Online

in association with the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies

and UCL Institute of Jewish Studies

Lecture by Eli Rubin based on his recent book, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity. a comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism through the Kabbalistic concept of ṣimṣum. The onset of modernity, Eli Rubin argues, was heralded by this startling idea: existence itself is predicated on a self-inflicted “rupture” in the infinite assertion of divinity. Centuries of theoretical disputations concerning ṣimṣum ultimately morphed into religious and social schism. These debates confronted the meaning of being and forged the animating ethos of Chabad, the most dynamic movement in modern Judaism. Innovatively integrating history, philosophy, and literature, this presentation shows how Kabbalistic ideas are crucially entangled in the experience of modernity and in the response to its ruptures.

Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org. His writing has appeared in The Jewish Review of Books, Jewish Currents, The Lehrhaus, AJS Review, Shofar, and In Geveb. He studied Chassidic literature and Jewish Law at the Rabbinical College of America, and received his PhD from the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London. He was a co-author of Social Vision: The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Transformative Paradigm for the World (Herder and Herder, 2019), and his most recent publication is Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2025).