Cybernetic Hasidism: An Essay on Social and Religious Change*

This paper employs a cybernetic model of a religious symbol system to explain the competition among Rabbinists, Hasidim, and Messianists in the Jewish communities of eighteenth-century Poland. Hasidism's ability to attract adherents is explained by the great flexibility of its constitutive belief, “communion with God”when compared with Rabbinic Torah or the Messianic belief in the “lifting of sparks.” This flexibility is traced through all levels of the cybernetic hierarchy.