let's not forget that most people who "join" Chabad, or attend their services, or drop in to have their kid's bar mitzvah there, or use their nursery school are not Lubavitch. They use services that Chabad provides, they like the rabbi and his wife, they feel good, but the vast majority are not Chabad.
Exactly, and this places them in an interesting relationship vis-a-vis "denominationalism". One of Chabad's greatest strength is its geographical ubiquity; in nearly any place with a sizeable Jewish population (and some places that aren't so sizeable), Chabad is there- and its
longstanding marketting approach has been to present itself as being a nonjudgmental, pan-Orthodox (and in some cases, more "traditionalist" than strictly Orthodox, from an MO and certainly haredi viewpoint, which is borne out in how it is viewed- with a fair degree of suspicion- by those communities) movement that reaches out to unaffiliated OR disgruntled Jews that aren't satisfied with the Jewish status quo available to them.
Which is to say that sending your kid to a Chabad school, or even davening in a Chabad shul, is really not an indicator of "Orthodoxy" as much as it is a dissatisfaction with whatever Jewish experience they were having before they started being involved with Chabad. You might still consider yourself Reform but think Chabad has better sermons, or you just like their vibe. How are we to measure the denominationalism of Jews who go to Chabad on a quasi-regular basis but go somewhere else for family occaisions and High Holidays?
I'm sorry, in this day and age there's more options and choices than ever before. You can live in the middle of Mississippi and download Orthodox and Reform drashes on your iPod. You can shul hop from week to week. You can read Samson Raphael Hersch, go to a Conservative minyan and identify as a Reconstructionist. People's affiliations are becoming a lot more complicated, and this is something that America's Jewish leaders (and Israel's, for that matter,) would do well to start to understand this, before they become increasingly irrelevant.
Got that, Mike?
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