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His Name
His TImes
An Unusual Person
Hasidism
Storytelling
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This is the only module devoted to just one person, rather than
a text or a genre of Jewish literature. This is not accidental
-- the person is a remarkable one, as important as any text and
not easy to pin down in a text -- Israel ben Eliezer v'Sarah,
the Baal Shem Tov (c. 1698-1760), of Medzibozh in Podolia (now
in Ukraine), considered the founder of Hasidic Judaism.
RESOURCES
I highly recommend two books in English which give a picture of
the Baal Shem Tov:
In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov by Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz (Schocken Books, New York, first published 1970 and reprinted
since) is a translation of the first book of stories about the
Baal Shem Tov -- the first Hasidic book of stories, altogether
-- called in Hebrew _Shivchei HaBesht_, first published in 1814.
The stories in this book are not always inspiring -- they are
sometimes pretty crude -- but they give a picture of the legend
of the Baal Shem Tov at an early stage and some glimpses of the
Baal Shem Tov himself as very human: crying, getting angry, joking.
Founder of Hasidism by Moshe Rosman (University of California Press, 1996) is a historical study of
what we can know about the Baal Shem Tov. Rosman reviews all the
evidence, including a source nobody before him thought to look
at, the Polish archives of the Baal Shem Tov's town, Medzibozh.
Since there were scholars in previous generations who questioned
whether the Baal Shem Tov ever existed, finding his name on the
property tax rolls is pretty significant.
HIS NAME
"Baal Shem Tov" literally means "master of a good name" and it
has been interpreted in different ways. Basically, though, it
means "faith healer" -- because Jewish faith healers had to know
how to use names of God (the "good name") to work magic. The Baal
Shem Tov was a faith healer -- or, to use terms that sound even
less Jewish today, a medicine man or shaman -- who helped people
through prayers, charms, magic and medications. He is listed in
the property tax rolls of Medzibozh as "Baal Shem, doctor".
HIS TIMES
Things were not as bad for Jews in Eastern Europe in the 1700s
as they are often made out to have been. Poland (whose borders
included the Baal Shem Tov's area then) was a rather multicultural
country, with various ethnic and religious groups (Poles, Ukrainians,
Estonians, Armenians; Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim; etc.)
coexisting fairly peacefully most of the time. Jewish communities
were self-governing to a large extent. Times were relatively prosperous.
The terrible pogroms of 1648 were only a memory by the time the
Baal Shem Tov was born, fifty years later. Still, Jewish life
was much different from ours. There were small-scale pogroms and
attacks by bands of robbers to contend with. Even when things
were peaceful, Jews saw their Christian neighbours as idol-worshipping
pagans, living crude animalistic lives. (Christians saw Jews similarly.)
Christians were mostly peasants, Jews were mostly town people.
Jews don't seem to have gone into the fields or woods much, or
to have had much appreciation for nature. The Yiddish language
which they spoke has very few words for different kinds of trees,
flowers, etc. Everyone was expected to live by religious norms;
this was enforced the way small-town community standards are always
enforced -- everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and talks
about it. Those who had real religious feelings expressed them
by being super-strict about all the rules of Shabbat, kashrut
and everything else; fasting a lot; and -- if they were men and
if their wives or family or business provided enough money to
live on -- spending their days bent over books, learning Torah
in hairsplitting, convoluted ways.
AN UNUSUAL PERSON
The Baal Shem Tov was not what you might ordinarily expect in
a rabbi -- in his time or in ours. For one thing, he was not immersed
in books. He certainly studied, but it doesn't seem from the early
stories about him as if he was deeply versed in any branch of
Jewish literature. He studied with tremendous feeling, not subtle
analysis. He taught his disciples to meditate on the letters of
the words when praying from the Siddur or studying -- and if you're
meditating on the letters, actually understanding what you're
reading is pretty irrelevant.
The Baal Shem Tov lived in a world of magic. He knew the languages
of the animals and trees. He could see from miles away when a
person was in trouble, and when he acted out helping them, they
were helped, miles away. He had "the charm for swift travel";
setting out on a journey with his disciples, he would tell Alexei
the coachman to let go the reins and turn his back to the horses,
and the horses would take the wagon wherever the Baal Shem Tov
was needed, covering hundreds of miles in a day. Souls of people
who had died would come to him for help, and he would help them.
When he said the daily prayers, he could go into a trance for
hours, moving through the palaces of heaven to argue with God
and the angels to help the Jewish people more.
