In Conversation: Rabbi Yaakov Trump and Dr. Henry Abramson

hello eric trump howdy rabbi pardo um having some technical difficulties here in uh in this corner of fairlawn but uh thank god it's not too bad oh it is finally here great dr abramson hi i was a little worried there did you lose power us a little bit okay but uh hashem nothing nothing could possibly stop me this program from happening too many people enjoy it okay it is 8 16. um rabbi doctor um how do you want would you like to wait a minute do you want to start i'm just going to change my background otherwise i'm totally ready just going to uh because some of the stuff we're going to talk about tonight is probably going to be a little controversial so it's better if i change my background hang on a sec here we go background i'll choose something that is a little bit more neutral fun there we go okay what could be more neutral than the uh deputy scrolls yes those certainly were without controversy and rabbi i'm gonna need uh share screen power oh yes absolutely let me make the two of you co-hosts um good everybody everybody in the zoom and beyond the zoom welcome to another amazing episode another amazing meeting of in conversation rabbis and their congregants torah stories inspiration um if you're if you're enjoying this if you're here again please share with your friends and if you have uh feedback suggestions um my last name at ou.org is the easiest way to reach me in the meantime i am uh i'm humbled and excited to introduce my friend uh rabbi jacob trump of the young israel of lawrence cedarhurst who will introduce you again thank you so much it is a pleasure to be joining again and seeing all the folks on nazi shabbos thank you everybody for taking the time to be here and for joining us so this is a fascinating conversation um and thank you to all the organizers in the ou rabbi schechter who has initiated this at the beginning and uh all the people involved so tonight we have an opportunity and we have an opportunity for those in the community in the israelites community this is this is a moment which needs no introduction but there are many other people here beyond the young israel lawrence leaders community that's the beauty of this is being able to bridge and we we have an opportunity this week of getting to meet one of the um one of the fascinating and proud members of our community dr hilal dr henry abramson dr abramson is now if i just spend the time reading the entire bio it would take our entire session so what i'm going to do is i'm going to give the short the short the short and longer it dr abrahamson is the dean of two of turo's schools and excels not only in just his organizational leadership but also in his educational leadership i believe that dr abramson is the only person one of his claims to fame uh many many planes of name is the only person published by both fell diamond and harvard university press um as a person who's able to bridge worlds be able to connect and believe strongly and firmly in the education in jewish history for free and is across multiple platforms um with tens of thousands of followers across the world is able to influence and guide and educate the jewish and non-jewish people alike in this very important very important education and discipline specifically at a time when there is so much unfortunately um which is relativism and uh and revisionism and it is a great pleasure dr bruce thank you so much for taking the time this evening to to join in this conversation anyway that's so kind of you thank you for the introduction uh but you know when when the rabbi says jump i always want to say how high well let's jump straight into you know i've been thinking about tonight when we talked about this i think we discussed having a conversation um we we were chatting in november time the beginning of november and we and we when we were thinking about this time we said well this week is a great week because it gives us the opportunity of talking about messiah and and false messiahs specifically and the 24th of december just passed through in the middle of saturnalia essentially there's so much to talk about i want to just frame the discussion just very briefly and then jump in because really i'm here to actually hear about from you um and we all are and just one fascinating thing and that is rabbenu nissimo girona once said a fascinating point and that is that um when when there is a natural inbuilt rule in a system sometimes there are collateral damages to that rule so the example it gives us let's say that you have a any basic creature um whether it be platform a platform or a animal life form has the need to eat has need to consume in order to produce energy to exist now at the same time that energy or that that capacity sometimes can be a negative so for instance you can have a human being i mean like we're very vulnerable you know i don't know how we've survived for nine months our kiddushes at this point in time but a human being we go about three about three hours and already grumpy we can't manage to get much further than that so we have this inbuilt capacity to want to eat but we eat all kinds of things so eat things aren't good for us we eat too much that is good for us we can't turn to god and say god how could you make us with a distracted capacity to eat too much because the main function of it was to actually sustain yourself and exist and it happens to be that sometimes that will be misappropriated in a negative form when it's overdone or recalibrated in the wrong way and i think that perhaps tonight's discussion is one of the most fascinating discussions because of the axioms of jewish faith there are many which many people over different stages of history have disagreed with but the accident we're going to talk about tonight is an axiom which actually is not something which people disagree with it's that they reappropriate it there's the idea of the idea of believing in the messiah not messiah perceived the messianic era to be more specific as the ram codifies it is something which is so central cook says it's actually the underpinning of all jewish history the fact that there is a destination to history is a necessary ingredient to getting to the end of history um but at the same time the danger of that is that that aspiration also sometimes comes where you can eat in the wrong places or eat the wrong things or too much and we've seen the destruction that's yielded that does not discredit the immense importance of the messianic age and the belief in it perhaps the most well sung of all animals but it does at the same time give