The Double Afterlife of Mendel Schneerson

I just read The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson by Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman. There seem to be a lot of “life” in these titles, the original biography by Shimmy Deutsch described the Rebbe as “larger than life”. Both titles tap into the unrecognized idea that the Rebbe indeed lived a double afterlife. His first afterlife was in Brooklyn and his second afterlife is the lasting legend and the legacy. Mendel Schneerson had his real life of a human being prior to coming to America and this very humanity that irks people who internalized the Rebbe in his “official capacity”. From that perspective any actual detail about the Rebbe’s life as a human being is historically inaccurate. It’s a sacrilege like a Mohammad cartoon. If mythologically speaking he attended the Sorbonne in his role as the Rebbe, he certainly did so as Mendel Schneerson in Paris…*

Moreover when the idolized image is internalized as a part of an identity, any deviation from the iconic description is a personal attack (a note to the book’s detractors). The character known as the Rebbe is projected in both directions – into the future where he continues to live eternally and into the imaginary past where he is getting ready for his messianic role. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said that “we march backwards into the future”. There is the afterlife in Brooklyn and the literal afterlife of the Messianic redeemer “may he live forever and ever” after Brooklyn. To be sure the Ramash proved a willing participant in the mythology mongering. So naturally my interest was always in the years when the Rebbe was still a Russian refugee Mendel Schneerson, a human being so to speak. There are new details and the chronology in the book that complete this human picture at the backdrop of Dnepropetrovsk, Berlin and Paris – the “human period”.

Ohh so dear to the Rebbe himself contradictions (as I mentioned in my offbeat biography). For the Rebbe his marriage to the royal family was his life and death. It’s astounding that the entire time while a nomad in the European capitals Mendel Schneerson never held a job or produced any income (40 years of his “real life” plus 10 years in Brooklyn!). This in itself perhaps is not that unusual for the aristocratic culture but what is surprising is that Mendel Schneerson managed to pull this off while going explicitly against the wishes of his benefactor, the father-in-law. Still if not for the connection to this family, to the Rayatz, most likely that Mendel Schneerson would perish in Russia or Europe. But this very connection eventually stripped him of his own humanity, made him enter the “afterlife” while still in this world. This also true even for Mussiya Schneerson herself as she spent her years in Brooklyn entombed, buried alive in the self-imposed house confinement on the President St., surrounded by the very peasants she was so desperate to escape, lamenting as the book notes “her best years in Paris”. And the literal erasure when the famous Schneerson inbreeding infertility paid a tragic visit.

On a personal note I can say that I hate reading these books as I nearly slipped into an afterlife following the after-living example of the aforementioned subject. And precisely the books that colorfully describe how Mendel Schneerson was once a human being make his almost posthumous betrayals, virtually vivid. If the Rebbe was indeed a neshoma klloly, a general soul, it was in the sense that post Gulag and post Holocaust, the post-traumatic trajectory ushered the dark age of fundamentalism, negating the promise of the fledglings enlightenment and in the case of the Menachem Mendel Schneerson rejecting his own essence as he succumbed to the agitprop of the totalitarian group-think representing his own afterlife. Hence his messianic urgency when he recognized that his first afterlife wasn’t a life or a life worth living for himself or for others and cornered begged desperately and frantically for the redemption.

* The book notes that when Mendel Schneerson finally graduated from the ESTP in January 1938 (he was 36). He wasn’t able to find work as an engineer. His application for the permanent status in France was rejected on June 10, 1939 and he applied for Sorbonne possibly in hope of expending his student status. Although there is no record of him actually attending Sorbonne and soon thereafter the events of the war forced him out of the country. Germany attacked France on May 10, 1940. Paris fell in June, 1940. The Rebbe was granted a visa to USA on April 17, 1941 in Marseilles.

Illustration: Shutter Island State Hospital flickr/robdobi

Further reading:

• Sculpting the Legacy of Jacques Lipchitz and Mendel Schneerson
• Schneur on the Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson
• The Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson

Tagged as: books, chabad, gulag, history, holocaust, review