The Project of Hasidism and the Possibility of Prophecy

Rabbi Steven Gotlib

Dec 25, 2025

The Project of Hasidism (Kodesh Press, 2025) is R. Bezalel Naor’s latest gift to the Jewish people. Naor is best-known for his work on Rav Kook so it should come as no surprise that his interpretation of the subject matter is inspired by Kook with an emphasis on somewhat controversially demonstrating that “at the heart of Hasidism was the aspiration to recapture the lost art of prophecy.”

Of particular interest to me was Naor’s assertion that the Vilna Gaon’s oft-cited antagonism towards Hasidism itself may have stemmed from that idea:

We are not privy to secrets, certainly not to the roots of souls. However, it is plausible that this apprehension of danger was foremost in the mind of the Vilna Gaon. This is to say that he feared that the People of Israel was not prepared for the way of prophecy, a way not circumscribed by the borders of Torah. He might have viewed the way of prophecy as precisely “fraught with danger.” The intellectual give-and-take of the Halakhah is assured. Imagination, with its outward manifestations — song and dance, storytelling and romance — is a minefield ready to explode.

Is such fear justified? Certainly, some Hasidic sects push boundaries in this direction. Naor notes, for example, that “[m]any find unsettling the notion of Rabbi Mordecai Yosef Leiner of Izbica (author of Mei ha-Shiloah) that there exists a will of the Lord outside the Torah of the Lord, and that, at times, man is called upon to temporarily depart from the bounds of Halakhah in order to serve the Lord in truth.” He demonstrates, however, that the Ishbitzer was himself preceded by Rabbi Nissim of Girona (the Ran) who himself was expanding the work of Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (the Ramban).

The Ran, Naor argues, assumed that “if society were circumscribed only by Torah law, eventually it would self-implode. Therefore Israelite society is in need of an additional legal system, i.e., the Law of the Kingdom.” This is because, quoting the Ran directly, “[i]t is possible that there is found in some of the laws of nations that which comes closer to the perfection of societal order, than that which is found in some of the laws of the Torah.” This, Naor further argues, finds precedent within the Nahmanidean approach:

There is a specific scoundrel who knows how to manipulate the laws of the Torah to his own selfish advantage. Nahmanides believed that to counteract just such hypocrisy, the Torah dispensed an all-encompassing commandment, “Be Holy” (Leviticus 19:2). In this manner, the Holy One, blessed be He, practiced preventive medicine, so to speak, heading off the “malady of the Pharisees.”

It stands to reason that just as there is an individual scoundrel within the domain of the Torah, so there is a collective scoundrel within the domain of the Torah. But to shield from this disaster, a single commandment of the Torah will not suffice — even if it be as all-encompassing as “Be holy.” What is required is an entire legal system outside of Torah law.

Of course, Naor is quick to emphasize that this does not mean to permit all that is forbidden:

Why do I see in Rabbenu Nissim’s Derashot a precedent for the perspective of Izbica? Here there was established an entire system to supplement, as it were, the system of the Torah. The court and the prophet serve other purposes as well. They were not purposed exclusively as a “supplement” to the laws of the Torah… Only in exigency might a court be forced to go beyond the pale of Torah law. This goes as well for the prophet. His functions include rebuking the people and predicting future events. Once again, only in extraordinary circumstances, will a prophet call for countermanding the laws of the Torah on a temporary basis.

Nonetheless, however, the ability to go beyond the Torah was itself built into the system and perhaps picked up on by the Hasidic movement. Though Naor also informs his readers that even the most commonly-known Hasidic violations such as davening after zman was not universally accepted. Ironically given contemporary Chabad practice, when Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Tzemach Tzedek, was informed of the practice he called it “a pre-Sinaitic service.” In a footnote, Naor explains that “[t]his is an interesting comment on the part of the Tzemah Tzedek, for this was precisely the point made by Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin when inveighing against Hasidic “malpractice.””

In addition to the above-quoted articles (both of which are included in the volume in their original Hebrew as well as English) several additional articles by Naor find their way into the book. The concluding piece is Naor’s review of Contemporary Uses and Forms of Hasidut (reviewed by me here).

