We continue our exploration of Judaism after Christ. After Christ, Judaism searched for an identity as Christians laid claim to the Hebrew Scriptures, showing how they were fulfilled in Jesus Christ. After Herod’s Temple was destroyed in 70 AD, the Sadducees, who were the keepers of the temple, the priesthood, and the sacrificial system, went out of business; they went extinct. Judaism evolved into a rabbinic religion based upon Phariseeism. The Talmud became the authoritative document for this new religion.
Last time, we discussed the Talmud, a voluminous, multi-volume rabbinic commentary on a compilation of oral laws (the Mishnah) reduced to writing between 200 BC and 200 AD. The rabbinic commentary (the Gemarah) which is 90% of the Talmud, was compiled mostly in the three centuries following 200 AD.
The Talmud is the main source of authority for the Jewish religion in the period after Christ. But there are many other writings in Judaism, including the Tanakh, the Midrashim, and the Zohar. The Tanakh is simply the Jewish term for the Old Testament; Tanakh is an acronym for Torah (“Teaching,” the books of Moses, or Pentateuch), Nevi’im (“Prophets”), and Ketuvim (“Writings”).
The Midrashim
The Midrashim are rabbinic writings that usually comment on some aspect of the Torah or the Tanakh. There are a range of midrash, varying widely in form and substance. One type of midrash is the Aggadic or Haggadic, consisting of storytelling expounding on Bible stories, biblical characters, and moral themes. Here is a midrash about Abraham:
When Abraham was a child. His father, Terah, was a shopkeeper of a store that sold idols, or statues of deities. One day, Terah put young Abram in charge of the store while he went out for some errands. Abram took a club and smashed all the idols except for the biggest one. Then, he put the club in the hand of the one big idol that was left.
When his father returned, he was furious: “Abram! What have you done?”
“Father, I didn’t do anything! The gods got into a fight and this one smashed all the others!”
“That’s impossible!” yelled Terah. “These idols aren’t alive!”
“If they’re not alive, Father, then why do you worship them?”
This is obviously a “tall tale,” one that brings to mind Parson Weems’ story about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. Except that, in Weems’ story, Washington tells the truth, whereas in this midrash, Abram lied to make a point about idolatry.
Kabbalah
Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. The idea behind all mysticism is to have a direct experience with the supernatural in an altered state of consciousness, a trance-like state. The trance is a form of self-hypnosis achieved through emptying the mind of conscious thought; typically, the mind is emptied by repeating a mantra over and over, but there are other techniques.
Mysticism is pervasive in Eastern religion, but in Christianity it has been relegated to the fringes. It is practiced in several Roman Catholic monastic religious orders, including the Benedictines, Carmelites, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits. In the Protestant tradition, the only mystical sect are the Quakers.
About fifteen years ago, there was an attempt, known as the “emerging church movement,” to mainstream mysticism into Christianity; this movement was making inroads into Seventh-day Adventism. Thirteen years ago, there was an article in the Adventist Review promoting mysticism, to which I responded with this article. But that movement was slowed, as responsible church leaders became aware of the history and dangers of mysticism (Elder Ted Wilson famously warned against it in his inaugural sermon as General Conference President, in 2010.)
It is important to note that while, within Christianity, mysticism is widely recognized as potentially dangerous, this is not true in Judaism. Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, is fully accepted by orthodox, Rabbinic Judaism; the most committed followers of Kabbalah in contemporary Judaism are the Hasidim, the Hasidic Jews, who are orthodox, conservative Jews. As we will discuss below, one widely acclaimed Jewish Messiah (or Moshiakh) emerged from mystical Judaism; his mysticism did not dampen the enthusiasm of his followers which, at the high point of his movement, comprised about half of all Jews on earth.
The problem with mysticism is that, when you are in the altered state of consciousness that is the goal of mystical practice, you are highly suggestible and vulnerable to demonic influence. The spiritual power behind mysticism is not God, and the mystic is typically being inexorably led toward false doctrine, including one or more of the following:
1) monism = all is one, all reality is a unified whole, with no sharp demarcation between the Creator and His creatures;
2) pantheism = everything is God, the tree, the flower, the bird the cat, the human—all are God;
3) panentheism = God dwells in everything and everyone; and
4) universalism = everyone will ultimately share in eternal life (which obviously de-emphasizes repentance and putting away sin).
