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Choose Life, Not Blame
Chabad has had the attention of many people before Tucker Carlson. The former newsman stands in a long tradition within a long tradition.
First, to deal properly with the truth content of Carlson’s remarks on Judaism in general, a story.
In the early days of Nazi rule in Germany, one Jew came upon another Jew reading Die Sturmer, the vile rag that specialized in raw, red-meat Jew hatred. “What are you doing reading that trash?! Isn’t it bad enough what’s happening that you have to wallow in that filth?”
The man reading the paper replied, “So I should be reading the Jewish paper? You know what it says? ‘Pogroms taking place in Poland; Jews expelled from all professions in Germany; Jews under attack in the Holy Land; Jewish store windows in Berlin smashed by the brownshirts.’ But when I read this paper, what does it say? ‘The Jews control the movies. The Jews control the banks. The Jews run the government in America and Britain.’ I feel better!”
It doesn’t do much good to argue with a fabulist. Humor at least disperses the sick fog.
But it is worthwhile knowing a little more about this one Jewish movement that Tucker has focused on of late, as it is likely unfamiliar to many.
Chabad is a spiritual movement within Judaism that was founded about the time that the Constitution was being written. Its founder was Rabbi Schneur Zalman, associated with the small White Russian town of Liadi where he lived and taught for many years.
This rabbi was a prodigy — by his early twenties, he had completed a task set for him by his teacher to write an updated code of Jewish law, and the work remains a classic that is still studied by aspiring rabbis and scholars across the Jewish world.
He was more renowned, however, for his great theological teachings, a synthesis of the Aristotelian sobriety of the 12th century jurist and philosopher Maimonides and the fire of the mystics of 16th century Tsefat. His purpose was to bring meditative depth into the lives of everyday people and so supercharge their faith. By teaching how to rely on the innate love of God hidden deep within the heart and by teaching how one could turn one’s mind constantly to God and so to release that love from its hiddenness, he helped people develop an ever-deepening love that expressed itself in every aspect of their lives.
Hitler’s empire of blame went down in flames, and the empire of his spiritual heirs in Iran appears to be meeting a similar fate.
Judaism has always been about a total integration of life under God’s sovereignty. That goal cannot be achieved by quiet withdrawal from life, but rather in engagement, but on divine terms. That engagement in community affairs made him the target of a hater who believed the rabbi was not true to Judaism.
Unable to make a persuasive case among the Jews, he instead submitted charges to the Russian government that Chabad’s founder was seeking to join with Russia’s enemy, Turkey, to overthrow it and set himself up as King of the Jews and many similar charges. The hater correctly gauged that the Tsarist government would believe almost any kind of a conspiracy theory about the Jews, and at least at the start, he was not wrong.
The rabbi was arrested and held in a dungeon in the Russian capital for a series of interrogations that lasted more than seven weeks. But it gradually became apparent even to the Russian authorities that the charges were the work of a malicious liar, and the rabbi was released and eventually honored.
In turn, when Russia was invaded by Napoleon in 1812, the rabbi gave Russia crucial aid. Rabbi Schneur Zalman saw in Napoleon a new kind of tyranny that would be far more dangerous than the old, a religion in which the state and its leader would demand the allegiance properly given only to God. He believed that as bad as the old regime could be, it still acknowledged God as the source of its power. He therefore organized a network to provide the Russian army with intelligence, leading to its successful strategic retreat that denied Napoleon victory and doomed his army.
When Lenin, promising freedom and bread, overthrew the Tsar, he worked to destroy all religion in Russia except the worship of the Socialist state. Jews who had become bewitched by Communism formed a whole section of the secret police whose task was to root out Jewish practice, and especially to end Jewish education of children. Chabad followers did their best to keep worship, study, and observance alive. They established underground networks for that purpose, at great risk. Many spent years in the Gulags, which some survived; many were tortured and executed. The Soviets considered Chabad much like Tucker does today, a shadowy underground force working against Stalin’s state. Stalin eventually arrested the fifth successor of Rabbi Schneur Zalman and would have killed him had not protests from many Western governments persuaded him to expel the Rabbi from Russia instead.
Setting up in Poland, Chabad was present at the flashpoint when Germany started World War II. The American government prevailed on Germany to rescue the Chabad rabbi and his family from devastated Warsaw, and eventually he was welcomed into New York. He called America a country of kindness; he composed prayers for the success of American arms in the war, and his son-in-law and eventual successor used his advanced electrical engineering skills to work on electrical command systems for the Navy, toiling away at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the war.
During the course of the war, Chabad was decimated in its European homeland. A small surviving remnant settled in Brooklyn. Its rabbis taught that, while America had little traditional infrastructure, and most American Jews were barely literate in their own heritage, this land of freedom offered unparalleled opportunities to renew Jewish life and to forge a new kind of relation with the other citizens of this country that had given its blood and treasure to destroy Nazism and to rid its culture of the poisonous hatreds that had nearly destroyed civilization. Challenged by its seventh leader to grasp America’s unparalleled opportunities, Chabad steadily became a growing force in American life and in rebuilt Jewish life around the world.
