Extreme insult and an utter disgrace

There is nobody from the Orthodox Jewish community that writes each week in the Maccabean about their authoritative understanding of progressive Judaism, and in the process insults, misquotes and misrepresents what its ideals stand for.

There is a person from the progressive Jewish community that writes each week in the Maccabean about interpretive ideals of Orthodoxy with an unbeliveable bias of hatred and viscious twisting of ideas.

I have just chosen to no longer attend the Kristallnacht commemoration as this person will be a speaker, and I am embarrased that somebody who can direct so much warped analysis and insulting commentary about my beliefs is extended the respect to represent the community publicly.   

Why does our harmonious and generally placid Jewish community subjected to such divisive and unfair badgering?  The Maccabean has totally lost the plot.

I am not going to disturb the dignity of this blog by quoting directly from the Maccabean column.

Our paper has the chutzpah to firstly claim that it is an Orthodox belief that the Holocaust was a punishment for non-orthodox and unbelieving Jews.

Then the article lays into the seventh Lubavicher Rebbe, a man who revolutionised Judaism and did so much good for the world.  He simplifies great and splendid ideas about the Jewish condition and our survival through the Holocaust that the Rebbe expressed in his responsa.  But then he suggests that the theology of the Rebbe is comparable to Christian crusaders who murdered so souls could be saved by Christ, and to the present day suicide bombers of Islam who murder to clense the world of infidels. 

I have never seen a Jewish leader so insulted, and I have never been so shaken that such an expression could come from one of our own.  How can it be that Chabad are considred to be an extremist fundamentalist mindset that advocates the killing of a soul for the sake of belief in G-d?  Nothing could be further from what the Rebbe brought to our world.

How are we expected to tolerate such madness?  How low does the Maccabean have to get, that it now reaches the point where it can sanction the use of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust to bash down the beauty of Judaism.

To the editors of the Maccabean - it is incumbent on you to apologise to the members of your community who are followers of the Lubavicher Rebbe, and  it is incumbent on you to stop insulting our religious beliefs by printing obscenely inaccurate accounts of what Orthodox Judaism stands for.