Prof Joseph Weiss (1918–69) in a famous essay distinguished between the ‘Hasidism of Faith” and the “Hasidism of Contemplative Mysticism.” In the Hasidism of faith, typified by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, the emphasis is on belief and faithfulness to a distant God, overcoming the absence via prayer, conversation with God, music, and personal words, our lacks, our melancholy and our fears are to be sublimated toward the divine. In contrast, the Hasidim of Contemplation, typified by Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritch, know as the Maggid of Mezritch, is about ecstatic prayer to reach the infinite divine. One nullifies the self and reaches the mystical realm divine Nothingness.
In the last few years, much of the Neo-Hasidut interest has been in the former, creating a psychological approach of hitboddedut, longing, desire, rejection, and abyss. But, some are attracted to the latter, the contemplative merging with God. Prof Ariel Evan Mayse in his recent book returns us to focus on the approach of the Maggid of Mezritch giving us a lucid exposition of the role of language in contemplative prayer.
Ariel Evan Mayse joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and serves as the rabbi-in-residence at Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute (atiqmakers.org). Previously he was the Director of Jewish Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. Mayse holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University and rabbinic ordination from Beit Midrash Har’el in Israel. He co-editor the two-volume A New Hasidism: Roots and Branches (Jewish Publication Society, 2019) with his teacher and colleague Arthur Green. Recently, his book was published, Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of the Maggid of Mezritsh (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritch was, in many ways, the architect of the Hasidic movement as a social organization. The Baal Shem Tov and others such as the Zlotchover Maggid, or Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Bar, were spiritualists or charismatic teachers who taught and exerted pietistic leadership for those they encountered. In contrast, between the Besht’s death in 1760 until his own death in 1772, Dov Ber created the idea of the Hasidic court and the importance of the rebbe for guidance. He also assigned future territories of influence to at least ten of his leading disciples. Hence, his disciple, Elimelech of Lizhensk received Poland, Aaron of Karlin received Lithuania, Schneur Zalman of Liadi received White Russia, Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev received Northern Ukraine. These students created the Hasidic dynasties. Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritch’s teachings were summarized as epigrams and short paragraphs which his students published as broadsides and pamphlets to attract disciples to this mystical teaching. Posthumously, Rabbi Dov Ber’s homilies were collected and edited.
The Maggid of Mezritch as he is known today, and in older literature he was known as the Maggid of Rovne, taught a doctrine of seeing God in all things. Everything contains divine sparks or reflects elements of the divine. Even physical pleasure should be considered as reflected divinity. One should know that no place is devoid of the divine and in everything one does one should make it into a form of worship. Some of his disciples occasionally overturned conventional religious categories by thinking that learning Torah takes one away from thinking about God or that God wants us to serve Him with our daily actions, not just ritual commands.
Rabbi Dov Ber’s view of prayer was that man loses himself and his surroundings through concentration of all his thought and feeling upon union with God. When a man becomes so absorbed in the contemplation of an object that his whole power of thought is concentrated upon one point, his self becomes unified with that point. So, prayer in such a state of real ecstasy, effecting a union between God and man, is extremely important. “The purpose of all prayer is to uplift the words, to return them to their source above. The world was created by the downward flow of letters into words and take them back to God. (Maggid of Mezeritch)
The Maggid has a specific language for this process of mystical contemplation of “divestment of corporeality” the world of limits, “world of speech” materiality, and the ego. One then enters in the limitless “World of Nothingness” and let oneself be a passive vessel of the divine.”
Prior to prayer he must cast off corporeality, characterized by finitude and limit, and enter into the aspect of Nothingness, which is without end. For man must direct all the wishes of his heart toward the Creator alone, and not do anything from his own self; This is impossible unless he enter into the attribute of Nothingness, to know that he does not exist at all, and then he will not turn to any thing of the world at all, seeing as how he does not exist at all.(Maggid of Mezeritch)
The Maggid is also know for the sexualization of this mystical union. If joy is felt as two human bodies come together, how much greater must be the joy of this union in spirit! – (Keter Shem Tov 72b).
Decades ago, Joseph Weiss in his studies and Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer in her Hasidut Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth-Century Hasidic Thought (Hebrew 1968) focused their scholarly research on this via passive, quietism, and contemplative mystical union. Ariel Evan Mayse shifts the focus to the role of language and linguistic theory in the Maggid’s approach.
