Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse: H H: R I S L

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.
Laurentian University Library, on 23 Nov 2017 at 14:24:18, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
AJS Review 41:2 (November 2017), 375–408

© Association for Jewish Studies 2017
doi:10.1017/S0364009417000423
H ASIDIC H ALAKHAH : R EAPPRAISING THE I NTERFACE

OF S PIRIT AND L AW
Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse
Abstract: This paper offers a novel perspective regarding the interface
between law, mysticism, and social reality. The inner turn that charac-
terizes Hasidism is often understood through a binary model defined
by the Christian Hebraists, and followed by many academic scholars,
in which law and spirit exist in intractable tension. We suggest,
however, that in the specific contexts of Hasidism, nomos, eros, and mys-
tical piety often merged in distinctive ways, and that these are visible in
novel forms of Jewish legal method and discourse. Our appreciation of
the multifaceted Jewish religious and pietistic expressions of modernity
should not be made to conform to the generally accepted definition of an
era of strict “Orthodox” formulation and monolithic, conservative legal
stagnation. Instead, we argue that the spiritual and legal ethos of
Hasidism took on new forms in the late eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, as local identities became increasingly complex and new cultural
fusions led to creative re-expressions of law and theology.
S PIRIT AND N OMOS

The Benedictine priest Gaudenty Pikulski served as one of the confessors for
the Frankists, an eighteenth-century Sabbatian offshoot, during their mass conver-
sion to Christianity in 1759. Soon after this event Pikulski published a historical
account of the Frankists, referring to them as the “Contra-Talmudists.” Surpris-
ingly, he claimed that Frankism was not a new phenomenon, nor was it simply
a kind of heretical Jewish sect. In his 1760 report Pikulski instead argued that
Frankism was an expression of the true, ancient, and pure secret Jewish theology
that had been confronted and suppressed by the rabbinic establishment for thou-
sands of years. He noted:
Today’s Contra-Talmudists existed in Israel even before the birth of Christ, Our
Lord, though they were called by different names, according to their time. At
the beginning they were called the “kabbalists” [Kabalistami] because they
explained the Holy Scripture mystically, through the teachings of kabbalah;
they were good and understood the mysteries of the Old Testament without
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
any error [i.e., in complete accord with the Christian teachings]. … Later,
when the sages of the Jerusalem Synagogue started to favour their Talmuds, tra-
ditions, and laws above the Divine Law, which misled the Jewish masses, the
kabbalists opposed them and they came to be called the Contra-Talmudists.1
1. Paweł Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 82 (emphasis added). See also Jan Doktór, “Frankism
375
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Laurentian University Library, on 23 Nov 2017 at 14:24:18, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
Pawel Maciejko has recently demonstrated that Pikulski’s distinction between

these two contradictory Jewish strands was by no means novel. Pikulski framed
the Frankist affair within a well-known medieval Hebraist pattern, one that was
outlined in different variations in the influential works of Raymond Martini and
Johann Reuchlin, as well as the many who followed in their footsteps.2 This
approach claimed to distinguish between the secret, mythical, and mystical orig-
inal Jewish tradition and the vulgar, hyperlegalistic talmudic culture. This distinc-
tion had an important role in establishing and justifying intellectual movements
like the Christian Kabbalah, for it suggested that these mystics were actually
recovering the true, essential Christian truths preserved in this theosophical
school. This separation also provided a convenient framework for conducting a
social, intellectual, and political affair like the Frankist dispute, demarcating
clean lines between the “nomian” rabbinic community (the Talmudisten) and
the mystical Zoharisten or Contra-Talmudists.3
The perceived rift between law and spirit has proven to be more than grist
for medieval and early modern Christian Hebraists.4 The impact of this dichotomy
has been felt across many areas in the study of Jewish mysticism, but its influence
on the academic study of Hasidism has been particularly acute.5 Indeed, the prob-
lematic assumption that legal obligation (as expressed in allegiance to Halakhah)
and Its Impact on the Mutual Perceptions of Christian and Jews,” Jewish History Quarterly (Kwartalnik
Historii Żydów) 4 (2004): 486–91. On the Frankists more broadly, and the historical circumstances of
their mass conversion, see Meir Balaban, Le-toledot ha-tenu‘ah ha-frankit (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1934), vol.
1.
2. In addition to the work of Stephen G. Burnett cited below, see Elisheva Carlebach, “Attribu-
tion of Secrecy and Perceptions of Jewry,” Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 3 (1996): 115–36; Jeremy
Cohen, “Scholarship and Intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and Evaluation of
Judaism in European Christendom,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 3 (1986): 592–613;
Moshe Idel, “Johannes Reuchlin: Kabbalah, Pythagorean Philosophy and Modern Scholarship,”
Studia Judaica 16 (2008): 30–55; Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Political Theology in Renaissance
Christian Kabbala: Petrus Galatinus and Guillaume Postel,” Hebraic Political Studies 1, no. 3
(2006): 286–309.
3. On this term, see Maciejko, Mixed Multitude, 63–91.
4. On the historical centrality of Christian Hebraism in the establishment of Jewish studies as an
academic field, see Stephen G. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf
(1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1996); and see also
Moshe Idel, “Differing Conceptions of Kabbalah in the Early 17th Century,” in Jewish Thought in
the Seventeenth Century, ed. Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1987), 166–74.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
5. On tensions between legal orthodoxy and spirituality in the study of Islamic mysticism, see
Louis Massignon, The Passion of Al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, ed. H. Mason, abridged ed.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 21, 61, 340, 359. In a number of Sufi texts
the strain between law and spirit is clearly visible, but Schimmel notes that even when Shari‘a is enu-
merated as a lower rung (or stage) of religious practice, Sufi thinkers often reiterate that religious law is
nonetheless essential to the mystic path; see ibid., 16, 98–99. See also Ephraim Kanarfogel, Peering
through the Lattices: Mystical, Magical, and Pietistic Dimensions in the Tosafist Period (Detroit,
MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000), esp. 19–31.
376
Hasidic Halakhah
and spirituality exist in intractable and fundamental tension with one another has
undergirded scholarship of Hasidism since the inception of the field. Yet a closer
reading of the historical sources reveals that in Hasidism, nomos, eros, and mys-
tical piety often merged together in distinctive ways, and that hasidic texts repre-
sent an arena in which new forms of Jewish legal thought, method, and discourse
have emerged. The present study explores the complex interface between hasidic
spirituality and Halakhah through three different heuristic lenses, each provided by
clusters of sources united by a shared theme or central question. Each of these
groups of sources will reveal an alternative to the influential—but simplistic—
binary division between the law and the spirit. While there is no one single
hasidic practice or theory of Halakhah, the creative fusion of legal traditions, mys-
tical inclinations, and social organization found in these sources is uniquely
hasidic.
The first group of texts will demonstrate the various ways in which hasidic
groups internalized Lurianic ritual culture, as individuals and especially as a com-
munity. This process, in which legal and mystical sources blend together, allowed
hasidic writers to use praxis and law as a claim to continuity with earlier forms of
Kabbalah. The second collection of hasidic sources engage with a fascinating issue
of specific jurisprudence, namely hasidic discussions of formulating and deciding
the law by means of the Divine Spirit (ruah. ha-kodesh). This type of divine rev-
elation was, of course, embodied in the charismatic figure of the hasidic leader,
whose personal inspiration could at times lead to rewriting the law.6 Finally, a
third thematic cluster examines a surprising array of hasidic sources on the possi-
bility of individualized law. These include teachings on subjective aesthetics of
legal scholarship or decision-making, as well as the diachronic transformation
of Halakhah across generations, which reflect the different “soul-roots” of the
law’s mystical adjudicators. These three issues or themes are examined in light
of their differing theoretical, theological, and social contexts, which are well doc-
umented in hasidic legal sources and literature. And subsequently, as we shall see,
each of them sparked its own lively public conflict.
W RITING THE H ISTORY OF H ASIDISM AND L AW

In 1938 Gershom Scholem, a founder of the modern study of Kabbalah,
gave a series of lectures on the historical development of Jewish mysticism.
These addresses were later assembled and published as Major Trends in Jewish
Mysticism, which became the cornerstone of the academic study of the subject
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
6. Immanuel Etkes, “The Zaddik: The Interrelationship between Religious Doctrine and Social
Organization,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (London: Vallentine Mitchell,
1997), 159–67; Moshe Idel, “‘The Besht Passed His Hand over His Face’: On the Besht’s Influence
on His Followers—Some Remarks,” in After Spirituality: Studies in Mystical Traditions, ed. Philip
Wexler and Jonathan Garb (New York: P. Lang, 2012), 79–106; Stephen Sharot, “Hasidism and the Rou-
tinization of Charisma,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 19, no. 4 (1980): 325–36; Nehemia
Polen, “Charismatic Leader, Charismatic Book: Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s Tanya and His Leadership,” in
Rabbinic and Lay Communal Authority, ed. Suzanne Last Stone (New York: Yeshiva University Press,
2006), 53–64.
377
and remains a work of immeasurable influence. Scholem devoted an entire lecture

to Hasidism, describing it as a spiritualist movement that sought a renewal of the
mythical and mystical elements of Judaism.7 In this chapter he articulated a fun-
damental contrast between the mystical life on one hand, and normative rabbinic
law on the other, to such a degree that the rise of one is predicated on the fall of the
other:
After an interval of a hundred years, during which Hasidism as a whole, apart

from the solitary figure of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Ladi,8 developed indepen-
dently of the rabbinic tradition, there occurred a revival of rabbinic learning,
chiefly under the influence of the Rabbi [Menahem Mendel] of Kotzk…. But
important as these aspects of later Hasidism no doubt are, they certainly rep-
resent a departure from what is new and original in Hasidism….
The miraculous thing about it all is the fact that Hasidism did not conflict
much more sharply with orthodox Judaism than it did; and yet everything
seemed to move towards a mortal struggle. The personality of the Zaddik,
its interpretation by the Hasidic writers, their insistence upon his supreme reli-
gious ration, of a medium of revelation—all this fairly compelled a clash with
the recognized religious authority of rabbinic Judaism.9
Yet this “miraculous thing” is far less surprising when some of Scholem’s assump-
tions concerning the essential relationship between mysticism, myth, and law are
abandoned, and with a close historical inquiry regarding the specific context of the
hasidic movement itself.
Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem fiercely debated many issues regarding
the study of Hasidism, ranging from the proper source materials to theological
questions like the attitude of the hasidic masters toward the physical realm.10 It
is noteworthy, however, that these two scholars agreed on this point, each
seeing in Hasidism a type of spirituality that is naturally and unavoidably
7. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1974), 345.
8. Excluding citations from scholarly literature, our transliteration of hasidic names and places
follows that of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe as adjusted to fit the stylistic conven-
tions of the present journal.
9. Similar notions of an unbridgeable rift between rabbinic orthodoxy and mystical anomianism,
or even antinomianism, is a theme that repeats itself throughout Scholem’s Major Trends. See also
Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press), 691–92.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
10. Martin Buber, “Interpreting Hasidism,” Commentary 36 (September 1963): 218; Gershom
Scholem, “Martin Buber’s Interpretation of Hasidism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other
Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1995), 228–50. For scholarly appraisals of
their debate, see, inter alia, Michael Oppenheim, “The Meaning of Hasidut: Martin Buber and
Gershom Scholem,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49, no. 3 (1981): 409–23;
Maurice Friedman, “Interpreting Hasidism: The Buber-Scholem Controversy,” Leo Baeck Institute
Yearbook 33 (1988): 449–67; Moshe Idel, “Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on Hasidism: A Crit-
ical Appraisal,” in Rapoport-Albert, Hasidism Reappraised, 176–202; Jerome Gellman, “Buber’s
Blunder: To Scholem and Schatz-Uffenheimer,” Modern Judaism 20, no. 1 (2000): 20–40.
378
Hasidic Halakhah
poised to conflict with the law.11 For Buber, the ethos of Hasidism is an example of
the larger dichotomy drawn between religion and religiosity, or the tension
between the structures of formal Judaism and the heart of Jewish spirituality:
Religiosity is man’s sense of wonder and adoration, an ever anew becoming,

an ever anew articulation and formulation of his feeling that, transcending his
conditioned being yet bursting from its very core, there is something that is
unconditioned…. Religion is the sum total of the customs and teachings artic-
ulated and formulated by the religiosity of a certain epoch in a people’s life; its
prescriptions and dogmas are rigidly determined and handed down as unalter-
ably binding to all future generations, without regard for their newly devel-
oped religiosity, which seeks new forms. Religion is true so long as it is
creative; but it is creative only so long as religiosity, accepting the yoke of
the laws and doctrines, is able (often without even noticing it) to imbue
them with new and incandescent meaning, so that they will seem to have
been revealed to every generation anew, revealed today, thus answering
men’s very own needs, needs alien to their fathers.12
Echoes of this juxtaposition of law and spirit are present with slight variations in the
works of other twentieth-century scholars,13 including Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer,
11. Buber’s and Scholem’s thinking should be contextualized within broader antinomian trends
in the philosophical circles of Weimer Germany; see Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the
European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), esp.
135–90; and Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A
Study in Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 47–70.
We should note, however, that Erich Fromm devoted an entire chapter of his 1922 dissertation, entitled
“Das jüdische Gesetz: zur Soziologie des Diaspora-Judentums,” to hasidic interpretations of Jewish law
and the role of Halakhah in hasidic society. See also Jonathan Garb, “Derakhim ‘okefot halakhah:
‘Iyyunim rishoni’im be-megamot ’anomiyut be-me’ah ha-‘esrim,” ’Akdamot 14 (2004): 117–30; and
Garb, Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2015), 148–68.
12. Martin Buber, “Jewish Religiosity,” in On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. E. Jospe
(New York: Schocken, 1967), 80. In an essay from his later period, Buber reflected on the reasons that
his enthusiasm for hasidic stories and teachings did not lead him to become a member of a hasidic com-
munity: “I could not become a Hasid. It would have been an impermissible masquerading had I taken
on the Hasidic manner of life—I who had a wholly other relation to Jewish tradition, since I must dis-
tinguish in my innermost being between what is commanded me and what is not commanded me. It was
necessary, rather, to take into my own existence as much as I actually could of what had been truly
exemplified for me there, that is to say, of the realization of that dialogue with being whose possibility
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
my thought had shown me”; see Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, trans. Maurice Friedman
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 3. Buber’s anomian—and, in many cases, antino-
mian—interpretation of Hasidism was criticized by many of his colleagues; see the exchange in
Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1955), 72–
92, 111–18, and see Buber’s explanation in a letter to Maurice Friedman in The Letters of Martin
Buber, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, trans. Richard and Clara Winston and Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1991), no. 624, pp. 576–77.
13. Joseph Weiss, “Torah Study in Early Hasidism,” in Studies in East European Jewish
Mysticism and Hasidism, ed. David Goldstein (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1997), 56–68.
379
a close disciple of Scholem, who downplayed the centrality of Halakhah in hasidic

sources in her attempt to compare them to the works of quietistic Christian
mystics.14 The division of law and spirit also informs the work of contemporary
scholar Arthur Green, who readily acknowledges Buber’s influence on his interpre-
tations of hasidic texts and theology. Green has argued that some of the early hasidic
masters explored the theoretical possibility of spiritual service outside of the frame-
work of Jewish law.15 Their teachings, he suggests, articulated a new paradigm of
religious life in which the ideal was to serve God beyond the confines of the com-
mandments.16 Although the hasidic leaders defended the importance of the law,
Green suggests that these yearnings for a spirituality unbridled by the specific
norms of Jewish law should not be dismissed as mere fancy.17
Few modern scholars have engaged the relationship between hasidic spiri-
tuality and the performance or codification of Jewish law.18 Many continue to
assume a model in which pneuma inspires the mystic to new levels of intimacy
14. Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth

