Consciousness as Mystical Memory: A Proustian Reading of Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn’s Literary Worlds

“The soul sees, intellect imagines, and the heart relives.” [1]

Abstract: Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin’s reading of Proust, this essay takes up a less recognized poet of memory who similarly sought to capture a collective experience of cultural rupture in an artful combination of erudition, memory and storytelling; in a vision that begins and ends with the self, yet encompasses all of reality in its totality. I refer to Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880-1950), sixth in the dynastic line of Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, a modern Jewish social movement that first emerged in eighteenth century Eastern-Europe, but which is heir to the mystical tradition known as Kabbalah, reaching back through the medieval era to antiquity. For Rayatz, memory become literature is the key to longevous-life, to true life, to infinite sanctity. In associating memory with the messianic revitalization of the dead he casts memory as an instantiation of the eschaton, as the crowning achievement of being and meaning, as the ultimate consummation of consciousness.

Prologue: Memory as the Muse of Consciousness

“Memory,” wrote Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), “creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening from generation to generation. It is the Muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. In the first place among these is the one practiced by the storyteller. It starts the web which all stories together form in the end.” [2]

Elsewhere, Benjamin underscored the particular significance of memory in “the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism.” To industrialism we might add urbanization, bureaucratization, political authoritarianism, world-war, revolution, and displacement, processes of rupture that defined the timespan of Benjamin’s cut-short life, and which reverberate anew today. Citing Henri Bergson, Benjamin characterized “memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience.” Moreover, he continued, “experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data … only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience.” [3]

Memory, in short, is the muse that inspires the storyteller or poet to create, practice, and invoke the kind of epic literary experience that captures and perpetuates collective tradition or culture in an era of rupture and alienation. Memory is the muse of consciousness.

For Benjamin, the poet who put this to the test was Marcel Proust, who, he wrote, combined “the absorption of a mystic, the art of a prose writer, the verve of a satirist, [and] the erudition of a scholar … in an autobiographical work.” [4] Thereby, he attempted “to produce experience synthetically, as Bergson imagines it, under today’s conditions, for there is less and less hope that it will come into being naturally.” [5]

My concern here is not with Proust, but with a less recognized poet of memory who belonged to this same era and similarly sought to capture a collective experience of cultural rupture through the artful combination of penmanship, erudition, storytelling, and autobiography. I refer to Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880-1950), the sixth rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, who I will refer to by the acronym “Rayatz.” [6] Hasidism is a modern Jewish social movement that first emerged in eighteenth century Eastern-Europe, but which is heir to the mystical tradition known as Kabbalah, reaching back through the medieval era to antiquity. [7] Might a proustian reading of Rayatz give us a new way to think about the intertwined phenomena of memory, mysticism, and consciousness?

The rural shtetl of Lubavitch (just over the border from Belarus in today’s Russia), was Chabad’s ancestral seat for most of the nineteenth century and Rayatz’s home for the first thirty-five years of his life. During World War One, as German troops advanced into the Russian Pale of Settlement, the Schneersohn family left Lubavitch, never to return. [8] For the next thirty-five years, Rayatz would live in the urban environs of Rostov, Leningrad, Riga, Warsaw, and ultimately, Brooklyn, New York, where the Chabad movement remains centered today.

For Rayatz, this exile from Lubavitch marked the rupture that made memory so “decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience.” Occasioned by World War One, this rupture was rendered irreversible by the Russian Revolution, and compounded in 1920 by the death of Rayatz’s father and predecessor, Shalom DovBer Schneersohn (“Rashab,” b. 1860). [9] Rayatz would spend the next seven years leading a bold resistance to the Bolshevik campaign of compulsory secularization, but was ultimately compelled to leave the Soviet Union. After successfully reconstituting Chabad’s center in the short-lived Second Polish Republic, he survived the even more devastating rupture of the Holocaust and began new projects of memory and continuity in the United States. [10].

Rayatz’s “prolific” literary activities have been noted by the late Ada Rapoport-Albert, in the context of her searching and insightful analysis of Hasidism’s internal historiographies. [11]. In Rayatz’s writings she identified “a subtle, and not unconscious, blurring of generic categories” according to which the terms “‘memoirs’, ‘histories’, and ‘stories’ … are often used interchangeably.” [12] She also related his literary project to what Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi called the “sharp break in the continuity of Jewish living.” [13]

For Yerushalmi, importantly, this break is not the ground of memory as it was for Benjamin, but rather initiates “an ever-growing decay of Jewish group memory.” In the place of the “sacred-text,” the Torah—and its associated traditions of collective memory and experience—it is now “history” that “becomes the ultimate arbiter of Judaism.” [14] Following Yerushalmi’s lead, Rapoport-Albert emphasized the ideological motives and the nostalgic quality of Rayatz’s historiographical project. [15]

Benjamin provides an alternate prism, which brings the nature of memory itself back into focus. Rather than casting memory as a fungible genre that serves only as an accessory to Rayatz’s historiographical and institutional agendas, it centers memory as the decisive experiential muse, the very “start” of “the web which all stories together form in the end.” Without memory, consciousness is impossible. From this perspective, we can move the historiographical questions that have shaped scholarship on Rayatz to the periphery, and more expansively consider his oeuvre as literature, or better, as an exemplary manifestation of memory as mystical consciousness. In literature and in consciousness, as opposed to in historiography, the subjective and creative elements of memory, imagination, and storytelling are not liabilities but assets.

Benjamin’s discussions of Bergson and Proust, both scions of Jewish families, helps us locate Rayatz and his literary oeuvre within the larger cultural landscape of European modernism, and within the more particular landscape of modern Jewish literature, which has deep links to Hasidism. In addition to the likes of Agnon, Ansky, Buber, Bunin, Kafka, Peretz, and Zeitlin, we should especially mention Fishel Schneersohn, Zelda Schneersohn-Mishkovsky, Zalman Schneour, and Avraham Shlonsky—four early twentieth-century writers who were all associated with the extended Schneersohn clan. [16]

In a comment that recalls Bergson’s notion of la durée (duration), Rayatz remarked: “In the memories of a person, generally, and especially of one who has received a hasidic education, there is no forgotten-past (fargesener ovar); it is all a living longevous-present (arikhus-yomim’diker havah).” [17] For Rayatz, we will see, memory isn’t simply a matter of consciousness, but also of hasidic education and praxis. Memory is not only an experience, but an activity, a craft to be learned, an art form to be cultivated. Ultimately, indeed, memory is a medium of mystical consciousness that extends its illumination into the real world of the present and future.

