Performing the past in hasidic tales

ABSTRACT

Hasidic stories told among hasidim today are contemporary works of literature and performance with a distinct relationship to the past. Given the disruptions of hasidic history, tales told today might be expected to differ greatly from those of prior generations. One might also expect today’s tales to be permeated with nostalgia. In fact, however, hasidic tales today scarcely differ in form or content from those of a century or more ago. Furthermore, there is little yearning for the past or sense of loss to be found in today’s hasidic storytelling. The article suggests reasons for these observations. In many ways, the present is better than the past for hasidim. Furthermore, storytelling itself unites past and present, as the storyteller enacts that which other storytellers have enacted before. This idea is elucidated through Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” and the ritual theory of Adam Seligman. Finally, in hasidic belief the rebbes of previous generations are alive in spiritual realms, and storytelling about them draws their power into our world now. There is no need either to innovate or to yearn for the past, when past and present are one.

KEYWORDS:

• Hasidism
• storytelling
• Walter Benjamin
• Adam Seligman
• ritual
• nostalgia
• Tosh

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Justin Jaron Lewis is the author of Imagining Holiness: Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), and the translator of a remarkable Old Yiddish text in praise of womankind (Harry Fox and Justin Jaron Lewis, Many Pious Women: Edition and Translation, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011). He has published articles on various aspects of Jewish law, lore, and imagination, especially in the realm of hasidic tales.

Notes

1. For a recent, accessible overview of the psychology and evolutionary significance of storytelling, see Gottschall (2012). There is a vast literature on oral storytelling and story more broadly. The scholarly works I have found most illuminating focus on particular cultures (Haberman 1988; Narayan 1989; Scheub 1998; Doerfler, Sinclair, and Stark 2013).

2. Thus, I am not engaging with other narrative art such as the growing number of novels in Yiddish by hasidic authors Katz (2004, 389–390), or other kinds of hasidic narrative writings about tzadikim. For example, on my shelf is a book in praise of Rabbi Moshe Yosef Rubin, “der Cimpulunger Rav,” by his grandson (Rubin 2004). It is in English, takes a historical tone, and includes photographs and genealogical charts. Another example is the series `Avodat haleviyim on the history of the Tosher dynasty (Anonymous 2013, 2014). As their title pages state, these compilations contain “pure sayings, epistles and letters, stories of tzadikim, holy customs, biographical accounts and events in the life, and eulogizing words” about the Tosher Rebbe’s great-grandfather Meshulam Feish and grandfather Elimelekh Segal Löwy.

3. With apologies to linguists, my transliterations of Yiddish follow the YIVO system for Standard Yiddish: I do not attempt to reproduce hasidic pronunciation.

4. For an overview of the impact of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on Eastern European Jews, see Haumann (2002, 99–233); a more focused overview must await the new history of Hasidism which leading sociologists and historians are working on, see http://www.dubnow.de/1/research/history-of-hasidism/.

5. “Many [rabbis at a 2012 public event] claimed the Internet was responsible for the crisis of faith, which has led to the growing population of ‘at risk’ Jews – at risk, that is, for leaving their communities” (Fader 2013, 72). On the other hand, Chabad-Lubavitch, in keeping with its “extrovert” orientation (Blondheim and Katz 2016, 89), “has been a pioneer on the Web, having an online presence as early as the 1980s” (Golan 2013, 155) though Pearl (2014) sees this as less than an unconditional embrace. More broadly,

the Haredi presence on the Internet only continues to grow. It is now possible, for instance, to read blogs written by Haredim, to participate in online forums (including some conducted in Yiddish) devoted to famously insular Hasidic sects such as Satmar and Toldos Avraham Yitzhak and to visit virtual Hasidic hoyfn (“courts”) on websites maintained by devotees. (Deutsch 2009, 5)

 Cf. Katz (2004, 390) on hasidic Yiddish on the Internet.

6. Heilman notices the “absorption of the present” in matters of medicine, women’s fashions, home furnishings, technology, and even the manufacture of tefillin (56–57, 75, 358–359).

7. Recent studies of contemporary hasidic communities include Levine (2003) (on Chabad-Lubavitch in Crown Heights, Brooklyn) and Fader (2009) (on Bobov and other hasidic groups in Boro Park, Brooklyn); both of these focus on women and girls. In Israel, hasidim tend to be lumped in with other haredi Jews; this is the case in Kalekin-Fishman and Schneider (2007) and Baumel (2006). On persistence and change in contemporary hasidic Yiddish, see Katz (2004, 379–391), Krogh (2012), Aptroot and Hansen (2014, 39–103), and Abugov and Ravid (2014) (which notes increasing use of Yiddish among the Sanz hasidim in the coastal Israeli city of Netanya). For a journalistic account of hasidim in Montreal, see Rosen (2017).

8. Most stories from the Chabad-Lubavitch movement are directed towards outsiders and deserve separate treatment.

9. “The quickest way to peruse the scope of [Yiddish-language] hasidic literature of the twenty-first century is to peruse the books in a bookstore, either traditional or online. For example, a direct web sale site in 2004 advertised 458 books in print in Yiddish: stories of hasidic tsadikim (rebbes) – 51; stories of tsadikim for children – 36 … ” (Katz 2004, 389).