Century Hasidic Thought, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993), esp. 242–54.
15. Arthur Green, Devotion and Commandment: The Faith of Abraham in the Hasidic Imagi-
nation (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1989); Green, “Hasidism: Discovery and
Retreat,” in The Other Side of God: A Polarity in World Religions, ed. Peter L. Berger (Garden City,
NY: Anchor, 1981), 104–30; and cf. Green, “Early Hasidism: Some Old/New Questions,” in
Rapoport-Albert, Hasidism Reappraised, 445. See also Jerome Gellman, “The Figure of Abraham
in Hasidic Literature,” Harvard Theological Review 91, no. 3 (1998): 279–300.
16. Of course, the impulse to serve God beyond the commandments does not necessarily imply
that one does so against them. For example, the notion of the Divine Will (rez.on ha-bore’) described by
the German Pietists led to supererogatory levels of piety; see Haym Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in
Sefer Hasidim,” AJS Review 1 (1976): 315–25.
17. Scholars have long been attracted to the possible flirtations with antinomianism found in the
teachings of Mordecai Joseph of Izhbits (1800–1854); see Joseph Weiss, “A Late Jewish Utopia of
Religious Freedom,” in Goldstein, Studies in East European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism, 209–
48; Morris M. Faierstein, All Is in the Hands of Heaven: The Teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Joseph
Leiner of Izbica, rev. ed. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2005); Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin: Rec-
onciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism (Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 2005); and Herzl Hefter, “‘In God’s Hands’: The Religious Phenomenology of R.
Mordechai Yosef of Izbica,” Tradition 46 (2013): 43–65.
18. The late Yehoshua Mondshine offers the following very insightful remark: “Hasidism will
always examine deeds in the light of the will of God and the instinctive inclination of the individual,
both of which change according to the circumstances of time and place.” Yehoshua Mondshine, “The
Fluidity of Categories in Hasidism: Averah Lishmah in the Teachings of R. Zevi Elimelekh of Dynow,”
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
in Rapaport-Albert, Hasidism Reappraised, 309–10. See also Naftali Loewenthal, “The Apotheosis of
Action in Early Habad,” Daat: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah 18 (1987): v–xix. For a
few key studies on this subject, in addition to those cited throughout the present article, see Aaron Wer-
theim, Law and Custom in Hasidism, trans. Shmuel Himelstein (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1992); Alan Brill,
Thinking God: The Mysticism of Rabbi Zadok of Lublin (New York: Michael Scharf Publication Trust
of the Yeshiva University Press, 2002), 5–12, 27–34, 134–62, 309–63; Samuel H. Dresner, Heschel,
Hasidism and Halakha (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002); Shaul Magid, “The Intolerance
of Tolerance: Mahloket (Controversy) and Redemption in Early Hasidism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 8,
no. 4 (2001): 326–68.
380
Hasidic Halakhah
with God, while nomos restrains and binds him to the norms of his community.19
The strain between these two poles can equally be described as fraught or fruitful,
both versions assuming that the spiritual quest and the obligatory practices
demanded by Halakhah pull the seeker in opposing trajectories.20 This framing
of an irrepressible tension between the law and the spirit is not entirely without
basis in certain historical records. The polemical works of the Mitnagdim reveal
biting criticisms of the Hasidim for their lack of study and disdainful attitude
toward scholars, perceived legal infractions, and even for using personal charisma
and mystical authority in making legal decisions.21 Indeed, this backlash from the
Mitnagdim may have been a factor in inspiring the Hasidim to reinforce their study
of Halakhah as well as their ritual observance, without tempering their powerful
critique of prideful and narcissistic scholars.22 But Halakhah as such and adher-
ence thereof should not be misconstrued as the central flashpoint of controversy.
The primary infraction for which the Hasidim were condemned was not their abro-
gation of rituals or customs, but rather the fact that they changed their practices—
deviating as communities as well as individuals.
Many of these revolutionary hasidic figures were not only ecstatic spiritual
leaders, but at the same time served as an integral part of the ancien régime of
Halakhah—they were official community rabbis, authors of legal texts, poskim
19. There is a decidedly Pauline echo in the dichotomy between the spirit and the law in this
way of reading Hasidism. Were this to be the case, we might have an interesting example of what
Shaul Magid has described as a relative openness in Hasidism to developing theological affinities
with Christianity precisely because these religious thinkers lived outside of the immediate gaze of
high Christendom; see his Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of
Modern Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 1–14. See ibid., 113–36, for
Magid’s remarks on Buber and the latter’s interpretation of the Ba‘al Shem Tov as a spiritual leader
who shared much in common with the founder of Christianity; and ibid., 51–80, where the author
lays out a case for hasidic ethics as grounded in love for the Divine rather than strict obligation
through the practice of Halakhah, which Magid argues neither abrogates the law nor competes with
it. The thrust of our article, however, will present a different interpretation of hasidic spirituality and
legal discourse, one in which love for God, human agency, charismatic power, communal practice,
and legal creativity are constantly engaged with one another.
20. More broadly, see Isadore Twersky, “Religion and Law,” in Religion in a Religious Age, ed.
Shlomo Dov Goitein (Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1974), 69–82; Jacob Katz,
“Law, Spirituality and Society,” Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 2 (1996): 87–98, 105–8. For an explora-
tion of the relationship between law and spirit in Jewish mysticism, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 187–
285.
21. See the summary in Mordecai Wilensky, “Hasidic-Mitnaggedic Polemics in the Jewish
Communities of Eastern Europe: The Hostile Phase,” in Essential Papers on Hasidism, ed. Gershon
D. Hundert (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 244–71; and Uriel Gellman, Sefer
h.asidim: H.ibbur ganuz be-genutah shel ha-h.asidut (Jerusalem: The Dinur Center for Research in
Jewish History, Hebrew University, 2007), 104–5, and n. 308. See also Arthur Green, “Hasidism
and Its Response to Change,” Jewish History 2–4 (2013): 319–36, esp. 328–33.
22. Joseph Weiss, “Torah Study in Early Hasidism,” 66–67.
381
(legal adjudicators), and authors of original responsa.23 This includes R. Levi

Yiz.h.ak of Pinsk and Barditshev (ca. 1740–1809);24 R. Avraham Yehoshua of
Apt and Jassy (ca. 1748–1825); R. Pinh.as Horowitz of Frankfurt (1731–1805)25
and his brother R. Shmuel Shmelke Horowitz (1726–87), who headed the
courts of Ryczywół, Shineva, and Nikolsburg;26 as well as R. Yisrael ben Shabetai
of Kozhenits, a legal scholar, though he was employed not as a rabbi but a preacher
(maggid).27 R. Shneur Zalman of Liady was a mighty scholar of Jewish law in
addition to a charismatic leader and sophisticated mystical theologian; his summa-
ries of the Halakhah were posthumously published as the influential Shulh.an
‘arukh ha-Rav.28 As the hasidic movement spread and matured, it became increas-
ingly common for the same individual to fulfill the roles of the hasidic rebbe and
the posek. By the nineteenth century it was not all strange to for a tzaddik to func-
tion as both a communal spiritual leader and a legal adjudicator.29
Scholars have assumed that the early hasidic masters left behind relatively
little writing on legal subjects, and that the few remaining texts are of minimal con-
sequence. Closer inspection, however, reminds us that many of those involved in
early hasidic circles were deeply immersed in the world of Halakhah.30 Delving
into the rich legal discourse produced by these leaders, including practical deci-
sions as well as broad conceptual and theological interpretations of the essence
23. Ariel Evan Mayse, “Beyond the Letters: The Question of Language in the Teachings of
Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2015), 421–45; and Mayse, “The Ever-
Changing Path: Visions of Legal Diversity in Hasidic Literature,” Conversations 23 (2015): 84–115.
24. Levi Cooper, “Rabbanut, halakhah, ve-lamdanut: Zavit nosefet be-toledot R. Levi Yiz.h.ak
mi-Berditchov,” in ’Assufat ma’amarim ‘al Rabbi Levi Yiz.h.ak mi-Berditchov,” ed. Zvi Mark (Ramat
Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2017), 62–130.
25. Two sections of R. Pinh.as Horowitz’s popular Sefer ha-fla’ah are commentaries to talmudic
tractates, but his pietistic (and perhaps mystical) practices are best attested in the writings of his famed
student Moshe Sofer.
26. The fact that the Horowitz brothers were very important rabbinic figures who were called
upon to lead communities in central Europe was an important moment in the spread of Hasidism
beyond the small circle of disciples around Dov Ber in Mezritsh.
27. In addition to Yisrael ben Shabetai’s many homiletical and mystical works, see the contro-
versial ‘Agunat Yisra’el (Warsaw: 1880).
28. Levi Cooper, “Towards a Judicial Biography of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady,” Journal of
Law and Religion 30, no. 1 (2015): 107–35; Cooper, “Mysteries of the Paratext: Why Did Rabbi Shneur
Zalman of Liady Never Publish His Code of Law?,” Diné Israel 31 (2017): 43*–84*; Avinoam
Rosenak, “Theory and Praxis in Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Tanya and Shulhan ‘Arukh
ha-Rav,” Jewish Law Association Studies 22 (2012): 251–82; Yehoshua Mondshine, Sifre ha-halakhah
shel Admor ha-Zaken (Kefar Chabad: Kehot, 1984).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
29. Iris Brown, “R. H.ayim mi-Z.anz: Darkhe pesikato ‘al reka’ ‘olamo ha-ra‘ayoni ve-’etgare
zemano” (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2004); Levi Cooper, “Ha-Admor mi-Munkatsh, ha-Rav
H.ayim ‘Elazar Shapira: Ha-posek ha-h.asidi—demut ve-shittah” (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University,
2011); Tamir Granot, “Tekumat ha-h.asidut be-’Erez. Yisra’el ’ah.arei ha-sho’ah: Mishnato ha-ra‘ayonit,
ha-hilkhatit ve-ha-h.evratit shel ha-Admor R. Yekuti’el Yehudah Halberstam mi-Z.anz-Kloyzenburg”
(PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2008).
30. To the figures listed above we should add Meshullam Feibush Heller, who enjoyed a rep-
utation for extensive knowledge of Jewish law, and the scholar Uziel Meisels, whose works Tif’eret
ha-Z.evi (Zolkiev: 1803) and Tif’eret ‘Uziel (Warsaw: 1863) exhibit great legal agility.
382
Hasidic Halakhah
of Halakhah, will allow us to reevaluate the basic relations between the law and the
spirit, between nomos and eros, and hasidic mysticism and legal jurisprudence.
H ASIDIC H ALAKHAH AS A L URIANIC O UTGROWTH

One tack for exploring the relationship between hasidic theology and Hala-
khah emerges from a perception of continuity, seeing Hasidism as a contiguous
branch from the beloved ethos of Lurianic Kabbalah. The ritualization of Lurianic
Kabbalah, the processes through which the highly esoteric kabbalistic ethos
shifted toward a theology expressed through diverse legal and religious practices,
was a central phenomenon among European Jewry in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries.31 Under attack by the Mitnagdim for violating traditional
customs and even for transgressing the law,32 some early hasidic leaders
grasped hold of this Lurianic precedent and attempted to present their community
as an additional stage of this process.33 In this light, aspects of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Hasidism may be understood as a legal ideology of internali-
zation through which the practices of Lurianic literature became merged with
the Halakhah of particular European Ashkenazic communities. More specifically,
in Hasidism we find that Lurianic or Ashkenazic pietistic customs once restricted
to individuals were transformed into central elements of the communal hasidic
ethos.
Apologetic declarations of this kind appeared immediately in the wake of the
first bans against the Hasidim in 1772. In that same year R. Shmuel Shmelke of Nikols-
burg penned a fiery and polemical letter to the community of Brody. This source
bespeaks an author incensed by the accusation that the Hasidim were innovative or
31. Moshe Hallamish, Ha-kabbalah ba-tefillah, ba-halakhah u-va-minhag (Ramat Gan:

