Richard Rothschild
February 27, 1932 – April 27, 2023
A Personal Note
(A short but concise biographical sketch of Richard Rothschild which appears below was published by his family following Richard’s passing in2023. I have added my own brief reference to Richard who was an exemplary human being in all respects.)
On April 27, 2023 my good friend Richard Rothschild passed away at the age of 91. He was a proud and vigorous member of PAJU for more than 15 years. Richard was born in Germany in the midst of the rise of Nazism and the first stages of the persecution of German Jews. His family departed from Germany and lived briefly in the Netherlands before emigrating to the United States. Richard spent much of his youth there, eventually becoming a social activist and trade unionist.
He met Karen, his future wife, a British immigrant who had come to the United States as a foreign student, on an early morning picket line in New York City. Several years later, Richard and Karen moved to Canada, living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Richard taught high school for many years, bought a hobby farm, and acquired his own milk cow, Boadicea. After his retirement, Richard, and family moved to Quebec, where Richard and Karen lived in Hudson.
Richard was deeply committed to social causes and the ideals of justice and equality. While in the United States he was active in grassroots trade union organising , the Reform Democrats in New York City and in the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam war movements. In Nova Scotia, he was involved in the Nova Scotia Teachers Union. In Quebec, he was involved with PAJU (Palestinian and Jewish Unity) and the Rigaud food bank. With his wife, he travelled to Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico in 1995, and he always remembered his brief meeting with Bishop Samuel Ruiz in San Cristobal de Las Casas.
Possessed of a sharp and analytical mind and a love of logic and philosophical debate, Richard was modest and humble with a wry sense of humour. A voracious reader of many genres, Richard enjoyed many things, from philosopher Ted Honderich to fiction by Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and John Mortimer, as well as the New York Review of Books, to name but a few. CBC radio and classical music, particularly string quartets and opera, were part of Richard’s daily life. He also had a strong appreciation of art.
Throughout his life, Richard gave steadfast support to his family in all circumstances. Great animal lovers, Richard and family shared their lives with very many animal friends over the years, most recently cats, and especially Little O, a feline television enthusiast with a sweet tooth. Richard enjoyed making puns and silly jokes. In recent years, he wrote poetry for the family, creating a new family Christmas tradition of “pick a poem”. His favourite things included walking in the woods, sipping morning coffee, delighting in birds in the back yard, wandering city streets, conversing intensely about the most fundamental questions, rummaging in used book shops, second-hand stores, and yard sales, collecting another “new” Christmas tree ornament every year, admiring artisan works at the fair trade Pure Art shop and savouring cassoulet, hearty soups, Furley’s sourdough bread and lemon pie.
I first came to know Richard following a phone call from him some 16 or 17 years ago when he told me that he had come across information about the Palestinian solidarity group, Palestinian and Jewish Unity and wanted to attend a meeting. I found him to be a very articulate man with a philosophical bent whose analysis of the situation in the Middle East spoke of a critique which went to the heart of the conceptual underpinning of Zionism which Richard characterized as ethnic ultra-nationalism and a blight on Jews collectively. The sharpness of his critique was unyielding.
My wife Manon and I got to know Richard and Karen well and we had the privilege of spending afternoons together over the years talking about whatever subject might come up over some coffee or tea, afternoons I will always fondly remember. What always impressed me about Richard was his humility, his sense of justice, the depth of his probing intellect and his wry sense of humour.
Richard was committed to working on behalf of the principle of Palestinian rights. Moreover, he recognized that the cause of Palestinian rights was also the cause of Indigenous rights everywhere. He actively pursued his activism in Hudson where he sought to educate municipal counselors on the reality of Palestinian living conditions and the false notion of conflating the critique of Israel with antisemitism. Several years ago his physical health began to fail but not his analytical mind. He remained true to his convictions all his life. To his wife Karen and their family, we at PAJU offered our deepest sympathy for the loss of a husband and father. As for myself, I lost a noble friend.
His philosophical essay, published here below posthumously, is unequivocal in its indictment of what Richard viewed as a racist ideological world-view espoused by Chabad writings. Richard’s views on Chabad are his own, but given the nature of the predominance of the extreme-right religious elements who control the government of Israel and its genocidal campaign in Gaza, Richard Rothschild’s probe into what he refers to as a collective “psychopathology” which he sees as being inherent in Chabad doctrine is nevertheless relevant.
Bruce Katz
August 14, 2024
Modern, ‘Moral,’ Reactionary Jewish Racism: Chabad’s Race Theory
By Richard Rothschild
If you don’t have 30 minutes, only have 30 seconds, here’s a synopsis of this essay. Chabad is a worldwide Jewish sect. Q. What’s the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish philosophy? A. Non-Jews teach, I am the master of my fate. Chabad Jews teach, ‘We are fated to be your masters’.
How does God decide what’s right and what’s wrong? The question is not: Does God choose between right and wrong the ways we do? It is not the lifeboat quandary: Whose life should be sacrificed so that the others might survive. Not that with the caution that one healthy, young person on board is Black. or a Jew. The question is: How did God resolve to create ‘wrong’ in the first place? He is perfect and omnipotent; He could have created the world without evil in it. Indeed, it is argued that it is impossible for the Creator of everything we call ‘existence’ to have created evil. Yet evil exists.
How Does God Decide What’s Right and What’s Wrong? is the title of an answer to the question as to whether the ‘wrong’ of an act is its intrinsic quality, or whether wrongness is imposed on acts that “displease” God, or are acts “that God decided He doesn’t want us to do”. The given, right answer is the third. If you think you understand it, have a pretty good idea what these words mean (whether or not you agree with the answer), you’ve been duped. If you’re not Jewish, you’re helpless in this fact. You’re not one of “us”. If you are a Jew and don’t get it, you can work at it and succeed. The trick’s in an exclusive, biologically inherited, communication center uniting God and Jews. The explanation will have to wait. First, the ideological nucleus of the worldwide Jewish sect, Chabad.
Chabad teaches three fundamental theses— 1) God created Jews and non-Jews with innate, invariant and immutable differences between them; 2) God promulgated the Noahide Laws that all Jews are obligated to obey and that authorize Jews to make sure that all non-Jews obey them as well; 3) God tasked the Jewish people (point 1 above) with His mission to create the conditions for ‘true peace’ from Israel and on out throughout the world. This obligation is summarized under the heading ‘Preparing the ground for the Messiah’. ‘These thematic chapters are held together by the specialized concepts, Land and Law. Chabad is a halachic sect with land titles in its briefcase. The organization tells its story in its book-length bedrock document Tanya (at www.chabad.org, where you’ll find all my other references with a few signaled exceptions). Sounds preposterous? Outrageous? Just you wait and read, read with three questions in mind. Does Chabad’s ideology harm, not merely is it likely to harm, non-Jewish minorities and majorities? Does it undermine the collective good of inclusiveness that is a fundamental attribute of decent societies? And, no less important, is it the best worldview that Judaism has to offer? Surely a few Jews, pretending to speak in the name of all Jews, do not speak in the name of all Jews, God forbid. With your help, please.
