Chesky Kopel
Review of Eli Rubin, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2025).
I have a theory that most observant Jews perceive Chabad primarily as a culture. Chabad represents a highly visible archetype of a Jew, not only with a unique religious orientation but also with a distinct tradition of given names, distinct nusah of prayer, distinct institutions, and with its own unquestionable center of gravity in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Recognition of Chabad as a unique culture does not necessarily inspire antagonism; instead, the most common relationship today is one of appreciation, but from a distance. We speak of Chabad with grateful cliches, referring to its global footprint and its relentless commitment to outreach. In the words of a recent Prime Minister of Israel, “there is no one like Chabad in the world. Whenever Jews are thrust into distress, no matter where in the world this happens, you will find there angels of Chabad showing up to assist.”
This association of Chabad with a contemporary set of people and practices makes it more difficult for non-Hasidim to encounter Chabad as an intellectual and literary tradition. The disconnect is especially pronounced in the contemporary “neo-hasidic” flourishing of engagement with hasidic textual traditions, a trend driven by the popular conviction that “the insights of Hasidism are too important … to be left to the Hasidim alone.”[1] To be sure, neo-hasidic thought has engaged with Chabad ideas, but these are mostly likely to focus on the vision and personality of Chabad’s seventh and final rebbe, R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson (“Ramash”), and less likely to engage with the full corpus of Chabad’s tradition. Material published here in The Lehrhaus provides a highly unscientific but hopefully useful illustration: The four Lehrhaus articles about Chabad thought all confine their analysis to the last rebbe.[2] In contrast, at least seven articles address elements of the Izhbitz-Radzyn “school” of hasidic philosophy.[3] Unlike in the Chabad case, modern Jews’ ability to conceive of and grapple with an existentially compelling Izhbitz-Radzyn body of ideas is generally uncomplicated by interaction with contemporary Radzyner hasidim.
But Chabad thought, too, is rich, sophisticated, and systematic. It would be a gross understatement to say that its corpus of ideas is underexplored by today’s neo-hasidic searchers. I can speak only for myself, but I have been waiting for a book to come along and invite the Chabad-curious into this edifice of meaning, much as Chabad’s shluchim warmly invite all comers into their homes. Eli Rubin, a prolific writer of Chabad philosophy, holder of a PhD in Hasidism from University College London, and a contributing editor at Chabad.org, is the man for the job.
A Cosmology Defined by Tzimtzum
Rubin’s new book, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity, offers, per its subtitle, “An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism.” Rubin organizes this history around the central motif of tzimtzum, God’s contraction of God’s infinite light to enable the creation of a finite cosmos. R. Hayyim Vital famously summarized the Lurianic conception of tzimtzum as follows:
Before the emanations were emanated and the creations created there was a simple supernal light that filled all existence, and there was no cleared place, empty space, and void at all. Rather all was filled with that simple infinite light, and there was neither beginning nor end… And when it arose in His simple will to create worlds and emanate emanations…He then contracted (ṣimṣem) Himself within the central point in Him, in the very center of His light…and contracted that light to the parameters around the central point, and then cleared a place and space, and an empty void was left from the central point…and then a single straight line (kav) was drawn from the infinite light, from His spherical light, from above to below, and it devolves and descends within that void (7, translating Eitz Hayyim 1:2).[4]
Lurianic kabbalah generally provided important source material for early hasidic thought, and, in Rubin’s telling, this account of tzimtzum in particular is essential to the Chabad tradition. “To be a Chabad thinker is to think through the prism of ṣimṣum” (45).
The book’s aim is not merely to explore the meaning of tzimtzum in Chabad texts and in the texts of each of its seven rebbes, but to frame how this feature of world-creation has shaped Chabad, both as an intellectual tradition and as a community. Beginning with the founding rebbe, R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi (“Rashaz”), tzimtzum provided “a central conceptual prism through which [Chabad’s rebbes] negotiated existential questions relating to being, meaning, and purpose, and also social questions of legitimacy, authority, and succession” (ibid.).
Rubin begins the historical journey by considering the Lurianic idea of tzimtzum alongside the “rupture between spirit and matter” popularized during the same period by modern Cartesian philosophy (11). The parallels did not go unnoticed by western philosophers, whose early attempts to grapple with Lurianic kabbalah prefigured later hasidic adaptations. The most striking example is the seventeenth century English philosopher Anne Conway, who saw in tzimtzum a potential blueprint for the (metaphorical) rupture and reunification of spirit and matter: After tzimtzum reduces the “intensity of divine revelation” in the cosmos, humans are charged with rediscovering and sacralizing “matter’s essential spirituality” (12). Conway’s insight is given powerful expression in Rashaz’s Tanya and the subsequent literature of Chabad; to our chagrin, however, Rubin doubts that Rashaz ever encountered her work.
