E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten
Bratslav The Podolian Nights
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-124-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Essential Tales
E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-124-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1811) was the great-grandson of Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. Born in the small town of Medzhybizh in Ukraine, he initially refused to carry on the family tradition of Jewish spiritual leadership. After a spiritually important trip to Israel, he returned to Ukraine and eventually moved to Bratslav. Nachman attracted many followers in his lifetime, including the young Torah scholar Nathan Sternhartz, who went on to transcribe Nachman's formal teachings, as well as the imaginative tales that make up The Podolian Nights.
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In the twentieth century, Hasidic tales became known to the wider world as a treasure of folk literature. For the first Jews who told and retold them, however, in the Eastern European borderlands of the mid-eighteenth century, they were more than literature; they were themselves religious acts. Repeating a story about the Baal Shem Tov, the wonder-working rabbi who was the founder of Hasidism, was a way of testifying to his holiness and spreading the good news of his teachings. These stories circulated orally for decades after he died, and were collected in print for the first time in 1815 in a volume titled ‘In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov’.
Around the same time, a very different kind of Hasidic tale made its appearance in print: the ‘Fabulous Tales’, but translated into English simply as Tales, of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Nachman was Hasidic royalty: his mother was the granddaughter of the Baal Shem Tov, and his uncle Baruch was an important rabbi in his own right. From the moment he was born, in 1772, Nachman carried as heavy a burden of expectation as any prince. Nothing could be more natural than that such a man would grow up to be a tzaddik, a ‘righteous man’ and Hasidic leader.
Yet the Tales of Rabbi Nachman are like nothing else in Hasidic literature. These are not tales about Nachman’s holiness and miracle-working powers, passed down by his followers. Rather, they are stories invented by Nachman himself, first delivered orally to gatherings of his followers. Unlike the usual Hasidic tale, with its pious, didactic message, Nachman’s stories are full of paradoxes and esoteric symbolism. The more deeply they are studied, the more enigmatic they become. For this reason, they have often struck readers as distinctively modern, akin to the legends of Hans Christian Andersen or the dark parables of Franz Kafka. To read Nachman’s tales is to enter a world of elusive meanings, where the only thing certain is that the world as we know it is deeply broken.
Outwardly, Nachman’s stories often resemble fairy tales. They are populated by princesses and kings and talking animals, and they feature babies switched at birth and heroes who go on quests. Scholars have found that they employ themes and plots common to folktales around the world, some of which Nachman must have absorbed from the surrounding non-Jewish cultures of Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is notable that the characters in these stories are seldom Jews, and the world they live in is not the world Nachman himself knew, but the wide world of royal courts and remote desert islands. His first listeners must have been startled by the way their holy tzaddik moved so easily in this imaginative realm. Perhaps that is why Nachman ironically deprecated his own stories: ‘What can people find to complain about? After all, they are nice stories to tell,’ he is quoted as saying in the introduction to the first edition of the Tales.
If Nachman’s stories were controversial, that only made them a faithful reflection of their author. He was never one of the more popular Hasidic rabbis; his followers were a self-selected elite, willing to undergo rigorous disciplines. They were so dedicated to Nachman that after he died of tuberculosis in 1810, they did not select a relative or follower to replace him, as was standard in Hasidic courts. Rather, to this day, the Bratslaver Hasidim continue to see Nachman as their leader, for which reason they have been given the grim name of ‘dead Hasidim’. Every year on Rosh Hashana, thousands of Bratslavers and other admirers of Nachman congregate in Uman, the Ukrainian city where he died, to celebrate his memory and worship at his grave.
The gaiety and simplicity reflected in the stories about the Baal Shem Tov are nowhere to be found in the anecdotes recorded about Nachman’s life. ‘No act in the service of God came easily to him; everything came only as a result of great and oft-repeated struggle,’ wrote his follower Rabbi Nathan Sternhartz. Even as a child, ‘he would often speak to God in heartfelt supplications and pleas… but nevertheless he felt he wasn’t being noticed or heard at all. On the contrary, it seemed to him that he was being pushed away from the service of God in all kinds of ways, as though he were utterly unwanted.’
