My Endorsement
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Kindness, discipline or truth: one of these drives sits at your core. A great 20th-century thinker explained how to find yours and build your life around it.
Are you an Abraham, an Isaac or a Jacob?
Each of the Patriarchs embodied a core drive that still lives inside every one of us. Abraham embodied chessed, kindness and the drive to give. Isaac embodied yirah, a deep sense of purpose and reverence for what is higher than yourself. Jacob embodied emet, a commitment to truth. Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, one of the great Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, taught that one of these three is the root of who you are, which makes them a fascinating personality test, and one that comes with a lifelong plan for building greatness on the answer.
You carry all three of these drives because you inherited them from your forefathers. According to Rabbi Dessler, one of them is your root, the deepest motivation that shapes how you think and act, while the other two work in its service. Two people can look equally kind and honest from the outside while being driven by entirely different engines. One gives generously and insists on doing it truthfully; the other is driven by truth and ends up sharing it generously with everyone around them.
Rabbi Dessler presented these ideas in 1943, in Gateshead, England, to a generation shaken by World War II. Of everything he might have told people living through that devastation, he chose to tell them that each of them carried the same greatness as their forefathers, and that their first task was to discover it. He wrote that the starting point of a person’s spiritual growth is to “recognize and reveal this dominant quality,” develop it fully, and stay faithful to it, and only afterward to work on everything else.
Build up the good that’s already in you, so that by the time you reach your weaknesses, you’re facing them from a place of strength.
The starting point of a person’s spiritual growth is to recognize and reveal this dominant quality, develop it fully, and stay faithful to it, and only afterward to work on everything else. Build up the good that’s already in you, so that by the time you reach your weaknesses, you’re facing them from a place of strength.
Your first task is to figure out which drive sits at your core, what the Jewish tradition calls the root of your soul. Each root shapes the way you see the world.
If your root is kindness, you see the world horizontally, through the people around you. When you walk into a room, you’re attuned to the expressions on people’s faces and the chances to be helpful, and before you’ve stopped to think about it, you’re already imagining how you could meet someone’s need.
If your root is reverence, you see the world vertically. Your gaze turns inward to your own inner world and upward toward something higher than yourself. You feel you were put here with a purpose you need to live up to, which can make you demanding of yourself and quick to assess how you’re doing. Even people who don’t think of themselves as religious often recognize this root in their drive toward perfection.
If your root is truth, you’re inspired by seeing past the surface of things to what’s really going on. You’re wary of extremes that distort the picture, and you love gathering small pieces of truth from books, conversations and the world around you, then fitting them together into the larger picture.
What you admire in other people usually reflects what matters most to you.
One of the simplest ways to find your root is to notice which qualities you most admire in other people, since what you admire usually reflects what matters most to you. You can also look back at your own choices as if you were watching someone else, or ask the people who know you best what they see in you. Once you’ve found your root, start noticing where it shows up across your relationships, your work and your inner life.
Natural strengths are often inconsistent. If your root is kindness, you may find that you’re generous with people you like and much less patient with those who challenge you. You might love helping strangers while finding the steady, everyday giving your own family needs much harder to sustain.
Developing a trait works like developing any skill. A naturally talented musician still needs years of practice and a good teacher. In the same way, you need to exercise your strength on purpose, especially in the places where it doesn’t come easily.
Over time, aim to understand your strength so well that you could teach it to someone else. Suppose your root is truth. Early on, your honesty might come out blunt, and people may feel criticized when you only meant to help. As you grow, you learn when to speak and how to frame a hard message so the other person can actually hear it. Eventually you can coach a younger colleague or one of your children through the same skill, because you understand exactly how it works.
The world will constantly pressure you to be more like everyone else. If your root is kindness and you work in a competitive office, you may hear that generosity makes you look soft. If your root is reverence, friends may tease you for holding yourself to such high standards. Staying faithful to who you are takes real courage and a quiet faith in the way you were made.
When you hold steady through that pressure, you come out stronger. The people around you, especially your children, will learn to be themselves largely by watching you remain yourself.
Only now, after fortifying your strength, does Rabbi Dessler turn to the areas you may be weak in. He writes that you shouldn’t be satisfied with your strength alone, because every good trait is planted in you as a seed. The lifelong goal is to help all of them grow so that you become a complete person, with your core identity always at the center.
The key is to approach your weaker traits through your root. If your root is kindness, discipline and honesty may not come naturally, but you can learn to value them as tools that let you help people in a more reliable and truthful way. If your root is truth, you can grow in kindness by recognizing that sharing what you’ve discovered with others is itself a form of giving. Your weaker traits grow strongest when they’re put to work for the person you already are.
The Torah shows this in Abraham. His root was kindness, yet at the binding of Isaac he reached the heights of reverence, and Rabbi Dessler explains that even this reverence remained rooted in Abraham’s kindness.
It also helps to notice that many weaknesses are a strength pushed too far. Rabbi Dessler describes how unbalanced kindness can lead you to give too much or in the wrong way, while unbalanced reverence can turn into self-criticism so harsh that it stops you in your tracks. Often the trait you most need to develop is the one that keeps your natural strength in balance.
Finally, you won’t be starting from scratch. The medieval sage Rabbeinu Yonah taught that a person who fully masters one trait finds it far easier to acquire the others. By this point, you have the confidence that comes from real progress and a method of growth that you know works for you, and you can bring both to the areas that come harder.
An inheritance that’s already yours
Whatever your connection to Jewish life, this framework belongs to you. The kindness of Abraham, the sense of purpose of Isaac and the honesty of Jacob are part of who the Jewish people are, and at least one of them is alive in you right now.
