Jeremy Rosen
Crazy Jewish Mystics: Mysticism Starts with a Mist and Ends in a Schism: Why Do We Take Them Seriously?

Jeremy Rosen - Crazy Jewish Mystics: Mysticism Starts with a Mist and Ends in a Schism - Why Do We Take Them Seriously?

- Hello everybody. Glad to be back with you. And I am going to be dealing with a very controversial subject today. The issue of mysticism, which is plays an important part in virtually every single religious system. And yet at the same time, it is in competition with the other side of religious life, so that religious life really divides into those who take a rational, logical approach and those who take a non-rational, and we’ll call it mystical approach. The word mysticism comes from the Greek, either meaning something that’s hidden or something that’s mysterious. And right from the very beginning of human culture, whether it’s through what we call early religious experience or if you like, human experience, there have been these different kind of humans who have emerged and have tried to bring a message to the masses. In theory, what the message is simply how to deal with this world, this world in which there are things we do know, things that we don’t know, there are mysteries. How are we going to deal with these mysteries? And the result, the solution is to divide the response into two categories. One which invites the individual to participate in this process. And the other which says, we will take care of this for you, you don’t have to bother about it. And these two different streams run right through, specifically today, the Jewish religion. Although as I said, you can find them everywhere. When you look at the Bible, you have the interesting distinction between what we would call the miraculous and the non-miraculous.

So on the one hand, the Bible is full of miracles, things that happened that are usually beyond our normal experience. And whether it’s Moses doing tricks with his stick or dividing the Red Sea or the different miracles that are described, on the one hand, they’re shown to be significant. And yet on the other hand, the Bible itself says, don’t pay any attention to miracles, ‘cause anybody can do it. And indeed, the ancient Hebrew term for what we call magic is a'chizat, inyan, to be able to grab hold of your eye and distract it, which is what all good magicians are able to do. And so there seems to be already there a very clear distinction between those people who need something magical, something mystical, and those people who don’t, who rely instead simply on, if you like, the constitution or moral codes and moral laws. And these two streams coexist as indeed they do today. You’ll hear people talk about emunah p'chuta, simple faith of the common man that doesn’t go into great theological disputes. And on the other hand, you have the idea that the intellectual connection with God through the mind and the brain is the way to go in a kind of irrational way. You have these interesting biblical characters, people like Elijah and Elisha that go up to heaven in a chariot of fire. And it’s interesting that fire is used in the Bible as a metaphor for what we would call mysterium, mystery.

And fire is going to run right through the Bible, whether it’s, I say Elijah going up to heaven and a chariot of fire, or whether it’s Isaiah and Ezekiel having these visions of God that are, if you like, multimedia phenomena that includes the animal, mineral, vegetable, birds, humans, all compelled into one kind of fiery image, which became the basis of what was known as merkabah, the chariot, the chariot of Elijah, the chariot of Ezekiel, and the chariot of Isaiah. This in a sense called on people to relate to religious matters, not in a logical way, but in a non-logical. And non-logical doesn’t mean anti logical, it doesn’t necessarily mean nonsense, it just means we are, oh, see what happened left. I got rid of him. That was Patel Bell getting in the way. Sorry for that. And so it really is talking about alternative ways of looking at things. And we look back 2000 years ago and we see that at the time of the destruction of the temple, you had the established Jewish religious rabbinic authorities in Jerusalem initially and then being driven out. And then you had the Dead Sea sects living a different kind of life, still in a sense claiming to be following the Constitution and Jewish law, but a more monastic and a more experienced version of Judaism, although it included all the structures of Jewish law that we’re familiar with today. And there were figures, figures in the Talmud that reflected this dichotomy. It was an accepted dichotomy.

One of the best example is a famous story of Honi Hame'aggel, a character who lived, roughly speaking, 100 years before the common era. And he was called Honi, the circle maker. Honi was based on a Greek name, so he obviously had the Greek influence. And the famous story in the Talmud is that Honi was this magical figure who whenever there was a crisis, could appeal to God and get his way. And the story essentially is there hadn’t been rain for a long time. And Honi goes into this, make a little circle in the in the sand and he says, I’m not moving here, God from this circle until you bring the rain. Well, the rain came down in little drips, and Honi turned back to God and he says, God, that’s not what I saw. I want serious rain. Rain that’s going to fill our wells and our fountains. And all of a sudden the rain comes pelting down in a massive thunderstorm. And again, Honi says, God, that’s not what I asked for. I want nice, sweet, calm, beneficial rain. And the rains came down normally. The head of the established community at the time was a man called Shimon ben Shetach. He happened to be the brother of Queen Heleni, the Maccabee queen at the time. And he turned to Honi and he says, listen, if it were not for you, I would excommunicate you, I’d ban you because you are treating God as a friend of yours. You are treating God as something you can bargain with. But what can I do? I would like to do that, but I see that actually God treats you like a spoiled child and gives you everything you want. So this little anecdote in the Talmud illustrates the difference between these two approaches. And yet they’re both in the Talmud. The other anecdote I’d like to bring briefly is that of the famous Simeon Ben Yohai, this famous representative of mysticism who had to hide from the Romans and go with his son into a cave for 12 years. And in this cave they buried themselves in the sand so that their clothes wouldn’t wear out.

