Search:
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Posted by Rabbi Mordechai Hecht
The Secret of Lubavitch Success?
New York Times/January 22, 2000 By Peter Steinfels
NEW YORK -- Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg would never be mistaken for a member of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement or a follower of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the movement's hugely admired -- and greatly controversial -- leader, who died in 1994.
"I never met the rebbe," said Rabbi Hertzberg, using the term for "teacher"
that Hasidic groups give to their spiritual leaders and that was universally applied to Schneerson. Hertzberg, a former president of the American Jewish Congress, for many years the leader of a Conservative Jewish congregation and the author of books on Judaism and Jewish history, said, "I always thought, what have I, a notorious liberal -- on the matter of Israel a dove
-- to say to the rebbe, who was a notorious hawk?"
But here was Hertzberg declaring that the Lubavitch movement "has made an enormous change in the Jewish world," one that left him, he said, "absolutely staggered with admiration."
For many people, Lubavitch is known for its curbside urging of Jews to increase their level of religious observance, whether by ritual actions or kind deeds. Today Chabad, as the movement is also known, operates centers or mounts programs in large cities and remote towns in 100 countries. Nearly a million Jewish children -- almost all of them not Lubavitchers -- attend its schools, camps and educational programs. At a time when a group of prominent Israeli rabbis have banned the Internet as morally perilous for their followers, Chabad has created 700 Web sites in more than 50 countries, again intended to serve not its own members but Jews in general. Hertzberg said Lubavitch had given Orthodox Judaism an altered, open face to the world. If almost all the branches of Judaism and even some of the Orthodox groups in Israel "have got into outreach," he said, Lubavitch is the reason -- "they are the ones who in a sense have shamed all the rest of us."
The conversation was provoked by an anniversary. Last Monday the Lubavitch group marked the 50th anniversary (according to the Jewish calendar) of the death of the sixth rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, and the succession of his son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the seventh and last rebbe in a line going back to the group's founding in the 18th century.
The testimony of people like Hertzberg is significant because anyone trying to understand the achievement of Chabad confronts a serious obstacle: the enormous reverence surrounding the rebbe. Such attachment inevitably puts the outsider on guard against the claims made on behalf of himself or his movement.
That reverence, of course, was not limited to the rebbe's Hasidic followers.
Jews from all around the world -- both rich and poor, pious and doubting, powerful statesmen and humble housewives -- streamed to encounter him at his headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Critics saw all this as pure adulation and accused the rebbe of fostering, or at least tolerating, a cult of personality that, in turn, was leveraged into political power in Israel.
The sixth rebbe had interpreted Bolshevik persecution in Russia, where the Lubavitchers were originally, followed by the Holocaust as signs that redemption by the Messiah was at hand. His son-in-law, the seventh rebbe, had read the unforeseen security and opportunity of exile in America as another mysterious sign of the same.
In the 1980s many Lubavitchers, seeing that the rebbe had no son or designated successor, took those messianic expectations a step further and concluded that the rebbe himself was the Messiah. The fervor quickly spun into what mainstream Judaism and Lubavitch leaders judged dangerous or heretical excesses, dividing the movement and threatening to overwhelm it.
Today the storm has calmed, and the question is no longer can Lubavitch survive, but why Lubavitch has been so influential. Its numbers are smaller than those of other Hasidic groups. There are no official figures; estimates run from well below 100,000 to up to 200,000. It has remained uncompromising in adherence to views that would be generally termed fundamentalist.
Nonetheless, its activities, costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, are largely supported by non-Lubavitch Jews, some of them not even observant.
The key to this success, organizationally, has been the concept of "schlicum," or emissaries, who are sent by the movement to a community in need and make a lifetimes commitment to serve and raise their families there. From their earliest years, Lubavitch young people see such a daunting commitment as the highest form of messianic undertaking. They are carefully selected for their assignments, but they are also expected to be self-supporting in their activities, recruiting assistance and raising funds locally. In this sense, Chabad is a movement that is both highly centralized and strongly decentralized.
There are nearly 3,700 emissary families around the world. They combine a kind of religious entrepreneurship, whose programs employ almost 50,000 other professionals, with a very personal ministry. "They have had a prominent impact on a great many Jews, especially in places without a large Jewish infrastructure as well as places remote from centers of Jewish life," said another scholar, not at all associated with Lubavitch, Jack Wertheimer, a professor of Jewish history and the provost at Jewish Theological Seminary. "They have often provided basic services, from education to kosher food, where they were lacking."