Bar-Ilan University Press, 2000); Hallamish, “Kabbalah ke-hitrah.ashut,” Daat: A Journal of Jewish
Philosophy and Kabbalah 70 (2011): 5–33; Moshe Idel, “‘One from a Town, Two from a Clan’:
The Diffusion of Lurianic Kabbala and Sabbateanism: A Reexamination,” Jewish History 7, no. 2
(1993): 79–104; Avriel Bar-Levav, “Ritualization of Jewish Life and Death in the Early Modern
Period,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 47 (2002): 69–82; and Morris M. Faierstein, Jewish Customs
of Kabbalistic Origin: Their History and Practice (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013). On the
ritual embodiment of theology in Luria’s own circle of disciples, see Lawrence Fine, Physician of
the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 1–18, 187–299. The spread of Safed Kabbalah in Europe and its multivalent
incorporation into ritual life was also tied to the proliferation of hagiographical works extolling the piety
and practices of Luria and his students or associates; see Eitan Fishbane, “Perceptions of Greatness:
Constructions of the Holy Man in Shivhei ha-Ari,” Kabbalah 27 (2012): 195–221. For a range of
studies exploring how Jewish thinkers and communities have translated theology or sacred texts into
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
praxis and lived religious experience, see the excellent collection Judaism in Practice: From the
Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period, ed. Lawrence Fine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001).
32. See the summary of offenses given in Wilensky, “Hasidic Mitnaggedic Polemics,” 89–113.
33. Similar claims of continuity are also found regarding hasidic theology. See Shlomo of
Lutsk’s introduction to Dov Ber of Mezritsh, Maggid devarav le-Ya‘akov (Korets: 1781), in which
the author traces the imagined development of Kabbalah from Moses through the Zohar to Moshe Cor-
dovero and Isaac Luria. His description of the evolution of Kabbalah naturally culminates with the new
stage ushered in by the Ba‘al Shem Tov and his disciple Dov Ber of Mezritsh.
383
revolutionary; Shmuel Shmelke defends the Hasidim as bastions of tradition who

strive to fulfill the law to the utmost degree. At the same time, he argues against the
tradition of restricting Lurianic customs to a well-defined group of elites:
Anyone who wishes to make himself [i.e., act like] a scholar [talmid h.akham]
may do so.34 One who sits and studies, who has a facility for and reputation
in35 the study of Talmud, Rashi and Tosafot, setting aside time for study when-
ever he can—[this includes] those who fear God even though they are not
widely esteemed—such a one is given permission to worship [God] in the
service of the heart [i.e., prayer] with all of his might, accepting all of the pos-
sible stringencies, in [matters of] clothing36 or the offering he brings in the
house of God [i.e., which liturgical rite he follows]. One does more, and
another does less—[but both are praiseworthy] as long as the heart is directed
[to heaven]. [These pious actions] are accepted as a pleasing scent before the
His Glory….37 The truth is as they have said, “Who knows how to distinguish
between different people [Ecclesiastes 6:8], creating boundaries above,38 sep-
arating between a famous scholar and someone unknown, between a youth
and an elder.” “God is close to the brokenhearted and will deliver those of
crushed spirit” [Psalms 34:19]—without distinction.39
R. Shmuel Shmelke’s letter opens the ranks of pietism beyond the scholarly or rab-
binic elite, although we should not misinterpret his goal as extending these prac-
tices to the masses without exception. His more evenhanded approach recalls the
mystical fellowship that crystallized around R. Dov Ber Friedman (known as the
great Maggid) of Mezritsh in the 1760s, which included both scholars and talented
or charismatic spiritual teachers.40 R. Shmuel Shmelke argues that devotion and
commitment, not pure intellectual acumen, should be the determining factors in
giving people free reign to accept Lurianic stringencies.
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady voiced a similar argument in a 1797 letter to
his followers in Vilna. In this missive he castigates the great Rabbi Eliyahu of
Vilna (popularly referred to as the Gaon or “genius” of Vilna, d. 1797) for his
lack of faith in the authenticity of the received Lurianic corpus.41 R. Shneur
34. T. Ta‘anit 1:7; cf. B. Ta‘anit 10b. Here the term talmid h.akham carries the connotation of
someone who observes an extra measure of piety.
35. Heb. yad va-shem, Isaiah 56:5.
36. Wilensky notes that the Brody writ of excommunication allows only famous individuals to
pray according to the Lurianic rite, and alludes to the practice of wearing white garments on the
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
Sabbath.
37. M. Menah.ot 13:11; and cf. B. Berakhot 5b.
38. Cleverly reinterpreting the talmudic discussion over the question of whether Sabbath bound-
aries apply to the space above ten handbreadths from the ground (teh.umin le-ma‘alah mi-‘asarah); see
B. Eruvin 43a.
39. Mordecai Wilensky, H.asidim u-mitnagdim (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1970), 1:87–88.
40. Mayse, “Beyond the Letters,” 121–34.
41. Wilensky, H.asidim u-mitnagdim, 201–2. Cf. Likkute ’amarim-tanya’, sha‘ar ha-yih.ud
ve-ha-’emunah, chap. 7.
384
Hasidic Halakhah
Zalman defends a hasidic practice (in this case, raising up the holy sparks) by
grounding it in the authority of Lurianic Kabbalah, claiming that he and his com-
munity—and not the Lithuanian scholars—are the true inheritors of this authentic
mystical tradition.42 He grounds this claim in a two-pronged attack on R. Eliyahu’s
approach to Lurianic Kabbalah. R. Shneur Zalman accuses the Gaon of Vilna of
believing that only a portion of the Lurianic teachings were divinely revealed. Fur-
thermore, he cites R. Eliyahu of Vilna’s assertion that the extant corpus of Lurianic
writings was textually corrupt and thus of diminished authority. Against the skep-
tical posture of the Mitnagdim, R. Shneur Zalman portrays the Hasidim as the
genuine followers of Lurianic Kabbalah. Their fidelity is manifest in theological
tenets closely tied to devotional practices and legal obligations.
Sources such as these offer a new way of approaching the synthesis of Hala-
khah and the various realms of Lurianic culture. It is often assumed that this
merger of intellectual and social worlds always leads the hasidic adjudicator
toward h.umrah (stringency),43 but conceiving of hasidic Halakhah as turning
blindly toward a strict ruling in all cases, including those connected to Lurianic
Kabbalah, occludes the complexity of hasidic legal thought. Scholars have dem-
onstrated that aspects of hasidic spirituality were a marked departure from the
severe penitential pietism that characterized much of east European Jewish prac-
tice.44 Some hasidic texts refer to stringencies as a positive expression of the
Jewish community’s love for the Divine.45 But many other hasidic sources refer
to h.umrah as a crushing burden that squeezes the life and vitality out of religious
practice,46 or as a misguided and dangerous expansion of the genuine legal obli-
gations levied by God and the classical rabbinic sages.47
An emblematic perspective on stringent practice, indicative of the stance
taken in many other early hasidic sources, appears in the following passage
42. Louis Jacobs, “The Uplifting of Sparks in Later Jewish Mysticism,” in Jewish Spirituality,
ed. Arthur Green, vol. 2: From the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present (New York: Crossroad,
1987), 99–126; and Moshe Idel, “The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism,”
Jewish Quarterly Review 103, no. 2 (2013): 196–240. This issue was of moment in the debate over
Safed Kabbalah because the notion of uplifting the fallen divine sparks, central to the Lurianic
project and hasidic teachings, does not explicitly appear in classical kabbalistic works like the Zohar.
43. On the broader concept of h.umrah in early modern Halakhah, see Benjamin Brown, “Hah.-
marah: H.amishah tipusim min ha-‘et ha-h.adashah,” Dine Israel 20–21 (2000–2001): 123–237.
44. Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba‘al Shem Tov (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1996), 28–30, 33–34, 115; Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician,
Mystic, and Leader, trans. Saadya Sternberg (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), esp.
122–66, 254; Seth Brody, “‘Open to Me the Gates of Righteousness’: The Pursuit of Holiness and Non-
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
Duality in Early Hasidic Teaching,” Jewish Quarterly Review 89, no. 1/2 (1998): 3–44. See also Mayse,
“Beyond the Letters,” 104–5; Uriel Gellman, “Ha-h.asidut be-Polin ba-mah.az.it ha-rishonah shel
ha-me’ah ha-tesha‘ ‘esreh: Tipologiyut shel manhigut va-‘edah” (PhD diss., Hebrew University,
2001), 180, 181–82 n. 22; and cf. Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses
to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 78–103.
45. For example, see Tsevi Elimelekh of Dinov, Bene Yissakhar (Bene Berak: Bene Shelishim,
2005–8), vol. 2, ma’amare h.odesh tishre 10:7.
46. See the sharp words of Nah.man of Bratslav, Likkute Moharan (Jerusalem: 2012), 2, no. 44.
47. Menah.em Nah.um of Chernobil, Me’or ‘enayim (Jerusalem: 2012), 356.
385
from a collection of teachings that likely originated in the Maggid’s circle: “When
one devotes his mind to the blessed Creator, God will send that person thoughts
regarding what he must do, as it says, ‘Cast your burden upon God, [and He
will sustain you]’ [Psalms 55:23]. If this person truly wants, desires and longs
[to perform] some pious practice [davar h.asidut], presumably it must be necessary,
for God has delivered it into his thoughts.”48 This hasidic source identifies the
inclination toward stringency as a possible instance of divine revelation.49 A wor-
shiper should adopt a certain pious practice not because strictness is inherently
valuable, but because his desire to fulfill a stringent interpretation of a command-
ment may disclose an immediate divine command given specifically to him. Thus
the question of whether or not to follow such a stringent interpretation must rest
solely upon the worshiper and his inner devotional and spiritual sensibility; it
cannot be cross-applied to all moments or an entire community.
Yet another teaching included in this same collection exhibits true distrust of
stringencies.50 This homily suggests that the Evil Inclination may seduce a wor-
shiper by claiming that he has committed a grave transgression, although he has
done nothing more egregious than failing to adhere to a stringency. The misplaced
guilt ensuing from this clever ruse will then lead him into despondency and even-
tually even into sin.
The blanket notion of “hasidic stringency” and the conceptual paradigm it
belies do not adequately allow for the many nuanced attitudes in Hasidism
toward h.umrah and other forms of legal stringency or supererogatory piety. Nor
can this idea account for the varied tensions and the cultural changes that followed
in the wake of the literary and intellectual fusion of kabbalistic sources into hasidic
nomian discourse.51 The internalization of knowledge external to purely legal
sources is, in our view, an enduring characteristic of Ashkenazic Halakhah and
48. Likkutim yekarim, ed. Avraham Yiz.h.ak Kahn (Jerusalem: Yeshivat Toledot Aharon, 1973),
no. 11, 2b.
49. Early hasidic sources often describe the emergence of thoughts as a type of ongoing revelation
that transpires within the human mind, taking place as new ideas bubble forth from the infinite realm of inner
creativity that serves as a nexus between God and man. See, for example, Mayse, “Beyond the Letters,”
228–31, 403–21; and Sigmund Hurwitz, “Psychological Aspects in Early Hasidic Literature,” trans. Hilde-
gard Nagel, in Timeless Documents of the Soul (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968),
149–240.
50. Likkutim yekarim, no. 23, 4b.
51. Here we should note the claim of Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, 254: “The
difference between Hasidism and Sabbatianism in terms of its common spiritualistic outlook lies only in
the inversion of the formula. That which Sabbatianism gained through the formula, ‘he who permits the
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
forbidden,’ was achieved by Hasidism through that of, ‘who prohibits the permitted.’ But in terms of
the judgment of history, this reversal is important in principle; Jewish orthodoxy struggled equally with
both of these outlooks and, in terms of the history of the struggle for the preservation of a unified image
of Judaism, they were indeed synonymous.” Schatz-Uffenheimer seems to have been unaware of the
more sophisticated dimensions of hasidic Halakhah discussed here, but she also misses an important
nomian aspect of Sabbatian thought as well. See Isaiah Tishby, “Hanhagot Natan ha-‘Azati, ’iggerot
R. Moshe Zakkut, ve-takkanot ba-sefer H.emdat yamim,” in H.ikre kabbalah ve-sheluh.oteha: Meh.karim
u-mekorot (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1993), 2:339–64; Meir Benayahu, “Hanhagot Natan Ha-‘Azati,”
Sefunot 14 (1978): 257–306; and, recently, Maoz Kahana, “Shabtai Zvi: ’Ish ha-halakhah,” Zion 81,
386
Hasidic Halakhah
one of the sources of its great dynamism.52 Ashkenazic Halakhah integrated medi-
eval demons, communal customs, various types of magical literature (such as the
Baraita de-niddah, the “Testament” of Rabbi Judah the Hasid, and so forth), the
fluid body of texts known as the Zohar, and Lurianic ritual into the ever-expanding
world of Jewish legal writing and thought.53 In this sense hasidic Halakhah should
be seen as a unique development within the tradition of Ashkenazic Halakhah. More
specifically, hasidic attitudes toward and formulation of Halakhah are an additional
stage in the continuing and complex impact of Lurianic Kabbalah on Halakhah that
began in the late sixteenth century.54 Thus the claims of continuity adumbrated by
many early hasidic thinkers, raised as a bulwark against the attacks of the Mitnagdim,
reflect an important aspect of the development of hasidic legal practice.
The elastic vitality of hasidic Halakhah as an outgrowth of Lurianic Kabba-
lah—as well as its weaknesses—may be demonstrated by examining the stormy
no. 3/4 (2016): 391–433; Kahana, “Cosmos and Nomos—Sacred Space and Legal Action, from Rabbi
Yosef Karo to Shabbatai Tsevi,” El Prezente 10 (2016): 143–53.
52. Haym Soloveitchik, “Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz (Part
1 of 2),” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 1 (2004): 77–108; Soloveitchik, “Halakhah, Hermeneutics,
and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz (Part 2 of 2),” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 2 (2004): 278–
99; Soloveitchik, “Catastrophe and Halakhic Creativity: Ashkenaz—1096, 1242, 1306 and 1298,”
Jewish History 12, no. 1 (1998): 71–85; Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Progress and Tradition in Medieval
Ashkenaz,” Jewish History 14 (2000): 287–315.
53. On this phenomenon, see Maoz Kahana, “Mekorot ha-yeda’ u-temurot ha-zeman: Z.ava’at
R. Yehudah he-H.asid ba-‘et ha-h.adashah,” in Spiritual Authority: Struggles over Cultural Power in
Jewish Thought, ed. Howard Kreisel, Boaz Huss, and Uri Ehrlich (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev Press, 2009), 223–62. On demons see Moshe Idel, “Gazing at the Head in Ashkenazi
Hasidism,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6, no. 2 (1997): 265–300; Haym Soloveitchik,
“Piety, Pietism and German Pietism: Sefer Hasidim I and the Influence of Hasidei Ashkenaz,” Jewish
Quarterly Review 92, no. 3/4 (2002): 455–93. On communal customs see Judah Galinsky, “Custom,
Ordinance or Commandment? The Evolution of the Medieval Monetary-Tithe in Ashkenaz,”
Journal of Jewish Studies 62, no. 2 (2011): 203–32; David I. Shyovitz, “‘You Have Saved Me from
the Judgment of Gehenna’: The Origins of the Mourner’s Kaddish in Medieval Ashkenaz,” AJS
Review 39, no. 1 (2015): 49–73. On Baraita de-Niddah: Evyatar Marienberg, “Lorsque la femme d’El-
éazar de Worms croise un âne: la ‘Baraïta de Niddah’ et son influence sur les coutumes des juives ash-
kénazes, de l’époque médiévale à nos jours,” Revue des études juives 164, no. 1–2 (2005): 235–47. On
Rabbi Judah’s “Testament”: Moshe Hallamish, “Rabbi Judah the Pious’ Will in Halakhic and Kabba-
listic Literature,” in Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism: International Symposium
Held in Frankfurt a.M. 1991, ed. Karl Erich Grözinger and Joseph Dan (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1995), 117–22; Ephraim Kanarfogel, “R. Judah he-Hasid and the Rabbinic Scholars of Regensburg:
Interactions, Influences, and Implications,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96, no. 1 (2006): 17–37. On
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
the Zohar see the classic studies of Israel M. Ta-Shma, Ha-nigleh she-ba-nistar: Le-h.eker sheki‘e
ha-halakhah be-sefer ha-zohar (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me’uh.ad, 2001) and Jacob Katz, Divine
Law in Human Hands: Case Studies in Halakhic Flexibility (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1998).
54. On the broader issue of changing attitudes toward Halakhah in this region at the cusp of
modernity, see Jay R. Berkovitz, “Crisis and Authority in Early Modern Ashkenaz,” Jewish History
26, no. 1–2 (2012): 179–99; and Berkovitz, “The Persona of a Poseq: Law and Self-Fashioning in
Seventeenth-Century Ashkenaz,” Modern Judaism 32, no. 3 (2012): 251–69. See also Jacob Katz, A
House Divided: Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-Century Central European Jewry, trans.
Ziporah Brody (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998).
387
controversy between the hasidic leader Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum (1759–1841),

