At first, Menachem Mendel Schneerson appeared to the general public mostly as a dynamic but largely parochial leader. When news of his activities occasionally reached the general press (commonly buried in the local New York section) and hence the population at large, it mainly focused on celebrations of the Lubavitcher festivals—the commemoration of a former rebbe’s release from imprisonment or the celebration of a yarzheit.1 In America in the 1950s, the activities of Hasidim and their leaders were not of concern to very many people outside the boundaries of Jewish Orthodoxy. Here, as indeed in the new state of Israel, the assumption was that these sorts of Jews were relics of the past, destined to fade away with time.
By 1962, however, he had begun to make a name for himself in the larger Jewish community in America, when his written call for additional aid for parochial schools from the government was printed and reprinted in Jewish publications, as was as well his public objection to the newly instituted U.S. Supreme Court ban on school prayer.2 Taking a very public position so at odds with the one most American Jews embraced made him stand out, not only in America but also from the rank and file of Jewry; that was news.
As he established his leadership over Lubavitch and set the direction it would take, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who knew well the history of his movement, understood that the world he inhabited was altogether different from the one in which his immediate predecessors had lived and led their Hasidim. Theirs was a world in which Jews were chased and persecuted, in which the move out of the orbit of Hasidism and tradition seemed to be absolute for those who chose it. Theirs was a world filled with adversaries, conflict, and despair—to which the coming of the Messiah was a solution.
In contrast to the past, the world into which the seventh rebbe and his generation were taking Lubavitch was one in which society was extraordinarily open to the Jews, where secular society did not see itself as ineluctably antagonistic to religion, and where persecution was limited to those caught behind the Iron Curtain (and even that would end in time). In America and the West, the risks were not that Jews would be chased to their death or that they would despair, but rather that they would be embraced and loved to death, that they would be so accepted and happy that they would assimilate and become indistinguishable from the cultures in which they found themselves. This was a world in which being Jewish might become so vague and amorphous as to lose all distinctiveness. Even in the Soviet Union, where Jews might not be happy, there would also be significant assimilation.
The new Rebbe saw all this and was at first flummoxed by it. In 1964 he wrote that “the house of Israel is on fire (May God have mercy), and the young generation, as things now stand, is largely trapped. You are surely not unaware of the ‘dry’ statistics of intermarriage and assimilation in this country [the United States] and the subject is similar in other countries.”3
Yet as disconcerting as this reality might be at first glance, Menachem Mendel understood that it was possible for a Jew to move into the outside world, to leave behind tribal Jewish ties, to aspire to a career and a life far from the precincts of Jewish tradition and practice, to become an acculturated cosmopolitan citizen of the world—and yet be retrieved and redeemed. He knew, moreover, that some Jews were able to stand with a foot in both the precincts of religious observance and the general culture, as they had done in the Hildesheimer Seminary in Berlin and as many were doing in the growing number of Modern Orthodox day schools of America, some in his own Crown Heights, Brooklyn, neighborhood.* He believed that this journey away from parochial Jewish identity, belonging, and practice was not irreversible or permanent. One could be made to abandon those aspirations, to counter-acculturate and turn back to the most parochial of Jewish identities, to escape the seductions of contemporary culture and embrace the tradition and old practices even more powerfully. He knew that being and looking traditional in America—even looking like a Hasid—could be acceptable, even laudable. He understood that a Jew could now choose to be publicly religious even in a so-called secular environment.4 He knew all this because he had experienced it himself.
Yet while he had come back on his own (and not from such a great cultural distance as those he would try to retrieve), forced by destiny and history, as well as by mystical forces that he was still figuring out and that placed on his shoulders the mantle of leadership and showed him the way, he believed that now he had to burst the boundaries of the past, to the four corners of the world, to the farthest margins of Jewish life to bring back others. No one was beyond the pale or out of reach.
The tool for this outreach would be, as we already know, his emissaries, young Lubavitcher men and women (going as couples), who were his strongest backers. These young people who learned to share his messianic beliefs, whom he could shape and make living instruments of his vision, would become an enthusiastic cadre of followers. He urged them to reach into themselves and be publicly and proudly Jewish in places where others were not, and to teach others to share his beliefs and carry out the practices he was convinced were vital. They would do this even among and ultimately with those Jews who were completely ignorant of what it meant to be Jewish. By their example and enthusiasm, they would light fires of redemption and offer religious and cultural counterseductions that would bring back all the prodigal children. They could change and “purify” the world and the mundane and prepare the way for the Messiah as no one had done before
Unlike the fifth and sixth rebbes, who had remained within the cocoon of Lubavitch even when they were on the run, this Rebbe had been on the periphery. While both Rabbi Shalom DovBer and his son, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, remained far more distant from those who inhabited the world beyond their own and could only imagine it through the prism of their sheltered experience, this new Rebbe had firsthand knowledge. Because of their far more sheltered and insular situation, the previous two rebbes “could not see the future” as it was, only as they wanted it to be.5 Menachem Mendel, however, could see the future because he had been living in it. He had been in Montparnasse and he had been in Berlin, where the prodigal sons and daughters were living. And he knew how to recognize them still, even in post–Second World War America, Europe, and Israel.
Someone who has forever lived entirely within a single closed system or culture is generally unlikely to be the instrument of change. Rather, his thinking is likely to remain loyal to what is the accepted wisdom and way of acting. One who comes from the outside, on the other hand, will often radically alter the conventional.6 Menachem Mendel Schneerson was neither the former nor the latter. He was instead someone who was a bit of both. Accordingly, he would become an innovator, but one who always used the language and instruments of what appeared to be traditional ChaBaD Lubavitcher thinking and practice. So while he used emissaries as had his predecessors, he sent them on a new kind of mission and to places Hasidim had never gone. While he accepted the Lubavitcher idea of messianism and redemption as coming from the lower realms (tachtonim), he refashioned it so that it would be presented in a thoroughly contemporary mode.
Like everyone at the time, the new Rebbe watched young people in the United States get involved and excited by the presidential campaign for John F. Kennedy (both he and his wife were reading the daily papers) and as we have said saw them fired up by his exciting new idea of a peace corps that would send out devoted volunteers throughout the world to work “in areas like education, youth outreach and community development”; later he saw them become engaged by the civil rights struggle and campaigns for racial equality and witnessed their peace campaigns against the Vietnam War.7 Could his shluchim not draw on the same youthful enthusiasms and work in parallel fashion, but for a far more “important” cause? Witnessing the young people of this generation bursting the bonds of the conventional past in order to shape history and society, persuading their peers to join them, he realized that his young Lubavitcher shluchim could do no less in a campaign on which their new leader would send them.
The first of these would be a “mitzvah campaign.” Mitzvahs, acts of Jewish observance, rather than votes, were what he sought to inspire and accumulate. Rabbi Menachem Mendel followed the founder of the ChaBaD dynasty, Schneur Zalman, in sharing the rather radical view among Hasidim that the deed itself is what counts, not the motivation.8 He shared the belief as well, as had the Miteler Rebbe, Dovber, in “the messianic power” of mitzvahs, which he held were a kind of “practical action” that enabled communication with God and whose accumulated performance resulted in a mystical connection with the infinite that went “beyond meaning.”9 Convinced of these acts’ capacity to change, purify, repair, and “conquer” the world, the seventh rebbe added to this doctrine the argument that these “physical, mundane actions directed towards G-d [sic] represent the acme of religious endeavor.”10 Moreover, he argued that, in contradistinction to the Hasidic doctrines that asserted that spiritual ascent was best achieved by “turning one’s back upon the world [and] negating the material dimensions of existence,” for the ordinary person, mitzvahs—material, physical acts—had the capacity to “bring man to the greatest spiritual heights, beyond the reach of what are generally considered more spiritual forms of worship.”11 He would therefore try to get the Jews of his day to enhance their spiritual lives by observing and carrying out such physical and practical Jewish acts. And he could articulate this all in the terminology of America and of his times (to keep it simple): Hence a mitzvah campaign.
