Yitzchak Ginsburgh


Yitzchak Feivish Ginsburgh sometimes referred to as "the Malakh" is an American-born Israeli rabbi affiliated with the Chabad movement. In 1996 he was regarded as one of Chabad's leading authorities on Jewish mysticism.
He is the leader of the Derech Chaim Movement and founder of the Gal Einai Institute, which publishes his written works. His students include Charedim, religious Zionists, and Chabad Chassidim, as well as ba'alei teshuvah. He is currently the president of a number of educational institutions, including the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva in the settlement of Yitzhar in the West Bank. Ginsburgh has lectured in various countries, and throughout Israel. His teachings cover subjects including science, psychology, marital harmony and monarchy in Israel. He has published over 100 books in Hebrew and English, most of which are edited by his students.
Ginsburgh is a musician and composer. Some of his music has been performed by Israeli musicians. His students include Torah scholars, academics and musicians.
Some of his statements regarding the differences between Jews and non-Jews have aroused controversy. Ginsburgh and his students have responded to the controversy by saying that his use of concepts taken from Chassidut and Kabbalah are far removed from the language that the media has adopted.

Biography

Early life

Ginsburgh was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1944, the only child of Shimshon Ya'akov and Bryna Malka Ginsburgh. He was considered a child prodigy in music and mathematics. Both of his grandfathers were Chabad chassidim. His parents had a great affinity to their Jewish roots and a love of the Land of Israel. His father immigrated to Israel as a young man, where he was one of the founders of the City of Ra'anana, but returned to the USA to complete his higher education. His return to Israel was delayed when the Second World War broke out and he remained in the USA, where he married Ginsburgh's mother. His father held a PhD in education and served as principal of a number of Jewish schools. The family later moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Ginsburgh grew up until the age of 14, when his parents spent a year in Israel while his father wrote his doctorate on teaching the Hebrew language.
During their year in Israel, the young Ginsburgh studied at the Hebrew Gymnasium in Rechavia, where he learned Hebrew and began his path to Torah study by reading Ethics of the Fathers, which left a great impression upon him.
Upon their return to Philadelphia, he met the Rebbe of the Nadvorna Chassidic dynasty, Rabbi Meir Isaacson, author of the Mevasser Tov responsa, and at the age of 15 became a baal teshuva. He attended the University of Chicago, majoring in mathematics and philosophy. He then completed a Masters in Mathematics at the Belfer Graduate School of Science of Yeshiva University. At the age of 20, he abandoned his doctorate studies to devote himself entirely to Torah study.

Israel

In 1965, he returned to Israel and studied at the Yeshivah of Kamenitz in Jerusalem. He spent 1966 through 1967 at the Slonim shul in Tiberias. After the Six-Day War, Ginsburgh went to Jerusalem and was one of the first to move into the old Jewish quarter. There, together with his future father-in-law, Rabbi Moshe Zvi Segal, he began renovating the ruins, sleeping at night in the Tzemach Tzedek synagogue.
In the summer of 1967, he went to the Torat Emet Chabad yeshivah in Jerusalem, where he studied the Chabad school of Chassidus in depth. That year he visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and remained in Crown Heights, Brooklyn for several months. There, he was accepted for private audience with the Rebbe, whose guidance became his leading influence.
When he returned to Israel, he married Rabbi Segal's daughter, Romemia. They lived in Jerusalem, where Ginsburgh studied with Reb Asher Freund, helping to establish Freund's charity organization, Yad Ezrah. He also took part in founding Freund's Or Yerushalaim yeshivah in Jerusalem, where he taught Talmud, Shulchan Aruch, and Chassidut. During this period, a kernel of students developed around him.
In 1971, following an instruction from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, he moved with his wife and growing family to Kfar Chabad. In 1973, at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, under instruction from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Ginsburgh visited the warfront to transmit the Rebbe's blessing to officer Ariel Sharon, who later became 11th Prime Minister of Israel. The next morning, after a successful battle, Ginsburgh presented Sharon with a lulav and etrog.
Ginsburgh founded the Chabad house in the Yamit settlement in Sinai, where he lived during the last few weeks before the settlement's destruction by the Israeli government in 1982. He returned to Kfar Chabad in 1982, and was asked by Jerusalem rabbi and philanthropist Yosef Eliyahu Deutch to serve as head of the Shuva Yisra'el Yeshivah on Yo'el Street. Rabbi Ginsburgh gave frequent classes on a wide variety of subjects, from the exoteric to the esoteric parts of the Torah. Many were taped and form a large part of the 15,000 lecture archive of his classes.
Ginsburgh served as the Rosh Yeshivah of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshivah from 1987 until the retreat of the IDF from the Tomb in Nablus during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. He also served as the head of a Kollel in the Menuchah Rachel Synagogue in Hebron and as the head of a Kollel in the ancient Shalom Al Yisrael Synagogue in Jericho. As of 2014, he served as the president of a number of educational institutes run by his students, including the Torat Chaim elementary school for boys, the Ya'alat Chen elementary school for girls, Ma'ale Levonah high school for girls, and the Tom Vada'at Yeshivah in Jerusalem. He is also president of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshivah since its relocation to Yitzhar. In addition, he is the dean of the Torat Hanefesh School of Chassidic Psychology, founded and run by his students.
Ginsburgh lives with his wife in Kfar Chabad. One of his sons is Rabbi Yossi Ginsburgh, the Rosh Yeshivah of Tomchei Temimim Yeshivah in Ramat Aviv.

