Hasidism

This study explores an important Hasidic manuscript rediscovered among the papers of Abraham Joshua Heschel at Duke University. The text, first noted by Heschel in the 1950s, is a collection of sermons by the famed tzaddik Judah Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger (d. 1905). These homilies are significant because they were transcribed by one of his disciples, in many cases capturing them in the original Yiddish. Comparing this alternative witness to Alter's own Hebrew version (called Sefat emet), printed shortly after his death, reveals substantive differences in the sermons' development, structure, and themes. But the manuscript's importance extends beyond a critical new perspective on Alter's teachings. It offers a snapshot of the processes behind the formation of Hasidic books, and calls for scholars to consider the unavoidable divergences between Hebrew and Yiddish, between orality and textuality, and the transmission of ideas from a teacher to his disciples, vectors of change that inhabit all Hasidic literature.

As followers of the Jewish Messiah Yeshua, the Messianic Jewish movement has the task of communicating the divinity of Messiah to the Jewish world. A popular method for recontextualizing the incarnation as a Jewish concept has been to cite ancient Jewish precedents for the idea. This historical-textual approach, as popularized by Daniel Boyarin and others, has significant benefits. However, it also ignores underlying theological and philosophical issues that make the idea of incarnation nonsensical or redundant in the eyes of religious Jewish people. In order to address the objections of religious Jewish people, the Messianic Jewish movement may need to increase its proficiency in theological and philosophical discourse. This paper outlines a second approach to explaining the deity of Messiah, called the Theological-Philosophical approach.

The following article is an excerpt from a chapter of our forthcoming book: "The Shpoler Zeida – The Life, Legends, and Descendants of the Grandfather of Shpola."  The chapter is entitled: "Mysteries of the Shpoler Zeida Family."

Our decade-long genealogical research has been a dedicated pursuit to construct a family tree for a figure of profound importance in Chassidic history. This individual, born three centuries ago, is Yehuda Leib of Shpola (c. 1725–1811), a revered tzaddik known as the Saba Kadisha (Hebrew for “Holy Grandfather”) or the Shpoler Zeida (Yiddish for “Grandfather of Shpola”). His influence and teachings have left an indelible mark on Chassidic history, making our research all the more significant.

Our research has led us to identify over 5,500 descendants of the Shpoler Zeida. However, our journey was not without its share of enigmas and complexities. The intricate web of family connections, the gaps in historical records, and the challenge of verifying oral histories have all contributed to the depth and complexity of our research.

A particularly intriguing challenge was the discovery of fifteen families who claimed descent from the Shpoler Zeida, yet the specifics of their lineage remained unknown.  This lack of documentation has veiled their proud heritage in a cloak of uncertainty, shrouding their connection to the Shpoler Zeida in mystery.  As their lines of descent from the Shpoler Zeida were unknown, we have come to refer to them as the “Mystery Families.”

This article delves into the intriguing mystery of the Beletsky family (including the Belasco, Bell, Bruskin, Gellard, Goldberg, and Polis branches), who claim descent from the Shpoler Zeida.  The mystery involves how their earliest known Beletsky ancestor, Leiba Beletsky (1782–1846), and his wife, Risya (1789–bef. 1848), are connected to the Shpoler Zeida.

In this comprehensive research study on the Beletsky family's descent from the Shpoler Zeida, we painstakingly traced family records, cross-referencing them with historical documents and oral histories.  We believe that the available historical and genealogical evidence is sufficient to support the Beletsky family’s plausible line of descent from the Shpoler Zeida through his son Yaakov and the marriage of Yaakov’s daughter Risya to Leiba Beletsky and to connect them to the Shpoler Zeida family tree.