The key to this growth was the tremendous stress on love of one’s fellow and of making a life-long commitment to serving the community and making career advancement secondary to that deeper imperative. Chabad built a culture in which the best and the brightest would aspire to find some underserved community in the U.S. or anywhere in the world, and then move there for life, going forth as young couples devoting themselves to their new home. They opened their doors to all, aware that they were teaching religion by example, touching hearts and souls as their first job and everything else brought to serve that goal.
Just as the Book of Exodus calls the Jews escaping Egyptian slavery “God’s Army,” so too did the people who follow the rabbi of Chabad take on that name. Devotion to the task makes the term apt. Their dedication to the task of renewing the ancient covenant is heroic and it has inspired thousands of people to find their own way of joining in and helping along in this spiritual rebirth. It is a peaceful army, but fierce in its dedication to its eminently worthy task of reviving a life and an ancient tradition that was nearly exterminated.
Chabad is true to the ancient biblical mission given Israel of testifying to God and His covenant with their lives. This testimony is both internal, in establishing a model community, and outward-facing, aiming to bring blessing to all the world, as God promised to Abraham in Genesis.
There was little time to rest after World War II ended. Stalin became increasingly paranoid and antisemitic, preparing plans for a massive, Nazi-style campaign stopped only by Stalin’s death. The stand that Chabad took for keeping Judaism alive in the face of the Soviet onslaught was a stand for all seeking to serve God and not worship tyrants as gods.
So with Stalin, so with Hitler — Chabad’s work to restore life and spirit to a shattered people after World War II is simultaneously a restoration of the civilization that nearly gave up and succumbed to tyrants. As Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the UK put it,
And how can you redeem a world that had witnessed Hitler? The Rebbe [of Chabad] did something absolutely extraordinary; he said to himself: if the Nazis searched out every Jew in hate, we will search out every Jew in love.
Love by its nature attracts. A loving married couple inspires others to create such a life themselves. So too with the biblical idea of a community centered on the love of God — it naturally inspires. Every deep spiritual tradition knows how this works. We are wired for it, like a piano with the dampers lifted from its strings, resonating in tune with the clear note sounded by another. Love at each level and in each place strengthens love in each other place.
The love of husband and wife grows to include the love of children and grandchildren. These loves in turn are nested within love of community, homeland, and nation, in turn, and ultimately in love of our fellow creatures and the whole of creation and the One who created it, each and all, and loves it, each and all.
The last Chabad leader carried on an extensive correspondence with President Reagan as well as leaders and common people around the world. He advocated for education in America that would be God-centered in the broadest sense. We saw how a civilization educated in science and literature and art but lacking the crucial central uniting point, careened off-center and nearly into a new Dark Age. We must find the common thread provided only by the deepest central teaching, the one uniquely capable of guiding our lives and using the immense power given into our hands in a way that brings benefit and not destruction.
This has been the theme of Education Day celebrations which he inspired, declared by Congress every year since the Carter Administration. The last Chabad leader also launched a campaign that continues till this day that has resulted in 34 states having laws that either mandate, encourage, or permit public schools to have a moment of silence. This secures a place, free from compulsion to follow anything foreign to their own deepest commitments, in which students can contemplate as they are taught by their own families or religious leaders. It is properly a state priority, that all will have some time as part of their schooling to reflect on the deepest and most important of all things.
Since the oneness of God is supremely powerful, we seek to find a core of explanation that integrates every aspect of who we are so that we can live the best life. Conspiracy theories offer strange but compelling evidence of the truth of this idea. Especially in the oldest of conspiracy theories, people try to explain everything wrong in their world by finding a supreme villain, whose power explains everything.
America is in a mess, says Tucker, and I know who is to blame. It models its explanatory power after the real thing, but in making its central commandment placing blame and teaching absolution from responsibility, it reveals its hopelessness and weakness to all who know that hope and strength are blessings God asks us to choose to receive.
A message of blame and absolution from responsibility. Not so different from a man in Germany who gained power by saying, “We are not to blame for our terrible defeat in the Great War. We were stabbed in the back.”
How unlike great American leaders who call people to sacrifice and strive with all our might to achieve a victory in which peace and abundance will be established as never before. How unlike Tucker’s erstwhile ally, Trump, who relentlessly seeks to do whatever he can to change the world for the better and achieve a greatness that no enemy has the power to deny.
Hitler’s empire of blame went down in flames, and the empire of his spiritual heirs in Iran appears to be meeting a similar fate. Perhaps that sobering spectacle will inspire Tucker to step back, return, and rebuild his life rather than be forever remembered as a man consumed by falsehoods and enlisted in the service of hatred. That need not be anyone’s destiny — unless one chooses it. And recognizing that it is we who choose can itself be decisive proof that what we need most is not someone to blame, but the courage to choose rightly, just as God has asked from the beginning: choose life.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
When Democracies Grow Up Too Late
Head of State, Not Head of Faction
The Virus in the Faculty Lounge
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