Parables, Part 3: The Hasidic Tradition

Hasidic tales—terse, often cryptic, sometimes personal—reveal the nature of Hasidism, the mystical religious movement that seized Eastern European Jewry about the middle of the eighteenth century and remains very much alive today. In this course, we read tales told by the founder of Hasidism: Israel ben Eliezer aka the Baal Shem Tov, and other Hasidic rabbis, including Dov Baer of Mezritch (“The Great Maggid”), a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov; Shneur Zalman of Ladi (“The Rav”); and Yaakov Yitzhak of Lublin (“The Seer”). The tales we read teach the absolute transcendence of God, combined with what Martin Buber calls His “conditioned immanence”—a divine spark lives in everything and every being but each spark is enclosed by an isolating shell. Only man can liberate it and rejoin it with its origin.