For Hasidim to repeat tales about their rabbis was not folk reminiscence in the usual sense, but a way of making the teacher become present to them as an edifying influence. Their recollection of, for instance, the Baal Shem and his deeds had in it an emotional elevation like that experienced by the friends of Socrates when they celebrated the memory of their master. Phaedo said: “To be reminded of Socrates is always the greatest delight to me, whether I speak myself or hear another speak of him.”

Myth-making tends to be an essential feature of movements of thought that go beyond system building to a re-education of the individual through personal communion and the exchange of living intuitions. And Hasidism—which was through and through an experimental discipline of the individual spirit, not only in what Kierkegaard called the “God-relation” but in the love between zaddik and disciple as well—produced a body of genuine legend as its most intimate and characteristic language.

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