Orality can explode in and overcome even the most literate cultures. Centered as the varieties of Judaism up to the eighteenth century were on study and performance, a powerful phenomenon emphasizing orality took place beginning in the mid-eighteenth century in Eastern Europe and changed the spiritual physiognomy of many Jewish communities there. Hasidism is basically a move from literacy to orality, as we saw in an example in Chapter 6 dealing with the encounter between the Besht and the Great Maggid of Mezeritch. While the latest classical form of Kabbalah, Lurianism, accepted—more in principle than in practice—the concept of indeterminacy and infinity of the classical texts, whether the Bible or the Zohar, Lurianic Kabbalists restricted the plurality of interpretations one is able to offer. As we saw in Chapter 3 and Appendix 4, each soul is almost identical to a certain interpretation, which is predetermined before birth and unique to this soul alone. The next major movement in Jewish mysticism, Beshtian Hasidism, represented a substantial departure. At least in one major case the claim is that the interpretive community, to use Stanley Fish’s concept once again, is not that of the learned but often remote Kabbalists or of the entire Jewish people dispersed throughout the world, in the case of the ethical-Kabbalistic literature. Indeed, Kabbalah operated with the concept of an invisible audience insofar as the author is concerned, an audience regarded as cooperating in order to make manifest or to proclaim all the mystical and nonmystical dimensions of the divine text or of that of an ancient mystical authority, R. Shimeon bar Yohay—the tannaitic master who was believed to be the author of the Zohar.
The East European Hasidim, the followers of a living master who provides the religious text to be interpreted, are now the main audience of the new spiritual leaders. In other words, the Hasidic community as a text-consuming group is constituted less by acts of reading and interpreting canonical texts, as it was earlier in Jewish culture, than by the pneumatic Tzaddiq’s “saying of the Torah,” namely the homiletic exposition during the afternoon of the Sabbath, and its various interpretations offered afterward by adherents. This is a textual community before the text was committed to writing. According to this description of Beshtian Hasidism, the ensuing movement may be conceived of as the ascent of verbal teaching stemming initially from a secondary elite who emphasized some of the oral aspects of the Jewish tradition, as explicated by some forms of Kabbalah and as performed in the most accomplished manner by the perfect man, the polestar of the group, the Tzaddiq. This emphasis capitalized on the importance of orality in some developments in Kabbalistic thought, especially the talismanic accent on sonority, as expressed especially by R. Moses Cordovero.1
The Hasidic masters added, however, to the oral performative aspect of the objective Torah the interesting phenomenon of describing their oral, homiletic activity by resorting to the very term that refers to the divine instruction: Torah. In a moment I will try to trace the precise stages of the emergence of this influential terminological development, but here I would like to point out the affinity that might have been operative in this old/new situation. The Hasidic righteous was not only the charismatic leader, the pneumatic mystic, and the powerful magician, but also conceived of in divine and semidivine terms.2 The apotheosis of the Tzaddiq to a new religious status is related to the apotheosis of the status of this figure. As such, the oral activity performed while in a state of union with the divine assumed the aura of a divine revelation. After all, the biblical God was a great speaker but not an accomplished writer.
In any case, the deep concern with the orality of the teaching that was referred to as Torah, apparently formulated in vernacular Yiddish, is evident in one of the legends attributed to the Besht:
There was a man who wrote down the torah of the Besht that he heard from him. Once the Besht saw a demon walking and holding a book in his hand. He said to him: “What is the book that you hold in your hand?” He answered him: “This is the book that you have written.” The Besht then understood that there was a person who was writing down his torah. He gathered all his followers and asked them: “Who among you is writing down my torah?” The man admitted it and he brought the manuscript to the Besht. The Besht examined it and said: “There is not even a single word3 here that is mine.”4
Let me start with the alleged interlocutor of the Besht, the studious and curious demon. He is indeed a very curious guy, who attempts to keep himself up to date with any interesting spiritual development. It seems that Jewish culture was so imprinted with the concept of the importance of books that even its demons were imagined as avid readers.5 In this particular instance, however, involving a story that in my opinion is emblematic of the nature of Hasidism, the very emergence of the book was regarded as questionable: the author, the Besht, was trying to preserve the oral form of his teachings as quintessential. Demons, so it seems, are especially fond of illicitly written books. In fact, in this case the demon focuses his attention on a composition that the author himself would take to be an extreme falsification of his thought. What went wrong is not a matter of bad intentions or sheer misunderstandings: it seems that, as in Plato’s famous critique of writing, it is the very nature of the medium that is imagined as problematic, and not the faulty manner of its performance.