And they dealt in mysterious cabalistic, mysterious experiences of God. And after the period of time when the emperor had gone, they were allowed to come out of the cave. They came out of the cave and they looked around at ordinary people, and these ordinary people were ploughing the fields and were doing what normal people were doing at that time, and looked at them and burnt them to a symbol. So there you have the symbol of fire coming in and a voice comes out from heaven and says, Simeon Ben Yohai, you’ve come out of your mystical trance in your trying to ruin my world. Go back into the cave until you can calm down. And the Talmud relates the distinction between Simeon Ben Yohai, whose dream was a perfect one of the most important thing in the world, was closest to God, nothing was more important than that. And how could you not be that close to God by wasting your time earning a living? And Rabbi Sh'may on the the other hand, who represented the mainstream, he said, listen, people have got to learn. People have got to make a living. Not everybody’s suited to this. So this distinction between the ideal, if you like, in a mystical sense, and then normal behaviour so to speak, is deeply embedded in our tradition, What we call the Kabbalah was not known as that beforehand. It was known more as the term mista, something hidden, not generally available for everybody. That turned into a new development of mysticism. It didn’t spring from nowhere. It wasn’t entirely a creation, it was based on much earlier traditions. And the founder was an interesting man called Isaac the Blind who lived in an area south of France, north of Spain where it is today, where really what became known as Kabbalah, suddenly flourished, interestingly, at the same time as within Christianity, Christian Church was battling against the Cathars in Languedoc in southern France because they were mystics too. And they were challenging the authority of the Pope and Christian hierarchy. And this was also at a similar time when the Sufis under Islam were beginning to challenge the established structure of Islam.

So this movement, almost interfaith international movement of mysticism began to flourish at that time. You’ll think of, for example, the famous Eloise and Abelad who shocked the church with their relationship in which Abelad represented, the mystical tradition within Christianity. And so did later people like Pico della Mirandola. This was something that spread everywhere, but the specific Jewish version of it, which flourished in northern Spain, initiated by Isaac the Blind. But some of the great minds were, for example, Abraham Aboulafia, who lived in Zaragoza, Zaragoza, depends how you pronounce it, in the 13th century. And he was the man who in a sense expanded Kabbalah into three quite separate areas that I’ve mentioned in the past. One of them is the philosophical or the intellectual, the attempt to explain the world in a non-rational way. So whereas the philosophers are talking about creation out of nothing and perfect unities, and the meaning of what God is, Abraham Aboulafia was talking about and developing a system which said, don’t look for rational explanations. But the thing that matters most is not the theory, it’s the practise. And what is the practise? The practise is you trying to relate to God. The term that developed out of him was a term called tikun, which is a correction which now has been hijacked to mean in general do goody ethical behaviour. But what Tikun meant was to repair the relationship with God. And the way to do that was through experience and through exercises. And he developed exercises which were very similar to yoga, the body in a particular position, particular poses for meditation. And at the same time the idea that language is sacred, and finding the right language to relate to God is the core of meditation and the core of a mystical tradition. Now, at this stage, that is still one of the options. And in northern Spain there were people who opposed this, major rabbis who thought this was too dangerous. But then there were also rise in northern Spain who opposed the rational side because they said that leads to philosophy and that leads to apostasy.

