THE BESHT
THE BESHT AS SHAMAN AND MAGICIAN
The fundamental task of a religious person is to do their part in maintaining the proper alignment between the sacred and the profane, between the divine and everyday life. This alignment allows for everyday life to be infused with the sacred and for the religious person to find it meaningful. The religious person seeks to maintain this alignment through a complex web of practices. Different cultures emphasize different aspects over time and cultures are not monolithic even at a given point in time.
The primary force in maintaining this alignment within Judaism since the rise to power of the Rabbis has been Halacha. We have traditionally emphasized what we are supposed to do, and have placed much less emphasis on what we should believe, the intentions with which we should follow the law or even non legal ways to maintain the alignment between the sacred and the profane. However, sometimes law is simply not enough.
Thus there have always been Jewish ways to maintain the alignment between the sacred and the profane that were not based on halacha. These paths have always been in some degree of tension with our Rabbinic heritage, even if the practitioners of them have also been halachically oriented Rabbis.
Some of these paths have been grouped under the term kabbalah. While practitioners of Kabbalah such as Joseph Karo have also been known as halachic experts, the potential for tension between halacha and Kabbalah has always been present. [1]
This paper differentiates the three paths of shaman, magician and mystic. I seek to clarify the meaning of these terms as they apply in our Jewish context because they offer fundamentally different ways of maintaining the alignment of the sacred and the profane, and are too often collapsed by scholars who are just not well enough versed in the study of the history of religions.
I then begin to explore understanding the Besht, Israel Ben Elizer, the Baal Shem Tov, as shaman and magician.
My interest in the Besht is because I’m interested in recovering and reinventing an “archaic” but authentic form of Judaism that is a non-mystical path. I think the Rabbinic form we have inherited doesn’t speak to many Jews (for the ones for whom it does speak, Kol HaKavod) and so rather than have our spiritually inclined look towards Buddhism, native American practices, Hinduism or something else, I want to help make it possible to find it by us. And I believe that it does exist by us as something that Jews in our past authentically did as Jews. I see the Besht as a prototype of a Jewish shaman and shamanism as a possible part of this reinvented archaic, earth based Judaism in which I am interested.
My comments on all aspects of this paper should be viewed as very preliminary in nature. I’m hampered by a number of things. First, I don’t read Hebrew well enough to read original sources, and the amount of important and untranslated sources is simply staggering. The fact that there is no translation of, for instance, Toldot Yaakov Yosef simply amazes me. Second, this is an overly ambitious paper and all the more so given my knowledge level. To do these topics justice, I should know a lot more about Kabbalah, Hasidism, shamanism, archaic religions, mysticism and magic than I do. That said, I believe what I am pointing towards is significant enough and different enough that what insight I might offer will outweigh the impact of my ignorance. As far as I can tell, there is no one discussing these issues in anything like the way I am in this paper.
Let us begin with working definitions of our three phenomena.
Magic, in my view, is a kind of technology for maintaining the alignment of the sacred and profane in order to achieve this worldly goals such as health, protection from enemies, male children and the like. It is first based on the belief that when bad things happen or might happen in the world, such as illness, it is because of a misalignment. Thus one part of a cure for illness, or protection against enemies has to be to get the realm of the sacred to support the this worldly desires of the person seeking the aid of the magician.
Magic is often accompanied by and seen as complementary with other this worldly activities. For instance, Malinowski’s Trobriander Islanders performed garden magic, but also did all the activities to grow their gardens that a secular person would. [2] Similarly, baalei shem in the Besht’s era were also natural healers and did things like herbal cures and blood letting. [3] When I was in Japan in the mid 1980’s amulets against traffic accidents were hung on almost every rear view mirror—but everyone still buckled their seat belts, used their turning signals and did everything the people who didn’t have amulets also did.
The implication of this view of magic as technology is that the most important criterion for judging magic being performed is effectiveness. The question of whether magic is true or real, actually misses the point. The question is “does it work?”. I can’t see an electron any more than I can see a demon, but believers in electrons have produced wonders greater than believers in demons, and so I believe in electrons.
Shamanism[4] is all about repairing breaches in the proper alignment of the profane and sacred worlds. Shamans undertake conscious, ecstatic journeys with the aid of spirit guides to other worlds in order to bring back healing to their clients. Let’s unpack these terms.
