If you had asked young members of Chabad back in the 1980s what the principles of the Lubavitcher Rebbe were, you probably wouldn't have received the full and in-depth answer that every Chabad youth could give you today. While Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was still alive, it was impossible to make one's way through his hundreds of books and thousands of letters and arrive at a well-ordered belief system.
But since the Rebbe's death, research into his beliefs has progressed, both in Hassidic circles and in academia. Kabbalist literature says that after a righteous man dies, he is more active in the world than he was when he was alive, and perhaps this is one of the things the books were talking about.
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So what exactly is the belief system of the Lubavitcher Rebbe? Like all Hassidic leaders, he presented nothing new and yet renewed the world and everything in it. The ideas that guided him were Hassidic beliefs: that our world is the creation of the Lord, and therefore the world must be good. There is nothing to fear – the opposite. We must work with the world and as a part of it.
The same principle applies to people, who are also entire worlds unto themselves. A person does not have to ignore his mind and his feelings – the opposite, he should embrace them and use them to become a pious Jew. Of course, that holds true for the entire world.
If everything had already been said before he came along, what innovations did the Rebbe create? He created a totality, the transformation of this idea to actual reality. First of all, by establishing the movement of Chabad emissaries, but not that alone. By treating every person and his views as a goal, he expressed this idea exactly. His conversations with haredim whose beliefs he wanted to strengthen through Torah study and following the commandments, were very similar to the conversations that he held with secular people, whom he also sought to strengthen through Torah study and the commandments. He did not busy himself with sectarianism, but rather with trying to spread the Jewish message that we all must make an effort to equally internalize.
In his scholarly Torah work, he tried to find any and every part of our sacred literature that addresses this basic point. He spent many hours, for example, looking for a connection between the various positions of Jewish law on points that appear far removed from each other. His desire to find common denominators in the Torah as a whole was no mere intellectual game; it expressed his true belief that the Torah cannot be summed up in a collection of rulings, but rather by a single principle on which everything rests. He voiced the results of this intellectual-emotional research in dozens of speeches, each of which lasted for hours, and later published them in hundreds of books and exegeses.
Today, the Rebbe's face is known in every part of Israel. Some will connect to his warm embrace of every Jew, and some will be moved by the activity of his Chabad emissaries, and still, others will enjoy his teachings. There are very few of whom it can be said that they fulfilled their vision, yet 25 years on, it seems to me that it can be said that the Rebbe transformed thoughts into deeds. And that, at the end of the day, is what the Torah is all about.
