A lot of news attention has been focussed on a little town near Nablus called Qusra. Hilltop guys have all sorts of maps of their strategery and they decided this is an important new place for hostile acquisitions. Why? I don’t know, ask them. Anyway, unlike the miscellaneous ‘hamlets’ full of Bedouin corrugated iron shacks that have been their bread and butter, Qusra is a relatively affluent place and some people there have connections, including one who’s an American citizen:
As a result, this has been even more of a diplomatic disaster for Israel than the normal resting state of diplomatic disasters. None other than the cringest of cringe boomerzionists, Mr Huckabee himself turned up and was like ‘errr what?’ Coalition pressures or no coalition pressures, Bibi had to buckle this time, and he ordered some outposts to be dismantled, and some of the perpetrators actually got arrested. Where were they arrested?
This is not a very big surprise because 95%+ settler terrorism is committed by Breslovers. It’s interesting, though, because Daas Yochid is starting his revolution, and it turns out the missing ingredient for Haskalah ver. 2 that isn’t just a big disaster is Breslov, you see:
People like to mock Rebbe Nachman, but most people who become Breslov are noticeably happier and more fulfilled, no matter how crazy they started off.
Sigh. So I guess we have to do this again.
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I suppose they are happier and more fulfilled.
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They sound extremely happy and fulfilled.
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So happy, so fulfilled.
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The boys certainly seem happy and fulfilled.
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So. Much. Fulfillment.
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TBF, he does look happy.
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The world is a narrow bridge, and the ikar is not to be bumraped by a Breslov tzaddik.
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I guess he was happy and fulfilled.
Defenders of Breslov like Daas Yochid will claim all movements are like this, because they are incontinent liars. In fact, you cannot find any Jewish group with the same number of high-profile scandals per capita, or even remotely close. I doubt you can find a gentile one, though it’s a big world. Like Daas Yochid, they will make the lunatic claim that they are better off being Breslov because they were even crazier to start with, but, in the real world, random Hiloni Israelis are not constantly getting exposed for running child sex abuse cults. All this is so silly. Likely in the absence of Breslov, a lot of these guys would be leading fairly meaningless lives with a lot of video games and weed, but that’s better. We’re just getting started though.
Heresy and sin
As Daas Yochid explains, Breslov is about more than artificially inducing a state of subhuman intelligence in yourself through spiritual exercises, it’s also about hiskashrus with the perfect tzaddik. Basically, you’ll never be good enough on your own and God is too far away for you to grasp, but luckily there is a wholly righteous man who is kind of God wink-wink, no of course I didn’t mean that literally, but, like, you can meditate over him and think about him all the time, and that will get you close to God, which he is … part of, wink-wink.
What Breslovers (really all Zoharists) love to do is say completely insane heresy and then, when you simply quote back what they said, demand that you engage in ridiculous apologetic to explain why they are actually monotheists while they just go around propagating their completely insane heresy to people who literally wouldn’t understand the apologetic interpretation even if it was put to them, which it never is. If you don’t engage in this demeaning game, it’s because you lack Ahavas Yisrael. They think this is very clever. It’s not, but lucky for them, you don’t need to be very clever.
Where does this theology come from? As I have explained, it was developed by followers of Shabtai Tzvi (with some contribution from the man himself) to explain what it meant for him to be the Messiah when all he really did was go around being weird and making gnomic statements. The rabbinate did not succeed in stamping out this theology, largely because many of its members were adherents or sympathisers, and it grew in different directions for a century and a half. Over time, the theology of divine mediation developed for Shabtai Tzvi was applied to a wider range of purportedly righteous leaders, sometimes without any particular messianic connotation. Eventually, the radical wing of the movement coalesced around Jacob Frank who flamed out and led his followers into formal adoption of Christianity. The moderate wing dumped the least sustainable part of its belief system, namely faith that Shabtai Tzvi specifically was the Messiah, and rebranded itself under the name Chassidim (a term hitherto applied among Ashkenazim to ascetics who had little if any connection to the new movement).
The Modern Jewish History series has stalled a bit, because the next installment is supposed to be about Maskilim, and I don’t know anything about them and needed to read some books and these books are boooooring. This is a shame because the episode after that one is going to be a banger about the cleaving of the Chassidic movement from the third generation onwards.
Many people have studied primary Chassidic texts and looked at Chassidim today and wondered what on earth they have in common. Here’s a somewhat annoying short video about that:
The answer is twofold, a good bit and a bad bit. The bad bit is that the normal thing happened with an idealistic movement once it gets followers. Being a tzaddik with followers is great, but being a rich tzaddik with a pimped-out chair and a fur coat is even better. Cynicism set in, and with it corruption and the general conversion of the movement into a business. The good bit (well, sort of) is that large sections of traditional orthodox Jewry threw in the towel and decided that it was better to get subsumed into Chassidus than hitch up with the yeshiva movement and be miserable all day. As they did, they brought in a lot of their vibe with them, and the Chassam Sofer became the real ideological cornerstone of the movement as it spread into Hungary. The synthesis was helped along by the Haskalah giving traditionalists and Chassidim a common enemy. Eventually, this tendency became Satmar-normative Chassidus of today, in which any appeals to primary Chassidic texts can be nicely batted away with a neat ‘the way of Besht is lost’ and everyone eats their kugel and it’s awesome.
