From Tiberias With Love is a journey to rediscovering the magic and mystery, the intimacy and depth of a lost moment in the history of a remarkably relevant conscious community in the Galilee that still has much to teach us. In the year 1777, a group of spiritual seekers from Eastern European set sail in search of a promised land, far away from the internal and external conflicts plaguing those souls seeking the infinite within this finite world. Some who set sail identified with the burgeoning Jewish spiritual renewal movement of hasidism, while others seem to have just come along for the ride. Weathering challenges both socio-economic and geographic, this emigrating group sought to establish a center for a burgeoning hasidic ethos that would radiate to the Diaspora from its renewed center in the Holy Land in Palestine. Tiberian Hasidism provides a model of an intensive contemplative life that is particularly appealing to contemporary spiritual seekers for many reasons, including: its deep focus on mystical theology; devotional practice; and the ecstasy of deep friendship rather than allegiance to an institutionalized religion. This volume focuses on the teachings of letters of love from Vitebsker and Kalisker in Tiberias to their disciples in Eastern Europe known as the Iggrot Qodesh, still so ripe for excavation, offering an authentic roadmap to future contemplative pathways ripe for our age.
Dedicatory Preface: In Memoria: Professor Ada Rappaport-Albert, of Blessed Memory
David Assaf
Acknowledgments
A. Reader’s Guide
Love (Un)interrupted: Imbrications as Interconnectivity in Letters of Love of the Iggrot Qodesh
Aubrey L. Glazer
The Matter of the “Poor Folk” Who Joined the Hasidic Aliyah of 1777
Avraham Avish Shor
The Relationship of Hasidic Masters to the State and the Connection between the Bnei Aliyah to the Holy Land and the Division of Poland
Avraham Avish Shor
Doctrine of the Distant Tzaddiq—Mysticism, Ethics, and Politics
Tsippi Kauffman
The Measure of Truth: Hasidic Questions of Love and Integrity between the Diaspora and the Holy Land
Eli Rubin
Karlin Hasidism in Its Diasporic period: 1786–1801
Avraham Avish Shor
Love from Afar: Visualization in the Letters of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk and Rabbi Avraham Kalisker
Lawrence Fine
Books on Musar and Reverence, and the Ambivalence toward Physical Love: A Letter from Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk to the Holy Community of Beshankovichy
Leore Sachs-Shmueli
Spiritual Affinity: Mystical Friendships in the Galilee. Between Tiberian Hasidism and Galilеan Sufism
Aubrey L. Glazer
Afterword: Ethics and Community at the Heart of Jewish Modernity: The Stakes of Tiberian Hasidism
Yehudah Mirsky
B. Letters of Love
Translators’ Note
Aubrey L. Glazer and Nehemia Polen
Annotated Translations
Aubrey L. Glazer and Nehemia Polen
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