In response, Nachman turned towards the kind of self-tormenting asceticism that Hasidism usually preached against. As a child, he decided that he must overcome his pleasure in eating and began to swallow food in large pieces without chewing, so as not to taste it. As a teenager, he would fast from Sabbath to Sabbath and roll naked in the snow in winter. Rabbi Nathan compares Nachman’s repeated assaults on his own body—above all, on his sexual urges—to military conquests: ‘being a powerful warrior… he succeeded in overcoming his passions.’ Haunted by the sense that he was unworthy to inherit his great-grandfather’s mantle, Nachman created a religious style that was the opposite of the Baal Shem Tov’s: not a simple celebration of God, but a kind of existential striving for Him.
The course of Nachman’s adult life was correspondingly stormy. At the age of twenty-six, in 1798, he decided to undertake a pilgrimage to the Land of Israel. This was not an uncommon aspiration for Hasidic rabbis—his own grandfather had settled permanently in the Galilee—but Nachman made his trip at an especially dangerous moment, just as Napoleon’s armies were embarking on their campaign in Egypt and Palestine. For Nachman, this was not an obstacle but an attraction: ‘Know that I want to place myself in danger, even great and terrible danger,’ he is supposed to have said. Indeed, just hours after he stepped off the boat in Haifa he announced that he wanted to return home, as if the ordeal of the journey had been the whole point. Only with difficulty was he persuaded to remain in the Holy Land for several months, visiting sacred sites and the small but growing Hasidic communities. On his return journey, Nachman ran into still more trouble: he sailed in a Turkish warship that was attacked by the French, narrowly avoided shipwreck, and had to be redeemed from captivity by the Jewish community of Rhodes.
Once he returned to Eastern Europe in 1799, Nachman settled in the town of Bratslav, where his followers began to preach that he was either the Messiah himself or else the key to his arrival. But the death of Nachman’s only son, in 1806, seems to have put an end to his messianic ambitions. It was in the summer of that year, at a time of personal and religious crisis, that he began to tell his stories, usually during the gatherings of his followers that took place on Jewish holidays.
‘When the Rebbe began telling stories,’ according to Rabbi Nathan’s introduction to the first edition of the Tales, ‘he said “I am now beginning to tell stories.” His intent was as if to say, “[I must tell stories] because my lessons and conversations are not having any effect in bringing you back to God.”’ Nachman believed in the redemptive function of storytelling: ‘The world says that fabulous tales may put you to sleep, but I say that tales can wake people up,’ he said. He went so far as to teach that even Gentile folktales contained the seeds of religious truth, though in distorted and confused form: ‘Many hidden meanings and lofty concepts are contained in the stories that the world tells. These stories, however, are deficient; they contain many omissions. They are also confused, and people do not tell them in the right order.’
The clear implication is that Nachman’s own stories are going to rectify this confusion, to tell the world’s tales as they are meant to be told. And so it is appropriate that rectification—in Hebrew, tikkun—is the main theme of his tales. The phrase tikkun olam, ‘repair of the world’, is often used by Jews today to refer to social justice activism, but in Kabbalah, the tradition of Jewish mysticism, it has a very different meaning. In the sixteenth century, the great Kabbalist Isaac Luria elaborated the idea that divine ‘sparks’ left over from the Creation are hidden in our world, buried and obstructed by ‘shells’. The task of the Jew is to liberate these sparks and return them to God, thus hastening the advent of the Messiah. According to this activist mysticism, prayers and good deeds could literally repair the world.
For Nachman, telling tales served this redemptive purpose: the right story told in the right way could bring a person back to God. But it was necessary for the storyteller to proceed carefully, adapting his spiritual truths to the capacity of his audience. A blind man who has just been healed, Nachman once explained, must be protected from bright lights; even so, a person in a state of spiritual convalescence should not be exposed to the full glare of truth. A story is a therapeutic device, allowing the listener to uncover its meaning at his own pace.
The first edition of Nachman’s Tales included thirteen stories (later editions added others, of more dubious authenticity). The simplest can barely be said to hide their spiritual message at all. Take ‘Of a Rabbi and his Only Son’, one of the...
