Rabbi of berlin
It is fascinating to me that you keep asserting that you and I are saying similar things and in fact I am echoing things you say, but just don’t want to admit it. Somehow you are relating to my words, but I am not relating to yours. It is a mystery to me, and we’ll have to leave it at that because I will not be posting here any longer after today..
Just allow me to answer your comments: regarding the “chassidiste”, she was off her mind, and it wasn’t just a different derech. I am not one who is intolerable of other peoples derachim. Otherwise, I have never met any of his other tens of thousands of chassidim, so i have no way to judge. But i still maintain that any true BT goes through many teachers and rabbonim in their journey to yiddishkeit.
Finally, I keep asking you why you started this blog, what you were hoping to accomplish. You don’t want people to judge him, etc. No one was judging him. We are not sitting in our homes blasting him. We simply have nothing with him. (I talk for myself, of course)
I’m sure he was a very fine Jew. We do not HAVE to consider him a tzaddik, do we? If our gedolim would refer to him as a tzaddik, I would accept that although his actions were strange, I don’t really understand things as they appear to be. But why should I consider him a tzaddik otherwise, when his actions seem incomprehensible to me (as far as halacha goes).
The thing that’s going on here is that you want so badly that EVERYONE should recognise that your REBBE was a true tzaddik, just misunderstood. Dear rabbi of Berlin, I will need more than your say-so to go and worship his memory. Is that acceptable to you?