This English edition of Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer's classic work Haḥasidut Kemistika contains some completely new material as well as supplements to the original text, and is bound to be of interest not only to scholars of Hasidism but to every student of religious thought in general. With the great erudition for which the distinguished author was renowned (alas, she died soon after the book was published), she provides a fresh understanding of what the early Hasidic thinkers were trying to achieve or better-since, as she shows, their emphasis was on quietism-were trying not to achieve. This study, employing the tools of both phenomenology and comparative religion, exposes the one-sidedness of those scholars and popular writers who dwell on the activist and social elements in Hasidic life and thought to the virtual exclusion of the mystical and quietistic elements by which the masters themselves, at least in the school of the Maggid of Mesirech, set great store.

Quietism is that attitude in religious thought in which the worshipper sees himself as a passive instrument in the hands of God. The Hasidim, as Orthodox Jews, could not and did not ignore the active life represented by the performance of the precepts. Judaism has rightly been defined as the religion of doing the will of God. For all that, considerable tension can be observed in early Hasidic writings between the need to be up and doing for the sake of God and the equally compulsive need to sit back and let God take over, so to speak. For instance, to recite the prayers three times a day was as much an obligation for the Hasidim as it was for all Jews, but since the majority of the standard prayers are petitionary, the very act of praying tended to frustrate the Hasidic ideal of bitul hayesh, ‘annihilation of selfhood'-the losing of the self in God. The usual response was that the true Hasid should pray for his needs to be satisfied for the sake of the Shekhinah (divine presence), in which there is a lack whenever humans are in distress. The more subtle thinkers were aware of the danger of self-delusion; the Hasid could easily imagine that he was praying for the Shekhinah's lack to be satisfied when indirectly he was really calling attention to his own needs.