[Avodah] Yahrtzeit of Reb Yisroel Salanter is this Shabbos

[Prof. Levine]

The following was sent to me by Neil Harris who 
asked the I send it out.  Note "connection" 
between 13 Middos and Benjamin Franklin.

"As the yahrzeit of RYS is coming up on the 25th 
of Shvat,  I've written a little pamphlet  about RYS's 13 Middos:

http://uberdox.blogspot.com/2012

Note also that it says on this page

My thanks to Rabbi Micha Berger for his essay and 
chart regarding the 13 middos.  Available here: http://tinyurl.com/6ow2ghr"

At http://tinyurl.com/6ow2ghr it says

One of the more amazing pieces of history of the 
Mussar Movement was that Rav Yisrael Salanter, 
despite his own antipathy for Haskalah 
(Enlightened Judaism), promoted a seifer written 
by a maskil, Rabbi Mendel (Leffin) Satanover. 
Admittedly, Reb Mendel Satanover was from the 
early Haskalah and was himself a fully observant 
Orthodox Jew. However, if you think of how 
Orthodox history portrays Moses Mendelsohn, about 
whom the same could be said, and Rav Yisrael’s 
embracing and republishing R’ Mendel’s 
“<http://hebrewbooks.org/32473>Cheshbon haNefesh” is astounding.

More so, Rav Yisrael Salanter must have been 
aware of the book’s original source. Cheshbon 
haNefesh describes a particular way to keep a 
mussar journal, keeping track in one’s progress 
in various middos. This format is seasonal, 13 
middos to work on each season, and each week of 
the season focus is placed on one of those 13. 
One therefore maintains each week a 13×7 graph, 
one direction marking off the days of the week, 
the other marking off that season’s middos, 
creating boxed in which marks can be made 
counting incidences of success or failure at each middah.

The plan is taken from Benjamin Franklin’s 
autobiography. Malcolm Shosha posted the relevant 
chapters to Avodah, 
<http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/vol11/v11n010.shtml#03>here. 
The differences are twofold. First and more 
fundamentally, Franklin intended to create a list 
of virtues. R’ Mendel Satonover is clear that he 
is offering 13 sample middos to demonstrate the principle.

Please see both URLs for more.  YL

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20120216/a435b591/attachment.htm>