[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img] This morning’s senseless murder in Mumbai of 29-year-old Rabbi Gavi Holtzberg and his 28-year-old rebbetzin Rivky, by Muslim terrorists a day after their 2-year-old escaped, reminded me…
The Holtzbergs’ circumstance, before their cowardly Muslim killers came to town was not so different from thousands of other young Jewish couples of a certain commitment.
From an unpretentious building in an unpretentious Brooklyn neighborhood, the leaders of a 250-year-old movement within mainstream Orthodox Judaism send young, often newly married, couples — a recently ordained rabbi and his rebbetzin — to corners of the world you and I never have heard of, and could not pronounce anyway.
Who They Were
Like the Holtzbergs, these couples belong to the highly visible group of Chasidic Jews known as Chabad (Germanic gutteral pronunciation, please, not chuh-bahd).
Cha-B-Ad is an acronym that represents the first letters of three Hebrew words, wisdom, understanding, knowledge.
The Chasidic movement that spawned Chabad was organized in the Middle Ages to serve those Jews less educated in Torah than their fellow Jews. At their religious services, a heavier emphasis was placed on singing than on Torah learning.
A couple of centuries later, a Chabad service differs little from those conducted in older dimensions of Traditional Judaism.
Unlike the rest of Judaism — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist — Chabad communities aggressively welcome all Jews to services, members or not, observant or not.
Chabad was emphasizing the diversity of its congregations long before today’s cultural hotshots thought it up as a nifty marketing gimmick.
Unlike the rest of Judaism, Chabad worries about the souls of Jews who have drifted from their heritage. Chabad is revered across much of the world for rescuing drug addicts and restoring them to normalcy.
No Conversions
Like other Jews, Chabad believes that Christians should be Christians, Muslims should be Muslims and Jews should be Jews.
No changes or crossovers, please.
One of their main reasons for existing is to return Jews to the fold of their heritage — not Christians, emphatically not any non-Jews.
And so we return to the young couples, called emissaries, who are dispatched from Chabad House in Brooklyn to every continent and to the unlikeliest little and big communities —logically because Jews live in those places.
As a veteran dreamer, it seems to me that almost nothing could be more romantic than following the trail of these newlywed couples.
Warm hand in warm hand, you and your bride dance off to the brilliantly colored, unclouded skies, undreamed-of adventures awaiting you, fairly soaring, permanently, into exotic settings.
A Choice: Stand Out or Fit in?
Once at your destination, you settle , into communities where absolutely no one else looks like you, thinks like you, dresses like you.
I don’t remember how many Chabad centers there are in California. But no matter where a Jew decides to live in this state, he is darned near within walking distance of a Chabad center.
The mission of these rabbinic couples is unalloyed.
To find Jews who have drifted into the vague environment of assimilation and draw them back to their base.
The most frequently voiced distinction between Judaism and those Christian groups committed to proselytizing is that Jews believe every good person has a place in the world to come while Christians groups who proselytize believe only Christians can enter heaven.
Blending in
And so, this is how Rabbi Holtzberg, and Rebbetzin Holtzberg came to find themselves in Mumbai, India, five years ago, when he was a tender 24 and she was a tender 23.
News stories erroneously have referred to the Chabad center in Mumbai as “ultra-Orthodox.”
Hardly.
If anything, Chabad is more lenient, more welcoming, more open, more flexible than any other group of Orthodox Jews. But I guarantee you the designation will not be changed, even by reporters who know better.
Since the former Bombay is the second largest city in the world, at 13.6 million, it probably was not hard for the Holtzbergs to blend in, un-noticed, no matter how different they were. One reason they were sent there was because Mumbai is a great crossroads of Jewish tourism, especially from Israel.
The latest wave of Muslim terrorists knew the cultural landscape of Mumbai better than city planners. They knew exactly where to find Jews to torture and murder.
Millions of blinded Jews, however, fail to learn a lesson from the hundreds of bloody Muslim mass killings perpetrated every year.
Unbelievable Event
Wretchedly, almost purposely, naive persons such as Laura Geller, a Reform rabbi at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills walk around the community with their eyes on the ground, a hand over each ear, deaf to real life.
Does she read a newspaper? Watch television? Visit the internet?
A week ago last Monday, the embarrassing Rabbi Geller, in co-operation with an equally pathetically misguided rabbi from New York, Marc Schneier of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, invited our friends from the King Fahad Mosque of Culver City over to Temple Emanuel for an evening of shmoozing.
Clearly, you do not have to pass intelligence tests to attain certain positions.
Interfaith dialogue, never embraced by serious religious people, is the folly of willing fools.
Jews who sit down to dialogue with Methodists or Presbyterians or Lutherans, scarcely could waste their time more flamboyantly. And then, by George, Rabbi Geller and friends topped themselves, sitting down with those who have pledged to destroy us.
