Eli Rubin: Is the Rebbe the Messiah?

David Bashevkin:
Hi, friends, and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast, where each month, we explore a different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and this month we’re continuing our exploration of the world of Chabad and the Lubavitcher Rebbe. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big, juicy Jewish ideas. So be sure to check out 18forty.org where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails.

I don’t usually begin talking about this, I don’t even notice it. I’m not actually the person who generally picks out the names, the titles for each individual podcast. But I wanted to begin by talking about the title for this podcast, which is, I believe we settled on “Is The Rebbe Moshiach?” Now, from the outset, I want to obviously state this is very much a gimmick. This isn’t the tone of the entire conversation, and there is something sensational and almost salacious. It’s like clickbait that we would entitle a podcast, “Is the Rebbe Moshiach?”, as if at the end of this, we’re going to come out with a clear answer, as if we’re advocating like, “Yeah, maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. We’re taking a side.”

The honest truth is I don’t … I wouldn’t say I don’t care, but the point of this question of why we titled this podcast is not because it is a description of the conversation. First and foremost, I have to be honest, there’s a gimmick component to it. I know for sure the guest today who is my dearest friend, mentor, I consider him really a chaver and a rebbe of the highest order. And that is my friend Eli Rubin, a Chabad Hasid who writes for chabad.org.

He has a forthcoming book being published by Stanford University Press on the idea … I think it’s Stanford University. And on the idea of tzimtzum, God’s divine constriction. It is absolutely fascinating, and his book really discusses how this idea is carried out and discussed in the world of Chabad.

Forthcoming very, very soon. The title, it is a forthcoming book, I don’t think it’s out yet. It’s called Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism.

He also was involved along with Philip Wexler and his son, a different book called Social Vision, which is about the Rebbe’s approach to social services and really his mystical approach to social ideas. I’m bringing this up because I could say definitively, I know this for an absolute fact, Eli Rubin did not want our conversation to be titled, “Is the Rebbe Moshiach?”. Come on now. He doesn’t want to step into that. It’s very gimmicky. It’s not his style. Why did I insist upon it? Really, for two reasons.

One is the gimmick, is the clickbait, is the, “Ah, okay, let’s get into it.” But really, there’s a much more important reason. And the second reason is really what I have learned from Eli Rubin, from his writings, which is learning how to take theological questions seriously. Very often, we have a discomfort in talking theology. Theology, I’m trying not to use Torah words even. Like sometimes we’ll call it machshava. Sometimes, we’ll call it Kabbalah, B’sha’ah like Jewish thought, or Machshevet Yisrael. I don’t like any of those titles. I actually like the title theology. I like theology because it is a discipline that is coming to ask the most cosmic questions about existence, about the world, about how God interacts and is manifest in this world, assuming there is a God. And the reason why I wanted to title something like “Is The Rebbe Moshiach?” is because questions like that. We usually demote or we put into the box of politics or social questions or even hashkafa, which is your contemporary religious outlook.

“I’m a little bit more right wing. I’m a little bit more left wing.” And so much of the way in which we filter the world is through a political lens. I have no problem with that. I find politics interesting to a degree, but only as interesting as I think politics is an applied manifestation of a much deeper, more essential worldview that rests on different theological outlooks of how the world works. This is the foundation of all thought, philosophy, economic, psychology. Really comes down to fundamental and essential questions of how do you think this world functions? And the person who really opened my eyes to showing me what does it mean to take theology seriously? What does it mean not to throw around buzzwords? Not to quote little vortlach, little short Hasidic ideas which are uplifting and inspirational, but aren’t necessarily getting to the essential questions about existence.

And what Eli Rubin taught me and what is so much this conversation is about is we don’t need to be … I don’t want to use the word afraid. We don’t need to approach theology as something that is silly, that you kind of wave your hand and say, “Okay, come on now, let’s get to the real stuff.” I believe this is the real stuff. This is the most foundational essential questions about existence itself. I have a dear friend named Pini. I know he’s not going to mind if I quote him on this, but I’m not going to use his last name, but you’ll figure it out who it is. And Pini used to sit right next to me in the back when we would listen to my mentor and teacher Rav Ari Bergmann, when he would give classes in Shaaray Tefila, the shul that I grew up in.
And he loved Ari’s explorations of lomdus of the Talmudic analysis, which is what we call lomdus, which is the different Talmudic back and forth. He would love the halachic analysis. But anytime they started getting into more supernal transcendent matters, he would call it hooey. He was like, “Hooey, I don’t know.” He would shrug it off. And I don’t criticize him for it. He knows how much I love him and admire him. As does Ari, but it wasn’t his speed. And I think very often that feeling we have is like, “Come on now. What does this have to do with anything? Let’s get back to reality of our lives.” The question that Rav Aaron Lopiansky asked in one of his essays that I actually quoted an essay of mine called, “Jewish Thought: A Process, Not a Text.” And I begin the article with the question that Rav Aaron Lopiansky asked, which is, “Okay, if you study these essential theological questions, at the end of the day, does it help improve your mincha?”

And I objected, obviously with great deference and respect, but I think this is, in a way, it does improve your mincha, your afternoon services and the way that you pray. But even more than that, it gives context and framing for what mincha is. What are we doing when we daven mincha? What are we doing when we don’t feel like davening mincha? What are we doing where people who don’t know what the word mincha even means? Why are they around? What’s their purpose for the Jewish people for the world? We need to start asking bigger theological questions. When you ask small questions, you get small answers. And I find very often people, go through life and their questions are smaller. Which synagogue should I belong to? Even which community should I belong to? And you ask a smaller question, and it’s okay, you’ll get a smaller answer. It’s an answer that does not encompass and address the totality of existence and the world, because it doesn’t address world religions and everybody else.

And you have to live your life, “Okay, I have this truth and the rest of the world is mistaken or doesn’t have it yet. Or maybe we’ll do outreach and they’ll all come back and join my synagogue and my community and my shul.” To me, that is a small approach to reality. The vastness of the world, the vastness of human existence, of human history, is so much bigger than 2024. It’s so much bigger than the little corner that most people … The 10 blocks that people interact with in their day-to-day lives. And we can usually get through our lives by asking smaller or more manageable or more practical questions. But I think this moment, this moment in 2024, when the world literally seems to be on the cusp of just existential doubt, we don’t know why we’re here, we don’t know what we’re fighting about, but we know that we’re fighting, it is time to reintroduce cosmic theological questions, and be able to ask them with maturity, sophistication, and seriousness.

And not dismiss and say, “Okay, this is for the people who are meditating all day in some mountain. This is for the mystics.” This is for all of us. We are all confronting the reality of existence. We are all confronting the same question that existence in and of itself asks of ourselves, which is what is the purpose of all of this? And I know that’s a cosmic question. I know that’s something that’s associated with, I don’t know, a 10th grader who I don’t know, maybe smoked a little too much marijuana and is coming up at some party and is like, “Hey, man.” I don’t think we should associate these questions, cosmic theological questions, with immaturity, with being overly idealistic. It just means that you are no longer satisfied, distracting yourself by so many of the other distractions that we have, that take our focus away from the most essential existential questions of existence.

And that is big theological questions. And that is why I am so indebted and so excited for our conversation today with my dearest friend, Eli Rubin, because Eli Rubin asks those questions, he approaches reality with that seriousness, and he approaches other people’s questions. Eli is not locked in. He’s one of those fascinating people that I know. He is not stuck in one lane. He’s reading all sorts of philosophy and academic works, but he’s so deeply rooted in the approach of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, which is why I think he’s the perfect person to close this series and introduce really the depth, through the eyes of an insider of the thought and approach of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson. And it is my absolute privilege and pleasure to introduce our conversation with Eli Rubin.

It really is such a privilege to be speaking with somebody who I really now consider a friend and a mentor, Rav Eli Rubin. Thank you so much for coming back. This is your second interview on 18Forty, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Eli Rubin:
It’s really great to be here again.

David Bashevkin:
So I want to begin with a question. We’re here to talk about the Lubavitcher Rebbe. And I have been criticized very often by listeners of 18Forty that I focus too much on superficialities. But I think with the Rebbe, even superficialities had importance. So I want to begin with a little bit of a strange question, but I think it’s actually something very important, at least to me, in understanding the Rebbe. And that is the Rebbe’s father-in-law who had a huge influence, obviously on the Rebbe’s life, who’s known as the Rebbe Rayatz I believe, the sixth Rebbe of Chabad. It was the Rebbe’s father-in-law. When he came to America, he famously said, “America iz nisht anderish.”

America is going to be no different. We’re going to build here too. And yet, when the Rebbe took over the Hasidus a year after the passing of his father-in-law, he did do things a little bit differently. He did respond to issues in America that seem to be different challenges and different opportunities. The most superficial, and I’m beginning with the most superficial question, is that the Rebbe, as opposed to every other Hasidic Rebbe, did not wear a shtreimel. The Rebbe wore a hat. And I am wondering … I want you to answer the specific question about that switch, but I know it’s superficial. And I want to know, do you think, or did the Rebbe ever discuss, was this part of something larger in adapting or interpreting or translating the legacy of Chabad onto American soil?

