3 - Aborted Initiatives and Sustained Attacks

Summary

REACTION to the article was swift, widespread, and varied. A leading Orthodox commentator and communal figure called Jewish Action to say that this was the most important piece they had ever published. The late Rabbi Shmuel Yaakov Weinberg, head of Yeshiva Ner Israel of Baltimore, told a member of the editorial board that publishing it was an act of great merit (mitzvah gedolah). Rabbi Chaim Dov Keller of the Telshe Yeshiva in Chicago, who had written a critical article about Lubavitch during the Rebbe's lifetime, called to express his congratulations. A prominent spokesman for Satmar hasidim, who represent a very different element in the Traditionalist Orthodox spectrum and whose long-standing hostility to Lubavitch I have already noted, did the same. There was even one call of unmitigated support from a Lubavitch emissary in New Jersey.

Nonetheless, the dominant reaction from ostensibly anti-messianist Lubavitch circles shattered yet another of my naive expectations. Despite the article's careful focus on the messianist group, Chabad solidarity prevailed, and the Orthodox Union (OU) was accused of having authorized an attack on Lubavitch as a whole. The non-messianists, I was told, were taking care of the matter internally, and external criticism would only complicate their task. A columnist for the Algemeiner Journal suggested that the OU might have published the article because it saw itself as ‘the potential economic beneficiary of the hit that David Berger suggests the rest of the Orthodox community deliver to Lubavitch’.

While I was gratified by the many private expressions of support and disappointed by the reaction within the movement, my primary concern was to turn this article into a vehicle for meaningful statements by groups and individuals whose views would really count. And so I sent copies along with covering letters to several major rabbinic figures and organizations, including the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), which represents the Modern Orthodox rabbinate in North America, the Council of Torah Sages (Moetzes Gedolei Hatorah), which is the governing body of the Traditionalist Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein of Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel, one of the greatest rabbinical figures in contemporary Modern Orthodoxy, and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of England.