Jeremy Rosen
Sects and Heretics

Jeremy Rosen - Sects and Heretics

• Well, good evening, everyone. It’s my great pleasure to introduce my good friend Jeremy Rosen, who I know is having an incredible success on the Lockdown University, provoking much discussion, I get it from all my friends. So, Jeremy, over to you. And tonight it’s Sects and Heretics, I believe. So, over to you, Jeremy.

• Thank you very much, Trudy. Yes, S-E-C-T-S and Heretics. And both are subjects very close to my heart. It’s a long subject and as is my wont, I would like to give a bit of background first. And I don’t know if I’m going to have time to complete it all in one session, so, we may have to extend it, but I’m going to give it a jolly good try. We are a small, very argumentative, very divided people. Of course, you can say all religions are divided, every people’s got its splitters, but we seem to make an art of disagreement, dissension, and this has been going on right from the very beginning. Think of poor old Moses and all the trouble he had to put up with with those people who disagreed with him and those people who actually rebelled against him. And then, think what happened after Moses died and Joshua took over. The tribe split into rival factions. And if for a while, Saul unsuccessfully, David successfully, got them to come together, within a generation at the end of King Solomon, they split into two warring factions. Two states, Israel in the north with the 10 northern tribes, and Judea in the south with the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. And on occasion they killed each other.

They went to war against each other. However bad things are nowadays, we haven’t yet reached that stage. But that’s what it was two and a half thousand years ago. But the first we could call it theological division came with the exile in 586 when the Judeans ended up in Babylon. They weren’t scattered as were the northern tribes and they were able to reconstitute Jewish life in Babylon. And their king, after being in prison for a while, was taken out and allowed to lead the community. And then the Persians took over and they were very tolerant. And the Jewish community then had to come up with a new way of expressing Jewish life without the temple. There was no temple. The priests had no actual function. And so, in Babylon you have the first significant innovation that caused difficulties within the Jewish body politic. So, amongst the ideas that came up in Babylon was that the scribes, as they were called at that stage, are allowed to adjust the law and interpret it to meet new circumstances.

You have the emergence of a synagogue, of a study hall where people came together, instead of a temple where they come together. And you had the adoption of new ideas. The idea of a Messiah, which basically was a king coming and leading us back out of exile, ideas of resurrection, all kinds of strange ideas emerge in Babylon. Now, after King Cyrus, Cyrus the great, Cyrus the good, who’s actually described in the Bible as a Messiah himself, allowed the Jews to go home. Most of them stayed put in Babylon in the diaspora, but some went back and began to rebuild the temple. And when they came back to rebuild the temple, they came up against opposition, opposition from the Samaritans. And the Samaritans did whatever they could to block them, to stop them, to undermine them. Now, who were the Samaritans? When the kingdom of Judea and the kingdom of the north, Israel, split, the capital of the north was called Shamerayin, Samaria today. So, the 10 northern tribes were known at that stage as those living around Samaria. In 722, they were completely removed by the Assyrian invasion and scattered all ‘round the Assyrian Empire. Some people even think they came to England. In Victorian England, there was the British Israel Society who said the 10 lost tribes came to Britain because Britannia is made up of the two Hebrew words, brit, the covenant and annia, the boat. Or British, the covenant of a man, is a Jewish man. They came here. But of course, everybody thinks they were everybody else. They’re being found in South America, in North America, in the Middle East, in the Far East, in Africa. But policy of the Assyrians was to scatter those countries and peoples they conquered and bring back to replace them locals from other places.

And basically, Assyria incorporated what is called today. And so, those people were brought into northern Israel to replace the 10 tribes who were being kicked out. They come back and all of a sudden they find they are being attacked by wild animals. And so, this is the version of the Bible I’m going to give you. The version of the Bible is they then wrote back, sent messages back to the king of Assyria saying, “We are being attacked here and that’s because we’re not worshipping the local gods. We don’t know anything about them. Please help us.” The king of Assyria sent messages down to the south saying, “Please send your priests up there to educate the locals in your religion and this will make them feel a lot happier,” and that’s what they did. And that according to the Bible is what this group of people called the Samaritans were because they lived in Samaria. And the Bible actually calls them , that is to say, strangers who converted to Judaism out of fear, not out of positive ideology. And these Samaritans claimed that actually they were descended from the 10 lost tribes, and they were the real Jews.

And these Jews coming back from Babylon were the fake Jews. And not only that, but their temple was on Mount Gerizim, near Nablus today, not Jerusalem in the south, because they rightly point out that in the five books of Moses, there’s no mention of Mount Zion or of Jerusalem, but there is a mention of Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. And so, they claim they were the genuine Jews. And not only that, but in Assyria, in Babylon rather, the Jews had changed the script from the paleo-Canaanite script, which was the script that probably Moses received the Torah in, to this new Assyrian script, which is the script we have today. The Samaritans still had the five books of Moses. And their five books of Moses were written in this original script. So, they claimed they were the original guys and these new guys were interlopers. In certain respects you could argue, it’s not very different to the Palestinians. We’re here now, you guys have suddenly come in, who gives a damn about what happened before that? And they tried very hard to block progress. And they did for a while, until later King Darius was able to send reinforcements. They rebuilt the temple.

And you had from that moment on this division between the new Judeans, who had a combination of biblical law and now these new oral laws that have been developed in Babylon, and the Samaritans on the other hand who said, “No, we’re not having any of this new stuff whatsoever. And we don’t believe in this nonsense about a Messiah. This nonsense about afterlife, this nonsense about resurrection. All the things you claim were in the book of Moses, but we see no track of them or trace of them there. We don’t accept any of that.” And these two people, once the Jews were if you like, entrenched and took control of their area, they got on and managed some form of accommodation. So, you had the essential Jewish community and you had the Samaritans and Jewish law’s full of all kinds of statements about Samaritans. Do they count as Jews? Do they not count as Jews? And some rabbis say, “Yes they do.” And they’re stricter when it comes to keeping the Bible than other people, than other Jews. And some say “No, they’re not.” Sometimes they intermarried, sometimes they didn’t.

