The Hasidic Ethos as an Alternative Social Paradigm
A fresh reading of the “Holy Epistle” of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov—a founding document of sorts that has been much discussed both in internal Chassidic discourse and in academic studies of Hasidism—yields six elementary principles of what Wexler calls "the Hasidic ethos" as an alternative paradigm that can be fruitfully contrasted with Max Weber's analysis of "the spirit of capitalism."
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Eli Rubin, a contributing editor at Chabad.org, is the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (forthcoming from Stanford University Press). He was a co-author of Social Vision: The Lubavitcher Rebbe's Transformative Paradigm for the World (Herder and Herder, 2019). He studied Chassidic literature and Jewish Law at the Rabbinical College of America and at Yeshivot in the UK, the US and Australia, and received his PhD from the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London.
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