The Musar (Ethics) movement of Israel Salanter deserves more attention than it gets. Its claims are great.
The way to understand this is to see the beginning of Isaac Blazar's book the אור ישראל. Plus you have to see the lectures of Sapolsky at Stanford. And then you need to put 2+2 together to realize the vast implications of what Israel Salanter was implying.
I would like to divide human problems into different areas, physical and biological, psychological, spiritual, super-organism, social meme's etc.
What Sapolsky is suggesting is schizoid personalities comes from biology. What people call nowadays a chemical imbalance. That is the source of all shamans and people that make a living by meta magical thinking. But others sources of human problems come from attitudes. or social memes picked up the super organism. Others have some spiritual component. Some are genetic and hard wired. Some are software--not hard wired. That is attitudes or reactions that have been absorbed into ones personality but are like software programming and can be easily changed.
I could go on and on but you get the idea.
The claim of Reb Israel Salanter is that learning Musar is a cure for all of the above mentioned aliments. And he is referring to a limited number of books. To him, not anything that talks about things that sounds like Musar are authentic Musar. They most often are pseudo Musar. Phoney and opposite in effects.
You know the Drill. Authentic Musar is Medieval Musar. There was something about that time period that the spirit of the fear of God existed in a way that got condensed and distilled and bottled into the works of Ethics written during that time period. [Much like Hegel claims about the Spirit.]
Phony Musar works just as well as taking phony aspirin.
The way to understand this is to see the beginning of Isaac Blazar's book the אור ישראל. Plus you have to see the lectures of Sapolsky at Stanford. And then you need to put 2+2 together to realize the vast implications of what Israel Salanter was implying.
I would like to divide human problems into different areas, physical and biological, psychological, spiritual, super-organism, social meme's etc.
What Sapolsky is suggesting is schizoid personalities comes from biology. What people call nowadays a chemical imbalance. That is the source of all shamans and people that make a living by meta magical thinking. But others sources of human problems come from attitudes. or social memes picked up the super organism. Others have some spiritual component. Some are genetic and hard wired. Some are software--not hard wired. That is attitudes or reactions that have been absorbed into ones personality but are like software programming and can be easily changed.
I could go on and on but you get the idea.
The claim of Reb Israel Salanter is that learning Musar is a cure for all of the above mentioned aliments. And he is referring to a limited number of books. To him, not anything that talks about things that sounds like Musar are authentic Musar. They most often are pseudo Musar. Phoney and opposite in effects.
You know the Drill. Authentic Musar is Medieval Musar. There was something about that time period that the spirit of the fear of God existed in a way that got condensed and distilled and bottled into the works of Ethics written during that time period. [Much like Hegel claims about the Spirit.]
Phony Musar works just as well as taking phony aspirin.