But during this period of about 500 years from when they were both together rivalling the land of Israel. The Samaritans in Jewish law, they are often referred to as the Kutim, Cutheans, which is a term that could link them to other countries outside of Israel. But the Samaritans coexisted. And of course, as you know, they’re mentioned in the New Testament. There are not many Samaritans alive today. The Samaritans continue and they still exist. And they exist mainly in Nablus. Part of them are in Nablus in the West Bank. Some of them are in Holon in Israel. There are only a couple of thousand of them left. Poor guys, they got beaten up on all sides. The Muslims didn’t like them 'cause they weren’t Muslim, the Christians didn’t like them 'cause they weren’t Christians. They were very, very strict, the Samaritans. They wouldn’t intermarry or marry with anybody else. They were very, very strict about what they kept.

And they’re reduced now to this small little remnant. But at the time, they were the main challenge to mainstream Judaism. And so, the question of who belongs and who doesn’t belong, that began with the emergence of the Samaritans. When the Jews returned to the land of Israel, you had a new split emerging, because when they returned, they came back under the descendants of the original royal family of Judea. But this time, we now have the scribes or what we would call the rabbis with Ezra coming back and saying, “Look, this is a new regime. We’re rebuilding the temple. We’re going to put the priests back in place. But the priests and the rabbis are in competition. And ironically, the priests more or less adopted the Samaritan position. And the priests were known as the Sadduqim, or we call them Sadducees, either from the house of Zadok, the priest, or from the house of Boethus, the priest. And they again, like the Samaritans, objected to any rabbinic innovation. Give you a little silly little example, but one that will resonate with you. The Torah says, . Don’t burn fire in your homes on the Sabbath. And the priests said that literally means you shall have no fire. The only place where we have fire on the Sabbath is in the temple. And they were in the temple and they had fire in the temple.

And not only that, but in the cold winters of Judea, when it was really freezing, they were okay 'cause they had heat in the temple, but the poor peasants outside were suffering in the cold. And besides, the priests were very rich, and if it really got too bad, they could always go down to their summer homes in Caesarea or Galilee or off even to Ischia in the Roman Empire. The rabbi said, "Listen, we’ve got to worry about the poor people. Poor people don’t have all this luxury, so, we’re going to interpret it this way. Don’t burn fire means don’t start a fire on Shabbat, but if you start your fire before Shabbat, you can have it on Shabbat.” And so, this innovation was something that the rabbis accepted, which is why we have candles today on a Friday evening, but neither the Samaritans nor the Sadducees were prepared to accept because they said, “You’re tinkering with the law.” And this is one of the challenges of course, that we have today because so much has been added on and on and on.

Our Judaism today is hardly recognisable to the Judaism of thousands of years ago. And yet the question is, is this creating something completely new or is it a legitimate interpretation of, if you like, the original constitution? And that consisted of the first major theological divide in Judaism over the power of the oral law and over the power of the written law. There was a political division between them. The priests were rich, associated with the Greeks and the Roman Empire. They were in favour of integration. It was the priests who brought the circuses and the games to Jerusalem. And on the other hand, those who disagreed with them became known as the the prochim, the separatists, the Pharisees. And the Pharisees were more interested in the masses, in the people, in catering to their needs. They were more popular. They were less, at that moment, nationalists. They were in favour of accepting if it’s Greek authority, if it is Roman authority, no big deal. We’re not going to rebel against them. We just want to preserve our own separate culture. And that situation existed through the period of Alexander the Great, through the period of the emergence of the Romans and the Roman Empire, until we get to the first century BCE, before the common era, where a situation exists in Jerusalem, which is very similar to those of you who have seen “The Life of Brian” by Monty Python.

And remember that scene in the circus where they’re all gathering together and accusing each other of being splitters and disagreeing. There’s the Judean People’s Liberation Front, there’s a Liberation Front of Judea, and so forth, and they’re all arguing with each other. And that really was quite true to life 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem. On the one hand, you had the priesthood, the aristocracy, it was basically pro-Greek. You had the Pharisee mainline who were neutral. So, long as we preserve our religious tradition, we’ll cope with whoever’s in charge. Then you had what were called the zealots, the nationalists, rather, like today the nationalists, we must fight for our independence. We are not going to accept these Romans telling us what to do and if necessary we’ll go to war. And if necessary, there were fanatics amongst the zealots called the Sicarii, the dagger men, who even went around assassinating other Jews who disagreed with them. Thank God, again, we haven’t reached that stage yet. And then you had the Essenes, the Dead Sea sects, who said, “A plague on all your houses, we can’t bear all this. We’re getting out of here. We’re getting out of Jerusalem, out of town, down to the Dead Sea.”

And each one of them had a different perspective on Jewish life. You might say that they were loyal to the original constitution. They all consider themselves to be Jews. That’s a term that the Greeks and the Romans used to describe them, and they felt very proud of it. But they took very different perspectives on exactly how to express that religious commitment. And then of course, we’re going to have the rise of Christianity. And I’ve discussed before, how much Christianity can be said to be the first Jewish reform movement or a complete innovation, and whatever it was, this was a challenge to the rabbis of the Talmud. And so the rabbis of the Talmud starting calling anybody who disagreed with their point of view a Kutim. And we don’t know if they were referring to the Samaritans, or referring to the Sadducees, or referring to the Christians. But this is the first time you find within Judaism this notion that we would call the notion of heresy. There was no such term applied in Judaism at all until this moment.