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi wrote Tanya, the Chabad sect’s Very Big Bang theory. In its first chapter (as Rabbi Yosef Wineberg elaborates its Likudai Amarim text), “Every Jew, whether righteous or wicked, possesses two souls” of which one is “the side of creation that is the antithesis of holiness and purity” and the second of which, “in the case of the Jew . . . contains good that gives rise to positive natural traits . . . The souls of the nations of the world, however, emanate from the unclean kelipot which contain no good whatever.” It does not give rise to positive natural traits. “(A)ny good done by (non-Jews) is for selfish motives . . . the desire for self-glorification . . . and the like.” Chapter 2 opens with, “The second, uniquely Jewish, soul is truly ‘a part of God above’ . . .” A bit further on, “The fact . . . that this soul originates in the ‘innermost aspect of Godliness’” follows from “the metaphor of blowing used to describe God’s implanting the Jew’s soul in his body.” Grounding race in souls rather than in genes doesn’t make race theory less pernicious. It merely makes it harder to navigate the unfamiliar terrain. Besides, souls are God’s business, not ours. Don’t you believe it. God doesn’t tell stories. People do.
An early word of disclaimer— I am not anti-Semitic by drawing attention to Jewish racism as articulated and promoted by a modern sect, founded in the maturity of the Age of Reason and expanded into a worldwide movement in the twentieth century. (There are earlier examples of Jewish racist sects in the history of the Jews.) I am not befuddled by arguments that religious freedom protects ‘master race’ racism when some rabbis write and teach it in religious rhetoric. And then I am not so blindly pro-Semitic to believe that all of us Jews are utterly incapable of our own self-serving brand of racism, because, after all, we’re Jews, the eternal victims. We Jews aren’t as unhuman as that.
Since the very idea of Jewish racism will be met with disdain and dismay—for very good reasons—I’ve quoted much detailed, self-incriminating testimony from Chabad leadership. I add a theoretical tool that simultaneously structures my accusation — it isn’t a rant — and helps explain why Chabad’s racism doesn’t jump out at us as obvious at this time. The quick answer is, all of us think that we think with our minds. Chabad scholars teach that’s the subjective way of non-Jews. It’s not that non-Jews got it wrong, that with a little more education and insight they can correct their error. It is inherently impossible for non-Jews to pass the test. Jews don’t suffer that inherited disability. Put differently, “all of us” as one humanity doesn’t exist. To complicate matters, the word ‘existence’ is also under fire.
How do we distinguish humans, molecules and mountains from beliefs, hopes and desires? John Searle asks the question and here’s his answer: The first three are “mind-independent”. They do not owe their existence to anything anybody knows or believes. The other three are “mind-dependent”. They owe their existence to what goes on in our heads (John R. Searle, Making of the Social World, Oxford University Press, pp 16-17). Chabad’s heads work differently. Not only do they not admit to ‘human beings’ being a single category of entity, they tell a long story that explains why it can’t be so. You just read a soul-searching snippet from Tanya. What they can’t escape is that their story (like everyone’s) is a “mind-dependent” construction.
Searle distinguishes between perceptions, beliefs and memories on the one hand and desires and hopes on the other. Beliefs are (communicated in propositions that are) true or false. If false, drop or modify them to make beliefs fit the world. Desires are ‘I want to do something; I intend to make some changes’, as well as ‘I want you to . . . ; I intend to make you make . . .’ expressions. In these cases we try to change the world to fit our desires. Chabad’s desires and intentions are signaled in the sect’s second thesis, the Noahide laws, to which we’ll come back. First, concentrate on the claim that Jews exist individually as ‘I’ and collectively as ‘we’ where these pronouns both highlight and conceal the categorical distinction Chabad asserts between Jews and non-Jews who also use ‘I’ and ‘we’ words. For Jews these pronouns don’t have the qualitatively neutral reference that stretches across all language users. The collective we Jews know who we are, and we know it is impossible for non-Jews to know that fact. Although they would do well to accept it. You will be reading that a Jew’s “cognitive faculties” (distinguished from “cognative-volitional” (desire-intention) faculties, Searle, p.15) don’t correspond with a non-Jew’s. At the “quintessential level” Jews don’t have minds of their own. Jewish God created Jews with “good that gives rise to positive natural traits.” The “good” includes His “knowledge” such that Jews innately have the corresponding “knowledge” to fulfill God’s design, whatever else goes on in their heads. As embodiments of His will, Jews make non-Jews comply with His intention for His occupation of the world. God makes the Law; Jews are His administrators. Chabad narrates its race theory seriously. You’ll be reading more in their words in a minute.
How does the sect get away with it? “In addition to these two faculties [we adjust beliefs to fit reality and we (try to) adjust reality to fit desires], there is a third: imagination. The propositional content of imagination is not supposed to fit reality in the way that propositional contents in cognition and volition are supposed to fit, but which nonetheless functions crucially in creating social and institutional reality” (ibid., p.15). Imagine your story. Convince enough people that your fiction, fantasy, is true and it becomes common knowledge, an ‘everybody knows that’ social reality. I’m reading a story. Its publisher informs, “References to real people, events, places, establishments and organizations are used fictionally.” I’m reading the U. S. Constitution. Some hominids count as “2/3 of a person,” no more, no less. Both collections of words in print are parts of social reality. They differ in their respective contents. Dracula and Charles Darnay are fictitious characters. Are 2/3rds of persons real persons for the fact the Constitution says so? It says no such thing. The founding document states, ‘Each slave shall count as the given fraction of a white’. Trouble begins when individuals or groups of individuals believe, and try to get others to believe, that they themselves are Dracula or Tom Jefferson, or that Blacks are not fully human or that Jews really have a generic exceptionality for evil or for good.
“Declaration is peculiar in that it creates the very reality that it represents. . . . All of non-linguistic institutional reality is created by Declaration. Once you see the power of the Declaration to create an institutional reality of governments, universities, marriages, private property, money and all of the rest of it, you can see that social reality has a formal structure of the language used to create it” (ibid. p 16). Convince enough people that everyone has civil rights and you’ve overthrown monarchy. Fail to so convince and you’ve got authoritarianism and dictatorship. Convince enough people that Jews are a race apart and you’ve created a racist society. Hitler did. Chabad’s leaders also are in the business of declaring and convincing that Jews are a race apart. An unfounded, anti-Semitic insult? They want the Jewish nation to be the winners this time round. “The Jewish people have been backseat passengers for over two thousand years. Now it’s our turn to own and drive the car” (Chaim Charles Cohen, Jewish Democracy, www.israelinationalnews.com, 12/13/2014).
Here’s a distasteful example that, with regrets, vividly illustrates Searle’s emphasis, that “declarations create institutional realities.” For a decade in recent history, ‘death camps’ were a social institution in Nazi Germany. There were official rules as to who was to “count” as eligible for being exterminated, as well as further rules that created “real powers” for those who administered and executed the rules within the camps, rules laid down by those in governmental positions who created those killing-camps in the first place. Everything was in ‘law and order,’ duly authorized and legitimized. Being institutional reality, the death camps were accepted, easy to ignore, known about but not challenged. The ‘declaration’ that successfully set it off was the message that Jews are an existential danger to the German-“Aryan” people, repeated from governmental and non-governmental sources and echoed in popular voices. Is it fair to say that in the Nazi period Jews were presented and generally acknowledged as a dangerous enemy of Germany and Germans, although known to be unarmed and to have no violent intentions? Keep this question in mind, please.
Let me not be misunderstood or misinterpreted. You undoubtedly agree that rabbis have an authority granted by their positions in religious institutions in our liberal democratic societies. But you may reject my argument that there are Jews, rabbis, who endorse an ideology of a Jewish ‘race’. I am making an anti-Semitic slur by insinuating a resemblance between Jewish leaders and Hitler, you believe. That’s why “it is very hard to sell such a [Jewish] nationalistic perspective in the modern Western world” for two reasons—
One, fascism and communism have given collective people-hood a bad name. . . . Second, Western culture is dominated by an empirical materialism and a radical individualism, both of which make it very hard to accept the Jewish concept of people-hood” (op cit, Jewish Democracy. www.israelnationalnews. com is the website of Arutz Sheva, a daily of Israeli religious right-wing organizations, including Chabad).
