Brian Schwartzman: From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. Rabbi Jay Michelson: There can be no heresy without authority, right? There can just be diversity of practice. We're liberal Jewish people on this call, and there are some who would regard us as heretics, but we don't care because we don't submit to that authority. Brian Schwartzman: I'm your host, Brian Schwartzman, and co-hosting with me today is Rabbi Jacob Staub. Today the two of us will be talking to author, Rabbi Jay Michelson, who will be discussing his Evolve essay, The Allure of the Antinomian, or How Jacob Frank Seduced Me. Okay, we promise that title and all of this will make sense. So yes, Michelson, a polymath if there ever was one, has written a new book about the 18th century heretic, movement leader, Jacob Frank, whose life and teachings were so wild that they could only have been drawn from fact. This is the kind of stuff you can't make up. So, you haven't heard of Frank? Don't know much about 18th century Jewish life or the Frankest movement? Do not worry. Michelson will catch us up and he'll explain everything and why it matters today. Why Jacob Frank matters to progressive religious communities, to our broken politics, to gender relations. Strap in folks, this is going to be a great conversation. As I mentioned, I'm joined today by Rabbi Jacob Staub, who is executive producer of this show and director of the Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations Project. He's also my friend. So, Jacob, welcome. Welcome back to the booth. Jacob Staub: It's great to be here. It's always a pleasure to work with you, both being recorded and not. I'm glad to be here. Brian Schwartzman: Now, before we start the interview, just want to remind you that all of the essays discussed in the show are available to read for free at evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. The essays are not required reading for this show, but we recommend checking them out. Now, let's get to our guest. Jay Michelson is the author of the newly published book, The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth. I first became aware of him through his writings on culture and politics for the forward, and Jacob has known Jay for decades, so this is a friend reunion here. Jay has written on the Supreme Court, religion, sexuality, climate change, and Israel for New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast and other outlets. Get this, he's an ordained rabbi and holds a JD from Yale Law School, as well as a doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And he's currently a meditation teacher and podcast host for 10% Happier. He also teaches in the Chicago Theological Seminary, and there's more we could say. Know we're going to put a link to the new book in the show notes so you can find it and order a copy if this gets you interested. Jay Michelson, welcome to the podcast. So glad you're here. Rabbi Jay Michelson: Thank you. It's really nice to be here. I feel like, a little bit like I'm coming home. Brian Schwartzman: Awesome. Been looking forward to this conversation, and I guess, why not jump right into it? So, I'm going to go out on a limb and say most of our listeners probably aren't familiar with Jacob Frank, who he was. Those who are probably, like myself, read something about crazy orgies or other stuff like that somewhere. So, I think to get started, I know you just wrote a whole book about Jacob Frank, can you tell us, standing on one foot, as they say, who was he and what was this movement he created? Rabbi Jay Michelson: Absolutely. Yeah. I think I've gotten my history of the Sabbatean and Frankist heretical movement pitch down to two minutes, so I'll give you the expedited version. Probably more people who have heard of Jacob Frank have heard of Sabbatai Zvi, the failed Messiah in the 17th century, who at the peak of his popularity, had up to one third of European Jews believing that he was the Messiah. In 1666, Sabbatai Zvi converted under duress to Islam. He was given the choice to convert or die, and he chose to convert. That was the end of the mass movement of Sabbateanism and it became- Brian Schwartzman: One third? That's crazy by the way, when you think about it. Rabbi Jay Michelson: Yep. Yeah. And the Sabbateans took over several rabbinic courts in major Jewish centers across Europe, actually. There were even some true believers who started packing their bags and were ready to head to the land of Israel as part of the restoration of the dynasty. That all ended, but the movement actually didn't end, and it splintered into two underground movements. One in the Jewish world where a number of outwardly traditional Jews were secretly still believers in Sabbatai Zvi with complicated theological rationales. And also in the Muslim world, there were some, a small group that, like Sabbatai Zvi, converted outwardly to Islam, but maintained their heretical quasi Jewish messianic faith. These became known as the Dönme, which is a somewhat pejorative term, meaning traitors, turn coats. And that culture endured up until the middle of the 20th century, which is really quite remarkable when you think about it. That there were these people who presented as Muslims to the world, but secretly were practicing heretical Judaism. That is where the orgies come in, just once or twice a year. Well, not really orgies, but sexual ritual and Antinomian ritual was part of these movements because the abrogation of sexual morays and laws was seen as part of the Messianic age, which was now, in effect, was now at hand. Brian Schwartzman: Antinomian