I would add that according to Maimonides they are defined as idol worshipers, and this is his language:

“One who accepts upon himself as a god any one of the various forms of idolatry is liable to stoning, even if he merely lifted a brick and said to it, ‘You are my god’; and likewise anyone who says anything of this sort is liable, and even if he retracted within the time of utterance and said, ‘This is not my god,’ his retraction means nothing, and he is stoned.”
(Laws of Idolatry 3:4).

Meaning, there are two laws regarding idolatry: 1) one who worships idols, 2) one who accepts some thing as a god even if he did not worship it.

Needless to say, an idol worshiper is more severe than a heretic, skeptic, or denier.

Thank you.

Is there no point in formulating responses to their apologetics on this matter? For example:

“From time immemorial, the Hasidic public in general—and the committee of Chabad Hasidim who believe in the Rebbe, King Messiah, may he live long—have been ‘accused’ in particular of excessive exaggeration, as it were, in this belief. The opponents claim that involvement in this subject, and our relating to the Rebbe as the connecting intermediary, which obligates belief in him as a man of God, could, God forbid, degrade our faith in God; and as a result of this belief we could come to gross error and believe in an ‘intervening intermediary,’ Heaven forbid, which is a grave flaw in faith—namely, believing of a flesh-and-blood human being that he has divine qualities.

“And of course faithful Hasidim pay no attention to these baseless claims, which have no foundation whatsoever and are fundamentally mistaken. For the true outlook—that the Rebbe is nullified and unified with His very Essence, in the well-known phrase: ‘His essence and being, may He be blessed, as clothed in a body,’ and therefore he is the ‘connecting intermediary’—cannot be confused with the false outlook that His very Essence, may He be blessed, is a body, God forbid, or the likeness of a body, for these are utterly opposite and contradictory outlooks, with no connection or resemblance whatsoever.

“For the true faith is that God is infinite and utterly simple, and the Rebbe—even his physical body—is so pure and refined as to be in total self-nullification and absolute unity with the Infinite One, blessed be He. Accordingly, the only exclusive being that truly exists is the Holy One, blessed be He, who is unlimited, whereas the Rebbe’s physical body is nullified out of existence, as will be the case in the future for all of us, as it is said: ‘And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken’; meaning that even the fleshly body will be permeated, nullified, and unified with His very Essence, may He be blessed. And thus the Rebbe, King Messiah, may he live long—who will bring creation to this level—stands in this nullification at all times even during the exile.

“By contrast, according to the heretical outlook, divinity is a body, God forbid, whereas the reality of the Infinite does not exist; this is the pantheistic view of Spinoza, may his name be erased, who claimed that God is nature, etc., Heaven forbid.”

https://abc770.org/article_node_4249/

There’s no point. You’ll waste your words.

It’s kind of funny that Copenhagen, who claims to understand different theologies, doesn’t bother for even a moment to understand Chabad thought that he’s so angry about. When their books say “self-nullification,” they mean an intense feeling of nullification as though only God exists, and the passage quoted above claims that the Rebbe is at that level.

D,

I don’t recall claiming to understand different theologies.

The problem here is not connected to the question of what exactly someone understands, but to the fact that there is a positive commandment not to listen to one who prophesies in the name of idolatry. That logically and temporally comes before the possibility that some rabbinic or admoric *authority* will claim—without this having been proven to each of us—that it has succeeded in clarifying why it is unreasonable to think that the theological innovations in Chabad thought might amount to idolatry, and therefore there is no problem.

Otherwise, any prophet prophesying in the name of other gods could come and claim that the other gods he invented are in fact the God of Israel, and that if only you understood his thought deeply enough you would agree (as, for example, the Mormons say), and then you have effectively nullified the commandment. In order for there to be practical significance in the overwhelming majority of cases, what first needs to be clarified in the natural reason of each person considering whether to believe some new doctrine like this is that the answer to the question whether there is a reasonable concern of a test is explicitly negative, and that it is not likely that this is a case of “For the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” That cannot be clarified by the mere existence of Chabad apologetics itself, without creating a circular argument.