Will you object that ‘fascism’ isn’t ‘Nazism’ and therefore not racist? I will not only remind you that the two often are used interchangeably. If you insist, I’ll retort that, at the least, the call is for a Jewish “nationalistic” dictatorial society. Chabad’s race theory does not share the same theoretical basis as did Hitler’s. But it is more meticulously argued. And must we concede, without further inspection, that Hitlerian racism is the only possible one in town? As Cohen’s second point indicates, Jews themselves have to overcome non-Jewish mentality to realize that, by God, we are a race apart with a this-world duty. ‘Jew’ is not a one-way street, from Jew to Judaism to religion. There’s a lane from Creation to Jew to people-hood to politics.
“Declarations create institutional realities.” They are sentences whose semantic meanings (can) bring about social change. ‘I pronounce the meeting adjourned’, and for the reason that the speaker had been empowered according to the organization’s rules, there’s a new state of affairs in the hall: the meeting is adjourned. ‘We, duly elected and so on, declare that Jews everywhere in the world are born citizens on landing at Tel Aviv”. In consequence, the new state of affairs is that Palestinian Israelis are increasingly outnumbered and displaced. ‘We, leaders of recognized religious political parties, declare this land is our God-given inheritance’ and in consequence Palestinian Territory is Israel’s Sudetenland.
Chabad has a formal structure conforming with the rules of the existing social reality. It’s officially “declared” a legally recognized non-profit corporation. Its leaders use their authority within the organization and the corporation’s legitimacy within society to influence the policies and rules of other structures that comprise the larger social reality. The existing institutional facts provide, distribute and deny powers to peoples who, imagining a ‘better world’ — i.e. one more to their liking — speak their mental attitudes into existing social institutions from and through which they try to reinforce, transform or eradicate aspects in our current social reality. Most frequently, most of us don’t speak about it, taking our social reality for granted. (We grumble but rarely effectively engage in the structures of the system.) ‘That’s just the way it is’ keeps things just the way they are.
Most Chabad congregants this side of Israel gain satisfaction from the organized internal friendliness and a feeling of protection from external anti-Semitism. I use “congregant” to emphasize that Chabad is formally a ‘religious’ corporation and is considered exclusively as such by almost all of its members. Their attitude, unquestionably sincere and mistakenly limited to religious holidays and rites, keeps the road cleared for Chabad’s sectarian mission. Religion necessarily is politics: people exercising power to create and institutionalize legal rules that define what “counts” as “religion”, and, while protecting their religion from external politics, give a protected social space from which religious leaders effect political decisions in their favor. In Canada, for example, the religion-politics duality is formally separated by State secularism laws. In Israel this religion-politics duality is intertwined: Israel recognizes itself as a Jewish and Democratic State. In Chabad’s ideology political activity is the sole aim of God’s Creation.
So much for theoretical criticism of Chabad’s story-book account of the origin and qualities of the world’s two and only two races (pp 1-2), and an argued reason why Jewish racism escapes us. But I haven’t told you in detail the sect’s story, in its words. I do that now, touching on some saddening real-world consequences, for non-Jews within easy reach of Jews, to dispel the dismissive thought you might have that, “Well, it’s only religion”, or, “Jews have suffered the Holocaust”, or, religious freedom is inviolable, or, “Jews don’t do that kind of thing”. To lighten the burden, I’ve mixed in a handful of ‘Why did the chicken cross the road’ jokes explicitly and implicitly told by Chabad. For you who, like me, do not find the jokes funny, there’s a practical suggestion at the end of the essay.
* * *
Who is not a Jew? Obviously everyone who does not profess or practice Judaism. This definition by religion or culture does not explain Chabad’s claim that some non-Jews unwittingly are Jews and some practicing, even devout, Jews unknowingly are not ‘real Jews’, are not Jews at all. So, who is not a Jew? Modern answers include: everyone both of whose parents and at least three of four grandparents are not Jews; everyone whose veins do not carry Jewish blood; all who lack Jewish genes; all and only people who have a soul; only people who do not have two souls; only people to whom God is not directly connected in their bodily inside: no one identified by one or more of these markers is a Jew. Flip everything over and you have Jews. From the regrettable familiar to the disbelieving ‘uh?’, all these markers have this in common across humanity: they are innate, inextinguishable, unalterable, and sexually transmitted. But from this comprehensive list of race identifiers, ranging from the mythical and mystical, through religion, on up to the pseudo-scientific, and recently symbolized on armbands and tattoos with stars or swastikas (depending on which race you’re in), how can we decide which is the vital race, which is its threat, non-Jews or Jews?
It’s an outrageous question formulated to insult and denigrate Jews. As always. So I will reformulate it in the less familiar idiom used by the Chabad sect: Which is the ‘good’ race and which the ‘evil’? God created the existence of Jews on the one hand and of the nations of the world (as non-Jews are often referred) on the other. How does He decide which race is ‘good’ and which is ‘evil’, given His purpose for creating existence in the first place?
Stop right there. You’ve already gone too far. Judaism and Christianity are two monotheistic religions. From the two Testaments one might argue that God was an evolutionist, from infant mythological beginnings of humans through Jewish adolescence to Christian adulthood. Or we can say that God is “One” to some and “Three Persons” to others. Nowhere in the primary sources is there mention of different ‘races’ of humans, no less than that one human race is good and the other evil.
Your objection is relevant. You are repeating a familiar story told in the language of religion as narrated in the Bible. Religion — by unspoken assumption – is a protected sanctuary. Is that so? You’ve already read that ‘religion’ is whatever those with recognized powers declare “counts” as religion. Watch the Chabad sect to see how Searle’s theory works in action. Chabad leaders, occupying top positions in a respected worldwide religious organization, as well as in various secular corporations, governmental bodies, and civic associations in Israel and elsewhere, contribute an unfamiliar revision of Old Testament. It leap-frogs the Five Books of Moses and retells Creation its way. It trashes the religious question, “Who is a Jew?” replacing it with the anthropomorphic ‘What is a Jew?’, and being a Jew, what his mission is. Is this assertion true or false? Start by opening How Does God Decide …?, and then you decide.
Q. Which was the first Jew, Man or God? Tzvi Freeman takes the first quarter of his essay to make the point that God is not the Primal Cause of existence. He can’t be, because He’s Jewish! “The Jewish God cannot properly be called a ‘Primal Cause’.” “The Jewish God has free choice” between causing and creating (emphasis added). Dear reader, can you already entertain the possibility that a Jewish God might have a bias in favor of creating a race of Jews a notch or twelve above non-Jews? Well, nothing compels God to create Jews as a superior race or as a race at all. Nothing compels God to create anything, neither time nor space, “and similarly with the rules of logic, causality, geometry, and, yes, of ethics” (a bench-mark statement I’ve italicized and to which we’ll return).
Yet Jewish God so decided with unprecedented originality. Every type of existence, from electromagnetic radiation that makes things visible, from astrophysics to microbiology, through mathematics and systems of reasoning, up to the “science of conduct in human behavior” (OED), as well as humans— everything that exists is run through with God-commanded laws and rules. (‘Everything’ must include the rules of grammar, of biological evolution, of the history of mankind and social transformation, including the institution we call ‘religion’.) God had His reason: He implanted His laws in everything that exists in order to oppose and overcome their direct opposites, chaos and void. Do Chabad leaders have their reason for overlooking or censuring the distinction between mind-independent and mind-dependent existences? Between the natural and social domains? Between what humans are capable of and what are nature’s brick walls?