This legend, which portrays the Besht’s adherence to the oral form of teaching, may be related significantly to R. Nahman of Braslav’s description of the Tzaddiq as the oral Torah, in the explicit context of a discussion about his great-grandfather, the Besht. Concerning the Sabbateans, R. Nahman wrote that they
left the community and spoke deleteriously about the entire oral Torah, and this happened because hard gevurot6 reached them and they did not sweeten them … and those utterances fell upon the paragon of the generation and the Besht was then the paragon of the generation and he departed because of it … because when there are deleterious utterances about the oral Torah or about the Tzaddiq of the generation, this is indeed the same thing because the quintessence of the oral Torah depends on the Tzaddiq of the generation, as it is said that the Shekhinah stands7 between two Tzaddi-qim8 which is the oral Torah … because the Tzaddiq makes from their [utterances]9 a Torah.10
In Bahiric and Zoharic symbolism, oral Torah stands for the last female sefirah, Malkhut, while the Tzaddiq is a distinct divine attribute possessing strong male features. These two attributes are quite distinct. There can be no doubt that R. Nahman did not extract his view from the only alleged proof text he explicitly mentions, the Zohar. The affinity between orality and the Tzaddiq does not stem from a reading of a Kabbalistic text, but rather it reflects an inference as to the impact of the Sabbatean disrespect of the rabbinic legislation on the righteous of the generation, who has to pay with his life for the sin of others. The identification of oral Torah with the Tzaddiq in general and with the Besht in particular seems to arise from a Hasidic tradition that is corroborated by the contemporary story about the Besht and his illicitly written book studied by the demon.
I assume that we witness a change of paradigm within the symbolism and the hierarchy of the two Torahs in the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah: the elevation of the oral over the written Torah. In the rabbinic literature the status of the oral Torah has been elevated to that of mystorin,11 the unique patrimony of the people of Israel, while the written one has already become the common property of the gentiles. In a text of R. Abraham bar Hiyya, the oral Torah was likened to the moon and the written Torah to the sun, a comparison that implies the elevation of the written over the oral.12 This is also the case in the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah; as we have already seen,13 the oral Torah was identified with Malkhut and the written Torah with Tiferet. There can be no doubt that most of the Kabbalists belonging to a theosophical school, including those who were great Halakhic figures, conceived of the written Torah as higher, more sublime, and more important.14
The Hasidic axiology therefore represents a departure from the more general Kabbalistic-theosophical views, caused by the new type of direct and oral relations based not on the common study of written texts but on sermons and homilies. In a letter written by a student of the Gaon of Vilnius, addressed to R. Yehudah Leib de Botin, he accuses some unidentified Hasidim of speaking vanities and regarding them as “words of Torah.”15 This is, apparently, not his own formulation; from the context it appears that it was his addressee, a lesser-known rabbi who had some leanings to Hasidism, who had informed him about it in a previous and apparently no longer extant letter. In fact, it is a characteristically Hasidic view that the sermon delivered by the Hasidic rabbi at the end of the Sabbath is called Torah. This is quite a remarkable claim, to argue that the mystical sermons delivered each and every Sabbath in so many communities are part of, or even similar to, the sacrosanct Torah. In any case, it seems that this assumption is instrumental in the later printing of the greater part of Hasidic literature, which consists of homilies in Hebrew versions. Moreover, in several instances Hasidic masters contended that they could transform the ordinary speeches of the common people, and even of heretics, into Torah by elevating them or by changing the order of the letters of the words.16