It doesn’t occur in early Hebrew Jewish literature. The word heresy comes from a Greek word, which means just simply to have a different opinion, an opinion, any opinion, it’s neither good nor bad. And so, when we look at the Talmud during this early period of the first, second, third, fourth century, as there’s rivalry between these different groups, for the first time you have people calling each other heretics. And the question is, what actually does heresy mean? What do we mean by it? Now, when you look at the Talmud, you can see that there are different kinds of arguments going on within the rabbinic school. By this time, the Sadducees are out of the picture. When the temple was destroyed, their role finished. And we remember them now today in a couple of little ritual examples that we have, but by and large, the role of the priests as a separate entity ideologically disappeared and they merged into the mainstream rabbinic Judaism, which was run both in Babylon and in Judea, essentially by the rabbis loyal to the oral law. And they are concerned to reinforce what differentiates them from those other sects and sectors in Judaism. Everybody by and large has the same Torah.

There are minor variations in the Samaritans to our version, but by and large it’s the same. The Dead Sea sect have minor variations, but by and large they’re the same. Some of the books of the Bible, particularly the prophets are identical. The constitution, so to speak, remains the same. But the interpretation of it, there’s the problem. The rabbis at this moment have only said in the Talmud that there are certain principles that are important. They have no example of what we would call a credo, you must believe this or else. And as I’ve mentioned before, the Bible does not use the word believe in the sense that you must believe this idea. The first of the 10 Commandments doesn’t say, you must believe in God, it says God is there. You have to find a way of relating to it, but we’re not telling you how to organise your brains. And then you have these other ideas that emerge from Babylon. The idea of life after death, which is something that I’m going to address in a couple of weeks time, and resurrection, and issues of this kind.

And basically, what they say in the one area where they actually discuss this in the Talmud Sanhedrin, and in the 11th chapter they say, “There are a list of people, who if they don’t believe certain fundamental ideas, will have no life in the world to come.” It doesn’t call them necessarily backsliders, bad people. And basically what the Talmud goes on to say is that, look, if you don’t believe in life after death, you don’t get it. That’s all. You don’t get your life after death. But they don’t say and throw them out of the Jewish people. And there are certain things that are important in the Jewish psyche. One of them is that the Torah, the constitution, comes from Mount Sinai, goes back thousands of years. And it all comes from God to Moses. But they don’t actually specify how it came from God to Moses. Or if it said, when God spoke to Moses mouth-to-mouth or face-to-face, whether they meant that literally or metaphorically. And they weren’t driving people out who said, I don’t believe in a Messiah.

They were only concerned at that moment with two things. On a rabbinical level, they were concerned with the democratic process of law. If there’s a debate between rabbis on any fundamental issue of law, then there has to be a majority decision. And that majority decision has to be accepted and it has to be accepted even if you disagree. And there are several examples given in the Talmud about rabbis who disagreed, who stuck to their opinion. Now, those who stuck to their opinion like Rabbi Joshua, who thought, for example, that evening service was optional, not compulsory. He was outvoted. And he was outvoted, and authority was, you’re outvoted what you going to do? And Rabbi Joshua accepted he was outvoted and that was the majority decision. Unfortunately, the leadership at the time, Rabbi Gamaliel didn’t treat him very nicely. And as a result there was a rebellion against the authority of Rabbi Gamaliel, but that wasn’t over the question of accepting authority. But there was others like Akiva ben who said, “No, not only do I not agree, but I’m not going to budge.”

And the Gemara says, “Look, please, please, accept the majority decision. And if you accept majority decision, we’ll make you kind of chief rabbi top guy.” And he said, “No, I don’t want to betray what I believe. I’m not prepared to change my mind and I’m not prepared to change my actions.” And at that moment the rabbis introduced the idea of what we call the herem, the ban that poor old Spinoza had to suffer from. What the herem was, okay, you don’t accept, leave the community. This community is what we do. You don’t want to accept it. Fair enough, it’s your right, go somewhere else. There was another case, the famous case of Elisha ben Abuyah, this rabbi who disagreed with the whole idea again of life after death with anything irrational or illogical in Judaism. And although he was a great scholar, he refused to recant and he was also given this herem. And yet as the Talmud records, the rabbis kept on walking along with him to study from him 'cause he knew so much. They maintained their good relations.

They didn’t curse him. The herem, the ban, the simply meant, look, when you change your mind and you come back, you are one of us. Meanwhile, we don’t have anything to do with you. And even then they didn’t keep to that too seriously. Where things began to get a lot more unpleasant was during the Christian era, because for the first time Christianity introduces the idea of a credo. You must believe this. And if you don’t believe this automatically you are no longer a Christian. So, unless you believe in the Trinity as defined by the Council of Nicaea, then you’re out of it. And as we know, after Constantine’s Council of Nicaea, Christians went around killing so many Christians, they possibly ended up killing more Christians than they killed Jews because they couldn’t agree on what the credo belief was. This Greek notion of belief and truth as being one and indivisible is something that led both to Christianity and Islam believing that they had to do something about the Jews, either get them to convert or get rid of them in some way.

But it had never been an issue for the Jews because the Jews have always talked about in the Talmud, the the pious of other nations who believe other things to us, but so long as they abide by a basic moral code, the seven commandments of Noah, we’re happy, they’re good people, they get to heaven too. They don’t have to convert. We’re not into that at this particular moment. And so, you have this notion of belief suddenly used as a political weapon, as a way of imposing, shall we say, social cohesion as much as ideological agreement. And this is the problem that emerged during the Middle Ages. And I just want to go offline for a minute to say there was one final, shall we say, kick of the dead cow, so to speak, of sectarianism after the temple was destroyed. And that was some 800 years later. 800 years later a movement developed in Babylon known as the Karaim, or we call them the Karaites, from the word micra which is text. Which means the text of the Bible.