What is this comparable to? To a Messianic Jew trying to join a minyan by attempting to prove the harmlessness, in his view, of the doctrine of incarnation by means of interpretive assumptions that were not clearly transmitted in the tradition, are not learned from reason, and are not necessary according to the plain sense of Scripture—and then claiming that there is no violation of the commandment here (as Christians have always done since Nicaea). Of course not. That is exactly what is under discussion. The Torah commanded us to examine whether there is a serious basis for saying that this is indeed idolatry, and if so—to suspect that it is a test. It says this originally about a prophet who performs signs and wonders, all the more so someone who cannot be defined as a prophet—such as Chabad admors, who were not sent as prophets, did not live in the Land of Israel, did not try to predict the future, and did not speak in the words “Thus says the Lord” or “utterance of the Lord,” which expose their speakers to the personal risk of the criterion of refutation in Deuteronomy 18, where one who fails it is liable to death.

So the whole question is whether there is reason to suspect a test. And the answer that someone like me is capable of saying he *does know* is—certainly. Here is one example. It was quoted above:

“As it is said, ‘And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken,’ meaning that even the fleshly body will be permeated, nullified, and unified with His very Essence, may He be blessed. And thus the Rebbe, King Messiah, may he live long—who will bring creation to this level—stands in this nullification at all times even during the exile.”

Let us try for a moment to think about the possibility that the Chabad theology concerning the nullification of the reality of material existence is not correct. As nearly any scholar will tell you, this is what Maimonides and the overwhelming majority of the great sages of Israel before Hasidism held. That is, the “Rebbe’s” body, personality, soul, or spirit are part of a distinct creation (as follows from the plain sense of the verses, “And God created man in His image”); they are not part of God and are not unified with His essence (the very statement is blasphemy, but let that pass). In that case, the moment you say that the “Rebbe’s” soul or body are unified with His very Essence, you have effectively said that the “Rebbe” is God or has divinity in him. This contradicts Maimonides’ principles 2–5, and immediately raises the possibility of the test of which the Torah spoke.

Suppose you somehow manage to prove that this does not follow from the words. Even then, the commandment says that we must reject the words of the prophet, admor, or rabbi *until* it becomes clear to us that there is no concern of idolatry (otherwise, once again, it would never be possible to apply it), and not to say, “We do not understand the depth of the thought, but one may rely on Chabad articles, and therefore there is no problem.”

You can make your calculations regarding the commandment not to listen to a prophet and so on, and decide that Chabad are idol worshipers, but for me, as an outside observer who knows the spirit and intention behind the words, who sees the heated proposals about tearing one’s garment and excluding them from a minyan (oh, so it’s because they pray to the Rebbe and not to God. It’s embarrassing to even address this nonsense) by people who really understand nothing about the subject (not theology, but just some understanding of your enemies’ views here)—it just seems laughable to me (and I’m no great expert in Chabad thought. It’s just that on this specific issue I also wondered about it once and looked into it a bit).
By the way, your attacks on Hasidism based on Maimonides’ principles of faith also raise a question about the owner of this site, who has declared more than once that the Thirteen Principles don’t interest him at all. Tear one’s garment?

D,

Anyone with good arguments can simply present them instead of talking about subjective mental states. Ridicule, embarrassment, and ad hominem points are not arguments. As long as you are not trying to respond substantively, this is a barren discussion—and it also does not satisfy the requirement of the commandment in question not to accept innovative theologies of the sort under discussion.

You say: “Oh, so it’s because they pray to the Rebbe and not to God. It’s embarrassing to even address this nonsense.” Christians too do not pray to Jesus but to the “Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1), but in their view Jesus plays a role within the divine being, and therefore it was ruled to be idolatry by association.

You are using words that add or subtract nothing—“heated proposals,” “my attacks on Hasidism,” and the like. By the same token, we could talk about “your heated proposals” to count certain Chabadniks for a minyan (against God’s command), or “your attacks on the Torah of Moses.” Once you claim truth and I claim falsehood, each of us is attacking the other’s position. That is simply the nature of things.

Notice that you also didn’t bring arguments, just quotations and declarations that it contradicts the principles of faith.

D, why make this complicated? Such formulations that attribute divinity to the Rebbe are idolatry in the simple sense, just as brought in Maimonides above. What need is there for further explanations?

One who accepts some object as a god is considered an idol worshiper.