As Moshe Rosman discusses in his book, this magical side to the
Baal Shem Tov was not as unusual in his time as it would be in
ours. In his time and the generations before there were quite
a number of "baalei shem" like him, who were sought out for help
and well respected. They didn't have to be super-learned rabbis;
they knew Kabbalah, lived holy lives and could work miracles,
and many people came to them for help.
The Baal Shem Tov stands out from these other faith healers, though,
by being deeply involved with nature. The stories about his early
life show him wandering over the wild and vast Carpathian mountains
for days at a time, finding God among the rocks and trees. He
knew folk remedies such as how to heal an infection with mould
[penicillin] or stop bleeding with the ashes of a frog. He could
teach a disciple how to hear what the trees were saying. This
kind of joy in nature unfortunately almost disappeared from later
Hasidisim; it surfaces again in the teachings of Rebbe Nachman,
a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, who taught that everyone
should spend time alone every day in the forest or the fields,
where all the plants and trees join in your prayers.
Being connected with nature, the Baal Shem Tov was connected with
his own body too. He discouraged fasting and self-affliction;
he prayed with shouting, dancing and singing, with his whole body.
He and his followers drank and smoked [at a time when tobacco
was purer than what is sold now, and before the health effects
had been studied!] much more than their opponents thought was
decent, using both drinking and pipe smoking to lift their spirits
and even enter into trances. The Baal Shem Tov was not strict,
but lenient and forgiving about Jewish law. There are many stories
about the Baal Shem Tov in which he has a choice between strictness
and mentshlichkeyt [human caring] and chooses mentshlichkeyt.
He taught that by recognizing our own faults we can empathize
with what others do wrong, and treat them with love. Besides being
a healer and miracle worker, the Baal Shem Tov was a spiritual
guide, teaching the ways of mentshlichkeyt and dveykus [attachment
to God].
HASIDISM
The word "hasid" (chasid) comes from the word "chesed" which means
love or loyalty. A hasid is a person who is in love with God and
loyal to God. Religious people throughout Jewish history have
been called Hasidim, but the word became especially attached to
the followers of the Baal Shem Tov. He himself probably was not
the leader of a movement; he was a popular healer and helper who
was a spiritual guide to a fairly small network of people. After
his death, one of those who had learned from him, Dov Ber, the
Maggid (storyteller/preacher) of Mezrich, became the organizer
of the Hasidic movement, which spread throughout Eastern Europe
until in two or three generations the majority of Jews in Poland
and surrounding areas were Hasidim, looking back to the Baal Shem
Tov as the founder of their kind of Judaism.
The old-style Jews who still preferred halakhic strictness and
a maximum of intensive Torah study became known as "misnagdim"
[or "mitnagdim"] meaning "the opponents". In spite of becoming
the mainstream, Hasidism had a revolutionary energy that opened
up many possibilities. Prayer became a time of real ecstasy. Women
became Rebbes [spiritual leaders]. Meanwhile the "opponents" accused
the Hasidim of being ignorant and making thoughtless changes in
tradition. There are real parallels with the "Jewish Renewal"
movement today -- which draws a lot of its inspiration from Hasidism.
We'll learn more about the teachings and stories of the Hasidic
movement in a forthcoming module.
STORYTELLING
The Baal Shem Tov was a master storyteller and he encouraged those
around him to tell stories. He could heal a sick person by telling
a story. People experienced miracles from telling stories about
him. There is a famous story of an old man who had been a disciple
of the Baal Shem Tov; he was too old and weak to stand. Someone
asked him to tell a story about the Baal Shem Tov. He started
to describe how the Baal Shem Tov prayed with leaping and dancing.
As he told the story, he also got up and leaped and danced --
and all his strength came back to him and stayed with him.
The best book about Hasidic storytelling is Storytelling and Spirituality in Judaism by Yitzhak Buxbaum (Jason Aronson Publishers, 1994) -- which
includes many good stories and many teachings about how the Baal
Shem Tov and other Hasidic leaders told stories.
The best teller of Hasidic stories in our time was Reb Shlomo
Carlebach, the "hippie rabbi" who travelled the world singing
the thousands of songs he wrote, teaching about open-hearted traditional
Judaism, and telling stories in the most heartfelt and poetic
way. Reb Shlomo's storytelling can be heard on a variety of tapes
available in Jewish bookstores, and his tellings of stories can
be read in the books Shlomo's Stories and The Holy Beggars' Banquet.
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