The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference [Hardcover]

David Berger (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1874774889 | ISBN-13: 978-1874774884 | Publication Date: September 2001

'Years from now, this work will likely be seen as a primary text that formed part of the internal Jewish debate.' ~ N. R. Deutsch, Choice --- 'Passionate, powerful, brilliant...This is simply the most important book of Judaism - not about Judaism but of Judaism - to appear this year, and the most urgent in decades.' ~ Jacob Neusner, Jerusalem Post --- 'Throughly engrossing book...Berger's abiding Orthodox religious commitment, deep familiarity with religious texts and ideas, and specialized training in historical scholarship have singularly positioned and qualified him to embark on this defense of Judaism...Astute historian that he is, he offers trenchant and compelling explanations for this lack of aggressive Orthodox reaction to this latest false messianism...an articulate, thoughtful, and passionate book.' ~ Benny Kraut, Shofar --- 'Compelling...imperative reading, as it carefully and systematically documents the true nature and scope of contemporary Lubavitch missionary work.' ~ Allan Nadler, Forward --- 'Carefully and vigorously argued...a compelling, jarring, deeply disturbing polemic and precisely what Professor Berger intended it to be: "[A] memoir, aòhistory, a religious tract, an indictment, a lament, and an appeal." It is passionate, yet scholarly and precise. Its message is emotional and religiously inspired, yet its careful treatment of evidence bears the unmistakable mark of a seasoned scholar.' ~ Yaakov Kermaier, Tradition --- 'A courageous and important book...carefully and clearly argued, and generally persuasive...enhanced, in this regard, by its memoir form, which draws the reader into Berger's legitimate agony as his awareness of the problematics of Chabad messianism grows along with his equal despair that no one else seems to care.' ~ Lippman Bodoff, Midstream --- 'The principle is right, the passion is right, and the deeply classical nature of David Berger's book is very moving. It is rare that the scholarly study of Judaism so intensely engages with living Judaism. Berger's erudite ferocity is exhilarating.' ~ Leon Wieseltier

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Years from now, this work will likely be seen as a primary text that formed part of the internal Jewish debate.' N. R. Deutsch, Choice 'The growth of Lubavitch does cause concern, and Berger's book must be read to why it can be a danger to all of Judaism. This book is a brilliant exposition of the parameters of contemporary messianism ... both the author and the publishers must be commended for their courage and openness.' Uri Ben Alexander, European Judaism 'A passionate account of one man's involvement in a controversy that may well be one of the new century's major religion stories.' Alan Cochrum, Fort Worth Star-Telegram 'Compelling ... imperative reading, as it carefully and systematically documents the true nature and scope of contemporary Lubavitch missionary work.' Allan Nadler, Forward 'Passionate, powerful, brilliant ... records not only conviction, but evidence and argument ... This is simply the most important book of Judaism-not about Judaism but of Judaism-to appear this year, and the most urgent in decades.' Jacob Neusner, Jerusalem Post 'A profoundly fascinating and at the same time a profoundly disturbing story of admiration turning to adulation, thence through mass hysteria and mysticism to messianism ... authoritative.' Geoffrey Alderman, Jewish Journal of Sociology 'A courageous and very troubling memoir ... His criticism cannot be easily dismissed ... Berger has performed an important service to world Jewry by raising an issue that for too long has been swept under the rug.' Lifestyles Magazine 'A courageous and important book ... It is courageous because it is the first book of its kind and is directed against an icon of Orthodoxy. It is important because it has something important to say to a number of different constituencies ... carefully and clearly argues, and generally persuasive ... enhanced, in this regard, by its memoir form, which draws the reader into Berger's legitimate agony as his awareness of the problematics of Chabad messianism grows along with his equal despair that no one else seems to care.' Lippman Bodoff, Midstream 'Until now, no one has made the case as forcefully as Berger ... If its j'accuse is ignored and its author dismissed, it will mean that the leadership of Orthodoxy is too timid to confront a major challenge to Jewish faith, and that would be tragic indeed.' Jack Riemer, Moment [a similar review by Jack Riemer appeared in American Jewish World] 'Throughly engrossing book ... Berger's abiding Orthodox religious commitment, deep familiarity with religious texts and ideas, and specialized training in historical scholarship have singularly positioned and qualified him to embark on this defense of Judaism ... Astute historian that he is, he offers trenchant and compelling explanations for this lack of aggressive Orthodox reaction to this latest false messianism ... an articulate, thoughtful, and passionate book.' Benny Kraut, Shofar 'Carefully and vigorously argued ... a compelling, jarring, deeply disturbing polemic and precisely what Professor Berger intended it to be: [A] memoir, a history, a religious tract ... an indictment, a lament, and an appeal.A" It is passionate, yet scholarly and precise. Its message is emotional and religiously inspired, yet its careful treatment of evidence bears the unmistakable mark of a seasoned scholar.' Yaakov Kermaier, Tradition ENDORSEMENTS 'The principle is right, the passion is right, and the deeply classical nature of David Berger's book is very moving. It is rare that the scholarly study of Judaism so intensely engages with living Judaism. Berger's erudite ferocity is exhilarating.' Leon Wieseltier --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

