HASIDHISM («Pietism»). — Religious movement founded by Rabbi Jisra'el Ba'al Šem Tōbh (1699–1760). The epithet “master of the good name” indicates one who knows the permutations of the phonetic elements composing the divine name and, out of kindness of heart, makes use of this means to obtain healings. Hasidism represents a change of direction within the broad current of cabbalistic thought (v. CABBALA), mystical and speculative within Judaism, thus giving the piety and religious life of the Jews of Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania) a new orientation.
The founder Šem Tōbh is regarded as a man who, proceeding from his relationship with the divine, lives with and for
his fellow human beings; he was neither learned nor a member of the hierarchy of rabbis endowed with intellectual acumen. At first he was a teacher of young children, and later an innkeeper in a solitary region among the Carpathian Mountains. There, among 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 transformations, continually nourishing the spirit and the soul. Within the architecture of ethical law and religious formula he discovered the real human being. He and his followers, the spiritual leaders of individual groups of pietists, call themselves “the righteous,” sadāhūm, thereby indicating their ability to intervene with God on behalf of their suffering brethren as intrepid intercessors.
They have the courage to ask God insistently for a change in the fate of the oppressed people. They speak first of all as representatives of the pious, whose life, soul, and body are permeated by 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 opposition to the ascetic ideal of the great rabbis, Hasidism advocates joy, sacred joy, as a life-giving force of the spirit and as the sacred path leading to God. In joy, the human being gives himself wholly to God, thereby attaining communion with him; joy in daily life, too, must be incorporated into the religious sphere. The body of precepts is enveloped in a vivid mystical light. Prayer becomes a song and a weeping that spring from a moved heart. The pietists, reproached by their adversaries, sometimes delay the hour of prayer, awaiting the moment when the heart overflows with thirst for God. Eating and drinking become sacred actions, an element of communion with God; in food, as in everything that surrounds the human being, there are concealed luminous sparks born when the primordial light was shattered against human transience and fall. The human being is called to liberate the sacred sparks from every creature and to receive them within himself. This is the goal of his living and acting. The means of redeeming the primordial light is the desire for communion with God. The redeemed sparks are thus led back to their first source, and the pious person fulfills a co-redemptive function in life.
This way of life on the part of the “pious” is not aimed at the redemption of his own person. There is something more: the divine majesty, the immanence of God, is the divine bride separated from her king and condemned always to remain in exile, always wandering. And the pietist movement, nourished by the inner strength of the “righteous,” for a century poured itself into the social misfortunes and religious decline of the shattered and suffering Judaism of Eastern Europe. Some have thought of comparing it with Franciscanism.
In 1772 the ga'on of Vilna, Elia, pronounced a major excommunication against the pietists on account of their separation from the synagogue and their changes in the liturgy and ritual slaughter, as well as because on the Sabbath and feast days they wore white instead of black.
It is Martin Buber’s undisputed merit to have made Hasidism known in Western Europe as early as 1906 through 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).