My father paused for a moment and finished his tea. Then he looked at me and smiled. 'Are you tired yet, Reuven?'
'No, abba.'
'I am not sounding too much like a schoolteacher?'
'I don't mind it when you sound like a schoolteacher,' I said.
'It is not a lecture,' he said. 'I will not ask you questions afterward.'
'I want you to go on,' I said.
He nodded and smiled again. 'I want some more tea,' he said. 'But a little later. Now let me tell you about a man who was born in that century, and I think you will begin to have your answer.
'There are many legends about his birth, but I am not interested in telling you legends. He was born about the year 1700 in Poland. His name was Israel. His parents were very poor and not learned, and they both died while he was still a child. The people of his village cared for him and sent him to school. But he did not like school, and whenever he could he would sneak away and escape to the woods where he would walk under the trees, look at the flowers, sit by a brook, listen to the songs of the birds and to the noise of the wind in the leaves. As often as his teachers brought him back, so often did he run away to these woods, and after a while they gave up and left him alone. When he was thirteen, he became an assistant to a schoolmaster, but instead of helping the master teach the little children, he often took them also to the woods where they would sing or stand in silence, listening to the birds in the trees. When he grew older he became the beadle of the village synagogue. All day long he would sit around, listening to· the learned discussions that went on inside the synagogue walls, and at night, when everyone else slept, he would take the holy books in his hands and study them carefully. But it was not the Talmud that he studied, it was the Kabbalah, the books of Jewish mysticism. The rabbis had forbidden the study of the Kabbalah, and so Israel had to study in secret. He married, finally, but almost nothing is known about his wife. She died soon afterward, and Israel, a full-grown man now, became a schoolteacher. He had a wonderful way with children, and he achieved a great reputation as a teacher. He was a kind and gentle person, honest and unaffected, and often people would come to him and ask him to settle their quarrels. He came to be regarded as a wise and holy man, and one day the father of Rabbi Abraham Gershon of the city of Brody came to him and asked him to settle a business dispute he had with another man. He was so impressed with Israel that he offered to give him his daughter Hannah in marriage. Israel agreed, but asked that the betrothal document be kept a secret for the time being. And now, an interesting event occurred. The father of Hannah died, and Israel traveled to Brody, to the house of the great Rabbi Abraham Gershon, Hannah's brother, in order to claim his bride. He' was dressed in the clothes of a peasant, tom boots and coarse garments, and you can imagine how shocked the rabbi was when he saw the betrothal agreement in Israel's hands. His sister should marry a peasant? What shame and dishonor that would bring upon the family name! He tried to persuade his sister to reject her father's choice, but somehow Hannah saw something in Israel which the good rabbi of Brody did not, and she refused. After their marriage, Rabbi Abraham Gershon tried to improve his brother-in-law's education. He began by teaching him Talmud, but Israel was a failure at that, too. Finally, the rabbi gave up and ordered his sister and brother-in-law to leave Brody so as not to dishonor his good name, and they left.'
'And now, Reuven, you will begin to have the answer to your question. I am sorry I am taking so long.'
'Please go on, abba.'
'All right, Israel and his wife left Brody and settled in the Carpathian Mountains in a village near Brody. They were very poor, but very happy. Israel earned a living by selling the lime which they dug in the mountains. The Carpathian Mountains are beautiful, and Israel built a little house and spent many days there alone, praying, dreaming, and singing to the great hills. Very often he would remain alone throughout the entire week, and return to his wife Hannah only for Shabbat. She must have suffered terribly because of their poverty, but she believed in him and was very devoted.'
'Reuven, it was in these mountains that Israel gave birth to Hasidism. He was there many years, thinking, learning from peasant women how to heal sickness with grasses and herbs, to write amulets, to drive out evil spirits. The people of the village loved him, and soon his reputation as a holy man began to spread throughout all of Poland. Legends began to grow about him. He was not yet forty, and already there were legends about him. You can imagine what kind of person he must have been.
'His brother-in-law, Rabbi Abraham Gershon, finally regretted his cruelty and asked Israel and Hannah to return to Brody. He acquired a tavern for them to operate, but it was Hannah who really managed it while Israel wandered about in the woods and meadows outside of Brody, meditating. Finally, he began to travel, and he became a Ba'al Shem. He was kind and saintly and godly, and he seemed to want to help people not for the money they paid him but for the love he had for them. And so they came to call him the Ba'al Shem Tov – the Kind or Good Master of the Name. He mingled with the people and talked to them' about God and His Torah in plain, simple language that they could easily understand. He taught them that the purpose of man is to make his life holy – every aspect of his life: eating, drinking, praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly. Evil is like a hard shell. Within this shell is the spark of God, is goodness. How do we penetrate the shell? By sincere and honest prayer, by being happy, and by loving all people. The Ba'al Shem Tov – his followers later shortened his name and called him the Besht – believed that no man is so sinful that he cannot be purified by love and understanding. He also believed – and here is where he brought down upon himself the rage of the learned rabbis – that the study of Talmud was not very important, that there need not be fixed times for prayers, that God could be worshipped through a sincere heart, through joy and singing and dancing. In other words, Reuven, he opposed any form of mechanical religion. There was nothing new in what he taught. You will find it all in the Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah. But he gave it a special emphasis and taught it at a key time to people who were hungry for this kind of teaching. And these people listened and loved him.
Many great rabbis came to mock him and went away converted to his way of thinking. When he died, his followers opened their own synagogues. Before the end of that century, about half of eastern European Jewry consisted of Hasidim, as his followers were called, pious ones. So great was the need of the masses for a new way to approach God.'
'There was another man born in that century, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, a great Talmudist, a genius, and a strong opponent of Hasidism. But even his opposition could not stop Hasidism from growing. It flourished and became a great movement in Jewish life. For a long time there was terrible bitterness between the Mitnagdim, the opponents of Hasidism, and the followers of the Besht. For example, if the son of a Hasid married the daughter of a Mitnaged, both fathers would say Kaddish after their children, considering them to be dead and buried. So great was the bitterness.'
'The Hasidim had great leaders – tzaddikim, they were called, righteous ones. Each Hasidic community had its own tzaddik, and his people would go to him with all their problems, and he would give them advice. They followed these leaders blindly. The Hasidim believed that the tzaddik was a superhuman link between themselves and God. Every act of his and every word he spoke was holy. Even the food he touched became holy. For example, they would grab the food scraps he left on his plate and eat them, because the food had become holy through his touch, and they wanted some of this holiness inside themselves. For a while, the tzaddikim were kind and gentle souls, like the Besht himself. But in the next century the movement began to degenerate. Many of the positions of tzaddik became inherited posts, going automatically from father to son, even if the son was not a great leader. Many tzaddikim lived like Oriental monarchs. Some of them were out-and-out frauds, and they exploited their people terribly. Others were very sincere, and a few were even great scholars of the Talmud. In some Hasidic sects, the study of the Talmud became as important as it had been before the time of the Besht. Secular literature was forbidden, and the Hasidim lived shut off from the rest of the world. Anything that was not Jewish and Hasidic was forbidden. Their lives became frozen.