“The Chesed Personality”

I’ve been reading a book called Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar by Alan Morinis (Boston: Trumpeter Books, 2007). In a section on hesed (or chesed,  חֶסֶד , loving-kindness) on pages 189-190, he discusses “the chesed personality.” “The Mussar tradition points out that some people are moved to acts of chesed whenever they are confronted by someone who is in need of their help. Others, however, don’t wait for that sort of opportunity to arrive on their doorstep, but rather search out any chance to act generously in ways that sustain others” (p. 189). Those who do loving-kindness “run after the poor,” as the Sages put it.

Morinis notes that Abraham is the paragon of chesed, illustrated by his hospitality for the three strangers. Morinis points out that the words “run” and “hurry” are used four times in the short story as Abraham rushed to get food for the strangers. He was “infused with the spirit of chesed” so that “this quality defined his very outlook on the world” (p. 189). He also cites the example of a certain rabbi’s students who sought to do three acts of loving-kindness each day---which meant that they often had to go off and look for people to help (p. 190).

Another example is the well-known passage Micah 6:8, where God commands us to “love chesed”---to love loving-kindness. Morinis writes that we can look at our religious life as a kind of score-card wherein we check off good things we’ve done. But the way of Micah is “to stretch ourselves to sustain one another, and the most important dimension of that behavior is to awaken your heart to love the very act of caring for the other” (p. 190).


Respectfully using Morinis’ words for Christian practice, I can think how this active form of loving-kindness, wherein we really love loving-kindness, would be an excellent goal for this Lenten season. Perhaps we could search our hearts for the ways we aren't very loving, even as we meanwhile extol the beauties of agape. Perhaps we could set personal goals of helping sustain a certain number of people each day or each week, even if our good deeds are never acknowledged, and develop this kind of personality.