How serious is this claim? Were those sermons, delivered in Yiddish,17 indeed considered by the preacher or by his audience as Torah, according to the plain sense of the word? Although basically an explanation of the pericopes of the Torah, they were no more and no less than interpretations. Therefore we may ask whether this phenomenon represents an attempt, reminiscent of the modern debates in the fields of literature and hermeneutics, about the relationship between text and commentary. I would prefer not to offer an answer that may be held as pertinent for the whole range of Hasidic literature. There can be no doubt, however, that in some schools the teachings of the Hasidic leader became canonical, and this happened almost immediately. This is obviously the case with the teachings of the great-grandson of the Besht, R. Nahman of Braslav, each of which was designated as a Torah. According to his closest student, R. Nahman repeatedly recommended to his disciples that they transform his Torahs into prayers.18 Thus, R. Nahman himself openly regarded his teachings as Torah. His student, R. Nathan Nemirov, however, went a little bit further; he describes his master’s teachings as “containing, each and every one of them, the entire Torah, the whole people of Israel, and all the things in [all] the worlds.”19 Indeed, R. Nathan’s whole introduction is a lengthy description of the manner in which the teachings are transformed into prayers. Unlike the story about the Besht, where the writing down of the teaching is conceived of as deleterious, in the case of his famous great-grandson the canonic status of the teaching of the Tzaddiq is much more pronounced, and his major book indeed attained the status of a classic within his group of disciples, who did not choose another leader but relied on the guidance found in his books.
Extremely relevant from this point of view is the rapid ascent of the practice and importance of saying Torah—lomar torah, another term for preaching20—which had already become a custom drawing upon some earlier source, perhaps certain practices in R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto’s circle.21 Formulated near the beginning of the nineteenth century, the attempt to discredit the effort to commit to writing the Besht’s teachings found in In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov only anticipated the flood of written descriptions of the oral teachings of the Hasidic masters and their lives. It was a desperate effort to maintain a culture of orality over the increasingly written transmission of Hasidic thought. Even among some of those early authors, like R. Shlomo of Lutzk, who wrote down their teacher’s sayings, it is conspicuous that their enterprise needs explicit legitimation.22 Unlike their opponents, the mitnaggedim, whose illustrious leader, a famous scholar named R. Elijah of Vilnius, was a recluse and hardly interacted with his students but assiduously studied and wrote, Hasidic leaders preferred orality over literacy. If the Gaon of Vilnius is the most accomplished paragon of Jewish literacy and writing, the Besht is the great oral teacher.
We have examined the views related to two members of the same family, the Besht and his great-grandson, R. Nahman. Let me move now to the second-most important family in the history of Hasidism, that of R. Dov Baer of Mezeritch, known as the Great Maggid, and his own great-grandson, R. Israel Friedmann, the famous Ryzhiner Rebbe. Friedmann once reported a
great debate between the disciples of the Great Maggid concerning the Torah said by the Maggid, blessed be his memory. One argued that he said so, another otherwise. And the [Great] Maggid told them that both versions are the words of the living God, because the words I said include all of these [interpretations]. End of the words of the Maggid. And he [the Great Maggid], blessed be his memory, said that there are seventy facets to the Torah, and indeed it [the Torah] emerges from the place of true unity. Although in its source the Torah is one, only by its descent into these worlds does it become seventy facets. This is the reason why in the Torah of R. Meir it is written kuttonet ’or, spelled with ’aleph because R. Meir took over the Torah from its source, and this is why it was written with ’aleph, while with us it is written with ’ayin.23
As we saw earlier, the connection between the name of R. Meir and the version of the Torah in his possession was already adumbrated in a Lurianic passage.24 The tannaitic figure is described here in terms that are reminiscent of Neoplatonic thinking: his name means “illumining,” and that is why he is able to adhere to the source of light, and thus the version he had resorts to the letter ’aleph, with the value 1 which transforms the word ’or, “skin,” into the word ‘or, “light.” The source of multiple interpretations is explained in rather Neoplatonic terms: one basic spiritual unit becomes diversified when descending into the lower worlds, where the ‘aleph becomes ‘ayin, namely 1 becomes 70, which stands for both multiplicity25 and, in this specific context, skin. As indicated in the above passage, the Great Maggid regarded the divergences in the views expounded by his disciples as equally important, saying “both versions are the words of the living God,” a recurrent phrase used in rabbinic literature to describe the status of the different stands concerning Halakhah that remained part of the talmudic heritage. Thus, those who debate about the Torah of the Great Maggid are conceived of as possessing a divine spirit—even more so, implicitly, the originator of the views under discussion.
