Digging the Well Deep: The Jewish “Ultra-Orthodox” Relationship with the Divine Explored through the Lifeworld of the Breslov Chasidic Community in Safed

Abstract

The Jewish Charedi (“ultra-orthodox”) community is an example of a contemporary social group whose lifeworld is dictated almost entirely by the tenets of its religious beliefs. This thesis seeks to illuminate the physical, psychological, social and metaphysical structures of that Charedi world, using the Breslov Chasidic community in the town of Safed, northern Israel, as its ethnographic anchor. Following an introductory theoretical background to Judaism, Kabbalah, the Chasidic movement, and the Breslov group, a descriptive account is given of the Breslov lifeworld across many of its facets, including demographics, dress, prayer and study practices, the venerated position of the head Rabbi of the community, various religious practices, connection to and meditation in nature, attitudes towards non-Jews, pilgrimage, and the use of psychoactive drugs. This ethnographic material forms the basis for subsequent deeper analyses. The Charedi aspiration towards “zero degrees of freedom”, in terms of that society’s extreme application of the myriad prescriptions and proscriptions of Halakhic Law, is discussed, as well as Charedi society’s emphasis on constituting its own identity through what it is not; namely the “goyim” (non-Jews) and non-religious Jews. The parallels between Judaism and the anthropological category of shamanism are considered, with the argument made that much of the Jewish tradition is essentially shamanic, yet that this aspect of the religion has been relegated to a relatively minor position in the contemporary Jewish religious (including Charedi) milieu. A functional analysis is then given regarding certain Jewish practices, demonstrating that Judaism contains within it sophisticated mechanisms, acting in affective, cognitive and social domains, to ensure replication of the religion—and specifically its core “template”, the Torah—from generation to generation. This analysis is followed by an exploration of the phenomenology of the religious experience and the Torah lifeworld, seeking to penetrate and document the experience of “being Breslov”. The final chapter ties all of the previous material together, presenting several psychoanalytic perspectives on the Charedi phenomenon.