MY TAKE ON WHO THE REBBE REALLY WAS ...The Rebbe wanted girls on the cover of magazines for the youth. [Miller, p. 338] Some Chassidim took the girls off the cover as they felt it inappropriate. Yet the Rebbe put it back on. Why? What harm could there be in more seclusion, more chumrot, more segregation? But to the Rebbe, there was something amiss in a world where girls cannot be on the cover of a Jewish youth magazine. Here is the irony. Some Chassidim, feeling that this characterizes the Rebbe falsely, will be pushed to say the Rebbe compromised the truth in order to draw people close. Put simply, he lost battles to win the war as any great tactician must do. I.e. to preserve the system they know, they are willing to say the Rebbe deviated from the pure truth. Or as one Chassid told me, “You know the Rebbe from the colorful people, the BT’s, the people like your father, the interesting Lubavitchers etc…to those people the Rebbe presented Judaism bidi’eved, after the fact. Not optimal, not pure, only 75% truth. I know the Rebbe from the black and white Jews, the traditional normal Chassidim. To those people the Rebbe spoke 100% truth.” To me, not only is that disrespectful to the Rebbe’s integrity, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of who the Rebbe was a person, as well as what he stood for. You see, the Rebbe, far from compromising on pure Torah or Chassidus, took Torah to its logical conclusion...
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 17:31:06 +0000
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