SURVIVAL DANCE, DELIVERY SYSTEM AND THE BESHT PART 2

Let’s then turn our attention to Israel ben Eliezar, the Baal Shem Tov, the (mythical) founder of Hasidism and explore the questions of survival and sacred dances.

The Besht (abbreviation of Baal Shem Tov) did at least the following things to earn money:  Teacher’s assistant, teacher, ritual slaughterer, innkeeper, lime digger, synagogue sexton, Baal Shem (a kind of indigenous Jewish magical healer), community mystic.  Which of these were survival dances only, and which were possible delivery systems?

The teacher’s assistant, teacher, lime digger, synagogue sexton, ritual slaughterer and innkeeper all seem to have been purely survival dances.  Now all of those could certainly have been sacred dances, but there’s no real indication that they expressed his unique purpose.  The Besht cared deeply about proper ritual slaughter and one of the flashpoints of conflict between Hasidim and Mitnagdim (their religious opponents) was the quality of the knives used to carry out ritual Kosher slaughter, but still being a ritual slaughterer just seemed to have been a short term job.

The context of what was a sacred dance for the Besht is based on our understanding of his true purpose. I think we should understand the Besht’s true purpose in life as enhancing the spiritual well being of ordinary Jews.  He  was always motivated by taking care of ordinary Jews whose lot in life was difficult both economically and because they were Jews. He is usually portrayed as being uneasy with establishment Judaism which he felt was too distant from ordinary Jews and made their lives more difficult, rather than taking care of them. Rosman in his biography actually argues against the notion that he didn’t fit in with establishment Judaism, but his followers certainly revolutionized the feel of Judaism, and we shouldn’t discount that he wanted a different direction and emphasis in the relationship between the Jewish masses and the elite leaders.

The Besht chose to focus his activities in a healing/spiritual direction, rather than on an economic level for the average Jew. Baalei Shem (that’s the plural) used a combination of sacred names of the divine, herbs, bloodletting and other methods to enact healing of physical and emotional issues. They were common in Eastern Europe at the time and it was a completely respectable profession. The Besht was a proud Baal Shem who signed his letters to the end of his life with this title.  For those who want more detail, there’s a lot more information in the wonderful biography by Immanuel Etkes The Besht, Magician, Mystic and Leader.

The Besht’s healing focus included the well being of the Jewish soul of the average Jew.   Even when he made his living as a Baal Shem, he is portrayed as travelling around telling stories in the marketplace to ordinary Jews seeking to offer them some spiritual succor. 

What’s interesting to me is that even though he certainly never renounced it, it sure seems in reading the biographies that at some point he stopped doing this kind of healing and stopped functioning as a baal shem.  Instead, he wound up making his living as a community supported mystic, something that wasn’t uncommon in those days. The community would support a small number of mystics who would spend their days studying Kabbalah and doing other mystical practices.  Further, there seems to have been a change in the orientation of his practice from individual healing to communal healing.

At some point, as far as I can tell reading the biographies, he shifted his focus to communal healing through blocking decrees that impacted the entire community that he would discern through what should be called shamanic journeys through the upper world.  One of the few sources that clearly historically belongs to the Besht was a letter written to his brother in law in 1752.  There are different versions of it, but for our purposes, I’d like to highlight two shamanic journeys he undertook for the Jewish people as a whole.  The first was on Rosh Hashanah in 1746 where he sought to address some forced conversions followed by the deaths of those who were forced to convert.  He learns and presumably shares that their deaths were for the sake of heaven because otherwise people would be encouraged to convert to save their lives. 

The second ascent to the upper worlds was also on Rosh Hashanah three years later. There he saw an accusation against the Jews that would lead to the destruction of multiple communities.  Through his journey and his later prayers with his group of mystics he converted this evil decree to a limited plague.

There’s also a story from In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (story 41) on a Yom Kippur  where the Besht travels to the upper worlds because there’s a charge that the Oral Torah would no longer be ours.  He perceives that this is because the prayers of Jews have been blocked.  With the help of his spirit teacher, Ahijah the Shilonite and in turn the Messiah himself, he is able to unlock the block that prevented the prayers from rising to the heavens, and the decree was cancelled.

So was being a Baal Shem just a survival dance and he later found a different/better one, in the way that some of us change jobs?  Maybe.  But there are at least two other possibilities I wish to explore.  This is all admittedly speculation.

One possibility is that a person can have multiple delivery systems that express their true purpose.  This seems to be the direction Plotkin suggests in his discussion of delivery systems in Chapter 11 of The Journey of Soul Initiation.  Another possibility is that being a Baal Shem didn’t really quite express his true purpose and while he never renounced it, it didn’t quite work and he basically stopped doing it once he found something that fit better.

I prematurely attempted a delivery system of raising grass fed beef in the 1990’s soon after the revelation of my mythopoetic identity.  It fit me in many ways, and I loved raising cattle and nurturing the land, but there were ways in which it didn’t fit me and I feel far more settled as a teacher of a kind of Animist Judaism than I did as a grass farmer—even though both are close to my heart.

Both being a Baal Shem and this kind of shamanic activity of blocking evil decrees against the Jews would involve enhancing the spiritual well being of the Jewish people, the Besht’s true purpose.  Given that he seems to have given up practicing as a Baal Shem while never renouncing it, I speculate that he found this more group oriented work to be a better expression of his true purpose and thus a better delivery system.

The Siddur of the Besht that he used when he made his ascensions to the upper world