#chasidism

TBH: the more I explore judaism the more I want to take an orthodox/chasidic route which is bizarre only because I never would have thought that it would be like this.

"We all sing Rebbe Akivah's ma'amar about "Mikveh Yisroel Hashem" on Lag ba'Omer... Do we hear what we are saying?

The ‘Midrash on the Creation of the Child’ relates that after its guardian angel has given it a fillip upon the nose, the newborn child forgets all the infinite knowledge acquired before its birth in the celestial houses of learning. But why, Eleazar asks, does the child forget? ‘Because, if it did not forget, the course of this world would drive it to madness if it thought about it in the light of what it knew.

There is little to connect these old Hasidim of the thirteenth century with the Hasidic movement which developed in Poland and the Ukraine during the eighteenth century... The identity of name is no proof of real continuity.

Of special interest in this connection is the doctrine of the archetypes—wholly foreign to Saadia—which dominates Eleazar’s work on “The Science of the Soul,” but is of importance also for the “Book of the Devout.” According to this doctrine, every “lower” form of existence, including lifeless things,—“even the wood block” to say nothing of even lower forms of life, has its archetype, demuth. In this conception we recognize the traits not only of Plato’s theory of ideas, but also of the astral theory of correspondence between higher and lower planes, and of the astrological doctrine that everything has its “star.” The archetypes, as we have already seen in connection with the Hekhaloth tracts, are conceived as being pictorially represented in the curtain spread before the Throne of Glory. According to the Hasidim, this curtain consists of blue flame and surrounds the throne from all sides except from the west. The archetypes themselves represent a special sphere of non-corporeal, semi-divine existence. In another connection, mention is actually made of an occult “Book of Archetypes.” The archetypes is the deepest source of the soul’s hidden activity. The fate of every being is contained in its archetype, and there is even an archetypal representation of every change and passing made of its existence. Not only the angels and the demons draw their foreknowledge of human fate from these archetypes; the prophet, too, is able to perceive them and thus to read the future. Of Moses it is expressly said that God showed him the archetypes. There is a hint that even guilt and merit have their “signs” in the archetypes.

This ‘inner’ glory now has its pendant in the ‘visible’ glory. While the first is formless, the second has various changing forms of which each change is subject to the will of God. It is this second glory which appears on the throne of the Merkabah or in the prophetic vision, and which forms the subject of the enormous spatial measurements in the Shiur Komah speculations regarding the “body of the Shekhinah.”