Adjusting Our Lenses for Rosh HaShana
“When you come to the land that Hashem your G-d is
giving to you … you must place a king upon yourselves …”
(Deut. 17:14)
Good malchut has been robbed from us. By good malchut I mean (more…)What am I?
“I’m having a hard time figuring out my personality and some of the personalities of my grown children, can you help me; please”
Sent from my (blotted out) Wireless (stop advertising here with your doohickey)
Two thoughts come to mind. My initial, more technical answer would be that you and/or your children may have the chesed personality. This means that you may not have any quality that is overbearing in your personality, and you should possibly look to your secondary middah and/or mold your chesed middah to get trained in a field of your choosing, (I elaborate on this advice in a previous post). However, I think a more general, all encompassing answer is really in order. When trying to figure out someone’s middot/qualities/personality, you must really observe them carefully, and avoid making some very common mistakes. You cannot select one small quality from someone’s personality and extrapolate it to be more than it really is. You must really observe his or her mannerisms and tendencies; you must look more deeply, beyond just initial observations or actions that one, for example, would check off on a checklist of technical inquiries, if one were to be doing research (I hope to explore this later; this is is a major difference between the two upper sefirot of chochma and binah, between analytical/gathering factual information and intuitive sensing/seeing beyond the facts). To ascertain someone’s true personality may take time and thoughtful inspection. I recall describing the yesod personality in great detail to a mother of six and I mentioned that yesods think very much “out of the box”. The mother immediately pointed to her oldest daughter and said, “Oh, (blank) is very muck like that.” The daughter was a later chesed (defined here) who, yes, did have some nice thoughts of her own, but no where near the big, often revolutionary thoughts of a yesod-type. There is nothing inherently wrong with not having the yesod middah, and one is not “only” a later chesed – each personality has equal positive and negative aspects. However, it is important to be accurate as to which middah one possesses; it makes a very big negative impact if one is mis-typed, similar to the detrimental impact young boys and girls receive when they are told that there IQ is very high or very low. It just doesn’t help. To respond to you directly, it may take time and a careful reading of The Seven Ways to guide you to your or your children’s true middot. May you find the answer soon and use your respective insights to fund happiness and growth. IBPosted in
eBook Now Available!
The eBook version of The Seven Ways is now here! Just click here to explore. Compatible with all major eReaders. Did you know that you can download an eReader onto your computer from Kindle for free? Rabbi BPosted in
Why We Keep Kosher
Why We Keep Kosher When we read about a mitzvah in the Torah, our contemporary brains usually conjure up a spiritual, behavioral/psychological, or sociological reason for the commandment. It is easy to explain that certain seemingly obscure (more…)Posted in
The Seven Ways For Women
Along with a team of wise women, I am composing a Seven Ways book specifically for women. The book will relate the seven different personalities to the unique experience of women and highlight their unique struggles and paths to victory through the stories of seven great women of the Torah (Bible). As such, I am compiling letters and monologues from women who have been inspired and positively impacted by the Seven Ways system. They will be published (with permission) on this website and in the new book. Please send your writings and ideas for a title to Rabbi Bailey at Questions (General). They are always treated as confidential until expressed consent is given. Current title suggestions include: The Seven Ways: Women’s Ways The Seven Prophetesses The Seven Women Please send in your feedback!Posted in
How do Your Parents Relate to God? A Beautiful Binary – Ekev
How do Your Parents Relate to God?
A Beautiful Binary
I’ve found that people generally conceive of their relationship with G-d as the same as the relationship that they had with (more…)Posted in
The More Things Change, the More They Don’t Stay the Same
Parsha Print-Me
Va’etchanan
There is a very common tension that is found in religious groups, organizations, and even marriages that appears in many forms, but inevitably has the same subtle subtext underneath. It is essential for one to be aware of this tension, as we spend a great deal of time dealing with it. When a business or non-profit initially (more…)Posted in
Perception & Projection
When you study the Torah, you inevitably find sources for insightful ideas or studies that have been gathered by human investigation and research. This is most notably true of psychological concepts. In this week’s Torah portion, Moshe (Moses) brings (more…)Posted in
Other Peoples’ Middot
Question: “Do other people in the Torah have special middot in their personalities, or only the seven mentioned in your book?” A great question. The short answer is ‘yes’, other people can be seen as having the seven middot as well, but we must understand exactly how. The seven great Biblical figures that are singled out by our sages each have one specific middah/attribute that underscored the events and actions that make up their lives. Each go through a sequence of seven meta-stages that highlight the middot/sefirot. Other people in the Tanach (set of canonized scriptures) quite clearly exhibit middot that resemble our middot, namely, combinations of the seven in primary and secondary middot (such as chesed–tiferet or hod–gevurah). For example, Yitro (Jethro) can be seen as having the yesod–netzach middah, because he walks into Moshe’s (Moses’) court (Exodus 18), firmly and bluntly educates (netzach) Moshe on how he should rearrange (yesod) the way he set up his court system. Korach (Numbers 16) can be seen as an unhealthy gevurah–netzach as he vehemently attacks (unhealthy gevurah) Moshe, using morality- and religious-based (netzach) pretexts. Devorah (Deborah, from the Book of Judges) seems to exhibit the middot of netzach–yesod, because she is knowledgeable enough to be the head decisor of Jewish Law (netzach) and fills the political leadership position of Judge of Israel (yesod). We can use our understanding of the seven different middot to better apprehend the events in the Tanach, to more clearly understand the way in which people communicate and understand better why they do what they do, especially when they do things we wouldn’t do. May we all merit to find the parts of the Torah that speak to us the most, and the ones that speak to us less should still be as sweet as honey. Rabbi BaileyPosted in
