IN THE EYES OF OTHERS: HASIDISM IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
IN 2012, THE ISRAEL MUSEUM STAGED A MAJOR EXHIBITION titled “A World Apart Next Door: Glimpses into the Lives of Hasidic Jews.” The extraordinary success of the exhibition—both in Israel and elsewhere in the world—suggests the deep fascination that Hasidism exercises for secular culture, a fascination with an alien, exotic world that is nonetheless visible on the streets of major cities around the world. For, in the course of the twentieth century, Hasidism entered into contemporary Jewish culture—as well as modern culture generally—in a variety of ways, some of them linked to real Hasidim and others using Hasidism for goals remote from the historical and contemporary movement itself. While one normally thinks of museums exhibiting artifacts of cultures long dead, this exhibition was rooted precisely in the ongoing vitality of Hasidism as both a relic of a vanished world and a social and religious movement constantly reinventing itself.
And, if the Israel Museum exhibition provided a window for those who do not belong to Hasidic society to gaze inside, it was also striking that the museum-goers included many Hasidim, eager, evidently, to see how a secular Israeli institution was portraying them and perhaps also as a vehicle for understanding Hasidic groups other than their own (a similar phenomenon has occurred as a result of the immensely popular Israeli television series Shtisel, which depicts haredi life). The exhibition thus showed how this self-consciously insular group has become increasingly visible “in the eyes of others.” In this, the last chapter of our book, we turn to the many ways contemporary culture, Jewish and non-Jewish, views and uses Hasidism and Hasidim. We start with those who are close intellectually and spiritually to Hasidism without necessarily identifying either with a particular court or with Hasidism altogether. After examining these “neo-neo-Hasidim,” we will turn to the wider culture, Jewish and non-Jewish, and how it portrays Hasidism. It is, in fact, paradoxical that at a time when Hasidism has tried even more than in the past to segregate itself from the modern world, it has come even more to fascinate outsiders, who sometimes even take it as a source of spiritual inspiration.
Neo-Hasidism after the Holocaust
In chapter 21, we examined the literary movement of neo-Hasidism, a movement that used Hasidism—or its construction of Hasidism—for modernist purposes. We traced that movement from around 1900 through the interwar period. Now we turn our attention to the new incarnation of neo-Hasidism, a second wave of this phenomenon that peaked with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s and continues to this day. The bridging figure between the first wave of neo-Hasidism and the second was Martin Buber, whose literary activity around Hasidism began in the first decade of the twentieth century and continued to his death in 1965. Buber fled Germany in 1938 for Jerusalem and from there was able to transmit the spirit of fin-de-siécle neo-Hasidism to a new generation and to new audiences, especially in North America and Israel. In 1947, he published simultaneously in German and in English translation his Tales of the Hasidim. In the 1950s and 1960s, Buber’s disciple, Maurice Friedman, undertook translations of many of Buber’s essays on and anthologies of Hasidism. And, in Israel, in 1965, the year of his death, there appeared a Hebrew translation of a 1924 German anthology of Hasidic stories under the title of Or ha-Ganuz. The multiple reprints of many of these works guaranteed to Buber a wide audience well after his death.
Buber was not the only author to convey Hasidic stories to a broad, non-Hasidic audience. In 1934, Louis Newman published his Hasidic Anthology, a collection that was reprinted several times in the 1960s. The Jewish American author, Meyer Levin, who became famous for his novel about the Leopold and Loeb kidnapping case and who was one of the first Americans to discover the Diary of Anne Frank, published his own collection of tales of the Ba’al Shem Tov and Rabbi Nahman under the title of Classic Chassidic Tales in 1966. So, too, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wiesel, who came from Sighet, Romania (the town was in Hungary during the Holocaust), and who was connected to Vizhnits Hasidism on his mother’s side, published several collections of retold Hasidic tales: Souls on Fire (1972), Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggles against Melancholy (1978), Somewhere a Master: Hasidic Portraits and Legends (1982), and others (Wiesel also wrote his own version of the Israel of Ruzhin tale, discussed in chapter 21, about telling the story of the ritual in the forest). Herbert Weiner’s immensely popular Nine and a Half Mystics (1969), and particularly his chapter on the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, brought Hasidism to a mass culture. So, too, did the novels of the American writer, Chaim Potok, in particular, The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev.
A particular fascination with Nahman of Bratslav is evident in the popular and scholarly publication of his tales, an enterprise that started in 1906 with Martin Buber’s German rendering and continuing with versions published by the Israeli Talmud scholar and philosopher, Adin Steinsalz, and the literary scholar, Arnold Band. The Nahman stories clearly strike a chord in modern readers both for their fantastical originality and as possible precursors to religious existentialism (Nahman has been compared by some to the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, Sǿren Kierkegaard). An outstanding work that brought Rabbi Nahman into contemporary culture is Arthur Green’s biography Tormented Master (1979), a work distinguished not only for its meticulous scholarship, but also for its passionate psychological sympathy with its subject. Green’s book awakened a great deal of interest in Nahman in the English-speaking world and had even a greater impact in Israel when it was translated to Hebrew at roughly the time that Bratslav in Israel began to attract a growing following. Green (b. 1941) is also a contemporary Jewish theologian of note, and his highly original Kabbalistic meditations in a modern key clearly owe much to his daring readings of Nahman’s life and thought as well as that of other Hasidic teachers.