I — Vos gedenkstu? Hasidic Tradition as the Pedagogic Praxis of Memory

On several occasions, Rayatz spoke of the way his father, Rashab, schooled him in the practice of memory, encouraging him to exercise his childish faculties of recollection and imagination. The earliest example of this, as far as I am aware, dates from 1934 and appears in a transcript of Rayatz’s remarks published in the authorized Likutei dibburim series:

When I was five years old … I was with my parents in Yalta (Crimea). While strolling in the mountains, I would play near my father. Often, my father would ask me what I remember of what I had seen when I was still very small. I would tell him about various things that I remembered, and he then spoke and explained what I had seen.

As a result of this, various things that I observed as a little one became engraved in my childish mind, and were of great use to me when I grew older.

Through this good practice of remembering what I had previously seen, in which my father coached me, the supremely holy portrait of my grandfather, the revered Rebbe Maharash, was engraved within me, as I had seen him when I was two years and three months old …

The benefit brought by imagination is a tangible one, which each person can know and feel in life itself. [18]

Already in this early iteration of this recollection, memory and imagination are linked not only to the hasidic past in a general kind of way, but specifically to the question of dynastic continuity and succession. Later iterations add more details about what Rayatz remembered concerning the appearance of his grandfather, Shmuel Schneersohn (“Maharash,” 1834-1882). [19] But the underlying point is already present here: Rayatz’s own memories are not merely a private affair, but a collective one, engraving the persona and authority of the earlier leader in the mind and persona of his grandson and successor.

This lends a particularly hasidic spin to Benjamin’s cogent observation that “memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening from generation to generation.” In this case, the “happening” is the phenomenon of Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism itself. To remember and reimagine the hasidic past, Rayatz exhorts his listeners and readers, is to instantiate the hasidic community in the present and to extend hasidic life into the future. Consciousness is the medium of continuity.

Towards the end of Rayatz’s life, he recollected his father’s pedagogic cultivation of his earliest memories with heightened frequency. The latest example, dating from the day after his seventieth birthday in the summer of 1950, lends even greater acuity to the association of memory with the continuity of Hasidism itself. The acuity is twofold: First, Rashab’s question: “What do you remember?” is ultimately attributed to Israel Baal Shem Tov, Hasidism’s founding figure. Second, going beyond Hasidism’s institutional dependency on intergenerational memory, memory also becomes intertwined with Hasidism as theophany, as a mystical revelation of G-d’s infinite sanctity within the world:

Our honored and holy Alter Rebbe [Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founding patriarch of Chabad Hasidism] received the phrase “what do you remember (vos gedenkstu)?” from [DovBer] the Maggid of Mezritch, who received it from his teacher, our master, the Baal Shem Tov.

This very phrase — vos gedenkstu — vitalized hasidim throughout their generations with life that revitalizes the dead. The revitalization of the dead (teḥiyat hameitim) is synonymous with longevous-life, true life. Death is rupture, and longevous-life is life without rupture, which is the meaning of true life; non-life is non-existent. This is more than life. In terms of spiritual labor this means not simply to be alive oneself, but to enliven another too.

The essential point here is that true life is sanctity, and sanctity is infinite. [20].

If memory is the key to longevous-life, to true life, and if true life is synonymous with infinite sanctity, then memory is the key to infinite sanctity. To associate memory with teḥiyat hameitim—the messianic revitalization of the dead—is to cast memory as an instantiation of the eschaton, as the crowning achievement of being and meaning, as the ultimate consummation of consciousness.

In the continuation of this talk, Rayatz describes the perpetuation of hasidic community and family life, marked with the label darkhei haḥasidim (the paths, or ways, of the hasidim), as manifesting “the essence of the soul.” [21] Torah study and devotional prayer are framed as the vessels—crucial, and yet auxiliary—through which this manifestation is received. Rayatz exhorts his listeners to commit themselves to devotional prayer with relentless zeal, but ultimately sets the domestic realm of darkhei haḥasidim on the most sacred pedestal:

Tear yourselves away from eating, tear yourselves away from sleeping, but not from the time that must be dedicated to the members of your household. You must speak with the members of your household, and coach them in the ways of Hasidism. [22]

At this point he begins to speak of his own induction into the ways of Hasidism, returning to the theme of memory with which the talk began:

My personal hasidic education, under the tutelage of my honored and holy father, began circa 1889. During that time, my honored and holy father customarily asked me, ‘vos gedenkstu?’ and would then explain to me the events that I recollected from the past.

This phrase: vos gedenkstu? Is a tradition received from my ancestor, the righteous Reb Baruch—the father of the Alter Rebbe—who was asked this question by the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov asked this question of all his disciples […] And, likewise, the Alter Rebbe asked the same of his disciples. After they answered this question, he would explain what they themselves didn’t understand.[23]

Notably, the Baal Shem Tov’s disciple, Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye (1710-1784), did record a teaching in the name of his master according to which “the [messianic] redemption comes from the faculty of memory,” and thus memory stands as a synonym for teḥiyat hameitim. [24] Rayatz’s knowledge of this teaching may well be reflected in his linkage of these themes, together with his attribution of the pedagogic cultivation of memory to the Baal Shem Tov. [25]

Even if this is the case, however, Rayatz is certainly not offering a straightforward repetition of the teaching recorded by Yaakov Yosef. What was previously a peripheral teaching about the redemptive quality of memory now becomes a defining element of the hasidic pedagogical tradition, and is indeed equated with the hasidic tradition itself. In Rayatz’s construction of the hasidic chain of transmission, Yaakov Yosef does not appear. Instead, the chain of pedagogical memory passes directly from the Baal Shem Tov to the father of Schneur Zalman of Liadi (“Rashaz,” d. 1813), and also to the teacher of Rashaz, DovBer of Mezritch.

Below, we will return to the figure of Reb Baruch, father of Rashaz. Though little historical information has been preserved about him, from the 1940s onward he would play an important role in Rayatz’s project of hasidic memory and consciousness cultivation. But we should first turn to earlier phases of Rayatz’s literary creativity, which are deeply intertwined with his memories of his grandmother, Rebbetzin Rivkah Schneersohn (1834-1914), and with the consciousness of earlier generations that she passed on to him.

II — Rebbetzin Rivkah Schneersohn and Storytelling as the First Variety of Epic Art

Rebbetzin Rivkah was born to Soreke, the youngest daughter of Chabad’s second rebbe, circa 1834. Apart from a few years during her childhood, she would spend her entire life in Lubavitch. In 1850 she married her first cousin, the youngest son of Chabad’s third rebbe. Sixteen years later, her husband, the aforementioned Maharash, inherited his father’s position. Following Maharash’s passing in 1882, she reigned as the dowager Lubavitcher rebbetzin until her own passing more than three decades later, in 1914.

Most of what we know about Rebbetzin Rivkah comes from the writings of her grandson, Rayatz, for whom she personified a rope of experience and memory tethering the present and future to the past, stretching back to the earliest generations of Chabad. As such, she figures prominently in his writings, especially in the role of storyteller. For Rayatz, we might say, she came to personify the muse of consciousness.

