Hasidism: Revolutionary Orthodoxy

Introduction

In my teens and early twenties, I had an older friend and neighbor who worked before I knew him in the Department of Agriculture’s bookstore at its main office in Washington, D.C. He told me that one day a man walked into the store in full Hasidic regalia—black hat, long black coat, sidelocks, prodigious beard. He began pulling books off the shelves, apparently at random, opening them, and praising G-d for whatever he found there. “Blessed be Ha-Shem for contour plowing!” “Blessed be Ha-Shem for shelterbelts that guard the soil from wind!” “Blessed be He for giving us bacillus thuringiensis to fight the pests that destroy crops!”

Irreligious at the time, I must have laughed and shaken my head along with my friend. I realize now, though, that the actions of that Hasid represent an apt if extreme—and possibly pathological—illustration of the essence of Hasidism.

Many non-Jews, and a good many Jews as well, think of Hasidism as quintessentially ultra-Orthodox, the utmost in religious conservatism and punctilious compliance with the Torah. That’s hardly an unwarranted perception. But Hasidism arose as a revolution within Judaism, a reorientation of approach to Judaism. Chief among the things that made it revolutionary were the emphasis on joy and religious ecstasy and the sense of sanctity in the everyday that the bookstore Hasid exhibited.

It has proven difficult to formulate the beliefs and principles of Hasidism into a system; even Martin Buber, the movement’s most renowned academic interpreter, did not do so. Wikipedia comments, “The lengthy history of Hasidism, the numerous schools of thought therein, and the definitive use of homiletic literature and sermons … to convey its ideas make the isolation of a common doctrine highly challenging to researchers. As noted by Joseph Dan, ‘Every attempt to present such a body of ideas has failed.’” Buber argues that Hasidism—like Judaism at large—is less a system of beliefs than a way of life, and that therefore greater understanding of Hasidism can be gained from the legendary tales of its great figures depicting this way of life than from its more conceptual theological treatises. While Gershom Scholem sharply and astutely criticizes Buber’s neglect of Hasidism’s theoretical literature, Buber’s narrative approach serves the present task: Hasidism can best be explained and characterized by telling the story of where it came from, how it arose, and how it grew and evolved into what it is now.

History of Hasidism

Background

First, we must set the stage of the conditions of Eastern European Jewish life from which Hasidism emerged. From the mid-Seventeenth to early Eighteenth Centuries, much of Jewry in Eastern Europe languished in social, economic, and spiritual misery, for two major reasons.

Poland gained control over Ukraine in 1569. The new foreign rulers quickly comprised most of Ukraine’s aristocracy and gobbled up most of its land. Many Polish nobles employed Jews as their estate managers, delegating to them the duty of collecting the Ukrainian tenants’ rent, which the tenants much resented. In 1647, a Cossack of the lower Ukrainian nobility, Bogdan Chmielnicki, launched an uprising continuing for the next two years that rid Ukraine of the Poles, even penetrating into Poland itself. In the process, Chmielnicki and his troops massacred the Jews, whom they perceived as their oppressors’ henchmen. At least 100,000 Jews were murdered (according to Harry M. Rabinowicz’s book The World of Hasidism, nine-tenths of Ukraine’s Jewish population), often through the most vicious, depraved torture; Heritage, Abba Eban’s panoramic history of the Jews, cites contemporary chroniclers who recorded that 300 Jewish communities were destroyed. Those Jews the Ukrainians didn’t kill they sold as slaves to the Turks. The thousands who fled Ukraine and Poland strained the resources of Jewish communities supporting them as refugees.

The Chmielnicki massacres made the Jews of Eastern Europe all the more susceptible to the second cause of their demoralization in this period. In Jerusalem in 1663, a Turkish Jew named Shabtai Tzvi met a fellow young Kabbalist named, in the Sefardi pronunciation he would have used, Natan of Gaza. Possibly under Rabbi Natan’s influence, Tzvi came to believe that he was the Moshiach, the Jewish Messiah, which they both proclaimed publicly in Gaza on May 31, 1665. Calling himself a prophet, Natan penned letters to Jewish communities all over the world heralding the would-be Messiah’s appearance and predicting his victory over the Ottoman sultan, liberating the Holy Land for the Jews.

The news electrified the Jewish world. Followers of the “despised faith,” after a millennium and a half of exile and persecution, at last saw their redemption at hand. Countless Jews sold all their possessions and stored up food and supplies for the journey to the Holy Land. The Turkish navy intercepted Tzvi’s ship on its way to Constantinople, however, and took him prisoner. Ultimately, in 1666, the sultan gave him a choice between conversion to Islam and execution; Tzvi became a Muslim, was made a court official, and was given a state pension. Natan of Gaza pathetically argued that this, too, was part of Tzvi’s messianic mission: to rescue the latent holiness in Islam from within. But Tzvi’s conversion devastated the vast majority of those who had rallied to him.

