God is Everything, Everything is God
Out of this simple, revolutionary realization sprouted the four main innovations of Chassidut. Let's go over them.
We have learned that Chassidut was a revolutionary movement within Jewish history. But what exactly were the innovative points that it added to what was before it? Since Chassidut grew out of Kabbalah, to understand it we must first acquaint ourselves with one of the most central Kabbalistic ideas, known as the concept of tzimtzum, or “constriction.”
Before the Beginning
The Torah appears to open with a description of the creation of all things: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” However, a student of the inner dimension of the Torah seeks to dig deeper and discover what happened even before creation, within Godliness Itself. To discover the beginning before the beginning.
It could be said that the Torah itself invites us to this inquiry by opening with the letter Beit, the second letter, whose numerical value is 2, and which thus denotes duality. Considering that the Torah’s main purpose is to announce to the world that “God is one,” we would think that it would open with Aleph, which denotes unity. The fact that it doesn’t, but insists on opening with Beit, seems to suggest that it is like a story whose opening has been omitted, a book that begins with chapter two.
In our days it’s customary to produce “prequels” — books or films that describe what happened before a well-known story. In the same spirit, we could say that Genesis invites us to reconstruct a “lost first chapter” that ostensibly preceded it. This concept is further strengthened by the fact that Aleph (אלף) is made up os the same letters as the Hebrew word for “wonder” or “concealment,” pele (פלא). This suggests the lost first chapter is a wondrous text which hides behind chapter two, like a child playing hide and seek, waiting to be discovered.
The person who took up the challenge and discovered the lost first chapter of the Torah was the greatest Kabbalist of the modern era — Rabbi Isaac Luria Ashkenazi, more commonly known as the “Ari” or “Arizal,” who lived in Safed in the 16th century. The Aleph hidden behind the Beit of Genesis, explained the Ari, hints at a state of Divine, non-dual unity that existed “before” the creation of the world. In his words, before God created the world, all that existed was ohr ein-sof pashut, “simple infinite light” — pure Godliness.1
Now, since this reality was utterly perfect, why did God change it? Well, you see, its perfection was precisely the problem: It was too perfect. Its flaw was that it had no flaw. It had everything, except the experience of lack. In order to be truly perfect, God had to diminish Himself, to make room for something other than Himself, and then try to establish a relationship with it.
Thus took place the transition from unity to duality: God chose a point in the center of the infinite light, and there contracted His light sideways, creating a dark, empty void — an island of night at the heart the ocean of light. This was the tzimtzum: The Creator making room for creation, which was to become His other and His partner.
Only then the familiar “Let there be light” of Genesis occur: God disentangled a single thread from His fabric of infinite light and lowered it into the empty space, thereby both creating the world and revealing Himself to it.
God is Everything, and Everything is God
Thus far is the innovation of the Ari. To this innovation, the Baal Shem Tov added another. The act of constriction, he explained, should not be understood literally, as if God actually withdrew His light from creation and now only oversees it from above. Rather, God is still the simple, infinite light He always was, and creation exists within Him. It is part of Him, and He is omnipresent within it. “I am He before the world was created, and I am He after the world was created”:2 God is the same now as He was before the world was created. Only to our eyes are God and the world two distinct things.
From this it follows that what the Ari described as the constriction of God’s light to the sides is not a withdrawal but a concealment — the hiding of God’s light from the eyes of the created beings. To the basic Jewish faith that God created everything and oversees everything, the Baal Shem Tov added a new layer: God Himself is everything, and everything is God.
A byproduct of this innovation is a redefinition of what Kabbalah explores regarding what existed before creation. Everything that preceded creation is, we now learn, is actively present within creation. This is important, because in principle, delving into the secrets of what preceded creation is forbidden: “Whoever looks at four things, it would have been better had they not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what is before, and what is after.”3 If, however, God’s infinite light is not just a thing of the past, but also present here and now, engaging with it is not a forbidden glimpse into “what is before” but a deep dive into the reality of the present.4
The Four Innovations of Chassidut
The view that the tzimtzum is not to be taken literally gives rise to a fundamentally different existential experience compared to what came before it. Specifically, it is expressed in four aspects, each of which was revolutionized by the Baal Shem Tov.
