UKRAINE
IN THE YEARS AFTER THE DEATH of the Maggid of Mezritsh in 1772, Hasidism developed from a few scattered courts into a movement. Coincidentally, 1772 was also the same year as the first of three partitions of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria (or the Habsburg Empire), a process that culminated in the second partition of 1793 and the final partition in 1795. These dramatic geopolitical events, which put an end to the centuries-long Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, had very little direct impact on the development of the Hasidic movement in the last decades of the eighteenth century, although they were to be of great moment in the nineteenth century. For the time being, the new geopolitical boundaries did not interfere with the bonds between Hasidic leaders and their devotees, just as they failed to stop the expansion of Hasidism beyond the areas of its origin.
Hasidism originated in the region of Ukraine that fell to Russia in 1793, but it spread during the partition period to Lithuania and White Russia (present-day Belarus), which came under Russian rule as well. The movement further established major outposts in Galicia, the region of southeastern Poland that, from 1772, was governed by the Habsburg Empire. In addition, several small Hasidic groups were also active in Central Poland, which from 1795 was divided between Prussian and Austrian rule. In 1807, these regions were turned into the Duchy of Warsaw and, after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, they were transformed into the Kingdom of Poland, also known as Congress Poland or Russian Poland. In this and the next two chapters, we will examine the proliferation of Hasidism into these areas, although we will take up the story at greater length in the nineteenth century.
Both the Hasidim themselves and most historians until recently believed that the movement followed one trajectory as it spread. As the nineteenth-century rebbe Menahem Mendel of Kotzk is reported to have said: “The Besht came to remedy … so that they would worship God, may he be blessed, in the heart. And his work proceeded from Podolia to Volhynia [the Maggid of Mezritsh] and later to Galicia [Elimelekh of Lizhensk] and thence to [Congress] Poland.”1 In each of these regions, according to historians like Simon Dubnow, Hasidism supposedly took on distinctive characteristics: White Russian and Lithuanian Hasidism was “intellectual,” Ukrainian “popular” or “materialistic,” Galician “conservative,” while in Poland there were a variety of forms.
In reality, however, these typologies are misleading, since the diffusion of Hasidism in the late eighteenth century resembled the growth of a complex network rather than a single trajectory. Its cultural and ideological characteristics in each place were more the result of local factors rather than some “national” or “regional” identity. Nevertheless, it is convenient to divide our discussion of the proliferation of Hasidism according to these geographical divisions. Though political boundaries could not prevent the flow of people and ideas from one region to another, each region had a certain character that distinguished it in a rough way from the others; these characteristics were to become more pronounced in the nineteenth century as a result of the different political paths taken by the Russian and Habsburg Empires.
It is conventional to speak of this period as the age of the students of the Maggid, who were responsible for turning the original fellowship into a movement. But it is important to remember, as we mentioned at the end of the last chapter, that there were Hasidic leaders who had no connection to Dov Ber of Mezritsh but nevertheless played significant roles in the same process. Just as the Maggid did not stand as the leader of a coherent movement, so his disciples were not by themselves the “third generation” responsible for extending it further. Many of the tsaddikim active in the last quarter of the eighteenth century did not have developed courts or leave followers after them, either from their families or from their students. Nevertheless, like the Maggid’s disciples, they too became highly influential as a result of their charisma, spirituality, popular leadership, or for their books that advanced Hasidic ideals.
Two issues in particular came to dominate the debates in the decades after the death of the Maggid, debates that can be traced back to tensions within his own teachings: whether Kabbalistic and Hasidic teachings should remain elitist and esoteric or be popularized, and what was the appropriate type of leadership for the developing movement. In addition to these ideological questions, which generated different answers, Hasidism also developed common institutions and books as it spread. It is these that came to define it socially as a movement. We will examine those institutions in chapter 9.
The Ukrainian Cradle and Its Offshoots
The numerous Jewish communities annexed to Russia as a result of the first partition of Poland in 1772 included important Hasidic centers, most of them outside the Ukrainian “cradle” of Hasidism, especially in the provinces of Minsk (Mińsk) and Vitebsk. The areas of the greatest concentration of Hasidim in the southwestern areas of Ukraine—Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia—were annexed in the second partition of 1793: these were Hasidism’s genuine cradle, including the Besht’s Mezhbizh. From the first partition, when Tsarina Catherine the Great began to formulate her policy toward the Jews who had become Russian subjects, the authorities generally adopted a policy of relative tolerance toward the Hasidim, above all in the struggles between the Hasidim and Mitnaggdim. A significant landmark in this protracted process was the Statute on the Status of the Jews of 1804, which sought, among other things, to weaken the kehalim (plural of kahal), communal institutions of Jewish self-government. The statute established the right of any ten Jews to split from the community on religious grounds, to establish their own prayer houses, and to choose their own spiritual leaders. This constituted de facto recognition of the Hasidim, dealing a severe blow to their opponents, although the statute was probably not promulgated primarily to intervene in the internal conflict over Hasidism.
Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl
Perhaps the most important Ukrainian branch of Hasidism, from the late eighteenth century and up to our own time, was composed of the many dynasties that originated with Chernobyl, including Talne, Trisk, Skvira, Makarov, Cherkassy, and more. The founder of the dynasty was Menahem Nahum Twersky (1730–1797), thought to be one of the youngest of the Besht’s students and one of the oldest of the disciples of the Maggid of Mezritsh. Menahem Nahum must be counted as belonging to at least two of the early generations of Hasidism. The known facts about the life of Menahem Nahum (often called just Nahum) are fragmentary and based mainly on later family traditions. Here, for instance, is a family tradition that tells of Nahum’s humble origins, his awakening to Hasidism as a result of visiting the Besht, and the beginnings of his activity as a tsaddik:
The Admor, the holy Rabbi Master Yitshak of Skvira, of blessed and righteous holy memory, related that his grandfather, Rabbi Nahum of Chernobyl, of blessed and righteous holy memory, was at first indigent and immeasurably poor. In his home he had nothing with which to protect and cover himself from the cold and wind except a single pelz [fur wrap]. And when he had to go about at night in winter to immerse himself in the river, as was his holy custom, his wife went with him to guard it [the pelz]. She would wear the pelz till they came to the river, and on their return from the river he would wear the pelz until they reached their home. And his undergarment was very torn from above between his shoulders, till his flesh was almost visible there. And there was nothing to repair it with. Later things got a little better for him and he bought himself an upperwear garment called tuzlik [short jacket].
It occurred to him to gird his feet to visit the Besht, and so he did. And when he came to the Besht the first time it was a holiday. The Besht was sitting with his students at a meal. And when the holy Rabbi Reb Nahum came there, he was greeted by the Besht and later stood in one corner at the side. Then the Besht called to him and spoke to him: “Yunger man [young man], go and wash your hands to eat and feast with us.” And the holy Rabbi Reb Nahum stood embarrassed with his thoughts, and knew not what to do, if he should eat with them wearing the tuzlik, that would not be right, but if he should strip off the tuzlik, that too would not be right, since his undergarment was not fine, as we have written. Till the Besht called him a second time and told him: “Go wash your hands and feast with us.” Then he washed his hands and feasted with them. And the holy Rabbi Reb Nahum then stayed there at the Besht’s for a long time, and became a great pupil of the Besht. And later when he came home from his holy Rabbi’s, he was immediately received in a certain town to be a maggid there.… Then he was appointed maggid in Chernobyl, where he earned one ruble a week. And one rich man from there gave him from his money each week.2
This text gives us an insight into Jewish clothing in the mid-eighteenth century, but its main purpose is to describe Nahum’s meeting with the Besht as the decisive event that turned him into a devoted disciple. How exactly he may have heard of the Besht remains unexplained, and the text, deriving from the nineteenth century, may reflect an anachronistic—and unhistorical—view that the Besht actually ran a court. According to the story, as an unexplained but evidently connected consequence, Nahum “immediately” attained a post as a maggid—that is, a paid preacher in an unnamed town. At a later point, he became the maggid in Chernobyl with an even higher salary. Thus, like the Besht in his day, Nahum held a formal community position, earning his living from the coffers of the kahal.
Nahum was still relatively young when the Besht died, and, again for unexplained reasons, he took the Maggid of Mezritsh as his master. In his sermons, he refers to both of them as “my teacher.” It seems that he was especially close to the son of the Maggid, Avraham “the Angel,” and to Shneur Zalman of Liady. From other sources, we learn that after the death of the Maggid, Nahum was already functioning as an independent leader in the context of his job, at first in Pohrebyszcze, where he attracted a few acolytes (at least up to 1776), and later in Chernobyl. However, he did not found a fullfledged court, with the economic and social organization familiar to us from some of his contemporaries, in either place. Nahum’s practice as a tsaddik provides good evidence that not all the students and contemporaries of the Maggid established the kind of court they had seen while with him; some adopted portions of it, while others were inclined to a more nomadic existence. Famous for his ecstatic spirituality, Nahum deliberately lived a life of poverty. From what we know, even after he was hired as a community maggid, he was able to continue some of his wanderings to nearby Jewish communities, giving public sermons and working as a ba’al shem.
