HASIDISM («Pietism»). - A religious movement founded by Rabbi Yisra'el Ba'al Shem Tov (1699-1760). The epithet "master of the good name" indicates one who is acquainted with the permutations of the phonetic elements that compose the divine name and who, out of goodness of heart, uses this means to obtain healings. Hasidism represents a change of direction within the vast current of cabalistic thought (v. CABBALA), mystical and speculative within Judaism, thus giving a new direction to the piety and religious life of the Jews in Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania).
The founder, Shem Tov, is considered a man who, starting from his relations with the divine, lives with and for his fellow men; he was not learned, nor did he belong to the hierarchy of rabbis endowed with acumen. He was first a teacher of children, then an innkeeper in a solitary region among the Carpathian Mountains. Among the mountains he learned to stand in holy fear before the gift of revelation; there he understood that the service of God always offers the true through mutations, always nourishing the spirit and the soul. In the architecture of ethical law and religious formula he discovered the real man. He and his followers, the spiritual leaders of individual groups of pietists, call themselves "righteous," sadāhūm, thus indicating their ability to intercede with God for their suffering brothers as intrepid intercessors.
They have the courage to ask God insistently for a change in the fortunes of the oppressed people. They speak first of all as representatives of the pious, whose life, soul and body, is permeated with the love of God, and it is in their name that they intervene to ward off illnesses, poverty, misunderstandings in family life, and sins.
In antithesis to the ascetic ideal of the great rabbis, Hasidism advocates joy, sacred joy, as a life-giving force of the spirit, as a sacred path that leads to God. In joy man gives himself entirely to God, thus attaining communion with him; even joy in daily life must be brought into the religious sphere. The body of precepts is wrapped in a vivid mystical light. Prayer becomes a song and a weeping that flow from a moved heart. The pietists, reproached by their adversaries, sometimes delay the hour of prayer, waiting for the heart to overflow with thirst for God. Eating and drinking become sacred actions, an element of communion with God; even in food, as in everything that surrounds man, there lie hidden shining sparks born from the shattering of the primordial light against the transitoriness and the fall of man. Man is called to liberate the sacred sparks from every creature and to receive them into himself. This is the goal of his living and his acting. The means of redemption of the primordial light is the desire for communion with God. The redeemed sparks are thus led back to the first source, and the pious man carries out a co-redemptive function in life.
This way of living on the part of the "pious" does not aim at the redemption of one's own person. There is something more: the divine majesty, the immanence of God, is the divine bride separated from her king and condemned to be always in exile, always wandering. And the pietist current, nourished by the inner strength of the "righteous," pours for a century over the social misfortunes and the religious decadence of broken and suffering Judaism in Eastern Europe. Some have thought of a comparison with Franciscanism.
In 1772 the gā'ōn of Vilna, Elijah, pronounced a great excommunication against the pietists because of their synagogue separatism and their changes in the liturgy and in ritual slaughter, because on the Sabbath and on feast days they dressed in white rather than in black.
It is the undisputed merit of Martin Buber to have made Hasidism known to the West of Europe from as early as 1906 in a series of publications: Rabbi Nahman (1906); Legenden des Baalschem (1907); Mein Weg zum Chassidismus (1918); Der grosse Magghid (1922); Das verborgene Licht (1924); Chassidische Bücher (1927), a kind of corpus of Hasidic tales; Erzählungen der Chassiden (1949).
Bibliography2 works
Eugenio Zolli