Founder of Hasidism

"I think the subtitle is A Quest for the Historical Baal Shem Tov . Rosman wanted to echo Albert Schweitzer and his Quest for the Historical Jesus . So the founding figure of a historical movement of awakening religious enthusiasm. Rosman goes the whole way. Where there is no solid evidence for an idea he throws it out. What we have on the Baal Shem Tov is a body of hagiographic material and quotations that appeared in print many years after he died. Actual contemporary evidence that might be used to construct who this person was is very, very thin. So that’s what the book exposes. But more than that, it shows how this religious movement—a movement that is still with us—created this founding figure in its own image. Rosman shows the evolution of this man from the earliest times after his death until later on, and he is totally transformed. He begins as a sort of shaman, a mystic shaman but still a shaman, and then he is transformed into a Hasidic leader, a Hasidic Rabbi. Well he does. I mean, I think he probably pushes a little too hard. He’s a hard-headed historian. So the religious or mystic message is not his focus. His focus is on something else. The key text is a letter that we have from this man—but the problem is that we have it in several different versions… The key passage, which continues to effect Jewish life to this very moment, is where he has a vision and he goes up to heaven where he meets the Messiah. Now if you meet the Messiah, everyone will ask him the same question: “When are you coming?” And he gets an answer: “When your teachings have spread out like …”—I forget the precise metaphor—”… when everybody can perform the same mystical practices that you can.” Now, in the letter itself, or at least in one version of it, the Baal Shem Tov says “and that made me very sad,” because of the long time it would take. But others—the Lubavitch Jews you see going around in prayer shawls very actively trying to get Jews to repent—accepted this as their task. What the Baal Shem Tov does is that he turns around the appropriate demeanor before God of the Jew. That is, before his time, the proper demeanor was dour; sadness at living in exile and at its length, and at having to live in such an immoral and terrible place. And what he teaches instead is that one should be joyous in performing God’s will. There is joy available to everybody if they’re performing the commandments. And that God is in everything. That there is no place where God is absent. and that this is a cause for joy and not sadness. In fact he says that sadness is an obstacle to the worship of the creator. This is not a Messianic creed. The Baal Shem Tov is not a Messiah and he’s not a Messianic figure. There’s no active Messiasm in his teaching. What happens with him and with the people that follow him is that they’re turning mystical doctrines into a kind of psychology. God and joy are always within you, and you can find them within you. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter They were compared even before the end of the eighteenth century to Quakers. And in this respect they’re very much part of the eighteenth century. They license people to make choices. You can choose to become the follower of this or that Rabbi, of this or that path. You don’t have to follow the ways of your ancestors. Exactly. I think that most, if not all, of the books that I’ve mentioned restore a kind of agency to Jews. And are concerned not to reduce, but to restore all the heterogeneity, all the multiplicity that this civilization has encompassed. And yet there are, of course, continuities."