Chabad rebbe learning on the job book11/29/2022 I’m not sure the Rebbe was happy about making this decision. Others will ask, “Did it work?” But the Rebbe would say that it was the only way it could be done-there was no other way of doing it. There are a few people who may not agree with the Rebbe. The Rebbe said, “now we have to make it into a body that is trying to be effective.” Now we must save the people, and that demands that we roll up our sleeves and get busy doing simple, crass work.įor 150 years, Chabad was an intellectual body that craved excellence. So he said we cannot now afford to bask in our own spiritual work–including devotional prayer–to any great degree. But he saw that it was not a working tool. He knew the stakes he knew that the experience of contemplation, a world in which Chasidim would live a different type of life was beautiful. I don’t know that it was an easy decision and I won’t try to absolve the Rebbe because he knew he was paying an enormous price. The Rebbe made a very conscious decision to shift the focus of the movement. To the elder Chasidim who remembered the old school, it must have been a difficult change to abide. Once it relocated to America, the focus seemed to shift. When Chabad was in Russia, the model Chasid spent considerable time in contemplative prayer, spiritual devotion, and was generally very inner directed. His book, My Rebbe, published in 2014, is his firsthand account of the Rebbe. A close disciple of the Rebbe and scholar of Chabad Chasidism, Rabbi Steinsaltz authored numerous books on Chabad themes. His Steinsaltz Edition of the Talmud has also been translated into English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, celebrated teacher, philosopher, social critic, and author, has devoted his life to making the Talmud accessible to all Jews, publishing the Talmud in modern Hebrew, with a running commentary to facilitate learning. Here, we present the first of several excerpts from my conversations with some of those authors and Jewish personalities about the Rebbe and his leadership. In recent years, the Rebbe’s stunning transformation to the Jewish experience has captured the imagination of thinkers and scholars seeking to understand and analyze the Rebbe’s iconic leadership. “Revolutionary,” “visionary,” “prophetic.” These are among the many descriptives used to characterize some of the unusual qualities that registered in the Rebbe’s phenomenal leadership. How would the Rebbe pick up the reins in the aftermath of the Holocaust that left the Jewish people diminished by a third, and crushed in body and spirit? How would the Rebbe bring healing to survivors nursing shame and insecurity, wanting to hide their identity, to forget, to be left alone in their grief? Although he himself formally assumed the position the following year, in 1951, Chabad points to the date of 10 Shvat in 1950, as the beginning of the Rebbe’s leadership. His son-in-law (and distant cousin–himself a direct descendant of the third Chabad Rebbe), Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, succeeded him. Schneersohn, sixth in the dynasty of Chabad Rebbes, passed. On that date (January 28) in 1950, Rabbi Joseph I. Wednesday, the Jewish calendar date of 10 Shvat, marks 70 years of the unfolding of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s vision.
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