Chassidus Was Never Meant to Leave the Person Behind

A response to “Chassidus Misapplied: The Dangerous Reinvention of Chassidus“

By a Member of Anash

Rabbi Kesselman has written a serious essay, and it deserves a serious answer. He is worried about something real. He is also, I believe, wrong about the most important thing, and wrong in a way that will cost us people we cannot afford to lose. Let me try to give him the credit he has earned before I explain where the argument fails.

The author is right that Chassidus is yedias Elokus. It is Divrei Elokim Chaim, and its subject is Hashem, not us. He is right that a mashal exists for the sake of its nimshal, and that a teacher who leaves his students holding the analogy has failed them. He is right that psychology cannot be permitted to redefine Torah, that “bittul” cannot be emptied and refilled with whatever a culture currently finds comfortable, and that a spirituality whose center of gravity is the self is the inverse of what the Rebbeim taught. Anyone who has sat through a shiur in which “kabbalas ol” turned out to mean self-acceptance knows exactly what he is describing, and he is right to be alarmed by it.

The problem is the map he draws around these truths.

Strip the essay to its core and it says: there’s Avodas Hashem, which is the real thing, and there’s the human being, whose emotional health is “supportive infrastructure” around the real thing. Wellbeing concerns the functioning of the person; avodah concerns what the person does with himself for Hashem. Fix the person over there, with the professionals, and then bring the repaired person back here to serve.

Chassidus was given to erase precisely that border.

Tanya does not open with Seder Hishtalshelus. It does not open with Atik and Arich or with the three levels of Or Ein Sof before the tzimtzum. It opens with a human being: the tzaddik, the rasha, and above all the beinoni, the person whose inner life is a battlefield and who will never in this lifetime stop fighting. For twelve chapters the Alter Rebbe maps the architecture of a Jew’s mind before he asks that Jew to contemplate anything above. When the author prescribes a seder in which we first understand the concept “l’maalah” and only later, as a concession, notice that it speaks to a person’s struggle, he is prescribing the reverse of the seder the Alter Rebbe himself chose for the sefer that founded our derech.

In the second chapter, the Alter Rebbe tells us that the neshamah is chelek Elokah mima’al mamash. Not a metaphor for the Divine. A portion of it, literally. The human being can no longer be filed under “mashal.” The nefesh is not an analogy that helps us understand Elokus; it is the place in this world where Elokus is actually found. מבשרי אחזה אלוקה is not just a teaching tool; it’s a statement about where to look.

The author writes that what was once the nimshal has become the mashal. One of the commenters gave the correct answer, and I will sharpen it:

The nimshal of all of Chassidus was never the sefiros. The Rebbe said this in the first maamar he ever delivered and repeated it for forty years. The purpose of everything, of the entire Seder Hishtalshelus, is a dirah for Hashem in the lowest world, the world of which there is none lower. The olamos are the roadmap. The destination is a human being in a body, in a marriage, in a business, in a mood, becoming a place where Hashem lives. If you insist on the mashal and nimshal language, then Atik and Arich are the mashal, and the frightened, resentful, grieving Jew learning about them is the nimshal. That’s not New Age; that’s Basi L’Gani.

The author defines Chassidus by its subject matter: the study of Hashem, Seder Hishtalshelus, Achdus Hashem. The Rebbe, in Kuntres Inyana Shel Toras HaChassidus, declined to define it that way. He defined it by what it is, not by what it talks about: the yechidah of Torah, an essence that is not one department alongside others but the pnimiyus that penetrates all of them and gives each of them life. The Rebbe’s demonstration in that kuntres is not a passage about Keser. It’s Modeh Ani, the first sentence a Jew says with his face still in the pillow, explained on every level of pardes and then illuminated by Chassidus. He chose the most human moment of the day on purpose.

If Chassidus is what the Rebbe said it is, then the question “is this teaching about Elokus or about the person?” is malformed. Chassidus is the thing that reveals that there was never a border between them. A shiur that makes a man capable of hearing his wife, and does so by showing him that his defensiveness is yeshus and his yeshus is the concealment of Elokus in his own nefesh, has not used a pen as a bookmark. It has done exactly what the yechidah of Torah is for.

