When Menachem Friedman and I resolved to write what became The Rebbe: The Life and the Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, we did so because as sociologists we were puzzled, as we put it in our preface, by how a “a small Hasidic group that seemed on the verge of collapse in 1950 with the death of their sixth leader” had replanted itself in America and in less than a generation “gained fame and influence throughout the world in ways no one could have imagined” at the time their next and thus far last rebbe, Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, took over the reins of leadership in 1951.Footnote ¹ More than that, we were quite amazed that this group, which at its height during the twentieth century was never among the largest hasidic sects and probably numbered at most about 100,000 worldwide, had managed to become among the most well-known hasidim in the world. We were no less struck that they had found ways to make their Jewish outreach efforts, as well as their extraordinarily parochial belief that the contemporary world had entered messianic times (and that only Lubavitchers and their rebbe knew how to hasten his coming), both newsworthy and known far beyond the borders of the hasidic world. Through a series of directed campaigns that aimed to transform Jewry and the world, many, if not most Lubavitchers had also tried to convince the world that their leader, who had reigned over them from Brooklyn for forty-three years, was the Messiah incarnate, even as he lay dying at Beth Israel Hospital in New York.

To understand all this, we thought we would have to look not only at what the Lubavitchers were doing today—in the afterlife of their rebbe—as they carried on the mission on which he had sent them, but also at who exactly that man was who had articulated that mission and managed to take an obscure group and series of ideas and put them on the front pages of the news throughout the globe, without leaving his base in Brooklyn. The latter task was complicated by several facts. The rebbe had been dead for more than twelve years when we began our work, and neither of us had interviewed him during his lifetime. We therefore had to tease out the intentions and meanings of certain actions or statements from both the historical and social context in which they took place. Of course, on matters that are deeply felt, people may have motives that are not always easily articulated or even consistent; we came to believe that this might have been true for Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson. That would mean that even had we been able to ask him about his motives and the full meaning of what he said, he might not have been able or willing to provide us with unequivocal responses. Judging by the evasive and often cryptic answers that he gave a variety of people who asked those sorts of questions, I suspect that our case would have been no different.Footnote ²

Although we had access to many letters written to, by, and about him as well as his many writings, all of the former were not available to us, but rather were in the safekeeping of the Lubavitcher hasidim, who strictly limited access to them (indeed, following the publication of our book, a volume of correspondence written by the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe to Menaḥem Mendel and Moussia Schneerson between the years 1913 [5673] and 1947 [5707], and long held in the archives, was published).Footnote ³ The voluminous hasidic writings and published talks, mostly dating from after he became their leader, were subject to editing and “special understandings” by Lubavitchers, who printed and controlled access to the originals. Moreover, as Zev Gries has persuasively argued, the oral experiences transmitted during a rebbe's talks, heard while in his presence, generally have “played a more direct, immediate and significant part in determining the nature of the hasidic experience than did any of its written texts,” particularly because “scribes, copyists, editors and printers” often shaped the written texts.Footnote ⁴ When possible, therefore, we quoted from recordings of his talks (although these too were often not available in their entirety).Footnote ⁵ While we interviewed Lubavitchers about their rebbe, and read many testimonies and accounts, we recognized that penetrating the motives and inner thoughts of the man who was rebbe would at best be a matter of conjecture or interpretation, based on what we understood about his time and circumstances, as well as the social and cultural environment he inhabited. It would also be based on our assumption that he and those with whom he interacted were human beings, subject to the same motives, social pressures, and realities as those around them. For hasidim, kabbalistic and mystical ideas suggest that a rebbe and his family are qualitatively different from other people and understand the world in another way than the rest of humanity. This way of thinking, however, played a relatively minor role in our understanding of the character of the people, as well as the social and cultural questions that were the bulk of our concerns. In this, of course, our starting point was distinctly and ineluctably different from that of hasidim and other like-minded believers.

