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2 Review Essay The Lubavitcher Rebbe and Education: A New Study Dr Shmuel Klatzkin ARYEH SOLOMON, Spiritual Education: The Educational Theory and Practice of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. New York: Herder and Herder press, 2020, 314 pages. Education was as essential to the lifework of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, as it has been to the Jewish tradition. Throughout his decades of leadership, his exhortations, directives, and words of support and encouragement about education appeared in books, letters, talks, and in the words of advice, counsel and blessing given in countless personal audiences. Aryeh Solomon, in this book representing decades of study and thought, makes the case that the Rebbe’s voluminous contributions on the topic of education form a coherent whole: a cogent philosophy of education that is original and comprehensive, and which addresses issues that are universal, beyond parochial boundaries. The problem confronting the author was that, unlike most who write systematically about education, what the Rebbe has had to say about education was not simply organized into a book dedicated to clearly and methodically setting his philosophy out. Instead, his educational teachings are widely scattered throughout his immense oeuvre. The default of modern scholars has been to assume that the lack of an organized and
3 summary presentation of a philosophy means that such a coherence does not exist. Instead, one must assume what is present is merely an unsystematic scattering of insights that do not cohere into anything larger and more rigorously assertive. Such a default position is after all the reigning consensus in modern circles about the totality of Jewish tradition. Spinoza asserted of the lynchpin of Judaism, the Torah, that it was “faulty, mutilated, tampered with, and inconsistent.” As modern academic thought has assimilated towards Spinoza’s position, the default assumption is that the whole of the Jewish tradition is a congeries that does not provide itself any principles coherent enough to unify its various constituents into a whole. For that purpose, the modern academic supplies principles from outside – historical criticism, literary source criticism, Marxist premises, gender analysis premises, etc. The scattered nature of the Rebbe’s pronouncements on education seem to be just another instance of the incoherence of the whole. What else would they expect of a proponent of a system which they believe to be lacking “mutilated, tampered with, and inconsistent?” Dr. Solomon does not begin with such a premise. To begin with such a premise would be to beg the question, in the formal sense of that phrase in classic logic – to establish a premise that already dictates an answer, assuring that there will be no rational exploration of the topic ostensibly being investigated. Rationally, Dr. Solomon lets the evidence do the talking, and by doing so, establishes a powerful case that the Rebbe had a whole and coherent educational philosophy. Already in Spinoza’s era, the shaking out of the medieval paradigms that had grounded the West were having their effects. In England, the poet John Donne wrote:
4 And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out, The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone… True, there is a beauty in the elegance of the grand physical conceptions of Newton and Kepler. Kepler praised G-d for their beauty, and Newton wrote at greater length in theology than in physics or math. Yet the sense that something was lost that had been in the world’s grasp grew and reasserted itself again and again. Another poet, William Butler Yeats, took up Donne’s theme with even greater power and now with a sense that something unmistakably horrific stalks in the chaos. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
5 It is certainly clear that the Rebbe saw that Chassidic thought revealed an inner unity among all aspects of Jewish tradition as well as revealing the inner unity of human consciousness, the collective consciousnesses of nations and of the world, as well as the unity of the divine itself. Preceding on such premises, it would be perfectly consistent to take advantage of this overarching coherence to freely address the great educational issues of the day without having to first prove a consistent underlying theory. That he left to others, and in Dr. Solomon’s work, we see his choice to do so justified. In the Rebbe’s thought, the data of Judaism, in all the debates of the Talmud, in the differing emphases and geniuses of the Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions, in its halachists and aggadists, in its rationalists and its mystics, all point to a unity so cosmic that it overcomes and integrates every duality and grounds all fragmentation in a an ever-renewing and ever more strongly actualized integral wholeness. This manifests as well in education in a practical way. Solomon notes that the Rebbe addresses directly “youth alienation and disenchantment, an over-preoccupation with materialism, and a questioning of the human being’s universal significance” in his educational directives. His writings are filled with a sense that it could not be otherwise, for were his philosophy to lack concrete expression, that would be a concession to duality and a surrender to incoherence. Solomon’s work is methodical and patient, with a slowly developing sense of the magisterial arising from his close and organized consideration of the vast corpus of the Rebbe’s work. This book is clearly the work of a mature scholar who has spent