The central concern of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity, however, is the changing appearance of tzimtzum, redefined in novel expressions by Chabad’s seven rebbes. Although Rubin did not arrange his chapters along these lines, they may be understood as asserting eight distinct conceptions of tzimtzum:
- Tzimtzum as an Act of Love: In the work of Rashaz, God’s self-contraction “emerges as a process in which God is simultaneously rendered distant and near. The rupture of creation nourishes the passions of love, desire, and union through which that rupture is rapturously undercut and overcome” (26). The love between God and humans is only one facet of this act, however. God is near only when divine love is extended through charity among the creations: “[W]hen engaged with true compassion—compassion for the spark of the divine that ‘journeys in the dark vanities of the world’ and compassion ‘for those who have nothing of their own’—material existence is actually revealed to be saturated with divine significance” (58).
- Tzimtzum as Divine Communication: According to Chabad’s third rebbe, the earlier R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson (known as “Tzemah Tzedek”), “the infinite radiance that is prior to the ṣimṣum obscures the essential language of God. To conceal that infinite stream of divine consciousness, and to externalize God’s essential language via the finite prism of divine speech, is therefore to rediscover the intimate self of God that is otherwise unarticulated” (101).
- Tzimtzum as Divine Will, Calling for Human Fulfillment: According to the fourth rebbe, R. Shmuel Schneerson (“Maharash”), “the entire will for Torah and mitzvot is synonymous with ṣimṣum…”[5] “The investment of divine will in a set of precepts governing human activity traverses the gap between infinite transcendence of the cosmos and finite immanence within the cosmos” (138).
- Tzimtzum as the Negation of Divine Will, Calling for Human Rectification: Perhaps paradoxically, Ramash saw within tzimtzum “an aspect that is counter to the will [of God], for it is the opposite of the primordial will that luminosity shall radiate” (255). Negation of divine will leads to “the general possibility of sin, and ultimately the sin of the tree of knowledge, and the sins that follow it throughout the ages” (ibid.) As a result of this dynamic, however, “the possibility is given for human work to transform the nature of the ṣimṣum” (257).[6] As Rubin memorably summarizes this point: “[It] is not God who will rescue humanity from evil, but humanity who will rescue God” (ibid.).
- Tzimtzum as Innovation: According to the fifth rebbe, R. Sholom DovBer Schneerson (“Rashab”), “the sense of futurity insinuated by the leap of ṣimṣum is not merely the resuscitation of metacosmic primordiality within the cosmos. The future heralded by ṣimṣum is rather an utterly original elicitation of unprecedented revelation from the essence that is otherwise undisclosed and undisclosable… in the aftermath of ṣimṣum, a ‘new’ revelation of the essence becomes possible that is more than a retrieval of the revelatory radiance that was hidden by ṣimṣum” (186). Rashab also analogized and applied this conception to the personal process of teshuvah, in which “one’s entire devotional life is infused with the new luminosity that is drawn from the essence, and which stands beyond the dynamic of revelation and concealment” (199).
- Tzimtzum as Reflection of, and Model for, Personal Adversity: As part of his efforts to rally Chabad hasidim in Russia facing the threat of Soviet persecution, as well as Chabad hasidim in the United States facing the threat of materialism, the sixth rebbe, R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson (“Rayatz”), clarified that tzimtzum occurred “in order that each person, according to their own capacity in Torah study and mitzvah observance…will thereby strip away the concealment of the world and disclose the revelation of divine light concretely in the world” (225).[7] For Rayatz, the parallel of world and soul flowed naturally from the numerical link between the “six hundred and thirteen mitzvot that delineate and fuel the soul’s transformative mission” and the six hundred and thirteen “stations of the cosmos” (238).
- Tzimtzum as Death and Legacy of the Tzaddik: In the immediate aftermath of his predecessor Rayatz’s passing, Ramash theorized that “[t]he nonliteral ascent of the ṣadik parallels the nonliteral ascent of God from the void in which the worlds are emanated and created” (250). As a result of this dynamic, the departed tzaddik leaves a lasting intellectual and spiritual legacy within the void, and Ramash accordingly “denied that there was any need for anyone to succeed Rayatz” as rebbe (ibid.). Of course, this teaching was ultimately applied to Ramash himself, leading “Chabadniks [to] continue to see Ramash as their rebbe in the present, three decades after his death” (ibid.).
