From the archives via Aussie Echo
Gabby Wenig
07/02/04
The Chabad movement found many ways to commemorate Gimmel Tammuz, the 10th anniversary of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (aka the Rebbe)’s death last Tuesday.
Some Chabadniks made the trek to New York, where they stood in line for two hours with 30,000 others to be allowed two minutes at the Ohel, the Rebbe’s final resting place in Queens. The scholars who answer questions on Askmoses.com, Chabad’s interactive Web site, convened in New York for a meeting on how to improve the site. Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, the Director of West Coast Chabad Lubavitch attended a fundraising meeting where he secured $8 million in pledges for new projects. Chabad of California and Kehos, Chabad’s official publishing company, published a new Chumash with English translation and the Rebbe’s commentaries. And all over California and the world, Chabadniks got together for farbrengens, Hassidic gatherings that are meant to stir the soul through words of Torah and song. At these gatherings, the main topic discussed was how to commemorate the Rebbe’s legacy and ensure that it lives on, and determine the spiritual significance of his passing.
But the one thing Chabad did not do on Gimmel Tammuz was mourn.
"[After Gimmel Tammuz in 1994] I was sitting with my son Levi in the office, and we looked at each other and he started to cry," said Cunin. "I said ‘the Rebbe wouldn’t want you crying. The Rebbe wants action. Let’s open a new Chabad institution’. And we opened Chabad of Malibu, right then. And many of our projects since then- the new girl’s school (Bais Chaya Mushka on Pico Boulevard), the Chumash, - the funding has come from Malibu. Everything flowed back to that first institution that was opened during shiva."
Cunin’s full-steam-ahead attitude is indicative of the way that Chabad has bloomed since Gimmel Tammuz. While Cunin and others admit that Gimmel Tammuz was the most difficult challenge the movement ever faced — far more difficult than say, surviving the czarist and communist prisons that incarcerated its previous leaders in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Russia- after Gimmel Tammuz Chabad did not disintegrate, as many predicted it would. Instead, it flourished.
In the 10 years since the Rebbe’s passing, the number of shluchim (emissaries) sent around the world to help Jews find Judaism has almost doubled, from 2200 to over 4000; there is now a Chabad campus initiative funded by philanthropist George Rohr that has put Chabad houses on more than 70 different college campuses in America; there are websites- chabad.org, chabad.com, askmoses.com that receive hundreds of thousands of clicks a day. In California, in terms of numbers of new buildings (42), institutions (84), shluchim (112), and dollars raised ($125 million), Chabad has grown more in the past ten years than it has in any other decade of its history. And though he is not physically present, the Rebbe remains a vital and iconic figure in Chabad.
Members of Chabad attribute the growth to the strength of the Rebbe’s message, the mainstream acceptance of Chabad ideas, and to individuals in Chabad feeling an acute sense of responsibility to carry on the Rebbe’s mission of bringing every Jew closer to Torah and hastening the Messiah.
"Whatever each of our individual and collective shlichus (mission) meant before Gimmel Tammuz they mean so much more after Gimmel Tammuz," said Rabbi Chaim Cunin, PR director for West Coast Chabad Lubavitch. "Now we are quite literally the hands and feet of the Rebbe, and he relies on us to fulfill his shlichus even more. The goals that the Rebbe set out to accomplish clearly lie on our shoulders."
Schneersohn assumed the leadership of Chabad in 1951 after the death of his father-in-law, Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn. The Rebbe saw the great challenge of Jewish life in America as resisting the allure of assimilation. While leaders of the Conservative and Reform denominations were peddling a Judaism that made concessions to modern life, and the leaders of the ultra Orthodox movements sheltered their followers from the outside world, the Rebbe taught that Judaism didn’t have to be watered down to be attractive, and that religious people didn’t have to resist interaction with the outside world to remain committed. Instead of keeping themselves holy, he taught, they should elevate the world around them and make that holy. He also taught that every Jew, religious or not, had infinite potential and a divine mission in this world. He encouraged traditional, Orthodox observance and sent emissaries out all over the world on lifelong missions to teach Jews Torah and thus hasten the coming of the Messiah.
While Schneersohn was alive, many in Chabad assumed that he was fit to be the Messiah. After he passed away in 1994 leaving no heir, there was some confusion in the movement about the Messiah issue that hasn’t entirely dissipated. While many thought that Gimmel Tammuz put an end to speculation that the Rebbe was the Messiah, because traditional Judaism teaches that the Messiah needs to be a living person, others thought that the Rebbe could still be the Messiah because traditional Judaism also teaches that a resurrection of the dead is one of the signifiers of the Messianic era. There is even a third, more radical group, who believe the Rebbe is the Messiah and the events of Gimmel Tammuz did not actually occur.
This issue not only caused a lot of division within Chabad, but it also lead many others from different denominations to criticize Chabad over these beliefs, claiming them akin to Christianity. The most vocal critic was David Berger, a Brooklyn College history professor who in 2001 published his anti-Chabad screed,
"The Rebbe, The Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference," (Littman, 2001) in which he argued that the Orthodox community needs to disenfranchise Messianists from institutionalized religious life.