D,
There is a difference between a situation where people say “everything is God” and a situation where they say “so-and-so is half God and half not God.” In the first case, there is some distinction between God as encompassing all worlds (and creating them) and God as filling all worlds (sustaining them at every moment). We are indeed part of God, but we are not God ourselves. One can argue that there is some confusion here, as the opponents claim, but one cannot argue that the gap between God and man is not preserved. In the second case, however, we point to a human being in whom, supposedly, that gap is not preserved. He is both God and man. When someone is both God and man, the hand-waving is a bit less convincing, and the feeling that this is idolatry starts to surface. I don’t want to say this about the Chabadniks, and I respect them greatly, but at a certain point the intoxication has to wear off and they need to decide which side they are on.

By the way, years ago someone close to Chabad, who for a certain period also saw himself as a Chabad Hasid, told me that this is exactly the problem with the Christians. If Jesus is the son of God, then we are not part of God. Apparently he wasn’t thinking about the Rebbe, or wasn’t aware of this talk about the Rebbe.

Y.D.,
I agree, and I’ll only comment on one point: according to your view, was Rabbi Tanhuma an idol worshiper?
Incidentally: “And this is the blessing”—Rabbi Tanhuma said: If he is God, why a man? And if a man, why God? Rather, when he was cast into the Nile of Egypt, he was a man; and when it was turned to blood, he was God.
Another interpretation: when he fled from Pharaoh, he was a man; and when he drowned him, he was God.
Another interpretation: when he went up to heaven, he was a man—and what is a man before the angels, all of whom are fire? And when he came down from heaven, he was God, as it says, “And they were afraid to come near him.”
Another interpretation: when he went up to heaven, he was God—just as the angels do not eat or drink, so too he did not eat or drink, as it says, “And he was there with the Lord,” etc.
Another interpretation: what is “man of God”? Rabbi Avin said: from his midpoint downward, man; from his midpoint upward, God.
(Deuteronomy Rabbah 11:4)
This is an example of how emotions turn into words that sound extreme. It’s clear to me that if you caught the author of the midrash for a conversation, he might perhaps retract the formulations, and the same is true in the case of Chabad (though there it is a bit more systematic).

D,

If I didn’t bring “arguments but only quotations and declarations,” then apparently the Rabbi was right in saying, “There’s no point. You’ll waste your words.”

I’m also a bit surprised by the Rabbi saying one should tear one’s garment over this. Even though my view is like the Rabbi’s on the matter of being strict about the principles of faith, in the sense that these are matters of truth and falsehood and not something one is obligated to “think” or believe as such. Indeed, some principles of faith are necessary in order to be observant of Torah and commandments and to join a minyan and so on—for example belief in God’s existence, and apparently also in His uniqueness and oneness, in the truth of Moses’ prophecy and the eternity of the Torah, in divine providence (or knowledge), and in my view also reward and punishment—but what does tearing one’s garment have to do with this? Tearing is a Haredi act (from the more extreme sort of Haredi-ness), for the most punctilious, and doesn’t suit the Rabbi at all. The same applies to wine libation and all the other things.

And I don’t suspect myself of any special affection for Lubavitch Chabad. But in the end reality is judged by people and their actions, and from their actions it very much appears that they believe in the core of the necessary principles of faith, and all their talk about a man who from his midpoint upward is God means that he is basically a man of God (a prophet, like Moses, etc.), whose upper part (his soul, say) is totally nullified to God and therefore is “as if” it is God, while his lower half (which is man) is his material side, and because of that, the overall human being that the Rebbe was, was not “God.” The bit about being a channel of abundance and a mean between the rest of humanity and God—“mean” here means “mediator.” This is just ordinary Hasidism. I personally do believe that with respect to a Chabad Hasid these things are true. Meaning, for him, from the moment he chose to bind himself to him, the Rebbe really is a mediator between him and God (at least in what concerns spirituality, and perhaps as a result also materially). His belief in the Rebbe’s mediation between him and God responds to a reality that exists potentially and in Torah and brings it into actualization.

Eilon, the obligation to tear one’s garment is anchored in Jewish law in various contexts. It has nothing to do with Haredi-ness and the like. And it also has nothing to do with the blameworthiness of the person who holds this or that view. One also tears one’s garment over a burned Torah scroll.

Does one need to tear in front of everyone?

The problem starts with the shirt printed with “Long live the King.” If he tears it, this falls under “You shall not do so to the Lord your God.”

It would create a ridiculous situation in which a Chabadnik who sees the other person tearing over him would himself have to tear, and then those who see that act would also have to tear, and so on ad infinitum until the first cause. Take note.

How did it happen that Jews lost their sensitivity to statements like: the Lubavitcher is “His essence and being, may He be blessed, as clothed in a body” (from the quote above)?

