It is hard to think of a contemporary Jewish figure more deserving of a scholarly biography than Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), the seventh leader of Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism. Schneerson's extraordinary achievements in transforming Chabad into a leading power in the Jewish world provide ammunition for those who tend to emphasize the role of individual actors in the unfolding of history. Speculative as pondering alternative historical trajectories is, in the case of Chabad it would make perfect sense to argue that its course of development would have been entirely different had not Schneerson but his older brother-in-law and contender, Shemaryahu Gurary, become the movement's seventh president in 1951. In all probability, Gurary would not have stirred the messianic surge that has pervaded contemporary Chabad in proportions unknown in Judaism since the heyday of the Sabbatian movement in the seventeenth century. Still, writing the biography of a figure of such caliber is an intricate and vexing task, as the authors, sociologists Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, have found out. The patina of grandeur that enshrouds the life of any hasidic zaddik turns into a nearly impenetrable hagiographic armor when the zaddik is viewed as the Messiah. How can one (or even two) write a biography of the Messiah? It should not come as a surprise that the book has stirred a heated debate. The Rebbe has received a lot of coverage and many favorable reviews, and won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies, but it was not spared the wrath of Lubavitchers and their supporters. Whereas Arthur Green has praised the sensitivity and warmth with which the authors restored Schneerson into the real world of humanity, Rabbi Chaim Rapoport in a meticulous, knowledgeable, and harsh critique accused them of presenting a distorted portrait of Schneerson as manipulative and egocentric. Without delving into the details of the fiery exchange between Rapoport and the authors, I find the authors' overall depiction of Schneerson's intriguing life circumstances and afterlife reverberations very compelling. Rapoport did expose some factual mistakes in their account, but I suspect that the bone of contention here is primarily epistemological, having to do with the authors' very attempt to divest Schneerson of his mythologized, grander-then-life stature.
To the chagrin of glorifiers, Heilman and Friedman excel precisely in this task. They stalk the faint traces of young Schneerson in Leningrad, Berlin, and Paris, arguing convincingly that until the early 1940s, his major concern was to complete his studies and to establish himself as an engineer. His noble pedigree, as a direct descendant (and namesake) of Chabad's third leader, the Ẓemah Ẓedek, gave him access to the court of the sixth rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak (the RaYaTZ), and to the heart of RaYaTZ's second daughter, Chaya Moussia. But the marriage did not seem to change Schneerson's life priorities. Still, as the authors do acknowledge, throughout these years Schneerson's hasidic mentality remained intact, and he kept his connection to the RaYaTZ's court. The authors cogently present him as living a double life at this stage, alternating between two worlds and two mindsets.
Since a lot of young Schneerson's early life remained undocumented or else idealized by hagiographers, this part of the biography perforce relies on a relatively thin database. The authors grapple with the lacunae by resorting to inferences regarding their protagonist's motivations and intentions. Rhetorically they phrase their views in the subjunctive mood, suggestively orienting the readers through elaborate sets of questions. Did the RaYaTZ, in his sermons during the wedding ceremonies, give vent to his dissatisfaction with his son-in-law's insistence on pursuing “foreign wisdoms”? Did Schneerson suffer from a survivor's guilt after being rescued from the Nazis? This rhetoric of letting the readers draw the conclusions ordinarily works because the inferences are plausible and appropriately grounded in the right context. Sometimes the questions appear a bit too suggestive. For example, after vividly sketching the ethnic microcosm of Hotel Max, the Schneersons' residence in the bohemian 14th arrondissement in Paris, and specifying the famous artists, philosophers, and writers who had lived nearby, the authors ask: “Could the Schneersons . . . have remained completely ignorant of this life around them? Did they want to be? Did they never walk the boulevards, stop at the cafes, visit the galleries, or feel the energy around them? Had the couple who had stayed out late in Leningrad while they were courting and who may have attended the theater there become homebodies in Paris?” (114). Here the seductiveness of the text added to that of a description of Paris appears a bit too imposing. One major concern, which Rapoport did not fail to notice, is the sporadic reliance on Barry Gurary, Shemaryahu's son and the only male descendant of RaYaTZ, in reconstructing young Schneerson's portrait. Even if we accept that Barry admired his uncle, it appears naïve to assume that his memories of him were not affected by the succession rivalry and the battle at the court over Chabad's library that pitted him against the rebbe as a bitter enemy.
According to Heilman and Friedman, the transitional moment in Schneerson's two-act life plot was his arrival in New York in 1941. They soberly interpret the transformation he completed within a decade—from an aspiring engineer to a zaddik—as a pragmatic move under harsh circumstances. After losing hope of finding a job in his vocation, first in Paris and later in New York, he had only Chabad as a viable option. Not only was he accepted there unconditionally, but as the RaYaTZ's second son-in-law, only Shemaryahu Gurary stood between him and the throne. This pragmatic approach, propelled by unintended circumstances, stands in contrast with the hasidim's view of Schneerson's winding road to Chabad's presidency as predestined. Yet the gap is bridged through the authors' judicious reading of the rebbe's state of mind at that transformative point. Mystically oriented as he was, he could easily be led to ponder his outright failure to achieve his life objectives outside Chabad as intended consequences, indicating that he could not flee his destiny. His ascent to power in 1951 and his impressive achievements thereafter might have bolstered his assurance that he was indeed the right man at the right time. With the “hot” messianism he advanced from his very first day in office, this right time could well be the end of time.
