Eli Rubin’s Book on Chabad, Modernity, and Rupture

Eli Rubin. Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism. Stanford University Press, 2025. 446pp. $70.

Writing a book review is reminiscent of high school, an enduring trauma to which I have no desire to return. Instead, I’ll just write a perspective I’ve gained by reading Eli Rubin’s latest book.

Rubin weaves Chabad metaphysics and significant events so they illuminate one another, taking us through the forks in the roads to better understand the path that forged forward. In each case, the vision of Chabad unfolds and reveals more of its true meaning. It’s an approach that presents a major leap forward in the study of Chabad history and philosophy.

As he insists in his preamble—and this is indeed the hallmark of his book—the philosophy of a movement and its history are essentially entangled. It’s foolish to imagine you could understand a movement’s history without an intimate understanding of its philosophy. But on the other hand, if you are unaware of the historical context of a philosophy, how it emerged, how it was applied, its success, its failures, you can’t be said to understand that philosophy at all. Because ideas only have meaning as they play out in the real world.

Chabad thought, Rubin insists, is about rupture. Rupture, we are told, is the keyword of modernity. Not the rupture itself. Not the acceptance of rupture, either. Modernity is the awareness that there is a rupture that must be addressed.

In Rubin’s narrative, the Lurianic description of tzimtzum represents that rupture. The history of Chabad is a history of confrontation with that tzimtzum head-on, embracing it, struggling with it, and healing it.

What Is Modernity?

What is that rupture? We need to know, because if Rubin is correct (and I think he is), we cannot have a proper understanding of Chabad without some knowledge of the great shift in thought that was occurring in Europe, a shift that distinguishes modernity from all that came before it. As it turns out, that shift was far more related to Jewish, and in particular, kabbalistic thought, than most imagine.

Rubin points to René Descartes with his mind-body duality. However, to lay a seismic shift in the destiny of civilization on the shoulders of one bright and gleeful Frenchman who spent much time lying in bed staring at the fly on the wall and pondering how he could prove his own existence—I’m sure that’s not what Rubin means.

When Rubin’s book landed on my desk, I was in the middle of Jessica Riskin’s landmark work, “The Restless Clock—a history of the centuries-long argument over what makes things tick.” This was more than serendipity. I don’t think I could have grasped the import of Rubin’s thesis without Riskin at my side.

Riskin is a formidable scholar whose book has left its mark in the field of biology, cited in numerous papers since its publication in 2016. She brilliantly and skillfully tells the story of a civilization shaken by a great rupture that has left its wounds to this day.

The civilization was post-Reformation Europe. Having relegated the Great Designer/Primal Cause to a position outside His creation, intelligentsia were now stuck with a universe of divinely designed automata that have no spirit or agency of their own. Or perhaps they do. That was the debate.

The Protestant church of the time rathered that they don’t. G‑d, the reformers preached, has exclusive rights to life, spirit, and destiny. Allowing every living creature the autonomy to somehow own its own life ran against the theology of the time, certainly of Calvinist doctrine, but generally throughout Western Europe.

And so, the spirits within things were banished. Even the organs within churches were dismantled, as they represented just that notion—a spirit running through the pipes to create music and life.

The aristocracy also found the notion of distributed agency threatening. Better to keep it exclusively at the top of the hierarchy of things. Naturalists and philosophers, including Descartes, were wont to bow to their patrons and to curry favor of the church.

And it was enabling. If living organisms are messy things that make up their own minds with a spirit of their own, why bother studying them? How reliable could any predictions be? How can mathematics apply to deliberate, voluntary actions?

But if they are divine automatons, the craft of a Great Mind who has permitted us to peer into the mechanics and wondrous patterns of His work, then the naturalist is G‑d’s apprentice and the philosopher His PR man.

The wrench in the works was that those fuzzy creatures seemed so sensitive, even sentient, and, well…alive. Descartes had provided a special dispensation for humans who just had to have a soul, because, well, they do. Somehow the church was good with that. But others, notably Henry More, could not swallow the lifeless-machine pill.

The outlier of the time, and perhaps the most creative mind of the 17th century, was Gottfried Leibniz. On the one hand, Leibniz accepted that all of G‑d’s creatures are machines—wondrous machines made of smaller machines made of yet smaller machines, ad infinitum. And yet they are alive. Because machines are alive. They have to be, because everything is alive, not only humans, not only animals and vegetation, but even the fundamental elements.