David Berger, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University, is Professor of History at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University. For many years he was Broeklundian Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and co-chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. He is a Fellow and Executive Committee member of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and a member of the Council of the World Union of Jewish Studies, the Academic Committee of the Rothschild Foundation Europe, and the editorial board of Tradition. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and from 1998 to 2000, he served as President of the Association for Jewish Studies. He is the author of The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages (1979), which was awarded the John Nicholas Brown Prize by the Medieval Academy of America, and co-author of Judaism's Encounter with Other Cultures: Rejection or Integration? (1997), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 195 pages
• Publisher: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (September 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1874774889
• ISBN-13: 978-1874774884
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (81 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,360,780 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Berger-No Civil Wars and No Witchhunts!, February 6, 2005

By 

givbatam3 "givbatam3" (REHOVOT Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference (Hardcover)

Most reviewers have either put 1 star or 5 stars which indicates, to me, a partisan attitude towards the book. I put 3 stars to indicate that the book is interesting, does raise important points, but must be kept in proportion.
I live in Israel, am a member of the "National Religious" camp and consider myself a follower of former Chief Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak haKohen Kook's philosophy. Thus, for me the unity and internal peace of the Jewish people are paramount. If Berger is correct, the belief of some Habadniks that the Rebbe is the Mashiach and will come back to life in that role is "doctrinally incorrect" in normative (i.e. Orthodox) Judaism. The question that must be asked now is how to deal with those who hold these "incorrect" beliefs. Berger feels that the mainstream Jewish world is indifferent to the problem and thus a great danger is lurking out there and is not being confronted. I strongly believe that Berger is overstating the case. Doctrinal differences in the traditional Jewish community are nothing new. RAMBAM (Maimonides) wrote a classic halacha (Jewish law) book that did not include the sources he used. He also wrote the extremely controversial "Guide to the Perplexed". Many were outraged by these books and some were even burned. However, today, all groups accept the RAMBAM, even if they still disagree with his philosophical views. There is a raging debate in the religious world today over the age of the earth and universe, some claiming it is a matter of faith to believe they are 5765 years old, others, learned a pious, have no problem saying they are billions of years old. Some hold that the cosmology of the RAMBAM (based on Ptolemy) having the sun and planets go around the earth, is an integral part of the Torah given at Sinai, others say it is outdated and there is no problem with the Copernican view of the Solar System where the earth moves around the sun. The attitudes of the Hasidim and their Mitnaged opponents towards prayer, Torah study and other crucial matters differ widely, but today both accept each other as authentic religious Jews. Thus, people learned to live with differences that were once quite heated and sometimes lead to excommunications and even violence. Berger claims that the the essence of difference between Christianity and Judaism is the latter's rejection of someone rising from the dead and being Mashiach. This is a very gross oversimplification. Judaism can stand on its own and I don't see people becoming "confused" and going between Chabad and the other belief. Other false messianic movements like that of Shabtai Zvi and the Frankists led their followers away from mainstream Jewish observance and that is certainly not the case with Habad.
Here in Israel in the late 1980's and early 1990's there was a major controversy over the role of Habad and it led to many unfortunate and ugly incidents. Fortunately, this has more or less disappeared. If we were to follow Berger's advice, we would have to start an inquisition of each and every Habadnik's beliefs in order to decide whether he can remain an member of the Jewish society. NO ONE WANTS WITCHHUNTS OR A CIVIL WAR. Israel is now involved in a terrible war with Arab/Islamist terrorism, Jewry faces an onslaught of world-wide Judeophobia, and anti-relgious forces within Israel and the Jewish world are attacking the religious community in order to weaken it. These are the real challenges facing the Jewish people, and Habad plays an important (if not vital) role in its defense. Berger is right in pointing out that there are negative phenomena that can come out of doctrinal errors, but his warning MUST be kept in proportion and not be the cause of even more damage to the Jewish people in this time of peril. History has proven that groups that really broke with the mainstream traditional Jewish community over basic beliefs like the early Judeo-Christians, the Tzadukim (Sadducees), the Karaim (Karaites), Shabbateans, Frankists, and others have ultimately disappeared, so we can be confident that if a serious doctrinal error is really endangering Jewish belief, it will eventually extinguish itself in any event.

