Tormented Master

Arthur Green

Description

“A major contribution to the understanding of Hasidic Wisdom and thought; it brings the reader closer to Hasidism’s greatest teller of tales.”
—Elie Wiesel

The search for spiritual meaning drives great leaders in all religions. This classic work explores the personality and religious quest of Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810), one of Hasidism’s major figures. It unlocks the great themes of spiritual searching that make him a figure of universal religious importance.

In this major biography, Dr. Arthur Green—teacher, scholar, and spiritual seeker—explores the great personal conflicts and inner torments that lay at the source of Nahman’s teachings. He reveals Nahman to have been marked at an early age by an exaggerated sense of sin and morbidity that later characterized his life and thought. While subject to rapid mood swings and even paranoia, Nahman is a model of spiritual and personal struggle who speaks to all generations. Green’s analysis of this troubled personality provides an important key to Nahman’s famous tales, making his teachings accessible for people of all faiths, all backgrounds.

“If there is any single feature about Nahman’s tales, and indeed about Nahman’s life as well, that makes them unique in the history of Judaism, it is just this: their essential motif is one of quest. Nahman, both as teller and as hero of these tales, is Nahman the seeker. He has already told us, outside the tales, of his refusal ever to stand on any one rung, of his call for constant growth, of his need to open himself up to ever-new and more demanding challenges to his faith. The tales now affirm this endless quest…”
—from Excursus II. The Tales

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Judaism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 22 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580237505
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