The nexus between scholarship on Hasidism and modern Jewish philosophy, which began with Buber, had another important exponent in Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972). Heschel was the scion of several distinguished Hasidic dynasties, including his namesake, Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt, mentioned in section 2, as well as in the role he played in the Agnon novel discussed in chapter 21. But the twentieth-century Heschel broke with these roots, obtained liberal rabbinic ordination in Germany, and also studied philosophy at the University of Berlin. After expulsion to Poland in 1938, he escaped to America, where he taught first at the Reform Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and, then, for most of his career, at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
The case of Heschel differs from that of Buber, however. Heschel kept his Hasidic scholarship largely separate from his theological and philosophical writings, although the latter are often infused with a Hasidic sensibility. He wrote his study of Mendel of Kotzk in Yiddish and his Circle of the Baal Shem Tov appeared only after his death. However, his well-known books, The Sabbath and God in Search of Man (1955), both have strong Hasidic overtones, with the latter evoking the phrase that was also a favorite of Buber’s: “God dwells where man lets him in.” Unlike Buber, however, Heschel never constructed an explicitly Hasidic—or neo-Hasidic—theology. Yet when Heschel eulogized the murdered communities of Eastern Europe in 1946 in an address, later published as The Earth Is the Lord’s, it seems likely that he had in mind in particular the Hasidic culture from which he came.
Heschel inspired a younger generation of thinkers, writers, and activists (Arthur Green was one of these) who sought to create a new kind of neo-Hasidism, a Hasidicinspired spirituality, at times wedded to social action. In part because he played a vigorous role in American politics, especially as an ally of Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights movement, he was able to project a neo-Hasidic spirit beyond a limited Jewish circle to include Christian theologians. In this, he resembled Buber, who came to be, if anything, more influential among non-Jews than Jews. And, like Buber, Heschel envisioned a Judaism informed by spirituality and social action.
Neo-Hasidism as it developed in the 1960s found a place in both the non-Orthodox Jewish world and the larger non-Jewish culture. Two figures who were crucial in these developments, both born in Europe and both affiliated for a time with Lubavitch-Chabad, were Shlomo Carlebach (1925–1994) and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924–2014). Carlebach came from a non-Hasidic, Orthodox family in Germany and arrived in the United States on the eve of World War II. Although an outstanding student of Talmud in Lithuanian-style yeshivot, he became attracted to Lubavitch in the last years of Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. In one of his last acts before his death, Schneersohn sent Carlebach and Schachter to a few American college campuses in order to promote the repentance of American Jewry and thus hasten the redemption. Carlebach sang with his guitar, and Schachter got students to put on tefillin.
In 1966, Carlebach, who had developed a successful singing career, broke away from Chabad and moved to California. Soon after, he and his followers founded the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco. Carlebach departed significantly from Orthodox Jewish practice by sanctioning women singing together with men; a number of his female followers became teachers in their own right, also a departure from the world in which he originated. Carlebach additionally developed ties with Hindu teachers.
Carlebach combined Hasidic teaching with music. He composed songs inspired by Hasidic niggunim that all of the religious movements of modern Judaism gradually adopted as part of the synagogue liturgy. Carlebach began to spend significant periods of time in Israel, where one of his songs won first place in the Hasidic Song Festival (itself a sign of interest in Hasidism in the broader Israeli culture), and, through his music as well as his teaching, he had an impact in Israel as great as his impact in North America. His concerts in Poland helped to launch a Jewish renaissance there as well. Beyond Judaism, Carlebach played a role in the emergence of New Age religion; his songs were also adopted by a variety of Christian gospel groups.
Schachter-Shalomi was born in Poland to a Lubavitch family and grew up in Vienna. After internment in France, he came to the United States in 1941 and also affiliated himself with Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn; he was ordained a rabbi in Lubavitch and for a time became a pulpit rabbi in Fall River, Massachusetts. Ultimately, he, too, broke with Lubavitch and together with Arthur Green in the early 1970s founded Havurat Shalom outside of Boston, a New Age community. Schachter-Shalomi earned an MA in the psychology of religion from Boston University and a doctorate from the Reform Movement’s Hebrew Union College. Experimenting with psychedelic drugs, he developed an interfaith philosophy beyond Judaism. He sought out Native American and Buddhist spiritualists and developed a teaching that combined Hasidism with other religious traditions. This led to founding B’nai (later P’nai) Or, a spiritual center linked to the Jewish Renewal movement.
