of rising to heaven while yet alive, like Elijah of old, saying mournfully
that undivided such translation might have happened, but for him alone it
was impossible. Then again in a form of religion utilising so largely the
emotions of Faith and Love there was a strong appeal to the female mind.
The effect of this was soon evident, and Baalshem did not neglect to
profit by it. Among the most devoted of his early adherents were women.
One of them was the heroine of a favourite anecdote concerning Baalshem’s
work of Love and Rescue. It is related that in a certain village there
dwelt a woman whose life was so disgraceful that her brothers at last
determined to kill her. With this object they enticed her into a
neighbouring wood, but guided by the Holy Spirit Baalshem intervened at
the critical moment, and dissuading the men from their purpose rescued the
sinner. The woman afterwards became a sort of Magdalen in the new
community.
Above I have endeavoured to throw together in some order of sequence the
doctrines and practical rules of conduct which Baalshem and his early
disciples seem to have deduced from their central idea of the omnipresence
of God. This was necessary in order to give a connected idea of their
creed, but it is right to say that nowhere in Chassidic literature have
these deductions been logically co‐ordinated. Perhaps their solitary
attempt to formulate and condense their distinctive views is confined to a
statement of their idea of piety or service of God, and an examination of
three cardinal virtues, Humility, Cheerfulness, and Enthusiasm. What the
Chassidim held as to true service brings into relief Baalshem’s
characteristic manner of regarding the Law.
By the service of God was generally understood a life which fulfilled the
precepts of the written and oral law. Baalshem understood by it a certain
attitude towards life as a whole. For, as God is realised in life, each
activity of life when rightly conceived and executed is at once a
manifestation and a service of the Divine. All things have been created
for the glory and service of God. The smallest worm serves Him with all
its power. Thus, while eating, drinking, sleeping, and the other ordinary
functions of the body are regarded by the old Jewish moralists as mere
means to an end, to Baalshem they are already a service of God in
themselves. All pleasures are manifestations of God’s attribute of love;
and, so regarded, they are at once spiritualised and ennobled. Man should
seek to reach a higher level of purity and holiness before partaking of
food and drink, than even before the study of the Law. For when the Torah
had once been given by God the whole world became instinct with its grace.
He who speaks of worldly matters and religious matters as if they were
separate and distinct, is a heretic.
Upon the continual and uninterrupted study of the Law, Baalshem lays but
little stress. He accepted the ordinary belief that the Law (under which
term are included not only the Pentateuch, but the whole Old Testament and
the major portion of the old Rabbinic literature) was a revelation of God.
But, as the world itself is equally a divine revelation, the Torah becomes
little more than a part of a larger whole. To understand it aright one
needs to penetrate to the inward reality—to the infinite light which is
revealed in it. We should study the Law not as we study a science for the
sake of acquiring knowledge (he who studies it so has in truth been
concerning himself with its mere outward form), but we should learn from
it the true service of God. Thus the study of the law is no end in itself.
It is studied because, as the word of God, God is more easily discerned
and absorbed in this revelation of Him than in any other. The Torah is
eternal, but its explanation is to be made by the spiritual leaders of
Judaism. It is to be interpreted by them in accordance with the Attribute
of the age. For he regarded the world as governed in every age by a
different Attribute of God—one age by the Attribute of Love, another by
that of Power, a third again, by Beauty, and so on—and the explanation of
the Torah must be brought into agreement with it. The object of the whole
Torah is that man should become a Torah himself. Every man being a Torah
in himself, said a disciple of Baalshem, has got not only his Abraham and
Moses, but also his Balaam and Haman: he should try to expel the Balaam
and develop the Abraham within him. Every action of man should be a pure
manifestation of God.
