Bati Le-Gani and the Triumph of Humanity

Eli Rubin

An abridged excerpt from Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism by Eli Rubin, published by Stanford University Press, ©2025 by Eli Rubin. All Rights Reserved.

R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (“Rayatz,” 1880-1950) spent the first 35 years of his life in the rural shtetl of Lubavitch, the ancestral seat of the Chabad stream of Hasidism. But in October 1915, following the “Great Retreat” of the Russian armies from Lithuania and Poland, the Schneersohn family relocated from Lubavitch to Rostov-on-Don, a large industrial city 750 miles to the south and within easy reach of the Black Sea. Rayatz’s father, R. Shalom DovBer Schneersohn (“Rashab”), died there in 1920, shortly after the Red Army took control of the city. By this point, the “Jewish section” (Evsektsiia) of the Communist Party was setting out to systematically secularize the Jewish population of the former Russian Empire.

Not once, not twice, but three times—in the Soviet Union, in Poland, and in the United States following the Holocaust—Rayatz rallied Chabad hasidim and attracted new hasidim and supporters to the flag of Lubavitch, building new institutions and communities from scratch. His success was significantly advanced by the power of his penmanship. Rayatz was a prolific and expressive writer of letters, and creatively experimented with historiography, memoir, and narrative. He also continued Chabad’s older tradition of delivering and writing formal hasidic discourses, the most famous and impactful of which is known by its opening words, Bati le-gani (“I have come to my garden,” Shir Ha-Shirim 5:1).

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Bati Le-Gani is a series (hemsheikh) of four discourses that ostensibly dates to 1950, and is remembered as Rayatz’s final authorized publication prior to his passing on the 10th of Shevat in that year. In truth, the roots of this hemsheikh reach back to the late 1890s, and its afterlife extended to the late 1980s, whence it continues onward today.

Importantly, the underlying text of Hemsheikh Bati Le-Gani was not originally composed in 1950. In 1923, Rayatz delivered it as a series of two discourses under different titles. Moreover, Rayatz crafted this series by juxtaposing and embellishing two previously unrelated discourses, respectively composed and delivered by his father, Rashab, in 1898 and 1920. The act of juxtaposition itself reshaped and recast Rashab’s words, ingeniously and elegantly revealing the thematic resonances between two texts that would otherwise be regarded as unconnected. While paraphrasing almost everything that appears in Rashab’s original discourses, Rayatz also added a great deal of material. His elaborations are so smoothly integrated that only a line-by-line comparison can tease out the new layer from the inherited one. The old is subsumed within something entirely new.

In 1950, each discourse of Rayatz’s 1923 hemsheikh was bisected to form a “new” hemsheikh comprising four discourses, subdivided into a total of 20 sections. On the first anniversary of Rayatz’s death, in 1951, his son-in-law and successor, R. Menachem M. Schneerson (“Ramash,” 1902-1994), began an annual custom of delivering discourses interrogating themes from Rayatz’s Hemsheikh Bati Le-Gani. Each year, sequentially, he focused on one of its 20 sections while also expounding on the series as a whole. In these discourses he would explicitly cite teachings from each of the previous leaders of Chabad, and also teachings of their hasidic predecessors, the Maggid of Mezritch and the Ba’al Shem Tov. This continued until the death of Chaya Moussia Schneerson, Ramash’s wife and Rayatz’s daughter, in February 1988. Since that time, Chabad hasidim have continued the custom of studying another section of Rayatz’s hemsheikh each year, together with the discourses by Ramash that elaborate on it.

Bati Le-Gani begins with a premise, drawn from midrashic sources, that places God’s manifestation in the physical world at the center of cosmic purpose: At the beginning of time, God’s “primary indwelling”—ikar shekhinah—was manifest within the physical world, but “she ascended” (nistalkah) therefrom as a result of the primordial sin of the tree of knowledge. Thereafter, seven generations of righteous individuals iteratively drew the shekhinah back into the world, culminating with the giving of the Torah at Sinai and the construction of an earthly sanctuary (mishkan) for God, through Moses (Shir Ha-Shirim Rabbah 5:1; Bereishit Rabbah 19:7).

Incorporated into Chabad literature, this midrashic teaching is implicitly understood to transcend biblical time and to extend its significance into the present. Thus, the burning questions that animate the hemsheikh: How shall the shekhinah be returned below? How shall this lowly realm be made into a dwelling place for God?

The answer is introduced with an aphorism rooted in several Zoharic texts, but crystallized by Chabad’s founder, R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi (“Rashaz”):

When “the other side” (sitra ahara) is subjugated, the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, ascends in all the worlds. (Tanya 27)

While this aphorism specifies “subjugation” (itkafya), Rashab and Rayatz added that this leads to “transformation” (ithapkha) too. Subjugating and transforming the (apparently) un-Godly aspects of reality—such that their fallacy and concealment give way to truth and revelation—facilitates the indwelling of God’s most ascendant manifestation even in the lowest of all worlds.

The first half of Hemsheikh Bati Le-Gani (based on Rashab’s 1898 discourse) examines the practical nature of this subjugation and transformation. The work of pivoting from “unholy folly” to “holy folly” features as a prominent example. From the Chabad perspective, to sin is to act irrationally. This is unholy folly. An irrational commitment to God, however, is not subrational but superrational. This is holy folly. After all, of God’s transcendent infinitude it is said, “no thought can grasp You at all” (Tikkunei Zohar 17a). Accordingly, God is most truly embraced when religious practice exceeds thought, wisdom, and rationale.

