Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism

By Ariel Evan Mayse

The compelling vision of religious life and practice found in Hasidic sources has made it the most enduring and successful Jewish movement of spiritual renewal of all time. In this book, Ariel Evan Mayse grapples with one of Hasidism's most vexing questions: how did a religious movement known for its radical views about immanence, revelation, and the imperative to serve God with joy simultaneously produce strict adherence to the structures and obligations of Jewish law? Exploring the movement from its emergence in the mid-1700s until 1815, Mayse argues that the exceptionality of Hasidism lies not in whether its leaders broke or upheld rabbinic norms, but in the movement's vivid attempt to rethink the purpose of Jewish ritual and practice. Rather than focusing on the commandments as law, he turns to the methods and vocabulary of ritual studies as a more productive way to reckon with the contradictions and tensions of this religious movement as well as its remarkable intellectual vitality.

Mayse examines the full range of Hasidic texts from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from homilies and theological treatises to hagiography, letters, and legal writings, reading them together with contemporary theories of ritual. Arguing against the notion that spiritual integrity requires unshackling oneself from tradition, Laws of the Spirit is a sweeping attempt to rethink the meaning and significance of religious practice in early Hasidism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: May 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781503638983

Book preview

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

Edited by David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

LAWS OF THE SPIRIT

Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism

ARIEL EVAN MAYSE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by Ariel Evan Mayse. All rights reserved.

Two Elements by Marcia Falk, from The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems of Zelda (Hebrew Union College Press, Cincinnati, 2004). Copyright @ 2004 by Marcia Lee Falk. Used by permission of the translator.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mayse, Ariel Evan, author.

Title: Laws of the spirit : ritual, mysticism, and the commandments in early Hasidism / Ariel Evan Mayse.

Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2024. | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023034600 (print) | LCCN 2023034601 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503638273 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503638983 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Hasidism—History—18th century. | Judaism—Liturgy—History. | Mysticism—Judaism—History. | Commandments (Judaism) | Jewish way of life. | Jewish law.

Classification: LCC BM198.3 .M395 2024 (print) | LCC BM198.3 (ebook) | DDC 296.8/3320909033—dc23/eng/20230914

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034600

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034601

Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Cover painting: August Malmström, Dancing Fairies, 1866

For David Biale,

my friend, colleague, and teacher.

This book is a testament to your generosity, wisdom, and guidance

across the past twenty years.

Two Elements

The flame says to the cypress:

"When I see how calm,

how full of pride you are,

something inside me goes wild—

How can one live this awesome life

without a touch of madness,

of spirit,

of imagination,

of freedom,

with only a grim, ancient pride?

If I could, I would burn down

the establishment

that we call the seasons,

along with your cursed dependence

on earth and air and sun,

on rain and dew."

The cypress does not answer.

He knows there is madness in him,

and freedom,

and imagination,

and spirit.

But the flame will not understand,

the flame will not believe.

—ZELDA SCHNEURSON MISHKOVSKY, translated by Marcia Falk

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Style Guide

Introduction

1. Thinking Matters: Mind, Body, Action

2. Wrestling with God’s Word: Text, Study, Practice

3. Dwelling with Connection: Ritual, Commandment, and the Everyday

4. God-Making: Connectivity and Revelation

5. Thine Own Self: Individual, Community, Leadership

6. The Ever-Changing Path: Renewal and Diversity

7. Once and Future Commandments: The Torah Before Sinai and the End of the Mitsvot

Conclusion: Mysticism, Orthodoxy, and Renewal

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

THIS BOOK GRAPPLES WITH QUESTIONS that have preoccupied me for decades. Can vital religious devotion co-exist alongside commandment and obligation? How do religious people and communities find new meaning in inherited practices or texts that do not ignite the heart? How does ritual change in the wake of intellectual, social, and economic shifts? Can individuals use repetitive action to construct lives of meaning and to build their intellectual, spiritual, and physical worlds? How does religious practice lead to an experience of God’s presence? In wrestling with these questions, I have turned to the literatures of Hasidism, the most successful and long-lived movement of Jewish mystical renewal.

The contemporary imagination defines Hasidism by features that are strikingly incongruous with modern, cosmopolitan life: pious men in long black cloaks, speaking Yiddish and adorned with sidelocks and furry hats; modestly clad women who cover their hair and dress in antiquated fashions. Hasidism is often equated with scrupulous observance of the commandments and with the wholesale rejection of change in matters of language, dress, and religious law (called halakhah). Associated with the politically engaged forms of ultra-Orthodoxy, Hasidism is sometimes described as emblematic of all that is wrong with and backwards in religion—and mystical religion in particular.

Others approach Hasidism with a sense of romantic nostalgia, viewing it as the living embodiment of religious authenticity and, though the Hasidim are now a highly urban religious community, as a phenomenon rooted in the simple pastoral life of eastern Europe. Many see in its teachings a spontaneous, vibrant spirituality that privileges connection with God and joy above allegiance to Jewish law. Hasidism is driven by an anarchic impulse, such readers and practitioners suggest, assuming that mystical interiority will always push against the strictures of normative religion and external rituals.