And they, like the Samaritans and like the Sadducees said, “We are prepared to accept the text of the Bible. But there are too many of these weird customs and weird laws that the rabbis are imposing upon us that we don’t want to accept.” And actually, under the influence of a man called Anan Ben David, the Karaites in Baghdad grew so powerful that they almost became the majority. And had it not been for one man, the head of the community known as Saudia the Gaon, Saudia, The Great Man, the leader of the community who fought this battle hammer and tooth, they might well have won the battle for who defines a Jew. The Karaites, as with the Samaritans were very, very strict. They also refused to accept the idea of lights in their home on Shabbat. And so the Karaites didn’t have any heat or electricity. When it came to the building the sukkah, the agreed with having a sukkah, but they thought, as the Torah mentions, these four objects, the lulav and the etrog, and the myrtle, and the willow that we shake around, it doesn’t say specifically shake them, and therefore they just built them into the , into the roof. They took things very seriously from the Bible.

When the Bible says somebody who has leprosy has to go out of the camp or is in a state of impurity, yes, they had to go literally out of the camp in a state of impurity. They wouldn’t marry anybody else. And for all these various reasons, slowly over time the Karaites lost the majority position they had and in effect slowly withered almost away. There are still a couple of thousand Karaites, some say as many as 30,000 Karaites to this very day in Israel, community in Israel, in LA, in other countries. There are still people who adhere to Karaitism. They have begun to open up a bit. There are two groups, the electric group, which use electricity on Shabbat and the non-electric group who won’t. They’re very strict on who they marry. Some are getting a bit more flexible, some are marrying within only. There are these divisions, but they represent a very, very small minority. But again, the Karaites essentially are the heirs to the Sadducees, are the heirs to the Samaritans. And the Samaritans themselves will say, we are not, as the Bible says, converts under pressure, we are the remnants of the 10 northern tribes who stayed behind.

The Assyrians couldn’t clear out everybody. We stayed behind and they were there. So, everybody has their own narrative. And I don’t think anybody on any level has the right to challenge the narrative that a person feels comfortable with and wants to continue with. But they were not necessarily described as heretics. They were described as minyam. And the term min means a sect. Like a sex. One sex, two sex, three sex. Now of course, we have many more sexes and they’re all different sects. So, I have a great deal of difficulty with the whole notion of heresy, all the more so since the Talmud draws a distinction between people who abandon or disobey Jewish law simply because either they’re hungry or they don’t feel like it or they’re too poor, or whatever their reason is, they do it if you like, for non-ideological reasons, which they call . in modern Hebrew is you know, have a good meal. They do things because they want to, they feel they like it. As opposed to , provocatively. I hate this, I hate you. I think your religion is a load of rubbish. Everything you believe is codswallop and nonsense.

That is the problem. So, it is clear to me that from the Talmud itself, the Talmud is concerned primarily with people to say, this definitely ain’t the case. Not that people say, well maybe, and if I was stronger I would, and if you could explain it better to me I might be prepared to take it on board. They drew this distinction. And so they said very clearly in talking in the Sanhedrin about those who don’t believe in an afterlife, is it okay? Sure, don’t believe in an afterlife, you don’t get it. When you die, you die and that’s it. It’s up to you. Now, when did this begin to change fundamentally? Well, in two ways it began to change. Under Christianity and under Islam, talking about roughly 2,000 years ago, Jews were no longer in control of their own affairs. They were under the authority of either the Christian or the Muslim ruler. And therefore, as the famous dictum went in the Talmud of Samuel, the law of the land was the law. But they were always allowed to run their own internal affairs. And they had these internal committees which came to be known as the qahal, the community.

And this community committee was usually made up of an unholy alliance of the rich and the rabbinic, who took advantage of their position to keep the poor down. And that’s my political opinion. But nevertheless, they ran the affairs and they represented the Jewish community to the non-Jewish community. And conversely, when the non-Jewish community wanted to tax the Jews, as it did all the time, it went to the poor qahal, they were in the middle, they had to raise the money, so, nobody liked the qahal very much. But the qahal had to find some way of imposing order. And the only way it had of imposing order was the idea either of 40 lashes for people who were troublemakers or the herem, the ban, so to speak, for those people who really didn’t belong, didn’t want to belong. The trouble was, at that time, if you didn’t belong to a Jewish community, you had to belong to either a Muslim or a Christian community 'cause where else would you belong? Everybody was defined by their religion.

There’s no civil notion that came through 'roundabout, you know, after Enlightenment. So, this problem of identity and who was who and where was where, was one that the qahal community had to deal with. And therefore, it took upon itself these forms of discipline. But again, these forms of discipline were primarily in areas that were not theological, 'cause most people, most Jews were not great philosophers, were not great theologians. After all, you think of Tevia, the milkman in his cart. If you’d have stopped him somewhere in Poland and asked him, “Tell me, Tevia, do you believe in the perfect unity of God?” He would probably turn around and say, “What the heck are you talking about?” And these terms, theological terms, which came as a result of the influence of Greek philosophy, first on Christianity, then on Islam, or actually the other way 'round. But they came and tried to impose this idea that you have to believe certain things. So, that, the first example ever of formulating a system of you must believe otherwise you’re in trouble, finds its roots in Maimonides. Maimonides lived a thousand years ago, born in Spain, kicked out of Spain by one group of Muslims, accepted into Morocco by another group of Muslims. Moves across to Egypt where he lives happily.

