HARGASHAH: Emotional Labor as Spiritual Labor in the ME'OR EYNAYIM

• In Event: Spiritual Experience and Literary Form: Creativity, Practice, and Awareness in Ḥasidic Thought and Society

Abstract

Hasidic mysticism is often described as an interiorization or psychologization of the metaphysical speculative architecture worked out within the literature of its forebears. While this is an accurate insight, its significance has largely been directed to attend to the transposition of the SEFIROT from divine hypostases to structural nodes within the human consciousness, that is, to theory. In this paper, I will redress this lacuna and show how Hasidic psychologization was not merely an interiorization of a mystical ontology but also a practical program to develop awareness of one's interior phenomenological schema, with guidance from one's rabbi, laying out a program of spiritual labor, particular to oneself.
I will focus on the writings of R. Menachem Nachum Twersy of Chernobyl (c. 1730-1787), the ME'OR EYNAYIM. Like his colleagues, Twersky draws on the theological resources of his milieu, describing the current state of Eastern European Jewry as struck through with GALUT, an exile not merely political but metaphysical as well. It was impossible for the deity's supernal qualities to actualize in their fulness, in the material world, so they had to manifest within materiality. The task of the HASID is to dig deep and find divinity in the depths; beyond the conventional, worship is called for in the midst of the corporeal.
Twersky counsels his reader to develop HARGASHAH, a sensitive awareness of one's internal state. One's emotional comportment becomes the stuff of spiritual labor, as one is faced with discerning within one's feelings their source in the divine. However, the world's darkened spiritual state has a spiritual and psychological impact, often leading to feelings of frustration, melancholy, and discouragement. So, key to the HASID’S spiritual program is developing an intimate attunement to one’s affective complexion, taking note of when difficult feelings obstruct one’s ability to serve God, and developing the ability to offer encouragement (HITHAZKUT) to oneself, comfort and understanding of one’s finitude within a fallen world. The pain one feels in one’s difficulties becomes a point of contact between the HASID and the compassion within the deity. This emotional-spiritual program outlines a mystical experience and practice available, in particular, to the non-elite.

Author

• Joshua Simon Schwartz, New York University