Nahum fathered two sons and a daughter. One of his granddaughters married the grandson of the Maggid of Mezritsh, Shalom Sakhna, who, Hasidic tradition tells us, was raised in the home of Nahum after the death of his father, Avraham “the Angel.” Nahum’s younger son, Mordechai (ca. 1770–1837), began to function as a tsaddik while his father was still alive, eventually acquiring the title of Maggid of Chernobyl and assuming his father’s roles. It may thus be argued that the Chernobyl dynasty took shape in the framework of the community office of the maggid in Chernobyl.
Nahum was the object of attacks by the Mitnaggdim; he is mentioned unfavorably in the polemical writings of David of Makow and Israel Löbel. According to Hasidic tradition, on at least one occasion he was taken off the preacher’s dais by Mitnaggdim, and on another was even arrested by the authorities as a result of a denunciation. However, the reliability of these traditions is doubtful. In the polemical tract Zamir Aritsim, written during the final year of Nahum’s life, the author warns his readers lest they turn to this old tsaddik who can no longer save anyone: “Elderly, frail and feeble is he, carried upon the shoulder, hauled and set down where he stands, he moves not from his place and even if shouted at does not answer, in his afflicted state he will not save us.… Why should you lose your good money for nothing and your labor for vanity by giving it to these fools?”3 Nahum’s son Mordechai is mentioned as well in the writings of the Mitnaggdim, from which it follows that already in the late 1790s he was recognized as a significant figure.
Nahum’s sermons were edited and collected in the books Me’or Einayim and Yismah Lev, printed sequentially right after his death (Slavuta, 1798). The books are based on his regular sermons, as is said in the introduction to Me’or Einayim: “He would sit and give a sermon each and every Shabbat on the subject of the Torah portion, as well as on holidays and festivals … and at times in his goodness he would give new interpretations of the Torah even on ordinary days.”4 His books became fundamental texts that contain much of early Hasidic ethos. His teachings preserve the voices of both of his teachers, the Besht and the Maggid, which at times are in tension with each other (for example, Nahum’s embrace of worship through materiality—avodah be-gashmiyut—is much closer to the Besht’s teachings than to the Maggid’s, but he reflects both in his writings).
Statements of a social or biographical nature are hard to find in Nahum’s sermons, and the topic of the tsaddik as a leader of a community also appears rarely. Several sermons describe the activity of the tsaddik as mokhiah (“reprover”) and healer, similar to the activities of Nahum himself. The tsaddik is presented here as an idealized figure, a pillar of the world, less as a social leader of a community of Hasidim, and still less as the holder of an institutionalized office. Indeed, in Nahum’s writings, anyone can aspire to become a tsaddik. Rare too in his writings are accounts of ecstatic experiences. In terms of theology, he evidently adopted the doctrine of divine immanence attributed to the Besht, and believed in the presence of divinity in man and the world. Like the Besht, he emphasized the importance of joy rather than asceticism.
Levi Yitshak of Barditshev
Side by side with Menahem Nahum, we find the striking presence of individual tsaddikim in this region, including the Besht’s grandchildren, Barukh of Mezhbizh and Moshe Hayim Efrayim of Sudilkov, whom we have already met. Another important figure was Levi Yitshak of Barditshev (1740–1809), already mentioned in the discussion of opposition to Hasidism, who began his career in Central Poland as the rabbi of the town of Zelekhev. In 1776, he was appointed the head of the rabbinical court and yeshivah in Pinsk, which, as we have seen, was not a community dominated by Hasidim. He successfully maintained his position there until 1785, when he was finally dismissed, apparently under pressure from the Vilna Mitnaggdim. He then moved to Barditshev, one of the largest communities in Volhynia and an important commercial center. In Barditshev, Levi Yitshak did not have a court nor did he lead a defined Hasidic congregation; rather, he operated as a typical communal rabbi. As was the case with a number of other early Hasidic leaders, he left no distinguished heirs, but he became a very important figure in the Hasidic pantheon. In Hasidic memory as preserved in tales, he is a heroic figure, “the protector of Israel,” a man who loved the simple folk and engaged in fiery debates with God to defend the Jews of his time from the dangers that threatened them. We have, in fact, very little historical evidence regarding his public activities and his impact on the communities in which he functioned as a rabbi, and it is therefore hard to differentiate the legendary figure from the historical one. Levi Yitshak did participate in a 1781 debate defending Hasidism against the Mitnagged rabbi of Brest-Litovsk, Avraham Katznellenbogen. In addition, at the beginning of the nineteenth century he apparently convened a meeting of important Jewish leaders (not just Hasidim) in Ukraine to formulate a common policy in response to new Russian laws on Jewish status.
