Hasidism and Modern Man

By Martin Buber and David Biale

Hasidism, a controversial, mystical-religious movement of Eastern European origin, has posed a serious challenge to mainstream Judaism from its earliest beginnings in the middle of the eighteenth century. Decimated by the Holocaust, it has risen like a phoenix from the ashes and has reconstituted itself as a major force in the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Philosopher Martin Buber found inspiration in its original tenets and devoted much of his career to making its insights known to a wide readership.

First published in 1958, Hasidism and Modern Man examines the life and religious experiences of Hasidic Jews, as well as Buber's personal response to them. From the autobiographical "My Way to Hasidism," to "Hasidism and Modern Man," and "Love of God and Love of Neighbor," the essays span nearly half a century and reflect the evolution of Buber’s religious philosophy in relation to the Hasidic movement. Hasidism and Modern Man remains prescient in its portrayal of a spiritual movement that brings God down to earth and makes possible a modern philosophy in which the human being becomes sacred.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Oct 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781400874095

Martin Buber

Martin Buber (1878–1965) was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher, essayist, translator, and editor most known for his German translation of the Bible, his religious existentialism philosophy, and his role in the Zionist movement.   Buber grew up in Vienna during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which fell after World War I. He was raised by his grandparents, who introduced him to Zionism and Hasidism at a young age. Buber had a knack for languages, learning more than ten during his school years. After school, Buber was recruited to lecture on Jewish religious studies at universities, educational centers, and Jewish groups. In 1938, as the Nazi Party gained power, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem. He continued to lecture in Jerusalem at Hebrew University. Known for politically utopian ideals including anarchism and socialism, Buber became a leader in the Zionist movement and supported a bi-national solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. In 1951, he received the Goethe Prize of the University of Hamburg and in 1953, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 1958, he won the Israel Prize. In 1963, he won the Erasmus Award in Amsterdam. He lived and worked in Jerusalem until his death in 1965.

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Introduction to the 2016 Edition

Wearing a long black or gold silk coat with a round fur hat, the Hasid is a readily identified figure, whether on the streets of Brooklyn, London’s Stamford Hill, or Jerusalem’s Mea She’arim. Publicly visible, Hasidism remains as much the object of mystery and fascination today as it has for the last hundred years. Perhaps no one in the twentieth century did more to bring this endlessly complex movement to the attention of a broad public than the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965). In essays that appeared in the first decade of the century and continued until nearly the time of his death, Buber probed the spiritual originality of Hasidism in strikingly modern terms.

By the time Buber came to consider the meaning of Hasidism for modern man, the movement had already been in existence for a century and a half. Sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century, in the Carpathian Mountains of southeastern Poland, the first seeds of Hasidism germinated. As legend has it, the founder of this movement was an untutored wandering preacher named Israel Baal Shem Tov, or Israel the Master of the Good Name (1700–1760; also known by his acronym, the Besht). Gathering around him a circle of disciples known as hasidim (meaning literally the pious), he created a new teaching based on joy in prayer, thus challenging the traditional doctrines of asceticism and study.

Although there is some truth to this legend, recent historical scholarship has cast much doubt on this story of origins. Israel was hardly untutored but was, instead, a learned kabbalist who was employed by the community of Medzibozh as its resident healer or magician. Nor, it seems, did he set out to found a new movement. The profession of baal shem, that is, one who knew how to manipulate the divine name, was well known throughout Jewish Eastern Europe, where there were non-Jewish practitioners of similar crafts as well. Israel was not much different from these magicians, some of them itinerant and some resident. And Israel’s disciples, some of whom were baalei shem themselves, hardly regarded themselves as belonging to any kind of spiritual movement.

It was only in the next generation that a movement began to form, notably around the court of Dov Ber, the Great Maggid (or preacher) of Mezeritch. Dov Ber’s disciples went out, in what was initially an unplanned fashion, to found courts of their own, and so a network of courts and disciples developed in the provinces of Podolia and Volhynia, later spreading to White Russia, Poland, and Galicia. The leaders of these courts were called tsadikim (meaning literally righteous) or, in Yiddish, rebbes. And the disciples came to be called hasidim, which now acquired the secondary meaning of disciples of tsadik X.

Because Hasidism was a decentralized movement organized around the courts of the tsadikim, it did not have one centralized ethos, but rather many, at times contradictory, characteristics. There were elitist and populist groups, ascetic and joyful. Some were deliberately anti-intellectual, while others were scholarly or mystical. Some flirted with dangerous laxity with respect to Jewish law, while others were rigorously legalistic.

