The first book I read in 2024 was A Director Prepares (2001) by the legendary theater director Anne Bogart. In one of the essays, she explores what she terms the “violence” inseparable from directing, explaining that to stage something a specific way inherently destroys all other staging possibilities. It creates a set form, and excises every other option. Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about how apt a metaphor that was for the liberal Jewish world’s view of the obligatory nature of halakha (“Jewish obligatory practice”): we brush off its yoke, and dismiss it as a “violent” attack on our free choice. What could be meaningful about something that limits what we can do?

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But Bogart argues that it is precisely through these prescribed forms that the actors are set free. “The actor must find new, deeper spontaneity within this set form…[they must] bring… skill and imagination to the art of repetition… Paradoxically,” she writes, “it is the restrictions, the precision, the exactitude, that allows for the possibility of freedom. The form becomes a container in which the actor can find endless variations and interpretative forms.” [1]

Strangely, a similar point was made in the final book I read in 2024 as well. 

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In Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (2024), scholar Ariel Evan Mayse argues that two centuries prior and thousands of miles from Bogart, Hasidism had preached the same paradoxical message of “freedom through set forms.” For them, the forms were clear: halakhah, the Jewish path of walking through the world.

As soon as I sat down with this book, I knew it would be a lifelong resource. Although quite academic in style [2], the information it contains is a goldmine of sources on how to use one’s body as a spiritual tool to serve the Divine. In fact, Mayse himself said that he wrote this book to “remind scholars of religion that bodies matter.” [3] After all, it is through the body’s performance of mitzvot that Jewish religiosity is lived.

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As a neo-Hasidic seeker, I have always felt a bit unmoored in regards to praxis. Our movement has been one replete with ideas but lacking in practical guides. Neo-hasidism is a post-denominational movement that has adherents across the spectrum of religious observance, so the exact “how”s of our path are not often clear. But in the pages of Laws of the Spirit I have one potential path forward: playing in the sandbox of traditional halakhic observance with a renewed spiritual attentiveness.

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From a liberal vantage point that often sees strictures on our free choice to be “violent,” this traditionalist-and-yet-radical spirituality is often incomprehensible. Non-orthodox neo-Hasidism today, Mayse explains, prefers to see “in [Hasidism’s early] teachings a spontaneous, vibrant spirituality that privileges connection with God and joy above allegiance to Jewish law.” [4] But Mayse argues that this was not the case for the early rebbes. The Hasidim were, according to him, deeply invested in the halakhic system.

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He goes further to argue that most academic scholars have misunderstood this component of Hasidism. [5] For example, despite disagreeing on every other component of the movement, both Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem— famed 20th century scholars — agreed that Hasidism represented the emergence of an anarchic turn away from Jewish law. Much scholarship and neo-hasidic writing since then has taken their claim as true. Mayse swims against that current and argues — based on a remarkable swath of sources— that “the revolutionary spirit of Hasidism took flight within the structure of traditional Jewish practice.” [6] The early Hasidim did not reimagine the forms, but instead reconceived the purpose of the forms. 

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This is because for the Hasidim, the sole purpose of doing mitzvot was to reach the state of devekus, a mystical closeness with the Divine. In fact, an oft-quoted hasidic dictum homiletically argued that mitzvah (often translated as “commandment”) is derived not from the Hebrew “to command” (which is its actual etymological root), but rather from the Aramaic “to connect.” The Maggid of Mezeritch (1704-1772) even taught that mitzvot are “physical methods of binding the worshipper’s mind and body to God.” [7] 

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Thus, the central point of religious ritual is to connect to the Divine. Anything less, such as rote worship (which was previously understood as beneficiary, although not ideal), comes to be seen by the early Hasidim as a form of idol worship. [8] This is to say that the hasidic revolution didn’t consist of creating new practices, but rather in reinvigorating ancestral traditions. To this end, Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir (d. 1798) taught that it was a commandment itself to create new meaning for an inherited religious ritual. [9] It was this very dynamic that Bogart would later describe as a “deeper spontaneity within this set form.”

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So what does this all mean for us as seekers today? Well, perhaps halakhah is an area in which liberal neo-Hasidism should invest more energy! Perhaps, we are forgetting that spiritual discipline should be just that: a discipline! Perhaps we are too willing to let what feels good or what we deem aesthetically “spiritual” dictate our practices. As Reb Menahum Nahum of Chernobyl (1730 - 1798) says, actions only earn the title of “Divine service” through toil. [10] 

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To this end, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (d. 2014)— neo-Hasidic pioneer and founder of the largely non-halakhic Jewish Renewal movement— wrote that “when everything becomes relative and negotiable, then we can’t really talk about Torah or halachah anymore.” [11] He went even further, insisting that he did not “defy so much convention” in his shift away from orthodoxy, only “to give permission to people to do things carelessly.” [12] In his insistence that his students take halakhah seriously in their spiritual decision making, Reb Zalman is reiterating a revolution-within-tradition sentiment that is rooted in the early Hasidic emphasis on halakhah that we learn from Laws of the Spirit.

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This is not to say that everyone should become orthodox— I am not orthodox and I’m not personally interested in being orthodox. While I live a largely halakhic life, there are many mitzvot and customs that I don’t follow. But despite my spiritual aspirations, I also live a real, imperfect life; most of my blessings before eating are rushed and my focus during prayer leaves what to be desired. Although I try to find the Divine in these rituals, sometimes I wonder if any of this is really actually worth it. 

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Laws of the Spirit reinvigorates my best aspirations. Mayse’s research has made clear that the hasidim lived a halakhic life not as a default — just because that’s “what we do” — but as a conscious choice, motivated by a belief that it is a spiritual path that will connect the seeker to the Divine. 

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If I took it more seriously, maybe I, too, would feel God in my life more.