Levi Yitshak’s teachings were widely read and influential, but his later importance also derives from the fact that he was among the key students of the Maggid and one of those who wrote down his teachings. Levi Yitshak’s version of the Maggid’s thought is perhaps the richest and most fully articulated. These transcriptions have been preserved in manuscript form, and in several published collections of the Maggid’s sermons, starting with Maggid Devarav le-Ya’akov (first printed in 1781), as well as later compendia of his homilies printed in the twentieth century. In addition, many of the rituals attributed to the Maggid are found in Levi Yitshak’s writings, so much so that we can regard him as one of the most important of the Maggid’s scribes, alongside Shlomo of Lutsk, who, interestingly, never mentions him.
Levi Yitshak’s literary reputation rests on his book Kedushat Levi, a first part of which was published in 1798 while the full book appeared in 1811, after his death. The book became one of the keystone books of Hasidism and was reprinted over twenty times in the nineteenth century alone. Among the students of the Maggid, he was one of the greatest innovators in the area of homiletics and in the hermeneutic development of central Hasidic concepts. Even though he did not function as a Hasidic leader himself—that is, with a court and a group of Hasidic followers—Levi Yitshak’s book is filled with ideas about Hasidic leadership, expanding the powers of the tsaddik in the magical realm as well as his role in coming to the material aid of his followers. He responded to the social and religious challenges that arose as a result of the expansion of Hasidism in his generation to broader audiences in the Jewish community. Here, for example, is his view about the inherent tension found in Hasidic writings between the tsaddik’s desire for mystical transcendence as against the mundane demands of his public role:
Thus we see that there are tsaddikim who through their prayers can have the effect they desire, while others do not. The matter is thus: the great tsaddik, when he arrives at the garden of the abode of the King of the world and sits in front of Him, forgets that he had come with a request about the business of this [mundane] world, and only seeks to achieve a [mystical] union [devekut] with the king.… and he forgets the reason he came. That is not the case with tsaddikim who are not at this high a level. Even though they are standing in front of the king, they do remember their requests—what they have come to seek.… Of the first tsaddik, the one who does not remember that his task is to bring down abundance [shef’a] to this world, it is said that “he had not offered a perfect [shlemah] prayer,” that is, he does not possess perfection, because he does not draw down the abundance but, instead, thinks only of the matters of the world to come, where he will worship the Creator. And the tsaddik who thinks that his task is to draw the abundance down to the world, his prayer is called “a perfect prayer,” for that prayer contains perfection, by bringing abundance to this world.5
Levi Yitshak prefers the “lesser tsaddik” who reaches the king’s palace and thinks about the sustenance and health of his Hasidim over the “greater tsaddik” whose desire for closeness to God makes it impossible for him to ask for anything that is not related to his personal spiritual transcendence. In his homiletic writings, Levi Yitshak portrays positively the tsaddik who is close to ordinary people. One of the important roles of the tsaddik is to descend to the level of sinners in order to rectify their ways, and the best way to do that is through teaching them as well as offering rebuke. Embedded in the tsaddik’s pronouncements is a divine light that can draw down the abundance and influence his surroundings.
Aharon of Zhitomir (1750–1816), one of Levi Yitshak’s students, explicated his teacher’s method as follows:
For, sometimes, the tsaddik has to bring the wicked closer than the upright, for if he lets the wicked man go his own way, he might, God forbid, be lost altogether and never repent. But in regard to the man who walks the straight and righteous path, one should worry that he does not become haughty, God forbid, and therefore, one needs to push him away once in a while. And this is what my teacher the holy rabbi, his soul resting in the treasure house of heaven, the rabbi of the holy congregation of Barditshev, used to do, drawing outsiders near to him over his followers, and he said that distancing himself [from his followers] is, in fact, his form of closeness. There is a great wisdom in this.6
The importance, and even necessity, of human agency is another of the cornerstones of Levi Yitshak’s theology. God’s boundless love for Israel led Him to reduce His infinite power through creating the world, inviting and demanding the tsaddik to become an active participant in the ongoing construction of the cosmos. Of course, this great power is largely limited to the tsaddikim. In sermon after sermon in Kedushat Levi, he quotes and paraphrases the Talmudic dictum of “the blessed Holy One decrees and the tsaddik annuls” (Babylonian Talmud, Moed Katan 16b). While some homilies claim that the tsaddik can only actualize different potentialities that are already latent within God’s will, more radical sermons suggest that the Divine has no will as such and it is human leaders who shape and articulate God’s desires.
