The Rabbi, the Rebbe, and the Messiah

By Brian Schwartz

If someone were to ask you of an instance where a rabbi was declared the messiah by his followers, the first example that would probably come to mind is the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, R’ Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, who to this very day many of his chasidim regard as the Messiah, despite his death.  Many people would struggle to point to any other similar times in history, besides for the Shabbethai Tzvi affair and his various successors[1], where someone was thought of as the Jewish Messiah. However, throughout the past few hundred years, there have been a handful of rabbis who have been explicitly or implicitly declared the messiah, suggested it, or have been accused of suggesting it. 

Messiahship was a chasidic and mystical phenomenon, with chasidic rebbes; R’ Yisrael Ba’al Shem Tov[2], R’ David of Tulna[3], R’ Yisrael of Ruzhin[4], R’ Nachman of Breslov[5], R’ Yitzchak Isaac Safrin of Komarna[6], R’ David Moshe of Chortkov[7], and mystics; R’ Chaim Vital[8], R’ Chaim ibn Attar[9], R’ Moshe Chaim Luzzato[10], Shukar Kuchayil I[11], and Shukar Kuchayil II[12], and more recently Yisrael Dov Odesser[13], all being labeled one way or another as the Messiah[14].  Despite the characterization of these individuals as the Messiah, most lived on without any scandal associated with the eschatological attribution.  There is one instance however, which unfortunately did cause a great uproar.  I refer to you the case of R’ Menachem Mendel Hagar, the scion of the Vizhnitz chasidic dynasty, and the Transylvanian town of Borşa.

Borşa was a mountain village located in Northern Transylvania, in the Maramureș region of Romania.  In 1830 it had a Jewish population of 250, rising to 1,432 in 1890.  Most of the people in Borşa were chasidim of the Kosov-Vizhnitz dynasty.  In 1855, R’ Yaakov Tzvi Waldman, a chasid himself, though an adherent of R’ Chaim Halberstam of Sanz, was chosen as rabbi of Borşa.  Considered a great talmid chacham by his peers[15], Rabbi Waldman was defrocked by his own kehillah because of his harsh words towards the Vizhnitz Chasidim of his town.  The story behind this is relayed by R’ Avraham Yehuda Schwartz, author of the Sh”ut Kol Aryeh, in two letters he sent; one to the townspeople of Borşa, and one to R’ Menachem Mendel Hagar, the Rebbe of Vizhnitz.  In the letters, he mourns over the great bizuy talmid chacham that transpired because of the people of the town removing Waldman from his position as rabbi, replacing him with a boor, and threatening anyone who still considered him rabbi with excommunication.  

What caused all this to transpire?  In the year 1870, the Chasidim of Borşa decided that since the gematria of “Menachem” (the Vizhnitzer rebbe’s name) is equivalent to that of “Tzemach” (a term used by the prophets to refer to the messiah, see Zachariah 6:12, and Midrash Eicha Rabbah 1:57), Menachem Mendel Hagar, the Rebbe of Vizhnitz must be the messiah.  Reacting to this, Waldman said, “כי אמונה כזאת ועבודת האנשים המאמינים בה זרה.”

Here are the two letters printed in the Toldos Kol Aryeh, and if you look at the footnote to the letter to Borşa on p.147, you’ll notice that it says that it was first printed in the beginning of Shu”t Vayitzbor Yosef:

The Vayitzbor Yosef was written by R’ Yosef Schwartz[16], the grandson of R’ Avraham Yehuda Schwartz.  The copy I initially had, was the second edition printed by R’ Yosef’s nephew in Brooklyn in 1987[17].  Here is the title page:

  

However, a thorough search for the letter through the entire work came up with nothing.  It seems to have vanished.  After an exhaustive hunt, I was finally able to procure a first edition of the Vayitzbor Yosef, and upon examination, I was able to realize the full extent of how doctored the second edition is.  In the second edition, there are approbations added from R’ Yosef Schwartz’s other work Ginzei Yosef, and the index is in the back of the sefer, unlike the first edition where they were printed in the front, right after the hakdamah and before the pesicha.  These changes are quite innocuous.  However, in the second edition, a picture of the original title page is presented with a glaring omission.

