Jewish History - Kabbalah & Hasidism (13a of 20 sessions)

we're talking today about kabbalah jewish mysticism and the hasidic jewish movement which takes off beginning in the 1700s and really accelerates in the late 17th to early 1800s and on one level you might think this is a very odd topic to use as the beginning of the modern jewish history block that we'll be studying and there's a couple of reasons why i decided that modern history could legitimately be counted as beginning with this with the caveat that of course our imposition of eras is artificial looking backwards you know it's not like it turned to 1700 and people said oh it's enlightenment time and they decided to just start changing it you know this is our retrospective looking back and saying well modernity starts at this point you know nobody turned the calendar page and said oh it's modern era now um so take it with a grain of salt understand it's sort of a spectrum and it's sort of a gradual process of what we might define as modern uh in jewish history and we also have to remember that modernity strikes differently in different parts of the world that is um you know jews living in the united states might have hit the postmodern era at a different point than jews living in uh the ottoman empire or living in uh in iran under the ayatollahs and there are still tens of thousands of jews there so you know their particular moment of their own cultural historical intellectual religious development may be different based on different geography and certainly this will be the cases we'll see for jews living in western europe and jews living in eastern europe because the haskalah the jewish enlightenment will have an impact in western europe somewhat before it makes its way into eastern europe nevertheless i do think that talking about the hasidic movement in particular is a useful way to begin to conceptualize modern jewish history for three basic reasons the first reason is one of the features of modern jewish life is that we don't have a universal halachic jewish legal consensus where if you were living in the jewish world in 1500 and you went from baghdad to cairo to venice to warsaw you would generally have similar standards for kosher practice for what the prayer book would include i mean your accent will be different the melodies might be different but the content and the legal requirements for observing shabbat for what prayers needed to be said when for what the sources of rabbinic authority were basically the talmud and the codes of jewish law that were promulgated very broadly there was a general halachic consensus of what jewish life meant and what it meant to be jewish and the facility movement really marks the first significant break and to some extent the jewish mysticism that led into the physical movement that we'll talk about today led to a break with this halachic consensus and so that since that's a sign of modern jewish life because obviously today there's no consensus on anything even within the ultra-orthodox world there's major debates over certain issues certainly within the non-orthodox jewish world which is the vast majority of jews both in israel and in the us again 70 or higher in both places we understand that we're on the other side of that split the other parallel or sort of aspect to that break with consensus you might remember when we talked previously about the ashkenazi jewish experience the idea of the kahila as the jewish self-governing body and the fact that the kahillah could appoint a local rabbi who would have jurisdiction over what happens in the town and there was a synagogue of the town that everyone went to there was again a an establishment and there might even be a hierarchy if you had the yeshiva that that rabbi was trained in and then the council of the four lands making international decisions almost covering all the territories under the polish lithuanian empire well with the rise of hasidism where you have a charismatic rebbe that you feel attached to even if you don't happen to live in the town where he is in charge nevertheless you're following his rulings and not your local rabbi's rulings now that's again a breakdown of that traditional authority and this is where we live today in in germany and in france in england there is a chief rabbinate that opponent appoints official rabbis and very few people listen to them the same is true in israel there's a chief revenant and for some people the chief rabbinate is an outside religious authority telling them what to do and they hate it and for other people the chief raven is a sellout and not religious enough for them and they're also orthodoxy and they don't listen to them either so the chief rabbinate has a limited cashier even in israel even if they have the force of law behind them and this break with the the authority says so and it's a top-down structure and you have to listen to what the rabbi of the town says that's this side of modernity and that comes out of the facility moment a second aspect of khasidism and jewish mysticism that i think is relevant to the modern period of jewish history is that the phacetic world begins to emphasize the importance of the individual in particular the individual's emotion and state of mind when participating in jewish life particularly in the prayer service where it's not just a function of rote recitation and rope study and do what you're told but rather it becomes a process of emotional what's called kavanagh intention and your emotional process might be even more