A Weird Breed of Jew Opposes Moshiach

The Rebbe Rashab

The draft of a cold wind can be felt on many Torah blogs that pay lip service to the topic of Moshiach.

Rather than bring you the warmth of this new era as it now unfolds, they seek to thwart its advance. Instead of accepting Moshiach, they chill the unsuspecting Jew. They say, "It's not him - so sit back and wait!" If it were up to these self-professed experts, they could sit back another 2,000 years before accepting Moshiach.

Meanwhile Moshiach waits behind the curtain of Nature for Jews to embrace him on faith. A Jewish king cannot become king of the Jews unless most Jews accept him. These "pundits", therefore, cast Moshiach as a contemporary irrelevance - as some far-off if not far-fetched concern. Rather than being heartened by a faith to accept, they rationalize to reject.

Like Korach, who, well-equipped with titles, pedigree, wealth, self-professed wisdom and supposed justification - attacked Moses, these prolific Torah bloggers also wage war on the Moses of our generation.

Moshiach wants to be accepted - not outwitted!

Just as Korach mocked the announcements of Moses, these bloggers mock the proclamations of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. These "Misnagdim", this new, strange breed of religious Jew, vent contempt for Moshiach, when they ought to fixate on it, it being the crux of Judaism. Instead, they take up battle lines where the earlier "Misnagdim", those supplanted by Chassidus, left off. They want to win a war of intellectual ideas rather than submit to an emancipation by a vibrant Yiddishkeit. So they fight in the name of Torah - against Torah and the purpose of Chassidus.

They dress their blogs with tons of Torah. After all, nothing is sweeter than Torah. But as sure as the delicious doughnut is bad food, they seek to entice readers with spiritual counterparts of worthless dough, adulterated sugar and toxic oil. Some Jews find nourishment in this pernicious tactic, like children who know no better drawn to sweets.

This is not so much an attack against their Torah. It is a condemnation of their hypocrisy. On the one hand, they pray and invoke Moshiach with every 5th or 6th phrase therein, then they take duck down and take cover behind highfalutin constructs uncommitted to their words of prayer. They are spiritual cowards, unwilling to submit to a higher authority.

They'll even construe the Maimonideic qualifications to deliberately misconstrue the public. They even compare the Moshiach phenomenon with a base Gentile connotation, because the Rebbe, though he invoked himself in no uncertain terms as King Moshiach, and qualifies illustriously according to all criteria enumerated by Maimonides, now cannot be seen. Suddenly the supernatural dimension that abounds in Talmud, Midrash and stories of tzaddikim can no longer permeate Jewish essence, even one that is the crux of Judaism.

What they DO NOT DO is more telling than what they do do. Knowing a man supposedly qualifies as Moshiach, knowing scores of rabbis signed a declaration that sanctions the Rebbe as Moshiach, knowing the Rebbe encouraged singing Yechi for over a year, knowing the Rebbe over 100 times referred to himself as Moshiach, knowing the entire essence of the Rebbe epitomized Moshiachism, knowing the Rebbe succeeded in bringing hundreds of thousands of Jews to Messianic orthodoxy - from a life of spiritual nudity, these antagonists will never bother to read any of the Rebbe's articles, talks or letters - even just to inspect what the Rebbe really said. They'll deal with the subject at arm's length. Once they close their prayerbooks, Moshiach remains in the pages. They wish to remain orthodox without anticipating, let alone accepting, Moshiach.

The 5th Lubavitcher Rebbe prophesied, in 1888, that two consecutive generations would precede the Era of Redemption. Both generations would unleash significant forces to try and vanquish Judaism and Chassidus. The first of the two generations, the "Maskilim", were a blatant anti-Torah force. In the next generation, a more dangerous, pernicious force would arise! The Rebbe Rashab backed his prophesy with a verse by King David (Psalm 89:52). The first part of this verse, said the Rashab, refers to the anti-Torah foe; The second clause of this verse refers to the poisonous, internecine anti-Moshiach foe.

אשר חרפו אויביך יהוה
אשר חרפו עקבות משיחך

Those who besmirch, are Your enemies God;
Those who besmirch the arrival of Your Moshiach!

To defeat these two foes, the Tomchei Temimim Lubavitch Yeshiva was deliberately established. Its students would be the counterweight against those who would deny God and Moshiach - in that order. He called these Yeshiva students "The Soldiers of the House of David" (חיילי בית דוד)(acronym = Chabad). This was not some gimic to try and retain youth. It was a divinely inspired strategy to undermine the oppressors, to preserve the survival and purity of Messianic Judaism, which Chabad Chassidus constitutes.

The European Maskilim waged the first war. Then broke out WWII and out of the inferno religious Jews trickled out to begin with a fresh, traditional resurgence. Gentiles in the Soviet Union also had their crosshairs aimed at what to them was considered "Enemy Number One" - religious Jewry. The last remnant of Jews there held tightly to their ancient tradition with utter self-sacrifice as well as devotion to the Lubavitcher Rebbeim. In the end, the Soviet Union crumbled, and the force that tried to extinguish the light of Judaism faded like a puff of smoke into oblivion.

The antagonistic Jews and Gentiles of that generation lost. Now wages the war against the next and last barrier.

Because of this aberrant phenomenon, namely, that orthodox Jews at the outset of the Era of Redemption could oppose Moshiach, even as they hinge their identity with orthodoxy, the Rebbe Rashab referred to them as "this strange breed of Jew"; An orthodox Jew who opposed emancipation.

Chassidus prevailed against the Maskilim and against the mighty Soviet Union. Soon enough Moshiach's soldiers will fly the flag of victory against this last shred of resistance.