Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…If it’s correct, I would expect that you would as a reasonable man, but I certainly don’t believe it. The second thing I would say that might give you pause about Hasidism is theurgy which is . . . And this is a deep kabbalistic belief. This is where, if I can go on a mini rant about tikkun olam — and I say this deliberately at Sixth and I — tikkun olam has nothing to do with saving the whales; it doesn’t. Tikkun olam is actually not a synonym for social action even though everybody uses it that way. Tikkun olam . . . [scattered applause] Please, by all means, let the record reflect that there was scattered applause. [laughter] Tikkun olam is a kabbalistic term — that is, a term from Jewish mysticism, in which you do mitzvoth in the world to fix breaks in creation and in God, OK? And that means that you’re doing tikkun olam when you wrap tefillin in the morning just as much as when you give tzedakah, when you give charity; when you keep kosher just as much as when you — I don’t know — when you’re kind to animals. Every mitzvah is tikkun olam. Now, the idea that there are breaks in God that human beings can affect is a beautiful idea, but if you’re a rationalist, it’s a hard idea to absorb. But if I defend Hasidic philosophy and I say there’s something wondrous about the world, a kind of immanence, which maybe other traditions have neglected, and it was a resurgence in Judaism, it was part of the Enlightenment. It happened at a time where Judaic philosophy and life was having a lot of problems. It was highly modern. If I think about a lot of 19th-century or even early 20th-century Jewish writings, that’s arguably the most dynamic tradition, again, at that turning point. And in terms of capturing the beauty of existence in a way that reflects how we moderns would call a subjective perspective on that. Isn’t that the most profound branch of Judaism, or no? OK. Well, you asked me to critique it. You didn’t ask me what was good about it. Now, you’re asking what was good about it. So what I would say, I don’t want to call it the most profound branch of Judaism. I don’t think that you could say, for example, that the Vilna Gaon, who represented the Mitnagdim — those who opposed Hasidism — certainly was not less profound than the Baal Shem Tov. What I would say is that Hasidism, which is a tradition that I deeply love — in some ways my greatest religious hero was a very offbeat, strange Hasidic rebbe called the Kotzker Rebbe — Hasidism, what it did was, at least from the Baal Shem Tov, is it sought, yes, to restore the sense of God’s immanence in the world, the sense of joy in connecting to God and to other people. It expanded the expressions of religious ecstasy in dance and song and also, very powerfully and importantly, in religious stories, Hasidic stories, especially the stories of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, the most famous example but not the only example by far. Hasidic stories are an immeasurable contribution to the world treasury of spirit. So all those things absolutely are true.…

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