In the months following Rebbetzin Rivkah’s death, Rayatz sought to preserve her memory, and perhaps also to emulate her, through writing the story of her life. “There is no one upon this earth,” he explained, “who has before them such a treasury of stories and anecdotes about our family … as I do … as I heard them from her. There is much that she witnessed with her own eyes in the days of the leadership of her honored father-in-law [that is, Chabad’s third rebbe]; and that she heard from her honored mother-in-law, the daughter of the second rebbe; and from her honored grandmother, the wife of the second rebbe; and from the elders of our family who knew our great rebbe [that is, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad] … And behold, after her sun set, I said I will gather the requisite material, and erect upon its basis a beautiful building, an account of her history and all that happened to her …” [26]

The account of Rebbetzin Rivkah’s life that follows might best be characterized as an unfinished historical novella. Its riches-to-rags-to-riches plot is spliced with a romantic cliffhanger; an arranged marriage ends in tragedy but allows a childhood promise to be happily fulfilled.

While this early text remained in manuscript until the 21st century, Rebbetzin Rivkah figures in narrative texts published by Rayatz in the 1930s. In the fifth issue of the periodical Hatamim, published at the height of Chabad’s renaissance in interbellum Poland, Rayatz richly reminisced about the “causes that catalyzed the flowering of my love for stories.” The first of these causes takes the reader back to a wintery shabbat eve in Rayatz’s childhood:

My honored mother, the rebbetzin, was not home at the time, as she had traveled to Vitebsk. I entered the study of my holy father, the rebbe … He was sitting at the table, with several large and small volumes open before him, and his face was shining.

This scene aroused within me a fierce jealousy. I went over to the book cabinet, took out some books, and flipped through their pages. But I quickly tired of this activity. I closed the books and felt sad, letting out a deep sigh …

My holy father closed his books and told me to put on my coat. He too put on his winter shabbat coat, then lifted me in his arms, and carried me to the home of my honored grandmother, the righteous Rebbetzin Rivkah of blessed memory.

My honored grandmother, the Rebbetzin, read to me from a large volume — Tsenah urenah — and told me a very wonderful story … This story captured my heart, and from that time onward I would come to my honored grandmother’s home each week after the shabbat candles were lit, and she would read to me from her large volume, and tell me wonderful stories. [27]

This is a story about stories, and one of its functions is to provide precedent and justification for the telling of such stories within the context of Chabad’s literary tradition. Textualized words had always been the medium for the communication and perpetuation of Chabad’s mystical teachings. Before the 1930s, however, stories had not been included in the Chabad canon to any significant degree. [28] In Hatamim, accordingly, Rayatz was not only perpetuating Chabad’s literary tradition, but remaking it. Here, literary narratives, especially in the form of diaries and memoirs, were published alongside classic Chabad texts. The periodical also included sections devoted to scholarly essays and exchanges on complex topics of Talmudic law and Chabad philosophy. The inclusion of narrative literature created an equivalence according to which epicly conjuring the past becomes as important and serious a preoccupation as the study of Talmud and Chabad thought.

Ada Rapoport-Albert was certainly correct to note that Rayatz repeatedly highlights his indebtedness to his grandmother “without a hint of embarrassment.” Importantly, she added, this reflects “his equally novel project of integrating ‘the wives and daughters of the hasidim’ in his Habad constituency,” even encouraging “the initiation of women in the speculative teachings of Habad hasidism.” [29] But Rayatz apparently did not share Rapoport-Albert’s assumption that anchoring his historiography in so-called “old wives tales,” “would hardly have enhanced the questionable status of the genre.” [30]

In the case of Chabad’s mystical teachings, Rayatz was continuing the legacy of his father, Rashab. [31] But in the case of Chabad’s collective memory he was continuing the legacy of his grandmother, Rebbetzin Rivkah. Her image provided not only the inspiration, but also the dynastic precedent and authorization, for Rayatz’s highly experimental projects of literature and memory, or of mystical consciousness cultivation. Through writing and publishing about Chabad’s past, including stories told by her and about her, Rayatz included Rebbetzin Rivkah’s authorial voice and persona in Chabad’s canonical tradition. The result is a mutual elevation of status: Rebbetzin Rivkah is elevated to Chabad’s dynastic pantheon and the epic art of storytelling is elevated to Chabad’s literary canon. [32] But the most important result is the elevation of consciousness itself.

Rayatz’s recollections place storytelling at the very beginning of his educational experience, which is synonymous with the beginning of his memories, with the beginning of his conscious self. Before he can read the books that his father studies, his heart is “captured” by the “very wonderful” stories told by his grandmother. In this sense, storytelling is not simply an addendum to the more serious and formal tradition of Chabad’s mystical teachings, which have an epic literary quality of their own. Instead, storytelling is given “the first place,” from which all other “Muse-derived” elements and varieties find their start.

III — Epic Versification, Visceral Visualization, and Messianic Memory

In the 1930s, when the Hatamim journal was appearing, Rayatz also began publishing edited transcripts of talks that he delivered on celebratory occasions, under the title Likutei dibburim. These texts formed a genre unto themselves, characterized by the modernist mystic and essayist Hillel Zeitlin as the “synthesis of pure thought with epic visualization, and… inner reverence for ancestral legacy.” [33]

“With wonderful artistry,” Zeitlin wrote, Rayatz “wove his own inner life, and his unique lot in life, together with the events of the life of the ‘Alter Rebbe,’ together with the events of Hasidism generally, and especially with the events of Chabad. Before us, the Rebbe brings to life the entire splendor of Chabad’s past, with images, with stories, and with discussions. With rare naiveté he narrates, versifies, moves from a tale to a hasidic discussion, to a hasidic parable, to a hasidic aphorism, and again to a tale, and from narration to description and visualization, and from description and visualization to a Chabad teaching that demands subtle and deep study, and from that teaching, once again to light conversation. The words are heartfelt, always powerful and wonderful, entering into the innermost interiority of the soul.” [34]

Zeitlin’s description successfully captures the meandering style of Rayatz’s prose, wherein tangent builds upon tangent, before circling back to the original trajectory. The circle isn’t always completely closed, and a reader who isn’t lost is likely to find themselves rereading, striving to remember, striving to grasp the thread of consciousness.