OK, God created laws that make light, ‘animal laws’ that determine how animals function and ‘people laws’ that make us people into humans. But from what I observe, the Chabad sect teaches that human beings are not one uniform category but is a label for two disparate races. That means that Jews and non-Jews are created with different sets of laws, although we’re all people, aren’t we? How is that duality even conceivable?
Good point. Chabad acknowledges that ‘humans’ is one single thing, different from everything else. God created all people in His image and everything else He created not in His image. From this fact, everything — cosmos, Earth, Jews, non-Jews, sheep, shale, shoals, Corona virus (?), everything “down to each blade of grass”— is uniformly “sacred”. Yes, Jews are sacred but not super-sacred. They’re sacred plus another, crucial bit more. But let that wait and continue with Freeman—
At the onset of the world’s creation, God beheld the deeds of the righteous and the deeds of the wicked. . . . ‘And the world was chaos and void’ (Genesis 1:2)—these are the deeds of the wicked. ‘And God said: Let there be light’ (ibid, verse 3)—these are the deeds of the righteous. But I still do not know which one of them God desires… Then when it says ‘And God saw the light, that it is good’ (verse 4), I know that He desires the deeds of the righteous, and does not desire the deeds of the wicked.
Freeman is citing this revision of Genesis from an ancient Midrash. (Chabad rabbis have a predilection for unearthing truths “behind” the O.T.) He cites Beishit Rabbah to elucidate “the question of why there is evil in the world”. Our dilemma is: Given that God is perfect and omnipotent and has free choice, why and how does evil exist? Freeman’s answer, “God chose to hate . . . After all you can’t hate something that doesn’t exist. So evil exists in order for God to despise it.” Freeman could have spared us his joke. “The righteous” and “the wicked” were present before “the onset”, two groups of angels, one sitting at the right, the other at the left hand of God. Turning His head from side to side, He saw the forerunner of a two-races solution. Jewish God was free to choose.
M. M. Schneerson peers into God’s “Divine consciousness” before God had created Time. Like Freeman, the Chabad sect’s most recent Chief Rabbi assembles a story by skipping Bible—
Two things precede God’s creation of the world: Torah and Israel. Still I do not know which preceded which. But when the Torah states, ‘Speak to the children of Israel …’, ‘Command the children of Israel…’, and so on, I know that Israel precedes all.
Untangling it for us, Schneerson confirms “So the concepts of ‘Israel’ and ‘Torah’ both precede a concept of a ‘world’ in the Creator’s mind.” So here is ‘Israel,’ the Jews, as a distinct category of human beings, if not the only humans, in His mind during those pre-days. But which first, Jew or Torah? Guiding us through a vertical thought-maze of “revealed” and “hidden” planes, Schneerson takes us to Chabad’s fundamental avowal of Jews as race, reaching behind the Jewish soul—
On a quintessential level, there exists a third connection, the ‘direct’ connection between God and His people which precedes the very concept of Torah . . . On this level it is the Torah that ‘needs’ the Jew to evoke God’s desire . . .The essence of the Jew, as it is rooted within the essence of God, is indeed one with its Source. But then it ‘descends’ to become part of the created existence, assuming a distinct identity as a soul and then as a human being. (What Makes a Jew ‘Jewish’?, based on Schneerson’s teachings.)
Jews being innately one with the Creator of universal Law settled, Eliezer Shemtov leaps from Deuteronomy to Talmud to a quote by Rashdi to give us a concise dissertation on constitutive laws, the “facts” of the matter, which are—
The laws of the Torah are as (or more) objective and inalterable as the laws of nature. The same way one cannot alter the laws of gravity . . . one cannot alter the laws of the Torah. The Torah student and sage looks . . . to discover the Divine structure that is inherent in the universe and life” (On Intermarriage).
Q. What’s the difference between Christian God and Jewish God? A. Christian God is in Three Persons while Jewish God is in 15 million Jews. What is “the Divine structure inherent” in every Jew? “The distinguishing element of the Jew is the Neshamah (soul) that every Jew possesses. The soul of the Jew is different than the soul of the non-Jew. They have different potentials, characteristics and needs.”
Yes, non-Jews also have souls, but here’s the big diff. They have ‘animal’ souls (Nefesh); Jews have ‘animal’ souls as well. We’re all humans, aren’t we? But Jews have that additional second God-soul (Neshamah); non-Jews do not. Not all of us are walking, talking Gods on Earth, are we? The Neshamah is “truly ‘a part of God above’” (What is a Soul (Neshamah)?).
How did Neshamah get inside Jews? For us, soul is a mind thing while breath is a lung thing. For Chabad, ‘nemesh’ is a union of ‘soul and breath’. God created Man by exhaling His Word on Day 6. First emerged non-Jews; towards the end of the day, nearly out of breath, the Jews. But by then His breath was contaminated with traces of Godly phlegm, throat and lung which infected the Jews. Whence two human races all in one indivisible Divine utterance. To Chabad’s credit, it does not indulge in abstract speculation. It connects the causal dots to prove the origin of the Jewish race.
All too mythical for you? Chabadniks are strict empiricists in their racial way. From the vantage of “the Divine structure in every Jew,” the rabbis rewrite biological taxonomy. All humans share the ‘7 animal appetites’ soul (Nemesh). The monopolized Jewish soul (Neshamah) consists in Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom. Using their KUW, Chabad leaders discover only Nemesh in non-Jews. Therefore they classify non-Jews down among the other animals, though not less “sacred” for that. From the fact that they discover both Nemesh and Neshamah in Jews, they classify Jews up in a category shared with God, uniquely “holy” for that. Schneerson uses the phrase “entirely different species” to label Jews. “Different species” connotes a new biological discovery. “Entirely different [from all other worldly] species” entails Jews are off the biological, taxonomic table. (See The Sefirot for details on the 7 + 3 attributes. “Holy” vs. “sacred” are Schneerson’s file cards.)
The sect’s circular reasoning is blatant. Illogical as it is to us, not so for Chabad. Human error is possible: it’s our subjective, emotional undoing. But “God created the rules of logic,” Freeman speaking his bench-mark sentence, from which it is impossible for there be anything “objectively” illogical. ‘Logic’ simply is, as mind-independent as gravity. Jews are born with non-human mind KUW to be able to claim the truth of this mind- independent assertion!
Eleizer Shemtov, recharged with KUW, explains it is “not only prohibited for a Jew to marry a non-Jewess, it is impossible for a Jew to marry a non-Jewess.” He is not talking about the State of Israel where no instance is authorized to perform the ceremony of ‘intermarriage’ and where nonetheless ‘intermarriage’ is recognized as legitimate when the happy couple returns from Cyprus. This current Israeli practice of guarding the impossibility of intermarriage on its turf is similar to the impossibility 2/3rds of persons. Everyone knows it’s phony. In both cases verbal manipulation screens reality: Lifelong intermarriages exist; 100% whole black people exist. Shemtov’s ‘impossibility’ is of a different order. “It is clear that we are not dealing here with racial discrimination which is borne of a personal and subjective attitude that the Jew has vis-à-vis the gentile. What we are talking about is an objective, Divine command . . . more objective and inalterable than the laws of nature” (On Intermarriage, emphasis added). God created Law to defeat void. Therefore intermarriage is void.
In Chabad cosmology intermarriage is objectively — not politically — impossible everywhere in the world. As an Assertion, this claim is clearly false. What do some Jews with power in existing institutions in many parts of the world try to do about it? Change the world by changing Assertion to Declaration. Declare the Jewish nation is God’s physical emissary often enough and eventually the nation, with political clout, actualizes God’s will on Earth. In time there will be no free, sovereign territory anywhere in the world where anyone will have the authority to perform the rite. Political impossibility will have caught up with “objective” impossibility. And intermarriage is only one example of interracial relations in general. The Jewish nation has its plate full. Reader, don’t despair. I once did, therefore now I write.