These four doctrines crop up in mystical thinking across the ages, and across the boundaries of geography, culture, and formal religion.
Kabbalists have a doctrine of God that resembles pantheism and panentheism; they believe God is not a being, but is rather Being Itself. God does not exist; God is Existence. God is the is-ness, present in all things, but is Itself not a thing; therefore, God is also called ayin, which means no-thing, or literally “there is not” in Hebrew.[i]
Non-mystical Judaism and Christianity see the creation of male and female as a created bifurcation, but Kabbalism imputes one-ism even into this aspect of the creation; according to the Kabbalistic understanding of this story, Adam was originally created androgynous, containing both male and female; in creating Eve, God took the feminine “side” out of Adam, separating his male and female components.[ii]
Another example: it is well known that the name for God in Genesis 1:1, Elohim, is plural, although conjugated with a singular verb. Christians argue that its use in Genesis one points to the involvement of the entire Trinity in creating the world, but Kabbalists have their own take:
“The ancient Hebrews were not saying their god is the most powerful of all the gods. Nor were they saying that their god is the only god. Rather, they were saying that all the gods are actually a Unity; the manifold forces of the universe comprise a singular Being whose Name is “Gods.”[iii]
This is another manifestation of monism, or “one-ism,” which always accompanies mysticism.
Kabbalah also teaches that we have two souls: the nefesh behamit, or Animal Soul, and the nefesh Elokit, or Divine Soul; one of the goals of Kabbalh is for the Divine Soul to get control over the Animal Soul.[iv] But this mystical doctrine clearly teaches that we are divine—one of the goals of Kabbah is to unfold one’s own divine nature—rather than creatures of a divine Creator; hence, it is a form of “one-ism.”[v]
We translate Deut. 6:5 as “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength,” but Kabbalists translate it as “Love Hashem, your own Divinity, with all your heart, all your soul and all your might!”[vi]
The Zohar
In 1286, a Spanish Jew named Moses de Leon (1240 – 1305 AD) published a book called the “Zohar” which has become the “Bible of Kabbalah.” De Leon claimed to have found the book; he attributed authorship to a legendary Second Century rabbi named Shimon bar Yokhai. Modern scholars reject that claim for numerous sound reasons, including that (1) de Leon was an infamous forger of documents from the Babylonian Talmudic academies, and (2) after de Leon’s death, his wife admitted that he had written the whole thing. Nevertheless, many among the faithful still believe the legend that Shimon bar Yokhai was the true author of the Zohar.
The foremost interpreters of the Zohar were Rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovero, a 16th-century Kabbalist who lived in Sefad, in Galilee, and a young rabbinic student in Jerusalem named Isaac Luria. In 1569 Luria moved to Sefad, where he studied briefly with Cordovero. After Cordovero’s death, Isaac Luria was the acknowledged master of Kabbalah, attracting a devoted circle of disciples. Luria became known as the “Ari” or lion.
Luria’s Kabbalistic system included numerology, as wells as scrutinizing the shape and form of letters, positing a supernatural relationship between events and time that could be discerned through letters and numbers. The magical quality attributed to the numerological value of dates contributed greatly to the widely held expectations and hope placed on the coming of a Messiah on the 18th day (6+6+6), of the 6th month, of the year 1666.
Sabbatai Zevi
Sabbatai Zevi (variant spellings include Shabbetai Tzvi, Sabbatai Sebi, Shabbatai Tsebi, etc.) was a false Messiah who led a movement during the third quarter of the 17th Century. Zevi was a Kabbalist mystic, and taught that acts traditionally considered sinful were, during this Messianic Age, to be deemed righteous. This antinomian doctrine led Zevi and his followers to violate, as part of their spiritual practices, both the ceremonial and moral laws.
Zevi was born in 1626 into a wealthy Jewish family living in Smyrna. He was given a traditional Talmudic education, but in his late teens became obsessed with Kabbalah. He read Isaac Luria's writings, as well as the Zohar, and practiced asceticism and Kabbalistic purification exercises called tikkunim.
Zevi was charming and good looking, as documented by those who knew him. According to an eyewitness, Rabbi Leib ben Ozer:
You must believe that this was how it was. I spoke with people who ate and drank and were near him, who were not [his] proponents, and they told me that there was none like him in stature and in the way his face looked, like that of one of God’s angels.[vii]
Zevi’s bride, a Jewish girl named Sarah, was orphaned during a Cossack invasion of Poland, and was found by Christians who sent her to a convent for care. At age sixteen, she escaped and made her way to Amsterdam, and later to Livorno, where she became a prostitute, while also claiming that she would marry the Messiah.
