Religion: The Lubavitchers

A rundown, three-story building at 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn is the hub and powerhouse of one of the most intense religious brotherhoods in the modern world: the Lubavitcher movement. In Communist Russia and North Africa, Australia and all over the U.S.. an estimated 10,000 followers of this Hasidic sect look to Brooklyn for light and guidance, for it is the home of their Rebbe,* Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He is the seventh leader of the Lubavitchers, a man whose wisdom is believed by his followers to be something more than human.

Few outsiders have made the effort to try to understand this paradoxical sect of highly organized, missionary-minded mystics, strongest remnant of the great age of Hasidism, that inspired Eastern European Jewry during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the March and April issues of Commentary, Reform Rabbi Herbert Weiner of Temple Israel in South Orange, N.J. presents the results of a year-long study of the Brooklyn Lubavitchers.

Joyous Mysticism. The Lubavitcher movement, deriving its name from a small town in northern Russia, was founded by Shneur Zalman (1747-1812), a brilliant young Talmudist in White Russia who became a disciple of Hasidism. This was a movement of holy men (zaddiks) and their followers who reacted against the arid, hairsplitting Talmud-boring of 17th century Judaism with a kind of joyous mysticism; they have often been compared to the followers of St. Francis of Assisi. Shneur Zalman burned with Hasidism’s hitlahavut (spiritual enthusiasm), but he recognized the need for organization and teaching as well, and he steered a middle course between mystical rapture and the traditional emphasis on study. He gave his followers and their descendants a highly organized religious school system, a missionary tradition and a lively concern for health and material welfare that kept the movement alive (often underground) through persecution, war and revolution.

In 1940 the sixth Rebbe, Joseph Isaac, arrived in New York City, an ill and exhausted refugee from Communist imprisonment and the German bombardment of Warsaw. But in the decade before he died, he planted the Lubavitcher movement deep in the U.S. He organized “Torah Missions,” and set up Lubavitcher Bible classes, founded a publishing house to turn out textbooks in English and Hebrew, dispatched missionaries all over the world. After his death in 1949, he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Menachem Mendel, who, like all Rebbes, added Schneerson to his name in honor of Founder Shneur Zalman.

Long Discourse. Author Weiner describes his visit to a farbrengung, an annual festivity in celebration of Joseph Isaac’s release from Communist prison. The courtyard adjoining the Brooklyn headquarters was jammed with Lubavitcher men at benches and tables, many of them in long black coats or full jackets and large-brimmed black hats. Some wore the gartel, a black silk cord bound around the waist to symbolize the distinction between the “higher” and “lower” parts of man. As soon as blue-eyed, black-bearded Menachem Mendel arrived, he was handed a bottle of whisky, which he passed to outstretched hands below him, and almost immediately bottles of whisky and paper cups appeared on all the tables.

Then there was singing, followed by toasts (“L’chayim!”—to life), followed by more singing, and the first of many talks by the Rebbe, during which everyone remained standing. The Rebbe spoke on the four levels on which, according to the Hasidim, the Bible is written: p’shat or literal meaning, d’rush or simple allegory relating to moral teachings, remez or “the hint” of the mystical relation between man and God, and sod, the secret, dealing with esoteric cosmological matters accessible only to students of the cabala.*

Every Lubavitcher who possibly can comes to consult the Rebbe on any aspect of his life—financial, moral or medical. It is in the medical field that Rabbi Mendel has performed many feats that Lubavitchers do not hesitate to call miraculous. The Rebbe himself—he studied science at the Sorbonne—merely says: “Sometimes all that is necessary to know what a man’s troubles are is to spend a half hour observing how he looks and how he moves his hands, and then to try identifying with him.”

The Danger of Compromise. Russia-born Rabbi Mendel, like all Lubavitcher Rebbes, looks upon himself as spiritual “shepherd” of all Jews everywhere—Hasidic or not. He lives modestly with his wife in their $75-a-month flat, devotes his whole time to the Torah, to his flock and to directing missionary work among Jews who have fallen away from the Orthodox faith. As he sees it, the most important injunction for Jews is not to compromise in matters of faith and observance. “Compromise is dangerous because it sickens both the body and the soul . . . One must do everything, but at the same time we welcome the doing of even a part. If all we can do is to save one limb, we save that. Then we worry about saving another. A man may say, ‘I would like to be whole, but I can’t. My evil impulse prevents me, or I have to make a living, or I don’t have the time’ . . . The great fault of Conservative and Reform Judaism is not that they compromise but that they sanctify the compromise [and] still the conscience.”

His followers are sure that he is right, and every year some 100 young Lubavitcher missionaries travel all over the U.S. to spread his word to other Jews. Often they find little or no understanding. But, says one of his disciples of the Rebbe: “He is to us what Moses was to Israel in his time. Not that the Rebbe is to be compared to Moses, like whom there has been none other since. But the Rebbe is like a little Moses.”

* A Hasidic term for leader, stemming from the Hebrew rabbi, meaning teacher. *An esoteric system of speculation on metaphysics which went in for much symbolical manipulation of words and names. The cabala originated in Palestine but came under strong Babylonian influence between 500 and 900 A.D. Its best-known work, the Zohar, compiled in the 13th century, had a profound influence on Hasidism.