us a little bit of a warning a little bit of a pause so perhaps tonight as we discussed before let's let's jump straight into this what your perspective as we start this conversation just about messiah messiahs and false messiahs in general in their emergences how are you how would you begin okay great thank you rabbi well i i prepared a prezi so i sort of structured my thoughts uh in advance i hope everyone can see this uh this uh image that says false messiah is their impact on history just not if you can see it then i'll know that uh on the right by the way this is a uh a prayer book uh written for the followers of shabbat sv one of the most notorious of the uh false messiahs in jewish history so uh the way i thought you know when the rav suggested that we speak about this topic i um i thought about you know four of the most prominent false messiahs in jewish history and um you know i tried to look at it from the perspective of a historian studying a um you know an anthropological unit studying a a sociological unit a group of people specifically us the jews and seeing what the damage was by following a false messiah that's really sort of like the the question i wanted to answer through each of these four and i ironically they all thought they i figured out words that i'll start with the letter d so we can have a little bit of uh alliteration division destruction depression and devastation and um so i with your permission rabbi what i thought we would do is uh why don't we look at each of these four really big periods of false messiahship and i think the the historical introduction will provide sort of a launch pad to discuss how they are illustrative of these four deleterious you know pardon another d word there uh impacts on the jewish community does that sound uh okay to you i mean it sounds climatic over here it sounds like we're going in a dark a very dark route here but let's let's jump straight in well i'm hoping that you're gonna give the ula message at the end that's really what you're paid the historians always talk about the past and all of you know bad things that happen on the delivery doctor delivery very good okay so obviously the the elephant in the room is here we are it's that december 26th and we're talking about false messiahs and this is an organization uh that is founded on the principles of orthodox judaism so the the first individual that we should look at for our purposes is of course jesus and uh i realized that i'm i'm running a grave risk of breaking the booby rule of the internet and i'm sure many of you are familiar with the booby rule don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want your boobie to see right because eventually everything lives forever and whatever embarrassing things you put up there eventually someone will look at it when they're thinking about you for a job or a and things like that so you have to be very careful about it and as i'm as you mentioned earlier rabbi quite a few of my students are christians and they're they're wonderful people and very dedicated and very supportive of the jewish cause very supportive of israel and so on and speaking about jesus specifically my intention is not at all to malign their beliefs obviously like like they say one person's revolutionary is another person's uh terrorist right one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorists so in this context uh i i want to make it clear that we're speaking here from inside the in group looking at the uh the history of jesus uh as it were outside of this group and uh i don't certainly mean to cast any aspersions on what any other faith community white might hold this will not hold true for the other the next two false messiahs but it will for the final one because there is actually a following of shabbat tights we even today and so i will issue this generic sort of warning and caveat in advance to them as well so obviously when we look at the false messiahship of the first century which was ultimately incredibly successful on a global level because it did create a massive and enduring faith that has contributed a tremendous amount to civilization as a whole it also is very ambiguous because from the perspective of the jews this is essentially a kind of a breakaway minion that just went overboard or a family dispute that went south went sour in a very bad way and by the time there was some reflection on what the implications of the split would mean it was far too late to repair that split there's a lot that we can say about the actual evolution of christianity away from the synagogue but just to say two things very quickly one is that much of it was not located in the person of jesus himself but really in his most uh powerful disciple saul of tarsus also known as saint paul who carried the message of christianity which was essentially the uplifting parts of judaism like life after death and a personal god who listens to prayer the idea of moral responsibility and so on and he freed it from the ritual obligations that constituted a very high threshold or barrier to conversion such as circumcision the dietary laws the sabbath and so on so by making much of what was really exciting about judaism available to a broader audience it you know it really went viral so to speak but the negatives for our part are really nasty if you look at this remarkable piece of art from by mark chagall la crucifixion blanche the white crucifixion the date 1938 is certainly very important to us he goes to great pains to illustrate the tremendous damage wrought on the mother religion by this division created by the messiahship of jesus you can see that he's clearly identified him as a jew you can see on the top according to the christian scriptures the romans wrote on the top the the four latin letters i n r i for uh jesus of nathan nazareth the rex you the autumn the king of the jews and he put it underneath in aramaic as well to really underscore that point that jesus the nazareth king of the jews was a mocking statement and as a result of this we have all kinds of things that are referred to here david you may appreciate this you see the the person in blue there is clearly a san benito it's a representative of the spanish inquisition and the the crypto jews and the humiliation as a result of of christianity's attack on jews in the iberian peninsula in the 15th century um the torah scrolls set on fire women weeping uh people set you know on boats to uh be refugees this is right around the time of the voyage of the saint louis um you know synagogues ransacked uh this is actually one of the changes that chagall made