This power is manifest in the ability of tsaddikim to work miracles, but Levi Yitshak also describes it as a type of absolute interpretive freedom given to Israel. This gift of exegetical license, he argues, was the essence of the theophany at Mt. Sinai. The Written Torah was offered to Israel as a sacred writ inscribed upon the tablets. But the ever-changing Oral Torah transmitted to Moses, which even then, as an ancient midrash already said, included all later ideas to be expressed by future scholars, is manifest in new ways through new interpretations offered by the tsaddikim of each generation. Levi Yitshak strikingly extends this notion to the realm of halakhah, which, like all other homiletical dimensions of Torah, must be determined and reinterpreted as time goes on. This exegetical freedom is possible because the divine words of Scripture hold an endless multiplicity of different meanings and new ideas, but it is also the result of God’s decision to follow the tsaddikim below. In this striking theology of interpretation, Levi Yitshak tried to balance tradition and creativity. On the one hand, the tsaddik is called upon to listen to the unfolding divine will in his particular generation, but on the other, he plays an active role in shaping the manifestation of God’s voice.
Another tsaddik, Ze’ev Wolf (d. 1800), who lived in Zhitomir (north of Barditshev), was a wine merchant and eventually became a maggid in his community. Like Levi Yitzshak, he was a disciple of the Maggid and did not head a community of Hasidim. He left a homiletic book, Or ha-Me’ir (1798), a deeply mystical and theologically creative work that includes much information about the Maggid’s teachings and practices. The book reveals Ze’ev Wolf as a critic of his contemporary Jewish society and of the process of popularization of Hasidism in his day. He derided the false leaders pretending to be tsaddikim by empty imitation of the behavior of their teachers:
As has become commonplace in this generation, there are many ordinary people who gain a name for themselves among the great of the generation, offering their teachings along with esoteric meanings … and delude themselves into believing that they too can influence reality and bring about good things.… And what kind of wisdom do they possess? After all, they are full of deceptions and self-aggrandizing … and are ruled by their own covetous appetites.7
We do not know to whom exactly he is referring, but it seems that Ze’ev Wolf believed that the opposition to true tsaddikim is caused by the behavior of false tsaddikim. This view demonstrates the elitist approach that strives to preserve an “authentic Hasidism” and not allow it to become a popular “product” based merely on the superficial behavior of Hasidim. That he believed in an authentic Hasidism demonstrates that the movement and its ideas were already well developed by the end of the eighteenth century, when Ze’ev Wolf wrote his book. Even though there might still be controversy about key concepts, like avodah be-gashmiyut, a sense of who was authentic and who was not, took hold for key Hasidic leaders.
A distinctive place within the world of early Hasidism belongs to Nahman ben Simhah of Bratslav (1772–1810), founder of a unique school of Hasidic thought and practice. For his followers up to the present day, he is “our master,” the only rebbe of the Bratslav group (or “Breslov,” as pronounced by its members). One of the most creative, if idiosyncratic Hasidic thinkers, he offered original and often daring rereadings of a vast array of prior Jewish sources. Largely an autodidact, but unusually well-versed in biblical, rabbinic, and Kabbalistic lore, he wove the sources together into highly imaginative creations of his associative mind. Yet it must be said that the Bratslav movement—small, marginalized, and even persecuted in the nineteenth century—has assumed much greater importance in the twentieth century by attracting the interest of non-Hasidic writers and scholars, such as, for example, Martin Buber. In recent years, it has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance, as we shall see in section 3 of this book. During the lifetime of Nahman himself, however, Bratslav might have merited no more than a paragraph, so that the relatively greater attention we are about to pay to it reflects a retrospective sense of its significance.
Nahman was a great-grandchild of Israel Ba’al Shem Tov through the maternal line. His paternal grandfather was Nahman of Horodenka, also a well-known figure in early Hasidic circles. As the offspring of such lineage, Nahman may have been expected to become a Hasidic master, growing up in the years when the new movement was just beginning to adopt the model of hereditary leadership. Nahman at first refused, showing considerable disdain for the popular Hasidism of his uncle, Barukh of Mezhbizh, and others. It was only after his return from a dangerous and highly transformative pilgrimage to the Land of Israel in 1798–1799 that Nahman began to gather around himself a small band of followers who constituted the first generation of what were to become Bratslav Hasidim. However, he was not content to merely start one additional Hasidic court. He also openly challenged the authority and even the spiritual legitimacy of other rebbes. In the first years of his leadership, he engaged in open conflict with the popular Hasidic leader Aryeh Leib, the Shpole Zeide (1725–1812). This controversy, like that with his uncle, reflected Nahman’s view that Hasidism was already in decline in his day. He was contemptuous of both the popular faith in miracleworking and the tendency some Hasidic leaders showed to accumulate wealth and power. Although his lineage from the Besht might have indicated otherwise, he aligned himself with such older intellectuals of the Maggid’s school as Shneur Zalman of Liady and Levi Yitshak of Barditshev against the popular Hasidism that was spreading quickly in his day, perhaps most personified by his uncle Barukh.
