I love it when I get involved in a project and it starts leading me to unexpected places. For the last few weeks I've been traveling back to some places in my mind that I haven't visited for quite a while, the fundamentalist perspective on the Bible and some of the times I spent living that life. To balance that out, I've been reading some other things, Armstrong's book (see below) for instance. The Bible: A Biography and a conversation I'm having about it with a friend of mine has gotten me thinking about the Hasidim again and so I've been rereading Chaim Potok'sThe Chosen, set amongst the Jewish communities of New York City during World War II and following the trials of a brilliant young fish-out-of-water Hasid.
About a third of the way through the book there's a chapter in which a teacher explains to his son the history of Hasidism and I really like this one passage that talks about the Ba'al Shem Tov (the "Besht"), the spiritual father of Hasidism. I won't reproduce the whole of it, but here's a portion that talks about the Besht and his teachings:
Finally, he (Israel) began to travel and he became a Ba'al Shem. he was kind and saintly and godly, and he seemed to want to help people not for the money they paid him but for the love he had for them. And so they came to call him the Ba'al Shem Tov--the Kind or Good Master of the Name. He mingled with the people and talked to them about God and His Torah in plain, simple language that they could easily understand. He taught them that the purpose of man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking, praying, sleeping. Giod is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly. Evil is like a hard shell. Within this shell is the spark of God, is goodness. How do we penetrate the shell? By sincere and honest prayer, by being happy, and by loving all people. The Ba'[al Shem Tov--his followers later shortened his name and called him the Besht--believed that no man is so sinful that he cannot be purified by love and understanding. He also believed--and here is where he brought down upon himself the rage of the learned rabbis--that the study of Talmud was not very important, that there need not be fixed times for prayers, that God could be worshiped through a sincere heart, through joy and singing and dancing. In other words, Reuven, he opposed any form of mechanical religion. There was nothing new in what he taught. you will find it all in the Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah. But he gave it a special emphasis and taught it at a key time to people who were hungry for this kind of teaching. And these people listened and loved him. Many great rabbis came to mock him and went away converted to his way of thinking . When he died, his followers opened their own synagogues. Before the end of that century, about half of eastern European Jewry consisted of Hasidim, as his followers were called, pious ones. So great was the need of the masses for a new way to approach God.
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