An abridged excerpt from Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism by Eli Rubin, published by Stanford University Press, ©2025. All Rights Reserved.
In the autumn of 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte advanced into Russia. As his Grande Armée approached Liadi, home to the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Shneur Zalman (“Rashaz”), the famed author of the Tanya left his home and traveled eastward with retreating Russian troops. With the onset of winter he journeyed far to the south. Unfortunately, this would be his last journey, from which he never returned. Before he could reach his intended destination he took ill, and spent his last Shabbat in a peasant’s hut. He was buried in the closest Jewish cemetery that could be found, some four hundred miles from his home territory.1
The sense of loss and rupture that came with the news that Rashaz had died was compounded by the decimation left in the wake of Napoleon’s retreat across the region between Vilna and Moscow. Some hasidim argued that Rashaz was irreplaceable, and that Hasidism itself had passed on from this world.2 But many more looked for leadership from two individuals who had long been lieutenants to Rashaz and mentors to his disciples, and who had themselves been good friends and companions for many years. More recently they had fallen into disagreement, and now their parting of ways would become an open controversy over the legacy of Rashaz.3
While Hasidism emerged and became a movement in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was in the first half of the nineteenth century that it became clear that this spiritual revivalism was more than a passing blip in the long trajectory of Jewish history. In this era, the various streams of Hasidism were institutionalized, led by scions or disciples of earlier masters who were confident bearers of distinct spiritual legacies. The authority of these leaders—the ṣadikim—extended much further than that of rank-and-file members of the rabbinate, and their unique status fundamentally reshaped the social, cultural, and economic norms of Jewish life across Eastern Europe.4
The ways in which dynastic authority became consolidated in the figure of one leader or another, and was passed from one generation to the next, varied among different hasidic streams.5 But in the case of Chabad, the most crucial element would prove to be authoritative custodianship, and further development, of the movement’s intellectual and literary tradition.
Rabbi Aharon Halevi Horowitz of Staroselye (1766–1828) and Rabbi DovBer Schneuri (1773–1827) were the two primary contenders to succeed Rashaz. While both were leading students of his, Rabbi DovBer was also his oldest son. Yet this distinction alone did not carry sufficient weight to guarantee his place as the unrivaled leader of Chabad. For one thing, Rabbi Aharon was the senior of the two. Moreover, according to the authoritative Chabad chronicle, Beit rebi, Rabbi Aharon laid claim to the mantle of Rashaz before Rabbi DovBer had even returned to the locale where his father had lived and taught over the course of more than thirty years.6
When Rabbi DovBer did return, he found the buildings of his father’s home and court destroyed, and the land occupied. His authority, accordingly, couldn’t simply be established through assuming his father’s geographic seat. Nor was reestablishing the court in proximity to his father’s burial site a viable option; it was too far from Chabad Hasidism’s original heartland. Instead he established his court in Lubavitch, a town some eighteen miles north of Liadi.7
Despite these challenges, Rabbi DovBer ultimately came to be recognized as the chief conduit of Chabad continuity. There were several factors that contributed to this, including the power of his own spiritual persona, the eloquence with which he expounded hasidic teachings, and the vocal support of other leading members of his father’s retinue.8 But the chief factor, in my view, was his prolific program of literary curation, writing, and publication.9
Less than two years after the passing of his father, Rabbi DovBer brought a new edition of the Tanya to press (Shklov, 1814), with the addition of never-before-published epistles and essays by Rashaz.10 The additional material came to acquire the same canonical status as the main body of the work, as published by Rashaz himself.11 Rabbi DovBer also began publishing the multivolume first edition of his father’s new code of Jewish law, known as Shulḥan arukh harav, which was printed between 1814 and 1816. Moreover, by the end of 1817 he had published two compendia of his father’s oral sermons. The first of these, Siddur im da”ḥ, collected discourses that reinterpret the prayer liturgy in light of Lurianic Kabbalah combined with Hasidism’s mystical ethos. The second compendium, Be’urei hazohar, collected discourses that do the same for passages in the Zohar, the most important text in the kabbalistic canon.12
By the time Rabbi DovBer passed away, in 1827, he had also published eight volumes of his own writings, ranging from the weighty Imrei binah (1821), with its sustained focus on divine unity, to works of a more devotional and penitential nature, such as Derekh ḥayim (1818).13 Like his father before him, Rabbi DovBer delivered many oral sermons that were transcribed, circulated, and preserved in manuscript copies, before being published in print in the second half of the twentieth century.14 These texts are like gushing rivers of new thought, yet they flow directly from the axiomatic wellsprings that are the teachings of Rashaz. The tension they exhibit between the new and the old did not go unnoticed, and attracted the oblique critique of his former colleague, Rabbi Aharon of Staroselye, who cautioned against overreliance on both reason and parable in the pursuit of theological illumination.15
Rabbi Aharon, for his part, clearly understood the importance of literature for the perpetuation of Chabad as an intellectual and spiritual movement. In 1820 he published a book titled Sha’arei hayiḥud veha’emunah.16 The work is presented as a commentary to the Tanya, and its title refers to the second part of that book, Sha’ar hayiḥud veha’emunah. Yet it should not be lost on us that in the very same year Rabbi DovBer also published a work whose two parts were respectively titled Sha’ar ha’emunah and Sha’ar hayiḥud.17 Rabbi Aharon also wrote that his intention in writing his opus was “to open the gates of light,” sha’arei orah.18 This is precisely the title of another work by Rabbi DovBer that appeared in 1822.19 Though they don’t name one another, and for the most part don’t engage in explicit critique of each other’s publications, they were certainly not hiding the literary rivalry between them.
