The Priestly Cult in the Eyes of the Hasidic Pietists

• In Event: Rituals and Practices: New Approaches to their Meanings:

Abstract

Various passages in the classical Hasidic homily-literature negate any inner identification with the toraitic priestly roles. They re-defined the priestly class in a way to bypass any sense of the kehunah as a status and role passed down through heredity from father to son, defining the KOHANIM, instead, as those who follow the ways ascribed to AHARON HA-KOHEN and as those who serve God truthfully with inner integrity.

The priestly role in connection with those suffering from skin-afflictions is also read metaphorically as one of guiding penitents through deepening growth toward truly humility and worshipful living. In that sense, the priesthood emerges as an image of the role of the Hasidic TZADDIK, just as the sacrificial ritual itself is re-read as a metaphor of Hasidism’s self-understanding.

Isaac of Radvil explicitly negated the place of sacrificial worship in the Torah’s authentic meaning and maintained that, with Redemption, we would observe such verses of the Torah simply by reciting them. While his very pronounced position stands out in a singular way, a questioning and de-valuation of sacrificial ritual can be heard also in more broadly-based comments on the sacrificial cult both within Hasidic teaching and in somewhat earlier discourse which impacted eighteenth-century Hasidism. For example, SHNE LUHOT HA-BRIT, an early eighteenth-century kabbalistic text, emphasized the claim that the sacrificial ritual was mandated only as a consequence of the Primordial Sin of the First Man, and Avraham Yehoshu’a Heschel of Apt viewed the biblically-mandated sacrifices as addressed not to the person of true and deep devotion to God but as a religious expression for the multitude of Jews situated on an emphatically lower spiritual level.

Such statements point to a definite distance between the priestly sacrificial ritual and the nature of Hasidic pietism with its ethos of innerness.

Author

• Aryeh J. Wineman, Independent Scholar