IN THE PREVIOUS APPENDIX, I made reference to the Tosafists’ discussion of what they call ‘association’. Because of the importance of this text to a key contention of this book, I present here a more detailed and technical analysis.

A talmudic regulation urged Jews to avoid business partnerships with pagans lest a dispute arise in which the non-Jewish partner would take an oath in the name of his god. The Jew would thus violate a biblical injunction that the Talmud understands to forbid causing someone to invoke the name of ‘another god’. What is the standing of this regulation in Christian Europe?

The Tosafists maintain that accepting an oath from Christians is permissible because they swear in the name of the saints, to whom they do not attribute divinity. It is true, Tosafot continues, that they mention ‘the name of Heaven’ (presumably God) along with the saints ‘and their intention is to something else [a better text reads ‘Jesus of Nazareth’], but this [i.e. ‘the name of Heaven’ without explicit mention of Jesus] is still not an idolatrous name. Also, their intention is to the Creator of heaven [and earth].’ This last sentence may mean either that in addition to Jesus they have in mind the Creator or, in a formulation more accurately reflecting Christian doctrine, that while they think of Jesus their ultimate intention is the true Creator. In either case, Tosafot maintains that Christians intend to worship the true God but cross a crucial line by incorporating a human being into their conception of the divine. The Tosafists even considered the possibility that one actually pronounces the name of a foreign deity by simply saying the word ‘God’ with Jesus in mind, and they take for granted that the explicit invocation of his name would run afoul of this prohibition.

This, however, is not quite the end of the text. The enigmatic continuation, which has produced a literature unto itself, says, ‘And even though they associate the name of Heaven with something else, we do not find that it is forbidden to cause someone else to associate, and the commandment not to cause a blind man to stumble [i.e. not to cause someone to sin] does not apply because Noahides [i.e. non-Jews] were not commanded regarding this [i.e. association, as an alternative version of the text says explicitly].’

ON 13 TEVET (11 January), I published an article in Ha'aretz that aroused a stormy discussion is Israel and the diaspora. I noted a new rabbinic ruling requiring all of us to believe in the messiahship of the Lubavitcher Rebbe as well as developments that I regard as manifestations of avodah zarah.

In the wake of the article, we have seen defences of even the most frightening formulations, but we have also been privileged to hear sharp denunciations of the practitioners of avodah zarah emanating from various Chabad circles, including those of committed messianists. It remains to be seen whether participants in extremist publications who have not repented will be removed from their posts as educators, spiritual mentors (mashpi'im), and directors of Chabad Houses.

If this does not happen, the aura of danger and suspicion that now envelops the movement will remain intact, and the argument that we are dealing with entirely marginal phenomena will be publicly exposed as worthless. If it does happen, we will be able to feel reassured at least with respect to avodah zarah.

On the other hand, the rabbinic ruling itself has not been the object of vigorous criticism on the part of the movement's leadership. On the contrary, the latest advertisement indicates that the plague of messianism has spread to the point where the number of signatories on the ruling has grown from six to fifty, among them rabbis of cities and heads of rabbinic courts.

Let us imagine that, ten years ago, we would have approached a rabbinic decisor with the following question:

‘Before us is a candidate for a position as head of a rabbinic court, or as a rabbi, or as a principal or teacher or ritual slaughterer or kashrut supervisor. He commands broad knowledge and is endowed with superb talents. Nonetheless, we feel conflicted as a result of one small drawback that concerns us a bit. This individual is a major spokesman for a movement of false messianism that has attracted thousands of observant Jews.

‘He declares that a person who was buried in Queens, New York three years ago is Messiah son of David.

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.

IN MY FIRST ARTICLE in Jewish Action (above, Ch. 2), I briefly proposed some tentative explanations for Orthodox Jewry's blithe betrayal of one of its fundamental beliefs. The question, however, cries out for fuller treatment. I regret to say that the reasons for this phenomenon now strike me as broader and deeper than they did in 1995, so that despite their utter lack of substantive merit, their sociological force will be very difficult to overcome.

The Ideal of Unity and the Avoidance of Communal Strife

The point is self-evident. Every practising Jew has heard countless sermons about the imperative to love one's neighbour, particularly one's Jewish neighbour. At the barest minimum, the annual Torah reading about Korah's rebellion against Moses (Num. 16–17) generates discourses about the severe prohibition against fomenting disputes within the community. (I heard one of these just two days before writing this sentence.) While rhetoric about this value cuts across all Orthodox—and Jewish—lines, in our context it is especially compelling for Modern Orthodox Jews who maintain cordial, even formal relations with other denominations and pride themselves on embracing an ideal of tolerance.

