The Baal Shem Tov

Israel ben Eliezer is known through hundreds of hagiographic tales, most collected in Shivhei ha-Besht fifty years after his death, and for a long time that was effectively all there was.

Moshe Rosman changed the position in the 1990s by going to the Polish archives, tax records, communal registers, the documents of the town of Miedzyboz, and finding the man in them. What emerges is a real and modestly documented figure: a baal shem, a master of the Name, which was a recognised occupation involving healing, amulet-writing and exorcism; supported by the community, which housed him rent-free, indicating recognised standing rather than the outsider status the later legend prefers. He was not the marginal wonder-worker of the stories, nor was he running a mass movement in his lifetime.

The teaching, transmitted through disciples since he too wrote almost nothing, turned on divine immanence: God fills all worlds and there is no place void of Him, which makes ordinary life, eating, working, ordinary speech, a possible site of worship rather than an interruption of it. Devekut, cleaving to God, ceased to be the preserve of the ascetic elite and became available in fervent prayer and in joy. Against a rabbinic culture that measured worth by Talmudic learning, this was a claim that the unlettered could reach God directly, and it is why the movement spread among ordinary Jews and why the established rabbinate opposed it so hard.

Hasidism as an organised movement is really the achievement of the generation after him, particularly Dov Ber of Mezeritch, and the retrospective construction of the Baal Shem Tov as its founder is part of that generation's work.

One document stands apart from the legends because the Besht wrote it, or dictated it, himself: the letter to his brother in law Gershon of Kutow, who had settled in the Land of Israel. Known as the Holy Epistle, it was printed in 1781 at the end of Jacob Joseph of Polnoye's Ben Porat Yosef, and manuscript copies preserve variant texts that scholars still compare. In it the Besht describes, matter of factly, an aliyat neshamah, an ascent of the soul, undertaken on Rosh Hashanah of 1746: rising through the heavenly palaces, seeing the souls of the living and the dead, and reaching at last the chamber of the Messiah. He asks the Messiah when he will come, and receives the answer that has organised Hasidic self understanding ever since: when your wellsprings burst forth to the outside, when what you have learned spreads abroad.

The letter also reports a second ascent in 1749 and practical teachings brought down from the first, above all concerning prayer: that in every letter of the words of prayer there are worlds, souls and divinity, and that one who binds himself to the letters ascends by them. Whatever one makes of the experience, the epistle fixes three things the tales cannot: that the historical Besht practised a technique of ecstatic ascent, that he understood his teaching as bound to a messianic timetable, and that the centre of that teaching was the interior of ordinary liturgical prayer.