IN THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS: POLAND
ALTHOUGH THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH effectively ceased to exist after 1795, Imperial Russia carved out a semiautonomous rump state, after 1815 variously called Congress Poland (after the Congress of Vienna), the Kingdom of Poland, or Central Poland, in the lands centered around Warsaw (see chapter 10). Hasidism had already established a few outposts in this region in the latter part of the eighteenth century, as we saw in chapter 6. The first Hasidim to arrive there encountered less resistance than was the case in Galicia or the northern part of the Pale of Settlement (White Russia and Lithuania). In Central Poland, the movement was easily integrated into the communal rabbinical establishment, with many Hasidic leaders functioning as community rabbis before and even after their ascendance to leadership (see map 12.1). In this respect, Hasidism in Central Poland was the opposite of Ukraine, where communities contracted with an already-established tsaddik to be responsible for their spiritual life. In Central Poland, while a tsaddik’s tenure as community rabbi was indeed a position of leadership, the authority that this position granted him was much more limited than for the tsaddik in Ukraine.
The forefathers of Hasidism in Central Poland were Elimelekh of Lizhensk, who is also considered the father of Hasidism in Galicia, and his disciple, Ya’akov Yitshak Horowitz, the Seer of Lublin, as well as Israel of Kozhenits, all of whose lives and thought were discussed in section 1. And because one can point to specific fathers, the history of Hasidism in Congress Poland is largely the history of the disciples of these two tsaddikim. For our purposes, the passing in 1815 of the Seer of Lublin marks the beginning of Hasidism in Congress Poland in the nineteenth century, although his disciple, the “Holy Jew” from Pshiskhe (Przysucha), who died in 1813 before his master, is also part of our story as the founder of the school known by the name of his town.
There were Hasidic dynasties based on family lineage in Congress Poland already from the very beginning of the period. However, whereas in Russia this became the dominant pattern, in Poland, prominent disciples often became tsaddikim in their own right. In many cases, after a tsaddik’s death, his adherents split between those who followed his biological offspring and those who followed a gifted disciple, with the latter often overshadowing the former. This nondynastic pattern might reflect the elitism of a number of Polish Hasidic groups, such as those associated with Pshiskhe, where intellectual and spiritual qualities trumped genealogy. This school gave rise to a number of dynasties—Ger, Aleksander, Sokhachev, and Izhbits—known for similar elitist spirituality.
In contrast to this tendency, there were also “populist” courts in Poland—those of Meir of Apt, Yisakhar Ber (the “Holy Grandfather”) of Radoshits, Moshe of Lelov, and Shlomo of Radomsk—that emphasized the tsaddik’s role in providing for the material well-being of his followers. However, populism can also be discerned within Pshiskhe, which split into two branches: the elitist Kotzk Hasidism and the more populist Vurke branch. Such distinctions are partly the product of Maskilim and their twentieth-century successors, who naturally favored the more intellectual Pshiskhe and Kotzk styles of Hasidism, just as they favored Chabad in Russia. As we will see, such accounts frequently lack historical grounding.
Hasidism in Poland arose under the shadow of a governmental inquiry into the movement in 1823 and 1824, which resulted in a decision to allow Hasidism to act relatively freely on the grounds that it was not a negative influence on the Jewish populace. This investigation, which will be discussed in chapter 19, focused on two Hasidic leaders: Meir of Apt and Simhah Bunem of Pshiskhe, both disciples of the Seer of Lublin. In 1834, a further investigation named two other prominent leaders: Yerahmiel of Pshiskhe, son of the “Holy Jew” of Pshiskhe, and Menahem Mendel of Kotzk. This evidence shows that even to the Polish authorities it seemed that Hasidism in Poland was divided between Pshiskhe and other Hasidic groups.
As the nineteenth century wore on, the Polish tsaddikim lost popularity outside of Poland, and local leaders in places like Hungary emerged to take their place. There were also many followers of Russian and Galician courts to be found in Poland, such that Polish Hasidism was never really a pure “brand.” However, in the pages that follow, we will focus on several prominent leaders and schools that were active in Poland. We will omit treatment of the other groups—such as Przedbórz, Lelov (Lelów), Radzymin, and Skernievits (Skierniewice)—not only because of lack of space but also owing to lack of research.
A striking example of the need for further research is the Kozhenits-Grodzisk dynasty. We discussed the ancestor of this dynasty, Israel of Kozhenits (d. 1814), in the previous section. Two branches, which were interconnected by marriage relations, stemmed from Rabbi Israel. One of them was the Kozhenits branch led by his son Elyakim Beriyah Hopstein (d. 1828), who considered himself a disciple of Elimelekh of Lizensk, and his brother Rabbi Zusya, and indeed, in his writings, he cites their theories of the tsaddik. The second branch stemming from Israel of Kozhenits was Grodzisk, first led by another grandson of Rabbi Israel, Hayim Meir Yechiel Shapira (1789–1849) of Moglenitz, who was followed by his son Elimelekh of Grodzisk (1824–1892), one of the most famous nineteenth-century tsaddikim. Although the various Kozhenits rebbes left a rich library, it has been almost totally neglected by scholars. This neglect is particularly striking since the Piasetshna (Piaseczno) offshoot of Grodzisk, which will be discussed in chapters 23 and 26, has attracted intensive interest for its responses to the crisis of interwar Poland and to the Holocaust.
While it may be impossible to calculate the size of the diverse Hasidic factions that existed in nineteenth-century Poland, we can learn quite a bit from the internal divisions within the groups by identifying the various Hasidic prayer houses that were active at the time. Through exacting research based on contemporary communal memorial books (yizkor bikher) and newspapers, it is possible to deduce that at the beginning of the twentieth century, one out of every four prayer houses in Poland was affiliated with Ger, and one out of every six was affiliated with Aleksander. This was followed, at a much lower rate (approximately 6 percent), by the prayer houses of Kotzk and Vurke (Amshinov and Otwock), from which Ger and Aleksander descended. At a slightly lower rate, we find Radzin and Radomsk. There was, therefore, a clear division in Polish Hasidism into two dominant branches: Ger and its factions, and Aleksander and its factions, to both of which we will devote considerable attention later in this chapter.
Meir of Apt and the Radomsk Dynasty
Meir Rotenberg (1760–1827/30) was one of the disciples of the Seer of Lublin, and apparently alongside his role as a communal rabbi he started to act as a tsaddik even during the Seer of Lublin’s lifetime, although his influence increased after his rebbe’s death. An episode about a local dispute can shed light on how Meir gained influence as a Hasidic leader. A few weeks after the Seer’s death, residents of Olkusz traveled to Meir, who was in Stopnica, and asked his intervention in a dispute that had broken out in the town. He advised them to establish a Hasidic minyan (prayer quorum) in Olkusz, which included tailors and butchers. The internal disputes in Olkusz were brought to the attention of the authorities, who began a thorough investigation into the new and mysterious sect that was spreading among the Jews of Olkusz. During the inquiry, one of the residents of Olkusz told the investigators that the local Hasidim were loyal to the leader of the sect who resided in Stopnica, namely Rabbi Meir, who considered himself to be a “prophet” and attracted hundreds of gullible believers who gave him pidyonot in exchange for his blessing.
Meir moved subsequently to Apt, the town most associated with his name, and became one of the leading tsaddikim of Congress Poland. He was summoned to give testimony before the 1823–1824 commission of inquiry. Even after the commission completed its inquiry at the end of August 1824 and called for lifting all the prohibitions against Hasidic gatherings, Meir of Apt and his court still aroused the authorities’ interest. Toward the end of 1824, the local police conducted an investigation into the Hasidim who frequented Meir’s court. Through the mediation of a merchant named Ya’akov Bergson (son of Berek Sonnenberg, a patron of a number of Polish tsaddikim), Meir lodged a complaint of harassment on the grounds that the government was not applying its liberal policy on Hasidism to his town. His appeal was evidently successful, and the authorities no longer bothered the Hasidim of Apt. This was the first instance of a Hasidic leader initiating a request on behalf of his Hasidim and not as a response to government inquiry. As such, it makes Meir of Apt one of the first Hasidic politicians—namely, a leader who intercedes with the authorities on behalf of his followers in the context of a modern state.
Meir’s teachings were printed two decades after his death under the title Or la-Shamayim. Meir placed great emphasis on the figure of the tsaddik, perhaps even more than his teacher, the Seer of Lublin:
Even if a person has polluted himself through great transgressions, God forbid, his soul is nevertheless purified of all sin and blame through his connection to the tsaddik. The tsaddik asks of God … that this man be forgiven and illuminated, because he is bound to him [the tsaddik] and the Holy One fulfills his request.1
In order to be cleansed of sin, a person needs to cleave to a tsaddik, who, as a mediator between the Hasid and God, has the power to effect absolution from sin. It should be noted that contrary to the image of Meir of Apt as a “practical” tsaddik only providing material aid to his Hasidim, the preceding text emphasizes his spiritual role. This “spiritual populism” may reflect a conscious effort to reject the elitism of the prominent tsaddik, Simhah Bunem of Pshiskhe, about whom we will say more later.
