BS"D

Judaism is a religion. And religion exists only when G-d conceals Himself. When the G-d of Israel was revealed in the days of the prophets, there was no Judaism. There was Israel, the Torah, and the Presence of G-d. It was a cord of three strands, and a cord of three strands is not easily broken. The cord remained whole for 754 years, and then it was torn to shreds by the sins of the people – sexual perversion, murder, and idol worship, and all three performed inside the Temple of Solomon by Jews with members of a Chaldean priestess cult. That is when G-d then said, “Enough is enough.”

First, in the year 722 B.C.E., the ten northern tribes were conquered and led into exile in Assyria, which today is northern Iraq. The Assyrians welcomed the exiled Israelites, who promptly assimilated into friendly surroundings and became the Ten Lost Tribes.

126 years later, eleven thousand of the elitist Jerusalemites – royalty from the House of David, prophets and sages, and Jewish craftsmen – were taken in exile to Babylon, which by that time had conquered and replaced Assyria.

Ten years after the elite of Jerusalem were gone, precisely 890 years after the Revelation of Sinai, the world of the Children of Israel was shattered, the broken pieces burnt and trampled to dust.

The Babylonian Army destroyed the Temple that Solomon had built. They carried away its priceless treasures, the Menorah and Showbread Table, and according to Rebbe Eliezer, the Ark of the Covenant. And they slaughtered every living soul in Jerusalem, with estimates upwards of a million slain and starved to death. The destruction and slaughter were horrific. Worse of all, G-d placed the Jews under a ban, cherem. He did this by concealing Himself. G-d abandoned His faithless wife, the daughter of Jerusalem. But in His mercy, He left her with a tattered remnant of the Torah, and a shattered remnant of the people, among whom were prophets, priests, and sages endowed with great wisdom. They were the ones who created Judaism out of what was left of the Torah.

The goal of Judaism was to re-connect the Jewish people to their G-d even though He had abandoned them. They saw this as the only means of Jewish survival. The idea was to create a kosher religion that would appeal to a people who lusted and ran to idol worship.  

The founders of Judaism were the Anshei Knesset Ha-Gedolah, the Men of the Great Assembly. This body of elders modeled itself after the seventy elders who received the spirit of Moses, as it says (Num. 11:25), “And the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took of the spirit that was upon him, and put it upon the seventy elders.”

But the nature of these two groups of men and their functions were entirely different. The seventy elders in the wilderness were prophets, not judges. The Men of the Great Assembly were judges, not prophets. At first, there were a few prophets among them, Zechariah, Haggai, Malachi. But they were sent to Jerusalem to supervise rebuilding the Temple.

The Men of the Great Assembly were a brotherhood with the collective power of wisdom and righteousness. But they were judges and the Torah forbids a judge to show mercy. Therefore, judges do not make good shepherds. And the one Judge who does show mercy, G-d Himself, was no longer around.

Curiously, the greatest prophet of the generation, Ezekiel, our only source of knowledge of the Third Temple, was excluded from that body of judges, and was later assassinated.

And the venerable leader of the generation, Daniel, according to Jewish tradition, was sent to his death by the hand of the wicked Haman.   

At the helm of the Men of the Great Assembly was the wise and righteous Mordecai, who knew all seventy languages of the world, and was among the most astute politicians who ever lived.

Second in command was Ezra, born into a priestly Jewish Babylonian family. File that piece of knowledge in a secure place. It is of great significance that Ezra was a Babylonian Jew who had never walked four cubits in Israel, because he was the one who established the tenets of Judaism. Why was this significant? Because Ezra had not received the transmission of the spirit of Moses, smicha emiti, true ordination, which is given only in the Land of Israel. The Babylonian Ezra did not receive the spirit of Moses. And he was the one who created Judaism, a blend of Torah mixed with superstition, error, deception, witchcraft and mind control.

The original intent of Judaism was to keep the Jewish people focused on survival. The problem was that in order to achieve survival, Judaism took away the free will of the individual.

Every observant Orthodox Jew from the age of three years enters a beautiful, holy, mystically formulated auto-hypnotic trance. The awesome divine code he faithfully follows is Babylonian Torah, a corruption of the Hebrew language, a corruption of the Hebrew script, and a corruption of the Hebrew people.

How did the Men of the Great Assembly corrupt the Hebrew people? By downgrading the teachers of all Israel, the Levites.

With the backing of the Persian army, Ezra punished the Levites for not accompanying him when he made aliyah to Jerusalem. He punished them by taking away their sustenance, maaser rishon, the first tithe of produce grown in the Land.

The Levites minister to G-d in the Holy Temple and are the teachers of Torah, as per the blessing of Moses (Deut. 33:10), “They shall teach Jacob Your judgments and Israel your Torah.” They subsist on the gifts from the Jewish people. With no maaser rishon, the Levites had to abandon their function as the teachers of Israel and go out to the fields to pick strawberries.

One might be shocked to learn that the Torah lists the Levites among the aniim, the poor of Israel (Deut. 26:12). This would never have happened if G-d had been around. It is not righteous to take away the livelihood of a poor person.

Babylonian Torah is lacking in mercy and wisdom, being almost entirely din, judgment. It is religion, the opposite of the Torat emet. In Judaism, the covenant is with the rabbis, not with G-d.

Now, let us look at Zionism. It is not a religion. It is a consciousness. Zionism is the consciousness of the redemption of Israel and all mankind. It is Geulah consciousness.  For 2500 years, Judaism failed to bring the Shechina back to the people. Zionism did it in less than two generations. Zionism is fifty times greater than Judaism.

The Sulam, Yehuda Leib HaLevi Ashlag, zy”a, an ardent Zionist, taught that to be worthy of the Final Redemption (Geulah), a person must not have a master over him. G-d must be his master.

It is important to know that rabbi does not mean teacher, it means master, as rav and eved, master and slave.

Judaism was born in exile and died in exile. In the year 1939 of the Common Era, G-d removed the spark of Moses from the High Rabbinic Council of Lithuania and placed it in the heart of the Zionist. Nine years later, the Jewish people had a homeland with internationally recognized sovereignty, with greater autonomous sovereignty than the Maccabees had.  

For the record, the Sulam was a Levite who managed to return from picking strawberries in the fields. He brought the Zohar and the Kabbalah of the Arizal to the world. In Galut, the Zionist and the Levite answer to the rabbis. In Geulah, the rabbis answer to the Zionist and the Levite.

May we all receive our share of the Torah on the sixth day of Sivan, in the Hebrew year 5777, when two loaves of leavened bread are brought as an offering to G-d in the Third Temple according to the prophecy of Ezekiel.

And even with the Temple only in our hearts, we observe the holiday of Shavuot, commemorating our hearing the Voice of G-d say the Ten Commandments. On this day, we rest from work and observe the Biblical command to be joyous to the ultimate that one can be joyous while still remaining in a body. Hag Sameyach, Happy Shavuot.

Next blogpost: Zion. What does it really mean?