Reply To: Achdus Versus Sholom Bayis

BS”D

No one believes that anyone other than Hashem runs the world. (Even those meshichisten who have not taken total leave of their sanity do not believe that anyone but Hashem rules the world.) There is no mekor anywhere for the statement he made in the midst of his grief.

What he believes and probably thought he was saying is what the Gemara says which is that tzadikim are still with us after they leave the world so that the Rebbe still has (spiritual) hashpaah over the situation – but when he already knew in his heart that the worst was the case he broke down and said something that makes no sense.

Every Simchas Torah I get hammered, use the bima as a pull up bar, and sing an old song about HaRabbi Shlita; everyone who sees that and joins in knows all I am doing is remembering old times because I know all too well that the Rebbe is not shlit”a anymore (but I would never let anyone video that scene or even do it on Purim when pictures could be taken).

I also know how he reacts when under stress and how emotional he often gets when speaking about emotional subjects. His mother A”H has not been with us for years now; when I heard him speak the Shabbos of her >15th yahrtzeit, he was speaking with the same heartfelt sense of loss as if she had just passed away a few days hence. I felt as if I knew her, even though all I knew of her was her name and that she had predeceased her husband A”H.

We knew but did not want to believe that there was little hope (sadly I figured out what the situation was when the Holtzberg parents tzu langer yorn got a police escort to take them to the airport) and most of us were in a state of mourning even though we had not gotten official news because of the time zone differential.

That video should never have been made public – it was a private situation – but knowing him I think he likes the controversy and he is not the type to care what anyone thinks of him. If he weren’t like that he could never have done what he does and continues to do for Yidden and Yiddishkeit (or survived as a practically lone frum boy growing up in a changing neighborhood – he’s not from Crown Heights).

If he said something like that on a normal day, everyone would be right to question and my first thought would be that perhaps he had become ill (knowing him as I do). If he had a website filled with that kind of thought, it would go into my filter with the other obscene trash and I would probably think of him in the same terms as I think of the Ku Klux Kartel. (More likely, if this were the case I would ask family members if he is ill L”A or being treated with medications that may have psychological side effects).

But when someone speaks from heartfelt grief, you never know what they are saying because they are not thinking straight.

If you said something absurd or unusual under unusual circumstances, I would pay it no heed. That includes anything as mundane as your sukkah beam crashing on your head, or even being drunk on Purim, as well as L”A the kinds of things that should never happen to any Yid. I assure you I don’t use bad language in English or any language people can understand but when my hat flew, my reflexes took over and I screamed the 2 most offensive words in the English language in a very public place. No one cared except to try to help me retrieve the hat.

If you wrote articles defending j4j or anything else outside of Torah, I would probably write a long post attacking you on every point and then throw your site in my killfile. If you had made a name for yourself with kefira or even plain shtus, you’d earn yourself a profile in my infamous satire blog (which has 2 Lubavitch entries, one for a freak meshichist and the other for someone who spent countless hours attacking a popular entertainer over total nonsense).