Maimonides’ Straight-Branched Menorah: A Samaritan Parallel

The article deals with the social construction of the charisma of the seventh leader (rebbe) of the Jewish Chabad movement, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (19021994). The comprehensive analysis of the charismatic carrier of the leader shows the process by which the spiritual power of Schneerson moved from a classical (according to Weber) interaction between charisma and a community that recognizes this power to a identification of his figure with the Messiah. Schneerson and the Chabad movement actually represent an effort to modernize one of the two tendencies present in the Chassidic tradition concerning the figure of Messiah: in contrast with the idea that considers not predictable the arrival of Messiah, Chabad, particularly because of the Schneerson's charisma, believe the advent of Messiah imminent. The task of the leader consequently is to pay attention on the premonitory signs of the forthcoming event. The identification between charisma and Messiah in Chabad movement represents a case study of extreme messianism that means a real impasse to solve and rule the question of succession of charisma after the death of the Rebbe.

Originating in eighteenth century Russia, present day Chabad Lubavitch is strongly shaped by the thought and previous leadership of the seventh and last Chabad Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. In keeping with the two preceding Chabad Lubavitch Rebbes, Schneerson remained essentially opposed to major aspects of political Zionism; he distinguished clearly between the land of Israel and the state of Israel. Schneerson maintained, as did his predecessors, that Redemption would occur only with the coming of Moshiach (the Messiah). Given the fact of the state’s existence after 1948, however, Schneerson modified to some extent the previous extreme anti-Zionism of Chabad Lubavitch and put great emphasis upon the security of Jews and of the Holy Land. In 1997, three years after Shneerson’s death, a lengthy article titled “Eyes Upon the Land” was posted to the Chabad website and was edited by rabbinical affiliate Eliyahu Touger into a book. The following examination of the text Eyes Upon the Land: The Territorial Integrity of Israel: A life Threatening Concern provides insight into an influential sector within the context of which Ibrahim Abu-Rabi spoke and wrote.

Jewish Mysticism: From Ancient Times through Today

1. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Letter to the Jewish Community of Teaneck

