In the early XVIII century, a person emerged in Eastern Europe who revolutionized Judaism. He was not a great halachic authority, nor a renowned yeshiva head. His biography is shrouded in mystery, but by most accounts, he was a wandering healer, a storyteller, a man who spoke to peasants and wagon drivers as readily as he did to scholars. His name was Israel ben Eliezer (c. 1700-1760), but he became known throughout the Jewish world as the Baal Shem Tov – the master of the Good Name – or, in the Hebrew acronym that his followers still use with reverence, the Besht.
“What drew so many people towards someone who wasn’t known as a Talmid Chacham?” asks Dr. Roee Horen, head of the Abrahamic House of Learning at the Ohr Torah Interfaith Center and the author of the Hebrew book “The Baal Shem Tov: The Man Who Came from the Forest.” The question has fascinated Horen since his twenties, when he first began studying Hasidic thought and found it transforming his Judaism. “I felt that the Baal Shem Tov hadn’t been studied sufficiently,” he says, arguing that the inner world of the Besht’s teachungs has not been adequately mapped out. This is precisely what he sets out to do.
Horen’s forthcoming book, “Renewal of the Soul: Post-Traumatic Growth from Hasidic Sources” (also in Hebrew) combines the Besht’s thought with contemporary psychology. In the wake of October 7 and ongoing war since, Horen has worked with bereaved families and trauma therapists, bringing Hasidic teachings to bear on experiences of shattering loss.
Telling Jews to begin with themselves
To understand what made the Baal Shem Tov revolutionary, Horen argues, you must first understand the spiritual world he was born into. Early XVIII century Eastern European Jewry was shaped by two powerful currents: the world of the great yeshivot, and the Lurianic Kabbalah of sixteenth-century Safed. According to Rabbi Isaac Luria (c. 1534–1572, known as the Ari), the cosmos was thought to be in a state of catastrophic fracture – the shattered vessels of the primordial divine light scattered across creation. The task of the Jew was
tikkun, repair: a rigorous program of fasts, vigils, bodily mortification, and intensely demanding prayer exercises known as kavvanot. According to this worldview, the more a person afflicted the body, the higher the soul could ascend.
The Baal Shem Tov fundamentally rejected this. “His most important revolution is internal-to-external,” Horen explains, “rather than the other way round.” Earlier spiritual frameworks had directed the worshipper outward and upward: towards the cosmic structure of the sefirot, toward the repair of celestial worlds, towards collective redemption. The Besht reversed this by telling Jews to begin with themselves.
Horen describes this as placing “the individual subject at the center of the spiritual work,” identifying it as the Baal Shem Tov’s most historically consequential innovation: “This makes him the first modernist in Judaism.” The Besht created what Horen calls a “pyramid of resonance” – change radiates outward from the inner life of an individual, touching first the immediate community, then the wider world. He taught his disciples to begin with themselves. Prayer, study, and good deeds were not cosmic levers to be pulled but rather expressions of an inner transformation that had first to occur in the soul of the worshipper.
The Besht’s attitude toward the body
Nowhere was this revolution more startling than in the Besht’s attitude toward the body. The generations before him had largely adopted what Horen describes as a “framework of struggle”: the body as obstacle, appetite as enemy, physical sensation as the adversary of spiritual ascent. For the Kabbalists of those times, to become more spiritual meant becoming more extreme – rolling in snow, undertaking lengthy fasts, withdrawing from the world. The yetzer hara, the evil inclination, was identified with the body’s desires, and the war against it was conducted with corresponding severity.
The Baal Shem Tov reversed this approach. “People had to celebrate their bodies in a way that was aware of holiness,” Horen explains. “Holiness isn’t isolation and removal from the world. Holiness suffuses the world – God is in the world.” Eating, dancing, sex: done right, these now became pathways to the divine. Building on the Ari’s teaching that sparks of divine light are embedded in all material things, the Besht concluded that if God is everywhere, then, far from being an obstacle to spiritual ascent, the body itself is a vessel of holiness.
The impact on his followers, as recorded in Hasidic literature and the anthology of the Besht’s commentaries on the Torah, Keter Shem Tov, was profound. Disciples who had previously been locked in spiritual mortification, isolated from their families and communities, now learned that the divine could be found in a melody, a cup of wine, or a Shabbat meal. This led to the creation of the Hasidic movement but also had a major influence beyond the religious world. “The Second Aliyah took this idea and applied it to
the land,” Horen notes, with the secular Zionist pioneers of early twentieth-century Palestine drawing on Hasidic teachings about the holiness of the natural world.
