been thinking about sabbateans recently
Dec. 8th, 2018 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
78nanosievertscontext: In the 17th century, a rabbi named Shabbatai Zvi (spellings vary) showed up and became a messiah claimant, ending up with a contingent of followers (Sabbateans), before abruptly converting to Islam and making a lot of people very embarrassed.
until recently I was only vaguely familiar with him and the Sabbateans, but one of their main tenets was pretty wild: everything that is forbidden should actually be allowed. eating chelev, making feasts on fast days, all manner of sexual misconduct, etc. was considered good, and led to interesting scenarios such as wearing tefillin that were actually empty (see the middle of this article ).
I kind of want to look into this more-- partially to understand why anyone was following this guy, partially because it's fascinating (like watching a car crash, I guess?), and partially because it makes me feel a lot better about current divides in the jewish community. sure, people still levy charges of meshichism or non-observance at others, but at least nonsense like this seems to be a thing of the past.
until recently I was only vaguely familiar with him and the Sabbateans, but one of their main tenets was pretty wild: everything that is forbidden should actually be allowed. eating chelev, making feasts on fast days, all manner of sexual misconduct, etc. was considered good, and led to interesting scenarios such as wearing tefillin that were actually empty (see the middle of this article ).
I kind of want to look into this more-- partially to understand why anyone was following this guy, partially because it's fascinating (like watching a car crash, I guess?), and partially because it makes me feel a lot better about current divides in the jewish community. sure, people still levy charges of meshichism or non-observance at others, but at least nonsense like this seems to be a thing of the past.