Nachman of Breslov

Nachman's central practice is astonishingly simple and is the thing his followers still do. Set aside an hour a day, go somewhere alone, preferably outdoors and preferably at night, and talk to God out loud, in your own language, about whatever is actually going on. Not liturgy, not Hebrew, not formulae. He called it hitbodedut, self-seclusion, and he taught that if nothing comes and the hour passes in silence or in complaining that nothing comes, the hour still counts.

The practice follows from his account of the spiritual life, which is unusually frank about failure. He taught that the experience of God's absence is not a lapse to be got past but the condition of the work. His treatment of the vacated space, the void that had to be cleared for a world to exist, concludes that certain questions arising from it have no answers available in this life, and that the correct response is not a better argument but a cry. Doubt, on that view, is terrain rather than error.

Out of it comes the saying his followers put on walls, that there is no such thing as despair at all. It is not optimism. It is an instruction issued to a man who described his own depressions in detail, and it sits beside his equally emphatic teaching that joy is a discipline to be manufactured deliberately, by dancing if necessary, when it does not arrive on its own.

In the last years of his life Nachman began telling stories, in Yiddish, and they are unlike anything else in the literature. A king's daughter is lost and a viceroy spends years searching for her and fails at the last moment, repeatedly. Seven beggars, each maimed in a way that turns out to be a concealed perfection, come to a wedding. A prince believes he is a turkey and lives under the table until a wise man joins him there. He refused to explain them, said that they were the garments of very high teachings, and told his disciple that people would fall asleep during the difficult discourses and stay awake for these.

That disciple, Nathan of Nemirov, is the reason any of it exists. He wrote down the discourses, the tales, the conversations and the biography, published them after Nachman's death at his own expense and considerable risk, and organised the community that carried them.

Nachman died of tuberculosis at thirty eight in 1810 and was buried at Uman. No successor was appointed, then or since, which is unique among the Hasidic courts: the Breslov community has had the same rebbe for more than two centuries and he has been dead for all of them. The annual gathering at his grave for Rosh Hashanah survived a century of Soviet prohibition and now draws tens of thousands of men to a Ukrainian town for two days a year.