1. Unconditional Love
The Torah commands us to “love your fellow as yourself,”5 meaning in halachah (Jewish law) that we should love all Jews, our fellows in the covenant with God, as we love ourselves.6 However, before the Baal Shem Tov, it was common to interpret this commandment as conditional on the other Jew's behavior: a Jew who sinned and did not repent was not to be loved, and some even said it was a commandment to hate him, as he was a sinner.7 There needed to be a reason to love a Jew, or at least it was necessary to check that there was no reason not to love him, due to his sins or corrupt opinions. Of course, a critical eye that seeks faults and sins will invariably find them, and the result of this approach is that the feeling of love is granted only to those who are close and similar to us.
The view that a person's faults indicate a fundamental and absolute flaw in them derives from a literal interpretation of tzimtzum: Just as the darkness of the world is seen as absolute, so too is the darkness of a person, i.e. their negative traits. In contrast, based on the view that constriction isn’t literal, the Baal Shem Tov taught to look beyond the darkness of sins and to see the shining soul within, pure as the day it was created. According to him the commandment of loving fellow Jews applies to every Jew unconditionally, regardless of their actions, opinions, and our personal relationship to them.8
In fact, the Baal Shem Tov extended this principle to loving all created beings — all human beings, all animals, and even all of nature. The very fact that God created them indicates that He loves them, and therefore we should do the same.9
2. Joy in Serving God
The perception that God is present in everything can sweeten much of the bitterness and sadness often associated with serving God solely out of yir’at shamyaim, fear of heaven or awe. The experience that “God has abandoned the land”10 and that He is not with us in our shortcomings and falls tends to lead people to judge themselves, and their surroundings, harshly. In contrast, when we recognize that all falls and shortcomings are part of the Divine plan, a “descent for the sake of ascent” that assists in drawing closer to God, the bitterness is sweetened and serving God becomes a joyful experience.
Integrating Hasidic joy into serving God, it should be explained, does not come at the expense of fear of heaven but adds to it. According to the Zohar, the most balanced state of the soul is when “one side of the heart weeps, and the other side is joyous.”11 A truly whole heart is both whole and broken, simultaneously joyous in the presence of God, and sad over the fact that His presence is not more revealed and shining. Nevertheless, according to Chassidut, joy is supposed to be the primary emotion pulsating within the heart.
The commandment “Serve the Lord with joy” of course already appears in the Bible,12 but often there is a significant gap between the establishing something in theory and its practical application, and so it was with this matter in earlier generations. Thus, what the Torah already taught in ancient times became, with the advent of Chassidut, an actual possibility.
3. Devotion
The perspective that God is present in everything means that we can become much closer to Him than we’ve thought. The Baal Shem Tov placed the value of deveikut — devotion, creating a deep spiritual connection with God — at the center of the believer’s life. Service to God that does not penetrate the innermost heart, he taught, is ultimately empty. In studying Torah, in prayer, and in fulfilling the commandments, one should strive to create a personal connection with He who gave them. Why, the Baal Shem Tov asked, do we bless every individual commandment with the plural form “who has sanctified us with His commandments”? Because every commandment is actually two commandments — the external action and the internal spiritual connection with God that it facilitates.13
One of the central ideas in Kabbalah says that if one follows the belief that God is infinite and unlimited to its logical conclusion, it paradoxically means that He can also be perceived as a personal God — A God who listens to us, is interested in the details of our lives, and wants to have a relationship with us. To claim that God is always sublime and inaccessible, never personal, is to limit Him to the abstract realm — which contradicts His being unlimited in every sense.14 The entire wisdom of Kabbalah rests on this insight, but the Baal Shem Tov took it one step further: God is not just overseeing the world from above but also dwells within it, and we have the ability to connect with Him here.