Do you see the reflections of C. C. Cohen’s ‘Western culture’s materialism and individualism’ that block the clear view of “people-hood” (Cohen’s synonym for ‘the Jewish people’ and ‘nation’)? We can grant Jews, and not only Jews, indulge in “racial discrimination which is borne of a personal and subjective attitude.” That’s not the racism Chabad leaders “deal with”. Chabad’s racism is not mind-dependent “attitude” but mind-independent, non-social, objective existence. I use Shemtov’s Intermarriage to make two points: i) to illustrate a Chabad central thesis, that all Jewish social institutions are constituted of God-made laws no less than natural phenomena, and ii) that Chabad leaders and emissaries communicate this thesis without drawing attention to the significance of meaning of its spiel: “We use meaning (semantics) to create reality that goes beyond the meaning” (op. cit. Searle, p.65). Chabad is very much in the business of reshaping reality to its racist vision, wherever it can.
As mentioned perhaps too often, the sect is deeply halachic in story-telling. For Chabad all ‘laws’ are one, all of which are external to human making and influence. Imagine taking the ‘rules’ out of thermodynamics, out of molecular biology, out of geological formation; imagine taking the rules out of social constructs: algebra, marriage, morality, the liberal ‘rule of law’, baseball and pinochle, Jews and non-Jews, and whatcha got? A mess or less. In Chabad cosmology all Creation consists entirely in Divinely existential constitutive laws. No human attitude, belief, experience and powers can touch those laws. Religious beliefs, etc. might conceal or misinterpret them. Don’t allow religion to stand in your way. Jewish God makes no distinction between the laws of physics and the laws of baseball and the laws of Torah and the laws of what a Jew is and the laws of what a non-Jew is. For Him, all existence is His one big game, His Creation to defeat “chaos and void”. ‘Games’ is the only game Jewish God plays. Shemtov’s pitch for Team Chabad is that there are no man-made laws and rules that amount to “more than a formality,” that are more than “subjective,” more than illusion. That’s Jewish God speaking through the voice of Chabad’s leaders, and vice versa, at the high risk of sounding psychopathological.
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Up to this point I’ve concentrated on the origin of two disparate human species as narrated by Chabad’s founder and carried forward by subsequent rabbis. Now we turn to race relations. I won’t keep you in suspense. It is impossible for the interrelationship to be of mutual benefit. It is impossible for the racial relations to reach a point of mutual acceptance, of conciliation, of “real peace”. The impossibility, as you’ve read, is not due to lack of will or bad faith on either side. It’s explained by “the laws of the Torah that are as (or more) objective and unalterable than the laws of nature.” The impossibility of “real peace” (until and unless) is explained by God’s reason for having created Land— the Earth as His resting place, and the Jewish people to prepare His room at the inn. For an overview, open a text less than one page short for three reasons. It emphasizes the central role of politics in Chabad ideology. It is straightforward in expressing the intention to impose Jewish domination wherever practicable. It testifies to extreme irrationality if the leadership sincerely believes Jews have no alternative. If they don’t really believe it, they should be ashamed of the damage they do to Judaism as an inclusive religion.
You’ve already read that the sect denies the validity of the distinction between natural and social laws. So reminded, let’s turn to The Land of Israel.
“God has enabled the Jewish people to live as sovereigns in . . . the land promised to the Jews by God” is the single-sentence opening paragraph. ‘It describes “reality”’ is an explicit claim about this religious assertion. Let’s examine it through the ‘reality’ lens. A “promise” was made by God to “the Jewish people” to transfer ownership of a large piece of undescribed real estate to them, by contract or gift, either with no conditions or with reserves. The only thing we are told about the content of the promise is i) ‘the Jewish people’ have the right to occupy the land, and ii) they have the right to sovereignty in it. (No mention as to whether the land promised is vacant.) We know who made the promise but to whom, exactly, was the promise made? ‘The Jewish people’ has no address and no authorized spokesperson. Who got the original title to the deed? How was it transferred to hundreds of unborn future generations of Jews? These are ‘reality’ questions, ours, not Chabad’s. It’s ‘reality’ is “God promised”, “God enabled”. In any event, Exodus tells a more violent story about the manner in which Jews occupied the land they claimed, after the fact, God had promised. Let’s leave the unfathomable at that.
Fast-forward 4,000 years. “This reality places a special burden and privilege upon Israel’s citizens and its government, (namely) to preserve the Jewish integrity of the country” is the first sentence of the second paragraph. It does not speak of costs and benefits. A useful analytical tool is a square matrix with ‘citizens’ and ‘government’ on one axis and ‘special burden’ and ‘special privilege’ on the other. Israel’s both ‘government’ and its ‘citizens’ have both ‘special burden’ and ‘special privileges’. To get you started— Among the world’s 300+ states, Israel is entitled to a special status because its government, that speaks for the country in international affairs, enjoys what no other national government has. As regards domestic policy, in comparison to whom do the citizens have privilege? Obviously residents of Israel who are not Israeli. But this answer overlooks the fact of Chabad’s Jewish racial exceptionalism and the “special burden” that comes with it. It necessarily follows from God’s promise that only the Jewish citizens are meant for privilege, not Palestinian Israelis. ‘Privilege’ for some simply means exclusion of others.
The second paragraph in The Land . . . continues, “(Israel’s) education system must be founded on . . . Jewish tradition so that its citizens grow to be proud keepers of their Jewish heritage.” “Tradition and heritage” are broad terms. Is the story of the exclusively Jewish second soul Jewish tradition and heritage au complet or a specifically identifiable narration of Jewish mysticism told by particular Jewish sects? The fact that all Chabad’s internet texts end with, “Copyright, all rights reserved. (You must) comply with Chabad.org’s copyright policy” is sufficient to show that Chabad corporate leaders don’t buy the idea that “tradition and heritage” alone are sufficient to protect the sect’s racist ideology. You want to copyright a tradition or a heritage?
The theme of the two-sentenced third paragraph is that Israel’s foreign affairs “must proudly assert Jewish pride”— one of Schneerson’s visible contribution to the sect’s program. I’ll quote the fourth paragraph of The Land of Israel’, about Israel’s peace and safety, a bit further on.
C. C. Cohen has something to tell us about Israeli citizens and Jewish education. He argues that “a government whose guiding principle is the liberal ideal of Israel as a ‘state of all its citizens’ is almost literally burying Zionism and raising the white flag.” You probably thought that liberal ideals, yours, are the only ideals in town. You’ve just been told you’re a born anti-Semite. The non-Jews’ “political-social philosophy contends that mankind cannot know a set of metaphysical or philosophical Absolute Truths that would objectively determine laws of morality.” “Diametrically opposed to (liberal philosophy), we hold that man (Jews) can only fulfill and redeem his life if he . . . attaches himself in a committed manner to . . . an Absolute law of morality . . .” “Only an Israeli state that pro-actively promotes the Jewish character and Jewish development of our country will survive and flourish in an international environment . . .” (Chaim C. Cohen, The Issue of Equality, israelnationalnews.com, 8/22/2018). You can’t sidestep “Absolute Truths” and “Absolute morality” any more than you can jump over a tall building in a single bound without some propulsion equipment strapped on your back. On that discouraging note, back to Chabad’s texts with “Absolute morality” up and running to direct and enforce Jewish sovereignty in the Land.
