Chess as Mussar

Well, now that I have made a sufficiently random statement, I should explain. My Shana Aleph in Israel, there was a friend of mine in my yeshiva that was an excellent chess player. He was enough better than anyone else at the yeshiva that he lost a game once the entire time he was there. In any case, I was mediocre at best, though I was familiar with the game, and even some basic combinations, forking, pinning, and many of the basic mating combinations. My friend pointed out to me one thing I was doing in the game that I needed to stop doing.

I remember it well; after being told that the game was over (since he had a forced checkmate in 6 moves, or something ridiculous like that,) he explained to me that I needed to stop moving peices purposelessly. When I played a game of chess, I had no plan, and did not accomplish anything with most of my actions. My moves were frequently counter-productive or lost me pieces. Before moving, I had to simply think of both the short and long term goals I had in the game, and then attempt to find a move that advanced some or all of these goals.

R. Yisroel Salanter once said that chess is the perfect game for a yeshiva bochur to use to relax, because it forces them to check all of the possibilities. To attempt to add to this, it also forces a person to understand what goals are, and what it means to persue a goal, by checking these possibilities. If the ultimate goal of your chess game is not to mate the other player, it is unlikely that you will end the game by accomplishing that. It may be that on the way, you have sub-goals, such as capturing a peice, or avoiding checkmate yourself in order to survive long enough to win, but each of these goals must be subordinate to the overall goal.

In life, a person has many goals. Some of the ones everyone I know shares are goals such as feeding and clothing ones' self, and one that all of the people I let near me share is staying clean. These, however, are not overall goals, but rather sub-goals. No one would tell you that their purpose in life is to be clothed. What remains for us then, is to understand what our ultimate goal is in lifeª, and what sub-goals we need to accomplish to get closer to this. Once this is done, we can begin to examine our possible moves, and choose the ones that will help us achieve these goals.

ªThis, of course, is laid out by The Rambam explicitly inj the fifth perek of the Shmonah Perakim, on the Mishna which says "yehiyu kol ma'asecha l'shem shemayim," and points out that this too is simply commentary on "v'ahavta es hashem elokecha b'kol le'vavcha"