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The Legend of the Baal-Shem The Legend of the Baal-Shem These twenty captivating stories about Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism known as ‘the Baal- Shem’ or ‘Master of God’s Name’, offer a profound and charming account of the genesis of Judaism’s most significant mystical movement. Prefaced by an explanation of the life and principles of the Hasidim, they tell of the Baal-Shem’s life in early eighteenth- century Podolia and Wolhynia, and of the birth of his revelatory faith, founded on active love, joy and private longing for God. Initially scorned by the Rabbinical establishment, the Baal-Shem’s fierce piety ultimately made him a figure of devotion among commoners, peasants and visionaries. As a delicate portrayal both of the Baal-Shem’s mystical faith and of Eastern European Jewish daily life, The Legend of the Baal-Shem is an ideal introduction to Hasidic religious thought, and to Martin Buber’s own influential philosophy of love and mutual understanding. Martin Buber (1878–1965) was one of the greatest religious thinkers of the twentieth century, and was nominated for Nobel prizes for both Literature and Peace. His works include I and Thou, The Way of Man and Between Man and Man. Martin Buber titles available from Routledge: Between Man and Man The Legend of the Baal-Shem* Meetings: Autobiographical Fragments Ten Rungs: Collected Hasidic Sayings* The Way of Man* Also available: Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue by Maurice S.Friedman * Not available in the United States and Canada MARTIN BUBER The Legend of the BAAL-SHEM Translated from the German by Maurice Friedman LONDON AND NEW YORK First published as Legende des Baalschem in Frankfurt, 1908 First published in English 1955 by Harper & Row This second edition first published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1955, 2002 the Estate of Martin Buber Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, r other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-38066-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-38684-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-28264-0 (Hbk) ISBN 0-415-28265-9 (Pbk) CONTENTS FOREWORD vii INTRODUCTION ix The Life of the Hasidim 3 HITLAHAVUT: ECSTASY 3 AVODA: SERVICE 10 KAVANA: INTENTION 19 SHIFLUT: HUMILITY 28 The Werewolf 39 The Prince of Fire 45 The Revelation 51 The Martyrs and the Revenge 63 The Heavenly Journey 69 Jerusalem 73 Saul and David 79 The Prayer-Book 85 The Judgement 91 The Forgotten Story 101 vi The Soul Which Descended 117 The Psalm-Singer 127 The Disturbed Sabbath 135 The Conversion 147 The Return 161 From Strength to Strength 171 The Threefold Laugh 179 The Language of the Birds 185 The Call 195 The Shepherd 203 GLOSSARY 211 FOREWORD It is fifty years since the legends of Hasidic literature cast their spell over me. Soon thereafter I began the retelling of the Baal-Shem cycle out of which this book arose. The existing material was so formless that I was tempted to deal with it as with some kind of subject-matter for poetry. That I did not succumb to this temptation I owe to the power of the Hasidic point of view that I encountered in all these stories. There was something decisive here that had to be kept in mind throughout. What that was can be gathered from what follows. But within these limits, which forbid bringing in alien motifs, all freedom remained to the epic form. Only some time after the original German edition appeared in 1907 was a stricter binding imposed on the relation which I had as an author to the tradition of the Hasidic legends—a binding that bid me reconstruct the intended occurrence of each individual story, no matter how crude and unwieldy it was in the form in which it had been transmitted to us. The results of this new relation, as they took shape in the work of three decades, were collected in the book The Tales of the Hasidim (Hebrew edition, 1947; English edition, viii “The Early Masters,” 1947, “The Later Masters,” 1948). Later I undertook for the first time to render satisfaction to both—truth and freedom—in the chronicle novel For the Sake of Heaven (Hebrew edition under the title Gog and Magog, 1943; English editions, 1946 and 1953). The present revision of The Legend of the Baal- Shem, a product of the summer of 1954, is purely of a stylistic nature; the character of the book has remained unchanged. MARTIN BUBER Jerusalem, 1955 INTRODUCTION This book consists of a descriptive account and twenty stories. The descriptive account speaks of the life of the Hasidim, a Jewish sect of eastern Europe which arose around the middle of the eighteenth century and still continues to exist in our day in deteriorated form. The stories tell the life of the founder of this sect, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, who was called the Baal-Shem, that is, the master of God’s Name, and who lived from about 1700 to 1760, mostly in Podolia and Wolhynia. But the life about which we shall learn here is not what one ordinarily calls the real life. I do not report the development and decline of the sect; nor do I describe its customs. I only desire to communicate the relation to God and the world that these men intended, willed, and sought to live. I also do not enumerate the dates and facts which make up the biography of the Baal-Shem. I build up his life out of his legends, which contain the dream and the longing of a people. The Hasidic legend does not possess the austere power of the Buddha legend nor the intimacy of the Franciscan. It did not grow in the shadow of ancient x groves nor on slopes of silver-green olive-trees. It came to life in narrow streets and small, musty rooms, passing from awkward lips to the ears of anxious listeners. A stammer gave birth to it and a stammer bore it onward—from generation to generation. I have received it from folk-books, from note- books and pamphlets, at times also from a living mouth, from the mouths of people still living who even in their lifetime heard this stammer. I have received it and have told it anew. I have not transcribed it like some piece of literature; I have not elaborated it like some fabulous material. I have told it anew as one who was born later. I bear in me the blood and the spirit of those who created it, and out of my blood and spirit it has become new. I stand in the chain of narrators, a link between links; I tell once again the old stories, and if they sound new,it is because the new already lay dorman in them when they were told for the first time. My telling of the Hasidic legend aims even as little at that “real” life which one customarily calls local colour. There is something tender and sacred, something secret and mysterious, something unrestrained and paradisiacal about the atmosphere of the stübel, the little room in which the Hasidic rabbi —the zaddik, the proven one, the holy man, the mediator between God and man—dispenses mystery and tale with wise and smiling mouth. But my object is not the recreation of this atmosphere. My narration stands on the earth of Jewish myth, and the heaven of Jewish myth is over it. xi The Jews are a people that has never ceased to produce myth. In ancient times arose the stream of myth-bearing power that flowed—for the time being —into Hasidism. The religion of Israel has at all times felt itself endangered by this stream, but it is from it, in fact, that Jewish religiousness has at all times received its inner life. All positive religion rests on an enormous simplification of the manifold and wildly engulfing forces that invade us: it is the subduing of the fullness of existence. All myth, in contrast, is the expression of the fullness of existence, its image, its sign; it drinks incessantly from the gushing fountains of life. Hence religion fights myth where it cannot absorb and incorporate it. The history of the Jewish religion is in great part the history of its fight against myth. It is strange and wonderful to observe how in this battle religion ever again wins the apparent victory, myth ever again wins the real one. The prophets struggled through the word against the multiplicity of the people’s impulses, but in their visions lives the ecstaric fantasy of the Jews which makes them poets of myth without their knowing it. The Essenes wished to attain the goal of the prophets through a simplification of the forms of life, and from them was born that circle of men that supported the great Nazarene and created his legend, the greatest triumph of myth.
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