The idea of sending young Lubavitchers away from the protected cultural preserve of the ChaBaD enclave on a “universal mission,” but at a grassroots level, as we have previously noted, was not immediately embraced by their parents.12 They worried that their children would be lost to them, subject to acculturation in the places of their posting, becoming victims of religious erosion or even worn down by the seemingly impossible task of turning contemporary Jewry back to Jewish observance.
Besides encouraging and nurturing emissaries, the Rebbe and his associates could also “punish” those who showed their lack of faith and declined the role after being selected. Thus, for example, when early in the campaign the parents of a young man, asking about how long and where he would be sent, implored the Rebbe “not to send their son on a mission,” they were given to understand that no one would be “compelled” to go but that this sort of reluctance was “a breach of discipline” by someone who was considered one his troops.13
“I thought he was my soldier,” the Rebbe wrote to the parents, “and that I could assign him. . . . However it emerges that before he makes a decision, he must listen to his mother and his family. Obviously, this is not the behavior of a soldier—to inquire about conditions and time periods and then to ask his family’s opinions of the matter.”14
The Previous Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak, had also been “devoted to the general cause of strengthening Judaism” and had sent out emissaries to many who “had become completely estranged from Judaism.”15 Not only had he reached into the Soviet Union but also back into Europe after 1945 and to Morocco.16 And he had even sent out two emissaries, Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schachter (who would become famous after they left Lubavitch), to “the universities.”17 The two men had come for farbrengen on the Lubavitcher celebration of 19 Kislev. Carlebach and Schachter were standing outside the Rebbe’s office that day in December 1949, a few days before Hanukkah, singing some tunes. The Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak was quite ill by this time and so remained closeted in his office for much of the time, where only a few Hasidim at a time would be allowed in to be with him.
As Schachter tells it: “They didn’t allow everyone to come into the farbrengen because the Rebbe was frail. We would stand outside the door and sing niggunim [melodies], and sometimes the Rebbe’s secretary would come and would open the door and call certain people to come in.”
Berel Chaskind, acting at the request of the Rebbe, called Shlomo and Zalman in.18
We approached the Rebbe’s table and the Rebbe gave a big lekhayim [toast to life], and he said, it would be “Keday ir zolt onheybn forn tsu colleges.” [It would be worthwhile for you to start visiting the colleges.] He suggested we start with Brandeis, and offered us a little bottle of schnapps that was sitting on his table to take along with us. That was it.
But, he hadn’t told us what to do. So, we decided to start on Hanukkah and make a tour of the Boston colleges (because I lived in Massachusetts), starting with Brandeis, and going on to Boston University, and the others.
I had collected from the shul [in Fall River, where Schachter was serving as a pulpit rabbi] 13 pairs of tefillin that people had dropped off because no one was using them. I rehabilitated them. I had some translations I’d made of the Rebbe’s teachings. I had one of the first tape recorders. They were big reel to reel. . . . I recorded several hours of Hasidic music.
It was the middle of the week, Hanukkah. It was snowing when we arrived, and we had to shlep the accordion, tape reorder, tefillin, and boxes of papers all the way up the slippery steps going up to “the castle,” a cafe at Brandeis where a dance was in progress. The lights were out. A guy with spotlights was hitting couples in the dark and a jukebox was playing. The two of us come in, the spotlight hits us. Pretty soon we put the lights on in the corner. The dance stopped. I set up the tape recorder to play Hasidic music, Shlomo starts to tell stories on one side, and I’m assisting, bringing people to Shlomo. First, they listened to the music, and then they started to ask questions.
That first night at Brandeis, the new Jewish-sponsored university that at the time was barely a year old, was a big success; the students stayed with them until the early hours of the morning. Zalman made a deal: anyone who learned to put on the tefillin and take them off three times would get to keep one. “We gave out 13 pair, all we had.”
Clearly America, and especially its young people, were ready for this sort of Jewish outreach. But it would fall to the seventh rebbe who with energy unmatched by those who came before him to seize upon the opportunities that emissaries like Carlebach and Schachter saw. He was the leader who would enlist “an army” of his followers, a new type of shluchim who would find a postwar population and atmosphere that would in time make outreach the best-known activity of his reign.
Beginning in the late 1960s, particularly after the Six-Days War in 1967, and gaining traction in the next decade, this campaign sought to insert traditional Jewish religious behavior and more specifically concrete mitzvahs into the public square and onto the Jewish agenda. The importance of transforming the individual was at the core of every campaign. Rather than overwhelming the target population with the full range and complexity of Jewish practice and tradition, the initial goal appeared first simply to raise Jewish awareness that observances could have spiritual and cosmic importance. Thus, instead of reminding Jews of the need to observe 613 mitzvahs along with their myriad details that, according to Jewish tradition, were mandatory, the Rebbe chose to focus on ten concrete acts, a kind of echo of the Ten Commandments of which everyone had heard. By doing these acts, the people would begin the process of allowing God to be revealed in the reality of the physical world and in their lives.19
It would also, as we discuss in greater detail later, serve as an alternative to what seemed to be happening in Israel, where military victories by the Israel Defense Forces who had regained the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and all of the biblical territories appeared to have taken the initiative in Jewish messianic dreams. They, the armies of the secular Zionist state, seemed again to be bringing the messianic age and now the return to Jerusalem. The Rebbe needed to reclaim the advantage. To prove his point, he initiated his massive outreach effort to persuade believers and unbelievers that Lubavitchers, and not the Zionist state of Israel, would lead to the end of history. He aimed to do that everywhere—even in Israel.
Ten mitzvahs was easy, doable, and a simple number to remember. But his ten were not the famous ones. His included lighting Sabbath candles by all females over the age of three, getting males over the age of thirteen (bar mitzvah) to don tefillin, getting mezuzahs on every doorway in a Jewish home, some daily study of Torah (which would include ChaBaD Hasidic texts), giving charity, owning holy Jewish books (including those by ChaBaD authors), observing Jewish dietary laws (kashres), loving one’s fellow as oneself, getting a Jewish education, and observing the ritual laws of “family purity,” meaning exerting control over sexual relations among the married, including getting women to use the mikveh or ritual bath.20 These mitzvahs had to be made palatable, and some of them fared better than others in the public square. Several became signature practices of Lubavitch.
We have already suggested that a conviction of the imminence of messianic redemption, the atmosphere of youthful activism, evidence of other campaigns, a sense of urgency about Jewish youth who were on the verge of assimilation, with growing intermarriage rates and widespread Jewish illiteracy, played key roles in the campaign’s timing. In an age when most of the “People of the Book” could no longer read that book or any of the commentaries on it in their original Hebrew or even cared to do so, the Lubavitcher Rebbe decided a clear ten-step program for Jewish revival would work. What began as the Uforatzto initiative easily morphed into the mitzvah campaign. It would bridge the period of rebellion, when the conservative stability of the immediate postwar years had given way to a growing counterculture that challenged many of the assumptions of the previous decades, and last into the next period of religious revival and returning conservatism.
At the outset, this campaign and the precursor outreach efforts sought to counteract the new antinomianism that reigned supreme in the era of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll when young people regarded the establishment as the enemy. Religion was part of that establishment, and most of the young wanted no part of it. Lubavitchers, who with their beards and black hats did not look or seem to be part of the establishment, tried to coax them back. They would go to those places where they believed the challenge was greatest: the college campuses.
Consider the following example. At Brandeis University in the mid-1960s, the school sponsored by Jews and with a large number of them in the student body, a campus known at the time for its radicalism, where among others the future counterculture hero Abbie Hoffman and students who shared his willingness to challenge conventions were undergraduates, several Lubavitchers came for the weekend, guests of the Hillel campus group.21 The main Lubavitcher speaker, reputed to be an intellectual and one who valued higher education (unlike so many other Hasidim, whose conservatism, cultural insularity, and anti-college stands were by now well known), was willing to come to this hot bed of the counterculture to speak at a Friday night forum and again at Saturday morning lunch about general matters of religious openness and the importance of allowing all ideas, including Jewish ones, a voice in the university. The turnout was good if not great, because at this time in the mid sixties a Hasid taking such an unusual stand at Brandeis was a curiosity that went against type.
