Tzadik

Tzadik is an ordinary Hebrew word for a righteous person, used throughout the Bible and the rabbinic literature without any technical weight. What happened in the eighteenth century is that the Hasidic movement gave it one. In Hasidic teaching the tzadik is not merely a person who behaves well but a conduit: the blessing that descends on a community is understood to pass through him, and attachment to him is a means of approach that is available to people who cannot reach it through study. Arthur Green's analysis reads the developed doctrine as making the tzadik an axis, a point at which the upper and lower worlds meet, and traces the imagery back through earlier kabbalistic material.

The institutional consequence was the court. A tzadik gathered followers who travelled to him, ate at his table, sought his blessing and asked his advice on matters far outside religion, and the position descended to his sons, so that Hasidic dynasties formed and are still identified by the towns their founders lived in. The movement is therefore not one thing: Chabad, Breslov, Satmar, Ger and many others descend from different courts and differ from each other considerably.

This was also the central charge in the opposition to Hasidism. The Mitnagdim, the opponents, led from Vilna in the late eighteenth century, regarded the elevation of a living man to that position as a displacement of Torah study and a step towards something worse. The dispute was bitter, involved bans and denunciations, and although both sides long ago made a working peace against shared external pressures, the theological objection has never been withdrawn.

Where the tzadik meets the wider comparative subject is at the grave. Visiting the tombs of the righteous is an old Jewish practice, attested long before Hasidism, and Josef Meri's work on medieval Syria shows Jewish and Muslim visitation running side by side at overlapping sites. Hasidism intensified it. The anniversary of a tzadik's death, the hillula, is kept as a gathering at his tomb rather than as a day of mourning, and the largest of these are very large indeed.

Two are worth naming because the atlas already holds the figures. The tomb attributed to Shimon bar Yochai at Meron in the Galilee draws a mass gathering on Lag BaOmer, with bonfires, music and the first haircutting of small boys; the attribution of the site is traditional and the association of Shimon bar Yochai with the Zohar is itself a scholarly dispute of long standing. The grave of Nachman of Breslov at Uman in Ukraine draws tens of thousands of men at Rosh Hashanah, on the strength of a promise his followers record him making about those who come to him there, and the pilgrimage continued through Soviet prohibition and has continued through war.

The comparison with Muslim ziyara and with Christian pilgrimage to relics is close enough to be useful and different enough to be worth stating carefully. In none of the three does the tradition's own theology describe the dead person as an object of worship, and in all three that has been the accusation made from outside and, more sharply, from inside.