Lekh Lekha (Hasidism)

Postscript to the Ba’al Shem Tov on Prayer

A few further thoughts in light of last week’s “interim conclusions” about the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings on prayer. I wrote then: “… a modern approach to Hasidism may start by adopting its model of an emotionally intense, deeply engaging life of prayer and mitzvot, without necessarily adopting all of the specific contents of its Kabbalistic world-view.” Upon reflection, I feel it important to add that there is another, possibly more authentic option: to engage ourselves directly with the overt Kabbalistic contents, bizarre as they may initially seem, and to attempt to “translate” these into a conceptual language that bridges the gap between themselves and modern modes of thinking. For example: reinterpretation of the four-tiered scheme of the universe in psychological terms: be it in terms of the inner worlds of our own experience, or adopting a model of reality that takes account of dimensions overlooked by empirical science (see on this, e.g., Huston Smith, The Forgotten Truth). Example: dealing with word mysticism by reading the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as, on a very subtle level, actual codes for the pattern of the universe. Stan Tenen, of the Meru Foundation in Sharon, Mass., has explored what he calls the “sacred geometries” of the Torah text, the letters as “Divine energy patterns,” relating inter alia to sophisticated cosmological models of modern physics. I cannot pretend to have digested his ideas, so I cannot even begin to evaluate them, but they certainly represent an interesting attempt to confront the problem. Example: some of the oral teaching of Rav Shlomo Twersky, ztz”l—one of the most brilliant and lucid minds in Orthodox Jewry, who died tragically early. I was once privileged to spend a single, unforgettable Shabbat at his home, at which he attempted to explain such arcane concepts as “angels” in terms that for once did not sound medieval, but related in a coherent way to modern concepts. Yet another way of reading Kabbalah and Hasidut would be a kind of free-flowing one, in which the symbols are allowed to speak directly to each person on the suggestive, associative level—which is, of course, the great strength of symbols. We shall, bs”d, return to all these questions during the course of the year.

Abraham and Earthliness

We now leave the Baal Shem Tov for the present and turn to one of his (and the Maggid’s) earliest and most profound disciples, R. Nahum of Chernobyl, author of Meor Einayim. The book was first published in Slavita, 5548 (1788), making it one of the earliest hasidic books. The author was, in addition to his own merits, the progenitor of a long and diverse line of Hasidic teachers; his numerous descendants included the founders of such dynasties of Hornistopol, Talner, Trisk, and Apt, as well as Chernobyl itself; they all bear the surname, Twersky. Art Green (whose partial English translation of this work appears in Paulist Press, of all places) describes his as at once one of the deepest and healthiest-minded approaches in Hasidic thought, least marred by dualistic thinking. Hasidism, like any spiritual movement, was troubled by the tension between the spiritual and the physical. The mystic wants to live a purely spiritual life, to leave behind his “corporeality” or “earthliness.” And yet—he must live in the world. He must live in the world because he is a creature of flesh and blood (or some would say, “a soul inhabiting [or even: imprisoned in] a body of flesh and blood”—itself a highly significant statement). But more than that: he must live in the world because this is the world (hopefully, one will add: “the good world”) created by God for humankind, and because it is the fitting site for the practice of good deeds and acts of kindness to other living things.

It is a truism to say that Judaism eschews the type of asceticism and celibacy, rooted in dualism, which seems to be idealized in Christianity and Far Eastern monastic traditions. In truth, the picture is a bit more complicated. While it is perhaps lacking in the radical rejection of the physical found in some Christian monasticism—to take an extreme example, we do not have a Simon of the Desert—nevertheless, one often encounters within Judaism attitudes very nearly akin to hatred of the body and physical and existential guilt about ones physical needs. But, in general, the “high road” of Judaism seems to perform a delicate balancing act between transcending the world and accepting it (what William James called “world- acceptance” and “world-rejection”).