That statement arises from the view according to which created beings, from the perspective of the Creator, are not distinct entities but are nullified and unified with Him, like sunlight within the sun itself, which is not a separate thing from the sun but nullified and unified with the sun (as the author of the Tanya describes in Sha’ar HaYichud VehaEmunah, chapter 3). Only at the time of redemption will the illusion end that there is some distinct reality here, whereas in the case of the Rebbe this is reflected already at this very moment: “And thus the Rebbe, King Messiah, may he live long—who will bring creation to this level—stands in this nullification at all times even during the exile.”

The problem is that all this would follow only if one could prove that Chabad panentheism describes the state of affairs accurately. But I think not only that it is not so, but that it can be proven false. And indeed, if we go back in time to the thinkers who preceded Hasidism, such as Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, or the author of Sefer HaIkkarim, none of them had a conception even approaching any kind of panentheism, certainly not that of the author of the Tanya. However much we examine Scripture or the extrabiblical literature of the Second Temple period, we will never get the impression that the God of Israel is none other than the God of the author of the Tanya, just waiting for a chance to come out of the closet.

Perhaps the time has come to say: we do not need invented gods.

The Rabbi surely means, in our context, tearing one’s garment over blasphemy and cursing (when one testifies to the fact that a person blasphemed God and one has to explicitly state the blasphemy verbally in the testimony). But today this is a kind of figure of speech (even with tearing in mourning—and although it is Jewish law, it is very artificial. There isn’t really tearing there either. They cut a cheap shirt or undershirt with scissors. In ancient times this was a natural act all over the world. It was an international mourning custom that became law). Usually among Haredim when they hear “heresy” (pronounced in Ashkenazi style with a segol at the end). And I was a little put off by the Rabbi for using this cheap expression.

With God’s help, 4 Tishrei 5779

Rabbi Avin (Deuteronomy Rabbah 11:4) describes Moses as the man of God, “from his midpoint upward God and from his midpoint downward man,” and it seems to me that this can be explained as follows: just as a translator from one language to another needs to understand both languages, so Moses, on the one hand, understands deeply the divine mode of thought, and on the other hand understands the human mode of thought with all its limitations and weaknesses, and therefore he is able to translate divine wisdom and will into a form that human beings can absorb and understand.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains (in the essay “The Drawing Down of All Blessings Through Moses the Man of God,” Hitkashrut 716, on the Chabad Israel website) the quality of Moses as “the man of God,” namely the ability to convey infinite divine blessing into limited human reality: “Moses contains these two dimensions… and because he has these two dimensions, Moses has the power of ‘A prayer of Moses’—to bring down the blessings of the Holy One, blessed be He, as they are above all measure and limitation (‘and I will bless them’), to the children of Israel as souls in bodies below (in the aspect of ‘man’).”

This quality of connecting the divine and the human exists (according to Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson there) in every Jew: “More than that: in order for the blessings of the Holy One, blessed be He (which are above measure and limitation), to be inwardly absorbed by the children of Israel, it is understood that they too need to have a semblance of these two dimensions (‘man’ and ‘God’). And it can be said based on the well-known teaching that every Jew has an aspect of ‘Moses’ within him… Just as Moses has these two dimensions, ‘man’ and ‘God’ (through which he is the connecting intermediary between the blessings above and the children of Israel below), so too there is ‘a tiny edge and slight trace of it’ in every Jew… through each Jew revealing (through the power of our generation’s leader) the fact that he is the emissary of the Holy One, blessed be He… using his powers for the service of God, such that the powers become only a vessel, an ‘emissary,’ to do the mission and will of the Holy One, blessed be He, in Torah study—both the revealed Torah and the inward dimension of Torah—and in observing the commandments with excellence, and thus he also acts upon the world, so that all worldly matters become a vessel for carrying out the mission of the Holy One, blessed be He.”

May it be His will that we all be faithful emissaries—not tearing, but connecting and bringing connection to the divine light!