Mayse presents the idea that Hasidism saw a linguistic vitality echoing in the cosmos, in which Rabbi Dov Ber considered all human tongues, even in their mundane forms, to have the potential to become sacred when returned to their divine source.
The language of prayer is the “World of Speech” who origin is in the “World of Thought”; the mystic awakens first the realm of thought before the words flow from his lips. At the same time, the Maggid thinks God emerges from the silence of a pre-verbal inner realm that unfolds gradually through the structures of being. Words allow the mystic to bring down and articulate this realm of divine infinite and silence.
Especially strong is Mayse’s discussion of revelation. “The Maggid claims that the Torah is an expression of the sublime depths of God’s silent Mind from which it emerged…. God therefore constricted—or focused—this primordial Scripture into letters and words, an intricate latticework of narratives and laws. That’s what happened at Sinai.” According to Mayse, “this particular take on revelation has the utmost practical meaning for him, precisely because the Maggid understands the giving of the Torah matan Torah as an ongoing process rather than a historical event.” The Maggid draws a “parallel between God and the human teacher,” the Hasidic preacher. The ineffable wisdom flows through the preacher’s words into the mind of the disciple. Hence, the book makes a point of looking at the role of orality and mysticism in the creation of the Maggid’s own homilies.
Mayse qualifies the antiquated William James idea that mysticism is beyond words, solely as an ineffable experience by showing the immense role of words and language in the Maggid’s mysticism. Mayse used Wittgenstein, Michael Sells, the scholar of Islamic mysticism, and others for this conceptualization.
However, this year also witnessed the publication of Moshe Idel’s Vocal Rites and Broken Theologies: Cleaving to Vocables in R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov’s Mysticism, who only sees the words and goes to the opposite extreme and denies the mystical element in many Hasidic texts. Idel see these text as a form of vocal linguistic magic and ritualized vocal linguistic practice for power and not contemplative mysticism. In the coming years, the term paper for many a graduate class in Hasidic thought will be to compare Ariel Evan Mayse to Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer on one side and to Moshe Idel on the other.
In sum, this work is a fine historic-literary analysis of the Maggid’s abstract theory of language. A detailed look at the different ways that language is mentioned or used. Even though the book was clearly written with passion for the subject, the topic is explored as part of the academic study of the history of Kabbalah, a study of tropes and images. Personally, I would have wanted to see ritual studies, psycholinguistics, or performance studies play a role in the analysis. I also found its modernist views of language could have benefited from the richness of post-structural ideas. The interview ends with two questions on the contemporary application of these ideas – to environmental concern and to our lives.
- What is the thesis of your new book?
The book offers a comprehensive intellectual biography of Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman, the Maggid of Mezritsh I argued that his innovative theory of language is the singular key to unpacking his abstract mystical theology, and suggest that Dov Ber must be considered one of the foremost architects of the emergent socio-religious movement that developed into Hasidism
It is commonly assumed in the study of religion that mystical illumination is necessarily beyond language. The homilies of the Maggid demonstrate otherwise. His sermons portray language as a divine gift, referring to the faculty of language as nothing less than an aspect of God dwelling within the human being.
I did not set out to write a comparative book about mysticism, and throughout the book I note the significant dangers of interpreting the Maggid’s teachings through the broadly-construed lens of “mysticism.” Nevertheless, natural conversation partners for the Maggid would include ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, John of Cross, Teresa of Avilla, Farrad ud-din Attar, to name just a few. But that is a project that must be left for a different day.
2. What is the role of language for the Maggid?
The Maggid understood the process of redeeming language by “raising it up” to its source in the Divine to be the crux of religious service and key to cultivating a life of contemplative holiness. What does the Maggid really mean? Can language truly be “returned” to God without annihilating it, thereby essentially undoing the project of creation? . Rather than negating the power of word or retreating into meditative silence, the Maggid’s argues that the process of elevating words to their divine source requires a full and unreserved embrace of language. God formed the cosmos through a series of creative utterances that continue to saturate the fabric of existence with sacred life-force. Moreover, all acts of revelation—divine, but also human—are driven by the urge to break forth from silence and cast one’s wisdom into words.