Meir of Apt had two sons who served as tsaddikim, although his most prominent successor was actually his disciple Shlomo Rabinovich of Radomsk (Radomsko; 1803–1866), who founded a dynasty that continued for four generations up until the Holocaust. In 1834, Rabinovich received a rabbinical post in the town of Radomsk. From the curriculum vitae he submitted to the authorities, we know not only his biography until then, but also the fact that he was fluent in Polish. It was then that he apparently started to conduct himself as a Hasidic rebbe, although his influence gradually increased after the death of some of the more influential Hasidic leaders of the day and the departure of others to other locations. Between the years 1850 and 1852, a dispute broke out between Shlomo and the new anti-Hasidic kahal of Radomsk. The kahal tried to deprive him of some of his sources of income, as well as to impose a fee on the local Hasidic shtibl. He complained to the authorities and won, another example of favorable governmental attitudes toward Hasidism.
In Shlomo of Radomsk’s books of teachings, Tiferet Shlomo, compiled and printed by his followers after his death, the figure of the tsaddik as a social leader is once again prominent, closely following his teacher, Meir of Apt. Shlomo of Radomsk continues the well-known distinction in Hasidism between the tsaddik’s concern for the spiritual well-being of the shekhinah (the feminine personification of God in Kabbalah) and his concern for the material well-being of his followers. While stressing the need to support the material needs of both tsaddikim and Hasidim (an implicit variation on avodah be-gashmiyut), he also at times gave emphasis to more spiritual vocations. Similarly, Shlomo also expressed contradictory positions on messianism: on one hand, he praised the Exile and the tsaddik as a kind of this-worldly substitute for the Messiah, but on other hand he was known to ascribe messianic meanings to settlement in the Land of Israel.
The town of Pshiskhe is associated more than any other place with nineteenth-century Hasidism in Poland. Ya’akov Yitshak Rabinowitz (1766–1813), also known as “the Holy Jew,” who was a devotee of the Seer of Lublin, founded this school together with his disciple Simhah Bunem of Pshiskhe (1765–1827). We have already encountered this unique figure in chapter 6. As we learned there, some kind of conflict broke out between the Holy Jew and the Seer of Lublin, a conflict, however, not attested in contemporary sources. The twentieth-century theologian and scholar of Polish Hasidism Abraham Joshua Heschel, himself the scion of several Hasidic dynasties, argued, based on later Hasidic traditions, that the Holy Jew established a new role for the tsaddik: in place of the tsaddik working miracles by interceding with Heaven, he taught that the tsaddik should avoid contravening the laws of nature.2
However, there are stories in the Pshiskhe tradition about the many wonders performed by the Holy Jew, such as the miraculous son he apparently delivered to the wife of the Seer of Lublin. Additionally, the Holy Jew did not totally object to the worship of the tsaddikim. According to one tradition, the Holy Jew interpreted the saying in the Mishnah, “Anything that is attached to something that is pure, becomes pure itself” (m. Kelim 12:2) not as referring to the ritual purity of objects but instead to the spiritual state of human beings. A Hasid should adhere to the pure tsaddik and thus become pure himself. This stance seems to have surprised his disciple Simhah Bunem, who understood this as not demanding enough of the Hasid. The Holy Jew answered him: “it is a very difficult task to connect to a true tsaddik, more difficult than being a tsaddik oneself.”3 When the Holy Jew said that it is difficult to connect to a true tsaddik, he might have meant that it is difficult to find such a tsaddik or he might have meant that the connection itself is very demanding. In any event, such a dialogue, whether historical or imagined, reflects an internal tension within the Pshiskhe school itself regarding the role of the tsaddik. The Holy Jew was also known for his laxity with regard to the time of prayer, a pietistic practice that recalls accusations made in the previous generation by Mitnaggdim against early Hasidim.
All attempts to portray the actual teachings of the Holy Jew are necessarily based on later stories and anecdotes, since we possess none of his own writings and only a handful of laconic aphorisms attributed to him in other books. While some have interpreted these terse teachings as constituting the Holy Jew’s form of Hasidism, it remains very difficult to reconstruct his system of thought out of them.
The Holy Jew died in 1813, while his master, the Seer, was still alive. After his death, his three sons led small groups of Hasidim, supported by notable figures such as Moshe Elyakim Beriyah Hopstein of Kozhenits and Yisakhar Ber (the “Holy Grandfather”) of Radoshits. But most of the Holy Jew’s Hasidim followed his main disciple, Simhah Bunem of Pshiskhe. Simhah Bunem appears to have continued and sharpened the Holy Jew’s criticisms of contemporary Hasidism, including the groups led by the sons of his teacher. Simhah Bunem’s own disciples inherited this critical style. Thus, for example, Yitshak Meir of Ger, who began as a disciple of Simhah Bunem, is credited in a late tradition as considering “whether it might not be better to do away with this matter of leadership [of tsaddikim], because people were depending too much on tsaddikim and were not doing enough themselves.”4
Simhah Bunem won his position not only because he was the student and heir of the Holy Jew, but also because of his own unique biography, which became better known than that of his elusive teacher. Born into a non-Hasidic family (Hasidic legend even describes him as a Mitnagged), he was sent at a young age to study in a yeshivah in Hungary and later, following his father, traveled to German lands, where he picked up some customs of the Ashkenazic or German Jews. He was known for dressing like them, speaking foreign languages, and having a certain familiarity with their cultural pastimes. He apparently served as an agent for the Sonnenberg-Bergson family of Warsaw in their lumber business. This family supported a number of Poland’s tsaddikim, and there are several Hasidic sources that even credit Temerl, the wife of Berek Sonnenberg, with Simhah Bunem’s conversion to Hasidism. He began his career as a follower of the Seer, but settled in Pshiskhe no later than 1793, becoming a devotee of the Holy Jew. He worked there as an apothecary, but eventually went blind. He started to lead his own followers while the Holy Jew was still alive (and also during the lifetime of the Seer), perhaps in the framework of the court in Lublin, or perhaps only in Pshiskhe. In any event, after the Holy Jew’s death, he became the most important leader of the Hasidim in Pshiskhe.
Simhah Bunem’s persona had a profound effect upon the image of Pshiskhe and appealed to enlightened Jews in the nineteenth century, representing for many a rational brand of Hasidism that eschewed magic and mysticism as well as the worship of the tsaddik as practiced in Lublin. Pshiskhe Hasidism was also portrayed as a place where study of Talmud and other rabbinic texts was given pride of place. It cannot be denied that the groups that came out of Pshiskhe, such as Ger and Sokhachev, showed a scholarly quality that was not particularly discernible in Lublin. But there is no unequivocal evidence that this ethos was established in the time of the Holy Jew and Simhah Bunim, just as there is no evidence that all Pshiskhe Hasidim were especially learned in comparison to the followers of other rebbes. Similarly, the idea that Pshiskhe was anti-Kabbalistic in opposition to Chabad in Russia and Zhidachov-Komarno in Galicia is also difficult to substantiate.
Whether or not Pshiskhe was especially scholarly, rational, and antimystical, the primary image that later writers cultivated about this school was its practice of telling the unvarnished truth and its equally uncompromising rejection of social hierarchy. An example of this later image appears in the following story adapted by Martin Buber from a 1908 book about the Holy Jew:
Once the Yehudi [Holy Jew] was asked to examine the thirteen-year-old Hanokh, later the rabbi of Aleksander, in the Talmud. It took the boy an hour to think over the passage, which had been assigned to him before he could expound it. When he had done, the zaddik cupped his hand around Hanokh’s cheek and said: “When I was thirteen I plumbed passages more difficult than this in no time at all, and when I was eighteen, I had the reputation of being a great scholar in the Torah. But one day it dawned on me that man cannot attain to perfection by learning alone. I understood what is told of our father Abraham; that he explored the sun, the moon, and the stars, and did not find God, and how in this very not-finding the presence of God was revealed to him. For three months I mulled over this realization. Then I explored until I too reached the truth of notfinding.”5
Whether or not this story, told in the early twentieth century about the early nineteenth century, actually happened, it presents the Holy Jew both as an authoritative scholar as well as one who set limits to the value of learning: knowledge of God comes from the very lack of scholarly knowledge and an unending spiritual quest. Unfortunately, it appears that Buber added the paradoxical end to the story, thereby portraying the Holy Jew according to what he wished him to be. Yet, even if one removes the ending, the story still shows that the way to the divine is independent of traditional scholarship.
The various images of Pshiskhe Hasidism reflect not only Pshiskhe’s criticism of contemporary Hasidism, but also the way other Hasidim attacked Pshiskhe for violating religious and social norms. A story circulated later in the nineteenth century that sixty Hasidic leaders met at a wedding in the early 1820s in the town of Ustila to issue a ban of excommunication on Simhah Bunem and his followers. Yitshak Meir, who later went on to found the court at Ger, represented the Pshiskhe school. He agreed to abandon the breaking of religious and social norms and return to the “straight and narrow,” as he did eventually in his role as the tsaddik of Ger. The source of this story was the Hasidic writer Ahron Marcus (1843–1916), a follower of one of Simhah Bunem’s sworn enemies, Shlomo of Radomsk, so the story is probably unreliable. And it is not at all clear what deviations the school was promoting. But even if vague and inaccurate, Marcus’s story surely reflects the controversies around Pshiskhe that persisted into the late nineteenth century.
