AMONG THE ABILITIES with which the hasidic story credits the tsadik is the power to heal the sick, and to restore to life people presumed to be dead. The enmity between professional non-Jewish physicians and the tsadikim, whom they regarded as no better than witch doctors, is evidenced in many hasidic stories; in the competition between the two, the tsadik is naturally victorious. The attitude to Jewish doctors is more varied: those who have abandoned the Torah way of life are treated with contempt, but those who have found their way back to Torah observance are accorded respect, and particularly if they become adherents of hasidism.

Stories of the healing of both Jews and non-Jews by tsadikim are so numerous that to list them all would require a separate volume. Inherent in each is the belief that the tsadik possesses supernatural power, and that he succeeds where the accredited physicians fail. Ba'alei shem had traditionally dispensed remedies, as did the Ba'al Shem Tov, for whom this was a source of livelihood. Shivḥei habesht relates that in the city of Radvil ‘people began coming to him to seek cures, and so everywhere, until he brought livelihood for his home’.

According to one of these accounts, a person who had lain in sick in his bed for ten years, paralysed and mute, ‘without hands or feet, and without sleep’, was summoned by the Ba'al Shem Tov to complete a minyan. The Ba'al Shem Tov first sent emissaries and gave them his walking stick, but the man did not move, let alone rise from his bed, and they returned with their mission unfulfilled. The Ba'al Shem Tov dispatched them a second time, this time giving them his hat, with orders to place it on the sick man's head and to put his walking stick in his hand. According to the story, the man came to the prayer service, and thereafter lived hale and hearty for a further ten years.

Another story relates that the Ba'al Shem Tov came to a city where two brothers, who were followers of his, lived, and heard that their brother was dying. This brother was a mitnaged, and would not hear of receiving a blessing from the Ba'al Shem Tov.