It’s not every day that you get an opportunity to peer into a world almost entirely unknown to outsiders.

We give you here but a fleeting glimpse into the world of the Hasidim, a minority of minorities — a small inner circle within a circle inside the Jewish nation. And that nation itself, even in its entirety, is but a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a percentage of our planet’s population that has now surpassed seven billion souls.

Many will come to this blog simply out of curiosity — which, in its purest form, we deem nothing less than noble and praiseworthy. For it is entirely healthy and natural that we should want to know something about people who are very different from us. And, paradoxically — provided we approach the undertaking with the proper frame of mind — such an exploration cannot fail to teach us something about ourselves, and to shed light on who we are, and on what it means to be human.

You only need to read or hear world news on any random day to realize that our species still has a great deal to learn in that domain.

I wish to express my very special and heartfelt thanks to Ahuva B., Eli B., and Avigail F. of Monsey, New York, for facilitating the personal introductions that made these photographs possible.  The Hasidim are by their nature a private — one could even say reclusive — folk;  it is not every professional photographer who can gain access to their private world. I am grateful to have been granted access to a highly unique and exclusive milieu.

Who, then, are the Hasidim? It would take several books to answer that question with any completeness. Simply put, however, the Hasidim are a subgroup of Orthodox Jews (themselves a subset of the Jewish people) who adhere in their own particular way to a set of structured Jewish traditions that are several millennia old at the one extreme, and but a couple of centuries old at the other.

To elaborate on the previous paragraph: the traditions and lifestyle of the Hasidim are rooted, first and foremost, in Jewish law and lore as laid out in Scripture (aka Bible) — the “Written Tradition” — and in the Talmud, the “Oral Tradition”. The ages of these huge repositories of Jewish history, law, knowledge, and wisdom are measured in intervals of thousands of years. And it is vital to understand that all Jews, and not only the Hasidim, share in their inheritance of those proud ancient traditions faithfully transmitted from generation to Jewish generation over the centuries and millennia.

The Hasidim, however, have added to that mix certain unique elements of their own, thus enriching to a very great degree the culture of observant Judaism that preceded it by over thirty centuries. Hasidism as a “movement” has its roots in Eastern Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries — practically yesterday morning, so to speak, in the Jewish historical timeline that reaches back almost to the dawn of recorded history.

And speaking of history — a small digression into “modern” Jewish history will here be necessary to provide the background for understanding the circumstances that gave rise to the birth of Hasidism. So thank you for bearing.

The 17th century had brought immense persecution and suffering to European Jewry — on a scale unknown even to a people for whom persecution and suffering had become almost a way of life for at least a millennium and half. Most notable — but not by any means unique even for that fairly narrow period — were the torments inflicted on European Jewry by Bogdan Chmielnitsky of Ukraine and Poland in 1648-49. The Jewish nation was brought to its knees.

Chmielnitsky and his accomplices murdered and tortured Jews by the hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of Jewish communities were wiped off the map almost overnight. If, as the prophet Habakuk had declared (circa 600 BCE), “a righteous man lives by his faith”, then faith was being severely tested as almost never before in the Jewish collective memory — and without faith the Jewish will to live was itself seriously waning.

For century upon century upon century the Jews had won renown as the People of the Book. Even in the blackest moments of the seemingly endless persecutions the Jews had always found solace in their God and in His Torah — the indivisible Written and Oral Law (mentioned earlier herein) — studying it literally day and night, as Moses’ pupil Joshua had enjoined them to do. And when circumstances deprived the Jews of any further possibility to live by the Torah, they were equally prepared without hesitation to die for the Torah, as tens of thousands did — but only never to forsake it, or the God who had bequeathed it to them.

But extreme suffering pushes men (and women) to their very limits, and those 17th century Jews were perilously close to reaching theirs. To be sure, brilliant Talmudists have existed in every age, including that one. But the Jews of that period were by the thousands losing their ability to appreciate Judaism in Talmudic — that is, intellectual — terms. There comes a time when the human soul, even the Jewish soul carrying the love of books and learning in its very genes, cannot live by casuistry alone.

A fundamental axiom of Jewish history is that in every generation God provides the right person — that is, leader — for the task at hand, to “stand in the breach”. The year 1760 saw the birth of Yisroel (Israel) ben Eliezer, often called the Baal Shem Tov (“Master of the Good Name”) — a Jewish mystical rabbi considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism.

The Baal Shem Tov set to repairing the broken souls of the Jewish nation, of which there were untold numbers at that time. He even did not hesitate to deemphasize the centrality and urgency of Talmudic scholarship to each individual Jew, stressing instead that a Jew’s service to God should be based on simple and yet profound joy in living life and in knowing God. And if anyone could restore joy to the all but joyless Jewry of those times, as the Baal Shem Tov aspired to do, and by all accounts largely succeeded in doing, he surely commands our respect and admiration on this account.

These are but the broadest strokes we have room to paint here regarding the Baal Shem Tov. But it is he who is credited with founding Hasidic Judaism, which survives and lives vibrantly until this very day — look closely at the photographs in this blog, and you will see that the Baal Shem Tov’s legacy of joy in living life with God yet lives on the faces of the Hasidim you see.

And what better way to multiply joy by creating large — indeed, by our standards, very large — families? The Hasidim truly excel at this. A very ancient Jewish tradition informs us that there are exactly 613 mitzvot (commandments) in the Five Books of the Torah.  No doubt you are inclined to ask which commandment is #1 of those, the very first. It is: “Be fruitful and multiply.”  These words, at once a blessing and a commandment, were spoken by God to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and then again to Noah upon his leaving the ark after the Deluge.

The Hasidim thus demonstrate their total commitment to fulfilling God’s mitzvot — beginning with #1, and moving onward to #613, one by one.

(…to be continued…)