Lubavitcher Rebbe Research Articles

The Holocaust as an (UN)Exceptional Phenomenon: Development and Change in the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Outlook

Abstract This article examines the evolution and transformation in the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s perspective concerning the Holocaust. It traces the Rebbe’s viewpoint on the Holocaust by analyzing his various insights and observations in his sermons and writings over the years, and highlights a significant shift in his stance whereby he reached the conclusion that the Holocaust is exceptional and does not fall into the terms of sin, punishment, or even Tikkun (metaphysical rectification)—concepts which he himself previously utilized in earlier stages of his life. In his most recent phase, the Lubavitcher Rebbe posited that the Holocaust is an unprecedented and exceptional occurrence, both on historical and theological grounds. This assertion is not commonly espoused by traditional Jewish theologians and orthodox rabbis, thus rendering the Lubavitcher Rebbe relatively distinctive.

Tribute to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Tribute to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Blessed be the surgeon? : the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Emuna u-mada' controversy and its legacy

Blessed be the surgeon? : the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Emuna u-mada' controversy and its legacy

Memoirs of a Refugee: The Travels and Travails of Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung

In October of 1941, twenty-nine rabbis and rabbinical students left Shanghai and eventually arrived in Montreal, under an unusual Canadian government visa program to help Orthodox rabbis. Among these refugees were the future chief rabbi of Montreal, Pinchas Hirschprung, as well as nine shlichim of the Lubavitcher rebbe. This article offers a detailed account of Hirschprung’s journey from his hometown of Dukla, Poland, through Lithuania, Latvia, the Soviet Union, Japan, Shanghai, and the United States, until his arrival in Montreal. Through Hirschprung’s personal experience, the article highlights the complexities and difficulties of searching for refuge during this particular period of the war, prior to the US entry after Pearl Harbor. As well, this article brings together previously untranslated archival and biographical information on the other rabbinical refugees who travelled with Hirschprung including students and teachers from some of the best-known prewar yeshivot of Lithuania and Poland. The article also addresses the tensions between the Orthodox and secular rescue organizations during the Holocaust.

The Age of Messianic Reproduction: The Image of the Last Lubavitcher Rebbe in Chabad Theology

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.

Shamil:Concept, Practice and Reception of a Nigunin Habad Hasidism

The article discusses the conception, performance and reception of nigun Shamil as a representative case of the social, literary and technological mechanisms that characterize music in Habad, past and present. The author argues for the centrality of non-accompanied, mostly wordless vocal tunes performed by the Hasidic masters such as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as a main vehicle for the articulation of both the heightening of mystical experience and the teaching of Hasidism.

A Moroccan Kabbalist in the White House: Understanding the Relationship between Jared Kushner and Moroccan Jewish Mysticism

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...

Miracles, Media, Mezuzot: Storytelling among Chabad Hasidim

In 1994 the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, died leaving no successor. His group split into two groups: messianists who maintained that the Rebbe had not died and was Moshiach, the Jewish Messiah, and the non messianists who agreed that the Rebbe had died. This paper focuses upon a prominent Chabad practice; the role of storytelling. I propose the question, “Whose interests do these stories serve?” Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lubavitch, I present a number of narratives pertaining to the Rebbe’s miraculous feats. Following his death, stories surrounding the Lubavitcher Rebbe not only bolster his “charisma” but lead to a sense of his continuing presence. These stories are produced predominantly by the messianic faction of Lubavitch and following his death are published regularly on messianic websites.