Many scholars of literature have discussed the characteristics that earn a given literary artifact the application of the term “epic.” [35] To offer an oversimplified summation: An epic exceeds realism and encompasses vast swathes of collective history. For Zeitlin, Rayatz’s hasidic storytelling is raised to the category of the epic, not simply by dint of its quantitative and historical scope, nor only due to its role in the formation of community and identity, but—most importantly—by the way it saturates consciousness with cosmic significance:

The hasidic epic, and the versification of that epic, is aligned with lofty celestial phenomena, within which lie the mysteries of existence, of the chain of being (seder hahishtalshalut), and of what transcends that chain … The artisan of the hasidic tale must know all the hidden paths between one world and another, and the wondrous channels by which the listener or the reader is moved from one world to another … What was a realist-earthly actuality, a quarter of an hour earlier, now becomes a mere parable for the most subtle of spiritual investigations, and that spiritual investigation itself will shortly transform into a mere parable for an investigation whose subtlety is even more sublime. [36]

In Rayatz’s writings, according to Zeitlin, “every tiny detail, and even the slightest sketch, is in harmony with the spirit hovering over the entire visage of his encompassing song, and the encompassing song is in harmony with all of those tiny details and slight sketches.” [37]This harmony is not simply a matter of literary integrity, but of temporal and cosmic integrity, knitting together the spiritual and material worlds, the past, the present, and the future. All of these elements are enriched and heightened by the visual and imaginary quality of Rayatz’s prose.

At the very same time that Zeitlin’s essay was being serialized in the Warsaw press, Rayatz’s own epic reflection on the hasidic significance of visualization was being serialized in the pages of Likutei dibburim. This reflection extends through four instalments, presented as transcripts of talks delivered on the festivals of Passover and Shavuot, in the spring of 1934. Towards the beginning of this serialization Rayatz writes that “contemplation and visualization can set the individual in any time and place that he desires.” [38] It ends with a statement attributed to Rayatz’s father, Rashab: “Once one understands the concept … one lingers on delving reflectively on the concept, and gazes visually in one’s mind upon the concept, the way one gazes at a beautiful painting.” [39]

There is much richness that lies between these two quotations. The following discussion, however, is restricted to the third of the four installments mentioned, which is associated with the last day of Passover and turns the reader’s focus to the messianic future. Rayatz opens with a teaching of Rashaz: “The Messiah will come to return the righteous in repentance (teshuvah).” [40] Rayatz unpacks the paradox encoded in this pronouncement: The righteous (ṣadikim) are understood to remain in an intrinsic state of pious union with G-d, whose revelation flows through them into the world. Teshuvah, on the other hand, is usually understood as a process of “return” to G-d, as a path of penitence prescribed for sinners. So what does it mean for the righteous to repent or return to G-d’s embrace from whence they never separated? [41]

This question forms the springboard for the characterization of messianic revelation as flowing from the physical to the spiritual, from the somatic to the soulful, rather than the other way around. The messianic “return” of the ṣadikim ultimately comes to be understood as the reversal of the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, and of conventional concepts of religiosity and piety. As we will see, visceral visualization—the cultivation of a new form of mystical consciousness—emerges as the praxis by which this reversal is achieved. [42]

Rayatz links the messianic centering of the somatic to one of Chabad’s most important and far reaching theological principles, famously articulated by Rashaz in an epistle appended to Tanya, his magnum opus: The creation of something out of nothing (ex nihilo) is only within the capacity of the essence of the divine self. [43] This principle reveals a special link between physical matter, the most brutish instantiation of created “somethingness,” and G-d’s most essential being: Physical matter brazenly asserts itself as primordial, as being caused by nothing. This is an untruth, and yet it reflects the deep truth that the being of physical matter can be attributed to nothing; nothing other than primordial Being, the very essence of G-d.

“This particular statement,” Rayatz writes, “that the creation of physicality is from the Essence … is a cornerstone of the conceptual structure of the advantage of the physical over the spiritual, and it is this very advantage that will be revealed in the messianic era.” [44] This advantage, he explains, is realized when the starting point of theological apprehension shifts from the soul to the body, from cognition to vision:

When the Messiah comes, the physical body, on its own accord, will see the word of G-d that inheres in each thing. Apart from the fact that now we can only understand, rather than see, [additionally] it is the soul [rather than the body] that understands. But when the Messiah comes, speedily in our days, we will see, and it will be the body that will see … the soul will receive from the body. [45[

This is a reversal of the fundamental structure of consciousness: It will no longer begin from the mind, but from the body. After making this point, Rayatz continues with a depiction of how the disciples of Rashaz would have received his teaching about the unique connection between physical matter and the divine essence. Here too, visceral visualization is central:

It is clear to me, as if I were seeing it now before my own eyes, that when the Rebbe made these few heavenly soul words known … thousands of hasidic minds delved deeply into them; for hours long they were utterly abstracted from physicality. They scrambled up the ladders of profundity, they were soaked through with the ocean of wisdom, and were overcome by the current of feeling. [46]

A few lines later, in the closing section of the talk, Rayatz moves from the depiction of his own vision of this historical disclosure to an exhortation for his listeners and readers to similarly conjure such a vision in their own minds:

Knowing well the lifestyle of hasidim in those times, and possessing the art of visualization (a chush in tziyur), one who can imagine something, visually, in the mind’s eye, can attain an iota of understanding as to how hasidim grasped with tangible conceptual perception the advantage of the physical over the spiritual …

Visualizing each thing sets the thing in its right context. Just as when it comes to the concept itself, through depicting the matter in the faculty of intellection—and in one’s mind—the concept comes alive … Exactly so is the case concerning the visualization of the environment, the occasion and situation, how and when the concept was revealed. [47]

In addition to the traditional praxis of conceptual study and contemplation, Rayatz advocates a contemplative praxis that is orientated towards the imagined historical environment in which the concept was originally disclosed. It is hard to escape the implicit intimation that it is specifically such a praxis that opens the way for the sort of visceral visuality apprehended in the messianic “return” of the righteous to G-d’s embrace, which has been the central concern of this instalment of Likutei dibburim from its very first line. An imagined memory of the past is the passage by which the practitioner exceeds the present and consciously arrives in the messianic future.

IV — Memories, Visions, Dreams, and the Numinous Collapse of Time’s Rupture

Evidence of Rayatz’s personal praxis of contemplative memory and visualization is found in a 1933 letter he addressed to his son-in-law, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994):

There are felicitous times and occasions when I transport myself and place myself in that very environment where I found myself during the days of my youth. Meaning, I reminiscently ponder the faces of the people, and the general scene of the homes, of the arrangement of the household furniture, and the modes of lifestyle in that time. This reminds me also of the gestures of the people, and the movements of their lips. And sometimes this also brings me to recall what was said on that occasion. And sometimes, after much thought and visualization, over the course of several hours of the day, behold in a dream it appears as if I am in that festive-gathering, seeing and hearing. And how good is that hour, and how pleasurable for me to dream and see and hear what I saw and what I heard. [48]

What is described here is not a mere remembering of past experiences, but what Benjamin described as “the weaving of memory.” [49] Rayatz explicitly acknowledged the blurring of the boundary between memory and imagination: “There are many things that I recall,” he once said, “which I myself do not know whether I saw them myself or whether this is what I imagined for myself based on what I heard.” [50] In this letter, the explicit repetition of the word “dream” (ḥalom) implies that at a certain point the voluntary cultivation of memory gives way to something akin to Proust’s “involuntary recollection.”

