Straps on a Plane

So last week I was in Eretz Yisrael for the week, in order to attend a computational linguistics conference at Bar Ilan. More about my experiences on the way there and back in a different post.

The plane landed in Israel at about 9:10 AM. And so a bunch of folks davened Shacharit on the plane. One large fellow with a beard was just finished davening, and took off his tefillin. Then, he turned to a few non-religious Jewish (male) teenagers, who were on an organized tour of Israel. He offered them the opportunity to try putting on tefillin. He told them he would put it on for them, and they should repeat after him. (Yes, he most likely was Lubavitch, for those are the ones most likely to engage in such types of kiruv.)

(IIRC) For the tefillin shel yad, at every wrap he would say a phrase from the beracha and wait for the teen to repeat it. For the shel rosh, he had him say the pasuk Shema Yisrael and Baruch Shem, repeating phrase by phrase. A bit weird, but OK, perhaps efficient.

And then finally:
"We want"
"We want"
"Moshiach now."
"Moshiach now."

Yup, that was part of the formula for putting on tefillin! He had to go and ruin it.

I was annoyed.

Professing a belief and desire for mashiach to come has nothing to do with the mitzvah of putting on tefillin. And the teenager did not really desire or understand it. It is a formula now, on the same level as Shema Yisrael!

I don't know if that this is still a focus of Lubavitch in general, or just the meshichists that believe that the Rebbe is still mashiach, such that it enters such kiruv efforts as a matter of formula.

In Israel as well, I saw posters all around proclaiming the Rebbe was mashiach, but more specifically (at Tachana Merkazit of Yerushalayim, right outside Massouv Burger) posters encouraging people to put on tefillin because this is what the Rebbe, King Mashiach wants. Not that this is what Hashem wants. What the Rebbe MHM wants.

Bleh.

Perhaps it is time for Lubavitch to move on, past extreme Rebbe-focus and especially past Moshiach focus, at least as a horaat sha'a, until such time as they recover and dismiss the dangerous meshichist element. There were plenty of great thoughts and Rebbes in Lubavitch before this last one, and this would still be a Lubavitch chassidic movement.