The other tendency was the opposite, to try and go back to the original meaning of Chassidus. Again, this had a good side and a bad one. The revivalists were trying to overthrow corrupt and often tyrannical Rebbes whose courts were centers of intrigue and avarice, scarcely more edifying than those of a secular monarch (and with worse interior decor). The bad side is they also wanted to go back to authentic Chassidic theology, which is heresy. Breslov was the most extreme and deranged representative of this tendency, with its deification of their tzaddik unmatched until Lubavitch schized out following the Holocaust. It was also paradigmatically radical in some other ways. Nahman of Breslov didn’t just return to the earliest times of the movement, he wanted to go back further, and deal with some business the Besht had left unfinished.
That’s Yehuda Liebes, who is a heretic if ever there was one, but has a useful penchant for spilling the beans. Unsurprisingly, Nahman was condemned by more orthodox Chassidic Rabbis as a heretic, in response to which he drew on his roots and called them Erev Rav.
The idea of cleaving to a perfectly righteous man who alone is capable of saving you obviously parallels the central claims of the Christian religion. Some Jewish monotheists use this as a rhetorical weapon, but I think it’s wrong. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be all that great a deal of Christian influence on Sabbatean theology. The Zohar contains some recycled Christian exegesis, Cardoso smuggled in a bit of his youthful Catholicism, but mostly it’s an internal development, parallel to, but not deriving from Christianity. There seems to be something structural in the Jewish religion, or the Jewish people, where out of despair at living up to monotheism we kick against it and alight on the most primitive form of idolatry: the deification of human beings. Secondly, even if it is effective as a short-term tactic, it ends up compounding the real problem, which is the assumption that anything ‘Jewish’ that we came up with on our own can’t be a fundamental violation of the Torah, that we are immune from precisely the sin that we are very patently addicted to.
However, there certainly are parallels to Christianity here. Daas Yochid thinks it’s fine to cleave to the perfect tzaddik who is entangled in some kind of hard to define way with God as long as it makes you a better person at the end of it. OK, here’s David Wood:
If utilitarian considerations trump theology, then Christianity beats Breslov four million times over with spare change. And you don’t have to go to America for it, here’s the Israeli version:
These guys are kind of cringe (though they are working on it with their PR team), but they aren’t chimping out and running sex cults. If you want to help miserable people fix their lives and be productive, that’s your answer, and you can tap into practically limitless American funds to support this evangelisation.
But that’s not Jewish! Right, it’s not Jewish, but what is Jewish? Is it fulfilling the laws regardless of what you believe? Well, the nevi’im say the precise opposite, that fulfilling the laws while adulterating faith in the true God is not only worthless, but an offense in itself. OK, so maybe they got carried away with rhetoric from time to time, but they keep coming back to this point. They must have meant something. Have you thought about what is?
There is an interesting midrash:
דרש רבי פפיס וימירו את כבודם בתבנית שור. שומע אני, בשור שלמעלן תלמד לומר אכל עשב. אמר לו רבי עקיבה: דייך פפיס! אמר לו: מה את מקים וימירו את כבודם בתבנית שור אכל עשב בשור שלמטה. שומע אני, בשור שלימות השנה! תלמד לומר אכל עשב. אין לך מנול ומשקץ יותר מן השור בשעה שהוא אוכל עשב.
There is nothing more revolting than a cow chewing the grass then swallowing it, then spitting it up, then chewing it again, then swallowing it again, over and over. Yet, for this, of all things, did the Children of Israel spurn their Glory. The Satmar Rebbe explains: Jews can’t do Avodah Zarah properly. When the goyim do it, they build these beautiful temples, they play this incredible music, it has all this aura. But when you do it? You’re sitting in a filthy room, books full of nonsense and inane wordplay scattered about the desks, a stinking fatso next to you intermittently bursting into tears and giggling. Something deep within you refuses to give you the excuse. When you do Avodah Zarah, you do it lishmah.
We learn from Mishlei that the temptation of idolatry is like that of a woman. To become a Christian is to forsake your wife for a stone cold 10, with a PhD, and a dowry, and, for some reason, she is incredibly into you. You shouldn’t do it. It’s wrong. God is real, Jesus was just a man and now he’s dead. But if you do it, we know why. To choose Breslev is to forsake your wife for a diseased, whore with lesions on her face. You didn’t want better; you just wanted different. Desperately wanted it.
It’s Rosh haShanah tomorrow night. According to the Talmud, we are supposed to read the curses of Devarim beforehand. The prevalent custom is to do it two weeks beforehand, for reasons we shan’t get into here, but the basic point remains: you are going to be judged, be afraid. This is no joke.
As it happens, Breslovers like this passage. It’s where they hallucinated the belief that it’s a great mitzvah to be happy at all times. This is what we do: always read what it doesn’t say, always focus on what it doesn’t mean. The simple reading, that actually God is really serious about this monotheism thing, that He isn’t playing around, that He is not going to tolerate this, that He doesn’t care about whether you feel connected, He wants you to do what you’re told, that’s boring. Does that make you feel good? No, and that’s the real test.
This is not a joke. It’s not funny. If the Torah is true, for any conceivable meaning of true, we can’t do this anymore. We have to stop literally right now. God’s mercies are so incredible that it sometimes overwhelms one to think about it. After every chance we’ve been given, after each time we have thrown it back in His face, He still gives us more. But his mercies don’t get you off the hook indefinitely. He told us so in that book we claim to believe in, and He showed us too. Not so long ago. Isn’t that enough? Can’t we just do the right thing? When it’s this easy?
How much of frumstack is people making long, long posts, just to take potshots at each other? (How much of all substack is that?)
I guess I kid, because there is an underlying serious tenor to this post, but there’s an awful lot of internal politics going on here.
Breslav is ideological opium for the neurotic litvak masses.
( jk..jk)