It was less in the realm of ideas and more in social structure that Hasidism gained its definition. The rebbe as spiritual, charismatic leader became its essence. Although some of the tsadikim also served as communal rabbis or preachers, Hasidism generally developed into a supra-communal movement, that is, the followers of a rebbe were not limited only to the town in which he lived. He cast his net wide, sometimes very wide, so that Hasidism became a geographically far-reaching affair. A tsadik’s hasidim would make pilgrimage to his court once or twice a year (perhaps more often if they lived in proximity), and he might visit them on occasion in their market towns. Although the Jews of early modern Poland had had a supra-communal governing structure, the Council of the Four Lands, it was disbanded in 1764. Hasidism came to take its place, if not intentionally, as a series of overlapping spiritual networks that bound together the hundreds of small towns in which the Jews lived. Later in the nineteenth century, certain hasidic leaders in Poland and Russia emerged as spokesmen for the Jewish community as a whole, no doubt as a result of the influence they wielded beyond their own domiciles.

Regardless of the varieties of Hasidism in the latter part of the eighteenth century—and even more in the nineteenth—the movement attracted vehement opposition, first from scholarly and communal leaders and, later, from advocates of enlightenment. All of these figures targeted specific ideas and practices of the hasidim: some denounced them for turning somersaults when they prayed, others found fault with their lack of scholarly acumen or their methods of ritual slaughter. The enlighteners made them the primary butt of their war against superstition and obscurantism. But in all cases, what they intuited, even if they did not say so explicitly, was that Hasidism provided a new form of Jewish leadership and social order just as traditional communal structures came under siege.

As Hasidism spread westward in the nineteenth century, it came to dominate the world of East European Jewry. While never claiming the loyalty of an absolute majority, it was still the only mass Jewish movement until the new political movements of the twentieth century. Several striking developments took place in Hasidism’s second century. While the founders of courts in the eighteenth century may not have thought about the question of succession, by the nineteenth century many of these courts became dynasties. Some of them took on the trappings of royalty or nobility, with opulent courts, servants, and conspicuous luxury. At the same time, a movement that had challenged traditional structures of power in its origins now increasingly became the bedrock of conservatism. Indeed, as the storms of modernity lashed the Jews of Eastern Europe, Hasidism more and more embraced aggressive antimodernism, a defense of tradition that belied its own recent lineage.

So it was that at the turn of the twentieth century the Hasidic court came to symbolize the world of tradition that, for modernizers, needed to be overcome, eradicated, and replaced. Yet a curious thing happened in the midst of these culture wars. A number of intellectuals, writing in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and German, discovered in Hasidism not medieval degeneracy but instead the sparks of spiritual and social revolution. Some of these writers, like Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865–1921), came from a Hasidic background. Berdichevsky embraced the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, translating his ideas into Hebrew. In his full-throated assault on rabbinic Judaism, however, he sought out movements of resistance to the culture of the book and found one of them in Hasidism or, at least, Hasidism in its formative age. Yehuda Leib Peretz (1852–1915) was not from such a background, but he too saw in Hasidism an alternative to the Jewish religion that, as a militant Yiddish secularist, he rejected. Peretz crafted stories in which Hasidism prefigures socialism as a movement of justice for the poor. And Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), the dean of Russian Jewish historians, began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century to gather materials for his History of Hasidism, published finally in Hebrew and German in 1931. Dubnow, like his literary counterparts, found great intellectual and spiritual vitality in the Hasidism of the eighteenth century, a vitality that vanished after the death of the first generations of the movement’s founders around 1815.

The belief that Hasidism had a moment of revolutionary potential in its first half century, only to degenerate afterward into fanaticism and rigid orthodoxy, may explain why these writers could fashion a neo-Hasidism even in the face of what appeared to them a very different religious phenomenon in their own day. Historians today have overturned this paradigm and discovered that nineteenth-century Hasidism was a highly dynamic movement, both socially and intellectually; indeed, one might speak of Dubnow’s era of degeneration as the opposite, a golden age of Hasidism. The neo-Hasidic writers also belonged to a post-enlightenment age when, instead of rejecting all of tradition, it became fashionable to go to the folk in search of a culture that might be salvaged for the future.

Of these writers, none had as much impact as Martin Buber. Buber’s essays and anthologies of Hasidic tales probably did more to make Hasidism known to a non-Hasidic readership than the work of any other single individual did. Starting with the publication of Legend of the Baal-Shem and Tales of Rabbi Nachman in the first decade of the twentieth century,¹ Buber drew attention to a genre of Hasidic literature that was largely unknown outside the Hasidic world (although it had drawn attacks from enlighteners early in the nineteenth century). As a result, scholars over the last hundred years have treated these works as part of the history of Hebrew literature and folklore, in addition to their role in Hasidic spirituality. Furthermore, unlike most of the other writers mentioned above, Buber lived and continued to work well into the post–World War II era, and his work resonated not only with the early-twentieth-century neo-Hasidic movement, but also with what might be called the second wave of neo-Hasidism in the 1960s and beyond. Moreover, by writing in German, Buber reached an audience outside of Eastern Europe, and later, in translation, the English-speaking world, as well as many other languages.

