Hasidism חסידות
The movement begun by the Baal Shem Tov: service through joy, prayer and closeness to the simple person.
Hasidism arose in mid-eighteenth-century Podolia, in a world wrecked by the Chmielnicki massacres and disillusioned by the false messiah Shabtai Tzvi. The Baal Shem Tov brought an idea that sounded almost scandalous: God is present everywhere and in everyone, and a simple Jew praying from the heart is no less precious than a scholar.
Hence its practices: prayer with fervour, song and dance, story instead of treatise, service through the ordinary. Hence too the figure of the tzaddik, the rebbe, to whom people come not only to learn but to ask.
After the Baal Shem Tov the movement was led by the Maggid of Mezritch, who sent students across Eastern Europe; the dynasties — Chabad, Breslov, Ger, Satmar, Belz — grew from them. The Vilna Gaon and the mitnagdim responded sharply, fearing the neglect of study.