As he’s toured around the country talking about his newest book, Alan Morinis likes to say he wrote a book about Shabbat that also isn’t about Shabbat, despite his book being called The Shabbat Effect.
“The part of it that is not about Shabbat is a larger frame, and that frame is the interplay of religious structure,” said Morinis, the founder of the Mussar Institute “The idea of a structured practice that is not deliberately or not exclusively a spiritual practice, but a religious practice – and the spiritual impact of that when it’s approached with a certain intentionality, and that’s what the Shabbat effect is: That by practicing a formal Shabbat, that can have an enormous impact on inner life that is lasting the other six days of the week as well.”
Living Mussar, the Twin Cities’ Mussar group, is bringing Morinis to Minnesota for events on April 29 and 30. The event is the first big speaker event Living Mussar has hosted in its current iteration. Executive Director Julie Dean said that Morinis was in Minnesota in 2015 as the Mussar program was launching.
“We had a Shabatton, and I saw Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews all in one space together,” Dean recalled. “And it struck me how powerful Mussar can be in bringing people together.”
The events next week are co-sponsored by: Adath Jeshurun, Bet Shalom, Beth El, Beth Jacob, Mayim Rabim, Mount Zion, Shir Tikvah, and Temple Israel.
Dean said that The Shabbat Effect is looking at Shabbat and Mussar as two cornerstones of Jewish tradition.
“Mussar can really uplift Shabbat, and Shabbat can uplift Mussar,” Dean said. “Ideally, it doesn’t matter where someone practices. They could have a very structured Shabbat practice, or they may be exploring Shabbat for the very first time. So it creates an inroad into both practices, and it adds this extra vibrancy to both of them. It’s a cool way to integrate these two parts of our Jewishness.”
The new book, like Morinis’s other books on Mussar, came out of his own lived experiences.
“I found my way to Mussar out of my own spiritual journey. Nobody introduced it to me; I went looking and looking and looking, and then came upon this tradition,” he said. “I found it was what I was looking for, although I didn’t know what I was looking for. But it worked.
“Then as my own Mussar teacher said to me: ‘You’ve got an obligation to share with other people.’”
Morinis’s own Mussar journey had been largely a path of personal spiritual practice, and he hadn’t been interested in how it connected to the rest of the infrastructure of the Jewish world.
“I evolved and my own connections to things evolved, and I began to see something which my teacher had explained to me years before but I didn’t want to hear it and wasn’t ready to hear it, which is the interplay of the religious and the spiritual, which I began to explore more and more, and that then became a substance for the book,” he said. “That interplay of structure and beginning to realize, it takes exploration. It’s not obvious, and the way it’s presented to us is not even attractive or appealing for the most part, to most people. That the traditional form of Jewish practice of certain kinds is a very interesting entry point to recognizing why, for centuries, that structure has been a fundamental part of Jewish life.”