So there was this turmoil, this ferment that existed within Jewish life at that moment. And it’s something that has come in cycles, almost every 500 years or so, there’s a ferment and a change in the way we look at religion and religious experience. Of course, the major figure of that moment in time was the famous Moses de Leon who lived also in northern Spain, in Christian Spain as opposed to Muslim Spain at that time, in Guadalajara. And he is the man who revealed or who wrote depends who you ask, the Zohar, which became the Bible of mystical ideas. Now, the interesting feature of the development of Kabbalah in Europe and in North Africa, that at the same time it spawned, so to speak, a whole series of mystical frauds. Now, there’ve always been false prophets. The Bible had false prophets who’d said, I’m speaking in the name of God, and clearly they were not. They’ve always been false messiahs people who have said, I’m coming to rescue the Jewish people. And they didn’t. This was a new phenomenon that by and large was given the impetus by the expulsion from Spain where the most powerful, strong, cultural, dynamic Jewish community was suddenly decimated and scattered across, most of them gone North Africa and to the east, but some went Spanish and Portuguese to the Caribbean up into Europe and northern Europe. This altogether opened up a huge, big emotional problem because you had the Conversos who for a long time in many cases had been living both as Christians and as Jews, and therefore their Jewish knowledge was not as intense as those who were living all the time in a total Jewish atmosphere in North Africa, in Babylon. And when they were allowed to come back into Jewish life in dribs and drabs in the 16th and 17th century, many of them found it difficult to find their place within Judaism.

The most classical example of course will be Spinoza, but there were many others like him. There were whole series then of these false mystical messiahs who claim they had mystical experience of God and knowledge, and they were coming now to rescue the Jewish people just as Christianity had hoped to rescue the Jewish people from the Roman occupation, so now they were trying to free Judaism from this alienation of being kicked out and not knowing where to go as a result of the expulsion from Spain. And amongst 'em, there were two, to give an example, amongst the many who stick out, one of those man called David Rocobani, very weird guy, a dwarf of a man who came from the far east and claimed that he was king of the Jews and there was a massive army there waiting in order to rescue Christianity from Islam and rescue Judaism. But at the same time, he claimed he was going to bring about a unification between Christianity and Judaism and Islam, and he would be the saviour of the world. And he managed to get interviews with a range of people from Portugal, from the Habsburgs, from the Pope, from different places. And many kings were interested in alliances. And for a while, this man was able to persuade a lot of people. He was the real thing. And then into his life came another man called Solomon Molcho. Another weird character who also claimed that he was a saviour. He was an example of a converso who came back to Judaism and also claimed he was going to save everybody.

And both of these men were using incantations and magic and hocus pocus to influence and persuade these leaders of the world at the time that they were the genuine article. Because in Kabbalah, there was a third element, not just theoretical Kabbalah and practical Kabbalah, there was the element of called it hocus pocus Kabbalah, this kind of area which until modern science dominated the lives of most human beings who couldn’t afford doctors and therefore relied on incantations, who didn’t have an education in the Western sense, and therefore they relied on spells and magic, and astrology, and all these other, shall we say, tricks of the trade, which is what miracles were originally. And using these miracles, people such as these two began to have a profound influence. But Moho ended up being burnt at the stake by the Inquisition who decided he was a fraud, Ruveni ended up his life in jail because they thought he was a fraud. The next interesting character who was part of this mystical world was a man called Sabbatai Zevi, who lived in the 17th century, 1626 he was born on Tisha B'Av and he died in 1676. He was born in Turkey, born of a mixture of Ashkenazi Greek Jews who were Ashkenazi, were from Europe, the Greek Romaniote Jews were from Thessaloniki. And that part moved in to live, and born in Isme. And the man was a scholar. He was taught by the greatest rabbis of the Iraqi community, which at that stage had grown to be the most important community because the Ottoman Empire had welcomed the Jews who fled from Spain or from Portugal and then from Italy and from other places. And not only that, but encouraged them to settle in places like Safed where there was industry. Whereas in Jerusalem, there never was. Sabbatai Zevi managed to convince the people, first of all in Ismea, that he was the man who had the answer, the man with a secret, the man who was going to save the world. But because of his cabalistic involvement and he became a Cabalistic scholar, he found ideas in Kabbalah that many people find problematic.