With blessings for a final good sealing,
S.Z. Lewinger

Paragraph 2, line 2:
…to convey the divine blessing…

I feel it is too early to decide what the halakhic definition of Chabad Hasidim is. Tearing one’s garment and exclusion from a minyan are astonishingly extreme positions, and not really consistent with Jewish law in practice. For many more halakhic decisors would forbid counting for a minyan someone who does not believe in the antiquity of the Zohar (Copenhagen??), or would disqualify for testimony someone who carries a non-kosher cellphone—which automatically removes the entire religious public from the option of praying with one another. In practice people did not act this way, and these pray with those. “They are sons of prophets,” and they know how to distinguish what is idolatry and what is merely error. Chabad Hasidim are still licking their wounds. Only when the whole generation that saw the Rebbe dies will it be possible to assess the degree of their distancing from Jewish faith. As things look today there is some degree of rapprochement between the sectors. In my opinion, the Tanya exams held at Binyanei HaUma, which draw tens of thousands of religious Jews of every kind—more than they constitute some missionary attempt by Chabad, they are a kind of call for reconciliation with the general public. In this they are really trying to return into the midst of the religious communities and be absorbed as part of the Jewish organism. More than they are doing us a favor with exam scholarships and discounts on books, we are doing them a favor by telling them: “You are our brother, you are our brother.” Time will tell where this osmotic process will lead. One should be patient before making rash blows that will harm not only them but pure Judaism as a whole.

For further study: https://tomerpersico.com/2010/01/10/wolfson_interview/

Just so it’s clear: this is not about Chabadniks in general. We were talking about someone who said very specific things, and that is not every Chabadnik. I explicitly wrote here several times that Chabad as a whole is not my cup of tea, but I am far from thinking they are all transgressors or heretics and the like. And of course, their merits are many.

Gil,

One cannot compare the severity of a disputed ruling not to count for a minyan someone who does not believe in the antiquity of the Zohar with idolatry, the principal sin for which we were punished with the destruction of the First Temple and the exile that followed, after which self-rule was lost to Israel.

Suppose you were going about in the streets proclaiming that Rabbi Michi had sent you to carry out some public mission in his name. Clearly this is a claim that has a truth-value (in logic, “truth-value” means that the claim is either true or false)—there is nothing in the middle. This is a principle called “the excluded middle.” Every sentence that speaks about reality itself—aside from matters of poetic or fictional truth and the like—is like that. For example: “The current president of the USA is Barack Hussein Obama,” and so on.

All the more so regarding the existence of the Creator of the world—the necessary being: whether He did or did not send some prophet or messiah to carry out some mission is the strongest factual question of truth and falsehood there is. Therefore Jeremiah extensively dealt with the question of identifying the true prophet: “And the Lord said to me: The prophets are prophesying lies in My name; I did not send them, nor command them, nor speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, divination, worthlessness, and the deceit of their own hearts” (14:14). The Holy One, blessed be He, says that people imagine things, see false visions, their hearts deceive them, and they attribute it to a mission that came from Him. But it is all false.

Assuming we have returned theology to the ground of reality, do you think there is any chance at all that the Holy One, blessed be He, really sent the Lubavitcher to be the messiah, the final redeemer, contrary to all the plain sense of Scripture? Could He not have known what He was going to do and prophesied accordingly?

The messiah in Scripture is certainly a prophet—and there are midrashim that dared to elevate his prophecy even above Moses. Therefore Maimonides infers in the Epistle to Yemen that one who claims messiahship is in effect claiming prophetic mission. What do you think follows from this regarding the meaning of belief in a false messiah/prophet, when all the prophetic books are full of the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, expects us not to listen to them and not to believe them, and then on top of that they add that this false messiah is none other than His very Essence in a physical body?

Copenhagen, as far as I know almost all Chabadniks admit that the Rebbe died—meaning, he is not the messiah (they’ll explain that the generation did not merit it). As far as I know God cannot die, so apparently they will admit that too. Go to a Chabadnik and ask him face to face whether the Rebbe is God. He will tell you no. And look very, very carefully whether this is apologetics. I promise you’ll be surprised.

Copenhagen. In my opinion the Rebbe is not the messiah, but God—whatever may be—is much more forgiving of mistakes. Proofs from Scripture are not, in my opinion, any consideration at all. Nor from Maimonides. If you want to discuss this halakhically, ask leading halakhic decisors who deliberate on the basis of tradition. The consensus you will get is that there is no idolatry in anything you are quoting. So what are you left holding? Proofs from Scripture? No. From halakhic rulings? Nada. All that remains is philosophical arguments, which really are not worth using to stir up conflict and deny other people’s beliefs. And anyway, with philosophical discussions like these it is highly likely that you will reach far-reaching conclusions also about the principles of faith, and in the end there will always be someone who will want to tear one’s garment over you. He will of course be mistaken, but unlike you he will at least be leaning on the halakhic consensus.

