Yisroel Salanter - Teachings

Teachings

Rabbi Salanter is recognized as the father of the Musar movement developed in 19th century Orthodox Eastern Europe, particularly among the Lithuanian Jews. The Hebrew term musar (מוּסַר, properly transliterated as musar), is from the book of Proverbs 1:2 meaning instruction, discipline, or conduct. The term was used by the Musar movement to refer to disciplined efforts to further ethical and spiritual development. The study of Musar is a part of the study of Jewish ethics.

Rabbi Salanter is best known for stressing that the inter-personal laws of the Torah bear as much weight as Divine obligations. According to Rabbi Lipkin, adhering to the ritual aspects of Judaism without developing one's relationships with others and oneself was an unpardonable parody. There are many anecdotal stories about him that relate to this moral equation, see for example the following references.

The concept of the subconscious appears in the writings of Rabbi Salanter well before the concept was popularized by Sigmund Freud. Already in 1880, the concept of conscious and subconscious processes and the role they play in the psychological, emotional and moral functioning of man are fully developed and elucidated. These concepts are referred to in his works as the "outer" and "inner" processes, they are also referred to as the "clear" and "dark" processes. They form a fundamental building block of many of Rabbi Salanter's letters, essays and teachings. He would write that it is critical for a person to recognize what his subconscious motivations are and to work on understanding them.

Rabbi Salanter would teach that the time for a person to work on not allowing improper subconscious impulses to affect him was during times of emotional quiet, when a person is more in control of his thoughts and feelings. He would stress that when a person is experiencing an acute emotional response to an event, he is not necessarily in control of his thoughts and faculties and will not have access to the calming perspectives necessary to allow his conscious mind to intercede.

Based on his understanding of subconscious motivation, Rabbi Salanter was faced with a quandary. Given that a person's subconscious motivations are often not apparent or under the control of a person and are likely to unseat conscious decisions that they may make, how is it then possible for a person to control and modify their own actions in order to improve their actions and act in accordance with the dictates of the Torah? If the basis of a person's actions are not controlled by them, how can they change them through conscious thought?

Rabbi Salanter writes that the only possible answer to this quandary is to learn ethical teachings with great emotion . He taught that a person should choose an ethical statement and repeat this over and over with great feeling and concentration on its meaning. Through this repetition and internal arousal, a person would be able to bring the idea represented in the ethical teaching into the realm of his subconscious and thus improve their behaviour and "character traits".

Rabbi Salanter felt that people would be embarrassed to study ethical teachings in such a way in a normal study-hall and he therefore invented the idea of a "house of ethical teachings" that would be located next to an ordinary study hall and that would be designated for learning ethics in this way.