The reason why we should do what the Law commands is not to gain grace
thereby in the eyes of God, but to learn how to love God and to be united
to Him. The important thing is not how many separate injunctions are
obeyed, but how and in what spirit we obey them. The object of fulfilling
these various ordinances is to put oneself, as it were, on the same plane
with God, and thus, in the ordinary phrase of the religious mystic, to
become one with Him, or to be absorbed in Him. People should get to know,
says Baalshem, what the unity of God really means. To attain a part of
this indivisible unity is to attain the whole. The Torah and all its
ordinances are from God. If I therefore fulfil but one commandment in and
through the love of God, it is as though I have fulfilled them all.
I have now briefly to refer to the three virtues to which the Chassidim
assigned the highest place of honour. Of these the first is called in
Hebrew “Shiphluth,”(15) and is best rendered by our word “Humility,” but
in Chassidic usage it includes the ideas of modesty, considerateness, and
sympathy. The prominence given to these qualities is in sharp contrast to
the faults of conceit, vanity, and self‐satisfaction, against which
Baalshem was never weary of protesting. He regarded these as the most
seductive of all forms of sin. But a few minutes before his death he was
heard to murmur, “O vanity, vanity! even in this hour of death thou darest
to approach me with thy temptations: ‘Bethink thee, Israel, what a grand
funeral procession will be thine because thou hast been so wise and good.’
O vanity, vanity! beshrew thee.” “It should be indifferent to man,” says
the master, “whether he be praised or blamed, loved or hated, reputed to
be the wisest of mankind or the greatest of fools. The test of the real
service of God is that it leaves behind it the feeling of humility. If a
man after prayer be conscious of the least pride or self‐satisfaction, if
he think, for instance, that he has earned a reward by the ardour of his
spiritual exercises, then let him know that he has prayed not to God but
to himself. And what is this but disguised idolatry? Before you can find
God you must lose yourself.” The Chassidim treated Shiphluth from two
sides: a negative side in thinking humbly of oneself, a positive in
thinking highly of one’s neighbour, in other words the love for our
fellow‐man.
He who loves the father will also love his children. The true lover of God
is also a lover of man. It is ignorance of one’s own errors that makes one
ready to see the errors of others. “There is no sphere in heaven where the
soul remains a shorter time than in the sphere of merit, there is none
where it abides longer than in the sphere of Love.”
The second Cardinal Virtue is “Cheerfulness,” in Hebrew “Simchah.”(16)
Baalshem insisted on cheerfulness of heart as a necessary attitude for the
due service of God. Once believe that you are really the servant and the
child of God and how can you fall again into a gloomy condition of mind?
Nor should the inevitable sins which we all must commit disturb our glad
serenity of soul. For is not repentance ready at hand by which we may
climb back to God? Every penitent thought is a voice of God. Man should
detect that voice in all the evidence of his senses, in every sight and
sound of external nature. It is through his want of faith in the
universality of God’s presence that he is deaf to these subtle influences
and can read only the lessons which are inscribed in books.
The reader will be prepared to learn that Baalshem, taking this cheerful
view of things, was opposed to every kind of asceticism. Judaism, or
rather Israelitism, it is true, was not originally much of an ascetic
religion. But there can be little doubt that in the course of history
there came in many ascetic doctrines and practices, quite enough at least
to encourage such tender souls the bent of whose minds lay in this
direction. To one of these, a former disciple, Baalshem wrote: “I hear
that you think yourself compelled from religious motives to enter upon a
course of fasts and penances. My soul is outraged at your determination.
By the counsel of God I order you to abandon such dangerous practices,
which are but the outcome of a disordered brain. Is it not written ‘Thou
shalt not hide thyself from thine own flesh?’ Fast then no more than is
prescribed. Follow my command and God shall be with you.” On another
occasion Baalshem was heard to observe that it is a machination of Satan
to drive us into a condition of gloom and despondency in which the
smallest error is regarded as a deadly sin. Satan’s object is to keep us
away from the true service of God, and God can only be truly served from a
happy and confident disposition. Anxious scrupulosity in details is
therefore to be avoided. It is the counsel of the Devil to persuade us
that we never have done and shall never do our duty fully, and that moral
progress is impossible. Such ideas beget melancholy and despair, which are
of evil.
