Nahman of Bratslav
Hasidic master whose disciples refuse to appoint a successor--even two
centuries after his death.
By Rabbi Louis Jacobs
Reprinted with
permission from The Jewish Religion: A
Companion, published by Oxford
University Press.
Nahman of Bratslav (1772-1811), a Hasidic master and
religious thinker, was a great-grandson of the founder of Hasidism, the Baal
Shem Tov. Nahman sought to reinvigorate the movement which he saw as having
lost its original impetus.
He gathered around him a small number of chosen disciples,
among them Nahman of Tcherin and Nathan Sternhartz, the latter acting as his
faithful Boswell, recording his life and teachings. Nahman undertook a
hazardous journey to the land of Israel (1798-9). A year or two after his
return he settled in Bratslav where he remained until 1810. The last year of
his life was spent in the town of Uman in the Ukraine where he died of
tuberculosis at the early age of 39.
In Uman, Nahman became friendly with followers of the Haskalah
movement of enlightenment. Although he is extremely critical of all secular
learning, some of the ideas he seems to have obtained from these Maskilim do
occasionally surface in his own works. Nahman's grave in Uman is a place of
pilgrimage for his Hasidim to this day. The veneration in which the Bratslaver
Hasidim hold Nahman is unparalleled even in Hasidic hero-worship. In the
Bratslav synagogue, in the Meah Sharim district of Jerusalem, Nahman's original
throne-like chair stands next to the Ark. Nahman promised his followers that he
would be with them even after his death, so that no successor to him has ever
been appointed and the Bratslaver are called the "dead Hasidim" in
that, unlike all others, they have no living master.
Nahman's Thought
Nahman's ideas on the Jewish religion were conveyed
verbally, in Yiddish, to his disciples but were later written down by them,
under the heading Likkutay Moharan,
"Collection of Sayings by Our Teacher Rabbi Nahman." Basing
his theory on the doctrine of Isaac Luria that the En Sof [the infinite God in
kabbalistic thought] withdrew into Himself leaving an "empty space"
into which all worlds could emerge, Nahman draws the conclusion that, in a
sense, the world is void of the full presence of God. That is why, he affirms,
man is bound to have religious doubts and all his attempts at proving the
existence of God are doomed to failure from the outset. The only way to find
God is through faith which alone can raise the human soul beyond the void.
Nahman seems to have had the kind of mind in which faith and
reason cannot exist side by side. One of the two must yield totally to the other
so that Nahman, similarly to his contemporary, Kierkegaard, is a religious
anti-rationalist, critical of the attempts of the medieval philosophers to work
out a faith based on reason. Nahman speaks often of the "true Zaddik of
the generation," which is understood by both his disciples and modern scholars as referring to
himself. Obviously alluding to his own struggles against more conventional
Hasidic leaders, Nahman remarks that God gives a man the desire to journey to
the "true Zaddik," but then he meets with obstacles; these obstacles
are presented to him in order to awaken his desire, since whenever a man meets
with obstacles in his desire to achieve something, the obstacles he has to
overcome strengthen him in his resolve and his desire to becomes even more
powerful.
Nahman
encouraged his followers to practice "solitude." Solitude is defined
by Nahman to mean that a man sets aside at least an hour or more during which
he is alone in a room or in the field so that he can converse with his Maker in
secret, entreating God to bring him nearer to His service. This pouring out of
the heart in solitude should be in Yiddish, the ordinary language of conversation.
Nahman also stresses the value of worshipping God in man's present
circumstances. Too much planning for the morrow is inadvisable even in spiritual
matters. "For all man has ill the world is the day and the hour where he is,
for the morrow is an entirely different world."
Nahman's famous Tales (published
by Sternhartz in 1815) are unique in Hasldic literature. The historian of
Hasidism, Simon Dubnow, dismisses these as "fairytales" and certainly
on the surface that is what they are: "The Loss of the Princess"; "The
King Who Fought Major Wars"; "The King's Son and the Maidservant's Son
Who Were Switched," and so forth. Naturally, Nahman's followers read all kinds
of mystical ideas into the Tales. Whatever their meaning, the Tales are
admired for their literary merit.
Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs
was the founding rabbi of the New London Synagogue and is Goldsmid Visiting
Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at Lancaster
University. His books include
Jewish Prayer, We Have Reason to
Believe, Principles of the Jewish
Faith, and A Jewish Theology.
(c) Louis Jacobs,
1995. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of
this material may be stored, transmitted, retransmitted, lent, or reproduced in
any form or medium without the permission of Oxford University Press.
