Responsibility, Jennifer Nemhauser and Matt Offenbacher
“Mussar…takes you by the shoulders and turns you around so that you face squarely all the (real or potential) messes, breakage, or offenses you might have had a role in causing. Take responsibility, it says. If you made that mess, clean it up. Better still, foresee the mess and take responsibility before it happens, so there won’t even be a mess for you to have to clean up afterward.”
Using this definition of responsibility (achrayut), Alan Morinis captures both the practice of preventing harm and the practice of repairing harm already done. Indeed, he argues that the core of Mussar is that “our personal spiritual advancement takes place not separate from but rather right in the midst of our relations with other people”. Over the last year of learning about and trying to enact the practice of Mussar, we have felt the satisfying soreness of building muscles—finding new ways to center soul traits in everyday interactions with friends, families and colleagues.
In doing this work, we have also wrestled with the question of where individual soul transformation connects to communal transformation. Can Mussar help us perform ‘heshbon hanefesh’ (a spiritual accounting) on the systems that form the contexts in which we do and repair harm: the laws, customs, codes, institutions that structure our individual relationships? Sometimes as we are urging ourselves individually to “bear the burden of the other”, our organizations, groups and governments are left unchallenged as they pursue their own interests. With something like climate change or reparations to Black Americans, it’s pretty clear that our individual choices and actions – while meaningful in the context of our own lives – are insufficient to clean up the mess.
Maybe the traits we work on balancing in Mussar could be viewed as worthwhile only insofar as they let us, as individuals, be more effective and resilient in changing the systems we are part of, to finding the intention to work for the structural changes that will cause less harm in the future and acknowledge harms in the past. This placement of the individual within the community reminds us of something Rabbi Rachel wrote in the newsletter titled “It’s Time to Dismantle the House”. In that powerful drash, she drew a connection from a Leviticus text on how the community should respond to the discovery of a house with a plague upon it to “the seemingly impossible trick of dismantling and rebuilding the house while also continuing to live in it!” We cannot wait to be perfect before we act. Instead, we have to move forward, painfully aware of our individual accounting still underway, to take collective responsibility, imperfectly.