- Tzimtzum as Subjectivity: In the notes of the American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman, whose hasidic influences Rubin addresses in a surprising and delightful postscript, we find intimations that “[w]ithout ṣimṣum, being remains fundamentally impersonal, irrespective of any aesthetic merits it might have. Simṣum transforms the aesthetic object, indeed cosmic being itself, into a dynamic ‘place’ of numinous exaltation that can be subjectively experienced. Since art depends on subjectivity, without ṣimṣum art simply isn’t possible. Simṣum enables the being of art and the art of being” (281).
Is this the inviting course on pan-Chabad thought for which I hoped? In most ways, absolutely. The richness of Rubin’s analysis heightens the urgency of every text, every layer of meaning. But “inviting” may not be the correct word. The popular appeal of Rubin’s book will be limited by the fact that it is written in a style reminiscent of Heschel, combining scholarly erudition with devotional drama. Of course, the form of Rubin’s writing is inseparable from its content. Choice of elevated language like this operates as an important signifier of sophistication, conveying to the broader readership of English-language philosophical texts, including those outside provincial batei midrash, that Chabad offers something carrying high stakes and worth taking seriously.
A History Defined by Tzimtzum
Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity does more than provide an introduction to Chabad thought, however. The book advances at least two original claims that ought to be assessed in light of the evidence. First, Rubin argues that Chabad’s figurative interpretation of tzimtzum—according to which God is concealed in, but not literally absent from, the created cosmos—was a major factor in Chabad’s institutionalization as a movement (chapters 3-4). He adduces textual evidence that Rashaz’s chief ideological opponent, R. Eliyahu of Vilna (“Gra”), regarded the figurative interpretation of tzimtzum as dangerous heresy, and even ordered the public burning of hasidic texts in Vilna in 1796 (28-35). As a corollary to Ada Rapoport-Albert’s observation that it was the resistance of anti-hasidic mitnagdim that “generated ‘the new consciousness of hasidism as a movement’” (44),[8] Rubin concludes that Gra’s fierce opposition to Chabad’s interpretation of tzimtzum led to the emergence of Chabad as a distinct “intellectual institution” (45). This argument is well supported by evidence that Gra likely encountered Tanya, and apparently alluded to its formulations in his written campaign against hasidism (31).
Second, Rubin argues that the intra-Chabad dispute over the meaning of tzimtzum constituted an “inescapable factor in the…succession controversy” of 1866 (147). Following the death of Tzemah Tzedek in that year, Chabad underwent a schism: the dynastic seat in Lubavitch was assumed by Tzemah Tzedek’s youngest son Maharash, while followers of his older brother R. Yehudah Leib Schneerson (“Maharil”) flocked to a competing court in Kopust (126). (The Kopust branch remained separate from Chabad-Lubavitch until 1923.)[9]
Rubin ties the Chabad schism to the debate over tzimtzum by juxtaposing the following pieces of evidence: (a) In a sermon first developed during the life of Tzemah Tzedek and supplemented following his passing, Maharash proposed a “theological and existential recalibration of Chabad thought” (123), according to which the post-tzimtzum physical cosmos is construed as “a direct manifestation and realization of ultimate reality” (125); (b) Maharash’s recalibration clashes with the view that this world is a lower realm, inferior to pre-tzimtzum luminosity, a view apparently shared by Maharash’s rival and brother, Maharil, who “long[ed] to transcend the constraints of the physical”(126); and (c) A letter written to Maharash by his father Tzemah Tzedek towards the end of the latter’s life suggests that Maharash required encouragement to wage his disputes with ideological detractors (123). While it is plausible based on this evidence that the meaning of tzimtzum may have been a factor in driving the brothers apart, and may have helped Maharash earn the Lubavitch seat, I believe that it does not justify Rubin’s confident conclusion that “Chabad’s internal split was deeply enmeshed with a split over how ṣimṣum should be interpreted, and over the ontological consequences of ṣimṣum’s interpretation” (158).