Schachter-Shalomi published a long series of books, including his own anthology of the early Hasidic masters and, more interestingly, a collection of writings by Aharon Roth, the founder of the Reb Arele Hasidim (one does not normally associate this very extreme group with Jewish renewal, but Schachter-Shalomi saw Reb Arele explicitly as a “Hasidic Reformer”). A key text is his Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hassidism for the Aquarian Age (1975), which, as its title suggests, seeks to harmonize Hasidic teachings with what the author takes to be the new spirituality of post-1960s America. Schachter-Shalomi also published a translation of Tikkun Klali: Nahman of Bratzlav’s Ten Remedies for the Soul, which reflects the growing popularity of Bratslav Hasidism in America particularly within the Jewish Renewal movement. In all his writings, Schachter-Shalomi was concerned to create a Jewish spirituality that might draw young Jews back into the fold from their infatuation with Eastern religion, without denying the value of studying those traditions. His books are an eclectic, decidedly nonscholarly compilation of Hasidic and Kabbalistic teachings intended to inspire such a Jewish renewal.
Like Carlebach, Schachter-Shalomi was willing to part company with the halakhic practice of his youth, basing himself on a New Age philosophy but also partly on the teachings of Mordechai Leiner of Izhbits (see chapter 12), who argued that even sin and heresy may reflect the will of God. While Jewish mysticism, including Hasidism, was rarely antinomian (with the great exception of the Sabbatian and Frankist movements), Schachter-Shalomi’s version of Jewish renewal put the emphasis so squarely on spirituality that the law came to be almost irrelevant.
In chapter 28, we examined the vigorous attraction that Hasidic ideas have exercised on young Israelis in search of spirituality. Bratslav and Chabad are the two groups that have particularly inspired those who may not want to formally affiliate with a Hasidic court but want to embrace Hasidic ideas for their own spiritual quest. In this way, as in North America, a variety of quasi-Hasidic groups have emerged on the margins of Hasidism. While all Hasidic groups have peripheral members—that is, those who identify partially with a rebbe without fully committing themselves—this phenomenon is perhaps most notable in Chabad. The charismatic figure of the seventh Rebbe attracted a wide circle of admirers, but its outreach to the secular world may explain figures like Schachter-Shalomi and Carlebach, who abandoned Chabad while translating Hasidism into a modern idiom.
A figure who remains closer to Chabad, although he has his own independent standing, is Adin Steinsaltz (b. 1937), the scholar whose rendition of the Talmud into modern Hebrew is one of the most significant attempts to make rabbinic literature accessible to a broad readership. In addition to this massive undertaking, a series of homiletical books and the tales of Rabbi Nahman, Steinsaltz has also published a modern commentary on Shneur Zalman’s Tanya, the foundational text of Chabad Hasidism. From this commentary, it becomes clear how closely Steinsaltz, who was raised as a secular Jew and became religious as a teenager, has over the years come increasingly to identify with the theology of Chabad.
Another quasi-Hasidic figure with ties to Chabad is Yitshak Ginsburgh (b. 1944), an American ba’al teshuvah and graduate of the University of Chicago in mathematics and philosophy who moved to Israel in the mid-1960s after becoming religious. Ginsburgh’s path to religion passed through a Lithuanian-style yeshivah and Slonim Hasidism, but after the Six Day War he came to affiliate himself primarily with Chabad. Even though he still considers himself a Chabad Hasid and lives in Kfar Chabad, he has carved out a partially autonomous niche for himself as a kind of rebbe. He holds gatherings similar to a Hasidic tish or a Lubavitch farbrengen in which he teaches his version of Hasidism. And he clearly has devoted followers, who may not refer to him explicitly as their rebbe, but who view him as their main spiritual—and political—inspiration. These followers include the so-called hilltop youth, young Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews who have built themselves residences in sites in the West Bank (or Judaea and Samaria), often in opposition to government policy. They are a highly volatile and at times violent group, which follows its own eclectic and even antinomian version of halakhah. Ginsburgh has had a major influence on this group in part through the Od Yosef Hai yeshivah, which he established in Nablus (Shechem) at the site believed by religious Jews and Muslims to be the grave of the biblical Joseph (the yeshivah was moved to the radical settlement of Yitzhar after Joseph’s Tomb was seized by Palestinians during the Second Intifada in 2001). Ginsburgh was also the leader of a group of seven families that founded the settlement of Bat Ayin southwest of Jerusalem in 1989. Now a community of some two hundred families, Bat Ayin has attracted many ba’alei teshuvah, some loosely affiliating with Chabad and others with Bratslav. The settlement is considered politically radical, and some of its residents have been associated with acts of terror and revenge against Palestinians. Even though Ginsburgh no longer lives in Bat Ayin, his political philosophy continues to resonate there, as well as elsewhere in the West Bank.
