This book will be essential for anyone interested in Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, and the dynamics of the Hasidic movement, which began in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. It also tells great stories about twentieth-century Jewish figures including Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Etty Hillesum, and Arthur Green.
Living in the Presence is about teachers, questing, reverence, justice, and peace. It is difficult not to catch the zeal the author brings to his pursuit of understanding and personal meaning.
This is accomplished in the course of discovering the historical Baal Shem Tov, who was born Israel ben Eliezer, also sometimes called the Besht. In the introduction, Jewish Renewal Rabbi Jacobson explains the meaning of “Besht,” as well as how he came to spend decades writing this book: “It took a number of years, but eventually the BeSHT (an acronym for Ba’al SHem Tov) became my own religious model and rebbe, and since that time I’ve been ardently devoted to the study of his life and thought…. In studying what his disciples and the stories and traditions stated about the Baal Shem, I have been drawn to what his teachings reveal about his personality, his psychospiritual development, his mystical experience and thought, and the ways that he effected the transformation of Polish Jewry.”
Jacobson is honest about his own spiritual journey, too, which is woven throughout his quest of the real Baal Shem Tov.
Susannah Heschel, the only child of Abraham Joshua Heschel, writes the book’s foreword, offering that Jacobson was Heschel’s student at Jewish Theological Seminary, and is now carrying on her father’s work: “Burt has striven his entire life to hand over the legacy of Hasidism and of my father to generations to come. Let us listen to his voice in the pages of this book so that we may be enriched by our Hasidic inheritance and offer that heritage as a great fire of passionate devotion to God, to one another, to our fragile earth to generations to come.”
There are also many parallels in this 600+ pages work of the Baal Shem Tov to “wounded healers” throughout history, to other famous Jews including Moses and Jesus of Nazareth, and even to the Buddha.
Most essential are the ways Jacobson turns frequently to spiritual practice. He does not deal in dull details. Here’s one example of many when he discusses the Baal Shem’s essential teaching about the Exodus of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt:
“For the Besht, every individual carries within their depths all the major protagonists of the Exodus…. Each of us must choose whether to identify with the narrow repressiveness of Mitzrayim and the Pharaoh, or with the liberatory aspects of Moses and Aaron, which can free us from Mitzrayim. When individuals identify with Mitzrayim, they are dominated by their inner Pharaoh, the yetzer ha’rah, the psychological predisposition to make the fulfillment of egocentric desires the center of their lives. If, however, they choose to undertake the inward path of Moses and Aaron, they will move toward freeing themselves from bondage to their inner and outer Pharaohs. According to the Besht, we have the capability of attaining redemption from the yetzer ha’rahhere and now, even before the collective redemption of the messianic era. But to become free and whole, we must come to understand what it is that’s actually enslaving us.”
An appendix of thirty-five pages gathers and explains in detail dozens of spiritual practices inspired by the Baal Shem Tov. (See the excerpt accompanying this review for a sample.)
