Nathan of Gaza

I told them, do me a favor, go to Gaza.

Over there in Gaza, there's a well-known... person which is a kabbalist he can help you with your demons as they say so he went to Gaza and he sought out this person this person was Nathan of Gaza we'll call him Nussen from Gaza this Nussen was a very young chap he was about 22 years old all very very young and but he was mathism all over he was known all over to be a a very deep kabbalist we will have to devote a whole entire episode to nusna zussi by himself because although he was the biggest movie he was the movie of shapsit he was a very big kabbalist he i mean there's this this freedom that he wrote you can actually see his freedom and although his freedom are not really accepted to be learned from in our circles, but there is a lot to talk about Nussan Hawa Zussi.

And we'll come back to him.

Basically, he was a very big Kabbalist, and he knew a lot.

If you can read it, it's a very interesting read, but a lot of boring parts to it.

But you can see what the big mokhumel was going on between the Rabunim, if Shab Tzitzit was the Mashiach or not.

So we've talked about Abiyak of Suspotas, and I want to go back now to talk about Nusa No Azusi, which is Nathan of Gaza.

But we'll do this in the next year, because this year is already quite long already.

Ignore those visuals.

I'm actually talking about a man who lived hundreds of years later, Shabtai Zvi, or Sabbatai Zevi, a self-proclaimed messiah who spearheaded a movement with the help of his prophet, Nathan of Gaza, during the reign of the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century.

Shabtai Zvi's movement, or Sabbateanism, is considered one of the most momentous heresies in the history of religion, a movement that managed to capture the attention of much of the Jewish world in a matter of months before his shocking conversion to Islam that splintered the movement apart.

In recent years, the importance of his movement, not only for Judaism, but Islam and Christianity as well, has started to come to light.

In fact, he was banished from Izmir in the 1650s for his messianic claims and erratic behavior.

Everything kicked into high gear in 1665.

That year, he traveled to Gaza to visit a prodigy of Kabbalah named Nathan Benjamin Ashkenazi, or simply Nathan of Gaza.

It's likely that it would have fizzled out without his help.

But according to David Berger, in a separate scholarly essay on Maimonides, that same passage was, in Berger's own words, the major stumbling block Sasportus faced, because Maimonides' criteria for a merely presumptive messiah are modest enough that a claimant's own followers could plausibly claim, spiritually understood, that he had already met them.

Then, in 1666, facing execution by the Ottoman sultan, Sabatai Zevi converted to Islam, his prophet, Nathan of Gaza, reached for two explanations to keep the movement alive.

The famous one is Kabbalistic, that his master's soul had deliberately descended into what Jewish mysticism calls the Keli Pa, the husks of evil, to redeem the holiness trapped there, apostasy included.

But Nathan also, in Berger's words, falls back upon the Maimonidean passage even after the apostasy of his master, appealing to Maimonides' own statement that the details of the messianic process cannot be known by anyone until they actually happen.

It is John 5, 43, playing out again.

They would not receive the one who came in his father's name.

With the signs the prophets promised, and a substantial number of them are prepared to receive another in his own name instead.

So did Chabad believe its Rebbe was the Messiah.