168 M o s h e I d e l
Instrumental and Talismanic Uses of Torah in
Later Jewish Mysticism
Th e notions that the Torah is a name of God and thus in some senses an
icon of divine presence has far-reaching consequences in later Jewish mys-
ticism, especially in Hasidism in eastern Europe. Th e Hasidic movement
arose in the eighteenth century in what is today Poland and the Ukraine,
spreading to most of eastern Europe; with the destruction of European
Jewry in the Holocaust, Hasidism is now centered in Israel and parts of the
United States (especially in New York). Hasidic theory and practice raise
crucial issues pertaining to the concept of scripture — that is, to the basic
question of what scripture is and what it does. Th ese include the question
of how a Jew uses Torah to access God, how a Jew accesses Torah itself, the
extent to which it is important for a person to understand the Torah used
to access God, what we may refer to as phonic talismanics (the idea that the
very sounds of Torah are carriers of a divine power which human beings
can utilize to aff ect God or the world), and thus fi nally the question of the
relationship between scripture and magic. In these Hasidic texts, we see a
transcendence of meaning (both of the plain sense and the esoteric one) in
favor of oral performance, which eff ects the restitution of the primacy of
spoken language.27 Th ese sources insist that scripture, or the Written To-
rah, is in essence an oral phenomenon and that only in its oral state does it
fully function in the manner ontologically unique to scripture.28
Let me start with a short survey of topics that are related to the prac-
tice of reading the Torah in early Hasidism. Th e founder of Hasidism, Is-
rael Baal Shem Tov (c. 1698 – 1760), also known as “the Besht,” has been
reported by his grandson, R. Moshe Hayyim Ephrayyim of Sudylkov, as
holding the following view:
How is it possible to take the Holy One, may He be blessed, so that He
will dwell upon man? It is by the means of the Torah, which is indeed the
names of God, since He and His name are one unity, and when someone
studies the Torah for the sake of God and in order to keep His command-
ments and abstains from what is prohibited, and he pronounces the letters
of the Torah, which are the names of God. By these [activities] he genu-
inely takes God, and it is as if the Divine Presence dwells upon him as it is
written [Exodus 20.21]: “in all places where I pronounce the name of God”
(which is the holy Torah, which is in its entirety His names), then “I will
come to you and I bless you.” 29