The 20th anniversary of the passing of the Lubavitcher Rebbe (1902-1994) has inspired no fewer than three new biographies, a fact that attests to his enduring importance even outside the Chasidic community he led for four decades. Even more telling, however, is the fact that he is not merely the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe but apparently the last one. Unlike his predecessors dating back to the 18th century, who were each followed in turn by a son (or, in Menachem Schneerson’s case, a son-in-law), there has been no new Lubavitcher Rebbe.
The subtitle of Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s ambitious and comprehensive biography, “Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History” (Harper Wave), attests to the Rebbe’s commanding stature. Indeed, Telushkin argues that he was “inarguably, the most well known rabbi since Moses Maimonides (Rambam).” But even Telushkin warns his readers that the Rebbe was and is not wholly without controversy in the Jewish world. He was willing to insert himself and his hawkish views into Israeli politics, for example, and he disapproved of the confrontational tactics adopted by the movement to free Soviet Jewry. Above all, he embraced, advocated and symbolized a version of Judaism that was all too constraining for most American Jews, and yet, at the same time, his media-savvy emissaries have never been entirely forthcoming about the core values of Chasidism when approaching secular Jews.
. The recent availability of new source materials, including his personal letters and correspondence, as well as the reaction to hagiographic works that “blur the line between testimony and interpretation,” are factors that explain why it has taken so long for serious biographies to emerge. </p>
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Miller’s brilliant and highly readable biography is a good example of how the tools of scholarship allow us to glimpse the ironies and nuances of the Rebbe’s life and work. Although Chasidic tradition dictated that the mantle of rebbe passes from father to son, Schneerson was only distantly related to the Lubavitcher dynasty, did not grow up in or near the traditional seat of the Chabad movement in the Russian town of Lubavitch, and met the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe only when it was proposed that he marry one of the old Rebbe’s daughters. Yet, as Miller shows us in fascinating detail, he found his own way into Chabad at a time when Bolshevism and then Nazism threatened to destroy the Chasidic community in its entirety, and, in a real sense, he succeeded in remaking it into something ideally suited for post-modern America.</p>
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The fateful moment was the death of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe in Brooklyn, where the world headquarters of Chabad had been located since the escape of the rabbinical court from Europe. He was the first Chabad Rebbe to die without male offspring, and his two sons-in-law were the only candidates to replace him. Schneerson’s mastery of Torah and Talmud turned out to be no less decisive than his “extreme decisiveness,” his “quiet confidence,” and his “deeply mystical orientation, which stood out as a sign of religious transcendence.” Surely none of the Chasidim who acclaimed him as the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, however, could have imagined a future of seemingly ubiquitous Chabad Houses, “Mitzvah Tanks” and pairs of young Chabadniks who approach secular Jews on the street with a set of <em>tefillin </em>ready at hand, or the annual telethon that would become the symbols of Chabad.</p>
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A third biography of the Rebbe, “My Rebbe” by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz (Shefa Foundation/Maggid Books), originates with a man who is himself an esteemed figure in Jewish scholarship.</p>
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