Eli Rubin:
It’s a very fascinating question, and I hear the point you’re making about superficiality. But I think that you’re right that it is a deep question. And I think that to answer it, you first have to ask the question, what is Hasidus? Because if you want to ask the Hasidism of that, you have to know what Hasidism is to begin with. And often we have this picture of some kind of ideal Hasidic past, and that was the true Hasidism. And either we’re just trying to hang onto that authentic past and not let it fade away, or we’re adapting away from it.

And I think that’s a massive misconception about … Which depends on a superficial understanding of what Hasidism is. And what Hasidism really is, if we go back to the Baal Shem Tov and all the more so in the case of Chabad, it’s about communication, it’s about relationships. And the most important relationship is the relationship between God and the world. So in all relationships, you need good communication. Otherwise, the relationship is going to fray. And the Baal Shem Tov said that he wants to bring connection. And in his famous letter that he wrote to Gershon of Kitov, which is the founding document as it were, of Hasidism-

David Bashevkin:
Sure. His brother-in-law, I believe.

Eli Rubin:
To his brother-in-law. Exactly. And it’s one of the only documents that everybody agrees today, all scholars, that this is an authentic letter authored by the Baal Shem Tov himself. Whereas almost all the other teachings that Baal Shem Tov were written down later by students or students of students, this is something that we know comes from the Baal Shem Tov’s own hand. And there, in addition to the famous remark about the coming of moshiach, being dependent on the spreading of the wellsprings of Hasidism, there’s another very important remark that he makes there, which is that in every word that a person says, he should be uniting worlds and souls.

And that unification, that bringing together of divinity, worlds and souls. So that unification, that bonding, that creating of a relationship between the divine, between the worlds, between existence and soul individuals, that’s at the core of Hasidism. And I think the contribution of Chabad, Naftali Loewenthal, one of my own teachers, wrote a book Communicating the Infinite, in which he made this very strong argument, which I think is absolutely correct, that the defining feature of Chabad Hasidism was to communicate the infinite. That is to that God should not just be some kind of abstract being, some kind of theological abstraction or even just a more simplistic faith in some transcendent being. But rather, that there should be a real communication. That God should be able to speak, be made to speak as it were, be articulated.

The divine should be articulated in words that we can understand, on which we can implement in our lives, in the world. The souls can implement divinity within the world. So when you look at it on that essential level of what Hasidism is, I don’t think the Rebbe adapted Hasidism at all. I think that what the Rebbe did was he took the essence of what Hasidism always was, and he communicated divinity in the world that he found himself in. Now, everyone knows that all relationships are different. The circumstances, if the circumstances are different, you’ve got to communicate differently. If the audience is different, you’ve got to communicate differently. But what’s important is not the language in which you’re communicating. What’s important is the content that you’re communicating. And so I think on that essential level, there is no fundamental change.

On the contrary, the Rebbe was someone … Elliot Wolfson actually described this in a beautiful way in the introduction to Open Secret, which I know you’ve recently been reading.

He says something to the effect that the Rebbe almost contributed nothing of his own. And the way the Rebbe presented himself was that he was contributing nothing new of his own. Even though we, who are students of the Rebbe, know that he was a tremendous innovator in all kinds of ways, and that there were many new things that he contributed. But in a very deep sense, he was like the mystical attribute of God known as Malchus, which is described as a receptacle, as a receptacle for all the other qualities of God. And similarly, the Rebbe, this is how Elliot Wolfson describes it. The Rebbe was a receptacle in which there was nothing of himself, and all that his being was, was a tremendous spilling over of the wellsprings of all who had come before him.

David Bashevkin:
I hate to interrupt, and I hate to bring it down to the superficiality. But I know you understand where I’m coming from and I’m curious if the Rebbe addressed it or if any Hasidim speculated, why did the Rebbe not wear typical rebbishe clothes? He did not wear a frock as far like a bekishe. He wore a long coat, I believe, but did not wear the shiny bekishe that nearly every other has Hasidus wears. And his own father-in-law, and he did not wear a shtreimel. I know this is superficial, but I’m not coming from that place. I’m coming from a place of knowing that the Rebbe-

Eli Rubin:
There’s a lot of speculation about it, or at least some speculation about it.

David Bashevkin:
He never said explicitly.

Eli Rubin:
Yeah, I don’t think he ever spoke about it explicitly. But just from a historical perspective, I think this also, there’s this kind of misnomer about Hasidic dress, that all Hasidim always wore the Hasidic dress that you’ll see today in Borough Park, Williamsburg. That’s not really the case. And the truth is, if you went to Lithuania, before the War, you would see rabbonim who were not Hasidic wearing shtreimelach. And to someone today, they would look like Hasidim. They wore shtreimelach and long coats. Something like a bekishe. So that’s number one. Number two is in Chabad specifically, there was a historic discussion about in the 19th century, which Glenn Dynner has written about, in terms of the Russian authorities enforcing non-Hasidic dress or non-Jewish dress. And a lot of Hasidic rabbis, including the Gerrer Rebbe and the Tzemach Tzedek we’re … So it wasn’t such … And Chabad dress was never seen as a fundamental.

And I believe that I saw also in Glenn Dynner’s book, in his most recent book, if I’m remembering correctly, a description of one of the Chabad shtiebelach or maybe the Rebbe’s shtiebel as it was in Poland in the 1930s, because of the Rayatz you mentioned before, who did wear shtreimel sometimes. He didn’t always. And during the week, he suddenly didn’t wear a shtreimel. He wore a shtreimel on special occasions on Shabbos. And there were periods that he didn’t wear a shtreimel, actually, even on Shabbos. He started wearing a shtreimel again in honor of the Rebbe’s wedding, which is an interesting point. And there’s a letter from one of his very close Hasidim … where he is writing excitedly to the other Hasidim that since the wedding of the Rebbe, that is the seventh Rebbe, the Rebbe Rayatz has been wearing his shtreimel every Shabbos. So this was like-

David Bashevkin:
They were excited about that.

Eli Rubin:
A new exciting development. So Glenn Dynner has its description of the Frierdiker Rebbe’s shtiebel, I believe in Warsaw or maybe near Warsaw. And he says that the Chabad Hasidim don’t wear Hasidic dress, the person who’s describing this. It’s a memoir describing I think various courts and Hasidim people dressed in modern Western European dress. So this wasn’t just … So I think that’s something about Chabad in general and about the way things have developed today in the 20th century, 21st century. Dress has become much more important, I think, than it was actually, even in the 1930s. And certainly in the 19th century, it’s become much more associated with Hasidism than it was in that time.

David Bashevkin:
Interesting.

Eli Rubin:
Certainly, in the Chabad. That’s … Yeah.

David Bashevkin:
I always understood it as part of, again, the way you articulated it was so beautiful. But the Rebbe almost translating the experience of Hasidus, and both translating the distinctiveness of Hasidus into the American context. That’s always how I understood it.

Eli Rubin:
Yeah, I would add more thing. To add one more thing, I think that in some ways, Hasidic dress has become a way of self-ghettoizing, a way of becoming more parochial. A way of saying, “We want to preserve the past and not interact with the surroundings around us.” Not be relevant, actually, to the world around us. And that is obviously something that was totally in contrast the Rebbe’s whole approach, which was to be, as it were, a universal Rebbe, a universal teacher. He wanted to share Torah and mitzvos with the world. And so he didn’t want to self-ghettoize. He wanted to do the opposite.

David Bashevkin:
So let me ask you, let me bring in … I don’t want to spend the entire time, though you know I could, speculating about the dress of the Rebbe. And I want to talk about some of the other differences that the Rebbe brought specifically to America. And one thing that I noticed that I’ve always found very fascinating is the difference in the approach to specifically outreach that Chabad has, as opposed to … There are many outreach institutions and they all exploded in the 1960s. The Rebbe was doing it even before. And I know for many that they have always couched outreach in Torah learning, in learning Torah, and the centrality of Torah. I would never say or ascribe that the Torah and Torah learning is not central in Chabad.

That would be an absurd claim and an ignorant claim because it is … There’s probably no Hasidus that has produced more Torah in terms of pages. Yet, when the Rebbe translated Hasidus and into the world of outreach, he emphasized very much mitzvos and the performance of good deeds.
Good deeds. Do more good deeds. Why is it that the Rebbe centered the performance specifically of mitzvos rather than … Let’s call another model, it’s called the Lakewood model, which is setting up kollelim which could transform a community. Setting up … I don’t know, the Chabad certainly has set up yeshivas. But at the heart of the storefront of Chabad, in people’s minds, is always going to be tefillin, Shabbos candles, tzedakah. Homes having a tzedakah box I know was very important. There’s a long history to that. Why is that … Unless I’m misreading it, but it seemed like the Rebbe was deliberately emphasizing the performance of mitzvos rather than Torah learning. Why do you think that was so, and did the Rebbe ever address that specifically?