Yet even in the so-called “mainstream” of Judaism, the sense of duality between heaven and earth is often close to the surface. Maimonides, for example, sees the ideal of “attachment to God” accomplished through a kind of split between mind and body; the ideal level, attained in reality only by Moses and the three patriarchs, involves constant intellectual attachment to the Divine sphere even while involved in practical activities in the world. “Through his apprehension of the true realities and his joy in what he has apprehended, [he] achieves a state in which he talks with people and is occupied with his bodily necessities while his intellect is wholly turned toward Him…. they performed these actions with their limbs only, while their intellects were constantly in His presence…” (Guide of the Perplexed III.51; Pines trans., pp. 623-624)

Is this the solution proposed by Hasidism? The instruction to Abraham at the beginning of this week’s parsha, “Go out of your land,” is read here as an imperative, “Go forth out of your earthliness”—which serves as a starting point for a dialectical discussion by R. Nahum of Chernobyl of the tension between the spiritual and the physical:

And God said to Abraham: “Go out… [lekh lekha]” [Gen 12:1]. Rashi comments here: “for your pleasure and for your benefit”—and this is difficult. For it is written, “Abraham my beloved” [Isa 41:8]—that is, he served God out of love and not because of any ulterior motif. And one may say: it is written “Abraham, Abraham” [Gen 22:12], “Jacob, Jacob” [Gen 46:2], “Moses, Moses” [Exod 3:4]. That is that “God’s portion is his people” [Deut 32:9] and the righteous man, as he is on this lowly world, so is he in his root above.

The initial problem considered here is: How could Abraham have been told, as Rashi would have it, that his obedience to the Divine command (leaving the land of his birth, on the literal level; transcending “earthliness,” on the metaphorical level) is to his benefit? Is not the ideal of the righteous man to serve God without any thought of personal gain?

The answer given has to do with the nature of the righteous man: namely, that he transcends the divided consciousness or duality experienced by ordinary people. This idea is derived in an interesting way: in several key Biblical verses in which God addresses the righteous, He calls their name twice in succession. This repetition (to which one might add the call to Samuel in 1 Sam 3:10) is taken by the Meor Einayaim to reflect a deeper doubleness or duality: namely, his ability to be equally present, equally at home, in both the supernal, heavenly worlds and in this earthly, corporeal world:

And it is for this reason that he was created here: even though he is incarnated in a foul and ugly body; nevertheless, through his goodly choice he serves God, and does not deny the seal of the king. And he is righteous in the world as he is in his root above. And this is what is meant by “Abraham, Abraham”—that he is Abraham the righteous here as he is in his root above; and similarly for the other righteous, whose names are here as they are above.

And it is known that the souls above enjoy the radiance of the Shekhinah. But this is bread of shame [i.e., an unearned reward], for one who eats that which is not his is embarrassed to look at it. And for this reason the soul is brought down below, so that by its goodly choice to serve God, it may be paid the reward of its action. And it will not be bread of shame.

We have here a classical explanation of the meaning of life in this world, the same as found in the introduction to Mesillat Yesharim: an opportunity to do mitzvot so as to “earn” ones reward in the World to Come. But there is an interesting twist here: why couldn’t God just create souls in such a way that they would immediately enjoy His closeness, the “radiance of the Shekhinah”? The problem is what is called here the “bread of shame”: there is a natural law, a kind of psychological axiom, applicable in both this world and in heaven, that people are ashamed to enjoy something they haven’t worked for. People may think that pleasure is the aim of life (the right to the “pursuit of Happiness” stipulated in the US Declaration of Independence), but unearned pleasure is somehow sour. The dignity of not being beggars, of not being recipients of hand-outs—even in the spiritual sense—is somehow assumed here to be even more essential to the human being than the enjoyment of even the most refined and spiritual pleasure.

An interesting anecdote is told in this regard about the Gaon of Vilna (the arch Mitnagged!). An angel offered to miraculously grant him knowledge of the entire Torah (or perhaps specifically of the esoteric teachings—the Zohar or Safra de-Tzeniuta). He refused, because he wanted the effort of working to understand it, and the reward of having earned that knowledge through his own labors. We continue:

And this is, ”Go out”—for your pleasure and your good, for in reward for your action you will be granted pleasure and goodness, and not bread of shame. For even though the soul is embodied in gross matter, and desires physical and earthly desires, with this body you can go in the service of God. And this is “from your land” [me-artzekha]—from your earthiness, you may walk go in the service of God.