Both extremes miss the complexity of Hasidism and its religious vision—a subtle and textured devotional path that is particularly evident in its depictions of ritual and action. These sources are by no means monochromatic, and in what follows I have tried to honor, and interrogate, the unique voices and real variations between the different early Hasidic figures and texts. While I appreciate the consistency of Hasidic teachings on the commandments, they have been invited to speak with their full multivocality, and I have sought to avoid the pitfall of flattening these distinctions by collapsing them into a single argument. My analysis, rather, highlights the key tensions for this revivalist and spiritual social movement that remains bound to a set of authoritative patterns of life and action.

Though it demands some attention to what is unspoken and between the lines, the reader will find that I, too, argue that the teachings of Hasidism have an important message for our highly digitized, disembodied, and increasingly fragmented world. These sources address the work of ritual in connecting mind, spirit, and body, describing how personal religious meaning is forged through embodied engagement with the material. Hasidic sermons reveal a devotional sensibility in which simultaneous commitment to tradition and innovation—and to communal action and the individual religious quest—can flourish within a single heart.

This book’s earlier working title was The Shores of Devotion. That is because shores are sites of indeterminacy, home to what the poet Mary Barnard calls the slipping texture of the sand. The taxonomy of religious phenomena is a kind of intellectual map-making, an effort that uses the imposition of names, forms, and comparisons to delineate and designate.¹ But the texts we meet rarely fit squarely into categories inherited from the study of religion, and, if we listen, they push us to reconsider both the aptitude of our heuristic tools and our foundational assumptions. The Hawaiian scholar and activist Isaiah Helekunihi Walker explores the importance of the ka poʻina nalu, the shorebreak or surf zone, as a liminal space in which hierarchies topple, identities reconverge, communities form, and multiple commitments co-exist. Hasidic teachings on ritual, I believe, offer a window into similar domain of fluidity and transformation, a kingdom of action in which one holds fast to tradition by remaking it in the present.

The commandments provide their own syntax and grammar to be embellished and reinterpreted by practitioners; this framework or life-pattern functions much like the score of a drama or theatrical production. Jerzy Grotowski, the noted Polish director and theorist, often compared the script to a riverbed, a channel of organizing steps into which impulses and inspiration can be directed. The text is fixed, as are the riverbanks, but the space is always unforeseeable, the river you enter is always new. . . . And that is the score. Then the actor is not condemned to think constantly ‘What should I do?’ He is freer, because he did not give up organization.² The rain of museful creativity, in other words, ought to be directed into a canal of scripted steps whose banks are both supple and secure. Hasidic sermons, I believe, describe the commandments as providing a similar catchment system for spiritual inspiration.

The lion’s share of this book was written during a worldwide pandemic, as our world tottered and as we were forced to embrace a disembodied, digital civilization that shattered our connection to lived communities and to the non-human world around us. In light of the collapse of those banisters of modernity—the stable climate and a relatively secure geopolitical order—the present book argues that Hasidism offers a powerful answer to Elaine Pagels’s repercussive question: Why religion? What follows is an attempt to share their response with a broader audience of scholars, and with anyone open to the notion that mystically inflected voices from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might have something to say to us as we, inhabitants of this fraught and complicated twenty-first century, go about making sense of our world and rebuilding it through the craft of ritual.

Acknowledgments

THE TERM MONOGRAPH IS, in many respects, a grievous misnomer. Books gather the insights of scores of individuals, and, as one colleague recently suggested, authors are charged with making constellations out of stars. We are cartographers of ideas, charting our own path within the teeming ocean of texts, theories, and questions while navigating the wisdom that has been shared with us by so many others. The present book is suffused with the knowledge and understanding I received from students, colleagues, friends, and family. What follows is an attempt to convey my thanks, proceeding in approximate alphabetical order, with the caveat that further expressions of gratitude and appreciation will be forthcoming.

This book has benefited enormously from two workshops sponsored by the Stanford Department of Religious Studies. The first brought together graduate students from Stanford—and beyond—to review the work in progress. This community of young scholars, whose far-ranging knowledge and expertise represent the cutting edge of their respective fields, offered critical feedback and helped to open the book to new readerships. My heartfelt gratitude extends to Ralph H. Craig III, Nathan Fisher, Hannah Frakes, Chanhee Her, Julia Hirsch, Ariel Horowitz, Rafa Kern, Oriane Lavole, David Maayan, David Monteserin Narayana, Aaron Schimmel, Avinoam Stillman, and Kat Whatley. Additional thanks to Sam Page and Carmel Charka, lively participants in a graduate seminar on Hasidism and ritual, and to my tireless and brilliant research assistant and student Avraham Oriah Kelman, who took part in that seminar and also served as the book’s first and most sustained reader. Kelman’s wisdom has enriched everything between these bindings, from the quotidian to the cosmic, and I am grateful for his limitless attention and enthusiasm.

A second workshop invited feedback from faculty colleagues, whose criticism reshaped the manuscript and revealed the potential hidden within the stone of earlier drafts. I am grateful to David Biale, Don Seeman, and Leore-Sachs-Shmueli for serving as outside readers, and to my Stanford colleagues Paul Harrison, John Kieschnick, Tanya M. Luhrmann, Brent Sockness, and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. Steve Zipperstein has been an extraordinarily strong advocate and abiding supporter of my work, offering gentle critique alongside countless sage suggestions. In addition, I am grateful for the wisdom of departmental colleagues Anna Bigelow, Michael Penn, and Lee Yearley, and to my fellow travelers at the Stanford Taube Center for Jewish Studies, including Rowan Dorin, Amir Eshel, Charlotte Fonrobert, Shaina Hammerman, Eitan Kensky, Vered Karti Shemtov, Ari Y. Kelman, Orit Malka, Aron Rodrigue, and Gabriella Safran. This book would have been impossible without their contributions at every stage.

