The Besht

In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov [Shivhei ha-Besht]. The Earliest Collection of Legends About the Founder of Hasidism.
by Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz.
Indiana University Press. 352 pp. $17.50.

We know almost nothing about Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, whose teachings and preachments form the core of Hasidism, the movement that served to revivify the spirituality of Central and Eastern European Jewry two centuries ago and that has had a decisive influence on the piety and religious pedagogy of the Jewish people ever since. The life of Israel ben Eliezer is, in effect, the legend of the Baal Shem Tov. (Baal Shem Tov, commonly abbreviated to BeShT, is the title by which Rabbi Israel was called. Literally, “Master of the Good Name,” it was an honorific bestowed upon wonder-working rabbis of the time.) There are accepted dates of birth and death (1700-1760), conventional agreement upon his family origin, his orphaned youth, his years as a teacher of the young and secret prodigy, his self-revelation, his ministry in the Pale, and his ultimate settlement in the Ukrainian town of Medzhibozh; but beyond scant facts all is legend.

In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov—the Hebrew collection of tales about the Master, first published in Poland in 1814 and now made available, for the first time in its entirety, in English translation¹—underscores the complexity of coping with this remarkable religious personality. Clearly the Baal Shem Tov himself did not help matters. When people asked him direct questions, he responded by telling stories about himself; he narrated history in the guise of tales; he made his own biography into a basis of instruction; his habits, his manner of speech, and his behavior became the surety of his teaching. The living man, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, disappeared behind the emblem of his work.

Not alone a teacher or sage, an interpreter of the law, or a leader of his people, the Baal Shem Tov was also an adept of the secret names of God, the knowledge of which enabled him to perform wonders. He is thus clearly a figure out of theurgic Kabbalism. His great power, however much its immediacy might ultimately depend upon the quality of his works and its posterity upon the relevance of his exempla, was in the first instance founded upon the fact that he could put the mysteries of the Kabbalah to work for himself, the community at hand, and the whole of Israel. Of the 251 tales identified and separated by Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz, more than half deal with the working of wonders, whether in the form of straightforward prophecy and prevision, the location and exorcism of demons, the working of miraculous cures, the guaranteeing of offspring to the infertile, or the punishment of adulterers, Jew-haters, and other malefactors.

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The tales have a strength that derives from the power of the Baal Shem Tov’s persona. Indeed, few of the tales—I would except such examples as “Jonah” and “The Language of the Animals,” where the mystery is in the meaning and not in the narration of an act-have independent force. As the translators observe, the typical tale begins with the propounding of a conundrum or a difficulty (the petition of a barren woman, the imminence of a blood libel or other individual or collective calamity), followed by an appeal to a doctor or to a lesser sage who fails to resolve the matter, and finally a call to the Besht who does what the hour demands. The tale usually ends with the redactor, Rabbi Dov Ber, the son-in-law of Rabbi Alexander the Shohet (who had been the Besht’s scribe for eight years), emphasizing his own mystification or stressing the tale’s authenticity by recalling the unimpeachability of its source.

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The language of the tales is never as fluent and gracious as in the renditions of them offered in Martin Buber’s well-known The Legend of the Baal Shem (translated by Maurice Friedman, Harper, 1955). Nor are the tales, either in the original or in the uncompromising Ben-Amos-Mintz translation, striated with those meta-psychological presuppositions that Buber employed. One of the best known of the tales, for example, in which the fourteen-year-old Besht receives secret Kabbalistic manuscripts from the son of Rabbi Adam, is, in the original version, unencumbered with the elaborations and psychological supports found in Buber’s retelling. At the conclusion of the tale, Rabbi Adam’s son importunes the Besht to attempt to summon for a second time the Prince of Torah (the supernal master of the esoteric and exoteric Torah); but, failing to remain awake as the Besht had cautioned him, the rabbi’s son is slain by Satan. The original narrative concludes: “Before the morning light, Rabbi Adam’s son could not restrain himself and he dozed a little. When the Besht saw this he ran to him quickly and made a loud noise, but Rabbi Adam’s son suddenly fainted. They tried to awaken him but it was no use.

They buried him with great honor.” Buber’s version, in contrast to this dry account, is overblown: “Toward morning the rabbi lost the power of resistance, and he leaned his head against the wall. The boy sought to arouse him, but the rabbi’s already stiffening arm raised itself, and a stammer of black blasphemy broke forth from his mouth. Then the flame stabbed him in the heart, and he sank to the ground.”

