Letters to the Rebbe : religion and healing among the Lubavitch of Stamford Hill
This thesis examines sickness and healing among Lubavitchers, a group of Chassidic Jews living in North London. It attempts to answer a number of questions: To what extent do their ideas about the body, sickness and the cosmos derive from their religious texts? How do they conceptualise the relation between words and objects, between religious texts and the body? Under what circumstances do they resort to symbolic healing? How do they understand healing? Are rituals intended to effect change in the world or their own dispositions or both? Lubavitchers response to sickness must be understood within the context of Chassidic ideas relating to suffering and misfortune. At times of severe sickness or that not responding to biomedical treatments, appeal is made to their spiritual leader, the Rebbe. He mediates between the material and spiritual worlds and effects physical healing through the manipulation of religious artefacts. Deriving from Tanya, Lubavitchers emphasise the unity of everything in the universe and the close interrelation between the physical and spiritual, words and objects and religious texts and the body. Healing ~works~ on account of the fact that there is a close correspondence between Hebrew
Dein, Simon Lawrence
Chassidic Jews; Tanya; Sickness
Letters to the Rebbe : religion and healing among the Lubavitch of Stamford Hill. This thesis examines sickness and healing among Lubavitchers, a group of Chassidic Jews living in North London. It attempts to answer a number of questions: To what extent do their ideas about the body, sickness and the cosmos derive from their religious texts? How do they conceptualise the relation between words and objects, between religious texts and the body? Under what circumstances do they resort to symbolic healing? How do they understand healing? Are rituals intended to effect change in the world or their own dispositions or both? Lubavitchers response to sickness must be understood within the context of Chassidic ideas relating to suffering and misfortune. At times of severe sickness or that not responding to biomedical treatments, appeal is made to their spiritual leader, the Rebbe. He mediates between the material and spiritual worlds and effects physical healing through the manipulation of religious artefacts. Deriving from Tanya, Lubavitchers emphasise the unity of everything in the universe and the close interrelation between the physical and spiritual, words and objects and religious texts and the body. Healing ~works~ on account of the fact that there is a close correspondence between Hebrew
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