Michele Alperin

By: centraljersey.com
Picture a thriving synagogue in New Jersey, a crowded seder meal in Nepal, an inexpensive Jewish nursery school in Italy, or a lively Hanukkah celebration at Rutgers University. These are but a tiny sampling of the facts on the ground established by a vast army of "shluchim," or emissaries, sent out by the now-deceased Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), who was spiritual leader of the Chabad/Lubavitch Hasidim for 43 years.
A Hasidic rebbe is not like an ordinary rabbi, but plays a more powerful role in the lives of his followers. Beyond being a charismatic leader, a teacher, and a quasi-parental adviser on personal issues, a rebbe is the medium through which each individual Hasid connects to God.
Within the Hasidic community, a rebbe is assumed to be destined from birth for his revered position, and Lubavitcher historians have plumbed Schneerson’s life story for signposts. So when two sociologists, Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, had the chutzpah to publish a biography, "The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson," that paints a picture of a complex human being who grew into his mission, sparks began to fly.
Samuel Heilman, who is professor of Sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York, will speak about the book at the Jewish Center of Princeton on Sunday at 4 p.m.
Although cooperative at the beginning, Chabad eventually tried to disparage both the authors’ motives and scholarship. Professor Heilman explains, "When you look at a religious leader and see him as other than the holy man, the Rebbe, he was always slated to be – that is unredeemable, impossible, and unacceptable."
On Amazon.com, reviewers of the new biography rate the book at the extremes, with the naysayers accusing the authors, for example, of using sources to validate their theories and ignoring information that challenges them. Supporters of the authors, on the other hand, blame the Lubavitch organization for keeping under lock-and-key anything that portrays the rabbi as "a human being rather than a saint."
Others accused Professor Heilman’s coauthor, who testified at a trial over the ownership of the books in the Lubavitcher library, of having an ax to grind, saying that the books aim "was to undermine the Rebbe and to malign and slander him."
Professor Heilman denies having any motivations other than scholarly ones. "We painted a portrait of the man as we understand him, and we leave it to the readers to judge," he says. "I think that describing a man who has gone through a transformation doesn’t demean him, but on the contrary, it said he was an extraordinary person who could transform himself and transform the Jewish world."
Professor Heilman is hardly a likely figure to malign the Rebbe for his religious commitments. He was born in Germany of parents who were Holocaust survivors on Schindler’s list. He grew up in Brookline, Mass., where he attended both public school and Jewish day school. He is also an observant Jew.
A student of sociology, Professor Heilman got professionally involved with Jewish Orthodoxy early on, with his dissertation and first book, titled "Synagogue Life" – an ethnography of an Orthodox synagogue, suggested by his professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Irving Goffman.
In the 1990s Professor Heilman got involved in the Fundamentalist Project out of the University of Chicago, which looked at the characteristics of fundamentalist-like variants of many religions, both Eastern and Western. That’s where he linked up with Menachem Friedman, Israeli Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, who was writing for them about Lubavitch.
One aspect of the biography is particularly problematic for the Rebbe’s followers: its focus on the many aspects of his life in prewar Europe that did not follow the expected Lubavitcher life trajectory.
Schneerson himself did not attend the Lubavitcher Tomekhei Temimim schools, despite coming from a Hasidic family. In a community where men and women tended to marry at young ages, the courtship between Schneerson and his wife, Moussia, lasted quite a number of years, and there is evidence of at least one instance of their having been out late together and without a chaperone. At the wedding itself, although Schneerson did wear traditional Hasidic garb, he changed to a brown suit and fashionable white dinner gloves for the reception.
In January 1929, he and Moussia moved to Berlin, where Schneerson studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin as an auditor, and Moussia studied German language and literature. Although Schneerson was not pursuing a traditional Hasidic lifestyle, he did remain an observant Jew and even did some research in Jewish scholarly sources for his father-in-law during this period. In Berlin and later in Paris, Schneerson used his facility with language to secure Jewish books and manuscripts for his father-in-law’s library.
With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Schneerson realized that his auditing would not gain him admission to a German university, and the Schneersons moved to Paris, where they were soon joined by Moussia’s sister, Sheina, and her husband, Menachem Mendel Horensztajn, who had grown up in a fairly secular atmosphere. The two couples lived in the same building in a colorful neighborhood, peopled by artists and writers, with the Jewish quarter two-and-a-half miles away, and the nearest synagogue about three miles.