Ginsburgh’s teachings draw on a mixture of Talmudic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic elements, but with an application to contemporary political problems, primarily the conflict between Jews and Arabs. He earned special notoriety when he published a volume titled Barukh ha-Gever, justifying Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of twenty-nine Palestinians in Hebron on the holiday of Purim in 1994. For Ginsburgh, Goldstein’s deed was at once self-defense—for he was alleged to have thwarted an Arab attack—an act of revenge for earlier Arab attacks, and an act of martyrdom, because Goldstein was killed by Arabs during his rampage. Two of Ginsburgh’s disciples have taken this argument further in a volume titled Torat ha-Melekh (The Law of the King). Motivated by acute messianism, this group rejects the authority of the State of Israel and legitimates violence as part of the redemptive process. Although many individual Hasidim, especially those connected with Chabad, may share these kind of extreme views, which have made inroads generally in the haredi world, no Hasidic group as such embraces such politics or the violence that at times accompanies it. However, it would be a mistake to only focus on Ginsburgh’s political theology. He has also developed his own profound interpretation of Chabad’s historic doctrines, as well as a kind of New Age meditation practice. Ginsburgh and his followers thus demonstrate that various types of groups and ideas inhabit the borders of contemporary Hasidism.
A final group on the margins of Hasidism, which has devoted itself to Kabbalistic innovation, developed out of the teachings of Yehudah Leib Ashlag (1884–1954). Born in Poland to a family with ties to various Hasidic courts, Ashlag never affiliated with any one Hasidic movement and never himself acted as a rebbe. In 1921, he immigrated to the Land of Israel and began to teach Kabbalah to a wide public. He developed his ideas in a number of writings, most notably his multi-volume commentary on the Zohar called the Sulam. Ashlag promulgated a unique doctrine about the upper worlds as a kind of science governed by certain “laws.” He believed that the forces of creation are “the desire to bestow” and the “desire to receive,” which is a kind of vessel. The first desire is the essential quality of God, while the second is the essence of humanity. Although man is born as the “desire to receive,” he has the capacity to transform himself into the divine “desire to bestow.” This latter desire should find expression in man’s relationship to God but also in his relationship to other people. In this way, Ashlag arrived at a doctrine of religious socialism that he sometimes called “altruistic communism,” based on spiritual principles rather than Marxist dialectical materialism. He claimed that only by realizing egalitarian collectivism could the world fulfill the “desire to bestow” and thus embark on the road to redemption. Ashlag saw national liberation—of the Jews and of all other nations—as part of this process on condition that one nationalism not deny the rights of other nations: national liberation should apply to all nations equally.
Ashlag’s ideas were highly unique in his day, but even if other Orthodox rabbis did not accept them, they treated him with respect and his ideas as legitimate. After his death, his followers continued to disseminate his teachings and they formed various small Hasidic-like circles. His son, Baruch Shalom Ashlag (1907–1991), refused for many years to earn a living from teaching Torah and instead worked as a manual laborer. He eventually agreed to head the most prominent of these circles, functioning effectively like a Hasidic tsaddik. Ashlag’s second son, Shlomo Binyamin (1909–1983), became the rebbe of a competing group. Their sons inherited these roles, thus creating an Ashlag dynasty. Ashlag’s brother-in-law, Yehudah Tsvi Brandwein (1903–1969), a descendant of the Stertin Hasidic dynasty, renewed the Stertin court at the end of his life and taught Kabbalah in the spirit of Rav Ashlag. His son inherited his position and functions as a rebbe. One of his students, Shraga (Philip) Berg (1927–2013), founded the Kabbalah Center, which has spread Kabbalah far beyond the Jewish world to Hollywood celebrities, most notably Madonna. The Kabbalah Center does not, however, see itself as Hasidic. All these groups deriving from Rav Ashlag teach Kabbalah based on his doctrines and because of their universal appeal, their teachings have aroused great interest among many adherents of New Age spirituality.
These various teachers and groups challenge the very definition of Hasidism in the postwar period. The leaders of these circles do not descend from earlier Hasidic rebbes and they do not claim the names of venerable dynasties, as do those who are more explicitly Hasidic. While some of the practices of these leaders may look Hasidic, the groups themselves exist somewhere on the margins of Hasidism, a testament to the power of its ideas to affect those disinclined to affiliate with establishment courts.
Hasidism and Modern Music
We now turn to the influence of Hasidism on the wider, nonreligious culture. As we saw earlier, music is one of non-Jewish culture’s primary areas of influence on Hasidism. But the direction of this influence was largely one way until the twentieth century. Only with the proliferation of neo-Hasidic ideas did music, both Jewish and non-Jewish, begin to reflect Hasidic themes. We noted in chapter 21 how Hasidic niggunim made their way to secular Zionist culture and how the ethnographers of the Society for Jewish Folk Music brought Hasidic music into the broader world. But what was the impact of Hasidic music more generally on classical and popular music?
With regard to classical music, it is often hard to disentangle Hasidic melodies from klezmer and cantorial influences. Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes is influenced mainly by klezmer-style melodies, but also from Hasidic ones. A young Polish-born Jewish composer, Moishe (or Mieczysław or Moisey) Weinberg (1919–1996), who wrote mainly modern music, composed his Sinfonietta no. 1 on Jewish Themes in 1948 and some of those themes also reflect Hasidic influence. Even stronger Hasidic motifs can be found in some of his works whose official titles do not suggest a Jewish connection, such as his “Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes” (1949), his “Fantasia for Cello and Orchestra” (1951), the “Largo” movement of his Flute Concerto no. 1 (1961), and—the work considered by many critics as the best of his oeuvre—his Cello Concerto (1948). However, the most explicit influence of Hasidic music on classical music is in the works of the Swiss-Jewish composer Ernst Bloch (1880–1959). Bloch not only incorporated Hasidic themes in his Schelomo (1916) and Voice in the Wilderness (1936) but also even titled one of his major works Baal Shem—Three Pictures from Hasidic Life (1939).
