Bereshit (Hasidism)

Introduction to Chasidic Cogitations

With the new cycle of Torah reading, we have decided to devote this year’s Hitzei Yehonatan to Hasidic homilies on the weekly Torah portions; specifically (but not exclusively), the teachings of early Hasidism.

Why Hasidism? There are two main reasons: public and personal. There is enormous interest today, almost everywhere in the Jewish world, in Hasidic thought and writing. The current revival of Jewish spirituality seems to take much of both its spirit and contents from Hasidism. Classes on Hasidic texts are ubiquitous: in my own extended neighborhood, there are shiurim on different Hasidic books almost every night of the week: Sefat Emet (Ger), Mei Shiloah (Izhbitzh), Netivot Shalom (Slonim), and of course Sefer Baal Shem Tov. There are times, on Shabbat morning at Yakar, when it seems that almost everyone around me is busily studying some Hasidic text or another.

On the personal level: thinking back, I realize that Hasidism was instrumental in my turn towards a more serious involvement with Judaism. During the year immediately after my bar mitzvah, when my interest in things Jewish began to go beyond the usual for an American Jewish child, my mother brought home a pair of newly released recordings of music of the Modzitzer Hasidim, which she had been given by a colleague at the Jewish day school where she taught in the Rockaways. (At that time recordings of Hasidic music were virtually nonexistent; there was a certain pristine purity and simplicity to these records lacking in later recordings: a few male voices and a piano.) Something in this music spoke to my soul. Similarly, a copy of Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim that I was given as a Bar Mitzvah by an Israeli friend of the family awakened my curiosity about this movement. Both of these whetted my appetite to see and experience “real” Hasidism and, on the Simhat Torah just before my 14th birthday, I visited a Hasidic synagogue for the first time: Rabbi Eichenstein’s shteibel, in the “distant” world on the other side of Queens Boulevard. I arrived early, and was greeted by a man who looked exactly like the picture of Elijah the Prophet in the my Hebrew school Haggadah, with a long flowing beard, a brocaded knee-length robe, and speaking English with a strange accent. What struck me most about the service was its utter informality and spontaneity, in striking contrast to the big Conservative synagogue in which I’d grown up a few short blocks away; there was a sense of authenticity, and of prayer being at once important, personally engaging and joyful in the rather nasal singing of the Hallel by Rabbi Eichenstein, accompanied by the soprano voices of his three young sons.

During my college years, I began to have more serious exposure to “real” Hasidic life: several weekend encounters with Lubavitch, with the intense energy of the Rebbe’s farbrengen, the deep faith and devotion expressed in almost every conversation with the Hasidim, and the intricate mystical world view found in the pages of the Tanya; my ongoing involvement with the community of the Bostoner Rebbe throughout my six years in Boston, enjoying the warmth, hospitality and real caring of the Rebbe and his family, and observing a Hasidic Rebbe “close up,” at the tish, the davening, and at home; occasional forays into Boro Park, where I was especially impressed by the grace and dignity and sense of the ineffable in the Bobover court. I also became seriously involved with what might be described as the intellectual neo-Hasidim of the Havurah movement: a seminar on Rav Nahman of Bratslav at the Boston Havurah; occasional study of Hasidic texts with Art Green before davening Shabbat morning; the attempt at creating a neo-Hasidic mode of prayer at the Havurah. And, of course, I came to know the unique figure of Reb Shlomo Carlebach, who existed somewhere in a twilight zone between “mainstream” Hasidism and the American counter-culture and new style of spirituality.

More recently, I have also uncovered a certain Hasidic component in my own family background. My great-great-grandfather, Rav Eliyahu Yosef Galante of Radzhynova, was a disciple of Rav Simhah Bunem of Psyshcha, while my grandfather, Rabbi Abraham Gallant, noted preacher in New York City during the early part of the twentieth century, is cited by latter-day scholars of “American Orthodox sermonics” as the one among that group who was closest to Hasidic sources.