As Benjamin wrote:

Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past. The rituals with their ceremonies, their festivals … triggered recollection at certain times and remained handles of memory for a lifetime. In this way, voluntary and involuntary recollection lose their mutual exclusiveness. [51]

In Rayatz’s sacralized context, such “involuntary recollection” is experienced as a form of numinous revelation in the present. Indeed, among Rayatz’s writings we occasionally find attestations to visionary experiences in which the rupture between the past and the present seems to completely collapse. In the following example the vision occurs during prayer, further emphasizing its mystical and numinous nature:

During the evening prayer of the first eve of Rosh Hashanah 1924, I saw my father the Rebbe, as if I were seeing him while he was in Lubavitch, wearing Shabbat clothing, and with his holy face radiant … [52]

Rayatz’s father, Rashab, who had passed away four years prior, and who is mentioned here with the honorifics reserved for a deceased saint, is described as addressing a short hasidic discourse to his son, glossing a liturgical formulation inserted into the Rosh Hashanah prayers. At the end of this attestation Rayatz confesses “I do not know how to explain this,” expressing wonder, together with appreciation and hope that he will again see his father “while awake” (behokitz) and receive from him both blessings and additional hasidic explanations (traditionally termed “words of the living G-d,” divrei elokim ḥayim).

In another attestation Rayatz recalls:

A vision that I saw in a nighttime dream, and I knew in the moment that it is a dream, and I set myself to remember the vision that I saw and to remember the talks in holy matters that I heard; the biblical verses, the exegetical interpretation of Talmudic aphorisms, and the three stories, and thank G-d I successfully recalled everything … I noted everything in shorthand, and when I return home I will write it all at length as I heard it … [53]

This example appears in a diaristic entry, dated to 1927. It is part of a larger text that I would characterize as an autobiographical novella, set in the leadup to Rayatz’s arrest by Soviet officials later that year. Memories and visions recounted both by Rayatz and by other characters play crucial roles in the novella’s construction. It is likely that these diaristic entries were not composed in realtime, but were creatively and memoristically reconstructed at a later date. [54]

Such trancelike visual experiences, lucid dreams, or visitations are reminiscent of similarphenomena and practices associated with the literature of the Zohar, with Modern Kabbalah, and with Hasidism in particular. [55] A few visionary attestations survive from predecessors of Rayatz in the Schneersohn line. [56] But Rayatz’s own case is distinguished by salient memoiristic and diaristic dimensions. In the above example, the revelatory dream occurs within an autobiographical story that is given the form of a diary, and he records his intention to write out stories told to him in that dream “at length.” [57] Memoiristic accounts are also shared by several characters who appear within the larger narrative. [58] In another diaristic composition, published in 1934, Rayatz similarly writes of an interlocutor recalling “standing and dreaming in memories of bygone days.” [59] In yet another, from the same period, we read a story about Rashab’s birth, in which a dream experienced by his mother, the aforementioned Rebbetzin Rivkah, plays an important role. [60]

Earlier, it was shown that Rayatz attached great importance to the capacity for imaginative visualization that he had been cultivating since childhood. By now, it is also clear that he actively engaged in a praxis of consciousness-altering memory that was strongly imaginative, and he attested to vivid dreams and visions in which he received stories about the past, as well as Hasidic teachings. By his own account, Rayatz’s prolific and fragmented literary project was, to a large degree, built on the foundation of these visionary practices and experiences, and dreams and visions also appear within his memoristic stories about the past. These experiences can therefore be understood not only as processes of memory and imagination, but also as processes in which literary creativity spills into the mystical construction of consciousness.

Moving beyond Rayatz’s explicitly autobiographical writings, memory continues to feature prominently, functioning as a crucial tool for crossing intergenerational gaps within a historically expansive story. This is exemplified in a lengthy, but incomplete, epistolary narrative addressed to his daughter in 1935. Known among contemporary Chabadniks as di lange brif (“the long letter”), the text’s primary story arc is introduced by a character named Simcha Zisel. Simcha Zisel’s son is named Mordechai Horedoker, who is identified as the first teacher of Shmuel DovBer of Borisov (“Rashdam,” d. 1886). [61] As a young boy, Rayatz had met Rashdam, and later featured him as a conduit for stories from earlier generations in several texts. [62] In di lange brif these individuals give us a chain of transmitted memory that rapidly transports us back to the mid-1770s.

In the mid 1770’s the early Hasidic movement’s self-understanding as a collective had been catalyzed by campaigns of external opposition and denunciation. Simultaneously, hasidim contended with “internal struggle between different factions within” the nascent movement, and developed particular allegiances to specific ṣadikim [63] In Rayatz’s narrative, Simcha Zisel’s decision to switch his allegiance to Rashaz, who would later emerge as the founder of the Chabad faction, induces extensive soul-searching reflection:

Over the course of several weeks he reminded himself, clearly and in detail, how it occurred that he became a hasid … [64]

The narration of this memoristic exercise carries us back to Simcha Sizel’s first encounter, some twenty-five years earlier, with a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov named Chaim Holtz. [65] The incomplete tale of how Reb Chaim became a hasid, thanks to the meandering quest of his friend Reb Mordechai, includes the narration of an incomplete story about the Baal Shem Tov. [66] At one point, we read of a moment when Reb Mordechai’s “whole path in life once again ran through his memory…” [67] At another point, we read that “in his sleep, in a dream, he saw the Rebbe—the Baal Shem Tov—and also heard a Torah teaching.” [68]

What we have here is not only stories nested within stories, but also memories nested within memories, dreams dreamed within dreams, consciousnesses encompassed within consciousness. [69] Memory and imaginary visualization collapses the rupture of time and the rupture of individuation, bringing us from the personal memories of Rayatz himself to the era of Hasidism’s initial emergence, and beyond. In exceeding the past, moreover, memory spills over into the future. As Elliot Wolfson has commented, “the dream is an interior state of anticipatory remembering.” [70]

V — Proto-Hasidic Zikhroinois and Institutional Praxis in the Post-Holocaust Era

The most monumental instantiation of Rayatz’s expansive memoiristic project is his Sefer hazikhroinois (Book of Memoirs), written following his arrival in New York in 1940. After being serialized in the Yiddish press, it was subsequently published in two volumes by Kehot, Chabad’s official publishing house. The first volume appeared in 1957, the second in 1965. It has also been issued in Hebrew, English, Russian, French, and Spanish [71]

“Despite its title,” Ada Rapoport-Albert wrote, Rayatz’s “book of memoirs” contains “long cycles of plainly hagiographical tales about personalities and events predating his own lifetime by centuries.” [72] If we are to treat this material as biographical or historiographical, Rapoport-Albert’s application of the term “hagiography” would certainly be correct, and Rayatz’s use of the term “memoir” would certainly be a misnomer. My argument, however, is that we should treat this material as the literary product of creative memory weaving. From this perspective, Rayatz’s designation of his work as Memoirs accurately represents the numinous praxis of memory that forms the creative incubator for his literary worlds. This is a process that begins with the self and ends with the self, and which—in the interim between beginning and end—collapses the distance between the past and the present, between self and community.

