Shmuley Boteach’s Seven Challenges of Chabad’s Future published on his blog:
- Shore up its educational institutions.
- Make moral educational and personal introspection an integral part of a Lubavitch upbringing.
- Establish tribunals that allow Shluchim to air grievances in a fair and impartial setting.
- Fix the Shidduch system.
- Teach Chabad Rabbis and Shluchim that public oratory is not just a regurgitation of a Sicha.
- Make Chabad a meritocracy and not an aristocracy.
- Address the growing number of Chabad youth who are abandoning the community.
Read more on Shmuley’s blog.
The Seven Challenges to Shmuley:
- Surely these are not just challenges to Chabad specifically. These are the challenges to the Jewish cultural legacy in general and the orthodoxy in particular. Even the point about the tribunals, although unique to Shluchim, could be spun as a complaint about the impotent, corrupt and protectionist religious courts in all denominations.
- Virtually all of the suggestions have been experimented by the so called Modern Orthodoxy. Chabad already is considered modern, at least by the rest of the Chassidim. The fact the “the army” of Shlucim live amongst secular Jews and their children are influenced by the culture will only accelerate this process.
- If you want to criticize a culture, please start by shoving that elephant under the carpet. Namely that all of this is the result of mismanagement and the relegation of the communal responsibilities at best or even deliberate negligence on the part of the Rebbe himself. You can no longer honestly get away by blaming the lieutenants, even if there is a letter from the Rebbe to prove any given point on any given day. Yet no reform is possible till the movement will assume a sober posture about the role of the Rebbe in the current malaise. The best one can say is that he was disheartened by the state of affairs and hoped for a messianic cataclysm. But perhaps the worst is true; he was definitely aware and complacent about the incompetent mismanagement of the institutions. When the movement will be honest about the Rebbe it will no longer be a movement, a catch 22 here.
- The “regurgitating of sichos” is the most grotesque detriment, no argument there. But there is the deeper problem that underlines this phenomenon. The derivative, the closed source propriety code needs to be broken. The regurgitation is an expression of the pervasive derivative thinking that dimmed the Jewish discourse for thousands of years, not unique to Chabad.
- The appeal to Chabad as a centralized entity is misguided. The power is never given it has to be taken. Stop the appeal to the larger entity, the entire corporate paradigm is so the last fascist century. Speaking about the “ego management”. Who calls himself the “America’s Rabbi”? Right, the America’s Rabbi has as much to say about what I eat for lunch as the Word Jewish Congress. Is the detox from the centralized thinking one of the challenges?
- Why give the impression that Chabad is all about Shluchim, this is a shortsighted concern. You want depth, don’t talk about breadth.
- Finally the challenge of addressing “the growing number of Chabad youth who are abandoning the community” is as productive as the talk about the urgent closing of the Mexican border.