Dialogue with a Chasid
RIEMER, JACK
Dialogue with a Chasid God at the Center by David R. Blumenthal Harper & Row, 1989. 246 pp., S20.95 Reviewed by Jack Riemer God at the Center breaks down the stereotype that most of us have...
...David Blumenthal has done more than translate sections from Kedushat Levi...
...The Chasidic teachers were not just revivalists, as I had thought...
...I still remember how surprised I was when I picked up his book, Kedushat Levi, for the first time and found that to comprehend it required an enormous knowledge of cabalistic literature...
...Blumenthal writes about God as a reality, as the reality at the center of our lives...
...Blumenthal, who is both a rabbi and a philosopher, has done something that few others would dare: speak to the spirit...
...He takes the religious life seriously as a personal option—as a personal obligation—so he writes, not to document what someone in a previous century once believed but to set forth honesdy and direcdy what he himself believes...
...From this we grew up thinking that Chasidim were naive, simple-minded, happy-go-lucky innocents who sang and danced and who reached God by reciting the aleph bet or by whistling...
...He has engaged in a dialogue with its author...
...I grew up hearing all the stories, folktales and songs about Levi Yitzchak and so I pictured him this way: a life-loving, God-loving spokesperson for the Jewish people who made up in spirit what he lacked in sophistication...
...But Blumenthal has done more than that: He has given us a series of personal ruminations on what these Chasidic thoughts have to say to us, who live here and now...
...We are not accustomed to reading this kind of writing...
...Translating Levi Yitzchak would have been achievement enough, for it took great skill and enormous literary sensitivity to take a work written in cabalistic language and to convey its ideas in an English style that is lucid and resonant...
...He is creditor of Fth/cal Wills: A Modern Jewish Treasury (Schocken, 1986) and edrtor of Jewish Reflections on Death (Schocken, 1976...
...we have little strength left to deal with spiritual issues...
...Trying to get through that first page of Kedushat Levi cured me forever of the stereotype about Chasidism that I once held, and reading the selections that David Blumenthal's book has now made available in English will do the same for its readers...
...It took many hours and much help to get through even one page of his writings, and I learned from that experience to regard Chasidism with more humility...
...They were men of mind as well as heart, men who had a complex understanding of reality, men who struggled with metaphysical issues of the greatest depth...
...The secularists don't write about God because it is a waste of time to discuss the archaic...
...Most of us got our understanding of Chasidism either from plays like Fiddler on the Roof or, if we were a bit more knowledgeable, from Shalom Aleichem or Y. L. Peretz...
...The pious don't write about God because it is impossible to discuss God in God's presence...
...Our energies are focused on budgets and bylaws, committees and coalitions, bin-gos and bazaars...
...Jack Riemer is the rabbi of Beth David Congregation in Miami, Florida...
...And most philosophers are forever caught up in the study of abstract things...
...Most rabbis are forever caught up in the politics and problems of running institutions...
...We don't have many books in modern Jewish literature that talk about God...
...246 pp., S20.95 Reviewed by Jack Riemer God at the Center breaks down the stereotype that most of us have about Chasidism in general and about Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev in particular...
...they are seldom interested in, or capable of, relating their studies to the inner life and the spiritual hungers of human beings...
Vol. 15 • June 1990 • No. 3
