Last week’s article dealt mostly with Chabad’s history and involvement in fierce resistance to the great Western tyrannies in Russia and Germany. This resistance was not shallow, and while it was certainly political in that it addressed fundamental political issues, particularly freedom of religion, it always came to the political issues from a religious base. Politics as religion is disastrous. Politics that recognizes the sacredness and primacy of our relationship with God is a blessing. The kind of politics that results in a First Amendment is a blessing we all need. The state places religion beyond the control of government while simultaneously disallowing religion to enshrine itself at the helm of state power. The government is a civil authority, and its citizens will bring their religious inspiration and insight to their civil engagement, for good governance is itself a divine concern. After the bloody wars surrounding the Reformation, and the attempt of all sides to forcibly establish their version of the true religion as supreme, the West brought forth a new view that embraced an ever-stronger concept of religious freedom. It was powered by thinkers who read widely and found inspiration and practical guidance in many sources. This was not new. The very small educated class of medieval Europe engaged in scholarly exploration across the boundaries of the warring faith communities. The Christian Scholastics knew and valued not only the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, but also Muslim thinkers such as ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Farabi, and ibn Rushd (Averroes) as well as great Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides and Gersonides. What was new in post-Reformation Europe was the engagement with the rabbinic/Talmudic tradition. For a thousand years, Christian thought treated rabbinic thought as worthless at best, fiendishly dangerous at worst, so that on several occasions, the Talmud was seized and burnt. But for Christian thinkers like Pico della Mirandola, Joahnnes Reuchlin, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, rabbinic legal and mystical traditions opened up a new door which they were eager to pass through. These people and those influenced by them led the way to the First Amendment. They had stopped looking at those outside their own tradition as caricatures of evil and found that such mythology hindered the development of personal moral accountability that is the cultural sine qua non for self-governance. We realize God’s wisdom and will are meant to be internalized, accepted as the deepest expression of who we really are. And so, when formerly trusted political commentators have suddenly embraced spiritual and political atavism, it is time to show how inadequate that response is to the challenges of today. The goal here is to continue to contrast Tucker Carlson’s viciously shallow caricature of a Jewish movement with a brief summary of some of its central religious ideas. The aim is to contrast Carlson’s approach with that of the scholarship that made the West’s greatness possible. The goal is not to escape from any criticism, much less to censor anyone. It is rather to allow readers to see for themselves and judge for themselves what criticism is constructive and valid and results from a deep and caring insight into those it criticizes and what criticism is destructive, not in good faith, and unwilling and afraid to see beyond bias and self-serving caricature. The most important of Chabad’s ideas lie in the deep insights of the Jewish mystical tradition into the nature of God’s creation. In the language of the 16th century Tsefat school of Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, before there was a creation, before there was time, before there was a “before,” there was only the Infinite Light of God. No boundaries or delimitations existed, no definitions, as nothing was defined, as there was no finitude, only the infinite. How could a world of individuation come to exist when there could be no boundaries? Every particular thing would be overwhelmed by infinity. But limitlessness means as well that there was no boundary to stop God from choosing to limit Himself in order to make a world that could endure and enter into a relation with God blessed by Him with a consciousness and an identity. These are the preconditions of love. The world was created by God choosing to make love possible by making space to bring the beloved into being. It is this world that God loves. He sees it as He creates it and calls it good, again and again. He sustains it by choosing again and again to make the space for His beloved creatures to know themselves and then to know Him. God becomes greater in this way than any being trapped in stasis, imprisoned in infinity. God informs us in His word that we humans are created in His image and that He has put the world within us, enabling us both to work it and preserve it. We can become deputized creators, created in His image, making the world become better and preserving its ancient good, the way it has always been in God’s mind, which sees through to the end from the beginning. We learn that we become great through making room for others — not by compulsion, for God is uncompelled — but by choice. We become greater through submitting to love, through choosing to limit our fixation with the infinite realm of our private self to willingly love our fellows and make space for them in every meaningful way, even to the last full measure of devotion. We realize God’s wisdom and will are meant to be internalized, accepted as the deepest expression of who we really are. Thus, we learn to govern ourselves not because of some superior outside force that makes it a bad bet to misbehave, but because we detach ourselves thereby from the very core of our life, our liberty, and our happiness. It is about being self-governing in order to be fully human. It is about teaching those closest and everyone in one’s network of life how to do so as well — not by external compulsion but by being a compelling example, modeling this self-governance in the divine model so that it resonates with others. This is an epitome of a large and deep literature and tradition. There is a vast library from these 250 years of Chabad that touches on law, philosophy, theology, language, aesthetics, and the vast range of topics that help to make real the wonder and marvel of the world God has made and the humanity with which we have been blessed. Chabad was very early present online and its flagship website, Chabad.org, contains a motherlode of material, whether books, lectures, videos, or what have you. Some literature requires context, as there is a vast difference in the world we inhabit in 21st century America and the world of Tsars where Chabad began. But anyone with even modest skills in the online world will be able to easily find much of interest and of value. As the world goes through one more cycle of this vile fantasy with its unique track record of horror and evil, immunize yourself through replacing noxious mythology with knowledge. Help make our American discourse great again. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Choose Life, Not Blame When Democracies Grow Up Too Late Head of State, Not Head of Faction