Dear Da,
I couldn’t disagree with you more.
Very little of the Toras Habesht has been preserved and none of it is novel for his day. He wasn’t an innovator in what he was teaching. The controversy was who he was teaching it to. There is nothing in the entire breadth of early chassidus that can be considered a new teaching in terms of a scholastic method. Though there is a lot of taking one known scholastic method and disregarding all the others. For example, exclusive use of Kavanos HaAri.
I don’t know who you are quoting about the Beshtian Teachings. Either you are understood it wrong or I strongly disagree with ‘pretty much everybody’. Along the lines of Neville’s point, it’s been noted that it difficult to distinguish the core teachings of the Besht from those of the Gra, AndSefer Tanya from Nefesh Hachaim. Later on we have Rav Nachman, The Kotzker, and others who incorporated many novel ideas into their teachings. These were not transmitted to them from the Early Chassidim. It is clearly their own approaches.
Us Litvaks lived ina very unique situation. The Litvishe Mesorah does not go back thousands of years. There is no model for the litvishe set up among the Rishonim or Gaonim. THe Jews settled in Lita for just five or six centuries. It is justified by what it produced. Not where it came from. Other than Iran or Yemen (And even then most of them are ignorant of their own traditions what is ancient and what is modern.), nowhere and nobody can claim anything close to a thousand year mesorah since the formation of the State of Israel. (The first half of the nineteenth century saw all the other ancient communities of the Mid East go through foundational changes.)
It can be debated if there was an original nusach or not. But the more we go back through the last millenium, the more we find even larger differences among the European Congregations. So it’s more likely that the Chassidim and the Misnagdim created their own uniform nusach than there having been any standard before them. Anyways, every nusach follows the same basic structure that the Misha speaks about. It’s all just minor changes to whatever nusach was used in the early days of European Jewry. It seems petty to me. As long as they daven for real, it’s fine with me.
You have to be kidding that observance in halachah wasn’t in constant flux throughout the time Yidden settled Eastern Europe. The entire history of Poland etc. is one timeline of seeking an exact code for communal practice. The is no correlation between the minhagim of the same town in 16th century, the 18, and the 20th. The bottom line didn’t change much but the communal bar for normative observance was never stable.
I hope everyone understands that this is a historical disscusion and is not about the yiras shamayim of previous generations. First we avoid any conclusion about Chasidim and all other groups. Second, we examine what actually ocurred. And third, we try to see what changed and why. Only then is possible to attempt an evaluation of what was a ‘better’ approach toward the future that we now live in.