100 of 129 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shocking, Frightening, and COMPLETELY TRUE, October 28, 2001

By 

Stephen M. Tolany (Thornwood, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference (Hardcover)

In his new book, which has been received with great acclaim from academics and rabbis from across the spectrum, Rabbi Dr. David Berger tells the story of how he and other Jewish leaders have been trying to get the Orthodox Jewish community to realize that a large, well-organized, and powerful messianic missionary group has been misrepresenting itself as Orthodox Judaism around the world.

Berger tells us how in 1994, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson died, and the radical tendencies in his chasidic teachings started to become even more manifest and obvious among his followers, the Chabad/Lubavitch chasidim. This group, with its headquarters in Crown Heights, had long been controversial. Deans of leading talmudical accademies in America, such as Rabbi Aaron Kotler, Rabbi Isaac Hutner, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, and Rabbi Henoch Leibowitz, had been making known their intense displeasure with the group and its leader for many years, and in the late 1980s the elder sage Rabbi Menachem Shach in Israel had pronounced Rabbi Schneerson a "False Messiah", citing, among other things, the statement of Rabbi Schneerson that a rebbe was the "Being and Essence of God in a human body." Despite the deeply felt and almost universal elite rabbinic opposition to the Lubavitch movement, the majority of the the Orthodox Jewish public, especially the Modern Orthodox community and its local rabbis, could not bring itself to think ill of the Lubavitch chasidim, who, as agents of their teacher, Rabbi Schneerson, had been engaging in Jewish outreach and Jewish education in a remarkable and selfless fashion around the world, founding synagogues and centers of Jewish education in far-flung communities no one else seemed to care about.

Berger's book describes how he has been fighting against either profound sympathy for Lubavitch or a general sense of apathy in trying to bring the Orthodox, especially the Modern Orthodox, Jewish community to recognize how far the Lubavitch group has strayed from normative Judaism over the years.

In the months following Rabbi Schneerson's death, a radical theology has emerged, one in which Rabbi Schneerson is viewed as having established himself as the Messiah, has completed his mission on Earth, and needs only to be "greeted" and "taken into our hearts" in order to return to the world. Some claim that he will be resurrected, others claim that he never died, that his body is as physically alive and healthy as ever, in the most literal sense. Hundreds of Lubavitch rabbis around the world, including the chief of the rabbinical court in Montreal, and many rabbis highly placed in the offical Israeli rabbinate, have signed a bizarre legal ruling that maintains that every Jew in the world is bound by Jewish law to accept Rabbi Schneerson as the Messiah. They maintain that Rabbi Schneerson was literally a prophet, and that he proclaimed that he was the Messiah who had arrived, and Jewish law requires Jews to accept the word of a prophet as binding.

Berger presents extensive and incontrovertible evidence that "a significant majority" of the Lubavitch movement accept Rabbi Schneerson as the Messiah, and that they are teaching his messiahship to tens of thousands of children in their schools around the world, including many children in the former Soviet Union (where they are poised to dominate all Jewish institutions) and Russian immigrants in Israel.

