Redemption, love, and hope can be deeply intertwined. One Friday night in February of 1992, I witnessed and felt all three attempting to spring eternal, as Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson knew his time was coming.
The question of whether that time would precede the arrival of the Messiah or synchronize with it hovered over every Lubavitcher in the world that Sabbath eve. In the large synagogue at their headquarters, known by its address alone as “770,” I was led to the eastern front of the vast, packed hall and told to wait at the ark, where the handwritten Torah scrolls are held.
Lubavitchers were used to waiting and waiting, anticipating and anticipating, hoping and praying. They wanted the Messiah – the final Redemption of the world – now, before the unspeakable – their leader’s death. And they meant it with every fiber of their being.
I waited as well, though perhaps with imperfect faith.
Only now, three decades since the Jewish people lost one of its greatest leaders, is the purpose of my anticipation on that fateful Sabbath night starting to reveal itself.
It was an intense, energetic scene at 770 – normal for Lubavitch but with an added dose of on-the-edge-of-Redemption spirit.
A sea of black hats bobbed up and down, back and forth. Rows of bright fluorescent lights above the gymnasium-size prayer hall illuminated open prayer books held inches from thousands of pale male faces. Unsynchronized lips mumbled the Hebrew of the prayer service. On a raised platform to the right of the ark where I waited, a lectern stood next to an elegant wooden chair, its seat and back cushions covered in royal red velvet. Empty.
Boys with black velvet skullcaps and buzz haircuts elbowed each other below the platform with anxious whispers. The children’s movements became frenzied, nearly uncontrollable. “The Moshiach will come any time now,” Shmulik, a nine-year-old, told me. His black head covering proclaimed in colorful letters: “We Want the Messiah Now!”
A melody spread like wildfire, engulfing the gathered, uniting their lips, magnetizing their hands. The black and white sea parted – a miracle, given how packed the room was – creating an open pathway to the ark, to the waiting children.
Emerging from the back of the room, a figure enters to the beat of the raging Hasidic melody. Necks strain and eyes peer from each side, seeking contact with their leader’s darting blue eyes.
As he approaches the children at the platform, his frail left hand slices the air with an invisible baton that orchestrates the intensifying song. The children instantly respond with even louder voices.
The Oracle walks right by me, touches the right side of the velvet curtain covering the ark, slowly climbs five stairs, and opens a large prayer book on the stand in front of his velvet-covered throne. The singing suddenly ends; the bobbing black hats resume their prayers.
“He’s arrived,” says a smiling Shmulik.
Deep into the service, however, the telling moment came and left in a flash. I saw what I saw, and it left me with an ominous feeling. I couldn’t say anything to my gracious hosts. They had stationed me close to Rabbi Schneerson so that I might sympathetically translate the state of the movement to the wider Jewish world, which was aghast at its surging Messianism and its calls for Rabbi Schneerson to be revealed as the Messiah.
With a grant from the Religion News Service, I was dispatched by Moment magazine, an independent Jewish publication, to report on what would turn out to be Rabbi Schneerson’s final active days.
The community had more than four decades to prepare for the impending new era. When Rabbi Schneerson was chosen to lead the Lubavitch movement in the aftermath of the Holocaust, that generation already knew that he would likely be the last of the dynasty. He and his wife, Chaya Mushka, were childless. And he was the seventh Lubavitch leader, or rebbe – a perfect mystical bookend to a distinguished line that began with Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi in the late 18th century.
Yet, it seemed, the community was caught unprepared. As I was reporting, a split was emerging. In broad strokes, the generation who grew up in Crown Heights, who knew Rabbi Schneerson personally, who strategically built up the movement with him and were with him when he suffered a heart attack in 1977, was the moderate wing. For them, he was their extraordinary leader, the best candidate in their generation to be the Messiah – but he was also human. The Lubavitch disciples in Israel, known in Hebrew as the Chabadnikim – for whom Schneerson’s larger-than-life aura was amplified by distance – often were more vigilant and outspoken in their Messianism.
Redemption can mean many things: a world of peace, health, and freedom from jealousy or financial distress. But in that moment, in the heart of Brooklyn, redemption meant that the laws of nature, of life and death, would need to be suspended so that Rabbi Schneerson would lead the Lubavitchers forever.
It was a symbiotic dynamic: To bring the final redemption, everyone had to increase their Jewish observance, and Rabbi Schneerson’s disciples were not only doing so themselves. They were simultaneously reaching out to secular Jews, encouraging them to study Torah and perform mitzvahs in anticipation of the End of Days. The increased activity around the world only gave energy to their leader, who stood for five hours that weekend of my visit, doling out advice, blessings, and handing out dollars to be given to charity.
On that Sunday afternoon, as he was handing me a dollar, I would end up posing the very last question for Rabbi Schneerson to answer before a massive stroke silenced him forever.
Proximity to Rabbi Schneerson could be spiritually intoxicating – everyone in Crown Heights seemed to be enchanted. And for good reason. Rabbi Schneerson did have a different energy about him.
He did relate to each person he met as Moses related to the lamb that led him to the burning bush. His gaze was piercing. His wisdom was both accessible and deep.
So when I arrived in Crown Heights at the height of the frenzy, my deep personal hope was that the Rebbe was indeed the Messiah – the traditional and historical redeemer of the Jewish people from thousands of years of exile.