By Saturday afternoon, as twilight and the conclusion of the Sabbath neared, his message, however, would change. Gathering in the lobby of the anthropology building, where primitive masks and totems were on permanent display, students and Lubavitchers sat around several long tables that had been set up for the mystical closing meal of the Sabbath. As the evening gave way to night and he was joined by dozens of other Lubavitchers in the Boston area who, with the end of Sabbath and its restrictions on travel, had driven in to the campus for the occasion and joined the crowd, there was a lot of singing of Hasidic melodies and at last a big circle during which the remaining students and the Hasidim all danced rather incongruously around the pagan masks and totems, singing praises to God and repeating over and over the melody of uforatzto that the Lubavitchers taught them.
Most of the Brandeis students had by the close of the Sabbath left for the Saturday night activities that were so much a part of campus life. The Lubavitchers surrounded the few remaining students whose interest had been sufficiently piqued to stay. Now they lowered the lights and recited the havdalah, the separation ceremony over a candle and wine by which they formally ended the Sabbath and segued into the numinous melave-malke gathering with which Sabbath was ushered out and the week inaugurated. In their remarks, the Lubavitchers, now outnumbering the students, had changed their tune; speaker after speaker urged those who had stayed to give up the heresies they were certain they had been learning in college and come “home” to our Judaism and hasten the day of redemption. Even though he had been a university student himself in his earlier life, now Menachem Mendel Schneerson had “decided that America’s college campuses would have a detrimental effect” on Jewish life.22
Such visits, just beginning in those years, would become more frequent and would be repeated with greater subtlety on many campuses and later wherever students and young people congregated. Students, separated from their parents, homes, and communities of origin, living on campus in a liminal period of becoming, were a perfect target audience for initiating change, and Lubavitchers understood that. The shluchim would try to convince them to change, to become like them; but until the change came, they would accept them as they were. Ultimately these emissaries of the Rebbe would become a permanent presence on or near the campuses, building over 250 ChaBaD Houses into which they invited students and others, hoping to provide them an alternative Jewish home where the Lubavitcher couple would be like parents or older siblings and with their children would represent a kind of model Jewish family with which visitors could share a warm environment, Sabbath meals, ideas, and a Jewish life, without a commitment in advance to total Jewish observance. They would also often offer a lekhayim, sanctification of life carried out over drinks, where the alcohol flowed freely. Young college students could thus mix the excesses of liquor (always a campus pleasure) with the excuses of religion in an atmosphere of camaraderie and friendship that the shaliach and the others in the ChaBaD House provided. This was often an irresitble draw for those searching for a haven from the insecurities of adolescence and the loneliness they might have felt on campus.
The goal, as the Rebbe would put it on Hanukkah in 1986, was that every ChaBaD House would be a Jewish home and every Jewish home “a place worthy to be a Chabad House.”23 Judaism and ChaBaD constituted a single indivisible whole. That meant that in his mind, his brand of Hasidism was not a variant of Judaism; it aspired to be the very essence of Judaism. This approach was by no means limited to America.
In Western Europe, although the tensions of the cold war would rise and ebb, the Common Market, established in 1956, had led to a society that in many ways emulated the American model of coexistence among individual states, allowing for prosperity and peace. Quite surprisingly, Western Europe achieved “political and social stability by the mid-twentieth century after two great, destructive wars and the intervening upheaval.”24 Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this stability, student uprisings and culture in the late 1960s in France, Italy, and Germany were not altogether unlike those in the United States. The year 1968, when those whom François Truffaut at the time characterized as the daughters “and sons of the bourgeoisie” rebelled and protested against everything, was a wild year on both sides of the Atlantic.25 There developed in the European Union a population that would be no less receptive to the Lubavitchers’ campaigns than those in America. In these countries, peace, increasing prosperity, and security permitted people of all ages to think about matters other than their fears and allowed their children to extend their youth, just as their counterparts in America were doing. Lubavitchers would approach them in the same way they had their American peers. In Europe, Jewish assimilation was no less the case than in America. Hence the Lubavitcher Mitzvah Campaign could and would be launched as an international effort. Moreover, since the young of these societies were on the move, the Lubavitchers would follow after them—even reaching the extreme of the extreme, whether in Katmandu, Nepal, or in outposts in the Far East as well as in South America, Australia, Alaska, or other places where young Jewish trekkers, particularly Israeli youth who in their post-army-service adventure trips around the globe, would travel. These young adventurers would often turn up at ChaBaD looking to rendezvous with friends and peers, often at Passover time, and be treated to a seder (none larger than in Katmandu). Far from home, Lubavitchers would be welcoming, offer a no-strings-attached chance to observe Judaism ChaBaD-style—an offer many found easy to accept.
But not only adventurers and students found their ways to ChaBaD. By the last twenty years of the century, when a backlash against the excesses of the counterculture took hold, and as the rebels of the sixties aged, finally moved into their adulthood and careers, and began their own families, many from the liberal era of the counterculture found refuge in religion. At the same time, fundamentalist variants of religion resurfaced. Led by new Christian fundamentalists, this resurgent religion often spoke to the needs of those who had been disappointed by the unfulfilled promise or emotional letdown of the radical counterculture. Often those who had in their youth been radicals against religion began to take it up in their middle-years. At the other extreme, so-called “New Age” religion and spirituality, an open exploration of faith and belief, also captured the imagination of many, allowing people to either explore religious roots they thought had long been torn out or establish new connections to ancient or novel religious practices. From studying kabbalah to using crystals or practicing feng shui, these New Agers turned religion into a kind of therapy. What both extremes shared was a willingness to be public and assertive about their religion and to take their places in the public square. This fit perfectly with what the Rebbe had urged his shluchim to encourage, and it would create a place where Lubavitch could increasingly insert itself and its public form of Jewish practice and identity.
In the late seventies and early eighties, as the counterculture receded, the Mitzvah Campaign did not. The Rebbe and his emissaries created a mitzvah tank corps to further his campaign. The tanks (really caravans and mobile homes emblazoned with a variety of Lubavitcher logos and slogans), which the Rebbe believed would be more successful than the Israeli army tanks in their wars in bringing about the messianic age, traveled everywhere. Menachem Mendel Schneerson wanted an alternative army to the Zionist one, one that did not move by firepower but was driven by spiritual power, one that he commanded and which brought not destruction before victory but mitzvahs before redemption.
On Hanukkah of 1980, the Rebbe commissioned a local artist, Michoel Schwartz (with whom he had worked in 1944 on a logo for the Merkos L’Inyunei Chinuch publishing house), to create an insignia for the newly formed “Tzivos Hashem” (Army of God). This boys’ organization was to march against assimilation under military banners and symbols that, as art historian Maya Katz notes, created “a coat of arms reminiscent of the national emblem in Israel.” The Rebbe insisted the emblem “should be inked solid blue and red, and the symbols of the sun and the moon should be removed because of their association with idolatry in the Talmud.”26 This army would be an instrument of God, working to get people to observe mitzvahs, and unlike the Israeli one, would bring true Jewish final victory.
Over the years the religious Zionist and Lubavitcher version of what was messianic and what was not would blur. For the former, a return of Jewish sovereignty to the Biblical homeland and Jewish settlement there were the signs of the approach of the Messiah , while for ChaBaD the return of Jews to mitzvah observance would be the key signal. Of course, to the Rebbe the victories in Israel and the settlements were proof his activities were working. For him it was critical to persuade his followers and the world that his troops and his ideas were the crucial elements in the triumph of the Jews over their adversaries, and that they alone were bringing the Messiah.