The purpose of this research is to publish a manuscript of the treatise Sefer Habri’a (The Book of Creation), written in 1670 by Rabbi Avraham Binyamin Nathan ben Elisha Chaim Halevi Askhenazy, also known as Nathan Ghazzati or Rabbi Nathan of Gaza. It has been copied into several manuscripts, which ended up scattered around the world, until they were ultimately collected by professor Chaim Wirszubski Z.L. of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s. Wirszubski set out on a project of conducting a scientific edition of the treatise, and even published a small part of it.  However, misfortune has prevented him from finishing his great work, and he was called upon to teach in the Great Yeshiva in heavens. Now, the reader is presented with a full edition, accompanied by a comprehensive and methodical research. The research is separated from the original text, to allow the reader to focus on the text itself, if they so wish. Those who would seek to also delve into the analysis, can easily do so.
It is not everyday that a person is awarded the great privilege of returning a lost book to the collective Jewish library. Even more so when it is a book written by one of the greatest rabbis in recent generations, least of all a halakhic figure of the magnitude of Rabbi Nathan. We are faced with an unparalleled text in Rabbinic messianic and Hebrew literature. It is the central text of the Sabbatean movement after Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam. Sefer Habri’a was written by the progenitor of the movement, Rabbi Nathan of Gaza. Rabbi Nathan was famously considered a prophet by the spiritual leaders of the Jewish world in his time, and was one of those who declared Sabbatai Zevi to be a messiah. He was the one who explained the profound meaning of Zevi’s conversion, and the one who tried to prevent the masses from converting along with him.
If we wish to be certain that we can indeed declare “thou art our brother” to Nathan, we must look at this renewed text from every possible perspective. The text’s uniqueness, it’s complexity, length and meaning introduce many challenges, both on the technical-philological level and on that of semantic analysis. We should also pay heed to how socially problematic the Sabbatean movement is, following the heated debates that arose several generations after Zevi’s conversion. On that subject, we can view Sefer Habri’a as a treatise which ascribes profound meaning to Zevi’s ‘foreign acts’, through the Ha’ari’s hyper-nomic system. That is, the Lurianic Kabbalah, which unequivocally accepts the Jewish Halakha as sacred, is the treatise’s main method of discourse. It seems that the survival and continuity of Jewish tradition after the crisis was Rabbi Nathan’s main motivation in writing this immense work. That is, the desire to give a profound kabbalic meaning to the commandments of halakha, in the face of a shifting historical reality is at the heart of the text.
Sabbateanism is a grave subject in Jewish history. Therefore, whenever a new Sabbatean document is published, we must ask ourselves how its publication will affect the existing knowledge we have. When people read new material that contradicts what they perceive to be true, they often develop a ‘resistance front’, assuming that every new claim must be proved out of the existing body of knowledge, as if the unknown can be explored from the confines of the known. The problem here is evident - new information cannot be added in this way, and true learning cannot be achieved. All that can happen is that we pour old knowledge into a slightly different mould, at best. That said, there are times when a newly published document is so important that it demands of us to re-examine all of our previous held knowledge. More often than not, those who are tasked with preserving knowledge are not enthusiastic by the appearance of a new research which undermines the well known system to which they adhere. Therefore, if we wish the new knowledge to be properly accepted by people in that position, upon publishing such a document we must present in detail what we retain, and what we reconsider. It is possible that Sefer Habri’a would lead us into rethinking the Sabbatean movement in its entirety. It is, after all, a fundamental text written by the movement’s progenitor, immediately after the conversion. We will soon see that Sefer Habri’a would lead any observant reader to a clear understanding that it is a Kabbalah book that follows directly the writings of the Ha’ari. It is a direct continuation, and some would even say the highlight, of the Lurianic corpus. In this manner we can also see that Torat Israel, the Jewish halakha and the well-being of the nation at a time of crisis were undoubtedly on the mind of the author, Rabbi Nathan of Gaza, and that he was a loyal grand sage of Israel.

The paper examines the dominancy of narrative in Hasidic religious life through the discourse of narrative ethics and its implications for theology, specifically feminist theology, and for religion in general.
I claim that the centrality of storytelling in Hasidism reflects and constructs an essential attitude toward religious life. This attitude directs one to narrative and contextual thinking, which focuses on the specific person, circumstances, emotions, as opposed to law, norm, and abstract determination. This centrality of storytelling is connected to a deep Hasidic awareness of the restriction of normative religious life, a finite facet of the infinite paths to God

The mystical technique of imagery, i.e. visualizing an imaginary picture, found already in the earliest stages of Kabbalah, reached its peak in the teachings of R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of Piazecna (1889-1943). Academic interest in exploring mystical phenomena solely within their historical, social and political contexts has increased in recent years. This article challenges the exclusive quest for historicization in the study of Jewish mysticism, using R. Shapira's remarkable mystical-imagery techniques as a case study. Through employing the concepts of “empowerment” and “intensification” as a lens for the study of mysticism in world religions, this article argues that R. Shapira used imagery techniques as a method for empowerment in ritual, both nomian and anomian, in order to transform normative religious acts into mystical experiences. These imagery exercises are not simply one technique among many. Nor do they just function as an alternative to the experiences made possible by secularism in the early twentieth century, as have been claimed in studies based on historical readings of his works. Historical research that negates a phenomenological perspective impedes the scholar from observing a variety of important insights. R. Shapira used imagery techniques as a powerful tool for intensifying all religious practices, transforming ordinary rituals into encounters with the Divine.

Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira (1889-1943), Rebbe of the Polish Hasidic group of Piaseczna, was one of the outstanding Jewish mystics of the Twentieth Century. In an undated entry in his personal spiritual diary Tsav ve-ziruz,  R. Shapira describes an occasion upon which he somersaulted at a Torah Scroll dedication ceremony. This remarkable passage, which has gone largely unnoticed in Piaseczner research, offers a unique insight into R. Shapira's mystical practices and aspirations. In this paper we will briefly survey the literature on Hasidic somersaults, and attempt to unpack the meanings of R. Shapira's description of his own experience. Lastly we will attempt to understand the nature of this mystical technique in the context of other Jewish mystical practices and, based upon the theory of syncope, offer a comparative explanation as to how a somersault can serve as a mystical technique.

סיפורה של חסידות קרלין, אחת החסידויות הראשונות, הוא מן המרתקים בתולדות החסידות. חסידות זו שמה דגש על עבודת ה' ברגש ובגוף, על האמת, על הענווה ועל התנגדות ליומרנות אינטלקטואלית. היא הייתה הראשונה שהעמידה בראשה 'ינוקא', בן של צדיק בעודנו ילד, ואף חזרה על תקדים זה כעבור כמה דורות. היא עודדה עלייה לארץ ישראל שנים לפני הציונות ואף תמכה בהגירה ממזרח אירופה לאמריקה זמן רב לפני מלחמת העולם  שנייה, בניגוד לעמדתם של רוב רבני התקופה. משפחת אדמו"ריה כמעט שנכחדה בשואה, אך היא הצליחה להמשיך ולהתקיים ושרדה התפלגויות ומתחים. צאצאים של חסידי קרלין נטלו ונוטלים חלק פעיל בצדדים מגוונים של חיי  יישוב והמדינה, והיא עצמה, על ארבעת פלגיה, ממשיכה לקיים חיי דת תוססים בישראל ובעולם.
כספינה מיטלטלת: חסידות קרלין בין עליות למשברים הוא מחקר רחב יריעה ראשון על חסידות זו. אף שהאדמו"רים עומדים במרכז הדיון, הספר מאיר גם את דמויותיהן של הנפשות הפועלות מסביבם: נשותיהם, בני משפחתם,  פעילים והעסקנים. הספר משלב עיון מחקרי ותיאור סיפורי ומציג ניתוח מעמיק של אמונות וערכים לצד התנהגויות אנושיות, אישיות וחברתיות. עלילתה של חסידות קרלין ראשיתה במאה השמונה עשרה ואחריתה בימינו אלה, תחילת המאה העשרים ואחת.

This review essay on Jewish "traditionalism" (Hasidism, musar, Orthodoxy,etc.) argues that, notwithstanding a past tendency among historians to magnify secularist trends within modern East European Jewry, several new works suggest a revitalization of traditionalism in the region during the modern era.

This is the lecture that I gave regarding Hasidism at the European Congress of Jewish Studies in Krakow, July 2018. In it I discuss the influence of R. Kalonymus Kalman Epstein's "Meor V'Shemesh" on the Hasidic works of his great great grandson R. Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira of Piaseczna. I hope to elaborate on this in a forthcoming Hebrew article.

"The most powerful Hasidic teachings made accessible--from some of the world s preeminent authorities on Jewish thought and spirituality.
Hasidism, a great movement of spiritual revival within Judaism, began in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe and continues to have great influence on Jewish life today. A key tool of this revival was the oral sermon, using novel mystical readings of the Torah to open people s minds to thinking more profoundly about the texts and how the wisdom relates directly to their own lives.
While Hasidic tales have become widely known to modern audiences, the teachings that stand at the very heart of Hasidism have remained a closed book for all except scholars. This fascinating selection--presented in two volumes following the weekly Torah reading and the holiday cycle, and featured in English and Hebrew--renders them accessible in an extraordinary way. Volume 1 covers Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus, and includes a history of early Hasidism and a summary of central religious teachings of the Maggid's school. Volume 2 covers Numbers and Deuteronomy and the holiday cycle, and includes brief biographies of the Hasidic figures. Each teaching is presented with a fresh translation and contemporary commentary that builds a bridge between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries. And each teaching concludes with a dynamic round-table discussion between distinguished Jewish scholar Arthur Green and his closest students--the editors of this volume. They highlight the wisdom most meaningful for them, thus serving as a contemporary circle's reflections on the original mystical circle of master and disciples who created these teachings."

