With Us More Than Ever: Making the Absent Rebbe Present in Messianic Chabad (Spiritual Phenomena) by Yoram Bilu

The messianic surge that engulfed Chabad (the Lubavitch Hasidic movement) in the last generations hardly subsided after the 1994 death of the movement's last leader and designated Messiah. Focusing on the radically messianic Hasidim (meshichistim) who deny that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneershon has ever died, this book investigates the ways followers make their absent Rebbe present. It shows how the meshichistim, recurring to a rich repertoire of both traditional and ultramodern means, are able to engage in ongoing dialogue with the Rebbe, to render him portable" and embodied, and even to see and hear him. Their toolkit includes the dialectical mysticism of Chabad, which denies the ontological status of the world; practices of embodiment, based on a ritual ecology replete with signs and traces of the Rebbe; and a visual culture that makes the Rebbe's ubiquitous portraits and videos the focus of an elaborate cult. The virtual Rebbe that emerges as a result-one who is multiple, visible, accessible, and highly decentralized-helps us chart the religious horizons open to a twenty-first-century messianic movement"--

• | Author: Yoram Bilu
• | Publisher: Stanford University Press
• | Publication Date: July 21, 2020
• | Number of Pages: 344 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1503612414
• | ISBN-13: 9781503612419