Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism

Preface to the English-language Edition

Preface to the English-language Edition In every respect a historical study, Untold Tales of the Hasidim also seeks to tell a compelling tale. True, this book has all the trappings of critical academic writing, including notes and a detailed bibliography, yet it also possesses features of mystery, drama, and tragedy, whose spellbinding powers I hope can be glimpsed among the lines, words, and letters, placing matters in a new and surprising light. While writing this book, I found myself on more than one occasion overstepping the bounds of the circumscribed field of the historian who deciphers papers and documents, reconstructs events from a variety of sources, and interprets and evaluates facts. Alongside moving experiences—especially while tracing the tragic fate of Moshe, Shneur Zalman of Lyady’s youngest son, or reading the heartfelt confession of Rabbi Yitshak Nahum Twersky— I found myself swept into a craft whose affinity to that of the historian I had never before considered: detective work. I saw myself as a sleuth who illumines dark corners with his flashlight, looks for the faded hand- and footprints of forgotten figures, seeks treasures hidden from every other eye and ear, pokes around in smoking ruins and destroyed cabins, and tries to fit tiny mosaic stones into the rough outline and fine tracery of the picture of the past. As Yaacov Shavit put it: “The detective seeks to prove—after the requisite winnowing—that no fact is fortuitous and that every fact has ‘meaning’ within a given system. Both detective and historian seek to portray a chain of events over a given time span in a specific location and to bestow an explanation and ‘meaning’ on these events . . . The detective—like the historian—believes that it is possible to describe and restore the past ‘as it really was.’”1 In setting out to assume the detective’s mantle, the historian proceeds without weapons or search warrants, armed only with self-assurance and the optimistic belief that it is possible to reconstruct what others have tried to obscure . Confident in his ability to analyze and reconstruct, and in the overt and covert knowledge he has amassed on the topic of his study, he utters a prayer that he will neither fail nor lead others astray. Although admittedly xii Preface demanding, the task of the historian-detective is one of the most satisfying ones in the realm of historical study. The seven chapters of this book treat the hidden and the forgotten—or, perhaps more precisely, what has been concealed or deliberately suppressed. They describe anomalous individuals and dramatic episodes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were pushed to the sidelines of the glorious history of Hasidism. Ignored by the spokesmen and writers of this large movement, they were consigned to some hidden corner. All because of the discomfort they aroused, and in line with the popular aphorism: “Don’t air your dirty laundry in public.” Testimony of the extent to which concealment and silencing made entire chapters vanish from the history of Hasidism comes from early-twentiethcentury remarks by Rabbi Yehuda Leib Zlotnik (Avida) regarding the terrible Sabbath desecration attributed to Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotsk (he supposedly doused the candles, and some say he made heretical pronouncements at the same time): “Yet something occurred in Kotsk of which nary a soul dares speak. Everyone knows there is some truth to this matter, yet the heart does not divulge it to the mouth. I wonder, if anyone living today knows what actually occurred, and when the remaining hasidim from the past generation come to the Kotsk episode, they look heavenward, fearfully stutter ‘hmm . . . hmm . . . ,’ and fall silent.”2 But no one can keep the dirty laundry hidden forever. It has a habit of fermenting, bubbling over, and loudly bursting forth; any attempt to clap a lid on the boiling kettle is doomed to failure. Self-appointed watchmen have restrained and tried to suppress the embarrassing truth or “knowledge”—no matter what its nature or interpretation—but to no avail. And when concealment failed and an unpleasant truth burst forth to ostensibly threaten the faithful, a variety of tactics were employed in the Sisyphean struggle over “memory”: disregard or denial, erasure and blurring, twisting and rewriting, alternative interpretations, and even the creation of a new fictional story with the polemical power to undermine the dangerous “false truth” and replace it with a different, acceptable, holy truth. Originally published in Hebrew in 2006 by the Zalman...