He’s a doctor, and so, he serves the top aristocracy on medical matters. He is an amazing scholar and he’s also the manager, the head of the community. And Maimonides wrote two major works. The first work he wrote was called “Mishneh Torah.” It was the first coherent compilation of all Jewish laws written and oral and coming to a conclusion as to what the laws should be, because the whole of the Talmud argues and doesn’t always conclude. And besides in the hundreds of years after the Talmud, there were new situations and new laws. So, Maimonides in his law of the Torah, writes down absolutely everything from sacrifices, to purity, to agriculture, to ritual, to marriage, to divorce, all in this magnificent book written in the most beautiful Hebrew. At the same time he was a philosopher and he wrote philosophy in Arabic. And he wrote this amazing book, “Moreh Nevukhim,” “The Guide to the Perplexed.” I’ve forgotten what the Arabic original was. “The Guide to the Perplexed,” which is heavy duty Aristotelian philosophy and studies. People who study Aristotle often refer back to his interpretation of Aristotle. And he modified it with a little bit of Plato for theological reasons. And there is a fundamental difference between these two books. One of them written exclusively for the every man in the Jewish world, and the other reserved, as he says in an introduction, for philosophers, for people who like to think. For people who like to work things out for themselves.

So, for example, in “The Guide for the Perplexed” he will say as he does, you know, this whole idea of sacrifices, it was needed at the time because at the time, when Moses, everybody worshipped through sacrifices. If we wouldn’t have had worshipping with sacrifices, we wouldn’t have known what to do. Would be the equivalent of starting a religion later without prayer. Maybe in the next generation we’ll have a religion without prayer and with only with ESP or with artificial intelligence. But he said at that time they needed to have sacrifices. They were not intended to be there forever, but they were really a way of weaning people off the human sacrifice and other things that they did at that time. But when it comes to his book of Jewish law, he writes as though the temple will be rebuilt, every law of sacrifices will be kept, and we’ll have it. And that finds its place of course in our liturgy to a large extent. So, here we have clearly a difference in one man between what he’s saying for the masses and what he’s saying for the intellectuals.

And in fact, that’s one of the reasons why some Jews in northern Spain and southern France actually objected to his philosophy and burned his books and tried to ban him, poor guy. Amazingly, he survived all that. He survived all that and today, Maimonides is a crucial element in Haredi religious yeshivas because of his book of laws. “The Guide to the Perplexed,” you won’t find it there. And if anybody raises the question they’re told, “Don’t listen to it. Go somewhere else. That’s not for you.” I’m mentioning this because in “The Guide to the Perplexed” there is no such thing as this compulsory you must believe. It’s elsewhere, almost as an afterthought, that he mentions his 13 principles of faith. The 13 principles of faith in which it starts off by saying, “I believe,” “with complete faith in everything from God, God’s unity, god’s incorporeality, God’s benevolence, down to Moses and the Torah, and to the prophets and to life after death and to resurrection and to the Messiah,” all these things which are important ideas but have never been formulated in this simple, easy credo.

And why did he do it? Simply because Christians and Muslims are saying, you Jews, well, from you are, you don’t have a proper credo? That’s not a religion. A religion’s got to have a system of beliefs which are crucial. And if you don’t have 'em, you don’t belong. And Maimonides didn’t, in a sense, want that to be the case. And yet there was a need, particularly because both Christianity and Islam were putting so much pressure on the Jews at the time. You look at his letter to the Jews of Yemen, who were being subject to total oppression by the Muslims wanting them to convert and saying, “Help. We’re in trouble here. How do we answer? What are we going to say? How do we defend ourselves?” And in addition, he wrote this very famous letter on resurrection, on , on resurrection, in which he says, “People have said, I don’t believe in resurrection because I didn’t mention it at all in my 'Guide to the Perplexed.’ But just because I didn’t say it in my ‘Guide to the Perplexed,’ doesn’t mean to say I don’t believe it. But I can’t tell you anything about it. I don’t know how it happens, when it will happen, how it’ll work out, but I believe.” What kind of belief is that? Anybody can say I believe.

I believe in Dumbo, I believe in Mickey Mouse. So, clearly Maimonides, as the leader of community, was very conscious that he had to say things in order to keep the community coherent and the community socially together within the framework. And so, what he did is he gave this popular guide to what a person should believe. And that came under the general category of what we would call simple faith, a man, a woman of simple faith. You want to belong to a community, you want to know what the values of the community are, here’s a guideline to what the values are. But the process, the process of how you believe, of what belief means, of how you can even test whether somebody believes or not, whether statements I believe means anything or not, that he has left open and he’s left open because as a philosopher he knows you have to leave certain things open and up to the individual to try and work things out for yourself. And this now remains virtually the touchstone of who we call an epicurus. And epicurus is a Greek word. You will recognise it as being very similar to the epicurean. And the epicurus is not actually defined in the Mishnah. He’s mentioned in that list of people who have no portion in the world to come, but we don’t know what an epicurus was.

And as you know, there was a division in Greek philosophy between the stoics, and within the stoics, the stoics and the epicureans. Those who wanted to take things rationally. Those whose rationalism led them to accept the physical world and those who rationalism led them to reject the physical world. And then on the other hand, you had the hedonists and those who wanted to enjoy life because they said that’s all there is to life and nothing else matters. And these Greek debates, these Greek debates are what form the Talmudic reaction to heresy. So, in a sense all an epicurus means is you have different points of view. But nobody in the Talmud says that you actually have to reject them from the community because of their different points of view. You reject ‘em from the community simply because they refuse to conform to the social and religious norms of behaviour within that community. But since that time, there’s a very good book by an American rabbi and thinker called Mark Shapiro called “The Limits of Orthodoxy,” in which he shows, as others have before, when Maimonides produced his 13 principles, other great rabbis disagreed with him. Hasdai Crescas reduced them to six. Albo to three, and said, “You’ve got to draw a distinction between core beliefs and ideas that are important but don’t define who a Jew is.” And Albo’s three are very simple.