Buber was born to a religious family in Vienna but spent much of his childhood in Lemberg in the house of his grandfather, the scholar and maskil (enlightener) Solomon Buber. It was there and, even more, during summer visits to Sadagora, the seat of the Ruzhin dynasty, that he encountered Galician Hasidism and was at once repelled by the opulence of the court and enthralled by the charisma of the tsadik and the power of the hasidic community. As he wrote in 1918 in My Way to Hasidism, which is to be found in this collection, in the dirty village of Sadagora,

The palace of the rebbe, in its showy splendor, repelled me. The prayer house of the Hasidim with its enraptured worshippers seemed strange to me. But when I saw the rebbe striding through the rows of the waiting, I felt, leader, and when I saw the Hasidim dance with the Torah, I felt, community. (20)

The Ruzhin dynasty had more or less invented regal Hasidism, that is, a court with all the trappings of nobility and the rebbe as king.² But the young Buber was able to see beyond these external manifestations to glimpse the genuine community that Hasidism fostered, for how to create an organic community (Gemeinschaft in German) was one of the ongoing preoccupations in his early philosophy.

As a young man, Buber also went through a religious crisis that led him to abandon traditional practice, and the childhood memory of Hasidism faded. He joined the new Zionist movement and, as a cultural Zionist, subscribed to the prevailing view, represented by Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzburg, 1856–1921) and Berdichevsky, that Judaism was in need of renewal. While these two Hebrew writers envisioned the new national culture as secular, albeit drawn from traditional sources, Buber now came to favor a kind of non-Orthodox spirituality. His interest in Hasidism was reawakened as a source of such spirituality. As he wrote in one early text: The Hasidic teaching is the proclamation of rebirth. No renewal of Judaism is possible that does not bear in itself the elements of Hasidism.³

In the decade before the First World War, Buber’s philosophy was a mysticism of lived experience (Erlebnis) in which the mystic merges himself with the divine in an ecstatic union.⁴ Buber searched for historical examples of ecstatic confessions (the title of Buber’s 1909 anthology) from a wide variety of world religions. He also anthologized Hasidic stories for the same purpose, starting with the tales of Nahman of Bratslav (1906) and then the legends of the Baal Shem Tov (1908). Buber’s goal was not only to revivify Judaism, but also to demonstrate that Judaism contained the same ecstatic moments as other religions. His purpose was at once national and universal, particularistic and comparative. For that reason, and as opposed to the other neo-Hasidic writers of the fin de siècle, Buber found an audience beyond the Jews.

Buber was interested in elevating myth to a central position in the life of the Jews. While myth found a refuge from the cruelties of exile in the Kabbalah, that doctrine remained the province of a tiny elite. But then, suddenly, among the village Jews of Poland and Little Russia, there arose a movement in which myth purified and elevated itself—Hasidism…. And in the dark, despised East, among simple, unlearned villagers, a throne was prepared for the child of a thousand years.⁵ However, like other neo-Hasidic writers, Buber believed that the creative age of Hasidism was limited to the movement’s early years: Groups of Hasidim still exist in our day; Hasidism is in a state of decay. But the Hasidic writings have given us their teachings and their legends.⁶ It was almost as if the Hasidim that his readers might see around them—and, by the First World War, there were Hasidim in some of the Central European cities and towns where Buber’s German-reading audience lived—bore little relation to the exalted figures in his books. For the same reason, he explicitly rejected the rich Hasidic literature of the second half of the nineteenth century as the corruption of the transmitted motifs. They appear as thin and wordy narratives patched with later inventions and worked into a cheap form of popular literature.⁷

Buber was not interested in contemporary Hasidim, since he wanted to recover from historical Hasidism a message that might address the crisis of modern men and women, a crisis he defined as the radical alienation of the profane from the sacred. Hasidism, he argued, had overcome the Gnostic dualism of the earlier Kabbalah, which posited an absolute separation between the transcendent God and the material world. Instead, the Hasidic masters taught that the profane might be hallowed, that is, turned into the sacred. Although Buber rejected pantheism, he was deeply moved by the kabbalistic myth of divine sparks trapped in the material world. One’s everyday actions could redeem those sparks and thus hallow the everyday. Buber drew particular attention to the hasidic teaching of worship through the material (avodah be-gashmiyut), in which the hasid reached God by sanctifying everyday actions. According to one hasidic saying he quotes, one goes to see the rebbe not to hear his teachings but to watch him tie his shoes.

This rendition of Hasidism supported Buber’s idea of Hebrew humanism.⁸ His focus was on