Elsewhere, the same nineteenth-century master is said to have reported:
When the [Great] Maggid said Torah at the table, the students repeated it afterward among themselves when going back to their houses; one said, “I heard it in such a way,” another saying that he heard it in another way, because each of them heard it in a different way. I say that this is not a novelty, since there are seventy facets to the Torah, and each of them heard the Torah of the Maggid according to the [specific] facet he had in the Torah. And he [R. Israel] said: When I look attentively to the [ir] faces,26 there is no need to say Torah, because “the show of their faces27 witnessed against them.”28 And this suffices for one who understands.29
It is the living master, the Tzaddiq, who orally creates a new, polysemous text while his students should, much as the ancient Tannaites and Amoraites did, discuss the potential views inherent in his recently created oral discourse. The Hasidic master, the originator of the text, is surrounded by the disciples who presumably are understood to inhabit, at least spiritually, a lower religious level, where distinctions emerge as soon as the “Torah” is enunciated by the master in the vernacular, namely in Yiddish. Although the Lurianic view regarding the affinity between interpretation and the source of the soul in the Torah was absorbed at the level of the students of the Tzaddiq, it is the Tzaddiq’s new status as the creator of a canonical text, emerging at the defining moment of the new community of mainly laymen, the tisch (the table of the third ritual meal on the Sabbath), that seems to be novel. This semi- or quasi-divine status of the Tzaddiq in many of the Hasidic ideologies is also well attested in a wide variety of other matters—his wonder making, for example. Whereas R. Isaac Luria, the greatest of all the historical Kabbalists, was thought to be able to be in contact solely with the souls of the departed ancient mystics in order to learn new interpretations, or with the manifestation of the rather popular figure of the prophet Elijah, the Hasidic masters were imagined as capable of being unified with the divine on its highest level.30
The case of R. Israel of Ryzhin, however, is particularly interesting because it reflects an awareness that the very act of generating a plurivocal text is dependent not so much on a pneumatic leader as on the spiritual configurations of its immediate consumers or recipients. Without the homilist’s feeling that the semantic potential of the sermon will be understood and even explicated later by his listeners, the discourse itself will never emerge. At least in this case, the descent of the “Torah” is conditioned by the possibility of an adequate human appropriation. Without the visible propensity for multiple interpretations, the religiously authoritative text will never be promulgated. This testimony is especially relevant because R. Israel was certainly one of the most powerful leaders ever recorded in Hasidic history. Again, let me recall the invisible audience of the Kabbalists, who quite often did not meet the consumers of their books. Very rarely do we know about the impact of the audience on the Kabbalist as an author. In the Hasidic stories related to the Great Maggid and his great-grandson, the master needs first the mystical contact with the divine, namely the uttermost spiritual experience, but also the potential response of the simple audience, in order to perform.