Sefer hazikhroinois is a record of poetic memory and experience of the sort Benjamin termed “a matter of tradition,” instantiated not only in “private life” but also “in collective existence.” [73] It constructs a mystical memory foundation for the Chabad movement in toto. As such, totality and incompleteness necessarily coincide. Indeed, there is evidence that Rayatz intended his Sefer hazikhroinois to include additional volumes besides the two actually composed and published under that title. Related excerpts from Rayatz’s writings, such as Haṣemaḥ ṣedek vetenu’at hahaskalah (Kehot, 1946), were likely envisioned as elements of a literary constellation that would ultimately encompass the successive histories of all the leaders of Chabad up to Rayatz’s own time. [74]

In the first volume of Sefer hazikhroinois the main character is Baruch, a teenager who will later become the father of Rashaz. In the second volume the main character is Baruch’s sister, Devorah Leah. Both volumes contain long cycles of tales, which provide backstories not only for the families of Baruch and Devorah Leah, but also for many of the other characters they encounter. As in the example of Der langer brif, these cycles tend to carry us backward through time, but we do keep returning to the central storyline. [75] In short, after Baruch and Devorah Leah are orphaned from their parents, Baruch sets off on a quest for spiritual enlightenment. Little does he know that his sister had already received a rich legacy of spiritual knowledge from their mother, whose father was a disciple of the pre-hasidic kabbalist, Yoel, the Baal Shem of Zamość, and therefore “did not neglect to teach Torah to his daughter, Rochel.” [76] Baruch becomes acquainted with the proto-hasidic movement independently, then reunites with his sister and realizes he should not have been so blind to her erudition and acumen. [77]

As noted by Ada Rapoport-Albert, an earlier portrayal of a righteous female character in a story by Rayatz seems designed to “reinforce” rather than “overturn” conventional gender norms, valorizing “the traditional female virtue of the self-sacrificing, enabling wife.” In that case, the female protogenist merits “a place in the paradisal ‘palace of righteous women’” because she makes it possible for her husband “to pursue the male goal of becoming a Torah scholar, and to rise to the elevated status of a ‘hidden tsadik’.” [78] In the Zikhroinois, by contrast, women emerge as the principle carriers of the kabbalistic tradition, and we find approving descriptions of Rochel, Devorah Leah’s mother, as “a learned woman, and indeed of very broad knowledge … who would study Talmud with the same melody, and with the same diligence, as the menfolk. [79]

By any standard, the level of scholarship ascribed to these female heroines is superlative. Rochel tells her daughter of the secret instruction provided to her by her father, proceeding from Hebrew language instruction through scripture, then Mishnah and Talmud. “From Talmud he moved on with her to Maimonides’ Code and to Shulchan Aruch.” [80] Both Rochel and Devorah Leah are repeatedly referred to with the appellation lamdonis, the female form of lamden, a word used to describe male scholars with significant mastery of Talmudic literature and commentaries. [81]

Even in the Zikhroinois, however, we do not find a complete overturning of gender norms. Rayatz is careful to emphasize that these women did not abandon the domestic realm, and were excellent homemakers, as well as superlatively learned Torah scholars. [82] He also contrasts Rochel’s comprehensive grasp of practical law, halakhah, to the more theoretical erudition of the menfolk. [83]

In addition to portraying women as Torah scholars, the Zikhroinois take the further ideological step of framing spiritual empowerment of women—especially through Torah education—as a key characteristic of the proto-hasidic ethos, which is contested by male scholars who are suspicious of kabbalah, its popularization, and its tendency to a kind of egalitarianism. [84] Already in the first volume, before Devorah Leah’s surreptitiously gained erudition comes to the fore of the narrative, we find a story of another righteous and learned woman whose name becomes attached to an institution of Torah learning (“Nechamah Devorah’s Yeshivah”), even though such institutions were exclusively open to boys and men until the twentieth century. [85] It is unlikely to be incidental that during the period when the Zikhroinois were being serialized Rayatz was establishing educational institutions for girls, named for his aforementioned grandmother as Beis Rivkah. [86]

The establishment of the Beis Rivkah schools, in 1941, can be seen as a particularly powerful example of how Rayatz extended his mystical praxis of memory into social reality. In New York, as the old world of Eastern-European Jewry was being destroyed by the Nazis, Rayatz’s literary memorialization of an imagined and idealized past was actually realized in the creation of new institutions in the present. Consciousness, or mystical memory, was becoming the ground of the future.

Rayatz’s literary world-building was of a piece with the real-world work of building new Chabad social structures and communities. In the ensuing decades many tens of thousands of girls have progressed from kindergarten through high-school and seminary, receiving a full formal education that centers their identity not only as Jews but as Chabad hasidim. Many of these graduates have gone on to serve as “shluchos,” seen both in their own eyes and in the eyes of Chabad’s central institutions as personified representations of the movement as a whole. [87]

In educational terms, reality has yet to meet the very high bar of female scholarship set in Rayatz’s idealized Zikhroinois. But the trajectory of women’s Torah study within Chabad communities and institutions continues to incline upward. [88] Rayatz’s literary and institutional legacies are intrinsically, if sometimes imperceptibly, woven into Chabad’s social and cultural fabric, continuing to shape norms, expectations, and aspirations.

Epilogue: Consciousness as the Praxis of Life

The relationship between Rayatz’s literary and institutional edifices should not be understood in instrumental terms, where the literary means serves an institutional end. The evidence amassed above makes it clear that the mystical praxis of memory weaving was an end to itself, which Rayatz deemed essential to the praxis of Hasidic life, and—perhaps even more so—to the praxis of hasidic leadership. Can we extend this to a broader blueprint for how humanity can reorient its relationship to the past and future? Might we not all find the key to life in a new literary consciousness?

