By Michael Cohen
I was
sitting in a restaurant and about to sing “Happy Birthday” for a
relative when a message came through. I heard my brother’s voice,
quivering. He told me not to worry, that he was okay — I could barely
hear what he was saying because the line was muffled. I rang him
straight back.
Minutes earlier, he had been watching the ceremonial Chanukah getting lit as waves crashed along Bondi Beach.
His children had been playing on inflatable play equipment set up for
the event when, all of a sudden, the sound of gunfire broke out.
Somehow, and I still do not know how, he and his children managed to get
away; witnesses have said that my brother was directly shot at and
bullets landed near his children. Nevertheless, his quick thinking and
swift movement saved them all.
By the time we spoke, his voice was
calm enough. He had been changed as a person, but he was still alive.
Two other people I’d known were not so lucky.
This article is
written in the shadow of that day. Nothing I say here reflects the views
of my brother. He is a deeply religious person with deeply held
convictions. In this essay, I speak entirely for myself.
My roots
in Sydney and Bondi go fairly deep. My mother was a Holocaust survivor
from Poland, while on my father’s side I am a sixth-generation
Australian. My great-great-grandfather, Maurice Abraham Cohen, came to
Australia around 1893 to help establish the Sydney Chevra Kadisha, the
organisation responsible for Jewish burials.
Through other ancestors, I can trace my roots in Bondi back to the 1850s.
Furthermore, Jews have lived in Bondi’s Art Deco apartment blocks for just as long the suburb has existed.
Simply put: As much as it is known for surfing, Bondi could be known for its Jewish population.
Although it is rarely mentioned, the initial subdivision of Bondi was
the work of the Hart family, a British–Portuguese–Jewish family. A
surprising byproduct of the recent shooting is that Bondi’s identity as a
Jewish suburb has now become firmly established in the international
consciousness. Yet despite this recognition, a significant part of
Bondi’s Jewish culture is slowly being chipped away.
Let’s be
clear about this: Sydney is not a centre of Jewish culture — far from
it. Although economically a highly prosperous community, its cultural
output in regard to Judaism has never been much. Nevertheless, the
city’s Jewish organic community in Bondi was built on the idea that it
was not merely symbolic but a living culture, something to be argued,
debated, and discussed.
Once, there was genuine debate within Sydney’s Jewish community about Israel — then Chabad arrived.
For
those who may not know, Chabad is a Jewish outreach and education
movement usually tied to more Orthodox Judaism. When Chabad took root in
Bondi — an area with a Jewish presence but far from a Jewish identity —
it introduced an absolutism that largely replaced the previous
pluralism. Replacing debate with absolutism inevitably attracts the
hostility of competing extremisms.
I unfortunately became
involved with Chabad from a young age, albeit only for a short period. I
experienced its disdain for secular education and knowledge, its
hostility towards independent thought, and its cult-like conformity.
Nor,
in my experience, did Chabad live up to the values it preached. I
personally witnessed serious child sexual abuse while I was involved
with them, which they attempted to cover up.
Over the past 40–50
years, this group that I regard as a cult has — synagogue by synagogue
and organisation by organisation — taken over much of the Jewish
community. It did not happen overnight but over decades. Unlike the
development of Bondi’s Jewish communities, there was nothing organic
about Chabad’s growth. As it came to control communal institutions,
Chabad increasingly excluded those who were not part of the movement
— those of us who are more Reformed or secular Jews. Community spaces
became effectively monopolised, and viewpoints that diverged from the
Chabad worldview were gradually pushed to the margins.