Bratslav thus became a movement of spiritual reform or regeneration within Hasidism, set against the broader Hasidic goal of reviving the religious life of Judaism as a whole. Nahman believed that the attempt to live in God’s presence required intense and constant self-examination and purification; he demanded extreme practices of his disciples, shaping the Bratslav community as elite within the Hasidic world. Nahman claimed that he was training his Hasidim to become true tsaddikim, not merely loyal followers, a revolutionary reordering of the hierachy of tsaddik and Hasid. The relationship of master and disciples was extraordinarily close, a reality that brought forth admiration and envy in some circles, but disdain and suspicion in others. 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. Terms such as meni’ot (“obstacles” on the spiritual path) and ga’agu’im (“longings” for an absent God), seldom mentioned elsewhere in Hasidism, are key to the Bratslav vocabulary. Nahman understands the seeming absence of God as a consequence of the divine contraction and “breaking of the vessels” of Isaac Luria’s Kabbalistic system. But it is also a result of man’s sinfulness and especially the pollution of the human imagination by wicked—often sexual—thoughts. The process of overcoming this gulf between man and God is a constant struggle against one’s own limitations.
The Bratslav Hasid is to immerse himself in his sinfulness and weakness in order to rise above them. A favorite saying of Bratslav is “there is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” Only by embracing the depths of one’s despair can one overcome it. Although there is much talk in Nahman’s teaching of the melancholy caused by sin and of the methods used to overcome it, the emotional goal of these efforts is ultimately joy. His saying “It is a great commandment to be joyous constantly” became a watchword of Bratslav, sung out with great enthusiasm. 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 one passage, he adapts the parable of the Ba’al Shem Tov, discussed in chapter 2, which told of a deaf man who, coming into a music-driven group of ecstatic dancers, thought they must all be insane. The Besht meant the parable to say that people need to overcome their spiritual “deafness” in order to join into the ecstatic worship that he taught. But Nahman reads the parable to mean that each of us has within him or her a self that refuses to enter into the joy of the moment, standing aside and looking critically at our joyous selves. Our task is to pursue that part of the self and force it too, despite its resistance, into the circle of dancers. The spiritual path of Bratslav is therefore paradoxical, reflecting the theological paradox of a God who is at once transcendent and immanent. If the former is represented psychologically by melancholy and the latter by joy, the Hasid must pass through melancholy to achieve joy.
Nahman’s rigorously self-critical approach to the attainment of joy, quite different not only from popular Hasidism but also from the much more lenient and life-affirming teachings of such figures as Levi Yitshak or Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, is rooted in Nahman’s own odyssey of personal growth and conflict. We know much more about Nahman’s life, and particularly about his inner struggles, than we do of any other Hasidic master, because the teachings of Bratslav made of him the unique exemplar of personal piety, the one model to be followed by each of his disciples, down to the end of time. This was possible thanks to Nahman’s faithful follower Natan Sternhartz of Nemirow (1780–1845), who kept a detailed record of his master’s life, including his personal tribulations.
The accounts of Nahman’s childhood and adolescence, conveyed to Natan either by the master himself or by his earliest disciples, are filled with personal struggles involving sexual and other temptations, moments of religious doubt or fear that God had abandoned him, depression and questioning of his own self-worth. There is in fact evidence in Nahman’s teachings and in the testimony of those who observed him that he suffered from bouts of depression. 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.
This promise of redemption from sin, however, is something of a double-edged sword. The fact is that Bratslav Hasidism is marked by an extreme preoccupation with sin, especially of the sexual sort. Nahman offered his followers a practice called the “general redemption” (tikkun klali), a daily recital of ten psalms, which, together with ritual immersion, was supposed to cleanse one of the great sexual misdeed of masturbation or “wasted emission of semen.” This practice was considered a vital part of Nahman’s messianic efforts, to be discussed later.
The course of Nahman’s career as a Hasidic master was remarkably brief. While he had a small coterie of followers from 1799, it was only upon his move to Bratslav from Zlatopol in 1802 that he established anything like a Hasidic court. Nahman died in 1810 at the age of thirty-eight. That period of eight years was one of remarkably intense creativity, resulting in collections of teachings and tales so rich and profound that they are still studied today, both within and beyond the Bratslav community, and have generated a sizable literature of interpretation.
Commentators within the Bratslav community as well as modern scholars are in general agreement 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. Bearing the soul formerly present in Moses, Shimon ben Yohai, Isaac Luria, and the Ba’al Shem Tov, Nahman’s task was to prepare the world for redemption. He did this by creating a cadre of disciples so pure, and a body of teachings so filled with light, that they will illuminate a path by which the Messiah will come to earth.
