It is unfortunate that The Jewish Week uncritically portrays the chief rabbi of England as an ideological inheritor of the Lubavitcher rebbe (“The Chief Rabbi and the Rebbe,” Dec. 2).
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is quoted: “I tried to do what I know the rebbe would have wanted me to do.” But Rabbi Schneerson had great integrity and great respect for all of mankind. The rebbe never would have called a Reform rabbi (such as Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a Holocaust survivor, who taught Torah over the radio to tens of thousands of Jews in England) a destroyer of Israel in private while praising him in public, as Rabbi Sacks did.
The rebbe never would have described himself as an “enemy” of the non-Orthodox movements, as Rabbi Sacks described himself in a letter he wrote to Rabbi Chenoch Padwa (in a letter leaked to London’s Jewish Chronicle).
The rebbe never would have issued a psak [religious edict], such as Rabbi Sacks did in London, that Jews can’t donate organs because a Jewish brain-dead person is alive, but it is permissible for Jews to take organs from gentiles who are brain-dead.
The rebbe never would have written a book expounding his weltanschauung and then bend to the pressure from the religious right bowdlerizing his own book, as Rabbi Sacks did with his re-publication of “The Dignity of Diversity.”
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