Chabad Hasidism developed at the end of the eighteenth century around the persona of rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady (b. 1745–d. 1813). Shneur Zalman, who was a student of two important leaders of the nascent Hasidic movement, Dov Ber of Mezeritch and Menachem Mendel of Witebsk, gradually rose to become a Hasidic leader in his own right following the latter’s immigration to Palestine. His literary output, which encompasses both legal and mystical teachings, forms the core of Chabad doctrine. Following his death and a succession feud, his followers split into two groups. One followed his son Dov Ber Shneuri (b. 1773–d. 1827), while another followed his outstanding disciple, Aharon ha-Levi (b. 1766–d. 1826). Dov Ber relocated to the neighboring town of Lyubavitchi, from which the movement obtained the second part of its name: Chabad-Lubavitch. Aharon did not manage to perpetuate his leadership; when he died the majority of his followers rejoined Chabad-Lubavitch, confirming the father-to-son succession model in Chabad. Lyubavitchi remained the spiritual center of the Lubavitch faction of Chabad until 1915, when the fifth rebbe, Shalom Dovber Schneersohn (b. 1860–d. 1920), relocated to Rostov in an attempt to flee the advancing German army. After the October Revolution, the new communist regime and the antireligious persecutions that followed eventually forced Chabad out of Russia and into Latvia and Poland. The Polish episode in Chabad history did not last long and was abruptly ended by the outbreak of the Second World War. Thanks to persistent diplomatic efforts, Yosef Yitshak was allowed to leave occupied Poland and in 1940 arrived in the United States. Yosef Yitshak saw in the atrocities of the war and the Holocaust the birth-pangs of the messiah; the Chabad institutions that he founded in Brooklyn were intended as a tool of bringing American Jews back to the fold of religion and thus preparing the ground for the messianic advent. His son-in-law and successor, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (b. 1902–d. 1994), took up his message and developed around it Chabad as a transnational organization, emissaries of which are active providing orthodox religious services all around the globe. The success of Chabad outreach, the centrality of messianic message, and the charisma of the rebbe led part of his followers to believe that the rebbe himself was the long-expected messiah; this belief persisted to some extent even despite his death in 1994, and it caused a major controversy within the orthodox community with regard to the boundaries of Jewish messianism. The controversy notwithstanding, Chabad has continued to thrive, and with over a thousand centers scattered around the world, it has become perhaps the most visible Hasidic movement and a dominant force in the Jewish orthodox community of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Salvation or Destruction? The Meaning and Consequences of Lubavitch Messianism Benny Kraut (bio) The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference, by David Berger. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001. 195pp. $29.50. At supper one night at a friend’s home in Montreal in the mid-1960s, I was seated next to a very prominent Orthodox rabbi/scholar/teacher of mitnaged heritage, himself linked by marriage to an even more illustrious Lithuanian gadol, who shared the profound historic disdain of mitnagedim for hasidism. Strikingly, however, he expressed willing ness to reconsider his stance on hasidism generally because of his regard for the religious direction of the Lubavitch movement. “Only in our day and age must we consider whether hasidism is consonant with Judaism,” he declared, “and that is because of the Lubavitchers and their emphasis on Torah study.” How ironic, then, to read one generation later the charge of David Berger, another eminent rabbi/scholar who is by and large far more sympathetic to hasidism, that the belief of an influential sub-group of Lubavitcher hasidim in their deceased Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as the “King-Messiah,” represents a “catastrophe,” a dire threat to the integrity of Judaism and its fundamental messianic idea. This reversal is ironic perhaps, but, in light of the events and trends discussed in the work under review, quite understandable. In this thoroughly engrossing book, which is at once memoir and intellectual history, theological tract and religious polemic, ominous jeremiad and clarion call to action, David Berger traces in detail his evolving seven-year battle with Lubavitch messianism and messianists. Berger has waged this war of words virtually single-handedly, through published essays in the Jewish press and periodical literature, as well as through personal oral appeals and letters to the key Modern Orthodox and Yeshiva-world rabbinic leaders and institutions in the United States and Israel. (Some of these earlier writings are, in fact, reprinted as chapters in this book.) He has tried to galvanize Orthodox opposition to what he perceives to be the calamitous gradual legitimization of Lubavitch’s false messianism, a legitimization based on the booming silence on this matter emanating from Orthodox quarters. This [End Page 96] book summarizes his past efforts, while simultaneously pondering and castigating the critical failure of nerve of Orthodox Jewish leadership, which, with only a few excep tions, has not publicly joined his struggle. (He has received private support and commendations from such disparate sources as Yeshiva University President Norman Lamm, Former Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, individual members of the Moetzes Gedolei Hatorah, and members of the Israeli rabbinic establishment. Only the Rabbinic Council of America, by official organiza tional resolution, has taken a public stance against the false messianic idea implicit in Lubavitch messianism.) Berger’s abiding Orthodox religious commitment, deep familiarity with religious texts and ideas, and specialized training in historical scholarship have singularly positioned and qualified him to embark on this defense of Judaism; indeed, his biography is integral to this story and vital for comprehending his self-conceived mission. 1 His case against Lubavitch messianism is clear and distinct. The Rebbe died on June 12, 1994. Proponents of his messianic status, therefore, not only must believe that the messiah can be a dead man resurrected—an utterly problematic claim within the corpus of traditional Jewish texts, given that there is only one possible talmudic source, read according to one interpretation of Rashi, which could possibly support this view; even more implausibly, they have to believe that a redeemer [read the Rebbe] has come, has announced the beginning of redemption, has died before consummating his messianic mission, and that he will one day return to complete his unfulfilled task. This idea, Berger insists, cannot be substantiated by any halakhic or hashkafic sources and is unprecedented in Jewish history. Moreover, this notion of a Jewish “second-coming” is too redolent of messianic claims made for another dead Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, rendering it altogether untenable within the precincts of Judaism. Berger also demonstrates that the few public attempts by Lubavitch messianic enthusiasts to win acceptance for their views are as absurd as they are misguided...