In Israel, a new center of classical music was founded. Many of the new Israeli composers aspired to use oriental scales and stylistic elements in their music, often as part of an aesthetic return to the Middle Eastern origins of the Jewish people, but some turned to Hasidic music as well. The Hasidic Suite (1954) of Yehoyakhin (Joachim) Stutschewsky (1891–1982) is probably the best example of that genre. Some contemporary Israeli composers continue this trend in different ways. Particularly noteworthy are Andre Hajdu (1932–2016) and Noam Sheriff (b. 1935). Israel Edelson (b. 1951), who served as Leonard Bernstein’s assistant, joined Chabad and immigrated to Israel, where he began producing contemporary classical music infused with Hasidic influence. His Chabad Suite for Symphony Orchestra is a kind of fusion between Hasidic niggunim and an orchestral suite. Finally, among contemporary American composers, Steve Reich (b. 1936), although he has not incorporated specific Hasidic themes in his work, has paid an homage to the Ba’al Shem Tov in his You Are Variations, which is based on the Besht’s saying: “you are wherever your thoughts are.”
In the realm of popular music, Hasidic melodies have become increasingly part of the mainstream. We have already noted Shlomo Carlebach’s success in popularizing niggunim in non-Orthodox synagogue liturgies. As synagogue prayer moved away from virtuoso quasi-operatic cantorial style to group singing, Hasidic melodies—always suited more to group singing—were embraced in venues far from their origins. Benzion Shenker’s recording of the music of the Modzitser Hasidim starting in 1950 and David Werdyger’s records featuring Ger, Melitz, Skulen Bobov, Boyan, and Radomsk melodies made this music widely available.
Werdyger’s son, who goes by the name Mordechai Ben-David, perhaps the preeminent recording artist and performer of contemporary Jewish music, beginning in the 1980s intensified this effort of bringing Hasidic tunes and musical style into mass popular culture. Werdyger and Avraham Fried, a Lubavitch Hasid, appeared together at the end of the 1980s in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, in a kind of breakthrough performance in a venue never before used for such music. Subsequently, Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden, and even the Metropolitan Opera House hosted concerts of Hasidic music. These performances demonstrated the increasing use of Hasidic music to represent Orthodox identity at a time when Orthodox Jews were becoming a mainstream presence in New York City.
Fiddler on the Roof—both the Broadway musical and the film—included music, such as “If I Were a Rich Man,” that could be said to have a Hasidic “inflection.” And the klezmer revival, starting in the 1970s, made Hasidic music even more prominent, even though klezmer is technically a different genre of music. A key figure in this movement was Frank London, whose band the Klezmatics established itself as part of the non-Jewish musical scene. London, who is not Hasidic, makes original use of Hasidic melodies in his klezmer repertoire. Hasidim like Chilik Frank and ex-Hasidim like Sruli Dresdner also became part of the klezmer revival.
The market for recordings of Hasidic music is hardly limited to the non-Hasidic world. As Hasidism has become more insular, it developed the need for its own cultural productions, such as musical renderings of its niggunim. These recordings included musical influences from the outside world such as the “Bass Kol” music video discussed in the last chapter. In this way, the borders between Hasidic and non-Hasidic cultures have become more permeable than Hasidic authorities would like.
While women and men are the audience for Hasidic music performed and produced by Orthodox men, men are prohibited from listening to female voices. However, several women have made a career of singing Hasidic music for non-Orthodox audiences. Among these were performances by Barbra Streisand and Jeannie Goldstein of Hasidic-inflected versions of “Avinu Malkenu.” More recently, Neshama Carlebach, the daughter of Shlomo Carlebach, has had a stellar career continuing the legacy of her father.
No performer has had quite the career of Matisyahu (b. 1979), the Hebrew and stage name of Matthew Paul Miller, a reggae and hip-hop artist who grew up in a Reconstructionist family in White Plains, New York. Starting in 2001, he affiliated with Chabad, but later also became connected with the Karlin branch of Hasidism in Jerusalem. He took up residence in Crown Heights but frequently prayed at the Karlin synagogue in Borough Park, where the custom is to scream prayers. As he was becoming religious, Matisyahu’s career took off: in 2005, his single “King without a Crown” broke into the Top Forty.
