Rabbi Kaduri: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson is not the Messiah.
How do we know? Simple deduction: The Lubovitcher Rebbe died in 1994, but as Bloghd reports, Rabbi Kaduri says he met the Moshiach in 2003.
But hold off on the celebrating! (No offense to the meshichists. They may be on their third vodka of the day by now, but we know they're not celebrating the news that the leading kabalist of our time just disqualified their candidate.)
That fact that Rabbi Kaduri took a meeting with the long-awaited savior back in 2003 does not mean his arrival is imminent. At the Disputation in Barcelona the Ramban was confronted by the friars with a midrash claiming that Moshiach was alive and had been seen at the gates of Rome. The Ramban shrugged it off, saying both that he's not obligated to accept the literal truth of midrashim, and also that the moshiach is irrelevant until he actually shows up and does something. Moshe did not become Messiah when he was born, the Ramban argues, but when he arrived in the throne room and (chastely averting his eyes from the undressed woman who surrounded Pharoh) bellowed: Hey! Check out what I can do with a stick!
Also, it's not perfectly clear to me why we should trust Rabbi Kaduri on this matter.