important than the rogue recitation itself there's a famous story for modific circles where a man is not educated he's a working class person who didn't have the opportunity to go to school long enough he he knows almost nothing of reading in the prayer book all he really knows is the olive bank the alphabet and so when it's time for the prayer service he recites the aleph bait but he does it with such devotion and such love and such intensity that is deemed as acceptable as if it had been recited perfectly word for word letter for letter vowel for vowel now for the traditional rabbinic authorities what are you talking about intention god said say these words so you have to say these words but from the hasidic world and remember the word hasidic or khasid for the person comes from the same root as the hebrew word which means like love and caring love it's an emotional experience but most importantly by making the individual the measuring point of what is an authentic jewish experience that also plays into the modern world where people are choosing their synagogue by how it makes them feel they're choosing the movement of judaism to which they're attacked attached by emotional attachment and the measurement of meaningful jewish connection is not generally how strictly you follow the rules again depends on community but it's also does it strike you in the kishkas you'd say in yiddish in the guts is it really something that moves you as a person that again is a modern measurement and the last point and this may feel a little paradoxical to you that marks hasidic judaism as a harbinger of modern jewish history the rejection of modernity is also modern that is before the dawning of the hasidic movement and the reaction against them called the miss nagdin the opponents and then the mutual enemy of both the mis nagnima nakhazidin called the masculine the enlighteners before that time you had a kind of traditionalist style of jewish practice where the community generally did the traditional practice but if one person bent the rules a bit they have a warm coffee on saturday afternoon they weren't fanatics about it what happens in the hasidic world is you get this fanaticism of rejection of the modern world so much so that one of the codifiers of this practice actually comes out with a saying that says what is new is forbidden by the torah now what's funny is that some days people who are defending that perspective are tweeting it out well i thought you know what was new is forbid well you know you have to decide where is it new and where is it not new but this concept of we have to freeze things and you're not allowed to change anything because any change could be the camel's nose in the tent that makes it in the end unsustainable and so that's why the ultra-orthodox jewish world still wears the black hats and the black hats the fur hats and some of the sex the black clothing that was typical of polish nobility in the 1700s they were simply imitating the surrounding culture but they stopped changing it's like the amish who picked a point in time and said we're not doing anything from this point forward and so that's why they don't have zippers they have hooks and eyes but they work they will take trains because trains existed at the cutoff date for them so the uh ultra orthodox are the same way in some ways they've said certain things will not change from this point forward including dress and including uh women's morays and so on however it can change it can get stricter this is one of the ironies is that the ultra orthodox world actually has changed even over the last hundred years but generally in a more strict direction so much so there's a book that came out a couple years ago detailing the revisionist history that's been done it's like worthy of the soviet union where they've gone back and photoshopped pictures of the founding generation of certain rabbis and their sects and lengthened the women's sleeves or even photoshopped them out entirely to make them match today's standards when they were willing to do things a little bit more leniently in the old country 80 or 100 years ago so the rejection of modernity is also modern you might use a cell phone and you might use a computer for business but if you're saying that modern culture is fair is traffic i need to make even higher and higher and stricter and stricter walls around me that's modern the word orthodox is coined in the 19th century it didn't need to be coined before just like the catholic church wasn't called the catholic church until the protestant reformation it was just the church because they didn't care about the orthodox and the eastern orthodox and they were the church in western europe that was it so the orthodox world in fact is a reaction against and it's reaffirming their truth ortho is incorrect doxes and doctrine and in other words everybody else is wrong but you don't have an orthodoxy until you have a modernity that leads to people leaving and you have to push back so ironically the rejection of modernity is also part of modern so we're going to begin with uh jewish mysticism and kappala as the harbinger of modernity but to do that we have to go back in time a little bit into the late middle ages because that's really where the roots of this version of jewish mystical thought begins now when you say mysticism it helps to define it a bit but part of the challenge is that mysticism is describing the ineffable experience of emotional supernatural mind-opening whatever and so it's hard to put your finger exactly