head of the Jewish court in Sátoraljaújhely (northeast Hungary), and the
well-known rabbi Moshe Sofer (1762–1839; known as the H.atam Sofer), based
in the Hungarian capital city of Pressburg.55 In the 1830s R. Teitelbaum defended
the widespread hasidic observance of kabbalistic practices that had once been the
prerogative of the elite, arguing that hasidic communities embody and are indeed
founded on a strict legal obligation to the ethos of Lurianic culture. The case at
hand involved the hasidic custom to refrain from wearing any garments made
from wool, lest one unwittingly adorn himself in clothing with a forbidden
mixture of wool and linen.56 Teitelbaum, who emigrated from Poland and
brought with him new hasidic rituals, writes the following:
In the land of Poland, anyone whose heart has been touched with the fear of
God will not wear woolen clothing. From the time that I arrived in this land
many have stopped wearing woolen garments, and blessing shall come upon
them. We cannot, however, force the masses not to wear woolen garments.
Regarding the matter of one leading the prayer services57 while wearing
woolen clothing: in truth, if there is a forbidden mixture [of wool and
linen] [sha‘atnez] in the garment he is wearing, God forbid … it will
greatly damage his prayers even if he is unaware of it.58 In addition to the
fact that this is a biblical prohibition, it includes great impurity … since the
power of the Satan, who is exceedingly strong and powerful [‘az], will be
drawn over his clothing … and how can [divine] compassion be aroused
for the community [through the leader’s prayers] when he is dressed in the
power of the Other Side [sitra’ ’ah.ra’]?!…
Now it may be that the community wishes to establish that, although they
wear woolen garments and are not concerned about a [forbidden] mixture, the
one leading the services must nevertheless refrain from doing so while
wearing wool. He is their emissary and must arouse the heavenly compassion
on behalf of the community, so it is fitting to be more concerned. This is surely
a good enactment, and they will be blessed.
If the community is unconcerned because they and the majority of the
householders do wear woolen clothing, and a single individual wishes to
protest, I do not think [that this is permissible]. For according to the law, if
they pray in a synagogue that follows the Ashkenazic and not the Lurianic
rite, the individual does not have the power to protest or establish this sort
55. Maoz Kahana, Me-ha-Noda’ bi-Yehudah le-ha-H.atam Sofer: Halakhah ve-hagut le-nokhah.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
’etgare ha-zeman (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2015), 223–48; Michael K. Silber, “The Emer-
gence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity
in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992),
23–84.
56. On this controversy, see Wertheim, Law and Custom in Hasidism, 291–95; Kahana,
Me-ha-Noda’ bi-Yehudah le-ha-H.atam Sofer, 323–30.
57. Lit. “passing before the ark.”
58. Cf. Moshe Isserles’s comments to Shulh.an ‘arukh, yoreh de‘ah 303, for the position that
accidentally wearing a forbidden mixture is a lesser infraction than doing so intentionally.
388
Hasidic Halakhah
of new enactment; even if it is good thing, he does not have the power.
But if, however, they pray according to the Lurianic rite, which is the liturgy
followed by the Hasidim [ba-h.asidut], then the law is with the individual [who
demands that the prayer leader be dressed in garments other than wool], since
it is known that all those who pray according to this liturgy have accepted
upon themselves to flee from the ninety-nine measures of permitted things
so as not to be damaged by even one measure of something prohibited.
[Therefore] they do not wear wool.
To have someone dressed in wool who leads the prayers59 in a quorum
[minyan] that follows the Lurianic rite is unheard of, since his garment and
his prayers contradict one another! [Instead of compassion,] he will surely
arouse a powerful accuser [against them].60
R. Moshe Teitelbaum describes a community of devotees who have formed a vol-

untary association of piety defined by their shared allegiance to Lurianic liturgy. He
argues that this loyalty necessarily extends to other Lurianic customs, in this case the
added stringency of not wearing woolen garments. R. Teitelbaum admits that a com-
munity cannot be forced to accept this custom by a single pious individual among
their ranks as long as they follow the Ashkenazic liturgy. But if they do elect to pray
according to the Lurianic rite, as was the custom in hasidic communities, even a
single individual can demand from the prayer leader not to wear wool. In the follow-
ing passages Teitelbaum adds that even a community following the Ashkenazic rite
would do well to prevent anyone wearing wool from leading the prayers, since such
an individual serves as the temporary embodiment of the community and is charged
with inspiring divine mercy on their behalf.
At the same time this question was also posed to the H.atam Sofer.61 The
inquirer seems to have claimed that the Sephardic (i.e., Lurianic) rite is so
exalted that one dressed in woolen—and thus suspect—garments is unworthy of
serving as prayer leader. The H.atam Sofer answers that most people did wear
wool, and that although one who did not wear wool garments was surely called
“saintly” (kadosh), he vehemently condemns the claim that people in woolen
clothing cannot lead the prayers as entirely baseless:
Thus have I received from my teachers, the great Rabbi Natan Adler, and
[R. Pinh.as Horowitz], the author of Sefer ha-fla’ah and master of all the exile,
of whose words I drank and from whose source I was hewn: all of the liturgies
are equal to one another. All that is in one of them is in the others, and we just
do not know how to see it. We pray according to [the text given by] those who
established the prayers and the liturgical rites, for all of them are directed
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
toward a single goal; this is like “a single message that reached several prophets,
59. Lit. “descends before the ark.”

60. R. Moshe Teitelbaum, Heshiv Moshe (Lemberg: 1866), no. 7.
61. Rachel Elior, “Rabbi Nathan Adler and the Frankfurt Pietists: Pietist Groups in Eastern and
Central Europe during the Eighteenth Century,” in Judische Kultur in Frankfurt am Main, von den
Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Karl Erich Grozinger (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 135–77.
389
but no two prophets prophesizes in the same style.”62 The various liturgies differ
only in style, but they all ascend to the same place. But the light of God, the holy
Ari [Isaac Luria] came along and weighed, studied and established [the text of the
liturgy], for he knew the essence the things [tokhen ha-devarim]. He put every-
thing in its place in his prayer book, revealing the hidden depths of the Sephardic
liturgy. However, he himself was Sephardi, and if he had been Ashkenazi, or if a
person like him had been found among the Ashkenazim, he would have done the
same with the Ashkenazic liturgy.
In these latter generations, those who have come into the mystery of God, it is
enough for they who understand the words of the holy Ari. But we do not know
how to bring these things forth from the Ashkenazic liturgy. Therefore it is good
for them to pray from the Sephardic prayer book, in which the place of the [heav-
enly] palaces and yih.udim are written according to the holy Ari. Why should they
pray with Ashkenazic rite, for although everything [i.e., the supernal mysteries] is
alluded to in it as well, and the one who prays in accord with the one who estab-
lished the liturgy … nevertheless it is more comfortable for them to pray in accord
with [the rite] that they understand than to use the [ordinary] liturgy.
Therefore my pious teacher R. Natan Adler used the Sephardic rite from the
Ari’s prayer book when leading [the services], as did my teacher the author of
Sefer ha-fla’ah, but [even so] it was only they who would pray according to
the Lurianic rite. The others gathered together in the quorum used the Ashkenazic
liturgy.63
The H.atam Sofer continues by affirming that most individuals actually had a legal
obligation not to change the liturgical customs inherited from their ancestors, a
principle with which he claims even the Ari must have concurred. Only excep-
tional persons initiated into the secrets of Jewish mysticism should follow the kab-
balistic rite; all others should continue to employ the traditional liturgy.64 Bringing
his discussion back to the original question of whether or not one must accept the
interdiction of woolen clothes when leading the prayers according to the Lurianic
liturgy, his answer is resoundingly negative. The H.atam Sofer then gives a number
of examples of neglected legal precepts to which people should pay more heed
when serving in a public role in the synagogue, such as the prohibition of
eating new grain before the ‘omer offering is brought (h.adash),65 and the legal
writ allowing the rabbinical courts to absorb private debts during the Sabbatical
year (prozbul). In these matters one should try to fulfill the opinion of all the
various adjudicators of Halakhah, but there is no reason to extend oneself by
not wearing garments of wool.
Closer inspection reveals that this ostensibly traditional responsum in fact
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
presents an unusual and highly creative chain of argumentation. The H.atam

Sofer does not seek to undercut the authority of Luria, something that would
62. B. Sanhedrin 89a.

63. She’elot u-teshuvot H.atam Sofer (1819), ’orah. h.ayim 15.
64. Ibid.
65. See also R. Shnuer Zalman of Liady, Shulh.an ‘arukh ha-Rav, no. 489, 29–30.
390
Hasidic Halakhah
have aroused ire in traditional nineteenth-century rabbinic circles. He does,

however, argue against a community adopting the Lurianic stringency of not
wearing woolen garments by undermining the uniqueness of Lurianic liturgy.
The H.atam Sofer levels the playing field by suggesting that all liturgical traditions
include the same mystical power. Isaac Luria revealed the concealed depths of the
Sephardic liturgy, that of the community in which he lived and taught, but the
equally potent dimensions of the Ashkenazic rite remained invisible. This cleverly
reverses the ordinary frame, for according to the H.atam Sofer it is the Ashkenazic
liturgy that is to be seen as the more esoteric.
In another responsum the H.atam Sofer offers a different reason as to why
entire communities should adopt neither the Lurianic rite nor the associated strin-
gencies and customs:
No two hearts are alike in their love for God…. If the piety of an entire com-
munity of people is expressed by a single custom, it itself becomes “a law for
Israel” [h.ok le-Yisra’el] and dead routine. Such a thing is impossible. There-
fore I saw that my teachers, the great [author of Sefer] ha-fla’ah [R. Pinh.as
Horowitz], my teacher the pious Natan Adler, and the pious Zalman, did
not leave a community behind. And I hereby witness that I never heard the
name of the Zohar pass through the lips of these holy ones of Israel during
any homily….66
The H.atam Sofer closed with the now-familiar affirmation that the various differ-
ent liturgies were essentially the same, although the hidden mysteries of the Ash-
kenazic rite have been forgotten. Thus those who wish to achieve mystical uplift in
prayer should follow the pattern established by the Ari, who paved the way in clear
steps, but this fact in no way suggests that the Lurianic liturgy is superior or even
qualitatively different than any other.
Here the classic Ashkenazic conservative legal figure, famous for his
demands to follow tradition unflinchingly, criticizes the institutional hasidic move-
ment precisely for its lack of spontaneity and its overly uniform and rigid outlook
on Halakhah.67 The H.atam Sofer argues that the treasury of kabbalistic knowledge
must be kept in a loose and flexible state within the legal sphere, and it could not
be allowed to crystalize into a formal or communal obligation. Only thus can the
spiritual realm be preserved as a fruitful and multifaceted source of inspiration,
expressed in an individual manner through personal devotion of the different
members of the community. The individual must lie at the heart of true piety,
for, as Sofer suggests, “no two hearts are alike in their love for God.”
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
66. She’elot u-teshuvot H.atam Sofer, ’orah. h.ayim 197. On this responsum, see Maoz Kahana,
“‘Yesh lanu ’av zaken’—ha-shamranut ha-h.adshanit shel ha-H.atam Sofer,” in Ha-gedolim: Ha-’ishim
ha-gedolim she-‘iz.vu ’et pene ha-yahadut ha-h.aredit be-Yisra’el, ed. Nissim Leon and Benjamin
Brown (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, 2017), 73–104.
67. Maoz Kahana, “Kez.ad bikesh ha-H.atam Sofer le-naz.eah. ’et Shpinoza? Tekst, lamdanut,
ve-romantikah be-ketivat ha-H.atam Sofer,” Tarbiz 79, no. 3 (2011): 557–85.
391
H OLY S PIRIT AND S CHOLASTIC F ORMULATION