Berger also analyzes all of the "proofs" Lubavitchers claim to have brought to support their "Second Coming" ideology, and shows with the devastating critical precision of an accomplished academic scholar and rabbi that the rejection of this belief is not only integral to Judaism, but was a critical defining element for Jews over most of the last two millenia, when they often lived among a dominant Christian population that believed in precisely such a teaching. Already, Christian missionary groups have been taking eager advantage of the Lubavitch debacle. For instance, a recent "Jews for Jesus" billboard shows a picture of Rabbi Schneerson with a caption that reads, "Right Idea, Wrong Guy".

Berger takes great pains to address the problem of Lubavitch messianism as an issue separate and distinct from the problem of the frightening new worship of Rabbi Schneerson as a divine being that has appeared in several mainstream elements of the group. Although the two problems are entangled phenomena, Berger wants to make it clear to his readers that even if no Lubavitchers were worshipping Rabbi Schneerson, the idea of idenitfying a dead man as the Messiah and then waiting for his ressurection is a profoundly dangerous, and un-Jewish idea.

But Berger still outlines the contours of the group that worships Schneerson, and uses much of the second half of his book to present evidence that they are not the fringe element we thought they were, and that they have theologians of their own who are developing a theology of Schneerson that presents him as a "man-God" and that looks remarkably like certain stages of early Christianity. As Berger points out, even non-messianic (indeed even the few anti-messianic) Lubavitchers regularly claim, even after his death, that "der rebbe firt der velt": "The Rebbe runs the world." In Crown Heights, many of the school classrooms have a picture of Schneerson on the Eastern wall (towards which Jews pray), and in the main sanctuary of the movement at 770 Eastern Packway in Brooklyn, Lubavitchers now face the balcony (where Schneerson used to stand) during prayers. The students and children are insructed to "direct their hearts and thoughts" to Rabbi Schneerson, who is "omnipotent" and "omniscient", and will fulfill all of your wishes when you pray to him.

Mainstream Lubavitch institutions employ rabbis who have published lengthy defenses of the idea that the Rebbe is an incarnation of the infinite essence of God, and that this idea is meant in a completely literal sense, that he is not merely an intermediary between us and God.

Those who are as skeptical as I was at first to hear these incredible claims should buy the book (or borrow it from a library) and examine all the evidence for themselves. The reknowned rabbinic scholar Jacob Neusner, author of over 700 hundred books and former head of Jewish Studies at Brown University, declared in a recent issue of the Jerusalem Post that Berger's book was the most important Jewish book published in many years, and that Berger has established himself as a "sage-prophet" in having had the courage to write it.

Very possibly.

30 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disinformation campaign, July 24, 2003

By 

B. Wollenberg - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference (Hardcover)

Stephen Tolaney of NY writes:

"In Crown Heights, many of the school classrooms have a picture of Schneerson on the Eastern wall (towards which Jews pray), and in the main sanctuary of the movement at 770 Eastern Packway in Brooklyn, Lubavitchers now face the balcony (where Schneerson used to stand) during prayers. The students and children are insructed to "direct their hearts and thoughts" to Rabbi Schneerson, who is "omnipotent" and "omniscient", and will fulfill all of your wishes when you pray to him."

This is a blatant lie. I have lived in Crown Heights for 5 years and daven regularly in '770'. Yes, they do say yechi after davening, that is up for discussion but regarding his other allegations:

1. I have not seen any schools with pictures of the Rebbe on the eastern wall. Not sure where he heard this from. Most schools do not have pictures in rooms where they daven, to avoid just such a problem chas v'shalom.

2. There are 3 or 4 individuals, all in cherem, all lunatics, who say the Rebbe is G-d (ch"v) and supposedly daven to him. They are condemned and ignored by the mainstream as fringe lunatics and do not represent anything remotely approaching a minority.

3. Everybody faces East during prayers in 770. Never saw anyone face any other way. Not sure where he heard this from...

4. There are NO pictures of the Rebbe in 770.

5. Stephen writes that 'The students and children are insructed to "direct their hearts and thoughts" to Rabbi Schneerson, who is "omnipotent" and "omniscient", and will fulfill all of your wishes when you pray to him."' Again not sure where he heard this, it is untrue and a horrible thing to say. Chabad schools place enormous emphasis on prepartaion for davening, getting into the right frame of mind, etc. I am not aware of *anyone* who does these things - and believe me, I've been around long enough...

I can only assume that somebody supplied wrong information. Come take a look at what is really going on before you condemn us.