The Jewish Week has a good piece on the Chabad conversion crisis. Basically an Israeli beit din charged with conversions rejected a potential Chabad convert because he believes the late Rebbe is the messiah.
The Jewish Week tells the story. And then it asks various rabbis what should be done. The breakdown goes like this:
- An unnamed spokesman for Sefardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, who is the head of all government beit dins in Israel, indicated that it is up to each individual judge to decide on the conversion candidate standing before him. The Jewish Week thinks this means Rabbi Amar will decline to overrule the beit din that refused to convert the messianist.
- Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, formerly of CLAL, avers the late Rebbe was a "failed messiah,' not a false one, and should be treated with respect even though his followers err. Rabbi Greenberg then goes on to say that the messianist should be converted because, "If he said he believed in another religion or another God, that would be a legitimate criterion" for denying his conversion. But this case is different, he says. "That mistaken belief should be criticized but should not be the basis for refusing entrance to the Jewish people."
- Rabbi Seth Farber of Itim said, "I think it could be agreed upon that someone who was observant but continued to deny the singularity of God or God’s omnipresence ought be denied entry through the gates," said Rabbi Seth Farber, director of Itim, an Israeli organization that helps converts deal with the rabbinic establishment there.
"Given the consensus among the Orthodox community regarding the fact that messianic deliverance has not yet occurred," Rabbi Farber continued, "it seems reasonable that someone who assumed [and acted upon this belief] this could be denied." - Rabbi Basil Herring, the executive director of the Rabbinical Council of America, waffled, ""is a very delicate, sensitive issue and we respect the right and jurisdiction of the rabbinate of Israel to make its decision on this issue."
The Jewish Week also notes that the RCA resolution condemning Chabad messianism, passed two years after the Rebbe's death, wasn't all it was supposed to be:
[The RCA is] an organization with about 1,000 centrist Orthodox rabbis. In 1996 the RCA passed a much-debated, carefully constructed resolution condemning Jewish messianism, without mentioning Lubavitch in particular. Authored by Rabbi Berger, who is a member of the group, they removed the name of Lubavitch because they did not want to deprecate the entire chasidic sect, some of whose members do not share the messianist beliefs, said the RCA’s president at the time.
I'm told what really happened is there was heavy opposition to the resolution by rabbis with close ties to Chabad and by wealthy Modern Orthodox financial backers of Chabad. That, combined with Rabbi Berger's belief that the Rebbe should be separated from the errors of his followers, and his belief that the few non-messianist Chabad rabbis should be protected from attacks meant for the messianists, caused the resolution to be watered down.
Rabbi Berger's attempts to spare the Rebbe weren't met with gratitude. Chabad instead launched a smear campaign against Rabbi Berger that has continued to this day, a campaign Basil Herring has never seriously addressed.
I also want to address Rabbi Greenberg's point regarding accepting this messianist as a convert.
In effect what Rabbi Greenberg is saying is that in 44 CE the Sanhedrin should have accepted converts who believed Jesus was the messiah but kept mitzvot and identified as Jewish. It should have converted them and allowed them to study and affiliate with James and Peter – because the only major difference between Jews and Early Christians in Israel in those days was who believers thought was the messiah.
The rabbis spent years trying to make separations between Early Christians, known as "minim" in rabbinic literature, and normative Jews, going so far as to ban prostration in prayer because Early Christians prostrated themselves during prayer, and banning other Jewish practices because Early Christians did them, as well. Indeed, the rabbis added a special blessing cursing the minim to the Amidah prayer.
In those days before widespread literacy and the printing press, the Amidah was said out loud and the congregation answered Amen to each blessing. There was no "silent Amidah" as we now know it.
The idea was as follows. A Jew entering a synagogue could immediately tell whether the congregation was messianist or not because messianist synagogues would not say that added section of the Amidh prayer.
Further, minim, the messianists of their day, would not pray in synagogues that did say the new anti-minim prayer. If one did, and did not answer Amen to that blessing, he was discovered and, shall we say, dealt with.
These steps over time helped to create Christianity by separating the messianists from Judaism.
Perhaps the rabbis were wrong to do this. But they did it, not because Early Christians did not keep mitzvot but because Early Christians did keep mitzvot while at the same time holding to a heretical belief – that their dead teacher would rise as the messiah. This seems to be a very close parallel to the situation we have today with large chuncks of the Chabad movement.
We can diverge from the policy set almost 2000 years ago, although it seems strange rabbis who today will not change policies set in error 10 years ago or 100 years ago will so easily change this one set by the greatest rabbis of our people's history.
Perhaps that is beginning to sink into today's non-Chabad rabbinic mind.
[Hat Tip: Michelle.]