Abstract: This article presents a first attempt to classify and present a group of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hasidic texts as belonging to a specific literary genre: rationales for the commandments. In this category we include Sefer Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef , by Ya‘akov Yosef of Pollonye; Sefer derekh pikudekhah , by Tsvi Elimelekh of Dinov; Sefer otsar ha-@hayim , by Yits@hak Eizik Ye@hiel Safrin; Likute halakhot , by Nathan Sternharts of Nemirov; Derekh mitsvotekhah , by Menachem Mendel Schneerson; and, finally, Sefer be’erat Miriam , by Avraham Abele Kanarfogel. We survey the works broadly and relate them to one defined literary genre. In so doing, we offer a new framework for a scholarly discussion of the Hasidic occupation with nomos and kabbalah. We demonstrate how Hasidic works discussing rationales for the commandments simultaneously employ halakhic and kabbalistic perspectives, emphasizing the punctiliousness in their fulfilment, their theurgic efficacy, and personal-spiritual completeness.

Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Letter to the Jewish Community of Teaneck, 1981

Scholarship on Hasidism typically utilizes literary source material of the dynastic leaders and their top disciples, while the more typical master/disciple relationship has escaped attention. Hasidic movements have produced, distributed, and voraciously consumed visual portraits of their leaders throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The most visually productive Hasidic community is the Belarusian HabadLubavitch, which has produced images of five of its seven generations of leaders. Indeed, portraits of its leaders have been integral to the development of Habad both in Eastern Europe and its post-Shoah rejuvination in the United States. This paper begins with Habad's visual history from the 1880s release of portrait paintings of the first and third Habad leaders in the effort to establish a unified group identity at a time of factionalism. The survey then moves to Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Rebbe of Habad, who rallied his followers with the medium of photography. Photography became a central component of his leadership in the 1930s and 1940s. The study then moves to the seventh and last Habad leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who expanded the use of visual culture in Habad and used his own image to forge a post-Shoah group identity around a distinctly American leader who was also the spiritual repository of the six preceding Russian leaders. Schneerson's image production and reproduction began to model American celebrity culture in the early 1970s as part of a public campaign to inaugurate the Messianic Age. This broad dissemination of Schneerson's image inadvertantly created an elastic Schneerson portrait, whose reflexivness, in some respects, transcended its subject.

This chapter explores the question of possible influences of Maimonides on early Habad thought and the unusual focus on him in the contemporary Habad movement. The last Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) presented the image of Maimonides as a paradigm of the ideals of Habad Hasidism. The chapter defines those features of both Maimonides and Habad which make this juncture possible. Maimonides' depiction of the advent of the Messiah, in the final chapters of Mishneh Torah , were cited by Rabbi Menachem Mendel in 1970 in a context of the special focus on the Lurianic messianic process which he had brought to post-holocaust Habad thinking, linked with Habad Jewish outreach and the bursting forth of the wellsprings. For the Hasidic followers, this passage in the Mishneh Torah became a central element in the messianic movement in the last years of Rabbi Menachem Mendel's life. Keywords: Habad Hasidism; Hasidic followers; Lubavitcher Rebbe; Lurianic messianic process; Maimonides; Messiah; Mishneh Torah; Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson

The smiling face of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known fondly as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, is a well-known sight to even secular Jews. Staring out of billboards, key-chains, and newspapers, Schneerson, despite his death in 1994, appears everywhere. The Rebbe’s portrait is a devotional image for many members of the Lubavitch-Chabad sect. For those familiar with Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the many copies of Schneerson’s portrait appear to contradict the singular holiness, or “aura,” of the beloved image. By investigating Chabad’s use of the Rebbe’s portrait through Benjamin’s concept of aura, this article shows that Schneerson’s portrait has maintained ritual power while participating in the capitalistic consumption of images. Finally, due to Chabad’s Messianism and outreach efforts, the act of reproducing the image itself has become a part of Chabad’s theology, creating a new paradigm for how religious images retain aura.