Some of these possible “deviations” can be gleaned from Jewish sources and government reports, which describe the extroverted behavior of the followers of Simhah Bunem, including singing, jumping, dancing, and drinking in their prayer houses as well as outside on the street. An epistle sent by the non-Hasidic rabbi Eliezer Tsvi Harlap to Simhah Bunem in 1825 offers evidence of the unusual behavior of followers of Pshiskhe during Simhah Bunem’s lifetime. Harlap denounced the Simhah Bunem’s Hasidim for neglecting Torah study and failing to follow the commandments, including desecration of the Sabbath, and contempt for Torah scholars, Harlap accused Simhah Bunem of providing his young adherents with a bad education that stressed Hasidic homilies rather than Torah learning. Harlap’s criticism recalls the attacks by the Mitnaggdim in the early days of Hasidism. Even if Harlap exaggerated, his epistle is clear evidence that some regarded Simhah Bunem’s followers as bordering on religious anarchism.
While there are only a few teachings attributed to the Holy Jew, Simhah Bunem is the subject of a whole book, Kol Simhah, written by one of his disciples and published in 1859 by his heirs. However, other disciples disowned the book as unfaithful to the spirit of the Simhah Bunem. This does not mean, however, that the entire work is unreliable, but suggests that Kol Simhah reflects the specific teachings favored by its editor.
In addition to their teachings, the Holy Jew and Simhah Bunem fostered an exceptional group of disciples, who eventually became the most prominent Hasidic leaders in Poland in the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. These included Menahem Mendel Morgenstern of Tomaszów/Kotzk, Yitshak Meir of Ger, Yitshak of Vurke, Hanokh of Aleksander, and Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbits. They and their descendants formed the many branches of Polish Hasidism that existed up until World War II. Some of the novel values that were attributed to Pshishke can be identified in these later branches.
Kotzk-Ger-Sokhachev
Menahem Mendel of Kotzk (Kock, 1787–1859) is perhaps the most enigmatic figure in the history of Hasidism. More than any other tsaddik, he violently rejected his public role and behaved in harsh ways toward his Hasidim, ways that were difficult to understand. A devotee of the Seer of Lublin, the Holy Jew, and Simhah Bunem, after Simhah Bunem’s death in 1827, he became a leader in Tomaszów, where he had been living since his marriage. He moved to Kotzk two years later and functioned there as a rebbe for a period of ten years. As we have seen, government authorities recognized him as one of two most important leaders of Polish Hasidism in the first half of the 1830s, alongside Yerahmiel of Pshiskhe, son of the Holy Jew.
The rebbe’s bizarre behavior culminated in 1839, when he locked himself in his room and remained a recluse until his death twenty years later. According to a famous story, this period of seclusion began on a Sabbath eve in 1839 during a gathering with his Hasidim, when Menahem Mendel suddenly took the name of God in vain and publicly desecrated the Sabbath. This story circulated in many variations at the end of the nineteenth century, around forty years after Menahem Mendel’s death. There is no historical basis to the story since no eyewitness accounts have been handed down. However, contemporaneous sources do suggest the possibility that the Rebbe of Kotzk may have had a major psychological crisis around that time. Some suggest that this crisis was related to messianic hopes that intensified around the year of 1840, the beginning of a century according to the Hebrew calendar and thus widely viewed as a year when redemption was either supposed to begin or end. However, Kotzk is not generally associated with overt messianism (a famous Kotzk niggun says that one goes to Kotzk in place of the Temple). In any event, some dramatic event divided his leadership into two distinct periods: thirteen years of active leadership and twenty years of seclusion.
According to one Hasidic tradition, as a result of this crisis, his close disciple Mordechai Yosef Leiner left the court in Kotzk and established a new court in Izhbits (Iżbica). Whether or not Leiner actually broke with his rebbe, it is clear that most of Menahem Mendel’s prominent disciples remained faithful to him even after he abandoned his post as their leader. Some went on to found important Hasidic communities of their own, among them Yitshak Meir Rottenburg who would eventually establish the powerful Ger dynasty. Yitshak Meir may have also run some of the leadership functions of the bet midrash at the court of Kotzk, practically substituting, at least partially, for the Kotzker.
Even if the tale of the Sabbath eve in Kotzk is not historical, from the time it was reported at the end of the nineteenth century it endowed Menahem Mendel with the image of a religious leader with unorthodox convictions and equally unorthodox behavior. The twentieth-century memoirist Yehiel Yeshaya Trunk (1887–1961), who collected many Hasidic traditions, had this to say about the years of the Kotzker Rebbe’s seclusion:
Hasidim were later to tell that the floor was never swept in the little room where the Kotzker spent his time. Large mice ran around freely. They became fat from the luxury. Old, grey, and ugly frogs jumped around the lonely Kotzker like trained dogs. It goes without saying that the Hasidim of Kotzk said that the mice and ugly frogs were really the souls of departed Hasidic sinners who had gone to the rabbi to bewail their needs in the next world and to ask him for improvement. The mice and frogs living with the Kotzker became so accustomed to their room-mate that when the Kotzker ate his one meal at two in the morning … the well-fed mice and frogs encircled him, looked greedily straight into his eyes, croaked, and whistled, and he threw them breadcrumbs. These bold mice were also alleged to have eaten pieces of the Kotzker’s long coat and even to have dared to bite him in the face. No one was allowed to chase away these ugly and weird creatures. The Kotzker fell into a rage whenever someone interfered with his roommates, and the assailant was cursed with deadly imprecations. The Kotzker considered these undesirables the only beings with which a recluse could interact.… In addition to all this was a truly remarkable fact: The Kotzker became a widower in the midst of his ascetic-misanthropic period and married a young virgin, a great beauty and the daughter of a rich man from Warsaw.… Exactly a year after the wedding, the ascetic Kotzker celebrated the first circumcision (brit). For one part of his followers the extraordinary contradictions in the Kotzker’s behaviour only added to this authority and magnetism. Hasidut emphasized the idea of trust in authority. The unconditional believers transformed all the shadowy sides of the Kotzker into major, secret-filled lights. In the rabbi’s presence they were in seventh heaven, for all that his “heaven” was sardonic and sealed-off under lock and key. They thought the Kotzker’s ways had hidden holiness. His path was a tangle of different things. It belonged to a different dimension from simplistic human thinking and contained great symbolic meaning.6
This description of Kotzk, published in the middle of the twentieth century, should not be taken as reflecting historical reality, as Trunk writes himself, but rather capturing something of the popular image of Menahem Mendel.
Some scholars of Hasidism see Kotzk as a revolution in the history of Hasidism, whose ascetic ethos was the absolute opposite to that of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s: an elitist leader who separated himself from the masses and led a small group of disciples to whom he presented a radical and uncompromising ethos. He demanded extreme integrity that was to be achieved by an unflinching introspection in order to root out every last speck of personal vanity and deceit. He demanded that his followers always seek the truth, even if it entailed conflict within Hasidic society or with society at large. These radical demands often led to harsh encounters with his Hasidim, as described in the following story, which is also late:
The study house is filled with followers, important people, sharp-minded scholars. Suddenly he enters. The crowd that couldn’t escape in time is frightened. He looks with fury at the congregants and his voice is terrifying: “You consider yourselves scholars, learners, Hasidim?! You learn a chapter of Mishnah, you pray together and already pat yourselves on the back. Have you one drop of truth in yourselves? A glimmer of honesty? Loathsome, repulsive creatures! Liars all! Prideful! Get out, you loafers! You give off a bad smell! Leave here at once! You call yourselves God-fearing?! You are all idolaters!”7
Menahem Mendel did not give sermons or leave any writings, except an interesting letter to his student Yitshak Meir of Ger in which he expresses his loneliness and his longings to his student.8 The verbal communications attributed to Menahem Mendel were succinct sayings, at once paradoxical and obscure, transmitted orally by his disciples. However, most of these sayings cannot be reliably attributed to him and, once again, have more to do with his later image than with historical reality. Martin Buber, who was one of the scholars who promulgated the myth of the Kotzker Rebbe, brought the following saying that became part of Menahem Mendel’s image, although it is doubtful whether he really said it:
“Where is the dwelling of God?” This was the question with which the rabbi of Kotzk surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting him. They laughed at him: “What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of his glory!” Then he answered his own question: “God dwells wherever man lets him in.”9
With this pithy statement from a late source, Menahem Mendel qualified the Hasidic theology of divine immanence: God may be everywhere, but man has the capacity to shut him out. In general, his maxims privilege the individual standing before God over the needs of the community. He demanded uncompromising religious commitment without any assurance of spiritual or material reward. His Hasidism was distinctly non-Kabbalistic, since he placed little emphasis on mystical communion with God and the metaphysical negation of man in relation to the divine. For the Rebbe of Kotzk, humanity was part of the abject materiality of this world and only an extraordinary individual might free himself and attain spiritual transcendence. He interpreted the eighteenth-century demand for bittul (self-negation) as total submission to God, but at the same time emphasized man’s agency in achieving that submission.
