heshbon HaNefesh, teachers can assist students in studying the Mussar tradition and learning more about the middot. For example, students can learn that the middah of patience is a gift, especially when confronted by the unexpected and the uncontrollable. When that happens there is nothing to be done but to bear the consequences of these events. Both the intellectual study and the experiential aspect of studying middot provides students with a deeper understanding of the values that can make an amazing difference in how they live their lives. Teachers can assist by beginning each class with reminding students that they are currently working on a particular middah and by designating particular time for self-reflection and for va’ad work.

Choose a form of self-reflection.

It is vital to the practice of Mussar to have time to review behavior and its impact on others through the lens of the middah, and the practice works best if there is a standard time for students to review their behavior several times a week. As part of that review, school-age students are encouraged to keep a personal journal of reflection in which they can enter a reaction to the experience of the middah and/or anything that happened which reflects the actions of that middah in their day-to-day living experience. This journal can be completed as a written entry or as a drawing/collage of some kind.

The student’s self-reflection can be guided by answering the following (or similarly crafted) questions:

• What is the middah I am working on?
• What middah experience did I choose to have? What did it feel like to me?
• Was there also a particular time that I struggled with that middah in the last day or so?
• Describe the incident that happened.
• Was there something that upset me or made me afraid in the incident?
• How did I act?
• Was I happy/upset with the way I acted?
• How did my actions affect the other(s) who was involved in the incident?
• How might I change my actions in the future?

Participation in va’ad (small group).

A va’ad provides an opportunity to share the self-reflection and experience of trying to choose to live aligned with a middah. The va’ad is based on non-judgmental responses from all participants and allows the students to talk about how well each one is doing, as the students understand that they are trying to improve their own behavior. In the group, even the youngest of students can become mutually supportive of the other by understanding the fact that, as humans, we all struggle between the yetzer hara and the yetzer hatov.

The va’ad works best in small groups of 8-10 that meet every two weeks and focus on one middah. There are three components to the va’ad: 1) a discussion of the middah; 2) a sharing of one particular middah experience the students took on (i.e., cooking instant and real pudding); and 3) a self-reflection of an event they encountered where they put the middah to use.

The teacher can generate the discussion of the middah by reviewing a standard Mussar text or reviewing the middot on www.mussarleadership.org. This gives the opportunity to review/discuss each middah individually, its significance, and its impact on choosing to live a value-driven life.

Each student shares a piece of their middah experience by showing a picture, reading a piece that they wrote, or just simply discussing the kind of experience they took on and their reaction to it.

During the self-reflection the teacher is the only one to ask questions that offer opportunities for each student to deepen the reflection of his or her behavior. The questions are essentially the same as those used in the self-reflection document, which are to describe the incident and the student’s behavior in the situation. The teacher’s responsibility is to help each student see what problems he or she may have encountered in doing the middah work. These problems are reflective of whether or not the yetzer hara was active during the incident, how that might have impacted anyone else involved, especially other students, and if there were other options for his or her behavior. The real focus of this work is trying to get students to realize the impact that their behavior has on another; and to see how responsible they are for helping others in their lives. During this process, all the other students get to listen supportively without sharing comments and reactions. Individually, the students get to share their stories in a safe space.

Students continue to explore the selected middot, changing every two to four weeks. In the classroom Mussar program, each student, regardless of his role in the class, begins to see himself as a critical component of the classroom constellation, able to impact all of the others through how he or she is engaged in the day-to-day actions of the middot (i.e., being patient, staying calm, telling the truth, keeping order). The insights of Mussar study, translated appropriately for the classroom, are incredibly transformational and powerful for each member of the classroom and for the class itself.