Hillel Zeitlin (1871-1942) was the leading figure of what may be called philosophical neo-Hasidism among Eastern European Jews in the pre-Holocaust era. A tireless author, journalist, and polemicist, he published constantly in both the Yiddish and Hebrew press, offering a bold new vision of contemporary spiritual life grounded in his reading of Hasidic sources. But Zeitlin sought to become an activist as well as a literary figure. He was especially concerned with the situation of the rootless Jewish youth. Throughout his career as a public figure, beginning shortly after World War I, he issued calls for a new organization of Jewish life. In a series of articles published in the 1920s he sought to form an elite Jewish spiritual fraternity to be called Yavneh, the most fully elaborated of his attempts at intentional community. The present study collects together Zeitlin’s Yiddish writings on the Yavneh fellowship, which are here re-printed and translated for the first time. Alongside these we present a newly discovered manuscript signed by Zeitlin, a single-sheet four-sided signed text in which he describes more succinctly and clearly the nature of the group and its intended function.

One of Hasidism's most striking features is its centralization and intensification of emotional experiences within devotional life. The unruly ecstasy and enthusiasm characteristic of such a revivalist mystical movement, which often is coupled with a spiritualizing and even oppositional relationship to formalized, external obligations, has evinced conflicting understandings of Hasidism's relationship to Halakhah (Jewish law). Hasidism has concurrently been described as being slavishly obedient to Halakhah as well as harboring the aforementioned antinomian tendencies. This paper poses the question: how did the emotional intensity evoked by Hasidic religiosity affect one's obligation under the law?  In this paper, I will attempt to explore the seams where emotion and law intersect through the case of the writings of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810). In particular, this paper will examine texts in which Rebbe Nachman responded to the possibility of being unable to muster up a sufficient amount of kavvanah (intentionality) to perform one's required worship in fitting fashion. I will argue that Rebbe Nachman, in the counsel he offered in response, was able to navigate a complex relationship between law and emotion by maintaining commitment to the formalized obligation to pray while, at the same time, making space for and even endorsing the feelings (specifically, frustration and desire) experienced by the individual. This nuanced approach evidences a moderate and complex relation to law, which I deem “therapeutic.”  By this, I mean an approach to law in which the juridical authority (Rebbe Nachman) utilizes judicial discretion to read the law in question expansively, not to overturn the ruling but rather to provide a more wide-ranging space within the bounds of the law that include the plaintiff's concerns. In his simultaneous prioritization of the emotional aspect of religious life and advocacy for a normative legal practice, we can find in Rebbe Nachman's writings a subtle middle position between legal realism and legal formalism. This paper will thus contribute to a more robust understanding of the particular nature of Jewish mysticism within the strongly normative framework of halakhic observance.

An antinomian doctrine is most often created in order to endorse a deviation from the law. But why should a thinker build such a doctrine if he immediately stipulates it with so many restrictions that it is rendered theoretical? This question is addressed through the thought of Rabbi Mordekhai Yosef Leiner of Izbica (c.1800-1854), a hasidic leader who sparked the enthusiasm of many modern scholars and spirituality-seekers for his alleged "boldness" and "antinomianism". The article suggests that his doctrines served religious functions similar to those that utopias often serve in politics and literature. Besides the revolutionary function of utopia, that is usually emphasized by scholars, the article points at other, often neglected function: the conservative one.

It is in this thesis we will explore the thought and religious phenomenology of the Hasidic master, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Ishbitz (RMY).
RMY maintains that God has cast a veil over human eyes which obscures the divine reality, while the humanly perceived reality is rendered a divinely orchestrated illusion.  The reality which is obscured and the illusion which emerges is not of the exterior world. The subject of the illusion is primarily the very self consciousness of human beings which experience themselves as autonomous agents independent from God and possessing free will. Thus it is the reality of consciousness which RMY understood to be multilayered; one layer in which there is no will other than God's will and another layer in which humans are conscious of themselves as autonomous, willing beings.  Both layers enjoy paradoxical reality since they are products of divine perspective and divinely orchestrated human perspective. None the less, the human perspective compared to the divine perspective can be considered an illusion, just as dream reality is an illusion when juxtaposed to waking reality.  To a degree, societal constructs (including the halakha) are also understood and experienced as a part of the illusory reality.