to the painting he originally had a swastika on the armband of the person going to the synagogue but he later didn't want to have the swastika on the image itself pogromous communism and above it all are the ancestors of jesus who are clearly in dismay looking at what has come of this tremendously deleterious divisive action of splitting this early first century religion it expanded dramatically under paul as i mentioned earlier because one of the phenomena that happens you know it's not at all unusual for jews to have disputes in fact it's much more unusual for them not to be engaged in some kind of dispute but by taking this message to the larger mediterranean basin in particular the iberian peninsula sorry the uh the italian and the the greek peninsula and asia minor paul essentially had to create a model in which by elevating christianity he had to at the same time depress judaism it was impossible to say how great christianity was without the same time saying how bad judaism was this is represented hundreds and hundreds of time in medieval church art such as you see in this image here the contrast of ecclesia the church on the left and synagogue on the right ecclesia is always portrayed as an upright clear-eyed woman often holding a staff not in this particular example which is from borgo spain uh she's often crowned and so on whereas in the right here you have this this this crone with claw-like hands holding on to the tablet loosely it's about to fall out of her hands she's clearly contorted uh her eyes are blinded to the truth and so on and this kind of negative contrast of judaism with christianity is really a result of this particular false messiahship and uh was was incredibly harmful to the jewish people over the centuries just to jump in there for a second did you know the specific timing you know the the contortion that's going on in general with jews versus romans the impending distraction all of these things how did that contribute to their willingness to to follow jesus at this point in time well that's that's an excellent question and the reality is on a historical level we have virtually no sources other than internal christian sources that give us any sense of how this uh moved forward the for example the the only first century source we have that talks about it outside of the christian scriptures is um josephus and there's one particular passage where he mentions jesus as the messiah but most scholars feel that that's actually a third century forgery that some very enthusiastic christian copyist inserted into josephus otherwise he basically he's a cipher he's not even important enough to make the uh to hit the radar of any of the people writing in the first century the the talmud does reflect on the uh the division of christianity judaism but as you know that's written hundreds of years later certainly dependent on oral traditions but they're only really codifying their remarks so much later we really don't know how effective the message was for jews per se but we do have a much better sense of how effective it was outside of israel proper and there was incredibly powerful and appealing fascinating fascinating yeah lots more to say we could spend the whole hour talking about this but um i would probably want to stay out of trouble no doubt right more likely it is i'll say something i regret well there's lots of distraction ahead of us unfortunately so we wouldn't want to miss all right so should we go to destruction then let's do that okay so uh the second false messiah and this one is is more tragic perhaps because many would regard him as a veritable jewish hero and even though it's difficult to say these things by the way about jesus because when you really go into the passages in the christian scriptures it's very hard to pin him down as actually being an enemy of the established synagogue but we'll leave him behind barakah of course leads a uh a dramatic and highly symbolic and initially very successful revolt against rome in the uh second century um they uh we don't know again we have sparse historical documents that really tell us what happened the most of most of the sources we have are from christian sources written later cassius deo and so on but we found in when i say we i mean the royal us historians although i had nothing to do with it i would have loved to have been there but in the uh the cave system that were um that's located by the dead sea the uh gael yadin and others found some amazing documents that tell us a lot more about what actually happened he led this quixotic rebellion against the romans unlike the first revolt in the year 70 66 through 74 which was riven by internal infighting by various zealot groups and uh a lot of the jews simply tripped over each other um with with misplaced sinashinam with baseless hatred and were unable to unify themselves against the romans although they did you know mount a rather remarkable defense barcock but was a much more effective military leader and really gave the romans a hard time he was so successful that none other than reby akiva as famously his most famous disciple who endorsed him as mashiach phenomenal thing of course yoshua bentorta one of his interlocutors disagreed and said that akiva grass will grow from your cheek bones before uh barakah is the messiah right very strong statement of of disagreement and ultimately uh the jews pitched in with him uh fighting for probably three to four years some develo doubt about exactly when the war ended uh and it but it certainly ended in tremendous destruction uh the uh destruction of the final camp at baytar it was so horrific that it was actually enshrined in our benching uh it is in the the the blessing is in memory of the last massacre of the uh of the bark rebels and the backlash against it was absolutely horrific with the martyrdom of rebbi akiva uh the asara mahusa are especially associated with this time it was a terror terrific uh it was a terrifically horrific time for jews that really resulted in statelessness and even more persecution for the romans just to show you these images because they are quite remarkable one of the hutzpadic things that the barakah rebels did is uh they seized roman coinage like this silver tetradocum or in hebrew a cella and they simply heated it up and restamped them with jewish themes so it says in paleo hebrew you know the nasi is royal on the left you see the basa mikdash and on the top of the basement is a little star which is the reference to him as kochba the star his actual name by the way was actually cosiba but rebbi akiva coined the kochba um sort of pun and