An Outward Mission to Every Jew, Whatever Their Observance

Chabad Hasidism holds an outward obligation to reach every Jew regardless of their level of observance, engaging a person on that basis without first requiring they become observant before Chabad will have anything to do with them, a stance that distinguishes it sharply from Hasidic courts that turn inward toward an already committed community and keep their distance from Jews outside it. The Rebbe's Army, on the movement's global outreach network, credits the doctrine's fullest development to Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Chabad's seventh and, to date, final Rebbe, who led the movement from 1951 until his death in 1994 and reoriented it from a single, war depleted Brooklyn community into an organization whose stated purpose is contact with as much of world Jewry as it can reach. The Encyclopaedia Judaica corroborates this shift in emphasis, describing Schneerson as explicitly rejecting the idea that a Jew's current level of practice should determine whether Chabad engages with them, teaching instead that any single positive commitment, however small, has value in itself regardless of what does or does not follow from it. The doctrine has made Chabad one of the most visible Jewish institutional presences on university campuses and in cities with only a small resident Jewish population, precisely the settings its more inward looking counterparts are least likely to reach at all.