The Spiritual World of a Master of Awe: Divine Vitality, Theosis, and Healing in the Degel Mahaneh Ephraim

Abstract

Graetz characterized Hasidism primarily as a popular revivalist movement, one which contained elements of superstitious magic and obscurantism. In contrast, twentieth century scholarship has followed the neohasidic views of Buber and Dubnow, presenting Hasidism as a form of romanticism reflecting modern experiential and pietistic sensibilities.1 Gershom Scholem's kabbalistic conception of Hasidism, while consistent with this romantic trend, emphasized the kabbalistic background of this romantic outburst of experiential piety and mysticism. Scholem's dialectic of history reconfigures Hasidism, seeing it as a popularist channeling of the myth and symbols of Kabbalah and of Sabbatian antinominalism into a devotional movement dedicated to finding God in the physical world.2 Accordingly, then, contemporary scholarship, with its view of Hasidism as a romantic movement based on popularized Kabbalah, has produced elucidations of the quietism and mysticism of the Maggid of Miedzyrec,3 the social ethos of the court of the Hasidic zaddik,4 and the classical Safed piety of the Toldo t Yaakov Yosef.5