Nonetheless, the refutation of this argument is no less self-evident than its initial attractiveness. A few weeks after the Torah reading about Korah, very different sermons are preached about the zeal of Pinchas (Num. 25). I will not burden the reader with a detailed recapitulation of arguments that have appeared throughout this volume. No Orthodox Jew believes that everyone committed to the Jewish community has the right to serve as an Orthodox rabbi because of the value of unity. The appeal to this principle is relevant only after one has concluded that Lubavitch messianism is essentially within the boundaries of Orthodoxy. Since this is precisely what is at issue, the argument begs the question.

Orthopraxy and Appearance

Two distinguished academic observers of contemporary Orthodoxy have chided me for incurable naivety in imagining that matters of faith play any significant role in the community. Anyone who looks and acts the way Lubavitch hasidim do will be treated as an Orthodox Jew. Period.

THE PRIMARY OBJECTIVE of this book is to establish the principle that anyone who proclaims the messiahship of the Rebbe stands outside the parameters of Orthodox Judaism and must be treated accordingly. From this perspective, the question of the size of the Lubavitch movement and the percentage of hasidim who affirm this belief is secondary. Nonetheless, the importance of the Chabad community and the nature of its messianic profile have major implications along a broad front of halakhic, sociological, and public policy issues, and I have no choice but to confront them.

With respect to the movement as a whole, the Lubavitch Youth Organization publishes a directory including an incomplete but very impressive list of emissaries in countries covering the alphabetical spectrum from Armenia to Venezuela. After consultation with official spokesmen in New York, a journalist reported that ‘Chabad's facilities have grown by almost a third in [the] six years [since the Rebbe's death]. The movement has established more than 500 Chabad institutions throughout the world, raising the global total to 2,600, with 3,700 couples serving as emissaries.’

Even as we recognize the fluidity of the term ‘institutions’ and the possibility that these numbers are exaggerated, there is no question that the worldwide Chabad presence is growing at a stunning rate. I have made some random enquiries from what I believe to be reliable local sources to supplement publicly available information, and they reinforce this impression to a degree that will surprise even knowledgeable observers.

I was taken aback to learn that Chabad rabbis constitute 50 per cent of the English rabbinate. Milan has a powerful Chabad presence, Venice boasts a Chabad centre where many Jewish tourists eat and spend the Sabbath, and the most important ritual slaughterer in Rome is a Lubavitch hasid. Any Jewish traveller to France, where the Lubavitch directory lists thirty-five major emissaries, will testify to the visibility and significance of Chabad institutions and services there. Half the twenty-six synagogues in Sydney are led by Chabad rabbis, and, in the words of my informant, ‘Kashrut, including shechita (ritual slaughter), is governed in Sydney by the Kashrut Authority, which is supervised by one rabbi only—Habad, of course’. Chabad, he went on to say, ‘has completely dominated the efforts to bring Russian immigrants into the community’.

IN ORTHODOX JEWISH circles there is a widespread genre of leaflets or booklets ranging from one to six or so pages containing discussions connected to the weekly Torah reading, or parashah. After Sukkot, the annual reading cycle resumes with the beginning of Genesis (Bereshit). In that week's issue of Siḥat hage'ulah [‘Discourse on Redemption’, 11 Oct. 1996], a fourpage messianist parashah booklet, the standard formula declaring the Rebbe's messiahship (‘May our Master, Teacher, and Rabbi, the King Messiah, live for ever’, often described simply as the Yeḥi after its first Hebrew word) appeared in a modified form. One of the regular features of Siḥat hage'ulah is a story of a miracle effected by the deceased Rebbe. In the account published in the Bereshit issue, a beneficiary of the miracle bursts out into thankful praise, declaring, ‘May our Master, Teacher and Creator [bore'enu] the King Messiah live for ever’. The relevant section was reproduced in a religious newspaper called Yom hashishi and caused a flurry of discussion in Israel, with a number of Lubavitch rabbis expressing dismay.

At about the same time, the individual who had arranged the meeting in Crown Heights spoke to Rabbi Sherer, who told him that the Council of Torah Sages would probably not act unless some additional messianist provocation emerged. I was, of course, deeply disappointed and wrote a letter to Rabbi Sherer in which I may have allowed this disappointment to manifest itself more forcefully than I should have:

FOR BETTER or for worse, this is no ordinary book, and writing an account of the afterlife of its original edition is no ordinary task. Within the short compass of an introduction, I need to provide an overview of the reactions that the work elicited, my assessment of their merit, the range of attitudes in the larger community towards believers in the messiahship and/or divinity of the Lubavitcher Rebbe (Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who passed away in 1994), and the contours of faith within Lubavitch hasidism more than six years after publication. Moreover, the debates that swirled around the book impel me to provide a more sharply focused analysis of some core concerns that require further clarification. Ultimately, at least from my perspective, the issue before us is nothing less than the state—and fate—of the Jewish religion.

