Meeting the Lubavitcher Rebbe set the course of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s life, he used to say. In 1968, as an unknown Cambridge undergraduate, Sacks visited Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York, and carried away a line he repeated for the rest of his life: “A good leader creates followers, but a great leader creates leaders.”
This past week, we marked the Rebbe’s 32nd yahrzeit. He published around 70,000 pages, 39 volumes of talks that he edited himself, and over 12,000 letters, an output that makes him, in Yosef Bronstein’s words, one of the greatest generators of published Torah in Jewish history.
As the author of Engaging the Essence: The Torah Philosophy of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Bronstein seats the Rebbe beside Rav Kook and Rav Soloveitchik, the two thinkers our world already canonizes, arguing that Schneerson too, has earned his chair. Congress gave the Rebbe its gold medal, his face ran on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and prime ministers closeted themselves with him for hours.
Bronstein did not grow up with hassidism and does not call himself a hassid. He heads the Machon Zimrat Ha’aretz Torah-learning institution in Efrat and teaches Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University, and he learned in the Brisker method (highly analytical and reductionist approach to Talmud study) under Rabbi Michael Rosensweig.
But Bronstein also learned Torah with a Chabad spokesman as his learning partner, who clearly assisted him in understanding the basic idea that spread across every subject the Rebbe touched.
Bronstein names it “dira batahtonim,” God’s desire for a dwelling in the lowest world, the material one we live in.
The sages call this world a hallway before the palace of the World to Come, a corridor to be crossed and left behind. The Rebbe inverted the image. The hallway itself is to be made into the palace.
He pressed the claim furthest in his treatment of body and soul, locating the deepest divinity, the “Essence” itself, not in the soul’s heights but in the body and the physical world below. This is where he is most radical, and where a “Litvak” raised on the soul’s primacy feels the floor tilt.
To find the essence of God disclosed in matter more than in the soul is either the deepest reading of creation or the highest sanctification of the ordinary, and Bronstein makes the reader feel its force before one can decide which it is.
The Chabad emissary on a plane to a town that cannot yet make a minyan is that philosophy in motion.
Bronstein’s most ambitious claim is that the programs we credit to the Rebbe’s organizational genius are a single philosophy enacted.
The principle that sent the emissaries out, he argues, also governed how the Rebbe read the rise of women, the place of non-Jews in a redeemed world, and modern science, which he read as a discipline drifting toward the oneness of God, in its search for the unity beneath nature.
While the Rebbe did not write a system, he spoke to occasions for 40 years. Bronstein anchors the structure of the Rebbe’s talks in his first discourse of 1951.
Making messianism feel smaller than its reputation
NO CHAPTER feels more like the present than the one on the Land and the State of Israel. The Rebbe loved the land, its people, and its soldiers without theologizing the state as redemption’s first flowering, and for more than 25 years, he argued against ceding captured territory.
His grounds were not messianic but halachic and practical: the Shulhan Arukh’s ruling that a border town must be defended even on Shabbat; his insistence that all of Israel had become a border; his refusal to trade lives that are certain for a peace that is speculative; and a flat distrust of hostile neighbors’ promises and of United Nations guarantees.
On spreading the wellsprings, the Rebbe’s insistance that the deepest secrets of Kabbalah be opened to every Jew and not guarded for an elite, the philosophy becomes a program. On free choice, the same essence that anchors everything anchors the dignity of the Jew on the street.
These pages make the messianism, when it comes, feel smaller than its reputation. Bronstein gives it three late chapters and a restraint that is almost severe. He establishes that the Rebbe never explicitly declared himself Mashiach, and reads him as a man who likely thought himself a candidate awaiting a sign that, in his words, never came, so that he “died in an unredeemed world.”
The limits are real, and Bronstein names them before a critic can.
We know how to thank the Rebbe for what he built. This book asks the more demanding thing, that we read the thought he built it from. ■
ENGAGING THE ESSENCE: THE TORAH PHILOSOPHY OF THE LUBAVITCHER REBBE
By Yosef Bronstein
Maggid Books/Koren Publishers
710 pages; $35