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What do we mean by Hasidism, anyway? A few initial thoughts; the question will return again and again the course of this year. Martin Buber, perhaps the first one to attempt to bring the message of Hasidism (as he understood it, of course) to Westernized, “modern” Jewry, spoke of it as “Kabbalah made praxis”—that is, a movement that forged the lofty, esoteric , teachings of Spanish and Lurianic Kabbalah into a way of life accessible to entire communities of Jews, of varying levels of erudition and even of piety. To such Haskalah historians as Simon Dubnow and Raphael Mahler, it was first and foremost a populist rebellion against the dry scholasticism of the Rabbinic elite. According to Art Green, contemporary American scholar and spiritual teacher, the essential hallmark of Hasidism lies in the shift of emphasis from halakha to avodah. That is, from concern with the questions, “What is the Law? What is permitted and what is forbidden? How am I to be yotzei—to fulfill the formal minimal requirements of the Torah regarding such-and-such a mitzvah?” to “How do I best serve God? How do I make prayer into more than a collection of words? How do I become close to Him?” To its opponents, at least in the early days (i.e., till the death of the Vilna Gaon in 1797), it was a near-heretical cult which threatened to destroy Jewish piety as they knew it. To its adherents, it bore within itself the seed of the light of Messiah. Hasidim are fond of telling a story in which the half-legendary founder of the movement, the Baal Shem Tov, encountered Elijah and asked him, ”When are you coming, Sir?” to which Elijah replied, “Until your wellsprings [i.e., Hasidic teachings] spread outwards.” And one could go on and on. (I have not, for example, mentioned the views of such major academic interpreters of Hasidism as Gershom Scholem, Rivka Schatz, Moshe Idel, and Joseph Weiss.)

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A few comments about the nature of the Hasidic homily, or derush. Hasidic teachers make unabashed use of the Torah text as a symbolic structure. That is, they are almost totally uninterested in peshat—the literal, straightforward meaning of the text. Nor is their approach that of midrash, which is a kind of synthesis between old and new, between exegesis of the existing text and creation of a new story. (In a book now in preparation, Joshua Levinson of the Hebrew University speaks of the combination of exegesis and narrativity in the midrashic narrative.) Here, we are dealing with what is essentialy an entirely new creation. The texts we will study this year are based upon and by-and-large arranged according to the weekly Torah portions, but the Biblical text is really no more than a kind of peg on which to hang whatever issues and ideas the authors want to discuss: the nature of prayer, man’s internal struggles with his various inclinations, how God acts in the world, or whatever.

Some people are taken aback by this, and are unable to enter into this world because it seems to misread the biblical verses. Prof. David Weiss Halivni, one of the great Talmudic scholars of our day, a man of a strong critical bent, describes in his autobiography how he could not appreciate the “Mussar talks” of Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner—a rosh yeshiva who gave theological talks with emotional overtones, based on a strongly Kabbalistic conceptual framework, which later became the basis of his multi-volumed work Pahad Yitzhak—because he could only see the “the holes and not the cheese in these talks.” For him, “The distortion of the plain meaning of the texts… was unacceptable” (Weiss Halivni, The Book and the Sword, p. 148). Although Hutner came from a somewhat different school than Hasidism, the basic tradition is the same—one in which the biblical or Talmudic text is frankly used as a symbolic framework, which takes on flesh and sinew as its author wishes. Indeed, the Hasidic authors seem to take delight in turning a verse or dictum on its head, unabashedly reading it in a manner diametrically opposed to its literal sense. Call it literary convention; call it a mystical approach to the Torah as a Divine entity which contains within itself infinities of meanings, some of which bear little or no relation to the syntactic or lexicographical meaning of its words or sentences—this is the nature of the animal, and if one wishes to read it and learn from it one must accept it on its own terms.

“How does one Dance before the bride?”

Having spent so much space on the introduction, I shall bring a relatively brief passage. As this first issue is in honor of the marriage of the daughter of one of my oldest and dearest friends (a Hornistopol hasid, as it happens), I shall bring a passage from Toldot Yaakov Yosef from this week’s parashah that talks about weddings. This book was the very first Hasidic book ever published, in 1781. Its author, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polonnoye, was a noted scholar, originally a Mitnagged (opponent of Hasidism), who “converted” to Hasidism in mid-life, through the aegis of the Baal Shem Tov himself. His writing has an unusually strong emphasis on Talmudic learning, the texts used often involving halakhic issues, Tosafot, etc.—which are then interpreted in a spiritualist direction. In this passage, appearing on the very first page of his book (following the introduction), he interprets a familiar Rabbinic dictum, the first half of which is the text of a song sung at almost all religious weddings:

In the name of my teacher, of blessed memory, who explained the controversy between the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel: “How does one dance before the bride? Beit Shammai says, ‘One speaks of the bride as she is.’” That is, that in general one should know that His Glory, may He be blessed, is hidden in every place, as mentioned above.