A tsaddik whoworships through the [divine power of the] letters becomes connected to the supernal wisdom (hokhmah)… He enters the gateway of Naught (ayin), concentrating on the fact (ma‘aleh ‘al libo) that, were it not for the power of God in him, he would be nothing at all.
That being the case, all [that he is and does] derives from God’s power. Human speech is the divine World of Speech, through which the world was created. The World of Speech proceeds from [God’s] wisdom. This is the source of pleasure and delight that God receives from the worlds.
Even now, the worshipper should speak only for the sake of divine pleasure, thus returning the letters to their ultimate source in hokhmah. (MDL 60 pp 94-95)
The primary goal of divine service, says the Maggid, is properly aligning the stream of language from the deepest realms of the mind to the spoken utterance.
This is accomplished through uniting a dyad found throughout the Maggid’s homilies: ‘olam ha-dibbur (“the World of Speech”) and ‘olam ha-mahashavah (“the World of Thought”). This symbolic pair plays a critical role in the Maggid’s theory of language. Spoken language expresses an idea that first appears in the mind, but the Maggid also intends it as a prescriptive instruction: the worshipper must constantly seek to unite the World of Speech and the World of Thought in every utterance (MDL, no. 34, p. 53). ‘Olam ha-dibbur and ‘olam ha-mahashavah are linked as the oral elements of language are aligned with the realm of cognition and contemplation within the speaker’s mind.
The Maggid follows the position of the Kabbalists, who describe Hebrew as a divine tongue holding unlimited cosmic secrets. But his theory of language goes deeper yet, since he suggests that all human speech may become filled with divine life-force and power.
One’s every utterance is filled with God’s power because the name Y-H-V-H is, by necessity, “garbed in every word and expression.” (LY 264, fol 81a) The Maggid’s homilies suggest that all languages—even their mundane forms—become redeemed when returned to their divine source.
3. How can the Maggid not refer to the Besht? What then is his authority?
Why should the Maggid have needed to refer to or quote the BeSHT? The latter had not yet been crowned, anachronistically, as the “founder of Hasidism.” From what we know, they only met a few times, though the hagiographical accounts describe their meetings in electrifying terms. If we are to believe Rabbi Shlomo of Lutsk’s account, they studied some rather obscure books of medieval Kabbalah (Raziel ha-Malakh, Maayan ha-Hokhmah), and the BeSHT taught him the language of the trees and the birds (a common Kabbalistic trope inherited from rabbinic literature).
But rather than absorbing a large body of particular teachings and then passing them on to his own students (or readers, in the case of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye), what the Maggid took from the BeSHT is best described as an ethos, a sensibility or an approach to the religious life. The BeSHT emphasized joy and the paramount value of ecstatic prayer, but he also taught that God’s vitality is omnipresent, animating all physical phenomena and thus transforming even the most mundane tasks into opportunities for divine service.
The Maggid took this legacy and developed it further, reshaping and reinterpreting key aspects of the BeSHT’s teaching in light of his own religious personality and philosophy. His introspective and contemplative religious path was markedly different from the approach suggested in the teachings of the BeSHT, and the Maggid continued to espouse a religious ethos defined by a deep fear of sin and a distrust of physicality. But taking the BeSHT’s notion of God’s immanence as a kind of linguistic vitality echoing in the cosmos, the Maggid developed a theory of language in which all human tongues have the potential to become sacred.
The Maggid also combined the new spiritual orientation with a new social structure, including the emergent Hasidic court. For this reason, the Maggid must really be considered one of the foremost architects of the emergent socio-religious movement that was developing into Hasidism in the 1760s and which happened further in the lifetime of his students. The tale of the Maggid’s life is the story of an introspective mystic, painfully shy and utterly confident in equal measures. Wary of the company of others and alert to the boundaries of language, the Maggid was a religious intellectual for whom God is revealed through the innermost reaches of the mind and heart. But the Maggid was pulled toward a life of public teaching and leadership and thus took a central role in the formation of Hasidism.
4. What is the relationship of Silence and Words in the Maggid’s thought?
God emerges from silence through the pathways of language. All divine revelation originates in a pre-verbal inner realm that unfolds gradually through the structures of being. The cosmos was formed through the divine word, perhaps even through the Torah itself. God’s creative utterances continue to inhere in the cosmos, animating all existence and causing the world to shimmer with divine linguistic power.