In a short but insightful biography of Rabbi Aharon, titled Seeker of Unity, Louis Jacobs argued that there were two primary points of disagreement between his protagonist and Rabbi DovBer. The first concerned their divergent attitudes to the experience of emotional ecstasy during contemplative prayer. Rabbi Aharon, following the model espoused by Rashaz in Tanya, idealized an open expression of heartfelt love and awe born through intellectual cognizance of G‑d’s greatness. Rabbi DovBer, more in line with the later sermons of Rashaz, idealized a self-effacing union with G‑d of such profundity that any subjective sense of a self in emotional relationship to G‑d would be lost. The second point of disagreement, according to Jacobs, concerned the role to be played by reason in the elucidation of kabbalistic ideas.20
To this I would add that an even more fundamental disagreement between these two masters is found in their respective responses to the following question: What elements of the kabbalistic system can even be subjected to the inquiry of the human mind?
In his introduction to Sha’arei hayiḥud veha’emunah, Rabbi Aharon argued that the cosmic rupture of ṣimṣum renders G‑d’s unmitigated infinitude fundamentally inaccessible. The faculties of human cognition and imagination, including the tool of parable, are only useful for attaining a perception of G‑d’s union within the four worlds that are emanated and created within the cosmic hollow left in the aftermath of ṣimṣum.21 In the introduction to Imrei binah, by contrast, Rabbi DovBer argues that even when contemplating the union of G‑d within aṣilut, the uppermost of cosmic worlds, the worshipper must constantly affirm and reaffirm that G‑d always remains an utterly primordial singularity, unruptured by ṣimṣum. Cognitive attention, he insists, must chiefly be dedicated to the overcoming of the false dualities and hierarchies that are the result of ṣimṣum, and which do not bear on the essential self of G‑d at all.22
Rabbi Aharon emphasized that even Moses could not perceive the nothingness of G‑d as it utterly transcends the somethingness of cosmic being.23 Rabbi DovBer, by contrast, emphasized the dissolution of the difference between nothingness and being through discovering the true being of primordial divinity.24
Undeniably, Rabbi Aharon and Rabbi DovBer held much in common, and it is easy to see why they would have been such inseparable friends, and later such well-matched rivals. Both of them wrote voluminously and expansively, and both are in constant search of unity and clarity. Rabbi Aharon is the more orderly and skillful writer, laying out his sources and his arguments piece by piece, and entertaining the reader with a prose that is as lucid as it is poetic. Yet at times his explanations feel too neat to address the philosophical complexity of the conceptual challenges he probes. Rabbi DovBer writes with greater mystical immediacy, never allowing the reader to escape the totalizing mystical embrace of G‑d’s unruptured singularity, even as his rushing river of thought washes away one explanatory avenue with an entirely new one. The effect on the reader can sometimes be discombobulating, and perhaps deliberately so. After all, he is explicitly using the formulae of rational articulation to collapse the binary terms that render such formulae legible.
In addition to contemplating the unthinkable essentiality of G‑d, Rabbi DovBer consistently taught that this unthinkable essentiality can ultimately be perceived even from within the created realms. And although he couches this in the futuristic terms of messianism, he is quite clear that such messianic enlightenment is within the grasp of the contemplative mystic in the present. He presents the Shema, recited twice daily, as a messianic incantation that leaps across the exilic rupture of ṣimṣum, raising composite oneness into singular effacement and disclosing singular nothingness in the lowly fragmentation of created being.25
Notably, Rabbi Aharon made a similar remark: “The entire purpose of the creation of the worlds is to make what is above and what is below equal. Meaning, just as in His blessed essence all the stations are equal, so shall there be equality in the revealed stations [of the cosmos],” such that “the potency of His blessed equanimity shall be disclosed” within them.26 Despite the obvious differences between them, these two masters ultimately seem to agree that the cosmic hierarchy, and likewise the rupture of ṣimṣum, only exists in order to be overcome, such that the somethingness of created being will reveal the true being of G‑d’s most essential nothingness.
The fifteen years following the passing of Rashaz were a period of tremendous literary and intellectual activity. The rivalry between his two foremost disciples spurred both to more deeply plumb the resources he left them, unpacking and elaborating the import of his teachings as fully as they possibly could. The result was nothing less than prolific. Chabad’s library was greatly enriched, not only in terms of the number of volumes it contained, but also in the sense that Rabbi Aharon and Rabbi DovBer each developed his own distinctive language of being and nothingness, of wonder, equanimity, effacement, ecstasy, and devotion. Retrospectively, the great clash between them yields a harmonious symphony rather than a cacophony, testifying that their shared loyalty to Rashaz endured. Through their debate, they both unveiled the radical sophistication and blinding luminosity of Chabad’s mystical revolution.
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