Local opinion: Tucker Carlson’s Myth About Chabad

Far-right commentator Tucker Carlson recently claimed that the Chabad-Lubavitch movement instigated the current war in Iran as part of a covert effort to rebuild the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. The claim is not only bizarre and unfounded; it reflects a basic misunderstanding of what Judaism is and how it operates.

It took me back to my days visiting Washington, D.C. alongside Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, one of Chabad’s most prominent figures and its representative in the nation’s capital.

At the time, I was a young rabbinic intern serving as his assistant. Based in Philadelphia, we would take an Amtrak train to Union Station and then head to the halls of power.

I watched him move through the corridors of the White House and Capitol, meeting senators and administration officials. He carried a sleek black attaché case. It held no maps of the Middle East or policy briefings. When he opened it, as a Washington Post profile once described, he took out a tray of lox, whitefish, and sable, alongside potato salad, cream cheese, and fresh rye bread.

Why would a rabbi schlep a kosher deli spread from Philadelphia to the heart of Washington? He would lay out the food, creating a setting where conversations could unfold and relationships could form.

The purpose of his visits, as he told the Post, was to serve as a “messenger.” A lobbyist typically seeks a specific outcome. Shemtov’s goal was different. He wanted leaders to act with a deeper sense of purpose, to remember the “overall purpose of life.”

When a newly elected senator once asked if he was in town to discuss Soviet Jewry, Shemtov replied, “I am here for the whole world.” He saw this as a moral mandate, to be a “light unto the nations,” encouraging policymakers to act responsibly for the benefit of all people.

Shemtov, to whom I later became related through marriage, focused his decades of advocacy on education, which he viewed as the bedrock of society. He pushed for the creation of the Department of Education, served on the National Advisory Council on Adult Education, and helped establish “Education and Sharing Day, U.S.A.,” a national day dedicated to character building.

In those same marbled hallways, he spoke about the Sheva Mitzvos Bnei Noach, the Seven Noahide Laws, a basic moral framework for all humanity: respect for life, property, family, the treatment of living creatures, and justice, grounded in the recognition of a Divine authority.

This is where Carlson gets it wrong. He assumes religion operates as a form of power, that every belief conceals a strategy, and every movement advances an agenda. Judaism emphasizes obligation, not power. It measures success not by control over events, but by fidelity to a moral framework.

The Jewish role is to live by that framework and let it shape our actions. Chabad’s work reflects this premise. Its focus is on people, education, community, and the steady work of strengthening moral and spiritual life.

The claim that Chabad lobbied for a war to build a Temple misunderstands the entire enterprise. As Shemtov told a reporter in 1983, the Jewish task is constructive. “We have to build a better world,” he said with a smile. “G-d will take care of the Temple.”

The real danger of Carlson’s myth is not limited to people believing strange things or acting on them. It is the mindset that such thinking creates, where nothing is guided by principle, and everything is reduced to power.

And in that kind of world, even a Chassidic rabbi with a tray of whitefish starts to look like a threat.