Neo-Hasidism and the Renewal Movement (feat. Estelle Frankel)

Main Ideas

The panel explored neo-Hasidism as a broad set of modern movements that draw on Hasidic teachings and practices to renew Jewish spiritual life. Rather than belonging to one denomination or relying on a single body of texts, these movements adapt Hasidic ideas to contemporary settings. The speakers emphasized that this renewal can support personal healing and community, but can also take very different—and sometimes troubling—political forms.

Rachel Werczberger: Neo-Hasidism as a Lived, Social Phenomenon

• Werczberger approached the topic as an anthropologist, emphasizing people’s religious experiences and practices: their emotions, bodily perceptions, desires, doubts, and encounters with the sacred.
• Her research on Jewish-renewal communities in Israel found that many participants were young and secular, and sought a direct, personal experience of the divine. They pursued it through meditation, emotionally intense prayer, music, and other practices.
• These communities drew on Jewish mysticism—including Kabbalah and Hasidism—while also incorporating Eastern philosophies and New Age techniques. Some held study sessions on Hasidic tales; others gave particular attention to prayer, bodily movement, and emotional ecstasy. The communities she studied dissolved within several years.
• Werczberger traced Israeli Jewish renewal to a wider set of influences, including Jewish Renewal and neo-Hasidism in North America, as well as travel to India and the spread of New Age spirituality.
• She described Hasidism as attractive to contemporary seekers because it offers adaptable teachings, practices, and ethical frameworks. Its emphasis on inward intention, emotion, the body, and psychological life can make religious practice feel personally meaningful and function as a form of spiritual self-reflection.
• In her account, the search for spiritual experience is also collective: communal prayer and music depend on people gathering together, and shared intensity can create new forms of belonging.
• Neo-Hasidic influence is not confined to liberal or secular circles. Werczberger also discussed its presence in religious Zionist settings. There, Hasidic sources may be used to challenge institutional authority and pursue personal authenticity, but the resulting outlook can be nationalist and, in some cases, associated with political violence. She stressed that the context and community matter.

Sam Berrin Shonkoff: Spiritual Practice, Activism, and Critical Engagement

• Shonkoff situated neo-Hasidism within a recurring countercultural response to modern alienation and “disenchantment”—the sense that modern economic and social changes can weaken spiritual, communal, and cultural life.
• He focused on the Hasidic idea of avodah be-gashmiyut, or spiritual work through material, embodied life. In this view, spiritual practice is not separate from action in the world.
• He identified a productive tension:
  • One side is approaching each moment with awe, gratitude, and awareness of divine presence.
  • The other is recognizing suffering and brokenness, and taking action to repair or transform them.
• For Shonkoff, this tension can inform spiritual activism: people can appreciate the world and remain open to others while also working to change conditions that require healing or liberation.
• He cautioned that the call to “repair” the world is shaped by one’s cultural and political perspective. Different communities may disagree about what is broken and what needs to change.
• He urged neo-Hasidic readers to apply critical attention to Hasidism itself. The tradition offers beauty and wisdom, but also contains histories of misogyny, ethnocentrism, and racism. Earlier interpreters sometimes edited or romanticized Hasidic sources to make them more appealing to modern audiences.
• His proposed approach is neither to dismiss the tradition nor to idealize it, but to engage it with both reverence and critical scrutiny.

Estelle Frankel: Hasidic Ideas in Psychotherapy and Healing

• Frankel described her path from encountering Shlomo Carlebach’s ecstatic Shabbat services in 1969, through years of immersion in the Hasidic world in Israel, to integrating Jewish spirituality with depth psychology and psychotherapy.
• She sees her therapeutic work as an effort to re-enchant psychology by bringing spiritual meaning back into a field that, in her view, has often downplayed its spiritual and Jewish dimensions.
• She treats a client’s words and silences much as a reader might study a sacred text: looking for connections, layers of meaning, and what may be left unspoken. She drew a parallel between psychoanalytic interpretation and the Jewish practice of interpreting text.
• She described several Hasidic ideas that inform her practice:
  • Identity and wholeness: People may identify with wounds or perceived flaws rather than their fuller selves. Therapy can help them see themselves as more than their brokenness.
  • “Holy listening” and story editing: Listening for a person’s dignity and sacredness can help shift how they understand their own story—from a harsh or detached narration to a more compassionate one.
  • Strength through wounds: Pain and vulnerability can coexist with, or help reveal, a person’s strengths and virtues.
  • Fate and destiny: People cannot control everything that happens to them, but they can respond to it and shape what comes next.
  • The union of opposites: Wholeness involves holding different or conflicting parts of the self together rather than reducing a person to one side. Frankel connected this idea to both Hasidic thought and therapeutic approaches that work with multiple aspects of the self.
  • Humility and worth: A person can be both one-of-a-kind and precious, and also part of a larger whole—not separate or all-important.
• Frankel also described practical elements she uses in therapy, including prayer, blessings, Jewish teachings, and some ritual practices.

Shared Discussion

• The speakers agreed that Hasidic teachings can be deeply valuable while still requiring discernment. Frankel cautioned against rejecting the entire tradition because of its problems, while emphasizing the need to name and examine those problems.
• The discussion highlighted that neo-Hasidism is not politically uniform: similar spiritual resources can support different values and social projects.
• The moderator introduced an eight-part description of the Hasidic ethos, including its social dimension, joy, the embodied soul’s significance, self-transformation, egalitarian aspirations, self-effacement, and the idea that spiritual wealth belongs to the wider community rather than only to individuals. The captions omit one item in this list.
• The panelists cautioned that any attempt to define a diverse tradition in a short list is necessarily selective. Such summaries can be useful, but also reflect the interpreter’s perspective.

Speakers and Sources Mentioned

Speakers

• Jonah Gelfand — moderator
• Rachel Werczberger — anthropologist of contemporary Judaism and New Age spirituality
• Sam Berrin Shonkoff — scholar of Jewish studies and neo-Hasidism
• Estelle Frankel — psychotherapist, spiritual director, author, and teacher

People, Traditions, and Texts Referenced

• Martin Buber
• Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
• Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach
• Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson
• Rabbi Nachman of Breslov and Breslov Hasidism
• The Baal Shem Tov
• Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin (the name is unclear in the auto-generated captions)
• The Ishbitzer Rebbe
• Emil Durkheim and Victor Turner, in connection with collective religious experience
• Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis
• Philip Wexler, referred to by surname in the discussion
• Chabad/Lubavitch, Jewish Renewal, Hasidism, Kabbalah, the Torah, Psalms, and the Zohar