It is well appreciated that until about 50 years ago, the Litvishe Yeshiva world and Chabad were not antagonistic to one another, whereas now they are. Decades ago, not only did the Rebbes of Chabad attend rabbinic conferences, they had a close relationship and worked together on community issues with the leaders of Lithuanian Jewry. There may have been some tension but no more than between misnagdim and any other chassidic group. Yet, in the USA , those who know, know that the mistrust and suspicion go back many decades, and they intensified in the past thirty years. R. Hillel Goldberg, for example, reports scathing criticism of the messianic tendencies in Lubavitch by R. Hutner already more than four decades ago and I remember hearing remarks as well from another godol about the tendency of Lubavitch to duplicate communal institutions instead of joining in community wide institutions decades ago as well. There was the Shanghai controversy. It seems to me, though, that the antagonism in the USA is different than it was in R. Shach's camp in Eretz Isroel, where it was still drawing on the two hundreds year-old ideological opposition to chassidus in general. Was there a precipitating event in the USA after which everything went downhill?
R. N. Kaminetzky in his controversial, "Making of a Godol",reports such an event. Now, I attempted to check some of the facts that he reports and was not able to do so. I spoke to some people who asked good questions but had no independent knowledge of this issue. I would appreciate if someone who does know more can respond in the comments sections. I attach the relevant pages form R. Kaminetzky's book and the relevant issue of Hekeriah V'Hakedusha.
In brief, the journal Hakeriah V'Hakedusha, a new Lubavitch periodical in Yiddish, that was supposedly under the direct supervision of the Friedeker Rebbe, published an editorial by Y. Segal on October 13, 1940 (the journal, unfortunately sans the relevant first volume is available on HebrewBooks.org), which asserted that studying talmudic passages like the one about, "ox which gored a cow", important as it may be , is completely physical (kulo gashmi), is a meagerly inspiring subject even from a worldly perspective... and one will gain nothing spiritual from studying it...Certainly, the superficial study (of this mishna) has no connection with G-d and reminds a student very little of Him: No spark of Divine light is beheld in the revealed part of the Torah. But when Chassidus takes on the same mishna and begins to unravel from it the depths of the Torah, the hidden part, a new light arises which reminds the Jew about the Giver of the Torah and which leaves the student and participant with a deep moral lesson of tremendous spiritual worth".
This may have been just an unfortunate choice of words because standard Chabad teaching does not denigrate the study of Nigleh or relegate it to a secondary status. Perhaps the writer was simply not familiar with Nefesh Hachaim's approach to this topic. This is a summary of what the Yeshiva World considers axiomatic:
Nefesh HaChaim Shaar 4 Chapter 2:
First I will set my words, on the subject of torah study 'lishma'. What is 'lishma'? This is a stumbling block for many who think 'lishma' means with great and constant 'dveikus' (emotionally cleaving to G-d).
And even worse than this, they think learning torah without dveikus is worth nothing and has no purpose, chas v'shalom. So when they see themselves, that their heart is not going in this level, that their learning is not with constant dveikus, they won't even start to learn and therefore (in our times) the torah has fallen....
To learn torah 'lishma' , the truth is 'lishma' does not mean 'dvekus' like most people think... the truth is learning torah 'lishma' means - for the sake of the torah... as the Rosh explains:
to know and to understand, and to increase lekach (knowledge) and pilpul (sharp analysis) and not to be insolent (l'kanter) and to show off (l'hitgaos)...
Nevertheless, certainly we cannot say that you don't need any purity of thought and yiras Hashem in learning torah. As it says 'if there's no yira, theres no torah' (mishna)...(see the text for an explanation of the purpose of Yira as a 'warehourse' for the torah learned)
Thus the true path, which He chose... (Rabbi Normal Lamm wrote a book devoted to this subject.
With this in mind, one could have predicted that the nascent American Yeshiva World would strongly react and it did. It was surely not meant to provoke it, but it did.
This poorly thought out piece in the Lubavitch flagship publication brought on a firestorm of criticism in the Yeshiva World, since it attacked its raison d'etre and its bedrock of legitimacy - Talmudic study for its own sake. R. Kaminetsky informs us about how much it upset R. A. Kotler and others and how R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik was recruited to write a response, which he did.
I believe that this was the incident which set the unfortunate pattern of animosity and suspicion between the two groups. In the highly tradition centered environment of the yeshivos, in which the mesorah was paramount, students absorbed a certain view of this incident from their teachers and it became invested with the authenticity and holiness of mesorah, and so it expanded and grew to our own day. Chabad messianism came later and was another icing on the cake. May Hashem soon bring peace, respect and reconciliation between all Jews.
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