Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
This week, we've been discussing the difference between regular psychology and mussar, which Rav Wolbe calls Torah psychology. To me, one of the main differences (which is quite apparent from what we spoke about yesterday), is that the Torah views a human being as having certain evil traits inside of him that need to be fixed; certain sinful activities that need to be fixed-
It's all about the evil inclination, evil and sin that we have to fix; whereas in the world of psychology, we don't hear those words. We hear emotions, we hear disorders, we hear trauma. A lot of it revolves around what I'll call mental illness.
Conversely, the Torah is really talking to the healthy person that has his freedom of choice and needs to use it to overcome and battle with evil. Anger and jealousy, are, of course, emotions, but anger and jealousy are evil, as is laziness.
I was once at a conference and heard a world-renown secular speaker in the area of education. He made a statement that, to this day, still bothers me. He said there's no such thing as a lazy child. There's no such thing as a lazy person. There's no such thing as laziness. People are just not motivated. If you're motivated to do something, you'll do it.
But that's counter to my belief. I have a Torah and I have a belief in the traditions of our Torah and the Mesilat Yesharim dedicates chapter upon chapter to dealing with laziness.
It says afriyut hachumriyut gas/the the earthliness of physicality is coarse.
That means there's a heaviness that the human being has, naturally. There are four fundamental building blocks of man: earth, wind, fire, and water. Each one of them has certain base negative traits that are built into man. With the fundamental of earth comes laziness. That's something built into man. You're heavy. You have to overcome your laziness and it's hard. That's part of the human condition. Mussar looks at that as an evil trait that you have to fix, it doesn’t deal with your emotions. Rav Wolbe, in Aleh Shor (vol 2 page 139) says it quite succinctly. He says, the common theme of all the different commentaries’ descriptions of mussar is as follows:
“We have an inclination. There is evil. There is sin. And we have to fix them. These are not modern terms. They're even archaic. What can we do? The evil inclination is not a side factor, it's not a coincidence. That's what we are here for. We are here to fix and overcome the evil in the world.”
The Gaon of Vilna writes this in his commentary on Mishleh, on the pasuk that says, “Hold on to mussar, don't let go. Guard ii because it's your life.” To quote the beautiful words of the Gaon of Vilna, “Why are we living? To break a Middah you haven't broken until now. You have to keep on strengthening yourself in mussar, to break another Middah. If you don't strengthen yourself, what do you need to live for? We live to fix our bad middot.”
And he says, This is the Torah outlook on the 6,000 years that we’re here from the sin of Adam HaRishon, until the final redemption. It's the era where evil and good are mixed together in everything in the world. Our job is to sift through and purify the good from the bad. And that needs constant mussar.
So, it's a different approach. We're looking at bad middot as an evil part of us that we have to work through and uproot and fix, versus just an emotional challenge or a mental illness, which is more of a physical approach.
That's the Torah outlook. And that's why we believe that Torah is going to fix the Yetzer Hara, because Torah brings purity. One of the parts of Torah that you need is mussar.
That’s been our topic this week.
You can put all these classes together and study this concept of Torah psychology versus secular psychology.
Have a wonderful day.