The author’s focal point is Tanya Perek 26. He notes, correctly, that the Alter Rebbe introduces the discussion of sadness because sadness paralyzes the war against the yetzer hara. He concludes that the Alter Rebbe is “interested in avodas Hashem. Period!” and that psychological healing is a side effect.

Read the next five chapters. In Perek 27, the Alter Rebbe tells the person tormented by unwanted thoughts that his distress comes from a mistaken belief about what he is supposed to be, and he calls that belief foolishness. In Perek 28, he gives a technique for handling intrusive thoughts during davening. In Perek 29, he diagnoses timtum halev and identifies its root in the arrogance of the animal soul, and he prescribes a controlled, deliberate confrontation with one’s own yetzer. In Perek 31, he takes the residue of sadness and converts it into joy by redirecting a person’s attention from the failures of his body to the reality of his soul.

This is a sustained, technical, sequenced treatment of the inner life, with diagnosis, etiology, and intervention. The Alter Rebbe is not a psychologist in the modern professional sense, and no one serious claims he is. But the claim that the psychological content of Tanya is incidental to its avodah does not survive reading Tanya. The psychological content is the avodah. It is how a beinoni serves Hashem: by learning the mechanics of his own heart well enough to redirect it.

The pen and the bookmark, then, is the wrong analogy. A pen used to hold a page is unchanged by the use, and the book is unchanged by the pen. A Jew who works through his anxiety with Perek 26 and emerges able to daven with zerizus is not a pen doing an odd job. He is a kli. And the Alter Rebbe told us in that same chapter that making him a kli was the entire point.

The author frames the current moment as an unprecedented importation of foreign language into Chassidus. The history does not support the framing.

The Baal Shem Tov’s revolution was to take the Kabbalah of the Arizal, which had been the property of a few, and make it the inner life of the simplest Jew. The Alter Rebbe was denounced to the Czar’s government partly on the charge that he had founded a new sect with new practices and new language, and the Tanya’s translation of sefiros into the faculties of the nefesh was exactly what his opponents found dangerous. The Mitteler Rebbe wrote Kuntres HaHispaalus, an entire treatise on the phenomenology of emotion in davening, distinguishing authentic excitement from self-generated imitation. The Rebbe Rashab wrote Kuntres HaAvodah and Kuntres Umaayan, works about ta’avah, middos, and the structure of desire. The Frierdiker Rebbe taught, and it is quoted in Hayom Yom, that a life of Torah, mitzvos, and Chassidus is the happiest life a person can live, in the most literal sense.

And the Rebbe. The Rebbe used radio, electricity, satellites, and the discoveries of physics as meshalim for Elokus, in a language no earlier Rebbe had used. He answered letters about depression, anxiety, obsessive thinking, and marital collapse, and his answers were Chassidus, applied to exactly those things, in exactly the terms the person had used. He built a movement on the principle that the shliach must speak the language of the place he is sent to, and he sent us to a generation whose native language is, for better and for worse, the language of the inner life.

Every one of these moves looked to someone at the time like new language superimposed on Chassidus. Every one of them turned out to be Chassidus doing what Chassidus does.

I want to dwell on one sentence, because I think it reveals more than the author intended. He lists the “new values and ideals” being imposed on Chassidus: self-worth, self-esteem, presence, mindfulness, trauma, abuse, inner peace.

Trauma is not a value. Abuse is not an ideal. They are things that happened to people. A child who was hurt by an adult with authority over him did not adopt a foreign ideology when he grew up unable to hear the word “submission” without his body going cold. He was injured. To list his injury alongside “holistic wellbeing” as an imported fashion is not a philosophical error. It is a failure of ahavas Yisrael of the kind Perek 32 was written to correct, and I say that with respect for an author who clearly does not intend it.

Chassidus has always had a robust vocabulary for what the culture calls self-worth. Chelek Elokah mima’al. Yisrael af al pi shechata Yisrael hu. The Rebbe’s insistence, against every evidence a person could bring against himself, that there is Someone who loves him. The Alter Rebbe’s teaching in Perek 31 that a Jew’s sadness should be reserved for his body and never touch the joy of his soul. We do not need to borrow self-esteem from the therapists. We need to stop pretending we never had it, and stop treating people who reach for it as though they had wandered off the derech.