For Rayatz, we have seen, Hasidism is synonymous with consciousness as mystical memory. Through his pen, he made the inherited consciousness of the Chabad movement, in toto, available to all his readers. Indeed, he described the literary act of writing itself as a sublime articulation of consciousness:

The hand writes what arises in the depth of one’s thought … in that very moment one experiences great pleasure from the comprehension of that deep concept, and one experiences a great desire to explain this in clearly articulated writing, each thing as is fit and appropriately ordered, and this is accomplished specifically though studious pondering and thought … to find the phrases and precise formulations via which the profound idea will be revealed with clarity …

All the capacities of the soul, and the most sublime and essential talents, take part in this … Intellect, pleasure, will, thought, excitement and longing, all as one, grafted one upon the other, combined one with the other, are vested in the vitality of the concrete activity [that is, in the act of writing] … [89]

Writing is clearly a way of living; a profound pouring of the fullness of the soul into the reality of the current moment, a way of advancing, meaningfully and concretely, into the future via the past. Literature does not belong to some realm other than the empirical world inhabited by history and society. Literature is the window through which the world is both seen and shaped; the ground of consciousness as much as its product. A consciousness awake to the literary anticipation of mystical memory provides fundamental context, coherence, and direction to the story we continue to write through the ongoing praxis of living.

[1] Yosef Y. Schneersohn, Sefer hasiḥot 5706-10 (Kehot, 2001), 40, in the name of his father.

[2] Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn and edited by Hannah Arendt (Schocken, 1968), 98. Italics in the original.

[3] Idem., “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” ibid., 157.

[4] Idem., “The Image of Proust,” ibid., 201.

[5] dem., “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” ibid., 157.

[6] While Rayatz hasn’t yet been the subject of a comprehensive academic biographical work, a number of articles have been published and a forthcoming monograph by Wojciech Tworek will be an important step in that direction. Also forthcoming is a biography by the Chabad rabbi and researcher, David Eliezrie, to be published by Maggid Press.

[7] See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken, 1941).

[8] See Shalom DovBer Levine, Toldot ḥabad berusya haṣarit (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot, 2010), 221-2; idem., Mibeit hagenazim (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot, 2009), 27-30. On World War One as the crucial turning point that ended Hasidism’s nineteenth century “golden age” see Marcin Wodziński, “The End and the Beginning” in idem., Hasidism: Key Questions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 243–77.

[9],On Rashab’s death see Moshe DovBer Rivkin, Kuntras ashkavata derabi (Brooklyn, NY: Balshon, 1976).

[10] See Shalom DovBer Levine, Toldot ḥabad berusyah hasoviyetit (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot, 1989); idem., Toldot ḥabad bepolin, lita velatvi’a (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot, 2011), and idem., Toldot ḥabad be’arṣot habrit (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot, 1988).

[11] Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hagiography with Footnotes: Edifying Tales and the Writing of History of Hasidism” in ideam., Hasidic Studies, 199–266.

[12] Ideam., 234.

[13] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Schocken, 1989), 86; cited in ideam., 234.

[14] Idem..

[15] Rapoport-Albert, “Hagiography with Footnotes,” in Hasidic Studies, 235. Also see Israel Bartal, “‘Shimon hakofer’: Perek behistoriyografiyah ortodoksit” in Keminhag ashkenaz vepolin: sefer yovel leḥone shmeruk edited by Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1993), 243–68; Wojciech Tworek, “Nostalgia, Canonization and the Messianic Renewal: The Case of the Chabad Hasidic Movement” History & Memory 34.2 (Fall/Winter 2022): 173–4.

[16] On Fishel Schneerson and Avraham Shlonsky see Eli Rubin, “Traveling and Traversing Chabad’s Literary Paths: From Likutei torah to Khayim gravitser and Beyond,” In geveb (October 2018): Accessed Jun 09, 2025. On Zelda Schneersohn-Mishkovsky see the extensive discussion in Ariel Evan Mayse, “Gardens of the Spirit: Land, Text, and Ecological Hermeneutics in Jewish Mystical Sources,” Dibur Literary Journal, Issue 11 (Spring 2022): 79–88. Zalman Schneour’s real name was Schneur Zalkind, and though he is often said to have been a descendent of the Schneersohns, this might be misapprehension based on his self-identification with the family patriarch (who also takes center stage in Schneour’s five volume novel, Keiser un rebbi), through taking the inversion of his name (Schneur Zalman) as a moniker. Recent articles on Shneour include Lilah Nethanel, “Hidden Contiguities: Zalman Shneour and Leonid Andreyev, David Vogel and Peter Altenberg,” Dibur Literary Journal, Issue 9 (Fall 2020): 87–98; David G. Roskies, “Shtetlspeak: The Triumph of the Dialogical in Zalman Shneour's Shklov,” Shofar Volume 40, Number 1 (2022): 38–62.

[17] Rayatz, Sefer hasiḥot 5706-10, 109.

[18] Rayatz, Likutei dibburim vol. 1 (Kehot, 2021), 332–34 [Shavuot 5694, section 2, p. 314–15 in older editions].

[19] Rayatz, Sefer hasiḥot 5706-10, 41, 64-65.

[20] Ibid., 333.

[21] Ibid., 333–34.

[22] Ibid., 336.

[23] Ibid..

[24]Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, Ṣafnat pane’aḥ (Koretz, 1882), 77a. The teaching is also included in the collection Keter shem tov (Koretz, 1897), 55a; #381 in the Schochet edition (Kehot, 2004).

[25] Indeed, Rayatz goes on to mention one of the books wherein this teaching appears, Keter shem tov, in the continuation of his remarks: Rayatz, Sefer hasiḥot 5706-10, 336.

[26] Rayatz, Reshimat … divrei yemei harabanit rivkah (Kehot, 2014), 2, in footnote a.

[27] Rayatz, “Divrei yemei haḥasidim … rashdam” in Hatamim #5 (Warsaw, 1937), 99–100.

[28],On this point seeRapoport-Albert, “Hagiography with Footnotes” in Hasidic Studies, 238–42; Tworek, “Nostalgia,” 178–79.

[29] Rapoport-Albert, “Hagiography with Footnotes” in Hasidic Studies, 242–43.

[30] Ibid., 221 and 242.

[31] On this point, see Eli Rubin, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2025), 232–40.

[32] On other aspects of this see Eli Rubin, “The Image of Rebbetzin Rivkah Schneersohn (1834-1914) and the Remaking of Chabad’s Literary Tradition,” unpublished paper delivered at AJS 2024, and idem., “More than ‘a Khsidishe Yidene’: Rebbetzin Rivkah Schneersohn (1834-1914) as a Link in Chabad’s Chain of Dynastic Leadership,” unpublished paper delivered at “East European Jewry: History, Culture, Traditions” April 21–23, 2025

[33] Hillel Zeitlin, “Go’el haḥabad II,” Baderekh (Warsaw, May 4, 1934): 18. My thanks to Wojciech Tworek for bringing this text to my notice.

[34] Hillel Zeitlin, “Go’el haḥabad I,” Baderekh (Warsaw, April 7, 1934): 17.

[35] See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1981), 3-40; Philip Hardie, “Ancient and Modern Theories of Epic,” in Structures of Epic Poetry, Volume I: Foundations, edited by Chrisiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann (De Gruyter, 2019), 25-50.; Herbert Tucker, “Epic,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Retrieved 22 Jul. 2025, from https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1059.