Shamans undertake conscious journeys. These are journeys that are under their control, unlike in cases of spirit possession or channeling. These journeys are taken through a tri-partite cosmos that has an upper world (s), lower world(s) and a horizontal plane. So the K’fitzat Haderech that is present in many stories about the Besht, his ability to do accelerated travel, is well known in other traditions and is an example of a shamanic ability of journeying in this world.
Ecstatic journeys are journeys where the physical body of the shaman might lie unmoving on the floor, or in front of the ark, or swaying or dancing, but the conscious part of the shaman goes for a journey to find answers he or she needs in other realms. The body of the shaman stays behind in this world, but the soul, in a non-technical sense, goes on a journey.
The shaman uses spirit guides to help find the answers s/he seeks. These spirit guides might be plants, as in South America, [5] they may be power animals or they may be revered teachers or ancestors. Ahijah the Shilonite is a perfect example of a revered teacher as spirit guide. [6]
Mysticism, to use the felicitous definition from Wikipedia, is “the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity,spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight. Mysticism usually centers on a practice or practices intended to nurture those experiences or awareness. Mysticism may be dualistic, maintaining a distinction between the self and the divine, or may be nondualistic. Differing religious traditions have described this fundamental mystical experience in different ways.”
Mysticism is all about the divine, however the divine is defined. The this worldly concerns that characterize most people are deprecated in favor of an obsession with the really real world of the divine. The mystic seeks to know the divine and to be absorbed in the divine at the inevitable price of the normal or profane world. The demands of the world are viewed as a distraction from what really counts. Mysticism always, as Uffenheimer rightly argues, runs a risk of quietism.
My threefold distinction amongst mysticism, shamanism and magic also has implications for how we understand Kabbalah. Kabbalah is typically understood as Jewish mysticism. But I think it will help us all if we are more precise about Kabbalah as a multi faceted phenomenon.
First, there is a large part of Kabbalah that is mystical. Some of the lovingly detailed, obsessive descriptions of the divine, the meditations designed for unification with God—these are all mystical.
Second, there’s a use of Kabbalah that is magical. Traditionally, this is called Kabbalah Maasit. It’s about the manipulation of the terms of Kabbalah, including divine names by baalei shem, to achieve this worldly goals.
Third, Kabbalah gives the cosmology through which Jewish shamans navigate. Shamans are culturally bound, like the rest of us, and necessarily express their understanding of their journeys using the conceptual framework of their culture, possibly modified by their interactions with spirits in the spirit realms. A Jewish shaman of the Besht’s era simply can’t express his travel using the conceptual framework of the worlds of a Mongol Shaman. Jewish shamans get their cosmology from Kabbalah.
However, what the mystic and the shaman do with the same cosmology is radically different and should not be collapsed. Let’s consider journeys through heavenly palaces, a staple of Jewish religious imagery and practice from ancient times. The shaman’s journeys are all about helping his/her clients or the Jewish people as a whole. If s/he can achieve this goal at the first palace, that’s great. But the mystical adept would never be satisfied at reaching only the first palace of some angel; they would obviously want to continue to purify themselves and perform rituals and do whatever is necessary to get to the second palace and the third and the fourth etc all the way to God.
We now turn to the Besht as a Jewish magician, a baal shem or master of (the) name. The term baal shem comes from the fact that most Jewish magic is performed by manipulating the various names of God or His spirit helpers such as Angels, Demons or Princes. Harari [7]offers 8 characteristics that taken together make a given text a Jewish magical text (pp.119-120). We may safely extend Harari’s perspective to rituals and stories.
Dating the use of the term baal shem is problematic. [8] We may say with confidence that the term itself predates the middle ages. Further, there are both texts from the Cairo Geniza and such material findings as metal and clay amulets in Palestine throughout the fifth through seventh century and clay magic bowls in Persia in the same period. [9]
Etkes says Jewish magic at the time of the Besht addressed a typical range of problems including exorcism, spells and reversing spells, locating people, banishing demons, health challenges, protecting from the dangers of childbirth, having male children, protection from enemies and divination about the future. [10] These are the same kinds of problems we see in magical texts adduced by Shaked, Bohak and Harari.[11]
Thus I believe we can say with confidence that there is a linking ancient Jewish magic with Jewish magic at the time of the Besht.
I also believe that we can say that the Besht was a proud baal shem. I think any other reading of his life is simply an ideologically motivated attempt to diminish this part of his work because being a magician has come to be regarded poorly.
Let’s look at some evidence that the Besht was a proud Jewish magician.