on what it is there is a fantastic book of scholarship on this that was written in the 1940s it's still a standard textbook today and if you know anything about how academia works having something written in the 40s it's still a standard textbook for the subject is really impressive it's called major trends in jewish mysticism by a man named gershom sholum so we had the same last name just with an accent ship and he was a german scholar who wound up moving to israel shortly before world war ii and became the world expert on jewish mysticism there's a famous anecdote that he once came to speak at the jewish theological seminary in new york and he was introduced by a very famous talmudist and jewish legal scholar who said well we all know that jewish mysticism is nourish kite it's foolishness but the study of nareshkai that is great scholarship now shalom himself had a very different perspective on what jewish mysticism was because his take was this was a legitimate response to history it was an intellectual trend it was in fact sometimes more dominant than the strictly follow the talmud rationalist trend in jewish life you know i mentioned it when we talked about maimonides that maimonides guide for the perplex that philosophical treatise written in academic judeo-arabic was actually burned by some rabbis who thought it was heretical and these rabbis were part of that mystical trend um because he was going in the opposite direction he was abstracting god into undefinable words and they were making god even more intimate in terms of personal mystical magical mind-altering experience so what sholem describes as the historical context for mysticism is important for us to think about for example what might cause a mystical moment in a religious tradition well some examples that uh sholum brings are what if there's a major social dislocation everything you thought to be normal and stable gets uprooted and you yourself are on the move and have to find new grounds and so the old rituals of i'll say these words and god will protect me i'll recite these prayers and everything will be fine that doesn't seem to be working anymore and so maybe you know as wren comments you start to lose your hope in the rational predictable world and you have to turn to something else that's more direct contact to god not mediated by the prayers and the torah readings but i want to talk to god directly and have the direct experience um so that might be a a spur for mystical developments sometimes the legalism gets more legalistic and more legalistic and more legalistic to the point that you're missing the point here you know for some people they can observe the small details of cleaning the house for passover and hear god's word in fulfilling the little tiny details but for other people they can't hear god through the details you know it's too legalistic it's too minutia and they want something else they want a shortcut they want an immediate not not mediated experience through the torah through the talmud through the kalakata through the law they want something direct and finally the surrounding context can make a difference in particular that region in provence i mentioned that had people who rejected by modernity and rationalism was a hotbed of mystical thought in both spain and in what is today france in both christian and islamic circles and so it's not a surprise that jewish intellectuals are exposed to similar thoughts of the intellectual circles of the day and themselves become inclined to explore mystical context it's not an accident that the modern day jewish renewal movement which is sometimes thought of as a jewish new age approach comes about in the counterculture period of the 60s and 70s when people are exploring buddhism and hinduism and hare krishna and similar kinds of mystical moments right there's a cross-fertilization of that phenomenon so what i want to do to start to explain a little bit about this mysticism again it's putting into words what they don't want you to put into words and let me say one thing before i share an image with you i don't personally believe that this mysticism stuff is factually true but it's important to know what people think and what they believe so as i'm describing this i don't want to get caught up in it and thinking that i'm actually coming up with a new atomic theory based on the kabbalistic cosmology of the universe rather this is understanding the phenomenon to be able to understand his cultural influence in later times and places so here's an example of the basic premise of the the kabbalah especially is formulated formulated in a book called the zohar zohar means splendor wonder uh like brilliant light and the zohar is framed as sort of a walking and talking commentary it imagines that rabbi shimon bar yokai shimon salam yokai who lives around the year 200 i'm sorry around your 100 at the beginning of the second century of the common era that early missionary period he's wandering around the land of israel and he's sharing these special mystical interpretations of uh rabbinic sources uh specifically of the the torah and his interpretation so you might have the surface meaning of the torah that's the shot the simple version and then you might have an allegorical meaning that a philosopher might give you like maimonides and then this is the secret the mystical meaning that's hidden inside the text so i'll give you one example of one of those secret interpretations the first few words of the hebrew bible are very bara elohim in the beginning god