An example, there is an idea in Kabbalah that first you have to descend before you can rise. You can’t know God if you’ve not tasted sin, if you are perfect. Getting to know God is a process and it involves you in these exercises and these meditations and these dances, and the excitement of reaching beyond the boring structure of your average synagogue. And he caused a split. There were those who supported him and loved him and those who hated him. And the more the split was, the more he challenged authority. And the more he started saying, look, you know, sort of, you don’t eat need to eat kosher, you don’t need to keep the same old festivals. We’ve got to be flexible about these things. But in the end, it’s my relationship with God that is going to redeem the world. Now we don’t know whether he was sincere or not. He moved, he was kicked out basically of Turkey and he moved out to Egypt. And in Egypt he managed to come up with a man called Celebi, who was the equivalent of a .com millionaire of our day. He was multi multimillionaire and he really was impressed by Celebi, and he funded the man and he encouraged him to go to visit a man living in Gaza, who was regarded at the time as the greatest mystic Nathan of Gaza, and the Sabbatai Zevi got on with Nathan. Nathan created a league together in which they set about writing and declaring that this was the Messiah and the Messianic era. And this gathered space everywhere around the world. In Hamburg, you had this Jewish housewife who wrote a famous diary that we have, in which she said, I am salting meat 'cause we are ready to go to Israel 'cause the Messiah is coming.

And not only that, but in London, in the city, they were taking bets that this was the Jewish Messiah and it was all going to happen. Sabbatai Zevi ended up going to the head of the Ottoman Empire to try to show that he was going to solve the problems of the world, bring peace to everybody, and help the Jews settle in the land of Israel. You might even call him a proto-Zionist, a kind of a kind of a Herzl figure. Well, the Ottoman authorities didn’t like him. They thought that he was disruptive and they wanted peace and calm. They didn’t want excitable politics. And after a period of stringing along, they gave him an ultimatum, either you convert to Islam or we kill you. And Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam. And he claimed for a while that although he converted to Islam, he was still a Jew and he was only interested in bringing Jews and Muslims together. And he was again, only interested in trying to do the best for everybody. And he was teaching his mystical ideas. But unfortunately, unfortunately, nobody took him seriously anymore. And he tried to play each group against the other and ended up in exile in in Montenegro on the Adriatic. And that was the end of his life. But you’d be surprised to know that there were whole people who carried on believing in him afterwards, they were called the Donme, and there’s still a few of them left alive today. They were part Muslim, part kind of Sabbatai Zevi, and carried on for hundreds of years in Turkey and couple elsewhere supporting Sabbatai Zevi. The most crazy of these guys was a guy who was born outside of the Ashkenazi world called Frank. And Frank came and appeared almost 100 years after Sabbatai Zevi and claimed that the only important thing was a relationship with God. And because God is a reflection of human beings, and the greatest pleasure a human being can have is sex. Therefore sex is the way to get through to gods what you can imagine, you know, your crusty old rabbi not going to be very happy with that. So he was soon excommunicated from the Jewish community because he was organising these orgies in the forests of Poland.

And then he converted to Catholicism and did the same thing in Catholicism and managed to get a lot of people to believe that he was a great mystic. He too came to a sad end. But all this then laid the groundwork for the emergence of Hasidism, and Hasidism was the mystical expression of kabbalah, and the Cabalistic founders Isaac Luria, the Arizal people of Sfat, and the mediaeval and post mediaeval world in which they tried keep the good in the mystical side, the excitement, the relationship, the joy. And in fact it was through Catholicism that singing and dancing became the accepted manifestation of Jewish religious worship. Until that time, they were still mourning the destruction of the temple. So this movement is a movement that has been going on for thousands of years. If you look up actually on the internet, a list of false messiahs, you’ll find hundreds of them. And coming from all parts of the Jewish world, from Yemen, from Iran, from Africa, from Europe, this is a feature. And as we know to this day, Habad make messianism the central, shall we say, foundation of their worldview even though all Hasidic institutions and all Hasidic movements are messianic in their own way, but it’s Chabad that has publicised this beyond the walls. And they would be a good example of what we would call controlled mysticism. I mean, maybe not so much on Purim when they drink more than they ought to and at very other times when they think that vodka is the root to God. I’m just being trivial saying that. But nevertheless, there is this idea that many people in our age, even you might say people like Shlomo Carlebach who believed that sort of we can experience different experiences, different kinds of substances, different kinds of drinks, different kinds of dancing and music, all to bring us closer to God.