The third virtue is called in the Hebrew Chassidic literature
“Hithlahabuth,”(17) and is derived from a verb meaning “to kindle” or “set
on fire.” The substantive “Hithlahabuth,” so far as I am aware, was first
coined by Baalshem’s followers. It is best rendered by our word
“Enthusiasm.” Every religious action, to be of any avail, must be done
with enthusiasm. A mere mechanical and lifeless performance of an
ordinance is valueless. A man is no step nearer the goal if he thinks,
forsooth, that he has done his duty when he has gone through the whole
round of laws in every section of the code. This essential enthusiasm is
only begotten of Love. The service of fear, if not wholly useless, is yet
necessarily accompanied by a certain repulsion and heaviness, which
effectually prevent the rush and ardour of enthusiasm. The inspiration of
true service is its own end. There is no thought of this world, and there
is none of the world to come. In the Talmud there is frequent reference to
one Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah, an apostate from Judaism, who, when urged to
repent, replied that repentance was useless, and that for this mournful
belief he had direct divine authority. For he had been told by a voice
from heaven that even though he repented he would be excluded from sharing
the happiness of the world to come. Of him it was said by one of the
Chassidim, “This man indeed missed a golden opportunity. How purely could
he have served God, knowing that for his service there could never be a
reward!”
From the conception of Enthusiasm springs the quality of mobility,
suggesting spiritual progress, and commonly opposed by Baalshem and his
followers to the dull religious stagnation of self‐satisfied
contemporaries. Man should not imagine himself to have attained the level
of the righteous; let him rather regard himself as a penitent who should
make progress every day. Always to remain on the same religious plane,
merely repeating to‐day the religious routine of yesterday, is not true
service. There must be a daily advance in the knowledge and love of the
Divine Master. Mere freedom from active sin is not sufficient; such
negative virtue may be but another word for the chance absence of
temptation. What boots it never to have committed a sin if sin lies
concealed in the heart? It is only the uninterrupted communion with God
which will raise and ennoble your thoughts and designs, and cause the
roots of sin to die. The patriarch Abraham, without any command from God,
fulfilled the whole Torah, because he perceived that the Law was the life
of all created things. In the Messianic age the law will no longer seem to
man as something ordained for him from without; but the law will be within
the hearts of men; it will seem natural and self‐evident to them, because
they will realise that God and life are manifested through the law.
Baalshem, who dealt largely in parable, has left the following, which we
may fitly add to our somewhat inadequate presentation of his doctrine.
There was once a king who built himself a glorious palace. By means of
magical illusion it seemed as if the palace were full of devious corridors
and mazes, preventing the approach to the royal presence. But as there was
much gold and silver heaped up in the entrance halls, most people were
content to go no further, but take their fill of treasure. The king
himself they did not notice. At last the king’s intimate had compassion
upon them and exclaimed to them, “All these walls and mazes which you see
before you do not in truth exist at all. They are mere illusions. Push
forward bravely, and you shall find no obstacle.”
We must not interpret the parable to mean that Baalshem denied the reality
or even the importance of the actual phenomenal world. The very contrary
is the truth. The world is for him full of God, penetrated through and
through by the divine, and therefore as real as God himself. It was quite
in Baalshem’s manner when one of his disciples declared that only fools
could speak of the world as vanity or emptiness. “It is in truth a
glorious world. We must only learn how rightly to make use of it. Call
nothing common or profane: by God’s presence all things are holy.”