The Hasidic element in Matisyahu’s performances is not in the musical repertoire, which is almost totally devoid of the tradition of the niggun. Instead, it consists more in the visual incongruity of a reggae musician dressed like a Hasidic Jew who mixes occasional Hebrew and Yiddish phrases into his music. In “King without a Crown,” he includes the Chabad slogan “I Want Moshiach Now!” which gives the King of the song’s title a specifically Chabad meaning. Matisyahu therefore contradicts the stereotype of the insular Hasid. Indeed, in a very touching moment at the end of “King without a Crown,” he shakes the hand of a clearly non-Jewish boy on the street wearing a “hoodie.” The message seems to be one of harmony between the Hasidic Jew and the Gentile kid on the block. Sadly for the future of such outreach, Matisyahu posted a picture of himself on Twitter in 2011 without a beard: now divorced from his Orthodox wife, he has apparently abandoned Hasidism and most connection to Jewish observance.
A song that starts as Hasidic may also end up detached from its roots and thoroughly integrated into secular culture. We recall from chapter 21 that the song “Hava Nagila” was based on a Sadagora niggun, brought by the Boyan Hasidim to Palestine. Zionist emissaries transplanted the song to summer camps and schools in America in the 1930s. By the early post–World War II period, the song jumped into American Jewish culture generally, becoming a staple of bar mitzvahs and weddings. In the early 1950s, the black singer Harry Belafonte began to perform it for broader audiences and it became one of his most popular songs. Within a decade, virtually every performer developed his or her own rendition, leading as well to satires by Alan Sherman and Bob Dylan. Ironically, at the same time that it became the American Jewish song, “Hava Nagila” virtually vanished from the culture of the State of Israel. As it now circulated in popular culture generally, its Hasidic origins vanished into the mists of history.
Visual Representations of Hasidism
In chapter 21 as well, we discussed two cinematic representations of Hasidism in the interwar period: Molly Picon’s silent film, East and West, and the film version of Ansky’s Dybbuk. Hasidism and Hasidim remained largely invisible in the movies in the decades after World War II, the undoubted result of the fact that the movement itself was relatively invisible to outsiders. In the last few decades, fascination with Hasidism has produced a long list of feature films, television shows, and documentaries in North America, Israel, and elsewhere. A few examples will illustrate the major themes that emerge in these visual representations: the exoticism of Hasidic life, especially around marriage and sexuality, and depictions of members of the community—usually women—daring to cross the boundary into the secular world (these two themes are sometimes combined).
One of the first serious Hollywood feature films cast in the Hasidic world was A Stranger among Us (1992). Melanie Griffith stars as a detective who goes undercover to investigate the murder of a Hasidic diamond merchant. She lives in a rebbe’s house, which affords the audience a window into Hasidic customs including the arranged marriage of the rebbe’s son. When she discovers that the rebbe’s wayward adopted daughter was instrumental in the robbery and murder of the diamond merchant, the plot turns into a clichéd shoot-out, with the rebbe’s son killing the villain. The film was not well received by the critics, but it set the agenda for subsequent representations of Hasidism as an exotic world apart, yet next door.
A Price above Rubies followed in 1998. On the face of it, the film is almost a clichéd representation of the sexually frustrated Hasidic wife, Sonia, whose husband is too immersed in his studies to satisfy her. She is virtually assaulted by her brother-in-law, who is as immoral as his brother (her husband) is holy. The brother-in-law, Sender, sets her up in his jewelry business, where she exhibits extraordinary talent. Here the movie veers close to an antisemitic portrayal of unethical, money-grubbing Hasidim. Sonia develops a relationship with a Puerto Rican jewelry artist, is discovered, ostracized, and divorced. But at the end, her husband relents and gives her custody of their son.
There is, however, another dimension to the film that is both more interesting and more universal. We learn at the beginning that Sonia’s family is demonically possessed. Her sexual cravings (at one point, she kisses her sister-in-law) and her seeming indifference to her child now acquire a different, more surreal meaning, augmented by repeated ghostly appearances of her brother, who died mysteriously when they were children. When she confesses her malady to the rebbe, he suddenly becomes sexually aroused by his wife and then drops dead. Sonia is not so much a woman frustrated by a patriarchal and repressed society as she is a demonic character who destroys everything in her path. Since this narrative departs from more typical Jewish folklore—such as dybbuk possession—the film could have been set in any community and its message relevant beyond the world of Hasidism.
Secular Israeli culture has developed an increasing fascination with the haredi world in general and Hasidism, in particular, as the Israel Museum exhibition with which we started this chapter testifies. Exposés of this world have focused on the sexual abstinence regulations we have discussed, as well, more generally, on the status of women in Hasidism. Here, one has the sense of a kind of voyeurism about a community that lives next door. A television series He-Hatser (“The Court”), which aired in the 2000s, explores the family life of a fictional rebbe living in the Tel Aviv area. His wife has a secret: she had been married and divorced earlier but had a son whose existence she has kept secret. Meanwhile, the daughter of the rebbe is married to a ne’er-do-well, whose gambling lands him in prison. These are not normal tales of the Hasidim, but, as we have seen in both the nineteenth and twentieth-century sections of this book, family scandals are not unknown in the history of Hasidism.
