A Heart Afire: stories and teachings of the early Hasidic masters

Foreword

xi Foreword IT WAS MANY YEARS AGO, SOMEWHERE ON THE now far side of my own forty years’ wandering that I first encountered Jiri Langer’s Nine Gates to the Chassidic Mysteries. That collection of stories, written by a Jewish seeker from Prague who had “gone East” and become a Belzer Hasid in the years before World War I, made a great impression on me. The warmth and love he felt for the Hasidic masters, their lives, teachings, and tales almost literally rose from every page and sought to draw me into its embrace. I felt that same loving warmth in reading A Heart Afire, the manuscript of my friend and teacher Reb Zalman that you now have before you in finished form. Reb Zalman has done for our generations what Langer did for his. He has retold the story of Hasidism in a way that welcomes us, his readers, and invites us in to become more than visitors in the courts of the Rebbes to whom he introduces us. He and his disciple, Netanel Miles-Yepez, retell the tales not only with grace and style but with an unfailing ear to the question, Who are our readers and what do they need to hear? Reb Zalman, publishing this book in the ninth decade of his life, has much to give his readers that young Langer did not. In addition to knowing the tales, he and Netanel offer a deep reading of key teachings of Hasidism, translating and offering unique commentary on them. Because both have taught and studied in programs of comparative religion for many years, they offer rich examples of comparison with sources and tales of many faiths, especially drawing on Sufi and Indian parallels to Hasidic insights. Perhaps most important, Reb Zalman draws deeply on his own well of life experience and wisdom. Careful readers of this volume will know that they have before them, in the form of Hasidic narrative, the distilled personal wisdom of a great master of human insight and living. The story with which Reb Zalman opens the book, that of his own journey to Mezhbizh (Miedzhybozh), is the key to the entire volume. Visiting the Ba’al Shem Tov’s grave, he prays that his Hasidim, those of the neo-Hasidic Jewish Renewal movement, might somehow be grafted onto the tree of the original master’s disciples, so that they, even living very different lives from contemporary Hasidim, might feel themselves authentic continuers of the early movement’s path. Throughout the book, Reb Zalman is engaged in that grafting. He is serving perfectly in the role he has cut out for himself over his long career: being a living bridge between the Hasidism of old, that to which he was exposed in the Belzer shtibl in Vienna and in the early Brooklyn years at Lubavitch, and the emerging new Hasidism of North America and Israel at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He thus retells the tales as he heard them from his Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn of Lubavitch, the living branch of Hasidism in his own early memory. His version of Hasidism is that which his Rebbe taught, including the full embrace of the famous Herson genizah and all the Lubavitch use of those “sources,” even though he tells us more than once that scholars question the authenticity of all these documents. He tells tales as his mentors in Lubavitch told them or as they were printed in the 1930’s Kovetz ha-Tamim, even though he well knows that this is not what is taught about Hasidism at the Hebrew University. That doesn’t matter to him; he is constructing (dare I say “reconstructing”?) a Hasidism that will be useful and accessible to future generations, flowing through him as a branch on the great dynastic tree. To the old materials he adds new or rewritten tales, especially some shaped by contemporary feminist readings, to make the flow work better. Yes, he knows that these were composed in Boulder rather than Berditchev. But that is just the point. Hasidic creativity did not end in 1815, 1880, or 1939. It continues today, even in the most unexpected places. Hasidic truth and wisdom coming from the most unexpected places. Raising up sparks even in shtetlakh called by such odd names as Boulder and Berkeley. Come to think of it, isn’t that what Hasidism is all about? Scholars might raise questions, but I have no doubt that the Ba’al Shem...