Leibniz called the life force of all things vis viva (Latin for life force) and demonstrated that it never vanishes, but only transforms from one form to another. Vis viva eventually joined our vocabulary as “energy,” and Leibniz’ insight into its preservation became known as the conservation of energy—one of the most important principles of science. Where would we be if we couldn’t speak of “energy and matter?”

To us, today, energy is just another predictable element of the universe. To Leibniz, however, energy was a kind of god-likeness within each thing, so that each thing, even the clock, moved by its own agency in search of equilibrium.

Almost a century later, inspired by Leibniz, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck authored the discipline of biology. He defined it as the study of “vital mechanical striving.” Living organisms, according to Lamarck, strove autonomously towards perfection through their own will and agency. We can credit Lamarck for the notions of biological adaptation and evolution over time. Only that, for him, it was not by external natural selection, but rather by the purposeful striving of these organisms themselves.

Yet the dominant voices continued to overwhelm the protests of such Romantics and mavericks. As the steam engine powered Europe, the brute-matter machine idea dominated human thought, the Great Designer was eventually dropped from the picture, and we ended up with a flat, vacuous world. Progress and evolution proceed counter-entropically toward greater complexity without navigation. Lots of action, no actors. Great design, no designer. Stuff happens because stuff happened beforehand that made it happen.

As Riskin describes the determinist belief system elsewhere, it’s turtles all the way down, and anyone who believes otherwise is insane.

This is modernity. A rupture between spirit and matter, mind and body, Creator and created, then and now. An internally contradictory concept of reality, but convenient and enabling nonetheless. And into modernity stepped the Jewish mind.

Tzimtzum as Rupture

Although modernity began two centuries earlier, its landmark eruption was the French Revolution, which sent seismic waves throughout Europe in the final decade of the 18th century. It was during that decade that Rabbi Schneur Zalman was busy writing his classic work, the first part of which he called “The Book of the Beinoni.”

A beinoni is a person in the middle, not wicked, not saintly. The guy on the street. The wannabe tzadik, who just doesn’t have what it takes to make it all the way. Much like the bourgeoisie out to emulate aristocracy. A work directed towards the beinoni couldn’t be more in synch with the period of the French Revolution.

The second book of this work references the rupture of modernity directly. Neither Descartes, nor Leibniz, nor Spinoza receive any mention. Rather, a yet earlier articulation is at play here. Two decades before Descartes’ birth, in Tzfat, under the rule of the Ottomans, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria espoused the notion of tzimtzum.

Tzimtzum, as Rubin points out, was a radical break from the Neoplatonic cause-and-effect model of the cosmos that had dominated Western thought for almost 2,000 years. In that cosmology, there’s a continuity, clean and simple. It begins with a formless Primal Cause whose introspection spontaneously generates perfect forms that then mechanically set off a long chain of steady ontological descent, finally resulting in our coarse, imperfect world.

The implication is that whatever is, had to be. There is no intimacy between Creator and created, only a long chain of the inevitable. Forced to debate on such ground, Maimonides was hard put to argue that there was a first point of creation. If the world has to be, how could there have been a point when it was not?

Rabbi Luria now turned the tables. He made an assertion that is a radical break from that cosmology and a return to the Biblical tradition of a deliberate act of creation. Before the beginning, he taught, there was no space for a world. Divine infinite light filled all. Any creation, anything at all other than G‑d, was not just unnecessary. It was an absurdity.

And then there was a deliberate action. Not of creation, but of withdrawal. A tzimtzum. Within the infinite light, a vacuum came to be, entirely devoid of any light whatsoever. It is this void of absolute darkness that provides the background upon which the act of creation can proceed.

Into that void, a fine thread of light pierced the barrier from the infinite light beyond. Only now could a system of cause and effect begin, and even then entailing more mini-tzimtzumim and similar catastrophes, until this physical world was able to be.

At the very core of existence, then, is a rupture. A barrier of utter darkness stands between the divine infinite light and the created worlds. Between Creator and created.

Truth be told, as Rubin is quick to point out, the Lurianic world is full of life. Divine life, pervading everything. Did Luria or any of his disciples see in this narrative a sustained barrier between spirit and matter? Or was such a perspective entirely outside their frame of reference? I don’t know of anyone who settles this question, Rubin included.

What is clear is that when the Lurianic notion of tzimtzum landed on the other side of the Mediterranean, it was inducted wholesale into the raging debate.

Rupture Meets Rupture

And it got there fast. Luria’s ideas spread throughout Europe even before those of earlier Kabbalists. By the 1670s, they were being published in Latin, influencing many of the thinkers mentioned above—Leibniz in particular, which could well explain several of his most novel ideas.

Two interpretations of tzimtzum arose. At face value, it seemed to align with the vogue of the day, the notion of a Creator who stood outside His creation. But the very popular work, Shomer Emunim of Rabbi Yosef Irgas, published posthumously in 1736, made clear that this was certainly not what was intended. The tzimtzum, he explained, is only a demonstration of the Infinite’s capacity to contract His light and generate finite beings.

In other words, the entire import of tzimtzum is to say one thing: G‑d is not like the sun that must shine. He can choose to contract and limit His light, even to withdraw it altogether. Creation is an act of will, drawing and withdrawing the worlds as He chooses. The Creator withdraws and transcends, while at the same time He enters through a fine line of light that pervades all things.

And yet, one of the esteemed and highly significant kabbalists, one whose name appears among the three laudatory approbations to Shomer Emunim, later protested. “To say that it is not literal,” Immanuel Chai Ricci wrote, is to “decrease His exalted glory in saying that His self is found among us, even in places that don’t befit Him.”

In the final analysis, he concluded, “it is not as disrespectful to say that the King supervises a filthy thing through his window as it is disrespectful to say, heaven forfend, that the King Himself is therein.”

It came to me as a surprise that a similar-but-different debate occurred half a century earlier, not among Jewish-Italian scholars, but in England, between Sir Henry More and his protege, a fascinating woman named Anne Conway.

Sir Henry rejected the Lurianic notion of tzimtzum for much the same reason that he rejected Cartesian dualism—he felt it was a crass and corporeal notion of G‑d to say that “the worlds are not able to be where He is.” His student set him straight. She had a deeper understanding of the meaning of tzimtzum. It was not truly withdrawal, certainly not absence or “privation.” On the contrary, it was necessary for “communication.” In her own writings, she cites “the ancient hypothesis of the Hebrews,” as saying:

Since God was the most intense and infinite light of all things as well as the supreme good, He wished to create living beings with whom He could communicate. But they could in no way endure the very great intensity of His light… For the sake of his creatures (so that there might be a place for them) He diminished the highest degree of his intense light. Thus a place arose, like an empty circle, a space for worlds. This void was not privation or non-being but an actual place of diminished light...

Rupturing the Rupture

By the late 18th century, as Rabbi Schneur Zalman puts ink to paper, the rupture had taken on many faces—deism, pantheism, determinism, materialism, and more—and plenty of confusion. He addressed two sorts, both monotheistic.

One group denies that G‑d supervises the details of His creation. They don’t accept the accounts of miracles and prophecies in the Torah. That’s pretty much the deism of the time.

The other group accepts all of the above, but insists that G‑d supervises from beyond, and is not found within these worlds that He has created. That would include Rabbi Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, in good company with Rabbi Immanuel Chai Ricci, mentioned above.

For Rabbi Schneur Zalman, G‑d both transcends this world and pervades all things. Everything is alive with its own, unique spark of the divine. This is the world in Lurianic terms, faithful to the cosmology of the Baal Shem Tov, and to a simple reading of the Hebrew Bible and Midrash, as well. Those who require little boxes with sticky labels for every idea like to call this panentheism.

But here is the crunch: The rupture, too, is divine. The same thought that Irgas expressed, Rabbi Schneur Zalman grabs and runs with. Tzimtzum is the divine capacity for limitation. Tzimtzum means that G‑d is present not only in the light, but also in the shadows, the outlines, the boundaries of light.

If so, the same G‑d who transcends this finite, bounded world, cloaked within infinite light, also pervades it, within the very life, perceptions, emotions, and agency of every being. That very same assertion of being that marks both the material world and life within it, obfuscating the divine energy that sustains it, is itself a manifestation of the divine.

On the contrary, in a certain way, G‑d’s essence becomes more accessible through concealment. When infinite light dominated at the onset of creation, it overwhelmed and concealed this creative aspect of G‑d. That which was lost in the luminous emanations of the higher realms becomes available in the tightly-bounded, lowly and dark worlds.

This is where Chabad’s participation in modernity begins.

If G‑d can only be found outside of this world, then you should be an ascetic, spending your day removed from humanity, contemplating ideals. You’ll be closer to G‑d than the rest of us. Any involvement in material matters is a compromise, a necessary evil. If you are a Jew, you have a halachic obligation to participate in certain activities, so they can’t be entirely evil. But you’ll see no purpose in them. They are simply things that must get done.

