The Soul of the Worker – Jewish Currents
Likewise, contemporary Chabadniks are likely to associate socialism with their inherited memories of Soviet persecution. Thousands can recount stories of grandparents and great-grandparents who were shot or sent to the Gulags for practicing and perpetuating their Jewish way of life. Those who evaded arrest lived in fear, in hiding or on the run. Their refusal to work on Shabbos usually meant that they couldnt find official employment; often, they survived by laboring in home workshops and selling goods on the black market. The stories of this struggle, experienced not only by rabbis and kosher butchers, but also by laborers, homemakers, and artisansordinary men, women, and childrenare the threads from which the collective story of the Chabad community is woven. Take, for example, the story of Sarah Katsenelenbogen (known among Chabadniks as Mumme Sarah). Her husband was disappeared in 1937, and she was left alone with five young children. She insisted on raising them as religious Jews, refusing to send them to government schools. After World War II, she helped mastermind the mass escape of Chabadniks (including Plotkin and his surviving family members) into Poland. She never made it across the border herself, and she died in 1952 while incarcerated by the Ministry of State Security, which conducted surveillance and repressed political dissent. Today, more than a hundred of her direct descendants serve in Chabad institutions all over the world.
Given this background, it is understandable that contemporary Chabadniks often respond to any invocation of socialism with suspicion, or even fear. This reflex is part of a broader matrix of factors that skews political inclinations among Hasidic Jews to the right, so that when it comes to the ballot they tend to be more aligned with political elites than with working people whose interests might appear much closer to their own. Last years Pew study of American Jews showed that those who identify as Orthodox tend to have lower household incomes than those affiliated with other denominations, suggesting that contrary to the pervasive stereotypes, many are workers, modern incarnations of Moshe the carpenter.
As a member of the Chabad community myself, as well as an academic who studies the movements intellectual, social, and literary history, one of the reasons Kaddish Denied grabbed my attention is the way it centers a character whose very identity is a rejection of the false bifurcation between working people and religious Jews. Plotkins story, it seems, might help us cast off this antiquated binary.
CHABAD EMERGED AS A DISTINCT STREAM within the wider Hasidic movement at the end of the 18th century, under the leadership of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. His classical work of Hasidic thought, Tanya (1796), demystified Kabbalah and made contemplative mystical practices accessible, empowering readers to overcome spiritual and material anxieties through the joyful alignment of thought, speech, and action with divine wisdom and will. Over the course of the 19th century, Chabad (centered from 1813 in the village of Lubavitch) became the dominant Hasidic group in the region that now encompasses Belarus and stretches south into the eastern parts of Ukraine, north into Latvia, and east into Russia. Chabads heady mix of cerebrality and spirit, combined with a rich tradition of literary and melodic production, was seminal to the development of Eastern European Jewish culture. Modernist figures like the artist Marc Chagall and the playwright and folklorist S. Anskyfamed for his play The Dybbukboth emerged from the Chabad milieu.
In the first decades of the 20th century, Chabad-Lubavitch was led by Rabbi Shneur Zalmans great-great-grandson, Rabbi Shalom DovBer Schneersohn (Rashab). Advocating for the primacy of traditional Torah authority in institutional Jewish life, he successfully competed with the Jewish aristocracy, who sought the acculturation and reform of Russian Jewry, and who had previously dominated representation of the Jewish community to the tsarist government. Rashab celebrated the tsars 1917 abdication, comparing it to the fall of Pharaoh, and in subsequent elections for a new All-Russian Jewish Congress, he mobilized a united religious front that captured a significant share of the vote. By then, however, Octobers Bolshevik Revolution had ended Russias brief moment of emancipation and initiated a bloody civil war.
When Rashab died in the spring of 1920, the networks and institutions he had built had been all but decimated. In the wake of war, pogroms, famine, and disease, the Evsektsiiaaided by other agents of the new statewere beginning to systematically stifle traditional Jewish life. But the students of Rashabs rabbinical school had internalized his vision, and his son, the aforementioned Rayatz, rallied them to resist the Evsektsiias campaign of compulsory secularization.
Kaddish Denied is set in the 1930s and 40s, the darkest and most difficult period for Chabadniks who remained behind the Iron Curtain. Sholemke grows up in the shadow of his most vivid childhood memorythe night that uniformed men ransacked the dank apartment he shared with his parents (halfway underground, halfway a grave) and took his father away:
Do you see? Schneersohn!
They ordered Father to dress and to come with them. Father came over to my small bed, bent over, and kissed me; a powerful and final kiss. A few large tearswarm, hot, boiling like bloodtumbled from his deep black eyes onto my forehead. Then he gave my mother a fiery glance, his eyes now bloodshot. He kissed the mezuzah, opened the door and was swallowed up in the unending darkness of the night.
Sholemke remembers his father as an unhappy kaloshnik, a mender of old galoshes and rubber boots. But as he pieces together the mish-mash of impressions and incomplete images that survive this shattering event, he comes to understand that his father was actually a rabbi forced to abandon his position due to the more recent circumstances. The arrest and presumed murder of Sholemkes father draws on real events with which Plotkin was intimately familiar. On a single night in 1938, 12 of his closest friends and colleagues were arrested, tortured, and later shot. The location of their communal grave, in the Levashovo Wasteland near Leningrad, remained unmarked until 2014.
Amid the horror of this repression, the light in the darkness was chassidusChabadniks term for their rebbes teachings. Reflecting on his own experience as a teenager and a young adult, Sholemke explains how the rich and spirited conceptual forms of chassidus endowed him and his friends with a new life-meaning . . . a glorious inner world, fruitful and divine. The new world that it conjured within gave them the ideological conviction to meet all the difficult circumstances of life with courage, poise, and the capacity to endure.
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The Soul of the Worker - Jewish Currents