Reviewed by: Music in Lubavicher Life Joshua Jacobson Music in Lubavicher Life, by Ellen Koskoff. Music in American Life Series. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 225 pp. $39.95. Hassidic music has been collected and analyzed. Decontextualized, it has been commercialized, arranged, performed, published, recorded, sold, and exploited for all it’s worth. But now for the first time we have a serious scholarly monograph about the role of music in the life of a Hassidic community. Ellen Koskoff is an ethno musicologist—she studies the ways a society uses music. Since 1973, she has been examining the role of music in Lubavitcher life. Through her fieldwork she has learned a great deal not only about her subject, but also about the relationship between investigator and informant. Koskoff set out to examine how music reflects the core values and beliefs of the Lubavitcher community. But her fieldwork became a context for both other- and self- understanding, as she gained significant insights into her own attitudes towards Orthodox Judaism. Stepping into a world that she had assumed would be somewhat familiar, she experienced an unexpected culture shock. Living among informers who were constantly proselytizing, she found herself increasingly on the defensive. Con fronting culture and gender attitudes that were antithetical to her own cherished beliefs, she found it difficult to maintain her professional detachment. Koskoff relates all this through an engaging combination of descriptive vignettes, historical background, and systematic analysis. In the Lubavitcher world, music is regarded as a powerful force, with the potential to elevate the soul. A niggun (devotional song), especially one associated with the first Lubavitcher rebbes, can bring a Jew to a state of dveykus, a sort of spiritual fusion with [End Page 160] God. As such, the singing of niggunim is an indispensable feature of Lubavitcher gatherings, whether liturgical, paraliturgical or secular. But Koskoff also sees the niggun as a manifestation of Lubavitcher values. Many niggunim are borrowed or “rescued” from external sources. By liberating a secular song from its profane context the Hassid has performed an act of tikkun olam. Diverting a song to a sacred purpose is consonant with the Chabad mission of turning a secular Jew onto the path of orthodoxy. Analysis of the structure of a niggun reveals further links to Chabad ideology. “Der Alter Rebbes Niggun,” also referred to as “Niggun of the Four Worlds,” is constructed in four-part form. But there are also many ideological fours: the four worlds of the ten sefirot, the tetragrammaton, and the four-stage process of dveykus: awakening, self- evaluation, work, and union. In her observation of the farbrengen, the author also discerns a manifestation of the four-stage process of dveykus in performance practice. “Awakening” the intention of the performer stems from the act of choosing a niggun, a task either taken by the rebbe himself or delegated to a Hassid who is intimately familiar with the rebbe’s intentions. In the stage of “self-evaluation” the singing begins with emotional intensity, characterized by musical gestures such as strong accents, ornamentation and repetition. In this stage the animal urges are said to become hypnotized, allowing the divine soul to take control. In the third stage, “work,” performance gestures become exaggerated. The performers begin to sway and dance, clapping becomes louder, the vocal tone becomes harsher, the pitch level rises, the tempo increases, and the vodka flows even more feely. After many repetitions, the performers may swoon or lose consciousness, behaviors considered to be the ultimate “union” with the divine. Koskoff also explores the structure of Sefer Ha-nigunim as a reflection of the organization of Lubavitch society. Sefer Ha-nigunim, a collection of 347 notated songs, was commissioned by Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in the 1940s as part of a project to preserve and disseminate Chabad niggunim. The songs placed at the head of each volume are those that are felt to be closest to the divine. These are the com positions attributed to the first Lubavitcher rebbe, Schneur Zalman, and the four rebbes who succeeded him. The middle section contains songs attributed to European Lubavitcher rebbes’ court composers, as well as songs stemming from other Hassidic courts. The third section, representing...