The Besht signed his letters as Baal Shem. [12] There’s a famous letter from Gershon his brother in law asking for an amulet that doesn’t have to be renewed every year. [13] We should also note the general prevalence of Baalei Shem. Baalei Shem were a generally accepted part of society. Etkes talks about a book of charms that existed around that time and provides us with a list of other famous baalei shem of the era. [14] As the letter from R. Moses of Kutow and the evidence adduced by Etkes demonstrate, everyone used baalei shem. They were a normal part of society. Then there are the stories in Shivhei HaBesht. Let’s talk a little about this text and then about some of the relevant stories
Shivhei HaBesht is not a course without problems. It has the great merits of being translated into English and of being collected relatively soon after the Besht’s life (the Besht died in 1760 and these tales were collected in 1814). The compiler of the tales sources almost all of them and seems to tell them without embellishment. And while he has the express purpose of presenting tales about the miraculous nature of the Besht’s in order to strengthen the faith of his contemporaries (pp.3ff), he seems to have less of an ideological axe to grind than say Buber or Buxbaum.
Some of the tales are undoubtedly pious fictions designed to teach something in particular (see Rosman on the Adam Baal Shem Tov tales). Some of the tales may not belong to the Besht himself, as they closely resemble tales told of other figures. The tales were all transmitted orally, and obviously underwent some changes as they were told.
To me, the obvious situation is that there were a lot of tales floating around about the Besht that began to circulate as the Hasidic movement grew. Our compiler chose amongst them, and some are obviously problematic, but overall they are a good source. I’m happy to use it.
The one thing that puzzles me is the privilege given Shivhei HaBesht by the scholarly world, including Etkes and Rosman. I don’t understand why the stories about the Besht in Toldot Yaakov Yosef, for instance, don’t have at least the same status. There are apparently over 250 mentions of the Besht, and Toldot Yaakov Yosef appeared in 1780. Dresner argues that many of the stories about the Besht recorded in Toldot Yaakov Yosef were written before the Besht died.[15] This would make them a significantly better source than the variety of sources utilized in Shivhei HaBesht
Shivehei HaBesht[16] has a number of stories that I have construed as being about the Besht as a baal shem. For instance, in story 20 the Besht exorcises a demon from a madwoman. He exorcises demons from a house in story #23 and places amulets to protect the house. There’s the case of a sick woman who is protecting the city from robbers so the Besht refuses to give her a remedy (story #117). Story 204 is about a charm for easy delivery. Lastly, the father in law of the compiler of these stories served as the Besht’s scribe and the Besht had two scribes “because the Besht’s affairs grew too big for one scribe to handle.” (story 17)
Etkes argument, which I find totally persuasive, is that magic was widely accepted, identified with practical kabbalah and therefore baalei shem were thought to be masters of kabbalah. This mastery lent them prestige and being a baal shem was something prestigious in the community. Being a baal shem wasn’t something one would have hidden; that would happen later with the rise of the Enlightenment and Jewish Haskalah and the 19th Century denigration of anything that seemed like magic. But the Besht was a man of the 18th, not the 19th Century. [17]
I want to point towards two areas of inquiry about baalei shem that seem to me to be under researched and crucial to having a much fuller picture of who these people were and the role they played in the community.
The first issue relates to the selection and training of a baal shem. I’d really like to understand the process by which one became a baal shem. What kinds of personal characteristics made someone a potentially good choice? Then, what kind of training did a Baal shem actually receive?
We have some really iffy answers to this in some of the stories about the Besht, present in both Buxbaum and Shivhei HaBesht, relating to the Besht’s relationship with one Adam Baal Shem. The stories seem apocryphal and designed to augment the Besht’s authority (or possibly the authority of someone in a dynastic dispute such as with the printer of Shivhei Ha Besht). But we have nothing that I know about who became a baal shem and why were they called.
The second area that interests me is the question of the contact with the sacred that a baal shem had in connection with his work. How does a Baal Shem know what to write, which names to use? Does he do some kind of inquiry into the sacred? How? Trachtenberg[18] says something about Jewish magicians being in positions of danger and having to protect themselves because of the danger of demons clinging to the baal shem.
We may summarize what a baal shem does by this quotation from Etkes: “Like other baalei shem, the Besht employed amulets, incantations and oaths in the course of his practice. The common denominator of all of these was the invocation of Holy Names, though the power of which the desired performance could be effectuated. The Besht also used charms…Can one point to features that characterize the Besht in particular and that distinguish him from the other baalei shem who worked in or near his day?...What was characterisitic of the Besht’s working methods, and what set him apart from the other baalei shem who we know about from the same period, was that side by side with his employment of magical knowledge, the Besht made use of his remarkable spiritual powers.” (pp46.7).