Folklore and History

Folklore and History Chava Weissler (bio) As a folklorist, I study the expressive culture—rituals, prayers, music, and crafts—of ordinary people (in my case, ordinary Jews), rather than the intellectual or artistic creations of cultural elites—rabbis, philosophers, and classical composers. In practice, of course, these are not distinct categories, and I have often found that my most productive material comes from those who mediate between religious elites and “ordinary Jews.” Throughout my career, I have moved back and forth between ethnographic and historical research. My dissertation research was an ethnographic study of the havurah movement, groups of Jews who come together for fellowship, study, and prayer. I followed this with a historical study of the piety of eighteenth-century Central and Eastern European Jewish women. My present project, once again based in ethnography, is a study of the Jewish Renewal movement in North America. My study focuses on the organization now called ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, with forty-four affiliated communities, primarily in North America, and administrative offices in Philadelphia. It has its roots in the teachings of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a former Lubavitch Hasid and emissary of the Lubavitcher rebbe. Reb Zalman, as he is called, is still the “rebbe” of the Jewish Renewal movement. More specifically, I seek to understand the varieties of Judaism created in this movement through a study of the expressive culture of participants in ALEPH—their rituals, art, dance, and worship—as well as their writings. Members of ALEPH often quote the words of Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank, describing their movement as “Hasidism meets feminism.” I am particularly interested in the way women and feminism figure in Jewish Renewal. I’ll address each of the discussion questions in turn. 1. How does the history we choose to engage with shape the ethno-graphic tale we tell, and what type of historical consciousness do we bring to the work? While Jewish Renewal can be described as a “neo-Hasidic” movement, it can also be understood as part of the contemporary drive toward varieties of religion that stress intense experience and “spiritual practice.” Indeed, Jewish Renewal can be set into both of these historical frameworks: the history of Kabbalah and Hasidism and the history of American religion. [End Page 9] What difference does it make if I tell this as a Jewish tale or as an American tale? The study of Jewish Renewal started out for me very much as a Jewish story. I got interested in the topic because of my previous research on Jewish women’s piety in eighteenth-century Europe; I discovered kabbalistic motifs in writings for and by women. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was doing this research, scholars thought of Kabbalah as an elite mysticism, exclusively the province of learned Jewish men. I was among a cohort of scholars asking whether women and non-learned men could know Kabbalah, and how they learned it. In the course of that research, I encountered a literature in Yiddish that popularized Kabbalah. Although women were still excluded from learned circles of Kabbalah study (and the inner circles of the emergent Hasidic movement), they read and used this literature in the vernacular to gain some knowledge of kabbalistic ideas and symbols, and to use these as a resource to shape their own prayers and practices.1 Searching for a new research topic after I completed that study, I looked around, saw news about the pop star Madonna and her interest in the Kabbalah Centre,2 as well as other varieties of popular Kabbalah, with a whole literature in the vernacular—English, in this case—explicating Kabbalistic ideas. Jewish Renewal, which draws on Hasidism and Kabbalah, intrigued me as a site to investigate what I came to call contemporary, “vernacular Kabbalah.” What are the questions that emerge from this approach? First, they suggest a traditional “philological” methodology: What are the textual sources used by members of Jewish Renewal, and how are they interpreted or changed? How do contemporary works about Kabbalah and Hasidism in English compare with the earlier Yiddish works? Further, who has access to kabbalitic materials and concepts, how do they have access, and who has the...

From Woman as Hasid to Woman as “Tsadik” in the Teachings of the Last Two Lubavitcher Rebbes

The paper deals with some of the ways in which the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menahem Mendel Schneerson, radicalized the legacy of his predecessor, Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn, who was the first hasidic leader to mobilize women as active members of the Habad constituency. In the teachings of Menahem Mendel Schneerson, women were invested for the first time with the sense of being full-fledged female hasidim in their own right. Moreover, unlike his predecessor, whose mobilization of women never became an integral element of his apocalyptic messianism, Menahem Mendel Schneerson consistently framed the empowerment of women in terms of kabbalistic eschatology, anticipating in the present the inverted gender hierarchy of the messianic future, which was, as he declared, just about to unfold. In this context, he applied to women some of the classical hasidic formulations of the doctrine of the tsadik, depicting them as a channel that mediates between Heaven and earth, and as the trigger that releases from Heaven the flow of material prosperity expressed in terms of the traditional tsadik’s blessing for sons (offspring), life (health), and food (secure livelihood).

