Can the Rebbe Be Moshiach?

Can the Rebbe Be Moshiach?
Author: Gil Student
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781581126112

During his lifetime, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of blessed memory, was a highly successful religious leader. His brilliant scholarship and eloquent speaking touched hundreds of thousands of people. Larger than life and presiding in a post-Holocaust world during which Jews returned to the land of Israel in an unprecedented fashion, he was declared by many of his followers to be the Moshiach (Messiah) for whom Jews have waited for thousands of years. His death in 1994 should have dashed those hopes. However, many of his followers have advanced the position that even today the Rebbe can still be Moshiach. This book is an analysis of this position within the Jewish tradition. What do the doctrinally binding texts say about a dead man being Moshiach? In a presentation appropriate for both the layman and the experienced scholar, this work demonstrates from dozens of texts that according to the authentic Jewish tradition the Rebbe unfortunately cannot be Moshiach.

The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference

The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference
Author: David Berger
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2008-03-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 178694989X

This book is a history, an indictment, a lament, and an appeal, focusing on the messianic trend in Lubavitch hasidism. It records the shattering of one of Judaism's core beliefs and the remarkable equanimity with which the standard-bearers of Orthodoxy have allowed it to happen. This is a development of striking importance for the history of religions, and it is an earthquake in the history of Judaism. David Berger describes the unfolding of this historic phenomenon and proposes a strategy to contain it.

The Rebbe

The Rebbe
Author: Samuel Heilman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2012-03-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691154422

A biography of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson that discusses his childhood in Russia, education in Germany and Paris, messianic conviction, religious leadership, legacy, and other related topics.

Living with Moshiach

Living with Moshiach
Author: Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Publisher: Merkos L'Inyonei Chinuch
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1999
Genre: Bible
ISBN: 9780826604682

A renowned scholar and theologian presents inspiring and articulate observations on the ultimate purpose of G-d's creation - the redemption by our righteous Moshiach. Based on the talks and writings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, these concise adaptations are arranged according to the weekly and holiday Torah portions. This volume unites these cogent insights with the well-known Chasidic adage, "one must live with the times," that is, take guidance from the appropriate Torah reading.

Rebbe

Rebbe
Author: Joseph Telushkin
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2016-06-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062319000

“One of the greatest religious biographies ever written.” – Dennis Prager In this enlightening biography, Joseph Telushkin offers a captivating portrait of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a towering figure who saw beyond conventional boundaries to turn his movement, Chabad-Lubavitch, into one of the most dynamic and widespread organizations ever seen in the Jewish world. At once an incisive work of history and a compendium of Rabbi Schneerson's teachings, Rebbe is the definitive guide to understanding one of the most vital, intriguing figures of the last centuries. From his modest headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the Rebbe advised some of the world's greatest leaders and shaped matters of state and society. Statesmen and artists as diverse as Ronald Reagan, Robert F. Kennedy, Yitzchak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Elie Wiesel, and Bob Dylan span the spectrum of those who sought his counsel. Rebbe explores Schneerson's overarching philosophies against the backdrop of treacherous history, revealing his clandestine operations to rescue and sustain Jews in the Soviet Union, and his critical role in the expansion of the food stamp program throughout the United States. More broadly, it examines how he became in effect an ambassador for Jews globally, and how he came to be viewed by many as not only a spiritual archetype but a savior. Telushkin also delves deep into the more controversial aspects of the Rebbe's leadership, analyzing his views on modern science and territorial compromise in Israel, and how in the last years of his life, many of his followers believed that he would soon be revealed as the Messiah, a source of contention until this day.

Basi Legani

Basi Legani
Author: Joseph Isaac Schneersohn
Publisher: Kehot Publication Society
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1990
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

This seminal work of Chabad Chasidic philosophy is considered to be the "last will and testament" of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. The discourse was released for the 10th of Shevat in the year 5710 (1950); on that day Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak passed away. Chasidim customarily study Basi LeGani each year in honor of the yahrzeit, and each year his successor, the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, explained another of its chapters in depth. The Rebbe's exposition of Basi LeGani, the first Chasidic discourse he spoke upon assuming the mantle of leadership in 5711 (1951), was also a declaration of his own mission and goals. This widely acclaimed English edition will enable many more Jews to participate in the study of this important work.