Above we have reviewed the essential doctrines of Baalshem and his
immediate followers; we have now to see how they fared at the hands of the
sect which he founded. This is a sad part of our task, for the subsequent
history of Chassidism is almost entirely a record of decay. As formulated
by its founder the new creed amounted to a genuine Reformation, pure and
lofty in ideal. After his death unhappily it was rapidly corrupted and
perverted. This was due almost exclusively to the dangerous and
exaggerated development of a single point in his teaching. That point, the
honour due to the divine in man, was relatively a minor article in the
original creed. But the later Chassidism has given it a distorted and
almost exclusive importance wholly out of proportion to the grander and
more essential features of Baalshem’s teaching, until the distinctive
feature of the Chassidism of to‐day is an almost idolatrous service of
their living leaders. What little there is to say of the history of the
sect after Baalshem’s death would be unintelligible without some
explanation of the origin and growth of this unfortunate perversion.
It has been explained that Baalshem laid but little stress upon the study
of the Law or the observance of its precepts in themselves, but regarded
them only as means to an end. The end is union with God. Man has to
discover the presence of God in the Divine word and will. Now this
mystical service of God, although perhaps sufficing to sensitive and
enthusiastic natures, is scarcely plain or definite enough for ordinary
men. Few can realise abstractions: and yet fewer can delight in them and
find in their contemplation sufficient nurture for their religious needs.
What then had Chassidism to offer to the ordinary majority who could not
recognise God in all the plenitude of His disguise? The want of something
tangible whereon to fix the minds of the people, which has confronted the
teachers of so many creeds, was also encountered by the Chassidim, and
they unfortunately found their way out of the difficulty by relying on and
developing their doctrine of man’s position in the Universe. Man’s ideal
is to be a law himself; himself a clear and full manifestation of God.
Now, not only is he God’s servant and child, but in highest development he
becomes himself a part of God, albeit in human shape, so that he may
become wholly one with his divine Father. But if man may reach this
highest level of holiness, he is virtually a kind of God‐man, whom his
fellow‐men of lower levels perceive by reason of his manhood, but his
essential office consists in raising them up to God by reason of his
Divinity.
The few chosen spirits who through the successful persistency with which
they have sought God in all things have become, though yet on earth,
absorbed in Him, are known in Chassidic literature by the name of the
“Zaddikim.” The Hebrew word Zaddik(18) means “just” or “righteous,” and
the term was probably chosen in conscious opposition to the title of
Rabbinic heroes, “disciples of the wise.” For the Zaddik is not so much
the product of learning as of intuition: his final consummation is reached
by a sudden and direct illumination from God. The Zaddik not only
resembles Moses, but, in virtue of his long communion with the Divine, he
is also the true child of God. He is, moreover, a vivifying power in
creation, for he is the connecting bond between God and his creatures. He
is the source of blessing and the fount of grace. Man must therefore learn
to love the Zaddik, so that through the Zaddik he may win God’s grace. He
who does not believe in the Zaddik is an apostate from God. Here then we
have the fatal exaggeration to which I have alluded, and here its logical
consequence. The step to man‐worship is short.
This peculiar doctrine of the Intermediary soon became the distinguishing
feature of Chassidism. By a Chassid was understood not a man who held such
and such opinions in theology and religion, but a believer in the Zaddik,
and one who sought to attain salvation through the worship of the Zaddik.
Every other doctrine of Chassidism was rapidly pushed into the background
and overlooked. Even the grand and fundamental doctrine of Omnipresence in
the Creation was veiled by the special presence in the Zaddik. Chassidism
became mere Zaddikism, and its subsequent history is identical with the
downward development of that cult.
Whether Baalshem named his successor is doubtful. But the lead after his
death was assumed by his disciple Beer of Mizriez. This man’s conversion
to Chassidism was an important event for the new community; his piety and
learning were beyond dispute, and, whereas during Baalshem’s life
Chassidism had found its chief adherents among the lower classes of
society, Beer managed to gather round him many of the most learned among
his contemporaries. It was to these new and ardent disciples of Beer that
the expansion of Chassidism was chiefly due. They came together from many
quarters, and after Beer’s death separated and preached the new doctrine
far and wide. Many even went forth during the lifetime of their master,
and at his command, to found fresh branches of the new sect. Like Beer
himself, they directed their efforts mainly to winning over the educated
sections of the Jews. The elder men paid little heed to their word, but
the youths, just fresh from their casuistic studies, which had sharpened
their wits and starved their souls, lent a ready ear and an eager heart to
the new doctrine. The uneducated were by no means excluded; to them
Chassidism held out a deeper consolation and a grander hope than the
current Rabbinism of the age; they therefore joined the young community in
large numbers without any special effort being necessary to gain them
over.
