I don’t get many arguments these days on how dysfunctional is the Jewish traditional society but yet we have the obligation to our forefathers, to the imagination, to the sacrifice, etc. Who can argue with the forefathers? But just in their defence I would have to point the following:
- It’s unlikely that the forefathers and foremothers would recognize their own religion as practiced by the grandchildren. They would be inclined to make the burden of the future generation lighter not to make their life unbearable, especially in their name.
- Part of the historic preservation of the projected legacy is to make sure that the majority of Jews in every generation are deliberately cut off from the main trunk. This is peculiar because the cut off branches have the same claim to the forefathers if not more. In fact the assimilated Jews are usually the grandchildren of the Jewish aristocracy not some Romanian peasants. How do you think the forefathers feel about their own grandchildren being cutoff by the impostors in their name?
- While the present is being lived to re-enact the imaginary past utmost care and attention is dedicated to the sacred task of passing the dysfunction to the future generations. I doubt the forefathers are OK with that.
- The historically inaccurate theatrics, the séances with the dead come at the expense of being devotional to your fellow human beings. Bein odom l’meis always supersedes bein odom l’haveyro, not even close. I can’t imagine the forefathers being OK with that.
Jewish leaders promote this dynamic because the way they are treated is as if they are already dead even when they are alive. So is not that the Lubavitcher for example is now alive after he died but he actually was already dead when he was alive. He was remote, uncaring, unapproachable and detached and he became even more so after he actually died, so he is now more alive than ever.
Mendel Schneerson
David Levine, perhaps the greatest American cultural caricaturist passed away in December. I have a special affinity for this art because my relative Joseph Igin was the Russian counterpart of David Levine. The new York Review of books published the entire archive of David Levin. Take a look at this Russian Writers caricatures, simply superb. Especially interesting are the different takes on the same people, you can see that these were not just semblance portraits but tour de force psychological descriptions, infections of the dominant personality notes. David Levine never seen this photo, yet he captured the Lubavitcher exactly, genius!
The first word that comes to mind about the blogger know as the Rebel Jew is respect. He was a reader, correspondent and participant on my old forum and my only regret is that we never actually met, even though he lives in the neighboring Connecticut. He is also one of the bloggers who have been writing long, distinct and thoughtful posts since the early days of the craft. One of the things I learned from Jaron Lanier is that it takes at least ten years to overcome emotionally internalized ideas, in other words, one can’t speed up the process by using a rational argument. Ideas accepted as identity are not easily or hastily discarded. So its been about ten years really. Thoughts on Judaism – Why I am no longer Chabad.
Guma Aguiar in Rostov, Russia with Moshe Meir Lipszyc of Chabad Fort Lauderdale. Photo by B. Olidort
On the subject of Tom Kaplan: Guma Aguiar is a “Messiah wannabe”. Nobody should be surprised that immediately following his “graves and drones” expedition to Russia, euphemistically described as Exploration of his Chabad’s Russian Roots, Guma Aguiar was forcibly admitted to the “Abarbanel Psychiatric Hospital” in Israel – Jpost quotes Aguiar:
“I told Schalit I hope to see him home already in the next few days. He said he wanted me to tell his family how much he loves them and Israel, and that he hopes it will all be over soon. I have saved thousands of people, not only Gilad Schalit, and I want to be able to save thousands of people every day, and not only Gilad Schalit.”
How can you not go crazy after a visit to “Chabad of Russia”? Now that Lev Leviev’s honey pot has dried up, the commissars pounce on the fast billions with the well rehearsed formula, the “graves and good deeds treatment”, and pay attention to the forgotten grandma under that stone to the left. This is for a guy who didn’t know he was Jewish a year ago and suddenly came into the possession of a few billion rubles. The sad photos that followed Guma’s tour to Russia, being tightly sandwiched between the familiar and foreign oligarch whores, the Milano-Moscow Berl Lazar and the Kfar Chabad-Dnepropetrovsk Shmuel Kaminetzki. The impetuous Brazilian deserves a full emotional support, not sure his Jerusalem doctor is ready to give him the correct prescription: to stay the heck away from the frummies of all stripes, they don’t care for you as a human being, they want to separate you from the money and they resort to the abusive psychological pressure of the worst kind in the process. People who love Guma should have committed him to a psychiatric ward when he started his conversations with Leib Tropper or the apparatchiks, a dialogue far more dangerous than the brotherly, truly “generous chat” with Gilad Schalit. Even the Rashab would agree. After all the Rebbe Rashab, being an early patient of Dr. Sigmund Freud, could have given Guma a far more sympathetic advice than the finger-pointing commissar.
