Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2017 book:

* ….the trajectory of history did not lead in a straight line from religion to secularism, “darkness” to “light”: religion is as much a part of the modern world as it was of the medieval. As much as religion typically claims to stand for tradition, even the most seemingly “orthodox” or “fundamentalist” forms of religion in the modern world are themselves products of their age. Just as secularism was incubated in the womb of religion, so religion since the eighteenth century is a product of its interaction with secularism.

The southeastern corner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was certainly an improbable place for a “modern” religious movement to be born. Yet it was there, starting sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century, that small circles of Jewish pietists coalesced around rabbis who would come to be called, in Hebrew, tsaddikim (“righteous men”) or, in Yiddish, rebbes . From these modest beginnings emerged a movement that eventually named itself Hasidism (“piety”). The name referred not only to the traditional virtues of piety that the movement espoused but also to a new ethos of ecstatic joy and a new social structure, the court of the rebbe and his followers, his Hasidim , a word formerly meaning “pious men” but now also “disciples.” …could commune with the divine. They signified this relationship to God with such terms as devekut (“ecstatic union”), ha’alat nitzotzot (“raising of sparks”), and avodah be-gashmiyut (“worship through the material”). Focusing primarily on prayer rather than study, they developed new techniques for mastering mahshavot zarot (“alien thoughts,” or distractions, typically of a sexual nature). Rather than ascetic withdrawal, they emphasized simha (“joy”), seizing such thoughts and elevating them to pure spirituality. Above all, Hasidic theology emphasized divine immanence—that is, that God is present throughout the material world.

* It is not surprising that a new religious movement could take root in Poland. The Polish state of the eighteenth century was a “Commonwealth of Many Nations”—which meant also of many religions. Approximately 40 percent of its more than eleven million inhabitants in 1760 were ethnic Poles. The rest were Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Belarusians, Lithuanians, Letts, Estonians, Germans, Tatars, Armenians, Italians, Scots, and Jews, each with their own language, customs, and beliefs. Religions included Roman Catholicism, Eastern (“Greek”) and Armenian Orthodoxy, Ukrainian (“Greek”) Catholicism (the Uniate Church), several varieties of Protestantism, Islam, and Judaism. This religious and ethnic pluralism in fact led to a comparatively high degree of religious toleration in Poland, where there was never a war resulting from religious strife, no mass trials of dissidents or mass executions of “heretics.” As we shall see, Jews benefited greatly from this relative toleration.

* Up until the twentieth century, Hasidism was, in a profound sense, a men’s club. For some men, perhaps threatened by women’s growing role in Jewish culture, Hasidim’s virtual exclusion of women may have been one of the attractions of the new movement.

* The Besht’s dynamic, ecstatic experience, in which the mystic’s soul is merged with God, led to the concept of divine immanence, which he taught to his disciples and which became a hallmark of Hasidic thought. Having experienced union with God, the Besht realized that earthly existence was a mere illusion. In reality, “there is nowhere devoid of Him”—that is, God’s presence suffused all being. Everything offered a path to communion with the divinity. This fundamental insight was the source of other basic tenets of Hasidic doctrine, such as worship through corporality, rejection of asceticism, divine providence, and the positive role of evil in the world…God’s presence pervades everything: thoughts, actions, objects, events—all aspects of human experience. The obstacles and barriers separating our world from God are an illusion…

* The ultimate spiritual objective of achieving communion with God—devekut—does not require separation from the material world, but rather a profound engagement with it. Take evil, for example. One must recognize the appearance of evil in the world for what it really is. It should be perceived as a tool of God to perfect humans and their world by bringing them to adhere to God: “evil is the seat of good.” It is by experiencing evil that we learn to recognize and appreciate the good. Evil has a function but no independent, demonic existence.

* In the earliest years, Nahman demanded of would-be disciples that they confess all their sins to him. Later, this was replaced by a unique practice of daily hitbodedut , or “lonely meditation,” that involved verbal “conversations” with God, in which the disciple was to pour out his soul in longing and contrition.
The spiritual life of Bratslav is suffused with an awareness of God’s transcendence—that is, one’s distance from God. This theology contrasts sharply with the tradition of the Besht according to which God is immanent, present everywhere. In contrast to the Ba’al Shem Tov, Nahman experienced and modeled for his followers the painful struggle to attain the divine presence. At the same time, he recognized the paradox that the transcendent God is to be found everywhere, but His immanence remains out of reach.

* Both song and dance played an important part in Nahman’s own spiritual life and have remained a key part of his legacy. While the Hasid was to spend an hour each day in brokenhearted conversation with God, the rest of the day was spent making every effort to live in joy. Even foolishness was permitted, Nahman taught, if it led one to break through the clouds of melancholy.

