Q&A: Kabbalah and Hasidism
Kabbalah and Hasidism
Question
I argued with a friend about a statement by Rabbi Nachman. I claimed that it has no content whatsoever, and I proved it. The answer I got was the classic response: "There are probably kabbalistic and Hasidic things in it that we don’t understand." I wanted to ask whether, in the Rabbi’s opinion, that answer is acceptable, and if not, what do you think one can answer.
Answer
It’s possible that there is, but how does that help me? If I don’t understand it, then as far as I’m concerned the text is worthless. And if he doesn’t understand it, then as far as he’s concerned it’s worthless too.
Beyond that, the question is: how does he know that there really is something like that there? About any random and arbitrary text, one can say that it contains sublime content. That’s what people say about postmodern art and postmodern texts. See my series of columns 178–184.
Discussion on Answer
If, from your familiarity with Rabbi Nachman’s writings, you know that he isn’t just a babbling nonsense-spewer, and if other unclear passages can be explained by learning some sort of introduction (Kabbalah) that you were missing, then it is very reasonable that he didn’t simply utter a contentless sentence.
As for Derrida and his friends—sometimes smart people need to admit that they do not encompass all the wisdom in the world, and it is possible that there is some field of knowledge or style of thought that they are far from being able to grasp despite their brilliance. Maybe there is no standardization of wisdom, and it may be that one wise person does not understand the language of his fellow.
See this following quote from Noam Chomsky:
"Since no one has been able to show me what I’m missing, we are left with the second possibility: I’m simply incapable of understanding. I am certainly willing to assume that this may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious for reasons that seem good to me. There are many things I do not understand—for example, the latest debates over whether the neutrino has mass, or the way in which Fermat’s Last Theorem was apparently recently proved. But from 50 years in this game I have learned two things: 1) I can ask friends who work in these fields to explain it to me at a level I can understand, and they can do it, without any special difficulty; 2) if I want, I can go on and learn more, so that I can understand. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, and the like—even Foucault, whom I knew and liked and who was a bit different from the others—write things that I do not understand, but (1) and (2) do not hold: no one who says he understands [what they say] can explain it to me, and I have no idea how to proceed in overcoming my failures. That leaves two possibilities: a) some new development has been achieved in intellectual life, perhaps by a sudden genetic mutation, creating a kind of ‘theory’ that is beyond quantum theory, topology, and the like; or b) well, I won’t call a child by its name