Gil,

Indeed, God tends to forgive, but “whoever says that the Holy One, blessed be He, is indulgent—his innards will be relinquished,” provided there is a tendency toward repentance in which the person wishes honestly to examine his views and actions and correct them whenever he finds an error in them, not one who chooses stubbornness as a policy.

It seems that you are reducing central matters in Judaism to halakhic questions decided by leading decisors who deliberate on the basis of tradition. But who determines who counts as a “leading decisor”? And what in the tradition is primary and what secondary (Maimonides as against the author of the Tanya)? After all, a Reform Jew will give you a different answer from an Orthodox one. In order to avoid circularity, the answer will have to rely on some extra-traditional, extra-halakhic principle that explains how one derives from some independent theological, moral, or philosophical obligation the obligation to obey the tradition or the halakhic ruling in question.

The trouble is that the same extra-traditional, extra-halakhic principle will also define the boundaries. If, for example, you try to derive from belief in Torah from Heaven the obligation to obey some halakhic ruling, that same belief will also tell you that there is an independent obligation not to learn from false prophets or listen to a prophet who permits idol worship, all the more so not to decisors who permit it; and thus the difficulty returns to its place.

Be that as it may, it is ruled both in the Babylonian Talmud and in the Jerusalem Talmud that one may not obey even the Sanhedrin sitting in the Chamber of Hewn Stone when you know it is mistaken (certainly not some “leading decisor” or other).

In any case, your dismissiveness toward Scripture as a tool for learning God’s will is puzzling. We are not talking here about some theologian of one school or another, but about prophets who conveyed things explicitly in His name.

With God’s help, 5 Tishrei 5779

To Copenhagen—greetings,

Without addressing this or that particular view—

Today, sadly, many errors in the principles of faith are widespread. There are atheists who do not believe at all in the existence of a Creator of the world; there are those who do not believe in His providence over the world; there are those who do not believe in Torah from Heaven; there are those who do not believe in the Oral Torah; there are those who do not believe in the coming of the messiah; and there are those who do not believe in the World to Come and the resurrection of the dead.

The reality is painful, but there is no escape from dealing with it. Tearing one’s garment or expelling a person from the synagogue will not turn him into a believer. We have nothing except to adopt Aaron’s trait, that he “loved people,” even those far from Torah, and through the power of his love he would bring them near to Torah.

Once a person understands that you love and respect him, there is room for hope that over time he will be willing to listen to you, and then you can explain, prove, and establish the principles of faith in pleasant ways and with a friendly face, and then the chance grows that your explanation will find a listening ear. And your sign for this is: with Copenhagen’s pleasantness, the interpretations will be accepted 🙂

I do not know of any other way to treat errors in faith.

With blessing,
S.Z. Lewinger

S.Z.L.,
and well said. I’ll add that sometimes you also need to ignore things. Rabbi Michi teaches us the severity of the matter, but practically sometimes one also needs to ignore it or turn a blind eye. Not everything needs to be made into an issue. And someone who can’t manage that should simply not go into Chabad houses, like Rabbi Michi. The Talmud says that messiah is called bar nafli. And I saw that Rabbi Kook explains that the messiah is built from all the fallen messiahs who came before him. I once thought about this in connection with Shabbetai Tzvi and the return to the Land of Israel. It seems to me that even if the Lubavitcher Rebbe was a fallen messiah, the messiah is still built also from him. The Lubavitcher Rebbe reveals something of the messianic dimension. I hope the messiah won’t turn me into an emissary and send me to southern Madagascar. I’m fine where I am. And still, when you read about the Lubavitcher Rebbe, you understand where this mistake comes from. There was something extraordinary about him. I don’t know where the messiah will come from, and I have a feeling he won’t come from the place people expect. But apparently the messiah will be even more extraordinary than the Rebbe was.

There’s a feeling coming up here as though idolatry belongs on the same plane of discussion as belief in providence and the like, but that’s not so. Idolatry is a pure and clear halakhic concept. One who worships a person or an object, or accepts it as a god, is liable to stoning, as detailed by Maimonides in the Laws of Idolatry, and in addition there is no exemption as an unwitting offender in this according to Maimonides, as he explains in Guide of the Perplexed, Part I, chapter 36.