And I’m sure the vast majority of them are entirely sincere and genuine in what they believe. So I’ve been trying to paint for you a picture of the richness of Jewish life, which includes mysticism. And although clearly mysticism has its faults, so does the other side, you can be too rational, you can be too cynical. And therefore in a sense, you might argue that the best solution is to be schizophrenic. By that what I mean to say is this. It doesn’t have to be either/or; you can be a rationalist who looks at things from a rational point of view and say this makes sense and this doesn’t make sense. You can be a mystic who looks at things from the point of view of saying, no, I particularly like a non-rational point of view. There are many things in our world that are non-rational. Love is not rational, emotions are not rational in one sense. And so we should be prepared to open up and relax and enjoy the mystical experience, the music, and the song, and focus on relating to God through our own minds and not just through the minds of other people or other rabbis or other experts. And it should be possible. Unfortunately at this moment, we live in a world of different ghettos and you have to belong to a ghetto. And if you belong to the ghetto, you have to adopt that ghetto’s dress, that ghetto’s way of worship, that ghetto’s language and traditions. And they all have values, but in the end one has to make up one’s mind where one belongs. Some people belong in a closed, secure community, and there are strong arguments in favour, particularly as the world gets crazier and crazier. Other people like to question and challenge, but questioning and challenging is difficult. It’s problematic. We often don’t have answers and we are left with questions.

And some people don’t like being left with questions. And so my point here is that within mysticism, there have been crazy lunatics, pretenders and nutcases. In their way, they’ve all contributed to Jewish life to some degree or another. And on the other hand, you’ve had the more controlled, the more if you like, disciplined in certain respects. Although to do a lot of the experiments and a lot of exercises in mysticism demands extreme self-control, enormous discipline. And not everybody is interested in that kind of discipline. And therefore most people like to go for a simple, easy anodyne comic book version of the real thing, which is very popular in the world we live in today where we live in a day of self-help and all kinds of weird religions and organisations vying for our attention. And in one way it’s good to be challenged and it’s good to be questioned. Indeed, one of the greatest rabbis of all time living 1,000 years ago, where of Saadia Gaon in Iraq said the most important thing in one’s life is to go on questioning, is to go on questioning and trying to find the answer, the truth. The trouble is, it can take a whole lifetime looking. And so while you are looking, at least have a stable structure and a stable framework for dealing with life day to day. And so as we look around the world, thus we see those of us in the world of Torah who are content to live in the world of the Torah, and to try to tell 'em that they’re wrong is as stupid as trying to tell Mao Zedong or Xi that they are wrong. They’re utterly convinced that they are right, and no amount of persuasion is going to change anybody. And in theory the answer is to try and find some sort of compromise, some sort of balance in between. But that is easier said than done.

One of the biggest challenges that exists is getting different groups of people to speak to each other. And it’s not that layer at the top of intelligence, sensitive, educated Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Christians who can get on with each other pretty well. The problem is when you go to seek down lower to the masses, it is the masses. They’re the ones that if you like, represent the biggest threat because they have the numbers, they have the voice, and they have the preparedness to go to extremes. And how we deal with that remains the problem. And in the same way you have the popularist, magic, astrological, astronomical, all the various different variations that people are presented with, that is the richness of our culture and of our world. And whether it’s Jewish or not Jewish, I believe that trying to understand and trying to embrace variety and different points of view is the only way to say sane and to cope with the pressures that we have. So at that point, I will end my presentation and start with the questions. I don’t know if the questions are up yet. I did ask for them to be, but clearly I can’t see if they are. So let me read them out.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Shelly says, you give rational answers to questions, and like questions, why don’t you do talks on the story of David, Bathsheba, Uriah, and the disintegration of King David’s family afterwards?

A: Shelly, that’s very nice of you. In fact, a few years ago I did do a series on that time and maybe it’s, maybe it’s time to revisit. I mean that was under the lockdown university and a time to revisit it. And I hope I will. I’m hoping to restart my Bible lectures, which although they’ll start in the five books of Moses, we’ll eventually get to King David and the rest of the royal family. Esther says mystery can be used like the Torah programme, create a reality, subconscious, I think you mean a way to prepare and guide us to understand what’s behind the message of a mitzvah.

Yes, I think that’s right. And the best way of explaining it is to say studying about love is not the same thing as experiencing love. And I believe that mysticism is, mysticism is the experience, potentially of God. The trouble is most people don’t go down that path. I remember when I was teaching in England, I used to have a long series, a very successful series on the Kabbalah, and people flocked to listen to about how the kabbala can solve the problems and can create an atmosphere of understanding and of sweetness, and of ability to cope with the pressures of life. But when I try to take it further to say, listen, that’s the easy entree, but you’ve really got to study this to understand how to take it further, how to get the experiences that you want. It just doesn’t happen. As my father used to say, learning how to play the piano overnight without losing any sleep. And unfortunately most people don’t want to go that far. And as soon as I moved off the happy clappy into seriously studying texts, people weren’t interested anymore. Judith, some 40 years ago, a professor of Imperial College produced a book based on research into flames and said the science of flames, that’s very interesting.