Not all hasidic conceptions of jurisprudence were as normative as the one
described above. A renewed belief in the accessibility of the Divine or Holy
Spirit (ruah. ha-kodesh) is clearly visible in the context of early Hasidism.
Rabbi Pinh.as Shapira from Korets (ca. 1726/28–1790), for instance, is credited
with saying that the Divine Spirit actually pursues every person, seeking to
reside within him.68 A teaching in the name of his contemporary Rabbi Dov
Ber of Mezritsh claims that it is easier to attain the Divine Spirit in the present
exile than it was in the time of the temple.69
But was this emergent focus on the Holy Spirit simply a theoretical way of
explaining innovation and personal inspiration, a devotional concept never
intended to be manifest in practical cases of Halakhah?70 It now seems clear
that the intensified cultural perception of the presence of the Holy Spirit indeed
left its mark on the inner workings of Jewish law. Official testimonies (geviyat
‘edut) against Hasidim from 1773 record a hasidic maggid (preacher) and leader
who permitted his wife’s menstrual stain by means of a lottery. Similarly, he
allowed the eating of the flesh of an animal suspected of being a treifah (a nonvi-
able and therefore nonkosher animal), relying on divine inspiration to justify his
assertion that the animal’s soul was in need of repair and hence could not be
treifah, as the simple reading of the law would imply in this case.71
Of course, it may be tempting to dismiss these testimonies as biased, but
internal hasidic traditions describe similar occurrences. For example, Shivh.e
ha-Besht preserves a strange legend in which the Besht (Ba‘al Shem Tov,
Yisrael ben Eliezer, ca. 1700–1760) publicly consumed an animal considered
68. Pinh.as Shapira, ’Imre Pinh.as (Bene Berak: 2003), vol. 1, sha‘ar ‘avodat ha-shem, no. 29, 331.
69. Dov Ber of Mezritsh, Maggid devarav le-Ya‘akov (Korets: 1784), 8a; No‘am ’Elimelekh, ed.
Gedalyah Nigal (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1978), 1:109–10.
70. The role of the Holy Spirit in deciding matters of Halakhah, and indeed the very meaning of
the phrase ruah. ha-kodesh in legal literature, have long been the subject of controversy. See, for
example, the comments of R. Abraham ben David (Rabad) to Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, hilkhot
shofar ve-sukkah ve-lulav 8:5; and Isadore Twersky, Rabad of Posquieres: A Twelfth-Century Talmud-
ist, rev. ed. (Skokie, IL: Varda Books, 2001), 86, 292. See also the famous She’elot ve-teshuvot min
ha-shamayim, a volume of medieval responsa framed as divine responses to questions posed by the
author; see Israel M. Ta-Shma, “She’elot u-teshuvot min ha-shamayim,” Tarbiz 57, no. 1 (1988):
51–66. It is not uncommon to find later legal adjudicators claiming that all rabbinic enactments (i.e.,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
those from the time of the Mishnah and Talmud) were accomplished by means of the Divine Spirit;
see R. Efrayim Zalman Margoliyot, She’elot u-teshuvot bet ’Efrayim, ’orah. h.ayim, no. 64; and R. She-
lomoh Drimmer, She’elot u-teshuvot bet Shelomoh, ’orah. h.ayim, no. 112. It is interesting to note that
certain later hasidic responsa extend this notion forward in time, arguing that even the rulings of medi-
eval authorities reflect the imprint of the Divine Spirit; see R. Avraham Borenstein, She’elot u-teshuvot
’avne nezer, ’orah. h.ayim, no. 27; ibid., ’orah. h.ayim, no. 272; R. H.ayim Halbershtam, She’elot
u-teshuvot divre H.ayim, yoreh de’ah, vol. 2, no. 105; and cf. R. Moshe Feinstein, ’Iggeret Moshe,
’even ha-‘ezer, vol. 4, no. 9.
71. Wilensky, H.asidim u-mitnagdim, 80–83.
392
Hasidic Halakhah
unfit (treifah) by the slaughterer, claiming that the beast itself longed for him to eat
it.72 Before he ate of the meat, however, the Besht sensed that this type of charis-
matic decision would be difficult for his disciples to accept. He sent the question
off to a neighboring rabbinic scholar, and a letter shortly returned declaring the
animal fit for consumption.
This phenomenon of deciding the law through spiritual inspiration can also
be found in the responsa literature and legal sources. In these works references to
the Divine Spirit are employed in order to permit the remarriage of women whose
husbands’ whereabouts were unknown (‘agunot), and also to clear the name of
women suspected of prostitution. The literature produced in the wake of these inci-
dents refers to an unnamed maggid (most likely the famed R. Yisrael ben Shabetai
of Kozhenits),73 to R. Yaakov Yiz.h.ak Horowitz (the H.ozeh or “Seer”) of Lublin
(both dating from the 1790s),74 and to Rabbi Yiz.h.ak Taub of Kaliv in 1814.75
This type of flexible, individualistic, and perhaps even anarchic tendency
within the legal system was not limited to the first few generations of the
hasidic movement. In a legal document from the late nineteenth century, which
mirrors the strange story of the Besht consuming unkosher meat in Shivh.e
ha-Besht, the hasidic tzaddik Rabbi Yehoshua Rokeah. of Belz (1825–94)
appraised a beast to be permitted via clairvoyance.76 The Belzer Rebbe then
ordered Rabbi Shalom Mordekhai Shvadron (1835–1911, known as Mahar-
sham)—the greatest Galician adjudicator of the time—to write a responsum justi-
fying his heavenly directed decision. This odd ruling was indeed composed but
was subsequently hidden, under the pretext that this incredible judgment was
only issued in regard to that specific case. Here the ideology described by
Shivh.e ha-Besht, whether it is historically correct or not, became a reality at the
hands of the Belzer Rebbe; the legendary past of the hasidic imagination had
become manifest in a legal ruling of the hasidic present. But whereas the Besht
as portrayed in hagiography had no need of legal confirmation by an official adju-
dicator, the Belzer Rebbe, perhaps less secure in his mystical powers and certainly
much more bound to the social reality of late nineteenth-century Hasidism,
72. Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz, In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov [Shivhei ha-Besht]: The
Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1993), 166–67.
Cf. the antihasidic testimony cited above.
73. A legal incident in the 1790s concerning such a hasidic leader is described in Yoav ben Yir-
miyah, Zeved tov (Zolkiev: 1806), kuntres ’Ah.aron, 169b (unpaginated). Traditions regarding the iden-
tity of this tzaddik, “who is like a true prophet in the eyes of the masses” appear in relation to the
Maggid of Kozhenits as well; see Yiz.h.ak Ze’ev Kahana, Mehkarim be-sifrut ha-teshuvah (Jerusalem:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
Mosad Harav Kook, 1973), 416. Cf. She’erit Yisra’el (Lublin: 1895), 23a, where the Maggid of Koz-
henits refers to the tzaddikim of later generations using the Holy Spirit in determining points of law.
74. See the tradition in Tanna de-ve ’Eliyahu ‘im perush ramatayyim z.ofim (Jerusalem: 1966),
Seder ’Eliyahu Zuta, 32b, no. 17. This work is not a legal text per se, but rather a testimony close to the
events at hand.
75. A report of this incident was preserved in a fiery letter of protestation by Moshe Sofer in
’Iggerot soferim (Vienna: 1929), no. 40, 38–39.
76. The responsum was eventually published in the hasidic periodical Kovez. bet ’Aharon
ve-Yisra’el 148, no. 4 (1990): 22.
393
participated in the formulation of an apparently official legal decree to provide

support for his heavenly decisions.
This particular combination of the Divine Spirit and legal formulation is
indicative of how, by midway through the nineteenth century, many elements of
the hasidic movement had indeed become more stable and institutionalized, and
had joined forces with the emergent traditionalist bloc of Orthodoxy. As this
process of the consolidation of Hasidism within east European Orthodoxy contin-
ued, the issues of law and legal practice took on central importance. Halakhah and
custom were key tools for combatting the inroads of modernity and for distin-
guishing various hasidic groups from one another. However, this focus on the
primacy of Halakhah and legal interpretation did not necessarily eliminate the
charismatic foundations of the hasidic tradition, as has generally been assumed
in the wake of Mendel Piekarz’s important studies.77 In sources that invoke
ruah. ha-kodesh as an element of determining the law, the hasidic tzaddik does
not seek to break or undermine the Halakhah. On the contrary, it is the tzaddik’s
charismatic vision that allows him to gaze deeply into the matter (or upon the
physical object), and determine the proper judgment for the unique situation.78
The double commitment of nineteenth-century hasidic Halakhah to the strict
boundaries of normative legal discourse as well as to hasidic traditions led to new
explorations of the interface between legal decision-making and revelation. This
literature raised questions about reliance on the Divine Spirit in a situation of
doubt, in a life-threatening situation, or facing a rabbinic prohibition
(de-rabbanan) or an act of legal piety (middat h.asidut). Can every legal or
moral intuition be considered the workings of the Divine Spirit? These surprising
legal discussions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to
render charismatic experience into stable legal formulas, thus tempering the spon-
taneous creativity with hasidic traditionalism. The writings of Rabbi H.ayim Elazar
Shapira of Munkatsh (1868–1937), a fiercely antimodern leader who expended
great efforts to justify hasidic practices with legal precedents, exemplify these
questions.79 In fact, in one teaching he cites a tradition permitting to rely on the
Divine Spirit only when the issue at hand is a matter of stringency, and not a
77. Mendel Piekarz, Ha-hanhagah ha-h.asidit: Samkhut ve-’emunat z.addikim be-’aspaklariyat

sifrut (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1999); and Piekarz, “Hasidism as a Socio-religious Movement on the
Evidence of Devekut,” in Rapoport-Albert, Hasidism Reappraised, 225–48.
78. This notion of the hasidic master as the charismatic decider of law may not be far afield from
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
the early rabbinic practice outlined in Nehemia Polen, “Derashah as Performative Exegesis in Tosefta
and Mishnah,” in Midrash and the Exegetical Mind, ed. Lieve Teugels and Rivka Ulmer (Piscataway,
NJ: Gorgias, 2010), 123–53.
79. Maoz Kahana and Levi Cooper, “The Legal Pluralism of an Enclave Society: The Case of
Munkatch Hasidism,” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 48, no. 1 (2016): 1–17. See also
Allan L. Nadler, “The War on Modernity of R. Hayyim Elazar Shapira of Munkacz,” Modern Judaism
14, no. 3 (1994): 223–64; and Aviezer Ravitzky, “Munkacs and Jerusalem: Ultra-Orthodox Opposition
to Zionism and Agudaism,” in Zionism and Religion, ed. Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita
Shapira (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 67–89.
394
Hasidic Halakhah
fundament of the law itself. This notion is clearly an attempt to temper the poten-
tial anarchy of a legal method that is so difficult to verify objectively.80
The scholastic formulations regarding how the Divine Spirit may be invoked
in rendering legal decisions has remained a part of hasidic legal discourse,
reemerging in new contexts and thus reflecting the consistent yet ever-changing
intellectual horizons of hasidic Halakhah. The first responsum in a 2010 collection
authored by the present-day hasidic tzaddik R. Yiz.h.ak Meir Morgenstern adds a
creative new layer to the issue of combining law and spirituality and the role of
the Holy Spirit therein.81 In this text he addresses a query regarding the extent
to which kabbalistic sources may, or may not, be employed as a determining
factor in rendering a legal decision. He cites the familiar talmudic adage of “the
Torah is not in heaven”82—namely, the law can no longer be determined by
direct revelation—and then pivots to the subject of whether an adjudicator or
prophet could give a legal ruling based on divine intuition or inspiration. Morgen-
stern stresses that one may indeed follow a heavenly voice or the Holy Spirit, but
only when there are valid (and perhaps provable) precedents on both sides of the
issue. In staking his claim he offers some remarks on hasidic precedent:
In light of this we may add an explanation for something done by each and
every one of the tzaddikim: answering legal questions by the Holy Spirit to
clarify the situation even in matters related to ritual law [’issur ve-heter],
such as knowing if the animal is kosher or not (or other things of this
nature). The explanation is that clarifying the situation [by means of the
Divine Spirit] does not contradict [the notion] that the Torah is not in heaven.
80. See, for example, H.ayim Elazar Shapira of Munkatsh, Divre Torah, vol. 7, no. 10; and cf.
Divre Torah, vol. 3, no. 62; Minh.at Elazar, vol. 5, no. 21.
81. R. Yiz.h.ak Meir Morgenstern, She’elot u-teshuvot yam ha-h.okhmah (Jerusalem: Mekhon
Yam Ha-h.okhmah, 2010), vol. 1, no. 1, 19–27. It is worth noting that our text is the first entry in
the initial volume of his responsa. Morgenstern, who was raised in London and later immigrated to
Israel, is an intriguing figure whose intellectual output represents a fusion of different cultural influ-
ences. His teachings synthesize a wide range of kabbalistic traditions from Ashkenazic and especially
Sephardic works, and are characterized by the interpretation of legal material (both talmudic and post-
talmudic) through the lens of mystical and hasidic literature. Morgenstern’s approach to Halakhah
reflects syncretist elements of contemporary Israeli haredi society and is surely no carbon copy of
that found in east European Hasidism, but his legal thinking (and much of his theology as well) is
largely continuous with key aspects of the hasidic tradition. See Jonathan Garb, “Mystical and Spiritual
Discourse in the Contemporary Ashkenazi Haredi Worlds,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
(2010): 17–36, esp. 23–25; and Garb, “Contemporary Kabbalah and Classical Kabbalah: Breaks and
Continuities,” in After Spirituality: Studies in Mystical Traditions, ed. Philip Wexler and Jonathan
Garb (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 22–23.
82. B. Bava Mez.i‘a 59b. See Itzhak Englard, “Tanuro shel ’Akhnai—perushehah shel
’aggadah,” Shenaton ha-mishpat ha-‘ivri 1 (1974): 45–56; Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories:
Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999),
34–63; Chaya Halberstam, “Encircling the Law: The Legal Boundaries of Rabbinic Judaism,”
Jewish Studies Quarterly 16, no. 4 (2009): 396–424; Itzhak Brand, “Can Wondrous Signs Determine
Law? A Comparison of Two Talmudic Traditions,” Revue des études juives 172, nos. 1–2 (2013): 1–22.
395
We should furthermore note an interpretation heard in the name of the Rebbe

of Klausenberg, may his merit shield us … who explained why tzaddikim
would delay their prayers. They grasped this through the Holy Spirit, from
amidst the light hidden within our holy Torah, that they should act in this way.83
R. Morgenstern embraces the notion that gazing into the Torah and seeking knowl-
edge via the Holy Spirit are admissible elements of the judicial procedure. Certain
elect individuals are alert to the fact that, in their particular instance, the Divine
Will is different than the normative Halakhah. They are able to reach this illumi-
nated understanding through the Holy Spirit or by means of a vision of the godly
light within Scripture. But Morgenstern notes the radical nature of this idea, and
seeks to qualify its impact through the more normative method of justifying
dissent by relying on minority opinions.84
R. Morgenstern connects the issue of deciding the law in accord with the Holy
Spirit to the debate over the authority of Isaac Luria’s teachings. He argues that the
positions of the Ari should be followed because his teachings are actually a continua-
tion of the Zohar itself; Luria’s authority is not simply linked to the gravitas of personal
revelation.85 R. Morgenstern then returns to the aforementioned disagreement between
R. Shneur Zalman of Liady and the Gaon of Vilna, in which the hasidic scholar accused
the Gaon of showing too little respect for the practices found in the Lurianic corpus.
But R. Morgenstern’s interpretation of their controversy is more complex, since he,
a member of the diverse ultra-Orthodox community in twenty-first-century Israel,
cannot deride the Gaon of Vilna.86 To this end he grasps hold of the opinion of the
Vilna Gaon’s disciples, who claimed that their teacher never controverted Lurianic
Kabbalah openly. R. Morgenstern concedes that the rulings of the Gaon do indeed con-
flict with those of Luria in some cases, and that although the Vilna Gaon may have
agreed with Luria in matters of mystical gnosis, the Gaon left room for a great deal
of individual freedom when it comes to determining Halakhah.
Toward the conclusion of this responsum, R. Morgenstern returns us to an
earlier point in our discussion, in giving the example of the Sabbatian debacle as
an example of the danger inherent in involving Kabbalah and the various—even
83. Morgenstern, She’elot u-teshuvot yam ha-h.okhmah, 20.

