He did not like it, and often daydreamed; he was eventually considered a lost hope, and was expelled. Later on, he held numerous minor ecclesiastical posts at synagogues, where he was considered maniacal, due to zealous, incessant prayer, and ignorant, due to his near verbal stillness when not praying. He then, at age 36, decided to show his true colors. He was then called the title Ba"al-Shem Tov, literally meaning Master of the Good Name, or one who produces miracles in the name of G-d. There were other Ba"al-Shems, but Besht received the title Ba"al Shem Tov (Tov means good.) by curing with chants and herbs not only Jews, but faithful, undemanding Gentile peasants. Besht was able to use his newfound favor to preach his theological motives. His key philosophy, which digresses hugely from the Talmudic form of Judaism in Poland at that time, is that true faith is not teaching or learning the Talmud, it is rather unconditional dedication to G-d, by means of persistent, passionate prayer and an unrefined belief in G-d [Dubnow, 221-227].
Besht, along with not being the only Ba"al Shem, was not the only leader of "simple faith" movements after the Ukrainian uprisings.
There were precedents in the Polish-Jewish history for anti-intellectual movements. The crudest was the pseudo-Messianism of the seventeenth century. In the period immediately following the Chmelnicki massacres countless thousands of Polish Jews had been deranged into a kind of prayerful expectancy that a Messiah would arise to lead them back to the Holy Land Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank made bombastic claims to the "Messiahship," building up a formidable response among distraught Polish Jews by promising to lead a mass return to Palestine. Although these men dissipated their followings by opportunistically accepting conversion - to Islam, in the case of Sabbatai Zevi, to Christianity, in the case of Frank - the frenzied apocalypticism did not die so easily [Sachar, 75].
