HARTMANNO (Hasidism). - A religious movement created by Rabbi Jisra’el Ba’al Šem Töbh (1699-1760). The epithet “Lord of the Good Name” indicates one who knows the permutations of the phonetic elements composing the Name of God and, out of goodness of heart, uses this means to obtain healings. Hasidism represents a shift in direction within the broad current of Kabbalistic (v. CABBALA) thought—mystical and speculative in the sense of Judaism—and thus gave to the piety and religious life of the Jews in Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania) a new orientation.
The founder, Šem Töbh, is regarded as a man who, beginning from his relationship with the divine, lived with and for his fellow men; he was not learned, nor did he belong to the hierarchy of acute rabbinic scholars. He was first a teacher of children, then an innkeeper in a solitary region among the Carpathian Mountains. There, amid the mountains, he learned to stand in sacred awe before the gift of revelation; there he understood that the service of God always offers truth through change, ever 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 pietistic groups, call themselves “the righteous,” “the satisfied,” so as to indicate their ability to intervene with God on behalf of their suffering brethren as intrepid intercessors.
They dare to ask God insistently for a change in the fate of the oppressed people. They speak first as representatives of the pious, whose life—soul and body—is permeated with love of God, and it is on their behalf that they intervene to ward off illness, poverty, misunderstandings in family life, and sins.
In antithesis to the ascetic ideal of the great rabbis, Hasidism upholds joy, sacred joy, as the life-giving force of the spirit, as the sacred path that leads to God. In joy, man gives himself entirely to God, thus attaining communion with Him; even the joy of daily life is to be inscribed within the religious sphere. The preceptive system is enveloped 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 until the heart overflows with longing for God. Eating and drinking become sacred acts, elements of communion with God; even in food, as in all that surrounds man, there are hidden sparks of light born from the shattering of the primordial light against human frailty and fall. Man is called to liberate from every creature the sacred sparks and to welcome them within himself. This is the goal of his living and acting. The means of redemption of the primordial light is the desire for communion with God. The redeemed sparks are thus restored to their primal source, and man then exercises a corrective function in life.
This way of life on the part of the “pious” does not aim at the redemption of the individual person. There is something more: the divine majesty, the immanence of God, is the divine spouse separated from her king and condemned to perpetual exile, ever wandering. It is the pietistic current, nourished by the inner strength of the “righteous,” that for a century poured itself out upon the social misfortunes and religious decline of the broken and suffering Judaism of Eastern Europe. Some have thought to compare it with Franciscanism.
In 1772 the ga’on of Vilna, Elia, pronounced a great excommunication against the pietists because of their separatist synagogue practices and changes in the liturgy and ritual slaughter, since on the Sabbath and feast days they wore white instead of black.
It is an undisputed merit of Martin Buber to have made Hasidism known to Western Europe from 1906 onward 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).