Righteousness is a good place to start

Never Done: Played Xbox (360)

My cousins Geof and Patty are fun and generous people. They show up to parties with home-infused blueberry vodka, magnificent and not inexpensive Alaskan king crab meat (once a year), and (usually music-related) video games. They also make time for people -- for fun and for not so fun, They brought a telescope to Maine this Fall, and showed me Saturn's rings in the clear night sky, and they found the time to be close with my mom when she was sick. To the extent that I am also a fun and generous person, I've definitely learned how to be that way from them. This Christmas they showed up with a game called Dance Central, on the Xbox 360, and we all got to bust out our best moves, and try to dance along with avatars, while a motion detector detected how well we did, and scored us. It's hard to explain, but it's a little like Dance, Dance Revolution meets America's Got Talent. In your living room. With web-cam sensors instead of judges. And family members cheering you on. Or competing against you. Or taking videos of you and posting them to your Facebook page (sorry Kenny.)

This week's mide (middah) is Righteousness: What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. I've been told that this ideal is found in every major religion. The golden rule, do unto others, love your neighbor as your self -- you know what righteousness is. As I hung out with my family -- uncle, aunt, sister, partner, cousins, and first cousins once removed on both sides of my family -- dancing against -- and for each other, I noticed that on the whole, we treat each other pretty well. We're not a kid-glove clan -- we have all developed our share of thick skin in reaction to sharp tongues and especially to a family pattern of needing to be right. But at the same time, we don't want to be treated with kid gloves either, so we do a pretty great job of treating each other the way we want to be treated.

And when we don't, the rest of us try to step in. Some of us had a tough talk after dinner -- we are trying to figure out how to give some much-needed support to someone in the family who isn't being treated the way they should be. It's too delicate to go into on this public forum, but this was also something we had never done -- spoken together, not just two or three people at a time, but many of us, putting our heads together, to try to solve something big. Every time I noticed us slipping into a blame game, I tried to catch myself, and think about righteousness, and what it would feel like if the shoe was on the other foot. And what I could to to shift the way I was thinking. Do unto others.

It's late and I have to go get stuck in the airport, so this won't be as developed as I would normally like, but I would like to do some more thinking about how an ethical structure like one that Mussar provides could help us through this situation. I will start writing about it in my private Mussar journal, but for now, I think righteousness is a good place to start.