I have been receiving Yitzhak Buxbaum‘s almost daily email dispatches of hasidic anecdotes and stories but up till now I haven’t actually read any of his books. I started with the one I thought I would have most fun with: Jewish Tales of Mystic Joy. My intuition was right. I found a treasure trove I can dive into when/if I feel down.
The book has at least a hundred truly joyous stories. The table of contents has only 80+ relevant chapters, but the introduction contains lots of anecdotes too and many stores are nested in other stories. The vast majority of them originated from the hasidic world. Buxbaum lists the eight stories that are not connected to hasidim at the end of his introduction. Most of the stories are one or two pages long: easily digestible length in our world where we are getting accustomed to read only a paragraph/headline/tweet before moving onto the next information bite to consume.. The penultimate story (the longest in the book) is based on the author’s personal experience, while the very last one is one of his students.
The most obvious pleasure and learning you can derive from the book is how to find joy under the utmost extreme circumstances in life or even at the cusp of death. This last bit is the most amazing (and hard to understand with a non-believing heart): there are several stories that talk about masters, rabbis or even simple(but spiritually evolved) individuals who manage to find joy even at the end of their lives.
The next aspect of the book I appreciated was the notes. This book was clearly written from a religious and a particular theological point of view, but has the level of citations I am used to in scholarly books. Almost all stories are cited,making it easy to check the original. Except it is not easy, if you don’t speak Yiddish and Hebrew and don’t have access to those sources. What Buxbaum did was pulling together stories that fit his notion of “mystic joy”from a truly wide range of sources. I cannot imagine how many more sources are out there he may not have used. It is like a window onto a world I am not familiar with.
One more note about the sourcing: I came across lots of books that are written in the authoritative tone of “the Kabbalah says this or that.” I can get rather frustrated with them, because in my opinion the “Kabbalah”is not a person or a synthesized, single principle. If nothing else it incorporates hundreds of authors, their written and oral works through at least 10 centuries. At best it is misleading at worst it is intentional to cast a picture as there would be only one way to understand this vast field of knowledge, practice and literature. This is why I appreciate that Buxbaum didn’t fall into this trap.
Finally I have to go back the beginning, to the introduction of the book. I urge you not to skip it. It lays the foundation of the Jewish/hasidic theology of mystical joy. He says that “the essence of mysticism [is] directly knowing God… [N]earness to God produces mystic joy and ecstasy”(page 2).The introduction covers much more including the relationship between mysticism and joy, tracing joy to its source, loving joy and hating sadness, and the interplay of joy and Judaism. Even if you decide not to read the actual stories this essay is a worthwhile to read to understand why do you see a wide smile almost always on the face of hasidim and where the comes from.
I am sure I will keep returning to this book in the future for spiritual refreshments. Meanwhile you can explore the author’s website and sign up for the aforementioned newsletter too, at: