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| [Back of the Wagon | Matisyahu | Afiko.man | Alex Clare | TYH Nation - YouTube]. |
Introduction
This article—based extensively on the research by Dr Leore Sachs-Shmueli[1]—challenges the common assertion that the Baal Shem Tov’s innovative path was primarily one of experiential and joyful spiritual surrender. Instead, it reveals a far more complex and unnerving spiritual trajectory: one that first plunges deliberately into raw fear, negativity, and darkness in order to extract sparks of holiness from the husks of evil. Only then can the state of ecstatic joy be authentically reached.
One of the most beautiful and catchy hit songs in contemporary Jewish music must be the “Back of the Wagon of the Baal Shem Tov.” It is symbolic of radical trust and letting go, no matter where the storm takes you, as long as you’re in the back of the wagon of the Baal Shem Tov. Here, one rides with spiritual abandon, music, and a bottle of wine, into the Infinite Light:
“Where we headed? It doesn’t matter as long as I’m in the back of the wagon with the Besht (Baal Shem Tov)” (Opening lyrics of the song).
The reality of the Baal Shem’s teachings, however, as they are distilled in the first Chassidic book ever published—Toledot Yakov Yosef, by R. Yakov Yosef of Polonnoye (1780)—reveal a very different picture. Instead of rolling on through the Light, one plunges headfirst into the Darkness to retrieve fallen sparks from the abyss. In these writings, paradoxically, the descent into negativity and brokenness becomes the path to ascent. Fear, trembling, grief, and sin are not obstacles to joy; they are its prerequisites as joy is born from them.
Remarkably, in the original Beshtian[2] teachings, the 'wagon' does not float nonchalantly above suffering—it breaks upon it. Joy, if it exists, is hard-earned and forged through emotional descent into fear, grief, impurity, and trembling. These emotions become spiritual tools and ladders of ascent. The Baal Shem Tov’s wagon, then, is not a vehicle of comfort—it’s a crucible of brokenness, where the redemption of spiritual sparks demands confronting—not escaping—the husks of evil.
Toledot Yakov Yosef as a
test case
Sachs-Shmueli’s research is unusual and groundbreaking in that, besides close readings of the text of Toledot Yakov Yosef, it is supported by technology and distant reading. Close reading is the classical, slow and immersive human study of a text. Distant reading involves computers and statistical tools that analyse and compare large bodies of text and identify patterns and frequencies of words that humans may have missed.
The Baal Shem Tov did not leave any writings, besides one personal letter (or, according to Moshe Rosman (2014:97-126),[3] three other letters included in the hagiographical work, Shivchei haBesht—and, according to Chabad, some letters recorded in the Kherson Genizah). Due to the scarcity of the Baal Shem Tov’s original writings, Toledot Yaakov Yosef was selected for linguistic analysis. As the first published Chassidic work, it holds particular significance, containing numerous teachings attributed to the Baal Shem Tov by his disciple, R. Yaakov Yosef.
The findings
Until recently, most studies on Chassidism—including both academic and traditional scholarship— understand the Baal Shem Tov’s innovation to primarily be his rejection of asceticism, guilt, and self-mortification. In their place, he substituted unrivalled joy and experientialism through substances and song. However, through close and distant readings of the first collections of his teachings recorded in Toledot Yakov Yosef, a more serious, if not ominous, picture emerges. Sachs-Shmueli quantitatively demonstrates that joy does not simply come after negativity, but emotional descent into darkness is an essential spiritual mechanism for the ascent of joy. Joy is not merely the endpoint of spiritual experience but the outcome of a deliberate engagement with moral and emotional negativity—fear, grief, and impurity—used as catalysts for transformation. In Toledot Yakov Yosef:
“[T]raditions in the name of the Besht present…a prominent negative emotional bundle of fear, awe, and trembling as a necessary step towards correcting and uplifting sin and the evil reality” (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:3).
In other words, using digital distant reading, Sachs-Shmueli shows that joy doesn’t simply bypass brokenness (as previously and commonly thought), but is based upon direct confrontation and engagement with it.
The research methodology
Close readings of texts do not always pick up dominant vocabularies and therefore may miss core ideas, concepts and basic messages. Distant readings allow for a quantitative analysis of the frequency of recurring words and themes:
“[D]istant reading employs statistical computational tools, thus enabling an analysis of large scopes of text and producing indications of classifications and quantifications of textual patterns” (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:4).
This is a pioneering research project because it adopts distant reading in a way not used before in relation to Chassidic and Kabbalistic studies. Sachs-Shmueli divides R. Yakov Yosef’s writings in his Toledot Yakov Yosef (1780), Ben Porat Yosef (1781) and Tzafnat Paneach (1782), into two distinct categories. One comprises quotations and teachings R. Yakov Yosef attributes directly to his teacher—the other comprises his own writings.