his detractors called him cosiba with a zion meaning the son of a liar and on the right uh there's a lulav and we know from the documents that were found in the uh cave of horrors and the cave of letters that he actually was very religious they uh they found for example a lot of letters that specifically uh organized the distribution of lulavim and esrogim for the uh for sukkot uh we found lots of clothing there that had material for citizens including what they thought was tachylus but what chemical analysis indicates it was actually forged tachylis which was a known problem in the time and some other fascinating highly religious elements my favorite by the way is the babatha archive which is an amazing trove of about 34 documents that are the precious personal documents of a woman who hid out with the uh barcokba rebels in their last stand in these caves and she died there but she was engaged in a dramatic custody battle over one of her sons and uh a uh an inheritance battle over some date palms and she kept all of the legal correspondence that she had been involved with in these things so we learned the whole scope of her legal life as a result of the discoveries in barclays caves but to sum up and keep us on track with our agenda um barcema's rebellion had a lot more religious endorsement and yet it was something that on a political and military level there was no way it could possibly succeed they were perhaps thinking back to the glory days of the maccabees and by pushing the jewish community in that direction the the reaction from the romans was so horrific uh and possibly made our exile even longer as a result that's phenomenal i mean it's so sad yeah essentially since i we're roughly in the 130s since then until 1948 there's not been a sovereignty of the any part of the land of israel about by a jewish court that's unbelievable um do you see dr erinson have you noticed any reflections on um bayer kaufman by kappa who is viewing himself as the messiah we hear about ridiculous perspective have we had does he is any a record of such a perception no although there is the frequent use of the term nasi for shimabakba and there are some scholars who suggest that that term nasi has messianic overtones he actually used it before rebbe yehuda hanasi used it so it may have even he may have even sort of coined the the uniqueness of this particular name but the documentation that we have on barcah does not indicate his personal orientation this he definitely was a an imperious commander as the rav knows there are passages in the talmud in which you know one of the ways in which he would test the medal of his conscripts was by having them remove a digit from their hands which is you know self-mutilation kind of like you know you imagine the mafia doing things like this he was terrifying and the rabbis got him to give that up by saying listen why don't you try something a little bit less drastic how about you just have them like rip fully grown trees out of the ground with their bare hands if they can do that will you accept me says yeah that'll be fine and they get to keep their the digits that way and although we that's that's a talmudic um you know depiction of what kind of person is it certainly does comport with what the letters say in which he's ordering people about and uh very sharp and uh harsh and unforgiving in his military rule he definitely would have been a ferocious leader who and a feared warrior he he inflicted phenomenal damage on hadrian's troops so much so that when hadrian reported to the senate on the roman senate on the progress of the war uh he famously omitted the traditional passage in which he always says i and my troops are well because barkokpa had made it so that his troops were definitely not well they were suffering by the attacks from these guerrilla warriors that's sorry it just it just seems that his emergence as this potential messiah is in a different type of vein than perhaps the previous the previous uh a person and where we see the initiation is military and then coming along with that success militarily is okay which also i guess speaks to the idea of messiah being different to different people to some people the shia had certain stage would have been a military success as or sovereignty and perhaps different stages of history looking at machiato as well yeah i think that's that's a very valuable contrast and i think one of the fascinating elements when you look at these two figures side by side is that you know jesus he never really stepped over the line at least reading the text we have outside of the talmud talmud has a lot more uh you know unequivocal statements of his uh his um what's the right word um you know his his illegal activity anti-halachic activity but just reading the the the christian scriptures we have them he doesn't step over the line but he constantly walks up to it and he uh he gives and he speaks back to the rabbis with statements like you know uh was uh the sabbath made for man or man for the sabbath right which is kind of like a khutsbadik thing to say to a rav i would never say that to you rabbi and uh i might say to you when are we gonna have kiddush again but that's about it so uh but but by contrasting that to him to bark oh who was like staunchly religious he was like you know the rabbis talk about them going out to war wearing to fill in and and and hordes and hordes of film were left behind by the massacres and so on so they they were definitely their their religious bona fides were impeccable fascinating fascinating wow that's unbelievable let's me let's move straight forward what's next on agenda depression so uh this one's also thinking of uh rabbi pardo with his uh his tremendous lineage uh david rubini not a very well-known figure but a fascinating one who merged emerged in the 16th century uh he was an unusual figure and a very striking individual he was apparently a small person like you know the the the the older term for this would be a a very dark skinned very unusual but he he walked with tremendous you know self-assurance and he was able to parlay his story into actually meeting with popes and kings and emperors indicating that they should hand over the land of israel so that he can initiate the messianic era i mean it was overwhelming he had so much phenomenal traction here now he was not proclaiming that he himself was the messiah however he proclaimed that his brother was the leader of the lost tribes and that they were ready to go back to israel and he was visiting europe on this grand tour to essentially put all the politics in place uh he found some very