10. Cf. Benjamin (2006 [1936], 367): “Storytellers tend to begin their story with a presentation of the circumstances in which they themselves have learned what is to follow, unless they simply pass it off as their own experience.” In hasidic stories, the “circumstances” are rarely described, but implied: the teller was paying careful attention to the words of a trustworthy person. Whether such attributions are accurate is a different question; see Lewis (2009, 55–56).

11. A “famous orator” popular in Satmar circles, see the “Satmar Headquarters” Twitter feed of 14 August 2016. https://twitter.com/search?q=yosef%20greenwald&src=typd

12. The entire series of books Siah Zekenim (Asheri 1997–2014) is described on its title pages as “collected stories … heard from the mouths of trustworthy men, tzadikim and elders of our generation.” Most of these informants begin by mentioning their own sources.

13. Shmiel tells me that stories of living rebbes are primarily told among friends. He adds that he saw wonders worked by his rebbe, the Kashauer Rov (email, 26 January 2015). On miracle stories told about the Tosher Rebbe in his lifetime, see Lewis and Shaffir (2011, 160).

14. In addition to the studies cited in note 7, see Pew Research Center (2013, 10):

Orthodox Jews [including the “ultra-Orthodox”] … are much younger, on average, and tend to have much larger families than the overall Jewish population. This suggests that their share of the Jewish population will grow. In the past, high fertility in the U.S. Orthodox community has been at least partially offset by a low retention rate … But the falloff from Orthodoxy appears to be declining and is significantly lower among 18-to-29-year-olds (17%) than among older people.

15. Sociologist William Shaffir, who has studied hasidim and former hasidim for decades, notes, “The road leading to defection in paved with heartache and hardship, leading relatively few to embark upon this path” (email to the author, 3 November 2015). The difficulties of leaving a hasidic community are expressed in Davidman (2014), and on the websites of “Hillel” (not to be confused with the university students’ group of the same name) and “Footsteps.” The Footsteps website states, “Every year hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men and women attempt to explore the world beyond their insular communities … Footsteps has served over 800 people since its founding in 2003” (http://footstepsorg.org/about-us/). But the growing hasidic population of New York City and three surrounding counties was estimated in 2011 as 239,000, in 50,000 households (Cohen, Ukeles, and Miller 2012, 212). Even if the figure of 17% defection from American Orthodoxy in general cited in the previous note were to extend to the hasidic world, continuity would be far more assured than it seemed in the pre-Holocaust period.

16. At that time, Hasidism faced “a rising tide of defections from the observant community” (Polen 1994, 3; see pp. 1–3 on background and the Piaseczno Rebbe’s response). Some pre-Holocaust books of hasidic tales seem to be looking back on a vanishing way of life, as I wrote of the Yiddish Beys Mordkhe (Warsaw 1926): “In the aftermath of the First World War, the narrator looks back with nostalgia on a whole way of life and set of values that he assumes has passed away” (Lewis 2007, 247).

17. On the beginning of the controversial line of succession to Rebbe Joel, see Rubin (1997, 49). A hasidic online acquaintance who writes for the Satmar newspaper Der Yid told me that today, when there are two claimants to the title of Satmar Rebbe, it is common to be a partisan of one or the other without actually believing that he is a tzadik.

18. A version of this “well-known” story is mentioned by “Shveml” (“Mushroom”) at the beginning of a thread on “Gleybn sipure tsadikim – mayses vos shtimen nisht” (Believing in tales of tzadikim? Stories that are not right) in ivelt.com, accessed 30 April 2017, http://www.ivelt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=9941&hilit=%D7%9E%D7%A2%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA±%D7%A6%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%99%D7%9D

19. I am indebted to Tomer Persico whose comments on an earlier draft of this paper focused on storytelling as ritual and drew my attention to Seligman, whose theoretical approach I have found fruitful. I take these ideas to be primarily Seligman’s rather than his co-authors, since they appear with much the same wording in Seligman (2010).

20. Stephens, Silbert, and Hasson (2010) observed matching brain activity between a spontaneous storyteller and those listening to a recording of her story.

21. Scheub (1998) asserts: “Literary story is essentially the same as oral” (22).

22. Some of the disaffiliation from rebbes mentioned earlier is connected with this trend. On the Internet and this development, see Pfeffer (2017) (regarding Orthodox and haredi leaders in general). A Tosher Hasid told me and William Shaffir, “They say three people don’t have emunes tsadikim [faith in the holiness and power of rebbes]: a rebbetzin [the rebbe’s wife], a gabbai [the rebbe’s personal attendant] and I forget the other one.” To Pfeffer, “the other one” could be the consumer of Internet gossip about rebbes, who can no longer be idealized in their followers’ minds.

23. Seligman et al. (2008) further argue, building on Jonathan Z. Smith, that “Ritual … should be understood as working precisely out of the incongruity of the subjunctive of ritual and the actual world of lived experience” (27). Perhaps declining numbers of acclaimed rebbes and rising skepticism among hasidim will create a greater need for hagiographic storytelling?