84. See Morgenstern’s theoretical analysis of the legal dimensions of the various times of prayer
in his Yam ha-h.okhmah 5768 (Jerusalem: Mekhon Yam Ha-h.okhmah, 2008), 242–49.
85. Here Morgenstern takes issue with those who accept that the Zohar may be used in deter-
mining the law when classical adjudicators disagree, but do not extend the same authority to traditions
and practices attributed to Isaac Luria; She’elot u-teshuvot yam ha-h.okhmah, 23–24, referring to a
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
responsum of Moshe Feinstein in ’Iggerot Moshe, ’orah. h.ayim, vol. 4, no. 3.

86. In this case Morgenstern is justifying a hasidic practice and subtly broadening it into a more
universal legal phenomenon. Thus his responsum is suggestive of a new stage in the expansion and
reworking of the tradition of ruah. ha-kodesh within Jewish legal discourse, and not simply its institu-
tionalization. Decisions and reasoning such as this likely reflect the influence of the Israeli haredi
context. See Garb, “Mystical and Spiritual Discourse,” 17–36; and, more broadly, Menachem Fried-
man, The Haredi Ultra-Orthodox Society: Sources, Trends and Processes (Jerusalem: The Jerusalem
Institute for Israel Studies, 1991); Kimmy Caplan, “Israeli Haredi Society and the Repentance
(hazarah biteshuvah) Phenomenon,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 8, no. 4 (2001): 369–98.
396
Hasidic Halakhah
myriad—relative interpretations in the process of determining the Halakhah.87 His

rather circumspect answer is that any adjudicator, even if he reaches his verdict by
examining a mystical source or even through direct experience of the Holy Spirit,
must be able to ground his decision in the canonical body of classical legal literature
as well. A practice cannot be deemed acceptable if it is justified only by Kabbalah or
through the Holy Spirit, especially if it runs counter to the traditional Halakhah.88
The responsum commissioned by the Belzer Rebbe and the works of Rabbis
H.ayim Elazar Shapira and Yiz.h.ak Meir Morgenstern underscore the need to
examine hasidic practices within the greater discourse and precedents of the
world of Halakhah. In fact, close examination of the texts reveals that hasidic prac-
tices, which were in all likelihood spontaneous in their origin, must now be inter-
nalized within the discourse of Halakhah. This process of interpretation has led to
some highly innovative and richly mystical legal thinking in the hands of hasidic
scholars throughout the past two hundred years.
I NDIVIDUALISM AND L AW
The appeal to the Divine Spirit as the ultimate arbiter of the law injected an
absolute and unambiguous element into Jewish legal discourse, which is often full
of doubts and uncertainties.89 Yet, at the same time, an opposing element was
introduced into hasidic approaches to the law, namely, the personal root of the
adjudicator’s soul. The third and final group of sources engaging with hasidic
Halakhah points in the opposite direction of the legislative deployment of the
Holy Spirit. The notion that legal scholars have individual soul-roots is tied to
the inherent pluralism of Jewish legal discourse. Texts in this category generally
focus on two primary and interrelated questions: First, why have different sages
or legal scholars offered many divergent opinions—some of which are mutually
exclusive—when they are confronted by similar cases or precedents from the
same corpus of legal texts? Second, why has Halakhah changed over time, and
why does it continue to do so in the present day?90 These questions about legal
87. Morgenstern, She’elot u-teshuvot yam ha-h.okhmah, 27.

88. Morgenstern then gives several examples of kabbalistic customs that seem to contradict the
ruling as presented in the Talmud and legal codes, spilling much ink in an attempt to identify an ancient
source that supports the mystical practices.
89. See, for example, Shabetai ha-Kohen’s excurses on Shulh.an ‘arukh, yoreh de‘ah, no. 110;
and the well-known discussion in Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen Heller, Shev shema‘tata (Lemberg: 1804).
90. Of course, these questions are also the subject of great debate in earlier rabbinic and kab-
balistic literature; see the introduction of the fourteenth-century Yaakov ben Asher to his ’Arba‘ah
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
turim, in which he claims to have undertaken his codificatory project in order to clarify the many
doubts that had arisen regarding the proper modes of Jewish conduct; and see also Maimonides’s intro-
duction to Mishneh Torah, where, based on T. Sanhedrin 7:1 and T. Sotah 14:9, he attributes all rabbinic
disagreements and the eventual division of Halakhah into multiple streams to the fact that the students
of Shammai and Hillel were not sufficiently attentive to their masters’ words. The plurality of Halakhah
in his time—and thus an impetus for writing Mishneh Torah—is the result of defective transmission.
However, Moshe de Leon, Sefer ha-rimmon, ed. Elliot R. Wolfson (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press,
1988), 366–67, describes the unfolding of divergent opinions as the result of ideas being refracted
through the matrix of the sefirot; and cf. Moshe Cordovero, Pardes rimmonim 9:2. Cf. the comments
397
diversity are imbricated with a third issue: Were hasidic thinkers willing to extend
the mandate for theological creativity and spiritual renewal as a productive tool in
the realm of practical Halakhah in their own day?91
These questions about the nature of Jewish law and the processes through
which it may be decided make a significant appearance in the sermons of the
Maggid of Mezritsh. This focus on Halakhah is surprising in the teachings of a
spiritual leader who never played a clearly documented role in actual legal proce-
dures. One of his homilies begins with the classic disagreement between Beit
Hillel and Beit Shammai over whether or not an egg laid on a Jewish holiday
may be eaten on that same day.92 His explains that their lack of consensus in
this specific case is the key to understanding a broader legal phenomenon:
“These and those are the words of the living God,” both those that forbid and
those that permit.93 “With knowledge rooms are filled” [Proverbs 24:4]. All of
the [divine] attributes [middot] come from Mind [da‘at]…. Each person draws
forth from da‘at, combining the words in this way or that. This one draws love
[’ahavah, i.e., h.esed] from da‘at, meaning that the egg is permitted. Another
draws down awe [yir’ah, i.e., gevurah] from da‘at, and the egg is forbidden.
And when one wants to change the Halakhah, like R. Joshua, who said that
“we pay no attention to a heavenly voice,”94 he returns the ruling [din] to
the attribute of da‘at and from there draws it down through a different attri-
bute. The enlightened will understand.
Another explanation of “these and those are the words of the living God”:
The Oral Torah is the adornments of the bride. One person says that the adorn-
ment must be like this, and another says that this is not so pleasing, and
another way is more beautiful. The king receives great pleasure in their dis-
agreement over the adornments, since both of them wish to adorn the king.95
The Divine Mind is a realm of infinity and abstraction, and there the law is still
unformed and exists only as pure potential. Human scholars must decide the prac-
tical application of the Halakhah by drawing forth this energy and recasting it
of Ritva to B. Eruvin 11a, and the sixteenth-century Maharshal, Yam shel Shelomoh, Bava kamma,
introduction.
91. For an exploration of hasidic texts addressing these issues, see Mayse, “Ever-Changing
Path,” 84–115. Without duplicating the discussion in full, we will revisit a few of the key sermons
cited therein in order to sharpen our points vis-à-vis the two other approaches detailed above.
92. M. Bez.ah 1:1.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
93. B. Eruvin 13b, and B. H.agigah 3b. See further Avi Sagi, The Open Canon: On the Meaning
of Halakhic Discourse, trans. Batya Stein (London: Continuum, 2007); Michael Rosensweig, “‘Elu
Va-‘elu Divrei Elokim Hayyim’: Halakhic Pluralism and Theories of Controversy,” Tradition 26, no.
3 (1992): 4–23; Moshe Sokol, “What Does a Jewish Text Mean? Theories of ‘Elu ve-Elu Divrei
Elohim Hayim’ in Rabbinic Literature,” Daat: a Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah 32–33
(1994): xxiii–xxxv.
94. B. Bava Mez.i‘a 59b.
95. Dov Ber of Mezritsh, Magid devarav le-Ya‘akov, ed. Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer (Jerusalem:
Magnes, 1976), no. 58, 86–87.
398
Hasidic Halakhah
through the various divine attributes (sefirot). The positions these judges take may
all be described as the “words of the living God,” because each one of them is an
authentic manifestation of the different potentialities included in God’s Mind.
But the Maggid also claims, perhaps even prescriptively, that any of these
rulings can be overturned and transformed by returning it to its ultimate source in
the sefirah da‘at (Mind or Knowledge).96 There in God’s Mind the various other pos-
sibilities remain eternally valid and intact, and one may manifest a different legal deci-
sion as required by the hour. The seven lower sefirot, vessels for receiving divine
energy that are here described as “rooms,” emerge from the sefirah da‘at. The
Maggid’s sermon builds on the kabbalistic geography of the divine superstructure,
but in this case he is also referring to the correlate of these same sefirot within the
human psyche as well. Interpreting kabbalistic symbolism as relating to the psycholog-
ical and spiritual life of the individual is one of the principal features of his theology.
The Maggid often uses the term da‘at to refer to a seeker’s mystical awareness
of the Divine Presence, but it is also one of the deepest seats of human intellection,
and in earlier Kabbalah it is often associated with Moses and with the Written Torah
itself.97 This suggests that retracing a legal ruling back into the abstract potential of
da‘at—into the realm that is simultaneously the Divine Mind and the heartland of
active cognition—is a moment akin to the Revelation on Mt. Sinai.
This teaching may be read as suggesting that scholars possess an a priori
legal intuition that necessarily determines how they will decide the law.
However, the Maggid may have been describing a more intentional process of
decision-making in which judges actively seek to decide or change the Halakhah
by drawing out new possibilities from the unformed potential of God’s Mind.
There is not enough evidence to know if this conceptualization would have
affected the Maggid’s own legal rulings,98 but this framework provides an
96. In classical Kabbalah da‘at is often counted as one of the central sefirot, which, like tif’eret,
functions as bridge between the higher sefirot (keter, h.okhmah, binah) and those below it (h.esed,
gevurah, tif’eret). Furthermore, the hasidic masters interpret da‘at in light of “and Adam knew (yada’)
his wife Eve” (Genesis 4:1), understanding it as referring to a type of mystical awareness that create an inti-
mate bond with the Divine. See, for example, Dov Ber of Mezritsh, Magid devarav le-Ya‘akov, ed.
Schatz-Uffenheimer, no. 87, 152.
97. Zohar 1:47b–48b, 134a. The Zohar often correlates the Written Torah with tif’eret, which
emerged from h.okhmah, the abstract realm associated with the Torah that predated the world; see Zohar
3:160a. See also Perush ha-’aggadot le-Rabbi Azriel, ed. Isaiah Tishby (Jerusalem: Mekiz.e Nirdamim,
1945), 2–3, 77, 81–82. Moses is associated with the sefirah tif’eret, which represents the Written Torah,
and he is also referred to as ba‘al ha-matronita, the “husband of Shekhinah” or malkhut. But in some
texts, particularly those of the Lurianic tradition, Moses is associated with the higher sefirah of da‘at.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
See Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Hermeneutics of Visionary Experience: Revelation and Interpretation in the
Zohar,” Religion 18, no. 4 (1988): 378–79, 388; Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of
Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 3, 8–9, 14–15;
Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar,
trans. Nathan Wolski (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 75–76, 91–92; Fine, Physician of
the Soul, 314–15; Mayse, “Beyond the Letters,” 348–62.
98. For the relatively few historical records of the Maggid’s rulings, see Shalom Dovber Levine,
Toledot h.abad be-Rusyah ha-z.arit: Ba-shanim 530–680 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2010), chap. 5; Mayse,
“Beyond the Letters,” 52, 428–29.
399
interesting kabbalistic and hasidic justification for why different scholars will
reach different verdicts even when confronted by the same case. In the passage
above, the heavenly voice represents the current heavenly judgment on the Hala-
khah. Rabbi Joshua’s reasoning led him in a different direction, and, ignoring the
previous divine judgment, he changed the Halakhah to accord with his own deci-
sion. The Maggid’s reading of Rabbi Joshua rejecting the heavenly voice because
he wants to alter the Halakhah is a fascinating interpretation, and not at all the
obvious meaning of the talmudic passage.
R. Dov Ber’s second reading of “these and those,” however, differs from the
one given immediately preceding it. Earlier Jewish mystical texts commonly apply
the term “adornments of the Bride” [i.e., Shekhinah] to Torah novellae, but here
the Maggid argues that creative new interpretations of the Oral Torah, like stan-
dards of beauty, have an inherently subjective dimension.99 He gives a parable
of two sages who disagree over which of the various possible manifestations of
the law is the most befitting for the king (surely referring to the King of kings),
but without claiming which is the more rationally compelling. The Maggid sug-
gests that all such decisions bring joy to God, as does the very process of legal
argumentation if performed with integrity. Each decision is appealing in the eye
of the beholder and pleasing to the Divine, which remains true even if they con-
tradict one another or are mutually exclusive.
Perhaps the aesthetic analogy to sartorial ornaments is to be taken less liter-
ally, since surely each proponent has his reasons in addition to thinking that his inter-
pretations are more beautiful. Pure subjectivity, after all, is not integrity. But it is
important to note that the Maggid describes God as delighting in the multiplicity,
suggesting that the Divine takes no joy in a monochromatic or static legal system.
Another homily from the Maggid focuses on the figure of King David, portray-
ing him as the ideal adjudicator who makes his decisions based on the root of his soul:
The Talmud teaches: “David decided the tradition according to the Halakhah,
but Saul did not.”100 We must explain why this was so, for is it not taught that
“these and those are the words of the living God”? Of course, in truth “these
and those [are the words of God],” but each of them [i.e., David and Saul]
spoke and decided the law according to his rung and the origin of his soul
[shoresh nishmato].101 It is known that the root of King David’s soul was
the attribute of malkhut,102 and it is known that malkhut receives from all
of the six extremities;103 sometimes from this one, sometimes from that,
99. Katz, Divine Law, 56–87; and Daniel Chanan Matt, “Adorning the ‘Bride’ on the Eve of the
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
Feast of Weeks,” in Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period, ed.
Lawrence Fine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 74–80.
100. A paraphrase of B. Eruvin 53a. Cf. B. Sanhedrin 93b.
101. On deciding matters of law according to the root of one’s soul, see below. More broadly,
see Gershom Scholem, “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” in On the Kabbalah and Its
Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1996), 64–65; and Moshe Idel, Absorbing
Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 97–98.
102. Zohar 3:21a.
103. Referring to the six sefirot from h.esed to yesod.
400
Hasidic Halakhah
and sometimes it tends toward two of the extremities. It is written, “incline