In their methods of Prayer the Chassidim most conspicuously differed from
the older communities. Laying as they did supreme stress on the importance
and efficacy of prayer, they soon found it necessary to secede from the
existing synagogues and erect separate buildings for themselves. The usual
salaried Reader “with the beautiful voice and empty head,” who naturally
regarded his function as a matter of business, was done away with and his
place taken either by the Zaddik himself or by some other distinguished
person in the community. The Chassidim also effected many changes in the
liturgy. Instead of the German they adopted the Spanish ritual. They
excised many prayers which, lacking the authority of antiquity, were
cumbrous in form or objectionable in matter. They inserted new prayers and
hymns of their own. They paid little regard to the prescribed hours at
which public worship should be held. Prayer began when they had got
themselves into the proper devotional frame of mind. Frequent ablutions,
perusal of mystical writings, introspective meditation were the means by
which they sought to gain the befitting mood. The prayers themselves were
accompanied by the usual phenomena of religious excitement. Some in the
zeal of their devotion began to dance; others were rapt in a motionless
ecstasy; some prayed aloud; others in solemn silence. They justified their
abrogation of fixed hours for prayer by saying that you cannot order a
child when to speak with its father: such restraint were fit only for
slaves.
As a rule the larger number of the younger Chassidim were able to devote
their whole time to religious exercises. It was the custom among the Jews
in Eastern Europe for the young men to live at the expense of their own or
their wives’ parents, in order that they might give themselves up entirely
to religious study. According to the old notions, this meant the study of
the Talmud and its Commentaries; the Chassidim who cared little for the
legal side of Jewish literature betook themselves to the literature of
edification and mysticism. No small part of their time was taken up with
endless conversations about the Zaddik, his piety, goodness, and self‐
sacrifice and the wonderful miracles which he had wrought. If a Zaddik was
living in his own town, the youthful Chassid spent as many hours as he
could in the Zaddik’s company, in order to observe and study this embodied
Torah as constantly as possible. Where no Zaddik was at hand, periodical
pilgrimages were made to the town in which he lived, and endless were the
tales which were afterwards repeated, to those who were obliged to stay at
home, of the Zaddik’s marvellous wisdom and extraordinary deeds. The last
hours of the Sabbath day were looked upon as a special season of grace,
and the Chassidim were therefore in the habit of collecting together in
the waning of the Sabbath and celebrating the so‐called “Supper of the
Holy Queen.” The meal was accompanied by the usual conversations as well
as by hymns and prayers.
The Chassidim were second to no other sect in their loyalty and affection
for each other. No sacrifice for a brother Chassid was too great. They
knew no difference of rich and poor, old and young, wise and ignorant; for
they all, with one accord, worshipped one common ideal, the Zaddik, who in
his exalted position was equally raised above them all. Before him all
minor differences of rank disappeared. When a Chassid travelled, he had no
scruple in asking for lodging or entertainment in the house of any Chassid
who could afford to give them. If he was in money difficulties the purse
of his host was at his disposal. If that was not sufficient, it was
supplemented by a grant from the fund of the community. These gifts were
not looked upon in the light of charity either by giver or receiver; they
were made to the Zaddik, to whom all Chassidim alike were debtors. It
sometimes even happened that a Zaddik said that the son of some rich
merchant was to marry the daughter of a poor schoolmaster, and both
parties were equally delighted to fulfil the wish of their beloved chief.