Eli Rubin:
Well, first of all, it is a misunderstanding because one of the 10 mivtzo’im, I think one of the first, was Mivtza Torah.

David Bashevkin:
Just explain our listeners what a mivtza is. I know that’s the word that’s frequently used in Chabad.

Eli Rubin:
A mivtza is… Literally its campaigns, and these were the kind of flagship campaigns that the Rebbe called for, not all at once, over a progression of several years. Tefillin is the famous one. Shabbos candles is another one of the famous ones. And it came to be 10 mivtzo’im, and including Mivtza Torah, which is Torah study. So Torah was always, I think, from the very beginning part of his campaign sharing Torah early on, even before … he had campaigns for Mishnayos study. Mishnayos Baal Peh was something that, prior to his leadership, under the Rayatz, he instituted and encouraged that groups should gather to study Mishnah, and specifically to actually recite Mishnayos in the streets, to purify the air, as it were, to bring Torah into the streets. So that’s number one. Number two is that the Rebbe’s primary mode of communication was Torah. The Rebbe spoke for hours, and when he spoke, almost everything he said was firstly phrased using aphorisms or terms from pasukim and Maamorei Chazal, and secondly, and even more so, explaining that. So his speech is always Torah commentary.

David Bashevkin:
Absolutely.

Eli Rubin:
There’s a lot that he said about why he chose these particular mitzvos. I want to first say something that he said about the word mivtza as a general concept, which is, I think, a very beautiful idea, which is not so well-known even in Chabad. But this was in 1974, in the summer of 1974, when people were making, let’s say, protest thing or asking these kinds of questions, “Why does the Rebbe focus on these mivtzo’im and why use this term?”

David Bashevkin:
Yeah, we’ll get to more of that. Yeah.

Eli Rubin:
So he said, mivtza is from the word betza, which means profit or gain. And when you have a mem as a prefix to a word, that means that you’re doing it for others. So mivtza means to bring gain to others, to bring purpose to others. He used the words tachlis, to bring meaning, to bring something additional into the lives of others, to share gain with other people.

So the general idea of these campaigns is about sharing the richness of Jewish life and Jewish learning. If you want to think more kind of sociologically, this is less about what the Rebbe himself said. Because every time he introduced a new campaign, he would speak extensively about it from a Torah perspective, from talking about it in its halakhic terms, its midrashic significance, its Hasidic meaning. Books have actually already been filled just with anthologies of the Rebbe’s talks about the 10 mivtzo’im.

But from a more kind of sociological perspective, I think that what he really wanted to do, and what’s really central to the Rebbe’s Torah, and as he himself said so many times… If you listen to the Rebbe speak, you’ll hear these phrases over again. Toras Chaim. Torah is the Torah of life. Torah is mi-lashon harav, Torah is the language of teaching, which teaching means… Pedagogy is instructive. It tells you what to do. And there’s an older idea in Chabad thought, you can find it in the Alter Rebbe many times, that the Torah itself is all about telling you what the mitzvos are. The Torah itself kind of indicates that its own goal is to get you to act, is to get you live differently. So I think many of the mitzvahs that he chose to be mivtzo’im, to be central campaigns, are the kinds of things that can reshape people’s lives.

For example, he has Mivtza Bayis Malei Seforim, which is something I know very close to your heart, the mitzvah to have a house full of books. So that seems like, oh, you’re not studying the books, you’re filling your house with books. But if you have a house full of books, your life is going to look differently. You’re going to take those books off your shelf. It’s a way of actually reshaping the environment, the way a person lives, on the most basic level, on the level of the home, on the level of home life. It’s not like you go to a special place, a study hall, and once a week you do some studying. This is part of your life. And obviously, tefillin is also that kind of thing. It’s a daily mitzvah.

Candle lighting is a weekly mitzvah. Shabbos candle lighting is also the kind of thing that orients your week around Shabbos is coming. And so it might just start with lighting Shabbos candles, which in itself is a very tremendously valuable thing. But because this is the anchor of your week, well, then Shabbos becomes… It’s on your calendar now. So now Shabbos is also something that will probably become more a part of your life. And so you’re restructuring your life in this kind of way. Another mivtza which he had was the Mivtza Taharas HaMishpacha, which was about women going to mikvah, which again, this is about family life. It’s about the patterns of life.

I think often the idea of mivtzo’im to outsiders is just seen as this kind of, you meet someone in the street and you get to do a one-time event, a one-time mitzvah, which there is a truth to that.There’s a huge element, there’s a huge belief, in the Chabad theology about the infinite and eternal power of every single mitzvah. So in that moment, there is nothing else, and nothing more is needed as it were, right? This is an eternal moment of connection which is never going to go away. But at the same time, there’s another aspect to it, which is, I think, this kind of pattern-building, a way of Torah becoming a Torah of life. Ultimately, I think that this idea of mitzvos as important is an expression of the Rebbe’s understanding of Torah itself. If we think of Torah in a more compartmentalized kind of way, then Torah is a kind of-

David Bashevkin:
A discipline.

Eli Rubin:
Precisely. But if we think of Torah as Torah itself thinks of itself, it’s a Torah of life. It’s instructive. Torah is telling you how to live, how to act. Again, going back to the Alter Rebbe, and this is something the Rebbe many times repeated, but the Alter Rebbe already has this in Likkutei Torah many times. The Talmud has the famous debate, is Talmud gadol or is maisa gadol?

David Bashevkin:
What’s better?

Eli Rubin:
The conclusion is-

David Bashevkin:
Well, just explain what you mean by that.

Eli Rubin:
What’s greater? Is study greater or is action greater? And the conclusion is that Talmud is greater. Study is greater because it brings to action.

David Bashevkin:
Which is circular.

Eli Rubin:
It’s circular, but it tells you that the Torah itself always is inclining you. It’s always sending you towards the realm of action. What are you going to do with this Torah? And I think that’s at the heart of the Rebbe’s own Torah. The Rebbe, actually, he changed the world through teaching. That’s the amazing thing. He didn’t go out and, I don’t know, raise money and do campaigns-

David Bashevkin:
He wasn’t on street corners asking people if they were Jewish and putting on tefillin.

Eli Rubin:
Precisely. I think he might’ve done that once or twice. But yeah, it was through teaching. It was through teaching Torah. And he gave people a Torah worldview that inspired them to help to share it with others, to do mivtzo’im, to share gain, to help other people gain more Torah and more mitzvos.

David Bashevkin:
The thing that I find so remarkable, and I love… I was going to say, I love this idea of thinking about the way the Torah thinks about itself and this notion of living differently, which is that the Rebbe seemed to be cultivating an approach to Judaism where mysticism and divinity and transcendence can be hiding in plain sight. Meaning to me, I kind of understand, and I really saw this when there were all of this searching because of this outbreak of antisemitism that we’ve been seeing. And there were people who were searching and saying, “Well, now…” Obviously, as I’ve said 101 times and will continue to say, the purpose of Judaism is not to fight antisemitism. You fight antisemitism for long enough, and Jews start to ask themselves, “So what now? What is the purpose of Judaism?”

And there was this moment where I was frustrated at the Orthodox community that we were not providing a strong enough answer or even doorway for people to enter. All of world Jewry is going to, I don’t know, become Orthodox and move to Boca and Woodmere and Mea She’arim and Beit Shemesh? It seemed almost fantastical. I was frustrated. I’m like, “Why are we not rising and meeting this moment?” Which is something that still stays with me, and I’m afraid I don’t want this moment to close. But what I heard from so many people is that you know what Yiddishkeit is to me? And they would say, “I go to a Chabad. I go here, I go there.” To me, what the Rebbe seemed to be doing was reformulating what Common Judaism can be in a post-Holocaust world where we’re almost reminding people, not that we need to go back and reimagine what our past was as if everybody in the shtetl was a Chassid in the way that we think of Chassidim now, but reformulating a common baseline Judaism that actually has the potential to address and be an entryway for worldwide Jewry.

And when I say Common Judaism, I mean it in its academic term. Lawrence Schiffman used that term. Like, what were Jews in the Second Temple period? He said it was Common Judaism. Judaism meant a certain thing, kosher, Shabbos. They had a set. Not every Jew… Do you think there was truth to that? Was the Rebbe trying… People don’t like the word change, but I like the word translate, a common Judaism that could actually be a doorway for worldwide Jewry?

