#zaddik

The fact is that from the beginning the Baal Shem, The founder of Hasidism, and his followers were anxious to remain in touch with the life of the community; and to this contact they assigned an especial value. The paradox which they had to defend, that of the mystic in the community of men, was of a different nature than that upon which Sabbatians took their stand and which inevitably gave a destructive turn to all their endeavors: salvation through betrayal. The greatest saints of Hasidism, the Baal Shem himself, Levi Isaac of Berdiczew, Jacob Isaac the “Seer of Lublin,” Moshe Leib of Sassov and others, were also its most popular figures. They loved the Jews and their mystical glorification of this love did not decrease but rather added to its socially effective influence. It is not surprising, rather the contrary, that these men did everything in their power to avoid a conflict with a Judaism they intended to reform from within, and where it could not be avoided, to blunt its edge. Hasidism in fact solved the problem, at least as far as Judaism was concerned, of establishing so close a relation between the pneumatic, that is to say the man who feels himself inspired in every act by a transcendental power, the Pneuma or Spirit, and the religious community, that the inevitable tension between them helps to enrich the religious life of the community instead of destroying it. The fact that this possession of superior faculties, this pneumatic character, became an establishment, as it did in later Zaddikism after the holy fire had burnt down, is merely the reverse side of this positive achievement of Hasidism. Had the typical Zaddik been a sectarian or a hermit and not what he was in fact, namely the center of the community, such an establishment could never have grown up, safeguarding as it did a distinctive form of religious life even after the spirit had departed or, even worse, then commercialized.

Inevitably the original mystical conception of bottomless depths within the Torah was soon transferred to the personality of the saint, and in consequence it quickly appeared that the various groups of Hasidism were developing different characteristics in accordance with the particular type of saint to whom they looked for guidance.

The new ideal of the religious leader, the Zaddik, differs from the traditional ideal of rabbinical Judaism, the Talmid Hakham or student of the Torah, mainly in that he himself “has become Torah.” It is no longer his knowledge but his life which lends a religious value to his personality. He is a living incarnation of the Torah.

On the Day of Judgment, each person will be allowed to hang all of his unhappiness on a branch of the great Tree of Sorrows. After each person has found a limb from which his own miseries may dangle, they may all walk slowly around the tree. Each is to search for a set of sufferings that he would prefer to those he has hung on the tree. In the end, each man freely chooses to reclaim his own personal set of sorrows rather than those of another. Each man leaves the tree wiser than when he came.