Was the Lubavitcher Rebbe the Mashiach?

The Rambam’s own criteria for mashiach, and why spiritual greatness and miracles aren’t among them.

Q. Was the Lubavitcher Rebbe the Mashiach?

The Rambam (M’lachim 11, 3; Ta’aniot 5, 3) cites as the precedent of what the mashiach (messiah) is going to be like, when R. Akiva and all of the great rabbis of his generation proclaimed Bar Kochva as mashiach, because of his military rebellion against the Romans about 52 years after the destruction of the Second Temple. The mashiach is not expected to do supernatural miracles but to be a nationalist, political and military leader who succeeds in ousting foreign rule from the Land of Israel (Rambam, Teshuva 8, 7 and 9, 2; Mishna Brura 561, 2), and Bar Kochva for a short period fulfilled that criterion, until he was killed and his rebellion suppressed. With all of the extraordinary miracles the rebbe or any other leading rabbi in Jewish history did, the Rambam (11, 3) explicitly writes that is not the criterion. He may have been able to be a candidate for the Rabbi Akiva-like figure who guides the mashiach, but not the mashiach himself, for he didn’t serve in the Israeli army, wasn’t prime minister or any kind of nationalist or military leader, didn’t gather the exiles to make aliya, nor build the Beit HaMikdash. The Rambam also stresses that when Bar Kochva died without fulfilling the task, that proved that he wasn’t mashiach. We are clearly in the process of redemption, since the founding of the State of Israel, the flourishing of the Land of Israel and the ingathering of the exiles, but the mashiach is supposed to come at the end of the process.

M’lachim 11, 3 ; Rambam, Tshuva 9, 2 ; Sanhedrin 98a.

Megilla 17b.