Eli Rubin:
I think that is definitely part of it, the sense that Judaism is something that’s accessible to everyone. Denominations don’t matter. A mitzvah is a mitzvah no matter what and that this is the heritage of everyone, that this is not something that we should be keeping for ourselves or for those who we view as legitimate or those who we view as frum enough. So there’s certainly that aspect of… I think that in the 1940s, 1950s, when the Rebbe first arrived in America, there were those who were kind of defiantly clinging on to their old lives. There were those who had kind of moved into new denominations, Reform, Conservative, and then there were those who were just trying to continue to exist and not really thinking that much about preserving Judaism or passing it on to the next generation. And there weren’t even institutions reaching out to those people or being available for those people. If you were in some hick town in New Jersey, there was no school.

So I think there was a very concerted effort on the Rebbe’s part. And this started in the period when Rayatz was still the Rebbe, and I think it was part of his vision as well, to create schools for children who were going to public school. I think other Hasidic groups created schools for their own. Whereas, I live in Pittsburgh. Achei Tmimim of Pittsburgh was founded in those years, in the 1940s, and there was no Lubavitch community here. There was one Hasidic family, one Chabad family, and the Rebbe sent additional shluchim to create a school for the community. So I think there is a great truth to that. He wasn’t thinking about the narrow question of Chabad Hasidism or Hasidism in general or frum Judaism. He was thinking about the much bigger question of Judaism-

David Bashevkin:
Correct.

Eli Rubin:
… in its fullness.

David Bashevkin:
Yes. And you wrote about this in your book, Social Vision, which, again, I come back to it over and over again, and I credit it for being the first work that really translated the mysticism of the Rebbe’s thought into the Chabad that we see and interact with daily. For most people, particularly in the Orthodox community, Chabad is asking Jews on the street, men, “Did you put on tefillin?” For unaffiliated Jews or for Orthodox Jews on vacation. I didn’t really understand how the mysticism connected to all of the social programming that he was doing. But you kind of articulate… I don’t know if you use this language, but it was almost a mysticism hiding in plain sight, like maybe this is it. Maybe this is to better people’s lives and have even material benefit, to improve their lives and give them the basic necessities to be a Jew and to perform. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the deepest form of mysticism, the most sublime.

Eli Rubin:
Mystical connection. Mystical connection comes through connecting with others and helping others, being part of something bigger than yourself. I have to say, by the way, that this is not my book. It’s Philip Wexler’s book.

David Bashevkin:
Correct, correct.

Eli Rubin:
And this whole way of thinking, the socio-mystical model, that he saw at the core to be so fundamental to the Rebbe, is something that now that once he started talking to me about it, I saw it everywhere. But the idea is his. Philip Wexler was the one who had the sociological background, the training, that disciplinary prism and perspective to see this and to make that analysis. And I think it’s spot-on.

David Bashevkin:
Oh, it’s absolutely brilliant because it connects the conceptual with the lived experience, with the phenomenology. What does it feel like to be Jewish? What do people associate Judaism with? And it really connects the end, the end product, the program, the initiative, with the beginning, which is the conceptual, which I find extraordinarily remarkable and satisfying. But this notion of-

Eli Rubin:
And also another point about it is that it shifts the whole idea of what religion is about. Because I think generally we have this idea that religion is actually about retreating from other people. Spirituality especially is something that is an inner thing. For it to be really authentic, you’ve got to go into a room by yourself and meditate and connect to something beyond yourself and beyond society, outside of society, as it were. And what Philip showed was that this is really a misnomer, and actually, the highest spiritual experience happen in a group, when you’re together singing nigunim. If you’re singing a nigun by yourself, it might be a bit hollow. If you’re singing a nigun in a group with a bunch of people who you know share certain aspirations and you feel together, that’s a fuller, a richer, a more transcendent experience.

David Bashevkin:
Correct.

Eli Rubin:
And that really penetrates so many aspects and is reflected in so many aspects of Hasidic life, Hasidic thought, this idea, it’s in chapter 32 of Tanya, and it’s in so many other places as well.

David Bashevkin:
I don’t even know if I’m using the term correctly, and I know it’s a big term, but the… What does it feel like, phenomenology? What does it feel like to experience … But that brings me to something that we have discussed a great deal, this notion of the most transcendent hiding in plain sight. I want to have a fuller discussion about this specifically with you, number one, because I admire your scholarship so much. I also admire your honesty a great deal. I have a great sense of trust with you. I don’t know why. The expression that you’re giving me right now-

Eli Rubin:
I have idea either.

David Bashevkin:
I do. I have a real sense of trust with you, and I feel like when you talk to me, as opposed to many others… I was teasing Matti about this. You talk to me… You don’t make me feel mi-bachutz, like an outsider, which is a nice feeling. Even though I didn’t spend my time delving into the Chassidus of Lubavitch all that much, I know a little bit more now, but you’ve never made me feel like an outsider. In fact, from the very beginning of 18Forty, even, you’ve made me feel like I’m rowing with you, like we’re doing something very similar. We’re rowing together. I’m very grateful for you always approaching me that way.

Eli Rubin:
I think that’s true. I think there’s something very Chabad about the 18Forty project, because I see… My sense of 18Forty is also that it is something that is non-parochial, something that is… Like you said, you’re trying to do Common Judaism, to use your term and play it right back to you.

David Bashevkin:
Yeah.

Eli Rubin:
And yes, so there is an affinity there, no question.

David Bashevkin:
I want to talk a little bit more in depth about the role of moshiach in the Rebbe’s thought from the beginning, and what was the Rebbe trying to get people to emphasize or get people to experience or wait for in his notion of moshiach? And maybe we could begin by starting not with the Rebbe, because it didn’t even begin with him. We don’t have 20 hours for this, but maybe we could start… There was always an emphasis of moshiach, both we mentioned from the letter from the founding of Chassidus itself, and the letter of the Baal Shem Tov talks about a confrontation with moshiach where he ascends the supernal worlds, I don’t know how you’d even translate it, and has this meeting with moshiach, and says, “When are you coming?” And moshiach says: When your wellsprings spill overboard.

There was always a messianic component to Hasidic thought and the Hasidic movement, but it seems to have been emphasized in a different way. I don’t know when it began in Chabad, but certainly the Rebbe brought it out even more so. We don’t have to go all the way back, but maybe you could begin with the notion of moshiach in Chabad thought before the Rebbe, and then we’ll get to the Rebbe.

Eli Rubin:
I don’t know where to start. Maybe we should go back a little further and say that in Judaism in general, we should acknowledge that moshiach has always been a fundamental central part of Jewish aspiration.

David Bashevkin:
I don’t want to start there. I don’t want to start there. The reason why, and I’ve said this so many times, moshiach is the only central tenant of Judaism where, at least outside of Chabad, but I think that’s the really the only exception, where it is perfectly acceptable to have a second grade education, not even a second grade education. I find it shocking how little people know, or they know nothing about moshiach. I’ve asked people all the time. Is believing in moshiach-

Eli Rubin:
The question is why. The question is really, why is that the case? Because I think, again, to use a phrase that I used before, earlier on, how does Judaism think about itself? Meaning, if you think holistically about Judaism, Judaism has a messianic vision at its core. And the whole idea of being in exile, praying three times a day for moshiach, tzemach Dovid avdecho, this is at the core of Judaism. And it has always been at the core, and there have been messianic movements throughout Jewish history. Part of that dynamic is that there’s disappointments we suffer. So there are moments in history where as a result of disappointment, the messianic hope or the emphasis on moshiach sometimes recedes more into the background.

But I think as a general rule… And I think again, inherently, the way Judaism thinks about itself is that we’re on a journey towards universal redemption, towards something where all people in the world will together recognize God and work together in harmony. There’ll be no more war, this ideal, this hope, and that now… The sense is that now we’re in a world that is subpar, that is not okay. I don’t think this was always the case, but I think today, specifically now in the 21st century, I think part of the disinterest in moshiach has to do with how comfortable Jews have become in America. There’s a kind of assimilation, I think, even amongst frum Jews, right?

David Bashevkin:
I couldn’t agree with you more. Not even just assimilation.

Eli Rubin:
We’re so materially comfort. We don’t have oppression. The slightest bit of antisemitism is like, “Oh my gosh, this is the most terrible thing that’s ever happened.” Whereas if you go back a hundred years and compare your life to what it was to a Jew in the shtetl, or if you go back to the Middle Ages, how did Rashi experience… What was his kind of relationship? I think all those people who lived through the Crusades or through any other period of Jewish history, they felt that they were in exile in a very raw, direct… It didn’t need to be explained to them that there was a need for moshiach.

David Bashevkin:
Well, I think-

Eli Rubin:
We’re living in a different kind of era now where if it’s okay to have a second-year-old education about moshiach, I think that is in part to do with the fact, oh, we’re already in Israel. We checked that box already. And America thinks they’re fine too. So what more is there to look forward to?

David Bashevkin:
Not only that-

Eli Rubin:
I think that also comes from a certain ghettoization, a certain sense of just looking… and what I’m not thinking about, that the world around you is still suffering because there are other Jews who are not living a full spiritual life.

David Bashevkin:
I think it’s even more than that.

