Dov Ber of Mezeritch

The Baal Shem Tov was a healer and a teacher who moved among people. Dov Ber, who succeeded him, did almost the opposite. He was in poor health, rarely travelled, and held court at Mezhirech in Volhynia, where the ablest young scholars of the region came to him. What he built there was a school, and it is the reason Hasidism became a movement rather than a memory.

The method was deliberate. Students were formed at the court and then dispatched, each to a territory, with the authority to establish a following of his own. Levi Yitzhak went to Berdichev, Elimelech to Lizhensk and shaped the whole Polish wing, Menachem Mendel led a group to the land of Israel, Aaron organised Karlin, and Shneur Zalman was sent into Belarus, where the opposition was fiercest. Within a generation of his death the map of eastern European Jewry had Hasidic courts across it, and nearly every dynasty that exists today traces itself to a man trained in that room.

The Vilna Gaon's circle understood exactly what was happening and moved against it, issuing bans in 1772, the year Dov Ber died. The opposition was serious, sustained and in places vicious, and it failed. An organisational insight, that a movement propagates by training and posting teachers rather than by drawing crowds, is not the kind of thing usually credited to a mystic, and it is his.

Dov Ber wrote nothing for publication. What survives is a set of teachings taken down by disciples and issued after his death, the principal collection appearing in 1781, and even there the material is fragmentary: short, dense, often built around a parable and broken off before it is fully worked out. Anyone reading him is reading notes of what people remembered him saying.

The recurring idea is bittul, the nullification of self-existence. Creation, on his account, does not have independent being at all; what looks like a world is the divine speech continuously sustaining it, and a person who grasps this stops experiencing himself as a separate thing standing over against God. The practical upshot is a doctrine of prayer in which the aim is to get the praying self out of the way, and a doctrine of the tzaddik as a person through whom divine influence passes because there is nothing in him obstructing it.

His parables are the part that travelled. The father who steps back so that the child will walk toward him, and who is not withdrawing but drawing; the seal that leaves an impression which is the reverse of itself, and the world as such an impression. These are used across later Hasidic literature by writers who take them as common property. The teaching that reshaped a movement survives entirely at second hand, which is a fact about him worth stating alongside the doctrine.