Mussar in the yeshivas: from Salanter's circles to Slabodka

R. Israel Salanter began in Vilna in the 1840s from a plain observation: a person can know the whole tractate on deception and cheat in his shop. His remedy was regular reading of works on character — aloud, in a melody, half an hour a day, at dusk, when it is easier to be honest with oneself.

Resistance was strong. Yeshiva heads feared that an hour of mussar would be taken from the Gemara, and that a young man occupied with his own soul would start measuring himself instead of learning. The argument ran for decades and by the end of the nineteenth century reached open conflict in the yeshivas.

What won was not preaching but the timetable: mussar entered the schedule. In Slabodka R. Nosson Zvi Finkel, the Alter, set it on a particular footing — gadlus ha-adam, the greatness of man: the student must see how high he has been placed and be ashamed to act beneath it. Novardok taught the reverse, shiflus, man's smallness; the two approaches argued with each other, and both grew from Salanter.

Slabodka produced the generation of yeshiva heads who rebuilt that world in the Land of Israel and America after the First World War and the Shoah. The Alter moved part of the yeshiva to Hebron in 1924 — five years before the Hebron massacre.