The Besht

Last week's Shavuot holiday marked the 250th yahrzeit of Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism, known to history as the Baal Shem Tov or, abbreviated, the Besht. His death was only the beginning; the legend of the Besht, and the many interpretations of his sayings and deeds, gave birth to one of the most dynamic and consequential movements in Jewish history.

In mid-18th century Podolia (today's Ukraine), the phrase Baal Shem Tov, literally "Master of the Good Name," was a job description for a particular kind of salaried community functionary;  indeed, a listing unearthed by the Israeli historian Moshe Rosman in a 1758 Polish tax register gives the Besht's profession as, in one word, "Balsam." He was a healer, a magician, and a wonder-worker whose knowledge extended beyond herbs to practical kabbalah and the many uses of the names of God and angels. And yet, it is hardly for these qualities that the Besht is remembered.

Just what it was about him that so ignited his disciples and their followers has been hard to discern amid the fog of legend, the multiple versions of his utterances and stories, and the varied and often conflicting ways in which his teachings were interpreted—and acted on—over time. To say that he was charismatic is obvious and insufficient. Although his ideas, and his circle, were very much of a piece with currents in East European piety and mysticism, he reinterpreted them to transformative effect.

One of those ideas was devekut, mystical union with God. A venerable kabbalistic notion, it was elevated by the Besht to the pinnacle of religious values, achievable not through disciplined meditation but through ecstatic experience, and not only by scholars but also by pious laymen. For, in the Besht's teaching, God was not secreted away in heaven but rather here on earth, His celestial energies pulsating through the very stuff of this world.

In his lifetime the Besht had a loose circle of disciples scattered in different locales. Some were accomplished scholars in their own right; all felt a deep intimacy with him and took it upon themselves to spread his word. In the decades after his death they coalesced into a dynamic and in many ways revolutionary movement. Through the first half of the 19th century, Hasidism institutionalized itself. So did the opposition to it, led by modernizing Enlighteners (maskilim) from without and by traditional talmudists and kabbalists from within.

In the 20th century, modern Jews, done with Talmud and bereft of transcendence, eagerly absorbed Martin Buber's rendition of Hasidism. Emphasizing the movement's social dimensions and redemptive engagement with the world, Buber rewrote and popularized the corpus of hasidic legends and tales. He was bitterly criticized by Gershom Scholem, for whom the primary thing was the Besht 's theology, found not in tales, and certainly not in Buber's reworkings of them, but in the theoretical writings of the master's disciples. As for the redemption preached by the Besht, that,  Scholem maintained, was a matter internal to the individual self and only marginally concerned with society.

Both men were right. The Besht bequeathed a dual legacy: his teachings, and the social groups that lived them. Like all great spiritual masters, he embodied his own blend of piety and audacity; to this day, his teachings inspire religious radicals and conservatives alike. He also left a legacy of wonder: at the divine presence resting in this lowly world, and, not least, at the ability of an obscure holy man to change the shape of religious history.

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