Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

Introduction

Acknowledgments As this work reaches completion, I am overcome by a sense ofgratitude to the many whose teaching, counsel, criticism, and patience have helped to make it possible. While work on this book from the outset was a completely individual and highly personal endeavor, and responsibility for its contents is thus entirely my own, there are a great many influences to be traced here. A few inadequate words of thanks are in order. An earlier version of the present study, here much revised, was a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Professor Alexander Altmann . Dr. Altmann has been my teacher for many years, and I am grateful to him for much more than his careful reading of this manuscript and his many suggestions. Another important teacher whose influence is, I hope, to be felt in this work, though he died just as the writing of it was beginning, is the late Abraham Joshua Heschel. In his death as in his life he remains a source of inspiration to me. My serious study of Nahman began in connection with a course on Bratslav which I taught at the Havurat Shalom Community Seminary in 1971/72. The students in that course taught me a great deal about how to read the Bratslav texts, indeed about how to read a text altogether. Each of them contributed his or her unique understanding, and all are deserving of thanks: Jonathan Chipman, Larry Fine, Janet Wolfe, Gershon Hundert , Joel Rosenberg, and David Roskies. Various other students, including Danny Matt, Jeffery Dekro, and the participants in a seminar on Nahman's Tales which I taught with Zalman Schachter in the spring of 1977, have further contributed to my understanding. Having turned to both teachers and students, there remain colleagues and friends. Zalman Schachter is one with whom I have had many a fruitful argument over the meaning of a passage in Nahman's writings; I cherish the sharing of those arguments. Everett Gendler has been friend, teacher, and source of encouragement for many years now. His help in the publication ofthis volume is deeply appreciated. Van Harvey, though viii Acknowledgements far removed from the subject matter of this work, was a colleague from whom I learned much at the time I was writing on Nahman; his everquestioning presence is also to be felt here. I am grateful to Rivka Horwitz, Max Ticktin, and Joseph and Gail Reimer for having read parts of the manuscript and for their many helpful suggestions. For a very different sort of learning I am indebted to Tom Gruner, Mark Goldenthal, and several others. Wherever they are, my thanks reach out to them. Though I know he would be uncomfortable to see his name in this context, I cannot help but express my appreciation to Rabbi Gedaliah Koenig, one ofthe leaders ofthe Bratslav community inJerusalem, for the kindness and warmth he showed me on a visit there. I can only pray that he somehowunderstand thatI, too, ina way so different from his, stand in close relation to his master. My wife, Kathy, has been a constant source of support and understanding throughout the years in which this book was written. Without her help and patience its accomplishment would have been unthinkable. In love and gratitude I dedicate this study to her. PHILADELPHIA 2l;IoI ha-Mo'ed Sukkot, 5738 September 30, 1977 Tormented Master Before I became close to our master, of blessed memory, I could not picture in my mind how it was that Moses our Teacher was a human being like others. But once I had become close to our master and had seen how human he remained despite his greatness, I was able to understand how it was that Moses, too, was still a human being. RABBI NATHAN of Nemirov In the case of great young men ... rods which measure consistency, inner balance, or proficiency simply do not fit the relevant dimensions. On the contrary, a case could be made for the necessity of extraordinary conflicts, at times both felt and judged to be desperate. For if some youths did not feel estranged from the compromise patterns into which their societies have settled down, if some did not force themselves almost against their own wills to insist, at the price of isolation, on finding an original way of meeting our existential problems, societies would lose an essential avenue to rejuvenation and to that rebellious expansion of human consciousness...