Beautifully written, Y.D. And similar to you, I explained to myself that even Shabbetai Tzvi (not Lewinger!) was messiah in that he indeed redeemed the Jews from belief in messiah! In softer words, as you noted, he served as a catalyst for return to the land by those who, because of him, ruled that one should stop waiting for a heavenly redemption. And in that, who can say for certain that in that sense he was not a messenger of God? As Ramchal wrote about the writings of Gaza, that they should be hidden away because inside their shell there is a kernel of truth.

With God’s help, 5 Tishrei 5779

To Gil—greetings,

Shabbetai Tzvi and his believers caused a mass apostasy of thousands of Jews, and the ideology they developed to justify apostasy—that this was “a sin for the sake of Heaven,” a “descent into the shells in order to raise sparks of holiness from them”—paved the way for the sexual licentiousness of the Frankists, who in the end also apostatized.

The great immigrations to the Land in the 18th–19th centuries did not stem from despair of messianic redemption, but from faith that immigration to the Land creates an “awakening from below” that hastens the “awakening from above.” The basis for this approach already appears in the words of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi at the end of the Kuzari, that Jerusalem will not be rebuilt until Israel longs for it with the utmost yearning, to the point that they ascend and show favor to its dust.

The idea that human awakening can hasten the coming of the messiah was the basis of the mass immigrations to the Land of Israel in the 16th century, and it also underlay the immigrations in the 18th–19th centuries, when Jews streamed to the Land from Turkey, Italy, and North Africa, from Western and Eastern Europe—Hasidim, disciples of the Vilna Gaon, and disciples of the Hatam Sofer—bringing matters to the point that by the year 5600 (1840), the Jews were already the largest community in Jerusalem.

See Dr. Aryeh Morgenstern’s book, “Messianism and Mysticism—the Immigration to the Land of Israel in the 18th Century” (and the material I cited in my comments on Prof. Yitzhak Kraus’s article, “The First Visionary,” on the Shabbat Supplement—Makor Rishon website).

Even in Chabad’s path, anticipation of the coming of the messiah is a factor that arouses energetic action, in the Land and throughout the world, activity that brings material and spiritual betterment to Jews and to the nations of the world, and brings them closer to faith, Torah, and the service of God. It is a continuation of the path of the great rabbis of Israel in the 18th–19th centuries, for whom precisely the anticipation of messiah spurred spiritual and practical awakening—and it is the complete opposite of Sabbateanism and its offspring.

With blessing,
S.Z. Lewinger

And see in the source I cited above, where the Rebbe speaks about the power of Moses, present in every Jew, to be in the aspect of “the man of God,” capable of bringing infinite divine blessing into the limited world.

S.Z.L.—greetings and blessings,

Of course—especially at this time—everyone should be drawn with cords of love. But to love someone means to desire good for him—and when his good is the correction of a critical problem, refraining from the action required to correct it is not really an act of love but only flattery disguised as love. To respect someone does not mean to handle him with patronizing smooth talk as though he were a baby incapable of dealing with different views. On the contrary—such behavior expresses blatant contempt and lack of respect. Of course, practically speaking there is truth in what you say—pleasant ways, a friendly face, Copenhagen’s pleasantness in the tents of Shem (in the style of the Talmud in Megillah 9b), with or without the Interpretations 🙂 But a normal person respects one who respects him and recognizes that when one tells him the truth, that is the real respect, and then responds with respect.

Gil,

How did you get from the aspiration to distance oneself from things that have the smell of idolatry, or from the commandment “You shall surely rebuke,” to the phrase “to stir up conflict”? It seems that in your eyes there is a problem with “denying other people’s beliefs,” but that ignores the fact that the statement itself is a denial of another belief—namely the belief that “it is good to deny other people’s false beliefs.”

Above I distinguished between poetic and fictional truth and factual truth. The statement that Shabbetai Tzvi was messiah, in the present context, confuses factual truth with poetic truth. Chabadniks think their rabbi is messiah in the factual sense—as the final redeemer of whom it is said, “And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him… and he shall smell with fear of the Lord… and judge the poor with righteousness… and the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,” etc. Once one distinguishes between the concepts, one immediately sees that this is a problematic belief in a false messiah, something all the prophets of Israel spoke against. You say about Shabbetai Tzvi, “who can say for certain that in that sense he was not a messenger of God,” as though the Holy One, blessed be He, needs some wicked person who misleads the whole nation in order to achieve His purposes. We know that he was not a messenger of God, because the Torah precedent shows that he was not. Where do we find some inciter or false prophet to whom the Torah attributes a good mission from God, or whom it judges favorably? Indeed, the Holy One, blessed be He, can use evil so that even some good may come from it, but there is a difference between that and what you are saying.

