The rebbe is where Judaism's no-intermediary principle comes under the most pressure from inside. Hasidism, beginning with the Baal Shem Tov in eighteenth-century Podolia, taught that a tzaddik draws down blessing and can raise a follower's prayer, and by the third generation the role was hereditary and the courts were dynasties. A Hasid consults the rebbe on marriage, business and medicine, hands over a kvittel with a name and a mother's name, and eats shirayim, the leftovers from his table. The Vilna Gaon and the Lithuanian rabbinate excommunicated the movement in 1772 and again later, denouncing exactly this as a breach of monotheism, along with the changed prayer rite and the neglect of study. Hasidism won demographically: after the Shoah destroyed both worlds, the surviving Hasidic courts rebuilt fastest, and Chabad, Satmar, Ger and Belz are now among the largest Jewish communities anywhere. Chabad has deliberately not replaced Schneerson since his death in 1994, and the messianist minority within it is the sharpest live boundary dispute in Orthodox Judaism.