Albo’s three are simply, believe in God in some way, without defining it. Accept the Torah as an expression of our cultural tradition. And finally, belief in benevolence. There’s some possibility of interacting with God and God interacts with us. And this debate has gone on and yet, within the Orthodox world today, the 13 principles are regarded as absolutely fundamental. Now, about a hundred years ago, after the Enlightenment had begun to with pull so many Jews away from Judaism, so many Jews away from Judaism, they rejected the rigidity of the orthodoxy they were brought up with. They wanted to move in a different direction. The rabbis said, “Well look, do we put these guys in herem,” in ban, “'cause they won’t conform? We can’t force people to conform. And do we call them heretics and take some other measure against them? It doesn’t make sense.” And so, ironically what happened is that one of the greatest rabbis of the last century came up with an idea from the Talmud.

And the idea from the Talmud was that if you have a , a child that is captured, a Jewish child captured by non-Jews, brought up by non-Jews the whole of his life or her life and then comes back to the Jewish faith, do they have to atone for all the sins and all the things, all the mitzvah they didn’t do in all that time in all that past? And they said, “No.” Because that is a who had been brought up away from Judaism, and you can’t blame him, can’t take it out on him or her. And they said practically everybody in this day and age is like that. They are surrounded by so much secularism, so many different ideas, very few of them have had the experience of living a positive Jewish life, even if many in cases their parents were normally orthodox. You can’t accuse them of this. And therefore, ironically, all the energy of the ultra orthodox world has been directed inwardly into arguing that everybody else within the orthodox world’s a heretic. And so, many of the Hasidic groups call other groups heretics. Lubavitch that believes in outreach and has outreached to anybody no matter what they do or don’t, is a persona non grata in the extreme, right-wing Satmar Hasidic group, who only believe in those people who adhere to their very strict ways of dress, of codes of behaviour, and all these additional customs they add in and on to Jewish life. So, you have this debate within the Jewish world on who is a heretic.

And I’m happy to say, because the Jewish world is so divided in so many different ways, we now live in a world where we don’t have to belong to the qahal. We don’t have to belong to a community if we don’t want to. We can find other communities and other people to relate to, and therefore we’re in an era of individualism in a positive sense. Not the individualism that says I can do whatever I can and everything’s legitimate within Judaism. That’s relativism which has in the end absolutely no moral standards or practical standards. But we can make choices. How much to do, how little to do. And the fact is that every sector of Judaism, ultra-Orthodox, middle Orthodox and National Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Reform, whatever you want to call it, they are making their own decisions, and people face the consequences of that decisions. If you take a decision to abandon a Hasidic community, then that’s a decision you take. If you take a decision to follow the Reform community, knowing that their conversions will not be accepted by the Orthodox, that’s a decision you take and you’re entitled to take that decision. So, the term heresy has become almost meaningless.

It has simply become a way of saying, I don’t agree with you and I don’t want you in my community. Well, fair enough. You know, if I stuck to what I believe, I wouldn’t mind if somebody says, “Don’t come into my community.” Probably wouldn’t want to anyway. But that’s not entirely true because I find myself in a situation where some of the greatest and most intense and most wonderful of the Jewish communities that exist today, exists within the far right, where mystically I’m at ease and comfortable with them, but intellectually I’m in a totally different world, and I’m in a world of philosophy and rationalism. So, here I am in a situation that was once beautifully described by Professor Ernst Simon of the Hebrew University, in which he said, “The people I can pray with I can’t talk to and the people I can talk to I often can’t pray with.” And that is a dilemma that many of us have, but it’s not unique to Judaism. Those of you who are familiar with C.S. Lewis will know in his famous little book called “The Screwtape Letters,” in which junior devil writes to senior devil as to how to corrupt a good Christian. And junior devil writes to the senior devil and he says, “Look, my Christian’s going into church and he’s praying and he’s feeling something. What am I to do about this?” Senior devil says, “No problem, next time he’s kneeling in prayer, get him to think about the butcher to his right, who sold him a bad joint of meat, or the garage keeper to the left, who didn’t repair his car properly. As soon as you can get him to focus on other people, you’ll ruin the total effect.”

And that is unfortunately true, that very often you can love the faith as Hadrian VII said, in Baron Corvo’s famous play, “You can love the faith and sometimes hate the faithful.” And don’t we see this in Israel today? Don’t we see this everywhere? So, in the end I think the whole question of heresy is outdated and irrelevant and we do whatever we can for our own souls in our own way. And on that, I will end my presentation and open up for questions for as long as you want to ask.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Question number one. Here we are. Saul Kerbel. “Where do you think the Essenes of the Quran era in 200 BCE fitted in Jerusalem and Cairo? Was this a fantasy fiction, apocalyptic? Real code of war with so many elderly, 40, 50 in the front line?”

A: Well, you know, there’s a lot written about the Quran and about the Essenes and about the Theraputi and about who these people actually were. But we have a lot of their documents. Some of their documents coincide with the biblical tradition. Some of them take a new interpretation of the biblical tradition to the mainstream. The Pharisee, the Talmud interpret things through. They interpret it through pesha and through other ways. And we don’t know for certain how many they were. We know where some of them lived. We know that they believed in a teacher of righteousness, who would come and change the world and make the world better, which is probably where Christianity came from. And they believed in purification in the mikveh, in what we call baptism in the Christian tradition. We know lots of things about them, so, it’s not fiction, but we still have a lot more to find out. But you can see so much in Jerusalem. You’ll see the the Dome of the Rock where you will be able to find and everything actually is now online thanks to a Canadian donor who’s put the Dead Sea documents online and you can read them for yourselves.

Q: Esther Westelman. “I saw a documentary of a large Jewish community in Africa that claims to be part of the 10 lost tribes.”

A: Well, yes, there are lots of people claiming to be the 10 lost tribes. The Ethiopians claim they came from the 10 lost tribes, and others. And they do have certain elements of pre-rabbinic Judaism. That is to say, in the same way that early Christians were very similar to Jews of that time. They were no different to maybe let’s say Orthodox and Modern Orthodox, or Orthodox and Conservative. They were pretty close. And a lot of the evangelical movement in Africa came from these early Christians that were in a way rather like Christians today who call themselves Messianic Jews, and others who do practise elements of Judaism. Some of them only biblical, some of them more recent than that. And it could be that they come, we don’t know. All I can say as a general rule, if anybody wants to join us, you’re very welcome. So, if they want to, I’d make them welcome.