Zevi, who was then living in Cairo, announced that he, as the Messiah, was bound to fall in love with an unchaste woman, and that such a consort had been promised him in a dream. He sent messengers to Livorno to bring Sarah to him, and they were married. His followers saw this marriage as further confirmation of Zevi’s messiahship, and pointed to the Bible story of Hosea, whom God had commanded to take a "wife of whoredom.” But in 1666, at the height of the Messianic movement, Zevi divorced Sarah and married a woman named Esther.
Many Rabbis of the time publicly attested to having dreams in which Sabbatai appeared to them, and when they awoke they would profess that he was the Messiah.
“And this is one of the greatest occurrences, clearly super-natural, that came to pass in those days and a reason for the great belief in Sabbatai Zevi, for it happened in many places, that prophets arose in hundreds and thousands, women and men, boys and girls and even little children; all of them prophesied in the holy tongue [Hebrew] and in the language of the Zohar as well, and none of them knew a letter of Hebrew and all the less so the language of the Zohar.”[viii]
Eventually, Sabbatai Zevi announced that he was indeed the Messiah, the son of God. His press secretary, Samuel Primo, issued this announcement:
“The first-begotten Son of God, Shabbethai Tsebi, Messiah and Redeemer of the people of Israel, to all the sons of Israel, Peace! Since you have been deemed worthy to behold the great day and the fulfillment of God's word by the Prophets, your lament and sorrow must be changed into joy, and your fasting into merriment; for ye shall weep no more. Rejoice with song and melody, and change the day formerly spent in sadness and sorrow into a day of jubilee, because I have appeared.”
Sabbatai Zevi’s movement grew to include, by some estimates, a million followers, which was about half of all the Jews in the world at that time.
Although Smyrna and the other cities Zevi frequented, including Cairo, Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Salonika (biblical Thessalonica, modern Thessaloniki) were controlled by the Turks, the Sultan did not initially oppose Zevi’s movement, which brought in much money from Jewish tourism, as Jews flocked to Turkey from all over the world.
But then Sabbatai Zevi publicly proclaimed that, in the coming year, the Temple in Jerusalem would be rebuilt. This was too much for the Sultan, because the Dome of the Rock, which is the third holiest site in Islam, was built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, within the Ottoman Empire, and there was no way the Sultan could allow that to be demolished. “Your head or the turban,” the Sultan reportedly said, so Sabbatai converted to Islam.
Zevi adopted a new name: Aziz Mehmed Effendi (“Power of Muhammad”). The Sultan gave him a sinecure and the honorary office of “Keeper of the Gate.” The nominal conversion to Islam was not a big change, because Zevi’s mysticism was like that of the Sufis, the mystics within the Islamic tradition. Mystics in all religious traditions arguably have more in common with each other than with their non-mystic co-religionists, and Zevi had close ties to the Bektashi Sufis.
Despite his conversion to Islam, Zevi’s Jewish messianic activities continued, with the full knowledge and consent of the Turkish authorities. Nathan of Gaza, one of Zevi’s noteworthy followers, claimed that Sabbatai’s conversion represented the descent into the klippotic realm (“grossest” reality, or “husks” of creation) in order to reclaim the lost ‘sparks’ of divine light, and thereby ‘repair the world’. These Kabbalistic concepts were used to justify Zevi’s conversion. Nevertheless, many of his followers were disenchanted with his conversion to Islam, deeming it an act of cowardice, but others, such as the “conversos”, Spanish Jews the Inquisition had forced to convert to Catholicism, were sympathetic to Zevi.
The Lawlessness of Sabbatai Zevi
Many interpretations of Kabbalah, including the Zohar, teach that the task is not to destroy evil but to return it to its source; to “include the left within the right,” in the Zoharic metaphor, or “to uplift the fallen sparks” in the Lurianic one. Zevi and his followers claimed that they could liberate the sparks of holiness hidden within evil; this translated into breaking religious laws.
One of Zevi’s prayers was: Baruch atah Adonai, Elohainu Melech ha-olam; matir issurim:
“Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who makes the forbidden things permissible.”
