SIGN THE PETITION
It is unbelievable that anyone would dare quote the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson when speaking about Noahide Law. Rabbi Schneerson is the very Rabbi who is lauded in Public Law 102-14 for his role in spreading the Noahide code to humanity and his followers (Chabad-Lubavitch) were the ones who were directly responsible for having this law installed which recognizes the murderous Noahide Laws as the foundation of the American nation (here)! In an uploaded book to the Chabad website, we find quotes were the Rabbi had the audacity to say that if the world had been following the Noahide Laws that the holocaust would have never happened. This Rabbi said that non-Jews have inferior satanic souls and that they live for nothing but to serve Jews (here), that is dehumanizing, worse than most anti-semitism! And how can anyone who supports the Noahide Laws invoke guilt over passed genocides when the Noahide Laws themselves are setting up future mass genocide for Christians, pagans, homosexuals, atheists and much much more! There is no self-awareness here, this is supremacism beyond reason!
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3244226/jewish/Chapter-22-Tragedy-as-a-Wake-Up-Call.htm
Chapter 22: Tragedy as a Wake-Up Call
By Mendel Kalmenson
Notwithstanding his optimistic view of our world as a divine garden of essential goodness, the Rebbe was not blind to the fact that oftentimes, our world on its surface conducts itself not as the divine garden it inherently is but as a jungle. The Rebbe urged that our response to humanly generated tragedies must include the taking of concrete steps to improve the moral state of society.
On Monday, March 30, 1981, just sixty-nine days into his presidency, US President Ronald Reagan was leaving a speaking engagement at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., when he was shot. The president suffered a punctured lung, but with prompt medical attention, he recovered quickly.
On April 15th of that year, at a community gathering marking his birthday (on the 11th of the Hebrew month of Nissan), the Rebbe addressed the recent attempt on the president’s life and shared the following lesson with the thousands who were gathered for the event:
How could it happen that a person (the would-be assassin) should take such incomprehensible action that contradicts all reason and sensibility? Historically it has been argued that the root of all crime is poverty, which embitters the human spirit and, in turn, leads to feelings of revenge….
We see in the present case that the person who attempted the assassination was not at all impoverished—to the contrary, he was raised amid wealth1 and, apparently, he was denied nothing. Lest it be argued that poverty is the root of crime, this incident makes clear that to find the root cause of such deplorable actions we cannot look to the person’s economic background, but somewhere else.
Where can the root cause be found? The present case points us in its direction: education….
It is true that, by law, schooling is obligatory, but what is the philosophy of the public education system? What is expected of the schools? Only to transmit knowledge, not to shape, cultivate, or structure the child’s inner self—that he develop good character traits and that he recognize that, with all the facts he learns at school, the most important thing to learn is how to do good.2In this talk, the Rebbe reiterated a position he had advocated many times, including his letter to then Vice President Walter F. Mondale (9th of Shevat, 5739 [February 26, 1979]):
Education, in general, should not be limited to the acquisition of knowledge and preparation for a career, or, in common parlance, “to make a better living.” We must think in terms of a “better living” not only for the individual but also for the society as a whole. The educational system must, therefore, pay more attention, indeed the main attention, to the building of character, with emphasis on moral and ethical values.A more sharply worded iteration of this message can be found in a letter written by the Rebbe to Chaplain Brigadier General Israel Drazin in 1987:
Many thanks for the good news [your letter] contained, particularly about your talks and lectures on the Seven Noahide Commandments3 on a number of occasions and that these were well received, even enthusiastically. I am certainly gratified that you intend to continue doing so.
There is, of course, no need to emphasize to you the importance of promoting these Seven Noahide Commandments among gentiles. In our day and age, it does not require much imagination to realize that, by way of example, had these Divine Commandments been observed and adhered to by all the “Children of Noah,” namely, the nations of the world, individually and collectively, there would not have been any possibility, in the natural order of things, for such a thing as a Holocaust.4In 1964, the acclaimed American novelist Harvey Swados visited the Rebbe for a yechidut. In the course of their meeting, during which they discussed Hannah Arendt’s recently published book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which she accused the Jewish leadership during the Holocaust of having acquiesced too easily to the Nazis’ horrific demands, the Rebbe took a different approach, highlighting the incredible difficulties of retaining one’s integrity under totalitarian regimes. “…the miracle was that there was any resistance at all, that there was any organization at all, that there was any leadership at all.”
Swados then asked the Rebbe pointedly whether it was his opinion that the tragedy of the Holocaust was not a unique visitation upon the Jewish people and that it could happen again? Without hesitation, the Rebbe replied, Morgen in der frie, “Tomorrow morning.”
Swados asked: “Why [are you] so certain that so terrible a horror could occur again?” According to Swados, “The Rebbe launched into an analysis of the German atrocities…. He did not speak mystically nor did he harp on the German national character and its supposed affinity for Jew-hatred. Rather, he insisted upon the Germans’ obedience to authority and their unquestioning carrying out of orders—even the most bestial—as a cultural-historical phenomenon that was the product of many generations of deliberate inculcation.”5
The point the Rebbe made was that a society that does not inculcate in its citizens a belief in a Higher Power Who demands righteous and moral behavior could, if it had the military power to do so, carry out genocide against any ethnic group.
Just as the Rebbe saw the individual tragedies that occur in people’s lives as a call for teshuvah, the Rebbe’s response to national and global “man-made” tragedy was that it was a call upon society to reflect on its values and policies. The Rebbe was especially concerned about the state of education for youth, which he felt must include character development and moral education in order to ensure a safe and healthy society. Through proper education for all, the Rebbe felt, we could effectively transform our world from a “jungle” into a “garden.”
FOOTNOTES
1.John Hinckley Jr.’s father was John Warnock Hinckley, the president of World Vision United States, and chairman and president of the Vanderbilt Energy Corporation.
2. Sichot Kodesh 5741, vol. 3, pp. 107-109. www.chabad.org/968186.
3. The Seven Noahide Laws prohibit: idolatry, blasphemy, incest and adultery, murder, theft, and cruelty to animals. It also commands its followers to implement orderly processes of justice.
4. From a letter by the Lubavticher Rebbe, dated Erev Shabbat Kodesh Bereishit, 5747 [October 31, 1986]. For the full text of the letter, see: www.chabad.org/2021482.
5. See www.chabad.org/61921. It should be noted that in this instance, the Rebbe departed dramatically from his usual vehement insistence (see chapters 27 and 28), that the Holocaust would never happen again, often quoting the verse, lo takum paamaim tzara, which means, “An evil such as this will never reoccur.”
The difference between this occasion and others, though, is clear. The context of the Rebbe’s discussion and statement to Swados was not theological, as it was on those occasions when the Rebbe declared that G‑d would never again allow such an attack against the Jewish people. In this instance, their discussion touched on history and human nature and the susceptibility of a society that lacks a supreme moral authority as its anchor.
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