What does it mean to be spiritually healthy?

The Rambam was a physician as well as one of our greatest sages. In his introduction to Pirkei Avot, he draws a remarkable parallel between the health of the body and the health of the soul, describing the sages themselves as "doctors of the soul."

But spiritual illness presents a unique problem. When something distorts our character or the way we see the world, it can also distort our ability to recognise that anything is wrong.

In this next part of our journey through Pirkei Avot, The Chief explores what it means for the soul to function as it was created to function, why we may need help seeing what we cannot see for ourselves, and how Avot offers us a path back to spiritual health.

Drawing on the Rambam and the great commentators on Avot, we discover a vision of spiritual health that reaches from our character and the way we see the world, to the very heights of what a human being can become.

KEY QUESTIONS

• If spiritual illness can distort our ability to recognise it, how do we know when something is wrong?

• We accept that the body sometimes needs a doctor. Why do we assume the soul does not?

• Anger, arrogance and envy are usually treated as faults. What changes if we understand them as symptoms?

• Is there a connection between becoming a better person and becoming a calmer one?

• The Mishnah says that the human being is created in God's image. The Sforno reads that not simply as a description, but as an instruction. What is it asking of us?

Understanding that feelings of guilt come from the depth of the soul, can empower us to transform the discomfort they bring into a catalyst for personal change and new beginnings.

This understanding comes from understanding the deeper meaning of teshuva, which is often mistranslated as repentance. Repentance comes from the Latin for penitence, meaning remorse and regret. The same root gives us penitentiary. A prison. Time served for what you have done.

That is not what teshuva means. Teshuva means return. During Elul, the month of teshuva, we are then faced with a difficult question: if teshuva is return, what is it we are returning to?

The distinction is not just semantic. It changes what a person is actually being asked to do at this time of year, and what they are being asked to believe about themselves.

The parsha of Nitzavim is read every year in the days before Rosh Hashanah. Drawing on this parsha, Pirkei Avot, the Ramban, the Rambam and others, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein follows that question from guilt through to redemption, and asks what the discomfort has been trying to tell us all along.

• Guilt tells us something is wrong. Why can't it tell us what is right?

• Is the wrong a person has done evidence of who they are, or evidence of the distance they have travelled from it?

• If our deepest nature is already good, why would we need commandments at all?

• If the mitzvot express who we already are, why do they so often feel like rules imposed from outside?

Inner strength is needed to succeed in everything in life.

But how do we build the strength we need?

Avot gives us high-impact tactics for this. And more than that, it offers a profound understanding of the nature of life itself that can give us the strength we need to overcome all the obstacles in our path.

Courage is usually defined against fear. In the parsha of Vayelech it is defined against weakness, which makes courage a matter of strength. And that turns an abstract virtue into a practical problem. Where does a person actually get strength?

The parsha sits at a moment of handover. The forty years in the desert are ending, and Moshe is giving way to Yehoshua. A people who have had everything provided for them are about to enter a land they will have to fight for and then run themselves. Two words carry the whole transition, stated three times here and repeated another four more at the opening of the book of Joshua. Chazak ve'ematz.

In our lives, the stakes are more ordinary rather than epic. We set out to build families, earn a living, become the people we want to be, and we meet resistance we did not expect. Resistance from other people, from circumstances, and from our own character.

Drawing on Pirkei Avot, the Malbim, Rashi and the Maharal, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein works through the practical answers to dealing with fear and anxiety, and then deeper to what the Mishnah says about the nature of this world.

• If courage is the opposite of weakness rather than the opposite of fear, what have we been calling courage all this time?

• We are told to be strong. What use is that instruction to someone who does not feel strong?

• Which is harder to stand against, the people in your way or the parts of yourself that are?

• The soul, before it enters this world, meets no obstacles and no friction at all. Why is that not the better arrangement?

• What would change if the resistance in your life turned out to be the point of it?