Boteach Unloads on Chabad
Television host, sex columnist and Orthodox rabbi Shmuley Boteach is no stranger to controversy, but this week he added his voice to a growing chorus of Orthodox Jews who believe that their religious community has to take a look in the mirror in the wake of the New Jersey money-laundering scandal. In an article in the Jerusalem Post, he writes:
We Orthodox have no one but ourselves to blame. We are often “religious” without being spiritual, prayerful without being humble and ritually precise without displaying the same punctiliousness in business.
Perhaps the most unexpected part of the piece comes when Boteach takes the opportunity to wantonly unload on the Chabad-Lubavich religious community in which he was trained. Boteach says he still raises his children in the Chabad spirit, but he explains how they pushed him out:
In 1993 I was ordered by the leadership of Chabad UK to dismiss all non-Jewish members of our Oxford University student society. I refused because the Rebbe (who had just died) loved non-Jews and regularly reached out to them. Chabad fired me.
Boteach implies that Chabad representatives “preach hate” by calling for a distance from the non-Jewish world, and goes on to criticize Chabad’s representative in Washington, D.C., Levi Shemtov, who, he says:
wrote on a super-secret global Chabad Web site that I “desecrate” any Chabad House I visit and should not be invited to speak. I shudder to think that a man of such extreme opinions is Chabad’s representative to the US government.
Shemtov, who sounded surprised by the attack, told the Forward: “I did not write what he implies; he misconstrued words into a sentence of his own making to imply inaccurately that I condemned him personally.”
It’s not entirely clear how Boteach’s criticism of Chabad relates to his larger discussion of Orthodoxy. He does seem to say that if more non-Jews read his book “Kosher Sex,” they might see the inherent goodness of Orthodox Judaism.
Maybe, but then again, maybe not.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