means opposed to law basically, right? Rabbi Jay Michelson: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. An Antinomian is a principled opposition to the law. So, for example, if you're not Jewish, for example, and you eat a cheeseburger, that's not Antinomian because there's no law or rule that has anything to do with cheeseburgers for you. If you are a religious Jew or a formerly religious Jew and you eat a cheeseburger because you don't care anymore, maybe that's Antinomian, maybe it's not. But if you do it because Davka, specifically to transgress the law, because that's what you think you should do, that's Antinomianism. And so, this movement did continue in the Jewish world for almost a hundred years. There were sort of outbursts of Sabbatean heresy and the rabbis knew about it, but they kind of tolerated it, kind of squashed it, until Jacob Frank, who was active first in the 1750s and 60s, and became incredibly notorious. He was one of many Sabbatean sectarian leaders, but his sect, back to the orgies, was allegedly discovered engaging in a quasi sexual ritual in which a young early teenage girl sort of embodied the materialization of the shekhinah, the divine feminine, the goddess and the Torah, and had her breasts exposed, and the men and women in the circle were dancing around and kissing her breasts like you might kiss the Torah. This may or may not have actually happened, but it's the most notorious episode in the Frankist movement, thanks to the sort of myth about it. And whether it happened or not, that was seen as obviously kind of a shocking moment, and it led to a total turnabout in the way that the rabbis related to the heretics and heretical movement. At the end of a long series of disputations and some amazing twists and turns of history, the rabbis turned over the entire sect to the Christian authorities to be prosecuted as heretics. And Frank's sect was given the same choice that Sabbatai Zvi was given, convert or die. And the entire sect converted en masse to Christianity in 1759. Estimates vary, probably about 3000 people, maybe as high as 10,000, probably not. Let's say 3000 people converting en masse, that had never before happened in Jewish history. Some folks listening might know the familiar Jewish rule that you can't study Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, until you're 40. This was put in place in response to the Frankist heresy, which was seen as this outburst of mystical messianic activity that had to be stomped down. A lot of what Frank and the Sabbateans were proposing in terms of mystical ecstasy and favoring what we would call spirituality over legalism, became part of Hasidism, which was another kind of outgrowth of the Sabbateans movement. But there, again, there was kind of a fork in the road. Frank's fortunes did not go so well. It was quickly discovered that his conversion was false. He was thrown in prison for 12 years, only released when the Russian army came conquering and conquered the area where Frank was. And then at the end of his life, for the last 20 years of his life, he lived a whole other existence, which is almost impossible to believe that it even happened, kind of presenting himself as Russian aristocracy, Baron Jacob von Frank. All of that was false. In secret, he was in fact the Sabbatean heretic continuing what he was doing and with the sort of, kind of an 18th century cult leader. What I found fascinating about Frank, and we can talk about this more in a moment, was that contrary to some depictions of him, he actually created a shockingly original theology. He told tales that are really unparalleled, with one exception, maybe Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, which is not a coincidence. We can get to that too in a moment. In Jewish history, these fantastical stories and strange beliefs, combined with a kind of modern critique of religious law, that traditional religious law doesn't work. God does not reward the righteous and punish the wicked, it just doesn't work that way. Stop holding yourself back with all of these needless rules that don't actually accomplish anything. Things which might seem very familiar to a non-Orthodox Jew today, but which were radical and shocking in the 18th century. And so that's why this very obscure figure is one that I chose to devote so many years of my life to studying. Jacob Staub: You used the word heretical a few times, and I'm interested in defining heresy, especially since we don't really have an orthodoxy in Judaism. A belief system that you can't, that there's a papacy or some other authority enforces what you're allowed to believe. So it's clear that once they convert to Christianity, they're apostates. But before that, what makes them heretics? Rabbi Jay Michelson: That's a great question. Yeah. I think there can be no heresy without authority, right? There can just be diversity of practice. So we're liberal Jewish people on this call, and there are some who would regard us as heretics because we don't keep the Shabbat properly or because we're queer or because we think that the Torah wasn't written by God and came about over hundreds of years. All of those are beliefs which seem to run contrary to traditionalist interpretations of Jewish doctrine or Jewish law. But we don't care because we don't submit to that authority. That wasn't true in 18th century Podolia, in 18th century Poland. It wasn't the case that you could just sort of do what you did. The rabbis still had enormous power at that time, and the community also had power to shun people. So probably the most famous heretic, maybe