Despite the difficulty in portraying the ethos of the Rebbe of Kotzk, it seems that Torah study, including classical rabbinic legal texts, had a high value in his court, although not necessarily in the scholastic-argumentative way called pilpul that was customary for rabbis of the time. This can be concluded from the fact that the branches of Hasidism that emerged from this school emphasized this value, which was not so emphasized in parallel branches deriving from the Pshiskhe school. We have a personal testimony to confirm this observation. Avraham Bornstein (1839–1910), who later founded the Sokhachev dynasty, was the son of a follower of Menahem Mendel of Kotzk. He married Menahem Mendel’s daughter and lived in his father-in-law’s home. Although he never mentioned the Kotzker’s seclusion, one of the Hasidic legends that relates to the period of Avraham’s stay in his father-in-law’s house recounts how the rebbe would come out of his self-imposed seclusion in order to encourage and advise his son-in-law in his studies.
These stories are most probably based in fact, as can be learned from what Bornstein himself wrote about his years in Kotzk:
When I was still a child my father and master [Menahem Mendel of Kotzk] taught me scholastic debate [pilpul].… Later on, as a youth I entered to the inner circle of the home of my father-in-law, my master of Kotzk.… From him I learned the ways of intensive study [iyyun]. And from him I learned what original contributions in Torah truly are, because not every scholastic debate has anything new to say. His close supervision in terms of how to study and regarding originality in study is hard to believe.10
The Rebbe of Kotzk taught Bornstein the limitations of pilpul, but the study of Torah and Talmud generally was perhaps more important for him than for most other Hasidic leaders. Here, then, is a good example of how Hasidism should not be “essentialized” as a mystical movement based on belief in the tsaddik. While these characteristics are to be found among many Hasidic groups, Kotzk defies the rule: Talmudic scholarship predominated over Kabbalah and Menahem Mendel scarcely played the role of the typical tsaddik.
Despite his difficult style of leadership, government documents report that Menahem Mendel had sizable popular support and his adherents went on to found some of the more important Hasidic groups in Poland. In addition to Mordechai Yosef Leiner, who as noted earlier left Kotzk to establish a court in Izhbits, Yitshak Meir eventually founded Ger Hasidism, and Avraham, who married the daughter of the Kotzker Rebbe, founded the Sokhachev dynasty. It is to these offshoots of Kotzk that we shall now turn.
After Menahem Mendel’s death in 1859, the leadership of the Kotzk Hasidim split between a son and the disciples. The son was Rabbi David (1809–1873), who remained in Kotzk. However, Yitshak Meir Rottenburg (1799–1866) already during the Kotzker’s seclusion won the adherence of many of the Hasidim of Kotzk, who considered him the preeminent scholar among the rebbe’s disciples. He also showed an interest in politics and public affairs, and supported the Polish uprising against Russian rule in 1830. According to Hasidic traditions, as a result of his and the Kotzker Rebbe’s support of the uprising and its defeat in 1831 they were forced to escape to Brody, then under Austrian control. After they returned, Rottenburg settled in Warsaw and was appointed by the Jewish community to serve as a rabbinical judge in the city. The Russian authorities delayed his appointment until 1849 because of suspicions about his involvement in the uprising.
According to Hasidic historiography, Rottenberg was also one of the most prominent Hasidic leaders involved in opposing the so-called Dress Decree, which ordered the Jews to abandon their traditional dress (this ordinance will be addressed in chapter 19). It is not clear whether he did in fact oppose the decree because he also signed a number of proclamations in Polish that called for obeying it, though his signature was probably coerced. At some point, he changed his last name from Rottenburg to Alter. Some believe he did so in order to conceal his identity because of his support of the 1830–1831 uprising, while others contend that he did so only during the period of the Dress Decree.
As long as his master was alive, Alter did not assume a leadership position. When he became the rebbe of the Kotzker Hasidim, he was still living in Warsaw, but soon after he moved to the town of Góra Kalwaria, near Warsaw, and established his court there, apparently with funding provided by the Warsaw merchants who were among his devotees. Since Góra Kalwaria means “Calvary Mountain” in Polish, the Jews refrained from using a phrase that would evoke the crucifixion of Jesus and therefore called it Ger in Yiddish or Gur in Hebrew. For the Hasidim of Kotzk, Yitshak Meir Alter’s ascendance to leadership meant a dramatic change, because after many years of having no contact with their rebbe, they were once again able to meet face to face with him and hear him deliver sermons. He was also much less rigid than his predecessor. According to a later saying attributed to him: “The Rebbe Bunem of Pshiskhe led the world with love, and the Rebbe of Kotzk led it with vehemence, and I lead it with Torah.”11 While the value of learning was already present in Kotzk, and most probably in Pshiskhe, this statement, whose authenticity is difficult to prove, represents the selfconsciousness of the Ger Hasidim. Ger saw itself—and was seen by others—as the synthesis and successor to the two earlier schools. In his seven years as the leader of Ger, Yitshak Meir Alter won over many adherents, especially in Warsaw, which was the first actual metropolis in Eastern Europe to have a substantial Hasidic presence. Alter thus became the de facto leader of Hasidism in Congress Poland during his lifetime.
By the time Alter died in 1866, his only adult son had predeceased him. Since his grandson, Yehudah Aryeh Leib, whom he had educated, was only nineteen and was considered too young to succeed his grandfather, another prominent disciple of Menahem Mendel of Kotzk, Hanokh Henikh ha-Kohen of Aleksander (1798–1870), became the rebbe of the Hasidim of Yitshak Meir and thus the heir of the Kotzk legacy. Hanokh Henikh left little trace of his teachings and served for only four years until his death.
And so it was that the young Yehudah Leib Alter (1847–1905), the grandson of Yitshak Meir, became the leader of the Ger community in 1870. Under his leadership, which spanned thirty-five years, Ger Hasidism became the most prominent in Poland, a status that lasted until the Holocaust, and, as we shall see in the next section of this book, was resurrected after World War II into one of the largest Hasidic groups in the State of Israel. Accessibility to the court greatly expanded during Yehuda Leib’s tenure: a new study house was built, as well as facilities for the accommodation of visitors. Since the Alter family owned property in both Warsaw and Gora Kalwaria, the rebbe continued to be seen in both places.
Yehudah Leib’s teachings, which he delivered throughout the thirty-five years of his leadership, were gathered in the book Sefat Emet, still considered the essential treatise for Ger Hasidism. The rebbe wrote down these teachings himself, a break from Hasidic convention but especially from the Pshiskhe school. Some Ger adherents differentiate between the earlier homilies from the 1870s and the later ones from the beginning of the twentieth century. The earlier ones, characterized by intellectual depth as well as sophisticated language, were apparently intended for select and elite circles, while the later ones, written in a more accessible style, were geared toward a broader audience. Such a difference may hint that Ger became larger and more diversified over the years. However, the homilies in Sefat Emet also share a basic ideological unity, at the center of which is the necessity to spiritualize worldly existence, an old Hasidic principle, but one that had become less common among nineteenth-century Hasidic works.
Drawing from a variety of earlier Hasidic sources, as well as Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague (1520–1609), known popularly as the Maharal, Alter developed a binary theology based on inner and outer realms of reality. The inner realm is simple, lacks any differentiation, and is all-embracing. It is this realm that governs the world, but it is concealed by the outer realm of the material world. The world is thus divided into binary oppositions reflecting these two realms: inner and outer reality, miracles and nature, Israel and the nations, the Sabbath and the six days of the week, the written and oral Torah, the Temple and all other places in the world, redemption and exile, truth and belief. These pairs are not static, since the worshipper constantly attempts to overcome them. An important example of this spiritual goal can be found in the concepts of truth (emet) and belief (emunah). Truth—a key value that Alter inherited from the Rebbe of Kotzk—signifies the all-embracing unity of being, while belief is not a set of theological premises but an act of attachment to God, devekut for the purpose of achieving truth.
The concept of nature (teva) or the material world in Sefat Emet signifies the realm that man needs to breach in order to release the sanctity that lies hidden within it. Yehudah Leib stresses three sacred gateways for spiritual renewal, which are the realms of space, time, and the human being. The gateway of space is the Land of Israel and in particular the Temple and Tabernacle; the gateway of time is the Sabbath; and the gateway of the human being is the Jewish soul. These gateways lead to the divine essence concealed in the temporal world, which is described in Sefat Emet as the sacred “point” (nekudah). This nekudah is the point of contact between the human being and God that makes possible spiritual transcendence within nature. Although these ideas clearly have Kabbalistic origins, Yehuda Leib Alter refers only episodically to Kabbalah.
