Ontological Uncertainties: Kabbalistic and Scientific Theorizations by Chabad's Seventh Rebbe

• In Event: The Intersection of Kabbalah and Science in the Modern Era

Abstract

How did Chabad's seventh rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson (1902-1994), negotiate and challenge the divide between Kabbalah and Science, which emerged with modernity? This paper will survey and contexulize some of the themes that appear in relevant talks and letters by Rabbi Schneerson. But it will illuminate them anew through a focus on theorizations of scientific and kabbalistic "uncertainty," as well as on the interdependence of ontology and hermeneutics, in Rabbi Schneerson's oeuvre. Atika kadisha’s singular and polyontological capaciousness, he suggested, allows for a hermeneutical "uncertainty" and polyvocality that resists kabbalistic dogma. Separately, but perhaps not unrelatedly, he invoked the modern emergence of "uncertainty" in theoretical physics, and in the mathematical axioms of geometry, to argue that modern science was likewise sufficiently capacious to allow religious dogmas to stand. Reading such sources against one another can expose complexity and change in his lifelong project of hermeneutical synthesis.

Author

• Eli Rubin, Chabad.org