Sea Breeze wrote:
My challenge is not to atheists who claim to not see any evidence, but it is to the few "believers" on this board who claim to believe in a different Jesus than the one presented in scripture.
If Jesus didn't raise himself from the dead (proving he was God), then he is a liar, a con man and the worst sort of deceiver. And, should be utterly rejected.
Heretics can't have their con man and at the same time hold him in high esteem. This is the fundamental logical error with heretics. They want the Jesus they have created, a supposed "good man" one who is a liar and a deceiver.
Good men don't lie and deceive.
My people, the Jews, have been excited to welcome the Messiah for some time. Consider how we ushered in our own disaster, the Diaspora, with the selection of Simon Bar Kokhba?
In recent times, after the death of the Chabad’s movement’s own messianic figure, the Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (aka, “the Rebbe”), his members actually believed he defied death, some believing he would or actually rose from the dead due to the religious fervor of their own devotion. Due to the same religious doctrines inspiring the movements, it is easy to note the similarities and the patterns between Jesus’ disciples and what likely happened after his death and Schneerson. I posit that religious fervor and claims do not equate to moral or ethical “goodness” or “truth.”
From the Harvard Divinity Bulletin
“After the Death of Chabad’s Messiah”--Spring/Summer 2021
As my Rebbe lay dead on the floor of his office, I noticed a small group of men dancing and chanting outside on the street: “Long Live the Rebbe, King Messiah, Forever and Ever!” Only hours earlier, the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, was pronounced dead by the hospital physician, but for many of his Hasidic followers, he was still the long-awaited Messiah.
It was a hot and muggy Saturday night in June 1994. As a 14-year-old yeshiva student, I joined the vigil standing outside Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan, hoping and praying that the Rebbe would miraculously return to his followers and community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Alas, at 12:30 AM our hopes were dashed. Standing among the thousand Chabad followers, I saw the stretcher carried out on its way back to Brooklyn.
I rushed back to the Rebbe’s synagogue, known throughout the world by its address, “770.” There, a long line of mourners filed by the Rebbe’s office on the first floor to pay their final respects. When I saw the outline of his body laid out on the floor, wrapped in a prayer shawl, I was shocked and bewildered. He was surrounded by 10 burning candles and a small delegation of elderly Hasidim reciting the book of Psalms.
The crowd swept me outside to the street. Still in shock, I joined the dancing Hasidim and chanted along with them. I continued dancing throughout the night until daybreak. By 6 AM, completely exhausted, I made my way home and collapsed into bed.
Later in the day, I stood among the thousands of Hasidim gathered outside the Old Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens as the Rebbe was interred next to his father-in-law, Rabbi Yosef Y. Schneersohn. It began to dawn on me that the burial would surely put an end to the Rebbe’s messiahship. Or so I assumed.
More than 26 years have passed since the Rebbe’s demise. Nevertheless, to this day, most of the Rebbe’s followers, known as Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, continue to believe in his messianic identity. How can this be?
For years leading up to the Rebbe’s passing, and with tacit encouragement from the Rebbe himself, Chabad followers came to believe that the Rebbe was the Messiah. To a large extent, this messianic attribution was connected to the Rebbe’s mission of reaching out to every Jew across the globe. Unlike other Orthodox rabbis and Hasidic leaders, who primarily concern themselves with their own flock, the Rebbe saw himself as the leader of world Jewry. To this end, he sent emissaries from his headquarters in Brooklyn to every corner of the globe. To date, the Chabad movement has established approximately four thousand outposts, or Chabad Houses, around the world.
No previous Jewish leader had such astounding global ambitions. As the Rebbe’s program of Jewish outreach picked up steam in the early 1990s, his followers became ever more convinced that he must be the long-awaited Messiah. The Rebbe had no children and his health was deteriorating rapidly. In 1992, at the age of 90, he suffered a severe stroke, which led to his loss of speech and his ability to walk. In his weakened condition, he would appear for the evening prayer service on a specially built balcony in the back of his synagogue. On cue, the moment the curtains parted and the Rebbe came into view, the Hasidim would begin chanting fervently, “Long Live the Rebbe, King Messiah.”
The Rebbe’s death on June 12, 1994, came as a total shock to all of us. For the Chabad movement, his death simply made no sense. Everyone I knew—family, friends, and teachers—was convinced that the Rebbe was the Messiah. As such, how could he have died? Prior to the Rebbe’s death, the movement took it for granted that the Messiah had to come from the living, not the dead. Jews knew that Jesus could not be the Messiah because he left the world in an unredeemed state. Likewise, most observers outside of the Chabad movement were convinced that upon the Rebbe’s death, his followers would cease to believe that he was the Messiah. But they underestimated the tenacity of his followers’ faith in the Rebbe.
After the initial shock of the Rebbe’s passing, the Chabad movement recalibrated itself and came to believe that now, with the Rebbe no longer among the living, the Messiah would have to come from the dead. All that was needed was for the Rebbe to return to his synagogue in Brooklyn and finish the work he began prior to his death. Upon his return, he would gather all the Jews back to the Land of Israel and build the Third Temple in Jerusalem. In effect, this new schema can be considered a Hasidic version of the Second Coming.
Until the age of 22, I, too, managed to shake off the Rebbe’s death and continued to believe in his messianic identity. Like so many of my friends, I also had the mantra “Long Live the Rebbe, King Messiah” emblazoned on my head covering, or kippah.
“The Rebbe, The Jews, and The Messiah”
From Commentary, September 2001
A large segment—almost certainly a substantial majority—of a highly significant Orthodox movement called Lubavitch, or Chabad, Hasidism affirms that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who was laid to rest in June 1994, initiated the authentic messianic mission and will soon return to complete the redemption in his capacity as the messiah...Two thousand years of messianic literature were now scoured to find a handful of broadly relevant if, strictly speaking, inapplicable quotations—and several more irrelevant ones—to demonstrate that Judaism may countenance the belief in a messiah who returns from the dead. As the months passed, even this position did not suffice, and a growing number of messianists began to assert that the Rebbe never died, that he remained alive in the full sense of the word. In this reading, what happened on June 12, 1994 was an illusion, analogous to Satan’s stratagem when, just before the sin of the golden calf, he showed the Jewish people what appeared to be the coffin of Moses. The Rebbe’s funeral, like Moses’ coffin, was thus a
test for carnal eyes. . . . In truth, there was no passing away or leavetaking at all, God forbid. . . . What is special about the Prince of the generation is precisely that he is a human being in a physical body which must be a part of the world, and that is how he unites the world with the Godhead. We cannot say, we do not wish to say, it is entirely impossible to say that there was any “passing away,” God forbid. The Rebbe lives and exists among us now exactly as he did before, literally, literally....
A messianist catechism, in a passage ascribed to a religious mentor in a major Chabad yeshiva in Israel, described the Rebbe as in charge “of all that happens in the world. Without his agreement no event can take place. If it is his will, he can bring about anything, ‘and who can tell him what to do?’. . . . In him the Holy One Blessed be He rests in all His force just as He is . . . so that this becomes his entire essence.” The same mentor wrote an article titled “I Don’t Regard the Rebbe as Basar Va-Dam [Flesh and Blood].” He asserted:
Yes, the Rebbe’s body is composed of flesh and blood, but as far as he’s concerned he is not compelled or limited by anything—not by physical limitations nor by spiritual limitations. He “is what he is” [cf. the divine name in Exodus 3:14]. Even as he is enclothed in a physical body, he remains limited by nothing whatsoever and he has the ability to do everything and be everything in an unlimited manner.