Although the concept of accommodation of the divine revelation is visible here, it is far from being one that assumes an absolute power which takes into consideration the weakness of human nature. It is rather a weak master, despite the unprecedented power of R. Israel, which cannot cope with the even greater weakness of the recipients. Only the interpretive skills of the recipients are able to disclose the richness that elevates the sermon to the status of Torah. The more numerous the interpretations emerging in his audience are, the more authoritative the new, basically oral text may be. I would like to stress, however, that in the case of the Hasidic master, as in that of the text we adduced from Yalqut Shim’oni in a previous chapter,31 it is the unwritten voice that suffices to create the diversity of interpretations. Hasidism is basically a textual community organized around an oral text that was imagined to attract interpretations, just as the Tzaddiq, the righteous, who is the core of the Hasidic community, attracts his Hasidim, the disciples. Hasidic communities depend not on the written text but on the charisma that compels attention. In this context let me draw attention to the relationship between the words and speeches arriving from above and interpretation, as formulated in a seminal passage from R. Nahman of Braslav translated and discussed in Chapter 6. It is the oral text that the Hasidim were listening for (to use Brian Stock’s phrase) on the afternoon of the Sabbath, after the ritual reading of the written Torah. The above text should be compared to a homily of Saint Gregorius, a sixth-century pope, who professed, “I know that very often I understand many things in the sacred writings when I am with my brethren, which, when alone, I could not understand … Clearly, as this understanding is given me in their presence, it must be given me for their sake. Hence God grants that understanding increases and pride decreases, while I learn, on your behalf, that which I teach you. For, really, very often I hear what I am saying for the first time, just as you do.”32
The dynamics of the group, which should be seen as one of the major triggers of any spiritual creativity, is well known in Jewish mysticism, where many important treatises were generated by mystics that were leaders of mystical groups. This seems to be the case for the most important book of Kabbalah, the Zohar, as Yehuda Liebes has proposed,33 and the same dynamic seems to have inspired some of the main Kabbalists in sixteenth-century Safed.34 If this factor is given a significant role, then the function of the interaction within a group, which was facilitated, probably by resorting to the vernacular, in the process of inducing a state of creativity in the leader, seems to be paramount.35 It is also interesting to compare Gregorius’ claim for an inspired homily to the contention of Hasidim that their sermons are divinely inspired, a point that recurs in many of the descriptions of early Hasidism.
Let me elaborate on the manner in which the possibility of finding seventy facets in a sermon delivered in Yiddish is understood. R. Israel of Ryzhin’s assumption is that everyone has his own facet, or aspect, according to which he understands the written Torah, and consequently the Hasidic master stands on solid Kabbalistic grounds. This mode of idiosyncratic preunderstanding is expanded here, however, to his specific understanding of an oral Torah, generated not by God or Moses as part of the Sinaitic revelation, nor later on by ancient rabbis, but by the immediate speaker, the Tzaddiq. Again, a category stemming from the conceptualization of the written Torah was applied to the oral Hasidic Torah.
These traditions related to the Great Maggid deal, from the hermeneutical point of view, with the descent of the unified one of the orally innovated Torah into many of the seventy interpretations, or from the one central leader to his numerous disciples. This move is reminiscent of the Neoplatonic emanational scheme describing the processio, which had been loosely adopted in Hasidism. In another interesting discussion found in the work of an important Hasidic author related to the circle of the Great Maggid, R. Hayyim Tirer of Chernovitz, the relation between the ’aleph and the ’ayin is invoked again in the context of the Torah of R. Meir, but this time it concerns the Neoplatonic process of reversio. R. Hayyim describes the ascent of the source of the Torah implied by the change of the ‘ayin into an ’aleph, which is achieved by intense study and the indwelling of the divine light within the student, a process that culminates in his own attainment of luminosity.36 To a certain extent, this was the transformation undergone by the biblical Moses, whose facial skin was described as luminous.37
Let me close this discussion with a remark about the different garments of Adam and of the Torah. Garments of the Torah, whether material or spiritual—some of them even created by Torah study—are a topos in Kabbalistic literature.38 In Hasidic literature they nevertheless play a particular role: from the time of the Besht, Hasidic teaching resorted to telling stories, which were conceived of as garments for the Torah, necessary for the dissemination of Hasidism in a simple manner that can be understood by all Jews.39 The power of the spoken word is also obvious in the manner in which the Besht recites the book from the Heikhalot literature to his disciple, as demonstrated above.40
R. Israel of Ryzhin’s feeling of the need to speak, but also his awareness of the discrepancy between the ideal—perhaps also idealized—group that surrounded his great-grandfather and his own followers, is related to many issues. It is almost a ritual obligation to deliver a sermon on the eve of the feast of Shavuot, the kairos for the revelation of the Torah. The Tzaddiq is therefore requested to repeat the Sinaitic situation in nuce. Nevertheless, he is unable to do so: “Once, in the eve of feast of Shavuot, he was sitting at the table and did not say any Torah, neither did he speak one word; but he cried very much. The second night he did the same.”41 I assume that, historically speaking, this passage reflects the situation during the period of R. Israel’s residence in Sadigura, near Chernovitz, after he had fled from Russia to the province of Bukovina, on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire. Far from the more vibrant centers of Hasidism and learning in Podolya and Galicia, he had to rebuild his hyparchy in an all-but-forgotten land. It seems that the Jewish entourage he was thrown amid by his escape from Russia did not meet his expectations.