The Rebbe’s placement of his shluchim all over the world also coincided with a change in the condition of Orthodoxy. This Jewry that in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust had been quiet and insular had gradually become more and more engaged with the modern world. Orthodox Jews—especially those who called themselves “modern”—had reconstituted themselves and felt triumphalist about their capacity to do anything they wanted in the modern world. They traveled everywhere, and ChaBaD was often there to meet them and share their sense of being able to do more than simply survive modernity. Lubavitchers provided these Orthodox Jews with places and a support system for the effort to be Jewishly observant everywhere. They helped travelers and those who found themselves far from home to get kosher food and find Jewish services everywhere in the world (some wags even joked that there would be a ChaBaD shaliach on the moon, if Jews started to travel there). This, of course, tied this peripatetic Jewry increasingly to Lubavitchers and made them view the shluchim positively, in the process raising their Rebbe in their estimation.27
During each subsequent decade, Lubavitchers, under the direction of their Rebbe, would continually adapt to the changes that went on in society, and sometimes they even seemed to anticipate them. The matter of women in Judaism was one of these.* As the Rebbe explained often, the Israelites had been redeemed from Egypt, the Talmud (B.T. Sotah 11a) asserted, because of righteous women who lived in that generation; so too women would be essential to the redemption to come.28 Among the emissaries, the women would in many ways be even more the instruments of change than their husbands, as they shaped the character of life inside the ChaBaD Houses and pre-schools, which they often directed. Indeed, Menachem Mendel had understood—perhaps because his wife, Moussia, had been such an independent woman and so assertive in her youth—that women could and would be important to the Lubavitcher message and mission. Already in 1947 while in Paris he had tried to see to it that the education Lubavitcher girls received was organized and developed.29 Indeed, during the reign of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, education for women was considered important.30
The matter of women and their role in Judaism continued to be of great concern to Menachem Mendel. In the United States the new feminist movement began as an outgrowth of the civil rights struggle. Perhaps the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the presidential executive order in 1967 that prohibited federal agencies to discriminate on the basis of gender might be pointed to as key markers of its start.31 By the start of the next decade, with the emergence of Ms. magazine in 1971 and the effort to pass an equal rights amendment in 1972, the idea of women’s rights and prerogatives was firmly part of the consciousness of America. Jewish women, who were among the leaders of the movement, soon applied the principles of feminism to Judaism. As part of that, they sought a greater role in public Jewish life, in the synagogue, and in Torah study. In 1972, twenty-six-year-old Sally Preisand was ordained the first female rabbi by the Reform movement. Soon other movements would follow.
Orthodox Jewry seemed to be far more reluctant to embrace feminism, not knowing exactly how to do so. Yet the fact was that in some ways, females had already been more empowered in Orthodoxy of the twentieth century than they had in all the preceding years. In America, Jewish day schools were following the lead of institutions like the Maimonides School in Boston (founded by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and his wife Tanya) or the Flatbush Yeshiva and Ramaz School in New York that taught girls the same Torah studies it taught the boys. In ChaBaD, through the Beth Rivkah and Beth Chana schools, girls had been receiving a Torah education, albeit not identical to the boys’, since at least the time Menachem Mendel came to the United States.32
As Orthodox women became better educated Jews and in the cultural atmosphere of American feminism, they unsurprisingly began to seek a greater role in public Jewish life. While not as radical as the expectations and desires of women from more progressive movements, the Orthodox nevertheless began to demand more than their mothers and grandmothers. The Rebbe understood this desire and tried to demonstrate his willingness to respond to these wishes, at times even before they were articulated. In 1974, as part of his campaign of outreach, he urged even unmarried girls to take up the observance of lighting Sabbath candles, although in typical fashion for him claiming it was really not a radical innovation but only the spreading of a custom that was already extant in some communities.33 And of course, women served as emissaries in his outreach program—so much so that the Rebbe made it a practice to address them separately—and ultimately the women would have their own kinus shluchos gatherings to discuss strategy and the like.34 While for the most part, he pressed women to stress their role in the family, in line with what most Orthodox rabbis were saying in response to the emerging feminist revolution, there is reason to believe he would have gone even farther in allowing women a great degree of involvement in Jewish religious observance had he not discovered a fundamentalist-like backlash within the Hasidic and Orthodox world he inhabited. This belief comes from an episode that occurred in 1972.
In that year, Shlomo Riskin, a young Yeshiva University–ordained rabbi, who had taken a pulpit at New York’s Lincoln Square Synagogue, a new Manhattan congregation that he was trying to shift into the Orthodox orbit, came to him with a dilemma. Regularly consulting with Rabbis Soloveitchik, Schneerson, and the rabbinic head of Agudath Israel of America, Moshe Feinstein, Riskin had made progress in getting the increasingly popular congregation to move toward greater Jewish commitment and traditional Jewish practices. Among those in his synagogue were some women who had been involved in intensive and “serious Torah study.”35 In 1972 many of these women came to Riskin on the eve of the holiday of Simhat Torah and asked for his permission for them, like the men, to hold and dance with the Torah scroll in observance of the day. After much soul-searching about allowing this unprecedented and obviously feminist request, he agreed, permitting them to hold a separate set of dances behind closed doors. After the holiday, he went to the Lubavitcher Rebbe and later Rabbi Soloveitchik for retroactive approval. The latter replied that “from a halachic [Judeo-legal] standpoint this was perfectly alright,” and to confirm his approval of the synagogue subsequently came and lectured there.36 The Rebbe also met with Riskin privately; he had often opened his door to him and had followed the developments in the synagogue closely, for its outreach efforts were important to him and his mission. After nearly an hour’s conversation he was persuaded by Riskin that while his position in the congregation allowed him in the future to prohibit such dancing, were he to do so, he might “lose that large group of women that might thereby be offended and consequently move to the Conservative ‘temple’ ” and out of the Orthodox orbit.* Considering this, the Rebbe emphatically replied in Yiddish with his permission, adding, to Riskin’s surprise, “Not only may you do this, but you must do it.” The Rebbe clearly understood the need to reach out to these women and to provide them with what they needed and wanted in the cultural atmosphere of the day. Indeed, six years later, he joined in celebrating at his congregation in Crown Heights the writing of a Torah scroll, in which each of the 304,805 letters in the work would have as a sponsor a girl or woman who was attending or had attended one of the Lubavitcher-run Beth Rivkah schools around the world.37
When subsequently a rabbi of another Orthodox synagogue about a mile away from Lincoln Square publicly objected to the women’s dancing, labeling Riskin’s congregation “not Orthodox,” and others in a backlash against what was seen by the most traditional and retrograde elements of Orthodoxy as a surrender to feminist demands also began to jump on this condemnatory bandwagon, the Rebbe appeared to reframe his verbal advice. He sent a letter (published much later) in which he found reason to suggest that perhaps he had been too hasty in his blessing of the practice, for it was not a good situation to change “current established custom,” as today’s Jews “have no power or authority to direct innovations.”* This, of course, was the classic Orthodox position when objecting to all liberal religious movements.
Yet a close look at the letter also left room for others to draw alternative conclusions. In it the Rebbe hinted that only if the women experienced “a great sadness” over their exclusion from the synagogue activity was there precedent for granting their desire. That judgment was a sociological and psychological rather than a religious one, and Riskin understood it as such.38
Indeed, his reported comment to Riskin at the time of their conversation that “the matter of women is one of the greatest challenges that confront us in this time” was not contradicted by the Rebbe’s actions. Whenever he could, Menachem Mendel would try to find a way to include them in his mission and activities, as well as to provide a place for them to study Jewish sources and become more engaged by their Judaism.39
The replacement of the melting pot ideal by that of multiculturalism, a reflection of the rise of the unmeltable ethnics in the West, gave Lubavitchers and the Rebbe an additional opportunity to assert their presence in the public domains. They could claim to belong to the fabric of American life no less than any other group that stood apart from white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. This became even more the case in the 1980s and 1990s, as cultural and religious differences in society were increasingly acceptable, even if they were often only symbolic in character.40 This too worked for Lubavitchers, who would revel in public symbolic acts of religious engagement and involvement.
