The Baal Shem Tov Asked the Messiah When He Would Come

The founder of Hasidism once asked the Messiah directly when he would come. He climbed through the heavens on Rosh Hashana, stood in the Messiah's palace, and asked the question that every Jew across a thousand years of exile had wanted to ask. The answer was not what he expected.

The Baal Shem Tov's own letter, first published in Ben Porat Yosef (1781), part of the Chassidic Literature collection, preserves the account in his own words, or what his disciples understood to be his own words, addressed to his brother-in-law Rabbi Abraham Gershon of Kittov, who was then living in the Land of Israel. The letter describes the ascent in the year 5507 by the Hebrew calendar, 1746 by the Gregorian, on the day the tradition had always understood as the hinge of divine judgment.

The Ba'al Shem Tov, known as the Besht, was not the first to describe heavenly ascent. The tradition of the mystics who rose through the palaces of heaven, the Merkavah travelers of late antiquity, had been documenting these journeys for a thousand years before him. But his letter came with specific details, grounded dates, and a message whose content changed Hasidism's understanding of what it was trying to do.

What He Found in the Garden of Eden First

The Besht did not ascend alone, at least not at first. He arrived in the Garden of Eden and found it full. It was Rosh Hashana, the day of judgment and accounting, and God had opened a window of unusual grace. Many who had not lived righteous lives had repented, and their repentance had been accepted. The Garden was crowded with souls who had no business being there by any ordinary calculus but who were there because God had been merciful beyond what the scales had required.

These souls recognized the Besht and begged him to accompany them further up. Overwhelmed by their joy, he agreed. But he knew what it cost to ascend too high without a guide, so he called on his teacher, the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh, a figure who appears in the Books of Kings as the prophet who anointed Jeroboam and who in Kabbalistic tradition had become the Besht's celestial mentor. Together they entered the pathway upward.

The Besht led the souls through palace after palace. Each palace in the heavenly realm, according to tradition, contains a concentration of divine wisdom and mystery that no human mind below can fully receive. He guided them through, one level at a time, rising until he reached the highest heaven and the palace he had not entered before.

The Palace of the Messiah

The Messiah's palace was a place of teaching. The Messiah sat surrounded by the greatest sages, saints, and the Seven Shepherds, those figures the tradition identifies as the pillars of the ages. Different sources list them differently. Micah suggests Adam, Seth, Methuselah, David, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses. The Zohar, the central text of medieval Kabbalah, first published around 1290 CE in Castile, offers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, together with Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and King David, each associated with one of the sefirot (ספִּירוֹת), the channels through which divine energy flows into the world.

The Besht entered this palace. The reception was overwhelming. The joy in that place was so concentrated, he later wrote, that he feared his soul had left his body entirely, that he had crossed the line from living visitor to permanent resident. He was assured that he had not. His time had not yet come. He was still a traveler, not a resident.

Then he asked his question.

When Will You Come?

The Messianic hope is not a minor theme in Jewish tradition. It runs through the liturgy every day, through the Amidah prayed three times daily, through the Grace after Meals, through the closing prayer of every service. For Jews living in eighteenth-century Ukraine, under the Cossack raids and the crushing poverty of the Pale of Settlement, the Messiah's arrival was not theology. It was the only remaining hope.

The Besht asked. The Messiah answered: when your teachings are widespread in the world, and when others have become capable of ascending on high as you have.

The answer bound the Messiah's coming to the success of the Besht's own movement. Not to political conditions. Not to the rebuilding of the Temple. Not to repentance in the classical rabbinic sense. But to the spreading of a particular kind of spiritual practice, the kind of interior ascent and divine attachment that the Besht was teaching to the poor Jews of the Ukrainian countryside who had been told, essentially, that mystical Judaism was not for them.

What the Besht Understood When He Came Back Down

The letter was written to be shared. The Besht sent it with his disciple Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, who would later become the first great literary voice of Hasidism through the Ben Porat Yosef. The account was not a private mystical diary. It was a founding document, a statement of mission disguised as a personal narrative.

The movement that grew from this moment, Hasidism, became one of the most significant transformations in Jewish history. Within two generations of the Besht's death in 1760, Hasidism had spread from Ukraine across Poland, Romania, Hungary, and beyond. The teaching of divine attachment, of serving God through joy rather than purely through rigorous legal observance, reached exactly the ordinary Jews the Besht had spent his life teaching in the villages and forests of Podolia.

The Messiah had said: when your teachings are widespread. The Besht came back down from the ascent and kept teaching. His disciples taught after him. Their disciples taught after them. The palace in the highest heaven, with the Messiah surrounded by the Seven Shepherds and all the sages, was still waiting.

The question of when has not been answered yet. But according to the letter published in 1781 from the ascent of 1746, the answer depends entirely on what the living do with what they have been given.