Beware the Messiah
Some years ago, on a brisk Sunday morning, I received a phone call from a number I did not recognise. The caller had found my mobile phone number on our website. With a frantic voice, he told me that he was the Messiah. “You know, Rabbi, the person whom you Jews have been waiting for 2000 years”.
I managed to keep a straight face — or a straight voice. I explained that we Jews do not believe in a personal Messiah; we believe that humanity is progressing towards good and that we Jews must do our part to make this world better. I’m not sure he understood. Anyway, I politely excused myself, closed the conversation, and dropped an email to the CST.
The caller had not hidden his number, so I could track him; I even found some photos of his library online. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of religious/spiritual stuff, mainly New Age, magic and the like. He seemed not to know much about Judaism. There was not even a Bible on his bookshelf. Had he been more religiously literate, he would know what every Jew knows, that believing in a Messiah, personal or otherwise, is not a central tenet of Judaism.
Maimonides includes it in the “Principles of Faith” alongside life after death. Still, Reform and Progressive Jews do not consider themselves bound to Maimonides. And even many Orthodox Jews do not take literally Maimonides’s “Principles of Faith”, about the Messiah or the afterlife. Like us, they believe that as Jews, we must look at the future of humanity in a positive, constructive way rather than waiting for the moment when a descendant of King David will reveal himself and will lead us all towards the Promised Land and the Temple in Jerusalem will be rebuilt.
Of course, there are Jews who believe in a personal Messiah. It is a central belief of the Chabad movement and one of the reasons for the popularity of the catchy tune -”Mashiach, Mashiach”. But they are a colourful minority whose enthusiastic faith is not shared by many Jews.
Indeed, the Chabad movement aspires to spread faith in God and enthusiasm for performing mitzvot. They do many, many good things because of their zeal. They do it because they know the rest of the Jewish world does not share their enthusiasm. I often wonder what will happen once they reach their goal: to turn all the Reform, Orthodox, secular Jews… into Chabad Jews. Perhaps that will be the moment when Mashiach come!
There is one reason why we contemporary Jews are so sceptical towards Messianism. Because we’ve been there already. In 1648, in the Turkish city of Smyrna, a Jewish man, Sabbatai Zevi, proclaimed he was the Messiah. Kabbalists, Jewish mystics, validated the pretension. Like wildfire, the belief spread around the Mediterranean Jewish world, then in the Netherlands, Poland and the rest of Europe.
It was a massive phenomenon. In Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, almost every Rabbi and literate Jew believed that the Messianic time had come. Hundreds of Jews started making plans to move to the Land of Israel. Why the movement was so successful is an interesting question — I plan to give some shiurim next year about this matter, and perhaps we can find some answers.
The year for the final revelation was supposed to be 1666 (in curious assonance with some Christian prophecy).
The Turkish authorities were not enthusiastic. They could tolerate Jews moving to Jerusalem, as a vanguard actually moved. But they could not accept the paralysis of the major ports, like Thessaloniki, where all the Jewish merchants had closed shops and started packing for the Promised Land.
So in 1666, the sultan placed Sabatai Zevi under arrest. It was a comfortable prison, and Sabatai did not stop meeting with followers and sponsors while his emissaries were still walking around the Turkish Empire and beyond and spreading the message that Mashiach had come. At a certain point, the sultan had enough, so he summoned the prophet and told him he would either convert to Islam or be beheaded. And Sabatai Zevi, literally to keep his head in the proper place, chose to convert to Islam and was then exiled in nowadays Montenegro, at the extreme periphery of the Turkish Empire.
This is when the story becomes bizarre. Because the followers kept their faith in their Messiah and -heavily influenced by the Kabbalah- developed the idea that Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam was fake. They thought that the conversion was temporary and that in a few months, he would have returned.
Some followers followed him into the new faith and converted to Islam themselves, with the same agenda — to return to Judaism at the end of the times — they set up their mosques, schools etc.
The vast majority of European followers of Sabatai kept the belief that the Messiah would have revealed himself at a certain point. There were speculations and debates about the time. Sabbatarianism became thus a network of secret believers in Italy, the Turkish Empire and throughout Europe. People who, on purpose, transgressed certain mitzvot, like they ate bread on Pesach, banished the second day of Rosh Hashanah, brought flowers on the graves, and turned Tisha be Av into a day of celebration.
The followers of one Polish Sabbatean, Jakob Frank, set up an alternative form of Judaism and practised some form of polyamory out of the belief that such behaviour would have accelerated the Redemption. Precisely like the woke extremist believe that their behaviour in the bedroom can bring about revolution.