It was the work of Arthur Green, always my teacher and forever my friend, that drew me to the field of Hasidism. Over the past two decades, he has continued to challenge, encourage, and stretch me, reading and rereading versions of this work (and so many others) countless times and pushing me to rethink my arguments and assumptions. I look forward to many more years of working, writing, and thinking together.

My thinking on the subjects of Hasidism, law, and mysticism has, over the years, been sharpened by the contributions of colleagues across several continents: Deena Aranoff, Mira Balberg, Clémence Boulouque, Alan Brill, Benjamin Brown, Iris Brown, Jonathan Canel, Levi Cooper, Glenn Dynner, Muhammad U. Faruque, Eitan Fishbane, Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Uriel Gellman, Roee Goldschmidt, Roee Horen, Maoz Kahana, Moshe Idel, Hartley Lachter, Ebn Leader, Menachem Lorberbaum, Shaul Magid, Alexandra Mandelbaum, Ron Margolin, Zvi Mark, Omer Michaelis, Yehudah Mirsky, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Nehemia Polen, Daniel Reiser, Biti Roi, Or N. Rose, Eli Rubin, Eli Sacks, Gadi Sagiv, Berel Septimus, Sam Shonkoff, Elli Stern, Ora Wiskind, Marcin Wodziński, and Elliot R. Wolfson. I continue to mourn the loss of two cherished colleagues: Ada Rapoport-Albert, whose foundational work has shaped my understanding of early Hasidism; and Tsippi Kauffman, whose wisdom, sophistication, and sensitivity have left a significant mark on all elements of this book. May their memories be a blessing.

As this book moved toward publication, Michael Fishbane and Jonathan Garb provided extensive critical feedback at crucial junctures; I am deeply grateful for their insight and wisdom. The Stanford University Press series editors David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein were infinitely patient, encouraging, and supportive. Margo Irvin, my acquisitions editor, has been the model of efficient and thoughtful guidance, seeing this project through every hurdle with aplomb and good cheer. Jennifer Gordon, the attentive and talented copyeditor for the press, saved my writing from innumerable inconsistencies and infelicities.

Some ideas are forged in departments, others in private conversations or public conferences and gatherings. But wisdom emerges from the network of family. Boundless gratitude to my mother Ann Mayse and stepfather Robert Bernstein, and to my in-laws Nehemia Polen and Lauri Wolff. Their incredible support, warmth, and generosity of spirit inform and animate all that I do. My children Ezra, Nahum, and Daniel are an inspiration to behold. You are models of courage, curiosity, and connectivity. The spirit of inquiry that guides your lives is one that I have sought to emulate in academic work. And, of course, my beloved Adina. I am forever inspired by your work empowering artists and educators to trust the work of their hands. You encourage us to learn through action and to find personal meaning through presence in our deeds. In many respects, this book is but a footnote to your magnificent project of cultural and spiritual renewal.

Style Guide

CITATIONS FROM THE HEBREW BIBLE are based on the New Jewish Publication Society 1999 translation, often adapted to reflect the Hasidic understanding of the verse. The spelling of Hasidic figures and place names generally accords with The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, edited by Gershon D. Hundert (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).

Introduction

THE EXTENSIVE SCHOLARSHIP ON HASIDISM has yet to solve a great puzzle: how did a religious movement known to be radical in its views about God, revelation, and personal religiosity simultaneously produce commitment to the structures and obligations of Jewish law? One answer to this question emerges from Hasidic teachings on the commandments, and on the relationship between interiority and embodied religious practice more broadly. These sermons and homilies, which represent an incredible fan of spiritual colors and possibilities, are filled with rapturous portrayals of inner awakening and arousal. With exceptional consistency, however, Hasidic texts link these evocative states to physical action. Rather than assuming that adherence to religious law is incompatible with vital spirituality, I argue that nomos, eros, and mystical piety have merged in Hasidism to produce a daring and highly original theory of the commandments and their significance. The novum of Hasidism is visible not in whether its leaders broke or upheld rabbinic norms, but in the movement’s vivid reimagining of the purpose of religious practice.

Judaism is often portrayed as a law-centered tradition. Hasidic sermons on the commandments are concerned with issues of emotion, embodiment, experience, and with the capacity of these actions to make God’s presence real. These dimensions of interior, intellectual, and physical life are equally incomprehensible to lawyers and legal historians. For that reason, the methods and vocabulary of ritual studies are better suited to shedding light on the contradictions and tensions of this religious movement as well as its remarkable intellectual vitality. The lens of ritual opens the vast array of Hasidic teachings by bringing its nuances, emphases, and tensions to the surface in analytical terms that are recognizable across academic disciplines. These theories challenge us to think about Hasidic teachings in new ways, but at the same time, these mystical sources offer a rich and multivalent array of approaches to ritual that do not conform to common scholarly models. Rather than hewing the Hasidic material to fit conventional categories, I begin with the inductive, developing an internal taxonomy and phenomenology of ritual that does not fall into the normal fissures ordinarily found in the study of religion.