The teachings were published in two sections, the first during Nahman’s lifetime (1808) and the second immediately following his death (1811), both edited by Natan. The elegant literary style, unusual within the Hasidic corpus, is likely the contribution of the disciple. These two volumes, later published together under the original title Likkutei Moharan, form the core of Bratslav teaching. Nahman’s early teachings, those dating from before 1806, are mainly elaborations of the most fantastic legendary passages of the Talmud, the tales of Rabbah bar bar Hana and the “Elders of Athens,” along with some particularly obscure portions of the Zohar. These stories, filled with sea monsters and other mythic figures of exaggerated dimensions, are subjected to varied sorts of micro-analysis, ranging from the superliteral to the purely associative, to convert them to moralistic teachings with a mystical bent.
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. The closest parallel within Hasidism to this paradigm is the hitbonenut or contemplation taught in the nineteenth century by the second Chabad Rebbe, Dov Ber, although his approach was more theoretical and intellectual than Nahman’s.
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. Nahman seems to have known from experience something of the proximity of mysticism to madness.
While it would seem that the great intellectual effort of reaching toward divine oneness and the urge to cry out in simple, brokenhearted faith are quite different from one another, they are both described as paths to the same goal, the realization of our unknowing: “The goal of knowledge is [to realize that] we know nothing.” This paradox captures a deep theological conundrum in Nahman’s thought. In a remarkable sermon on the biblical passage “go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart” (Exodus 10:1), Nahman builds a dazzling meditation on the theme of paradox and heresy. Paradox stems from the void that God created before he created the world. The process of creation produced two types of heresy. The first is from the klippot, the shells of materiality left over from the shattering of the divine vessels. This type of heresy has an answer: “know what to answer the heretic.” But the second type of heresy comes from the void, where there is no God. There are no answers to this heresy, for “God cannot be found there.” In fact, it is necessary that God not be there, for the world can only exist if there is a place from which God is absent. Only Israel, by means of faith, can pass over the void of this heresy:
Thus Israel transcends all the intellectual challenges and heresies that come from the void—by knowing that they cannot be answered. For if one were to find an answer to them, one would be finding God in them; there would thus be no void and the world would not exist.… The perplexities and questions of this heresy derive from the void. They have about them a quality of silence because no intellect or language can resolve them.… In the void which surrounds all the worlds and is completely empty, there is no language.… Therefore the questions which arise there are silent.8
The perplexities that lie beyond language have no answer and can only be transcended by faith, a theology that some have seen as foreshadowing the religious existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard.
Yet, while Israel leaps over the void by its simple faith, there is one who enters into the void itself:
But know that if there is a very great tsaddik, one who has the quality of Moses, he really has to look into these words of heresy, even though it is impossible to resolve them. By means of his very inquiry into these matters, he raises up those souls who have fallen and sunk into that heresy.9
There can be little doubt that Nahman meant himself when he referred to the “very great tsaddik.” But 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 (see the discussion of Hasidic music in chapter 8).
This powerful sermon evidently stems from either 1805 or 1806. The year 1806 marked a major transition in Nahman’s life. He seems to have become overwhelmed by an increasing sense of messianic urgency. Since he lived with an ear attuned to events in the broader world, this may in part have been a response either to the victories of the Napoleonic armies or to the spread of Western Enlightenment among Jews in central Europe, both moving ever eastward. After fathering several daughters, Nahman had his first son in that year. He immediately cast messianic hopes upon little Shlomo Ephraim or his future offspring, and was devastated when the child died before his second birthday.
Nahman’s Talmudic sayings seemed to strike his fancy. They sometimes took on a lyrical, almost poetic quality, again making them stand out against the much dryer style of most Hasidic homiletics. He sometimes seems to strain against the methodologies of interpretation available to him, visibly trying to bring them to their breaking point. This frustration with the traditional homiletical and exegetical forms may explain why, in that same year, Nahman turned from interpreting ancient mythic stories to telling a series of fantastic tales of his own. He referred to these tales as “stories of events from prior times.” But the “prior times” of the tales seems to belong more to the realm of dream, fantasy, and myth.
The characters in the tales—kings, princes and princesses—are almost never recognizably Jewish and certainly do not inhabit the shtetl culture amid which his disciples lived. Although some of the motifs are borrowed from Eastern European folklore, the stories are suffused with what appear to allegories of the Kabbalistic sefirot, and the plots often revolve around themes of exile and return. However, Nahman’s genius lies in his ability to weave narratives that have their own hypnotic power, beyond their possible symbolism. And they often leave the reader with a sense of mystery that belies an easy moralistic or theological conclusion. The most important of these stories were published after his death as Sippurei Ma’asiyot (1815), in a Hebrew/Yiddish bilingual edition (Nahman almost certainly told the tales in Yiddish and Natan translated them to Hebrew). Further stories attributed to Nahman and most likely by him have been published by later generations of disciples, right down to our own day. Historians of Jewish literature in both languages have claimed Nahman’s tales as important literary compositions and even contributions to the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature.