Meanwhile, following Sabatai’s conversion, a small minority of opponents could claim victory. Among them the haham Jacob Sasportas who wrote entire books against the movement, and the haham David Nieto, the Rabbi of Bevis Markas, in London. They managed to marginalise the believers.
But the battle lasted for centuries. That is because the Sabataean movement did not die out. There were Sabbateans among the founders of West London Synagogue, the first reform Synagogue in the UK, and perhaps among the founders of Liberal Judaism. It is impressive to read which mitzvot they wanted to keep and which they declared outdated — it seems to come from a Sabbatean notebook!
Dreams were important for the followers of Sabbatai Zevi -they used to scrutinise their own dreams in search of Divine signs. Some scholar maintains that psychotherapy is one of the outcomes of Sabbatean, and there is evidence that some relative of Sigmund Freud belonged to the Sabbatean movement.
The same for Zionism. We associate the vision of a Jewish State with Theodor Hertz, who has the reputation of being a secular Jew, entirely assimilated. Except that his grandfather used to attend services in a synagogue whose members were all Sabbateans. Perhaps the disillusion following the failure of that messianic movement triggered some Jews to pack and move to the Land of Israel without waiting for a personal Messiah.
Among the Sabbateans who became Muslims, the Doenhme, we find in the 19th Century, the founders of modern secular Turkey. Among the Central European Sabbateans (and that is quite a dodgy story), you find nonetheless the family of Louis Brandeis, the legal scholar and justice at the USA Supreme Court, whose name is associated with the right to privacy as we know it. And perhaps it is not a coincidence that privacy was invented by someone familiar with a kind of underground movement.
It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of Sabbateanism in Jewish history and history at large. Fascinating stories. Yet, the parable of the Sabbatean movement raises many questions. Why did so many Jews fall for this movement? Why did so many Rabbis and literate Jews persist in believing that somewhere a hidden Messiah was waiting for the proper moment to reveal himself? Why did the open transgression of certain commandments become so appealing, and it was taught from one generation to another? The diffusion of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, was one of the reasons. The opponents to Sabbateanesim believed that the study of Halacha, how to perform the mitzvot, should be the centre of Jewish life, rather than Kabbalah, the mystical speculations about the future.
Nowadays, there is a general opinion that one should not study Kabbalah unless one is married with a family (and then he has less time for mystical speculation); this is one of the results of the battles against Sabbatianesim led by Sasportas and Nietos.
Sabbatai Zevi could persuade so many Jews that he was the Messiah because he was born on Tisha beAv, the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, last week’s fast day. The Kabbalists often quote the passage of the Jerusalem Talmud [Berachos 2:4], which states that the Messiah will be born on Tisha be Av — that is, on leap years, he was conceived on Hanukah. That was the case for Sabatai Zevi. By the way, the Kabbalists who endorsed him used to live in Jerusalem and Gaza — if you come to my class next year, you’ll learn that Jews have always lived in Gaza until the Muslims threw us out — a very contentious topic. I know.
Anyway, speaking of Sabbatai Zevi and his birth, on Tisha BeAv. You can take the story literally and then recognise the Redeemer of the Jewish people because his date of birth happens to be on a certain day. Or you can learn from the same Talmudic passage a very profound teaching. Even in the saddest moment, when we mourn the two destructions of the Temple alongside the tragedies fallen upon our people, even at that moment, we are commanded to look for signs of hope.
The Temple fell not only because of the military might of the Babylonians first and of the Romans then but also because of acerbic divisions internal to the Jewish people, in a situation strikingly similar to the situation we live in today.
But even on such a sad day, when the liturgy is shaped by desperation and horror, and black is the prevailing colour in the synagogue, when-contrary to Yom Kippur- we are forbidden even to sing; even on such a day, there can be a glimmer of hope, the beginning of our Redemption. A glimmer little like a newborn child, which is up to us to raise and educate. It is a powerful message; in times of despair, cultivate hope and believe that things can be better like parents must believe when they raise a child.
This is a message for us now and in the coming months, when the divisions, the abuses and the coups we see in Israel will reverberate in the Diaspora.
Of course, you can take the Talmudic stories about the personal Messiah and his horoscope. So you become a Messianic believer. In such a case, the painful failure of the Sabatean movement is there to show the outcome of Messianism. What’s the line? If we don’t learn from the past, the past will happen again.
It’s time we learn about Sabatai Zevi and the craziness that almost destroyed the Jewish world four centuries ago.
Come to my classes next year.
Brighton & Hove Reform Synagogue, 29 July 2023