powerful backers including the remarkable ben venita abravanel who is one of the the nieces of don yitzchak who famously gave him a great yellow banner which unfortunately has been lost this particular depiction which is a 19th century depiction is meant to kind of evoke it but he was famously described as you can imagine this small swarthy man wearing oriental robes riding a white horse carrying a massive yellow banner proclaiming it had the ten commandments on it proclaiming his jewish identity and marching into rome and into venice and into all these places saying that you know the messianic era is at hand and part of the main reason why he generated so much energy and especially from people like ben venita abravanel was because this was in the immediate aftermath it's about 50 years after the horrific spanish expulsion of 1492 and the the portuguese uh dispersion as well and the europe especially particular coastal cities as shown in this map were filled with desperate jews who are trying to understand how something so colossal had happened you know it's very difficult for us to imagine the level of the psychic stress that was placed on sephardic jewry by the expulsion if you can imagine it would be like if if the president were to declare that new york had to become judenrein it's like unthinkable it's like we have established our roots here for so long we're such so deeply embedded in society and to uproot us and force us to the winds you know with tremendous suffering and so on you know people were like their heads were spinning and they're imagining this must be this it's also i think worthy to note that we in 2020 stand in chronological relation to the holocaust uh with exactly the same amount of space that david riovani stood with relation to the um to the uh the expulsion so this is like people are still they're the children they're the grandchildren of survivors and they know the horrors that their parents and grandparents went to and they're still not figuring out how could this be we're still having difficulty fitting into society and david robini comes with this message and it just inflames the entire sephardic world in particular and christians are going along with it too christians are saying oh my gosh the jews were right look there is uh you know all these 10 lost tribes and they want to come back to israel we got to bring them in he inspired jews and non-jews alike perhaps one of the most uh i don't know uh emblematic of his inspirations was a young man named diego pieres who was a portuguese jew who had like most of the people of his generation uh converted to christianity he was actually the descendant of converts to christianity but secretly harbored a lot of jewish beliefs when he heard about david rubini he immediately renounced his christian identity pernic claimed himself a jew circumcised himself at the age 23 and then went out to follow david rubini around he also created a yellow banner this one we still have this is actually uh diogo paris's uh uh banner he renamed himself by the way mojo and he probably had some mental stability issues he came closer to personally uh identifying himself as the messiah but um you can see on the right by the way this is his signature and uh it evokes the yellow banner as well and it also it's it's definitely not a uh it's a pretty kind of uh in-your-face signature uh what i'm not gonna forge that one so easily i guess i think so so uh david rubini uh tried to disassociate himself from mulco and some interesting historical research suggests that maybe david rubini did actually have special plans for portuguese jews that much of his his strange idea was designed specifically to rescue them but uh mojo insisted on following him around and ultimately got himself in trouble with the inquisition uh mojo was burned at the stake in 1538 and his teacher david robiny was arrested shortly thereafter we don't know his fate but it's quite likely that he met the same fate as his student but what i think is especially relevant with this kind of model of false messiahship is that it really capitalized on the jews at a low point that here they were suffering and and reeling from the spiritual and psychic shock of the spanish expulsion and finally their redemption appeared to be at hand and so the the the surge of excitement to latch on to this false messiah was so profound that he won you know uh support up and down the socioeconomic ladder and ultimately it ended in disaster as well wow this is uh i'm really a uh uncovered a covered area of jewish history i just fascinating just to you you mentioned about edmundson the idea of the christian support as well you know it's fascinating when we're studying a lot of the barbados literature he himself was living in an era at the same time where you seem to have um the christians also focusing on the year 1500 as being the the iberian peninsula being emptied of muslims and jews and moving the idea of another crusade to the holy land how does that contribute in just your idea of the christian view of messianism at the same time i just fascinated you to think about it's it is a great uh question as well i mean one of the you know we we have to um we don't understand how important we are to the rest of the world you know if you were to take the uh the amount of you know settled territory in the world and assign each country their relevant space in the world media you would see that you know israel this tiny little section has like this massive amount of space in every newspaper in the world and like why is that why are so people fascinated with us why can they just you know give us the the proportionate amount of attention we deserve based on our numbers based on our our footprint and so on there's no question that in western culture in particular but also in eastern culture the jews are outsized in their impact on the outside world i think a big part of that is our very antiquity and our longevity and by the way what i'm saying right now about 2020 we could also say about the first century the romans were also fascinated with us because we were so old even then they looked at us and said wow how does this little people survive so long and what is it that they believe that that keeps them going you know just like the dalai lama was also interested in what what's your secret um we didn't tell them about the egg rolls that would have done it you would but the uh so i i think uh i lost my train of thought for a second oh yeah why were christians fascinated well you know there's like kind of like a theological nagging sort of concern that goes on and on you