Waiting for the Messiah of Eastern Parkway (New York Times)
By JONATHAN MAHLER
This long article from 21 September tells the fascinating story of the Lubavitcher community that believes that its rebbe, who died in 1994, is the Messiah and that he will come again. The parallels with Jesus and other messianic figures such as Shabbetai Zvi are obvious. I'll excerpt some interesting bits and add a few comments, but you should definitely read it all. (It was brought to my attention by a reader whose name I don't have, because the message didn't forward properly from my office. But I'll note it later when I can get at my office e-mail again. LATER: It was Steve Oren. Thanks Steve!)
It looks almost like a rain dance, only instead of precipitation, these Lubavitchers are trying to hasten the arrival of the messiah. There's just one problem. The words of the accompanying song -- ''May our master, teacher and rabbi, the king messiah, live forever'' -- refer specifically to a man who died nine years ago: Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the grand rabbi and spiritual leader of the Lubavitch movement from 1951 until 1994. The Yechi, as it is known, is sung as a demonstration of faith that their beloved rebbe will be back soon -- rising from the great beyond in a manner more befitting Jesus Christ than the savior of the Jewish people.
So if Yechi -- ''May he live'' -- is a demonstration of faith to some, it borders on a profane outburst to others. A swath of Lubavitchers are not only unwilling to utter the Yechi; they also refuse to be present in synagogues or at gatherings where it is chanted. To understand the concern of these so-called anti-messianists, consider that only a few men in Jewish history have been revered as the messiah after their deaths. One was Jesus. Another was Sabbatai Zevi, who won hundreds of thousands of followers across Palestine and Eastern Europe after publicly declaring himself the messiah in 1665. (Zevi's death was, relatively speaking, a small challenge to his adherents, who had already chosen to stick by him after his conversion to Islam.)
For the anti-messianists, their messianic brethren present a public-relations disaster of epic proportions. They worry that their Hasidic movement, which is 300 years old and has survived pogroms, Communism and the Holocaust, will become confused with a cult. What's more, they can hardly ignore the obvious Christian overtones of messianism: what kind of Jews believe in a second coming?
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What started as a fissure between the community's messianists and anti-messianists has gradually opened into a canyon, with each side insisting that it is the true heir to the rebbe's vision. Over the years, the conflict between the two factions has also become one of propaganda, with rival publishing houses, magazines and bookstores. There are also endless semantic distinctions between the two factions, the most common of which is that anti-messianists write ''Of Blessed Memory'' after the rebbe's name, while messianists insist on ''Long Live King Messiah.'' There is even a Lubavitch version of the school-prayer debate, over whether the yeshivas should encourage students to sing Yechi. (Some do, some don't.)
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Thirty-five years old and skinny, with long kinky black hair and a Frank Zappa goatee, Baruch Thaler left the Lubavitch movement several years ago, but his mother, stepfather and five siblings are all still very much a part of it.
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A promising student in the local yeshivas, he had been on track to spread the rebbe's teachings as a Lubavitch emissary when he found himself among the throngs outside 770 on the day after the rebbe's death. Forcing his way to the front of the crowd, Thaler, who was 25 at the time, managed to grab the rebbe's coffin as it was being carried out of the building and into the car that would transport it to a graveyard in Queens. Because Jewish law requires that corpses be returned to the earth and most New York cemeteries mandate that dead bodies be fully enclosed, some Jewish coffins are made with a thin wood panel on the bottom that slides out when they are lowered into the ground. Reaching up to lift the coffin, Thaler found himself pushing directly up into that layer of plywood. As he shuffled toward the street, he could feel the shifting weight of the dead rebbe pressing into his bare hands. ''Later, people would insist that the casket was empty,'' he says. ''But this was total reality -- physical-touch confirmation.''
After the rebbe was buried, Thaler pulled away from the movement.
Empty casket - empty tomb? It looks like something along those lines is getting started here. There was an empty tomb tradition about Shabbetai Zvi as well just a few years after his death.
The biggest difficulty in trying to figure out what the rebbe really wanted is that he, too, was aware of his movement's image and thus sent different signals to those inside and outside the community. This was more than a mere P.R. gesture. The rebbe seemed to believe that bringing secular Jews back into the fold was a critical part of the process of redemption and was thus understandably wary of scaring people off with messianic zealotry.
What does seem clear is that the rebbe was, for many years, eager to quell the tide of messianism when it began to rise. But as he grew older, he became more reluctant to do so. Among the messianists' abiding articles of faith are two videotapes of the rebbe in his later years. One shows him smiling as a crowd of Lubavitchers sing Yechi around him; in the other, he is accepting a petition signed by thousands that identifies him as the messiah.
In the late 80's and early 90's, the rebbe, no doubt increasingly aware of his approaching mortality as well as of his lack of progeny, began speaking more and more frequently about the messiah -- not explicitly nominating himself but nonetheless encouraging a messianic urgency among his followers and even occasionally hinting that the messianic era had already begun.
This reminds me a little of how Jesus frequently talks in the Gospels about "the Son of Man" in an ambiguous way that could be taken to refer either to him or to someone else. (Not to downplay the horrendous complexities and problems of the whole Son of Man tradition, but the parallel is still interesting.)
In this context, it's possible to see the rebbe as a postmodern religious leader, one who intended for his followers to make their own decisions about his identity as the messiah. This would be in keeping with the tradition of Hasidism, which itself began as a populist effort to wrest Judaism from the grip of an elite group of Talmudic scholars. ''I think the rebbe wanted to dismantle his movement in a way,'' Max [Kohanzad] says. ''He realized that in order for people to be redeemed, they have to redeem themselves. The current mess is part of the rebbe's attempt to empower people.''
Or maybe there's another way of looking at it. Perhaps the rebbe was trying to walk the fine line between discouraging cultlike fanaticism among his followers and wanting to avoid shattering their hopes for imminent redemption.
I have my doubts about the rebbe-as-deconstructionist theory, but who knows?
Here's an article on Shabbetai Zvi with links to more information. Here are some notes on Shabbetai and Sabbatianism from Eliezer Segal's ever-useful website. And here, from the also very useful Livius website, is a collection of articles on the concept of messiahship and on more than thirty Jewish figures throughout history who (more or less) made messianic claims or had such claims made about them. Spot-checking some of the articles, I'd say the quality is high, although there could be more secondary literature cited.
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