A Despairing Search for God

...A Despairing Search for God Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav By Arthur Green University of Alabama 395 pp $27 50 Reviewed by David Singer Editor, "American Jewish Year Book", contributor, "Midstream," "Commentary" In his Notesfrom the Warsaw Ghetto, Emmanuel Ringelbaum writes "In the prayer house of the Hasidim from Bratslav on Nowohpie Street there is a large sign 'Jews, Never Despair'' The Hasidim dance there with the same religious fervor as they did before the War " "Never Despair" is the message of hope Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (1772-1810)—grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism—bequeathed to his followers and to Jewish theology Nahman, however, was anything but a naive optimist Indeed, as Arthur Green shows in this brilliant biographical study, the Bratslaver reb-be was plagued throughout his life by a deep sense of despair over his religious worth, his role as a spiritual leader, and his awareness of the absence of God from the everyday world of human experience If Nahman saw himself as the zaddiq ha-dor, the single leader who stood at the center of his generation, he also regarded himself as an exemplary suffering zaddiq, a spiritual master who could lead his follow-eis beyond despair precisely because he himself had already experienced all their woes Thus, while Nahman was firmly rooted in the arcane spiritual world of the kabbalah, his religious sensibility and his icligious quest had a distinctly modem cast Part ot the tasunation of reading Tormented Master is that it demonstrates the superficiality of the popular view of Hasidism as a movement stressing simple piety and undiluted joy To be sure, these elements are present, and were particularly prominent during the founding period What the conventional view does not allow for are subsequent developments within Hasidism on the intellectual side, the contemplative prayer techniques of the Maggid of Miedzyrzec, and the bold theoretical formulations of Shneur Zal-man of Ladi, on the emouonal side, the brooding pessimism of Mendel of Kotsk and the Bratslaver rebbe Certainly, Nahman violates our conception of the happy, dancing Hasid Before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 38, he endured the humiliation of gaining only a small number of followers, the pain of being attacked by other Hasidic leaders, the horror of seeing both his wife and infant son die, and, perhaps most difficult of all, the torment of feeling himself periodically cut off from God Nahman, in short, came by his despair honestly Writing a critical biography of a Hasidic master is an extremely difficult undertaking Arthur Green, assistant professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania, has carried out the task with remarkable skill The key problem, of course, is separating fact from fantasy amid the welter of Hasidic legends, but Green is able to establish the essential reliability of the sources dealing with Nahman's life The rebbe left behind a mass of homilies originally delivered to his assembled followers around the Sabbath and festival tables, and Green ingeniously mines them for information about Nahman's thoughts and feelings at various stages in his career The author of Tormented Master also makes excellent use ot The Tales of Rabbi Nahman, a collection of 13 highly complex works ot symbolic fiction that constitute his major literary legacy, to achieve greater insight into the man and his theology In general, Green insists that "in the case of so fully sell-preoccupied a person as Nahman there can be no separation between biography and an understanding of his thought " "Whether he is offering a homily on the role of the true zaddiq in the world or spinning a fantastic yarn about kings and princesses,' Green argues, "it is the clarification and justification of his own life-task that is constantly at the center of Nahman's attention " In the Bratslaver rebbe, the "psychological complexities of the individual" and the "theological mysteries of the universe" are fully intertwined Even after Green has peeled away the overlay of myth, Nahman remains a figure larger than life As a child he was given to extreme asceticism, immersing himself in an outdoor ritualarium in the freezing Ukraman winter, and swallowing his food in large chunks so as to deny himself the pleasure of taste From adolescence on he regarded all sexual desire as abhorrent, noting that for him intercourse was as painful as circumcision Nahman often struck terror in his Hasidim by quickly shifting moods?at one moment exuding "extreme and seemingly arrogant self-confidence" in the next exhibiting the "most bleak and overwhelming depression ' He once told his gathered followers "You see in me a great, beautiful tree with wonderful branches, but the roots of that tree are Wing in Hell " A man who could make that statement could also, as Nahman did in 1798, announce without warning or explanation that he was leaving for the Holy Land i et no sooner had Nahman arrived there —having abandoned his family and Hasidim, having consciousU assumed the role of a buffoon during a stopover in Istanbul, and having nearly drowned during a terrible storm at sea—than he expressed a desire to immediately return to the Ukraine' Obviously, Green is not exaggerating in the least when he describes the Bratslaver rebbt as an "idiosyncratic and problematic religious personality " That remarkable personality begs lot psychological analysis, and Green otters it—but always with great restraint and a full appreciation of the complexities of human motivation More importantly, he goes on to show how the Bratslaver rebbe elevated his inner experiences into the supreme model of the struggle for faith As Green puts it " that which was descriptive of Nahman's own inner life was taken as prescriptive for the lives