It emerges that the two categories have very dissimilar word patterns. In the first section, which contained the “hundreds of teachings attributed to the Besht” (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:7), and is “the richest and most numerous repository of the teachings of the Besht” (Moseson 2015:152),[4] the results showed:
“a significant focus on negativity—moral, emotional, and conditional—as well as verbs that offer followers guidance regarding how to overcome these negative aspects of the human experience” (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:3).
This frequency of negativity was lacking in the second section of R. Yakov Yosef’s own writing. These findings:
“at once verify some previous scholarly arguments, reinforcing them on a quantitative level, and reveal new patterns in the data that cannot be easily dismissed, calling for us to reconsider some misconceptions” (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:5).
These misconceptions, of course, are that the Baal Shem Tov simply taught a path of joy, dismissal of asceticism and the preoccupation with sin, and encouraging the positive evaluation of materiality as essential pathways for divine worship. Previous scholarship has ignored, or perhaps been ignorant of, the Baal Shem Tov’s focus on theological and moral struggle coupled with existential challenge. Across these categories of writings, there is a recurring theme of sin, grief, impurity, fear and evil, indicating that these existentially adverse states were not dismissed in favour of joy. Rather, these spiritually fraught conditions were returned to, confronted, emphasised, engaged and dealt with as necessary catalysts for spiritual elevation.
Some reservations
Sachs-Shmueli’s research is only the beginning of a lengthy and fascinating process of refining our understanding of the enigmatic figure of the Baal Shem Tov as we try to extract him from the haze of popular mythology and hagiography. It must also be remembered that:
“each student has a different teacher, that is, the Beshṭ differs in the writings of each of his students. This premise requires that we analyze the imprint of each student on the traditions he cites in the name of his teacher” (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:7).
We have just dealt here with the image of the Baal Shem Tov as recorded in the writings of one student, R. Yakov Yosef. There were many others. This means that the process has to be repeated by analysing similar data over the entire range of students. The two main sources, however, remain the writings of R. Yakov Yosef as well as the Baal Shem Tov’s grandson, R. Moshe Chaim Efraim of Sedlykov, in his Degel Machanei Efraim.
But there is another factor too. Not only would there be some discrepancies in the writings of the students, but there would be inconsistencies—over time—in the writings of the Baal Shem Tov himself. This is because he sometimes changed his mind. According to Moshe Idel (2020:63-70),[5] the Baal Shem Tov initially taught that there was a mystical-theurgic (magical) energy in “liturgical-vocal utterances.” This means that at first, he focused on the spoken word during prayer because ritual language carried spirituality. However, he later adopted a different approach as his teachings moved more toward intellectual ideas and inner thought, connecting with the divine within each person, and no longer on the external structures of liturgical words. Thus, he shifted from outer ritual to internal and introspective spirituality. Interestingly, the teachings recorded by R. Yaakov Yosef represent the early stratum of Beshtian thought, grounded in vocal ritual and theurgical practice—mystical acts intended to evoke divine connection, spiritual experience, or supernatural influence.
Notwithstanding these reservations, the findings of Sachs-Shmueli's research remain compelling.
Some of the numbers
As mentioned, one of the striking differences between the section dealing with recorded traditions from the Baal Shem Tov and R. Yakov Yosef’s own writings is what Sachs-Shmueli (2024:16) refers to as the “cluster of negativity.” This “cluster” includes an abundance of negative words like evil, sin, fear, blemish and suffering.
The following graph indicates the word scores. The values in blue represent the frequency of words in the recorded teaching of the Baal Shem Tov. The values in orange represent R. Yakov Yosef’s own writing:
“that Jacob Joseph understood his teacher, the Beshṭ, as guiding his people to cope with distress and grief: an existential condition inviting a religious rectification; he suggested ways to overcome their evil inclination and redeem the sparks captured in the husks because of human’s sins; temper harsh judgments; and elevate alien thoughts. Thus, we can conclude that a major role of the Beshṭ as a master was to guide his followers in their complex mental-religious experience of cleaving to the divine, although this was entangled with misery and sin” (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:20-21).
A close reading
We conclude with a close reading of one of these texts brought by R. Yakov Yosef in his Toledot Yakov Yosef.
“[A]ll wars in the world, and all alien thoughts that a person has, are caused by the fact that the malkhut is not united with her Lover. And when a person reflects upon this, fear [yir’ah] and trembling [raʿad] will enter him, thus creating a unification between Fear [yir’ah] and Fearsome [nora], and ‘the workers of iniquity [‘aven] shall be scattered’ (Toledot Yakov Yosef, Bechukotai, fol. 116b).