created or in the beginning of god's creation there's some debate over what the grammatical form is but what the kabbalists do is they actually look at the space in between the letters because they think that the ultimate truth of the universe is a kind of mystical no thing that can't really be defined by human words or vocabulary or experience it's what's above this chart here that emanates down into the world they call it the enzo the beyond end or the endless the infinite and so what they what they read out of those first few words of the bible is that blank space is the unspeakable that emanates what we consider god very sheep barack elohim so in the beginning created the ain't self the infinite the emanation that we consider god into the world so it's like an extra layer not just the bible as the ultimate truth but the secret truth behind the bible is the ultimate truth and it's unknowable and indescribable in human words but we're going to write a long book about it that's again the trick of mysticism so what you see here is the different kind of emanations what are called the sephiroth or the sort of spheres that's not a translation of the hebrew but they're different like aspects of god as god is projected into the world in different ways so you have keter at the top which is considered the crown this is again that mystical iron first contact in the world you see that the mystical nothingness you also have two sources of power you've got understanding on one side and wisdom on the other so this is the intellectual side of things so you have the sort of rays of light coming down you've got the head here you've got then the sources of acting in the world god sometimes acts under the aspect of deen or judgment that's rigor and strength but sometimes god is forgiving and you get the aspect of love forgiveness so again those are two sides of the coin is god a judging god it's going to punish you for your sins or is it a loving forgiving god who will offer grace and forgive you for your sin now it's a stereotype of christianity that the old testament god is the judging god and the new testament god is a forgiving god the reality is that the god of the hebrew bible and rabbinic literature has both judgment and forgiveness that's two parts of the same coin then you have a source of beauty which is called deferred here in the middle it's like wonder splendor this could be considered the sun the heaven and so on again you'll notice there's different colors associated with these red white green going further down you've got the aspects of splendor and eternity sometimes associated with arms and legs you've got the yasoda foundation which is sort of the germinative seed of the universe that helps create things which is i'm not joking identified with the phallus and the male propagation and then at the bottom sort of by the feet you have this direct presence in the world which is presented as the shakina is from the same root as neighborhood or neighbor or residence this is the divine presence in the world as we experience it this is communion of israel this is the earth and moon the apple orchard it has all the colors of the rainbow you'll also notice if you know hebrew grammar it's feminine and so it's interesting that there is a feminine aspect of the godhead in this medieval period that's included as one of those tens if you're now it's the lowest of those it's the most subordinate to the higher one certainly but there is still this interesting detail of having this feminine aspect of the godhead as part of this vision so here's an example of the sephiroth both as an imagined cosmology of the universe here so here you have people relating to the near the bottom of the uh of that structure and then going up to the sun which is t ferret and then ultimately up to that mystical you'd have a unknowable everything that gradually emanates into the world in these different ways and then you also see it sort of mapped out on the human form again you've got that you saw it phallus uh you know seat of the world source with the shikina at the bottom which is where the rubber hits the road right it's where our feet hit the ground and that's the impact in the world so this is the general framework conception of the uh the zohar as it's presenting this and it sees this as sort of constitutive of the universe this defines the atomic level to the cosmology cosmological level right now where did the zohar come from it wasn't actually written by rabbi shimon bariah even though you'll still get people who make a pilgrimage to his grave every year from the hasidic world seeing him as the author of the zohar but just because it says this is the torah moses placed before the children of israel that don't make it true either okay so where did the zohar really come from well around the year 1280 a man named moses de leon who's living in leon spain says he received a special revelation that he managed to write down and here it is it's the zohar channeled magically and mystically from shimon bar yoja okay well today we would interpret that as pious forgery he attributes he wants people to read his stuff but nobody's going to read moshe's so instead they're going to read shimon bar yokai's commentaries instead now there are parts of the zohar that clearly come from earlier sources he didn't make it all up from scratch but the final form that it comes in most likely was assembled by uh de leon and uh and largely you know written and edited by him into one collection but the zohar takes off it becomes