The present book explores the full range of Hasidic texts from the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, from homilies and theological treatises to hagiography, letters, and legal writings. Scholars often describe this period as the most virile stage of Hasidism, a time of explosive creativity said to have declined into habituation and institutionalization by 1815.¹ I am revising the common thesis presenting an irresolvable tension between Jewish norms and spiritual discovery, as with the polarities of mind and body, and rote and innovation. Hasidic sources from this time demonstrate the opposite: law and spirit, nomos and eros, mind and body, tradition and innovation, these are portrayed as co-constructive rather than mutually exclusive.² I find the English word devotion, rooted in Latin terms for acts of supererogatory piety, self-sacrifice, and consecration, as well as deep religious emotion, to be particularly useful for describing the fusion of interiority and ritual action that characterizes Hasidic religiosity.

The domain of ritual is deeply personal, but such actions are also collective, common, and shared between bodies.³ Borne aloft by a new type of charismatic leader, Hasidism offered its adherents a sense of community in which to accomplish the world-building work of ritual.⁴ As time wore on, these gatherings and fellowships both local and trans-geographic came to represent an alternative to the transcendental homelessness of modern individualism.⁵ Rather than focusing on otherworldly escape or communion with God at the expense of material engagement, accusations that are often levied against mysticism as a whole, Hasidic teachings on ritual reveal a sustained commitment to this-worldly action.⁶ They describe the commandments as connecting body and spirit, uniting communities and cultivating an awareness of God’s immanence and expressing that knowledge through acts of love, responsibility, and obligation.

I also argue that Hasidism must be approached as a religious movement that shaped, and was shaped by, Jewish modernity.⁷ Research of this period often ignores Hasidism, perhaps because its endurance rebukes the attempt to synonymize modernity with secularism, humanism, liberalism, or disenchantment.⁸ More recent scholarship adds that Hasidism’s form of modernity was defensive or reactionary, locked in a dialectical struggle with its secular opponents, but I aim to trace a more nuanced portrait of Hasidism as a modern religious phenomenon as manifest in its teachings on the commandments.⁹ Approaching modernity as a constellation of circumstances that restructured all aspects of European life and thought, in diverse and often contradictory ways,¹⁰ I argue that Hasidism offered a compelling response to these conditions through its combination of intense spiritual religiosity—both personal and communal—and commitment to traditional Jewish norms and rituals.¹¹

Examining Hasidic teachings on the commandments reminds us that this revival movement was one of several attempts to reinterpret the meaning of these rituals in the eighteenth century.¹² That period was, more broadly, an era of the personalization of religion and the privileging of affective pietism and experience over rationalism. It was also a time in which philosophers fiercely debated the ideas of agency, sincerity, self-construction, and autonomy and how all of them might—or might not—be compatible with traditional religious praxis. Rather than isolating Hasidism within the silo of Jewish intellectual history, situating these mystical teachings within a broader historiographical lens reveals that the contested themes central to European modernity rest at the heart of Hasidic teachings as well.¹³

LAW AND SPIRIT

The commandments of classical Judaism form the armature of a complete modus vivendi. These precepts and prohibitions, called mitsvot (sing. mitsvah), are classically enumerated as 613 obligations said to have been revealed in the written Torah and elaborated in the oral Torah.¹⁴ These mitsvot rest at the center of a broad web of duties collectively described as halakhah (pl. halakhot), often translated as Jewish law, a dense system of practice that has come to orchestrate nearly every aspect of human life.¹⁵ These dictates are further complemented by both communal and personal customs (pl. minhagim; sing. minhag), local practices that often enjoy authority equal to—or greater than—codified or abstract religious statutes.¹⁶ The evolving discourse of halakhah has many normative shades, taking shape as dialogue across time and across geography, from ancient Palestine to every place that Jews have lived.¹⁷

But Jewish religious life throughout the generations has been defined by more than adherence to halakhah. The Hebrew Bible links obligation to God’s covenant and to the sacred narratives of Jewish history, and in classical rabbinic literature the statutes of halakhah came to be complemented—and challenged—by a wide and variegated body of theological doctrine, narrative, and exegetical teachings known as aggadah.¹⁸ Medieval philosophers and mystics continued this work, in part by developing an extensive network of concepts and values to explain the reasons or rationales of the commandments (called ta‘amei ha-mitsvot). For such thinkers the domain of ritual, claimed Charles Mopsik, was an extraordinary laboratory of ideas.¹⁹ The many Jewish interpretations of the meaning and significance of the mitsvot reflect the authors’ intellectual commitments: some examined the ethical importance of the commandments, while others focused on their social implications, and still others looked for experiential or theological justifications for the mitsvot.²⁰

These efforts by the practitioners of ritual represent an important thrust within Jewish literature, a vein of thinking in which obligation is seen as natural expression of love and connection.²¹ Both halakhah and aggadah have shaped classical Jewish religious culture, as compliance to the norms of Jewish practice was generally encouraged through motivation, inspiration, and explanation rather than through forceful coercion. The aims of religious life were to be attained not in spite of the mitsvot, but precisely through these physical acts of communal and personal devotion. Such impulses do not fit within a dialectical opposition between law and spirit. That frame, rooted in the writings of Paul and the attempt to free early Christian believers from adherence to Mosaic legislation, is particularly ill suited for examining Jewish mystical sources.²²