The forbidden things that became permissible included deliberate violation of food laws, ritualistic group sex, wife swapping, and belief in occult or hidden meanings of the Torah.[ix]
After Sabbatai’s death in 1676, sects composed of his followers flourished and continued to indulge in wife sharing, ritual sex orgies, adultery, and incest. A Sabbatean sect in Salonika, the Doenmeh or Dolmeh, regularly held a celebration on the twenty-second day of the Hebrew month of Adar known as the “Festival of the Lamb.” Eventually it became known that the festival included intoxication, ritual wife-swapping, and a rite called the “extinguishing of the lights,” which ended in total darkness.[x]
Jewish historians are quite open about these salacious details; they are not the domain of conspiracy theorists, but are well established fact:
They [the Doenmeh or Dolmeh] preserved their faith in Shabbetai Ẓevi, who had abrogated the practical commandments of the material Torah and had opened up "the spiritual Torah" of the upper world as a substitute. The principle of the divinity of Shabbetai Ẓevi was firmly developed and accepted by the sect . . . In addition to their abrogation of the practical commandments . . . their obvious inclination to permit marriages which were halakhically forbidden, and to conduct religious ceremonies which involved the exchange of wives and which, therefore, bastardized their issue according to Jewish law. Accusations of sexual licentiousness were made from the beginning of the 18th century, and although many have tried to belittle their importance there is no doubt that sexual promiscuity existed for many generations. The long sermon of Judah Levi Tovah (published by I.R. Molcho and R. Shatz, in: Sefunot, 3–4 (1960), 395–521) contains a spirited defense of the abrogation of the sexual prohibitions contained in the material "Torah of Creation." Orgiastic ceremonies in fact took place in the main on the . . . "Festival of the Lamb" which fell on the 22nd of Adar and was recognized as a celebration of the beginning of spring. (Jewish Virtual Library, Encyclopedia Judaica: Doenmeh)
It is important to note that modern Jewish mystics, the Hasidim, are not antinomians or libertines. And yet, it must be admitted that:
“Sabbateanism is the matrix of every significant [Jewish] movement to have emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, from Hasidism, to Reform Judaism, to the earliest Masonic circles and revolutionary idealism. The Sabbatean believers felt that they were champions of a new world which was to be established by overthrowing the values of all positive religions.”[xi]
Sabbatai Zevi’s movement was epic within Judaism in the 17th Century, yet most Christians have never heard of him. Why not?
Conclusion
Why am I going through this history of Judaism? Why not just make the biblical arguments? The answer is that Christian Zionism is not driven by the Bible. If Christian Zionists read the Bible, they would know what John says about denying that Jesus is the Messiah:
“Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist—denying the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.” 1 John 2:22-23. (See, also, John 14:6; John 5:23; John 8:19; John 15:23)
If you deny that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, you are a liar and anti-Christ. Judaism denies that Jesus is the Christ, and continues to look for a Messiah who is someone other than Jesus Christ, maybe a guy like Sabbatai Zevi, as half of Judaism once believed. Hence, Judaism is anti-Christ.
John forecloses the notion that Jews can continue along the track of Old Testament religion without accepting Jesus Christ (which seems to be what Christian Zionists believe), saying that if you deny the Son, you deny the Father. So Jews are not worshiping the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Christians are, but Jews are not. Jews have forfeited the Old Testament by denying the Messiah it was all about. (John 5:45-47. See, also, Luke 24:27; John 1:45; Acts 8:30-35; 17:2-3;26:22-23; 28:23). They do not have the Son—they rejected and continue to reject the Son—therefore they do not have the Father.
Christian Zionism is driven by a false idea of what Judaism is, and the only cure is to learn what Judaism actually is. Jews are a people in darkness, yet “Christian” Zionists pretend Jews have a different, but equally valid, path to salvation. It is time to stop pretending.
[i] Schachter-Brooks, Brian Yosef. Kabbalah for Beginners: Understanding and Applying Kabbalistic History, Concepts, and Practices (p. 18). Callisto. Kindle Edition.
[ii] Ibid, p. 27.
[iii] Ibid, p. 28.
[iv] Ibid, p. 69.
[v] Ibid, p. 74.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Sepehr, Robert. 1666: Redemption Through Sin (p. 5). Atlantean Gardens. Kindle Edition
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid, p. 16.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid, p. 18.