A Moroccan Kabbalist in the White House:Understanding the Relationship between Jared Kushner and Moroccan Jewish Mysticism Aomar Boum (bio) Few political pundits believed that Donald J. Trump would defeat a political giant like Hillary R. Clinton in the 2016 American elections. The mere image of Trump, a reality-television personality who found huge and unquestionable support among Christian evangelicals, in the White House excited derision in many liberal and conservative circles during the early days of the Republican nomination process. Like many, I had my doubts, although I also partly believed that Trump could win by riding the popular anger of many Americans, especially given his savvy populist messaging and familiarity with the television industry. Yet a number of Orthodox Jewish Moroccan informants with whom I spoke during and after the campaign never doubted that Trump would win the election. That the most significant Jewish support for Trump came from followers of the Shas Party in Israel, Chabad Lubavitch, and Orthodox and Hasidic Jews stirred my intellectual curiosity throughout both the primary and the national phases of the election. I wanted to understand why many [End Page 146] Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Moroccan Jews supported Trump as a candidate. One of my Moroccan Jewish informants, Mordachai (informants' names are pseudonyms), a member of Shuva Israel (Return Israel; see below), noted that in Ashdod and other Moroccan ultra-Orthodox communities in Jerusalem it was widely believed that a miracle would cause Trump to win.1 The popular opinion was that a well-respected rebbe had predicted Hillary Clinton's defeat.2 In the end, the miracle of President Trump happened, and miracle-working rabbis associated with Jared Kushner, the president's Orthodox Jewish son-in-law, wasted no time claiming that they had had something to do with it. Rabbi David Pinto3 and Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto,4 two descendants of a long line of North African rabbis, are thought to have been among those miracle workers.5 The Pinto Torah institutions are part of a global Jewish network led by members of the Pinto family to disseminate Torah in Israel (Ashdod and Jerusalem), France (Lyon and Paris), the United States (New York and Los Angeles), and Argentina (Buenos Aires).6 Another of their followers, Yosef, told me that "the election of Trump does not only mean that there will be Shabbat candles every Friday night at the White House, but that Moroccan mystic kabbalists will bless the White House from Ashdod every Shabbat."7 On November 6, 2016, two days before the election, Ivanka Trump and Kushner, her husband, visited the Ohel, the grave of Menachem Mendel Schneerson located in the Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens.8 Since the unexpected death of the Lubavitcher rebbe in 1994, his grave has been a major destination for many Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who come there seeking his blessing. Ivanka Trump converted to Orthodox Judaism before her marriage to Jared Kushner, and it is widely believed that she has maintained an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle since her conversion. In this short commentary essay, I reflect on the reasons that have driven Kushner, a Modern Orthodox American Jew, to seek a blessing at the Ohel without being an openly declared follower follower of the Lubavitch movement and its mystical version of Judaism and a believer that miracles happen through prayers mediated through a rebbe. I also discuss the larger religious context that makes it possible for a modern Jewish New Yorker like Kushner to believe in modern Jewish Orthodox theology and at the same time support Jewish mystics such as David Pinto, a descendant of Rabbi Haim Pinto of Essaouira, Morocco, in return for their blessings (see figure 1).9 (I acknowledge that there is a historical tension and division among Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews about secularism and belief in amulets and the power of tzaddiks, a clash that became obvious in the context of Israeli society.) Finally, I provide a tentative [End Page 147] theoretical argument that helps us understand the comfortable attitude of Kushner and his family toward mystical folklore, folk magic, and beliefs that have long been ridiculed by Ashkenazi Jews as a phenomenon of the poor and "primitive...

This introductory chapter discusses how two propositions from which every mainstream Jew in the last millennium would have instantly recoiled have become legitimate options within Orthodox Judaism. First, a specific descendant of King David may be identified with certainty as the Messiah even though he died in an unredeemed world. Second, the messianic faith of Judaism allows for the following scenario: God will finally send the true Messiah to embark upon his redemptive mission. The true Messiah's redemptive mission, publicly proclaimed and vigorously pursued, will be interrupted by death and burial and then consummated through a Second Coming. While the vast majority of Jews instinctively recognize the alienness of these propositions, and the Rabbinical Council of America has declared that there is no place for such a doctrine in Judaism, contemporary Orthodox Jewry effectively legitimates these beliefs. A large segment of a highly significant Orthodox movement called Lubavitch, or Chabad, hasidism affirms that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who was laid to rest in 1994 without leaving a successor, did everything subsumed under proposition 2 and will soon return to complete the redemption in his capacity as the Messiah. This book is an account of this historic mutation of Judaism.

When Menachem Friedman and I resolved to write what became The Rebbe: The Life and the Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, we did so because as sociologists we were puzzled, as we put it in our preface, by how a “a small Hasidic group that seemed on the verge of collapse in 1950 with the death of their sixth leader” had replanted itself in America and in less than a generation “gained fame and influence throughout the world in ways no one could have imagined” at the time their next and thus far last rebbe, Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, took over the reins of leadership in 1951. More than that, we were quite amazed that this group, which at its height during the twentieth century was never among the largest hasidic sects and probably numbered at most about 100,000 worldwide, had managed to become among the most well-known hasidim in the world. We were no less struck that they had found ways to make their Jewish outreach efforts, as well as their extraordinarily parochial belief that the contemporary world had entered messianic times (and that only Lubavitchers and their rebbe knew how to hasten his coming), both newsworthy and known far beyond the borders of the hasidic world. Through a series of directed campaigns that aimed to transform Jewry and the world, many, if not most Lubavitchers had also tried to convince the world that their leader, who had reigned over them from Brooklyn for forty-three years, was the Messiah incarnate, even as he lay dying at Beth Israel Hospital in New York.