I believe
many Jews take part in Chabad for honest reasons, but in practice, I
think its influence is often pernicious. Chabad promises outreach and
connection, and those it often connects to are Jews struggling with
doubt or weighing the complexities of their identities. It takes
advantage of the fact that many Jews have become alienated from their
heritage — whether religious, philosophical, or cultural — and it
replaces debate with certainty, questioning with obedience, and
complexity with easy answers. It substitutes what was once Jewish
culture with what I see as the cult of Chabad
No Jew takes
pleasure maligning fellow Jews, and I certainly am not implying Chabad
is to blame for the shooting, but the larger Chabad movement is
something I think warrants skepticism. In my opinion, even its stated
goal of increasing Jewish consciousness is largely disingenuous.
Ultimately, Chabad functions more like a business than a genuine
cultural revival, feeding off Jewish identity while replacing Judaism
with shallow, easily digestible garbage.
Judaism is a living,
breathing culture. Traditionally, you were Jewish because you lived as a
Jew— through language, ideas, customs, argument and shared memory. The
people drawn to Chabad believe they are experiencing authentic Jewish
culture from Eastern Europe. In reality, it is anything but.
Chabad
reduced Jewishness to a technical legal status. Most people are aware
of the prevailing Orthodox view that Jewish status follows the mother.
But Chabad elevated that principle into an absolute doctrine, making it
the defining feature of Jewish identity. The culture, the intellectual
tradition, the debate and the philosophy no longer mattered. What
mattered was a single technical criterion: Your mother was Jewish,
therefore you were Jewish. In doing so, Chabad transformed a living
culture into a technical status, or worse, a kind of lowbrow mystical
hocus-pocus.
In time, traditional Judaism was almost entirely
replaced here by what I would call Chabad’s McDonald’s Judaism: a
Judaism centered not on centuries of debate and scholarship but on the
utterances of one man, the Rebbe. Increasingly, Judaism has itself come
to be reduced to belief that one man was the Messiah who would one day
rise from the dead — or, in the minds of some followers, something even
greater.
Whatever creativity and independent thought had existed
in Sydney’s Jewish community was replaced with Chabad’s psychobabble,
pop psychology, and lowbrow mystical version of Judaism.
The
Chabad Rebbe’s eccentric ideas about what constituted authentic Judaism
became the status quo in Australia. The menorah, whose branches had
almost always been depicted as curved throughout history, gave way to
the baseless and far less elegant straight-branched version simply
because the Rebbe believed that was how it should be. To me, the
ugliness of the Chabad menorah reflects the ugliness of everything else
the movement promotes.
Chabad behaved, metaphorically speaking,
like the mafia, taking over institutions, eliminating rivals, and
ensuring that everything within the Jewish community, financially and
otherwise, benefited Chabad.
Chabad increasingly demands support
for the most hard-line settler politics, embodied by figures such as
Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Under its influence, the only
acceptable position increasingly became unconditional support for
right-wing Zionism, reflecting Chabad’s hostility towards anything
progressive or left-wing. In the process, anything progressive — any
voice advocating coexistence, peace, tolerance or basic human decency —
is gradually pushed out of the community.
In fact, Chabad has
openly declared on Chabad.org that the Lebanese, Gazans, Syrians and
anyone else targeted by the governments of Netanyahu, Smotrich and
Ben-Gvir are Amalek — that is to say, worthy of genocide. That is the
group now running Sydney.
Synagogues are now heavily guarded by
police. Barriers have been erected and security patrols are in place.
Meanwhile, Chabad is milking the December shooting as hard as it can,
presenting its movement as both innocent victims and the mouthpiece for
Sydney Jewry. It is neither.
In my opinion, Chabad’s hijacking of
this community, its hostility towards genuinely progressive values, and
its contempt for politics centred on peace or coexistence plays a huge
role in this state of affairs. If the Jewish community in Sydney is to
continue, it must return to the pluralistic and moderate model it once
had. Otherwise, I believe it is destined to slowly dwindle away.
Michael
Cohen is a Sydney-based Australian journalist and writer published
across a range of outlets. His work explores culture, identity,
politics, history, and contemporary life.
https://www.readtangle.com/otherposts/chabad-and-the-bondi-shooting/
