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at The 92nd Street Y, New York. Supported by The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity
Nov 16, 1967
The Kotzker Rebbe “is probably one of the five or ten or three greatest characters that ever lived.” Thus it is with the atypical Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, thatProfessor Wieselchose to begin his lectures on Hasidic masters and Hasidism. The themes of silence, of protest, of beginning anew the Hasidic project—and, especially, of solitude figure centrally. What in the year 1839 moved the Kotzker Rebbe to seek a life of almost total solitude? Was it a premonition of what would come 100 years later, and thus signaled the Kotzker’s attempt to fight fire with fire? And we learn that Kotzk “is still burning,” and, in the lecture’s closing words, “the world is aflame,” and yet, thanks to Kotzk, “we know that inside there is a master in the castle.”
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