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A Severe Ecstasy

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A Severe Ecstasy I'm not sure what the moral of this nal bricks from which Ferry is extrapo- In this learned and valuable book, is. I do know that, hke Peter Levi, I lating his straw. The well-meshed words Nadler seeks to deepen our picture of have enjoyed Horace's Odes since ado- seduce. They and their syncopated, un- that spiritual landscape by recapturing lescence, for their wry wisdom, their familiar rhythms are incantatory. I sus- the vivid religiosity of Hasidism's prin- exquisite sense of impermanence, their pect that a surprising number of people, cipled opponents, who themselves cast cynicism, stoicism, and epicureanism after tempting exposure of this sort, will a long shadow to the present. Amid (Horace was a philosophical magpie), quietly go away and start learning Latin; today's popular and academic concern their quiet courage in dangerous times, and if enough of them do that, we won't with "spirituality"—reflecting a disen- above all for the scintillating and unique need translations anymore, except to let chantment with intellect and structure, skill with words that stamps them all the litterateurs show off, which is anyway and a near-obsession with personal ful- into one's memory. I have seen many their most popular current use. Master fillment—a second look at the Mith- worse translations than David Ferry's, the original languages, and you can then nagdim and the spiritual ideals that they and occasionally he scores, as with the enjoy true yariation-spinners such as developed is particularly welcome. beginning of 4.1. ("Venus, it seems that Christopher Logue, or, for Horace, Don- The extraordinary philological and now/Your wars are starting again./ ald Hall with his delightfully apt Horse- historical researches of Gershom Scho- Spare me, spare me, I pray. / I am not collar Odes (Carne-Ross misses these, lem and his successors laid to rest what I was / When tender Cynara ruled too), however whimsically they may stray the rationalistic depiction of Judaism me.") Too often, though, he is prolix, from their theme. Until then, most read- offered by the Wissenschafi des Judentums chatty, and cute. ers will have to rely, like Ptolemaic of the nineteenth century, by demon- The best thing by far about Ferry's administrators in Egypt, on interpreters; strating the continuity and the vigor of The Odes of Horace is that it is bilingual. and what that means, alas, a perusal of mysticism throughout Jewish history. Again and again the eye is drawn to the Horace in English will tell them with quite So good a job did Scholem do that lef^t-hand page to see the exquisite origi- uncommon clarity. • the mystical tradition, and Hasidism in particular, have crowded out other streams of Jewish spirituality, and cer- tainly its anti-Hasidic currents. Indeed, one of the last popular cliches of Jew- ish history is the depiction of Hasid- A Severe Ecstasy ism's opponents as arid legalists, and even proto-Enlightenment rationalists; yet it too must now be put aside for a BY YEHUDAH MIRSKY fuller appreciation of the variety of Jew- ish spiritual life. The Faith of the Mithnagdim: hroughout Jewish history, mystical activity fiourished Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture alongside the study of Tal- by Allan Nadler mud, midrash, and other formsT • of exegesis, and philosophical (Johns Hopkins University Press, 254 pp., $351 speculation, with varying emphasis and hen I was growing up tradition, which Allan Nadler makes intensity over time and place. All these in New York, my family accessible in his important book, help- forms of creativity could regularly be would sometimes pray fully complicates our understanding, found within the same rabbis. Hasidism at a local shtiebel, Yiddish not only of Judaism, but of the vari- and Mithnagdism emerged out of this for "littlWe room," the designation for eties of religious meaning. Mithnagdism fertile terrain. Where Hasidism differed smallish, usually ramshackle, Hasidic broaches the difficult question of the was in its commitment to the popular- synagogues. Late in the day on Saturday, relationship of the spiritual and the ization and the internalization of mysti- the rabbi and his congregants would intellectual. cal ideas, which in turn changed the gather around a table for the third Mithnagdism, or Hitnagdut, crystal- shape and meaning of those ideas Sabbath meal, which, in the" Kabbalistic lized in the late eighteenth and early themselves. Thus Hasidism depicted the tradition, marks the passing of the day, nineteenth century in opposition to dynamic interaction of divine energies and of the union of higher and lower the spread of Hasidism. Then as now, explored by the Kabbalists as being worlds brought about by the Sabbath. Hasidism captured many imaginations played out in the inner lives of individu- The men would sing the hymns written with its mix of the exalted and the als, whose own rises and falls mirrored by the great sixteenth-century divine mundane, its popular dissemination