* In a less psychological age, theology and psychology were only partially separable from one another. But Nahman explored his affective states intensively and drew profound religious lessons out of them. He learned to throw himself entirely upon God’s mercies, to cry out from a deep place of brokenheartedness, and thus to begin again, from within the heart of each crisis, to long for God and to come back into His presence. The unique character of Bratslav Hasidism is fully intertwined with these accounts of the master’s inner struggles, particularly in his youth. Whatever difficulties you may undergo, Bratslav teaches, the master has already suffered those and worse, overcoming them all. As you go through life, you can have confidence that the rebbe is always with you, supporting you in your struggles, ever prepared to pull you back from the edge of the abyss.

* that the chief subject of Nahman’s teachings is Nahman himself, the single true tsaddik of his generation. Indeed, according to Bratslav tradition, he is the final great tsaddik to appear in the world before the advent of the Messiah.

* The mystical core of Nahman’s teachings lies in a series of stirring evocations of the mind’s ability to transcend itself, rising ever higher until it reaches a state of oneness with the mind of God. Although on the face of it this seems similar to the Besht or the Maggid’s strivings for devekut, the process prescribed by Nahman is significantly different. He offers a series of dialectical exercises, the mind ever stretching out to embrace and comprehend mysteries that are beyond it. As each question is resolved, a new and higher one arises to take its place. This chain of challenges draws the mind ever upward, leading it into levels of truth or reality of which the ordinary mind is completely unaware. The discovery of the divine mind and absorption within it are the culmination of this great effort of stretching the human brain.

* Alongside this impassioned exercise of the mind, there is a strain within Nahman’s teachings that denies the value of intellectual quest altogether, longing for simple faith and unquestioning outcry to God. A single sigh, if offered from the heart, he taught, can be worth more than all the great edifices of intellectual construction. Although himself well-versed in the classics of Jewish philosophy, Nahman forbade them to his students, claiming that you could see in a person’s face whether he had ever studied Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed . Such philosophical approaches to Judaism were the work of the forces of evil. He sometimes spoke about the need to leave the rational mind behind altogether, to act like a fool or a madman in devotion to God.

* …as opposed to the doctrine of the tsaddik who goes up to heaven to bring down divine blessings, Nahman descends into the void to redeem those souls who have fallen there. Only he can confront the deepest paradoxes for which there are no answers. And since the void is the place where there is no language, Nahman developed a theory of wordless music—the Hasidic niggun —that can express what language cannot…

* The final years of Nahman’s life were beset by the tuberculosis that took his wife’s life in 1807 and his own three years later. He sought the advice of physicians, but then condemned them as mere agents of the angel of death.

* [Shneur Zalman] seems to have operated with the conviction that he was responsible for the entire Jewish population in Russia, thus setting the stage for Chabad’s later public activity, which culminated with the last rebbe whose influence spanned the entire Jewish world.

From the New York Review of Books:

Four elements were at the center of the Hasidic sensibility. These elements were given different meanings and permutations in subsequent developments, and the weight of each of them differs from one Hasidic court and school to another, but they define what could loosely be considered the core of the Hasidic innovation.

The first foundational element affirmed divine immanence in all dimensions and aspects of reality—in human actions and thoughts, in material objects, and in animate forms of being. God is not a separate and transcendent entity that has to be approached by a flight from the lower material world; rather, God’s essence dwells in the here and now, and the encounter with God consists of the conscious realization of his veiled immediate presence.

The metaphysical meaning of divine immanence was given different interpretations among the second and third generations of Hasidic masters. At the more extreme end of the spectrum was the position that the world we live in is a mere mirage, obscuring an ultimate unity in which only God exists. This view, mainly articulated by Shneyr Zalman of Liady—the founder of Chabad and the most systematic Hasidic thinker—put at the center of religious life the full conscious realization of God’s exclusive and all-encompassing being. Other more prevalent versions of God’s immanence didn’t depict the world as a mere illusion, but rather asserted that every particular entity draws its vitality and existence from the essence of God that dwells at its core.

The idea of God’s immanence had precedents in earlier strains of Jewish mysticism and thought, but in Hasidism it became a dominant theme and entailed far-reaching human and existential implications. One important implication was the principled rejection by Besht of the ascetic practices that were prevalent at the time in Central and Eastern Europe. The ascetic mindset is anchored in the assumption of an inherent tension between body and soul, matter and spirit, in which the denial and repression of bodily urges is a precondition for saintliness. With its theology of divine immanence in the material world, Hasidism rejected the metaphysical dualistic foundation of asceticism, thus denying the holy war on the material. As the authors of Hasidism stress, the anti-ascetic posture of the Hasidic movement wasn’t consistent. The appeal of asceticism is very strong in pietistic traditions and it resurfaced in various Hasidic trends, but fighting this very powerful religious tendency toward asceticism was one of the central religious callings of the Besht.

The anti-ascetic stance implied as well a deeper change in what might be termed the “normative mood.” Ascetic circles tend to adopt and cultivate a severe melancholic attitude as a safeguard from temptation and sin. The psychological flag has to be always at half-mast, since happiness is associated with the spontaneous breaking of boundaries. The Hasidic movement from its inception adopted joy as the preferred human attitude. One of the most creative figures in the history of Hasidism, Nahman of Bratslav, who was himself prone to bouts of depression, considered sadness and melancholy to be inherently sinful. Depression has transgressive potential since with it comes depletion of value, and people who feel they have nothing to lose might turn nihilistic.