Nothing perhaps more brilliantly articulated this effort than the practice of lighting Hanukkah menorahs in public squares and places as a symbolic act of Jewish identification. Beginning in 1974 as a practice that Philadelphia (and D.C.) shaliach Avremel Shemtov had initiated at the foot of the Liberty Bell (and later in 1979 in front of the White House), Lubavitchers were able to play with the symbols of American liberty and the Jewish desire for religious expression and continuity.41 The idea of the public lighting that Shemtov fashioned , as he put it, “out of a reality that the Rebbe created,” a situation in which the idea of reaching the masses was encouraged via some visible Jewish symbolic act, caught on and in 1975, shluchim in San Francisco lit a 22 foot lamp in Union Square.42 In 1979, Shemtov was lighting a menorah with President Jimmy Carter. In 2000, at the lighting in front of the White House, Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat referred to the menorah “as a symbol of the pluralism and religious liberty that are such a precious part of our American heritage.”*
The particular figure of the Lubavitcher menorah would also play a part in the Rebbe’s campaigns. Designed by London artist Hirsch Pekkar according to principles laid out by the Rebbe, the menorah with its now recognizable Y shape made its debut on Hanukkah in 1982.43 It was modeled on what Menachem Mendel believed, basing himself on the twelfth-century scholar Maimonides’ minority view, was the true shape of the original candelabrum in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.44 It also presented a visual and symbolic alternative to the menorah that had become the most visible and recognized symbol of the state of Israel, which had become a Zionist symbol, as well as the infamous image on the Arch of Titus, where the Romans who have destroyed and pillaged the Holy Temple and exiled the Jews are depicted carrying a semicircular menorah into Rome. The Rebbe wanted the Lubavitcher menorah to stand in distinction to these, as he wanted his vision of what redemption would mean to stand in contrast. It would be defined neither by the Zionist state nor by a symbol of exile and of Jewish degradation.46 It would compete with them and become perhaps more recognizable. Ultimately, the Rebbe’s menorah would become the closest thing to a public brand for Lubavitch.46
Lubavitchers had taken the Hanukkah menorah that in its historical source was meant to emphasize Jewish survival and deny acculturation and pluralism to take advantage of it—after all, the Maccabees, whom Hanukkah celebrated, opposed the pluralism of Hellenism. Now the ritual had become a symbol of Jewish identity in a contemporary multicultural American society.
Certainly, Lubavitchers wanted this also to serve as a way of showing that being Jewish in public, even or especially at Christmastime, was acceptable, even if one wore a beard and was a Hasid. This gave them confidence to do the same elsewhere in the world. Indeed, the lightings were not limited to the United States, where by the end of the century they would be held in forty-five states and Puerto Rico.47 Lightings of the menorah occurred everywhere, from Red Square, where a film of the Rebbe’s lighting in Brooklyn was shown, to Bangkok, where a menorah would be placed atop an elephant.48 To be sure, not everyone accepted the insertion of this symbol into the mainstream of society, and the lighting in public places would face many legal challenges over the years.49 But these were overcome one by one.
To the Rebbe, the Hanukkah menorah was in many ways like the mezuzah, both being placed by the doorway, the former on the left and the latter on the right. In a sense, both served proudly to let the world know that Jews lived where these were found. But more than that, the mezuzah was highly symbolic, for, as the Rebbe explained, it represented all the mitzvahs.50 Lubavitchers took to affixing large and very visible mezuzahs on doorposts, and made it a practice to check their contents, to make certain the handwritten scrolls inside were complete and perfect, and if not seeing to it they were replaced. This action, they assured Jews, would protect those who lived in homes on which the mezuzahs hung. Shluchim would travel to the most distant places just to get a Jew to put up a mezuzah on the door of his or her home.
The mezuzah and the menorah highlighted the importance of symbols in the Lubavitcher program of outreach. Of course, the latter had not been one of the ten mitzvahs the Rebbe had chosen for his campaign, even though in a way it eclipsed many if not all of the ten. To understand how and why it did, we need to consider the reasons for some of the other mitzvahs that were chosen for the campaign and how they were part of the rise of symbolic ethnicity and religion that emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century.51
Lighting Sabbath candles was a way to remind people that it was Sabbath, and when the Rebbe stressed that even young girls should do this, he understood that by getting the children to lead them, he might bring about a change in the Jewish family so that it would perhaps choose to observe the Sabbath that followed that lighting. Moreover, candle lighting was something everyone had to do at the precise onset of the Sabbath. ChaBaD took to posting that time everywhere they could, for years putting it on the front page of the New York Times on Fridays. The idea was that if every Jewish home kindled the lights at the same time in each location, as the sun set on Friday, there would perhaps be a spiritual solidarity of each with all and the Sabbath, a way of moving of heaven and earth in a mystical way that would not only kindle the lights but also the Jewish souls of those who were doing so. Jewish engagement and solidarity would, the Rebbe imagined, become inevitable. Giving charity, another key part of the mitzvah campaign, would likewise bind Jews to one another.
When Lubavitchers began to implement the Rebbe’s mitzvah campaign, the idea was to encourage these practices among the general public, including those who were far from observance or Jewish consciousness. In fact, Menachem Mendel had been urging the performance of some of these acts for a while in his advice and counsel to supporters. As early as in a letter he wrote on 25 Iyyar 5711 (May 31, 1951) to a correspondent who wanted his blessings for his family, he responded that after taking the request to the grave of his father-in-law, he now advised the petitioner to “make sure that all the mezuzahs in his house were kosher, that before Friday night candle-lighting he give charity, that your sons should put on tefillin daily,” and this would help him.52
Menachem Mendel had been thinking about the matter of tefillin for a long time. In June 1944, when he was not yet Rebbe, he had written a letter in his role as head of Mahane Israel. In it he refers to the donning of tefillin as an act that daily binds hand, heart, and head together—a kind of combination of action, feeling, and intention that was precisely what a Jew needed to recall each day.53 And we have already seen how important they were for his personal piety.
When he decided to spread his advice in the form of a campaign outward, he simply took practices and advice he had made in private and now began to offer them to outsiders. But to get the latter to embrace this advice would require marketing the likes of which Hasidim had never engaged in before.
The campaign for tefillin, which the Rebbe first ordered shortly before the Six-Day War in June 1967, vividly captures this effort. Young Lubavitcher men would set up a table on which they had laid out tefillin. It was taking the program the Zalman Schachter and Shlomo Carlebach had conceived impromptu in 1949 at Brandeis University and institutionalizing it so that it could be taken out on the road and in public everywhere. Lubavitchers set up tables with tefillin on the street or, later, in a mall, airport, or next to a mitzvah tank, and they would stop male passers-by and ask, “Excuse me, are you Jewish?” That question alone was jarring when the campaign began, for Jews were still living in a time when standing out as Jews in America and Europe seemed if not dangerous, as it had been during the Holocaust, then at least uncomfortable. If the person responded that he was a Jew, the Lubavitchers would ask him to put on the tefillin with them, an act that would publicize their Jewishness in an almost exhibitionist way.54
By May 1968, the tefillin campaign had been immortalized as the Lubavitcher counter-response to the counterculture. The New York Times headlined the story, “Hasidic Jews Confront Hippies to Press a Joyous Mysticism.”55 It described a “tefillin-mobile” and published a large picture of the scene in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park under the banner, “Do a Mitzvah: Put on a Pair of Tefillin.” As a hippie shouted “let’s drop out,” the Lubavitcher was quoted as saying, “let them drop into the Old World.” The campaign was well under way.
From a social point of view, one may define the wearer of tefillin as a total “other,” someone entirely apart from the non-Jewish world. For the non-Jew, tefillin are on the contrary completely “Jewish.” Lubavitchers understood this well. When a passer-by in the modern city identified himself as a Jew to the young ChaBaD Hasidim, they immediately took him aside, thereby isolated him from the non-Jewish surroundings. At first no apparent change seemed to take place; he still resembled all the other passers-by. However, once they placed tefillin on his arm and his now covered head, he was transformed from a “non-Jewish” Jew to a committed one whose Jewish identity had an unambiguous public manifestation. This was the starting point: to transform the uncommitted Jew into a person identified as a Jew to himself and to others. This objective was achieved when the subject agreed even temporarily to “abandon” his non-Jewish identity and to put on tefillin in public. Once he acted out his Jewish identity so blatantly, there was a chance, however slight, that he might continue to do so by attending meetings and ultimately “repenting” and “enlisting” in ChaBaD. This, of course, was just what the Rebbe wanted. He would often repeat his belief that “a person should not be ashamed to live his day-to-day life as a Jew.”56
There was also another “internal” explanation connected with ChaBaD’s mystical-kabbalistic conceptions. Its Jewry-wide mission of “dispersing the wellsprings” sought to purify the Jewish soul, the source of holiness, of the dross of the non-Jewish environment. The Jew who lit Sabbath candles, put a mezuzah on his doorpost, or put on tefillin had crossed from one domain to the other, from the profane to the sacred, the non-Jewish to the Jewish. That was the mission of the shluchim who engaged in the kabbalistic tasks of “arousing the sparks of holiness dispersed in the valley of impurity” as a condition for the coming of the Messiah and complete redemption.57 Getting Jews to perform these mitzvahs was a first step in cleansing the Jew of his non-Jewishness, releasing the spark of holiness from the captivity of impurity.
