Most non-Jews, for whom one set of sidelocks is much like another, assume Hasidism to be synonymous with observant Judaism, or ‘ultra-Orthodox’ as it has become anachronistically known. But this is not and has never been the case. Hasidic cosmology owes almost everything to the Kabbalists of Safed – the redemption of the divine sparks of the creation from their entrapment in the base matter of the qelippot husks in particular – and this gives the Hasidim of Brooklyn something in common with Madonna Ciccone. But for the Ashkenazim of eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
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