Unless Buber was drawing here on other versions of the tale (a possible explanation, but we should bear in mind Gershom Scholem’s criticism of Buber for his indifference to the proper citation of sources²), what he has done is to condense the original narrative, conflate the two attempts to summon the Prince of Torah into one, merge the Prince of Fire who threatens the first attempt with the Satan of the second, and ascribe to the poor son of Rabbi Adam a demonic possession where none is indicated by the text. Buber’s version is surely lusher and more dramatic, but it is no longer a folk legend; it has been turned into a legend rendered by art, with all the invention and imagination appropriate to art.

The power of the original tale, however, resides in the fact that the causality of the universe, the intimacies of heaven and earth, the courts of God and the conventicles of men, are seen as self-evident, palpable, in no need of psychological interpretation. The tale of Rabbi Adam’s son and the dangerous manuscripts is a warning against hubris in the employment of the mysteries. It requires embellishment only if one does not believe in the Kabbalah, in the mysteries, in the gnosis of the adept, in the possibilities of theurgic manipulation. That may have been a problem for Buber; it may be a problem for us; but it certainly wasn’t a problem for the contemporaries of the Baal Shem Tov.

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It is no surprise, given the testimony of the legends, that the Baal Shem Tov left no works attributed to his authorship. His immediate disciples, Jacob Joseph of Polnoye, the Maggid of Mezritch, and others, collected his dicta and gave them the structure of a teaching, but even they did not regard the Besht’s pronouncements as a systematic, theoretical body of received truth. During the period from 1770 to 1815, when the great Zadikim set down their considerations on prayer, their commentaries on Scripture, doctrine was always admixed with tales of their own lives and stories about the life of their master, the Besht. Later, beginning in 1815, when In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov had become available, a whole literature of hagiography came into being: popular collections of tales, legends, fantasies, incorporating the wondrous deeds and sayings of the earlier generation of the founders of Hasidism.

Legend 159 of the present collection recounts that on a certain occasion a man wrote down the Besht’s teaching. One day the Besht saw a demon carrying a book and asked: “What is the book that you hold in your hand?” When informed that it was a book he himself had composed, the Besht summoned his followers and inquired who had committed his teaching to writing. The guilty author admitted his deed and brought the work to the Besht, who examined it and said: “There is not even a single word here that is mine.”

Something crucial to the understanding of the Baal Shem Tov is suggested by this story. The Besht was a master at reading signs and interpreting higher intentions, a worker of wonders, and, as Leontiev said of the Russian saints, so superior that there was nothing ordinary or simply “worthy” in his personality. The Baal Shem Tov was also frequently cruel and unyielding, arrogant and sarcastic, but only if judged by modern standards of decency and worthiness, qualities not called for by the age in which he lived. The stories in In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov make clear that the times were those of grinding poverty, depredation and blood libel, massacre by marauding Ukrainians and Tartars—not a period for conventional leadership. The Baal Shem Tov was not just a leader of his community, but—in the distinction developed by Max Scheler in “Model and Leader”—a charismatic figure who became the bearer of transhistorical meaning.

True leaders, including those of the charismatic variety, must be present, immediate, visible; their leadership, discriminated from that of both hereditary leaders (Queen Elizabeth II) and designated leaders (President Nixon), is charismatic because its power flows from the ontological interior. Moreover, charisma is nontransferable; it is desperately precarious, all historical. Who could be Napoleon after Napoleon (surely not Louis Napoleon), or the next Lenin (not Stalin), or another Che Guevara (neither Eldridge Cleaver nor Huey Newton)? The alternative to the fragility of historical charisma is the transformation of history into legend, the obscuring of hard fact, the suppression of the brute and rude, and the elevation of the fantastical. Freed from his times and context, the leader becomes a model, with transitivity, endurance, futurity.³

It is no wonder that in the posterity of the Baal Shem Tov there should be communities of Hasidim who regard Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, who died in 1809, as their active spiritual leader, or that Lubavitcher Hasidim still speak of the words and deeds of Shneur Zalman of Ladi as though he were their contemporary. For the follower, the master is never dead, his words are never set down and written, his life is never closed. He endures not as leader but as model, as the emblem and seal of life.

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¹ An indispensable companion work to the present volume is Legends of the Hasidim: An Introduction to Hasidic Culture & Oral Tradition in the New World (University of Chicago Press, 1968, $12.50), by Jerome R. Mintz, co-translator and co-editor of the collection under review.

² See “Martin Buber's Hasidism,” COMMENTARY, October 1961.

³ One must of course distinguish among different kinds of models: the Baal Shem Tov is surely not like Che Guevara. The former derived his power and authority from the fact that God was always with him, whereas the latter rested everything upon the working of the autonomous will. The former is an example of pneumatic leadership (like the prophets, like the Buddha, like Jesus of Nazareth, like Francis of Assisi); the latter was a charismatic leader who has become a revolutionary model.