MESSIANIC HOOPS
The Hirhurim blog cited recently
the Maccabi Tel Aviv wins Euroleague
title story from AP, with the inevitable citation from a Rebbe-starved Lubavitcher:
"Maccabi's
victory is another sign that any second now Moshiach
will come – just like the Rebbe taught us,"
Rabbi Yaakov Gloiberman,
the personal rabbi of Maccabi Tel Aviv coach Pini Gershon, said Monday.
"And God willing, Moshiach will be the rebbe himself," he added, referring to the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson...
I saw the opportunity for shameless self-promotion and noted
that in my book, Dancing and Crying, there's an entire segment about
Rabbi Betzalel Kupchik and
his messianic support for an
They ended up losing the season to Maccabi Tel Aviv.
But you must know that MTA has been the virtually
uncontested top Israeli team since the early 1970s. Which may
mean that the true sign of messianic revelation would be that MTA lose a season...
An irate anonymous reader, a few messages down, suggested we
should “have the
I responded that the nice thing about Rabbinic Judaism, and, indeed, the source of its vitality, is that we don't mess about trying to argue out hashkafa. As long as moshichistim light candles Erev Shabbat and avoid feeding the camp fire for the next 25 hours, they're inside the tent. Hashkafa is not an issue.
Steg wrote: “According to David Berger, what you think is so great about Rabbinic Judaism is a deep contemporary problem -- that as long as someone "acts observant" we as a community don't care whether they're worshipping dead messiahs or who knows what. Of course, the Slifkin controversy might disprove your and Berger's thesis of hashqafic unimportance...”
To which I responded with this fine short essay, which I uploaded but then thought, Hey, why should it be stuck in some message board when it can be shared with all the nice people who come to read about Vicki Polin and the Sitra Achra… So, here goes:
I’m not sure how you can put David Berger and myself in the same room together, let alone in the same
sentence. And the Slifkin scandal is proving that we
may be going beyond the Rabbinic era into a schismatic
epoch reminiscent of pre-Churban
What’s common to the three socio-political phenomena: Persecution of Chabad, persecution of scientists, and persecution of ideological settlers, is a spirit of intolerance never before experienced by mainstream rabbinical Jews. The Yevsektzia may have shown this kind of zeal in the pursuit of Jewish destruction by fellow Jews; but the Yevsektzia was outside the heart of the nation.
Now the willingness to point out heretics and to defeat those horrible people across the ravine who dare endanger the well being of the entire village with their ideas is overcoming our two-millennia old tradition of rabbinical benign common sense.
Daniel Boyarin theorizes that the impetus for the emergence of our rabbinic Judaism was the emergence of our first serious monotheistic competition. It was a time to close ranks, and so the same sage leadership which before the year 70 didn’t care a hoot about non-Prushim, other than to make sure the Cohen Godol obeyed the rules on Yom Kippur and your unschooled green grocer took out a tithing, all of a sudden developed a “catholic” perception of all Jews being under the umbrella. The rabbinical umbrella was designed to withstand the pressing and tugging of competing intellectual forces down the generations, aided by the grim reality of the alternative.
Now the fear of goyim as a common denominator is all but gone. We’re fresh out of great unifying forces. The Holocaust was the last solidifying event and we’re seeing its effect fizzling out before our very eyes. This is why we’re starting to see so much internal persecution. I shudder to think what will come next.
The only instrument we can rely on to ride us through this period is halacha. If we abandon our halachic bonds in favor of hashkafa disputes, we’re dead in the water.
Yori Yanover