6 much of a lifetime in disciplined study of the material he is writing on, and who sees the subject matter as having existential significance. As he wishes to establish the relevance of the Rebbe’s philosophy beyond the realm of the parochial, he subjects the Rebbe’s thought to analysis by the accepted canons of modern educational philosophy. This is a field with which Solomon is also thoroughly acquainted, and this is evident to the reader. This disciplined approach allows confidence to grow in the critical reader that this appreciation of the Rebbe’s educational philosophy does not depend on any sort of special pleading. Rather, awareness of the robustness and relevance of the Rebbe’s thinking on this topic grows inexorably as one proceeds through the book. Solomon traces how, in the Rebbe’s thought, the concept of unity flows from the core texts of Judaism, and that concept is all-embracing. Its first realization is in the person of the learner, who experiences this unity in the learning, for in the process of coming to know, the knower, the process of knowing, and thing coming to be known reveal themselves as one. This will be true no matter what the subject. But this would fall short of true unity if this learning remained abstract. There would be a deep, perhaps unbridgeable divide, between the abstract world of learning and the world of concrete experience which is the stuff of so much of our daily lives. True education should have as its aim the transformation of students into living exemplars of the force for unity that is the ever-present center of their studies. The core unity must bridge the many gaps between soul and mind, mind and emotion, emotion and action.
7 To achieve that, the student must freely accept discipline. This is the deepest level of personal existential commitment, programmatically lacking in the Rebbe’s estimation, from so much of contemporary education. A discipline imposed from without may have worked in ages past, but today requires that it be found from within. Although this involves deep soul-work, the Rebbe proposed a core method by which it could become a general program – the setting of a moment of silence in all schools so that students could meditate on the deepest questions of life and to realize within themselves why it makes sense and is good and pleasant to accept the empowering discipline that education must bring. Education in turn, since at its core is about revealing the principle of oneness, must be flexible enough to cultivate those areas where the student is best able to feel the attraction of the learning. From this foothold the learner may confidently process, since all learning is connected, and the learner will come with the self-discipline accepted consciously and delightedly. The embrace of education is universal; as Solomon puts it, “everything is educational.” There are as many moments of possibility as there are of life itself, in the Rebbe’s view. Thus, education is meant to reveal unity and interconnection in every aspect of life and accordingly, such an education becomes a matter of cosmic urgency. That urgency must be matched by a methodological discipline. Teachers of every sort must exemplify the process of exemplification and of all-inclusiveness. As Solomon writes,
8 R. Schneerson’s understanding of the responsibility for education leads to a methodology characterized by a sensitive, inclusive approach as well as a meticulous concern for detail and personal exemplification of ideals. These all culminate in an educator’s positive perspective of the individual learner, including those learners requiring special education. Dr. Solomon carefully sets out this coherent line of thought, tracing it back to first principles and what he calls meta-themes. He shares the Rebbe’s confidence that this philosophy invites scrutiny and rewards it, so he fairly and clearly traces the Rebbe’s thought from its mystical summit in the divine Unity in which the world is entirely included, and allows thereby comparison to other systems of education starting from different, even opposing premises. It is clear that this is a self-chosen discipline in which he delights, exemplifying in it the principles the Rebbe set down even as he transcends the limits imposed by less disciplined evaluation of the Rebbe’s thought, even among admirers of the Rebbe. His example is inspiring, and his work will reward anyone who values education. Shmuel Klatzkin serves as Senior Editor at Rohr Jewish Learning Institute and as a rabbi at Chabad of Greater Dayton. He received his PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University specializing in medieval Jewish philosophy.