The Lubavitcher rebbe was focused not just on America and Western Europe (and later the Soviet Union and what it would become). Israel, the place where so many Jews had put their hope for the future, the product of what his forebears had seen as heretical Zionism, was perhaps an even more important target into which his emissaries would go to reengineer Jews and Judaism. In Israel, where Lubavitchers would in time become a major force, reinvention was the name of the game. For the first half of the century, the struggle was to create a new settlement and new sort of Jew in the ancient homeland after an absence of more than two millennia. War, Arab riots, and the difficulties of immigration, coupled with economic hard times, made the years until 1948 enormously difficult. The victory over their enemies at the armistice in 1949 made Israelis who had declared their independent state in 1948 realize they could defend themselves against all odds. Now they had to create a new society that was overwhelmed with immigrants, including Holocaust survivors, refugees from Middle Eastern Muslim states who had fled or been expelled from their communities, and those who felt drawn by the Zionist dream and a chance to build the new Jewish state. This massive “ingathering of the exiles” required the new country to create a welfare state that would secure its citizens and offer them an opportunity “to build and be built up by” (livnot u’lehibanot) a new society and culture. They created myriad institutions and provided an economic and social environment in which people could create a new life and identity for themselves. In a country that by 1967 had a little more than 2.7 million citizens, there were seven universities, suggesting that this society could provide its young people with opportunities not only to study but also to extend their period of moratorium no less than their peers in Europe and America did. The fact that most of the youth also preceded their studies with several years of mandatory army service further expanded this period.
In the spring of 1967, the Jewish state suddenly found itself facing the greatest threat to its existence since its founding nineteen years earlier. After the Egyptians had got the United Nations to remove its forces from Sharm el Sheikh on the Red Sea and on May 22 closed the Straits of Tiran, threatening Israel with a naval blockade, they and other Arab armies began to mass their forces in preparation for an attack. The Israelis, who looked to their allies, found themselves suddenly alone. De Gaulle and the French offered no encouragement or help; Johnson and the Americans, although expressing the belief that the blockade was illegal, found it impossible to organize an international flotilla to test it, and consequently advised the Israelis against any military action, with the clear implication that if they did so, they were on their own.58 For many Jews, this apparent abandonment of the Jewish state by the world reverberated with the anxieties they had felt during the Holocaust, and indeed many of them the world over feared a repetition of that catastrophe. When some of the Orthodox Jews in Israel who harbored theological doubts about the Zionist enterprise had begun fleeing to the airport to escape in anticipation of the war, this only intensified the feelings of fear that many felt. At this time, at a parade in Crown Heights on the occasion of the Jewish celebration of the holiday Lag B’Omer (May 28), the Lubavitcher Rebbe spoke out, both in public and on the following Sabbath in a talk to his Hasidim, urging confidence and encouragement that the Jews and the Holy Land would not be harmed and therefore they should not abandon it and rush to the airport; it was a message to many of the haredi Jews in particular.59 The instrument of defense that he advocated was the tefillin.
In his words, “Jews in the Land of Israel should remain there in confidence, for God had promised that [Leviticus 26:6] ‘I shall bring peace to the land.’ ” That peace required as a precondition that Jews accept the Almighty as their God and then, if they did so, “He would lead his people forth with his full, open and holy hand . . . soon in the true and full redemption by means of the Messiah.”60 But did this inspire confidence? Actually, since most Israelis were not religious believers at that time, might such a message not add to their anxieties rather than allay them, or was it aimed to get them to repent at this critical time?
A few days later, on the Sabbath, he offered a recipe for everyone who was worried about the future. Now he argued that “in the current situation, we must pay great care to see to it that every Jew will put on tefillin, for this is a mitzvah that has great power to bring the Jews out from their difficulties in peace.” Then he quoted the Talmud (B.T. Menachot 44a) that all who don tefillin are guaranteed long life and (B.T. Brachot 6a) the Talmudic interpretation of the verse (Deut. 28:10) that “all nations will fear you” as a reference to the tefillin that are placed on the head. He concluded that the sight of every Jew wearing tefillin would throw the fear of heaven into all those who see him. “Every Jew who would don tefillin on behalf of those who are in the army [presumably a reference to Israeli soldiers] would thereby help them so that they would live long and the fear of them would fall upon all those who surrounded them.”61
When after six days the unanticipated military triumph of the Israelis led not only to survival but also to their regaining the ancient Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the biblical lands of what would be called Judea and Samaria, the Rebbe could claim the victory as his, arguing that it was the sight of soldiers donning tefillin that had miraculously frightened the enemy. Now Israel, once the product of Zionist accomplishments, could be reclaimed by ChaBaD, and its rebirth after 1967, stronger and bigger than ever, could be portrayed as the result of the Rebbe’s campaign and the Lubavitcher plan for redemption.
Israel had been the subject of Lubavitcher settlement already in 1949 when Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, with the help of, among others, Zalman Shazar, gained a foothold at Kfar Chabad, an agricultural settlement on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Its founders were Russian Lubavitcher refugees with no other place to go and whom the sixth rebbe had wanted to keep together. The village, established with the organization of a few shluchim, would in time grow to about five thousand inhabitants. Shazar, born Schneur Zalman Rubashov in Belarus to a Lubavitcher family (and named for the first rebbe), had after immigrating to Palestine taken his initials and made them into a new last name; he would become an important figure in Israeli government, finally serving as president between 1963 and 1973. While his help to the sixth rebbe was limited, his assistance to Menachem Mendel would be far more important. The seventh rebbe wanted more than a small village for his followers. In 1967, after the end of the war, Menachem Mendel had far greater objectives in mind. He did not want simply to inspire and guide the people of Kfar Chabad alone (where a duplicate of his 770 headquarters would be built brick by brick); he wanted to direct the entire state of Israel, whose destiny, politics, and religious culture he would seek to control in his campaign for redemption. In place of the Israeli army he would send his shluchim to do the work.
As Israel played an increasingly larger role in Jewish consciousness, especially after the “miraculous” victories in the Six-Days War of 1967 and later the remarkable turnaround in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War by the Israeli army, ChaBaD was confronted with a dilemma. How could it celebrate the miraculous victories of Zionist nationalism and the Israeli army—in the classic Lubavitcher ideology, false Messiahs—without strengthening these very same false Messiahs? Israelis, particularly the Orthodox among them, and other religious Jews were increasingly arguing that the establishment of the state of Israel was the “first flowering of redemption,” and now, with the retaking of the ancient biblical heartland, they were certain that what had been given to them came with the help of God acting through the Israeli army and state. Many were sure this was the true sign of the of Messiah’s impending arrival. Suddenly, it seemed the false Messiah of Zionism was going to steal the faith of the Jews that Lubavitchers had been working so hard to arouse.
Responding to the 1967 war, the Rebbe urged his emissaries to “speak about returning to tradition and they will listen. Ask them to don tefillin and they will roll up their sleeves.”62 He argued that it was not simply a military victory that had regained Jerusalem and the biblical homeland. Rather, the fact that some soldiers had donned tefillin was what made the Arabs flee. He wanted the Six-Days War to be a Lubavitcher Jewish victory, a miracle based on his mitzvahs.63
It was possible to make such claims as Israel became increasingly intertwined with America. Just as the American government and American Jews sought to play a larger role in Israel, so in parallel the Lubavitcher Rebbe from his “world headquarters” in Brooklyn sought to do the same. But his control had as its purpose not simply this-worldly realpolitik; it rather sought to hasten redemption. Of course, there were religious Zionists who would try to do the same, arguing that only settlements could do that. But the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who supported increased settlement in the biblical areas, argued that these settlements were not the cause of what seemed an irresistible march toward the coming of the Messiah. They were instead the evidence that the Lubavitcher campaigns, which were the “true” engine of change, were succeeding.
