[Avodah] Not livid with anger

[David Riceman]

This requires a longer answer (maybe next week) but here are some rashei 
prakim.

My impression is that the Rambam removes anger from his normal scheme of 
the golden mean because of "kol hako'es k'ilu oved avoda zara" (see the 
enlightening essay by David Shatz called "Maimonides' Moral Theory" in 
The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, especially pp. 174-180, where he 
discusses how the Rambam deviates from the Aristotelian doctrine of the 
mean).  IOW when a typical person gets angry the what his gut is 
thinking "nothing is as I would wish it to be" (see The Collected 
Reprints from Sing Out! vol. 1 p. 30) rather than "nothing is as God 
would wish it to be".  If he saw himself as helping to execute God's 
plan his reaction would be more practical than a useless outburst.

Micha Berger wrote:
> So, if anger is not the appropriate emotion when dealing with injustice,
> particularly injustice meted out to others, what is? What is it I'm
> supposed to be feeling when expressing anger at those young 20-somethings
> who couldn't give up a seat for a woman in her third trimester?
>   
Indignation, followed by an internal "what can I do to change this?"
> 1- Is the yeitzer hatov defined as responding with thought, or as
> responding with the right middos?
>   
Here is where it gets complicated, since you are trying to harmonize 
different opinions in mussar.  For the Rambam the yetzer hara is the ego 
(see MN I:2).
> Related:
>
> The Gra in Even Sheleimah refers to sheviras hamiddos and fighting
> middos, without ever specifying middos ra'os in particular.
The Gra in Even Shleima essentially restates R Haim Vital's opinion in 
Sha'arei Kedusha Sha'ar 2.  RHV uses philosophical terminology to label 
kabbalistical concepts, which leads to a great deal of confusion.  You 
can glean his definition of yetzer tov and yetzer ra from Sha'ar 3, 
which, unfortunately, is written allegorically and which I, at least, 
find hard to decode.
>  Also, in
> Igeres haMussar (a/a/a Ohr Yisrael ch. 10), RYS opens "Haadam chafshi
> bedimyono, ve'asur bemuskalo." -- switching to translation for the rest
> for legibility -- "His unbridled imagination draws him misrchievously in
> the way of his heart's desire without yir'ah for the uncertain future --
> the time when Hashem will examine all his affairs."
>
> Both appear to be identifying the yeitzer hatov with seikhel.
>
> And yet, RYS also writes of tiqun hamiddah, changing the middah
> (typically through hergeil) into something positive.
There's a machlokes between Aristotle and Hume about whether the 
intellect controls the emotion, or visa versa.  I find RYS's writing 
provocative, but too 19th-century-Germanic-flowery to think I understand 
it, but I do think I understand the writings of his student, the Alter 
from Kelm.  For him the point of mussar is to change the Humesean human 
("ayir pere adam yulad") into an Aristotelian human.
> More starkly contrasting is REED's model of nequdas habechirah, in which
> he lauds moving the nequdah over to the point where good deeds need not
> require conscious thought. Better to not need seikhel to come to the
> right choice, be such that it happens preconsciously!
>   
Now you're mixing apples with oranges.  REED, as far as I recall, never 
mentions the nekudas habehira in the context of emotions.
> 2- Is the ideal, particularly WRT ka'as? Is it the Rambam's middah
> beinonis or the Orkhos Tzadiqim's case-by-case some middos are tavlin,
> good in small amounts, others are more like the basar? Or is it total
> eradication?
>
> The Rambam himself appears to take both sides. I explore this in
> <http://www.aishdas.org/asp/2007/10/anger-and-the-golden-mean.shtml>.
> The Rambam, Hil Dei'os 1:4 introduces the concept of middah beinonis for
> each dei'ah, and gives ka'as as one of his examples. And yet in 2:3,
> the Rambam writes "veyeish dei'os she'asur lo le'adam linhog bahen
> beinonis... vekhein ka'as"!
>   
I've never studied Orhos Tzaddikim.  See David Shatz's essay, which I 
mentioned above, about the Rambam.
> And then I suggested a possible combination, that the chassid is bending
> over backward because he's the one working to fix the middah, training
> it like a vine on a trellis (to borrow a mashal from the Rambam).
>   
The problem with that is that even a tzaddik does that when he has a 
problem.  The answer I once gave, in an unpublished essay, is that a 
hassid goes out of his way to combat potential genetic and environmental 
influences, while a tzaddik does not.

David Riceman