Eli Rubin:
So I hate to put the shoe on the other foot, but I think that has a good part of it.

David Bashevkin:
No, I think it’s even more than that. I think it’s even more than that. I think people don’t just say, “It’s good here.” I think moshiach coming, for a lot of people, and they would admit this and maybe even joke around about it, but it would disrupt the comfort of their lives. I think moshiach allows us to defer actual belief in the reality of God and the purpose of existence and defer that, and say, “Oh, when moshiach comes, this’ll make sense.” It’s much easier to affiliate with Judaism on a more sociological level, on a cultural level, than to realize the very terror of existence that religion and Yiddishkeit comes to address, the very purpose of existence itself.

And when you talk about things like moshiach in an actual sense, not in a impossible sense… I think people talk about moshiach as an impossibility. When something seems impossible, they will say, “Okay, when moshiach comes, we’ll make sense of that.” “How would you do that?” “When moshiach comes.” But it allows you to defer any agency. And Scholem makes a similar argument, but not exactly. But it defers agency in actually imagining or creating a world where moshiach could be possible or moshiach would want to come. And for a lot of people, the way we think about moshiach, because it’s a second grade level of education, it’s dreadful for a lot of people. “Will I have a nice home when moshiach comes? How frum will I have to be when moshiach comes? Am I going to have to get up for davening every morning when moshiach comes? Am I going to have to have a good party?”

Eli Rubin:
I had a discussion with a group of yeshiva boys a few weeks ago, and they asked me, “Will there be theme parks when moshiach comes?” This was their big concern. So I said to them that a person matures through his life. Right? “When you were five years old, you enjoyed playing with Legos. Now you like theme parks. Probably in 10 years’ time, there’ll be other pleasures, other aspirations that you have, which you find more fulfilling and more thrilling.” And that’s how it is at every stage in life. People grow. And I think it’s the same for society as well. I think there’s an idea that other philosophers have discussed. I just started reading Thomas Nagel, if I’m pronouncing his name right, one of his recent books on moral philosophy. And he’s talking about how each individual goes through the stages that society as a whole has already gone through, in their own maturity.

But I think this is true. And this is part of the messianic idea also, in my understanding, that society is developing towards something greater, something better, something more whole, something more moral, something that is better for more people. Just like we grow up as individuals, society grows up. Society can grow up. And we can kind of get out of these immature ideas about what is exciting, what is fun. And maybe by the time moshiach comes and when moshiach comes, you’ll be along for the ride. In other words, you and the rest of society will be attuned, will be educated enough to realize what is important, what is exciting, what is valuable in a different way than you do now.

David Bashevkin:
Maybe so. Let me re-articulate the question and see how you answer it this way. The Rebbe’s emphasis on moshiach colored his entire legacy while he was alive and after he passed, since Gimmel Tammuz. The number one thing that people think about with the Rebbe: moshiach. Was he? Wasn’t he? Too much emphasis. Not enough emphasis.

Surely the Rebbe knew that his emphasis on messianism would come at a cost. Surely he knew. Why not take the approach of the yeshiva community, of other gadolim, and say, “Okay, when moshiach comes, he’ll come. We’ll know. We’ll know. And when he comes, we’ll know, like everybody else knows. We’ll all get the memo at the same time. And in the meantime, let’s learn and do whatever we have to do”? In Yeshivish parlance … to keep reminding people to do things, to bring moshiach. Just tell them to do the things. Why do you have to tell them that we’re doing it in order to bring moshiach? If we’re both are in agreement that more Torah, more divinity, more mitzvos, bring moshiach, then why even tell people that we’re doing this in order to bring moshiach?

It reformulated the entire character of the Rebbe and Chabad itself. Why pay such a heavy cost to remind people about the belief in moshiach? “Let them be, they’ll say the Yud Gimmel Ikarim,” that the Rambam includes, the 13 principles of faith. You’ll remind them, “Say it once a day after davening.” Why make a whole thing about it? He must have known it was going to come at a cost.

Eli Rubin:
I think that it has to do-

David Bashevkin:
And what was the theological purpose?

Eli Rubin:
I think it has to do with the Rebbe’s holistic view of Torah and of Judaism, which is to say that he didn’t see moshiach as something in the future, as one part of the Torah. The Nevi’im, oh, they talk about moshiach. For him, every aspect of Torah and every aspect of Judaism is interlinked, and moshiach isn’t just interlinked with every other part. It’s the point. It’s the purpose of the whole of Judaism. Right? I mean, it sounds kind of crazy, in a way, to suggest that you could go about achieving a goal while ignoring what the goal is. Right? I mean, that itself just kind of sounds like a preposterous kind of proposition. But just to take this thought further, you spoke before of the way people see moshiach as a way of deferring having to deal with existential issues with God-

David Bashevkin:
Yes.

Eli Rubin:
… with having God in your life. Having God in your life is a scary thing.

David Bashevkin:
Yes.

Eli Rubin:
But if you could say, “Oh, when moshiach comes, then we’ll understand God, then we can have a relation with God,” that’s undoing the whole purpose of Judaism in itself. If you understand a mitzvah as a way of connecting to God, if Hasidus came to build, like I said before, to build a relationship between God and humanity, between God and the world, then to relegate that and defer that to moshiach is to actually empty Torah mitzvos of its meaning in the present. Right? Moshiach isn’t the magical result of performing particular actions and learning certain obscure sugyos in the Talmud. Right?

The Rebbe sees the entirety of Torah, all the mitzvos that a person does, as a way of actually building instantiating redemption in the present as well. Right? You’re creating. You’re turning the world, bit by bit, experience by experience. You spoke before about the phenomenology, the feeling. What does it mean to live as a Jew. The Rebbe wanted that people should live as a Jew in connection, in a relationship with God. Right? That itself can be seen as a kind of messianic ideal, a messianic aspiration. And the Rebbe’s whole point in emphasizing moshiach is that he wasn’t deferring moshiach. He was trying to bring moshiach into people’s… He was trying to bring God into people’s lives. Right? He was trying to infuse the culture, the rituals, the things that we study, with their ultimate meaning. He was trying to share that ultimate meaning with all people, bring it to the fore of people’s consciousness. You ask about, “Surely he knew that people would be opposed to this.” I’m not sure that he really did consider that. I think that-

David Bashevkin:
But he must have known in his lifetime-

Eli Rubin:
… because the Rebbe had such an… Yeah, but because the Rebbe had such an integrated, holistic view of Torah, I don’t think it could have been any other way for him. I mean, part of it also has to do, if you want to speak more historically, Chabad Hasidism has put moshiach at the center of its theology from the outset. Right? So if you go to Tanya, when he talks about the ultimate purpose of Torah and mitzvos, Chapter 36, he says that the mitzvos are ways, are tools, as it were, to bring the infinite revelation of God into the world. And when will we ultimately see that revelation? In a messianic era, but the way that we draw that revelation into the world, the way that we permeate the world with messianic revelation, is through our mitzvos now, in the time of exile. The time of exile is a messianic time. Right?

David Bashevkin:
Did the Rebbe ever respond to his critics?

Eli Rubin:
It’s a good question. I’m not so aware of the Rebbe directly responding to critics about the moshiach issue specifically.

David Bashevkin:
And he has one set of levels-

Eli Rubin:
There may have been some occasions when he did, but I can’t think of the specifics now.

David Bashevkin:
Let me ask you this. And you had mentioned his name already once, and I know that you’re familiar with the book because in a lecture on YouTube, your voice is clearly discernible in the audience. But there was a book written by Elliot Wolfson about the Rebbe’s approach to messianism. Now, Elliot Wolfson is deeply involved in Kabbalistic literature. He’s an academic. I don’t want to just call him an academic, because I think he takes Kabbalah quite seriously, but I don’t know that it always coheres or aligns with maybe a traditional approach to mystical thought. And he has a very radical thesis about the Rebbe’s approach to moshiach, and it almost gives it away in the title, which is Open Secret. That’s the title of the book, which is, so to speak, that moshiach is already here and fully attainable, and almost the moment that you realize that you don’t need to wait for anything, that is the revelation of moshiach itself. It is very focused on the present.

And it’s a very radical thesis. It’s quite wild. I could hear a few reasons why somebody would criticize it, because it seems to minimize the more classical signs of moshiach, which would be the rebuilding of the Third Temple, and the reintroduction of sacrifices, and all the things that we associate, based on our second grade-level education, with moshiach. It’s very radical in its simplicity. It’s here if you can access it, if you can really bring that level of divinity in your life. Do you think Elliot Wolfson understood the Rebbe’s approach? Do you think that he missed certain approaches of the Rebbe? What do you think? And I know that you’ve been engaged in that book. What did you think about his thesis in the book Open Secret?

