Chabad and the Benedict Option

To return to the issue of Chabad and its methods of outreach. It is interesting to compare Chabad to Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Dreher urges Christians to recognize that they have lost the culture war and are now living in a society that is not only not even formally Christian but is outright hostile to Christianity. His basic model is of fourth-century pagans. They still believed that they controlled society, regardless of what god the emperor worshipped, and could never imagine that Christians really would seek to eliminate them. Recognizing that, culturally if not politically, they are being ruled by members of a hostile religion that is coming for their children, Christians, instead of focusing on getting Republicans elected, need to turn inward and focus on saving their kids. This is done by buildings self-consciously counter-cultural communities. A critical aspect of this is the value system you give kids. You can no longer raise kids on the model that they are going to college to enter a respectable profession. The reality is that becoming a doctor or a lawyer will require kids to do things that will go against their faith. For example, in my own professional life, I refuse, on principle, to give my pronouns because that would imply that I believe in the metaphysics of gender. Even something as innocent as this carries risk and has likely harmed my career. Kids need to know that their parents would rather that they be religious than be successful or they will never summon the courage to make such sacrifices. 

The term “Benedict Option” is a reference to St. Benedict of Nursia, who lived in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He could not change this fact, so, instead, he established a monastery. If your goal was to save Christendom, St. Benedict’s actions might have seemed counterproductive. You are taking your best and brightest and taking them away from society where they might actually do some good. The genius of St. Benedict was that he recognized that the Christianized Roman culture he grew up with was beyond saving so there was no point in trying. What he could do was establish a monastic culture that would, after several centuries become the basis for medieval Christianity.

What is really interesting about Dreher, is that he points blank tells his Christian readers to imitate Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews know that they are not going to win over society so the focus then becomes turning inward to family and community. On the surface, one could make the argument that Chabad, with its focus on outreach, serves as a counter-example to the Benedict Option. Outreach is central to Chabad and the Benedict Option is skeptical of outreach. From the perspective of the Benedict Option, outreach all too easily becomes an excuse to stay within society. It is “selfish” of Christians to send their kids to private schools. They should keep their kids in public schools in order that they should have a positive influence on all the non-Christian kids.   

I would argue that Chabad should be seen as a kind of Benedict Option. One might even go so far as to consider it one of the most successful Benedict Option communities in existence. Keep in mind that the Benedict Option is not against outreach per se but recognizes that it can only be possible once there is a functional community to serve as a base of operations. Furthermore, Dreher is clear that forming a Benedict Option Community does not have to be living in a monastery, as was the case of St. Benedict, or even to head to the countryside. The key idea is to be consciously counter-cultural and reach out to other people with similar values in the hope that, by working together, they can keep each other’s kids in the fold.  

Chabad is fundamentally counter-cultural. Chabad has no interest in accommodating themselves to the outside world. For example, despite Chabad being active on college campuses, Chabad has little interest in sending their own kids to college or in giving them an advanced secular education. One of the great ironies of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was that, despite the fact that he had a university education and spent years living outside of the Hasidic community, he opposed college. Contrary to post-Vatican II Catholic priests who tried to present themselves as basically regular people despite their vows of celibacy, often going so far as to drop clerical garb, Chabad rabbis present themselves as being from a different planet with their hats and beards. Despite Chabad’s friendliness, they make no bones about the fact that they are in opposition to modern society and do not simply wish to give it a more spiritual veneer.

One might think of Chabad as setting up Benedict Option communities and inviting people to join them. Keep in mind that Chabad does not simply do outreach in the sense of dropping people in for a brief mission to give a few classes. Chabad embeds themselves within communities with emissaries going out to places on the understanding that this is going to be their lives’ work and not simply something to put on their resume as they seek something better.   

Can Chabad’s particular version of the Benedict Option be replicated by Jews or by Christians? I am skeptical of this as Chabad benefits from a number of specific features. One is the incredible charisma of the Lubavitcher Rebbe that inspired his followers to build their little communities at great personal sacrifice. Two, Chabad possesses a distinctive ideology that allows them to thread the needle between turning into a sect that is simply hostile to the world along the lines of the Westboro Baptist Church or the Neturai Karta and accommodating themselves to the world to the point of becoming Tikkun Olam progressivism.

In one sense, Chabad’s theology can be seen as rooted in conservative Kabbalah. Rather than seeing commandments as pedagogic exercises to aid spiritual development or tools for building the sort of "Benedict Option communities" that are likely to pass on monotheistic beliefs, Chabad assumes that commandments serve a mystical function. This places commandments outside of any rational analysis and forestalls any attempt to reform ritual practice to better allow Judaism to function. Most importantly, the fact that commandments affect the metaphysical realm means that people who violate Jewish law are not just misguided sinners but agents of cosmic evil. In itself, this sort of thinking can easily lead to justifying assaulting women in the street or even executing them for the “crime” of wearing pants. For Chabad, this theology is balanced by a belief in the intrinsic spiritual value of Jews. Chabad’s theology of Jews having special souls is also rooted within this conservative Kabbalistic tradition and is connected to a view of Gentiles as manifestly evil found in Tanya. Historically though, Chabad has viewed non-observant Jews as worse than Gentiles as their Jewish souls allow them to gain access to various spiritual forces and parasitically feed off them in order to maintain the forces of evil.  

To be clear, Chabad, under the leadership of the Lubavitcher rebbe, came to downplay its early rhetoric against gentiles and non-observant Jews. This is likely connected to Chabad’s messianism. Messianism opens the door to holding that a belief is true while simultaneously accepting a contradictory claim on the grounds that the new truth represents a new dispensation. Standing in the doorway to messianic redemption but not yet in a fully realized messianic age, Chabad can believe that non-observant Jews are manifestations of evil and yet also the key to completing the redemption and fully entering the messianic age. 

C. S. Lewis argued that it is essentially impossible for a human being to fully comprehend the reality of sin while perfectly loving the sinner at the same time. Inevitably, one is going to end up sacrificing one spiritual truth in order to maintain the other. This was why it was important for Jesus to dine with tax collectors and other sinners. Anyone else would have fallen into the trap of flattering such people while telling themselves that they were doing "outreach." It is the strength of Chabad that they have come closer to this ideal than mere mortals have any right to expect.