Although Schneerson inherited the acute messianic orientation from his predecessor, he elevated it to unknown summits of intensity and urgency, making it the foundation of all his projects. Whereas RaYaTZ's messianism was catastrophic, based on the Holocaust as messianic tribulations, his was a messianism of success, resonating, among other things, with the benign climate for the Jews in the post–World War II West, the establishment of Israel and its swift victory over its Arab neighbors in 1967, and later the collapse of the Soviet Union and the exodus of its Jews. Indeed, while Schneerson, through his worldwide web of devoted emissaries, did his best to bring Jews to the fold in order to draw redemption closer, he interpreted these and other events as clear signs that his efforts were conducive to the imminent coming of the Messiah. Heilman and Friedman thoughtfully interpret the messianic agenda and its vicissitudes by setting its roots in the historical moment and wider social context, on the one hand, and in the rebbe's biography on the other. The global deployment of emissaries (shluchim), a revolutionary project that shaped contemporary Chabad as a dynamic transnational movement, is a case in point. The idea of “spreading the wellsprings” did not originate with Schneerson, but he expanded and consolidated it, taking advantage of the new opportunities for Orthodox Jews to live full Jewish life in the open and the growing search for meaning and spirituality among the non-Orthodox. The authors reasonably argue that the establishment of the Peace Corps by President Kennedy might have served as a partial model for shlichus, indicating how idealistic youth could be attracted to missions of high commitment. But Schneerson could also draw on his own personal experience, since he himself had managed to live outside the safe territory of Orthodox Judaism while maintaining his religious and hasidic convictions intact.
Even though Schneerson cultivated the notion of imminent redemption without explicitly referring to a designated messianic figure, most hasidim came to the conclusion that he had to be the chosen one. Scholarship varies as to whether he too saw himself as the Messiah. Elliot Wolfson, in his creative and erudite reading of Schneerson's messianic doctrine, claims that the rebbe's ideas were meant to invoke a modification in consciousness that would constitute a divine reality without a personal Messiah at all. At the opposite pole, Yoseph Dan and Allon Dahan not only assume that the rebbe viewed himself as the Messiah but speculate that his childlessness—uncannily congruent with the notion of the coming of the Messiah as the end of history—could have been the outcome of a mystical intention rather than a biological accident. I find Heilman and Friedman's balanced approach more credible than these two polar views. In emphasizing the crucial role of unintended consequences in transforming engineer Schneerson into a zaddik, they render Dan and Dahan's hypothesis quite implausible. According to their convincing scenario, the elder Schneerson, swept on the waves of success, fame, and veneration and bereft of friends and family to countervail his glorification, might have eventually relented and started toying with the idea that he could have been the chosen one. There is one clue, subtle but powerful, to support this. To emphasize the immediacy of the coming of the Messiah, the rebbe used to end many of his talks with the phrase tekhef u-miyad mamash (“immediately and without delay in actuality”), often repeating the last word, mamash, two or three times. Once he added: “mamash, with all the interpretations of mamash.” Could he not know that for his hasidim, the letters mem, mem, shin stood for the initials of his name, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, or, no less pertinent, for moshiach Menachem shmo (the Messiah named Menachem)?
Heilman and Friedman are at their best in describing the messianic surge in Chabad in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Schneerson, growing old and frail, was in the zenith of his fame. The authors have a keen sense for the unfolding drama, and their portrayal of the rebbe's collapse on RaYaTZ's grave and the ensuing frenzy in the court in face of his deterioration and eventual death in an unredeemed world read like a mix of a Greek tragedy and a suspense story.
The book's opening and closing chapters deal with Schneerson's afterlife, the sustenance of which is crucial for Chabad's survival as a headless movement. In Chapter 1, the authors focus on the burial site in Old Montefiore Cemetery as a major arena for making the absent rebbe present, though the more dramatic practices of embodiment take place in “770,” Chabad's headquarter and the old rebbe's residence in Crown Heights. The split between these two sites, emblematic of the major cleavage in contemporary Chabad, concerns the ontological status of Schneerson. While for restrained messianists the gravesite is the place for commemorating and bonding with the deceased rebbe, for the vocal minority of meshichistim (radical messianists) “770” is the place for bonding with the living rebbe. Flatly denying his death, they have managed to create a messianic ecology in which Schneerson is an active participant, “with us more than ever.” He is hypervisible through his multiple pictures and videos, and is also highly accessible through the oracle of Igroth Kodesh (Holy letters) based on the Schneerson's vast correspondence. This bibliomantic device is open to all, providing the rebbe's advice and blessing swiftly and easily. Since among the meshichistim young people and newcomers are overrepresented, I would take issue with the authors' claim that “those who never encountered the Rebbe in life and know him only as an image or through the words of a book cannot be connected as those for whom he was once a living presence in their lives” (275). Based on my work with meshichistim in Israel, it seems that they are able—not unlike Breslavers with Rabbi Nachman—to forge intimate bonds with a virtual but palpably close Rebbe Schneerson.
Yet the virtual messiah is highly decentralized. All hasidim can partake of him. His holy abode and portraits, the holy letters' oracle, the distributed dollars: All these and other means for making the rebbe present are open to all. This growing democratization and decentralization might be the most serious issue with which headless Chabad has to cope today. In the final chapter, a lucid sociological assessment of the prospects of Chabad as a headless movement, the authors note that Chabad has ingeniously withstood the disappearance of Schneerson by institutionalizing shlichus, turning it into “a professional career track for successful Lubavitch Hasidim” (258). But they also note the dilemmas and inconsistencies built into the work of the emissaries, given the unbridgeable gap between their impressive but piecemeal achievements and Schneerson's grand vision of redemption. As sociologists well aware of the ephemeral nature of personal charisma, the authors' final assessment of Chabad's long-term perseverance is not encouraging: “When he was alive, Menachem Mendel Schneerson brought his Hasidim to such a peak of expectations, hope, and organization in spreading the wellsprings that in his absence, should the Messiah continue to tarry, the future can only promise disappointment or the emergence of a new sort of Judaism” (278).