of the travails of the supernal worlds; and Isaac Luria, evoking the spiritual twi- hitherto esoteric Kabbalistic doctrines, the Kabbalah's appreciation of divine light. My father, himself a rabbi, did not and its projection of exquisite meta- immanence, which simultaneously re- join in the singing. He would remain physical motions onto the inner lives of inforced the significance of the ter- in the sanctuary with a volume of Tal- individuals. Its broad appeal, down to restrial concerns of halakha, Talmudic mud, and mark the Sabbath dusk by the present day, is not at all surprising. law, and offered a counterpoint to the laboring through the intricacies of the It is picturesque and soulful. Its mystic fixities of that same law, was taken to text. My father was a mithnaged: literally, enthusiasm, and its storytelling and far-reaching conclusions, with a near- "an opponent," that is, an opponent of song, present a perfect spiritual alterna- sanctification of bodily function and Hasidism. Or one who preferred study tive to the intellectually demanding and communal life. to rapture. legally oriented discipline of classical The well-known opposition to Hasid- The Mithnagdim represent a Jewish rabbinic Judaism. ism by many leading rabbis of the day spirituality in which study figures as Hasidism's appeal is so great that it has long been seen as variously arising the supreme religious act. Little-known has become virtually synonymous with from a rejection of Kabbalistic doctrine, today outside of Orthodox circles, this the Jewish religion of Eastern Europe. differing understandings of divine im- 38 THE NEW REPUBLIC APRIL27, 1998 manence, or class bias. Nadler joins a the early Hasidim were not, as com- as part of a broader effervescence of growing body of opinion arguing in- monly supposed, of the common folk, new rituals; and this resulted, in large stead that the opposition to Hasidism but members themselves of the rabbinic part, from the spread of Kabbalistic was based not on the rejection of mys- fraternity. Some, such as Shneur Zal- ideas among broader sectors of Jewish ticism, btit on the rejection of its pop- man of Liady (1745-1812), the founder society, and with it a more pervasive ularization. And this, as Nadler shows of today's Lubavitch movement, were awareness of the metaphysical reach of in his most innovative chapters, was acknowledged masters of the law. The human action beyond this corporeal rooted in a deeply pessimistic view of appellation Ba'al Shem Tov, or Master of life. the possibilities of widespread human the Good Name, given the founder of Not for the Mithnagdim. For them, in perfection. Hasidism, Israel ben Eliezer of Medzhi- Nadler's telling, real death was the only bozh, was a common designation for release from this world's relentless ny examination of Hilnag- the seers and the shamans who served imperfection. "For most of the classical dut must begin with the as community functionaries—along- Hasidic thinkers," he writes, death was career and ideas of Hasid- side rabbis, scribes, butchers, and oth- "an ascent, most often the final eleva- ism's first and most influ- ers—in the communities of Eastern tion, of the human soul ... the culmina- ential Acritic, Elijah ben Solomon of Europe; and he himself was well-inte- tion of the religious works already Vilna (or Vilnius), known as the Gaon, grated into the structure of his commu- partially attained in this world, and ... or Great One, of Vilna. He was the tow- nity. Nor are the roots of Mithnagdic life's final, crowning spiritual achieve- ering rabbinic figure of the eighteenth opposition to Hasidism entirely to be ment." For the Hasidim, the erasure of century, and one of the greatest masters found, as some have thought, in dif- the self in death climaxed the biltul of rabbinical learning in any century. fering understandings of the notion ha'yesh, the dissolution of the self and The Gaon, who held no official position of divine immanence in the material the material world through meditative and confined his teaching to a small world. Early Hasidic and Mithnagdic practices. But the Gaon of Vilna, Nadler group of disciples, attained magisterial thinkers alike believed that ultimately says, "assumed a diametrically opposed atithority by his staggering erudition, his the divine presence permeates both the position ... namely, that the descent of intellectual acuity and originality, and seen and the unseen worlds. Yet the the soul into the body is its worst tor- his ascetic piety. His Talmudic method Mithnagdim, as Nadler observes, "were ment and that, far from allowing for eschewed the labyrinthine dialectics intent on preserving the distinction even greater perception of the godly popular in many circles and emphasized between the human and divine perspec- realms, corporeal existence hopelessly instead the plain meaning of the text, obscures the divine domain from the tives on the nature of the cosmos, in human senses." and a broad knowledge of the entirety sharp contrast to their Hasidic contem- of rabbinic literature.
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