except for Jesus, is Spinoza. And so there was a herem written, a text of excommunication written against Spinoza. Interestingly, just a little side note, nothing to do with Frank. Based not on Spinoza's non-dualistic theology, but on his denial of the divinity of scripture. That was actually the grounds of his excommunication. So because there was an authority and a community to excommunicate and persecute, let's say Spinoza, he's a heretic. But in a way all of us are heretics today when we find our own, etymologically comes from the Greek term for kind of finding your own way. We all find our own ways and we all take bits of here and bits of this and bits of that. And so in a sense, all of us are heretics, but formally speaking, when there is a power structure that can enforce those norms, the heretic is someone whose ideas or actions deviate from the requirements of that power structure. Jacob Staub: Thank you. So you distinguished Frank from what happened subsequently in the modern period without the communal authority. I wonder what you think of whether there's a danger, as I think, when we focus on Sabbatai Zvi and Jacob Frank and regard them as extraordinary, when there were so many figures and movements throughout Jewish history that deviated from rabbinic authority. All the Jews and Baghdad in the eighth century who converted to Islam and called themselves Jewish Muslims. The 10,000 who follow it Abu Isa on Baghdad in the ninth century. The Karaites, or the people in Provence who during the Maimonidean controversy put each other in herem. And I could go on, but those are the ones we know about and they are, I'm sure, many, many more that we don't know about because rabbinic historiography tries to cover them up and eliminate them. So do you have any concern that focusing on Sabbatai Zvi and Frank enforces the claim that before that there was no such thing? Rabbi Jay Michelson: Yeah, that's a provocative question. Well, first I want to emphasize that I'm not putting, Jacob Frank was a bad guy. He was a very complicated figure. He was incredibly abusive to his followers. We also don't have the followers voices, so we don't know what level of consent there even was to participate, not just in the sexual rituals, but in Frank's leadership in general. It's a little ahistorical to call him a cult leader. In religious studies scholarship, we don't really use that word anymore anyway because it's really just a pejorative term. But some of the phenomenological features are there, the coercion, the megalomania, the self if not quite deification and certainly self-aggrandizement. It was strange kind of finishing this book during the Trump years actually, because there are really a lot of similarities. I'm the chosen one, I'm the only path, I'm the only one who can fix this, kind of thing. So he certainly, I want to just be ... There is a tendency, I think, and we've seen it a lot, to place onto the marginalized figure, all of the good stuff, right? Because marginalization is bad. A lot of us identify with those who are marginalized. But both Sabbatai Zvi and Jacob Frank were not paragons of perfect behavior or even good behavior. That doesn't mean he is not fascinating and I think he is fascinating and worthy of study, but I think your larger point is really a strong one. I think from the entry level point of view though, there's not even an awareness of these figures, let alone all of the other figures who you just mentioned. So while it's true that by emphasizing these kind of dramatic cases where history was made for a moment, let's remember we're talking about history, but Brian started us off by accurately noting that I'm sure no one's heard of Jacob Frank, right? The recorded texts of his oral teachings from 1784 are only now, in the last 10 years, have been published in Polish. There's not a really reliable English or Hebrew translation of them. We're already pretty far at the margins I think in terms of general understanding. But I take your point, we don't want to suggest that there's this one. I definitely felt like, I remember I guess, as late as high school and college, there were all the good Jews. There was the one bad guy, Korach in the Bible, but everybody else was good and orthodox and they did the right thing and they had four sets of dishes or whatever, and then came the enlightenment or whatever and then people went crazy. But everybody was pious before then. And obviously, that's not just a naive view, but also a destructive view. It's a false view of Jewish history that has resonance for the present. I still think I'm on the good team though, just by pointing out that there were these figures who were really quite original and daring and who were severely persecuted. Had the sect chosen not to convert, that would've been a mass execution. And there was, by the way, until the work of Paw Maciejko, the leading historian of the Frankest movement. My work on Frank is more looking at his philosophy, his religious teachings, but Pawel's incredible history called The Mixed Multitude, really sort of undid some of the misconceptions about that nature of that conversion, which was the original idea was this was voluntary and Frank depicts it as voluntary. He said, Yes, this is why we came to Edon, this is why we came to Christianity as if it was really his idea. But when you look at the actual sources, it was clear that this was under extreme duress. What they had originally hoped, the sect had originally hoped for, was that they would be granted some degree of autonomy from the rabbis. That this would just be seen as a different