From Kabbalah to Hasidism

Devekut reached its widest religious influence in the Hasidic movement founded by the Baal Shem Tov in eighteenth century Eastern Europe, which took the earlier Kabbalistic ideal and made it central to everyday religious life rather than reserving it for a scholarly or contemplative elite. Hasidic teaching held that devekut could and should be cultivated continuously, not only during formal prayer but through ordinary activity performed with the right inward orientation, a democratizing move that scholars including Gershom Scholem identify as one of the most significant innovations Hasidism brought to the older Kabbalistic tradition it inherited.

Different Hasidic schools disagreed about the precise mechanics and intensity of the state, and about how devekut related to the more radical, self effacing ideal of bittul, the nullification of individual selfhood pursued especially in Chabad thought, which some teachers treated as a further stage beyond ordinary devekut and others treated as devekut's own deepest meaning. Devekut remains a living devotional ideal in contemporary Hasidic and broader Orthodox Jewish practice, distinct from, though sometimes compared to, mystical union language in other traditions.