On a Tuesday night in February, 1992, the Rebbe stood for several hours at the front of the main synagogue at Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters. Men, women and children waited in line, and the Rebbe personally handed a newly printed discourse (“Ve'atah Tetzaveh”) to each of them, one by one. Though written in terse Hebrew and framed as a detailed commentary to a discourse by his predecessor, this is a discourse whose relevance cannot be overstated. This would be the very last discourse that the Rebbe edited and distributed before his passing, and it addresses questions that seem all the more urgent today: 1) What is the relationship between leadership and empowerment? 2) How can faith be reconciled with rationalism? 3) What does emancipation mean for Judaism and Jewish identity? 4) How can we, as individuals, bring about universal redemption?
The pressing relevance of these questions makes it all the more important that we try to extract the central insights of this discourse, distilling and elaborating them to make them as accessible as possible. At the end of each of these teachings, I have cited the section(s) in the original Hebrew discourse from which it is extracted. [For the Hebrew text, along with English translations, commentaries and video classes, please click here.]
1) True Leadership Depends on the Empowerment of Individuals
The role of a Jewish leader, a rebbe, is to nourish your faith and the faith of the entire nation, to reveal the essential soul within each individual, and thereby to bind us all as one. A rebbe draws forth divine knowledge and inspiration from above, thereby illuminating the essential soul within.
But the success of your leader’s mission crucially depends on your personal effort. Only you can open yourself and internalize the transcendent illumination gifted to you by your rebbe. Only you, through your own personal effort, can transform your inner world, making all your human faculties transparent to the essence of your soul.
A successful leader, in other words, is one who empowers each individual to take personal responsibility for their personal role in the collective mission. Such success means that even when the leader is no longer present, his constituents will perpetuate his leadership independently. By internalizing your rebbe’s mission, by laying personal claim to your essential soul, you stamp his visionary leadership with the seal of truth and eternal success. (Sections 11 and 12.)
2) Only Essential Faith Can Be Intelligently Internalized
We normally suppose that faith belongs to the realm of transcendence, to the realm of the superrational. This is analogous to the semi-prophetic state described by the Talmud, “though they did not see, their transcendent soul saw.” (Megillah, 3a)
Essential faith, however, does not depend on a transcendent vision beyond the self but stems from the subjective essence of the self. At the very core of your own self you are essentially bound up with G‑d, and it is this essential soul bond that is the basis of a faith that is subconsciously synonymous with your own identity. All the faculties of your soul, including your capacity for cognition and critical thought, are windows via which your essential soul makes itself manifest. Accordingly, essential faith does not intrude on your rational mind from beyond but arises from the subconscious realm within.
Essential faith, in other words, is integral to every aspect of your soul—including the soul as it is vested within the rational mind, within the body, within the world as we inhabit it and experience it. Even the rational mind is ultimately a lens through which your essential soul-faith can be refracted and intelligently internalized. (Section 5.)
3) Emancipation Provides the Ultimate Religious Opportunity
In earlier periods of Jewish history, persecution and the threat of martyrdom called forth a superrational commitment to the perpetuation of Jewish life, even if it meant paying the ultimate price. But today we face a spiritual challenge that is even more difficult, precisely because you no longer need to choose between your commitment to G‑d and your instinct for self-preservation.
The persecutions of the past acted as an external catalyst, awakening a powerful reaction, a powerful embrace of Jewish identity and practice. But without such negative impetus, your commitment to G‑d must be summoned from within your innermost self, from the essence of your soul, which is rooted in the essence of G‑d.
This provides the ultimate religious challenge and the ultimate religious opportunity: Under these conditions your Judaism is not imposed from without but must radiate from within. It must be immanent rather than transcendent, illuminating every facet of your soul and your life, intellectually and emotionally to the point that they are entirely transparent to the essence. (Section 10.)
4) Personal Completion Depends on Universal Redemption
Even when you attain physical and spiritual abundance, the ultimate desire of the soul is to experience the full manifestation of G‑d’s essence. So long as that desire goes unrealized, so long as divine revelation remains circumscribed, the soul is crushed under the weighty darkness of exile.
Divine revelation may illuminate your life, and you may rightly believe that you have achieved a lofty spiritual station. But you must recognize that your personal emancipation remains incomplete so long as it doesn’t transform the lives of all the other individuals in the world.
If the infinitude of G‑d would be manifest without any constraint for any one individual, it could not be constrained to the experience of that individual alone. It would necessarily be manifest universally. The fact that even one marginalized corner of the world remains unilluminated is conclusive evidence that your own lofty attainments remain fundamentally deficient.
That recognition should crush you and awaken within you the essential longing of the soul, which derives from its essential bond with G‑d. The awakening of this longing unveils the essence as it is integrated with every fiber of your being. Thereby it catalyzes the messianic redemption, the onset of an epoch when even the lowest realm will radiate the eternal light of G‑d. (Sections 9, 11 and 12.)
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