While in some cases we looked for hints about the meaning of the rebbe's actions in his hasidic writings and talks, we were far more likely to study his letters to and from family; we also analyzed the life choices he made. As sociologists, we found the latter more revealing, and less subject to editing and redaction than the former. Thus, for example, we examined a letter from Schneerson's father to his son in advance of the latter's wedding. We argued that the missive “demonstrates a closeness and affection that the father held for his son,” but that “a close reading of it also demonstrates a concern on the father's part for the son's proper religious behavior.”Footnote ⁶ We concluded this not only because of what it contained in relation to spiritual guidance and direction, but also because in the correspondence the father urged his son to don a silk kapote or sirtuk (the knee-length frock coat common to hasidim), which he trusted the bridegroom had had tailored in line with an earlier request. What we found particularly noteworthy, and which moved us to understand the letter as reflecting religious concerns by the father, was the fact that he added the note to his son that right after the ceremony, “if you wish you can wear another garment,” apparently responding to an objection on his son's part to wearing such an obviously hasidic outfit.Footnote ⁷ And indeed, we offer evidence that he did remove the sirtuk after the ceremony. That the man who would later be rebbe would choose to do such a thing, we found of crucial import—an action that for us framed not only the father's letter, but also the way we understood the son as he was at the time.

To those who revere the son as a hasidic rebbe, of course, our reading could not be correct. Similarly, we pointed out that during his days in Paris in pursuit of a degree in engineering, Mendel Schneerson (as he then called himself) and his wife lived in a neighborhood distant from the center of Jewish life, choosing to make their home in an area that “teemed with writers and artists from all over the world.” We noted that “Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas held court at 27 rue de Fleurus, only a five-minute ride away” or that at the time “rue Campagne-Première, two blocks from where the Schneersons lived, was the haunt of such artists as Picasso, Modigliani, Miró, and Kandinsky.” We legitimately asked whether the Schneersons could have remained ignorant of the prevailing lifestyle in the area.Footnote ⁸ We could not ignore that choice, even as Lubavitcher hasidim would have us believe that the true reasons their future rebbe went to Paris and selected this neighborhood were so that he could become a better hasid and to hone his skills as a student of Ḥabad teachings.

While a hasid generally believes that one who became rebbe was always destined for that role and therefore all his actions and motivations were forever guided by that reality, our approach was to argue sociologically that as a person's life circumstances change, he or she also changes. This, we assumed, was no less true for Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, who lived most of his life not being groomed for or necessarily expecting to be leader of the Lubavitchers. Thus, we inferred from a variety of the actions, statements, and choices the young Schneersons made that they had aspirations and interests that were not always in line with their hasidic past or what would become their hasidic future. We compared them to those among whom they lived and with whom they went to school, showing, for example, that their age of marriage was late by hasidic standards but not anomalous for people who attended university at the time.

However, because we were dealing with personalities who by the time we wrote our account were venerated by their followers, raised to the level of saints and in the rebbe's case, a Messiah, we knew these sorts of inference put us at odds with Lubavitchers and their supporters, as well as with those who have argued that primarily through his hasidic writings and discourses after he became rebbe could he be comprehended. Those who were his hasidim had a personal and religious interest in protecting the narrative of their rebbe's and his rebbetzin's lives. Moreover, because—as we noted in our book—“the life story of a Hasidic rebbe is often shrouded in hagiography,” and “to believers it cannot be that the man who stands between them and God could have had a life like any other . . . even that which seems prosaic is understood as appearing so only to the uninitiated, and therefore things can never be what they seem.” We realized that as nonhasidim and nonbelievers our reading of these materials would always be subject to challenge because for Lubavitchers, “beneath the surface reality there is to be found a deeper truth,” and from their perspective “only one who has the key can thus unlock the whole truth, and that key is possessed only by those who are truly Hasidim” (and indeed, the reaction to our book from Lubavitchers confirms this).Footnote ⁹ Since our account was not hagiographic nor an exercise in offering tribute and acclaim—nor did we accept the hasidic idea that one who becomes a rebbe was always destined for that role—our efforts to trace both the transformation of the movement and the man who led it were necessarily viewed as suspect at best and mendacious at worst. Yet for us, the transformation that the man who would become the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe underwent was precisely what made his subsequent efforts to transform Ḥabad comprehensible.

