The Forgotten Rebbe By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach Twenty years ago this Tuesday I awoke early in Oxford because I was taking a non-Jewish student President of our L’Chaim Society to Israel for the first time. I was packed and getting dressed when the phone rang. It was my father calling from Jerusalem. “I don’t think you’re coming to Israel today,” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “Israel radio just announced the passing of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.” The irony of hearing the shocking loss of a father figure from my actual father was not lost on me, but I had no time to mourn. What was on my mind was a dash to Heathrow airport to try and make the funeral in New York. Luckily, I was already packed. I called the student in question, Cory Booker, who would later become my own Senator in New Jersey, and said, “Cory, the Rebbe just died. I can’t go to Israel with you. But you should go and I’ll arrange for someone to escort you,” which I did. Knowing my close relationship with the Rebbe for the two years we were close friends at the University, he understood. The airline miraculously had a Jewish check-in clerk who somehow got me and about 30 other Chabad Rabbis on a flight that would get us into New York an hour before the funeral. It was a miserable flight with so many memories passing through my mind. Arriving at JFK amid a steady downpour, I dashed to Crown Heights and made my way into the Rebbe’s room where I saw the awful sight of the Rebbe cloaked in a prayer shawl. Governor Mario Cuomo was there looking somber, his head bowed. Few cried and noone spoke. Downstairs in the Rebbe’s synagogue thousands were dancing in the belief that this passing was a stage in the Rebbe’s revelation as Messiah. The celebration disgusted me and I went back upstairs where they took the Rebbe’s body out in the wooden remains of his prayer stand. As they did, a wall of sound suddenly hit me, almost knocking me over. It was the cry of perhaps 20,000 women wailing upon seeing the Rebbe in the makeshift coffin. I ran behind the body, losing my hat, tearing my suit, and struggling not to be trampled to be near my Rebbe. The pushing became so dangerous that they put the Rebbe’s coffin in an ambulance and slowly began to drive. I ran alongside. They sped up and I increased my speed. I ran and ran until I could run no longer and it was only then, as I stopped, gasping for air, that I began to cry. If the Rebbe were still alive he would have inspired me to keep on running. But who would inspire me now? Later it would emerge that approximately 50,000 people attended the funeral according to NYPD estimates, far smaller than other great Rabbis, like Moshe Feinstein, who had died just a few years earlier. Mostly Chabad people attended. Others did not bother and some even boycotted the Rebbe’s funeral. The twentieth anniversary of the Rebbe’s passing is being accompanied by the portrayal of the Rebbe as the founder of Judaism with a smile. The Rebbe, we hear, was vastly popular, opened more Jewish educational centers than any Jewish leader in history, and helped to turn the tide of assimilation after the ravishing losses of the holocaust. All this is partially true, but it’s not the whole story and to an extent it sanitizes the Rebbe’s legacy. The Rebbe was a revolutionary. His Judaism was friendly but it was also compelling and purposely divisive. The Rebbe forced you to take a stand. He played on your conscience and made to choose. Would you practice a convenient Judaism that focused on your own selfish spiritual development, or would you turn your personal home into a community center, inviting the less observant and neglected in? Would you practice Judaism in private or would you be identifiably Jewish, with a kippah, in the street? Would you accept the world’s flaws or would you clamor for a Messianic, more perfect world? Chabad today is mainstream and, as such, has lost some of its revolutionary fervor. It is inconvenient to rock the boat when you are the boat. Hence, we hear little today about the Rebbe’s intractable opposition to territorial concessions in Israel. Gone are the Rebbe’s battle cry that Israel’s retreat would embolden its enemies and invite further terror attack. We hear little about the Rebbe’s insistence that Judaism had a message for, and his outreach to, non-Jews, in Judaism’s call for a universal ethical covenant. Indeed, my having made Cory President of our Jewish organization at Oxford University, and the inclusion of the thousands of non-Jewish members at our activities, ultimately cost me my job as head of Chabad at Oxford, even as Cory is today, as a Senator, publicly claimed by many Chabad rabbis as having introduced him to the movement. And we hear little about the Rebbe’s constant discussion about Messianism – not his personal candidacy for Messiahship, which he found vulgar and always rejected – but in people being fed-up with a flawed, murderous, evil world and demanding better from G-d. The Rebbe’s thundering and quaking cry against G-d – always done in public where he shrieked “Ad Mosai” – objecting to G-d allowing the indiscriminate murder of Jews in Israel in terror attacks, has today been replaced with a silent, religious resignation where G-d is always just, even as the long-promised Messiah still tarries. Today the Rebbe is popular. But his funeral told a more honest story. He never pursued popularity. He never feared controversy. And it was influence, rather than numbers, that mattered. His mission was to make Jews uncomfortable with a materially driven life and he never intended for his movement to simply open centers the world over so that Jews could get kosher meals when they are on vacation in the Caribbean or doing business in the Far East. That Chabad can provide these essential amenities, thereby ensuring Jewish observance in the most distant places, is vital, but of secondary important. The Chabad House’s principal purpose is to spread the influence of the Torah and make the Jewish people a light unto the nations thereby hastening the Messianic redemption through a world filled with authenticity and spiritual purpose. The Rebbe loved all Jews and he loved all people. He considered it a terrible waste for people to squander their potential by having only a professional career that was not part of a larger spiritual calling. He paid a price for being an irritant, even as he is today remembered as the warm smile behind Chabad. At the end of the Bible, Moses ascends Mt. Nebo alone, by G-ds command, to his burial place, unknown to us till this day. Unaccompanied and abandoned, there was none to say the kaddish for him, there was no eulogy, no twenty-one gun salute. He had done his duty before G-d and man and then, like silent footsteps in the night, he was gone. His legacy was not of the popular leader who was lauded by the people but as the law-giver who pushed the people to aspire to holiness and moral excellence, often against their will. The Rebbe, who followed in Moses’ footsteps as one of the great Jewish leaders of all history, courageously pursued the same lonely path.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 11:57:35 +0000
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