The Ba’al Shem Tov

Against this background, a child named Yisroel ben Eli’ezer was born in 1700 in the town of Okop in Podolia, a region then in southeastern Poland and now in Moldova and Ukraine. Most of what we know of his early life comes from the legends that sprang up around him. Yisroel was born relatively late in his parents’ lives; he was orphaned young. According to Rabinowicz, an early biography, Shivchei Ha-Besht, records that the town of Okop “put him in the charge of a teacher for instruction, and he made rapid progress in his studies. It was a habit of his, however, to study for several days and then to run away from school. Then they would have to search for him and would find him sitting alone in the forest.” They eventually gave up on formally educating Yisroel, but while working as a shamash, or synagogue custodian, the youngster would stay awake late into the night, poring over religious texts.

Growing into adulthood, Yisroel worked at a variety of jobs. As a teacher’s assistant, he would escort the village children to the schoolhouse through the woods to show them the beauty of nature that he so loved. He also was a kosher slaughterer, kept an inn, and dug clay and lime to sell in the local market. Despite these humble occupations, he managed to marry into a respected rabbinic family.

On his thirty-sixth birthday, Yisroel announced his true vocation as a healer and teacher. He became a ba’al shem, Hebrew for “master of the Name,” a kind of Jewish faith healer who treated the unwell in body, mind, or soul. They did so by writing kamey’os, usually translated as “amulets”—the English word “amulet,” however, means an object whose power is thought to inhere within it. A kamea’ is a strip of paper or parchment with Bible verses inscribed on it; its power comes from the One Whose Word it bears. Yisroel supplemented this practice with a knowledge of the medicinal effects of certain herbs. He traveled the area extensively, plying his healing trade, and people began to seek out his services. But unlike other itinerant healers, Yisroel also provided a message of religious revitalization that lifted his listeners above the tragedies that had befallen Eastern European Jewry in the prior hundred years. The name applied to Yisroel as a healer changed to reflect this special dimension of his vocation: he became the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name.

Key Elements of Hasidism

Although scholars struggle to schematize Hasidism as a whole, we can identify certain specific main ideas of the Ba’al Shem Tov for consideration.

Populism Populism constitutes a very important one. In the Eighteenth Century, rabbis were quite isolated from most of the populace; the present phenomenon of pulpit rabbis emerged only in the last hundred years or so. Rather than directing the religious lives of congregations, rabbis functioned as experts in Jewish law who wrote books and answered questions about it. Each town had a rabbi, with large cities having several, and rabbis also concentrated around yeshivos where they taught. As The World of Hasidism notes, rabbis usually only preached during prayer services two Sabbaths a year, and on those occasions they usually gave expositions of the Talmudic logic involved in solving a problem of Jewish law rather than homiletic guides for spiritual life. The common person felt his or her alienation from the Torah scholars even more acutely in the countryside, where many Jews lived spread out on farms and in rural villages. In such areas far from the centers of Jewish life, rabbis were distant geographically as well as socially and schools were few and of poor quality. “So,” Rabinowicz concludes, “the Torah was a closed book to most of the country folk.” The rabbis, appointed by Jewish secular leaders or by the government, were seen by the masses—and probably saw themselves—as part of the social power structure. Given this elite status and the utmost importance Judaism has always placed on Torah study, the scholars looked down their noses at the unlearned common folk as worthless.

But the Ba’al Shem Tov taught a different scale of values: he said that one didn’t need to be a scholar to gain merit in the eyes of G-d. Telushkin summarizes, “The Besht [an acronym of the title Ba’al Shem Tov] was particularly fond of a Talmudic statement, ‘God desires the heart’ (Sanhedrin 106b), which he interpreted as meaning that for God, a pure religious spirit mattered more than knowledge of the Talmud”; keeping the few commandments one knows out of genuine love for and devotion to G-d means more than a rote adherence to the entire Torah. Jewish Literacy retells a classic Hasidic story perfectly capturing this teaching that Martin Buber also includes, in longer and somewhat different form, in “The Life of the Hasidim”:

It is told of the Besht that one Yom Kippur a poor Jewish boy, an illiterate shepherd, entered the synagogue where he was praying. The boy was deeply moved by the service, but frustrated that he could not read the prayers. He started to whistle, the one thing he knew he could do beautifully; he wanted to offer his whistling as a gift to God. The congregation was horrified at the desecration of their service. Some people yelled at the boy, and others wanted to throw him out. The Ba’al Shem Tov immediately stopped them. “Until now,” he said, “I could feel our prayers being blocked…. This young shepherd’s whistling was so pure, however, that it broke through the blockage and brought all of our prayers straight up to God.”

