Chabad and YU

Eli Rachlin, who lives in Teaneck now, grew up in a religious Zionist community in Toronto. “For decades, my mother was the volunteer treasurer of an organization that is now called Emunah,” Dr. Rachlin, a pediatric dentist, said. The organization’s mission, according to its website, emunahcanada.org, is to “improve the lives of the disadvantaged in Israel.”

A couple of years ago, he developed an interest in Chabad and started looking into that movement’s theology and philosophy. “I found that a lot of the ideas really spoke to me,” Dr. Rachlin said. For example, ideas “about the unity of the Jewish people.” One concept he found particularly powerful was an understanding of “ve’ahavta lerayacha kamocha.” That phrase “is often understood as ‘love other people as much as you love yourself,’” he said. “As though it’s a quantitative thing — which sounds impossible and also doesn’t give you any guidance as to how to do that.”

He read another approach to the phrase in Chabad literature. Rather than “love others as much as yourself, love others the same way you love yourself. When you do something that may be imperfect, you love yourself despite your imperfections, because people have a self-love. It’s not about having to judge themselves well or judge themselves perfectly or give themselves the benefit of the doubt. When you recognize that you’re a unity with others, the same feeling becomes true. So ‘ve’ahavta lerayacha kamocha’ can be understood as ‘relate to other people the same way you actually relate to yourself’– which is still very difficult, but it gives guidance as to how to actually go about feeling that unity and guidance as to what the end goal is.”

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He began to find that “the intellectualism of Chabad really helped in understanding a lot of areas of the emotional side of Judaism.”

Dr. Rachlin had read “Rav and Rebbe,” a 2016 book by Rabbi Chaim Dalfin about the relationship between Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik of Yeshiva University — the Rav — and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson — the Lubavitcher rebbe. “I read that book not long after it came out, from more of an academic perspective,” he said. “I probably read it because I saw it written up somewhere.”

When he started developing an interest in Chabad theology, he remembered the book. “I thought that because Rabbi Dalfin, who is a Lubavitch chasid, had written it, he must be someone who is interested not only in the world of Chabad,” Dr. Rachlin said. “It was not a book that treats one as second fiddle to the other — it refers to both respectfully as great leaders in their own rights who interacted with each other.” That got Dr. Rachlin interested in seeing what else Rabbi Dalfin had written.

Rabbi Dalfin has been writing about Chabad ideas and theology, and about Chabad’s relationships with other Jewish denominations and movements, for 30 years. He’s written 100 books, he said. One of his basic objectives is “to build bridges,” Rabbi Dalfin added. “To bring people together.”

Dr. Rachlin next read “Conversations with the Rebbe,” one of Rabbi Dalfin’s early works. He described the 1996 book as “a series of interviews Rabbi Dalfin conducted with a broad range of Jewish personalities.” The book includes interviews with novelist Chaim Potok and long-time Yeshiva University president Dr. Norman Lamm. Interviewees were people from a wide variety of backgrounds who had had interactions with the rebbe, Dr. Rachlin added. They were “Orthodox, people from other denominations, religious, irreligious,” he said. “It was a book of frank discussions about those interactions.”

From “Conversations with the Rebbe,” Dr. Rachlin “learned a lot more about interactions of a lot of these great Jewish leaders with the Chabad movement.” It also occurred to him that by publishing the book, “Rabbi Dalfin was saying that these are perspectives that are worth sharing.

“‘Conversations with the Rebbe’ really impressed on me not just that Rabbi Dalfin was a person of some knowledge, but that he was a person who knew how to speak with people with different perspectives as equals,” Dr. Rachlin said. “It made me think, ‘This guy’s really open to listening to all kinds of points of view, and sees value in all kinds of points of view, and respects people with different views. He might be an interesting person to talk to, to bounce ideas off, to ask questions about Chabad, whether about sociological aspects of the ideology, or philosophical aspects.’ I thought he would be able to relate to questions I had about the movement and give me straight, unfiltered answers.”

So Dr. Rachlin reached out to Rabbi Dalfin, and the two began corresponding. “I learned a lot more about Chabad,” Dr. Rachlin said. “He’s easy to talk to.”

The two discussed Chabad’s approach to issues including personal prayer and the human soul. And Rabbi Dalfin mentioned that he was working on a new book, his 101st, called “Chabad and Yeshiva University.” Dr. Rachlin offered to help edit the manuscript. “It sounded like the type of project that I’d be really interested in,” he said. He also thought he might have something to add, since his perspective and background were different from Rabbi Dalfin’s.

Dr. Rachlin did some initial editing and started adding “a little more perspective and filling in the type of blanks that I thought that a reader from my background might appreciate,” he said. Rabbi Dalfin appreciated the additions and the two started working together more closely. At that point, Rabbi Dalfin had “a well written manuscript,” Dr. Rachlin said. In addition to editing, Dr. Rachlin added “explanations and analysis” from a modern Orthodox perspective. The two also “bounced ideas back and forth,” Dr. Rachlin added. “I would say, as someone coming from the modern Orthodox world, let me tell you why that story resonates with me in a way that might actually be different from the way that it resonates with you, and why that’s meaningful to me.”

Rabbi Dalfin and Dr. Rachlin will talk about “Chabad and Yeshiva University” at the Young Israel of Teaneck on Sunday, February 2, at 8 p.m. (See box.)

The book compares and contrasts the approaches of Chabad and Yeshiva University to a variety of issues, and highlights areas where the two have worked together, Rabbi Dalfin said.

Dr. Rachlin did not attend Yeshiva University as a student but identifies with the institution on the religious spectrum. “Ironically, the only YU I attended as a student was York University in Toronto,” he joked. His first actual encounter with Yeshiva University was when he was doing a fellowship at Columbia University’s School of Dentistry and Oral Surgery. “I was living across the street from Yeshiva University and started studying in the beit midrash there in the evenings,” he said.

Rabbi Dalfin describes Dr. Rachlin as an “excellent writer” who “creatively embellished and developed my ideas” and “took my writing to a new level.” The “quality of his writing and analysis is amazing,” Rabbi Dalfin added.

“Chabad and Yeshiva University” includes interviews with, and writings of, people in both camps,” Rabbi Dalfin continued. He hopes the book will convince members of the Chabad movement to take teachings of the Rav more seriously and will convince members of the YU community to take the rebbe’s teachings more seriously.

The book is Rabbi Dalfin’s latest in a series of books about Chabad and other Jewish movements. Chabad is intermingled with many Jewish streams and movements, including Yeshiva University, Rabbi Dalfin said. “I want to study that, I want to talk about it, and sometimes that includes issues in the past that were very difficult in some of the relationships. I look to understand the other side.”

What: Rabbi Chaim Dalfin, author of the newly released book, “Chabad and Yeshiva University,” and Dr. Eli Rachlin, the book’s editor, will talk about the book.

When: Sunday, February 2, at 8 p.m.

Where: Young Israel of Teaneck.