“The Lower Half of the Globe”: Kabbalah and Social Analysis in the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Vision for Judaism’s American Era

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

AbstractMenachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), the seventh leader of the Habad-Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty, came to the United States as a refugee, having fled Paris as the Nazis took control of France. Yet the American future of Hasidism had already been considered in a letter addressed to him in 1933 by his father-in-law and predecessor as “Lubavitcher Rebbe,” Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson. Therein we find the beginnings of a kabbalistic theorization of the pivotal role that America was to play in the realization of the very telos of creation. Transposed from the realm of kabbalistic theory into the realm of socio-historical analysis, this became the basis for the seventh rebbe’s development and enactment of a counter-cultural strategy for a post-holocaust Jewish renaissance, centered not in Israel, but in America.