This process took on a different form at Sinai, as God’s endless wisdom became cloaked in the mantle of words. Summoned by the prophet Moses from the reservoir of infinite silence, the Torah became a garment of letters for this boundless divine life-force. Rather than one-time events whose significance is relegated to historical memory, these processes continue as God—and God’s language—are reborn through the power of human speech.
The Maggid, an introverted religious type, understands full well the power of contemplative silence and his homilies describe a contemplative realm beyond even cognitive language.But the primary thrust of his teachings consistently underscores the enormous spiritual power of human words. Silence may allow the worshipper to reach for the highest rungs, yet wordless contemplation threatens to leave the cosmos devoid of God’s vitality. Silence is only a transient moment in the service of returning the language to God. Raising up the letters through the various cognitive worlds and thus reinfusing them with sacred life-force, is immediately followed by drawing them back down—our summoning them forth—so that the influx of divine vitality may be revealed in the world
Language is a divine gift, one that demands great responsibility and commands human action; we have a religious duty to engage with and redeem language.
The tsaddikim could create a world if they wished to do so. (Sanhedrin 65b) “The heavens were created by the word of Y-H-V-H” (Ps. 33:6), and it is written “and He breathed into him the soul of life [and man became a living soul]” (Gen. 2:7), which is rendered by the Targum as “a speaking being.”
One cannot refer to parts when speaking of God, for God is endless (ein sof). One cannot describe the Infinite as blowing only His speech into his nostrils. Therefore, [all of God’s essence] was included in this speech. (271 fol 89b)
Words afford an opportunity to overcome the limitations of world defined by particularity and multiplicity through revealing the ineffable. All speech, although its letters and words appear separate, unites the speaker with the infinite Divine as they are raised up and returned to their root in God. Moreover, the Maggid’s embrace of language extends to his approach to pedagogy as well, since the riches of the intellect—as well as the depths of one’s inner experience—cannot be revealed to another without the mediating power of the structures of articulated speech.
5. How do you use the conceptual categories of Michael Sells?
Michael Sells, the scholar of Islamic mysticism who also discussed nonplatonic themes of mysticism, factors so prominently in my work because he tries to tilt to conversation around kataphatic (language-embracing theology) versus apophatic theology (negative theology in which God may be described or known only through negation rather than positive attribution). Sells moves them from a strict binary in which mystics either embrace words or disregard them, seeing these impulses as existing within a dialectic rather than an either/or, showing that language can be used in paradoxical and performative ways to overcome its own limitations. Thus the worshipper or spiritual educator maintains a foothold in the world of language and in the ineffable beyond at the very same time.
6. How does your work relate to the prior studies of Gershom Scholem?
Gershom Scholem was initially electrified by issues of language in Kabbalah and thought to write his dissertation about this subject. He chose to work on the linguistic theory of the Bahir; language and Kabbalah became the subject of his life’s work. He insisted on the linguistic nature of Kabbalah vis-à-vis all other mysticisms, offered in response to Martin Buber and the other universalizing scholars, since Jewish mystics encounter God takes place within the words of the Torah and the language of being itself.
Scholem’s reading of Kabbalah and its theology was shaped by Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”—and both he and Benjamin were deeply influenced by the German philosopher and Christian Kabbalist Johann Georg Hamann, whose influential “Aesthetica in Nuce: A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose” (1762), argues for the existence of a divine language that is constituent of being. Poetry, he argued, is the most elevated form of language, a tongue closest to the divine source from which all human speech emerges. This interweaving of divine and human language, of God’s word as interpreted and translated into human speech, is key to Scholem and Benjamin’s understanding of language “as such.”
It is therefore really interesting that Scholem could not, or would not, apply this way of thinking about mysticism and language to his studies of Hasidism. He rejected Buber’s existentialist reading of Hasidism and his reading of Jewish mysticism in general, but on this point, it seems that Scholem was himself deeply influenced by Buber’s interpretation of the mystic quest as a journey toward wordless silence. The work of Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, the first and only scholar to devote an academic monograph to the Maggid and his school, reiterates this thesis in greater depth
That’s where my book comes in. I argue that Schatz-Uffenheimer and Scholem have, in many respects, missed the key to the Maggid’s theory of language and thus to his theological project. Setting this right will teach us something about the integration of human and divine speech in the teachings of the Maggid, but also the place of language in mystical religion more broadly.