The idea of a perennial tension between religious practice and spiritual uplift, however, has enjoyed a long afterlife in Christian polemics against Judaism. It also provided grist for medieval and early modern Christian Hebraists, and from there it contributed to the academic study of religion and of Judaism—and Jewish mysticism—in particular.²³ Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) disagreed on almost every issue, yet they agreed in portraying Hasidism as a type of spirituality whose theological audacity is locked in perpetual conflict with the mandates and obligations of Jewish practice.²⁴ The miraculous thing about it all, claimed Scholem, is the fact that Hasidism did not conflict much more sharply with orthodox Judaism than it did.²⁵ Buber portrayed Hasidism as an example of the vital and spontaneous religiosity that conflicts with the institutionalized religion of laws and statutes in rabbinic Judaism.²⁶ While Buber and Scholem noted that Hasidic leaders did not, in practice, break with the mandates of halakhah, they depicted Hasidism as an eruption of the anarchic spiritual impulse that pushes against external obligation.

Buber’s and Scholem’s shared approach to reading Hasidic sources against the grain—a hermeneutic of transgression—has its own intellectual genealogy. It reflects previous interpretations of Hasidism as well as broader intellectual trends in the philosophical circles of Weimer Germany and Mandate Palestine, and is related to the understanding of mysticism as inherently anarchic developed by scholars and theologians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁷ Their historiography of Hasidism may also have been subtly influenced by the accusations of its eighteenth-century opponents, who lambasted the Hasidim for departing from communal norms and depicted them as privileging spiritual experience over adherence to the detailed mandates of halakhah.²⁸ Many scholars have followed suit by conceptualizing Hasidism within a dichotomy of spirit and law, even while underscoring that its leaders did not, as Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer put it, dare to derive the ultimate conclusions of antinomian spirituality.²⁹

The miraculous commitment of Hasidism to rabbinic norms is far less surprising if we abandon preconceptions about the incompatibility of mysticism, myth, and ritual. Recent scholarship has suggested an alternative reading of Hasidism, arguing that these sources directly tie spiritual flourishing to the mitsvot and to the halakhot that govern their performance.³⁰ Merging dedication to rabbinic norms with erotic religious passion and mystical yearnings for an immediate experience of God’s presence, Hasidic homilies foreground the commandments within religious life even as they acknowledge that these practices do not exhaustively define one’s spiritual journey.³¹ Scholars have begun to identify and examine the distinctive features of Hasidic legal discourse, examining jurisprudential materials were once overlooked or ignored, and it has been demonstrated that many Hasidic leaders were part of the ancien régime of halakhah in eastern Europe. They served as official rabbis, judges, adjudicators, and authors of responsa in communities across eastern Europe, contributing to every genre of Jewish legal literature.³²

The aim of this book extends beyond analyzing Hasidic jurisprudence or charting the development of particular practices. Rather, I seek to explore the rich spectrum of Hasidic reflections on the mitsvot as the keystones of religious life. Such Hasidic treatments of the commandments and their significance are in fact distinct from works of halakhah. Jewish legal writings have their own conceptual logic and technical vocabulary, developed through specific responsa, codes, and commentaries. While many Hasidic authors engaged in such work, discussions of the commandments in Hasidic homilies revolve around questions of emotion, embodiment, efficacy, and experience—issues beyond the purview of law and halakhah.³³ I argue that Hasidism forged a new and richly textured approach to religious action that entwines love for God, human agency, charismatic power, communal practice, and creativity. Because the teachings of Hasidism brook no polarity between law and spirit, we must look for new analytical models rather than tugging on the same rusty seesaw. One helpful way to expand our methodological toolbox is the appeal to ritual studies.³⁴

RITUAL AND LAW’S EMPIRE

The revolution in academic theories of ritual has changed the way that scholars in many disciplines think about marked time, space, and physical movement.³⁵ In recent decades scholars have largely broken with the once-popular vision of ritual as thoughtless action, as gestures performed out of allegiance to tradition, socio-communal pressure, or executed simply by mindless rote.³⁶ Some writers have suggested that rituals ought to be seen as anchors for cultural symbols that must be decoded or interpreted, much as meaning is conjured up from a text through exegesis and explication.³⁷ This significance may be known to some (or all) ritual actors, but just as likely the symbolic meaning remains the domain of the scholars who observe and explain those movements. But, taking issue with both the approach to ritual as thoughtless repetition and the emphasis on symbolism, a third group of scholars have argued that rituals ought to be seen as techniques for doing something.³⁸ This approach may entail taking seriously as a subject of study the worshipper’s perception that their own actions influence the cosmos or shape the divine will, but it also makes room for examining how rituals can—and do—influence and focus the flow of attention or shape the practitioner’s body and mind by changing patterns of thought, sparking new knowledge, and even triggering neurocognitive events.

The vision of ritual as social and personal world-building, and as a key dimension of human embodiment and cognition, will be extremely helpful for our study of Hasidism.³⁹ I draw upon Roy Rappaport’s definition of ritual as the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers, but underscore that Hasidic sources describe the commandments as acts, utterances, and movements with discrete purposes that shape the internal and external realms of those who perform them.⁴⁰ I have chosen six primary domains in which a fruitful conversation between theories of ritual and the study of Hasidism may take place, though many other possibilities have been left behind.