see as a thread really from the church fathers right up until the 20th century in particular this idea that you know maybe the jews have a point maybe we have gone a little too far in our stretching the reading of the text and it's kind of a nagging concern that the church had to face uh particularly the catholic church after the holocaust and that resulted in nostradate the famous statement on anti-semitism because you know the holocaust sort of pushed all images of of how we should be talking about jews to an entirely different place and i think the catholic church still has to deal with the reality of the state of israel i mean the idea that jews have somehow reclaimed sovereignty over the land of israel has theological implications the protestant churches especially the baptists and so on they love it because they think they see that as part of the the upcoming rapture which should be any minute now so the fact that the jews are back in their land is you know the next step is of course they're all going to convert to christianity but the they see that as a positive development not a threat so many christians view david rubini and we as we shall see shabbat sv as perhaps an unfolding of the next you know messianic era it reminds me of a bumper sticker i once saw that said um jesus is coming and underneath it said look busy right you got to respond to this we're about to have a messiah we we'd better you know get our ducks in a row fascinating fascinating and then i guess as you merge into the last the last of the focal points this evening so it just the spill over the aftermath you know depression reflects the stage the jury was in at this point in time did it um agitate that further or do we know anything of that as opposed to the next candidates uh yeah i think it i think it contributed to a definite decline in kind of spiritual temperature the the tremendous renaissance that you see for example in spot right around this time represents the apex of jewish spiritual creativity but by the time you you get to the end of the 16th century it's it's falling into uh some decline it will it will decline still further i think with the the last one we shall we go to it now absolutely okay very good so okay i'm moving forward a little bit jumping ahead right so this is of course shabbat heights v who is perhaps the most well known the most iconic of um of uh the false messiahs in jewish history he was actually an incredibly successful false messiah he was born in smyrna in contemporary turkey and he uh he showed at a very early age tremendous strengths as a um a thoughtful young man he was uh sought after as a tutor as a prayer leader he apparently had a very beautiful voice he was very charismatic and tall and good looking and so on and he was the um the the target of many ashadhan although until later in life he refused all marriage offers it appears however and i'm reflecting a little bit um more contemporary research much of the older research on shabbat sv really emphasized um kind of like a villainous character to him that he intentionally deceived he was a charlatan he went around and you know defrauded people of their money a more recent scholarship especially after gershom sherlock's path-breaking work on shabbat sv suggests that he was unfortunately sadly affected by mental disorders i'm not a psychologist but probably something like bipolar disorders or uh you know schizophrenia something like that and it was his chief propagandist uh nathan of gaza who was much more of the svengali in this story the raskolnikov who who you know kind of schlepped his story around europe at any rate what happened is in the middle of the 17th century um shabbat sv began to experience what he called illuminations in which he believed that he was being inspired with um additional wisdom they slowly increased and increased he believed that he could levitate and things like this and there were a certain number of jews particularly in israel who were well attracted to him and began to fund some of his studies nathan of gaza got involved at this point and started telling the world essentially that he was the messiah this was let us place it in historical context immediately after the disastrous malnitsky rebellion in ukraine of 1648-49 which resulted in in huge amount of bloodshed and upheaval in eastern europe where jews were forced uh out of their homes by pogroms and and tremendous devastation there and there was a lot of people felt that you know this is like another spanish inquisition it certainly was a massive upheaval in the in that region here is by the way a photograph of nathan of gaza but what end or not a photograph sorry uh like a line drawing what ended up happening was that uh it's difficult to know an exact number but likely tens of thousands of jews across europe went for this message and they sold their belongings and often at pennies on the dollar and they all marched to follow shabbat sv who ultimately went to constantinople to demand that the uh the turk the ottoman turk hand over the region uh if you've read glucal of hamilton's amazing memoirs of the time she recalls how you know she had uh people who were refugees from the kamalanisky massacres living in their home in northern germany and and how the the the debacle uh followed on after that here's a christian uh woodcut that shows the uh the masses of jews all flowing to jerusalem you can imagine how christians must have done this by the way uh much of these artworks are commissioned by christians because they're interested in it you can see this picture of uh shabbat it's v among the most famous you can see that in the background there is the artist's attempt to reproduce hebrew you can see on the kind of placard in the background he always doesn't know what hebrew looks like but he wants to make it look kind of exotic and oriental so he makes some chicken scratches like that and that's very common in the christian reproductions it was a cause celebra all around europe and at this point he's gotten very radical and his mental illness has taken over he has um you know uh pro he first of all he starts appointing all of his friends to be you know you're going to be the ambassador at turkey you're going to be the king of africa he abolishes fast days he says i'm here now no point in fasting on tishabav it's going to be a party um he he's very modern in his technology he says we don't need any more of these old you know handwritten torah scrolls let's use these new printed humashim this is so much more efficient everyone can have their own torah we don't have to have the written torah