…In the case of Hasidism, the shift toward joy had an impact on the most elemental layers of the religious stance; it cultivated a new Jewish type of personality.

* The second fundamental element of the emerging Hasidic sensibility, intimately attached to the element of divine immanence, was the call for worshipping in the material world (avoda be-gashmiyut). This idea enlarged the sphere of religiously meaningful acts to include mundane secular activities as well as rituals and properly ordained religious laws. The line between the sacred and the profane was blurred; every activity performed with the proper consciousness can become a meaningful religious encounter.

In prayer, for example, a person might find that his thoughts are wandering very far from the appropriate devotional intention. He can be seized by what were termed “alien thoughts” (machshavot zarot), which denote erotic fantasies, a possibility that even the most devout cannot fully escape. Such unsettling states of mind were traditionally dealt with through attempts to repress and avoid them.

In line with his metaphysics of immanence, the Besht offered a radically different devotional path, recommending that one dwell in the fantasy rather than helplessly combat it. Since God’s presence is all-encompassing, including in human desires and mental states, by delving into such alien thoughts the worshipper can “uplift them” by connecting the particular passion that he is experiencing to the larger divine animating force that is present in them. With the new call for worship in the material realm, even such embarrassments of the flesh might be embraced as religiously meaningful.

* These two dimensions of Hasidic teaching—God’s immanence and worship in the material world—can be perceived as constituting a mode of this-worldly mysticism, an affirmation of the here and now. This sensibility appealed to neo-Hasidic thinkers such as Martin Buber, who saw in it a path to reenchanting the world in opposition to the spread of technology and instrumental reason. Hasidism presented an openness to revelation while encountering what seemed to be the most mundane matters; for Buber and others Hasidism put at its center a continuous possibility for wonder.

* The third fundamental element at the core of Hasidic teaching—its notion of a mystical state of cleaving (devekut)—grew out of its ambivalent response to the previous teachings of Kabbalah, the mystical Jewish esoteric tradition…. The ambiguous Hasidic attitude toward this vast esoteric learning was expressed in a mystical orientation that asserted that the state of cleaving to God—devekut—is attained by wholehearted inner concentration that is attuned to God’s presence in all being. It is not dependent on or achieved by knowledge of a metaphysical system that is possessed by an esoteric elite.

* The Hasidic ideal of devekut aimed at cleaving to the divine immanent presence in the world. Such a mode of consciousness stood in tension with the scholarly tradition of Talmudic learning, which involved the study of intricate and subtle legal distinctions. In a statement attributed to the Besht, a scholar is advised to interrupt his learning of Talmud in order to attain a higher state of mystical devekut. It was said about a Hasidic master that when he studied a page of Talmud he would contemplate the white spaces between the black letters. The white color that encapsulates the spectrum of other colors seemed to constitute a preferable focus of meditative practice than the particularized legal material of Talmudic discourse articulated in the black letters. Prayer and study became indistinguishable, since they were both consumed by an ecstatic practice of a concentrated mystical cleaving.

* The resistance to Hasidism shaped two distinct cultural and communal camps in Eastern European Jewry—the Hasidim and the Mitnagdim (literally opposers). The difference between them was significant enough that they developed into contrasting stereotypes: the severe, scholarly, and legally pious Mitnaged, in contrast to the joyful, religiously ecstatic, and warm Hasid; one puts at the center of his worship the study of Torah and meticulous observation of the law while the other embraces prayer and religious intimacy as his core mode of devotion.

* One major target of criticism for those who opposed Hasidism was the fourth fundamental dimension of the innovative core of Hasidism, and the least appealing of its teachings—the central role it ascribed to the rebbe (the tzaddik) in the lives of his followers. This dimension, which had been absent in the teaching of the Besht and his earliest students, was developed by the third generation of Hasidic teachers and became the most defining feature of Hasidism. The rebbe was mythologized as a living channel of God’s bliss to the world. In certain Hasidic communities no meaningful decision—be it marriage or a commercial venture—is made without his blessing, approval, and advice. The role of the rebbe, who galvanized and cemented the loyalty of his followers, shaped among other things the hierarchy and rituals of the court.

* Since its inception Hasidism has generated a creative and imaginative body of texts, ideas, and practices. It has given rise to some of the most profound and sometimes exotic thinkers in the history of Jewish thought, persisting into the middle and second half of the nineteenth century with figures such as Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbits and Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin. With the expansion of modern secular movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Hasidism adopted a deeply conservative posture in its attempt to safeguard its followers from their corrosive impact and to secure its own continuity. The movement closed its ranks and managed to survive the historical and cultural travails of the twentieth century. Yet this impressive success had its cost. Fear of diminishing loyalty has constricted its inner creative resources. In today’s Hasidism the rebbe is dominant, but other aspects of the movement have mostly receded to the margins. Its successful strategy of combating outside influences might well prove to be its undoing.