With Heart in Mind

Let the wise one hear and increase learning. The understanding person shall acquire wise counsels.

WE ARE NEARING the end of these lessons on personal transformation, and it is wise advice to make a practice of clarifying what we have heard. That applies to these lessons but also to things we learn every day. Reality is complex, and it takes some determination to sort through the complexity to clarify for ourselves the essence of the lesson. That’s the kernel we need to retain, which can be lost to us if we don’t engage in this clarification process.

We may sit in a class nodding in agreement, or we may casually read something; but if we don’t make the effort to understand the true intended message, we fool ourselves into thinking that we have learned something when really we haven’t. Have you put in the time and effort necessary to truly understand the forty-six previous lessons, to uncover the foundation upon which each lesson was built? Have you made the effort to summarize the key points of each lesson in writing? Can you recall what you have been taught? Even just yesterday?

We are being urged to clarify the foundation of the lessons we hear and to try to understand their true intended meaning. To clarify the foundation means discerning the essence and the fundamental principle that is being conveyed. For example, if you were studying the rules of negative speech, you would encounter the law that prohibits speaking disparagingly about other people. But what about speaking negatively about inanimate objects, like your old car? What about a country? What’s the practice there? Only by understanding the essence of the teaching can we understand how it applies, especially in situations that extend away from the most typical case.

Here is a brief glimpse of an answer, to illustrate the point. The midrash tells us that the section in the Torah about the spies follows the section that tells of Miriam, Moses’s sister, being punished for speaking badly about Moses.¹ The midrash comments that the spies saw what happened to Miriam, and they did not take the lesson to heart—or, in the actual language of the text, they “did not take the Mussar.” They went on to repeat the same behavior by speaking disparagingly about the land of Israel, and for that they were severely criticized.

In fairness, could we really expect the spies to have learned this lesson from what happened to Miriam? She spoke badly about a person, after all, while they spoke badly about a land, an inanimate object. The answer is that the same inner motivator that causes someone to speak badly about people can also show up in speech about inanimate objects. At root, it is the same issue and hence governed by the same approach. Delving deeply into whatever we learn is how we discover the fundamental principle that is being conveyed.

The bar is set for us in this area by Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman,² who used to travel to spend Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur with his teacher, the Chafetz Chaim. One year, after the Chafetz Chaim spoke, someone commented that he had given the very same talk the previous year. Rav Elchanan told the person that he was mistaken because the Chafetz Chaim had, in fact, used several different words the previous year.

Imagine being so exacting and deep in your listening and learning. Yet that level is not really so beyond us as it may seem. If you were being trained to fly an airplane or do surgery, no one would expect you to hear a lesson once and then be ready to jump behind the controls or pick up a scalpel. In those situations, there is clearly too much at stake to depend on a single run-through of a lesson. You’d review as much as possible and expect to be thoroughly drilled and tested before you got anywhere near a real application of what you had learned.

It’s amazing, then, to think how casual we can be with our own lives and souls. Is your life not precious to you? Aren’t the stakes very high when you consider how deeply the decisions you make affect your own well-being and the welfare of those around you, in this life, for sure, and maybe for all eternity?

The more we understand what we learn, the more it connects with our inner essence and becomes part of who we are—the more of it we will retain as an enduring feature of ourselves. If you take the time and make the effort to assimilate your lessons, discern the fundamental principle, delve deeply into understanding the reasoning, take up a notebook (or keyboard) and summarize the ideas, that will help you to absorb the message into the very fabric of your being. This is what it takes to acquire wisdom.

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe made a version of this practice the cornerstone of his Mussar instruction. No matter what subject he was teaching, he always encouraged his students to look deeply into matters to see what they could learn from their own experiences—hitlamdut he called that, which can be translated as “self-instruction” or “teaching yourself,” and the clear implication is “from your own experience.” Hitlamdut is how we clarify and internalize what lies at the core of whatever it is we are learning.

Rabbi Wolbe himself wrote about this form of deeper learning: “This is not a single character trait, but a signpost for life of someone who works at Mussar. And if we only did it for this, it would have been enough: if all the Mussar work were to bring us to this self-instruction alone, this would already be a great goal.”³

This practice applies to lessons learned from a teacher, as well as to lessons learned from life experience. In both cases, it is up to us to extract the clear essence from the complexity of the original. When we take that step to clarify, we are not just hearing the lesson, we are teaching it to ourselves. This is how the heart changes.

To return to our example of hurtful speech, it is taught that gossip kills three people: the one who speaks it, the one who listens, and the one about whom it is spoken.⁴ And in your life experience, you are likely to have seen and felt the pain brought on by gossip, because gossip is so prevalent. But have you clarified for yourself the very essence of the prohibition on gossip, and have you taught that lesson to yourself in such a way as to embed it in your heart, to become a part of your human essence? That additional step makes all the difference.

The lessons are there. Do you hear them? And if you do, are they clear to you? Do you want to take them to heart? Then approach learning and growing as requiring that you be conscious about what you take away from the lesson.

We are near the end. It is very important to recognize that whenever you learn something, you should build a process of review and clarification into your plan.

PRACTICE

What did you just learn? Review the lesson and then come up with your own language that synthesizes and captures the essence of this practice, as it is meaningful to you.

Write out your own brief note. You are sure to find that by the time you have completed that brief review and written out the few words that describe this practice, you will know it more thoroughly and deeply than you did when you first read the lesson. That, in itself, is the meta-lesson.