Jack Ross on Chabad, referring to the next post down:
I'm not sure whether or not its fair to hold them up as representing
anyone but themselves. On the one hand they do more or less represent
a narrow a segment of American Jewry, as anyone will tell you, on the
other hand they have been shockingly enabled by the larger Jewish
officialdom. And of course, while they're almost the only ones ballsy
enough to say "from the river to the sea", we need
not repeat here all past discussions of the fictiveness of the "two
state solution".
The whole messiah question it seems to me
misses the point. Though I like to respond with the line from Life Of
Brian (greatest film ever made about Judaism, Christianity, and
Trostkyism!): He's
not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy! No doubt that is precisely
what the late Chabad leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson's virulently anti-Zionist grandfather (Scholem Dov Ber, the fourth rebbe) would have said.
Chabad is, at root, a deeply unprincipled organization. In an almost Leninist
fashion, they have come to dominate the Orthodox world, or at the very
least have the sort of "domination of the big tent" which the Workers World Party had over the antiwar movement of the last decade.
Curiously, they remain opposed to a specifically religious Zionism, that is, they do not have an Israeli flag in the sanctuary nor do they observe the holidays of the 20th century sacred narrative – Yom HaShoah (Holocaust commemoration), Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence day), and Yom Yerushalayim ('67 War commemoration).
Their embrace of the most extreme elements of political Zionism seems
more then anything to be merely a rather cynical means of outreach to
their target audience.
I'll give you my grand historical theory about Chabad: For a long time I wrestled with the question of how you explain the Christian right
while Protestantism was dying everywhere else in the world. I finally
concluded that it was analogous to the revival of paganism just before
the fall of the Roman Empire. In other words, in the late decadent stage of the empire its sacred narrative becomes increasingly eschatological.
Thus in the history of the American Empire did rational Cold War
liberalism give way to Christian dispensationalism as a justifying
public ideology. Likewise with Chabad, it represents a similar late
stage in Jewish nationalism as it replaced the Menshevism of the
classical Labor Zionists.
In other words, whereas the religion of Reform leader Eric Yoffie is little more than Hegelianism
masquerading as Judaism (and indeed quite antiquated as such), Chabad
is promoting a truly mystical religion of "Jewish peoplehood", based
largely on Lurianic Kabbalah, but with ultimately the same essence. That is, in the end as much a construction of political convenience as the Christian fundamentalism of the last generation.
