[Avodah] critique of mussar

[David Riceman]

I wrote:
> A friend from Jerusalem stopped by last week, and we chatted for a few 
> hours.  One of his remarks struck me as worth repeating here.  He told 
> me that when he reads mussar sefarim he gets the impression of small 
> mindedness; the concerns are very petty.  Whereas when he reads Rabbi 
> Kook "ze mamash marhiv et hada'at."
I told my friend was that he wasn't the target audience.  My friend is 
(hard as this may be to conceive) even older than I am.  He's a 
grandfather who runs his own business.  During the flourishing of the 
mussar movement the target audience was teenage boys who intended to 
spend several years intensively studying Torah and ignoring everything 
else.  Books that are "marhiv et hada'at" are precisely those to be 
avoided when you're trying to become a specialist; they're more 
appropriate for another stage in life.

The solution I should have suggested is not to avoid mussar sefarim, but 
to find the general principals and apply them to his own situation.   Of 
course some books are more useful for that than others....

Incidentally the person who made the remark about Ramhal was on the 
mark.  My friend mentioned (using different terms) that he found 
Ramhal's outlook too Cartesian to take seriously.

David Riceman