Again, from the historical point of view R. Israel was right. Neither he nor any of his disciples and descendants contributed substantially to the development of Hasidism as a mystical movement, important as their status in the eyes of their many followers was. The feeling of intellectual inferiority, which stems not from his own inability to preach but from the absence of a learned audience, was probably coupled with the image of R. Israel, known in some Hasidic and non-Hasidic circles as an ignoramus. Nevertheless, he had the feeling that he had to speak, and I would say that many of the Hasidic masters had the feeling, expressed in a remarkable way by Emmanuel Levinas, that to be responsible is to speak.42 R. Israel would, however, hesitate to attribute to the encounter with the faces of his disciples the same formative role that Levinas did. If the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher would envision such an encounter in general terms of the generic “other” that shapes the self, the nineteenth-century Hasidic master would say that such a move is a later development that must be preceded by an encounter with the transcendental, the divine, which may at the same time enrich and dissolve the personality of the mystic. The human faces of the Hasidim represent the descent of a personality that previously was illumined by a much higher plane of existence.
The plurality of the faces in the above text is also of some importance. Unlike Levinas’s notion of the “other” or Ricoeur’s concept of the “text” (both in the singular), Hasidic masters tended to be interested not in such generic abstractions but in individuals or communities. They were more concerned with what they were giving and whom they saved, religiously speaking, than with how their self was constituted by the encounters. Democratic elements are indeed to be found in Hasidism, but there are plenty of aristocratic approaches that sharply differentiate the spiritual leadership from the multitude. The Tzaddiq becomes the text, oral though it may be, that informs his followers, and if there is no pertinent audience the text-becoming enterprise of the leader is in vain. Plunging into leadership without a following is tantamount to producing a text that cannot be interpreted. This is why R. Israel is portrayed as crying: at the very moment of his (self-) revelation he had the feeling that his voice would be lost in a wilderness of ignorance.
Yet even this refusal to become a text for a moment, an oral one to be sure, became a written text, as the above passage testifies. Hasidic literature as it has reached us in its Hebrew garb, more concerned with specific individuals and situations than Kabbalah as a whole, underwent a deep process of textualization.
Let me conclude this appendix with a general observation regarding the nature of exegesis in Hasidic literature. Most of Hasidic exegesis is nonintercorporal and nonmetaphysical, in the manner in which I described these approaches in Chapters 8 and 9. No systematic metaphysical construct compelled them in a way that dictated a strong reference to a doctrine that should be introduced within and should force the direction of the interpretive process. The panoramic approach of the Hasidic masters, the relative dissolution of the dominance of Lurianism, and their flexible and often unsystematic attitude are evident when in comparison with those of almost all the Kabbalistic schools. Most of the theosophical symbols stemming from Lurianic systems were reinterpreted psychologically.43 This deployment of psychological exegesis on Jewish canonical books, even on the theosophical-theurgical concepts, represents the most original of the Hasidic contributions to Jewish mystical hermeneutics. It seems, however, that in the oral Yiddish texts characteristic of the homiletic discourse of the Hasidic leaders there was one more element that is not represented in the written Hebrew and printed texts: the Hasidic rabbis were more concerned during their sermons with particular individuals and their specific concerns, as we learn from the fascinating testimony of Shlomo Maimon regarding the Great Maggid’s sermons.44 In fact, most of Hasidic literature as it has reached us in print represents not only a shift in language and style but also a tendency toward general instructions that is less related to the immediate audience listening to the original sermon.45 To resort to the passage from R. Israel of Ryzhin, in the Hebrew texts of Hasidic homiletics the faces of the listeners were lost. Even in his own testimony no proper name is invoked. The uniqueness of the historical (non-)event was surpassed by its meaning.