A Hasidic master told followers to talk to God like a best friend
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov asked his disciples to spend an hour a day alone, ideally in a field or forest, speaking aloud to God in their own words. He died of tuberculosis at 38 in 1810, yet tens of thousands still travel to his grave in Uman, and his tales may have reached Franz Kafka.
Nachman was born on April 4, 1772, in Międzybóż, now Medzhybizh in Ukraine, a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism. At first he refused his family's tradition of leadership. Married at 13, he won over a follower that very day, someone several years his senior. A journey to the Land of Israel in 1798 and 1799, reaching Galilee just before Napoleon fought the Turks, served as his private rite of passage; afterwards he took up leadership on his own selective terms.
His teaching blended Kabbalah with rigorous Torah study while stressing joy, simplicity and faith. The daily solitary conversation with God, called hitbodedut, became central, alongside clapping, singing and dancing in prayer. He rejected hereditary dynasties, insisting each follower seek out a righteous guide, and held that any Jew could become one. Early on he favoured fasting and self-punishment, but later dropped harsh asceticism, fearing it bred sadness, and warned followers against fanaticism. Scholars have suggested his dramatic swings of mood point to depression or bipolar disorder; Breslov tradition reads them as stages of spiritual ascent.
His scribe, Nathan Sternhartz, a young scholar from nearby Nemirov, preserved almost everything, including the teachings of Likutey Moharan and thirteen Yiddish tales, the longest being The Seven Beggars. Martin Buber's translations carried these stories to twentieth-century writers. Two further books Nachman burned in 1808, convinced his illness was a heavenly punishment for writing one; Sternhartz, who took down one of them, admitted he had not understood it.
Life brought repeated grief: both sons died in infancy, the first in 1806, deflating messianic hopes among his followers, and his wife died of tuberculosis in 1807. After a fire destroyed his home in 1810, he moved to Uman, site of a 1768 massacre of Jews, meaning to be buried among its victims. Sternhartz began a Rosh Hashana pilgrimage to the grave that survived Soviet suppression and drew about 25,000 people in 2008.
Source: Nachman of Breslov
