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Full Description
The Przysucha school of Hasidism believed in a
service of God that demanded both passion and analytical study. There was little or no study of
kabbalah in Przysucha, and the emphasis was not on trying to understand God, but on trying
to understand the human being. It was clear to them that one could not stand with any sense of
integrity before the Divine Presence unless one first had some clarity of who one really was.
Directly or indirectly, Przysucha had declared an internal war upon the hasidic leadership of its
time. It simply refused to accept anything that smelled of falseness and self-deception, be it the
honor due to a zaddik or a particular religious practice. Przysucha equated pretension and
self-deceit with idol worship.
During the early part of the nineteenth century, when the center of the hasidic world
was in Poland, R. Simhah Bunim transformed Przysucha Hasidism into a movement and
thus rose to become a, if not the, dominant personality in the Hasidic community.
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