after the majority” [Exodus 23:2], meaning whatever the preponderance
may be, whether for kindness [h.esed], judgment [din], or compassion
[rah.amim], which mediates [between them]. Whatever it may be, this is
called “inclining after the majority.” It is known that any attribute that over-
powers another is called the majority, since those that oppose are subsumed
within this conquering attribute and are totally nullified [betelim
mi-mez.i’utam] like a lamp in broad daylight.104 The victorious attribute is
the majority, and even though the others are also the “words of the living
God,” they are subsumed within the majority.
Now King David came from the attribute of malkhut, where everything is
included and things reach completion. [Malkhut] is called the assembly
[‘az.eret kenishin],105 the house of assembly106 where all of the upper attri-
butes congregate. Thus David was able to align the law and to decide the tra-
dition according to the Halakhah. This attribute is called halakhah, since it is
the conclusion of all the “cosmic ways” [halikhot ‘olam; Habakkuk 3:6], whether
for kindness or compassion, and so forth, etc.
Furthermore, malkhut is called the Oral Torah, which is interpreted by means
of the thirteen principles, as is known.107 The Halakhah follows whichever attri-
bute is victorious above. [David] aligned the truth in accord with how it con-
cluded above in the root of his soul…. This was not true of Saul, whose level
was not from this attribute. He too taught “words of the living God” from the
root of his soul, but could not align to the truth as it had been decided above.108
The Maggid is offering a creative reinterpretation of Exodus 23:2, long cited in

Jewish legal texts as mandating the principle of majority rule.109 He suggests
that the process of deciding Halakhah entails determining which of the sefirot is
the strongest. The scholar charged with adjudicating the way has to be attentive
to cosmic processes, for the practice that is to become the legal norm is the
result of the interface (halikhot) between the different sefirot.
At first blush this seems to be a purely metaphysical investigation, leaving
far less room for personal autonomy in deciding the Halakhah than the teaching
104. B. H.ullin 60b.

105. Zohar 1:64a; 3:96b, 197a.
106. The Hebrew term beit kenesset sometimes appears as a name for Shekhinah; see Tikkune
zohar, ed. Reuven Margoliot (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1978), tikkun 69, 115a. On beit kenesset
as the assembly point for all blessings, see Tikkune zohar, ed. Margoliot, tikkun 47, 84b.
107. Sifra, Barayta de-Rabbi Yishma‘el (ed. Weiss, 1a–3a).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
108. Dov Ber of Mezritsh, Maggid devarav le-Ya’akov, nos. 189, 291.
109. Quoted in the story on b. Bava Mez.i‘a 59b. Cf. Deuteronomy 17:11; Y. Mo‘ed Katan 3:1,
9a; Y. Sanhedrin 1:4, 6a–b; B. H.ullin 11a; Derashot ha-Ran, no. 7; Zohar 2:117a. See Itzhak Englard,
“Majority Decision vs. Individual Truth: The Interpretation of the ‘Oven of Achnai’ Aggadah,” in
Jewish Law and Legal Theory, ed. Martin P. Golding (New York: New York University Press,
1993), 353–68; Ephraim E. Urbach, “‘Al ha-kelal ‘’ah.arei rabim le-hatot,’” in Studies in Jewish
Thought, ed. Moshe David Har and Jonah Fraenkel (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1998), 503–9; Mordecai
Elon, “’Emunat h.akhamim be-‘’ah.arei rabim le-hatot’ u-ve-‘lo tasur,’” Torah she-be‘al peh 45
(2006): 191–205.
401
cited above. However, the Maggid adds another important piece to the puzzle. He
explains that the origin of a judge’s soul is the lens that governs his internal process
of deliberation, even determining the outcome of the decision-making process.110
The Maggid describes King David as the legal sage and adjudicator par excel-
lence.111 As the embodiment of the sefirah malkhut, the receptive pool into
which all the other sefirot flow, David was the most attuned to the cosmic pro-
cesses. His legal decisions reflect the way the Halakhah had already been deter-
mined by the cosmos, which he was able to intuit due to the root of his soul.
Though Saul’s and David’s opinions were both the “words of the living God,”
only the latter figure was attuned to the higher legal truth.112
This understanding of law is quite different from that presented in the
Maggid’s first homily, in which one who wished to change the Halakhah
simply needed to return the law to its origin, tracing it back through the root of
his soul to the sefirah da‘at, from which he would be able to draw forth
another ruling more in line with his wishes. In the teaching discussed above,
however, there seems to be an ultimate legal truth beyond the subjective decision
of the individual scholar. The law is determined not by the scholar’s logic, but
through his perception—or perhaps better, his intuition, described as “the root
of his soul”113—regarding how the matter has already been decided in the
matrix of the sefirot above.114 Perhaps the Maggid was suggesting that a sage’s
legal reasoning would instinctively lead him in that direction, and this ability to
accord with the heavenly Halakhah was not obviously inconsistent with the
notion that it could also be transformed.
110. Here we might recall the debate about the role of intuition in legal decision-making more
broadly; see Joseph C. Hutcheson, Jr., “The Judgment Intuitive: The Function of the ‘Hunch’ in Judicial
Decision,” Cornell Law Quarterly 14 (1928–29): 274–88; Richard A. Wasserstrom, The Judicial Decision:
Toward a Theory of Legal Justification (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), esp. 20–21, 89–
115.
111. In this the Maggid follows the talmudic attitude; see, for instance, B. Berakhot 3b; B. San-
hedrin 93b. The utilization of this Davidic model for contemporary metalegal discourse is rather inter-
esting, and a parallel move to that of the Maggid can be found in the works of the H.atam Sofer; see
Kahana, Me-ha-Noda’ bi-Yehudah le-ha-H.atam Sofer, 428–30.
112. See also Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Torah Study and Truth in Medieval Ashkenazic Rabbinic
Literature and Thought,” in Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, ed. Howard Kreisel (Beer Sheva:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2006), 101–19.
113. Sha‘ar ha-gilgulim, hakdamah, 34. For examples in works of the Maggid’s students, see R.
Levi Yiz.h.ak of Barditshev, Kedushat Levi, vol. 1, purim, 237; R. Menah.em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
ha-’arez. (Jerusalem: Ha-mesorah, 1989), korah, 93–94; R. Uziel Meisels, Tif’eret ‘Uziel, shir
ha-shirim, 85–86, where it is cited as a Lurianic tradition. Naftali Bakhrakh refers to the notion that
each person’s soul derives from a certain letter of the 600,000 in the Torah, and that therefore there
are 600,000 explanations of Scripture. Although many of these will only be available in the future,
Bakhrakh says that Isaac Luria could discern each person’s origin in a particular verse simply by exam-
ining their forehead, then conferring upon them the fitting scriptural interpretation based on this infor-
mation; see ‘Emek ha-melekh (Jerusalem: Yerid Ha-sefarim, 2003), 16:30, 843.
114. Another reading of this same sermon, however, might yield a description of deciding the
Halakhah as a theurgic practice.
402
Hasidic Halakhah
The Maggid’s interest in this specific dimension of legal reasoning had a sig-
nificant impact on the next generation of hasidic leaders. The following teaching
by R. Levi Yiz.h.ak of Barditshev addresses the subjective elements of legal
decision-making quite frankly:
Regarding the disagreement between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, we have
said that, “these and those are the words of the living God.”115 A person under-
stands the plain-sense meaning of the holy Torah according to his own attribute
[beh.inah]. If he comes from the world of Kindness [i.e., the sefirah h.esed],
everything is ritually pure, permitted and kosher, according to the ruling his
mind deduces from the holy Torah. The reverse is also true. If he is from attri-
bute of Judgment [i.e., the sefirah din], then everything is the opposite. The
attribute of Beit Hillel was Kindness, and therefore they offered lenient
rulings. Beit Shammai were of the attribute of Judgment, and were therefore
stringent. But the truth is that each of these, according to their level, are “the
words of the living God.” … The sages that came after Beit Shammai and
Beit Hillel saw that the world needed to be run with Kindness, and they estab-
lished the Halakhah to follow the leniencies of Beit Hillel in every case.116
This sermon suggests that each scholar rules in light of his personal root in the
cosmic realm, manifest in his intuition as well as his cognitive framework. It
also offers an interesting justification regarding why the particular decisions of
the school of Hillel were adopted as the normative practice, an explanation that
runs counter to Talmud’s own explanation in b. Eruvin 13b. But elsewhere, R.
Levi Yiz.h.ak offered a more programmatic vision that acknowledges the continu-
ous evolution of Halakhah into the present:
The Oral Torah changes according to the sages of the generation. This one
says such-and-such, and another says something different. The conduct of
the Halakhah accords with the generations. Rashi decided that tefillin
should be donned in one way, and Rabbenu Tam decided that it be done in
a different manner.117
The truth is that the Halakhah follows the attribute [middah] with which the
Blessed One directs the world [in that particular age]. If it is conducted by
means of [divine] love [i.e., h.esed], then the Halakhah accords with the
sage whose position reflects that. If it is tif’eret, then the Halakhah follows
that one. This explains why Israel lovingly desired to receive the Torah [on
Mt. Sinai], for they said, “We will do and we will understand” [Exodus
24:7], but at first did not want to receive the Oral Torah…. It was difficult
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
for them [to grasp] that the Oral Torah would change in accord with the
tzaddik of each generation. He causes the world to be directed by a certain
[divine] attribute, and so too is it with Halakhah of the Oral Torah.118
115. B. Eruvin 13b.

116. Kedushat Levi, vol. 2, likkutim, 479.
117. B. Menah.ot 34b.
118. R. Levi Yiz.h.ak of Barditshev, Kedushat Levi, vol. 1, purim, 237.
403
R. Levi Yiz.h.ak begins with the assertion the Jewish law changed because it had to
respond to dynamic manners in which the Divine guided the world. The adjudica-
tor has to be attuned to the constant fluctuations in the Godhead, determining the
particular divine attribute (from among the sefirot) that characterizes his age and
should therefore be the lens through which he interprets the law. Based on this
knowledge of the workings of the Divine, the tzaddik decides the correct form
of the Halakhah as it applies to the entire community. Thus R. Levi Yiz.h.ak
turned the Maggid’s theoretical description of Halakhah in accordance with the
soul-root into an account of the history of Jewish law.
However, by the end of the sermon R. Levi Yiz.h.ak has arrived at a different
message. His conclusion suggests that the tzaddik first determines the Halakhah in
his generation, and that God responds to the sage’s ruling directing the world in
accord with the particular attribute embodied in his decision. This notion is
indeed radical, but it is very much in keeping with a cornerstone of R. Levi
Yiz.h.ak’s theology: God willingly diminished His infinite power by creating the
world and then revealing the Torah to Israel, entering into a relationship with
human beings and thus demanding that the tzaddik become His partner. God
does this because of the great delight brought about by the correct expressions
of human agency. In the case of the teaching above, the active role of the
tzaddik takes the form of an exegetical duty to interpret the Oral Torah and the
Halakhah anew in each generation.119
But surely R. Levi Yiz.h.ak —the official rabbi and court head of an impor-
tant Lithuanian community of Pinsk and then Barditshev—was not advocating
religious anarchy, a legal free-for-all in which the preference for human autonomy
leads each leader to develop his own unique version of the Halakhah. He was more
cautious, suggesting that the transformation of the law must happen on a commu-
nal, perhaps even a national scale. Change began with the tzaddikim, and Hala-
khah was not to be reshaped in accord with the fleeting whims of private
individuals. Furthermore, R. Levi Yiz.h.ak’s model is highly elitist, since change
emerges exclusively from the intellectual and spiritual leadership. Only tzaddikim
understand the different attributes with which God engages the world, and, more
importantly, only they have been entrusted with the power to command these
divine attributes.120
These texts present complementary, but not identical, versions of our third
thematic cluster of sources of hasidic Halakhah. They describe an approach to
legal decision-making in which certain scholars have the power to change the
Halakhah in accord with the unique needs of their generations, or, alternatively,
will render a judgment that reflects distinctive mystical origins of the root of
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
their own souls. This conceptualization of Halakhah is primarily oriented