Perhaps because the Messiah has not yet arrived to settle the question of who he or she is, Chabad has not managed to find a monolithic approach to solve the issue of Messianism, which did not help when it was trying to defend itself against the critics.
"The community is made up of individuals, we have always said that we are one community with differences of opinion and God bless America," said Shlomo Cunin. "Here we have diversity of opinion. There is no such thing as an official line."
In California, Messianism never caused the internal divisions that it did in other Chabad communities such as Crown Heights and Chicago.
"We live near the beach so we are much more relaxed than they are in New York," said Doonie Mishulovin, a third generation Chabadnik who teaches at Chabad’s Bais Chana High School. "The division between the opinions [about Messianism] is not so important here. No one takes it personally."
But even with the brouhaha over Messianism, which has dogged and probably will dog all discussions of Chabad in the wider community, the accusations of heresy, which Chabad utterly rejects, never stuck. If anything, Chabad is a more mainstream part of the Jewish community than it was ever before.
"Chabad went from being a group of Hasidim to a synagogue movement in this country," said Lawrence Schiffman, a Jewish studies professor at NYU who is convening the first academic conference on the Rebbe in November 2005. "Instead of being a core group of followers under a teacher, they have become teachers. That brings further integration into the society as a whole."
At the Gimmel Tammuz functions in California, the issue was not so much "who is the Messiah?" but rather "How can we bring it?"
At Bais Bezalel, one of the Chabad congregations on Pico Boulevard on the Shabbat before Gimmel Tammuz, special guest speaker Rabbi Mendel Greenbaum, the principal of Cheder Menachem, told the congregation that the Rebbe saw it as his job to elevate everyone and everything, and through doing the same the Messiah will come.
At the N’shei Chabad function the following Monday night, ten women lit tapered candles and placed a placard of an alphabet letter against a podium.
The letters spelled out the word "hiskashrus" which is a transliteration of a Hebrew word describing the closeness and connection that Hasidim have with the Rebbe. The message of the ceremony, and the speeches that preceded and followed it, was that hiskashrus did not die with the Rebbe, but is alive and well today.
"The connection between a Hasid and a Rebbe is not a physical bond, but a spiritual bond," said Rabbi Shimon Raichik of Chabad of Hancock Park. "And that is why there are people who are now connecting with to the Rebbe even more than when the Rebbe was with us physically."
Gabby Wenig
07/02/04
The Chabad movement found many ways to commemorate Gimmel Tammuz, the 10th anniversary of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (aka the Rebbe)’s death last Tuesday.
Some Chabadniks made the trek to New York, where they stood in line for two hours with 30,000 others to be allowed two minutes at the Ohel, the Rebbe’s final resting place in Queens. The scholars who answer questions on Askmoses.com, Chabad’s interactive Web site, convened in New York for a meeting on how to improve the site. Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, the Director of West Coast Chabad Lubavitch attended a fundraising meeting where he secured $8 million in pledges for new projects. Chabad of California and Kehos, Chabad’s official publishing company, published a new Chumash with English translation and the Rebbe’s commentaries. And all over California and the world, Chabadniks got together for farbrengens, Hassidic gatherings that are meant to stir the soul through words of Torah and song. At these gatherings, the main topic discussed was how to commemorate the Rebbe’s legacy and ensure that it lives on, and determine the spiritual significance of his passing.
But the one thing Chabad did not do on Gimmel Tammuz was mourn.
"[After Gimmel Tammuz in 1994] I was sitting with my son Levi in the office, and we looked at each other and he started to cry," said Cunin. "I said ‘the Rebbe wouldn’t want you crying. The Rebbe wants action. Let’s open a new Chabad institution’. And we opened Chabad of Malibu, right then. And many of our projects since then- the new girl’s school (Bais Chaya Mushka on Pico Boulevard), the Chumash, - the funding has come from Malibu. Everything flowed back to that first institution that was opened during shiva."
Cunin’s full-steam-ahead attitude is indicative of the way that Chabad has bloomed since Gimmel Tammuz. While Cunin and others admit that Gimmel Tammuz was the most difficult challenge the movement ever faced — far more difficult than say, surviving the czarist and communist prisons that incarcerated its previous leaders in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Russia- after Gimmel Tammuz Chabad did not disintegrate, as many predicted it would. Instead, it flourished.
In the 10 years since the Rebbe’s passing, the number of shluchim (emissaries) sent around the world to help Jews find Judaism has almost doubled, from 2200 to over 4000; there is now a Chabad campus initiative funded by philanthropist George Rohr that has put Chabad houses on more than 70 different college campuses in America; there are websites- chabad.org, chabad.com, askmoses.com that receive hundreds of thousands of clicks a day. In California, in terms of numbers of new buildings (42), institutions (84), shluchim (112), and dollars raised ($125 million), Chabad has grown more in the past ten years than it has in any other decade of its history. And though he is not physically present, the Rebbe remains a vital and iconic figure in Chabad.