So before we begin to look at the Besht’s “remarkable spiritual powers” I want to reiterate that there is a world of difference between a baal shem and a Jewish mystic. While both mystics and magicians might draw on some of the same names (and this would have to be determined through reading texts), the purposes with which they use the names are totally different. The magician, the baal shem, uses them for the range of this worldly goals adduced by Etkes and our other sources, while the mystic uses them to get closer to God in some way. [19]
I want to look at the Besht’s “remarkable spiritual powers” through the lens of shamanism. Let’s start with some stories from Shivhei HaBesht
The Besht as shaman is testified to in a number of stories, including 18,21,34-37,39, 40, 41, 46, 57, 81, 91, 100,105, 135,137, 203,206. Let’s start with looking at story 41.
I’ve chosen story 41 because it is a great example of the Besht acting shamanically on behalf of the whole people. We see this in other traditions as well, for instance the Seneca and the Sioux Ghost Dance religious revival.[20]
Story 41 is the famous story of the Besht in the Messiah’s Heavenly Palace. The story begins on Yom Kippur Eve where the Besht perceives a charge that the Jews will lose the Torah. When the Besht led Neilah, he “began to make terrible gestures and he bent backwards until his head came close to his knees….His eyes bulged and he sounded like a slaughtered bull. He kept this up for two hours.” After Yom Kippur was over, people asked him about the charge and he told them that during the Neilah prayer he could move from one world to another. He came to one palace that was but one gate short of appearing before God. In that palace, the Besht said, he found all the prayers of the past fifty years had not ascended. They were instructed to wait for him, but the Besht on his own couldn’t take the prayers where they were supposed to go. So the Besht turned to his teacher, Ahijah, who also couldn’t help. They went to the palace of the Messiah and brought back two letters. The Besht took these two letters and opened the gate. The prayers ascended and because of the great joy of all the prayers, the charge was cancelled.
This seems totally shamanic to me. The Besht enters a trance and goes on a conscious journey, the details of which he can relate after he is out of his trance. When he gets stuck, he asks his teacher (in other traditions this is where we would have a power animal or the plant spirit) for help. We see here a core difference between shamanism and magic in the relationship with the spirits. The Besht requests help from Ahijah, he in no way attempts to command, manipulate or coerce him into helping, given his status as a helping spirit.
We also see a core difference from a mystical vision. The Besht is only concerned with the welfare of the people. There’s no attempt to describe God or his palace. There’s no attempt to stay anywhere near there or to cling to God. In fact, when the trance is over, the story accounts that the Besht hurried to finish the prayers. The text doesn’t say why, but usually people want Neilah to end so they can break their fasts.
Let’s look at story 105 where the Besht revives a dying boy as an example of personal healing. The story depicts the Besht laying on the floor with his hands and legs extended. The story has the Besht forcing the soul to reenter the boy’s body. The Besht made some kind of bargain for the boy’s life (the story says the time for the boy’s death had come, but the Besht cancelled that out, and in exchange, the Besht agreed to accept “fiery lashes”.
This story might not sound like it involves any trance. There are three reasons why I think it did. First, the story has the Besht laying on the floor with his hands and legs extended. I think this is code for a posture in which he entered into trance. Second, the story has the Besht agreeing to fiery lashes. No lashes were given in ordinary reality, so we are left with two choices. Either this is a metaphor, or the Besht must have received them in what Harner would call non-ordinary reality.
Third, there’s the presence of the mikveh, where the Besht goes before he heals the boy. This can be read simply as an act of purification before entering into a ritual. However, bodies of water are very typical means of entering into the underworld and the frequency with which we have stories of the Besht using the mikveh make me wonder. There is an interesting story in Shivhei Ha Besht (story 206,) where the Besht says to R. Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, a main disciple “Why is it you remain for so long in the mikveh, and why when I go to the mikveh do I just close my eyes and I see all the worlds?”
The Besht happened to be both a baal shem and a shaman, but the two roles are logically distinct, just as being a magician and a mystic are logically distinct even though a given individual might practice in both ways. [21] That they could also be distinct from each other in real life is shown by the history of Hasidic Tzaddikim who played shamanic roles within their communities, but were not baalei shem writing amulets and such. This is beyond the scope of this paper and my competence, but it would be a worthwhile study to look at Tzaddikim as conscious journeyers to other realms to help heal the world and their followers.
