Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman, "the Magid of Mezritsh" (1704-1772), had a founding role in the formation of Hasidism, the mystical renewal movement that became one of the most important and successful forces in modern Judaism. In Speaking Infinities Ariel Evan Mayse turns to the Magid's sermons to understand the place of words in the mystical experience. According to him, the Magid's theory of language is the key to understanding his abstract mystical theology, and to the life of devotion and the service of Hashem to which he sought to lead his students. The book examines the life of this introverted mystic based on stories, legends and various historical sources, and distinguishes the historical figure from the figure that emerges from the complex array of textual and oral traditions that shaped the Magid's memory and his legacy.

Evan Mayse shows how the Magid of Mezritsh's perception of language was shaped by his encounters with the Ba'al Shem Tov, whose teaching presented a radical concept of divine immanence. The Magid interpreted immanence as the vitality of language that pulsates and resonates in the space of the world. From this interpretation, the Magid developed the concept that every Human word, in any language, and even in the most everyday uses, can be sanctified when returned to their divine origin. Examining the philosophy of the Magid of Mezritsh presents us with the image of a creative and revolutionary Hasidic thinker. In many respects, the author claims, the Magid of Mezritsh—and not the Besh"t—was the real founder of the Hasidic movement and the main shaper of its theology.

Ariel Evan Mayse is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. He previously served as a researcher of Israeli thought at Hebrew College in Boston, and as a research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan. The doctoral thesis was written by Evan Mayse at Harvard University, and he was ordained to the rabbinate at Beit Midrash Harel in Jerusalem. His research deals with the role of language in Hasidic thought, early Hasidic writing, the revival of Jewish mysticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the connection between spirituality and law in Jewish thought, and the design of environmental ethics from the sources of Jewish thought.