Members of Chabad attribute the growth to the strength of the Rebbe’s message, the mainstream acceptance of Chabad ideas, and to individuals in Chabad feeling an acute sense of responsibility to carry on the Rebbe’s mission of bringing every Jew closer to Torah and hastening the Messiah.
"Whatever each of our individual and collective shlichus (mission) meant before Gimmel Tammuz they mean so much more after Gimmel Tammuz," said Rabbi Chaim Cunin, PR director for West Coast Chabad Lubavitch. "Now we are quite literally the hands and feet of the Rebbe, and he relies on us to fulfill his shlichus even more. The goals that the Rebbe set out to accomplish clearly lie on our shoulders."
Schneersohn assumed the leadership of Chabad in 1951 after the death of his father-in-law, Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn. The Rebbe saw the great challenge of Jewish life in America as resisting the allure of assimilation. While leaders of the Conservative and Reform denominations were peddling a Judaism that made concessions to modern life, and the leaders of the ultra Orthodox movements sheltered their followers from the outside world, the Rebbe taught that Judaism didn’t have to be watered down to be attractive, and that religious people didn’t have to resist interaction with the outside world to remain committed. Instead of keeping themselves holy, he taught, they should elevate the world around them and make that holy. He also taught that every Jew, religious or not, had infinite potential and a divine mission in this world. He encouraged traditional, Orthodox observance and sent emissaries out all over the world on lifelong missions to teach Jews Torah and thus hasten the coming of the Messiah.
While Schneersohn was alive, many in Chabad assumed that he was fit to be the Messiah. After he passed away in 1994 leaving no heir, there was some confusion in the movement about the Messiah issue that hasn’t entirely dissipated. While many thought that Gimmel Tammuz put an end to speculation that the Rebbe was the Messiah, because traditional Judaism teaches that the Messiah needs to be a living person, others thought that the Rebbe could still be the Messiah because traditional Judaism also teaches that a resurrection of the dead is one of the signifiers of the Messianic era. There is even a third, more radical group, who believe the Rebbe is the Messiah and the events of Gimmel Tammuz did not actually occur.
This issue not only caused a lot of division within Chabad, but it also lead many others from different denominations to criticize Chabad over these beliefs, claiming them akin to Christianity. The most vocal critic was David Berger, a Brooklyn College history professor who in 2001 published his anti-Chabad screed,
"The Rebbe, The Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference," (Littman, 2001) in which he argued that the Orthodox community needs to disenfranchise Messianists from institutionalized religious life.
Perhaps because the Messiah has not yet arrived to settle the question of who he or she is, Chabad has not managed to find a monolithic approach to solve the issue of Messianism, which did not help when it was trying to defend itself against the critics.
"The community is made up of individuals, we have always said that we are one community with differences of opinion and God bless America," said Shlomo Cunin. "Here we have diversity of opinion. There is no such thing as an official line."
In California, Messianism never caused the internal divisions that it did in other Chabad communities such as Crown Heights and Chicago.
"We live near the beach so we are much more relaxed than they are in New York," said Doonie Mishulovin, a third generation Chabadnik who teaches at Chabad’s Bais Chana High School. "The division between the opinions [about Messianism] is not so important here. No one takes it personally."
But even with the brouhaha over Messianism, which has dogged and probably will dog all discussions of Chabad in the wider community, the accusations of heresy, which Chabad utterly rejects, never stuck. If anything, Chabad is a more mainstream part of the Jewish community than it was ever before.
"Chabad went from being a group of Hasidim to a synagogue movement in this country," said Lawrence Schiffman, a Jewish studies professor at NYU who is convening the first academic conference on the Rebbe in November 2005. "Instead of being a core group of followers under a teacher, they have become teachers. That brings further integration into the society as a whole."
At the Gimmel Tammuz functions in California, the issue was not so much "who is the Messiah?" but rather "How can we bring it?"
At Bais Bezalel, one of the Chabad congregations on Pico Boulevard on the Shabbat before Gimmel Tammuz, special guest speaker Rabbi Mendel Greenbaum, the principal of Cheder Menachem, told the congregation that the Rebbe saw it as his job to elevate everyone and everything, and through doing the same the Messiah will come.
At the N’shei Chabad function the following Monday night, ten women lit tapered candles and placed a placard of an alphabet letter against a podium.
The letters spelled out the word "hiskashrus" which is a transliteration of a Hebrew word describing the closeness and connection that Hasidim have with the Rebbe. The message of the ceremony, and the speeches that preceded and followed it, was that hiskashrus did not die with the Rebbe, but is alive and well today.
"The connection between a Hasid and a Rebbe is not a physical bond, but a spiritual bond," said Rabbi Shimon Raichik of Chabad of Hancock Park. "And that is why there are people who are now connecting with to the Rebbe even more than when the Rebbe was with us physically."
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