Wertheimer said there was both "a very loving, caring face to Lubavitch" and a more aggressive, militant one, "a kind of conquering mentality."
Congregational rabbis, he noted, have sometimes felt that Lubavitch presented an unfair competition, targeting particular age groups for programs or mounting colorful, publicity-gathering events for certain holy days, while the rabbis had to provide a wide array of year-round services.
Yet, "competition can be healthy and serve as a spur," he added, and other Jewish movements have been trying to meet the standard of "personal and caring presence" that Lubavitch has set.
Behind all this there is of course a theology, a spiritual vision -- of the rebbe himself and of the Chabad Hasidic tradition from its beginning. It is a vision that stresses how all creation is suffused with a divine essence; consequently, modern communications technology is to be embraced and put to good purposes.
From its beginning, Lubavitch teaching also had a strong anti-elitist, outward impulse expressed in the writings of its founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, who wanted to make even the mystical dimension of Jewish observance accessible to the average Jews.
These are the things that Lubavitchers like to point to rather than the mundane organizational details, and probably they are right. Nonetheless, the teaching remains most powerfully expressed in the way it is lived out -- in this case by thousands of people willing to make lifetime commitments to serve Jews not of their movement, and often in obscure and isolated places. |
|
Posted by Rabbi Mordechai Hecht
Rebbe to the world
By SHMULEY BOTEACH
Few men are able to shape the world in death as they did in life. To do so is to so subsume your existence to a lofty ideal, with such complete thoroughness, that your life comes to symbolize the values for which you toiled.
In the latter half of the 20th century perhaps only two men can be said to have so completely revitalized their communities that they achieved immortality by becoming the symbol of their nations. They are Martin Luther King, Jr., who offered dignity and self-worth to a persecuted people, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who offered education and identity to an assimilated nation.
Orthodox Opinions: The Rebbe's legacy
Had King not lived, the African-American community might still be reeling under the brutality of discrimination and racial injustice. Had the Lubavitcher Rebbe not lived, the Jewish community would still be hemorrhaging millions of members, ignorant and estranged from the glories of their tradition. These two colossi further share the distinct similarities of having used oratory, scholarship and religious conviction rather than political office to galvanize vast armies of followers, who breathed new life into their moribund communities.
But the principal difference between these giants lies in the fact that King's renown spread globally to the white community, while the Rebbe's remains largely confined to Jews. This is curious given that King's work was confined principally to the southern US, while the Rebbe's operations spanned the globe.
THAT THE Rebbe - the 13th anniversary of whose passing is commemorated this week - remains unknown to most of the non-Jewish world remains a tragic omission that requires rectification and constitutes the foremost failure of the otherwise astonishing achievements of Chabad. For he was a once-in-a-millennium holy man whose call for moral virtue, spiritual heroics and acts of lovingkindness was as universal as it was electrifying.
In 1992, just before the Rebbe's 90th birthday, hundreds of his worldwide emissaries gathered in a hall in Brooklyn to discuss how the important milestone should be observed. One rabbi got up and said that every emissary should bring 90 constituents to meet the Rebbe. Another suggested that 90 new Jewish day schools be opened over the course of the year.
I was one of the younger rabbis in the room, having just moved to Oxford, England, and I approached the microphone with trepidation. "We should endeavor to have the Rebbe awarded the Nobel Peace Prize," I offered.
My suggestion was greeted enthusiastically by the younger emissaries present, and with skepticism by the older guard. Ultimately, no steps were taken to have the Rebbe nominated - a missed opportunity if there ever was one, given that few world personalities had more eloquently articulated man's capacity for ushering in an era of eternal peace as did the Rebbe.
TO BE SURE, our people have always erred in believing that Judaism is only for Jews. The universal values our religion has bequeathed to the world have been largely treated as secondary to core Jewish ritual. As such, who would have thought that the teachings of a bearded rabbi in a long black coat could appeal to techies in Silicon Valley, or to ranchers in Wyoming?
Could the foremost spiritual leader of such a tiny people really have broad appeal? After all, the Dalai Lama, with shaven head and flowing red robes, who is the nominal head of Tibet with only 2.6 million citizens, was transformed into a global icon by his followers and was awarded the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize. Mother Theresa, in her simple white habit, won it for her faith-inspired humanitarian work in 1979.