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The Jewish masses naturally flocked to this message validating their spiritual worth. They were also drawn by the figure of the Ba’al Shem Tov himself, as Rabinowicz observes—he was one of them. He had gained most of his learning independently, at the Yeshivoh of Hard Knocks.

Joy The story of the whistling boy exemplifies a further pillar of Hasidism: joy. “Another ancient Jewish doctrine that was given particular emphasis by the Ba’al Shem Tov,” elaborates Telushkin,

was based on a verse in Isaiah: “The whole world is full of His glory” (6:13)…. Because the world was full of God, the Besht believed that a person should always be joyful. Indeed, the greatest act of creativity comes about in an atmosphere of joy: “No child is born except through pleasure and joy,” the Besht declared. “By the same token, if one wishes his prayers to bear fruit, he must offer them with pleasure and joy.”

This joy results from dveikus, or cleaving to G-d, striving always to be close to Him, which perceiving Him in everything helps. Buber’s “The Life of the Hasidim” provides an example of such elation inspired by seeing Ha-Shem in literally the most quotidian occurrence: “A zaddik stood at the window in the early morning light and trembling cried, ‘A few hours ago it was night and now it is day—God brings up the day!’” The highest form of this joy is religious ecstasy, or hislahavus—Hebrew for “enflaming.” From the Ba’al Shem Tov’s imperative to serve Ha-Shem with joy arose the Hasidic practice of moving the upper body back and forth during prayer called “shakeling,” from the Yiddish verb for “to shake.” Perhaps intended to manifest the hislahavus one experiences in prayer, shakeling also serves to induce it in the first place.

Reflecting its emphasis on joy, music quickly took an important place in Hasidic worship. Some Hasidic tunes, or nigunim, were applied to popular hymns, but many were and are “sung” without lyrics, the singer’s voice alone expressing the love for Ha-Shem that words could never suffice to articulate. The great composers in Hasidic annals include the Ba’al Shem Tov himself; Yechiel Michel, the Maggid (a preacher who delivered the sermons during Shabbos services that pulpit rabbis do today) of Zlotchov, whose haunting tune composed at the Besht’s deathbed is sung in some Hasidic congregations at the Ark’s opening for the Torah reading on the High Holy Days; Aharon of Karlin, who composed a rousing nigun that many Hasidim use to sing the hymn “Kah Echsof” during the third Shabbos meal; the rebbes of Modzhitz; and the late Bostoner Rebbe of New York, brother of the second Bostoner Rebbe. Buber’s “The Life of the Hasidim” attests to the mystical nature of the nigun, citing the account of “one zaddik [who] stood in prayer at the ‘days of awe’ … and sang new melodies, ‘wonder of wonders, that he had never heard and that no man had ever heard …’” Dance is another artistic outgrowth of the Hasidic creed of joy.

A predilection for spontaneity in worship arose from joy’s importance in Hasidism. Hasidim became notorious (and some remain so) for holding daily prayers later than their prescribed times—some because of preliminary meditation to put the soul in a state worthy of communion with Ha-Shem, others because they waited until the spirit moved them. Congregants sometimes shouted in the excitement of prayer, and “[i]n fulfillment of the Psalmist’s ecstatic declaration, ‘All my bones say, Lord, who is like you?’ (Psalms 35:10), worshipers were capable of performing handstands,” as Telushkin relates.

The Holy Sparks Hasidism gives pride of place to the Kabbalistic idea of the “holy sparks,” which teaches that at Creation the Divine light filling the universe “atomized,” as Gershom Scholem puts it in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, into individual sparks, around which physical shapes formed. The Kabboloh calls these shapes klipos, literally “shells” or “husks”; we know them as the objects that make up the universe. The task of the human being and of the Jew in particular is to “look” through the shells, perceive the holy spark in each object one encounters, and elevate it in our minds toward Ha-Shem to reunite it with its source. The Kabboloh considers this process a spiritual rectification of the universe that speeds the coming of Moshiach and the resulting redemption.

Accordingly, Hasidism posits that everything has a latent sanctity that raising the sparks can elicit. This engendered in Hasidism an ethos of what one might call the vernacular sublime: it gave the everyday life of the ordinary Jew a metaphysical underpinning of dignity. A tenant farmer’s plow, a tailor’s loom, a shopkeeper’s ledger were no longer merely equipment by which they earned an often meager living; they now also became instruments in the sacred mission to dedicate existence to G-d.

