SEPTEMBER 7, 2001	| current issue | back issues | subscribe |

THE FEATHERMAN FILE

of Noteworthy Items in the Press

A Fine Messiah

By ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL

The belief by many members of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement in a "deceased, divine messiah," and the relative apathy of mainstream Orthodox leaders, is "a threat to Jewish theology and Jewish practice alike," according to David Berger, a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Writing in the September issue of Commentary, Mr. Berger, an Orthodox Jew, continues his "public campaign" against messianists within Chabad, who believe that their late grand rabbi, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, "initiated the authentic messianic mission and will soon return to complete the redemption in his capacity as messiah," in Mr. Berger's words. Mr. Berger maintains that Maimonides and other sages firmly rejected as Christian the idea that the messiah could "die in the midst of his redemptive mission." Today, however, Mr. Berger charges that Orthodox Judaism, with its relatively muted denunciation of Chabad messianism, "has effectively declared that, with respect to this fundamental issue of principle, Christians were correct all along, and Jews profoundly mistaken."

Nor is Chabad messianism "a peripheral phenomenon or in retreat," writes Mr. Berger. Prominent messianists include the head of the Lubavitch Youth Organization, the rabbi of the main Chabad village in Israel, the head of Montreal's rabbinical court and Rabbi Berel Lazar, one of two claimants (and the one favored by the Kremlin) to the post of chief rabbi of the former Soviet Union. Despite Chabad's 2,600 institutions throughout the world, and its dominant position in the Orthodox communities of England, Italy, France, Australia and Holland, "the monumental importance of the Lubavitch movement, both before and after the Rebbe's death, goes largely unrecognized even by knowledgeable observers."

Mr. Berger acknowledges that his own anti-messianic activism has prompted "limited, episodic expressions of disapproval" from the Rabbinical Council of America and other groups. What's needed, writes Mr. Berger, is "a genuine communal policy, which would have to include such measures as the refusal to appoint messianists to positions of religious authority and a prohibition on the use of certain foods and ritual objects produced by Chabad [ch]asidim whose beliefs have not been determined."

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