branch of Judaism and that the rabbis wouldn't have temporal or spiritual authority over them. And that initially, there's a long story we could really get lost in, but that originally succeeded. There was a horribly antisemitic bishop who took advantage of the movement and who used it as an opportunity to enact horrible antisemitic decrees against the Jewish community. He then drops dead seemingly miraculously and is replaced by someone more favorable to the rabbis, and that's when things went bad for the Frankist sect. So for a moment, it looked as though there might have been a little reconstructing Judaism campus in Poland where there would be an autonomous area for these Maaminim, these believers in a messiah who had died almost a hundred years prior. Brian Schwartzman: Okay, I'm going to be that guy who stands up in the audience and doesn't want to yield the microphone to ask a two part question, and it's a stretch linking them. Rabbi Jay Michelson: If there's one thing I could be grateful for from the pandemic, it was not coming in contact with that guy for two years. Brian Schwartzman: You got me here. Rabbi Jay Michelson: And here he is. Brian Schwartzman: But I'm at a distance at least. Rabbi Jay Michelson: On the mic. Brian Schwartzman: We're on Zoom. So you did mention our former president of the United States and note some similarities. I guess I was wondering, the first part, is there something about Frank and Frankism that tells us that this cult of personality is a constant throughout human history, human development. And the second part is, you mentioned reconstructing Judaism. The founder of our movement was excommunicated by the Orthodox Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. By all accounts he had his faults, but not somebody we would loop in the same category, generally an upstanding person. So did you see any similarities between Frank and the founder of our movement? Rabbi Jay Michelson: I'm going to do the second one first mostly because I forgot the first question. Brian Schwartzman: Oh, I'll remind you. I'm here. Rabbi Jay Michelson: Yeah, yeah, that's good. I did prepare for this possible question, coming on this particular podcast. Suffice to say, I haven't been asked it before. I think what is really similar, other than being marked as heretics, there are two similarities that jump out. One for me is this proto-modern critique. This sort of notion that a lot of what traditional religion offers is just not true. Either the myths aren't true or the promises aren't true, or the practices came along for historical reasons and maybe have outlived their usefulness, and maybe were useful at a particular time, but have now outlived their usefulness. But also, this is the second part, there's treasure in that wreck. My animating myth of Judaism is a poem by Adrienne Rich, a queer Jewish poet, called Diving into the Wreck. And she describes, she analogizes I would say, the enterprise of engaging with any tradition, patriarchal tradition or any other kind, as diving into a shipwreck and looking for the treasure that might be there. Knowing that, she has one line, "There's going to be a book in which our names do not appear." And that's really resonant for me. And I think, I feel like what I find where there is that parallel is that between, let's say Frank and Kaplan, is that there's a recognition of all of the wreck-ness or that this is a wreck, but not a willingness. The other cliche is not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but to recognize that there's also treasure that's there. There's something of value that can be rehabilitated there. What they saw as valuable was completely different. Frank was not really ... What's interesting about him too is he sort of half rationalist and half anti-rationalist. So on the one hand, his critique of Jewish law is fairly rationalistically based or oriented, I would say. But he also teaches a kind of wild, esoteric myth that in the end of his career was basically about the pursuit of immortality similar to alchemy and to western esotericism and free masonry, complete with magical beings taken from Kabalah and also from other sources with a whole parallel world to our own where there was a parallel sect to Frank's sect. Very wild and interesting, but certainly not rational myth making. That feels very different. But there is that part where there's the willingness or predicament of engaging with this Jewish thing while fully recognizing it's severe shortcomings. Your first part was on cult of personality. I now remembered it. Brian Schwartzman: Right. Right. Rabbi Jay Michelson: Well, just on that, I don't want to go more into Kaplan, but what's striking to me actually is that there's not as many of these cults of personality for this period of Jewish history until the Sabbatean movement. So let's take the sort of standard model of the Hasidic rabbi. A charismatic leader who has both temporal and spiritual authority over his flock. Who is not credentialed, didn't go to RRC, didn't get Semikhah, didn't finish Shas, didn't this and the other, but has his, since it was his at that time, his claim to authority through his charisma, through his kind of presence or his spiritual whatever it is. And that is sort of a common figure. I feel like we see that a lot in new religious movements. We see a lot of it in Jewish renewal. We see a lot. That's a common figure. We see it in charismatic, evangelical Christianity. What's surprising is how little of that there really is in normative Judaism. The way I understand the history, Sabbateism, it didn't just