The doctrine of the holy sparks and the importance of joy produced an anti-ascetic bent in Hasidism. The Ba’al Shem Tov felt that depriving oneself of the permitted pleasures of this world and hence of availing oneself of elevating their sparks leads to sadness, not to the joy he held as essential to devotion to G-d. “No mortification of the urges is needed, for all natural life can be hallowed: one can live it with holy intention,” Martin Buber writes in the essay “Hasidism and Modern Man.” Elie Wiesel’s chronicle of early Hasidism Souls on Fire recounts, “Learning that one of his followers was indulging in the mortification of his body, he took the time to write him a long letter, pleading with him to consider his health and even giving him a few practical suggestions, such as what to eat and what to drink and when.” Some of the Ba’al Shem’s successors in the leadership of Hasidism were ascetics, but this resulted more from the influence of Lurianic or other schools of Kabbalism than from Hasidic ideas.

The Exile of the Shchinoh Another Kabbalistic concept the Besht emphasized, the exile of the Shchinoh, represents a kind of macrocosm of that of the holy sparks. It teaches that G-d’s presence in the physical universe, called the Shchinoh (usually rendered as “Indwelling”), is cut off by the boundaries of the universe from G-d’s transcendent essence, which dwells in Heaven beyond the universe. The Hasid overcomes this division as he or she does the imprisonment of the holy sparks: through perceiving the Shchinoh as belonging to the transcendent G-dhead and intending, in contemplating it, to reunite it with that G-dhead. In “The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism,” Martin Buber presents the Biblical personage of Enoch as Hasidic lore’s model of the adept at this process—"he was a cobbler and with every stitch of his awl, which sewed the upper leather to the sole, bound the holy G-d with his indwelling Glory.” As Buber also notes in “The Life of the Hasidim,” the exile of the Shchinoh correlates to the exile of Israel. Thus, like the elevation of the sparks, the redemption of the Shchinoh from exile will lead to the Messianic redemption. Because of this teaching, as Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism remarks, Hasidim often precede the performance of a mitzvoh with “a formula declaring that this was done ‘for the sake of uniting the Holy One, praised be He, and his Shechinah, out of fear and love.’”

After the Ba’al Shem Tov

The Ba’al Shem Tov eventually settled in Mezbuz, a town in west-central Ukraine, and had built an extensive yet close circle of disciples by the time he died there in 1760. This group, like certain movements in previous Jewish history, came to be called Hasidim. The Hebrew word Hasid is usually translated as “pious,” but it comes from the word chesed, meaning “loving-kindness.”

A good deal of confusion surrounds how the issue of the new movement’s leadership was resolved after the Ba’al Shem Tov’s passing. According to Souls on Fire, some say the Ba’al Shem appointed Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch, his successor while still alive. Some say instead that the mantle passed to the Besht’s son Reb Hersh who, quiet and retiring, bestowed the leadership before long on the Maggid of his own accord; a third story claims that for the same reason Reb Hersh was “deposed” by the Hasidim in favor of Dov Ber of Mezritch. But more authoritative sources differ. Two of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s great disciples, Rabbi Pinchas of Koretzand Rabbi Ya’akov Yosef of Polnoye, record in books of theirs that the Ba’al Shem Tov intended his grandson, the future Rebbe Boruch of Mezbuz, to lead the movement after him. With Boruch entrusted into the care of Rabbi Pinchas, Rabbi Ya’akov Yosef and the Maggid at age thirteen when the Besht died, the Maggid presumably acted as a regent of sorts for him until he came into his own. This is borne out by the fact that Boruch was the first, and among his generation the only, figure referred to as “Rebbe,” the standard title for leaders of Hasidic groups ever since.

Dov Ber of Mezritch cut quite a different figure from the Ba’al Shem Tov. While the Besht labored tirelessly to grow Hasidism and help the needy, he was easygoing in his interpersonal relations, enjoying telling stories and laughing with his comrades. The Maggid of Mezritch was considerably more severe in temperament. A legend tells that one day the Maggid strode from his private chamber, having engrossed himself in who knows what mystical study or meditation, into the Hasidim’s house of study with fevered appearance and blazing eyes, terrifying his followers so much that they all dashed out into the street—except Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev, who hid under a table. “In Mezritch, the climate was one of tension and stress,” Elie Wiesel writes. “People lived on the brink of nervous exhaustion…. The Maggid was feared, and that was how he wanted it.”

