Going from chaos to perfection
BS”D
I posted the following article on April 23, 2017. I am posting it again because it is more relevant today than it was seven months ago. And I added a postscript that may bring peace to the bloody war between Ger and Noahism, which has erupted as a kendo match between Rav K and Rav B (may Hashem open his eyes to the truth), as David said to Doeg, (Psalms 52:3), “Why do you pride yourself with evil, O mighty warrior. Don’t you realize that the kindness of the Al-mighty is all day?” So here is the April 23 article:
After the book, The Path of the Righteous Gentile came out, Rav Mendel Feldman, z’l, who gave the book his endorsement, informed the Lubavitcher Rebbe, zy”a, that B’nai Noach were seeking his advice and he wondered if the Rebbe had any words of wisdom concerning this.
The Rebbe answered him by saying, “Stay away from the organizations.”
That was it. One sentence. “Stay away from the organizations.”
What’s so wrong with organizations? Great things on behalf of mankind are accomplished through organizations. Organizations save lives and feed starving children and cure disease. They do many good things.
But there is a dark side to many organizations, particularly religious organizations. It was obvious that the Lubavitcher Rebbe saw that there was a dark side to Noahide organizations.
And he was right. We have seen it, and the B’nai Noach have suffered for it, and the truth of the Torah has suffered for it.
From this perspective, there are two major problems with organizations – politics and dogma.
And bear in mind that every church is an organization and every government is an organization, and so is Monsanto and Starbucks, and so is the local Kiwanis Club. An organization is nothing more than a group of people officially working together for a particular purpose, whatever that purpose may be.
The first problem with organizations, particularly religious organizations, is politics. One of the dictionary’s definitions of politics is: the debate or conflict in the pursuit of power. The primary business of every organization is to stay in business and thrive.
Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook, alav hashalom, taught that forming an organization is the opposite of learning Torah. When a person begins to learn Torah, he does it shelo lishmo, not for the sake of heaven, but to satisfy his own personal wants and needs. But as he learns more, he sees the greatness of Torah and comes to learn for the sake of heaven. Building an organization is the exact opposite. Here, a person begins for the sake of heaven – he has a cause – but soon he realizes that in order to survive, he must have money and in order to grow, he must have power and influence, and soon he is working for his own personal needs. This often includes bashing whatever competition might be around.
And what is particularly problematic, is that money and power often need to be sacrificed for the sake of truth. It takes an enlightened individual to do this. An organization? Rarely. Most organizations put money and power ahead of truth. As a result, running an organization, particularly a religious organization, may lead to manipulating people for the benefit of the organization. There are rabbis, pastors, as well as CEO’s of mega-corporations who use NLP, Neural Linguistic Programming, and other mind control techniques to get people to give their money and loyal obedience. Even Dale Carnegie’s classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People is really nothing other than a manual on how to manipulate people. It is presents it in a wholesome manner, but it is manipulation nonetheless. All of this is rabbinically forbidden as ganevat da’at, the Hebrew term for deception. It literally means to steal a person’s mind. But very few organizations care about this. I consider deception an aspect of witchcraft. The Rambam forbids theatrical magic tricks because they are sometimes used to warm up a person or a crowd to actual witchcraft (even though the Rambam does not believe any witchcraft has power). Organizations, by nature, are political. They will fight to survive and grow.
The second problem with organizations, specifically religious ones, is dogma. Dogma is the by-product of politics, and it tends to become more and more rigid and emphatic with time.
Just like a political party needs a platform, a religious organization needs a dogma to define itself.
The dictionary defines dogma as principles laid down as absolute truth by an authority such as a church or a political system.
Okay, so now we have an organization with a need for money and power, and a clearly defined set of principles – dogma.
And here is its dogma: Noahides are permitted to learn only the Seven Laws of Noah. They are forbidden to learn Torah beyond the Seven Laws and they are forbidden to keep Shabbat.
This dogma says that if a Noahide wants a greater share of the Torah than the Seven Laws of Noah, his or her only option is to convert and become Jewish, and then they can have all 613.
Now, the Noahide organization knows that G-d has given the Ger in the Gate, a great share of the Torah without converting. They know that the limitations they place on B’nai Noach do not apply to the non-Jewish Ger of today, but to ancient people who were subjugated in war and given the choice of accepting the Seven Laws or face capital punishment. Those people do not exist anymore. Today's righteous Gentiles come to the Torah because they searched for G-d and found Him. The non-Jewish Ger is not a Noahide. He is a different creation. The Seven Laws of Noah do not require a non-Jew to believe in Hashem. The Seven Laws of Noah merely require the non-Jew to reject idol worship. Conversely, the non-Jewish Ger in the Gate, is expected by the Torah to believe in G-d as it says (Deut. 31:12), “Assemble the people, the men and the women and the little ones and the Ger in the Gate, that they may hear and that they may learn and fear the L-rd your G-d and observe to do all the words of this Torah.”
So what do the politicalized Noahide organizations do? They twist around the law to say that the Ger in the Gate is the Ger Toshav, and there is no Ger Toshav today, even though the halacha is that, “for the sake of doing mitzvoth, there is always a Ger Toshav,” today and yesterday and tomorrow. These organizations are guilty of deploying triple deception:
1. The deception of saying that the Ger in the Gate is the Ger Toshav.
2. The deception of saying that there is no Ger Toshav today.
3. The deception of concealing that fact that the halacha is that “for the sake of the performance of mitzvoth,” there is always a Ger Toshav.
