THE POPULAR VERSION of the Ba’al Shem Tov's ‘Sacred Epistle’ (‘Igeret hakodesh’) includes the famous passage in which, entering the heavenly palace of the messiah during a mystical ascent of the soul, the Ba’al Shem Tov asks, ‘When will you come?’ The answer given is, ‘At the time when your teaching is … revealed in the world, and your wellsprings gush outwards … and [others] too are able to make [mystical] unifications [yiḥudim] and [mystical] ascents [aliyot] like you.’ The text continues: ‘I was shocked at this; I was very upset that the time until this could be was so long.’

The passage in the manuscript version published by Yehoshua Mondshine, which Immanuel Etkes accepts as authentic in his important book on the Ba’al Shem Tov, is more or less the same. By contrast, in the manuscript version published by David Frankel and discussed by Mordechai Bauminger, the messiah’s reply is much shorter: ‘Once your Torah will have spread through the whole world, etc.’ The idea remains that the coming of the messiah depends on the spread of the Ba’al Shem Tov's teachings, but the crucial phrase ‘gush outwards’ is missing.

It is this phrase—present in all the other versions of the letter—that became the key element of the process discussed here. There has been much scholarly debate concerning the different versions of the letter, raising such questions as what the Ba’al Shem Tov's exchange with the messiah might tell us about the Ba’al Shem Tov himself, how it might have been understood by the early hasidic followers, and how it related to the much-discussed issue of messianism in hasidism. However, my focus is on how a few words from this eighteenth-century text gradually became a central motto for followers of the Habad-Lubavitch school in the twentieth century, generating a major change in the direction of the movement.