The Top 4 Ways to Read The Seven Ways
In this post I discuss: Secrets of the book: I included hidden nuggets of information within the interviews; also, how you can positively impact yourself tremendously from the book. I realized that there are several different ways to read The Seven Ways that (1) people find most beneficial and (2) (more…)Posted in
Rabbi Danny’s three-part question
Rabbi Danny wrote a three-part question:
(1) Are bad character traits such as the classic anger, jealousy, the desire for physical pleasures, the desire for honor, etc. found more in specific personalities, or are they totally independent? (2) How does one tell a chesed, aside from process of elimination? (3) Seeing that approximately half the world are chesed personalities, it would seem to be extremely important to know specifically about the particulars of each secondary middah for cheseds. Which secondary middos make a “later chesed“?Answer to Part II & III (see Part I below):
(2) The way to tell if someone is a chesed is by (A) checking his or her mannerisms and preferences, and (B), which relates to your third question, is to try and check out their secondary middah (quality). Someone who has the attribute of chesed will naturally be more mild-mannered and less uptight when dealing with people in their environment, compared to other personalities. Cheseds are more willing to brush off the irritation of external stimuli than are gevurahs, by comparison. For example, if there is a couple consisting of a chesed-type and gevurah-type that throws a party and the party becomes overly crowded and a somewhat unruly, a common gevurah susceptibility is to become perturbed at the developments, and to attempt to restore order to the event. The gevurah may be tempted to allow his- or herself to become uptight and he or she may end up ruining some of the fun atmosphere of the party. A typical chesed response, in contrast, would be to be somewhat upset about the developments, but to not attempt to rectify the events fully. They tend to ‘let go’ and not get strongly involved. Another way to tell if someone is a chesed is that cheseds shy away from accepting people’s big plans as reasonable decisions and feel uncomfortable when urged to buy into others’ elaborate dreams. In addition, cheseds can be identified as people who feel that they are always searching for something to make themselves unique and special. Because chesed by nature is a middah that has no overbearing characteristics you will often find that the chesed’s secondary middah is his or her most prominent quality. This makes them a ‘later chesed’. A “later chesed” is someone who has a personality combination that is later in the sequence of the seven chesed personalities. The seven chesed personalities are in a specific order, chesed–chesed, chesed-gevurah, chesed-tiferet etc. all the way down to chesed-malchut. The later cheseds are later in this order. As such, I refer to people who are chesed-chesed as earlier cheseds. I prefer to identify these groups as two distinct subsets of the chesed middah, due to the fact that they each exhibit somewhat different characteristics. (Click here to learn more about some of the differences). You can ascertain if someone is a later chesed if they do not seem to have any overbearing characteristics in their temperament, but have some of another middah, i.e. a secondary middah, which shows up less than a primary middah. For example, if the person in question dabbles in some artistic area, but he or she does not have the personality of an artist, they may be a chesed-tiferet. It does seem to be ‘process of elimination’, but when one puts together these basic characteristics, cheseds will be readily discovered. IBAnswer to Part I:
Dear Rabbi Danny, Yes, those three ‘primary’ bad character traits do show up in certain personalities more than others. I cannot answer you fully right now, as it would take multiple pages to bring the full explanation and proofs. However, I am in the process of writing an article/chapter “Chachma, Binah, Da’at: The Building Blocks” that goes through this topic in full detail. The short if it, though, is mostly straight forward and quite intuitive: Malchut and gevurah types are very stong-minded, and concerned with self-preservation, so they are quite susceptible to gaavah and ka’as, arrogance/self-righteousness and anger. Netzachs unexpectedly are susceptible to their own version of the same, as they are naturally intelligent, thinking-oriented people and often feel that they are much smarter than others. The self-righteousness and contempt soon follows. Cheseds (especially chesed-cheseds ‘earlier cheseds’) and Hods are susceptible to tayva the desire for physical pleasure. Later cheseds (i.e. someone who is chesed-X where X is any middah (trait) except for chesed) can become quite cynical. I will explain why this relates to tayva in the aforementioned article. People with the middot of tiferet and yesod have issues with kina, as kina does not simply mean jealousy, but the use of the faculty of the imagination (this is based on Rashi, Malbim, and Maimonides). In truth, tiferets can be very jealous, but the key trait here is that they are susceptible to focusing on contrived expectations and imagined future events, hoping for unrealistic dreams to come (I discuss this issue and how to deal with it extensively in The Seven Ways). Yesods are, by nature, not jealous whatsoever. However, they continually imagine ‘what could be’ and desire to change, improve, and reach the goals in their imagination. We are all susceptible to these bad character traits, but certain people are susceptible to some more than others. May we all know our weaknesses in order to improve ourselves. Take it easy, Rabbi BaileyPosted in
Don’t We Have All of The 7?
A question that is frequently posed to me:“Don’t we have all of the seven middot (qualities, skill sets) that you describe, in our personalities?”
The answer is: yes, we do have all of the middot in our being. However, we have some of the middot in our personalities more than others. We each have all of the middot in that we are all capable of executing acts that are in line with each of the seven types of skill sets. For example, we are all able to paint attractive portraits, which is in line with the tiferet middah, or read more here!