• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 429 0

themselves raised in the Kabbalistic tradition, sought to strip it of what they saw as burdensome complexity and to turn directly to the task of describing the experience of intimacy with God, with an emphasis on the emotional side of that experience. If God was to be found within all things by a simple opening of the inner eye, there was no need for the edifice of symbolism. Most Hasidic teachings turned away from the Lurianic meditations; even the imagery of the sefirot themselves was mostly diverted to serve as a tool of religious psychology. They left in place only the “highest” and “lowest” of the divine manifestations, hokhmah and malkhut.48 The former, described as ayin (“Nothingness”) in the classical Hasidic sources,49 stood for the utterly unknowable God, the One prior to all content or delineation. The latter was another name for shekhinah, the indwelling Godliness that fills the universe, or inside which the universe itself exists. God as malkhut is discoverable in each and every moment of existence.50 This aspect of the Godhead is described as yesh (“Being”), divinity filled with worldliness, or world filled with God. The essential mystical task, as described in the school of the Maggid of Miedzyrzec, is to realize the unity of these two stages within God. “Being is Nothingness; Nothingness is Being!” is another early Hasidic watchword.

The metaphysical structure underlying Hasidism consists of a twofold dialectical process. Divine self-revelation is constant, uniquely present in every being and in each moment, resulting in the ever-increasing variegation of being and thus in the seeming breakup of cosmic unity into ever-smaller fragments of existence. “Seeming” is the key word here, as the deeper reality of unbroken divine oneness is the ultimate truth that is to be rediscovered and restored as a visible face of reality. Both world and Torah are products of this intentional but ultimately delusive self-fragmenting of Y-H-W-H. It is in the realms of both daily life (“serving through corporeal things”) and specific religious praxis, including prayer and study, that one is to seek out and reveal the hidden unity of Being, all roads leading back to the monistic truth. The illusion of cosmic fragmentation and distance from God is a “gift” given to the human mind in order to enable us to engage in the labors of restoration.

Philosophical sophistication or consistency was hardly the strength of these revivalist preachers, most of whose works are written in homiletical form. There are some relative exceptions to this rule, however, especially in the writings of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the HaBaD school, and his close disciple Rabbi Aaron of Staroselje.51 These carry the insights of the BeShT and the Maggid forward into a clearly delineated panentheistic theology of Judaism. While God as eyn sof remains utterly transcendent and mysterious, the light it gives forth shines through both in the ayin that surrounds existence and the yesh that fills it. The task of the religious mind is to understand that these make up but a single light, manifest in Torah and commandments (the self-revelation of God) as it is manifest throughout the world, since “Creation” itself is nothing but another self-manifestation of the divine glory. The pantheistic tendencies and insights found throughout the earlier mystical tradition are here presented in their most radical and systematic fashion.

With the elimination of all the intermediary sefirot, this Hasidism essentially gives up on the Kabbalistic faith in emanation. Instead it creates a theology that understands God as the eternal dialectical dance between presence and transcendence, between the revealed and the mysterious, hokhmah (sometimes parsed as KoaH MaH, a spiritualized Prime Matter) and malkhut or shekhinah, God's earthly indwelling presence. In a sense hokhmah functions here as a stand-in for eyn sof, considered too recondite even to be evoked in such a conversation. It is the deep and mysterious well out of which all existence is drawn. But the point of