LIVING IN THE PRESENCE

2025 Nautilus Award Winner | Silver | Religion

A rabbi’s lifelong journey to discover the source and inspiration of Hasidism.

As a student of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s at Jewish Theological Seminary sixty years ago, Burt Jacobson was moved to devote his life to the study of Israel Baal Shem Tov—the founder of Hasidism. Heschel considered the Baal Shem the greatest Jewish teacher and communal leader of the last 1,000 years. Living in the Presence: A Personal Quest for the Baal Shem Tov is a wide-ranging portrait, revealing numerous facets of the Baal Shem Tov’s biography and revolutionary thought previously unknown. Through his knowledge of the world’s wisdom traditions, and personal journey, Rabbi Jacobson is able to place the Baal Shem in the company of the great world spiritual teachers. He reveals the Baal Shem’s vision as an ecstatic mystical encounter that opened to the transcendent unity of existence. It was this that inspired his love and compassion for all creation, especially for the people he met. His disciples testified that their experience of these truths transformed how they understood their own identities as manifestations of the Divine, altered how they lived as spiritual leaders of their communities, and laid the foundations for Hasidism as a movement.

Throughout his book Jacobson presents and evaluates insights of historians and scholars, but it is also filled with personal stories about Jacobson’s own struggle with his Jewish identity and his encounter with the Baal Shem as his spiritual teacher. Both a tour de force and a labor of love, this book will quickly become the most essential work on the subject ever published in English.

Rabbi Burt Jacobson was a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he studied with Abraham Joshua Heschel, and was mentored in Kabbalah and Hasidism by Rabbi Arthur Green. After moving to California in the early 1970’s, Jacobson joined with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and others in founding the Jewish Renewal movement, helping to reintroduce Jewish spirituality and mysticism in the U.S. and throughout the world. 

In 1984, Jacobson founded Kehilla Community Synagogue in Berkeley, which presently has a membership of 560 families. One of his tasks at Kehilla was the creation of new Jewish liturgy that was both universal and non-patriarchal. Out of this work he co-edited with Rabbi Leila Berner Or Chadash: New Paths for Shabbat Morning, the first liturgy for the Jewish Renewal movement, published by P’nai Or Religious Fellowship. Rabbi Burt was also instrumental in designing the curriculum for the Rabbinic Training Program of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

Jacobson has been a student of the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, for fifty years. He lives in El Sobrante, California with his wife, Rabbi Diane Elliot.