And if you are not the ascetic type? Just avoid being bad. Don’t get sucked into it, keep to what halachah permits, and perhaps in the next world they will let you off the hook.

If, however, this world is the access-point of the divine essence, everything changes. Worldly engagement is crucial, purposeful, and deliberate. G‑d’s light is trapped within His creation, and it is up to us to uncover, untangle, and redeem it from there—not through escape, but by remaking this world so that it receives, rather than conceals, that light.

Is the World Real?

Along these tracks rides a recurring discussion in Rupture: Several scholars have insisted that Chabad is “acosmic.” Does Chabad deny that there is a world? That it is only an illusion?

There are indeed statements of Rabbi Schneur Zalman that can easily be read that way. For one:

The tzimtzum and concealment is only for the lower worlds, but in relation to the Holy One, blessed be He, everything before Him is considered as actually naught.

Rubin treats this reading of Chabad fairly and well-handedly, beginning in his chapter, “Does the World Exist?” His argument comes not only from a philological examination, nitpicking over the words, but an historical one as well. It becomes most compelling and fascinating when we arrive at a crossroads for Chabad, the inheritance of the leadership of Chabad in the mid-18th century, as modernity hit the Russian Empire at full force.

A railroad now connected the backwoods of Russia to the major European cities. Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers and journals carried politics and political ideologies into the shtetls of the Pale of the Settlement, along with news of science and technology. Some five million of the world’s eight million Jews lived under the Czar at the time, and the floodgates of the outside world were suddenly opened to them.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch, the third rebbe of Chabad, was by far the most dominant figure in Jewish life at this time. He purchased huge swaths of land in the Ukraine and settled Jews there. He dispatched rabbis, ritual slaughterers, teachers, community mentors, and fund-collectors to every place where there were Jews. At great personal risk, he directed an underground network to rescue Jewish children who had been abducted into the Russian army. The most difficult questions in halachah were sent to him by the leading rabbinic authorities of the day.

When the Czar wanted to control Jewish education in his empire, he knew he had to twist the arm of the Rabbi in Lubavitch—which he failed to achieve.

If you will bear my grumpiness for a moment here: What greater evidence do we need that Chabad is not an acosmic, escapist ideology? Yet Rubin makes scant mention of any of this. Certainly there isn’t room for everything in one volume. But the unarguable fact that Chabad was the most prominent, activist movement in the Jewish world at this crucial time is not something to brush over in an “existential history.”

Now, back to Rubin’s narrative:

“The story of Chabad in the second half of the nineteenth century,” writes Rubin, “opens with a tale of two brothers.” One, Rabbi Yehudah Leib of Kapust, is far older, conservative, and other-worldly, renowned for his passionate prayer and piety. The other is the youngest of seven, noted for “his humor, worldliness, and wealth.” While he is stringent on every detail of halachah and is immersed and fluent in Talmud and Kabbalah, he also speaks several languages and keeps abreast of current affairs in Europe, including scientific progress.

The younger son, Rabbi Shmuel of Lubavitch, has one maamar that he repeats a dozen times over his tenure. In it, he proves a startling fact: There is a world. “We are forced to declare,” he states, “that the appearance of the world as existing and something, is, in fact, reality.”

All that sustains this world is divine. The world has no existence outside of the divine. And yet it is real. How? Rubin explains cryptically that there are gradations of reality. It’s not binary. The ultimate reality is G‑d alone, but that does not render His creations false.

(At this point again, my preference would be for Rubin to spend less time on his academic interlocutors, perhaps relegating them to the endnotes, and more time clearly elucidating the philosophy he is discussing. It’s easy to sweep big ideas under a carpet of big words. But it’s perilous. When you misappropriate language used to describe belief systems quite foreign to the subject, the reader nods and says, “Oh yes, that’s just like…” happily reading on, oblivious to the violence he has inadvertently just committed.)

Rabbi Shmuel was by no means rewriting Chabad. He had strong support for all he taught in his great-grandfather’s writings and oral teachings. It was all a matter of emphasis. And indeed, the bulk of the elder chassidim embraced his path.

The book continues with discussions of the split between these two brothers, extending after both of their lifetimes. In the long run, the embrace of a real world, along with social and political activism within it—and along with an embrace of scientific and technological progress—won out over the more conservative elements.

The Seventh Generation

All this leads, of course, to the present moment. Chabad thrives today upon the living legacy of the seventh rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory. Rubin describes this era, as well, in terms of the tzimtzum/rupture. The key phrase for Rubin is “transformative synthesis.”