First, ritual affords a frame for thinking about the mitsvot as physical actions executed within a material sensorium flush with sights, sounds, smells, and other tactile stimuli.⁴¹ Hasidic sources refer to the commandments as scripted actions that transform body and self, arguing that a worshipper becomes attached to the Divine through embodied ritual practices and engagement with physicality.⁴² Rather than an unbridgeable rift between thought and action, Hasidic teachings describe interior illumination as achievable only through the works of a body filled with the same immanent divinity that suffuses the cosmos.⁴³ Unbound to the Cartesian attempt to split mind and body, Hasidic sources depict religious ritual as an affective, experiential, and physical mode of expanding one’s capacity for thought. Ritual is also a key component of Hasidic accountings of emotional life, since the capacity of the mitsvot as vehicles of personal and cosmic healing depends upon the worshipper’s passion, joy, and spiritual arousal.⁴⁴ Rituals are, among other things, techniques for guiding the flow of attention and concentration that can also generate new types of somatic knowledge.⁴⁵ This Hasidic framing adds to conversations about thought and embodiment, spotlighting religious sources that depict practitioners as learning through action.

My second point is that examining Hasidic piety and devotion with an eye to ritual, rather than halakhah, allows us to compare phenomena central to Hasidic spirituality that would otherwise fall into different analytical domains. This includes the common Hasidic notion of sacralizing the mundane by worshipping God through ordinary actions such as eating, drinking, or dance. The notion that ritual is something ubiquitous rather than exceptional, and that ritualization is itself an endless process, will be particularly helpful for illuminating these core Hasidic teachings. Of course, historians have described the processes of ritualization undergone by Jewish culture in the eighteenth century, as the details of life and piety were increasingly scripted by codified (and written) norms rooted in legal discussions as well as in patterns of behavior adopted from early modern Kabbalah. The development of Hasidism is indeed part of this story, as we shall see, but we ought to separate between this discrete socio-intellectual phenomenon and Hasidic sermons that call for the ritualization of all dimensions of life by demanding that ordinary actions be performed with an intentionality that is at once both scripted and spontaneous.⁴⁶

Ritual often has a way of making things present, though in some cases these actions can underscore absence, lack, and omission. This complicated dynamic represents a third realm in which Hasidic theology contributes to our understanding of ritual. Hasidism teaches that God’s vitality suffuses the cosmos, yet these sermons note that this immanent divine presence is often hidden from our eyes. Rituals help us navigate the tension between present reality and imagined ideal, claim Adam Seligman and his co-authors, because they can create temporary order through the construction of a performative, subjunctive world.⁴⁷ Far from eschewing the brokenness of this world or seeking to unmask permanently a concealed God, Hasidic homilies depict the commandments as generating temporary moments of expansive consciousness and infusing the world with new divine vitality.⁴⁸ They note, at the same time, that God’s presence itself becomes manifest in the physical actions of human worship even when this result is not immediately obvious to the practitioner. The mitsvot are thus gestures of presence, actions that foster belief or faith in an omnipresent God (often in the face of contravening experience) while reflecting and broadcasting that faith in a complicated two-way process.⁴⁹ Here I build upon Tanya M. Luhrmann’s argument that experiences of divine presence require significant effort and training, especially when commitments must be maintained when empirical facts seem to contradict them.⁵⁰

My fourth topic is the assumed incompatibility between authenticity and ritual, a presumption implicit in many ancient and medieval critiques of Judaism and developed more fully by early modern theologians and philosophers. This question was very much of moment for Jewish and Christian thinkers in the eighteenth century, and the idea of ritual will help us understand the complicated balance of commitment to individual spirituality as well as precedent, tradition, and communal norms that govern Hasidic devotion. Against the notion that spiritual integrity requires unshackling oneself from tradition, the case study of early Hasidism demonstrates otherwise: interiority and personal spirituality can co-exist with ongoing dedication to a system of inherited practices and rituals. Hasidic sermons seek to balance intentionality, authenticity, and spontaneity with allegiance to the thick web of obligations that comprise Jewish religious life, noting that the mitsvot are key tools for the process that we might best describe in contemporary parlance as the construction of the self. These teachings, moreover, reflect on the shared grammar of ritual as a force that binds one to the community while emphasizing the paramount centrality of an individual religious quest.⁵¹

Fifth, I argue that conceptions of ritual as a dynamic and ever-changing form of practice will help us make sense of Hasidic calls for spiritual creativity that exist alongside fealty to rabbinic norms.⁵² Hasidic sources grapple with the question of tradition and innovation in many different ways, and while their reflections on the purpose of the mitsvot were rarely translated into a different type of practical jurisprudence, they highlight the necessity of constant change and transformation. If, as these mystical thinkers insisted, halakhah is indeed the word of God revealed at Sinai and faithfully transmitted from Moses down to his rabbinic successors, why has it transformed dramatically over time and how can there be so many disagreements and different conclusions when scholars are presented with the same precedential materials and fact patterns. Michael Puett has shown that rituals contend with a fundamental question: how does one create anew. Rather than curtailing creativity, the ongoing development of these scripted actions provides the site in which tradition may be continually reimagined.⁵³ The work of ritual is, as a realm of constant recreation, absolutely endless.⁵⁴

My sixth point builds upon the depiction of rituals as gestures, movements, and physical practices that shift the actor into the domain of mythic time. The commandments are said to perform a similar function, recalling and reenacting the theophany at Sinai and reforging the covenantal bond between God and Israel. Hasidic sources, however, grapple with the idea of a period before the giving of the mitsvot, considering also the possibility of a future epoch in Jewish history in which their utility will have run its course. These homilies do so by invoking a pair of Talmudic teachings: a rabbinic legend of the biblical patriarchs performing the commandments before Sinai, and another describing the mitsvot as being annulled in the time to come. These ancient texts are cited and interwoven with striking frequency in Hasidic sources, revealing the ubiquity of the mitsvot as projected into the past but also providing room for speculation on their limits and imagining a time in which such duties are no longer commanded.