During the breakdown Guma Aguiar said to the local Jerusalem newspaper Kol Ha’ir:
“He [Gilad Schalit] is at one of my properties. I wanted to prove that I could enter Gaza and come out alive and that Shalit could come out alive as well…”
Stir together Tom Kaplan’s description of his nephew as “Messiah wannabe”, Guma’s catholic upbringing in Brazil, his gas exploration in Texas, his detour into the messianicly driven oligarchicaly oiled oasis of the Russian Chabad and you got yourself an explosive psychic mix-up.
Chabad Wire: A previously unknown Chabad House was discovered under the rubble of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The building was completely destroyed except, miraculously, for a portrait of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Rabbi Yudel Krinsky reached in the New York Lubavitch headquarters spoke about the solidarity with the people of Haiti and announced a national fund-raising drive to assist the Chabad humanitarian efforts on the island.
UPDATE: No joke, they already got an emissary in an adjacent country superimposed on Haiti ruin. That culture is beyond redemption.
On the subject of Rabbi Reuven Feinstein and Leib Tropper Trope. If someone still wondering why Rabbi Reuven Feinstein will not take a stand on the Leib Tropper scandal, well the introduction to Tom Kaplan was extremely profitable for Rabbi Reuven Feinstein, just in one year his organization received $3 m. Other notable donation from The Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation (in 2008 the foundation donated impressive $26.5m, mostly to the Jewish causes):
- West Bank City of Beth El: $3.2m
- Chabad of Fort Lauderdale: $515K
- Chabad World Headquarters: $500K
- Horizons (Leib Tropper): $4.85m
- Outreach Judaism, Monsey (Probably Tropper): $400K
- Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem (Reuven Feinstein): $3m
- Nefesh b Nefesh: $8m
Note this is only one year and doesn’t include donations directly to the EJF, just Tropper’s outreach organization. It’s hard to tell who are the actual people behind the charities (or their connection to Tropper), for example there is a “Pesach Fund” donation without an address for $150K, not a small change. Also the officers of the The Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation are listed as Guma Aguiar and Ellen Aguiar (I think this is Guma’s mother, Tom Kaplan’s sister). So it is unclear if the donations to Tropper listed here are from Tom Kaplan or Guma Aguiar. And if these donations are subject to the legal fight between Guma Aguiar and Leib Tropper.
See update on this story.
Following “the best documentary ever made” The Century of the Self, in 2007 Adam Curtis produced the three part BBC series The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom. The weakness and the strength of Adam Curtis is that he uses the broadest of the strokes. But he is the master of zeroing in on personalities pivotal for the history of ideas. In the third part of The Trap – We Will Force You To Be Free (Google Video) Adam Curtis describes the central ideological confrontation of the post WWII 20th century. On one side was Sir Isaiah Berlin who believed that the terror and the slaughter inevitable in revolutions should be avoided at all costs. Isaiah Berlin argued that a society without coercion, even if it negates progress and promotes inequality (welcome to America), is better than any progressive violent revolutions. On the other side was the inheritor of the French revolutionary tradition Jean-Paul Sartre who preached terror as just and required for progress. The idea was the underpinning of the African revolutionary Frantz Fanon, Yassir Arafat, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini and many “national liberation movements”. ( BTW, the description of the Lubavitcher Rebbe as existentialist is a severe misreading (The Rebbe and French Existentialism by Ephraim Rosenstein). Just the opposite is true (see my post The Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson). This is the classic case of confusion between the rhetoric and reality. The Rebbe for sure sided with his relative Isaiah Berlin, but his revolutionary rhetoric was just that. In fact the Rebbe never failed not take sides in any argument, let alone believed in the active and violent overthrows).
