Chabad is Chochmah, Binah, and Da’as

I spent the last week with a group of people working to translate a text by the rebbe Rayatz, also known as the Frierdiker Rebbe or by his name Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn. Rayatz was the sixth leader in the Hasidic dynasty from Lubavitch, also known as Chabad. Today, Chabad is one of the most well-known Jewish groups of all time, due to the global outreach efforts made under the 7th and most recent rebbe who lead from New York in the latter half of the 20th century–but that is a story for another time.

We came together to compose a translation of one of the Rayatz’s sikhes, which is a genre of writing unique to Chabad literature. A sikhe is a talk delivered at a farbrengen, or a Hasidic gathering for drinking and celebration. It was delivered in Yiddish without a real program, just various tangents on whatever themes the rebbe was drawn to. It was meant to be conversational and informal. The most talented students of the rebbe would commit it to memory and transcribe it later on, or, in some cases, the rebbe himself would write it. Unlike the maamorim, which are a transcribed talk by the rebbe that is meant to be juridical and canonical, and which were delivered in Yiddish but written in Hebrew, the sikhe was always in Yiddish even once it was printed and dispersed.

The Rayatz did something novel by publishing his sikhes first as pamphlets, and then later as books, both of which were distributed widely from his new home in Warsaw–having fled Lubavitch, Ukraine during the Russian revolution. This was an attempt to reach a greater number of Jews, including those who had left the fold of Hasidism. For us it may be hard to imagine, but in Warsaw in 1933, there were liminal figures both inside the Hasidic community and out, and some Hasidic thought leaders had real intellectual engagement with philosophers and other secular intellectuals.

Hasidism is known as a Jewish philosophy that deals with the “inner world” of spirituality, or panimi. That is to say that it psychologizes cosmology, and uses Jewish mystical theories about the inner dynamics and workings of the Godhead to help us understand our own consciousness and vice versa. By refining one’s behavior, mental manifestations, and emotional traits, we can ultimately refine our soul and therefore sharpen our relationship to God—perhaps even transforming God himself.

Hasidism is deeply psychoanalytic insofar as it considers these opposing drives that long for expression. For example, the very term panimi meaning “inner” or “immanent” is associated with certain mental faculties such as sekhel, reason, which are considered immanent and limited within the human body. Panimi is the opposite of makkif, meaning “beyond” and “transcendental,” and makkif has its own associated mental faculties such as desire and pleasure. These are considered not to be “inner” because they rely upon external sources of stimulation.

The text we were translating was a sikhe delivered on Simchas Toyre (“Simchat Torah”). He speaks about the holiday only briefly to say that for us to enjoy dancing with the Torah, we must first ensure that the Torah is happy with us, and that the Torah delights in the dancing just as much as we do. We can earn the Torah’s consent by being devoted and studying year-round prior to the holiday. The rest of the text does not deal with the holiday directly, but a variety of seemingly unrelated themes. The throughline is less thematic than hermeneutic or interpretive, as for each topic, the rebbe identifies two poles of experience that are in tension with one another—two inner drives or faculties which wrestle in the soul and achieve expression through our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Someone in the group said that the discussion of Simchas Toyre was underwhelming to them, because it ended on such an un-Hasidic note. Is study really what the rebbe thinks his Hasidim should do? That sounds so Litvish! Hasidim like dancing, celebration, and deep feeling—studying books is Jewish no matter what, but for these Hasidim, why would study be the bottom line?

The rebbe leading our discussion replied by saying that Chabad is the most intellectual Hasidus. Its very name, Chabad, came as an insult by a writer who said that it was too concerned with the 3 upper sefirot: chochmah, binah, and da’as. These 3 untranslatable terms, sometimes rendered as wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, are all distinct cognitive faculties associated with the head rather than the heart or the lower regions of the body.

This last week in Princeton has been a priceless experience and an answer to many questions I have cultivated over the last several years of private, individual study of Hasidus—the kind of answer which really only gives me more questions. It was an extremely rare union—the first I have ever experienced—between devoted religious practitioners of Hasidus and academic scholars of Jewish studies. Study itself became a spiritual practice and a source of illumination in each of our souls, regardless of what our lives look like on the other side of the walls of the house of study.