This is an event cosponsored by Brite Divinity School and the Andrews Chair at the John V. Roach Honors College as part of the Cristol lecture series.  Dr. Rubin will begin with how debates over the meaning of ṣimṣum led to the theological, historical, and social rupture, between Hasidim and Mitnagdim at the end of the 18th century, most dramatically manifest in the burning of hasidic books in Vilna, on the day before Passover in 1796. Then he will pivot to the encounter between Freud and Chabad's fifth rebbe in 1803, and how ṣimṣum illuminates how both these icons of Jewish modernity thought about questions of innovation and continuity in ways that are both strikingly similar and diametrically opposed.