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Chabad’s soulological anthropoidology elucidated, let’s examine the impact of the Absolute Truth of Divine law on the possibilities of and limits to relations between the two races. Q. Why did God create non-Jews? A. To give God a choice between losers and His Chosen. Q. Why did God create Jews? A. Since God can do no wrong He needed a reliable people to do the dirty work for Him. Tzvi Freeman tells these not tongue-in-cheek jokes in his Who Is a Jew? God cuts several deals with Jews. He supplies land (“with boundaries that are quite large and have yet to be fulfilled”), circumcision (“Jewish women are considered to be ‘born as circumcised’”), and a guarantee that the land would belong to Jews in perpetuity, even when they are in exile. In exchange, Jews unquestioningly obey the commands of Torah. Torah is commandments and through it assigns the tasks to be performed. “When your Creator assigns you a mission in life, the mission is who you are.” “There is nothing left of the Jew other than (God’s) choice and (His) mission” “so that eventually the entire world would be united under a single, just and caring God.” And He is Jewish!
Freeman warns that “Chosenness is deeply misunderstood.” He’s warning us away from misunderstanding Genesis and Exodus, that there’s God, there are Jews, there are the non-Jews, and Jews are His choice. The “eternal (land) holding” covenant was “no longer just a word, but an obligation and a physical sign in the human body for all generations,” “fus(ing) both parties in an unbreakable bond,”— covenants embedded in the DNA of every Jew so to speak. The covenants are not in someone’s body because he’s a Jew; rather, a person’s a Jew because the covenants are in his body. Every Jew’s body is a “physical sign . . . fusing Jew and God,” combining Torah, covenants, and God-assigned missions in the “essence” of Jews. That’s who a Jew is. Under this conception, Jewish God is neither in Mind nor in Heart, and although He’s transcendent, He’s simultaneously embodied in the persons of Jews, His physical presence and eternal custodians of holy land. Is any part of God’s Earth less or more holy or divine than any other? And all those non-Jews— are they squatters? trespassers? beggars? thieves?
Q. Why did God create non-Jews? A. To give Jews a population on whom to enforce the Noahide Laws. The second and third cornerstones in Chabad’s doctrine are the Noahide Laws and their real-world consequences. “Jews who are asked what their attitude toward their non-Jewish friends should be can be shown a complete formulation for non-Jewish integrity and well-being, which can be applied wherever they live.” The “complete formulation” is the Seven Noahide Laws. This political policy law, in one wording, reads, “Carry out justice—an imperative to pursue and enforce social justice, and a prohibition of any miscarriage of justice.” The Mitzvot of Non-Jews interprets this basic law like this; read it carefully and thoroughly for it does not speak in tongues—
Our sages state, ‘War comes to the world through the delay of justice, the perversion of justice, and the teaching of Torah not in accordance with Jewish law.’ When both Jews and non-Jews can learn Torah without distortion of its Jewish legal meaning, true peace becomes possible. This includes recognition of the principle that Jews can be judged only according to Torah law, no matter where in the world, and that non-Jews in Eretz Yisrael [Greater Israel] are considered according to the Seven Noahide Laws by the Jews there, with no sovereign jurisdiction of their own.
On reading this, you will recall from an earlier discussion that “sovereign jurisdiction” for non-Jews in “the Land of Israel” is objectively “impossible”. Non-Jews may insist on having equal political and social status with Jews. If and as long as they do, “true peace” remains “impossible”. Not because Jews are a mean-spirited bunch, but because Jews are “fusions” of man and God. Non-Jews are not.
Universal Morality baptizes Noahide Law ‘universal morality’. The objective moral law states, “Maintain justice. Justice is God’s business, but we are given the charge to lay down necessary laws and enforce them whenever we can” (emphasis added). God provides the principle; Jews transcribe His legislation; Jews enforce the laws, non-Jews are the hapless subjects. Can non-Jews expect justice under the law of “the just and caring” Jewish God? His laws are interpreted by us Jews according to their “Jewish legal meaning”. We cannot disobey God.
What are some model, moral Jewish laws? “If we see an idolater drowning we should not help him. If we see that his life is in danger, we should not save him . . . To whom do the above apply? To gentiles.” (Author’s insert: In the U.S. “the drowning rate for African Americans is 40% higher than that for whites and Hispanics” (Katy Guest quoting Splash! by Howard Means in The Guardian Weekly, July 3, 2020. That’s their racism and it is evil.) To continue with Jewish legalism, “It is forbidden to offer medical treatment to an idolater [a gentile] even when offered a wage. If, however, one fears that ill feelings will be aroused, one may treat them for a wage, but not free.” “It is forbidden to sell (gentiles) homes and fields in Greater Israel (though) one may rent them homes provided that a neighborhood (of gentiles) is not established. . . Even then it is not permitted to rent them homes for use as their dwelling.” (Take a gander at the functioning of the racist Jewish National Fund and you see just how this discrimination in land and housing is applied). Put politically, segregation, expulsion and, by implication, internment of ‘the nations of the world’ are mandated by Divine command; and although gas chambers are strictly forbidden, Jews are prohibited from interfering with God’s will, His killing non-Jews by natural causes with Jewish doctors commanded to stand aside. If she had been Jewish, she would not have died; she’d be well and alive.
I just made a provocative statement about Jews intentionally causing preventable deaths, but it expresses a sad truth about Chabad’s racism that reminds me of a different racism. I was born in Germany in 1932. Provoked, I am provocative. The source for the perverse lawfulness of Jewish racial dominion is Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Avodat Kochavim – Chapter Ten, the quotations slightly abbreviated.
Given this source, are its prescriptions a sound basis to influence Israeli domestic and international policy? After all, it’s only religion. It’s beyond the scope of this paper, but have a look at Freeman’s, an “element of the covenants is that (Jews) are all attached to a specific geographical territory. The (Jewish) people, the covenant and the land are inseparable.” (Who Is a Jew?); and at Schneerson’s The Land of Israel: Our Inviolable Heritage (www.truepeace.org. The title is a giveaway). With regard to the Jewish settlements in Palestinian Territory, he invokes, “the Creator gave (all that land) to the Jewish people as an eternal heritage. No man thus has the moral right to decide to give away any portion of it.” Enforcing that universal, “objective moral right”, the Israeli military thoroughly controls the internationally, officially recognized Palestinian West Bank. It’s Jews being “who we are” which is, to remind us of the hard-of-believing, Jews “born with an eternal, inextinguishable soul that is both ‘organically’ a part of God and a part of the Jewish collective” (op.cit. Jewish Democracy).
The other Chabad fact we find hard to keep hold of is Jewish or Torah law as the law, Divine law, that makes the social world go round no differently than the Earth goes around the sun. So it is well to interject a reminder that ‘true peace’ between “the two national collectives” (ibid.) can never be achieved through negotiation. Another one of those “objective impossibilities” here illustrated—
God decreed laws for observing Shabbat (Sabbath). Can Jews break the law? Sure, by discovering more laws in the supranatural environment. The halachic reasoning is narrated as an episodic story— walled cities with Jews in the inside and non-Jews (variously described as “besiegers, attackers or enemies” before the fact) on the outside. (1)“If their intent was financial gain, Shabbat laws should not be violated. (2)If their intent was against Jewish lives . . . or if there is a sense that they are coming for Jewish lives, then even before they come . . . it is a Torah commandment to go out and attack them with weapons of war and violate Shabbat. (3)If it is a city located near the border — even if they [the enemy-ed.] are only demanding hay or straw — we attack them and violate the Shabbat, lest they conquer the city, and because of that conquest it becomes easier for them to conquer the rest of the land.” (“Enemy” in square brackets is in the original.)