Q: “Answer, are lions are they not? The immigrants to Samaria adopted Israelite religion because they were being threatened by lions and surmised they needed to pray to the local God.”

A: That’s correct. They were called the converts of lions. And that means to say converted because they were frightened of the lions that were attacking them and that’s why they converted. The Samaritans themselves say, “No, that’s Jewish propaganda. That’s not true. We were there all the time. We were descended from the 10 tribes who were left behind. So, don’t try and rubbish us by claiming we are descended from converts.” And you know, that argument carries on to this very day.

Q: Next one is from Angela Landau. “At the time of Jesus, what was the position of the Sadducees and the Pharisees?”

A: Well, it’s very interesting. Nothing that Jesus says in the New Testament can have been really threatening to either of them. He wasn’t saying I don’t like the temple. He was criticising hypocrisy, which everybody was. The Pharisees were criticising hypocrisy. The Sadducees were criticising hypocrisy. The prophets attacked hypocrisy. The only example might be his argument with the money lenders around the temple. And the money lenders were simply there helping people coming up to Jerusalem from the diaspora with different coinage having the right coin to buy a sacrifice or to give charity or whatever it was. But that became an issue. But that wasn’t a reason for either arresting somebody and putting them in jail and certainly not for putting them to death. 'Cause that doesn’t count as a crime under Jewish law. And similarly, nothing he said could have offended the Pharisees to say, I’m the son of God, we’re all the sons of God. If he would’ve said, I am God, they would’ve thought he was mad, but they wouldn’t have accused him of being a heretic.

They would’ve just thought of him as being a lunatic maybe. And then the question is politically on what side was he? It’s true the Sadducees didn’t like rebels and if he was a rebel against Sadducee authority, they’d have been very unhappy. But half the Pharisees were rebels against authority. And so, I can’t think of any reason why either the Sadducees or the Pharisees would’ve had much of a problem with him. The Romans might have, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to ask the Romans what they found so offensive. I mean, anybody can say I’m the king of the Jews, that’s not offensive. And if you are leading a rebellion then you’ve got to have some people with you. But it seems that Jesus at the time hardly had anybody with him, so, he can’t have been a threat. So, the straight fact is, I don’t understand what the problem was.

Q: “Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, yes. Spiritually, the Sephardi Jews in Israel recognises the Karaites as Jews.”

A: Yes, there were some Sephardi rabbis who did indeed recognise the Karaites as Jews and others. Ovadia Yosef was one of the most liberal of the Sephardi rabbis. One of the greatest of Sephardi rabbis. The Sephardi rabbis in general were happy with Ethiopians and regarded them as Jews. Unfortunately, the Ashkenazi were much more uptight. And the reason why they were more uptight in my opinion, is because in the Ashkenazi world they never had a reform movement. And therefore in the Sephardi world, the rabbi had to be the rabbi of everybody. However strict they were, not strict they were, rich, poor, they were much more welcoming. Didn’t mean to say they weren’t strict on certain issues, but they were less aggressive towards anybody who was different.

And you know, involved in the Sephardi community as I am, I can attest at this moment there’s a battle going on because those Sephardim who are loyal to the tradition of Rabbi Josef and the Sephardi tradition are much more open-minded and tolerant than those on the Ashkenazi side. Unfortunately in Israel, and it’s happening here too, the Ashkenazi influence is beginning to turn more and more Sephardi to the right. And Rabbi Josef in one of his early books of responses said, “I don’t want my Sephardi boys to imitate the Ashkenazis.” Why wear a black hat? Nobody in the Sephardi world ever wore a black hat before, but now even his sons wear black hats. So, that’s another sign of change over the time.

Q: Fern Gitter. “Rabbi Larry Englander has really published a historical novel about life of Maimonides. It’s called "The Prince of Healers” available in Amazon. Very good reading.“

A: Yes, no, that’s very good. But if you want the best book on Maimonides there’s a book by Halbertal. Halbertal of the Hebrew University and New York University on Maimonides. It is by far the best serious academic book on Maimonides available nowadays, amongst the many.

Q: Now, Romaine. "Was there a relationship, the external non-Jewish political threat of Jewish existence and the Jewish sense of need for compulsory fundamentalism of law, which seems still to survive and define orthodoxy today. Are we scared into obedience?”

A: Are we scared into obedience? I think that might have been a case once upon a time that one needed to keep together for self protection. It’s no longer the case in my opinion. But I think that what is still the most powerful influence on the Orthodox world to this very day is the Holocaust, something I’m going to talk about with Trudy later on this week. And in that their mentality is to say the whole of the world stood by while we were being killed. Therefore, in our opinion, the whole of the world is morally corrupt. And therefore, anything that comes from that secular world is automatically a danger to us. And the only way we can survive is by being as different as possible. Now, that’s allied to another slightly less aggressive way of looking at it. And the other slightly lesser way of looking at it is this, as you can see in America, the less strict you are the more chance you have of assimilating and marrying out. And therefore the more strict you are, the more you are likely to stay within. There are no guarantees. There are plenty of examples of people brought up Orthodox becoming non and people brought up non becoming Orthodox. But that mentality I think informs this kind of defensive approach to Jewish life, this hiding behind the walls of the ghetto and keeping ourselves in and protecting ourselves.

Q: “What did Spinoza feel and say about Maimonides?”

A: He studied Maimonides. Spinoza studied Maimonides. He was a great fan of Maimonides and mentions him in his thinking. Of course, Maimonides didn’t know Spinoza. I wonder what he would have said about him. But there we are.