[36] Hillel Zeitlin, “Go’el haḥabad II,” Baderekh (Warsaw, May 4, 1934): 18.

[37] Ibid..

[38] Rayatz, Likutei dibburim vol. 1, 219 [Passover 5694, section 1, p. 226 in older editions]. See the extended discussion in Tworek, “Nostalgia,” 180-81 and 183.

[39] bid., 366 [Shavuot 5694, p. 354 in older editions].

[40] Ibid., 305 [Final Day of Passover 5694, p. 291 in older editions].

[41] bid., 305–7.

[42] Ibid., 307–321.

[43] Rashaz, Tanya, Igeret hakodesh, #20 [130a–b], cited by Rayatz, ibid., 322.

[44] Rayatz, ibid., 322-23.

[45] Ibid., 321.

[46] Ibid., 326.

[47] Ibid., 326-37.

[48] Rayatz, Igerot kodesh, vol. 15 (Kehot, 2010), 155.

[49] Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations, 202.

[50] Rayatz, Sefer hasiḥot 5706-10, 42.

[51] Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, 159-60

[52] Rayatz, Sefer hasiḥot 5680-5687 (Kehot, 1992), 70.

[53] Rayatz, Sefer hasiḥot 5680-5687, 145.

[54] See Yisrael Bardah, “Mafte’aḥ reshimot kh”k admo”r haraya”ṣ veyomano,” in Teshurah mesimḥat … eliyah bardah (2025), 25-30.

[55] See Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton University Press, 1994); Jonathan Garb, Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah (University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Daniel Reiser, Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism (De Gruyter, 2018).

[56] See Yehoshua Mondshine, Migdal oz (Machon Lubavitch, 1980), 471-82.

[57] Rayatz, Sefer hasiḥot 5680-5687, 145.

[58] Rayatz, Sefer hasiḥot 5680-5687, 129-30, 135, 144, and 157.

[59] “Divrei Yemei haḥasidim,” Hatamim #3, 92 [324].

[60] “Igerot kodesh,” Hatamim #3, 28-9 [260-1].

[61] Rayatz, Igerot kodesh, vol. 3 (Kehot, 1983), 156-279, and for Simcha Zisel specifically, 159-72. For a report of Rashdam’s death see Hameliṣ⁩ #149, 18 November 1886, 1826. See, however, Hatamim #5, 103 [527], where he is said to have died circa 1889.

[62] Rayatz, Igerot kodesh, vol. 3, 157-59; idem, “Divrei yemei haḥasidim … harashdam,” Hatamim #5, 99-103 [523-27]; idem., Igerot kodesh, vol. 16, 455-57.

[63] Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidism After 1772: Structural Continuity and Change,” in Hasidic Studies, esp. 77.

[64] Rayatz, Igerot kodesh, vol. 3, 169.

[65] Rayatz, Igerot kodesh, vol. 3, 170.

[66] Rayatz, Igerot kodesh, vol. 3, 269-79.

[67] Rayatz, Igerot kodesh, vol. 3, 182.

[68] Rayatz, Igerot kodesh, vol. 3, 198.

[69] Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (Zone Books, 2011).

[70] Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, 223.

[71] For a general discussion of the origins and publication of Sefer hazikhroinois see Shmuel Kraus, “Al reshimot hazikhronot shel kh”k admu”r n”e” Beit mashiaḥ # 45 (1995), 18-20; ibid., # 46, 17-19. This study provides important insight into the iterative nature and unwieldy scope of Rayatz’s project. Also seeTworek, “Nostalgia,” esp. 187-88.

[72] Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hagiography with Footnotes,” in Hasidic Studies, 233.

[73] Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, 157 (also cited and discussed at the outset of this study).

[74] Kraus, “Al reshimot hazikhronot,” Beit mashiaḥ # 46, 18-19.

[75] As a matter of form, these story cycles are at once chaotic, excessive, and incomplete. As will be pointed out in some of the following notes, at times they are internally inconsistent. These features can be seen as manifesting the dreamlike quality ascribed by Rayatz himself to his mystical praxis of memory. On this score it is important to remind ourselves of the significance of the dream in Chabad’s mystical phenomenology, as insightfully surveyed in Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, 197-217. A proper reckoning with the relevance of this discussion to the present study of Rayatz’s literary project cannot be undertaken here. But I want to at least highlight Wolfson’s association of dreams with a measure of epistemic egalitarianism (191)and also with the spiritual realm of chaos (tohu): “By locating the source of the dream in the world of chaos,” Wolfson notes (208-9), Chabad teachings imply “that the imagination during sleep draws from this excess of light … that is above comprehensible knowledge.” In the dreamlike story cycles of Sefer hazikhroinois an excess of light is made accessible even to the least erudite reader, and yet the bounds of the comprehensible are always exceeded.

[76] Rayatz, Sefer hazikhroinois II, 118-19. On the Baal Shem of Zamość, Joel ben Isaac Heilprin, see the relevant entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica.

[77] Contrast the depiction of Baruch’s return to Vitebsk, where his sister lived, in Rayatz, Sefer hazikhroinois I, 94-105 and in idem., Sefer hazikhroinois II, 386-87 and 389-91.

[78] Ada Rapoport-Albert, “From Woman as Hasid to Woman as ‘Tsaidk’,” in Hasidic Studies, 444-45.

[79] Rayatz, Sefer hazikhroinois II, 104.

[80] Rayatz, Sefer hazikhroinois II, 169.

[81] Rayatz, Sefer hazikhroinois II, 104, 167, 169, 172, 390. Notably, the term does not appear at all in volume I.

[82] Rayatz, Sefer hazikhroinois II, 103 and 169. The terms baleboste and balhabiste, respectively, are used.

[83] Rayatz, Sefer hazikhroinois II, 169-71.

[84] Rayatz, Sefer hazikhroinois II, 119.

[85] Rayatz, Sefer hazikhroinois I, 169. Also see idem., Sefer hazikhroinois II, 414.

[86] See Shalom DovBer Levine, Toldot ḥabad be’arṣot habrit (Kehot, 1988), 284-93.

[87] For an incisive ethnographic study of identity formation among Chabad shluchos, including but not limited to the role played by formal and informal educational opportunities and challenges, see Chavad Green, “The Hasidic Face of Feminism: Gender between Modernity and Mysticism in Chabad-Lubavitch” (PhD dissertation, Emory University, 2024).

[88] One relatively new institution devoted to advancing this trajectory is the Batsheva Learning Center, founded in 2015, and devotes itself to creating “community for women that centers around authentic Torah study” with the goal to “empower women with the skills and the confidence to own their Torah learning.”

[89] Rayatz, Sefer hamamarim 5711 (Kehot, 1986), 29-30.