The Maimonidean Menorah and Contemporary Habad Messianism: A Reconsideration

The menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum first described in Exodus 25:31–40, was a central part of the Tabernacle in the desert and later in the Temple of Jerusalem. This seven-branched menorah has served as the most widely used iconographic symbol of Judaism for more than two thousand years. Common to all these depictions are the central stem and the three arms extending in a U shape from the central stem. The one exception to the commonly accepted iconography of the menorah as having U-shaped arms is found in Moses Maimonides’ halachic code, Mishne Torah. In his description of the furnishings of the Temple, Maimonides describes the design of the menorah, based on his understanding of the Biblical text. His version of the menorah has a number of differences from the ‘‘normative’’ iconography. The most distinctive difference is that Maimonides describes the arms as being straight, in a V shape, rather than the curved U shape. The only visual representation of this menorah is found in the Kaufmann Codex, the oldest known manuscript of the Mishne Torah. Until 1982, this interpretation of the menorah had no impact or influence on Jewish life or religious practice. Shortly before Hanukkah of 1982, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, decreed that the Maimonidean menorah should become the new standard design for all menorahs employed or displayed by Habad followers and institutions. There is no history of Lubavitch-Habad having a distinctive menorah before 1982. However, as this was also the period during which the intensification of Habad messianic activity occurred, the question must be asked if there is any correlation between the introduction of this new menorah and Habad messianic activity. The past decade has seen an exponential growth in the scholarly discussion and analysis of the overt messianism that has defined the Habad hasidic movement since the early 1980s. Two recent scholars have addressed the meaning of the Maimonidean menorah and its

On Writing about the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe and His Hasidim

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.

A Messiah from the Dead: Cultural Performance in Lubavitcher Messianism

The scholarly literature on millennialism commonly employs Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance to understand how groups deal with failed prophecy. For many years Lubavitcher Hasidim held that their spiritual leader, Menachem Schneerson—the Lubavitcher Rebbe—was the Jewish Messiah and that he would reveal himself as such, ushering in the redemption. He died, however, in 1994 without fulfilling his followers’ messianic expectations. The author presents recent ethnographic data from fieldwork among Lubavitcher Hasidim illustrating the role of ritualistic performances and modern communication media (television, radio and the internet) in maintaining a sense of the Rebbe’s continuing presence. This ritualised reaffirmation of belief—a collective experience of symbolic fulfilment—provides disappointed followers with social and psychological support to render such an experience less cognitively distressing.

Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe

Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe

Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe (review)

Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe (review)

Rescued from the Reich: how one of Hitler's soldiers saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe

When Hitler invaded Warsaw in the autumn of 1939, hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them Jewish, were trapped in the besieged city. The Rebbe Joseph Schneersohn, the leader of the ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher Jews, was among them. Followers throughout the world were filled with anguish, unable to confirm whether he was alive or dead. Working with officials in the United States government, a group of American Jews initiated what would ultimately become one of the strangest, and most miraculous, rescues of World War II. The escape of Rebbe Schneersohn from Warsaw has been the subject of speculation for decades. Historian Bryan Mark Rigg has now uncovered the true story of the rescue, which was propelled by a secret collaboration between American officials and leaders of German military intelligence. Amid the fog of war, a small group of dedicated German soldiers located the Rebbe and protected him from suspicious Nazis as they fled the city together. During the course of the mission, the Rebbe learned the shocking truth about the leader of the rescue operation, the decorated Wehrmacht soldier Ernst Bloch: he was himself half-Jewish, and a victim of the rising tide of German antisemitism. A harrowing story about identity and moral responsibility, Rescued from the Reich is also a riveting narrative history of one of the most extraordinary rescue missions of World War II.

WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH, A TAMBOURINE IN HER HAND

Between March and July of 1994, the period just before and after the death of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, I was doing fieldwork among Lubavitch women in Crown Heights, New York, and in Morristown, New Jersey, home of the Lubavitch Rabbinical College. Most of the women I encountered said they believedor at least hopedthat their Rebbe would not die, but would rather emergerise up was the expression they usedas the Messiah. While attending their study sessions and prayer gatherings and visiting them in their homes, I inadvertently discovered that a new ritual object was emerging in the women's community: a Miriam's tambourine. Because a tambourine is a prosaic object, evoking folk concerts and children's rhythm training, it was not initially clear to me that this object, in the context of the Lubavitch women, possessed spiritual agency. In this essay, I attempt to narrate, in the form of a chronicle, various forms of spiritual work that the tambourine performed for Lubavitch women. Speaking broadly, I observed that the tambourine enabled the creation of women's bonds; it channeled anxiety and creative energy, and it released the women from boundaries of time and place as they identified with the biblical Miriam and the confident ancient Israelite women who had gracefully saved the day when their husbands quarreled, complained, despaired, and withdrew from procreation. The tambourine eased women across a threatening transition, guiding and assuring them, and creating a locus for divine-human intersection.

Music in Lubavicher Life

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...

Communication and change: Newspapers, periodicals, and acculturation among Israeli Haredim

Despite its outwardly static and traditional appearance, the Israeli Haredi world is engaged in a constant cultural dialog with modernity. This dialog, part of which the following study will survey, is exceptionally visible in the realm of communications, the conduit used by the Haredi leadership to inform its rank and file of dictates or decisions. 1 By observing the communication that takes place through the medium of Haredi journals, newspapers, and other periodical literature, in particular, those of the Habad-Lubavitch and Gur Hasidim, the Lithuanian Mitnagdim and the Sefaradi Haredim of Shas, it is possible to observe cultural activity that results in acculturation with the broader Israeli society, whether secular or religious. This is largely so, because Haredi movements are organized from a pinnacle downward, the pinnacle being the da’at Torah, the unchallengeable theoretical-theological religious wisdom regarding a specific issue as it is expounded by a given movement’s undisputed religious (and often political, too) leader. 2 However, officially or unofficially, directly or indirectly, Haredi periodical literature conveys this wisdom to followers, 3 if only because official publications derive their legitimacy from the approval, the transmission of da’at Torah, as it is expressed by a movement’s chief rabbinical authority. This approval extends even to policies concerning language, sometimes embracing the very choice of words. When the source of approval is blurred (such as in the case of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s death or the Mitnagid R. Shakh’s incapacitation) existing linguistic policies normally continue. Yet, the vacuum of leadership, however partial, may gradually blur these policies, as well as a publication’s orientation. In the case of the Gerrer Hasidism, linguistic change in the movement’s publications responded to the new leader’s policies and linguistic style. ∗ This article is based on a chapter of a dissertation entitled “Language Policies of Ethnic Minorities as Influenced by Social, Economic, Religious and Political Constraints: An Examination of Israeli Haredim” that is being written at the Department of English at Bar-Ilan University under the guidance of Prof. Bernard (Dov) Spolsky and Prof. Joel Walters.

A tale of two orphans: the limits of categorization

This paper describes an historical anecdote which occurred when Rabbi Shalom Dov-Ber Schneersohn, the 5th Lubavitcher Rebbe (known as the RaSHaB) visited Vienna in 1903, prior to his meetings with Sigmund Freud. At the time the RaSHaB was suffering from a certain 'lowness of spirits'. One afternoon he went into a trance-like state from which he seemed to emerge with difficulty. The next day he went shopping for women's clothes and then travelled to a distant city to arrange marriages for two recently bereaved girls. Taken out of context, the behaviour of the RaSHaB could easily be viewed as indications of psychiatric or neurological pathology. But when the totality of the Rebbe's personality and work are taken into account as well as the context of the events, it can be appreciated that he had entered an altered state of consciousness (ASC) in order to effect healing on both personal and mystical planes. The authors point out the dangers of over hasty diagnostic conclusions, for it is clear is that the Ra...