The Missed Messianic Moment that Caused the Holocaust According to Yeḳutiel Yehudah Halberstam of Tsanz-Klauzenberg

While the sociological significance of the post-Holocaust revival of Hasidism is widely recognized, outside of Ḥabad-Lubavitch and Satmar, the revival’s architects are widely perceived as intellectually uninventive. Mirroring this, while the life and exploits of Yeḳutiel Yehudah Halberstam (“Zalman Leib”, 1905-1994), the previous Tsanz-Klauzenberger rebbe have been widely studied, his intentions underlying those exploits remain unexplored. Thus, scholars have yet to determine why Halberstam held a negative view of modern technology and sought to transform the role of a Hasidic rebbe from a mystico-magical model to a sociological one. This paper reveals that Halberstam articulated his reasoning in a number of his lectures concerning the year 5600 (1839-1840), which was associated with the messianic era in both the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 99a) and Zohar (1:116b-117a), and was believed by many Jews throughout the world to be the year when the Messiah would come. As will be demonstrated, Halberstam believed that year offered the Jewish people a unique opportunity to bring about the Messiah. However, due to the growing influence of Reform Judaism and the Hasḳalah, God deemed them worthy of punishment rather than redemption. That punishment, according to Halberstam, was the Holocaust, which he asserted was actualized by God depriving twentieth-century rebbes of the miraculous abilities wielded by earlier tsadiḳim that could have rescued countless Jewish lives, and transferring those powers to the gentiles in the form of modern military technology. Thus, the tsadiḳim’s inability to save the Jewish people—and the Nazi’s ability to almost destroy them—were inherently linked to one another as well as to events that occurred a century earlier. I argue that Halberstam’s historiosophy represents his attempt to make sense of his experiences in labor and concentration camps and the loss of his first wife and eleven children at the hands of the Nazis.