In his new book, which has been received with great acclaim from academics and rabbis from across the spectrum, Rabbi Dr. David Berger tells the story of how he and other Jewish leaders have been trying to get the Orthodox Jewish community to realize that a large, well-organized, and powerful messianic missionary group has been misrepresenting itself as Orthodox Judaism around the world.
Berger tells us how in 1994, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson died, and the radical tendencies in his chasidic teachings started to become even more manifest and obvious among his followers, the Chabad/Lubavitch chasidim. This group, with its headquarters in Crown Heights, had long been controversial. Deans of leading talmudical accademies in America, such as Rabbi Aaron Kotler, Rabbi Isaac Hutner, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, and Rabbi Henoch Leibowitz, had been making known their intense displeasure with the group and its leader for many years, and in the late 1980s the elder sage Rabbi Menachem Shach in Israel had pronounced Rabbi Schneerson a "False Messiah", citing, among other things, the statement of Rabbi Schneerson that a rebbe was the "Being and Essence of God in a human body." Despite the deeply felt and almost universal elite rabbinic opposition to the Lubavitch movement, the majority of the the Orthodox Jewish public, especially the Modern Orthodox community and its local rabbis, could not bring itself to think ill of the Lubavitch chasidim, who, as agents of their teacher, Rabbi Schneerson, had been engaging in Jewish outreach and Jewish education in a remarkable and selfless fashion around the world, founding synagogues and centers of Jewish education in far-flung communities no one else seemed to care about.
Berger's book describes how he has been fighting against either profound sympathy for Lubavitch or a general sense of apathy in trying to bring the Orthodox, especially the Modern Orthodox, Jewish community to recognize how far the Lubavitch group has strayed from normative Judaism over the years.
In the months following Rabbi Schneerson's death, a radical theology has emerged, one in which Rabbi Schneerson is viewed as having established himself as the Messiah, has completed his mission on Earth, and needs only to be "greeted" and "taken into our hearts" in order to return to the world. Some claim that he will be resurrected, others claim that he never died, that his body is as physically alive and healthy as ever, in the most literal sense. Hundreds of Lubavitch rabbis around the world, including the chief of the rabbinical court in Montreal, and many rabbis highly placed in the offical Israeli rabbinate, have signed a bizarre legal ruling that maintains that every Jew in the world is bound by Jewish law to accept Rabbi Schneerson as the Messiah. They maintain that Rabbi Schneerson was literally a prophet, and that he proclaimed that he was the Messiah who had arrived, and Jewish law requires Jews to accept the word of a prophet as binding.
Berger presents extensive and incontrovertible evidence that "a significant majority" of the Lubavitch movement accept Rabbi Schneerson as the Messiah, and that they are teaching his messiahship to tens of thousands of children in their schools around the world, including many children in the former Soviet Union (where they are poised to dominate all Jewish institutions) and Russian immigrants in Israel.
Berger also analyzes all of the "proofs" Lubavitchers claim to have brought to support their "Second Coming" ideology, and shows with the devastating critical precision of an accomplished academic scholar and rabbi that the rejection of this belief is not only integral to Judaism, but was a critical defining element for Jews over most of the last two millenia, when they often lived among a dominant Christian population that believed in precisely such a teaching. Already, Christian missionary groups have been taking eager advantage of the Lubavitch debacle. For instance, a recent "Jews for Jesus" billboard shows a picture of Rabbi Schneerson with a caption that reads, "Right Idea, Wrong Guy".
Berger takes great pains to address the problem of Lubavitch messianism as an issue separate and distinct from the problem of the frightening new worship of Rabbi Schneerson as a divine being that has appeared in several mainstream elements of the group. Although the two problems are entangled phenomena, Berger wants to make it clear to his readers that even if no Lubavitchers were worshipping Rabbi Schneerson, the idea of idenitfying a dead man as the Messiah and then waiting for his ressurection is a profoundly dangerous, and un-Jewish idea.
But Berger still outlines the contours of the group that worships Schneerson, and uses much of the second half of his book to present evidence that they are not the fringe element we thought they were, and that they have theologians of their own who are developing a theology of Schneerson that presents him as a "man-God" and that looks remarkably like certain stages of early Christianity. As Berger points out, even non-messianic (indeed even the few anti-messianic) Lubavitchers regularly claim, even after his death, that "der rebbe firt der velt": "The Rebbe runs the world." In Crown Heights, many of the school classrooms have a picture of Schneerson on the Eastern wall (towards which Jews pray), and in the main sanctuary of the movement at 770 Eastern Packway in Brooklyn, Lubavitchers now face the balcony (where Schneerson used to stand) during prayers. The students and children are insructed to "direct their hearts and thoughts" to Rabbi Schneerson, who is "omnipotent" and "omniscient", and will fulfill all of your wishes when you pray to him.
Mainstream Lubavitch institutions employ rabbis who have published lengthy defenses of the idea that the Rebbe is an incarnation of the infinite essence of God, and that this idea is meant in a completely literal sense, that he is not merely an intermediary between us and God.
Those who are as skeptical as I was at first to hear these incredible claims should buy the book (or borrow it from a library) and examine all the evidence for themselves. The reknowned rabbinic scholar Jacob Neusner, author of over 700 hundred books and former head of Jewish Studies at Brown University, declared in a recent issue of the Jerusalem Post that Berger's book was the most important Jewish book published in many years, and that Berger has established himself as a "sage-prophet" in having had the courage to write it.
Very possibly.