In the coming decades he would continue to intensify his work in Israel. Not only did he send shluchim, he also tried to create ties to Israeli generals and politicians. These men began to make pilgrimages to 770 and the Rebbe. In time, Yitzchak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, and President Zalman Shazar made the trip, as did a host of army officers and other Israeli officials.
In 1972 Menachem Mendel sent two hundred of his own Lubavitcher “soldiers” to the fronts along the Egyptian border and to the Syrian one in the Golan Heights to get the Israeli soldiers to put on tefillin, arguing, as his emissary from Crown Heights, Hershel Hecht (who brought along a reporter from the New York Times), put it, “tefillin gives strength to soldiers and provides them with spiritual protection.”64
Perhaps one of the most striking encounters occurred in 1973, during the last days of the Yom Kippur War. The day was Simhat Torah, the last of the holidays of the season and what would be five days before the end of the war. The Rebbe was speaking, as usual in Yiddish, about the war and the question of Israel’s place among the nations of the world, but his comments were filled with allusions that were recondite and particularly puzzling to the Israeli diplomats and representatives who had come for the occasion. They were not used to such discourses that mixed Hasidism, biblical glosses, and rabbinic references. Following his remarks and just before the traditional dancing of the day, the Rebbe called over the Israelis and asked why their troops had not taken Damascus. He then offered answers to his own questions, most of them based on mystical and kabbalistic texts, which, he asserted, favored such a move. He then directed one of the Israel representatives, Aryeh Morgenstern, to contact Moshe Dayan, the defense minister of the sovereign state of Israel, and share this counsel with him. Amazingly, Morgenstern did contact Zevulun Hammer (a member of the Knesset foreign affairs committee), with whom he worked, and asked him to pass on the message to Dayan. Clearly, the Rebbe saw himself as taking a commanding position in current events. Moshe Dayan and the Israeli government, however, were not persuaded.65
In 1974, again seeking to usurp the charisma of the Israeli army, the mitzvah campaigns were carried to the public by mitzvah tanks.* In the aftermath of all the Middle East wars, it would not be the Israeli army and its tanks that brought the Messiah; it would be the soldiers and tanks of Lubavitch, the Rebbe’s army.66
Over time the Rebbe would, as his mitzvah campaign gave way to the Messiah campaign, see himself as controlling events not only in Israel but also in many other places in the world. In that campaign, Israel and his relationship to it would occupy a central position.
A turning point in this campaign was the decision to go to the Jewishly unschooled. A large part of the “spreading the wellsprings” had always been teaching all Jews the lessons of Torah and ChaBaD Hasidism. To accomplish this, the Rebbe had to explain to his emissaries that one could and should now teach these lessons not only to those who had been schooled in its esoterica and who were insiders but to everyone.67 In time, he would reiterate and repeat often that this meant “spreading it in the widest way, to the furthest extreme, with neither attenuation nor limitations, for if there were any such attenuation or limitation (however small) that would not be true ‘spreading.’ ”68
In a sense, this opening of access to the masses of what was once teaching limited to elites was not unique to Lubavitch. While the world of Jewish learning and observance was always a meritocracy—whoever had the intelligence and capability to study Torah and observe religious precepts could do so, whether they were children of the poor and uneducated or members of the elite—that meritocracy had been decimated by the countless Jews who had abandoned traditional religious life and observance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was finally devastated in a particularly large way by the Holocaust, in which so many Orthodox scholars and yeshiva students had been annihilated.
After the Holocaust, a generation or more of Torah scholars and even of learned laymen who would have come of age in the previous generation were missing (either because they had been killed or because they had lost interest in Torah). If Jewish study was to continue, a new cadre of learned and practicing Jewry had to be rebuilt. Orthodox Jews and Hasidim in particular had shrunk dramatically in numbers, because those who remained in Europe had been easiest to single out by the Nazis, having followed their religious leaders’ advice not to assimilate or leave Europe for America or the Land of Israel, where if they had arrived early enough they might have survived in far greater numbers. In the Holocaust, these traditional Jews sustained proportionately greater casualties than the rest of European Jewry. In the aftermath of the war and its tragic consequences for that traditional world in particular, the Orthodox survivors, particularly but not only the haredi ones, realized they could no longer remain so selective and exclusivist about who could study Torah and its myriad holy texts. Accordingly, they were ready to offer the most intensive Jewish education to anyone, whether they were suited to it or not. In yeshivas and, later, Jewish day schools, Talmud and myriad other sacred texts were part of a curriculum in every school. Some day schools, as we have seen, building on and enhancing what had begun in the prewar period, offered study to girls as well as boys.69 After all, in the new world and its welfare state, every child, boy and girl alike, was required to get an education. The Jews could not do otherwise, even in their private schools.
In synagogues the situation was even more open. In the past, among Orthodox lay people who in their adult lives studied Torah in the synagogue as an extension of their religious life, such study had been hierarchically organized. Making up the top tier were those in the chevra shas, the group assembled around the study of Talmud and its associated commentaries and glosses; this was only for those with the requisite skills. Below them were those who gathered to review only the narrative portions of the Talmud; they were the chevra Eyn Yaakov. So it went on down to the lowest rung, the chevra tehillim, those who gathered simply to recite the Psalms, not necessarily understanding their full meaning or studying their poetry. But after the Second World War, there was a whole generation of Jews even among the Orthodox who during the years when they might have been acquiring Torah learning skills instead had been trying simply to stay alive. As refugees they were now living with an American Jewry, many of whom had not yet acquired great capabilities in Jewish learning. Moreover, in America, the idea of hierarchies was undermined by a kind of democratizing ethic. All this led to opening Torah learning, from the Talmudic to the simplest level, to any and all who wanted to study. If the material was opaque, translations and English versions of texts and commentary were provided, and nearly every synagogue and primary school allowed everyone access to these once recondite volumes.* In time, even women, who were always excluded from Torah study by traditional Jewry, would gain access to even the most esoteric texts, even within Orthodox circles. A market grew for these books; especially as those who read them became increasingly middle class and had the money to purchase them.
This was largely because such study had by the twentieth century come to be seen as a vehicle for enhancing Jewish commitment and attachment. Studying Jewish books was a way to link oneself with generations of the past, venerated texts, and what seemed a living experience of being Jewish.70 In the effort to restore the ties to the ancient sacred texts and to allow people to act in a distinctly Jewish way in the post-Holocaust world, Torah study of all sorts was democratized. No text, however esoteric—from Talmud to Kabbalah—was now closed to anyone who wanted to study it, regardless of his or her abilities and background.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel, living in this reality, planned to do the same with ChaBaD Hasidic teachings, a practice made possible by Lubavitchers through a massive program of publication of all their basic texts, as well as the writings of their rebbes (and even descriptions and summaries of their gatherings). Even before he became Rebbe, he had been appointed to lead the publishing effort. As we have already noted, he paid attention to logos and decided what books to print, giving special care to presentation and showing a “preference for modern typeface and design.”71 He saw to it that the basic text of ChaBaD, Tanya, was published everywhere in the world, with editions that were produced in some of the most exotic locations. In time, as the Lubavitchers point out, “Kehot Publication Society and Merkos Publications, the publishing divisions of the Lubavitch movement brought Torah education to nearly every Jewish community in the world.” By the end of the century, ChaBaD would be all over the Internet, posting writings and videos for the entire world to see. Almost everything was being translated into all sorts of foreign languages. The whole idea was to symbolically demonstrate that everyone and everywhere in the world had access to these teachings. In this way they were spreading the wellsprings abroad.