popularize Kabalah, it popularized this idea of spiritual experience that we now take for granted. And it's funny to watch scholars kind of search for words, Scholem, Gershom Scholem, the pioneering scholar of Kabalah, called it the pneumatic. From pneuma from breath. But that's just another way of saying spiritual. He wanted a word that didn't use the word spiritual, but that meant spiritual. This kind of ecstatic, charismatic form of religious consciousness or religious life, that is familiar I think to any one of us who goes to one of those, a good Friday night service where there's clapping and singing and maybe some nigunim. In a non-trivial way, that traces itself back directly to the Sabbatean heresy. Sometimes there are direct links, like the Tu Bishvat Seder, which is Sabbatean in origin. And sometimes they're secondary, Sabbateanism through Hasidism mediated by neo-Hasidism and into a progressive Judaism. But that figure of the kind of cult of personality, I think, is in a certain way timeless. But actually it's interesting to see it emerge in history at a particular time under particular conditions. Where if you were to look at the great figures who we know about from the previous thousand years of Jewish history, they're overwhelmingly not the kind of cult of personality charismatic figure. And yet after this time, it becomes a very familiar type. Brian Schwartzman: If you'd like to support these groundbreaking conversations of Evolve on the podcast, on the website, in our conversations, you can engage in philanthropy and support us. Every gift matters. There's a donate link in the show notes. And please take a moment to give us a five star rating or leave a review. Those things really help other people find out about the show. It has something to do with algorithms and things I don't understand, but it works. Thanks for listening and thanks for your support. So, you've hinted at it. Why does Jacob Frank, why does the idea of heresy matter to progressive Jews today? Rabbi Jay Michelson: So for me I think, in the last chapter of my book, I kind of try to make it clear that I'm doing phenomenological work and not historical work. So I don't think that Jacob Frank created the forms of Judaism that we are familiar with today, but he did anticipate a lot of them. So one example, just around rationalism and critique of law, that really came from the Haskalah, that came from the Jewish enlightenment. And there are points of contact in the Prague Frankist community for example, which Justice Brandeis was a descendant of. The same people were Frankists and then they were Maskilim, they were leaders in the Haskalah, in the Jewish Enlightenment. But in general, the Jewish enlightenment is a much larger phenomenon. Shalom wanted to say that Sabbateanism kind of paved the way for the enlightenment, but really, more contact with Christian culture in Europe paved the way for the enlightenment in Europe. So I wouldn't want to say that Frank created or caused the kind of critique of Jewish law that I alluded to earlier that we're familiar with, but he did anticipate it. This idea that there could be a spiritual but not religious. The idea that there could be a charismatic, transformed Messianism. Which is really I think where the real roots of a lot of this kind of consciousness come from. This was a Messianic movement without a messiah. The Messiah had converted and died, but there was still a kind of dehistoricized Messianic fervor that it's well known. The Baal Shem Tov and the founder and the early pioneers of Hasidism also transformed Messianism from the historical arena, that there would be a charismatic leader who were going to lead the Jews to independence in Palestine, to your personal experience. That you could experience the world to come through ecstatic, in Hasidic terms, sublimated erotic prayer, but in Sabbatean terms, not sublimated erotic ritual. So these are I think fascinating prefigurations of kinds of Jewish practice and Jewish consciousness that we might really be familiar with now. For me, it started out really primarily as an academic enterprise, but not in a dry sense of academic. I went to Hebrew University almost 20 years ago at this point, to write a dissertation on Hasidism. And I ended up, one of my books, a book called Everything is God, is based on that research. But it became frustrating. No matter what the theological apparatus was, the end point was going to be Torah and Mitzvahs. It was going to be traditional Judaism. And it felt like, it just was infuriating. It felt very predictable no matter how ... You could have any wild idea you want, but at the end of the day, I was going to validate this worldview. And with Frank it was the exact opposite. I discovered his texts in the stacks of the Hebrew University library, and I sort of, I didn't smuggle them out, I checked them out properly, but I felt like I was cheating on my Hasidic studies by reading this heretical stuff. And it was all bets were off. Wild tales, chivalric tales of knights rescuing princesses. And vulgar, and Frank boasting about his sexual conquests and the size of his penis and his superhuman strength. This is why I could sort of see the analogies to Trump. And he depicts himself, the real Trumpist analogy is that he depicts himself as so stupid that he's obviously chosen by God. "I Jacob Frank, I am just a prostok", he says, which is a Polish word, sort of means like idiot or fool. "I'm just a fool, an idiot. God chose me, not because I deserved it, but because I'm the chosen one." Which is exactly what evangelical supporters of Trump said, certainly