I wasn't sure if this is the exact place to put this so, please move it if you feel it should be elsewhere.
I was wondering, I know the Haredi are the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, but, are all Haredi Jews Hasidic, or are all Hasidic Jews part of the Ultra-Orthodox movement?, the reason I'm asking is because I've read the Hasidic Jews do make up the Haredi, but, I've also read (I think it was in
Perle Epstein's 'Kabbalah: Way of the Jewish Mystic' ) that the are Ultra-Orthodox who are more legalistic, who oppose the Hasidism.
Anyway, I was just wondering, how related the Hasidism and the Haredi were?.
Also, where would
Chabad Lubavitch fit in? (i.e. I know they're Orthodox, but, are they Haredi, Modern Orthodox, or somewhere else).
And, just one final quick question, is
AISH.com Haredi or Modern Orthodox?, it's just I've seen some things that say it's Ultra-Orthodox (and some of their articles give that away, with some bigoted attitudes to other religions, and I really didn't like
their homosexuality articles (&
this one as well), but, I've also seen some of their articles which didn't seem too bad, and, I think I noticed some of Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs articles on there, and, if I'm not mistaken, he's Modern Orthodox, not Haredi (correct me if I'm wrong?).
Thanks agan for any help you can provide.
As Smoke mentioned, all Hasidim are Haredim, but not all Haredim are Hasidim. First of all, until the past 10-20 years or so, Hasidism was a movement confined to Ashkenazi Jews, and even among Ashkenazim, primarily to Eastern European Jews.
Hasidism (the word
chasid means, roughly, "righteous" or perhaps "kindly:" it stems from a word for which there is no equivalent in English, the word
chesed, which is often translated as "lovingkindness." A
chasid is one who is defined by embodying the characteristic of
chesed. The Besht's Hasidim took or were given the moniker in echo of the medieval movement of the Hasidei Ashkenaz ["The righteous of Ashkenaz," Ashkenaz being roughly Germany, the Rhineland, and parts of the Lowland Countries], who were instrumental in founding the Ashkenazic culture as we know it) arose when the Baal Shem Tov (R. Yisrael ben Eliezer, also sometimes referred to by his acronym, the BeSHT) began attracting followers to his particular interpretation of Jewish life. He was an ecstatic and charismatic, heavily influenced by Kabbalah, and preached a Judaism full of joy and celebration, where the mystic was embraced to the point of being exoteric. His was very much a movement of the popular masses, though often the Besht's students and future Hasidic masters studied at the great yeshivas also.
It was the culture of the yeshivas (the great Talmudic academies) to which Hasidism found itself in opposition. The yeshiva culture was geared toward the best young boys coming to study at the yeshiva, where they dedicated themselves to the pursuit of
pilpul, the art of infinitely refining legal theory. The rest of the populace worked to support the yeshiva students, but were themselves often ignorant, or even illiterate, and often found their lives hard and dull. The yeshiva culture, which upon the rise of Hasidism became known as Mitnagedim (the word
mitnaged means "to set oneself in opposition [to something]," so Mitnagedim are, more or less literally, "The Opposition"), gained strength as it eventually fought a two-front battle, as the rise to power and prevalence of Hasidism also coincided with the Enlightenment coming to Eastern Europe, and Eastern European Jews beginning to leave orthodox practice and tradition for an assimilated life in the largest cities, or Western Europe (where such assimilation was far more widespread).
Although the mitnegedic culture has always had strength-- one of their earliest leaders was the great
Vilna Gaon, and in the 20th century, some of the greatest acknowledged
gedolei ha-dor ("leaders of the generation" or "greatest of the generation," an appellation given to rabbis whose sagacity and authority is acknowledged by many, many Jews) have been mitnagedic, including
Reb Moshe Feinstein and
Rav Joseph Soloveitchik.
Hasidism flourished brilliantly in its early days: the great masters, who were the students and descendants of the Besht, wrote masterful commentaries on Torah, full of mystical teachings, and most of their works taught love of God, hope in the face of despair, joy in observance and daily life, and the respect for common people as well as great scholars and leaders. As the movement grew, and flourished, and became widespread, and as modern culture became ever more pervasive, and the Enlightenment drew many Jews away from traditional practice who might otherwise have embraced Hasidism, the movement became more xenophobic, and turned inward.
In the aftermath of the Shoah, with mass migrations of survivors to America, to British Palestine, to England, and to Canada, as well as a couple of other places; and in the lead-up to independence and the early years of the State of Israel, Hasidim and Mitnagedim often found it within themselves to work together, as the struggles within Judaism became ever more oriented toward Orthodoxy and secularism as polar opposites. Though friction has never entirely left the Hasidic and Mitnagedic interaction, especially in Israel both often work together to bolster Haredi political and social efforts. And both have been-- in the past twenty years or so-- picking up new membership from the Mizrahi and Sefardi communities, which have often been dismayed at their people leaving the Mizrahi and Sefardi traditions for the Ashkenazi ones they pick up in yeshiva (Hasidim have yeshivas too, they just have a slightly different culture than Litvak [Yiddish for "Lithuanian," where the mitnagedic movement was headquarted originally at the yeshiva of the Vilna Gaon, and thus often used today in place of the word mitnaged] yeshivas do).
Ironically, Hasidism, which began as an ecstatic movement, has become just as closed-off as Litvish Orthodoxy, and it can often be hard to find the joy in their Judaism. That said, occasionally it is still very much present.
Chabad (an acronym for
Chochmah, Binah, Da'at, or "Wisdom, Understand, Knowledge,") is a movement within Hasidism. Originally, it was comprised of several Hasidic dynasties working in concert, but all the major ones have left, dwindled, or died out save for the Lubavitcher Hasidim, which is why often today it is called Chabad-Lubavitch. It was the first rebbe of the Lubavitchers, Reb Shneur Zalman of Liady who began Chabad. He was brilliant, though always something of an oddity among the Besht's students, in that his Hasidism was much more intellectually-based and yet at the same time overtly Kabbalistic. Chabad was a movement that emphasized intellect over emotion, and encouraged rigorous study to a degree most of the other early Hasidic movements did not, nor did it particularly focus on ecstaticism. Reb Shneur Zalman's Kabbalistic teachings also were unusual in that they express a twist on Lurianic Kabbalah that ends up with a deeply pantheist, monistic theology. Nonetheless, Chabad was Hasidic, and the ecstatic and joyful elements where not entirely absent from the movement, either. Though the Lubavitcher (that is, formerly based in the town of Lyubavitche, near Smolensk) Hasidim have always dominated Chabad, originally other dynasties joined them, and even today, Chabad is such a powerful tool for
kiruv ("drawing close," that is, the reaching out by observant Jews to non-observant Jews in order to help the non-observant become more observant) that many today consider themselves Chabadnikim (
chabadnik is the standard Yiddishism that has been taken up by modern Hebrew as meaning "a member or follower of Chabad") who are not Lubavitchers at all.
Aish HaTorah is a much more recent innovation. It is a synthetic Haredi movement, blending elements of Litvish and Hasidic thought, along with elements of Kabbalistic
mussar (moralistic teachings). Its main purpose is
kiruv, and it is certainly much more open and less publicly judgmental about non-observant Jews than any other Haredi movement. I want to think well of them, but somehow, my gut always tells me they seem just a bit creepy....
As for Rabbi Sacks, he is not technically Haredi, although he is not quite what I would call Modern Orthodox, either. Centrist Orthodox is more or less how I would approximate his position.
And, BTW, I can't say I care much for the term "ultra-Orthodox" either, but I use it because not everyone understands what Haredi means.