I hoped it not because I had any enthusiasm for the idea of a Messiah-deliverer over the theology of working as a community toward a Messianic age, but because Rabbi Schneerson just had to be the Messiah, or at least usher him in. Otherwise, an entire community of fellow Jews – raised as if they were his children – would be orphaned and devastated. The zeal was intense because the love was intense. Lubavitch couldn’t imagine their community without their beloved Moses.
Rabbi Schneerson, by then known simply as “the Rebbe,” like the six rebbes before him, taught that on Shabbat a Jew is blessed with and elevated by a second soul. But I don’t know what he would say if one of those souls would suddenly fly off early.
Yes, I was embedded that weekend in 770 ostensibly to decode the Rebbe’s story for the Jewish world. But perhaps the real reason was that I was served with a mission: to cushion the heavy blow coming to his followers. By the evening Sabbath prayers, I understood this.
Later, as the line for dollars dwindled, the cascade of personal blessings and direct gazes for the faithful coming to a close, I was encouraged to write a note and drop it into a brown paper lunch-size bag with the several dozen other supplications already there. Sheepishly, self-conscious that my wish was not related to health or happiness, world peace or my family, I requested just that I be spiritually worthy and do honor to the story that was unfolding and coming to a climax before me.
After dropping the note in the bag, I was encouraged to get behind the few people remaining in line – four hours and fifty-eight minutes after the Rebbe first stood at the lectern – to ask the final question. Grasping a small recorder in my hand, I asked: Why do we deserve redemption?
Clearly, it had been a long day. He told me it was a year of wonders, as expressed in the Hebrew acronym of that Jewish year, which had been interpreted by his Hasidim to mean: This year will be wondrous in everything. I believe Rabbi Schneerson hoped for global miracles – the redemption – so that he could extend the time he could be with his disciples and with them change the world; his followers anticipated the wondrous event that would keep him with them – his revelation as the redeemer.
The Rebbe’s time was limited
The next day, March 2, Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, one of Rabbi Schneerson’s aides, pulled up to 770 in his gray Cadillac, and Rabbi Schneerson delicately entered the passenger seat. A New York City police cruiser escorted them to the Old Montefiore Cemetery. The car stopped outside the grave of his father-in-law, and Rabbi Schneerson slowly swung his legs onto the ground, rocked gently three times, then stood up with little effort. Inside, he communed with the soul of the previous Lubavitch rebbe, leaning on a chest-high stand upholstered in red velvet. On it was the paper bag filled with dreams – the petitions he constantly received. He read them and prayed that the aspirations of others reach the Heavens.
Several hours later, the aide went to check on him. “He was barely able to hold himself up,” he later told me. “I saw in his eyes that something was deeply wrong. I went over and held him up by putting my arms around him.” An ambulance was called, but the Rebbe insisted on going back to 770, not to the hospital. Like Americans who can recall where they were when they heard that president Kennedy was shot, or Israelis who vividly remember prime minister Rabin’s assassination, Lubavitchers to this day can recall where they were when they heard that something was wrong with their rebbe.
The illness was first reported as minor, but the truth was that he had suffered a serious stroke, paralyzing his right side and leaving him unable to speak. Worry became panic as workers hurriedly erected a covered walkway at 770 so Rabbi Schneerson could be carried in without anyone seeing him seriously ill. For six months, the Rebbe was not seen in public. But physical absence makes the spiritual heart grow fonder.
The leader’s ill health accelerated the Messianic fervor in the community. “The fact that the Rebbe cannot speak is a sign that redemption is near,” Rabbi Dovid Nachshon told me when I returned to the community to continue my report. Children especially were convinced. “Moses was not able to speak,” said Beryle, an 11-year-old. “But that didn’t stop him from being Israel’s redeemer. Just like the Rebbe.”
Back at the offices of Moment magazine, we debated the title. The editor, Hershel Shanks, recommended “When the Rebbe Dies.” He always had a good eye for well-meaning controversy, but by then I knew that I was writing it as much for the Lubavitchers as for the wider Jewish and religious world. In the end, the cover story carried the respectful but still painful headline: “What Happens If the Rebbe Dies?” Mr. Shanks agreed to send everyone in Crown Heights a free issue, ostensibly to advance subscriptions. But we all silently felt it was in service to our brothers and sisters, to ease the inevitable.
Ever since that Sabbath evening’s prayers, I knew the Rebbe’s time was limited. For at the high point of the service during the standing prayers, after the Jewish Patriarchs are mentioned – in just a split-second – a dark blur whisked out of the Rebbe’s body, whooshed over thousands of heads, and exited through the doorway in the back of the room.
I have wondered for over three decades if anyone else saw it. But even if they had, they would not have believed it. They awaited the Messiah, though he never did come the way they wanted.
But perhaps the fact that we are still talking about Rabbi Schneerson – at times even slipping into present tense – is a sign that the Messianic idea is, at least in some sense, here. Chabad has more than doubled worldwide without the leader’s physical presence. That can only be called wondrous.■
Winner of 14 Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism, Yosef Israel Abramowitz was a senior editor at Moment magazine and received the Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education.
He currently serves as a co-founder of Gigawatt Impact, a new NGO promoting climate development in Africa, as well as CEO of Gigawatt Global, an impact investment platform. This article (slightly edited) is excerpted with permission from The Oracle: Portraits of Rebbe Mendel Schneerson (forthcoming from Redux Pictures), which includes photos by Marc Asnin and fifty essays on the life, and afterlife, of Schneerson.