anymore he even gets married to a safer torah this is third marriage i mean literally married to a safer torah uh he also uh well what ends up happening as you can see in this another christian rendition of the story is he uh presents himself to the ottoman turk that's right in the center image there uh the ottoman turk who actually didn't meet with him directly but just simply issued the regulations said i have a better idea rather than give israel to the jews i'm going to let you live when you become a muslim and tremendously he decides to convert to islam he becomes a muslim the movement falls apart as jews realize oh my gosh it was all for naught and they slink back to their homes in europe impoverished now because they've sold all of their belongings and they have to try and recreate their lives thereafter a small number of them however are so committed to the cause that they double down and they say that wait a second maybe this means that we have to become muslims too in order to bring together all world religions and so they convert to islam they uh they acquire a special name the dunme they persist right up into the 20th century there are some interesting charges uh that uh the founder of modern turkey uh ataturk was himself of dunma origin although that's highly disputed and uh they are still around even today but very small numbers but the shabbat sv debacle uh shook europe for another century as heresy hunting was a major pastime of many rabbis for decades it is the uh the charge that that hounded uh none other than the ramkhal ravi mohamed sato across europe uh because people were were thinking that he might harbor sabbatian beliefs uh by the way before we leave this page i just got to show you one last image on the left here is a woman named sarah with the rather unusual uh hairdo she was an orphan of the malitzky rebellion who actually had a very checkered personal past and he insisted on marrying her it was his only human wife and and it's the only relationship that he actually uh we believe consummated but what i especially like about this particular image of sarah is that i think she was a profound influence on natalie portman who played queen amidala here and you can see that there's no question there's an homage there to sarah the wife of uh shabbat sv i just wanted to point that out i thought that would be valuable uncanny resemblance yeah okay all right so that that's uh that's my comments on sharp type 3. wow wow i mean it's it just sounds like the reverberations were so intense afterwards what what are some of what are some of the other collateral damages or outgrowths you would say of the champion well i think perhaps the most profound is is what i uh alluded to at the end of my comments there is that you know the the a whole new um notion of a a from test was introduced after shabbat sv uh we we had such an idea really in the first century the composition of the birkata minim right bella malshenim that was essentially a froome test that shmuel hakatan designed and put into our shmona esrae to draw a line in the sand between jewish christians and jewish jews and the same thing happened after shabbat sv but on a much more um really a corrosive level uh you see some you know the the sort of flexibility of rabbis like rabbi yonasan ibishus perhaps the most famous of them who was a brilliant and gifted orator and a tremendous speaker and a very profound rabbi who was also kabbalistically inclined and he was the uh he was the the victim of a phenomenal really a witch hunt uh of people suspecting that he was composing sabbatian amulets for uh for nefarious purposes and so there was like this this kind of like new ideology test that was introduced to the jewish world that i think was basically you know not not present before shabbat sv um we became much more intolerant of each other we became and by the way i would suggest that this also connects to the idea of the uh the uh promulgation of text as well you know the fact that now we have a printed shogun we know exactly how it has to be done and no other way you you know you combine that with the fear of heresy and it really changes i think a lot of the way in which jews look at fellow jews with the less of a charitable eye less uh you know of a feeling of tolerance towards their their practices and so on in my humble opinion wow i i i completely hear that i mean i just looking at now sort of the the zoomed out picture now we've looked at this has just been so fascinating these four distinct moments in history um but wouldn't you say something about the resilience of the nation of israel through all of this meaning if you think about it you know these are examples and there and they are noisy of false messiahs who baffled us and and ultimately caused tremendous damage but let's think about you know the fact that we're we're still here and we're still believing in the belief which itself caused that side damage what's your perspective on that well that's a great question uh it's a brilliant question actually i think that uh perhaps one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal is the the teachings of the hachameme of ghazal that you know really emphasize how we are khativa akhas we are one people and that we will ultimately make mistakes and and parts of us will go astray uh but they are who they they remain jews and if we are to retain our our very existence it's important for us to to realize that at our common root despite our ideological differences which may be expressed as we've seen in religious differences or in political differences like with bark they are things that we can overcome by recognizing our shared heritage and i i would hazard that our survival is directly proportionate to the degree in which we are able to see that larger vision of unity beyond the immediate obstructions of disunity well that was that was so poetic i thought that's very beautiful that is beautiful and and maybe maybe we should just close with that is that despite all these incredible difficulties throughout jewish history that we do await that age and time when we do see with clarity the coming of the unity of the jewish people god willing thank you so so much dr evans for taking the time this evening with many many people tons of people here in the room and on youtube and beyond who are watching and enjoying us oh that's a tremendous ruse uh do is the protocol to take any questions i think i see some things in the chat or do we uh sign off at this point uh you could go ahead and answer questions in that you've seen in the chat or um if anybody wants to unmute themselves and