THE EXTENSIVE SCHOLARSHIP ON HASIDISM has yet to solve a great puzzle: how did a religious movement known to be radical in its views about God, revelation, and personal religiosity simultaneously produce commitment to the structures and obligations of Jewish law? One answer to this question emerges from Hasidic teachings on the commandments, and on the relationship between interiority and embodied religious practice more broadly. These sermons and homilies, which represent an incredible fan of spiritual colors and possibilities, are filled with rapturous portrayals of inner awakening and arousal. With exceptional consistency, however, Hasidic texts link these evocative states to physical action. Rather than assuming that adherence to religious law is incompatible with vital spirituality, I argue that nomos, eros, and mystical piety have merged in Hasidism to produce a daring and highly original theory of the commandments and their significance. The novum of Hasidism is visible not in whether its leaders broke or upheld rabbinic norms, but in the movement’s vivid reimagining of the purpose of religious practice.
Judaism is often portrayed as a law-centered tradition. Hasidic sermons on the commandments are concerned with issues of emotion, embodiment, experience, and with the capacity of these actions to make God’s presence real. These dimensions of interior, intellectual, and physical life are equally incomprehensible to lawyers and legal historians. For that reason, the methods and vocabulary of ritual studies are better suited to shedding light on the contradictions and tensions of this religious movement as well as its remarkable intellectual vitality. The lens of ritual opens the vast array of Hasidic teachings by bringing its nuances, emphases, and tensions to the surface in analytical terms that are recognizable across academic disciplines. These theories challenge us to think about Hasidic teachings in new ways, but at the same time, these mystical sources offer a rich and multivalent array of approaches to ritual that do not conform to common scholarly models. Rather than hewing the Hasidic material to fit conventional categories, I begin with the inductive, developing an internal taxonomy and phenomenology of ritual that does not fall into the normal fissures ordinarily found in the study of religion.
The present book explores the full range of Hasidic texts from the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, from homilies and theological treatises to hagiography, letters, and legal writings. Scholars often describe this period as the most “virile” stage of Hasidism, a time of explosive creativity said to have declined into habituation and institutionalization by 1815.1 I am revising the common thesis presenting an irresolvable tension between Jewish norms and spiritual discovery, as with the polarities of mind and body, and rote and innovation. Hasidic sources from this time demonstrate the opposite: law and spirit, nomos and eros, mind and body, tradition and innovation, these are portrayed as co-constructive rather than mutually exclusive.2 I find the English word “devotion,” rooted in Latin terms for acts of supererogatory piety, self-sacrifice, and consecration, as well as deep religious emotion, to be particularly useful for describing the fusion of interiority and ritual action that characterizes Hasidic religiosity.
The domain of ritual is deeply personal, but such actions are also collective, common, and shared between bodies.3 Borne aloft by a new type of charismatic leader, Hasidism offered its adherents a sense of community in which to accomplish the “world-building” work of ritual.4 As time wore on, these gatherings and fellowships both local and trans-geographic came to represent an alternative to the “transcendental homelessness” of modern individualism.5 Rather than focusing on otherworldly escape or communion with God at the expense of material engagement, accusations that are often levied against mysticism as a whole, Hasidic teachings on ritual reveal a sustained commitment to this-worldly action.6 They describe the commandments as connecting body and spirit, uniting communities and cultivating an awareness of God’s immanence and expressing that knowledge through acts of love, responsibility, and obligation.
I also argue that Hasidism must be approached as a religious movement that shaped, and was shaped by, Jewish modernity.7 Research of this period often ignores Hasidism, perhaps because its endurance rebukes the attempt to synonymize modernity with secularism, humanism, liberalism, or “disenchantment.”8 More recent scholarship adds that Hasidism’s “form of modernity was defensive or reactionary,” locked in a dialectical struggle with its secular opponents, but I aim to trace a more nuanced portrait of Hasidism as a modern religious phenomenon as manifest in its teachings on the commandments.9 Approaching modernity as a constellation of circumstances “that restructured all aspects of European life and thought, in diverse and often contradictory ways,”10 I argue that Hasidism offered a compelling response to these conditions through its combination of intense spiritual religiosity—both personal and communal—and commitment to traditional Jewish norms and rituals.11
Examining Hasidic teachings on the commandments reminds us that this revival movement was one of several attempts to reinterpret the meaning of these rituals in the eighteenth century.12 That period was, more broadly, an era of the personalization of religion and the privileging of affective pietism and experience over rationalism. It was also a time in which philosophers fiercely debated the ideas of agency, sincerity, self-construction, and autonomy and how all of them might—or might not—be compatible with traditional religious praxis. Rather than isolating Hasidism within the silo of Jewish intellectual history, situating these mystical teachings within a broader historiographical lens reveals that the contested themes central to European modernity rest at the heart of Hasidic teachings as well.13
1. Scholem, Major Trends, 343; see also 336–338; Dubnow, Toledot ha-Hasidut, 2–4, 36–37; and Biale et al., Hasidism, esp. 4–9, 234, and 259.
2. See Wolfson, Venturing Beyond; idem, “Ascesis,” esp. 248; and the studies recounted in idem, Dream, 446 n93. See also Liebes, “Zohar and Eros,” 67–119; Idel, Kabbalah and Eros, esp. 2, 11–12, and 21–48.
3. King, Black Shoals, 199–205.
4. See Berger, Sacred Canopy, 7; and Wexler, Mystical Interactions; idem, Mystical Sociology.
5. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, esp. 41, 61–62, and 66: “The epic individual, the hero of the novel, is the product of estrangement from the outside world.” See also Buber, “Das Problem des Menchen,” in Werke 1, esp. 317.
6. See Brody, “‘Open to Me’,” 3–44; and cf. Hägglund, This Life, esp. 387, for reductionist approach to religion and ritual. See also Flood, Importance of Religion, esp. 35–98.
7. See Biale et al., Hasidism, esp. 11, 376; Rosman, “Hasidism as Modern Phenomenon,” 426–436.
8. See Lederhandler, Road, 40–44, 48, 60; Meyer, “Modern Period,” 329–338; Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 202–213; Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern World, 4–5; Chajes, “Entzauberung,” 191–200. For a helpful summary and critique of this view, see Stern, Genius, x–xx.
9. Biale et al., Hasidism, 376.
10. Stern, Genius, 8.
11. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” 1–29; Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 176–177.
12. See Eisen, Rethinking.
13. See Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 131–155; and the critique of Carlebach, “Early Modern Ashkenaz,” 65–83; Kaplan, “Jacob Katz’s Approach,” 19–35; and Kaplan and Teter, “Out of the (Historiographic) Ghetto,” 365–934.
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