Nonetheless, the Maggid was a skilled leader. Like his predecessor, he could relate to all types of people, not allowing his own character to distort his appreciation of the needs of those who came to him. The Maggid himself practiced asceticism, contrary to the Besht’s teaching, to the extent that it damaged his health late in his life. But when a rich man bragged to him that he dined on bread and salt alone and drank only water, the Maggid responded, “That’s no good. From now on, you should eat roast meat and drink wine.” When a disciple inquired later why the Maggid had responded as he did, he answered, “If he, a rich man, subsists only on bread and water, he will think the poor can eat stones.” An accomplished scholar, the Maggid guided the Torah studies of his brightest disciples. “At the same time, and with equal conviction, he showed the simple uneducated people that merely by reciting the prayer Sh’ma Israel, they could be worthy of redemption,” records Wiesel.

The Maggid of Mezritch’s greatest accomplishment was spreading Hasidism beyond its original home turf in the Polish-Ukrainian border country. “During the Ba’al Shem’s lifetime,” Wiesel states, “Hasidism had been one man; the time had come to make it into a movement.” Dov Ber sent certain followers to certain cities and towns to create Hasidic centers there. Wiesel relates that of the three hundred disciples ascribed by tradition to the Maggid, thirty-nine founded Hasidic dynasties. “Both excellent strategist and administrator, the Maggid succeeded in a few short years, twelve to be exact, in establishing and firmly implanting a Hasidic network spanning all of Eastern Europe.” Eventually, about half of all Eastern European Jews were Hasidim.

The Third Generation of Leaders

Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev, probably the most colorful of those who emerged as leading figures of Hasidism after the Maggid of Mezritch died in 1772, earned a reputation as the Jewish people’s staunchest advocate before Ha-Shem, always portraying them in a positive light. A Jewish coachman decided one day to save time by saying his morning prayer while repairing a wheel on his carriage. When Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev passed by, he saw the coachman flexing his tefillin-bound arm in his work and exclaimed, “How great is Your people Israel, who even in the midst of their most mundane labor think of You!” On another occasion, he came across a freethinker publicly eating on Yom Kippur, a fast day. The Berditchever broached the subject diplomatically, “Perhaps you have forgotten that today is Yom Kippur?”

“No,” the man replied, “I know that it’s Yom Kippur.”

“Then perhaps you have forgotten that eating is forbidden on Yom Kippur?” Levi Yitzchok continued.

“No, I’m aware of that.” Levi Yitzchok then blessed the Jewish people “for they would rather announce their sins to the whole world than tell a lie.” Sorrowful for his people’s oppression, he would preface the Kaddish prayer with his own supplications on their behalf. At times he went so far as to put G-d on trial during prayer services for the exile’s undue harshness. Souls on Fire narrates that at one such trial during the High Holy Days, he cried, “Zol Ivan blozn shofar!”—“Let Ivan,” that is, the typical Russian, “blow the shofar,” let him acknowledge Ha-Shem’s kingship, since his people fares better than that which Ha-Shem has chosen.

Elimelech of Lizhensk, like his teacher the Maggid of Mezritch, “could simultaneously preach joy and practice asceticism … put his hands into the fire and oppose mortification,” as Elie Wiesel characterizes him. “Publicly he followed the path traced by the Ba’al Shem, while privately exploring labyrinths of pain and suffering.” Like the Maggid of Mezritch, he mentored several future leaders: “At his school, the Tzaddikim of Apt, Sassov, Lublin, Ropshitz, Riminov, and Kozhenitz learned that they must be available to their followers at all times and in all matters.” And again like the Maggid of Mezritch, he knew how much to demand of whom. “Rather than teach Kabbala or theology to his Hasidim,” Wiesel elaborates,

Elimelekh gave them a zett koton: a short list of little things to do every day, when rising in the morning, when praying, when engaging in business, when being alone or with others. It is a seventeen-point program on how to be a good Jew … [ellipses Wiesel’s] with a minimum of effort…. Hasidim needed simple answers to not so simple questions.

Shneur Zalman of Liadi broke the mold of Hasidism by extolling the mind along with the heart and soul—though unsurprisingly, as his native Lithuania was Eastern Europe’s bastion of Torah scholarship. “According to Rabbi Shneur Zalman,” explains The World of Hasidism, “the intellect consists of three kindred faculties, Hokhmah (‘Wisdom’), Binah (‘understanding’), and Daat (‘knowledge’)…. The prophets and the rabbis taught that ‘God desires the heart’ and Rabbi Shneur Zalman stressed that God also desires the mind. Reason was elevated above emotion …” From the Hebrew initials of the three components of the intellect that Shneur Zalman described came the name of his brand of Hasidism: Chabad. It would also be called Lubavitch, after the Russian town where his son Dov Ber settled. Lubavitch historically has warned against overreliance on the rebbe, against allowing oneself to live one’s spiritual life vicariously through him rather than living it for oneself with the rebbe’s help when needed; ironically, many Lubavitchers came to believe that the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was the Moshiach. Some still do, controversially so because he died in 1994. Shneur Zalman codified his teachings in the book Tanya, Aramaic for “it was taught,” all but required reading within Chabad.

