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well worth the wait
| patience as wisdom
| patience, passive and active
| patience as a spoke on a wheel
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Mussar is a discipline of steady personal character refinement.
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middah of the week
Bring order in life, one step at a time.
Order gives structure to our days and environment so as to maximize our ability and effectiveness. However, order can be demonstrated in unhealthy ways. Order out of balance can either appear completely obsessive and neat to a fault, while on the other end of the spectrum a total lack of order appears as chaos and disarray. Those who embody order have actions, possessions and tasks all of an orderly nature – everything has a set place and a set time.
author's blog
mussar: vigilance against wrongdoing
Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehinnom. -- Matthew 10:28
We who believe in God and desire to be changed can be our own worst enemies. We know that his mercy outweighs his judgment and we imagine that therefore his judgment is canceled. There is a concept in Judaism that God’s compassion is holding up the world, the only reason it continues without being destroyed.
mussar and the garden of eden
How many hours every day go into fixing, cleaning, upgrading, improving, reconfiguring, and maintaining the things and aspects of your life? You commit so much time, thought, and effort because you are born with an impulse to improve.
-Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness, ch. 2, “What is Mussar?”
A generous heart
The theme of nadiv lev, a generous or noble heart reverberates throughout Parashat Vayakhel, and really throughout the entire account of building the Mishkan [tabernacle] in Exodus 25 through 40.
mussar: parts of the soul
The neshammah (lifebreath) of man is the lamp of Hashem, revealing all his inmost parts (Proverbs 20:27).
The lamp pictured is an ancient oil lamp, a clay vessel with a wick placed in olive oil giving light like a candle. The inmost parts literally are the “rooms of the belly.” There are two basic points made in this verse: God has a light inside each one of us and he sees all that is within.
middah gallery
Click on an image to bring you to the middah description. The highlighted middah is this week's.
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