in 2016 in particular. That clearly, this person does not deserve to be the candidate for president so that's the proof that God has ordained this to happen. So there are these multiple kids of prefigurations that I just found totally fascinating and absorbing. And I have heard back now ... Now it's such a unique pleasure writing a book like this because I've had two or three other careers over the last 20 years, but this has always been a little refuge. I go back to my writing room and I get to sit with Jacob Frank as a vacation from whatever else I'm doing, and now I'm able to share it. And so people have really written back that there is something, there's just something inspiring in the level of creativity. Again, not making him out to be a hero or somebody who he is not. But in the level of originality and startlingness of Frank's teachings. Jacob Staub: I want to talk about scurrilous accusations leveled that heretics. You mentioned the sexual, orgiastic accusations that we don't know whether they're true or not. And it made me think about whether the resistance to the inclusion of gay Jews as part of the normative Jewish community in the seventies and eighties and nineties, maybe the O1s, sometimes came with an explicit implication of orgies in the hallway or sexual licentiousness. I wonder whether you think that had anything to do with the resistance? Rabbi Jay Michelson: T\hose weren't the gay Shabbat services I went to. I'm going to the wrong shul, clearly. Yours has orgies in the hallways. So one of the most interesting theories on this side came from Ada Rapoport-Albert, who was on my dissertation committee. She just tragically passed away a couple of years ago. And she wrote a book called Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zvi, which I really recommend. It's a fantastic book. And one of the things she noted was that, while there was hardly any evidence of ... First, it's tricky to talk about this because on the one hand, I don't want to be sex negative. If people are doing sexual ritual, great. I think that's a great thing to do. On the other hand, we also don't want to sort let the heresiologists tell the narrative of these movements. So I don't want to condemn whatever ecstatic rituals were taking place. I also don't want to assume they were because the people persecuting the sex said that they were happening. Anyway, so that was kind of a long hedge. But one thing that Ada says in her book, there is not a lot of evidence, although there is some of these practices, but there is a lot of evidence of women having temporal power in the communities. There were women who were spiritual leaders, who were sect leaders. Who actually were running communities. There were also women participating in the prayer life of the community in a way that wouldn't be seen until the 20th century. So there's like all the jokes, well, why can't we let gay Jews into the synagogue? Well, maybe it'll lead to mixed dancing or something like that. This was her claim, really, is that a lot of these claims of licentiousness were actually generated by the visibility and power that women actually held in the movement. And that power was not mythical, that that was real power. And she goes into detail, she brings a lot of sources to defend this. It's not just some idea that she came up with, but it might be similar in a way. It's like, well, if women are having all this power, this must lead to mixed dancing. In other words, this must lead to licentious behavior that we want to condemn. There's the X-rated version about that, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to say that on the podcast, the mixed dancing joke. That somehow if we allow this to happen, this is going to lead to, all bets are off. We do really see that in contemporary politics. We saw it in the Satanic panic in the eighties and nineties. We saw it in the gay panic. Now it's the trans panic. That if we actually tell kids that transgender people exist, everybody's going to transition, or I don't know, experiment and start identifying as non-human or something like that. I'm not making that up. That's an actual right-wing conspiracy theory, that there are kids identifying as cats and schools have to tolerate that. There is this recurring notion of, all anarchy, all chaos is going to break loose if this segment of the population that's stigmatized for some sexual or gender reason is allowed to actually just exist. That certainly I think was true. I think Ada's right about that. And I think profoundly right in the Sabbatean movement about women. I should say that while Sabbatai Zvi had same sex relations with some of his male attendees and another sect leader followed in his footsteps, also had that in his history. Jacob Frank was voraciously heterosexual. And arguably, I wouldn't want to use the word homophobic, but he was certainly, he criticized Sabbatai Zvi for being effeminate. For being secretly a woman in the body of a man. Which now we might find really interesting to explore the gender dynamics about that. But Frank did not mean it as a compliment. I argue in the book that actually his heterosexuality is so voracious and kind of toxic masculine, that itself is kind of queer. It's this constructing, it's anticipating a little bit how the Zionists, the early Zionists, criticized diaspora Jews as weak and effeminate and wanted to create a new Jewish masculinity. That was Frank's program as well. He's very overt about it. That's not Jay Michelson's reading of Frank, that's Frank saying that he's going to create strong Jewish men who have the power of