I actually have zero years of coffee room experience under my belt; late night talks in a dormitory…. that’s another story. Of that I have plenty.
Re, eating meat from chabad shochtim – Rav Belsky zt”l told me years ago that the OU checks out every lubavitcher shochet for the very real percentage of “boreinu-niks”, people who say yechi but add in boreinu, rachmana litzlan. I hope this is still the case 5 years after his petirah.
I am not versed in chabad seforim aside from tanya, but I have read the sicha regarding “atzmus elokuso, vos ehr hut areingeshtelt in a guf”. I’m knowledgeable enough in chassidishe seforim to know what atzmus elokus means, and I’m knowledgeable enough in yiddish to know what the latter part spells out – we’re not talking implication, this is straight out saying that one may pray to a tzadik because he is thereby praying to god. Was he referring to a pantheistic idea that everything has god in it so when you pray to, say a stone, you are praying to the godliness in the stone? That is something ovdei avoda zara believe; it’s also the better alternative to the plain corporealism-oriented meaning of the words, a christian man-god ideology.
Whether the rebbe was overcome with some sort of ruach ra’ah or condition that made that come out of him, or other forms of limud zchus…. again, I am not here nor do I care to inspect the rebbe’s own character or level, or anything else.
This is among the very few things that make one a practitioner of a different religion altogether.
During the international conference of shluchim a few years ago, moshe kotlarsky, head of chinuch in chabad remarked “may the Rebbe look upon our gathering favorably, his presence is here with us now and may he grant our requests”
This is the man who regulates merkaz leinyonei chinuch. He oversees the education of tens and thousands of jewish children.
He believes – with the silent approval lf 50,000 shluchim – that we should earn the lubavitcher rebbe’s favor and that he should accept our requests.
That is indefensible. That is chabad in our time.