Criticism and Response

The spectrum of terms used to characterize the book has extended from ‘masterpiece’ to Mein Kampf, the first in a personal letter from Rabbi Shraga Feivel Zimmerman of K'hal Bnei Ashkenaz in Monsey, New York, and the second in a Yiddish article in the Algemeiner Journal by a Lubavitch hasid who announced that he had not read it but had heard about it, ‘and this is more than enough’. In the event that anyone is inclined to downplay the work's cosmic significance, I note that this article, entitled ‘Chutzpah without a Limit’, begins with several paragraphs about the transcendent chutzpah of Osama bin Laden, affirms that any significant phenomenon must emerge from within the Jewish people, identifies a certain Dr Berger as the evident source of this phenomenon, and proceeds to a measured discussion of my similarity to the NKVD persecutors of Soviet-era Chabad, and to other quintessential malefactors. The piece is illustrated with a single photo—of Osama bin Laden.

On a more serious note, two Lubavitch rabbis published book-length broadsides, one, by Rabbi Chaim Dalfin, entitled Attack on Lubavitch: A Response, and the other, by Rabbi Chaim Rapoport, bearing the somewhat puzzling title, The Messiah Problem: Berger, the Angel, and the Scandal of Reckless Indiscrimination.

JEWISH LITERATURE, especially polemical literature, is replete with arguments that the Messiah could not have come—or that Jesus could not have been the Messiah—because the prophecies of the end of days remain unfulfilled. In most cases, these two formulations appear interchangeable. Since the very definition of the concept ‘Messiah’ is rooted in biblical descriptions of visible, global redemption, Judaism properly recoiled from scenarios without a shred of biblical justification in which the Messiah's mission is interrupted by death in an unredeemed world. The God of the Hebrew Bible sends the messianic king to accomplish his end, not to follow a two-part script in which the hero tragically dies and the words ‘to be continued’ suddenly appear on the screen.

The Jewish denial of this possibility has been expressed in various forms through the ages. This appendix presents a small but, I hope, representative sampling of relevant texts. Three of these, from Maimonides, Nahmanides, and Sefer haberit, have appeared in whole or in part earlier in the book.

1. Midrash Bereshit Rabba 98:

Our father Jacob saw Samson [in a prophetic vision] and thought that he was the King Messiah. Once he saw that he died, he said, ‘This one too has died. For your salvation I wait, O Lord.’

2. Jacob ben Reuben, Milḥamot hashem(c.1170), ed. Judah Rosenthal (Jerusalem, 1963), 78:

‘And this is the name by which he shall be called: the Lord our Righteousness’ (Jer. 23: 6). You [the Christian] said that the Messiah is called ‘the Lord our Righteousness’. Now according to your words, how can you say that this messiah of yours ‘reigned as king and prospered’? How were ‘Judah and Israel delivered in his days’, and how did they ‘dwell securely’ (Jer. 23: 5–6)? … [This figure] is the [true] messianic king, as it is written afterwards, ‘Assuredly, a time is coming—declares the Lord—when it shall no more be said, “As the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt”, but rather, “As the Lord lives, who brought out and led the offspring of the House of Israel from the northland and from all the lands to which I have banished them.”

IN HA'ARETZ and in earlier correspondence, I pointedly used the provocative word idolatry. Though there is no better English translation of the Hebrew term avodah zarah, I have come to realize that Christians who read that Judaism regards incarnationist theology as idolatrous—even if only for Jews—see this as an offensive assertion that they worship the icons themselves as gods. Since neither Christians nor Lubavitch hasidim do this, I will henceforth use the Hebrew term, except, of course, in quotations from material written before I made this decision.

I have already noted that the literal meaning of avodah zarah is foreign worship, but this cannot serve as either a useful definition or a routine translation. Islam, for example, with a conception of God essentially identical to that of Judaism, is not avodah zarah, though its mode of worship is certainly foreign to Judaism. The best definition I can muster is ‘the formal recognition or worship as God of an entity that is in fact not God’. For Jews, any human being is such an entity. Even the generic worship of the Creator God with the intention of including one of these entities is avodah zarah when practised by a Jew, though there is surely a major distinction between paganstyle polytheism and avodah zarah in a monotheistic mode. A detailed discussion of the evidence for this position, which I have relegated to Appendices II and III, would unduly burden the reader at this point, when it is time to resume our narrative.