In the section titled “How We Got Here,” the author grants that for a person whose sense of self has been broken, traditional formulations of bittul and kabbalas ol may be unproductive and even harmful, and that for such a person it may be right to teach bittul in terms that first restore dignity and stability. He calls this an exception.

Once that is granted, the entire argument becomes empirical rather than principled. The question is no longer whether Chassidus may be taught through the door of the person’s actual condition. The author has agreed that it may. The question is how many people are standing at that door. He asserts, without evidence, that it is a small number and that “thousands” of Yidden are perfectly able to learn Chassidus as their grandparents did.

Perhaps. But he then accuses the teachers in the field of a sampling error: they see the wounded, so they think everyone is wounded. That knife has two edges. A rosh yeshiva sees the bochurim who stayed. He does not see the ones who left, and he does not hear the ones who sit in his shiur and tell no one what they carry. The author is entitled to his estimate. He is not entitled to present it as the default that the other side must overcome.

And one of his commenters put the consequence plainly: when a young Jew reads that his pain sits outside Avodas Hashem, the conclusion he draws is not “I must learn Chassidus more purely.” It is “the rabbis do not value healing, so I will find my answers elsewhere.”

The author’s implicit criterion is vocabulary: if the words are the Rebbeim’s, it is Chassidus; if the words are the culture’s, it is something else. I propose a criterion he himself uses elsewhere in the essay and then abandons. The test is vector, not vocabulary. Does the teaching move a person toward Hashem, toward Torah and mitzvos, toward other Jews, and toward a self that is less clenched and more available for all three? Or does it terminate in the self and call that arrival?

By that test, a “bittul” that means “I accept myself as I am and demand nothing further” fails, and the author is right to say so. A “dirah b’tachtonim” that means indulgence fails. A Geulah defined as a regulated nervous system fails. These are real distortions and they should be named as such.

But the same test must be applied in the other direction. A Chossid who has learned Chassidus for decades and walks through 770 with contempt on his face, who cannot sit at a Shabbos table without correcting someone, whose limud has produced a great deal of knowledge and no visible change in his middos, has also failed the test. The Frierdiker Rebbe said a life of Chassidus is the happiest life. If a man’s Chassidus has made him bitter, then whatever he is doing is also not what the Rebbeim meant, and it does not become authentic because it is dry. The author’s essay reserves all its suspicion for one failure mode. Chassidus requires us to fear both.

The author writes that bittul is now “about (fill in the blank)” and kabbalas ol is now “(fill in the blank).” He names no teacher, no sefer, no podcast, no shiur, and quotes no sentence anyone has actually said. The maskilim and ovdim of Lubavitch argued with each other by name and by text. A critique that leaves the blanks empty is not a critique; it is an atmosphere, and it lands on everyone who has ever taught Tanya in a way that made a listener cry. If there is a specific teaching in which a Chassidic term has been emptied of its meaning, bring the sentence, and let it be examined the way Chassidim have always examined each other. Some of it will not survive. Some of it, I suspect, will turn out to be Perek 26 in a different accent.

The commenter who challenged the author to produce the alternative was not being flippant. If there exists a way to teach Atik and Arich “as they truly are” that makes a thirty-year-old with two kids and a mortgage more of an oved Hashem by Tuesday, then produce it, and it will win. The author’s gracious reply that he is open to such a project is the most hopeful line in the entire exchange. I hope he does it. Nobody on the other side of this argument would be anything but glad.

We are between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in the days the Alter Rebbe devoted Iggeres HaTeshuvah to. Teshuvah, he taught, is not primarily about sin. It is תשוב ה’, the return of the soul to its source. It is entirely about the person: his history, his distance, his condition, the exact place he is standing when he turns. And it is entirely about Hashem, because the only direction that counts as return is toward Him. There is no border in it between the self and the service. The self, returning, is the service.

That is the model. Not a Chassidus that stays pure by keeping the human being at arm’s length, and not a Chassidus that dissolves into the human being and forgets where it was going. A Chassidus that goes all the way down into the tachton, into the wound and the fear and the marriage and the ego, because that is where the dirah is supposed to be built, and then all the way back up, because a dirah is for Someone.