A,
The problem is that it is not clear that the Chabadniks worship the Rebbe as a god. There are lots of stories and lots of talk, but nobody puts it on the table and officially defines him as a god. In that situation there’s a lot of “suspect him but honor him.” There is no clear answer as to what is actually going on there in practice, and therefore one cannot come out with official conclusions.

S.Z.L.,
That’s not precise. According to Yehuda Liebes, in the books of Rabbi Menachem of Shklov, leader of the immigration of the disciples of the Vilna Gaon, one can find many Sabbatean hints:

Click to access heshil.pdf

Apparently the immigration of Rabbi Yehuda HaHasid, which built the Hurva synagogue, was also Sabbatean. The Tu BiShvat seder, which greatly influenced the status of Tu BiShvat in the Zionist movement, was written in the book Hemdat Yamim, which is suspected of being Sabbatean (the custom itself predates Shabbetai Tzvi and appears in Ma’amar Mordechai in the name of leading Ashkenazi sages, apparently the Ari and Rabbi Bezalel Ashkenazi). The Baal Shem Tov’s own attempt to immigrate was also apparently connected to dealing with Sabbateanism and to an attempt by the Baal Shem Tov to position himself as the true messiah against Shabbetai Tzvi. True, the movement itself disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century, but the struggle with it and its connection to Zionism did not disappear so quickly.

Gil,
I’m glad for the enthusiasm, but Shabbetai Tzvi was a false messiah (and so was the Lubavitcher Rebbe).

We certainly do find that Herzl the defecator was the messiah of the God of Israel to redeem His people. That is simple among very serious circles.

The defecator?

There is the famous story about the Mizrachi rabbis who came to Basel for the First Zionist Congress to meet Herzl (and he took the meeting with full seriousness on his part). When they came out, they were asked whether Herzl was the messiah. So they answered that, thank God, Herzl is not the messiah, because if he were the messiah they could not support him 🙂

Your responses are ridiculous from root to foundation because of one critical mistake—you think Chabad teaching holds that the Rebbe and God are two separate things that contradict one another, Heaven forbid. The Rebbe’s entire purpose in the world is to unite and connect us simple people with the Infinite—the blessed God. And those who think there is some kind of “rivalry” between God and the Rebbe, Heaven forbid, in which a person has to choose whom he believes in—he is a complete and utter fool. I am nobody’s spokeswoman, and therefore I will not present my views here. One who desires truth will necessarily find it. The comments here proved unequivocally the enormous ignorance of the commenters in everything connected to Chabad Hasidism, and therefore I see no need to respond and explain.
May you continue to have good lives, well used and full of the service of God, and bringing others near with joy and gladness of heart!

Your response is deep, clear, and well reasoned; whoever desires goat cheese should dance on Mount Gilboa. I am not the toenail of any chair, and so around in a circle we shall go, round and round and round. May cushioned blueberries with dews of blessing enrich the earth. And He will redeem us!

D, H—
You should repost your comment as a question asking whether this is idolatry, because I don’t think anyone notices it here.

I’m reading these things and I’m stunned by the ignorance (and perhaps even falsehoods—but I will judge favorably)…
Most of the quoted material is written in total misunderstanding!
Not a single Chabadnik means to say about the Rebbe that he is God in any way whatsoever…
And even if you heard one person say something similar, he does not mean the simple meaning it appears to have. More likely he is quoting words whose meaning he himself does not really understand.
From my very deep acquaintance with the greatest mashpi’im as well as the leading rabbis of Chabad, not one of them thinks this way… And if that is the case, how can one assign significance to a sentence spoken by some young man or yeshiva fellow behaving like a young man?…
Phrases like “connecting intermediary” and the like have a completely different meaning (a person—not God—whose role is to help the children of Israel connect with God; of course that is only the roughest sketch), and so too with all the other examples quoted above.
Please! Sit down and learn the subjects you are talking about before drawing hasty conclusions…
And to you, Miki: for a person of your stature, it would be fitting to examine these things truly and deeply…
And if you are not expert in it, then go check the matter. I simply see that people bring this issue to you many times…