I also think that we might well benefit from looking at such practitioners as Isaac Luria through the lens of shamanism rather than mysticism. For any of the theurgic Kabbalists, such as Luria, the focus of healing the Godhead, the world and elite individuals within it sure seems to me to be much more shamanic than mystical. Lawrence Fine even titles his book on Luria Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos. Isn’t that the job description of a shaman?
The world needs healing. Many, even most of us, need to find a way to take our proper place in our relationship with both the sacred and the profane. I have sought in this paper to elucidate a perspective on Jewish magic, mysticism and shamanism that might open up some possibilities.
FOOTNOTES
[1] See particularly Rifka Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism and her discussion of R. Hayyim of Volozhin’s criticism of the Hasidism of The Maggied of Mezerich p.22 and p.47. Scholem has also discussed this tension, according to Uffenheimer.
[2] Bronislaw Malinowski Magic, Science and Religion
[3] See Shivhei HaBesht In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov translated by Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz. A fuller discussion of this text is below.
[4] For shamanism, the classic work is of course Mircea Eliade Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. See also Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman, Thomas Dubois An Introduction to Shamanim, Shirley Nicholson (ed) Shamanism, particularly the essays by Serge King and Yonasson Gershon, and Sandra Ingerman Soul Retrieval.
[5] For plants as teachers see Michael Harner’s book about The Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls. See also Shaman’s Drum magazine, issue # 80 and any of Richard Shultes books on the Amazon or Elliot Cowan’s book Plant, Spirit Medicine. In the Amazon, the ayahuasca plant itself is seen as the teacher of the different medical cures needed for patients.
[6] There are 5 stories in Shivhei Ha Besht that feature Ahijah, all of them in his role as the Besht’s teacher.
[7] See Harari, Yuval. What is a Magical Text? Methodological Reflections aimed at Redefining Early Jewish Magic (2005)
[8] See Gedalyah Nigel, Magic, Mysticism and Hasidism, p. 3. He tells of an inquiry to Rabbi Hai Gaon in Babylonia regarding a Baal Shem. Hai Gaon died in 1039. See also Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism. Rosman says (p.216) that apparently the earliest reference to ba’al shem is in Sifrei Zuta. Sifrei Zuta, according to Wikipedia, is from the school of R Akiva http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sifre_Zutta. This would be a much earlier dating, but I don’t want to go into the complexity of dating the term.
[9] See Harari, Yuval. p.118
[10] See Immanuel Etkes The Besht, Magician, Mystic and Leader. p.46
[11] Shaul Shaked Dramatis Personae in the Jewish Magic Texts: Some differences Detween Incantation Bowls and Geniza Magic.” Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic
[12] For his Holy Epistle, see Rosman, p. 108. There’s a letter from Shivhei Habesht also singed Israel Besht, Rosman p.115 There’s a Halachic inquiry to Rabbi Meir in 1857. Interestingly, a letter he wrote to R. Moses of Kutow sometime before 1737 refers to the Besht’s medical knowledge and is signed as Israel the son of Eliezer from Tluste.
[13] See Rosman, p. 129-30
[14] See Etkes, pp14ff.
[15] See Samuel Dresner, The Zaddik, particularly the appendiz and the chart on p. 251.
[16] Shivhei HaBesht, In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov. Trans. Ben-Amos and Mintz. I’m using story numbers because I think they will be more consistent edition to edition.
[17] There’s a story in Yitzhak Buxbaum’s wonderful but ahistorical collection of tales about the Besht where another magician counters the Besht’s spells and renders them ineffective. The Besht asks him why he is reversing all the spells, and he says it is because the Besht is using God’s name for lower purposes. The Besht then shows him an amulet that has no names of God, only the name of the Besht. This story seems to me to be a really interesting attempt to undermine the Besht as a baal shem in the name of some ideology. Yitzhak Buxbaum, The Light and the Fire of the Baal Shem Tov.
[18] Joshua Trachtenberg Jewish Magic and Superstition p.22 for one statement. There’s a stronger statement somewhere, but I’ve misplaced the reference.
[19] See Trachtenberg pp22-23 for a particularly strong statement where he says Kabbalah Maasit is a misnomer.
[20] For Handsome Lake and the Senece see Anthony Wallace The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. For the Sioux, see Joseph Jorgenson The Sun Dance Religion.
[21] This is the problem with Moshe Idel’s understanding of the Besht as magico-mystical practitioner. See Moshe Idel, Hasidism, Between Ecstasy and Magic.