Rebbe Boruch of Mezbuz felt that Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s take on Hasidism distorted his grandfather the Ba’al Shem Tov’s teachings, and relations between them were accordingly strained. Although Hasidism no longer had a single leader organizationally, his peers considered Rebbe Boruch the foremost figure of Hasidism in their time, and many of them often visited him to pay their respects. He understandably took pride in his descent from Hasidism’s founder, and Wikipedia says that he claimed to have inherited supernatural powers from his holy forebear. Rebbe Boruch was also the first of a few notable rebbes to suffer from depression. The responsibility of his position might have weighed heavily on him; Elie Wiesel cites a remark of his: “There are two possibilities. Either God is king of the world and I am not doing enough to serve him, or He is not, and then it is my fault.”

The Office of the Rebbe

But what exactly is a rebbe? The term comes from the same Hebrew word as the term for a regular rabbi, rov. Literally, rov means “master”—someone due respect and deference. Rebbe, however, means “my master,” an inflection indicating the intimate relationship of a Hasid with his or her leader.

The ideal characteristics and function of a rebbe derive from the notion of the tzaddik promulgated by the Ba’al Shem Tov. In Hebrew, tzaddik simply means “righteous” or “just,” but the Ba’al Shem Tov applied this term to what he lauded as the optimal religious personality. A tzaddik is one who has unified all facets of oneself for the service of G-d, to which one directs them at all times and with all one’s energy. The tzaddik enjoys a unique relationship with Ha-Shem as a result of this spiritual achievement, enabling the tzaddik to intercede with Ha-Shem. The tzaddik has, as it were, a pipeline to G-d, and consequently can serve as a conduit to G-d for others; when he does, the tzaddik becomes a rebbe. Thus, to a large extent, “cleaving to G-d” entails cleaving to the rebbe. Yet as much as the Hasidim need their rebbe, the rebbe needs his Hasidim to fulfill his Divinely assigned purpose. A popular story in Hasidic circles, only partly a joke, tells of a Hasid who came to his rebbe breathless with excitement and said, “Rebbe, Rebbe, last night I had a dream that I became a rebbe!” “Very interesting,” the rebbe conceded. The next day the man came to his rebbe again, gasping, “Rebbe, I dreamed again that I became a rebbe!” This time, the rebbe replied with a curt “That’s nice.” When the man said the same thing on the third day, the rebbe told him, “Listen, when the Hasidim start dreaming that you become a rebbe, then you should get excited.”

Aside from overseeing the synagogue and house of study (sometimes one and the same) of his particular “court,” as Hasidic groups are sometimes called, and teaching his followers, a rebbe’s main duty is to receive requests for assistance from them—usually by interceding for them through prayer, though some might involve more concrete effort on the rebbe’s part. The difficulties in question could be spiritual, emotional, physical, or financial. Many rebbes employ an assistant called a gabbai to help them administer the court. The root meaning of gabbai is “treasurer,” but the synagogue official that coordinates who does what during prayer services is also called a gabbai. Hasidim with a request often approach the rebbe through the gabbai, who manages access to him. A Hasid usually presents his or her request to the rebbe in a written note called a kvittel.

Depending on the group, the Hasid might accompany the request with a pidyon, Hebrew for “redemption”—a monetary donation for the rebbe’s counsel or prayers on his or her behalf. Critics of Hasidism cast aspersions on paying and accepting fees for religious guidance, even though non-Hasidic rabbis receive compensation for their services. The practice of pidyonos was never universal, moreover. The rebbes of the School of Psichah, of Zvhil, and of Ger have traditions of not accepting money for their duties as rebbes, working at other employment to earn their keep.

In time, the great majority of Hasidic courts became dynastic; the office of rebbe was passed down from father to son or from father-in-law to son-in-law. Some Hasidim opposed this development, arguing that it went against the movement’s egalitarian, populist spirit. Rebbe Boruch of Mezbuz, however, acquiring his status as rebbe by descent from the Ba’al Shem Tov, established a precedent for hereditary leadership. Hasidism’s evolution into dynastic leadership was probably inevitable: it offered a mechanism for continuous, stable leadership without acrimonious power struggles, although it has not entirely succeeded.