Several recent Israeli films have also taken up Hasidic life. Ushpizin (2004) treats the problem of childlessness in the story of a newly religious couple in Jerusalem’s Bratslav community. Destitute, they are the recipients of miracles that allow them to build a sukkah. Two escaped convicts, including one who knew Moshe before he became religious, arrive unexpectedly and become the ushpizin (guests) at the sukkah. Various trials ensue, but in the end, Moshe’s wife becomes pregnant so that miracles triumph over trials. The film treats a common theme in Hasidic lore—infertility—and does so in a way that is relatively sympathetic to Hasidism.
In Fill a Void (2012), Rama Burshtein, an Orthodox film director, tells the story of an eighteen-year-old girl, Shira, who is looking forward to an engagement with a boy she likes. But her older sister suddenly dies in childbirth. Her mother undertakes to convince Shira to marry her brother-in-law Yochai. Various twists of the plot ensue, but ultimately Yochai and Shira agree to marry, and the film ends with their wedding. As with Ushpizin, Fill a Void is quite sympathetic to the Hasidic world, even as it portrays a situation that secular viewers might regard as troubling.
Perhaps the most off-beat film about Hasidism is Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish. Released in 2012, Eve Annenberg’s rather amateurish movie sets William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in contemporary New York, spoken in today’s Yiddish by mostly young, ex-Orthodox actors. Ava, trying to win a master’s degree, undertakes a Yiddish translation of Shakespeare’s play. In over her head, she accepts help from some young ultra-Orthodox dropouts, Lazer and Mendy. When another such dropout enchants Ava’s apartment using Kabbalistic incantations, the young men begin to live Shakespeare’s play in their heads—with Juliet as a beautiful Lubavitch girl—in an alternative reality where everyone is Hasidic. The Montagues are portrayed hilariously as Satmar and the Capulets as Lubavitch, two courts with a history of enmity. Some of this quirky film reads more as an in-joke, but it has the virtue of avoiding the usual treatment of Hasidism as either exotic or repressive.
Finally, a recent film, Felix and Meira (2015), is a Canadian production in which the director, Maxime Giroux, lived for a period in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood in order to become familiar with Hasidic mores. His film follows the trope of the dissatisfied Hasidic woman who is slowly drawn out of her world by the character of Felix. Yet the film largely avoids stereotypes. Meira’s husband, Shulem (played by the ex-Hasidic actor Luzer Twersky), is a sympathetic character and we cannot blame him for Meira’s disenchantment with her life. And both Felix and Meira are flawed characters, so the plot hardly follows a predetermined course.
There is, of course, a fundamental contradiction between the world of film and the world of Hasidism. Since the conventions of film frequently involve graphic depictions of sex, they violate the most basic rules of Hasidic modesty. Thus, even if Hasidim were willing to go to the movies, most of the films about their lives would be anathema to them. So, almost by definition, those viewing the movies are not seeing the world as the Hasidim themselves see it. This contradiction has led to conflict when haredi or Hasidic actors are called upon to play in such films, as was the case with New York I Love You (2008), made up of ten vignettes of New York City. One of these involves a Hasidic woman, Rivka (played by Natalie Portman), who shares a romantic moment with an Indian Jain diamond merchant on the eve of her wedding. The Hasidic actor who was to play Portman’s husband walked off the set when asked to hold her hand, explaining: “I am backing out of the movie. It’s not acceptable in my community. It’s a lot of pressure I am getting. They [the rabbis] didn’t like the idea of a Hasidic guy playing in Hollywood. I have my kids in religious schools and the rabbi called me over yesterday and said in order for me to keep my kids in the school I have to do what they tell me and back out.”1 A Chabad Hasid, Elli Meyer, who appeared on the television series Law and Order, subsequently set himself up as a consultant and broker to help cast ultra-Orthodox actors. “I have two goals,” he said. “I want to make sure actors who are frum are able to work and are afforded the same rights on set. And second, accuracy—I want to make sure Hasidim are portrayed accurately, not as buffoons or fanatics.”2
In the genre of documentary, the focus is often less on exoticism and more on making the exotic familiar. A prime example was Oprah Winfrey’s visit to Hasidic Brooklyn.3 At first, she admitted being “intimidated” by the sight of the Hasidim. In a post-visit interview, however, given to a Chabad member, who largely hosted her visit, she concluded: “we are all more alike than we are different.”4 This is, of course, a message in line with Chabad’s outreach goals that would certainly be rejected by many other Hasidim. But it also conforms to the prevailing multicultural ethos of contemporary America.
Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky’s A Life Apart: Hasidim in America (1997) was one of the first such documentary films to focus on Hasidic life in the United States and to some extent in the Soviet Union. A kind of primer for those who know little or nothing about Hasidism, it looks primarily at Satmar, Bobov, and Lubavitch by interviewing individuals from these groups. The common theme is that even though these people are in a “life apart,” that life is accessible and comprehensible to us all.
In 2014, Shekina: The Intimate Life of Hasidic Women, a Canadian documentary, offered an insider’s view of what some call “kosher sex.” Primarily focused on women’s experiences, it tended to celebrate the Hasidic view of sexuality: “Hasidism is a feminist movement,” it announces. Dating for the purpose of marriage is better than shortterm relationships and the Orthodox way of sex is superior to the secular. The film takes Lubavitch as its main subject, which may explain why it was a winner at the Crown Heights Film Festival. Indeed, Shekina looks more like an expression of Chabad outreach than it does an objective documentary.