Eli Rubin:
The first thing to say is that Elliot is an extremely sophisticated thinker and also an extremely knowledgeable scholar. He really, as much as anybody else that I know, he has read the literature. And he himself actually he stood at farbrengens in his teenage years. He actually writes in the introduction to Open Secret–

David Bashevkin:
Sure.

Eli Rubin:
… about one of those encounters … about how, I think it was Yud Tes Kislev?. Or at least he mentions that a Hasid pointed out to him that his own birthday… And that is Elliot’s own birthday… is on the eve of Yud Tes Kislev. And so he expresses that kind of autobiographical connection—

David Bashevkin:
Yeah. It’s deeply personal. You can tell about it in the book.

Eli Rubin:
It is. It is, absolutely. I think all his scholarship is deeply personal. He’s a very, very engaged scholar. He cares deeply about the Torah that he’s learning and the philosophy that he’s reading. So when it comes to the question of moshiach, his interpretation is also related in general to his own very unique way of thinking about time itself. He has this term, the timeswerve.

David Bashevkin:
Yeah.

Eli Rubin:
Which is very embedded and very rooted in Kabbalistic thought and Hasidic thought. We have this kind of axiomatic or intuitive way of thinking about time, which is that it’s linear, that the past precedes the present, and the future follows after the present. And part of Elliot’s whole way of thinking is that, actually, all these things are kind of embedded within each other and that there’s a circularity to time, that the present actually absorbs the future in certain ways and can even project the future back onto the past. He thinks about this as a reality, not as some kind of-

David Bashevkin:
It’s not an abstraction.

Eli Rubin:
It’s not an abstraction. It’s part of how time itself, time as a real dimension of existence, works. That has to do with his thinking about moshiach as well, that moshiach is not just in the future. It’s something that is already in the present in certain ways. It’s accessible. And I think in that, he’s right. I already made a similar point earlier about how the Rebbe was doing the opposite of deferring the messianic and the divine to the messianic era and was trying to bring it to the fore of people’s consciousness in the present. And as far as, will there be a Third Temple? Is there a historical moshiach? So some readers of Elliot’s book have come to the conclusion that Elliot understood the Rebbe to be saying that that would not happen. I think that’s a very big stretch, and I don’t think Elliot himself would agree with that reading of his own book. In fact, on that very occasion that you mentioned earlier, where he gave a lecture, and I was in the audience, and I asked a question at the end-

David Bashevkin:
I think this was the question-

Eli Rubin:
I recall that-

David Bashevkin:
… you asked.

Eli Rubin:
There’s a question I asked, but here I’m referring to a question somebody else asked. I asked a question related to this, too. But there’s another question that was asked specifically about building the Third Temple and is this going to be a reality. And as I recall it, what Wolfson said was… And this is of a piece with his other theorizations, his way of understanding metaphor and Kabbalah in general, and especially in Chabad… that everything is absolutely metaphorical and also absolutely literal at the same time. So the Rebbe certainly insisted, explicitly insisted, on the Rambam as the only halachic codification, the only halachic authority who told us anything about what moshiach will be like. And the Rambam is quite clear that there will be a king who will communicate and encourage or actually persuade all the Jewish people to observe Torah mitzvos and that he’ll wage the wars of God and that he’ll build the Third Temple in its place and so on. Right? So there are certain clear halachic criteria, which if they do not happen, moshiach hasn’t come. Right?

So in thinking about the whole idea of moshiach in the Rebbe’s thought, I think it’s very important to distinguish between two kind of categories of thought. There’s the phenomenological dimension, the spiritual dimension, the experience of moshiach, and there’s the concrete actualization of the messianic era, the halachic criteria, the fulfillment of the halachic criteria for the coming of moshiach. And while the phenomenology of moshiach, I think the Rebbe would say absolutely is accessible now, and in every mitzvah that you do, you can be in touch with the messianic meaning, with messianic significance of that mitzvah, that needs to be separated from the universal, historical messianic era, which only happens when the Rambam’s criteria have been fulfilled. Right?

So when you think about the Third Temple, the Third Temple has tremendous significance, mystical significance, spiritual significance, symbolism. You can study the laws. You can study on a level of pure halacha how the korbanos are supposed to function. You can get into all the nitty-gritty details. And you can also get into what the korbanos mean on a mystical level. And Hasidus has a huge amount to say, actually, about the spiritual work of self-sacrifice … that a person who wants to come close to God, korban is from the language of closeness, to come close to God, to establish a relation with God. It has to come from yourself. The sacrifice, the coming close has to come from the person’s own effort, from his own turning towards God. There’s a tremendous mystical significance in all of that. And that’s all accessible in the present. But then there’s something shared, something which is not just about you and your personal endeavors or even the community around you. It’s something about a historical event, a historical purpose that the world will come to this-

David Bashevkin:
Collective realization.

Eli Rubin:
… ultimate realization. Exactly. And in that, too, there is this timeswerve element. And there’s another facet of Elliot’s reading of the Rebbe, but also just a plain reading of the Rebbe, that the messianic perspective will illuminate the past as well. So it’s not just that the messiah arrives and then we can forget the past. The messianic era is a result of our activity in the past. And so once the messianic era arrives, we will be able to look back and see, “This is how we got here. We got here because we did XYZ during the time of exile. And that goes back to the Alter Rebbe language as well, that the revelation, the messianic revelation is the result of our work, our actions throughout the duration of the exile. So exile and redemption can’t be separated neatly into two different boxes, as it were. They are two different eras, but they’re interlinked, that the future informed the past, and we can live in the present in a way that is aware of its ultimate meaning.

David Bashevkin:
I get timeswerve because, especially on an individual level, people have a very easy time understanding how childhood and your past still bears upon the present. But even your future, when you look back, because we don’t know the future yet, but when you kind of reflect back at your life, there is a narrative where it seems that the future was already drawing you into a certain place, so it does make a great deal of sense for you.
But I want to ask you this. I think I asked you this once a late night via text or a direct message or something on social media. Can you articulate, I want to give you three possibilities, and you can choose to answer any way you want. When you think about moshiach, when you think about the coming of moshiach, what do you have in mind? I’ll give you three choices. And I posed the same question to YY Jacobson, but we already had the recorders turned off. But maybe I’ll tell you what he answered afterwards. But let’s hear what you say. Choice number one, do you think of the Rebbe? Choice number two, do you think about it disembodied from any individual and just an era and a consciousness, moshiach consciousness? Or three, do you think it’s some third unknown that we do not know?

Eli Rubin:
So, I certainly don’t have any individual in mind when I think of moshiach. I don’t know who-

David Bashevkin:
Even the Rebbe?

Eli Rubin:
… moshiach will be. No. That’s my personal-

David Bashevkin:
Really?

Eli Rubin:
I don’t think there’s any obligation for a Chabad Hasid to think that it’s the Rebbe. And I personally don’t have the Rebbe’s face, the Rebbe’s avatar in the place of moshiach in my mind.

David Bashevkin:
Wow. I’m—

Eli Rubin:
To me, it’s an open-ended thing.

David Bashevkin:
I’m shocked-

Eli Rubin:
To me it-

David Bashevkin:
… by that.

Eli Rubin:
Okay. I’m happy to shock you sometimes.

David Bashevkin:
I think I have the Rebbe in mind. Yeah, ha ha. No, it’s almost unimaginable, in a way.

Eli Rubin:
I guess you’re more of a Chabadnik than I am.

David Bashevkin:
For you, it’s much more of an era and consciousness that you associate with it.

Eli Rubin:
Yeah. I do believe that there will be some figure, some person. Right? That’s again, the Rambam, a king, right, some kind of political figure or leader. It’s somebody who’s powerful, who’s persuasive. Maybe it’s a political figure. I mean, I don’t know exactly how it’s all going to work. The Rambam himself says in the second-

David Bashevkin:
Yeah.

Eli Rubin:
… in Chapter 12 that the details are open. And he says, I think the language is, “You just have to believe in … the general thing.” So I’m actually very comfortable with open-ended questions. That’s just something you should know about me. And the Rebbe, I think too, in certain ways, especially in some of his later talks, it’s very fascinating discussions he has about how to reconcile uncertainties and dogmas. He’s creating various Kabbalistic models to allow for kind of open-endedness, that you don’t need to necessarily answer the question. You can have multiple possible truths, which may be mutually exclusive, and yet you can kind of look at them together as part of a single whole, as part of the infinite permutations of Torah interpretation. Right? I mean, if you just go back to Shammai and Hillel, it’s kind of very basic idea of-

David Bashevkin:
These are the words of God, yeah.

Eli Rubin:
These are the words of living God, even though they’re mutually exclusive, but they’re both true. Right? So that’s a very kind of basic example of this. But the Rebbe actually thought about this a great deal. Especially having studied those particular talks of the Rebbe, that kind of makes me all the more comfortable with saying, “I don’t know exactly how it’s going to look.” But that doesn’t empty it of meaning, because it’s not about any individual.

