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263 8 Rabbi Nahman, Romanticism, and Rationalism Samuel Abba Horodetzsky Even before the struggle of heart against intellect, of feeling against reason, had been aroused in German civilization at large—even before the great German romantics were conscious of a “longing for God” and pined for the mystical experience characteristic of medieval religion in their love of the “nameless” and in their “striving after the unattainable”—a similarly spiritual phenomenon had already arisen in the small Jewish community. Here the heart prevailed, as religious sensibility (Empfinden) gained the upper hand over sense-perception (Wahrnehmung). The need for religious mysticism and for the imagination connected with it had already made itself felt. It was from this environment that the Hasidism of the Besht (b. 1698) arose.1 As a result of the strict rules that the rabbis drew up for the observance of various laws, thereby overstepping the bounds of their effectiveness, each tender impulse of religious feeling and poetry was nipped in the bud. Monotonous ceremoniality ossified the sensibility of the heart, which was receptive to mysticism in Judaism. Thus, on the one hand the budding Hasidic movement was compelled to lead a terrible struggle against fossilized legalism; but on the other hand, it had to assume little more than a heartfelt and sensitive attitude with the people in order to elicit the longing for the alluring poetic mysteries of Judaism that had been slumbering secretly all along. Whereas religious romanticism in Germany met with only isolated advocates because the majority of people had no appreciation of it, Jewish romanticism—Hasidism—engendered a great upheaval among the Jewish masses with amazing speed. The Jewish spirit is, it would seem, predestined for emotional intuition (gefühlsmäßige Anschauen). Its spiritual disposition is to become absorbed in the highest truths and in the deepest profundities of its nature. Various happenstance events, of which a more thorough treatment is here unnecessary, caused an overburdening of the people with all sorts of difficult studies and many oppressive laws, which superseded intuition and emotional contemplation in the people during certain periods. Yet it only required a little instigation, a trifling effort, to break through the enormous fence of legal prescriptions and instantly meet with assent and participation from the majority of the people. The common opinion that “The Israelite religion has and knows no secrets, no mysteries”2 is an incorrect generalization made by those who deny Judaism any understanding of mysticism. This is true only of official Judaism, of the Judaism of laws, of the intellectual aristocracy (Geistesaristokratie) in Judaism. It is there that 264 Samuel Abba Horodetzsky the principle of “the subjugation of feeling to reason” reigns.3 The majority of the Jewish people decidedly prefer mystery, full of feeling. The prophets, Aggadah, Kabbala, and Hasidism testify to this fact. The majority of the Jewish people knows only this religion of intuitive sensibility, for which Arthur Schopenhauer’s expression “religion is the metaphysics of the people” is appropriate.4 Hasidism gratified the yearning expectations of the people and attracted them to the movement , so that they withdrew from Rabbanism and its type of study. The cradle of the movement was situated in the district of Vilna, including Ukraine and Podolia. It was there that the founder of Hasidism, the Besht, lived and had his following. He himself traveled the entire region and planted his teaching there, which shaped the fundamental principles of Hasidism. In other places his students then spread the teachings of the “Master.” Hasidism quickly gained a solid position in this area. After the deaths of the Besht, of his immediate “successor” Rabbi Ber of Mezeritch, and also of his prominent student Rabbi Jacob Joseph (the Apostle of Hasidism), Hasidism began to take on another form in the places just mentioned. This form was essentially different from that of the original founder. Emotion inordinately grew out of hand; Hasidism became excessively popular, the direct opposite of its original form. To be sure, feeling predominated in its original form as well, yet it had no shortage of the depth based in rational understanding (verständnisinnige Vertiefung) which increased its appeal and kept interest alive. A religious movement of this kind cannot possibly endure without the necessary extent of both depth and spiritual content, or else it should not endure at all. Hasidism, just like religious romanticism in Germany, aspired to a union of reason with feeling in which the former is always meant to help the...

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