More broadly, Rubin oversells the relationship between tzimtzum and “[q]uestions of legitimacy, authority, and succession” in Chabad (xviii). For instance, any contention that the Chabad chain of succession was determined by views on tzimtzum, or by the rebbes’ general commitment to an “intellectual tradition of intergenerational intertextuality” (231), must contend with the simple fact that four out Chabad’s six successions ran from father to son, and the other two ran to sons-in-law. This trend is not exceptional; on the contrary, it is one of the few respects in which Chabad does not differ from other hasidic movements. But Rubin’s attempts to downplay the importance of father-son heredity in Chabad’s successions (see 45, 79) is difficult to accept in light of the simple fact that sons regularly succeed their rebbe fathers.[10]
Finally, although Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity explicitly aims to contribute to historiography regarding Chabad succession, it makes no attempt to address the lack of any post-Ramash succession. I do not wish to advance any original opinion on this, nor do I want to give the impression that every Chabad book must be about the same topic. More than enough has been said, written, explained, speculated, and accused regarding the nature of Chabad’s ongoing commitment to its long-deceased seventh rebbe. For these purposes, however, it is fair to ask that a book that seeks to interpret what drove succession forward in Chabad should also provide some account of what made succession cease.
Ultimately, I have the luxury of highlighting these quibbles only because Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity is, all considered, a stunning, important, and challenging work. Alongside its deep elaboration of philosophical and theological principles, Rubin’s book is attentive to historical methods, even offering original analysis of archival primary source material in its comparison of competing manuscripts of Tzemah Tzedek’s will held in, respectively, the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg and the Russian State Library in Moscow (118-22). For initiated and uninitiated readers alike, Rubin’s work provides an invaluable introduction to the evolving mystery of tzimtzum in Chabad thought, and to the thought of Chabad’s five middle rebbes, who receive comparatively little attention outside the community. My sincere hope is that this book shall be the first of many, for both the author and his sacred genre.
[1] Arthur Green and Ariel Evan Mayse, eds., A New Hasidism: Roots (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2019), xvii.
[2] See Ariel Evan Mayse, “Coherence, Contradiction, and the Philosophy of Chabad” (Dec. 19, 2024); Ilan Fuchs, “The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Theory of Education” (Feb. 11, 2021); Yosef Bronstein, “Selflessness and the Self in the Teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe” (July 4, 2019); Eli Rubin, “The Giving of the Torah and the Beginning of Eternity: Reflections on Revelation, Innovation, and the Meaning of History” (June 5, 2019).
[3] See Reuven Boshnack, “Man vs. Prophecy? A New Look at the Classic Discussion of Predetermination in the Izhbitz School” (Jan. 8, 2025); Aton Holzer, “On Yom Kippur, Determinism and National Unity” (Oct. 9, 2024); Batya Hefter, “An Ishbitz-Radzyn Reading of the Judah Narrative: Binah Ba-Lev–An Understanding Heart” (Jan. 1, 2024); Batya Hefter, “An Ishbitz-Radzyn Reading of the Joseph Narrative: The Light of Reason and the Flaw of Perfection” (Dec. 14, 2023); Jennie Rosenfeld, “Sin-a-gogue: A Must-Read for the Yamim Noraim” (Sept. 24, 2019); Batya Hefter, “Peshat and Beyond: The Emergence of a Reluctant Leader” (Jan. 13, 2019); Batya Hefter, “Peshat and Beyond: How the Hasidic Masters Read the Torah” (Nov. 7, 2018).
[4] Parenthetical number citations are to Rubin’s book.
[5] Quoted from Torat Shmuel, Sha’ar 19, 5637 II–Ve-Kakhah, at 16-18.
[6] Quoted from Ramash’s Sefer Ha-Ma’amarim 5731, 394.
[7] Quoted from Iggerot Kodesh I (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2011), 166-67.
[8] Quoted from Ada Rapoport-Albert, Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2018), 77.
[9] See “Kopust and Lubavitch, 120 Years Later,” Anash.org (May 21, 2020).
[10] Although the Chabad succession controversy of 1866 concerned competing claims to the leadership by two different sons of the deceased rebbe, a previous succession controversy in 1812 (discussed by Rubin in his Chapter Seven–”Being, Nothing, and Chabad’s First Succession Controversy”) pitted son against student. Rubin acknowledges that the winning successor, R. DovBer Schneuri, was Rashaz’s oldest son, but argues that “this distinction alone did not carry sufficient weight to guarantee his place as the unrivaled leader of Chabad” (79). Again, this may be a correct interpretation of the events of 1812. Still, the picture that emerges from Chabad’s full succession history is that the mantle of leadership never left the family. An examination of Chabad’s succession history cannot plausibly treat this fact as coincidental.
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