Jewish homiletic literature generally does not allude to actual events. However, because Sefat Emet gives the exact dates when the sermons were given, certain topics treated in it can be associated with events in the broader world. Here, for example, is a sample from the weekly Torah portion about the spies sent into the land of Canaan, preached in the summer of 1891:
Surely conquering the Land was a great thing, one with which the earlier forefathers struggled. The Holy One, Blessed be He, promised to bequeath them the Land, and this was certainly a rectification of sin, of separating the good from the bad, taking the Land back from the hand of Canaan for it to be the inheritance of the Lord. But this is not within human power.… The mistake of the spies was that they wanted to conquer the land by their own strength, and [the people of] that generation were the Lord’s heroes. But [winning] the war over the Land of Canaan is not within man’s power … because the giving of the Land of Israel depends on negating all of man’s pretenses, [and can only come about by] the will of God.12
Yehudah Leib stresses the importance of conquering the Land of Israel from the Canaanites, and views in this effort a metaphysical act of great import for the rectification of sin and the triumph of good over evil. However, this interpretation contradicts the simple reading of the text, since the book of Numbers states that the sin of the spies was that they feared entering into the land of Canaan. Alter argues instead that the spies were willing to enter the land, but their sin was that they wanted to do so under their own human initiative. This counter-interpretation is in line with the general spiritualist trend of the homilies in Sefat Emet, according to which man is required to negate his own conscience and will in relation to God.
It is hard to ignore the fact that Yehudah Leib delivered this sermon a few months after he pointedly dissociated himself from the pamphlet Shelom Yerushalayim, written by the grandson of the Kotzker Rebbe, which advocated cooperation with secular groups in the settlement of the Land of Israel. It is possible that the discourse about the spies was intended as an indirect reference to those seeking to settle the Land of Israel on their own, who did not understand that it needed to be accomplished by God alone. This sermon dates from six years before the founding of the World Zionist Organization, although after the wave of settlement that began in the 1880s. As such, it anticipates the ferocious arguments that Orthodox authorities would level at that political movement. Still, Yehuda Leib’s position is not the same as the one taken by his son, who purchased land in Palestine and eventually moved there.
A major theme in the spiritual world of Yehudah Leib is the messianic idea, which in Sefat Emet is expressed in terms of exile (galut) and redemption (geulah). Rather than neutralizing messianism, the homilies of Sefat Emet advocate both personal and national redemption. But Yehudah Leib was careful to avoid any messianic proclamations related to current political events, probably because such public remarks would have been construed as subversive in tsarist Russia. On the other hand, such sentiments can be found in a secret manuscript that was in his possession, although it is not clear whether he or his grandfather was its author. This manuscript features an eschatological vision that was supposed to take place in a not too distant time and place involving the rise and fall of the Messiah’s enemy, who was identified in the text as the Tsar Alexander (depending on who authored the text, this may have been either Alexander II or III).13
Yehudah Leib died in 1905 and was succeeded by his eldest son Avraham Mordechai (1866–1948), known as the Imrei Emet after the title of his collected teachings. After leading Ger Hasidism through the turbulent period of two World Wars, he became one of the most influential figures of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in the twentieth century. His biography will be treated in section 3, but here we quote from a letter his father wrote to him in 1886, when Avraham Mordechai was still a young student:
It is not proper that a young Torah student like yourself always be immersed in deep thoughts. You have only to immerse yourself in Torah learning and following the commandments because a person is rewarded much more from studying Torah than from his own thoughts and ideas, especially during his youth … and dedicate only a few minutes a day to contemplate in the awe of God, [considering] that He is your Creator and revives you in every moment.… And don’t separate yourself from the community … and regarding what you said about going to the Hasidic prayer house even if you don’t feel the benefit of it—it is very advantageous to be around other Hasidim.14
Here is a core component of Yehudah Leib’s teaching: Torah study and fulfillment of the commandments—in addition to social involvement—are preferable over spiritual contemplation. While these values were hardly unique to Ger, this variety of Hasidism left an indelible stamp on Polish Jewry because of its numerical dominance, both before and after World War II.
Sokhachev Hasidism also stemmed from Kotzk. Its founder, the aforementioned Avraham Bornstein (1839–1910), married the daughter of the Rebbe of Kotzk. After the death of Menahem Mendel of Kotzk in 1859, Avraham accepted the leadership of both Yitshak Meir of Ger and Hanokh of Aleksander (see above). In 1863, he received a rabbinical appointment, and in 1870, following the death of Hanokh of Aleksander, at the urging of some of the older Kotzk adherents, he began to act as a Hasidic leader. Bornstein ministered to his Hasidim from the town of Sokhachev (Sochaczew), where he settled in 1883, established a yeshivah and remained until his death.
Bornstein came to be regarded as one of the greatest legal authorities in Poland as well as the spiritual scion of Kotzk. According to Yehiel Yeshaya Trunk, Bornstein would convene the surviving veterans of Kotzk:
Rabbi Avremele [Avraham Bornstein] would linger with these old Hasidim, listen to their sharp Kotzker talk and their witty criticisms about this and that. Once Rabbi Avremele asked one of them—Hezkiah of Lubitch—if he still pokes fun at the tsaddikim of the generation. The adherents of Kotzk used to disparage all the other tsaddikim as worthless. Hezkiah replied that the tsaddikim of the generation were not even worth teasing. [He said,] there is only one tsaddik left in Poland worth making fun of, but it seems that it is my Rebbe [in other words, the Rebbe of Sokhachev himself]. The telling of this story is so typical for Kotzk! … Rabbi Avremele’s wife, the daughter of the Kotzker himself (her name was Tsine), became a female adherent of the Kotzker in her old age. All the satirical wit that was in the air during her youth, the style and the way of life the Kotzker were known for—all this was awakened and renewed in her. She would speak with biting sarcasm, openly expressing her opinion to all and sundry and banishing anyone who displeased her. She looked after her husband as one took care of a book, tending to his needs with a watchful eye. But she was more concerned about the Torah scholarship that he held than she was about his physical wellbeing.15
In a time when the wives of Hasidim were generally not considered Hasidot (that is, female disciples of Hasidism), the daughter of the Rebbe of Kotzk acted boldly as if she herself was the reincarnation of her father, especially imitating his bitingly honest way of speaking.
Avraham Bornstein was opposed to modern technological innovations, such as machine-made matsot, and fought against everything he considered heretical. For example, in a letter attributed to him from 1884, he voices strong objection to the reading of secular books and newspapers:
Jews, listen carefully!
We heard and have become angry about the increasing number of books that defile the body and soul of the readers and are being published among the Jews and are filled with invectives against the holy customs of the Jews whom we acknowledge [descended] from our mighty and most holy forefathers, and even worse, they have come to mock the entire Torah.… They also compose lewd love stories and serenades and print them weekly for thousands and tens of thousands, and multitudes will think that by reading them on the Sabbath they are reading for their Sabbath pleasure … and they will slowly move away from the path of faith … therefore we advocate to stamp out the flames … and we must make known … that it is forbidden to read [these works]. Anyone who reads them defiles his body and soul which will … descend into impurity.… Therefore each and every person for whom God’s word touches his ear and whose forefathers stood at Mt. Sinai, let him stand at the breach, and each and every one until his hand tires—remove this foulness from the holiness and root out these abominations from his own home. Also whoever’s voice is heard is compelled to hasten the masses to throw them into the flames.16
Though this letter is from a later source, and Bornstein may not have been the author, the attribution attests to his position of authority at the beginning of the twentieth century and undoubtedly captures the essence of his opposition to the growing custom of reading secular literature during Sabbath leisure time. Even if the reference to burning books was only metaphoric, those who read the letter and wished to interpret it more literally could have done so. Despite this fierce polemic, Bornstein was not known widely as a public leader. His reputation stood on his vast scholarship and legal authority. His book, Eglei Tal, devoted to the thirty-nine labors prohibited on the Sabbath, was printed in his lifetime, and two years after his death seven volumes of his responsa were published under the title Avnei Nezer.
Since Bornstein preferred his study to his court, his only son, Shmuel (1855–1926), managed his father’s affairs and led the court in Sokhachev during his father’s lifetime, eventually succeeding his father as rebbe. Trunk had this to say about Shmuel Bornstein:
Rabbi Shmuel … was tall and broad of build, with a large fleshy Slavic nose. His appearance was nothing like that of a young scholar. His Gentile physique seems to have influenced his frame of mind. He was the most calm and relaxed person. The Kotzk sharpness rather than expressed in restlessness was revealed in his serenity and self-confidence. There was quite a bit of the Slavic tyrant about him and he managed himself and his household with vigor, even though many of his sons … who were themselves of strong and stubborn demeanor, later pursued “non-Jewish culture” [tarbut ra’ah]. They joined the revolutionary workers’ movement, the Zionist movement, and one even became a Yiddish author.17
Trunk, who knew both Avraham and Shmuel (as well as Shmuel’s son, Moshe, who became a Yiddish author) because his uncle married one of Avraham’s granddaughters, described the austere way weddings were conducted at the court in Sokhachev at the end of the nineteenth century:
The Sokhachev court tried as much as it could to establish in it a Kotzk-like way of life.… In Sokhachev they also did not have much regard for the klezmer band. But, there is no choice, since a wedding can’t take place without a klezmer band. However, in this instance, the klezmer band members would feel displeased. The Hasidim would push and shove them around, and when they would just begin to play, R. Shmuel would call out: “Done!”—in other words, the obligation has been fulfilled—and R. Avremele would begin to discuss some matter of Torah with one of those present. The badhen [the jester who served as master of ceremonies]—who was invited to all Sokhachev weddings as a requisite evil—would just open his mouth and the Hasidim would immediately drown him out with their own racket. For R. Avremele, this kind of joking belittled the Torah, and R. Shmuel would immediately declare: “Enough!” and the rhymes would remain stuck in the poor badhen’s throat. Meanwhile he would be shoved out of his seat and trampled by the Hasidim who galloped up to the table to hear R. Avremele’s sermons.18
From this account of a wedding, much can be gleaned about the ethos of Sokhachev, which considered itself a continuation of Kotzk and thus showed contempt for gaiety or anything other than learning.