It is therefore no surprise that documentary films, like other representations, can serve different ideological purposes. Since, as a rule, Hasidim themselves do not watch television or movies and, at least in theory (as we learned in the previous chapter), are not supposed to surf the Internet, all of the visual representations we have been discussing would be aimed at a non-Hasidic audience. The one exception, here as elsewhere, is Chabad, which is more willing to allow access to modern media, thus explaining a Crown Heights Film Festival at which a film like Shekina might be the winner.
In the years since World War II, and especially in the last several decades, Hasidim in their characteristic costumes have become widely recognized not only in the Jewish world but in the broader culture as well. In a striking development, Hasidim have at times come to stand for Jews as a whole. Figurines of Hasidim are sold at Jewish sites, such as in Krakow and Prague, as identifiable Jewish images. In Disney World’s “Small World” ride, which celebrates nationalities from around the world, Israel is represented by a bride and groom at a Hasidic wedding, an obviously inaccurate representation since the vast majority of Israelis are not Hasidic. The diorama is equally inaccurate with respect to Hasidism since the groom lacks a beard and side-locks. He thus appears more childlike—something characteristic of other figures as well—than adult. A similar, if less benign, Russian example is at the Nikulin Circus, where different circus artists represent the various ethnicities of the Russian Federation. Only the Jews, however, are portrayed by animals—in this case, chimpanzees dressed for different parts of a Hasidic wedding. Although Hasidism has had a resurgence in Russia—the Chief Rabbi of Russia is from Lubavitch—Hasidim are not ever-present in the public eye as they are, for example, in Israel or New York City. Thus the choice of using Hasidim—or monkeys dressed as Hasidim—plays on stereotypes much more than reality.
One of the most striking and surprising images of Hasidism in the general culture is Jean-Paul Gaultier’s use of Hasidic dress in a piece of fashion performance art. Gaultier, who has done more than anyone to turn fashion into an art form, designed male Hasidic costumes for female models whom he then photographed on the streets of Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The photographs show the reactions of real Hasidim walking the streets to the models, who seem to be fellow pedestrians. As with the female dancers in Hasidic drag in the 1930s whom we encountered in chapter 21, these models trangress a basic precept of Judaism: women dressed in male clothing violate Jewish law.
But perhaps the greater cultural violation is that the Gentile world of high fashion has appropriated Hasidic dress, since, as we have seen in several earlier chapters, the Hasidim see their costumes as the most visible signs of their identity, between themselves and the outside world, and between different Hasidic groups. Gaultier’s female models in kapotes and shtreimels break down these barriers and convey a message that could not be more dangerous to contemporary Hasidic culture—namely, that Hasidism is now part of the broader world, a type of modernity and not its antithesis.
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Indeed, as Hasidism passes its 250th anniversary, it embodies a paradox: a movement that has come to define itself as the rejection of everything modern, it owes its identity to the very world it rejects. It must set its course in a world vastly different from the one in which it originated. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, the provinces of Podolia and Vohlynia in the southeastern corner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were regions of deep religiosity for Jews and Christians alike. Religion and magic were inseparable and so was the role of the holy man. Yet in a few decades, this world would begin to change as the Commonwealth disintegrated and modernizing states took its place. In the nineteenth century, the Hasidic courts, now proliferating to the west and north of the original cradle, began to contend with the demands of modernity, both internal to the Jewish world and external to it. This process vastly accelerated with World War I and the interwar period. And then came the Holocaust that destroyed most Hasidic communities and uprooted the movement from Eastern Europe. Resurrected in democratic countries outside Eastern Europe, Hasidism has had to adapt itself to a new reality. Its extraordinary success in doing so is a sign of its vitality and also of the way it has turned traditionalism into a powerful identity. And insofar as traditionalism is itself modern, Hasidism has made a remarkable contribution to the modern history of the Jews.
Finally, an equally surprising part of Hasidism’s story, which we have dealt with in this closing chapter, is the enduring fascination it continues to exert on nontraditional Jews and non-Jews, both as exotic and as a repository of spirituality. Whatever may be the historical reality of Hasidism, it serves as a mirror on which those from the outside have repeatedly projected their fantasies of religious renewal. This, too, is a critical way in which Hasidism participates in the modern world. And, so, our story comes to an end, yet it is a story that continues to unfold in ways both unexpected and unpredictable.
1 Veronica Belenkaya, “Hasidic Actor Walks off Portman Movie,” Daily News (March 15, 2008), http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/Hasidic-actor-walks-portman-movie-article-1.288110, accessed July 15, 2014.
2 http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/idolchatter/2009/06/need-a-Hasid-for-your-film-cal.html, accessed July 17, 2014.
3 This aired in June 2012 under the title “First Look: America’s Hidden Culture.”
4 http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/media_cdo/aid/1764563/jewish/Oprahs-Visit-to-Hasidic-Brooklyn.htm, accessed July 17, 2014.