transparency of glass, the steam of one’s breath, and dust visible in a ray of sunlight—but, more broadly, from the very rhetorical agenda that their invocations of Psalms 111:4 are intended to further. In their discussions of God’s “remembrances,” the Pietists were engaged in a pedagogic and exhortatory strategy aimed at a specific audience. Particularly in the sifrut ha-yihud, Psalms 111:4 is invoked in reference to an imagined interlocutor, who raises a succession of skeptical queries regarding the nature of God. “How can I believe that there is a God in the world, when no eye has seen Him?” “How can I believe that He is found everywhere, and that nothing is hidden from Him?” and so on. The goal of the Pietists’ exoteric writings—aimed at a “lay” audience rather than a select group of initiates—is to offer convincing answers to these questions precisely by listing examples of mundane substances that, though invisible, undoubtedly exist. That is, it is the very ordinariness of the objects and phenomena, their tendency to be taken for granted, that lends the argument its weight. Drawing linkages between, say, God’s invisibility and inexplicable, supernatural phenomena would not meet the needs of the consumers of the Pietists’ writings, who were interested in comprehending theological truths about God, not in begging the question through the marshaling of even more unbelievable phenomena.
The notion that the Pietists were concerned with the spiritual edification of those whose faith was less than perfect runs counter to the conventional depiction of the Hasidei Ashkenaz as elitist and withdrawn, closed off from the broader Jewish community and its manifold spiritual failings. Indeed, the possibility that there existed medieval Ashkenazic Jews who were capable of theological skepticism altogether belies the tendency to depict Ashkenazic Jewry as a “pious community,” unshakeable in their faith and religious commitment.58 And yet, there is ample evidence in Pietistic sources that facts on the ground were considerably more fraught than the idealized Ashkenazic self-image would lead us to believe.59 Sefer Hasidim, like the sifrut ha-yihud, is rife with discussions aimed at Jews doubtful about basic theological tenets, including God’s incorporeality,60 theodicy,61 divine omniscience,62 providence,63 and so on. As in the examples cited above, the dialogic structure is consistently marshaled in these discussions, suggesting that real conversations about these issues actually could, and did, take place. Hence the following programmatic statement: “People should not harbor doubts about their Creator. Rather, if they have any doubts about the Creator, they should speak with a sage (hakham) who is expert in theological matters … and who will give a wise and fitting answer to the doubter’s words.”64 The Pietists also discuss skepticism explicitly in their writings on pedagogy. Thus Sefer Hasidim at one point counsels, “One must not reveal wondrous teachings to children, lest they say, ‘This is nonsense, and since this is false, so are the others [teachings of Judaism].’”65 Elsewhere, the opposite approach is considered: “Children’s minds are like the minds of adults who are dreaming—they accept the truth of everything. So, too, children believe that everything they are told is true, until they are led astray by evil acquaintances.”66 In any event, it is clear that doubts about theological teachings were by no means uncommon during this period, thus necessitating the kind of exoteric response contained especially in the sifrut ha-yihud.
In sum, it is crucial to examine not only the content, but also the context of Pietistic invocations of Psalms 111:4. The Pietists’ analyses of the relationship between God and the natural world were not abstract or theoretical—they were rather aimed at real-life skeptics, necessitating argumentation that was rhetorically compelling. This need could be met by linking apparently unbelievable claims about God’s capabilities with common, prosaic natural phenomena, like steam, the rising and setting of the sun, and so on. The world’s “customary course” was not, per Soloveitchik, “empty of harmony and beauty, and above all of meaning.” Rather, as Eleazar puts it, God “created the world to reveal the power of His actions to His nation”67—the spiritual resonance and theological profundity imbued within the created world can be uncovered via careful study and observation. Or, as Judah states categorically elsewhere, at Creation, “God said in his heart: ‘Let Me create the world, not because I have any need of it, but in order that my creations might rejoice when I reveal My wisdom to them.’”68
EMPIRICISM AND ESOTERICISM
Significantly, the Pietists invoke empirical observations not only to confirm basic theological truths such as God’s existence, invisibility, and omniscience, but also to validate the more rarified teachings of the Jewish esoteric tradition. Beginning in late antiquity, Jewish texts identified the creation account in Genesis (ma’aseh bereishit) and Ezekiel’s vision of the divine chariot (ma’aseh merkavah) as two major loci of secret knowledge,69 and the Pietists subject both of these categories to extensive commentary and interpretation—particularly in Sodei Razya (Secret of Secrets), Eleazar’s massive five-part compilation of esoteric traditions. Sodei Razya and related texts were aimed at an audience of initiates, elite disciples who could be entrusted with secret traditions whose transmission was strictly regulated. In these writings, too, the Pietists invoke and explore the routine workings of the natural order, marshaling an array of naturalistic “proofs” that render their esoteric teachings convincing or comprehensible. As such, the theology of nature they lay out in their exoteric teachings mirrors, and must be understood in light of, the approach to the natural world undergirding their more recondite doctrines.
In Sodei Razya, empirical proofs are often marshaled with reference to Sefer Yetsirah, a cryptic cosmological text that the Pietists cited from frequently and reverently.70 Sefer Yetsirah focuses in part upon God’s creation of the universe, and details the precise sequence in which the primordial elements were formed—God first created air (ru’ah), derived water from air, and then fire and earth from water. Eleazar justifies this order using an array of confirmations from the natural world—what the Pietists elsewhere call “remembrances”—some original to his writings, others culled from a range of earlier sources:71 “There is an example in the world: If one breathes into the palm of his hand, it will become wet, and thus we know that water emerged from air. Fire emerged from water—for if water is heated in a clean glass vessel, and placed in the sun during the summer time, it can be used to light bits of flax. And stones [come from] fire [and water], for if you fill a pot [with water] and boil it for many days, the vessel will produce something like a piece of stone. All this is intellectually logical (sevarat ha-da’at).”72 Man can thus comprehend the order of God’s creation of the elements by being attentive to the moisture in one’s breath, the ability of a water-filled glass vessel to focus sunlight and kindle a fire, and the crystallization of minerals that have been boiled in water for an extended period.73 Using such observable phenomena, as filtered through sevarat ha-da’at, as a way of making sense of the order of creation, clearly comports with the Pietists’ instructions to “compare one situation to another until we discover the truth.”74 Eleazar similarly justifies the creation of water from air by invoking “the wet moisture of speech,” observable in the steam that comes from one’s mouth during the wintertime, “when the air is cold and the body is warm, and steam comes out of one’s mouth like smoke.”75 The same “smoky” steam allows Eleazar to verify that God could indeed speak at Sinai “from within the fire” (Deut. 4:13), since “the steam [of one’s breath in winter] resembles thin pillars of smoke.”76 That water originates in air is also proven by the fact that dew collects on the ground overnight, even when it does not rain.77
Experimental data is marshaled in Pietistic sources not only to justify the creation process according to Sefer Yetsirah, but also to shed light on such scientific topics as the workings of meteorology and the structure of the cosmos. Thus Eleazar explains the way in which winds separate raindrops from one another by advising his reader to “take light feathers, and place them into a vessel, and blow into it, and the feathers will be separated from one another.”78 Elsewhere, he describes a similar experiment, which can be marshaled to justify the fact that the earth is suspended in the center of the universe: “The earth is suspended
