The Vilna Gaon

Elijah ben Solomon Zalman of Vilna — the towering rabbinic figure of the century, a textual critic of extraordinary severity, an ascetic who studied in isolation, and himself a serious kabbalist who wrote commentaries on the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah.

⭐⭐⭐ The opposition is not the opposition of rationalism to mysticism, and reading it that way gets the whole quarrel wrong. The Gaon was a mystic. He fasted, he was said to have had angelic visitations he refused, and he immersed himself in Lurianic texts. His objection was from inside the same literature: that Hasidism had misread the tzimtzum, that it had put a person between the Jew and God, and that it had displaced study as the supreme act. ⚠ He never met a Hasidic leader; when Shneur Zalman and Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk travelled to Vilna to argue their case, he would not receive them.