Rubin, Eleazer; (2022) Ṣimṣum in Habad Hasidism, 1796-1920: Thought, Literature, and History. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Integrating disciplinary methods from the fields of philosophy, philology, hermeneutics, and historiography, an analysis of Habad’s internal discourse on ṣimṣum illuminates broader questions concerning the movement’s intellectual, literary and historical trajectories. A critical review of existing scholarship first takes stock of the theological and cosmological significance of ṣimṣum in Midrash, Kabbalah and Hasidism, and in the polemics that shaped Hasidism’s new consciousness as a distinct movement. In the case of Habad, it is argued, this consciousness is partly constituted and perpetuated through intergenerational engagement with ṣimṣum to negotiate existential questions about being, meaning, and purpose—and also social questions of legitimacy, authority, and succession—through the 19th century and into the 20th century. Chapter one counters previous portrayals of early Habad doctrine as denuding ṣimṣum of ontological significance and reducing the physical world to “an illusion.” This is achieved through systematic, close and carefully contextualized readings of relevant texts from the writings and transcribed oral teachings of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady (“Rashaz”), followed by comparative discussion of the reception of his teachings by his direct disciples and successors, especially Rabbi DovBer Schneuri and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (“the Ṣemaḥ Ṣedek”). Chapter two focuses on the 19th century, scrutinizing debates regarding ṣimṣum’s mediation between infinite primordiality and finite materiality through the prism of the succession controversy of 1865-6. From the very outset, it is shown, Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn of Lubavitch (“Maharash”) set out to trenchantly replace the rhetoric of acosmism with a metaphysics of materiality that foregrounded the apotheosis of the physical. Chapter three focuses on his son, Rabbi Shalom DovBer Schneersohn (“Rashab”), who brought Habad into the twentieth-century and pioneered its activist program of resistance and response to secularizing trends. His sustained and far-reaching reinvestigation of ṣimṣum’s purpose cast the physical world as a site of doubt and rupture wherein an unprecedented and overabundant manifestation can be elicited from the very essence of G-d.

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