a big big success in some ways more so than maimonides in certain parts of the jewish world and the next major stage in this jewish mystical journey is uh innovated by an ashkenazi rabbi who's living in spot in the land of israel his name is the ashkenazi rabbi yitzchak or the re but his name is isaac luria that's his last name and he creates this new model of kabbalah called lurianic kabbalah where he takes the premise of the divine power emanating into the world and creates a whole cosmology and this is being done in the 1500s and the 1600s so remember this is after the expulsions from western europe including the expulsion from spain a series of pogroms in response to the black death the crusades all kinds of other major dislocations so hear that history as i described the basic creation story of the loriana kabbalah in the beginning there was god who was everything there was no space that was not god and what god needed to do to create the physical world was he had to do a kind of tsum tsum a contraction into himself almost like creating a donut you know where there's a space in the middle where the physical world could exist and then he took the material world that was left and formed into special vessels bowls or tubes that could contain his divine life and he emanated his divine power into that material world through those vessels but because the vessels were material they could not contain the incredible effervescence of divine power and they shattered and they became scattered throughout the real world the material world and so now the task of the mystically minded jew and they have a very important task their task is to perform what the god has told them to do with the proper mystical intention as a way of liberating those divine sparks that are stuck to the pieces the material pieces of those vessels and if you can free those divine sparks to return to god gradually restoring the godhead to its primordial unity you can in fact bring forward the time of redemption and salvation the messiah the ultimate triumph of godhood in the world now we're fortunate because god has given us all the rules and all the practices we need to do that's the halakhah that's the religious practice but we need that special mystical focus and intention on the zohar imagining myself as yasod and my wife as the shahina or myself as israel and my wife is the shahina when we're having sex on shabbat i mean this is actually one of the things they talk about as a kind of mystical union between israel and um and shabbat between israel and the godhead and if we have the proper mystical intention as we're doing this we can in fact repair the universe and it's in mystical jewish thought that you first see this phrase tikkun olam it didn't start as environmental cleanup it started as this mystically inclined repairing of the world by saving the divine sparks from the shattered vessels from the beginning of creation to the end of time okay so hopefully you can see how the historical shattering experience of an explosion from spain and pogroms and crusades could lead to a kind of mystically inclined thought that says the world is shattered but we have some agency to try to repair it it's not by community service and social action it's by mystical thought and practice now i'm not saying it's illegitimate now to say tikkun olam and mean community service and environmental cleanups i'm just saying this is where the source has its origin now there's even an extreme case of getting caught up with this mystically inclined thought that takes place in the middle of the 1600s there's a man named shaptize v and if you read the historical atlas of jewish history that's one of the recommended texts for the class there's a wonderful sort of discussion of his story that gives you some of the detail you can also read more about them girls from trolling has a whole book about them but there's lots of other sources you can find chapters v is born in izmir which is in the ottoman empire on the coast of the mediterranean but he's convinced that he's destined for great things he was supposedly born on tisha b'av the memory of the destruction of the temple and one legend holds the messiah would be born on tisha b'am on the day of the destruction of the temple he he may have actually been a kind of manic depressive because of some of the things he said and did over his lifetime he had a penchant for publicly and flagrantly like breaking jewish laws but people tried to find a way to rationalize the fact that he was doing this you know maybe the messiah comes to fulfill the laws by breaking them in one of these sort of paradoxes remember one of the tricks of sounding mystically astute is you say two opposite things and say they're both true and then you sound like you have profound wisdom so for example it is wide but it is narrow it is deep but it is shallow it is light but it is dark i have no deeper message than saying the opposite but it sounds it sounds deep so chapters v was one of these he was someone who was breaking the laws but his advertisers his promoters especially amanda nathan of gaza found ways to rationalize this and found ways to claim him as indeed possibly the messiah come to the world as a way of repairing the sparks remember those sparks shattered buried well maybe the way you have to save some of the deepest buried sparks is by transgressions with the proper intention not just by like maybe we've saved all the ones we can save by following the rules now we got to make new rules and do it differently