7. What is the role of orality and oral teaching in understanding the Maggid?
I draw upon the conceptions of orality in Walter Ong, Deborah Tannen, William Graham, and others who note that oral speech is often distinguished from its written counterpart by its rhetorical style, linguistic register and semantic structure. But oral speech, from public sermons and political orations to hushed whispers, includes another dimension: the experience of hearing—or uttering—the words. Hasidic sources understand this element as part and parcel of a homily’s spiritual significance and the meaning of the sermon as a religious event, often describing the words of a tsaddik as a theophany akin to the revelation at Sinai.
Idel has pursued this line of thought regarding the BeSHT’s emphasis on spoken words, and, although Haviva Pedaya has argued that the Maggid’s approach to language is primarily visual, it characterizes the Maggid’s ethos and ideas as well. Hasidic teachings—including those of the Maggid—generally favor oral speech over the written word, but the picture is more complicated because Hasidism was essentially a hybridized culture, one in which spoken words and written language interface in complex and often surprising ways.
8. How does Wittgenstein help in understanding the Maggid?
Wittgenstein’s early writings are useful precisely because of their similarities of his linguistic theory to elements of the Maggid’s mysticism but also their significant differences. At the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein describes philosopher’s brush against the limits of language and the eventual move beyond words, entering a realm of non-sense that is utterly indescribable. This attempt to confront irresolvable mysteries is described as climbing a ladder rising above even the most succinct and precise philosophical statements. There, language buckles under the inscrutable paradox and the ladder of logical propositions must be cast away.
The Maggid’s teachings, by contrast, offer a very different perspective on the contemplative’s encounter with the ineffable. Rather than the rungs of philosophical language, the Maggid’s seeker of God climbs the ladder of words and letters in an inward journey toward the infinite pool of divine wisdom concealed in his heart and mind. But far from retreating into contemplative silence or casting away latter, the words remain in place and the worshipper’s sacred speech transforms the people around him and allows the world to shine with renewed divine vitality.
9. Your last chapter on prayer and the role of silence in prayer seems very similar to Rifka Schatz. You make a big deal of your going beyond her work, but it seems you return to her basic analysis, regardless of your greater mentioning of the concept of words.
The chapter on prayer is where my analysis does come closest to that of Schatz-Uffenheimer, since so many of the Maggid’s teachings on tefillah focus on transcending the self and the journey into the innermost seat of contemplation. Now, Schatz-Uffenheimer admits to certain differences that separate early Hasidism, her book focuses on the Maggid’s teachings on wordless rapture as similar to those of the Christian mystics who emphasize silent repose in worship.
Rather than “greater mentioning of the concept of words,” as you put it, I’m trying to show that devekut, cleaving to God in prayer, is attained precisely as worshipper articulates the words of prayer and concentration. This, taught the Maggid, awakens the divine vitality within the letters of the liturgy. In such moments of illuminated worship, the divine word (shekhinah or ‘olam ha-dibbur) speaks through the worshipper, revealing once more that human language embodies the divine quality of sacred speech. Awareness of this power, linguistic as well as contemplative, brings the worshipper to a state of humility and self-transcendence, allowing one to pray for the needs of shekhinah instead of his own personal desires. In certain moments of contemplative prayer, one may venture beyond words. But this elation is followed closely by the worshipper’s return to the structures of language.
The mussaf prayer on Shabbat includes keter. We raise the World of Speech up to the World of Thought. There the illumination is so great that no distinctions are visible. But according to this, no vitality would remain in this lower world. This world exists because of a divine need, for there can be no king without a people. Therefore, we immediately recite, “Where is the place of His glory.” “Where” (ayeh) refers to the three initial sefirot, where there are no divisions. Then we say, “From His place may He turn in compassion,” to bestow his goodness here, since there can be no king without a people…
The life-force of all things comes from the World of Speech, meaning the letters. Now the letters long to connect to their source. It is their vitality. But when some change is required, then the letters of speech are lifted up beyond the attributes (middot). [The one praying] falls silent and cannot speak until the transformation has been accomplished. Then song may be recited once more. (LY no. 224, fol. 66b; and see MDL, no. 118, p. 192)
Only through the medium of words may one’s illuminated experience be concretized, expressed and shared with others. These dimensions, core parts of the Maggid’s legacy, are some of the things that Schatz-Uffenheimer discuss.
