Intro to Hasidism Part I: A Unique Judaism for Every Generation

I realized that all forms of religion are masks that the divine wears to communicate with us. Behind all religions there’s a reality, and this reality wears whatever clothes it needs to speak to a particular people.

“Being or Y-H-W-H underlies and unifies all that is. ... There is no ultimate duality here, no "God and world," no "God, World, and self," Only one Being and its many faces.

When I refer to ‘God,’ I mean the inner force of existence itself, that of which one might say: ‘Being is.’ I refer to it as the ‘One’ because it is the single unifying substratum of all that is. (18, 19).

“Being is One, and each person is God’s unique image” (153).

“Often, when people begin conversations and they want to say ‘Our community does Judaism like this,’ and others say, ‘Ours does it like that. Ours is different,’ and I want to say, ‘No. Tamid Echad / Always and forever one.’

This oneness goes through history and it goes through Klal Yisroel / all the God wrestlers with whom we feel we share. [It goes through our connection to other religions too,] and the commonality also extends beyond human beings: We share with the birds, we share with the mammals, [with] the chimpanzees (who [have been shown to be able to] learn how to speak to each other in American Sign Language and then pass it on to the next generation). And when I watch the geese and the little goslings down at the lake, they also connect me with the oneness of it all.”

- Reb Zalman schachter-shalomi, “Renewal is not Judaism-lite“, 1998

Rabbi Arther Green, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Recasting Hasidism for Moderns:

A fourth area of obvious Hasidic influence is Heschel’s great belief in the Hasidic virtues of hesed and simhah as key to the spiritual life. When we heard Heschel read the famous passages in the Toldot Ya’akov Yosef or the Kedushat Levi about the proper mokhia (preacher or chastiser), who brings people back to God be-derekh ha-hesed (‘‘by means of kindness’’) rather than by harsh threats, we understood that Heschel saw his own role in this way. He never berated Jews for not being observant, but tried to show them the light and beauty that he found in the religious life. He saw his job as helping people to open their eyes in a deeper way, and he knew that this could only be done by positive example, not by anger or judgment. In this sense I think it fair to say that he did indeed take on the role of rebbe, however reluctantly, for liberal Jews. There is something very much Hasidic, in the original sense of Hasidism (before it became a weapon against modernity and sometimes revealed an angry face) present in this approach. Hasidism understands anger, even righteous anger, as a negative characteristic, emerging from too strong a pull to the bad side or the presence of too much black bile in the system. It has to be countered by the activation of haesed, divine love or compassion, for which Hasidism is named, after all. To be a hasid is to be an ish ha-Aesed, something Heschel tried to exemplify all his life. This is found in his writings on education and of course formed the basis for his commitment to reasserting the voice of religion in powerful nonviolent movements for social change. In Martin Luther King he saw gevurah shebe-Aesed, if I may say it in Hasidic language—the tremendous power that lay hidden in acts of love.