Reframing machshavot zarot
One of the Baal Shem Tov’s most important contributions addressed what Judaism refers to as machshavot zarot – literally “foreign thoughts” – the unwanted, often transgressive mental images that disturb prayer and meditation. Prior to the Besht, these thoughts were understood as external invasions to be repelled by force of will or intensified concentration, reflecting the idea that the thought came from an outside, alien realm.
The Baal Shem Tov reframed this entirely, teaching that these thoughts were not foreign at all but arose from within. The task, therefore, is not repulsion but transformation – “to know how to overcome them,” as Horen puts it. By tracing a disturbed thought back to its source in the soul, the worshipper could perform a genuine tikkun: elevating the fallen spark embedded in the thought rather than just suppressing its surface manifestation.
This insight speaks to the present moment. The Besht’s approach anticipates, in its own idiom, what modern psychology would articulate two centuries later: that what we seek to repress does not disappear but festers, and that genuine transformation requites encounter rather than avoidance. “Once you overcome your problems,” Horen explains, “your prayers will rise higher.”
One sincere intention outweighs a thousand rote ones
The Besht’s reinterpretation of the Ari’s kavvanot followed the same logic. As traditionally practiced, these were intimidatingly complex: intricate mental visualizations of divine names and configurations, requiring years of study to perform correctly and generating intense anxiety among those who feared they lacked the capacity. Many felt obligated to attempt them regardless, with results that Horen describes as spiritually counterproductive.
Instead, the Baal Shem Tov taught that, rather than performing the full Lurianic apparatus, the worshipper should instead take a single verse, a single intention, and explore its connection to their own inner world. “See how things connect to you,” Horen paraphrases the Besht’s teaching. “You don’t need to do it all during every prayer. One verse that speaks to you is far more valuable than doing it all.” The measure of a kavvanah’s effectiveness was no longer its completeness but its authenticity – whether it genuinely
moved the person performing it. For the Besht, a single sincere intention outweighed a thousand rote ones.
Gathering the scattered fragments of your soul
The Baal Shem Tov also addressed the question of Geulah – redemption. The catastrophic failure of the Sabbatean movement earlier in the century had destroyed the expectation of imminent national redemption while intensifying the longing for it. The Besht’s response to this problem was characteristically interior. “He said there were local revolutions,” Horen explains. “When you succeed in saving yourself.” The paradigm was the Exodus from Egypt: every person carries within them their own Mitzrayim, their own personal Egypt – a place where they are unable to grow.
“Everyone needs to escape his own personal Egypt and reach his own promised land,” Horen says. This was not a substitute for national redemption, but its prerequisite, with the broader redemption emerging from the accumulated weight of individual transformations. For the Besht, Kibbutz Galuyot – the ingathering of the exiles – begins with each person gathering the scattered fragments of their own soul. Later, Horen notes, Hasidic thought recognized that not everyone could complete this journey alone, which is why proximity to the rebbe came to function as a vehicle of redemption in its own right: the community gathered around the tzaddik (for example at the Tish) shared in his spiritual elevation.
Light only comes from darkness
In his special Beit Midrash for bereaved parents Horen has applied the Besht’s framework to contemporary suffering. The structure he identifies in Hasidic teaching – moving through acute pain toward a five-stage process culminating in hodaya (gratitude) – parallels what psychologists describe as Post-Traumatic Growth, the phenomenon where some individuals emerge from devastating experiences with one or more of the following elements: greater spiritual power, better relationships, a heightened sense of meaning, greater appreciation of life and new possibilities.
“Out of the sorrow itself comes the redemption,” Horen says. “Light only comes from darkness.” Or, as Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) put it while paraphrasing the Ari: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Horen has observed this dynamic among those returning from captivity after October 7: many describe themselves as spiritually stronger than before, more sensitive to meaning and connection, even as the pain continues. The Baal Shem Tov was himself the survivor of childhood orphanhood and years
of poverty and obscurity, making him deeply sensitive to suffering and its surprising ability to become a source of transformation.
The questions the Baal Shem Tov asked – about the relationship between body and soul, between individual repair and collective redemption, between inner transformations and their outward expressions – remain vital today. “His teachings have always touched me,” Horen concludes. Three centuries on, they continue to touch many others too.
For more, see Dr. Roee Horen’s series on the Baal Shem Tov (in Hebrew).
Main Photo: tomb of the besht By Nahoumsabban\ Wikipedia
