Читать книгу In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 - Nitza Rosovsky - Страница 10

Since the sixteenth century, Safed, the city where my great-great-great-great-grandfather Yoel Ashkenazi died in 1856, had served as a magnet for Kabbalists, for Jewish mysticists. Among those who settled there, none was more influential than Rabbi Yitzhak Luria Ashkenazi—not a relative—who moved to Safed around 1570. Facts and fable mingle when the story of Luria’s life is told: how he understood the talk of birds and animals, how he identified the burial places of many sages as he walked around Safed with his disciples. After he died his own tomb became a place of pilgrimage. His doctrine, known as Lurianic Kabbala, had great appeal for the masses because it made ordinary people feel that through tikkun, “restoration,” they could influence cosmic events. Tikkun is a complex process consisting of spiritual actions among which are prayer and the observance of the mitzvot, of God’s commandments. Since certain mitzvot can only be fulfilled in Eretz Israel, some Hasidim believed that they could affect events by settling there and, through tikkun, cause an awakening from “down below” and bring Redemption closer.

Hasidut has been called “the daughter of Kabbala” because, like the older movement, it differs from traditional Jewish rationalism. Founded in the middle of the eighteenth century by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, “Master of the Divine Name,” it was an anti-establishment movement, a reaction against the physically dreary and spiritually arid life of Jews at that time, and it provided the common people with a sense of joy in worship. The popularity of the movement must be seen against the background of the desolate sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, beginning with the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 and culminating in the Chmielnicki massacres (1648-1658) when Cossacks from the Ukraine slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews in three hundred communities. The political situation of the Jews was dismal as well. Most were denied a dignified occupation; riots and blood libels—when Jews were accused of killing Christians to use their blood for ritual purposes—were common and the law offered little protection. Not allowed to own land and limited by law to a few occupations such as lending money and selling alcohol, the Jews were hated by the peasants who were in their debt and vilified by the church as Christ-killers. Their own religious leaders did not bring them much comfort, particularly in Poland where the rabbis were constantly engaged in the reinterpretation of the Law. The ordinary man in the street—and especially the one living in a remote and isolated village—could neither understand nor follow the rabbis’ talmudic disquisitions. Instead, superstition triumphed, learning declined, and a wide chasm appeared between the scholars who dwelt in the city and the uneducated—if pious—masses in the countryside. All those conditions help explain the rapid spread of Hasidut.

The Baal Shem himself set out to go to Eretz Israel but for reasons unknown turned back. While he did not complete the journey, his brother-in-law, Avraham Gershon of Kutow did, and he settled with his family in Hebron in 1747. For centuries living conditions in Palestine were so difficult that it was mainly old men and women who went there, wishing to be buried in its consecrated ground. But this began to change, even before Avraham Gershon came, with the arrival of several notable groups such as the one led by Rabbi Yehuda Hasid of Poland—hasid here means “pious,” not a follower of Hasidut which began half a century later—who arrived in Jerusalem in 1700 with perhaps several hundred followers, or that of Rabbi Haim Attar of Morocco—who came to the city with his two wives and his disciples—and established a yeshiva there in 1741. Avraham Gershon’s aliya created a bridge between the ancient land and Hasidut, the new spiritual movement. Others followed him to the Holy Land and they too brought along their families. About thirty Hasidim left for Tiberias in 1764, then another group of three hundred Hasidim, led by Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, arrived in Safed in 1777. I do not know whether one of my ancestors came with the latter group but sixty years later, yet another Menahem Mendel, my great-great-great-grandfather whose tomb I had located in Tiberias, became one of the leaders of the remnants of the 1777 aliya.