When the Baal Shem Tov's disciples tried to write down his sayings, he gently chided them, "There is nothing of me in your pages; you thought you heard what I didn't say." His ecstatic joy would not sit still on a page or be contained in a doctrine. But to those who catch his inspiration, a grateful simplicity unfolds. Then, as Martin Buber puts it, each new day becomes "purer and more beautiful and more profound than the one before." - Patricia Carlson

“I came into the world to show another way, to cultivate the love of God, of Israel, and of the Torah, and there is no need for fasting and mortification.”

The Baal Shem Tov -- "Master of the Good Name" -- was the title given to Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer of Mezbizk, the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Rather than providing a set of teachings the Baal Shem Tov -- or the Besht, as his name was commonly abbreviated -- communicated his lessons through a certain attitude, a spirit of joy, an instinct for the holiness of existence, that would ultimately inspire a following far beyond the Hasidim, or "pious ones," as his followers came to be called.

He was born in a small town in the Ukraine in 1700. For Jews of that time and place the memory of savage persecution was still fresh. A series of pogroms in the latter half of the seventeenth century cost the lives of more than a hundred thousand Jews. In such an atmosphere of catastrophe there arose a number of messianic and mystical movements, of which Hasidism was ultimately the most successful. Nevertheless, the first part of the Besht's life was spent in quiet obscurity. Only midway through his life did he suddenly take to wandering from village to village, performing wonders and imparting his vision and wisdom. The besht proclaimed a mysticism of the everyday. Within each task and each moment there was a spark of the divine. The responsibility of each person was to discover and to fulfill the potential holiness imbedded within ordinary existence. This responsibility, furthermore, should be discharged in a spirit of joy. He opposed obsessive asceticism and self-mortification, just as he opposed a preoccupation with the law. Much more important was the spirit in which one lived. The religious life, according to the Besht, was not a matter of performing religious duties; the essential thing was the piety that one brought to daily life. He spoke of prayer as a window to heaven and called the entire world a prayer house. Thus, "A man needs no fixed place to say his prayers, no synagogues; among the trees of the forest, everywhere one can pray."

Martin Buber, the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, was the first to popularize the tales and legends of the Baal Shem Tov and the early Hasidic masters, thus helping to carry their message far beyond their original home in Eastern Europe. Though not himself a Hasid, Buber believed that Hasidic spirituality had a universal message especially relevant to the secularized West. He summarized this message as the consecration of everyday life to God: "For there is no rung of being on which we cannot find the holiness of God everywhere and at all times." Elsewhere he noted, "The task of man, of every man, according to the Hasidic teaching, is to affirm for God's sake the world and himself and by this very means to transform both."

The large Hasidic community in Eastern Europe was largely extinguished by the Nazis. But vibrant communities, especially in the United States and Israel, continue to live out the joyful and compassionate vision of the Baal Shem Tov. As he lay dying, surrounded by his family and followers, the Besht said, "I am not worried at all for I know that I am leaving through one door and entering through another door."

He died on May 22, 1760.

Additional Resources
See: Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim (New York: Schocken, 1966); Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz, eds., In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1970).