Book: Communicating the Infinite

Communicating the Infinite is Naftali Loewenthal's landmark study of the emergence of the Habad (Chabad) school of Hasidism. At the end of the eighteenth century the Hasidic movement faced an internal crisis: to what extent should the profound, esoteric teachings of the Baal Shem Tov and the Maggid of Mezritch, once reserved for a small elite, be transmitted to the wider Jewish world? It was at this point that the Habad school emerged, with a distinctive communication ethos that encouraged the transmission of these mystical teachings to the broad reaches of the Jewish world. Tracing the first generations of Habad under Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi and his son Rabbi Dov Ber, and examining the movement's early opponents, Loewenthal follows the unfolding dialectic between the urge to communicate the infinite and a powerful inner restraint. By stressing communication, the Habad school opened a path that was neither a retreat into elitism nor an abandonment of tradition. First published by the University of Chicago Press in 1990.