Self Denial: Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev and Nietzsche

Title page from the Lemberg, 1864 ed. of Kedushas Levi

Self-denial is common to many Hasidic masters and Nietzsche had a complicated relationship with this way of living and relating to the world, and so it might be worthwhile to do a little comparison, just for fun.
(If this isn't your idea of fun, then fine, I can also think of at least a couple of things that would really be fun...)

Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, also known by his magnum opus, Kedushas Levi begins his mystical exposition of Genesis with this thought:

We say [in Scripture and in the liturgy] "He fashions light and creates darkness" and not He fashioned light and created darkness... rather it is in the present tense, for in every moment He gives life to every living thing, everything derives from Him and He is inclusive of all. Thus when a person attains nothingness and knows that he is nothing at all, only the Creator b"h gives him power, then he may refer to God as the One who Creates, in the language of the present, for now too He creates. But when a person reflects on himself and does not reflect on nothingness, then he is at the level of existence ['yesh'] and he refers to God only in the sense of One who created, that is He created him in the past. And so we say "that he fashioned Man with Wisdom," for Wisdom is on the level of existence."

Of course this view is not unique to the Kedushas Levi or indeed to the Jewish mystical tradition more widely. This sentiment, I think, was first was challenged, called into question and indeed rejected by Friedrich Nietzche,* especially in the Prologue to his Genealogy of Morals. For Nietzche, just as it was for the Kedushas Levi nearly a century earlier, it was essential to begin with a reflection on self-denial.

For me the issue was the value of morality—and in that matter I had to take issue almost alone with my great teacher Schopenhauer, the one to whom, as if to a contemporary, that book, with its passion and hidden contradiction, addresses itself (—for that book was also a “polemical tract”). The most specific issue was the worth of the “unegoistic,” the instinct for pity, self-denial, self-sacrifice, something which Schopenhauer himself had painted with gold, deified, and projected into the next world for so long that it finally remained for him “value in itself” and the reason why he said No to life and even to himself. But a constantly more fundamental suspicion of these very instincts voiced itself in me, a scepticism which always dug deeper! It was precisely here that I saw the great danger to humanity, its most sublime temptation and seduction.—But in what direction? To nothingness?—It was precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, the standing still, the backward-glancing exhaustion, the will turning itself against life, the final illness tenderly and sadly announcing itself. I understood the morality of pity, which was always seizing more and more around it and which gripped even the philosophers and made them sick, as the most sinister symptom of our European culture, which itself had become sinister, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a European Buddhism? to—nihilism? . . 

*J.K. tells me that some Young Hegelians, like Stirner in The Ego and His Own: All Things Are Nothing to Me already came out against the "Unegoist" well before Nietzsche.