This essay focuses on how certain Zoharic and Hasidic texts conceptualize the relationship between what might be termed polymorphous theology—ways of speaking about the Divine that are ornate, elaborate, rich in symbol and myth—and nonduality. I begin by tracing four modes of Jewish theological imagination: henotheism, ethical monotheism, rationalism, and monism. Next, I turn to a
small selection of Zoharic and Hasidic texts to explore the surprising ways in which these theological currents are accommodated. Insisting on both a (nearly) heretofore unknown radical monism and a radical explosion of theological polymorphism, Zoharic literature at once retrieves the henotheistic language of myth, and proposes a monism more radical even than that of the philosophers. And later, the Hasidic masters of Chabad at once fashion a rigorous monism and insist that the greatest “unity” occurs in the diversity of manifestation.
Finally, I argue that the theological radicalism of those texts, which incorporates the greatest avodah zara of all—polytheism—within a nondualistic framework, does more than merely accommodate earlier mythic conceptions of the Divine. It provides a post-philosophical permission for the overwhelming majority of Zoharic textuality, itself a recovery and perhaps reification of myth. The supercessionist model of one theology displacing another is thus itself replaced by a more permissive and inclusive theological imagination which might, in the contemporary moment, promote a horizontal as well as vertical pluralism.

Mysticism Substitutes: A General Model for the Theological Development of Hasidism in the Nineteenth Century
Abstract

During the 19th century, Hasidism underwent a deep ideological transformation. From a small circle with more or less common mystical ideals, it became a decentralized movement in which various personalities and groups had a range of different religious ideals, the vast majority of which were not mystical. In this article, I would like to present a general thesis claiming that these ideals acted in the Hasidic groups that developed them as “mysticism substitutes”.

The article examines seven samples of 19th century Hasidic ideals. I show how each ideal demonstrates the direct connection between the late ideal and the early-Hasidic mystic value from which it originated and was “transformed”. The concluding chapter explains the phenomenon of mysticism-substitutes as follows: After Hasidism adopted a traditionalist character, it could no longer preserve its original values; however, it also could not discard them altogether. Therefore, the "natural" compromise was to transform them. Once developing into a conservative movement it became entangled in a paradox: the values it inherited were revolutionary, and the shift to traditionalist values required a change, which was, in turn, opposed to conservatism ("the paradox of conservatism"). Hasidism opted for "translating" the old mystic concepts into traditionalist ones, or turning practices that served as a medium for the mystical experience into ends in and of themselves. Hence, the mystic energy was not lost entirely, but rather became "conserved" in new forms that rendered a variety of non-mystic religious challenges.

N.B. The interested reader is invited to turn to the expanded and more fully annotated Hebrew version of this article, to appear in the volume Ma'or va-Shemesh: History, Philosophy, Lore and Legacy, edited by Levi Cooper, Ariel Evan Mayse and Zvi Mark (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, forthcoming).

Scholars have generally depicted kabbalists within an air of exclusivity. During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, however, a handful of Jewish mystics in Padua, led by Moses Hayim Luzzatto, opened their secret society to others interested but not adept in Kabbalah in an attempt to establish a "perfected community" and attain the long-awaited messianic redemption. This article explores the social factors and intentions that drove the group's activity, specifically how Luzzatto's thoughts of the unity of creation played out in life and community.

Rabbi Yitshak Hutner (1906-1980) was a remarkable scholar, an enigmatic religious intellectual and a charismatic teacher. Drawing upon his public discourses and his written letters, I argue that Hutner's vocabulary-which remained rooted almost entirely in the vocabulary of traditional Talmudism-afforded him a ready garment in which to clothe a syncretic educational theory, which combines Hasidic approaches to spiritual instruction and remakes the traditions of Lithuanian piety and study for his new American audience. The present study interrogates a series of key themes that appear in Hutner's teachings, all of which pertain to issues of pedagogy and the construction of religious education. The essay advances a historical argument by examining the works of an important and influential modern Jewish thinker, but it is also driven by a constructive question: What does Hutner's vision of Jewish religious teaching and learning have to contribute to today's Jewish education, and to the broader world of higher education in North America in particular?

This essay interrogates the legal discourse of Shulḥan ha-Tahor, a curious-and curiously understudied-work of Hasidic halakhah written by Rabbi Yitzḥak Ayzik Yehudah Yehiel Safrin of Komarno. The book is, at heart, a systematic reformulation of Jewish law in light of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and the quest for personal mystical experience. Shulḥan ha-Tahor offers a rare case study for the interface of mystical experience , Hasidic devotional values, and kabbalistic doctrine as they explicitly shape the codified forms-and norms-of halakhah. The essay reveals a different side of Jewish modernity through a close reading of an exceptional nineteenth-century legal code.