I attended an all-day Mussar retreat in New York yesterday. (If you asking, “What’s Mussar?” take a look at my article in The Jerusalem Report magazine from a few years back.) But here was my take-away, and it comes from Reb Eliyahu Lopian (1876-1970) in his book called Lev Eliyahu, which is a collection of talks edited by his students as Mussar lessons.

It’s this: the heart knows. In a chapter titled “Faith,” he writes this definition of Mussar: “Making the heart feel what the intellect understands.” To which I take that there are circumstances in life, indeed everyday events, that our heart gets. We feel the poignancy of an encounter, whatever it might be. A smile from a sales clerk, a question that shows concern from a loved one, a wagging tale of excitement from your pet dog. Mussar leaders like Reb Lopian didn’t want to take those moments for granted. As God-believers, they also saw in those moments a connection with the divine. And each evening, as they journaled in a practice called chesbon ha-nefesh, Hebrew for “an accounting of the soul,” they would take note of such encounters during their day. Or so I assume.

Amazingly, a similar practice is going on these days, not just in the Jewishly observant world, but in more liberal circles as well. That’s what I and 14 others were doing sitting around a table in the basement-social hall of a synagogue next to Gramercy Park yesterday. And my take-away was simply that the heart knows. Understanding that has all kinds of implications.