And maybe for me it’s different because I grew up mostly after the Rebbe had already passed away. So I didn’t have that strong emotional attachment in the kind of way that somebody who was in 770 and had pinned their hopes entirely on the Rebbe specifically in that kind of way. So maybe it’s different for me. And I sympathize with people who have different experiences than I do, but for me, it doesn’t seem like a fundamental. What seems much more fundamental is the whole ethos that the Rebbe brought to Judaism, to living every day with moshiach, right, to living every day with this kind of urgency, with this kind of sense of ultimate meaning that what you’re doing, when you’re holding a lulav and esrog in your hands, or when you’re giving a coin to tzedakah, you’re participating in the cosmic redemption of the world, is one little piece, and therefore a piece of the infinite, which we know, philosophically, a piece of the infinite is infinite. Right?

So I think that’s really what’s most important, is living with that feeling, with that sense, with that consciousness that the mitzvahs that you do have ultimate meaning and that they are contributing to the redemption of the entire world.

David Bashevkin:
No, I like it. And you said something when you were talking before about moshiach, and I reflected on some of the things that I felt very lacking in the Orthodox community now, and even more so, I think, even in the non-Orthodox community is moshiach as providing a historical consciousness to the Jewish people of saying, “We’re on a journey towards something” and not looking at the snapshot of whatever the Yiddishkeit looks like and feels like in July of 2024, “This is the way it always has been and always will be,” but understanding and appreciating we are moving toward something, and each generation has contributed and is moving us closer toward something.

And I find a lot of that historical consciousness, even of the development of Judaism itself and what is essential and what is non-essential, is troubling for a lot of people, especially Americans, because it’s a lot of good vibes here. It’s good vibes. You don’t like thinking necessarily about a future that is radically different than this. And even a past, it’s much easier to superimpose the present onto the past than really think about an actual past. And I’ve always felt that that was different in Chabad. But let me ask you this, because it’s so interesting. I don’t know if you’re wholly unique in this, but you’re unique, and definitely among the Chabad Hasidim that I’ve spoken to is your command of general secular philosophy.

David Bashevkin:
Of general secular philosophy and your engagement with philosophy outside of not just Chabad, but outside of Judaism. It really is remarkable. So I’m curious specifically, this is outside of Chabad, but as a critic, certainly not outside of Judaism. I’m curious what you make of David Berger’s book. David Berger in the ’90s came out with a book about Chabad-Lubavitch and “the scandal of Orthodox indifference.” And he begins the book by saying, “This is a lament. Am I watching the beginning of Christianity?” It was soon after the Rebbe died. There was a great deal of trauma both within and outside of Chabad. I felt a little bit of it. My assistant principal, Rabbi Newman was Lubavitch.

How do you, Eli Rubin, I’m not asking you to speak on behalf of worldwide international Chabad, but how do you, Eli Rubin, think about that book? Do you think he got anything right? Do you think he got a lot of things wrong? How do you approach that clarion call that basically said, “We got to wake up and make sure this doesn’t metastasize into a separate religion.” He obviously got his start with the beginning early Christianity. That’s his focus and scholarship. How do you look at that book?

Eli Rubin:
Well, as you said, it was published back in the 1990s when I was still very young. So I certainly can’t claim to have read it recently and I don’t even know if I read it at the time. I remember when it came out and I remember the scandal. I grew up in London and Rabbi Chaim Rapoport wrote a response. I remember that happening, and I probably saw Rabbi Rapoport’s response before I saw David Berger’s original. So it’s difficult for me to comment with any kind of, how do you say it, specificity?

But I think that just generally speaking, if we look at Chabad today and we look at Chabad’s relationship with the rest of the Orthodox world, I think things are pretty good. And I don’t think there’s a sense that Chabad is some other kind of cult of breakaway from Judaism. I think that if there was a feeling of a split or a forthcoming split, I think that that has largely receded and kind of been forgotten. That’s my sense.

David Bashevkin:
Let me kind of wind down. I’ve had you for a very long time and I’m very appreciative of it. The Rebbe passed away 30 years ago, and Chabad has gotten even larger and stronger in many ways. What do you think the secrets of the way his memory has been preserved that allow for such incredible posthumous growth? Do you think the Rebbe was deliberately preparing for the movement’s flourishing after this? The Rebbe obviously knew he did not have any children. He never appointed a successor. Does Chabad look at themselves as, like the Rebbe plans for all this? He saw this coming.

Eli Rubin:
I can’t speak for Chabad in general, but I can tell you what I think.

David Bashevkin:
Yeah, what do you think?

Eli Rubin:
That is that from the very outset of the Rebbe’s leadership, he actually spoke and acted as if there was no leader of Chabad alive. He spoke and acted as if the Rebbe Rayatz was the Rebbe, and he wrote so much, especially in the first years after Rayatz passed away about the way a Rebbe’s leadership continues after he’s departed from a physical body. He wrote about citing obviously Tanya. There’s a very famous letter on the back of the Tanya, letter number 27 with an additional … elaborating on it also by the Alter Rebbe, which talks about how tzadik in his lifetime has to mediate everything he communicates through the body. And so the soul is, as it were, imprisoned in a body. And the way his students can access that soul is only insofar as the tzadik speaks and articulates allows a kind of superficial externalized radiance of his soul to extend into the space around him.

So if you’re not present with the tzadik, you can’t really access the tzadik. If you can’t hear the tzadik, you can’t really access the tzadik. But then after the tzadik passed away, actually what’s happened is that the soul is no longer bound by the body. And so the spiritual life of the tzadik, what he defines as his love of God, his awe of God, and … there’s a third one, which I’m blanking on, which is terrible.

David Bashevkin:
That’s okay.

Eli Rubin:
But his spiritual life becomes accessible as it is without any superficiality, without any externalization, the soul becomes accessible directly to his disciples. Now, that’s a kind of mystical explanation about the soul no longer being bound by our body. But the Rebbe spoke about this in very tangible terms, that now the chief way to access the Rebbe and to have a relationship is not by looking at his face or being in his presence, but it’s through studying his Torah, which is his inner life. It’s through participating, getting a feeling for how the Rebbe felt, what was the Rebbe’s position as it were his relationship with God? Through his Torah you can participate in something of that in a very direct, more integrated way, in a way that is more your own inner worship than it could ever have been during the time of the tzadik’s life.

So my point here is that I don’t want to delve too much on all the details, but the Rebbe spoke about this a lot, tremendous amount in the 1950s. And so today it’s very easy for someone like me to go back and read this and apply it all to the Rebbe. There’s no one who spoke as much about how to relate to a tzadik who’s no longer alive as the Rebbe himself. And he wrote about it and he spoke about it. And I just finish off with one especially striking thing which I wrote about recently. He actually translates the word histalkus which means departure.

David Bashevkin:
Normally it signifies like somebody passing away.

Eli Rubin:
Passing away. So this is the traditional Hasidic euphemism for a tzadik passing. And it comes from, the word histalkus his is actually in today’s Chumash, I noticed, in Rashi. So it’s a Rabbinic phrase. It’s a Rabbinic Talmud, which is used in Kabbalah a lot. Specifically with regard to tzimtzum, which as you know is one of my favorite topics. Yes. So God withdrawing from the world, departing from the world, departing from the space of the cosmos is signified by the term histalkus.

And in one of the very first publications that the Rebbe issued after the Rayatz passed away, he said that just like in Chabad, I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of it is just like in Chabad, we understand tzimtzum in a non-literal way. That is to say that God never actually departs, but rather God is fundamentally present. So the term histalkus as departure also needs to be interpreted in a non-literal way. And he referred to the Rayatz’s own discourse, which he had published in advance of the day on which he passed away to be studied on the day that he passed away.

David Bashevkin:
When he passed away, meaning his father-in-law or when the Rebbe himself passed away?

Eli Rubin:
No, when Rayatz passed away. Before Rayatz passed away, Rayatz passed away in the 10th of Shevat, which is the anniversary, is the yahrzeit of his grandmother. So he had issued a publication, a published maamar or discourse, to be studied on the occasion of his grandmother’s yahrzeit, which turned out to be the day of his own passing. And in that discourse, he talks about the Zoharic phrase … which means when the other side, which means the profane, the unholy side is subdued … that’s the same word as histalkus. … The glory of God ascends in all the worlds. So there histalkus means an ascent, but the Rayatz in his discourse explained that this is actually a downflow of divine ascendance.

So he reinterpreted the word histalkus to mean a downflow of divine ascendance. And then a few weeks later, the Rebbe, his son-in-law and successor pointed to this interpretation of the word histalkus and said, “If you want to understand what the departure, the passing of a tzadik means, this is what it means. It means a downflow of ascending revelation of an exalted revelation.

So it means that the Rebbe is more present. And I think that for earlier Rebbes, this might’ve been a kind of mystical precept, like I said before, something you had to believe in. But I think when it comes to the Rebbe, his presence is tangibly more available. His teachings are more available than they ever were in his lifetime. I think if you stood in 770 in the 1980s, you had a very narrow perspective, a narrow glimpse of who the Rebbe was, of what was in his mind, what he was thinking.

