CLIMBING JACOB’S LADDER

One man’s search for enlightenment through “Mussar,” a Jewish spiritual movement that focuses on mindfulness and ethics in everyday life.

Walloped by a midlife crisis brought on by a failure of both his business and personal ethics, Morinis turned to his roots. Before writing his dissertation on Hindu pilgrimage, before studying with the Dalai Lama, before traveling to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he had been—and still was—“the little Jewish kid from the suburbs of Toronto.” Looking for answers in a book on Jewish thought and practice through the ages, Morinis happened upon a section on Mussar, and was captivated by its seeming contrariness to the spiritual wisdom he’d absorbed over years of study: Mussar eschews the pursuit of calm and tranquility in favor of an involved approach toward employing ethics and mindfulness “in the midst of the bustling marketplace” of life. A few years of intense study, first alone, and then with Rabbi Yechiel Yitchok Perr, led Morinis into this attempt to distill the lessons of Mussar in ten lessons. In chapters with headings like “The Gate of Growing,” “The Gate of Holiness,” “The Gate of Good and Evil,” and “The Gate of Working in the World,” he addresses the very broad concepts of the philosophy, mostly by relating how Rabbi Perr addressed the author’s questions about such issues. Each chapter is followed by an extremely simple exercise that can help the reader explore Mussar in daily life.

Accessible and thought-provoking, clearly written and notable for Morinis’s ability to soft-pedal his own struggles, even though his work—part self-help, part memoir, part religious study—is still mere lagniappe for those hungry to gain a deeper understanding of this strain of Jewish spirituality.