“Beit Hillel say, ‘Beautiful and personable bride.’” That one should know in a specific way how the light of the sparks of holiness fell within the shells. And alien thoughts came to him at the hour of prayer, so that he might to correct them. And he needs to separate out and to remove the shell and to uplift the sparks of holiness from within it, so as to adorn it. That she may be ”a beautiful and personable bride.”

This passage is composed of two parts: the Rabbinic text, and its allegorical, metaphysical interpretation. The debate discussed in the text itself—a baraita quoted in Ketubot 17a—is itself interesting. How is one to “dance” before the bride: that is, what kinds of things is one to say in her praise on her wedding day? May one tell a “white lie,” praising her beauty and pleasant personality, even if everyone knows that she is ugly and bad-tempered? Or must one be brutally honest, “telling it as it is,” even on this special day in her life, because speaking falsehood is forbidden under nay circumstance? Here, the schools of Shammai and Hillel seem to split along the classic, well-known lines of rigorous, high-minded ethical standards as against a softer, more humane approach, willing to bend harsh standards for the sake of human need and social harmony.

But then the “Toldot” gives it a characteristic Hasidic twist. Specifically the rigorous Beit Shammai is seen as a kind of panentheistic mystic, perceiving God’s goodness everywhere in His cosmos—even in this ugly, nasty young woman being led under the huppah. And Beit Hillel, by saying Kallah na’ah ve-hasudah (“beautiful and personable bride,” says that one is uttering a kind of prayer or call that she should in fact be thus. In this view, it is not enough to lay back and enjoy God’s harmonious universe; man is charged with the task of tikkun, of correcting and fixing God’s world, so that all things will in fact be whole and beautiful, not only “in general,” but each thing in its specific reality.

To return to Art Green: on another occasion, he spoke of “the essence of Hasidism” in terms of two Yiddish “mottos” found in correspondence between Hasidim. One “motto,” mentioned by a Habad hassid, was “Alts iz Got”—“Everything is God.” Or, in the better-known Aramaic formulation, “Leit atar panuy mineih”—“There is no place that is empty of Him.” The other, from the school of Kotzk, says that the central motif of Hasidism is “arbetn oif zikh”—“a person must work on himself.” These two approaches or traditions may be seen as reflected in the two positions described here by R. Yaakov Yosef: on the one hand, unitive mysticism, the overwhelming sense that God is present everywhere; on other, the ethical call for tikkun, for correction of the world, which clearly must start with a person’s one self, with the constant process of teshuvah.

The imagery, “that he should know in a specific way how the light of the sparks of holiness fell within the shells” and “to separate out and to remove the shell and to uplift the sparks of holiness from within it” is taken from the central myth or archetype of Lurianic Kabbalah: the idea that the imperfection of the world as we know it is the result of the primordial cosmic catastrophe known as shevirat hakelim, the “breaking of the vessels,” in which the holy vessels of light through which God emanated His being into the universe somehow got out of control and were broken, fragments of Divine light or energy being scattered throughout the universe in a state of chaos and disorder. Man’s task, accomplished both through performing the mitzvot and in general, is to somehow find these fragments of light and return them to their source. As I read it, by calling the ugly bride “beautiful and personable” one is in fact finding and somehow redeeming the points of beauty and grace—that is, of Godliness—that exist within this person.

This process of course takes place not only at wedding parties, but throughout life, and especially at the moment of prayer. “And alien thoughts came to him at the hour of prayer, so that he might to correct them.” One of the central subjects of early Hasidism is this matter of “alien thoughts”—that is, unbidden, irrelevant thoughts that come to one during davening. I imagine that almost everyone who tries to recite the prayers regularly encounters this problem: how to focus on the words of prayer, and not have ones mind wander far afield, to unrelated, distant thoughts—and on occasion even into lewd and sinful thoughts. In a nutshell, the solution offered by most Hasidic thinkers was that, rather than attempt to suppress these thoughts, one should on some level accept them, understand that they came for a reason—i.e., that they somehow represent the chaotic world of the unredeemed “sparks” of Divinity—and that one should try to “elevate” them. In contemporary psychological terminology, rather than suppression of the unconscious, one should strive for its transformation and liberation to a higher plane.