Using the frame of ritual has broader implications as well. This move shifts our analysis of Hasidism from the isolated file of Jewish intellectual history, enabling comparison to other religious traditions and the questions that animate their study.⁵⁵ Medieval Catholicism offered a similarly thick density of ritual—from classical sacraments and liturgical prayer to the supererogatory piety of monastic rules—meant to shape body within religious experience and to summon God’s presence.⁵⁶ So, too, the practitioners and teachers in esoteric Buddhist or Hindu traditions maintained commitments to the normative prescriptions of the vinaya (Buddhism) or Vedic and exoteric Scripture (Hinduism).⁵⁷ The study of Islam in particular has struggled against the assumption that Sufis represent a movement that has freed itself from the legal prescriptions of Islam.⁵⁸ While there were instances of radical pietists who transgressed religious norms, most Sufis amplified and interiorized the normative injunctions of Islamic law by developing new discourses of meaning, hence underscoring the need to conform with its precepts.⁵⁹ The law without truth is ostentation, wrote an eleventh-century Persian Sufi teacher, and the truth without the law is hypocrisy. Their mutual relation may be compared to that of body and spirit: when the spirit departs from the body, the living body becomes a corpse, and the spirit vanishes like the wind.⁶⁰ Scholars of Islam are also well acquainted with the complex relationship between exterior practice and the interior piety, and I particularly indebted to Shahzad Bashir’s analysis of the physical body as part of the imaginative world of Sufism.⁶¹

These theoretical frameworks can show us something new about Hasidic sources, but, at the same time, Jewish mystical teachings offer a different way of thinking about ritual precisely because they do not fit squarely within any single conceptual frame. Ritual as commonly used by anthropologists ignores the transcendent authority and normative social, theological, and personal significance that the commandments carry in Jewish life. Furthermore, ritual alone is not a strong enough category to encompass all forms of Hasidic religious practice. Mira Balberg has argued that both law and ritual are "equally foreign to the traditional vocabulary and conceptual world of halakhah."⁶² Many commandments are not rituals, in the sense that the former category includes ethical orientations or prescriptions, and political institutions, as well as a host of taboos and prohibitions that legislate non-action. Ritual is only one possible window on these instantiations. To avoid undue hardening of the categories, I acknowledge that for some Hasidic writers, the performance of the commandments is qualitatively different from other kinds of practice (more binding, more efficacious, or more normative). I do skirt back to the idea of law—and to emic categories like halakhah or mitsvot—because ritual cannot do all this work independently.

Theories of law are thus of some utility in examining Hasidic perceptions of the commandments as a force that moves the cosmos and reveals God’s presence. The exceptional work of Arthur J. Jacobson takes up religious law as a set of duties made known to the community of commanded subjects in a moment of divine self-becoming that is relived through the performance of the law. Persons do not obey law so much as they reenact revelation, claimed Jacobson. By obeying law they walk with God.⁶³ Similarly, Hasidic authors refer to halakhah as the obligations and duties by which the worshipper becomes bound to the Divine.⁶⁴ One early Hasidic tradition reads the verse Shout unto Y-H-V-H, all the earth (hari‘u le-Hashem kol ha-arets, Ps. 100:1) as an acronym for halakhah, suggesting that the norms of Jewish practice reveal the latent divinity simmering within all things.⁶⁵ Hasidic teachings on the mitsvot conform neither to legal positivism nor to any of the other mainstays of contemporary legal thought (strict construction, liberal construction, legal formalism, and even legal realism). Though they share some superficial similarities with the latter, Hasidic thinkers come at the issue of obligation from a very different angle, grounded in a sort of piety that transmutes law from the realm of the political into that of spiritual and devotional life. Religious duty, in other words, reflects a type of mutuality and reciprocity grounded in love and connection.⁶⁶

Martin Buber missed Hasidic commitment to religious obligation, perhaps due to his own allergy to halakhah, but he correctly understood that the cultural mind of early Hasidism privileged this-worldly action (what he called in German Tat, deed; or tun, to act). "Genuine religiosity is in doing, claimed Buber. It wants to sculpt the unconditioned out of the matter of this world. The countenance of God reposes, invisible, in an earthen block; it must be wrought, carved out of it."⁶⁷ God’s unity—or better yet, the unity of God rendered manifest in our world—is accomplished through action and lived experience (called Erlebnis).⁶⁸ Using a term that anticipates Tanya M. Luhrmann’s category of real-making, Buber described this process of actualizing God’s unity through deeds as realization (Verwirklichung).⁶⁹ This is what it means to realize: to relate life-experience to nothing else but itself, wrote Buber in 1913:

And here is the place where the power of the human spirit awakens and collects itself and becomes creative. . . . Where the foot of realization stands, there power is drawn from the depths and collected and moved to action and renewed in work.⁷⁰

Buber eventually shifted his thinking on this subject, stressing the social and communal dimensions of making the sacred presence real, but he remained committed to the idea that embodied human actions can unite the divine.⁷¹ Buber was correct in looking to Hasidism for a robust articulation of the power of mindful action, yet he failed to grasp that the revolutionary spirit of Hasidism took flight within the structures of traditional Jewish practice.⁷²

THE COMMANDED KABBALIST

The phenomenological or intellectual analysis of Hasidic teachings on the mitsvot requires us to briefly examine their roots in rabbinic, kabbalistic, and philosophical literature. Hasidic homilies are rooted in discussions of the mitsvot found in classical rabbinic discourse, where terms such as kavvanah (intention) and lishmah (study or worship for its own sake) appear, but its ideology was shaped by the vast and sophisticated literature of ta‘amei ha-mitsvot developed in medieval and early Jewish mysticism.⁷³ Figures like Gershom Scholem were quick to point out the hidden anarchic impulse at the heart of Kabbalah, but significant scholarship—including by Scholem himself—has examined the complicated interface between halakhah and medieval or early modern Jewish mysticism and the importance of ritual in kabbalistic sources.⁷⁴ The classical Kabbalists, many of whom were also rabbinic scholars of halakhah, consistently centered the mitsvot within their mythic religious landscape.⁷⁵ Only through the performance of the commandments, noted Scholem, does the symbol truly take hold.⁷⁶

These mystics acknowledged the authority of the commandments as having been emanated from God while largely rejecting the position that the mitsvot ought to be observed simply as divine decrees.⁷⁷ Instead, the Kabbalists developed an enormous literature of ta‘amei ha-mitsvot, most of which strengthened commitment to Jewish norms by attributing endless (ein sof) reasons to all aspects of the ritual system.⁷⁸ Each commandment has a great purpose, claimed the thirteenth-century Menahem Recanati, a hidden reason revealed through that commandment and which cannot be understood by any other commandment.⁷⁹ The mitsvot are often described as an interconnected fabric: like a single knot, since one [commandment] cannot exist without the other, like a woven garment in which each and every thread is connected to and sustained by its neighbor.⁸⁰ Kabbalistic writers attributed a wide variety of purposes to the commandments, from arousing God, uniting the sefirot, and fulfilling a divine need to refining the body, mind, and soul of the practitioner.⁸¹ Truly no deed is inconsequential, wrote the sixteenth-century Moshe Cordovero, reflecting the importance attributed to each element of halakhah and to every aspect of Jewish practice.⁸²

Such totalizing depictions of the mitsvot as a system in which every jot and tittle of the halakhah attained mystical significance differed from those of many medieval Jewish rationalists. Most notably they were a departure from the great philosopher and jurist Maimonides (d. 1204), whose vision of specific commandments as the means to particular ends (i.e., imparting virtue, shaping correct belief, creating a stable society, human perfection) enabled him to address the question of whether or not these and other aims could be reached without performing all the commandments.⁸³ This possibility underlies a cryptic—and influential passage—in his Judeo-Arabic Commentary on the Mishnah:

It is among the fundamental principles (Arab. osul) of learned opinions of the law (Arab. ‘al-sharīʿah) that an individual who fulfills one of the 613 commandments fittingly and properly, without joining to it any this-worldly goals and doing it for its own sake, out of love⁸⁴ . . . achieves life in the World to Come. . . . The commandments are so numerous that it is impossible for an individual not to perform one of them perfectly during his lifetime, and, in doing that mitsvah, give life to his soul through that deed.⁸⁵

Maimonides’s orienting principle provides one aim for all commandments, a purpose that is achievable through a single ritual action that has been executed correctly and with proper motivation.⁸⁶ This goal seems attainable even if the worshipper does not realize the aim of the mitsvot, so long as they are executed with pure intent. Maimonides notes that he derived this idea from argument and logic rather than received opinion, and it fits with his tendency to privilege interiority as well as his instrumentalist reading of the commandments as a divinely ordained means to various goals.

The idea that the commandments hearken to a single aim also bears an unmistakable resemblance to Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s (1058–1111) concept of maqāṣid ‘al-sharīʿah (the goals of the law). The precepts of Islam, he argued, promote maṣlahah, best translated as public well-being or flourishing.⁸⁷ Most premodern Muslim jurists, other than the notable fourteenth-century scholar al-Shatibi,⁸⁸ did not engage in this sort of maqāṣid discourse at an substantive level, but many medieval Islamic jurists nevertheless believed that there was an underlying telos to the law even if they deemed it too radical to derive actual norms for behavior from this concept.⁸⁹ Likewise, Maimonides does not draw upon law’s telos to produce specific rulings, and it is telling that he elected not to include this fundamental principle in his systematic restatement of rabbinic law.⁹⁰

While Maimonides left the notion of a single aim for the mitsvot achievable through one commandment by the wayside, and despite the fact that he assumed a very different view of the purpose of the mitsvot, countless versions of his teaching were quoted by early Hasidic sources.⁹¹ Many of these mystical teachings subtly but