The Living Messiah of Brooklyn : Dealing with the theological postmortem legacy of the Chabad movement’s last Rebbe and final messianic redeemer.

Abstract:

The Chassidic Chabad movement is one of Judaism’s most successful and influential groups interms of missionary presence around the world and distributed missionary material online.Chabad’s final Rebbe is still regarded by his followers to be the long-awaited final redeemerand Messiah, despite his clinical death in 1994. The aim of this study is to describe how theChabad-followers, through the movement’s publications, maintain the belief in the Rebbe asthe Jewish Messiah, and the theological interpretive tools utilized in order to ‘survive’ as aunited movement. The study indicates that Chabad is still a united and radical messianicmovement, wherein, internal theological mechanisms interpret the Rebbe as corporally alivebut concealed by illusion, and will soon be revealed or imminently resurrected to complete theredemption of the world. The study also discusses the movement’s extreme right-wingedpolitical stance in regards to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, the movement’s Holocausttheology as means to further understand how the group ‘survived’ the cognitive dissonance thedeath of the Rebbe created and the theological similarities between Chabad and earlyChristianity.