Reading these extra-human laws in reverse, the first word is “land”, the “rest of the land” which is not within the cities’ walls and is not less Jewish possession for that. As for “near the border,” what border? Where is it? “Jerusalem as well as all the cities in Israel today have the halachic classification of border towns where we have the obligation to kill a terrorist even on Shabbat” (Rabbinic Congress: No Negotiation with Terrorists, crownheights.info, 5/17/2016; a Chabad website from the sect’s American headquarters). “Rabbinic Congress” is an abbreviation for Rabbinical Congress for Peace “founded in 1993, amid talk of ceding the strategically-important Golan Heights.” The C.P.R. is a political corporation whose members are rabbis who lobby their political issues before the Israeli government. The political issues, stated in the opening paragraph of “Take the Word out …”, are two: protecting Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory and blocking concessions to the Palestinian Authority. “The group’s philosophy . . . centers around an explicit ruling in perhaps the most authoritative text on contemporary Jewish law (halacha): the Shulchan Aruch.” Read it at “Take the Word ‘Withdrawal’ out of the Israeli Lexicon”, israelnationalnews.com, 7/22/2013. The quotation-marked title is a demand attributed to Avraham Shmuel Lewin, the Executive Director of the RCP and Rabbi of a Chabad congregation in Tel Aviv.
This example, you will have noticed from an earlier example, is cut according to the standard Chabad template: On one side, the Jewish God’s inviolable halachic law, on the other, secular national and international law. What keeps the two separated in normal conversation? Reality: “existing as things or occurring as fact” (OED). What binds the two sides together in Chabad-speak? The inability, or unwillingness, of Chabad’s leadership to recognize ‘reality’ as a wall separating imagination from factual existence. You just read a Rabbinical Congress for Peace example, re-imagining existing municipal entities as they and their inhabitants would look under halachic law and then proclaiming that’s what they actually are. If it’s Chabad’s leaders’ inability to differentiate, it’s a psychological problem; if it’s unwillingness, we have good reason to ask for an explanation or eight. Not because we’re critics or ‘smarty-pants’ or anti-Semites or dupes of terrorists, but because, as these things still matter, there are lives and livelihoods and properties and justice, and plain decency under attack for the most unworthy and indefensible reasons. And what are they? “Torah wartime military ethics is based on the understanding that a Jewish war of self defense is primarily a conflict between two national collectives” (op.cit. Jewish Democracy). “Even before they come . . . Even if they are only demanding hay and straw . . . they are enemies.” Given that “enemies” is a label for ‘them’ in the same way as “peoplehood” is a label for ‘us’, what must ‘we’ do to achieve ‘true peace’?
Having clarified Chabad’s reality complex, I’ll leave you in peace to read and analyze the fourth paragraph in the sect’s The Land of Israel as promised—
Jewish law sets forth the criteria necessary for Israel’s peace and safety; these can only be achieved from a position of military strength and secure borders. Any sign of willingness to even speak about relinquishing land to our enemies is sure to encourage terrorism in Israel and abroad.
* * *
In 1980 and 1981 Israel formally annexed the Golan Heights and a large slice of Palestinian Jerusalem. Now Netanyahu’s ‘peace plan’ proposes more Anschluss: the annexation of the Jordan Valley (about a third of the West Bank), to annex the majority of the Jewish settlements and outposts in the Palestinian territory, and to exclude Jerusalem from being a shared Israeli/Palestinian capital. It’s all Absolute morality. You see, there are millions of Jews ‘exiled’ throughout the world. Israel tucked in its present borders isn’t big enough to take them all in. Therefore Israel rightfully must expand its borders outward underneath the exiles to bring them into their eternal land inheritance. “Eventually the entire world (will) be united under a single, just and caring God,” as Tzvi Freeman told us a couple of pages back. We make one annexation at a time, “wherever we can.” It’s natural to us because that’s “who we Jews are.” And how are the Palestinians faring?
Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories are judged in Israeli military courts. “A Palestinian brought before such a court, for example in the notorious Ofer Prison north of Jerusalem, has no hope of achieving even the slightest semblance of justice. Conviction rates of Palestinians in these courts are higher than 99 percent. Proceedings take place in Hebrew, which Palestinian defendants often don’t understand, and security specialists routinely give secret testimony to which defendants and their counsel have no access. . . At the very beginning of the settlement enterprise, which was entirely rooted in the theft of Palestinian land, the (High Court of Justice) probably could have ended . . . this unfolding disaster, still the major stumbling block to any future peace agreement. (David Shulman’s review of Michael Sfard’s The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine and the Legal Battle for Human Rights in The New York Review of Books, June 28, 2018.) The Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967 gives much specific information on the plight of Palestinians on both sides of the border. The March 2019 report is at ohchr.org.
But the Israeli High Court did not end the human rights disaster. Prison walls lock outside Palestinians within Israel’s separation wall that shuts Palestinians out. It’s the old one-two: the Noahide Laws + Chulchan Aruch in practice – Jews fulfilling God’s mission on Earth, giving themselves ‘meaning’ in life and being proud of it.
In 1999 Tzvi Freeman made a speech before the 18th International Peace Conference held in Munich. In that speech he told a joke. Nobody but insiders knew it was a joke. It was “May the nations beat their swords into plowshares.” “Nations” in the ‘nations of the world’ particular Chabad sense: only and all non-Jews must capitulate. When they do, not we, “that will be the beginning of a new world, a world of wisdom and peace.” Am I unreasonable to stretch “nations” into ‘nations of the world’? I don’t think so. Its invocation in the speech comes directly after that Noahide law you’re tired of reading. “God shall judge between the nations”. Jewish God that is.
What will the world look like under the ‘true peace’ agreement? Its basis must be “the wisdom of the Torah.” It must be “put into practice in the overriding political context of a Torah-based peoplehood.” “Only the Jewish people are entitled to self-determination . . . The (Jewish) government must give priority to the Jewish settlement of the Land.” (These ethnocentric racist principles were signed into ‘law’ in 2018 when Israel’s Knesset passed the Nation-State Law, confirming that only Jews have the right to self-determination in Israel and establishing (illegal) Jewish settlements as a ‘national value.’) By logical corollary, does it also place Israel above all other Nations?
A point of clarification— I have taken the principal arguments that C. C. Cohen invokes as the underlying principles for a truly Jewish State of Israel and stretched them globally. Is that a fair move? It follows directly from the Absolute Truth of the Noahide Laws’ ‘Jewish sovereignty’ clause. (The first two quotes are from Jewish Democracy, the other from The Issue of Equality, israelnationalnews.com.)
Ah, Tzvi Freeman. Remember his other joke, the one that God hated evil into existence? Chapter 1 in Tanya describes the souls of non-Jews as “the side of creation that is the antithesis of holiness and purity”. It’s not too late to put two and two together. The non-Jews’ “incapab(ility) of any good whatsoever” marks that race as considerably worse than congenitally immoral, if such a human condition actually exists. Too harsh a verdict? “Evil and impurity are often referred to in the Zohar as ‘the other side’, meaning the side distinct from, and opposite to, holiness,” leads The Other Side. An instance of comparative racism— Nazis killed Jews to protect the health of the Aryan people. Jews kill non-Jews to protect the safety of the Jewish peoplehood from attacks by the ‘permanent enemy’. Hitler had a choice in the matter. Jews have no choice in the matter.