The second half of the hemsheikh (based on Rashab’s 1920 discourse) takes up the theme of divine victory. The Supernal King’s inalienable will to triumph—the divine attribute of  netzah—is to be emulated and realized by the Jewish people, who are referred to in the Bible (Exodus 12:41) as the “hosts” or “armies” of God (tziv’ot Hashem). Spiritual victory is achieved through revealing the “hidden” strength that transcends ordinary consciousness and ordinary activity. Such holy triumphalism on the part of the Jewish people—born not of complacent presumption, but of a faith in the impossibility of impossibility—elicits the triumphalism of God. To elicit the triumphalism of God is to receive the innermost riches of the Supernal treasury, the essential concealment that even transcends the primal concealment known as tzimtzum. Indeed, this otherwise unarticulated reserve is nothing less than the interiority and essence of the Infinite (atzmut ein sof), whose unprecedented articulation within this lowest world realizes the original purpose of creation.

Through combining these two discourses, Rayatz elegantly brings two distinct strands of Rashab’s oeuvre into dynamic conversation. The first half of the hemsheikh focuses on the practical dimensions of personal spiritual work and transformation. The second half is much more esoteric, probing the theological and cosmological implications of divine infinitude and transcendence. Placed together, the two halves are mutually enriched. The everyday struggle to overcome worldly darkness is rendered transparent to the otherworldly luminosity that it is shown to disclose. Kabbalistic abstractions concerning the infinite light, and the undisclosed luminary from which it emanates, crystallize into the bedrock of inspired activism in the here and now.

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At the heart of Hemsheikh Bati Le-Gani we find an existential confrontation with tzimtzum: How can divinity be discovered in a world that God sometimes seems to have abandoned?

Many passages can be cited to demonstrate this point. The following example also illustrates how Rayatz’s embellishments to his father’s discourses often bring a heightened acuity to the interpenetration of the cosmic and the personal. This segment of the hemsheikh explains that unholy folly is overcome through revealing the essence of the Godly soul. This revelation is synonymous with enacting the mitzvot. Accordingly, the soul itself is woven of the mitzvot, which manifest divine transcendence within the world, and which are 613 in number.

The quote below overlays Rashab’s original text with Rayatz’s rewrite. Strikethroughs indicate deletions; additions are in bold:

It is written “Jacob is the rope of his inheritance” (Deuteronomy 32:9)…  and the rope is the soul itself, for the soul of man is the rope that binds him with divinity, and therefore the soul itself is woven of six hundred and thirteen threads, and as it’s written stated in Sefer shel Beinonim [Tanya] chapter 51, that the soul is comprised by 613 etc., and elsewhere it is explained that the totality of the cosmos is for the sake of the Jewish people, and this is because the reason for this is that the sages say (Sanhedrin 4:5) “each individual must say, for my sake the world (ha-olam) was created,” olam having the connotation of concealment (he’eleim), that each individual must say, the concealment and primordial tzimtzum was created for my sake, in order to refine and clarify it, and man is in the form of 248 limbs and 365 sinews that together are the number 613, and therefore also inall the stations in the cosmos are of that number the aspects of two hundred and forty eight and six hundred and sixty five exist…

Significantly, Rayatz replaces Rashab’s explanation of cosmic purpose in national terms—“for the sake of the Jewish people”—with an explanation that centers the individual human being: “Each individual must say, for my sake the world was created.” He also reinterprets this classical rabbinic aphorism by splicing it with a time-honored reading of the Hebrew word for “world” as a derivative of the Hebrew word for “concealment.” Thereby, he arrives at a new reading of tzimtzum that places the individual human being at its center: “each individual must say, the concealment and primordial tzimtzum was created for my sake.”

For Rayatz, the individual challenge of overcoming folly is not simply a personal problem, but confronts the most fundamental condition of the cosmos itself. Indeed, the personal process of overcoming and transforming folly—of cognitive clarification and transcendence—was the ultimate purpose of tzimtzum from the outset.

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As the first half of the hemsheikh draws to a close, Rayatz also takes the opportunity to introduce the themes of battle and triumph that will figure more prominently later. The messianic overcoming of tzimtzum, he explains, is to be attained through an existential war, a battle in which survival depends on tenacious alacrity and total triumph. Without tzimtzum, the struggle for ultimate clarification and transformation cannot unfold. It is through overcoming tzimtzum in the present that the messianic revelation of the future is constructed. Rayatz especially links this battle with the body, and goes so far as to assert that in the messianic era “the primary disclosure of divine transcendence… will be in the body” rather than the soul.

This messianic triumph isn’t simply an intellectual or spiritual endeavor, but a transformation of being in the most tangible sense. Being will openly manifest its divine nature, its true meaning, such that the body will axiomatically perceive it, secondarily communicating it to the soul as well. The assertive solidity of the body, of physical matter, will viscerally convey the essential solidity of primordial being, the essence of the divine self. This depends on the sort of bodily struggle that meaningfully transforms materiality into an essential fulcrum of luminosity.

The above examples illustrate some of the ways that Rayatz rethought his father’s teachings and rewrote his father’s texts, building new intellectual and literary structures that substantially exceed their foundations. In Rayatz’s discourses, Rashab’s cool erudition is molded into something more evocative and visceral, even as the concepts themselves are clarified, sharpened, and reshaped. Kabbalistic theorizations directly galvanize spiritual reawakening and muscular activism. Cosmic questions are constantly drawn back into the microcosmic world of the embodied individual. Practical questions of personal meaning and personal struggle are always at the fore.

Rayatz transformed Chabad’s rich legacy of thinking about tzimtzum into a timely reinterpretation of the human experience of rupture. In an era where the ground of continuity was so violently pulled out from beneath the feet of the Jewish people, human being itself became the ground of continuity, meaning, and triumph.