Shmuel of Sokhachev’s homilies were published immediately after his death in the book Shem mi-Shmuel in which he often quotes from his father. This book has still not received due scholarly attention and we will suffice here with an example from a teaching on the Torah portion Lekh Lekha, delivered in 1911, in the name of Shmuel’s father:
My father [Avraham of Sokhachev] taught [the following]: … Abraham our forefather … was born and raised in the home of Terah, a place [filled] with the filth of idolatry. When he felt some element of holiness, his desire [for sacred things] grew, for greater is the light that emerges out of darkness. Any holy thing was new and very precious to him, but he was afraid that his eventual descendants, who would be born and raised in the lap of holiness, would not perceive this as new or pleasant and it would slowly become cool to them (until they might, Heaven forbid, transgress).19 Therefore his advice was that they become enslaved in the Diaspora so that their passion for [holiness] would become renewed and their desire [for God] would continue to grow.20
As can be found in many earlier teachings, Avraham of Sokhachev understood exile not as a punishment for the Jews, but as a means to awaken the passion for holiness. He drew this conclusion from the story of the biblical Abraham whose yearning for holiness arose precisely when he was not in the Land of Israel. Here is the core Hasidic principle that light is greater when it emerges out of darkness. Later, Shmuel appended to his father’s teaching that persecution in the Diaspora added to this passion for holiness. He suggests that as the passion of Abraham’s descendants weakened, they were taken into further exiles, where they were persecuted, so that their passion might be rejuvenated. For Sokhachev, as for Ger, the Diaspora has spiritual value.
Vurke-Aleksander
Menahem Mendel of Kotzk was not the only successor of Simhah Bunem of Pshiskhe. Beside those who preferred his leadership, Simhah Bunem himself and another group preferred Simhah Bunem’s son, Avraham Moshe, but when he died at a young age in 1829, they accepted as their leader Yitshak Kalish of Vurke (Warka; 1779–1848), who had been another of Simhah Bunem’s disciples. Here is Yehiel Yeshaya Trunk’s twentieth-century summary of nineteenth-century Vurke Hasidism:
Yitshok Vurker [Yitshak of Vurke] was one of the Apostles of Polish Hasidism. He was the antipode of the Kotzker rebbe.… The Vurker’s outlook was … a completely optimistic viewpoint; namely, that the original sources of the world were a great love; that is, a great feeling of commonality. The low and the evil are only lapses in a peaceful world harmony. Every human being is in essence a divine substance, and if only the person wishes, he can easily return to the source of the world. The Vurker’s love for all people is proverbial even today among Polish Hasidim. A love that was heightened by world wisdom and world knowledge. The Kotzker said that the Vurker “slouches around heaven with his boots on”; that is, that he, R. Yitshok Vurker, sees there, in the highest elevations of life, a place for everyone.21
While it may be difficult to attribute these characteristics to actual sayings of the two opposing rebbes or to extrapolate from personal characters to an ethos of a group (as we shall see later), Trunk undoubtedly captured something of the popular image that circulated widely in Poland for many decades after their deaths.
Transcending his role as the tsaddik of a specific group of Hasidim, Yitshak of Vurke functioned as an intercessor or spokesperson for the entire Jewish population in Congress Poland in the 1830s and 1840s. He was able to win a number of concessions such as imposing religious supervision on Christian butchers claiming to sell kosher meat, and also became involved in lobbying efforts beyond the borders of Poland, such as the Dress Decree” that affected Jews in both Poland and Russia. He made statements to the effect that his work was for the benefit of “all Jews,” statements that reinforce his image as imbued with a “love of Israel” (for a detailed discussion of Yitshak of Vurke see chapter 28).
In addition to stories about dedicating his life to the needs of the Jewish public, Yitshak’s image was adorned by hagiography like any other tsaddik. The following story circulated among the Vurker Hasidim:
On a cold winter night he [Yitshak] arrived in Warsaw on some business pertaining to the Jewish community. Lying in bed he suddenly had a strong desire for a pinch of snuff. Now to arise and to take the snuff would be to yield for desire. Not to get up may be sloth. What did he do? He got up, approached the snuff box but did not take a pinch.22
Yitshak of Vurke was succeeded by Shraga Feivel of Gritza [Grójec] (1779–1848), who grew up in a Mitnaggedic environment but became one of the disciples of Simhah Bunem of Pshiskhe as well as Yitshak of Vurke. He ascended to leadership of the Vurke group after the death of Yitshak in 1848, but died of cholera a few months later. After he died, the Hasidim of Vurke divided their loyalties between the heirs of Yitshak of Vurke and their disciples, a process that led to the establishment of several courts.
In addition to Hasidic historiography, we have a memoir written by Ita Kalish (1903–1994), the granddaughter of Simhah Bunem (1851–1907), who was in turn the grandson of Yitshak of Vurke and was named for the master of Pshiskhe. Kalish tells that Simhah Bunem had already become a legend in his lifetime because of his bizarre behavior. She begins by mentioning that since he was a young tsaddik, he separated himself from his family:
He took up his abode in his villa in the dense Otwock forests, stretching all the way to the capital of Poland. Surrounded by his attendants and followers, he gave orders to admit no one without special permission, not even his wife and children [who remained in Vurke]. To his intimates’ argument of, “what will the world say?,” he countered: “The world! Who is the world? I am the world!”23
Some of Simhah Bunem’s strange customs were related to his strict observance. Hasidic hagiography mentions his custom to wait twenty-four hours between eating meat and milk, although the strictest Jewish law demands only six hours. Kalish confirms this custom in her description of his residence: “The two-story residence was divided into dairy rooms and meat rooms, Passover apartments and year-round apartments. My grandfather had separate kaftans for dairy meals and meat meals.”24
Simhah Bunem traveled to the Holy Land twice in his lifetime. During the first visit in 1887, he overstayed his visa, was imprisoned by the Turks, and was deported back to Poland. His second trip, this time alone, was shortly after the 1905 revolution. It seems that the revolution made a great impression on him, because Kalish relates that on the Sabbath before his departure he proclaimed in the synagogue: “Jews, a fire is raging and no one is aware of it!”25 Simhah Bunem, like his father Menahem Mendel (named for the Kotzker Rebbe), seem to have been quite melancholic or pessimistic by nature. This complicates the conventional belief that Vurke Hasidism was “optimistic” compared to Kotzk. This pessimism may have also been related to Simhah Bunem’s fear of the modern world, which he zealously opposed, although he was not famous in this respect like the Ger and Sokhachev leaders, and did not generally make his views known in public.
The court of Otwock was by no means the only successor of Vurke. The courts of Amshinov and Skernievits emerged from the offspring of the Rebbe of Vurke, whereas Strikov and Radzimin stemmed from his disciples. However, the most prominent Hasidic group to emerge from Isaac of Vurke’s successors was Aleksander. The story of the court of Aleksander starts with Yehiel Danziger (1828–1894), the son of Shraga Feivel of Gritza, who led the Vurker Hasidim for a few months in 1848. Only in 1876 did Yehiel Danziger establish a court at Aleksander (Aleksandrów Łódzki, about fifteen kilometers from Łódź) that served the Vurke Hasidim in the area.