What the followers of both decided early on was that the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa had a global mission; while the followers of the Rebbe concluded that his mission was a Jewish one.
This was never the case. At every available opportunity the Rebbe reached out to non-Jews. Several times a year, when his live addresses were broadcast on national television, he always addressed the mainstream public. Whether the subject was the need for a moment of prayerful silence in public schools, or a call to greater acts of charity, the Rebbe made it clear that outreach to the widest possible audience was his intention.
Most importantly, he made it a central staple of Chabad outreach to teach the universal code of morality, as embodied in the Bible's Noachide covenant, to all non-Jews.
WHEN MY mother worked in a bank in Miami Beach, a Cuban Catholic co-worker who was childless asked me if she could write to the Rebbe for a blessing for children. I told her the Rebbe would welcome her letter. A few weeks later, she called me to share how elated she was at having received a warm response from the Rebbe. The fact that she later gave birth to two children is beside the more relevant point of the Rebbe's love for all of God's children.
Yet, 13 years after the Rebbe's passing, Chabad and the wider Jewish community's outreach to non-Jews remains virtually non-existent.
Chabad is the single most successful Jewish educational network in the history of the world. But there remain millions of Jews who still have not been impacted by its work and who can only be reached by Chabad's influencing the mainstream culture in which they live, including their non-Jewish friends and neighbors.
This is a subject that is extremely close to my heart. Three months after the Rebbe's death I was summoned from my station in Oxford to a meeting of the Chabad leadership in London, where I was told that I would have to rescind the membership of 5,000 non-Jewish students because too many in Anglo-Jewry complained that their participation diluted the Jewish character of our organization.
I WAS crestfallen and resisted the order, leading ultimately to my official separation from the Chabad movement. And yet, many of the non-Jewish leaders of our organization - most notably Cory Booker, who was our president and is today widely regarded as the second most important African-American politician in the US and who is a brother to me - remain stalwart friends of the Jewish community due to the openness they experienced as students.
I have never overcome the pain of that break and remain, till today, a man who loves and considers himself Chabad, even as he lives without a community.
I take comfort, however, in knowing that the Rebbe belonged not only to Chabad, and not only to Jews, but to humanity at large, to all who seek inspiration from giants who teach us to live selflessly, righteously and lovingly.
The writer is the author most recently of Shalom in the Home. His two-volume work about his years as rabbi of Oxford is called Moses of Oxford. |
|
Posted by Rabbi Mordechai Hecht
Auschwitz and Darfur
Yosef Y. Jacobson
The images from Sudan are horrific: wounded, starving, diseased adults; skeletal, dying infants. Some people have referred to this as "ethnic cleansing," and the U.S. called it "genocide." Since 2003, an estimated 400,000 Africans have been massacred by the state-sanctioned Janjaweed ("men on horses"), many of them through savage torture. Many men had their eyes poked out. Countless women were raped, and if they refused, their arms and legs were broken. Children were mutilated while others perished from famine and disease. Two million people have been displaced from their homes and villages.
As youngsters, many of us could not fathom how the world remained silent as six million Jews were taken to their deaths. How was it that even among many Jews apathy prevailed? How, we wondered, could anybody go to sleep at night knowing that tomorrow another 12,000 Jews (as was the number in 1944) would be gassed?
But human nature knows all too cruelly how to detach. One of the tragic ironies of life: As many of us get ready to enjoy a serene weekend, in Darfur others will brace for rape, torture and death.
And the world remains silent.
Eli Wiesel once remarked that the lesson of the Holocaust was that "you could get away with it." Was he incorrect? Cambodia, Rwanda, Serbia and now Sudan demonstrate that at times it seems futile to ask where lies the conscious of the world.
Yes, the situation is complicated. The semi cease-fire attempts have been broken both by the Janjaweed and by the rebels who oppose the government. Yet it is incomprehensible that U.S. and world leaders find any item to be more important and urgent than genocide in Sudan.
And the hypocrisy is alarming, too. Ten weeks ago, on Nov. 8, 2006, Israel erroneously sent a missile to Beit Hanun in Gaza which tragically claimed the lives of 18 Palestinians, among them children. There was an international uproar. The United Nations, loyal to what has become its "mission statement," issued forth a condemnation and world leaders expressed outrage. The incident was discussed for weeks on the front pages of the world media and web sites. The missile was an error; it was targeting terrorists launching rockets against Israeli civilians, and Israel expressed regret for its devastating mistake. In Sudan, the government intentionally encouraged the murder of 400,000 innocent individuals, but weeks go by with scarcely a mention in the world's press.