Both Schneerson and Horensztajn studied engineering. Despite absences due to Sabbath and holiday observance, Schneerson completed the engineering program with a passing grade, securing his degree in March 1938; Horenstztajn, however, with a slightly lower grade, failed the exams and had to return to Poland, where he and his wife were ultimately murdered by the Nazis.
Eventually, in 1941, Schneerson and Moussia made it to New York, where they joined Moussia’s father and mother and her older sister and family. Like so many survivors and immigrants, the Rebbe had to reinvent himself in the face of his own personal losses and the decimation of European Jewry. As Professor Heilman describes it, "He was a man in his 40s and did not have any children, and his plans were upended by events he had no control over. Suddenly he finds himself in a new place that he never expected to be and in a situation he had never been in before. He must have wondered why he had survived and to what purpose."
After the Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak died without leaving instructions as to a successor, a year of competition ensued between Schneerson and his brother-in-law. Shmaryahu Gourary, until finally in 1951, Schneerson was acclaimed as Rebbe by the Lubavitch community. As Rebbe he took steps to realize his father-in-law’s vision that the Messiah was near and began instituting the changes that would bring him renown throughout the Jewish and even secular world. The Rebbe believed that getting more Jews to perform Jewish ritual observances, or mitzvahs, would hasten the coming of the Messiah. As a result, he sent out shluchim/emissaries to reach out to all Jews, at whatever level of observance, and bring them closer to Jewish practice.
Over his tenure the Rebbe also made other changes. Although originally unhappy with Israel as a secular state, he started to support Israel after the 1967 war because he believed Israel’s victory over such great odds had been divinely directed. In 1986 he began to spend his Sunday afternoons giving out dollar bills for people to donate to charity, as hundreds would line up and wait for hours to receive the Rebbe’s blessing and the dollar bill.
Over time the Rebbe’s belief in the nearness of the Messiah strengthened, and his Hasidim began to see the Rebbe himself as fulfilling that role. Although he neither denied nor directly accepted this mission, he did hint to his followers that it was true, and even after the Rebbe’s death in 1994, some Hasidim have continued to believe that he is the Messiah.
Evaluating the Rebbe’s contribution to modern Jewry, Professor Heilman offers a mixed review. Although acknowledging the movement’s success at outreach as well as the value for people like himself who can now travel all over the world and get kosher food and access to a synagogue, he asks, "Has it made the Jewish people more religious or changed the future of Judaism? I don’t know." He does note that the Lubavitchers are a model of being proudly Jewish and not assimilating.
Professor Heilman also discusses some of the downsides of Chabad. Conceding that they are "particularly great when there is nothing else in town," he says they can sometimes undermine local Jewish institutions. "In the organized Jewish community," says Professor Heilman, "if you become a member, then we give you services." When Chabad tells young families, "Come to the nursery school because you’re Jewish," the local synagogue’s nursery school may no longer be able to pull in young families. Or they open a Chabad house, and say, "Come for dinner, or for a lunch and learn, and you’ll like us," while the synagogue must charge dues to maintain its facilities and pay its clergy and staff.
On many college campuses, the Lubavitchers have set themselves up in parallel to the traditional Hillel houses. They provide a very supportive quasi-family, the shluchim famlies, without any of the negative baggage of home. "They offer a family that is supportive. They don’t have to say, ‘How are you doing in school?’ or ‘What are your plans for the future?’" he says. "There are few demands; they give a warm family experience that is all good and no bad."
Given the Rebbe’s sheltered position in the Lubavitch community, it was difficult for the authors to penetrate the Rebbe’s personality. "A rebbe’s personal life is very closed off, because a rebbe is supernatural, a step above human beings, just a little lower than the angels," says Professor Heilman. "Anything of his personal life is guarded jealously by people who have control over his personal effects and his letters."
Professor Heilman suggests that the Rebbe’s isolation likely contributed to his apparent acceptance of the mantle of the Messiah. "He doesn’t have children, friends, or the people he went to school with; he is surrounded by sycophants; and the one person who he converses with (the previous Rebbe) is dead," says Professor Heilman. A person living a more ordinary life, like Professor Heilman himself, would never have such illusions." I can’t say I’m the Messiah," says Professor Heilman. "If I did, my kids, friends, or wife would say, ‘Get over it.’"