One could reveal all the esoterica because in these days preceding the imminent arrival of the Messiah, in order to hasten that day, one “spent the treasury.” This was a time when one no longer acted as in the past, parceling out knowledge only to the privileged few. Now the information served as a form of connecting with people. More than that, it was a vehicle for protecting Jews from the onslaughts and seductions of contemporary profane culture and society. As he put it in a letter in 1962, “particularly in our generation, when we can see the Messiah’s footsteps [ikveso dimeshikho], the role of the yeshiva is not simply to be a place for learning Torah, but rather—and this is most important—a place for education about the foundations of the Torah and Mitzvah, an education of the true internal meanings [pnimi] that will [lead people] not to fear all those currents in the world and stand up to all trials.”72 Education was now more than learning; it was spiritual fortification and protection. The Rebbe pressed it forward as essential.
And what of the Rebbe personally? While his emissaries were out preparing the world for the Messiah, the man, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who was at the apex of this worldwide mission was all alone. By 1964 his widowed mother, whom he used to visit every day, had died. Now he was largely devoid of close family. His father was dead. His brother Berel, as well as Mendel and Sheina Horensztajn, had been murdered by the Nazis. His only surviving brother, Leibel, with whom he had once been so close, had died suddenly at age forty-three in Liverpool, England, in 1952. His relations with the Gourary family had soured when they were taken out of a leadership position and their son and heir was removed from being close to the nesies. When he could, the Rebbe wrote to and helped relatives, even those who did not share his worldview or life, as he did with his brother’s widow and daughter, whose welfare concerned him and to whom he sent presents. But they lived “far” from him in every sense of the word. Never having attended a Temimim yeshiva, he knew no Hasidim with whom he had grown up as friends or fellow students and who might now be intimates. When he had entered the court, he had been part of its “royalty,” and even then he had absented himself to Berlin and Paris, where once again he had lived distant from Lubavitchers. Now, as Rebbe, he was surrounded only by subordinates, assistants, and Hasidim—but they could not be his “friends,” precisely because they were his Hasidim. However close they felt to him, as one Hasid explained, “he’s not my friend; he’s my Rebbe.”73
Moreover, the Rebbe was increasingly sending some of the best of his Hasidim away as shluchim. His wife, Moussia (“Mrs. Schneerson from President Street”), did not take an active part in his Hasidic activities and barely functioned in any formal way in the court. (She was a very “private person,” as the Hasidim often explained). No longer able to live the private life she had had with her husband in Berlin and also with the Horensztajns in Paris, she experienced much solitude, reading the newspapers, watching television, going about New York on her own, or visiting with a small circle of friends who spoke Russian and discussed literature.74 Russian, of course, was the language she spoke to her husband frequently and to her sisters.75 She would drive herself to a variety of places, and often went to the library and out shopping, or occasionally to the ballet.76 She sometimes reached out to children (she reportedly “adopted as her special children” the offspring of her Hasidic assistant, “Chesed” Halberstam) and remained particularly close to another assistant, Shalom Ganzburg, who lived and ate with the couple in their private quarters and was treated like a family member.77 Indeed, perhaps answering the unspoken question as to why she did not have children of her own, she would reportedly comment in Yiddish, “Ale khsidim zaynen dem Rebns kinder”—“all Hasidim are the Rebbe’s children.”78 But the pattern of her life was not the pattern of her husband’s.79 Spending endless hours in his role as rebbe, he would be with her only a few hours of the day or in the very early mornings and occasionally in an afternoon for companionship—indeed, by Lubavitcher tradition, she was not expected even to eat at the same table (although they did not hold fast to that rule).80 As she had once said of her father that “he belonged to his Hasidim,” so she could say the same now about the man she married.81 The Rebbe had no children with whom he could share his innermost feelings and affection or who could talk to him intimately, which must have saddened him mightily (whenever he was seen around children his face would light up).82 Nor did he have children who could have given him the lessons in humility every parent normally receives from offspring, who do not see their parents as the giants they sometimes imagine themselves to be.
Indeed, the only person Menachem Mendel could really talk to and with whom he could expansively share his inner thoughts and feelings was a dead man, his father-in-law, whose grave in Queens, New York, he visited religiously and regularly, a place where he spent increasing hours alone. But the responses he got from this dead man were all inside his own head and heart.
Given this sort of personal isolation and solitude in the midst of the excitement of a campaign and a growing coterie of people who nearly worshiped him and revered his every act, statement, or thought, what must have happened to his sense of proportion? To whom could he turn for counsel and advice? He claimed he was getting it from his late father-in-law, but what could be the nature of such communications? Could they have connected him to reality, or would they instead have reinforced his sense of being all alone in the world? Was he, moreover, becoming a person with so much power and influence that he was now too heavily anchored in his own vantage point and unable to see beyond it? With no one around him who dared or could contradict his view of the world or reality, was he getting lost in a culture of messianic delusion?83
* The Crown Heights yeshiva had a coed student body and offered secular studies along with Jewish ones. Even the Crown Heights Mesivta, although only a boys’ school, offered secular studies in the afternoon. The state of New York required secular studies and that students pass state Regents exams, so all schools had some sort of secular studies.
* Indeed, in 1953 the new Rebbe had already organized a Lubavitch women’s organization. In a marked departure from an entrenched tendency to limit high-level Torah education to men and boys, he addressed his teachings equally to both genders, maintaining that women share the obligation to study and master the esoterica of Torah and Hasidism. When he would later send a young married couple out to the front lines of his war on assimilation, he expected the wife to wage the battle alongside the husband, reaching out to fellow Jews and reintroducing them to their heritage. See http://www.chabad.org/therebbe/timeline_cdo/aid/62170/jewish/1953-Chassidic-Feminism.htm (accessed April 6, 2008). Ada Rapoport-Albert demonstrates that concern for the education of women dates from the 1930s and Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak. See her article, “The Emergence of a Female Constituency in Twentieth Century Habad Hasidism,” in Studies in the History and Culture of East European Jewry Dedicated to Immanuel Etkes, ed. David Assaf, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Israel Bartal, and Shmuel Feiner (Jerusalem: Shazar Institute, 2009). See also B. J. Morris, Lubavitcher Women in America (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). In 1952 (Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Hisvadus 5712 vol. 1, p. 307), he reiterated publicly the ruling of Rabbi Schneur Zalman (Shulkhan Arukh HaRav, Orakh Khayim, §271: 2) that in certain situations women could recite Kiddush (the sanctification over wine) on behalf of men. See also Eldad Weil, “Tekhilata shel Tekufat Nashim,” Akdamot 22 (Nissan 2009): 61–85.
* In the July 16, 2008, interview by Heilman, Riskin denied using the word “temple” but confirmed he did express the belief that he would lose some women to the Conservative movement, and that threat was the “hook” that helped persuade the Rebbe to support his initiative.
* The rabbi of the other synagogue, the Young Israel of the West Side, was reportedly urged on by several of his congregants, who objected not only on religious grounds but on institutional ones as well. As the Lincoln Square synagogue became more popular, the Young Israel lost members. The fact that women were being offered more at Riskin’s synagogue would undoubtedly lead to more young couples and women choosing to be members there and not at Young Israel. Indeed, that is precisely what happened. Letter in Kfar Chabad 1111.
* U.S. Treasury, Office of Public Affairs, press release, December 21, 2000. Ironically, pluralism was something that Lubavitchers embraced in America but contested in every way in Israel. When Shemtov lit the menorah in the presence of President Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis, the latter saw the act as a way of “removing the darkness” of those times (Avremel Shemtov, personal communication to Samuel C. Heilman, August 13, 2008.
* Actually, before these caravans were called tanks, they were used and identified with another task and name. On November 23, 1963, the New York Times on p. 24 reported a “Mobile Library being used by Hasidic Jewish Group,” calling it a “Jewish Bookmobile” in which there would be a “mobile library, bookshop, and reading room with bookstacks” that would visit a variety of the Jewish communities and serve also “as an information center and synagogue,” and that it was under the sponsorship of the educational arm, the Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, which had been the Rebbe’s first responsibility when he arrived in Brooklyn. See http://www.chabad.org/therebbe/timeline_cdo/aid/62178/jewish/1974-Mitzvah-Tanks.htm (accessed April 9, 2008).
* The rise of Mesorah publications and the Art Scroll series of translations, among others, in the late twentieth century reflected and reaffirmed this trend. These books were written for people who could not gain access to the recondite Hebrew or Aramaic (and even Yiddish) texts but wanted to study them in English.