This is a Rebbe who attended the lectures of some of the most prominent scientists of the 20th century at the University of Berlin, including Erwin Schrodinger, John von Neumann, Walther Nernst, Hans Reichenbach, and Paul Hofmann. And then there was Paris and the Sorbonne.

Rubin points to the synthesis of that world into the voluminous Torah treatises of the seventh rebbe. The first published work of the Rebbe was his annotations to the Haggadah. It’s a work that carries the imprint of academic methodology and rigor throughout. As Rabbi Shlomo Y. Zevin pointed out upon reading it, it was “scientific.” And it was not the last of such works.

What of the content of those lectures? Also synthesized. The Rebbe embraced the bizarre world of quantum mechanics as “the most significant development in the history of science.” As he wrote to the Association of Orthodox Scientists, science was no longer at odds with the notion of miracles or divine supervision.

Did the Rebbe cite quantum mechanics in his maamarim or talks? Never explicitly. But it’s inescapably there, once you know what you are looking for. Rubin indeed cites several stark examples.

As the Rebbe remarked in a New York Times interview:

For me, Judaism, or halacha, or Torah encompasses all the universe, and it encompasses every new invention, every new theory, every new piece of knowledge or thought or action. Everything that happens... has a place in the Torah, and it must be interpreted, it must be explained, it must be evaluated from the point of view of Torah even if it happened for the first time in March of 1972.

Not as one swept off his feet and hurtled down the mighty river of modernity. Engagement, not acceptance. Modernity was not to be served, but redeemed. Materialism, the void of spirituality, the denial of entry for the divine, the sequestration of G‑d from His world—all this was an illness, the collateral damage of tzimtzum. Chabad is the prescription, the tikun of modernity, and therefore of the wound of rupture it carries.

This was “the seventh generation,” which the Rebbe marked from the outset as “the generation of Moshiach,” and that was certainly the theme.

And here again, those who lacked the context, or the interest in examining the context, saw an acosmic escapist. After all, in the secular materialism of post-WWII America, the rupture was no longer a rupture. What you saw was what you get, and anyone who might entertain the possibility of another reality could only be delusional.

When Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth rebbe of Chabad, arrived in America in 1940, he described the American exile as the dream of one who is deeply asleep. Yet the dream, he explained, allows access to the core essence of the human psyche, far beyond anything that can be accessed while awake.

The Rebbe repeated that teaching and explained further: There is a nighttime when you know it is night and you await the light of dawn. And then there is a nighttime when all you know is night. There is no dawn, the very concept has been obliterated by the thickness of this night. There is a thick darkness, but, with no point of reference, to you this darkness is light. You dream, but you believe the dream is reality. Anyone who would tell you otherwise is a fool.

So, too, anyone who will tell you of another reality about to dawn, must be a dreamer.

Yet, the Rebbe insisted, as the rupture is also divine, so is the darkness, its manifestation. And, as counterintuitive as it may seem to the uninitiated, it is through such a darkness that access is provided to the very core of the human soul, and to the ultimate objective of all reality. The darkness, as Rubin quotes from a key maamar of 1971, is the stage upon which the human being becomes the agent of transformation. It is out of this deep sleep that Moshiach is born.

In the youth of America, the Rebbe saw gold. When all other Jewish leaders jolted in repulsion to the Hippies of the sixties, the Rebbe saw “the melting of the iceberg.” In the gross materialism and overt affluence of the 80s, the Rebbe saw an expansiveness of mind that could be channeled into the building of a new world. As he told Rabbi Moshe Feller, his man in Minnesota, “You can’t tell American Jews to do anything. But you can teach them everything.”

In short, everything returns to the original teaching of the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, in his understanding of the tzimtzum: Superficially, yes, it is darkness. Look harder, and you will see it is actually a deeper sort of light. It is G‑d Himself, as Rubin puts it, awaiting the human being to redeem Him from His exile.

To Sum It Up

If you are perplexed by a global network of black hats and Ottoman-era kaftans who accost men on the street to engage in an ancient ritual involving Hebrew scrolls in leather boxes while simultaneously mastering the art of social media and SEO, believers in the imminent arrival of Moshiach as they invest in long-term projects to build institutions and edifices wherever Jews have been scattered—if it’s a philosophical-historical explanation you are seeking, you’ve found your book.

If you can excuse the heavy academic lingo, get past the quibbles with competing scholars, you will learn a huge amount from a brilliant upcoming luminary with a whole new insight into the past, present, and future of Judaism. And modernity.