It seems that earthly things play a more positive function here than they do in Rambam’s scheme. It is not only the realm of intellect that is the locus of holiness. This world is in fact the focus of the tzaddik’s actions, the place where he ought to be. Rather than going out “from” your earthliness in the sense of “going away,” the righteous man is charged to be so “from within” his earthliness, as the root of where he ought to be to serve God. This is the basic kernel of the idea of avodah begashmiut, “service within the corporeal,” yet another basic Hasidic concept—but more on that another time.

An interesting perspective on this problem is given by Martin Buber. In what he describes, with no little irony or paradoxality, as his own “conversion,” he says:

In my earlier years the “religious” was for me the exception…. hours taken out of the course of things… the reliable permanence of appearances broke down… “Religious experience” was the experience of an otherness which did not fit into the context of life. It could begin with something customary, with consideration of some familiar object, but which then became unexpectedly mysterious and uncanny, finally lighting a way into the lightning-pierced darkness of the mystery itself.…. here illumination and ecstasy and rapture held, without time or sequence...

The illegitimacy of such a division of the temporal life …. was brought home to me by an everyday event….. One forenoon, after a morning of “religious” enthusiasm, I had a visit from an unknown young man, without being there in spirit. I certainly did not fail to let the meeting be friendly, I did not treat him any more remissly than all his contemporaries who were in the habit of seeking me out about this time of day as an oracle that is ready to listen to reason. I conversed attentively and openly with him—only I omitted to guess the question which he did not put. Later, not long after, I learned from one of his friends—he himself was no longer alive—the essential content of these questions; I learned that he had come to me not casually, but borne by destiny, not for a chat but for a decision. He had come to me, he had come in this hour. What do we expect when we are in despair and yet go to a man? Surely a presence by means of which we are told that nevertheless there is meaning.

Since then I have given up the ”religious” which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy… I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am never taken.

For Buber, true religiosity can no longer be the purely theocentric, meditative path aimed at the attainment of individual ecstasy; such a path is for him an escape from life in the world, what he calls “the exception,” as opposed to the path of dialogue—of ethical and human engagement with the other. The dire consequences of his absorption in his own subjectivity which he mistook for “religion,” which led him to listen with only half an ear to this deeply troubled young man—evidently, the latter’s suicide—led him to abandon forever the path in which life and religion were divided from one another.

In this passage, Buber presents an interesting, diametrically-opposed extreme to the world-rejecting ascetic. His is an archetypal modern voice: where the monastic rejects the world and all its pleasures and comforts, Buber, with his religious humanism, rejects those who would storm heaven while leaving earth with its problems and sufferings behind. This stream in modern religious life, the “secularization of the spiritual,” the insistence on the “concrete” and the “earthly” as a manifestation of the spirit, played an important role in Zionism. Such figures as A. D. Gordon, but also Micha Berdychewski and Berl Katzenelson, were moved by what can only be called a religious spirit. (A close reading of the Protestant “Death of God” theologians of the 1960’s may reveal a similar mood—of secularization and demythologization as handmaidens of revitalization of religion. On another level, note the Church of the Brethren, the ”Bruderhoff,” who insist that life in community, as a means of living love for ones fellow man, is the highest expression of the spirit, and who have created kibbutz-like communities in the US in which there is no formal worship.)

A final word on this: would Buber see Hasidism of the type taught by Rav Nahum and the Baal Shem Tov as “religion” in the negative sense of which he spoke above (“the exception,” “ecstasy without time or sequence”), or as something closer to the involvement with and sanctification of the everyday that he sought? Buber’s own well-known romance with Hasidism (however distorted and misguided some of his interpretations may have been; see the Buber-Scholem debate of the early ‘60s on this subject) suggests that he himself saw things differently. It would also be instructive to read Soloveitchik’s essay on Halakhic Man, and especially his own critique of Hasidism and other-worldly-oriented mysticism, in counterpoint to this passage from Buber.