The Rebbe: Man or Messiah?
The subtitle tells the story: the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson had a fascinating, paradoxical life, with the paradoxes and the fascination redoubled by his afterlife: a figurative “afterlife” in the minds of his followers, and his more literal afterlife that remains their messianic hope or expectation for him.
A spiritual entrepreneur, Schneerson harnessed the hermetic, inward-turned energy of a small Hasidic sect to propel his schluchim, the missionaries who turned outward into the great world. The Lubavitchers’ spectacular accomplishments, according to the scholars Heilman and Friedman, were in outreach to the most secularized, minimally Jewish reaches of the diaspora, all over the globe: the world’s largest seder in Katmandu; freshly baked challah for earthquake victims in Peru; Sephardic trade schools in Israel; and mixers for lonely students in New Jersey, where Rutgers students were courted with a perky “You can celebrate being Jewish with us, no experience necessary.”
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Robert Pinsky has received Chicago’s Harold Washington Award and Italy’s Premio Capri. His most recent books are Gulf Music (poetry) and Essential Pleasures. His prose works include The Life of David, about the Biblical king.
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