Open Secret

Open Secret
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2009-10-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 023152031X

Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) was the seventh and seemingly last Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty. Marked by conflicting tendencies, Schneerson was a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda, a reclusive contemplative who built a hasidic sect into an international movement, and a man dedicated to the exposition of mysteries who nevertheless harbored many secrets. Schneerson astutely masked views that might be deemed heterodox by the canons of orthodoxy while engineering a fundamentalist ideology that could subvert traditional gender hierarchy, the halakhic distinction between permissible and forbidden, and the social-anthropological division between Jew and Gentile. While most literature on the Rebbe focuses on whether or not he identified with the role of Messiah, Elliot R. Wolfson, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and the phenomenology of religious experience, concentrates instead on Schneerson's apocalyptic sensibility and his promotion of a mystical consciousness that undermines all discrimination. For Schneerson, the ploy of secrecy is crucial to the dissemination of the messianic secret. To be enlightened messianically is to be delivered from all conceptual limitations, even the very notion of becoming emancipated from limitation. The ultimate liberation, or true and complete redemption, fuses the believer into an infinite essence beyond all duality, even the duality of being emancipated and not emancipated an emancipation, in other words, that emancipates one from the bind of emancipation. At its deepest level, Schneerson's eschatological orientation discerned that a spiritual master, if he be true, must dispose of the mask of mastery. Situating Habad's thought within the evolution of kabbalistic mysticism, the history of Western philosophy, and Mahayana Buddhism, Wolfson articulates Schneerson's rich theology and profound philosophy, concentrating on the nature of apophatic embodiment, semiotic materiality, hypernomian transvaluation, nondifferentiated alterity, and atemporal temporality.

Dvar Malchus

Dvar Malchus
Author: Menachem Schneerson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2017-11-19
Genre:
ISBN: 9781979797351

The Rebbe's Army

The Rebbe's Army
Author: Sue Fishkoff
Publisher: Schocken
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2009-04-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0307566145

“Excuse me, are you Jewish?” With these words, the relentlessly cheerful, ideologically driven emissaries of Chabad-Lubavitch approach perfect strangers on street corners throughout the world in their ongoing efforts to persuade their fellow Jews to live religiously observant lives. In The Rebbe’s Army, award-winning journalist Sue Fishkoff gives us the first behind-the-scenes look at this small Brooklyn-based group of Hasidim and the extraordinary lengths to which they take their mission of outreach. They seem to be everywhere—in big cities, small towns, and suburbs throughout the United States, and in sixty-one countries around the world. They light giant Chanukah menorahs in public squares, run “Chabad houses” on college campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge, give weekly bible classes in the Capitol basement in Washington, D.C., run a nonsectarian drug treatment center in Los Angeles, sponsor the world’s biggest Passover Seder in Nepal, establish synagogues, Hebrew schools, and day-care centers in places that are often indifferent and occasionally hostile to their outreach efforts. They have built a billion-dollar international empire, with their own news service, publishing house, and hundreds of Websites. Who are these people? How successful are they in making Jews more observant? What influence does their late Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (who some thought was the Messiah), continue to have on his followers? Fishkoff spent a year interviewing Lubavitch emissaries from Anchorage to Miami and has written an engaging and fair-minded account of a Hasidic group whose motives and methodology continue to be the subject of speculation and controversy.

A Time to Heal

A Time to Heal
Author:
Publisher: Ezra Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-10-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9780826690012

Current today as when originally provided, this volume is a collection of the Lubavitcher Rebbe's counsel to the bereaved whether responding to a widow struggling to explain her husband's death to her children, or to a community whose school was teh target of a terrorist attack, th eRebbe provided support and solace to individuals and commujnities explaining loss and tragedy, guiding them toward the hope for a brighter future.