By the Grace of G-d 13th of Teveth, 5735 Brooklyn, N.Y.

Greeting and Blessing:

I am directed to acknowledge receipt of your letter.

With all due respect for your feelings, it must be said that in all the Rebbe's שליט"א correspondence which he has received over the years, there has not been a letter so ill-conceived and unfounded, mildly speaking, as yours. Moreover that you should boast of having stopped making donations to over fifty Orthodox charities because you were so upset about the situation (based on complete misconception and ignorance of the facts) is, to say the least, the height of folly.

Under other circumstances, such a letter might have been ignored. However, since you are prone to hasty conclusions without first checking the facts, you might add another one by misinterpreting the lack of a reply as a concession to your superior wisdom. Hence, a very brief reply, for it is in any case impossible in the course of a letter to point out all your misconceptions. Just a few salient points:

1. The “Israel decision” to which you refer in your letter and condemn those who criticize it, does not (and could not) abolish the Torah-law that bastards may not marry (incidentally, they may marry other bastards). The said decision only declared that the two persons in question were not bastards. It does not apply to other cases. Hence your vehement protest “what crime did these people commit?!” which so upset you, should be addressed to the authors of the “Israel decision.”

2. The “Israel decision” as you call it, is based on a tremendous effort (outlined in a treatise of over one hundred pages), to prove that the two people in question were not bastards. This only reaffirms and, indeed pointedly emphasizes, how serious a matter this prohibition of marriage with bastards is.

3. For your information, the prohibition of intermarriage with bastards is not a matter of punishment. Nor is it a new law. It is a law as Divine and time-honored as Torah itself, the very same Torah which prohibits the punishment of children for the sins of their fathers and vice versa. It has not been introduced in our day and age of enlightened “civilization,” which saw the callous murder of six million Jews, parents and children, by a nation supposed to be one of the most “advanced” and “cultured” in the world and remains indifferent.

4. To illustrate the fallacy of your position, or at least, the confusion and misconception at the bottom of it, suffice it to say that the uproar against the Torah prohibition of intermarriage with bastards has been coupled with the fight against the prohibition of a Kohen marrying a divorcee. Obviously a Kohen is not “penalized” by his status, for he may marry any other eligible woman; nor is the divorcee penalized by her status, for she may marry the greatest tzaddik, yet is prohibited from marrying the most ordinary Kohen. To couple both these prohibited marriages together and argue in both cases on the basis of “undeserved punishment” is obviously to miss the whole point.

The truth of the matter is that those who purport to fight for “justice” and “compassion” by fighting against certain restrictions imposed by the G-d-given Torah — called Toras emes and Toras chesed, because it is the Truth and truly compassionate, are (consciously or unconsciously) rebelling against the Torah in its entirety, because it stands in the way of complete permissiveness and licentiousness. Those who would be “champions” of morality and ethics in terms of their own subjective judgment, would like to see their ideas for the abolition of all moral restraints receive some authoritative approval, to ease their troubled conscience, a conscience stemming from their soul, the Divine soul which every Jew possesses and which, deep below the outer crust, militates against the contradiction in their life and conduct.

With blessing,

Secretary