addik, or superior human being, superior because he had the special capacity to adhere to God. The zaddik was not a messiah in this view but also not quite an ordinary human being. He was thus a new kind of religious personality, one who could perpetuate and spread the movement. Second, the Besht invented a form of popular prayer which enabled ordinary, humble Jews to contribute. The Bal Shem Tov achieved a level of popular participation by means of the new theory of prayer taught by him and his successors, stressing that prayer was not so much a human activity as a supernatural act in which the human being breaks down the barriers to his natural existence and reaches into the divine world. This is accomplished by taking the prayer book and concentrating the mind entirely on the letters:
He does not read, he wills. As he does so, their actual shapes dissolve and--this is a typical kabbalistic idea--the divine attributes concealed in the letters become spiritually visible. It is like seeing through a transparent object . . . The Besht taught that, in order to enter in, the man has to annihilate his personality and become nothing. He thus creates a vacuum, which is filled up by a sort of supernal being, who acts and speaks for him (Johnson 297).
Bal Shem Tov left no writings, and what we know of him we know from his disciples. Most of this has been preserved in the form of allegories and parables. When Bal Shem Tov died in 1760, he had some 100,000 followers, and at this point, Hasidism may have included half the Jews in Eastern Europe. Dov Ber, his disciple, spread the hasidic gospel throughout Europe. However, fierce opposition to the movement developed and within a century, Hasidism had lost its force, though not so much because of attacks upon it as because of its own internal weakness:
New religions, like revolutions, must be quickly institutionalized, because they contain the seeds for their own destruction. H...