Rita asked Judith what the name of that book was, seems to be interested. And yes, I think flame is a wonderful metaphor, but remember, flame warms and it burns. There’s a danger as there is in water, in everything. There’s a question of, how do you find a balance, which is why my Monergies were so interested on the golden mean, on the balance of not being too far one way or the other, of trying to find a balance between them. That’s the challenge in everything actually in life.

Q: Romaine, rabbinically, how does the human need for control distort our ability to accept Torah thinking, linked, I think, to mysticism.

A: I think it’s an excellent question, Romaine. We humans have a tendency to think that we are right and very often in pursuit of right to disregard anything that might get in the way of it. It’s called single-mindedness. And very often single-mindedness has its benefits, but it has its faults. You think of all those passionate communists, you think about those passionate fascists, they’re so passionate, they’re so single-minded, but they are so dangerous. And the truth is that wherever you have a constitution like the American Constitution, Israel and England don’t have a constitution. Wherever you have a constitution, that constitution lends itself to interpretation and it lends itself to argument. After all, the whole of the Talmud is an argument about a constitution with different opinions, but the greatness of the Talmud is that it includes the different opinions. It doesn’t reject them, it registers them. It places them there for us to consider. And therefore there’s always the option when you have a core text, to go back to the text and see how it has evolved and see where it may have gone too far. So that’s if you like the beauty of the constitution, even though nothing is forever and nothing can exist without some tweaking of some sort.

Livia, since the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved, one can say that all religion is mysticism. Well, that’s a very good point. But there are people in the religions who believe they can prove. There are still, whether it’s in Christianity or in Judaism, or in any other religion, who believe they can prove both the existence of God and the veracity of every single word in their holy text coming from God. And if they have that point of view, it’s not a point of view that’s based on a rational argument. It’s based on an act of faith. And therefore mysticism does not encompass the rational side. And therefore you do need some term to describe the non-mystical variation of religions.

Lorna, your talk would be preferable if you could illustrate with visuals, portraits, and so on. Thank you, Lorna, that’s very helpful. I think maybe what I should do is have timelines in which you can see the time that I’m talking about. And I suppose I could also prepare for some visuals as well. I accept, that’s a very good suggestion. Thank you.

Q: Mavis, would you say Moses was a mystic receiving the Ten Commandments?

A: Well, I certainly think that Moses’ experience of God classifies as mysticism. It classifies as something that we cannot explain rationally how God communicates. We can analyse the brain and how the brain works. But yes, I would say any experience of God and Moses claim to experience God counts as mysticism. Thank you, Rita. Thank you, Nima.

Q: Myrna, you have fascinating history. Is there a book on the various characters in our history in one volume?

A: Well, probably there are. The easiest introduction would be “The History of the Jews” by Philip Johnson. Philip Johnson has a very good overall easy history of the Jews. You might also like to look, but it’s less concise, it’s less systematic, might be more entertaining. Simon Sharma’s “History of the Jews,” it’s more episodic. So there you’ve got two examples of books that would give you, I think a lot of what you want. Mira, thank you. Yes, the Bible C lessons are going to start up again. Please God, after the high holy Days.

Carla, thank you very much. Thank you, Carla. Looking forward, thank you Saul. They’re going to resuscitate the lectures then.

Yes, Judith, talking about false Messiahs, we have the example of two parties in Israel, the extreme right, who believe that by creating havoc, they’re hexon, the arrival of Messiah. Yes, and you know, I happen to think that’s very dangerous. And the Talmud itself says, don’t try to predict the coming of the Messiah. You can’t. We don’t know when it’s going to be and it’s dangerous to try to do it, but unfortunately you can’t stop people. You can’t stop people wanting to rebuild the temple by pulling down the mosque or wanting to bring back sacrifices on the Temple Mount. And I think this is a misuse of what is meant by the Messiah. I think the Messiah is essentially a hope that we can make the world better, but we’re not going to make the world better by being bullies. So as far as I’m concerned, anybody who’s a bully, ipso facto, doesn’t know what Messiah really should be about. Thank you, Yvonne.

Q: Shelly, don’t you mean Paul Johnson?

A: Oh, did I not say Paul Johnson? I meant Paul Johnson. I said Philip, I’m just getting old and so off the board. So thank you for correcting me. Could you repeat, she’s on Kabbalah over lockdown Zooms. I guess I could, if there’s a demand, so if people think there is a demand for it, I’d be happy to do it. So just let the authorities know and that’s where we end for today. Thank you very much everybody.