[Peace-discuss] More on Chabad

[David Green]

This post is from Philip Weiss' blog http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2009/03/jack-ross-on-the-relationship-of-chabad-to-zionism.html

Jack Ross is a serious guy, although I don't know or think enough to comment on his theories.
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Jack Ross on Chabad, referring to the next post down:
 
I'm not sure whether or not its fair to hold them up as representing anyone but themselves.  On the one hand they do more or less represent a narrow a segment of American Jewry, as anyone will tell you, on the other hand they have been shockingly enabled by the larger Jewish officialdom.  And of course, while they're almost the only ones ballsy enough to say "from the river to the sea", we need not repeat here all past discussions of the fictiveness of the "two state solution".
 
The whole messiah question it seems to me misses the point. Though I like to respond with the line from Life Of Brian (greatest film ever made about Judaism, Christianity, and Trostkyism!): He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!  No doubt that is precisely what the late Chabad leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson's virulently anti-Zionist grandfather (Scholem Dov Ber, the fourth rebbe) would have said.
 
Chabad is, at root, a deeply unprincipled organization.  In an almost Leninist fashion, they have come to dominate the Orthodox world, or at the very least have the sort of "domination of the big tent" which the Workers World Party had over the antiwar movement of the last decade.  
 
Curiously, they remain opposed to a specifically religious Zionism, that is, they do not have an Israeli flag in the sanctuary nor do they observe the holidays of the 20th century sacred narrative - Yom HaShoah (Holocaust commemoration), Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence day), and Yom Yerushalayim ('67 War commemoration).  Their embrace of the most extreme elements of political Zionism seems more then anything to be merely a rather cynical means of outreach to their target audience.
 
I'll give you my grand historical theory about Chabad: For a long time I wrestled with the question of how you explain the Christian right while Protestantism was dying everywhere else in the world. I finally concluded that it was analogous to the revival of paganism just before the fall of the Roman Empire.  In other words, in the late decadent stage of the empire its sacred narrative becomes increasingly eschatological.
 
Thus in the history of the American Empire did rational Cold War liberalism give way to Christian dispensationalism as a justifying public ideology.  Likewise with Chabad, it represents a similar late stage in Jewish nationalism as it replaced the Menshevism of the classical Labor Zionists.
 
In other words, whereas the religion of Reform leader Eric Yoffie is little more than Hegelianism masquerading as Judaism (and indeed quite antiquated as such), Chabad is promoting a truly mystical religion of "Jewish peoplehood", based largely on Lurianic Kabbalah, but with ultimately the same essence.  That is, in the end as much a construction of political convenience as the Christian fundamentalism of the last generation.