Sharon, thank you very much for thank you. And Pamela, thank you very much. And is this Syeg? Oh, thank you very much too, that’s really nice.

Q: Ruth B. “Who is the rabbi last century who thought belief was individual? Who mentioned a child brought up a Christian.”

A: I was referring to, I don’t think I would characterise him as saying he thought belief was individual, but who said you’ve got to be tolerant of people who are brought up without an intense Jewish experience. And that was a man called the man who delighted in life because of the book that he wrote was the undoubted leader of Eastern European Jewry in the beginning of the last century.

Thank you very much Judy, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Karen. “Illuminating many questions can certainly have a long time. I like Kabbalah-inspired groups like Chochmat Halev in Berkeley, but can’t handle lack of intellectual social awareness which can interact with the local community.” Yes, Karen, I’m with you on that one.

Janice Ficker, “Thank you for the lecture. I appreciate your enthusiasm.” Thank you very much.

Marion Jill Bergman, “Followers of Baal Shem Tov.” That’s an excellent thing. Had I had more time, I would’ve referred to, and maybe at a later lecture I will, to Hasidism because when the Baal Shem Tov started Hasidism at the end of the, Hasidism rose at the end of the 17th century, beginning of the 18th century, he was banned. There was a ban issued by the Vilna Gaon. And not only that, but what’s interesting is there’s a professor of sociology nowadays in New York called Dr. Berger, who believes that by any criterion, Lubavitch Hasidim are actually heretics, but they’re accepted because they abide by the law. They live a religious Jewish life. And in the end, because Hasidism was committed to Torah and to Talmud, the bans, there were two of them, fell away. “Money changers, not money lenders. Money changers, not money lenders.” You’re quite right, money changers, not money lenders. My mistake. What’s the difference, Trudy, am I all right to go on or do you want to draw an end to it?

• [Trudy] If you like. You can finish the questions if you’ve got the time.

• How many more do we have? Oh, we’ve got a lot. I’ll go on for another quarter of hour, if you don’t mind.

• [Trudy] No, go on for another 10 minutes.

• All right, another 10 minutes. Okey dokey. Romaine, lovely, thank you.

Q: Trevor Fenner. Hi Trevor. “Didn’t Maimonides allow and recognise marriages between Jews and Karaites?”

A: Yes, he did, but it depended which ones. It wasn’t that simple. But yes, he was inclined to be more lenient. After his time, you might know that some of the Karaites moved into Europe and actually there was a Karaite community in Lithuania. And the Karaite community in Lithuania actually petitioned Hitler not to recognise them as Jews 'cause they wanted to escape the camps. Can hardly blame them in a way, but there were Jews who took great offence at that and says, “Well, your own mouths have betrayed you,” which I think is unfair, but anyway. And so, there we have this Karahim in Lithuania and that covers Sylvia Sklar’s question too.

Q: “What’s the name of the book you just recommended on Maimonides?”

A: Let me just get it out from behind me if I can find it here. It’s National book winner, it’s called “Maimonides Life and Thought,” Moshe Halbertal, printed by Princeton University. And that’s the name of the book.

“Karaite.” Yes, that’s again, back to the fact there was this Lithuania community there. I don’t know if there are any left there or not. Maybe, but I don’t know.

Thank you, Adele Cohen. Robert Sachs, thank you very much. Ah, you’re so sweet. In the end, I don’t think words are going to be very helpful in life and most people change or develop as a result of experience, but you never know.

Thank you Joseph.

Q: Janet Y, “Address modern sects, conservatism and reconstructionists.”

A: Yes. I mean, I would like to, and I think, you know, this is something I must do on another lecture, which is deal with the Judaism in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the world we live in today. Maybe end up with also how we deal with the state of Israel on religious matters.

Barbara Rosenberg. You’re so sweet, thank you so much.

Eileen Green, thanks again. Eileen Green, oh, Barry Green as well. Hi. Hi, Barry, hi, Eileen, good to see you.

Q: “Is Rabbi Mark Shapiro related to Meir Shapiro?”

A: I don’t think so, but I don’t know. And besides Rabbi Meir Shapiro lived such a long time ago, I honestly don’t know relationship. I can tell you that Rabbi Mark Shapiro is one of the greatest, most wonderful people I know. And whatever he writes on the subject of Jewish religious thought is worthwhile reading.

“Thanks for a wonderful session.” Thank you very much. “Will you please answer my question?” Which question? I don’t know. You better come back at me on that one. Otherwise, if I don’t get to answer your question, email me jeremy@jeremyrosen.com and I’ll email you a reply.

“Always a pleasure, thank you.” “What do you think is,” oh, where have I gone? I think I’ve jumped all the way up not knowing how to go back down again. Let’s get back down here. Hillman. Oh, yes.

Q: “What’s the difference between credo and , since these are two statements mean exactly the same. You said they carry different ideas.”

A: Yes, is a Hebrew word, which means I am certain about something, I’m firm. The word in the Torah does not mean belief. It means to be convinced of something. It means to be strong from the word, which means I agree. You can agree with something. The idea of a credo is you have to adopt this specific terminology. So, I can say I believe in God, but as Stephen Pinker points out, there are so many different ways of believing in God. And so, the term belief is far, in the way it’s used in Hebrew, far broader and general than it is in the Christian way. Although I think that’s softening up a bit, so, maybe.

So, where are we? Any more, I’ve just got a few more. Jeffrey Margolis, “Wonderful lecture.” “Thanks for the lecture.” Okay, well, I think we’ll call it a day there if you like.

• I think so. Okay, Jeremy, as ever that was brilliant. And just to tell everyone that you are lecturing on Thursday and on Thursday Jeremy’s lecturing on theological responses to the Shoah. As ever, it’s a pleasure to listen to you. It’s a pleasure to work with you. Take care and see you very soon.

• Thanks, Trudy. Thank you very much.

• God bless. Bye.