Yehiel Danziger led the Aleksander community for eighteen years. He was a kind of “silent tsaddik” who delivered few sermons, and the handful of homilies that have been preserved are embedded in the book of his son and successor Yerahmiel Yisrael Yitshak (1853–1910), who built Aleksander into the second largest Hasidic group in Congress Poland after Ger. He also transformed the Vurke tradition into something more ascetic. While this dynasty has yet to receive the same scholarly attention as Ger, Trunk’s memoir provides a vivid depiction of the leader of the Aleksander Hasidism at the beginning of the twentieth century. He portrayed him as “a Jewish eunuch, without any trace of a beard or a mustache,” and then described how his Hasidim reacted to his bizarre physiognomy and ascetic teachings:
The Rebbe of Aleksander was an uncommonly great scholar and wise individual. In addition, he was also extremely pious, and had nothing whatsoever in common with warm-hearted and pleasant Vurke Hasidism.… People were both frightened of him and admired him in a mystical way. His weird physical appearance, the dark and strange secret of his asexuality, his dark jaundiced and hairless skin and the sharp intelligence expressed on his face created a kind of metaphysical and superstitious partition between the rebbe and his adherents. His Hasidic teachings were dark and ascetic. The Rebbe of Aleksander spoke about how the body should always be despised and broken. When he spoke about joy—since the foundation of Vurke Hasidism was joyfulness—the word “joy” was uttered with pious pessimism and an otherworldly echo. He delivered his sermons in a quiet voice while sighing and groaning, and as if he were asleep, with his eyes closed, as if the head of a dead man was speaking from the body of a living person. However, during prayers he would shout in a loud weeping voice, which could be heard above the [voices of] the entire congregation. His weeping voice also seemed to come from the shadowy depths of the cosmos.26
Yerahmiel Yisrael Yitshak put his spiritual powers to work in order to free potential recruits from the Russian army. Since the annual army draft began after the holiday of Sukkot, young men would come to Aleksander, after having starved themselves so that they would appear too weak to be drafted. Again, Trunk recalls:
The rebbe, dressed in his Sabbath shtreimel and silk and velvet striped kapote, sat at the head of the table in the rebbe’s study house. Seated next to him were the three elders—Zelikl of Pshitik, Moshe Hayiml of Vurker and Yisrael Yitshak of Tartshin. This was supposedly the “draft committee” that would submit the final verdict regarding the recruits. The pale, consumptive-looking youths stood in a long line and started to walk past the committee of rebbe and elders. The throng of Hasidim crowded around to see and there was complete, unexpected silence, because everyone knew that up above in Heaven they will only consider this committee of the rebbe, which is convening on Simchas Torah. Even the recruits’ skin was shivering with dread, because they all knew that this was the absolute and final decision. The Rebbe raised his head and looked at the young adherents standing in front of him as though they were on their way to the slaughterhouse. Tears were streaming from his eyes. The rebbe of Aleksander was always quick to cry. The young men marching before him tried to make eye contact with the rebbe, so that they might assess their situation. Scared and shaken, each young man whispered in the weeping rebbe’s ear his and his mother’s name. Zelikl of Pshitik lifted his aged wart covered eyelids.… Moshe Hayiml of Vurke was comfortably dozing. Yisrael Yitshakl [of Tartshin] was seething with anger like a boiling kettle. His cheeks were blushing like those of a naughty youngster. He turned to each and every one of the young recruits and loudly and sharply shouted in Russian: “Негодныь! [Not fit].”27
The preceding account serves to demonstrate that even at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Hasidism was supposedly already weakened, the court in Aleksander continued to provide vital services for its followers in a public and theatrical manner. In this story, the court functions not as a “state within a state” as has sometimes been argued about Hasidism, but rather as “state against the state,” a Jewish spiritual state against the corporeal Polish-Russian state. Yerahmiel Yisrael’s ability to intervene in heaven is staged here as a performance, with the rabbinic “draft board” overturning the Russian draft board.
Since, as might be inferred from Trunk’s description, Yerahmiel Yisrael had no children, he was succeeded by his brother Shmuel Tsvi Danziger (d. 1923), who published his brother’s book Yismah Yisrael. The book, which is the key text for Aleksander Hasidism, mostly comprises homilies by Yerahmiel Yisrael, but also some of his father’s and grandfather’s. Rejection of modernity, particularly in the forms of Haskalah and secularism, is a frequent theme:
Each and every individual must believe in God with a faith that is simple and whole. He should not be one of those inquisitive types who looked for and investigated the nonsense of philosophy, thus falling into the web of evil and apostasy, have mercy upon us. Even the workings of God should not be investigated … and especially now in this time of great darkness … many houses of Israel have been seduced by heresy.28
Danziger advocated simple faith, not intellectual belief grounded in Torah scholarship, as the correct religious path with which to battle the temptations of modernity at that time.
Aleksander was therefore far less intellectual than Ger, Aleksander’s main competitor in Poland, although they both derived from the same Polish school from earlier in the nineteenth century. Yet Ger was not necessarily more elitist or erudite than were the followers of Aleksander. The homiletic medium can be misleading: these teachings convey a demand but one cannot conclude that the demand corresponded to reality. And there certainly may have been serious Talmudic scholars among the Aleksander Hasidim. But in the eyes of the Hasidic public, Aleksander stood for faith and Ger for scholarship.
Izhbits-Radzin-Lublin
The third important school of Polish Hasidism was Izhbits-Radzin, although it never achieved the numerical strength of Ger or Aleksander. This school originated in the dramatic departure of Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1800–1854) from the court of Menahem Mendel of Kotzk. As we have said, the reasons for the departure were unclear to people at that time and remain shrouded in mystery to this day. The hypothesis that they differed in theological approaches is difficult to substantiate because of the lack of authentic teachings that can be attributed to the Kotzker. More plausible is that Mordechai Yosef, who seems to have had a mild temperament, had trouble remaining close to his stormy master. In any event, after Leiner left Kotzk he settled in the town of Izhbits, where he established a new court. He never saw his rebbe again, and the Hasidim of the two courts remained in perpetual conflict with each other.
Mordechai Yosef’s sermons were published in 1860, after his death, by his grandson. The book, titled Mei ha-Shiloah, was printed by a non-Jewish publisher, an unusual event in the Hasidic world, which some have argued reflects the radical—even (at times) antinomian—content of his homilies. A particularly dramatic example is Leiner’s interpretation of the biblical story of Pinhas (Numbers 25), who killed Zimri for having sexual relations with a Midianite woman. Leiner argued, against the plain meaning of the biblical text, that “God forbid anyone would think to say that Zimri was an adulterer.” On the contrary, his desire to engage in forbidden relations with Kozbi the Midianite reflected not his own wishes but was decreed by God. Therefore, “when his [Zimri’s] desire overcame him and he did the deed, this was obviously the will of God.” Pinhas, on the other hand, whom the Bible and later tradition regarded as a zealous hero, apparently misunderstand the meaning of Zimri’s sexual act with the Midianite woman:
After the act, God revealed to Pinhas with whom he [Pinhas] was doing battle, so that he would not think that he [Zimri] was a complete adulterer, God forbid.… However, the depth of this whole incident was hidden from him [Pinhas]. For she [Kozbi] was his [Zimri’s] soul mate from the six days of creation, as it is written in the Lurianic texts. Therefore, Moses did not intercede and explicitly dictate that he should be killed. In this incident Pinhas was like a naïve one [literally: a child; na’ar], meaning that he did not know the depth of this matter and judged Zimri only according to his human rational faculties. Nevertheless God loved him, and agreed with him, in that he acted according to his reason and risked his life.29
Moses did not act against Zimri and Kozbi because he knew the secret reason of their seemingly illicit relations, while Pinhas, who lacked this understanding, was compelled by misguided his zealotry to strike down the two sinners. Still, the ultimate affirmation by God of Pinhas’ action somewhat tempers or complicates the radical import of this text.
Here and in other homilies in Mei ha-Shiloah, there is a suggestion that the transgressions portrayed in the Bible are not actually violations of God’s law, but are rather the result of divine decrees that are not always discernible or understandable. God’s will is not always coterminous with the halakhah. This approach to sinful behavior is based on a determinist worldview according to which everything that happens in the world is decided by God. Free choice is therefore ultimately an illusion, a stance that might remind us of the Calvinist strain of Christianity. In light of this, Mordechai Yosef modified the Talmudic saying of “all is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven” (Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 33b)—a saying of the Sages of the Talmud that affirms the importance of free choice—to mean the opposite: “all is in the hands of heaven including the fear of heaven.” That is, man lacks freedom of choice, and transgression is therefore the product of divine will.
These contrarian readings of biblical and Talmudic texts are unusual in the history of Hasidism and attracted the attention of modern scholars for their perceived antinomianism, as if Leiner anticipated the heretical imperative of secularism. Indeed, this radical—if quite marginal—tendency within nineteenth-century Hasidism has had a striking revival starting in the second half of the twentieth century, but not in the Hasidic world (see chapter 31).
Following the death of Mordechai Yosef, leadership was divided between his son and his leading disciple, as was customary in Poland. Leiner’s son, Ya’akov Leiner (1814–1878), moved the court from Izhbits to Radzin (Radzyń-Podlaski) and his son, Gershon Hanokh (1839–1891), succeeded him. He was responsible for writing down, editing, and publishing not only his grandfather’s homilies (including Mei ha-Shiloah) but also his father’s, published in the book Bet Ya’akov.
Gershon Hanokh was described in Hasidic hagiography, as well as in the Jewish press, as an innovator but also as a controversialist. For example, according to reports in the Jewish press he forbade circumcising a newborn in one of the communities under his domain because the father claimed that Gershon Hanokh lacked the stature of his father.30 This tendency to stir up controversies may explain the rumors, unique among tsaddikim, that he used to carry a gun with him.
Gershon Hanokh was perhaps most famous for his initiative at the end of the 1880s to renew the commandment of wearing tsitsit (ritual threads on fringes on certain garments as well as prayer shawls) dyed with the color of tekhelet (usually understood as a type of azure blue), which he publicized in three books printed between 1887 and 1891. Traditional Jewish society in Eastern Europe was taken by surprise by his campaign, which stirred up great controversy. The widespread opposition that this proposal provoked had much to do with Orthodoxy’s reluctance to embrace innovations, especially with regard to modern science, since Leiner mobilized contemporary secular knowledge to recreate the ancient dye that had been manufactured from snails in antiquity. For his part, Leiner’s initiative can also be understood as an expression of a desire to restore missing parts of the Jewish ritual law. This aim had metaphysical value in and of itself, but it also enabled Jews to get closer to spiritual perfection of fulfilling the entire body of Jewish law.
