Jewish Meditation - Meditation in The Musar Movement

Meditation in The Musar Movement

The Musar (Ethics) Movement, founded by Rabbi Israel Salanter in the middle of the nineteenth-century, encouraged meditative practices of introspection and visualization that could help to improve moral character. Its truthful psychological self-evaluation of one's spiritual worship, institutionalised the preceding classic ethical tradition within Rabbinic literature as a spiritual movement within the Lithuanian Yeshiva academies. Many of these techniques were described in the writings of Salanter's closest disciple, Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv. Two paths within Musar developed in the Slabodka and Novardok schools.