As hereditary leadership became a fait accompli, rebbes and their families came to be viewed as a kind of Hasidic royalty. The rebbishe families predominantly married among one another, and yichus—illustrious ancestry—became a source of esteem. Some rebbes even took on material attributes of royalty. Rebbe Yisroel of Rizhin epitomizes this trend; the great-grandson of the Maggid of Mezritch, Rebbe Yisroel inherited tremendous wealth. His enormous home was practically a palace, where meals were served on gold and silver plates. Elie Wiesel in Souls on Fire characterizes the Rizhiner as little more than a spoiled “nepo baby,” despite conceding that every major Jewish figure of the period who met him loved and revered him. In The World of Hasidism, however, Harry Rabinowicz describes him, “Tolerant and kindly, he held the humblest individual in high esteem. ‘When a Jew takes his Tallit and Tefillin and goes to the Synagogue to pray, he is as important to-day as the Besht and my [great-] grandfather the Maggid were in their day,’” Rebbe Yisroel said.

The Misnagdim

Popular though Hasidism was, it made enemies as quickly as it spread, and the office of the rebbe constituted a major objection to the movement by the conventional rabbinate. Who were these upstarts, many without a day’s yeshivoh attendance, whose authority rapidly rivaled or superseded theirs? Hasidism’s acceptance of the unlearned, furthermore, exposed it to the charge of fostering neglect of Torah study. Many non-Hasidic Jews found the spontaneity and exuberance of Hasidic worship unseemly, to which the Ba’al Shem Tov replied in his wonted form of a parable, as told by Rabbi Telushkin in Jewish Literacy: “A deaf man passed by a hall where a wedding reception was being celebrated. When he looked through the window, he saw people engaged in exultant and tumultuous dancing. But because he could not hear the music, he assumed they were mad.”

The Hasidim early on adopted the prayer liturgy called Nusach Sfard developed by the celebrated mystic Rabbi Yitzchok Luria. Luria had an Ashkenazi father and a Sefardi mother; the product of different Jewish traditions, he produced a liturgy that incorporated elements of both the Ashkenazi and Sefardi liturgies, although despite its name Nusach Sfard more closely resembles the Ashkenazi rite. The Hasidim’s use of the new rite necessitated that they pray amongst themselves rather than with non-Hasidim using Nusach Ashkenaz. Non-Hasidic authorities consequently rebuked the Hasidim for sowing divisiveness in the community.

But a deeper reason that had little to do with the movement itself probably underlay the specific bones of contention against Hasidism: the Shabtai Tzvi debacle had made rabbinic authorities wary of unconventional, innovative approaches to Judaism. To them, any deviation from traditional rabbinism with its insistence on total adherence to, and therefore complete knowledge of, the minutiae of Jewish law threatened to completely derail Judaism.

The Hasidim called those against their movement Misnagdim—quite simply, “opponents.” The Misnagdim launched a diligent persecution of Hasidism. The Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Eliyahu Kramer), the foremost rabbinic authority in Ashkenazi Jewry, led the charge by excommunicating Hasidism’s members twice in the late Eighteenth Century. Misnagdim falsely accused Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi of espionage to the Russian government, leading to his imprisonment in 1798 and 1800. Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev was hounded out of rabbinical positions in several towns by Misnagdim until settling in the town he takes his epithet from. Both he and his teacher the Maggid of Mezritch refused to retaliate against the Misnagdim, unwilling to deepen the rancor between the two sides. Other Hasidim didn’t hold themselves back. Ya’akov Yosef of Polnoye wrote trenchant indictments of the rabbis of the time and, as Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism remarks,

Abraham Kalisker was the leader of a group of Hasidim who were in the habit—in the words of one of his Hasidic friends, who thoroughly disapproved of the practice—“of pouring scorn on the students of the Torah and the learned, inflicting all manner of ridicule and abuse on them, turning somersaults in the streets and market places … and generally permitting themselves all sorts of pranks and practical jokes in public.”

Nonetheless, such militancy against their opponents seems much more the exception than the rule among Hasidim.

The hostility between Hasidim and Misnagdim gradually resolved during the first half of the Nineteenth Century thanks to two factors extrinsic to the conflict itself. First, the Russian Empire in 1804 allowed any congregation to build its own synagogue and choose its own rabbi. The government no longer had much of a hand in Jewish communal life, and so could not be used to enforce attendance of Misnagdishe synagogues and the use of Nusach Ashkenaz in public prayer, or to deny rabbinical posts to Hasidim. The other factor was the rise of the Haskoloh, the Jewish Enlightenment of the late Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Centuries—a sharp increase in engagement with secular learning among European Jews that often went hand-in-hand with abandonment of Orthodoxy. Both Misnagdim and Hasidim opposed the Haskoloh, and their shared defense of piety against spreading religious skepticism and laxity caused a rapprochement, or at least détente, between the two sides.