This sample text confirms that the Baal Shem Tov actively encouraged an intricate, even uncomfortable process of meditating on the split in the Shechina from the Godhead, which would arouse both fear and shivering. By engaging in this ‘negativity cluster,’ the Baal Shem Tov:
“emphasizes mental and moral procedures as possessing theurgic power in the process of unification” (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:26).
The unification is good and joyous, but it cannot be attained through gay abandon, only through painful introspection. The original path of the Baal Shem Tov, as portrayed in the writings of R. Yakov Yosef, was not a frivolous form of escapism into the Light, instead, it required undergoing a hard-won cognitive process of self-transformation.
It may not be a coincidence that the notion of ‘entering into sin to redeem it’ is a fundamental aspect of Sabbatian Kabbalah as practised by the followers of the false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi. The latter had passed away just years before the Baal Shem Tov was born into a world teeming with secret Sabbatians. Menahem Lorberbaum (2022)[6] has:
“recognized a conscious, explicit adaptation of Sabbatean ideas used in an innovative way” (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:11).
This may indeed be mystically related to the Sabbatian and later Chassidic concept of ‘Holy Sin’ or ‘entering the sin,’ where:
“the notion of holy deceit or Holy Sin is the only way to enter the abyss of Kelipa [evil husks] and to redeem it of its evil before its guise is recognized” (Michal 2024:40).[7]
If these findings indeed reflect the authentic approach of the Baal Shem Tov, it invites a thoughtful reconsideration of whether the well-known adage coined by the third Chabad Rebbe, the Tzemach Tzedek—"Tracht gut, vet zein gut (Think good and it will be good”)—resonates fully with the deeper currents of Beshtian thought.
Similarly, R. Nachman of Breslov's teaching that one should not dwell excessively on past sins, as doing so could lead to despair, depression and spiritual paralysis, may also have been a reworking of the original concept of his great-grandfather, the Baal Shem Tov. R. Nachman's emphasis on joy and emotional resilience—epitomized in teachings like “It is forbidden to despair” and “It is a great mitzvah to always be joyful,” seems to be a deliberate departure from the actual strategy adopted by the Baal Shem Tov. Perhaps the later Chassidic Rebbes felt the original teachings were to intense for the average follower and recruit.
Modern psychology
The Baal Shem Tov's demand to confront emotional darkness directly may have been a prefiguring of the later approach adopted modern psychologists who also taught that fear and grief should not be bypassed. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory—particularly his concept of repetition compulsion—suggests that unresolved trauma often leads individuals to unconsciously reenact past wounds in new relationships or situations. Feud believed that healing required confronting and processing these buried memories. Avoidance of traumatic memories can lead to emotional dysregulation and PTSD.
In a strange irony, these psychologists may, in some manner, have better represented the original teachings of the Baal Shem Tov. Yet, there are some therapists today who do acknowledge the value of not over-identifying with trauma, which may tie in with the trend followed in later Chassidism.
Conclusion
These findings by Sachs-Shmueli call for a reevaluation of the Baal Shem Ṭov’s chiddush (innovation). Rather than offering an effortless path to spiritual upliftment by jumping onto the wagon, his teachings demand a profound engagement with negative emotions—such as fear, grief, and remorse—as essential instruments of transformation:
“The evil aspects of people and reality are highlighted, and recognition of the dangers they pose is an essential step in overcoming them (Sachs-Shmueli 2024:28).
These negative emotions may be temporary, but they are
essential to R. Yakov Yosef’s conceptualisation of the Baal Shem Tov’s path to
unification and joy. They do not obstruct spiritual elevation; rather, they
serve as its foundation. Joy is not despite negativity, but through a direct
and meaningful engagement with it.
[1]
Sachs-Shmueli, L., 2024, ‘Deciphering the Baʿal Shem Ṭov’s Legacy as Crafted by
His Disciple Jacob Joseph Using Distant Reading Digital Tools’, European
Journal of Jewish Studies, 1-28.
[2]
‘Besht’ is an abbreviation for Baal Shem Tov.
[3]
Rosman, M., 2014, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Baʿal Shem Tov,
Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, Oxford.
[4]
Moseson, C. E., 2015, “From Spoken Word to the Discourse of the Academy: Reading
the Sources for the Teaching of the Besht” (Ph.D. thesis, Boston University).
[5]
Idel, M., 2020, Vocal Rites and Broken Theologies: Cleaving to Vocables in R.
Israel Baʿal Shem Tov’s Mysticism, Crossroad, New York.
[6]
Menachem Lorberbaum, M., 2022, Before Hasidism, Bialik Institute,
Jerusalem [Hebrew].
[7]
Michal, G., 2024, (99+)
Sabbatian influences on the Chassidic and Mitnagdic movements: An excursion
into messianic Kabbalah and its disseminators in the aftermath of Shabbatai
Tzvi (Doctoral Thesis)
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