At the end of then film there is Tony Blair and the American neo-cons who imagine a revolution without a revolution, without the terror, etc., the position that proved to be unrealistic, especially in Iraq.
P.S. Today Slavoj Zizek is the most visible proponent of the violent revolutionary ethos (video Žižek on Robespierre and la Terreur).
On the subject of 10 Similarities between a Chabad House and a Las Vegas Casino. This is the plague of the late Bugsy Siegel, the Rebbe and the founder of Las Vegas. The plague is in the Bialystoker Synagogue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Note the auspicious day of his passing. You can see that Beirush was shot just two months after his father Max left the world. But the good news is that the Cunin family in Las Vegas can save of the yarhzeit candles and literally kill two birds with one stone.
On the subject of Vertical Axis in the Age of Kabbalistic Cosmology. Well, in addition to the noise surrounding this subject, a couple of overlooked diversions really. In the future, people who would undertake the thankless task of decoding the messianic eruption, these would be some interesting starting points. ►►►read more
On the subject of Horizontal Axis in Religious Worship. One of the greatest creative achievements of the Kabbalists following Moshe De Leon was the multidimensional vision of the universe. Even the word sefira implied a sphere, a circle and gematria is of course geometría. Kabbalists poetically imagined the geometric structure where the smallest part contains biggest and hiskollelus or inclusion and interconnection form the kabbalistic cosmos. After the eruption of the vision, it was inevitable that just few centuries later the science would articulate the same idea. Compare the kabbalistic cosmos and the discovery by Galileo Galilei.
Sefirot in Kabbalah, Moshe De Leon 1250 – 1305
The phases of Venus, observed by Galileo in 1610
The catholic apparatchiks couldn’t care less if the earth was a flat rock or a ball. But the spherical cosmos deprived them of the earthly hierarchy, of the top and down, the low and high. This was a management problem. The Pope needs to be on top at all times and that requires the flattened subjects.
Chassidim, especially Chabad, did their best to downplay the complex multidimensional cosmology of Kabbalah and substitute it instead with a pure vertical axis. The geometric metaphor repeatedly evoked in Chabad (and especially during the communist/fascist era) is up and down, high and low. For the same reason that the Catholic apparatchiks preferred a flat earth, Chabad commissars saw the world divided into high, low and not low enough (bittul). “And yet it moves!”- Galileo.
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.
The Dreidel in front of 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn
1. I was walking through a pedestrian bridge between a parking garage and a building in Boston, there was a carded access from the garage into the building, while exiting the building was wide open. My friend remarked that it was just the opposite of a Las Vegas casino – “In casinos they lure you in through a grand entry but make finding an exit intentionally difficult. They want you spend more time and money inside”. I thought this was similar to a Chabad House – every entry is wide open but if you ever get to the point where you confuse the house with a home your exit will be difficult.
2. Las Vegas casinos and Chabad Houses offer free food and provide free lodging for the customers, to make sure they pay in gambling or donations while hoping for a supernatural event.
3. Both Chabad Houses and Las Vegas casinos were founded by the New Yorkers, Menachem Schneerson and Bugsy Siegel respectively.
4. In both Las Vegas Casino and Chabad Houses customers are in the dark about how the game is really played, hence the house always wins.
5. Both Las Vegas casinos and Chabad Houses are run by family clans (not a surprise that Shlomo Cunin who coined the name “Chabad House” considers Las Vegas “his territory”).
6. The primary purpose of every Chabad House and every casino is to shake all and any change from the customers. If you have no money to gamble both casinos and Chabad Houses will confuse you with room service.
7. If and when you crack the code of the game, then a casino security and a Chabad House will try to ban you from the premises.
8. You are likely to find plenty of liquid spirits in both.
9. Hispanic maids are likely to be found cleaning shit in both establishments.
10. Customers of Las Vegas casinos or Chabad Houses are too embarrassed to admit that they have been had and so what happens in a casino or a Chabad House, stays in casino and Chabad House!