Commenting on the tension between the neo-hasidut of Rav Shagar and what I might frame as the “neo-hitnagdut” of Rav Lichtenstein, Naor sheds light on one of history’s most fascinating what-ifs. Shagar, Naor writes, could be described as “a Litvak’s worst nightmare” and evidently many students at Lichtenstein’s Yeshivat Har Etzion “were dissatisfied with the traditional diet of the yeshivah, [and] were taken by the siren song of Shagar, who dispensed a post-modernist presentation of Hasidic thought.” Naor then writes that

The thought occurs to this writer that the confrontation of Shagar and Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein in the Gush, might have taken place a generation earlier, had Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel become faculty at Yeshiva University. (There exists documentation to substantiate the negotiations between Heschel and Yeshiva University.) Within the halls of Yeshiva University there would have held forth the Rav and the Rebbe; the scion of the Beit Harav mi-Volozhin and the descendent of the Apter Rob (his namesake, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel), author of ‘Ohev Yisrael; Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, author of Kedushat Levi; the royal house of Ruzhin; and the Rebbe of Novominsk. A generation earlier, the encounter of the Man of Halakhah and the Man of Aggadah might have produced marvelous cross-pollination.

Returning to the collection’s theme, Naor points out how such cross-pollination would have been particularly relevant to precisely the idea of prophecy. At one of the yahrzeit shiurim for his father (which Heschel was known to attend), Soloveitchik said as follows:

I always had difficulty in regard to the role of the prophets of Israel. On one hand, we rule that a prophet may not innovate to add or subtract even a jot; on the other hand, the word of the Lord required prophets, and their prophecy was written down for generations. What is the purpose of their prophecy inasmuch as they were unable to innovate any matter of Halakhah? Certainly, they rebuked Israel, and rebuke was one of the purposes for which our prophets were sent. However, I still have difficulty saying that in their prophecy they told Israel nothing in the Halakhic sense.

But now all is crystal clear. There is an entire Torah in the books of the Prophets—the Torah of the ways of the Lord, the Torah of the epithets that obligates man in imitating his Creator. … Tout court, prophecy came to teach man how to participate in the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, and to attain His epithets.

For Soloveitchik, in other words, prophecy was meant to inspire a state of imitatio dei. Heschel, on the other hand, wrote differently in The Prophets:

Prophetic sympathy is by no means identical with the imitation of God, which in the broadest sense is also a biblical motif (cf. Lev. 19:2). The difference is the more significant because the resemblance, too, is obvious. Imitatio, the pattern of which is a concrete life-history, is realized as a practical way of life. Sympathy, whose object is an inner spiritual reality, is a disposition of the soul. The prototype of imitatio is an unchanging model; a constant traditional knowledge of it indicates a ready path to be followed. Pathos, on the other hand, is ever changing, according to the circumstances of the given situation. The content of sympathy is not fixed by any predetermination. What is abiding in it, is simply the orientation toward the living reality of God.

Imitatio is concerned with a past, sympathy with a present, occurrence. Imitatio is remote from history; what is at stake in sympathy is an actual historical situation.

…

The goal of sympathy is not to become like unto God, but to become effective as a prophet through approximation to the pathos of God. In sympathy, divine pathos is actually experienced in the moment of crisis; in imitatio, the fixed pattern is transmitted. In the former case, an assimilation or creative understanding is necessary; in the latter, mere knowledge is sometimes sufficient.

In imitatio, the whole being of the deity is often taken as the pattern; in sympathy, only its aspect as pathos is taken as the pattern.

Naor correctly notes in this “exchange” that

Where the Rav, the Ish ha-Halakhah (based on Maimonides, of course) “worked overtime” to glean the halakhic takeaway of the entire prophetic enterprise, and arrived finally at the notion of imitatio Dei (“ve-halakhta bi-derakhav”), the Rebbe, the Ish ha-Aggadah, dismissed imitatio Dei. While the Man of Halakhah sought the dimension of “prophecy needed for generations” (“nevu’ah she-hutzrekhah le-dorot,” b. Megillah 14a), the Man of Aggadah searched for precisely the “teaching of the hour” (hora’at sha‘ah).

In other words, Soloveitchik sought to teach the lessons of prophecy while Heschel sought to bring prophecy into the present. Naor concludes the review by noting that “when a meeting was arranged between Rabbis Heschel and Soloveitchik in the 1960s to map out a strategy for confronting the Vatican, at their initial encounter, these two Jewish leaders (whose parallel paths traversed Warsaw, Berlin and New York) focused on Yiddish literature. Perhaps the time has come for the denizens of the worlds of Halakhah and Aggadah to discuss—Prophecy.”

Today, neo-Hasidism is exploding across the contemporary Jewish world (having related but distinct embodiments both inside and outside of Orthodoxy). In both forms, however, it is a superficial appreciation in most cases that does not actually resemble Hasidism as lived by its most devout practitioners in this or any prior age.

Is the modern Jewish world ready to truly embrace Hasidism, and the possibility of prophecy that Naor argues comes with it? Likely not, but the thought is fascinating.

Originally published: https://rabbistevengotlib.substack.com/p/the-project-of-hasidism-and-the-possibility