Notes on Books I've Read: Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era, by Hillel Zeitlin

I had to individually scan all the passages I flagged, that's how much I wanted to share this with you

Hillel Zeitlin had the juice.

One of those guys whose genius wasn’t recognized during his era, who was kind of a marginalized figure during his life, but whose work is really hits now. He articulates a vision of chassidus that speaks to a modern person with some really interesting formulations that helped me personally.

A fun anecdote¹: Apparently he sent a letter to Rav Ashlag saying he liked his books, and Rav Ashlag sent him a letter back saying, essentially, shut up, if people find out you like my books, we’ll both get in trouble. This shows how marginal R. Zeitlin was in his life (apparently he paid for multiple ads in Warsaw papers for his “Yavneh” neo-Hassidic habura, with increasingly desperate calls for literally anyone to join him) and also how marginal R. Ashlag was (the people most afraid of heretics are the people who stand to lose the most by being associated with heretics).

But what we have here is, for lack of a better term, a beautiful soul, one who really yearned for beauty and connection and Godliness, and found his audience unfortunately after he had already been murdered.

Similarities and overlaps with the Piacezner, another Warsaw Chassidic mystic who was murdered in the Holocaust, though the Piacezner was very much part of the Hasidic tradition and an authority within it and R. Zeitlin was, despite his Chabad upbringing, an outsider due to his sojourn outside the community before his return on his own terms.

But you can read more about Zeitlin elsewhere, let’s get into the passages I flagged.

Page 20, from the intro

Zeitlin is interesting precisely because he rejects modernity after already being acquainted with it, which are the figures I find most fascinating. Like the Kuzari, who was already a member of the elite of a culture he ended up rejecting, Zeitlin understands what he is rejecting and critiques it accurately, not merely out of reactionary rejectionism but upon seeing what modernity has done to people.

page 75

So one of the themes in Zeitlin is his use of the chassidic ideas of “yesh” (“being”, “is-ness”) and “Ayin” (“nothing”, “isn’t-ness”), and the classic chasidic ideas of bitul hayesh (“nullification of being”) to “ayin”, which he is equating here with God. To Zeitlin, Ayin isn’t really “Nothing” as much as it is “infinititude”, that is only called nothing “because it cannot be defined, regulated, or placed within bounds of space or time”. Zeitlin is kind of reconfiguring our expectations as to what the Nothing is that we are supposed to nullify our Selves in front of, not a blankness but a fullness that cannot be put into words, hence it has no label, only a sense of wonder.
This is pretty cool.

page 78

I’m very into tzimtzum as a concept and this articulation of it and the chasidic understanding of it speaks to me personally. He says here that the Chasidic understanding of Tzimtzum is like a father (or, in my case, educator) speaking to a kid on their own level about a concept concept. Tzimtzum, to Zeitlin, is God ELI5’ing the universe to us. As an educator I very much love this idea, because it speaks to my specific experience trying to figure out how to convey complex ideas to middle schoolers. But it also helps solve a conundrum about chassidus (that Eli Rubin goes into in his book on Tzimtzum in Chabad Chassidus, which I read and understood like 25% of, so I don’t know if we’ll do it here): If Tzimtzum happened, but God is in everything, was God in that empty space prior to creation. Chassidus says yes, and then goes about many different ways of explaining how that is the case despite the literal meaning of the Tzimtzum doctrine². Zeitlin’s innovation here is to put in terms of Divine Pedagogy. God created the universe in a way that our limited minds can comprehend, and restricted Godself for that purpose, but Chassidus maintains that there is more beyond what we can comprehend.

page 80, might be my favorite thing in the book

So this is very cool. Here’s how I’m understanding Zeitlin. Each human being has an ego, which gives them their individual identity and sets them apart from others, endowing them with the drive to accomplish what they need in the world. But the ego, if unchecked, goes past motivating your role in creation within the proportions assigned to it, and demands to rule, to have power (and it’s very clear Zeitlin is working with Nietzschean ideas of the Will to Power here). This “I will rule” is an imprint of the original true “I will rule”, which belongs exclusively to God, because only God has no inherent lack that needs to be filled by others (which means every individual requires others and can’t get its own way all the time). But only God gets to say “I will rule”. This is how he understands the breaking of the vessels that could not contain the light in the Lurianic mythos, of each “vessel” asserting its right to say “I will rule”, and he’s onto something considering the source of the breaking of the vessels in the Zohar is the bits about the death of the Edomite kings, if I was understanding Melila Hellner-Eshed right (but we’ll do that book next).

A lot going on here that I like. The tension between individuality and community which is the stuff that animates some of my favorite pieces of Jewish thought,³ and the critique of human based hierarchy. I like the idea of the ego/will to power being both necessary for individuation and needing to be held in check by interaction with others and basic humility before God. I’ve come to think lately in terms of the end result of unchecked desire for individuality as a desire to be the only person, nay, last person, on the planet. Being part of God’s creation and realizing that your “I will rule” is only supposed to get you to do what is desired of you by God to contribute to the human community rather than for your own aggrandizement seems crucial to me.

Page 90, more on this

So what causes the vessels to break? Forgetting their divine root by seeking their own power, and not to return to the source of their being. In other words, letting individuality be its own end and power be its own goal leaves you disconnected from the source of all Being who power belongs to.

And so God creates human beings with lack, with shadow, with flaws, with stuff to work on, so we can all intuit that our individuality is not meant to be the end goal and that we are all to work collectively to reveal light.

And thus our task is to sort it all out

This is cool stuff!

page 93, in the midst of assorted quotes from chasidic sources

So this is an explanation of the classic gemara that records the argument between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel as to whether it was better if humans were created or not, concluding with the compromise “better if they weren’t, but now that they are, they should examine their deeds”

This quote asks, why is it better that they weren’t? And answers with a parable. Very interesting to me is the second brother, who merely longs to return to his source, but does nothing about it. There’s a critique here of mysticism without purpose, and fear of sin leading to inactivity, that you don’t see that often. The point is not to return just as they came, its to find the precious stone, even if that means struggling.

Page 95

So this will be a theme in R. Zeitlin, who builds off chasidic concepts but does it in a clear and relevant way. The idea here is that if you recognize that all desire, even illicit desire, is a lower form of the higher desire to connect with God, you can “raise up the sparks” by bypassing the object of your earthly desire and connecting it with its source in the divinity your soul truly desires. This entails a recognition of the illicit desire itself, so that means not dismissing or suppressing that desire, consequently temporarily falling in a bad place, but raising it as a result of your recognition of its true source.