Hasidic Typologies of Devekut and I-Thou Relations 1

CHAPTER EIGHT

HASIDIC TYPOLOGIES OF DEVEKUT AND I-THOU RELATIONS

1. Devekut and the I-Thou Relation

One of the central principles which Buber attributed to Hasidism and which he internalized in his dialogical thought was that of devekut— attachment to God (“Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis,” 252–254) or, as Scho- lem defi ned it, “intimate communion with God” (Scholem, “Devekut or Communion with God,” 203). Hence, I shall begin this chapter by presenting points of similarity between the ideal of devekut and that of the I-Thou. In subsequent sections I will discuss Buber’s typologies of devekut, in comparison to those found in Hasidism, in greater detail. Buber’s characterization of the difference between Kabbalah and Hasidism as analogous to that between Gnosticism and devekut,1 and his defi nition of the essence of Hasidism and its value in terms of the interrelationship between heaven and earth (“The Baal Shem Tov’s Instruction,” 180; Be-Pardes ha-Hasidut, “Introduction,” 6) indicate that Buber identifi ed devekut with the I-Thou relation. This identifi cation of the state of relation between the I-Thou and the state of devekut is also expressed in Buber’s statement that “Devotio means the unreduced service, practiced with the life of the mortal hours, to the divine made present as over against one . . .” (“Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis,” 244). The “tortuously dual” nature (I and Thou, 69) of the two forms of relationship, the I-Thou and the I-It, largely overlaps the two basic states in Hasidism, described as devekut and absence of devekut. Just as Hasidism turned the principle of devekut into the initial demand addressed to man,2

1 Oppenheim, “The Meaning of Hasidut,” 411; Bergman, “Buber and Mysticism,” 306–308. 2 Whether one is speaking of that type of devekut which is appropriate to a Zaddik (or to mystical virtuosi, anshei tzurah), or of devekut suitable to the masses of people who are bound to corporeality (anshei homer)—that is, attachment to God by means of attachment to the Zaddik. 248 chapter eight

“a starting point and not the end,”3 so is dialogical relation the proper human situation that makes man into a human creature in the full sense of the word—and it was this challenge with which Buber wished to confront man. Moreover: just as the early Hasidic masters were aware of the diffi culty involved in persisting in a state of devekut and the necessity to withdraw from it, an idea exemplifi ed in the verse “and the creatures ran back and forth” (veha-hayot ratzo va-shov), so too did Buber acknowledge man’s inability to persist in an I-Thou state, and that every Thou must eventually become an It. His recognition of the transition to the I-It state as an inevitable reality, as “the sublime melancholy of our lot” (I and Thou, 68), and as a necessary evil, fi nds its Hasidic parallel in the homily of the Maggid R. Mendel of Barr: “ ‘Happy is the man in whom God fi nds no iniquity’ [Ps 32:2] . . . That is, in whom there is found no iniquity transgression other than that his thoughts are not attached to Him, may He be blessed” (quoted in Toldot Ya’akov Yosef, 114d). Constant persistence in devekut is beyond the capacity of any human being; happy is the person whose only “sin” is that he fell from the level of devekut to its absence. All this holds true in terms of the parallel between the basic paradigms. However, there is also a phenomenological resemblance between the two states. There is considerable similarity between Scholem’s description of devekut as intimate communion with God, located somewhere between the absence of devekut and unio mystica and Buber’s characterization of the I-Thou relationship as lying somewhere between the lack of I-Thou relation, and ecstasy or ultimate mystical unity. As has been noted by both Piekarz and Idel, the Hasidic concept of devekut is not unequivo- cal, and at times is connected to states that are not necessarily mystical, such as “emotion, enthusiasm, pouring out one’s soul, dedication, inner arousal, communion, etc.”4 As I have already shown (above, Chapter Five), in his I-Thou philosophy Buber chose to use the mod- erate mystical sense of devekut. The typology of devekut in the I-Thou

3 Scholem, “Devekut or Communion with God,” 208. Scholem characterization of devekut as “communion with God,” as in the full title of his paper about devekut, is consistent with Buber’s characterization of the I-Thou relationship as a state of intimate relation with the Thou. Buber and Scholem agree that in the state of devekut, the parties involved are not negated in one another through their attachment, because Scholem explicitly distinguished between devekut and Unio-mystica, just as Buber dur- ing his dialogical period distinguished between dialogue and mysticism that devours the participants in the encounter. 4 Piekarz, Between Ideology and Reality, 154; and cf. Idel, Hasidism, 18, 86–89.