The tekhelet controversy also had an internal Hasidic dimension. The Hasidic opposition to Leiner was an expression of years of growing hostility among Hasidim against Izhbits-Radzin Hasidism because of his grandfather, Mordechai Leiner’s departure from Kotzk, which was considered an act of betrayal or rebellion. Indeed, opposition to tsitsit with tekhelet came primarily from the Kotzk Hasidim and also from followers of Ger, which, of course, derived from Kotzk. Izhbits-Radzin under the leadership of Gershon Hanoch might therefore be seen as the Polish equivalent to Bratslav in Russia, the enfant terrible of Hasidism. This was a small Hasidic community whose importance greatly exceeded its size because of its radical and eccentric ideas.
Alongside the continuation of the Radzin dynasty, we should mention two of Mordechai Yosef’s disciples who became Hasidic leaders in Lublin: Yehudah Leib Eger (1815–1888), and Tsadok ha-Kohen Rabinowitz (1823–1900). Eger, grandson of the influential halakhic authority Rabbi Akiva Eger, was brought up in an anti-Hasidic household. When he married, he lived in the home of his father-in-law in Lublin, and it was there that he became a follower of Menahem Mendel of Kotzk, who appointed Mordechai Yosef Leiner as Eger’s tutor. Eger followed his teacher when he left the Kotzk court and became a prominent disciple in Leiner’s new court in Izhbits. Following Leiner’s death, Eger took over as rebbe for over thirty years, relocating to Lublin, where there had been no prominent Hasidic leader since the times of the Seer of Lublin.
One of his unexpected admirers was Alexander Zederbaum, the Maskil who founded the important Hebrew periodical Ha-Melits. Zederbaum provides some rich detail about Eger’s embrace of Hasidism:
He suddenly left his home and, to the astonishment of everyone, fled to Kotzk. His father-in-law … hated anyone with the name Hasid and especially the Hasidim of Kotzk whom he considered bitter and evil.… He swore that he wouldn’t let his daugther live with this husband … but [Eger’s] faithful wife followed after him.
Zederbaum goes on to sing Eger’s praises:
Even an opponent of the Hasidim and the tsaddikim would not speak ill of this holy man.… Even we [Maskilim] would testify that he dedicated himself to God and His Torah from his mother’s womb. From his youth after his marriage in Lublin, he was a remarkable scholar. When he prayed, he divested himself of all foreign emotion and thought and did not clap his hands, stamp his feet or cry out in bizarre voices. And yet beads of sweat coursed down his brow from his great ecstasy. He would give charity to the poor in secret for he humbled himself before all. His countenance testified that he descended from noble stock and his wisdom illuminated his eyes.31
Zederbaum’s description of Eger makes him sounds less like a Hasidic tsaddik—his form of prayer lacks the typical Hasidic gestures—than a more traditional holy man.
After Eger’s death, he was succeeded by both his son Avraham and his friend, Tsadok ha-Kohen Rabinowitz, who also came from a scholarly background. Tsadok was childless and therefore did not found a dynasty. Although he may not have been very influential in his lifetime, he was one of the most creative and prolific authors among the Hasidic masters and certainly the most productive from the Izhbits school. His rich literary legacy included halakhic works, commentaries and philosophical books, which contain some autobiographical allusions.
One of Tsadok of Lublin’s central themes was repentance, as in the following concise remark:
The essence of repentance is when God will enlighten a person so that he will perceive his malicious sin as an advantage, in other words that man will recognize and understand that every sin that he committed was also the will of the blessed Almighty.32
In the spirit of Mordechai Leiner’s radical teaching, Tsadok saw God as the very author of sin. He also notes in this teaching (in the lines following those cited) the more general law that free will and true knowledge of events are mutually exclusive. When a person thinks he chose to sin, he actually lacks the knowledge of the will of God, and, once again, in a formulation reminiscent of Calvinism, when he understand the will of God, he knows that he does not have the free will to choose sin. In an even more provocative expression, he argued that the incitement of desire can be so great at times that “it is impossible for a person not to sin.”33
This radical statement raises a challenging question: if one is forced to sin, can his actions really be considered a transgression? Tsadok tempers his teachings, however, by reminding his reader that, “a person cannot himself testify in this matter, since perhaps he really was able to conquer his evil instinct,” so it was not true that he was forced to sin. There is thus an inherent paradox in human sin. One is called upon to overcome all challenges and to vanquish his temptation for sin, but in retrospective—and indeed from the divine perspective all along—he must remember that even transgressions are the work of God.
The theme of repentance is but one of a wide array of themes about which Rabbi Tsadok wrote extensively, and which cannot be covered here. Among them, noteworthy is his emphasis on Torah study, which may relate to the fact that he was known as a prominent Talmudic scholar outside the Hasidic world as well. At the same time, he was a mystic whose writings demonstrate the possibility of intellectual mysticism. He was also fascinated by human psychology. Here is one of the texts he wrote about the role of dreams and its relationship to alien thoughts:
A person’s dreams are his indicators [maggidim; literally: “angelic visitors” or “preachers”] about the thoughts of his heart, in order to know what they were immersed in during the day, and from whence [the dreams] come. This method will rouse his heart [following Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 55b] because when he sees that even when he studies Torah almost all day, as long as he does not flee from alien thoughts created from the concealed inclination of his heart … he is tied to them. He will not escape from these dreams and illusions, called by the sages the impure spirit dwelling in sleep.34
Although Tsadok’s psychological observations are deeply rooted in early Hasidic, Kabbalistic and rabbinic thought, it is striking that his interest in the relationship between dreams and one’s conscious life coincide roughly with the emergence of psychoanalysis.
1 Meir of Apt, Or la-Shamayim (Lwow, 1850), par. Emor.
2 Abraham Joshua Heschel, A Passion for Truth (New York, 1973), 70–71.
3 Ramatayim Tsofim (Warsaw, 1881), ch. 3, no. 34, 61.
4 Avraham Yisakhar Binyamin Alter, Me’ir Einei ha-Golah (Warsaw, 1932), vol. 2, no. 572, 58–59.
5 Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, The Later Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York, 1948), vol. 2, 224–225. The original source for this story can be found in Nifla’ot Hayehudi (Piotrkow, 1908), 57–58.
6 Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk, Poyln: My Life within Jewish Life in Poland, Sketches and Images, translated from the Yiddish by Anna Clark; ed. Piotr Wróbel and Robert M. Shapiro (Toronto and Buffalo, NY, 2007), vol. 1, 78–80. Only the first volume of this work has been translated into English; citations from all other volumes have been rendered from the original Yiddish: Poyln: Zikhrones un Bilder (New York, 1944).
7 Abraham Joshua Heschel, In Gerangel far Emesdikeit (Tel Aviv, 1973), vol. 2, 549.
8 Avraham Yisakhar Binyamin Alter, Meir Einei ha-Golah (Piotrkow, 1928), vol. 1, no. 197, 55–56.
9 Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, vol. 2, 277.
10 Avraham Bornstein, Eglei Tal (Piotrkow, 1905), introduction.
11 Alter, Meir Einei ha-Golah, vol. 2, no. 482, 30.
12 Sefat Emet (Krakow, 1906), vol. 4, par. Shelah, 1891.
13 Zvi Mark, “‘The Son of David Will Not Come until the Sovereignty of Aram (Alexander, King of Russia) Rules over the Entire World for Nine Months’: Messianic Hopes in Gur Hasidism” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 77 (2008): 295–324.
14 Yehuda Arieh Leib mi-Gur, Sefer Otsar Mikhtavim u-Ma’amarim (Jerusalem, 1986), 66–67.
15 Yehiel Yeshaya Trunk, Poyln, vol. 2, 297–303.
16 Emet ve-Emunah (Piotrkow, 1908), 19–20.
17 Trunk, Poyln, vol. 2, 300–301.
18 Ibid., vol. 2, 305.
19 These brackets, which seem to contain R. Shmuel’s notes, appear in the original.
20 Shem mi-Shmuel (Piotrkow, 1927), vol. 1, par. Lekh lekha, 1911.
21 Trunk, Poyln, vol. 1, 20–21.
22 Ita Kalish, “Life in a Hassidic Court in Russian Poland toward the End of the 19th and the Early 20th Centuries,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 13 (1965): 265. The following information from Ita Kalish was taken also from the more detailed Hebrew version of her memoirs: Ita Kalish, Etmoli (Tel Aviv, 1970).
23 Kalish, “Life in a Hasidic Court,” 267.
24 Ibid., 267–268.
25 Ibid., 271.
26 Trunk, Poyln, vol. 3, chapter 3, 22–23.
27 Ibid., vol. 3, 54–55.
28 Yismah Yisrael (Lodz, 1911), par. Lekh lekha.
29 Mei ha-Shiloah (Vienna, 1860), vol. 1, par. Pinhas. Trans. in Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism (Madison, WI, 2003), 192.
30 Ha-Melits (June 10, 1879), 453–454.
31 Alexander Zederbaum, Keter Kehuna (Odessa, 1867), 132–133.
32 Tsidkat ha-Tsaddik (Lublin, 1902), no. 40.
33 Ibid., no. 43.
34 Ibid., no. 243; trans. and inline comments in Alan Brill, Thinking God: The Mysticism of Rabbi Zadok of Lublin (New York, 2002), 122.