Christianity, the power of Edom. In fact, it sounds like I'm making this up too, but toward the end of his life, he was living on a kind of borrowed estate not far from present day Frankfurt, actually. And they conducted paramilitary organizations. His sect was marching back and forth doing military exercises on the grounds of his estate. For what purpose? It's not entirely clear. I think Pawel Maciejko accurately describes it as a kind of carnival. This kind of absurd charade that was taking place. But also it was connected to his idea that the Jews were going to have temporal power and these were going to be not even Jews. This was this new fusion of Judaism and Christianity. That again, maybe have wandered far from your question, but I think when we look at the way that gender is a site of dispute around what's kosher and what's treif, what's orthodox and what's heretical, that does seem to be a recurring theme across the millennia. Jacob Staub: Just as a follow up. Can you say a little bit more about the authority that women had in the Sabbatean and the Frankest movements? Rabbi Jay Michelson: Sure. Yeah. So again, Ada's book, I'll just repeat it because we're in audio. I don't know if there's show notes for the show, but it's Women and the Messianic Hersey of Sabbatai Zvi. So let's see, a couple of specific examples. Chaya Shore, the Shore family was very wealthy and basically kind of bank rolled a lot of the Frankist community. In the new novel, or newly translated novel, Olga Tokarczuk's book, The Books of Jacob, the family plays a significant role in the first, it's like an 800 page novel, in the first 300 pages. The family plays a significant role and many of Frank's, Frank sort of married into this family and there was a member of the family who was really going to be his successor, but instead decided to become a gun runner to the French Revolution. Every time I talk about Frank, it feels like I'm making stuff up, but I promise this is the historical record. Chaya Shore was known as, this was the period in the 18th century where women were presiding over salons and things like that and had a certain kind of power circumscribed in a certain way, but still power. She was kind of this grandam figure in the Sabbatean movement. And it was an open secret, everybody knew that this family was rife with heretics, but they were powerful and wealthy and she decided who was in and who was out and she organized, she moved people around. And in the novel, this part is, well, fiction from Tokarczuk, Frank is even kind of chosen by that family as like, you're the guy. They see this guy and he's a kind of crazy, charismatic figure and they're like, you're our man. You're going to be the leader because you've got this weird prophetic quality to you. That part is, we don't know that that's true, but that's a really interesting just sort of elaboration of how that took place. There's a scene which did apparently happen where somebody came to Chaya Shore from a different Sabbatean community and she took a piece of wax from the candle on her table and made him eat it to prove that he was a heretic because that candle wax is treif, it's made of beef tallow. And so that was a way of him proving ... I assume she let it cool off. That's not in the record. But she did that as a test of his faith. But another example is Eve Frank, Jacob Frank's daughter. So Jacob Frank never said that he was the Messiah. His Messiah is a figure called the Maiden, the Pana in Polish. And this figure is kind of an amalgam of the Virgin Mary and the Shekhinah and the principle of embodied sensuality that incarnates over time. And has incarnated in Frank's daughter, Eve. After Frank's death, Eve ran the sect. She took all the money in from the, she took a lot of money in from their followers and spent it all and ran the sect into the ground. But she was the successor to Jacob Frank. She was the Messiah incarnate. It's not quite true to say that Eve Frank was the Messiah, but she was the incarnation of the messianic impulse, which was the sensual impulse, the sexual impulse. Frank actually turns on its head the conventional notion of the foreign woman, which is this kind of awful trope in Jewish tradition that the temptress ... The foreign woman is the temptress who tempts all the pious men into sexual sin. For Frank, and he says this in his teachings, the foreign woman tempts men into sexual repression, into studying the Torah. And the real maiden, who is the fruit that lies behind the shell, the real maiden is sexual expression and liberation. So the Messianic era would be one in which there was liberation in which women ruled over men. But lest this sound too feminist, it's also pretty essentialistic, right? So it's like women are embodied, they are sensual, they are sexual. Men are too rational. This is actually a very misogynistic theme. This is why there should be a division of men and women. Frank just turns it on its head. So he keeps the misogynistic dualism of gender essentialism, but makes it good. That we should have the embodied and sensual and sexual piece rule over the intellectual. So symbolically, that was Eve Frank's role, but also temporally as well. There were some Sabbatean prophets who were female and who kind of would enter into trances and speak in tongues and things like that, and that probably came from the Muslim context of Sabbateanism. I talk about that a bit in the book. Eve Frank is not really one of those. There are some of her teachings recorded in the words of the Lord, the book of Jacob Frank. They're not as creative as Frank's own. She just wasn't