We began our account from what we believed most contemporary readers who would be interested in our book already knew: During the last third of the twentieth century the Lubavitcher version of Ḥabad hasidism had become a worldwide movement with an ambitious agenda of outreach, driven by a sense of mission guided by a leader animated by messianic passions and increasingly global concerns. Hence, our book became a sociobiography of that leader, analyzing how he came to head the movement and determine its direction. We framed that story by looking at his emissaries or shluḥim and how they acted, both during and after their rebbe's lifetime, and how a hasidic group that once focused on scholarship, in which young men aspired to attend a Tomchei Tmimim yeshiva and live the hasidic life, became transformed into one that sent young Lubavitcher couples out to live lives as Jewish outreach workers, often in places far from centers of hasidic or even Orthodox Jewish life. Our first chapter described these contemporary hasidim and their global program. The bulk of our book then explored the life of the one who sent them, his early years, how he became their leader, and how he participated in his many campaigns. Our final chapter returned to his hasidim, but now readers had a far clearer sense of what or who animated them and gave meaning to their mission. We raised the question of how that mission was affected by the demise of their leader whose status as Messiah was, by the time we commenced writing, more in question than ever; we asked how one might measure his success or failure.

Our work drew upon our disciplinary strengths and particular perspectives. My own background, as a student of Erving Goffman, led me toward the standpoints of social anthropology and ethnography, necessarily gravitating to descriptions of social behavior, a focus on symbolic interaction, and a frame analysis of the juxtaposition of actions, along with an emphasis on social context.Footnote ¹⁰ My coauthor, a student of Jacob Katz, took a more historical approach, closely reading documents, particularly letters, and analyzing how biography is affected by historical events. Moreover, because I am an American and he an Israeli, each of us understood the phenomena and personalities that we examined through the prism of our national experience. Thus, I saw Lubavitchers and their rebbe very much affected by their situation in America, subject to the minority experience, but also as shaped by New York City, where being Jewish and Orthodox allowed for unprecedented feelings of ethnic confidence, empowerment, and political influence. I understood the rebbe through the prism of his being an immigrant who came to a free and open American society during economic boom times, as a refugee from the Holocaust. Like so many of the Orthodox Jews who came to these shores in the shadow of the destruction of European Jewry, he had to construct a new life at a time when had he not gone through such turmoil he would, in his late forties, have been hitting his stride and living out his dreams and prewar plans. I understood him as a man who had to come to terms with the fact that he had survived while so many like him and in his own family had not, that his life plans had been undone by history, and that he now found himself in a society and culture unlike any he had ever encountered before or ever expected to join. In this new land, society was moving from the melting pot ideal in which Judaism ran the risk of assimilation toward the multiculturalism and symbolic ethnicity of the salad bowl, in which Jewish exceptionalism was conceivable.Footnote ¹¹ While my coauthor accepted some of these theories, he also understood him as shaped primarily by the perspective of Jewish experience and Israeli and Zionist efforts to redefine Jewish identity and existence. It was his sense that no matter where Ḥabad found itself, its first concern—especially during the second half of the twentieth century—was to distinguish itself from the Zionist project and define what and who was authentically Jewish. For my coauthor, neither Lubavitchers nor their rebbe could be comprehended without an understanding of the powerful contest between Israeli conceptions and Lubavitcher versions of what it meant to be Jewish, and which of these paths would lead to Jewish redemption and triumph. Our varying perspectives came together (not always without tension) in our work, leading us to create, we believe, a multifaceted portrait of the movement, its leader, and the forces that animate both.

Looking at the seventh rebbe's shluḥim, perhaps the core of his followers and a reconstructed cadre of his movement that turned him into a global leader, we saw that their rebbe understood, as had his two predecessors, the potential inherent in a young religious avant-garde who had been educated, prepared, and organized from an early age in a total institution like a yeshiva. As he became an innovator, he always used the language and instruments of what appeared to be traditional Ḥabad Lubavitcher thinking and practice. However, he gave these radical new meanings. In Elliot Wolfson's felicitous phrase, Schneerson was both “derivative and innovative.”Footnote ¹² So, for example, we argued that “while he used emissaries [shluḥim] 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.”Footnote ¹³His emissaries would go not just to the converted or the already traditionally religious. He would send them (and their wives—a totally innovative use of women) out of the yeshiva throughout the globe, not to speak to other Lubavitchers or hasidim of any stripe, but instead to retrieve the assimilated and the young who had never learned what it meant to be a Jew. Nor would they act simply “as interpreters and popularizers of the obscure discourse of the Rebbe,” as had emissaries of earlier Habad leaders who took the message from the court to hasidim in the hinterland.Footnote ¹⁴His shluḥim would be sent to those who were not hasidim at all, but rather Jews lost in secular society. There they would communicate, but in very simple (some might say, simplistic) teachings, Lubavitcher ideas, and thereby try to kindle the light of their Judaism in order to bring Jews to observance, so that the Messiah could at last come. They would do it by being model Jews whose enthusiasm was instructive and infectious. That in the end they converted a tiny few into Lubavitchers seemed beside the point; they were interested in the cosmic, almost magical, power of public Jewish acts—as dictated by them—to force the Messiah to come.

