My Day: Travels Around Blog Land

My Day: Travels Around Blog Land
Chabad: The Jerusalem Post, The New York Jewish Week, and The Forward have all recently run features about Chabad messianism. Why the sudden interest? Apparently outwardly messianic Chabadniks in Israel have ignored the ruling by Agudat Chassidei Chabad to not violently protest the disengagement. Instead, they've been blocking national highways by lighting fuel on fire and throwing nails into the street while hoisting the famous yellow flag of the messianic movement. It's now gotten to the point where Ha'Aretz and other Israeli dalies now publish political cartoons lampooning these individuals. How embarassing. The article in The Jerusalem Post even went so far is to suggest that all of these nuts were Sephardi baalei tshuvah. I dont exactly think that blaming brown folks in a national newspaper is going to help in this quest not to look like morons. Chabad websites seem to be in a fury over this, at least in the comments section. All seem to be wound up over the fact that this is being covered and that dirty laundry is being aired in public. My question is, what did you expect? A prominent Jewish movement involved in outreach and with branches in every Jewish community of significant size has a group of members who believe their dead Rebbe is the messiah and now members of this group are involved in massive acts of civil disobedience in Israel. Who WOULDN'T cover such a story!?

One commenter said it best: "if you don't want your laundry to stink, then don't soil your pants."

By the way, I loathe working on the 4th of July.

posted by Mordechai @ 12:18 AM

4 Comments:
At 5:10 AM, Mirty said...
Sorry you had to work on the holiday. :(

Good post though. I agree with you about the Palestinians. I wonder how they got to do such a good PR job though. Probably the situation just played into certain stereotypes that liberals then seized upon.


At 7:31 AM, Anonymous said...
Why do hate on Chabad so much?


At 7:37 AM, Mordechai said...
I don't 'hate on' Chabad. This stuff is in three daily papers. What I dislike is how crazy people are getting huge amounts of press for being nuts. This is becoming an issue to the point where some non-religious Jews think all Chabadniks run around screaming with yellow flags and hence avoid their local shliach like the plague.

I'm frustrated that the majority of Chabadniks are still dealing with this issue by trying to pretend it doesn't exist or that it would be bad to confront these people. That mode of dealing with this isn't working! These kooks made the front page of J'Post again