Here is how it is presented:

And here is it in actuality:

Notice anything different?  That’s right, on the original title page, there is mention of a separate part of the sefer, “Naftali Savah Ratzon” which is supposed to be a collection of things that the author heard from his father R’ Naftali Schwartz.  If you guessed that the second edition is devoid of this section in its entirety, you would also be correct.  Here is a picture of the beginning of that missing section, which also happens to be printed in the back of the New York edition of Toldos Kol Aryeh:

Having gone through the Naftali Savah Ratzon, I couldn’t find any objectionable material that would have motivated the publishers from removing it.  So what was their motivation?  Remember the missing letter from R’ Avraham Yehuda Schwartz, the Kol Aryeh?  Well, in the first edition, there is another small section right after the pesicha, called “Hashmatah V’hosafa L’kunteres Naftali Savah Ratzon.”

Here is how the second edition appears:

And here is how it’s supposed to look like:

This section is four pages long, and in it can be found the censored letter from R’ Schwartz to the people of Borşa.  It would seem that this sensitive letter was behind the publisher’s motivation to totally remove any mention of the Naftali Savah Ratzon, since it was officially part of it as a hashmatah.  So not only was an important document lifted from the sefer, a whole section became a casualty along with it.  Why the publishers couldn’t just take the letter out and keep the rest of the Naftali Savah Ratzon, I’m not sure.  I guess they wanted as “clean” of a job as possible.

I must point out how Leopold Greenwald, Yaakov Tzvi Abraham, Dr. Yehuda Speigel, and Gedaliah Stein explain the rationale of the people of Borşa’s belief that Menachem Mendel Hagar was the Messiah, and how their explanation is mistaken.  Greenwald[18], Abraham[19], Speigal[20], and Stein both suggest how the belief was formulated as a reaction to Hagar’s sefer, Tzemach Tzadik.  In his work Zichron Borsa[21], Stein explains that since Hagar gave no explanation to the title of his sefer, which was perplexing since it did not have Hagar’s name within its title as do other sefarim, such as “Kedushas Levi” by R’ Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, or “Ahavas Yonasan” by R’ Yonasan Eibeshutz, his chasidim saw in it an esoteric meaning.  As the gematria of “Tzemach,” which is used to refer the Messiah in Zachariah 6:12, is equivalent to “Menachem,” and likewise the gematria of “Tzaddik,” which is also used in Zachariah 9:9 to refer to the Messiah, is equivalent to “Mendel,” this must mean that their rebbe, R’ Menachem Mendel Hagar is indeed the Messiah! 

This explanation is simply untrue.  In no way, could the work Tzemach Tzadik have had any influence on what happened in Borşa in 1870, when it was only published for the first time in 1885.  As for the reason why it was called Tzemach Tzadik, Hagar’s son Baruch, explains in the preface to the work that he simply named it because the gematria is equivalent to Menachem Mendel.  It is also untenable to argue that a manuscript, or knowledge of one with the title Tzemach Tzadik, was floating around at the time of the dispute, because  R’ Baruch Hagar writes in the preface that the material for the work was only written a few years before his father’s passing in 1885.  Consequentially, we must take the letters of the Kol Aryeh for their simple meaning, that the people themselves came up with the gematria of tzemach and its link to the Messiah and the Vizhnitz Rebbe.

Many leading rabbis of the time came to R’ Waldman’s defense, including; R’ Moshe Schick[22], R’ Chaim Sofer of Munkatch[23], R’ Chaim Halberstam of Sanz[24], R’ Yosef Shaul Nathansohn[25], and the previously mentioned R’ Avraham Yehuda Schwartz. It seems that the only rabbi that came to the defense of the Vizhnitz Chasidim, was R’ Yehuda Modern[26].  What happened next isn’t very clear, but it seems that a tribunal was held by Schwartz to settle things[27], and Waldman was reinstituted as rabbi of Borşa.  Waldman died in Vienna in 1883.

As a side note, take a look at the last page of the letter of R’ Schwartz, printed in the first edition of the Vayitzbor Yosef, on the very bottom:

That is a stamp referring to the responsum of R’ Moshe Schick to Borşa!  I don’t know if this appears in every first edition copy, or if some private owner went to the trouble to specially stamp this, but it would be interesting to find out!