Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity
Lecture by UCL Hebrew and Jewish Studies alumni Dr Eli Rubin based on his recent book of the same title.
Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity
14 May 2025, 18:00 – 19:30
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's 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 at UCL.
He co-write Social Vision: The Lubavitcher Rebbe's Transformative Paradigm for the World (Herder and Herder, 2019). His most recent publication is Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Susannah Heschel
Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies and chair of the Jewish Studies Program
Dartmouth College
Susannah's scholarship focuses on 19th and 20th century Jewish and Protestant thought, including the history of biblical scholarship, Jewish scholarship on Islam, and the history of anti-Semitism.
Her many publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press), and most recently with Sarah Imhoff, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton University Press).