Chabad

In 1775, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi founded a new Hasidic dynasty in the Belarusian town of Lyady. He named it after three Hebrew words: Chochmah (wisdom), Binah (understanding), and Da'at (knowledge). The acronym Chabad defined his theological program: a Hasidism built on intellectual engagement with divine unity, not only on the ecstatic prayer that dominated other branches of the movement. His followers called the approach Chabad Hasidism.

The name drew on kabbalistic architecture that predated Schneur Zalman by two centuries. In the Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth century, Chochmah, Binah, and Da'at named three of the ten sefirot, the divine emanations through which God interacts with creation. Schneur Zalman codified his reinterpretation of this system in the Tanya, published in 1797. The book argued that intellectual apprehension of divine unity was the path to genuine spiritual transformation, and it remains the foundational text of Chabad philosophy.

The movement grew through six successive Rebbes headquartered in Russia. The sixth Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, moved the organization to Brooklyn, New York in 1940 after fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland. Under his son-in-law and successor — the seventh Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson — Chabad launched a global outreach program, dispatching young rabbinical couples to cities on every continent. By Schneerson's death in 1994, Chabad operated in over seventy countries.

Today the word Chabad names both the movement and, informally, any of its approximately five thousand local centers called Chabad Houses. The acronym has also acquired a contested theological charge: a faction within Chabad declared the seventh Rebbe the Messiah after his death, a position rejected by the mainstream Jewish world. Two and a half centuries after a rabbi in Belarus compressed a philosophy into three letters, the argument about what those letters contain is not over.