I assumed that I would walk out of the Crown Heights subway stop into throngs of Lubavitcher Hassidim surrounded by cheap kosher restaurants, Jewish ritual shops and stores selling stacks of identical black hats. Instead what I found on Sunday evening was an empty sidewalk save for a few men chilling on the front stoop of an apartment and a woman carrying home her groceries.
They weren’t Jewish: this was the other side of Crown Heights.
The throngs came two blocks later, men speaking a mix of English, Hebrew and Yiddish and all wearing the same black hat and long, bushy beard. They were in town for Chabad-Lubavitch’s annual conference of shluchim, or emissaries of the movement from around the world. I kept my bearings by virtue only of my former Chabad campus rabbi, whom I was able to recognize because I’d seen him almost daily for four years and because–thank God–he wore a dark gray pinstripe suit instead of the standard black.
The shift between the black side of the neighborhood and the black-hat one startled me. Fifteen minutes earlier I’d felt conscious of my Jewish appearance in a world of Gentiles and now I was uneasy because I wore a kippah instead of a hat, my beard was trimmed and a red undershirt poked out of my white collar.
I knew I would find myself in such an island of hyper-Judaism and hyper-masculinity but I’d expected to emerge right into it from the transient world of the subway, not from another place with another community that, strangely, seemed more familiar to me. These men–thousands of them–had isolated themselves, creating their own world with its own norms, language and dress in the middle of New York.
Police officers surrounding the crowd enhanced this sense of a barricade. My rabbi pointed out men with guns and binoculars patrolling the roof. He noted that the extra measures came in the wake of the al-Quaeda attack in Mumbai about a year ago on the Chabad shluchim.
The first room we entered was a red-carpeted mega-foyer with a dozen pickup-prayer services going on and the nicest portable bathrooms I’d ever seen. We were out of the street and in the Lubavitchers’ cocoon of safety: the only non-Jews here were the wait staff.
My rabbi led me into an atrium that looked like a huge airplane hangar–complete with the towering arched roof–that had been converted into a banquet hall; in fact, he said, it was an armory for the US military that they cleared out for the conference: more of an aura of protection, it seemed.
If not for the ceiling, though, they could have fooled me: a fine carpeted floor hosted round-table seating for 3,800 on the first floor . Plasma TVs lined decorated walls and a stage stood in the front of the room under a huge picture of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the final Lubavitcher Rebbe who passed away fifteen years ago and who gained worldwide fame because he sent the shluchim all over the world. Now a portion of those shluchim believe him to be moshiach, the Jewish messiah, either still alive somehwere or about to resurrect from the dead.
My Rabbi reassured me that Chabad’s official policy stated that the Rebbe had passed away. There were no official references to the Rebbe’s messiah-ness but that didn’t stop anyone. Several speeches referred to the Rebbe in the present tense (one recalled his mesirus nefesh, or self-sacrifice, during the Mumbai tragedy last year) and the latest issue of Lubavitch International, the shluchim’s magazine, featured an excerpt from a 1985 talk of the Rebbe’s where the editor’s note would have been–though one of the night’s videos did show shots of his funeral.
To say that the Rebbe was the honored guest of the evening would be an understatement. Videos and speeches throughout the night narrated his career in America, his global network of shluchim and his immense influence on the Jewish community. One striking video featured children of shluchim from around the world, all of whom were born after the Rebbe’s death, singing in a unified chorus about how proud they were to serve the Rebbe and do his work.
I give no credence to the notion that Chabad is a cult–its followers read secular books and face little danger if they leave the fold–but such transgenerational loyalty to one central leader, and such willingness to exhort his teachings to every Jew around the world, has few parallels in accepted organized religion.
What most inspired me, in fact, was a video about the murdered Mumbai couple, which alternated between clips of the two speaking passionately about their mission and photos of their engaging secular Israelis through Shabbat dinner, laying teffilin and saying basic prayers. I know few people willing to pick up their lives and families and move anywhere in the world in order to reach out to any Jew they meet, and here I was in a room with thousands of them.
The second thing I noticed about the children’s film was that despite being stationed around the world, the children all looked and dressed similarly and had Eastern-European last names. The reason for this is clear: most Chabadniks come from one area of Russia. Now, however, they live in Argentina and Singapore, SUNY-Binghamton and UCLA. Wherever they are, the shluchim and their children are first and foremost Lubavitchers, wearing their black hats where people may wear saris or tanktops and preaching the words of the Rebbe in English, Hebrew and Spanish to students on campus and Israelis in South America.
As I left I walked through the doors back onto Eastern Parkway, where some other men sat talking on a doorstep and different woman waited for the bus. I had returned to my world, a world where I lived with people like me, where I woke up every day and did my work in an office where everyone dressed like me and spoke my language.
That is not the world of the Chabad shluchim, a world that is at once all about outreach and insularity. The local Chabad rabbi will sit and speak with any Jewish person he meets but his kids meet their best friends in an online Chabad school; he will welcome anyone into his house no matter their dress, but he never leaves without his hat and coat; and his mission bases itself on the idea that he can go to Japan or Italy and connect with Jews there–using the teachings of a rabbi who lived and died in Brooklyn fifteen years ago, who came from a sect that originated in an area of Russia smaller than Crown Heights itself.
We ignore these complexities, some of us choosing to call Chabad a cult as others buy into its brand. And Chabad says that its message is simple: love for every Jew. Nowhere does this manifest itself more than on campus, where beer, music and Torah provide an easy entry into Jewish life.
Beneath that simplicity, though, is a life of fragile tensions: the tension of living simultaneously in Bangalore and Crown Heights, of being a Mendel in a world of Marcos or Mings, of engaging the unfamiliar while staying true to the familiar.
Every Hassidic movement has a rebbe, and what anchored the Lubavitchers’ life of contradictions until 1994 was the protective presence of Rabbi Schneerson, a bulwark of stability in such an uncertain world.
But fifteen years ago that foundation too became unstable, and Chabadniks now speak of the Rebbe as though he is both dead and alive: dead in body but alive in spirit; dead in this world but alive in the next; dead at present but alive for the future.
The bulwark has fallen and the certainty is gone. And instead of a sustaining spiritual father, the shluchim must deal with yet another paradox.