Moreover, the issue of devotion is related to the question of God’s presence within us. The Ari's metaphor of constriction can also be applied to describe our soul: the root of our soul is divine, but in practice, God shines only in its higher and surrounding layers, while the lower layers remain devoid of Godliness. According to the Baal Shem Tov's approach, however, which sees the constriction not literally, it is possible to discover Godly light also in the more earthly layers of our soul.
4. In All Your Ways Know Him
If the Holy Blessed One is omnipresent, that means anything and everything can be used in His service. Before Chassidut, the division between sacred and secular was dichotomous: God was present in the Torah, in the commandments, in the study hall, and in the synagogue, but not outside of them. Therefore, serving God involved withdrawing from most of the secular and focusing on the sacred. The Baal Shem Tov taught his followers that the secular is not truly profane; Godliness permeates it, and can be revealed everywhere — in nature, the body, the depths of the soul, in science, and in art. In Hasidic terminology, every secular thing can be “rectified,” meaning it can be elevated to the realm of holiness.
The Baal Shem Tov also taught us to seek holiness in deviations from the orderly path of life: illness, economic crisis, a carriage accident requiring us to stay in a strange place, etc. In every such case, there hides a “spark of holiness” that we must locate, redeem, and elevate. We need the Torah to achieve this, as only it provides us with the map by which we can distinguish between the spark and the shell; but God does not dwell only in the Torah.
This perception of the Baal Shem Tov is essentially a new interpretation of the Talmudic saying “Sanctify yourself with what is permitted to you.”15 Until the Baal Shem Tov, this saying was understood only as an instruction to reduce even permissible things, to add safeguards and stringencies to prevent them from leading to spiritual degradation (for example, kosher cakes are permissible, but excessive eating of them is negative, and therefore one should refrain from it). The Baal Shem Tov certainly accepted this principle but added that sanctifying ourselves with what is permitted to us also means sanctifying ourselves through the permissible: In all the secular matters we must deal with we need to search for the hidden holiness in them, which has the power to elevate and sanctify us.16
* * *
We presented these four points as “innovations” of Chassidut, as before that they had never been presented in quite this way. But you should know that there’s also an element of “renewing the ancient” to them — a reconstruction of simple and self-evident principles that were always present in Judaism, but which exile and forgetfulness buried. In this sense, all the Baal Shem Tov did was dust them off and reposition them where they have always belonged, at the center of Jewish life.
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Etz Chaim, Gate 1, Branch 2.
E.g. Tanna Devei Eliyahu 26..
Mishnah Hagigah 2:1.
Chassidut explains that this Aleph that precedes Genesis is hidden, as it were, within the Beit, in the form of the dot in it: בְּראשית.
Leviticus 19:18.
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, De'ot 6:3.
Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 113b. Shulchan Aruch, Choshen Mishpat, 272:11.
For an example of this approach in Chassidut, see Tanya, Chapter 32.
What distinguishes the love of Israel, in light of this, is the commandment to love them “as yourself,” as if they are truly a part of you. Today, it is common to present the love of the distant “other” as the most noble of all; but the truth is, loving a stranger to whom we owe nothing is relatively an easy task. The greater challenge is to love the “other among us” — someone who is part of our people and our flesh but is still different from us.
Ezekiel 8:12; 9:9.
Zohar, Part III, page 285a.
Psalms 100:2.
Keter Shem Tov, Part 1, 9.
In the words of the Kabbalist Rabbi Meir ben Gabbai: “The Infinite is perfection without deficiency. If you say that He has the power of unlimitation [i.e. to be abstract and impersonal] and does not have the power of limitation [i.e. to also have specific characteristics], you diminish His perfection.”
Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 20a.
The four innovations of Hasidism correspond to the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, as follows:
Yud: Devotion
Hei: Joy in serving God
Vav: Unconditional love
Hei: In all your ways, know Him