Nahman claimed that he turned to this sort of storytelling as a way to purify the imaginations of those around him. Redemption could not come, he taught, until the human mind, prisoner of sinful imagination, was freed. His tales would provide an alternative imagination, a world of imagination so powerful and attractive that it would draw the hearer away from his own fantasy life and toward the sacred fantasies that Nahman was weaving. It is no wonder that the tales are still studied and revered within the Bratslav community, which has produced several volumes of commentary on them.
In addition to his collected teachings and tales, Nahman wrote various other shorter works. Among these was a text referred to in whispers throughout Bratslav history as Megillat Setarim, “The Scroll of Secrets.” Only one or two of the most trusted disciples in each generation held copies of this manuscript. When it was recently published for the first time by an academic scholar of Bratslav, it revealed highly pictorial descriptions of the soon-to-arrive messianic age. Alongside a profoundly mystical messianism, in which the Messiah would wholly identify with the mind of God, Nahman imagined the redeemer as an earthly king seated on a throne, surrounded by a chorus of devoted singers. He would cultivate a garden of enchanted herbs, remedies for every illness.
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. His teachings in this period contain numerous references to breathing, the lungs, and the bloodstream, showing that his illness was often on his mind and that he was trying to piece together some spiritual and quasi-medical path of healing. The constant visits of his disciples became too great a burden, so he restricted their visits to three special times annually: the Shabbat of Hanukkah, the festival of Shavuot, and especially Rosh Hashanah. He delivered many of his most important teachings from this final period on one of these three occasions.
In his last year, Nahman surprised his disciples by a sudden move from Bratslav, where he was already quite well established, to the larger city of Uman. There he rented rooms from one of the earliest Maskilim of Ukraine. He seems to have developed a friendship with this landlord, discussing mathematics and playing chess with him and his well-educated son-in-law. His ever-curious mind had evidently begun to sense the new winds blowing in Eastern Europe and he was anxious to learn something of them. This attempt was cut short, however, by the worsening of his illness and his death during the Sukkot festival of 1810.
Nahman attributed enormous importance to the place where he would be buried. He wished to be buried next to the Uman Jews who were martyred by the Haidamaks led by Ivan Gonta in 1768. Before his death, Nahman explained to his followers the importance of upholding the “holy kibbuts” (gathering), which he commanded them to convene annually, on the New Year, at his grave. He promised them that “there is nothing greater,” and whoever goes there will be awarded salvation, and if necessary, he will free him from Hell:
Our master already promised in his lifetime … that when he passes away, and people come to his grave and give a coin for charity … and recite the ten specific chapters of Psalms … then our rebbe will lay himself lengthwise and crosswise, and will certainly save this person. And he said that he will take him out of Hell by his sidelocks.10
His grave in Uman became a site of pilgrimage for his Hasidim and, as we shall see later, in recent years, for many other spiritual seekers as well.
As we will see in section 2, in the years following Nahman’s death, Natan Sternhartz stood at the helm of a small but determined group of followers. For thirty-five more years, he edited and published both his master’s works and various memoirs of his years at Nahman’s side, and although he was a prolific writer in this own right, he never claimed the mantle of rebbe but only that of faithful disciple. Natan was much more conservative in temperament than his daring master and he also became involved in fierce polemics against Haskalah and modernity. Natan and the Bratslavers were persecuted and mocked by other Hasidic groups in Ukraine, a subject we will discuss at greater length in section 2. Uniquely in the Bratslav literature, the term Mitnaggdim refers to these hostile Hasidic groups, not to the rabbinic forces opposed to Hasidism altogether. The other Hasidic communities referred to them as the “dead Hasidim,” because they bound themselves to a master who was no longer living. The Bratslavers’ retort became classic, and one that revealed much about them. “Better a dead rebbe who is alive,” they said, “than a living rebbe who is dead.”
1 Yoets Kim Kadish Rakats, Siah Sarfei Kodesh (Warsaw, 1923), vol. 1, 61.
2 Yeshayah Zikernik, Sippurim u-Ma’amarim Yekarim (Warsaw, 1903), 7–8.
3 Wilensky, Hasidim u-Mitnaggdim, 2: 216.
4 Me’or Einayim (Slavuta, 1798), intro.
5 Kedushat Levi (Barditshev, 1811), Shir ha-Shirim.
6 Toldot Aharon (Barditshev, 1817), par. Toldot.
7 Or ha-Me’ir (Korets, 1798), par. Bereshit.
8 Likkutei Moharan, vol. 1 (Ostrog, 1808), 64. Trans. in Arthur Green, Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (New York, 1987), 315–316.
9 Ibid.
10 Hayyei Moharan (Lublin, 1921), 89, no. 41.