Obviously there were people who were very learned and who had more insight and so on. But generally speaking, the kind of access that we have now, the ability to really study the Rebbe’s thought on a grand scale and to think really deeply about what he wanted from us and about what we can learn from him, I think in that sense, he is much more accessible now than he ever was, and increasingly so.

We have the internet now, we have videos, we have audio. You can listen to farbrengens. I think there’s a massive difference. And between standing in 770 where you’re being pushed and you can’t hear so well and your memory isn’t so great and you’re tired, but now you could listen to the same farbrengen at your dining room table and follow along with a text and pause it if you get distracted and carry on. I think that’s a tremendous benefit that we have.

And so in that sense, this downflow of the Rebbe’s presence, I think is really, really tangible. And it’s not just a mystical idea as it might once have been in early generations.

David Bashevkin:
As we said from the outset, it created a world where that presence and mysticism and transcendence really can be hiding in plain sight. And my dearest friend, Reb Eli, I cannot thank you enough. I always wrap up my interviews with more rapid fire questions. I know we did this once. Humor me, we’ll do it again. I’ve been asking people, and this is so hard, especially with the Torah of the Rebbe, because there is so much of it. Do you have a good introductory text to the Rebbe’s thought, preferably in English?

Eli Rubin:
I’m very happy to now recommend that everybody read Yosef Bronstein’s really amazing tome. It’s like 700 pages and it is the most thorough introduction today to the Rebbe’s Torah teachings.

David Bashevkin:
That’s high praise.

Eli Rubin:
Yeah. Well, I don’t think anyone’s even tried before. It’s a very daunting thing to do because the Rebbe spoke for 40 years, and so his teachings are spread out and they’re in different genres, different times. He spoke topically on the parsha of the week, but to organize it and think about it systematically and to kind of extract and compile and anthologize thematically and take out the key lines of thinking and show how they’re linked together. And also to contrast it to earlier Jewish thinkers, to kind of put it in the grand narrative and the grand scale of Jewish thought. What did the Rambam say? What did the Ramban say about key theological issues like bechirah, free will?

And what is the Rebbe’s contribution to these fundamental theological philosophical discussions ought to take? How to demonstrate the way that the Rebbe kind of holistically reads Talmudic, halachic sugyas in light of Kabbalistic or philosophical Hasidic ideas. And to do that in not just kind of in a piecemeal way with one example or kind of an impressionistic way, but to do it really having stepped back and taken a look at something very big.

And then not just taking one topic like Elliot Wolfson, like you said, did a marvelous job, if also daunting in its own way, of really getting into the depth of what the Rebbe meant when he spoke about Moshiach, like you said, a phenomenological level, on an experiential level, on a philosophical level. But that’s one, it’s a fundamental aspect the Rebbe-

David Bashevkin:
No, Yosef’s work is… And God willing, we will be having him on. My next question, I’m always curious, and specifically for you, you already have a book coming out, but if somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical and write another book, because you have a book coming out about tzimtzum, you have the title that you could share with our listeners.

Eli Rubin:
The title is

David Bashevkin:
I love it. I love the title. Who’s publishing it?

Eli Rubin:
It’ll be out from Stanford University Press in March. And the subtitle is: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism.

David Bashevkin:
I’m so excited for it. If somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to write another book, what do you think the topic of that book would be? What’s the next one?

Eli Rubin:
That’s a good question. I have a bunch of different ideas. One that I have is actually to write a book on Rayatz. I think that would be a very interesting, no one has yet written a book, a study devoted to him specifically.

David Bashevkin:
The sixth Rebbe.

Eli Rubin:
The sixth Rebbe. And he’s in many ways, very different to the seventh Rebbe. A mystical giant in his own right, but someone with a kind of very vivid and creative mind, a writer, he was somebody who wrote literary works. He was a poet. He was a novelist, I think, in his soul, but he was also a Rebbe, and he kind of bridges the old world of the shtetl and the new world of America. He grew up in Lubavitch, spent the first 35 years of his life in the shtetl in Lubavitch. He already then in his young adulthood, he traveled to Vienna, he saw Europe, he saw the big cities of Europe, St. Petersburg and so on. But later he moved to Warsaw and then to New York.

So he had that memory. And his grandmother I mentioned before, whose yahrzeit he shares was also a repository of memory going back to the second Rebbe of Chabad. And he was very influenced by her. One of his earliest literary works was actually a kind of biography of his grandmother. I think he is this tremendous, luminous figure who has yet to be properly described and understood and appreciated. So maybe I’ll write a book about him one day.

David Bashevkin:
My final question, I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules. What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning? You’re always available to me at all hours of the day, so I’m always curious. But what time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Eli Rubin:
I would say these days I go to bed probably about 1. Some days later, sometimes maybe earlier, but about 1. And I get up when my kids wake me up, which is 7 o’clock in the morning or so, or a bit earlier than that even.

David Bashevkin:
My dearest friend, Reb Eli Rubin. I am so grateful for your time, for all of your friendships, scholarship, Torah, and kindness that you have given me over all these years. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Eli Rubin:
It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you. This was really a great conversation. Thank you.

David Bashevkin:
One way where I have seen the fact that Eli is not afraid of big theological questions, and I don’t want to get into too much detail on this, but people who have been listening to 18Forty for a very long time know that we’ve kind of stepped in the mud a few times with some of our theological explorations, and maybe we have asked questions that were inappropriate to ask publicly or maybe, I don’t want to use the word, but would be perceived as almost heretical or actually heretical.

And we’ve surfaced things that people are not always comfortable with. And there have been times where I’ve received very real and thoughtful criticism. I’m not even criticizing the criticism. There’s all “This is not a discussion that we should be having.”

And I’m so indebted to Eli Rubin because even at the worst or most difficult or most kind of confusing controversies that we’ve been embroiled in since we began 18Forty, we’re now entering our fifth year. I remember specifically a specific episode that we actually had to take down and delete. Eli reached out and said, “You know what? I understand what you’re doing. I understand what this is about. I understand the context and the perspectives that you are trying to transmit.”

And to me, it was more than just like, “Oh, it’s nice to have a frum serious person not think that I’m trying to eradicate or uproot or destroy Judaism.” I mean, that actually is nice and it’s a nice thing to hear. But more than that, I saw a kindred spirit. I saw somebody who’s not afraid of big questions, who’s not afraid of really stepping into the depth of the most cosmic questions that we have about life, that we have about the world, that we have about existence. He does not dismiss other approaches. He does not. He doesn’t have any sense of ego or entitlement that my approach must be correct.

What I find so moving about him is that he’s deeply committed and deeply moved in a very real way from the Torah and approach of Chabad Lubavitcher Rebbe. But it’s specifically because he’s so committed and so passionate, that gives him the confidence to explore. That gives him the confidence to look a little bit outside, to ask those big questions, to see how are other people approaching these questions. And that’s why I think Eli Rubin is such an appropriate messenger to convey the depths of the approach of the Rebbe.

The point of this series is not to get people to transform into Chabad. It’s not even to get, it’s certainly not to get people to believe the Rebbe is Moshiach, is not Moshiach, none of this is the point of this series. The point of this series is to introduce a perspective and a person who championed that perspective, namely Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, who tried to convey to the world a way to make the most cosmic questions apprehendable, to make them accessible and to create a world and a way of life where we don’t have to close our eyes in order to feel the divine, in order to find transcendence. But we can approach the world, whether it’s in our social services, whether it’s helping another Jew, looking at somebody else, looking at the world, looking at other ideas and philosophies, and do it with a sense of confidence in the realness of God, in the realness of Yiddishkeit and the Jewish people, and to not be insecure in our approach of the world.

And that is the gift that I have received from engaging in the world of Chabad and in the perspective specifically of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. That’s what this series and this approach, what we’re trying to transmit is all about. To have the confidence and the urgency and the motivation to ask big questions that ultimately we hope that we will see realized in our lifetimes the ultimate fulfillment of the capital-A Answers.

So thank you so much for listening. This episode was edited by our stand-in, Denah’s away. This episode was edited by our friend, Rob. If you enjoyed this episode or any of our episodes, please subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends about it. You can also donate at 18forty.org/donate. It really helps us reach new listeners and continue putting out great content.

You could also leave us a voicemail with feedback or questions that we may play on a future episode. That number is 516-519-3308. Once again, that number is 516-519-3308. Or of course, you could email us at info@18forty.org, 1-8-F-O-R-T-Y.org info@18forty.org. If you’d like to learn more about this topic or some of the other great ones we’ve covered in the past, be sure to check out 18forty.org. That’s the number 1-8, followed by the word forty. F-O-R-T-Y. 18forty.org, where you can find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails. Thank you so much for listening and stay curious my friends.