Teachings

Ginsburgh follows Chassidic practices in his teaching style and is proficient in many aspects of Chassidic literature. He bases his teachings on Kabbalah and Chassidut and presents them in practical terms, rendering the profound concepts of the original Kabbalistic texts relevant to today's world and presenting them in modern language. Although the media has dealt almost exclusively with his two booklets that address politics, the great majority of his work is of a broader and deeper scope.He has written books on Jewish law, Kabbalah, Torah and science, psychology, love, marriage and education. He has also published a book addressed to children, named Anochi Ve'Hayeladim. Ginsburgh specializes in analyzing modern cultural phenomena in the light of Kabbalah. These include psychology, psychoanalysis, homeopathy and economics.
He has published over 100 volumes of original work in Hebrew and more than 20 in English. Some of his books have been translated into French, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese.
Ginsburgh's teachings form a methodical ideology that covers three major areas: the individual, society and the Jewish national state. He has also developed a social and economical renewal strategy based on Torah teachings, called "The Dynamic Corporation." One of his seminars was recognized by the Israeli Ministry of Education as a supplementary teachers' training course. His books are published by the not-for-profit Gal Einai Institute, which he founded in 1991. The Hebrew name Gal Einai is taken from Psalms 119:18, meaning "Open my eyes."
He delivers classes in Israel, and has lectured in the United States and other countries including France, Canada and England.
Since December 2012, Ginsburgh has been a lead speaker at an annual gala evening commemorating the Chassidic festival 19 Kislev. The event includes performance of many of his musical compositions. In 2015, the event was held at Culture Palace in Tel Aviv, with an audience of approximately 3000 people.
Ginsburgh's style of teaching combines structured thought together with a freer, associative component that manifests in his generous use of the ancient tradition of gematria, by which he translates between words and numbers. He also implements the use of figurate numbers in interpreting Torah verses.

Psychology

Ginsburgh's contribution to Chassidic psychotherapy has opened up new horizons in therapeutic practice, whose processes are already evident in modern clinical psychology. Ginsburgh sees awareness of the Divine as the key to successful psychological therapy. He aims to find the balance between science and the Torah, which will allow establishing psychology on the Torah together with empirical analysis of the data in order to develop working theories.
Ginsburgh's writings on psychology develop the three-stage Chassidic model of submission, separation and sweetening that originated in the study halls of the Ba'al Shem Tov and his followers. He has thus severed the chain of non-Jewish religious sources upon which all western schools of psychotherapy are founded.

Meditation

Ginsburgh does not adopt foreign meditative methods. He remains faithful to the Chabad system of meditation, which consists of Torah study, pre-prayer meditation, and meditation during prayer. His particular innovation is the connection between personal consciousness achieved through meditation, and a change in the collective consciousness.
Ginsburgh defines two types of meditation, "general meditation" and "detailed meditation" The purpose of general meditation, according to Ginsburgh, is to arouse one's natural love and awe of God. In order to arouse love, he recommends meditating on how God vitalizes the individual and the entire world at every single moment of time. Similarly, he recommends meditating on God's omniscience to arouse fear of God in one's heart.
According to Ginsburgh, three general meditative aids are music, movement and breathing exercises.