Within days of my article's appearance, Ha'aretz published a brief response entitled ‘Al tige'u bimeshih. ai’ (literally, ‘Do Not Touch My Anointed Ones’, a reference to Psalm 105: 15) by Rabbi Gedalyah Axelrod, one of the signatories of the ruling requiring belief in the Rebbe's messiahship and the head of a rabbinic court in Haifa. He described the quotations about the Rebbe's divinity as ‘anomalous comments which should not have been made’, arguing that ‘these exceptions are being taken care of by Chabad rabbis everywhere by means of education and guidance’. As for the messianist ruling,

ON 17 JUNE 1994, five days after the petirah (passing) of the Lubavitcher Rebbe zt“l, an advertisement appeared in the Jewish Press declaring that he would be resurrected as the Messiah. At that point, I wrote a letter containing the following assertion: ‘There is no more fundamental messianic belief in Judaism than the conviction that the Davidic Messiah who appears at the end of days will not die before completing his mission’ [Jewish Press, 1 July 1994; see above, Ch. 1].

In my article in Jewish Action [see Ch. 2], I formulated the point as follows: ‘Even [the small minority of] Jews who believed that King David would be the Messiah (or the vanishingly tiny number who may have left open the possibility that Daniel might be) did not believe that a Davidic figure born (or reborn) during or after their lifetime would begin the redemptive process only to die and be buried before its completion. Such a position is utterly alien to the most basic messianic posture of all non- Sabbatian Jews through the ages.’

I repeat these formulations here because their key point has apparently been missed by both Rabbi Butman and Rabbi Weisberg. Although, as we shall see, I regard the belief that Mashiach ben David (Messiah son of David) can come from the dead as a rejected position (a shitah deḥuyah), the core of my argument does not depend on this conviction. Whoever the Messiah might be, once he begins his messianic activities, there is no dispute as to the certainty that he sees the process to its completion without an intervening death, burial, and resurrection.

Jews have written numerous works through the ages describing the career of the Messiah. In some cases, we find only highlights of the unfolding messianic drama, in others, painstaking accounts of every stage. Differences abound. Alternative scenarios are proposed.

AT THIS POINT, the imperative of thematic coherence compels me to interrupt the chronology of the narrative by turning to a critical article that appeared more than two years after this rejoinder. Jacob Immanuel Schochet, a Lubavitch rabbi and academic who has written widely on theological topics, responded not to my arguments but to an essay by Rabbi Chaim Dov Keller that I will have occasion to discuss in its proper time. Rabbi Schochet is a non-messianist who nonetheless affirms the essential legitimacy of the messianist position; precisely because he is not a believer himself, the messianists take special satisfaction in his arguments. Some of those arguments are familiar, but others raise new issues that require us to extend our discussion of the return of a resurrected Messiah from a redemptive mission interrupted by an untimely death.

Rabbi Schochet vehemently criticized Rabbi Keller for ‘an obscene analogy’ between the belief that the resurrected Rebbe will be the Messiah and the similar Christian belief in a dead and risen redeemer. The critique included the standard argument that belief in a resurrected Messiah ‘does not violate normative Judaism or valid Halachah one iota’ since this possibility is estalished by such sources as Sanhedrin 98b and Abarbanel as well as an additional text that we shall examine in due course. But there is also a more original slant. We are presented with a somewhat ambiguous formulation distinguishing Christian and Sabbatian doctrine from that of Lubavitch messianists by the degree of fulfilment allegedly achieved by the interrupted messianic mission.

‘Christians (as well as the Sabbateans)’, writes Rabbi Schochet, differ from the messianists because

Messianists, however, remain punctiliously observant.

Let us try to unpack this argument. Rabbi Schochet apparently maintains that Judaism has no objection to the belief that the Messiah will appear on what I called ‘the eschatological stage’ and die before completing his mission.

THIS BOOK is a memoir, a history, a religious tract. It is an indictment, a lament, and an appeal. It records the shattering of a core belief of a major faith, and the remarkable equanimity with which the standard-bearers of that faith have allowed one of its key pillars to be undermined. This tree has fallen during the last few years not in a deserted forest but in the midst of the madding crowd, yet the multitudes of observers somehow imagine that it continues to stand.

Since the religion in question is my own, I do not write as a dispassionate observer. I write, rather, with the hope that this account will awaken believing Jews from their torpor, alert them to the catastrophe that has befallen their faith, and inspire them to take the simple yet difficult steps needed to transform this moment from a turning point into an episode. To adapt a formulation originally applied to the abortive European revolutions of 1848 and 1849, we still have the opportunity to make this the turning point where Judaism failed to turn. If we do not seize this opportunity, a nearly irrevocable transformation will have been effected, and by the time the truth sinks in, it may well be too late to act.

As I write, two propositions from which every mainstream Jew in the last millennium would have instantly recoiled have become legitimate options within Orthodox Judaism: