TERMINATOR / by Yori Yanover
 Rabbi Norman Lamm |
The room was really crowded (I’m not sure if that has been true for earlier days of the conference), and the audience was even prepared to endure a humdrum talk on the Rebbe and the Tanya, which the first speaker, Bar Ilan’s Moshe Chalamish, read ad nauseum from the printed page.
It was well worth the wait. Both Brill and Wolfson were able to construct their talks to conform with the limitations of a relatively short presentation, and still come across fresh and intriguing. I’m looking forward to the printed versions to really sink my teeth into the stuff.
While Brill’s lecture did not touch on too much controversial content, Wolfson’s was magnificently radical in its take on the Rebbe’s notions of messianic times, when, by definition, Torah and Mitzvot will be replaced by a higher, completely intuitive connection to the divine.
Then came the part where the Respondent, Rabbi Norman Lamm, former YU president, got up to critique the presentations.
He loved the Chalamish thing, couldn’t have enough of it, possibly because that’s the part he understood. Then he gave Brill’s work the cold brush-off and rushed right in to decimate Wolfson’s work. He basically suggested that Wolfson’s work was better off not being presented, because of the “Sabatian and Frankist” trends it could evoke. He went on to call on the Lubavitch leadership to suppress the voices inside the movement which, mistakenly, may be adopting the late Rebbe’s post-messianic vision to be in effect nowadays.
Lamm was so thuggish in his talk, and so patronizing, one participant in the conference said to me, “The man hasn’t read a new book in years.”
One had to wonder what drove Professor Schiffman et al at NYU Jewish Studies to empower the retired YU old guardsman so patently needlessly.
One also had to wonder what chance someone like Elliot Wolfson could have had to develop his wonderful work if, God forbid, he’d been employed at Lamm’s YU…