Hasidic Philosophy
from 1740
God is present in everything without exception, so joy, ordinary work and attention are the practice, and learning is not the entry requirement.
- Active
- from 1740
- Where
- Podolia and Volhynia, then eastern Europe
- Also
- חסידות Ḥasidut
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Jewish
The claim
Divine immanence taken seriously. If there is no place void of God, then no activity is outside religious life, and the sparks in ordinary things are released by doing ordinary things with intention.
What it held
Hasidism took Lurianic Kabbalah — an esoteric system for scholars — and made it a mass movement. The theoretical move is a shift of emphasis from tzimtzum as literal withdrawal to tzimtzum as concealment: God did not actually vacate anything, only hid, and the hiding is what makes a world seem separate.
From that everything follows. If God is genuinely everywhere, then a labourer working with intention is doing what a scholar does. Joy becomes a religious obligation and melancholy a serious spiritual danger. Prayer with fervour outranks prayer with precision.
The tzaddik is the movement's most contested institution: a rebbe who serves as a channel for his community, and whose authority is personal rather than scholarly. The opponents — the Mitnagdim, led by the Vilna Gaon — regarded this as a catastrophe, and the conflict was bitter enough to involve excommunications and denunciations to the Russian authorities.
Chabad is the intellectual wing, and Shneur Zalman's Tanya is a systematic psychology of the divided soul that reads as philosophy rather than devotion.
How it argued
Storytelling, teaching in Yiddish rather than Hebrew, song and dance as practice, and — in Chabad — systematic contemplative treatises.
What it was arguing against
An establishment in which religious standing depended on scholarly attainment, and which the Hasidim regarded as having made Judaism arid.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether tzimtzum is literal or figurative — the central theoretical dispute with the Mitnagdim. Whether the tzaddik's role is mediation or example.
Common misconceptions
That it is anti-intellectual. Chabad produced a substantial philosophical literature, and the movement's founders were themselves accomplished scholars who chose a different emphasis.
How it began
The Baal Shem Tov in Podolia, in communities still recovering from the massacres of 1648 and from the collapse of the Sabbatean movement.
What became of it
Living, having been devastated in the Holocaust and rebuilt largely in the United States and Israel.
Lasting influence
Buber's retelling of the tales brought Hasidism to European readers and shaped his own philosophy of dialogue. Heschel came from this world and wrote out of it.
Why it still matters
Its account of attention to ordinary activity as the primary spiritual practice has been widely borrowed, usually without acknowledgement.
Put another way
Sparks in every object, released by the ordinary act of using it well.
Where to start
The Tanya, part one. It is systematic and it argues.
The surprising bit
The founder left no writings. Everything attributed to the Baal Shem Tov comes through students, which puts the movement in the same position as several of the schools it least resembles.
In their own words
No place is void of Him.
If you believe that you can damage, believe that you can repair.
Connections
- Answers
- Lurianic Kabbalah
The verdict
An esoteric metaphysics turned into a popular movement, and philosophically the sharper for it.