i mean there's even some passages in traditional literature you could deploy at one point they point out the highlight of the fact that the word for yom kippur the day of atonement in the bible is actually yom hakipurim it's plural so literally it was originally the day of atonements plural but people noticed this parallel to that and the the rabbinicality of purim which is about joy and happiness and say and so they say in the day of the messiah yom kippur will become like yom kippurim it will be a day like purim so maybe the messiah has come he can do it you know he can wear a mask and sing on yom kippur and it's okay so shopkins v gets a lot of followers his reputation spreads broadly i mean there are jews in eastern europe jews in amsterdam who are like waiting on the tops of their houses for the angels to pick them up and bring them to the land of israel for the messianic redemption well chapters v is living in the ottoman empire the adam empire is ruled by a sultan who gets reports of this unrest coming from this person claiming to be the messiah and so shantae goes to istanbul he's arrested by the sultan in the year 1666 when of course people are wound up anyways because the christians are going nuts over the year 1666 this is the sign of the devil and book of revelations and so on and the sultan gives shabtai a very simple choice he says okay you're making trouble i'll give you a choice you can convert to islam or i'll kill you now jews have had a messiah get killed before it worked out pretty well for the christian movement right in this case chavez takes option b he decides to convert to islam now that's a hard pill to swallow for most of his followers for the messiah to convert to another religion that's that's a tough one but as we know with cult behavior the most diehards will find some way to make sense of it and in fact that's what they do they they follow him in converting to islam but maintaining a kind of crypto jewish identity because they imagine he's going to liberate those deep sparks the sparks hidden even in the depths of islam now he will find a way to free them and they become a community called the donme or the converts that are based in greece and in some other cities salonika was a major center for them at one time i think you can still find a few of them out there not not a great number um but they are the descendants of this the sabatian movement that followed chapter all the way into uh into islam but most of those who were believing in shabtai were were disillusioned they said up we got had you know this is oopsie and uh and in fact it's around this time the rabbis put in a rule about not studying jewish mysticism until you're over a certain point in fact they decree the age of 40 as the age of which men are allowed to study the zohar and they have to be married so they have to be grounded in some level and over age 40 before they're even able to study the book so it's restricting it to a certain audience in fact when i had a friend turned 40 i bought him a volume of the zohar uh just because it was a new translation coming out just as an echo to that story um but you can't stop that mystical train once it's left the station that there's a there's a ferment out there and remember also what we learned last time about what happened in the mid 1600s the massive pogroms of chromolitsky in eastern europe that devastated jewish life in ukraine and parts of poland they were right for a chapter v mystical redemption and even there was a follower to shamanize the name jacob frank who also creates a kind of cult of personality in the early 1700s some were sucked up in that too but in the end what really sucks in the people of eastern europe is this new trend called hasidism and hostidism begins with one teacher whose name is israel balshem toe also known as the besht the baal shem tov they just make an acronym out of the name he's born in six in 1700 and dies in 1760. his burial is in a place called mizi bush which is in ukraine it's now a pilgrimage site by the way thousands of hasidic jews will make the pilgrimage to messi bush to mark their time with the best on his yard set on its anniversary of his death um and it honestly it's a big market in prostitutes and drugs for that time period because they're away from home and who knows you know i mean this is the irony about this this trip to ukraine um in any case the baal shem tov was known as a miracle worker baal shem tov literally means master of the good name he could use the divine name to make amulets and cure people but he was also known for his deep piety his learning that seemed to come out of nowhere and his example of especially holy life now when the baal shem tov dies in 1760 one of his followers who's known as the mageed of mezrich the storyteller of the town of mesrick creates a circle of disciples based on the model of the bash the balchemtov and he tells the stories of the ball shem dove that ultimately get written down and ultimately it's from him that these group of followers go off into various towns and begin to start their own following of the model of chasidic judaism so what i'm going to do now is again share an image with you that'll show you the map of the spread this comes from the um the historical atlas again and so you'll notice here's mizzy bush where about champ is buried but you also have mezrik which is sort of the starting point for this hasidic movement and you'll notice these green lines extending out from here where these disciples of the mageed of mesrick