As part of its reaction to the Haskoloh, Hasidism began to place more importance on Torah study. Hasidism had never opposed learning, but simply adjusted its place in the Jewish value system. The World of Hasidism comments, “It is a popular misconception that the Besht disapproved of study. The fact is that he put a different emphasis on study. It was not simply an intellectual exercise. He believed that the Torah … should transform the student. For man ‘must study Torah to become a Torah.’” The Ba’al Shem Tov himself was quite learned, and other early Hasidic notables already discussed were famous as scholars of Talmud and Kabboloh. Hasidism produced works of Jewish learning such as Ya’akov Yosef of Polnoye’s books, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi’s Tanya, his grandson the third Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Tzemach Tzedek, Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev’s Kedushas Levi, and the Torah and Talmud commentaries of the Gerer Rebbe known as the Sfas Emes. If the Haskoloh threatened the survival of the Torah, rebbes reasoned, then Hasidim needed to “become Torahs” all the more.

The Nineteenth Century

Not long after the “cult of the rebbe,” as its detractors called it, emerged as the norm, a reaction against it arose within Hasidism. Ya’akov Yitzchok of Psichah, a disciple of the renowned Seer of Lublin, spearheaded it. The Seer fit the popular stereotype of a Hasidic rebbe: charismatic, his reputed supernatural abilities holding his followers in awe. He gained his nickname because, although nearly blind, he could see into the state of the souls of those around him.

Ya’akov Yitzchok wanted to move Hasidism in a different direction. He left Lublin for the town of Psichah and propounded a form of Hasidism sometimes described as “rationalistic,” which stressed that zeal for G-d need not rely on miracles to sustain itself. Wiesel relates that while he “remained faithful to the person of the Master,” the Seer of Lublin, he also said that the Seer “was a great teacher in spite of his miraculous powers” [italics Wiesel’s]. Like Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ya’akov Yitzchok envisioned the rebbe as a guide, not a king. He even eschewed the title of “rebbe” for himself, despite forming his own following; he referred to himself merely as “the Jew,” a devotee of Torah like any other. His disciples and subsequent generations of Hasidim added “Holy” to this moniker—“Ha-Yehudi Ha-Kodosh” in Hebrew, in Yiddish the “Yid Ha-Kodosh.”

True to its nature as a countercurrent of Hasidism, the School of Psichah did not adopt hereditary leadership. The Holy Yehudi was succeeded by his disciple Rebbe Simchoh Bunam of Psichah. Rebbe Bunam, in addition to a religious leader, was a man of the world who had seen a bit more of it than most Hasidim: a lumber merchant by trade, his business often took him to Danzig, which is now Gdansk in Poland but was then a German city in East Prussia. He later became an apothecary. If his travel and his scientific training broadened his horizons, his occupations enabled him to relate to the average working stiff. “He played chess and cards,” says Souls on Fire; “he debated with the emancipated and the atheists, the so-called enlightened…. [H]e was even known to go to cabarets occasionally, for the purpose, of course, of bringing sinners back into the fold and onto the road toward salvation.” Hasidic leaders since the Ba’al Shem Tov had engaged in outreach to grow their followings, but Rebbe Bunam’s efforts might be the first instance of kiruv, of trying to draw unobservant Jews to religious observance.

Rebbe Menachem Mendel of Kotzk in turn succeeded Rebbe Bunam. As 7Up used to advertise itself as “the un-cola,” the Kotzker was the un-rebbe, pushing the School of Psichah’s reformist impulse too far for many, including some of his own followers. “He rebels against anything that is established and revered,” Elie Wiesel writes. Rebbe Mendel disdained the bathos and sentimentality that he felt had crept into Hasidism. Restraint (though not elimination) of emotion became the order of the day in Kotzk. When he asked his son what he felt at some momentous occasion, the son answered that he wanted to recite Shma’ Yisroel. “Did you?” the Kotzker further inquired. “No,” the son said. The Rebbe approved. Rebbe Mendel didn’t only preach against overreliance on himself to his Hasidim, he actively avoided them, secluding himself for the last twenty years of his life. He was “too much of an individualist to accept the notion that a man, whatever his title, could resolve the problems of his fellow man,” declares Wiesel. “You cannot live, you cannot fulfill yourself by proxy; no one can take your place.”