toward accounting for the diversity and development of Jewish law, and these
119. See also his formulation in Kedushat Levi, vol. 2, likkutim, 463–65.
120. The next generations of hasidic leaders engaged with and developed this notion. See, for
instance, Avraham Yehoshua of Apt, ’Ohev Yisra’el (Bene Berak: 1996), toledot, 23; ibid., be-shalah,
92–93, and the discussion in Mayse, “Ever-Changing Path,” 101–3.
404
Hasidic Halakhah
reflective sources may not have been intended to prescribe a practical new method
for determining contemporary Halakhah.
Yet it should not be surprising that some of these daring hasidic formulations
inspired a great polemical debate. In a sermon included in his 1832 Peri kodesh
hilulim, R. Tsevi Hirsch of Zhidachov remarked that, “as is well-known, the Hala-
khah changes according to time and place.”121 He based his claim of perpetual
change on the words of the Ari on the one hand, and on statements of scholars
of astronomy on the other. Since perpetual change exists both in the heavenly
realms, as taught by Lurianic Kabbalah, and in the astronomical “spheres,” the
same is true of the Divine Will regarding legal decisions. In this manner the
hasidic master explains the familiar rabbinic teaching that one should “study
[shoneh] halakhot every day”122—that Halakhah in fact changed (yishtaneh
[sic]) over time, since the constant changes in the Godhead and the celestial
orbits mean that no two days are ever identical.
The variety of hasidic texts discussed above, many of which offer an even
more daring formulation of legal development than this, demonstrate that Tsevi
Hirsch’s formulation was by no means out of the ordinary within the hasidic
world. But his sermon caught the eye of the wrong person, and only seven years
later Rabbi Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport (1790–1867), a Galician rabbinic
scholar and Maskil, cited this very passage at length in a letter written to the head
of the court of a German community. Rapoport viewed this hasidic exposition as
an example of the potential ruin of the Torah at the hands of radical reform, explain-
ing that these hasidic works include “their notions that, God forbid, the Torah is sup-
posed to change according to the times [‘assuyah lehishtanot ke-fi ha-zeman].”123
In his letter, R. Rappaport links this anarchic approach to Halakhah to the path later
taken by the Maskilim who favor significant legal reform, identifying the hasidic
precedent and its ideological relativism as the precursor to what will eventually
lead to the abolition of Halakhah in practice. Rapoport observes a dangerously
heretical element in the aforementioned hasidic exposition, which he describes as
“very close to the views of Spinoza.”124
Was Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport correct in his anti-Spinozan critique of a
hasidic approach to Halakhah that would eventually render the law entirely obso-
lete? Did this hasidic ideology of ever-present legal evolution have practical or
121. Tsevi Hirsch of Zhidachov, Peri kodesh hilulim (1832), derush la-sefirah, 12a. Tsevi
Hirsch (1763–1831) was a student of the “Seer” of Lublin.
122. B. Niddah 73a.
123. This letter was printed in Kerem h.emed 4 (1839): 56.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
124. A strikingly similar conceptualization of Halakhah that attributed to legal change across
generations to different “soul-roots” is found in a contemporary work published just before the end
of the eighteenth century. The author, Yiz.h.ak of Krisnapoli, was apparently a rabbinic and legal
scholar in addition to being well versed in Kabbalah. He was not clearly connected to any early
hasidic circles, but the legal ethos he articulates is remarkably familiar: each generation has a unique
source in the Divine, and its leaders are tasked with developing an approach to Torah that befits
their own spiritual circumstances. This constantly evolving system, which necessitates changing
laws and practices in addition to homiletical creativity, is graced unto teachers and legal scholars as
a veritable revelation from the Divine. See Yiz.h.ak of Krisnapoli, Sod berit Yiz.h.ak (Zolkiev: 1799), 75b.
405
systematic ramifications? Traces of subjective legal rulings based on the unique

soul of the adjudicator are in fact recorded in hasidic writings. The most prominent
example is the nephew and student of the aforementioned Tsevi Hirsch, namely
Yiz.h.ak Ayzik Yehudah Yeh.iel Safrin (1806–74), the Rebbe of Komarno. Rabbi
Yiz.h.ak Ayzik was a prolific writer as well as a highly original mystical and
legal thinker, and hasidic and kabbalistic themes permeate his works of
Halakhah.125
R. Safrin invokes the idea that Jewish legal scholars (and indeed, all Jews)
have diverse soul-roots in order to analyze—in remarkable detail—the disagree-
ment between Rashi and Rabbenu Tam over the arrangement of the parchments
in tefillin, as well as several other well-known legal quarrels.126 He argues that
each legal adjudicator possesses a soul-root, which causes him to incline naturally
either toward prohibition (gevurah) or permission (h.esed). Such distinctions in the
law do not exist in the Divine (since all souls are included therein) and both are
inherently “true,” but only one decision is correct for the soul-root of a particular
generation. This hasidic approach, first encountered in the teachings of the Maggid
and his students, was greatly enriched and deepened by Safrin, who employed it as
a model for legal innovation in his own day and not simply a historical description
of the evolution of Halakhah. Safrin argues that all single, unified positions had
once been established by the Sanhedrin.127 After the demise of this centralized
authority and the beginnings of the Exile, however, there emerged a number of
different scenarios for deciding the law. Safrin notes that the talmudic sages
gazed into the future via the Holy Spirit (ruah. ha-kodesh) and established the
proper ruling befitting the soul-roots of all later generations. But in cases of endur-
ing and unresolved controversy—such as that of Rabbenu Tam and Rashi—it was
left up to later scholars to decide the Halakhah in accord with the soul-root of their
generation or community; thus the conceptual framework becomes a prescriptive
tool in the hands of the contemporary sage.
In another illustrative ruling that highlights his attention to the individual, R.
Safrin took the bold step of condoning the creation of new blessings that fit new or
unique occasions.128 He begins by reinforcing the prohibition that one was not
allowed to recite a blessing when it was not called for, and then underscores
that the inverse is equally true: one must offer blessings whenever possible.
This includes the blessings of the Talmud, as well as those found in the midrashim
125. R. Yiz.h.ak Ayzik’s legal decisions (and his once-hidden work of Halakhah published as
Shulh.an ha-tahor) have not yet been the subject of a proper academic study, but on the style of his rab-
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
binic scholarship and legal method, see Yakov Meir, “‘Iz.uvah shel lamdanut h.asidit: Bio-bibliografiyah
shel Rabbi Yiz.h.ak Ayzik Safrin mi-Komarna (1831–1853)” (Master’s thesis, Hebrew University,
2012).
126. Yiz.h.ak Ayzik Safrin, Shulh.an ha-tahor (Tel Aviv: 1963), vol. 1, zer zahav, no. 34, 36–44.
On the different kinds of tefillin, see above.
127. Ibid.
128. The opinion of R. Yose in B. Berakhot 40b (“One who changes the form of the blessings
established by the sages does not fulfill his obligation”) is often cited as precedent against inventing
new blessings or modifying existing ones.
406
Hasidic Halakhah
(works not generally considered loci for normative Halakhah) or invented by the
Geonim, but Safrin extends the power of creativity into the contemporary world by
arguing that the sage examine his unique situation and recite the appropriate bless-
ing, even if it means creating something new.129 Guided by his unique soul-root
and his perception of the singular needs of the hour, the hasidic scholar is given
great freedom in interpreting, applying, and perhaps even reformulating the
sacred law.
*****
The law and its proper determination and practice were, thus, not marginal
concerns sidelined by the hasidic masters in favor of mystical rapture. In fact, these
issues lie at the very heart of hasidic devotional life and spirituality. Hasidism
offers a surprising variety of ways in which the fires of religious passion blend
with, and are expressed by, the ostensibly rigid nomos of the talmudic or rabbinic
tradition. The two realms of law and spirituality are often embodied together, inter-
twined in the communally oriented legal decisions and theological teachings of
single individuals. Hasidic sources that emphasize the importance, and indeed
the centrality, of studying the codes of Jewish law indeed appear in some of the
earliest layers of hasidic literature,130 but creative new approaches to Halakhah
that emerged in Hasidism are also concretized in legal decisions and ritual
practices.
What emerges is that the interface between law, mysticism, and social reality
is much more complex. The inner turn that characterizes Hasidism cannot be cap-
tured in the binary frame of nomos versus eros delineated by Christian Hebraists
and continued by many later academic scholars. Yet the picture is still far from
simple, as hasidic sources evidence unresolved tensions between the three
approaches of Lurianic continuity, use of the Divine Spirit, and the embrace of
legal change and diversity as emerging from the various soul-roots of scholars.
For example, hasidic texts that take up the latter theme, including a wide range
of sources underscoring the values of flexibility, innovation, and an openness to
change, often dovetail with the revival of the Divine Spirit in legal formulation.
In some works, such as the writings of R. Safrin noted above, the two notions rein-
force one another; the jurisprudential tool of ruah. ha-kodesh is admissible because
it fits with a broader ethos that embraces creativity and subjective legal decisions
that reflect the soul-root of the adjudicator. But, the conceptualization of hasidic
129. Yiz.h.ak Ayzik Safrin, Shulh.an ha-tahor, vol. 2, no. 222, 82. See also ibid., vol. 1, zer zahav,
no. 4, 14, where the author notes that although he received a tradition that the Ba‘al Shem Tov would
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
recite a blessing before smoking his pipe, Safrin did not know the appropriate blessing and therefore
would not say one. He then adds, however, that a great sage (talmid h.akham muflag) may formulate
his own blessing—for a pipe or any other such thing not obviously included in one of the classical
blessings.
130. In addition to those recalled thus far, see ’Or ha-’emet (Zhitomir: 1900), 63b. Cf. Keter
shem tov (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot, 2004), no. 423b; Likkutim yekarim, 69a, no. 337; Darkhe z.edek
(Lvov: 1798), 18; and Ma’amare Admor ha-Zaken 5565 (New York: Kehot, 1981), vol. 1, 489. We
would like to thank scholar Eli Rubin for bringing this text to our attention. See also Yosher divre
’emet (Bene Berak: 2003), kuntres sheni, no. 3.
407
Halakhah as a cultural and legal translation of Lurianic Kabbalah also indicates a

paradoxical embrace of change together with an emphasis on continuity, intensi-
fying and drawing authority from this image of the past. In some cases this meant
adopting kabbalistic stringencies or supererogatory practice (either as an individ-
ual or as an entire community), but this very turn (be it the inclination toward stric-
ture or permission) reflects the broader hasidic—and indeed Lurianic—belief in
the ever-changing nature of the cosmos. Hasidic sources preserve striking demon-
strations of legal flexibility that include the Divine Spirit, and embrace continuous
change and development of Halakhah, but these are held concomitantly with a
surefooted devotion to piety and in some cases stringency. A balanced understand-
ing of the uniqueness of hasidic Halakhah, however, becomes visible only as we
appreciate the complex—and at time strained—interface between these intellec-
tual currents.
Nomos, eros, and mystical piety merged together in distinctive ways in the
specific contexts of Hasidism; these forces are often most visible in the novel
forms of Jewish legal discourse. Hasidism offers a gateway to the complex intel-
lectual dynamics at the core of Jewish legal discourse and traditional society in
early modernity. The hasidic case study suggests that the wide variety of Jewish
religious and pietistic expressions that flourished in this era cannot be forced
into the oft-reiterated description of early modernity as an era of strict traditionalist
formulation, or a monolithic time of conservative legal stagnation, or simple anti-
nomian versus strict nomian trends. In early modernity local identities fractured,
reintegrated, and became increasingly complex, therefore enabling new cultural
fusions as well as vital re-expressions of law and theology. Elements of the resul-
tant transformations in Jewish legal discourse are visible in the three groups of
texts engaging hasidic Halakhah outlined above: the communal internalization
of Lurianic ritual and legal cultures; the embodiment of the Divine Spirit within
the charismatic leader and his legal decisions; and the role of subjective, personal
aesthetics in legal rulings and the soul-root of the adjudicator in the development
of Halakhah across generations. These preliminary models offer us a point of
departure for delving into the vast legal heritage of Hasidism.
Maoz Kahana
Tel Aviv University
Ariel Evan Mayse

Stanford University
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009417000423
408

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse: H H: R I S L

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse: H H: R I S L

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse: H H: R I S L

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.

AJS Review 41:2 (November 2017), 375–408

H ASIDIC H ALAKHAH : R EAPPRAISING THE I NTERFACE

S PIRIT AND N OMOS

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

Pawel Maciejko has recently demonstrated that Pikulski’s distinction between

W RITING THE H ISTORY OF H ASIDISM AND L AW

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

and remains a work of immeasurable influence. Scholem devoted an entire lecture

After an interval of a hundred years, during which Hasidism as a whole, apart

Religiosity is man’s sense of wonder and adoration, an ever anew becoming,

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

a close disciple of Scholem, who downplayed the centrality of Halakhah in hasidic

14. Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

(legal adjudicators), and authors of original responsa.23 This includes R. Levi

H ASIDIC H ALAKHAH AS A L URIANIC O UTGROWTH

31. Moshe Hallamish, Ha-kabbalah ba-tefillah, ba-halakhah u-va-minhag (Ramat Gan:

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

revolutionary; Shmuel Shmelke defends the Hasidim as bastions of tradition who

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

controversy between the hasidic leader Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum (1759–1841),

R. Moshe Teitelbaum describes a community of devotees who have formed a vol-

59. Lit. “descends before the ark.”

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

presents an unusual and highly creative chain of argumentation. The H.atam

62. B. Sanhedrin 89a.

have aroused ire in traditional nineteenth-century rabbinic circles. He does,

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

H OLY S PIRIT AND S CHOLASTIC F ORMULATION

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

participated in the formulation of an apparently official legal decree to provide

77. Mendel Piekarz, Ha-hanhagah ha-h.asidit: Samkhut ve-’emunat z.addikim be-’aspaklariyat

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

We should furthermore note an interpretation heard in the name of the Rebbe

83. Morgenstern, She’elot u-teshuvot yam ha-h.okhmah, 20.

responsum of Moshe Feinstein in ’Iggerot Moshe, ’orah. h.ayim, vol. 4, no. 3.

myriad—relative interpretations in the process of determining the Halakhah.87 His

87. Morgenstern, She’elot u-teshuvot yam ha-h.okhmah, 27.

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

and sometimes it tends toward two of the extremities. It is written, “incline

The Maggid is offering a creative reinterpretation of Exodus 23:2, long cited in

104. B. H.ullin 60b.

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

115. B. Eruvin 13b.

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

their own souls. This conceptualization of Halakhah is primarily oriented

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

systematic ramifications? Traces of subjective legal rulings based on the unique

Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse

Halakhah as a cultural and legal translation of Lurianic Kabbalah also indicates a

Ariel Evan Mayse

You might also like