10. Why is it important that letters are auto-emanated?
What’s important is that the letters represent a stage in the unfolding of the Divine, a process that transpires across the name Y-H-V-H. The build-blocks of language – all languages – are right there in God’s self-emanation. So, the early Kabbalists describe the emanation by means of the letters and words of divine speech as a manifestation of the Godhead within a finite structure. God is embodied within the speech through which the world was created, much as the Divine is expressed through the framework of the sefirot. The Maggid takes this paradigm and applies it to the font of human language within the mind and expanding through the levels of cognition and articulation, suggesting even that all languages can become a manifestation of this divine name.
11. What is divine vitality?
Divine vitality (hiyut) is one of many parallel terms (like shefa, ruhaniyut), which emerged in the works of medieval Jewish thinkers writing under the influence of Sufi devotion literature, used by the Maggid to describe the divine immanence that pulses within creation. It’s related to his concept of the ayin, the infinite divine Naught, or hokhmah, God’s wisdom, that represent the infinite potentiality hidden within each and every thing in this world.
12. What is the Maggid’s view of revelation?
The Maggid claims that the Torah as an expression of the sublime depths of God’s silent Mind from which it emerged. Scripture, he suggests in a clever reinterpretation of rabbinic traditions, predated creation as an endless expanse of divine Wisdom. Perhaps the primordial Torah was even beyond language, a surging font of sacred illumination undefined by words. The Maggid concludes that this limitless Torah could not be apprehended by the human being. God therefore constricted—or focused—this primordial Scripture into letters and words, an intricate latticework of narratives and laws. That’s what happened at Sinai.
Scripture could only have been given by someone who grasped the most intimate and powerful divine name, the one that animates all others and signifies the aspect of God that sustains all existence.
Our teacher Moses grasped the essence of divinity, which is the vitality of all the names [of God], where there are no distinctions and all is utter oneness. Therefore, the Torah in all its breadth (bi-kelalutah) was given through him. This was not the case with the other prophets, who grasped the essence of divinity only [as it was projected through] the divine attributes and names (middot ve-kinnu’im)…
Moses grasped [divinity] through the name Y-H-V-H, the all-encompassing vitality, such that the entire Torah, in general and particular, including all that a faithful student would innovate, was given through him. (MDL, no. 132, pp. 228)
Now Torah that predated the theophany at Sinai was, perhaps, pre-linguistic and without specific content, and the Maggid suggests that Moses may have taken an active role in shaping the textual fabric of the Torah..
This particular take on revelation has the utmost practical meaning for him, precisely because the Maggid understands the giving of the Torah matan Torah as an ongoing process rather than a historical event. This happens in several different and interrelated ways.
In turn, sacred study reenacts the intimate encounter between God and Israel at Sinai – through it one becomes linked to the pre-linguistic realm of divine thought, ushering a flood of creative inspiration. BecauseGod’s wisdom is continuously contracted into the words of Scripture, this revelatory act of divine self-limitation enables one to pierce the mantle of language and reclaim the sacred vitality within its letters. And, drawing a parallel between God and the human teacher, the Maggid suggests that ineffable wisdom flows through the preacher’s words—and, in particular, through parables—into the mind of the disciple.
“A teacher should always teach his student succinctly” (derekh ketserah). (Hullin 63b) If a master wants his disciple to understand his expansive wisdom, but the student cannot receive it [in its current form], the teacher must focus his mind (metsamtsem sikhlo) into words and letters. For example, when one wants to pour something from one vessel into another and is afraid lest it spill, he uses another vessel called a funnel (mashpekh). The liquid is contracted into it, and therefore the [second] vessel can receive without any of it spilling outside.
The matter is just the same with a teacher whose intellect is contracted into words and letters. He speaks them to the student, and through them the student can receive the master’s expansive mind. (MDL, #101, p. 178. See also OT, be-shalah, #92, p. 128.)
The task of the discerning student, claims the Maggid, is to reverse the process of revelation by reaching inward to the ideational core concealed in his teacher’s words.