TORMENTED MASTER
The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

Arthur Green
JEWISH LIGHTS Publishing
Woodstock, Vermont
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Contents
Introduction
1. Childhood and Early Years: 1772-1798
2. Nahman s Journey to the Land of Israel
3. Conflict and Growth
4. Bratslav: Disciples and Master
5. Messianic Strivings
6. Nahman s Final Years
Appendix: The Death of Rabbi Nahman
A Brief Chronology of Nahman s Life
Excursus I. Faith, Doubt, and Reason
Excursus II. The Tales
Note on Transliteration and Orthography
Abbreviations Used in Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Copyright
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Preface to the Jewish Lights Classic Reprint
I am grateful to the community of scholars, students, and the general public for the warm reception this book has received since it was first published in 1979. Tormented Master was translated into Hebrew and published in Israel (1981) as Ba al ha-Yissurim . I am especially indebted to my friend Avraham Shapira for having encouraged and supported that translation. Both the English original and the Hebrew translation have been out of print for several years. For that reason I am grateful for this opportunity to make Tormented Master available once again.
This is an unrevised reprint of the original 1979 edition. I look forward at a later date to undertaking some significant revisions and producing a new edition of this work. Beyond various minor changes, additional footnote references and the like, which I have been accumulating over the past dozen years, I hope there also to take cognizance of more recent scholarship on Hasidism in general and Nahman of Bratslav in particular. I wish to mention here the writings of Yehuda Liebes and Ada Rapoport Albert on Nahman, which I will certainly seriously consider as I prepare a future edition of this work.
I am most grateful to Stuart Matlins and Jevin Eagle for the enthusiasm with which they have prepared this Jewish Lights edition. The hasidim of Bratslav consider the spreading of works by and about their master to be one of their greatest obligations as his disciples. Though this book is written by a historian, not a disciple, I share with them a sense that the world will be a better place if Nahman s life and teachings are more well known.
Acknowledgments
As this work reaches completion, I am overcome by a sense of gratitude to the many whose teaching, counsel, criticism, and patience have helped to make it possible. While work on this book from the outset was a completely individual and highly personal endeavor, and responsibility for its contents is thus entirely my own, there are a great many influences to be traced here. A few inadequate words of thanks are in order.
An earlier version of the present study, here much revised, was a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Professor Alexander Altmann. Dr. Altmann has been my teacher for many years, and I am grateful to him for much more than his careful reading of this manuscript and his many suggestions. Another important teacher whose influence is, I hope, to be felt in this work, though he died just as the writing of it was beginning, is the late Abraham Joshua Heschel. In his death as in his life he remains a source of inspiration to me.
My serious study of Nahman began in connection with a course on Bratslav which I taught at the Havurat Shalom Community Seminary in 1971/72. The students in that course taught me a great deal about how to read the Bratslav texts, indeed about how to read a text altogether. Each of them contributed his or her unique understanding, and all are deserving of thanks: Jonathan Chipman, Larry Fine, Janet Wolfe, Gershon Hundert, Joel Rosenberg, and David Roskies. Various other students, including Danny Matt, Jeffery Dekro, and the participants in a seminar on Nahman s Tales which I taught with Zalman Schachter in the spring of 1977, have further contributed to my understanding.
Having turned to both teachers and students, there remain colleagues and friends. Z alman Schachter is one with whom I have had many a fruitful argument over the meaning of a passage in Nahman s writings; I cherish the sharing of those arguments. Everett Gendler has been friend, teacher, and source of encouragement for many years now. His help in the publication of this volume is deeply appreciated. Van Harvey, though far removed from the subject matter of this work, was a colleague from whom I learned much at the time I was writing on Nahman; his ever-questioning presence is also to be felt here. I am grateful to Rivka Horwitz, Max Ticktin, and Joseph and Gail Reimer for having read parts of the manuscript and for their many helpful suggestions. For a very different sort of learning I am indebted to Tom Gruner, Mark Goldenthal, and several others. Wherever they are, my thanks reach out to them.
Though I know he would be uncomfortable to see his name in this context, I cannot help but express my appreciation to Rabbi Gedaliah Koenig, one of the leaders of the Bratslav community in Jerusalem, for the kindness and warmth he showed me on a visit there. I can only pray that he somehow understand that I, too, in a way so different from his, stand in close relation to his master.
My wife, Kathy, has been a constant source of support and understanding throughout the years in which this book was written. Without her help and patience its accomplishment would have been unthinkable. In love and gratitude I dedicate this study to her.
Tormented Master
Before I became close to our master, of blessed memory, I could not picture in my mind how it was that Moses our Teacher was a human being like others. But once I had become close to our master and had seen how human he remained despite his greatness, I was able to understand how it was that Moses, too, was still a human being.
R ABBI N ATHAN of Nemirov
In the case of great young men rods which measure consistency, inner balance, or proficiency simply do not fit the relevant dimensions. On the contrary, a case could be made for the necessity of extraordinary conflicts, at times both felt and judged to be desperate. For if some youths did not feel estranged from the compromise patterns into which their societies have settled down, if some did not force themselves almost against their own wills to insist, at the price of isolation, on finding an original way of meeting our existential problems, societies would lose an essential avenue to rejuvenation and to that rebellious expansion of human consciousness which alone can keep pace with the technological and social change. To retrace, as we are doing here, such a step of expansion involves taking account of the near downfall of the man who took it, partially in order to understand better the origins of greatness, and partially in order to acknowledge the fact that the trauma of near-defeat follows a great man through life.
E RIK E RIKSON
Young Man Luther
Introduction
The role of biography in the history of religion is a changing and problematic one. From time immemorial, pious devotees of various masters and saints have sought to compose memoirs of their teachers lives that were to serve as sources of moral and spiritual edification for those who came after them. The example of the master s own life always took a place of prime importance within the educational ideals of religious communities. Much of what we know about the great religious teachers of the pre-modern world has come to us thanks to the activity of such pious hagiographers. The founders of the great religions, as well as those who established new sects, orders, or movements within their respective traditions, have had their lives told and retold in each generation, the subject of the biography strangely changing and growing with the changing tastes and mores of those for whom the tales were told. The writers of such works, of course, were not usually concerned with separating fact from edifying legend. As the fame of a particular figure grew, apocryphal tales inevitably sprang up about him; such tales were happily included if they served the moralistic purposes which the writer had in mind.
As modern biographers first began to turn their attention toward the religious past, it was generally out of a longing for the greater wholeness and simplicity of earlier times that they were attracted to the lives of the masters. While such writers, beginning with the nineteenth century, did make some attempt to distinguish fact from fancy, their own romantic predilections often carried them far along the path of reconstructing the lives of figures from the past in the image of their own times. Such values as the love of nature, the love of fellow man, and the simplicity of devotion, though indeed present in the sources, were emphasized out of all proportion; such negative factors as harsh asceticism, conflict, jealousy, and the like were either ignored or explained away into insignificance.
The shift from this sort of modern romantic hagiography to an attempt at critical biography is often slow and subtle. The faithful, both of the traditional and romantic varieties, have good reason to regard at