spread out and ultimately set up their own shops to become their own hasidic rabies in these hasidic centers and you might notice some familiar names from different sects of hasidic judaism that exist even today so you'll notice here to the right uh and south you've got broadslove there's a whole pacific set called the bratz lobbers uh going around counterclockwise to the left you've got vishnizia there's the visionitz uh sect of uh of classidism uh going again for the north sort of straight west of uh uh mesurik you've got belts the belcher facility is a very large uh sect today um you have if you go straight north um the uh stolen that was also a very important center believe it or not chernobyl which we think of as a radioactive site was a major center of acidic uh generations again notice it's the second generation here if you look in the far like bottom left just to the right of the code you see this town called satumarei you ever heard of the satbar kasiram that's based there actually satomare means saint mary in hungarian don't tell the sahmars they don't believe that etymology but that's what it is that was part of the second generation and then far up in the northeast here you'll notice a little tiny town called lubovic which is where the first lubavitcher based that's the foundation of chabad or chabad that we see you know accosting people and asking them to put onto filling and shake a little of an etrog all over the jewish world so the basic premise of classidism and what made it so popular uh were sort of three levels um the first was you had a charismatic leader that is known as the rebbe not a rabbit not the robbie not the rabbi but the rebbe this yiddish inflection has a different resonance to it the rebbe is also sometimes called the sadiq the righteous one and the premise is that the rebbe is perfect he is the best example you will ever have of how to live a jewish life a famous story attributed to the acidic world is that one man says i'm going to go to the rebbe's dish the rebbe's table to to learn great torah from him about this torah portion of the week and another man says i'm going to go to the rebbe's table and watch him tie his shoes and i'll learn a great lesson from that you know the concept is that the miracle work of the holy man is a model in whatever he does and so if you were a hasid if you were one of these lovers you weren't just a freelance hosted who followed anybody you were a hostage of belts you were a hostage of broadside of the but you had a rebbe you had a community that defined what you did and how you did it in particular you cleaved you connected to the rebbe see the model was the rebbe could talk to god and could connect directly you couldn't necessarily do that god's pretty big that's pretty strong but you could cleave you can cleave connect glue yourself to the rabby in fact the word for cleaving was and it's from the word devec glue like you you stick yourself to the rebbe and he'll pull you along so if you ever watch any movies that depict the hasidic world and one example uh that i like because it has a kind of humanistic message to it is called the price above rubies there's one scene in there where they're driving their car in town in brooklyn and all of a sudden the rebbe is getting out of a store and the man of the family parks the car in the middle of the street gets out of the store and goes to crowder on the rebbe as he's walking from the store into his car and then he comes back in his car and he's all smiling i saw the rebbe i saw the rabbit like it's it's like seeing god it's this you know um representative on earth it's the intermediary that you connect to because that's as close as you're going to get the god so you have the sadiq and the khasi they're sort of a two-sided coin and some of the titan were corrupt and abused their power and some were genuinely good people there's a famous story of one of these sadiki who every time he went out in the winter he would give his coat away to a poor man and they would say to him why do you keep giving away your coats to the to this poor guy and his response was well my followers will always make sure i get a coat they wouldn't necessarily give it to the poor guy so i'm going to give my coat to the poor guy they'll get me another cup so that's you know again using your power for good but it took all types and there were rivalries i mean even right now there's a major split in the satmar community between the zalmanis and the arroyones because there are two sons of the previous satmar rebbe one was named zalman and one is named aron and they both claimed the mantle of his authority after he died and there's a split in the community between some who follow one and some of all the other and they both claim the satmar tradition but it's a sibling rivalry and an air rivalry and that's that's what you get in all kinds of uh human settings the most important part of classism though and this is what really set it apart from the establishment of the day is this concept of the emotion the internal intention there's a word in hebrew for strict practice of reciting prayers and following following jewish law it's called keva keva is the fixed form and the internal side the intention is called kavanagh it's how you're feeling what your direction or intention is as you're reciting the prayers or doing the ritual practice you can hear echoes of that mysticism in there right that you have to have the right mystical kavanagh to fully accomplish the tikkun allah well what the hostage did