Musar: Spiritual Growth through Ethics and Character Development

The teachings of Musar provide a spiritual path that centers on a deep awareness of our personal impediments to behavior that reflects our soul's true nature, and providing a practice to transcend these impediments. One of the central texts of the Musar tradition, Mesillat Yesharim, written in the 18th century by Rabbi Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, introduces us to this practice. Read with a new, 21st century approach and commentary by Rabbi Ira Stone, we can recover this spiritual path for us as contemporary Jews. The goal of this lecture is to introduce the musar tradition, this particular text, and musar as a practice to help us live more closely aligned with our soul's capacity for goodness.