13. How does this connect to an environmental ethic?
In short, global climate change and the impending environmental disaster represent one of the greatest moral and existential crises of our day. Developing a Jewish language for meeting this challenge requires rethinking categories of Torah and finding ways to reformulate Jewish obligations in light of the Anthropocene, but we also need to find new ways of thinking about sacred narratives and theology (aggadah) that create a poetic language to motivate and inspire. The innumerable rabbinic teachings that expound the values of environmental stewardship should be developed, such as the following well known passage:
“Consider the work of God; for who can heal that which is damaged?” (Eccl 7:13). When the blessed Holy One created the first person, He took him and showed him all of the trees of the Garden of Eden, saying, “Consider my works—how beautiful and wonderful they are. All that I have created, I have created for you. Pay heed to this! Do not damage or destroy my world, for, if you do, who will heal it after you? (Kohelet Rabbah 7:13).
The teachings of Jewish mysticism—and of Hasidism in particular—will be particular helpful in championing the cause of environmental ethics. The radical understanding of divine immanence in these sources unabashedly describing the physical world as saturated with God’s presence:
The blessed Creator made everything and is everything. In each moment, without ever ceasing, God bestows blessing upon His creatures and upon all the worlds above and below… constantly forming, revitalizing all of life, moment to moment; all is from the blessed Holy One, who is perfect and all-inclusive (R. Levi Yitshak of Barditshev, translated in Arthur Green, Speaking Torah Spiritual Teachings from Around the Maggid’s Table, with Ebn Leader, Ariel Evan Mayse and Or N. Rose (Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2013), vol. 1, 80).
In my contemporary application of this passage, we see how the cosmos shimmers with sacred vitality, a creative divine life-force that unites all being. This divinity is manifest in the beauty of each flower, bird, and waterfall.
As David Seidenberg and Arthur Green have argued, such a world is surely not meant to be thoughtlessly trodden upon or slowly destroyed through relentlessly mining its resources. This vision of God’s presence in the physical world, incorporated into our rich legacy of mystical aggadah, shows us how to ask new questions of ancient Jewish legal literature in search of relevance to environmental concerns. Re-grounding these values in the language of halakhah thereby demands that we act with conviction in light of the theology and moral claims expressed in the Jewish mystical sources.
14. How does this focus on mystic language contribute to our lives?
“The renewal of man,” claimed Abraham Joshua Heschel, “involves a renewal of language” and rethinking our relationship to the word is a crucial step in reckoning with the nature of what it can mean to be human. Like all teachers, I struggle with the limits of language as a finite medium of communication. My time is the classroom includes frequent pauses—even on Zoom!—allowing students to gaze beyond the surface in an effort to consider the pulsing heart of the text. This can be uncomfortable, but thus we enter the quiet liminal zone of interpretation together, stepping into the echo chamber that surrounds its words as white spaces upon the page.
But, like the Maggid, my refusal to sink into permanent silence represents an embrace of the quest to share my inner world with my students. Choosing speech over silence links us to other human beings, forming an intimate conduit of communication between masters and disciples, parents and children, and experts and novices These words serve as vessels, channels through which the possessions of one human mind and soul are shared with others. In spending the past decade with the teaching of the Maggid, starting with my first semester of graduate school and now into my years as a faculty member at Stanford, writings about his life and thought has become a kind of spiritual practice. In what follows, I have attempted to share something of that with the readers of this book.
The Maggid’s contemporary relevance is a means for deep appreciation for the immense power of language, and an understanding that words can be debased and misused. Choosing speech over silence links us to other human beings, forming an intimate conduit of communication between masters and disciples, parents and children, and experts and novices. This is not automatic, however, and the repercussive, vital dimensions of language can only be awakened through presence and intention. It takes much work—and much practice—to cultivate these qualities in our words, no matter which language we are speaking. The Maggid’s teachings can give us a vocabulary and a paradigm for thinking about the potentially sacred nature of even the most ordinary language.
We are, as Charles Taylor notes, a language animal. The specific scholarly interventions of my book have much to do with the intellectual history of Kabbalah and Hasidism, but there are deeper questions at the heart of the book that are not restricted to this particular academic field. How do we create meaning through language? How do we forge relationships with other people through words, and what are the limitations of such communication? How does the experience of oral speech differ from human connections via its written forms? And, what’s the nature of spiritual education? These are the same kinds of questions I try to get my students to ask in the academic classroom through studying Jewish texts. The Maggid’s sermons seem arcane and opaque, but they provide concrete answers to these questions and, more importantly, they serve as textual anchors for classroom discussions.
The Book of Doctrines and Opinions: 