in their first couple generations that was so scandalous was they said kavanaugh is more important than kevin remember the guy reciting the aleph bet that's kavanagh that was seen as even more important than kevin famous story of the valshamto he assigned one of his followers to blow the shofar at yom kippur at the end of the day of atonement and gave him certain intentions certain kavanaugh that he had to follow to do so but when it came time for that end of the holiday he knew how to blew the show for but he could not remem remember the correct intentions and he was just totally devastated to have failed the community and failed the balchemtov in such a way and afterwards the baal shem tov came to the man and the man confessed that he had failed and the bosch of said the king's house has many doors and each door has a unique key but the universal key to open all the doors is the broken heart in other words your grief and your pain and having messed up which is part of the theme of the holiday of i've sinned and forgive me that was enough that opened all the doors even if you didn't have the specific thoughts in mind so that focus on kavanaugh over keva on one hand is very inclusive right you don't have to even know the the words for the prayers you don't have to read it was wonderfully popular among the working classes it was terribly unpopular among the educated classes would spend all that time learning how to read and recite the exact words what are you doing saying that's not important all that time spent studying talmud you're saying it i didn't need to do that so there wanda being a split in the jewish world in eastern europe between the khasid those sort of pious followers and their rebbies and the established community what are known as the mitnak deen or the misnom which means the opponents and you can tell who won by who gets called the opponents right the popular movement of hostilism was the dominant trend and the opponents were fighting a rearguard action so much so they got named the opponents today they call themselves yeshivish or litvish like lithuanian but they were the opponents and you'll notice there's a series of blue squares up here and blue lines that mark the yeshivas the rabbinical schools of these opponents that try to impose strict strict fixed form strict ritual practice and strict prayer practice they would make fun of the rebbies going off in the woods to do cartwheels and all kinds of other crazy things to get in the right intention reciting the prayers not exactly at the specific time but when they felt moved to there was a real rivalry between the two so much so that you'll notice that tan of lubovich is in the north and the sort of orbit of influence of lithuania here and these all these misnom yeshivas one of the first lubovich rebbies was reported to the russian police by the establishment as having done an innovation in religion and therefore that was prohibited by the czars well uh you know so this is really dangerous they each side excommunicated the other uh it became a real rivalry for again the mid uh the mid to late 1700s into the early 1800s one of the most famous figures in vilna part of this opposition group is a man named elijah the guy on the the genius of vilna who was well known for his talmudic are edition and uh literacy he also made contributions to mathematics by the way if you look him up as elijah vilna you'll see some of his contributions to the general study of mathematics but he led the opposition fighting back against this hasidic sweep in the end the qasidic and the misnomic worlds are almost impossible to tell apart today you'd i mean the outsiders have real trouble telling the yeshivish people from the hassidish people maybe the hassidish people dance more or are more uplifting you know you think of fiddler on the roof and picking people up with chairs at weddings that's acidic but by and large you can't tell the difference and the reason why you can't tell the difference is that they came up with a common enemy by the beginning of the 19th century early 1800s into the mid-1800s there was a new jewish group in town that was threatening to both of them and this was the group called the masculine the enlighteners who wanted to modernize jewish life to change jewish dress to learn non-jewish languages to be influenced by non-jewish ideas and philosophy and when push came to shove the misnock deemed the opponents and the khasidim the pietists came to a truce the truth was okay let's channel your enthusiasm within the bounds of galactic practice and focus that enthusiasm on studying talmud and torah and will forgive your excesses and jumping around and dancing stuff and you're cleaving to the rebbie stuff but let's follow sort of a common core of what today we would call ultra orthodox practice that specifically rejects modernity so this is also why the pacific world marks the beginning of modernity because it marks the rejection of the enlighteners the haskallah which we'll talk about next time by the ultra-orthodox which today encompasses both the opponents and the khasid one time they fought each other and then they made common cause against a more dangerous enemy they felt which was the enlighteners so we'll have to hear about them the next time

Channel: IISHJvid

Views: 2,004

Rating: 4.8461537 out of 5

Keywords: Secular Humanistic Judaism, Humanistic Judaism, Kabbalah, Hasidism, Jewish History, Adam Chalom

Id: Y0iQJyBUez0

Length: 46min 28sec (2788 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021