Freeman serves that up as allegory in his How Does God Decide What’s Right …?—
Since God is a free agent in all things, we (Jews) should also be! On this, the fifth Rebbe of Chabad . . . provides an insight. First God chose what will be good and what will be evil and the dynamic between them. Once this was determined, all things were designed as the background to this drama. Since the drama had already been written, the background could only be designed in one way. No choice was left. Therefore we, too, have no choice in these matters.
Q. How do you make a Jew? A. Take ½ whole God + ½ human Mind and shake well. Your head that is. We Jews have no choice because we have no mental capability of volition, of forming intentions. The Chosen, with no choice, with no moral self-assessment capability, with no powers of independent judgment, to disagree, to resist, to have an opinion, to be able to weigh and decide between this and that. We Jews, therefore, have no more capacity of agency than do blades of grass, fauna and marionettes. Who is a Jew? A person with the agency of a blade of grass, the body of a circumcised human, the delusion of being God, the fantasy of ruling the Nations of the world, and the narcissism of exponential self-pride. By God’s will, there’s no anti-Semitism in it.
That’s the lesser description. Jews are not individual beings, no more so than the parts of elephants are elephants. “(A) Jew is born an eternal, indistinguishable soul that is both an ‘organic’ part of God and a part of the Jewish collective. . . . God’s relationship to the individual Jew is primarily through the medium of the Jewish peoplehood. . . .A Torah way of life can only be actualized in its peoplehood” (op. cit. Jewish Democracy). Each individual Jew is a fleeting flash or spark of light in the eternal collective peoplehood (nation, the Chosen, Israel). The collective defines its members in that one-way direction. Race determines the individual’s character. This Truth holds for both Jews and non-Jews. Ask Chabad, are we Jews congenitally depressive-manics? And if so, is it by God’s doing, or Hitler’s ‘I told you so’?
Chabad’s failure to make any distinction between myth, world-stage theatrics and spiritual reality is not intellectual dishonesty. If it were, I’d leave its ideology on the left side of the ‘reality’ balance where Religious Studies and theology profs do their stuff. The trouble and the damage I see is that the sect’s ideology inextricably joins a history of actually existing anti-Jewish pogroms with a fanciful theory of the identity between anti-Semitism and the philosophical and political liberalism of non-Jews. Having thus designed the setting for the drama, the sect’s leaders rewrite the story of Creation as a divine proclamation to Jews to create a new social reality that goes beyond the telling alone. The Absolute reality is God “enabled” Jews by creating them from His own body, fitting them with a Jewish soul, promising them sovereignty, and commanding them to battle and enforce it— light defeating darkness, good defeating evil. It’s a duplication of Chabad’s three foundational ideological theses: two incompatible races, Noahide sovereignty, messianic true peace: Jews in the driver’s seat. Did God mean in real time on real space against real people? The drama in action in reality includes Jewish annexation of the ‘Land’, Jewish settlements on the ‘Land’, and Jewish expulsion from the ‘Land’ of the Jews’ perpetual “enemies”. It’s “the Torah way of life (being) actualized.”
Chabad’s manifested inability to distinguish fantasy from fact and then acting the fantasy in the real world — admittedly not alone — prompts me to wonder about a dangerous and harmful collective social psychosis.
‘No, no, no,’ Chabad leaders protest. It’s all about saving real lives. I suggest they read their own public messages. “(T)he surrendering of land (or even property) to enemies, by definition [of the concept] piktuach nefesh, (is) something which endangers lives and is thus forbidden by the Torah” (op. cit. “Take the Word ‘Withdrawal’ out …). “Enemy” is the role assigned to non-Jews. The script says even negotiation over land and property is what “endangers lives”. The “enemy” will be defeated after a protracted war. Since the drama is the blueprint for Jewish actors on the real-world stage, “saving lives” is exactly what doesn’t happen. “Saving Lives” is a cunning, conning battle-cry.
Quoting from The Sefirot— “Why does the Torah use a human description of God? (Because) the Torah speaks in the language of man. God borrows terms from (man) to express His relationship with the world.” As we say, Thank God, for there’s no need (or possibility) to translate from English or Hebrew or whatever into or from Godish or Godese to discover what He really meant when He first gave the Word. Everything Chabad leaders know, believe and communicate — about God, Jews, non-Jews and the rest of it — is in our worldly tongues. The leaders are as inescapably trapped in the word-to-world, world-to-word, and social reality as the rest of humanity.
So throw the book at them, specifically The Oxford English Dictionary. “Psychopathology is the science of mental disorders.” Denial of or the inability to recognize reality is mental disorder. Substituting a fantasy world for the real thing is mental disorder. No, no, no. Chabad truly is religion, the best Judaism has to offer. Then tell them to make it even better. Get that Jewish superior race horror out of there. It’s the rabbis’ story, the story they tell about ‘What the Jews would be like if God were Jewish’. The leadership only needs human language to do it. In fact, it’s the only language we all have, thank God. That fact allows us to speak to each other, possibly without prejudice, without hate, as equals.
It was not until 65 years after the Holocaust that Pope Benedict XVI officially declared (words) that Jews are not now, nor were they then, guilty of Christ’s death. Did the pope turn anti-Catholic? Relevant to this essay, Pope Benedict invoked “complex theological and biblical evaluation” to reach his verdict. Hate speech and race speech can be expunged from religion within religion with religious argument by religious leaders with decent convictions, all without damage to the religion while making the world a bit better for Catholics and non-Catholics. Chabad leaders and rabbis, I ask you to act on Judaism’s best principles. Amend your sect’s doctrine. Clear your formula — the Godly race perpetually warring against the evil race until they’re as subservient to Jews as the Jewish God is beholden to Chabad rabbis — out of there. Judaism will be healthier after surgery.
Of course, I’ve been cherry picking, selecting from the biggest, juiciest, incriminating fruits. There are plenty more top quality English language berries on the tree (I don’t read Hebrew). Anyway, my basket’s full enough to have made a text-supported, reasoned indictment. And what now? What follow up? Here’s one project you might have overlooked. I didn’t, and it worked in my home town of Hudson, Quebec though not entirely due to my ability of persuasion.
To counteract the 2000 year-old defeatist symbolism of the round-armed menorah, which is also the symbol of the State of Israel, Rabbi M. M. Schneerson designed a menorah that is the flag of the Chabad sect. It features eight straight, raised, parallel arms issuing four on opposite sides of a vertical stem, each lower pair longer than the next higher, such that the profile across the top is horizontal. Why Insist on Depicting a Straight-Branched Menorah? does a lot of explaining in the usual Chabad contortionist manner, but this time there’s a reproduction of a sketch by Maimonides of a straight-armed menorah, which drawing immediately exposes the untruth in Chabad words.
“The branches are depicted as straight lines from the stem to the full height of the menorah [the center stem].” The illustration shows no such thing. The end of each branch is a bowl-shaped vessel that holds oil and wicks. Each branch is decorated with identical, geometric patterns. One sees at a glance that all the branches are of equal length, with the result that the tops of the pairs of lower situated branches do not extend vertically as high as do the tops of the highest pair. Furthermore, the Maimonides menorah has three pairs of branches, Schneerson’s has four. Chabad’s unique menorah is its private, sectarian trademark. In Schneerson’s view, “the menorah is the symbol of the connection between God and the nation of Israel.” Schneerson’s menorah, that is. His “represent(s) our closeness to God, (while) the rounded menorah symbolizes the very opposite . . .” I agree. Chabad’s raised straight arms symbolize Jewish racism; the rounded, embracing-arms menorah indeed “symbolizes the very opposite.”
Jew and non-Jew, go tell it to your municipal councils and mayors. No racist symbols in our town, please.
Richard Rothschild
Hudson, Quebec,
October 2020