The former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Darfur are all conflicts that have taken many more lives than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet they receive nowhere near the attention that Israel does. There are 200,000 child soldiers in Sierra Leone alone, but who even knows about that? One peace activist, Rachel Corrie, ignores IDF warnings to stay out of the way and accidentally gets crushed by a bulldozer, and the world can't get over it.
In recent weeks we've heard the outcry concerning the inhumane method in which Saddam Hussein was hanged. "The means of his execution," former Carter speechwriter James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic, "is what will haunt us." Granted, even mass murders deserve a fair trial and execution, but why has the fate of Saddam inspired more compassion than the poor children of Sudan who are forced to observe in horror the flowing blood of their parents? Saddam's death will haunt us? Perhaps. But why doesn't the death of the 400,000 in Darfur and the 800,000 in Rwanda haunt us? Are we not observing today the truth of the profound psychological observation our sages stated long ago, that "One who exercises compassion toward the cruel, will end up exercising cruelty toward the compassionate." (Midrash Rabah Koheles 7:15.)
***
On Jan. 27, 62 years ago, Russian troops entered the little Polish town of Auschwitz, and saw sights we still find difficult to comprehend. It was their first glimpse of the Final Solution: the planned extermination of every Jew in Europe. It's hard to sense the sheer scale of the destruction. On Sept. 11, 2001, history was changed by a terrorist attack in which 3,000 people died. During the Holocaust, on average, 3,000 Jews were killed every day of every week for five-and-a-half years. And the killing didn't stop with just Jews: the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, gypsies and gays were murdered because they were different.
There is no comparison between the Holocaust and what is happening today in Darfur. The Holocaust was exceptional in the scientific precision with which it was carried out. It was unprecedented in the sheer scale on which it was conceived. But what made it different from other mass murders was that it served no interest. At the height of the slaughter, the Nazis diverted trains from the Russian front to transport victims to the extermination camps. As Emil Fackenheim once put it, the Holocaust was evil for evil's sake.
There is no comparison, but there is a connection. Both are what happen when human beings lose the capacity to live together despite our differences, and fail to make space for one another despite our conflicting aspirations.
In this week's portion (Bo), as the Hebrews are set free, Moses cautions them to "remember this day on which you departed from Egypt, from the house of bondage" (Exodus 13:3). Moses knew how easy it is to forget and he warned his people never to forget. That is because those who forget the past are more likely to remain apathetic to those suffering in the present.
|
|
Posted by Rabbi Mordechai Hecht
We would love your comments and feedback about the Chanukah Menorah's in Forest Hills.
The Forest Hills Menorah Story: Abridged Ver.: 1) Six years ago, after much negotiations, we the people represented by Chabad were granted permission by the Gardens Corp. to place the menorah in Station Square. The following year the Jewish Festivals Committee of the Forest Hills Gardens was formed and they coordinated the menorah each year thereafter. 2) 4 years ago we petitioned the Courd Meyer Corporation to place a menorah atop the Chase bank on Queens Blvd & 71st Ave. and after some negotiations and signed petition they arrange this Menorah each year. 3) For many years Chabad of Flushing has assited Chabad of Forest Hills by placing a menorah in McDonald Park - on Queens Blvd and 70th,...to be enhanced and beautified G-d willing next year for Chanukah 2007. 4) Last year, for the first time Chabad of Rego Park & Corona graciously presented a menorah at 67th Rd. and Queens Blvd. in our Absence...G-d wiling next year to be beautifed and enhanced by Chabad of Forest Hills.
Last but not least, for now anyway 5) Chabad of the Gardens - Forest Hills and the Borough President's office, under the keen directorship of Hellen Marshal, has placed a 10 foot menorah presentation on the lawn of borough hall, at which this year her honor herself attendanded ceremonies. Thank you.
Where else? Where do you think we should add a menorah next? Let us know? |
|
Posted by Rabbi Mordechai Hecht
Tell us what you know about Forest Hills that you think would interest the general public. |
|
Looking for older posts? See the sidebar for the Archive.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