Our central thesis connecting Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson to this cadre of emissaries of the new task was based on our understanding of his own transformation. That thesis, essentially sociological in character and based on our account of and perspective on his life, suggests that because Schneerson, unlike his two predecessors, had not been groomed or even expected to be rebbe and had spent a large proportion of his life pursuing interests and a life that was neither hasidic in its orientation nor global in its interests (he had called that life his “dream” in a letter to his father in which he reported on his unsuccessful efforts to find a position as an engineer living in Paris) he was able to look at the world differently from those whom he led, who had always remained inside. In the first half of his life, his Jewish orientation was largely private and avocational. He was not a very public figure concerned with world Jewry or its direction; rather, he was a man seeking to become trained and credentialed as an engineer.

But when Schneerson abandoned that life and its personal dreams because of the vicissitudes of history and seized the leadership of Ḥabad, he was ideally suited to change it because he had been on its periphery and could see it from a fresh perspective. We explained that “while both Rabbi Shalom DovBer [the fifth rebbe] and his son, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak [the sixth], 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,” the man who would take over from them, “had firsthand knowledge” of it and therefore could imagine his emissaries entering and changing it. Our argument was that because of their far more sheltered and insular situation, the previous two rebbes “could not see the future” as it was, but only as they wanted it to be. Their successor could, on the contrary, “see the future because he had been living in it.”Footnote ¹⁵ He had been living where the sons and daughters who had moved far from traditional Jewish life were, and therefore subjectively understood and objectively recognized them, even in post–Second World War America, Europe, Israel, and even after he became the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe. We argued that precisely because he had lived somewhat outside the world of Lubavitch, he could, on reentering it, become an instrument of change, one not completely bonded to the conventions of the insider.

This was not easy for him. Indeed, he as much as said so himself when he wrote, “it is difficult for a person in the prime of his life, or in more advanced age, to radically change his whole outlook and reexamine the whole approach in which one has been trained and steeped.” Yet that was exactly what he did and what his followers made the signature goal of their hasidism: to make Jews reexamine their lives as Jews.Footnote ¹⁶

We have argued that this required the new rebbe to accept the mantle of the legitimacy of the past; Schneerson always argued that his father-in-law and predecessor did not die but was still the rebbe, and that he himself was simply the memale mekomo, the stand-in (as he remains identified on his tombstone) who could send and receive messages from, and indeed channel, his predecessor and father-in-law. Yet while repeating the Messianic message of the sixth rebbe, his stand-in changed it radically. The former had warned that God had sent the Jews into exile “to hurt and to become martyrs”Footnote ¹⁷ and that “the degradation of exile was intended by God to create a receptivity” to redemption.Footnote ¹⁸ When the son-in-law took up this “Moshiach” (Messiah) campaign, he would reframe the message to make it clear that redemption required no further death, suffering, or martyrdom as a prerequisite. His was a messianism of promise in which one needed “kindness and goodness.” He stressed the ability of the converted sinner to change the cosmic balance and bring the redemption.Footnote ¹⁹ His was a messianism fitted to a time of prosperity and peace, not of persecution and an environment that brought a sense of exile, as it had been for his Lubavitcher predecessors.

We read and understood events, statements, and actions of the rebbe and his followers through our sociological perspective. More facts may yet come to light that might change our views as undisclosed documents emerge. Yet based on what we have seen, our book remains our best effort to decode the rebbe and his movement. We can only hope the resistance and enthusiasms of his followers will allow our explanations an opportunity to be read and judged.