of his disciples, and was thus abstracted from its psychological context As such, the motif of constant struggle, growth, and challenge became central to the Bratslav understanding of the religious life " Astonishingly, this was a fully conscious process, when Nahman told his followers, "My fire will burn until Messiah comes," he was offering his religious experience as the paradigm for all religious quests Small wonder, then, that the Bratslaver Hasidim saw the years of Nahman's ministry as an unparalleled period in the spiritual history of mankind, and that they took great pains to record for posterity his every word and deed When Nahman died, his disciples refused to appoint another rebbe, he, after all, was the "zaddiq for all time, it [was] inconceivable that anyone should attempt to stand m his shoes " As an analyst of faith, Nahman was very much the religious existentialist, in that the focus of his concern was the " concrete situation of the lone individual who seeks a path to God " Whereas Hasidism, in general, stresses the accessibility of God to man (indeed, at times, it comes perilously close to pantheism), the Bratslaver rebbe was centrally concerned with the "experience of the absence of God,' with "man's inability to experience God directly " Since we live in a world where God cannot be "seen," doubt is inevitable, the denial of God's very existence is "something at which the faithful cannot afford to scoff " Nahman meets this problem by standing it on its head—by arguing that "only in the seeming absence of God from the world can one truly find Him " As Green explains Nahman's position "Where the divine Presence is apparent, there is no challenge Thus he who ultimately seeks the presence of God on its highest and most authentic level must do so by following a unique form of via negativa paradoxically pushing himself toward those inner places where God is not to be found, or at least where His presence is not readily perceived Faith must be nurtured by constant growth, growth can take place only in the face of challenge, and challenge can exist only m confrontation with the seeming absence of God...

...Faith, then, is an act of defiance, it does not seek answers or proofs, but rather struggle at an ever-higher pitch What is implied here is a rhythm of religious life in which conflict is followed by resolution, followed by still greater conflict There could be no more exact mirroring of the Bratslaver rebbe is own struggle for faith And just as paradox was central to Nahman's definition of the life of faith, it characterized his conception of the nature of Hasidic leadership In classical Hasidism the rebbe,, or zaddiq, is seen as a clearly superior figure, a man who can lead others because he himself is virtually untainted by sin or conflict Nahman argued for something very different, for a zaddiq who is an accessible model, for a rebbe who can lead his followers beyond sin and religious doubt along a path that he himself has already traveled In the Bratslaver rebbe's view, the true zaddiq is capable of serving as a spiritual master "not because he has always remained above the reaches of sin, but rather because he himself has undergone all the conflicts and torments that even the most beleaguered of his followers could ever imagine?and has emerged tnumphant " It is the suffering zaddiq, the rebbe whose roots lie in Hell, who can lift others out of despair and transform their religious lives It hardly needs to be added that this view of the Hasidic master is, as Green nicely puts it, a direct reflection of Nahman's own "dialectical resolution of self-confidence and self-doubt into paradoxical self-assertion " While Nahman's theological concerns are treated head-on in his homilies, they find veiled expression in the symbolic fiction of The Tales These stories, it is important to note, are quite different from the type of matenal that Martin Buber collected in his two-volume Tales of the Hasidim Nahman is the author, not the subject—at least not ostensibly—and he deals with bewitched princesses, mystenous beggars, wood-spints, wizards, and the like, rather than the vanous zaddiqim His stones have a strong mythic quality and a marked complexity of literary allusion that set them apart Scholars have examined The Tales from various standpoints—literary, historical, theological, psychological—and Green believes that each has something to offer toward a larger understanding of Nahman's fictional enterprise (The interested reader now has available Arnold Band's excellent translation of Nahman's stones, Nahman of Bratslav [Pauhst Press, 1978], and in Beggars and Prayers [Basic Books, 1979] Adin Steinsaltz offers fascinating analyses of six of Nahman's stories) Green's own contribution is to stress the biographical element, arguing that the Bratslaver rebbe's turn to symbolic fiction must be seen m the context of his ongoing effort to sustain an image of himself as a religious figure of messianic proportions When Nahman failed to win a significant following, Green maintains, he came to the conclusion that the world was not yet ready for a direct encounter with his message Hence, during the last four years of his life he took up the spinning of tales to convey theological profundities in a veiled manner Here, then, is another paradox The revelation of the truth by and about Nahman can only come about through an act of hiding Because Nahman's adherents refused to appoint a successor to him, they were dubbed, in Hasidic circles, the "dead Hasidim " Nonetheless, they continue undauntedly in small conventicles in Jerusalem and Brooklyn, responding to taunts about not having a living master with the comment, "Better a dead rebbe who is alive, than a live rebbe who is dead " Reading Tormented Master, a model of critical yet thoroughly engaged scholarship, one has no difficulty comprehending what they mean...