Character as a Discipline to Be Trained

Mussar, a Hebrew term meaning ethical instruction or discipline, names both a body of classical Jewish ethical literature stretching back to medieval works such as Bahya ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart, and a specific, structured practice of deliberate character refinement most fully systematised by Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Lithuanian Mussar movement he founded in the nineteenth century, which treated the middot, the personal character traits such as humility, patience, honesty and generosity, as skills to be trained through sustained, deliberate practice rather than qualities a person either happens to possess or does not. The Mussar method as Salanter and his successors developed it typically has a practitioner focus on one specific middah, character trait, at a time, often for an extended period such as a week or a month, studying relevant classical texts addressing that trait, formulating a personal phrase or teaching to repeat and internalise, and keeping a form of accounting, a written record of specific situations across the day in which the trait was or was not successfully expressed, a self examination practice bearing real structural resemblance to modern cognitive behavioural and habit tracking techniques developed independently more than a century later.