G-d holds no one back from the Torah except an idol worshipper before he renounces his idolatry.
When a religious organization manipulates the truth in order to support its dogma, for the sake of its own growth and power, it no longer factors G-d in its decisions. It has either forgotten about G-d or explicitly rejects Him. It has gone dark.
This is why the Lubavitcher Rebbe told Rabbi Feldman to stay away from the organizations – for the simple reason that he did not want a Talmid Chacham tainted by a corruption of the Torah. How does a corrupt organization taint a Talmid Chacham? For example, one of the leading Jewish-run Noahide organizations fired its rabbinic supervisor because he became a member of the ad hoc Sanhedrin in Israel. This particular Jewish-run Noahide organization is anti-Sanhedrin for political reasons. Firing a rabbinic supervisor damages his name in the community. That is one way of tainting a Talmid Chacham. There are others. And all of them are political.
This does not mean to say that all Noahide organizations are bad. Some of them are good and some are even very good.
Here is how you can tell a good Noahide organization from a bad Noahide organization: The good organization wants to strengthen and enlighten the Righteous Gentile. And the bad organization wants to manipulate and degrade the Righteous Gentile.
Any non-Jew who has accepted the Seven Laws of Noah and believes in the G-d of Israel, and has been told by an organization that he or she cannot keep Shabbat, has been lied to by an organization that is working against the Torah and against the Righteous Gentile. Without Shabbat observance, there is no next generation of Torah-observing Gentiles. Thus far is the blogpost of April 23, 2017.
Addendum: Noahide Nations and AskNoah are examples of the organizations that the Lubavitcher Rebbe advised Mendel Feldman to avoid. They are driven by politics and dogma. If they had been formed while the Rebbe was in the flesh, neither organization would have gotten his blessing. But the Rebbe did give his blessing to the “The Path of the Righteous Gentile.” It was written with the Rebbe’s guidance and blessings by two apolitical, undogmatic, and non-organizational individuals, Chaim Clorfene and Yakov Rogalsky. That is why The Path of the Righteous Gentile goes beyond Jewish Law, and also teaches pnimiyut Ha-Torah, the inner dimension of the Torah. The first two chapters of The Path of the Righteous Gentile are Knowing G-d and Returning to G-d, both of which are based on the teachings of Kabbalah and Chassidut. These, you will never get from an organization or their books. Our only interest in writing The Path of the Righteous Gentile was to introduce the Torah given by G-d to the non-Jewish Ger, the Ger in the Gate, who is distinctly different from the Ger Toshav. The book is not written for a subjugated person, but for one who comes to the Torah because of his or her love of G-d.
Jewish Law is called a small thing by the Rambam. Kabbalah he calls a great thing. This is because the consciousness of Kabbalah is greater than the consciousness of halacha. We all obey the halacha. And where we don’t, it is all b’shogeg, inadvertently, and G-d wipes the slate clean every motzi Shabbat by the saying of the v’yiten lecha prayer. That prayer covers a person with the wings of the Shechina for the whole coming week. And if you listen closely to the sound of those wings, you will hear words of wisdom, “Stay away from the organizations.” Get into the books, The Path of the Righteous Gentile and its companion volume, The World of the Ger, which introduces the Torah heritage of the Righteous Gentile, originally known as the Brit Rishonim, the Covenant of the Ancients, referring to Adam, Seth, Enoch, Noah, and Shem. Between The Path of the Righteous Gentile and The World of the Ger, is reader is shown a portal that unifies the Brit Rishonim and the Brit of Avraham Avinu with the Revelation of G-d on Mount Sinai. The so-called brit chadash, the new covenant of the Christian Church, has no access to that portal and has no portion of the Torah, even though they accept the so-called Old Testament as the Word of G-d. In this, they are truer than the Muslims. But Christians are forbidden to say Shema Yisrael (Deut. 6:4), the Torah’s expression of the Oneness of the G-d, Who gave the Tablets of the Ten Commandments to His people. The Ger's belief in the Oneness of G-d is the same as Israel’s. And it is different from the faith of the Christian who believes in a trinity. It appears to me that it is possible to be a Christian and a true believer in G-d, but few accomplish it. It appears to me that some of the founding fathers of America were Congregationalists and were not Trinitarians.
And here is how to keep the Ger/Noahide battlefield calm. Disorganize. Trust in G-d, not in organizations and not the rabbis who run the organizations. If you have questions, do not ask the organizations. The Torah promises you good shepherds. Look for them. Rabbis are judges and lack the mercy and kindness of a true shepherd. Moses was a true shepherd. David was a true shepherd. Ezra was not a true Shepherd. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was not a true shepherd. The Babylonian Talmud is not a true shepherd. The Zohar is a true shepherd. Elijah the Prophet is a true shepherd. Kol mevasser mevasser v’omer – the herald proclaims and announces. May he be remembered for good. May 5778 be a year of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good. Ha-Tov u’Metiv – G-d is good and does good.
Addendum #2: If you will notice and look closely, you will see that there are no "Ger Organizations." The closest thing to a Ger Org is some Facebook pages.