raise their hands that also would be perfectly acceptable uh so here i have a question here robert pardo suggests we add disastrous uh and then afterwards uh so did everyone believe he was the messiah or only akiva so this must be referring to barakah obviously on the coins he is a president or leader i do not see mashiach it's an excellent question i uh i don't know what data exists to answer the question because um i mean well actually maybe i would take it this way if ruby akiva endorses someone as mashiach that's pretty good for me i mean i would take that endorsement very seriously and if we can look at something a little bit sideways for a minute this is kind of like an interesting debate on what happened to ruby akiva's 24 000 students um the the gemara says that the 24 000 students who died right around this time died of askara which is usually translated as diphtheria however the um the letter of sriracha a very important rabbi living in in the in babylonia some centuries later he doesn't say they died of a disease a communicable disease they died of um persecution i forget the exact aramaic word he uses there but it would not be so bizarre to think that rebbi akiva's 24 000 students had followed him in their support of barkhachba as mashiach and joined his forces because you imagine all these young men of military age all dying at the same time it's hard not to imagine that they were the victims of the roman onslaught so i think it would be very reasonable to imagine that that many jews believed he was in fact mashiach like rabbi akiva rabbiki also was you know at the end of his long life at this time he's he's a figure of tremendous importance and authority and if he stands up and says i believe this is the mashiach wow that's a huge endorsement actually just to add to ads that is a fascinating point is that the gomorrah does say that of askara which just seems to be a breathing disorder or a disease of sorts it is interesting that in when a person who is killed by crucifixion dies of asphyxia where their muscles go into spasm there's not enough oxygen to be able to support their their their muscles with trans-basement up to a short amount of time they actually suffocate to death which means to say that it actually relates to perhaps the way that gomorrah may have coded that description um itself you know just fascinating a lot of interesting research supporting exactly that points fascinating uh martha rabbi pardo did you want to take over the questions or should i just read them as i go i'm unmuted i can't believe 10 were 10 months into uh living this way and still like i can't get through a zoom call without someone saying [Laughter] i've been involved past that um i i see something interesting the disappointment of shots v a disillusionment with the very idea of mashiach leading people to look for secular replacements for a jewish messiah before before you answer the question i'll i'll throw in maybe some compounds because you mentioned gershon trollam's groundbreaking work on chopitzy gershwin sholum like he he invested everything in the impact of like the emergence of chris the versions of the scala and zionism itself like that we could chalk up the satellite of the state of israel and like every major ideological movement since shattered sea to the rupture created by chateaux i know that's been debated only since gross control passed i'm told i don't want to disagree with him to his face but that's what uh dr berger told us but um so that's yeah so how do you think so so i i i think there's a lot of value in in professor shalom's approach and i would be afraid of ever disagreeing with rabbi dr david berger but i only have two answers two words to answer yesterday's question about shabbat sweet and haskallah or shabbat sv and disillusion with the very idea mashiach and those words are baruch spinozza right i think you can draw a pretty straight line to the the the meshuganes if that's a word of the shabbatai sweet debacle and disillusionment in the central tenets of religion for jews and i think you could make a good argument for non-jews as well maybe even rene descartes they i i think there's a lot to say for um for the the the the events of shabtai tsubi and the the the general uptick in questioning of religious authority afterwards especially among jews um i guess before we wrap up if anyone who's currently in the zoom i'll try to jump to the youtube for a second but then when the zoom is uh just an asking question drop it in the box on weekends you have the ability to do that [Music] um while i'm checking the youtube i'll add uh we're talking about uh i'm i shot up every but i heard my name so many times to the presentation uh resisted the uh the urge you mentioned uh my ancestors so professor jonathan stark once again pointed out to me all the early schools in america all the original trolls in america first off obviously all of them spanish portuguese but more more interestingly they all have names like share with israel and mikveh israel and um i'm forgetting the other ones that easily you know uh googleable they're all messianic they all have they're all coded references to the shia because you can imagine these are the people who are running away from europe that's been not just hospitable but has been glorious to them for a millennia and a half um and they're running to this unknown place and it can't be anything but the end of times so messianism uh ran hot and uh in my people's blood for some time it's jet fuel i mean we need it we really need it it's what keeps us going if we're just saying well we're gonna be jewish for the for the spiritual status quo i mean that i mean the kiddush is good but no that's not why i'm in this i want mashiach now so to speak uh it is really the the it's the the juice as my kids would say it's the sauce um uh rabbit rabbit trump any final words before we wrap up this has been just really illuminating and i think obviously this is the beginning of much more discussions and uh um and uh i think that that also to think about the positivity that with which you close doctor every vision beforehand is that the ability of being able to go through this and come through this uh with more and having having emerged out of this more positive and perhaps um and knowing that we can get through this there is ultimately an end to this which is why it's so essential it's part of our belief thank you so much for really taking the time around pardo thanks for putting us together and everybody for being here um thank you all and uh we'll uh see you next week okay thank you again it's been an honor