that figure. That's not who she was. And yet she was still the leader of the sect for 25 years after Frank died. Brian Schwartzman: Since we actually are recording on election day, although folks won't hear this for a couple weeks, and Jay, you do cover politics for Rolling Stone, Daily Beast, other places. I guess I was wondering if there's a political analogy or ramifications today. First, with this idea that we make scurrilous accusations against those we don't agree with, maybe we put them beyond the pale, but also this idea of heresy. Like we said, there's not really a religious authority now for non-orthodox Jews, but I'm wondering if there's a political authority in a sense. There's a whole debate on whether or not there actually is a cancel culture, but there's this idea that, it's been said many times, that certainly on the left, if you say certain things, challenge certain things, you're out, you're off. You're the equivalent of excommunicated. And certainly we've seen on the right, certainly if you're a public official and you haven't denied the result of the 2020 election say, you're primaried and probably out of there. So I guess I'm wondering, is that an analogy worth making? Does what happened in 17th century Poland have any bearing on America and other democracies today and how we find our way forward? Rabbi Jay Michelson: Sure. The second part, now I'll do the second part second, the first part first. For me, I think the distinction between heresy and so-called cancel culture is the question of harm. So let's stipulate that there are excesses and people are sometimes shunned or canceled or whatever the word is that we want to use, and maybe they don't deserve it. So let's assume that that's true. But the ones who do deserve it, at least from the left point of view, are those who have caused harm. Who cause harm through their actions, whether it's sexual misconduct or something like that, or cause harm through hate speech or by denying scientific reality and the reality of lived experiences of millions of people in ways that don't just make people feel bad, I think that's the right-wing myth, but actually cause harm. So when someone says, when a well known Jewish publication that rhymes with Schmapplit, runs a transphobic piece of garbage on their front page that denies transgender identity, that's not to just make trans people feel bad. That's not the offense. The offense is that it causes profound harm. It's false. It's scientifically false according to every major medical organization in the country. And it leads directly to policies ... So right now, trans-affirming healthcare is illegal in Florida and partly illegal in Texas. So for me, the difference between, let's say, just heresy and what deserves to be canceled is that the latter is what causes actual harm, especially to vulnerable people. For me, the closest ... So I can't make my careers cohere at all. Jacob knew me when I was a professional LGBTQ activist. Now I'm a professional Buddhist meditation teacher and I also write for journalism and now I've written this book on Jacob Frank. So don't take any career advice from me. Where I do see a kind of overlap or a connection point actually is in the shadow side of Jacob Frank. I do think there is this kind of anger that's present in his work that's obviously present in our public culture. And at least from Frank's point of view, he didn't have a lot of access to power. So where he did have power was over his own sect, his immediate sect. And he was abusive to his own sect, but at least he didn't have the kind of power that the rabbis had, the power to excommunicate and the power to cause people to be executed by the Christian authorities. It's that functioning of power when yolked to anger that I do find quite terrifying. Those listening know the results of the election and we don't. But regardless of that moment in history, there's clearly a period, we're in the period now where the degree of someone's anger is seen as an indicator of their merit, particularly on the right I think, but also elsewhere as well. And that is sort of true in Frank and it's one of the most toxic, I think, aspects of him. And it's reading those ... When it's somebody marginal saying ... So he has a story where he goes into, and this is actually a story that has a theological teaching. He goes into a synagogue that's the kahal, I think it's Beit Eliyahu, the synagogue of Eliyahu, of Elijah the prophet. And he goes in and there's the Shamus, which translates into beetle, but I don't know if that means anything. It's the guy who takes care of the shul. And he says, "Where's Eliyahu? Where's Elijah?". The Shamus is like, "What are you talking about?" I mean, they have the chair. There's the customary chair where they do brit milah, circumcision, it's Elijah's chair. "What do you mean?" And Frank says, "Well, what do you mean what do I mean? It says right here that this is the congregation of the prophet Elijah." "Where the hell's the prophet Elijah?" So it's like, this is Frank's theology. Don't tell me that it's the congregation of Elijah if you don't have Elijah. But then Frank starts beating the guy up, and so it turns it from this story ... Now, do I think this actually happened? No. This is Frank's myth making, but he chooses to tell this myth. He chooses to tell this story where he beats him up and then the police come because they hear that there's a fight going on. And Frank explains, he said, "This guy said it. This is the congregation of Elijah, but Elijah's not even here." And the cops say, cops is maybe a bit of an acronism. The cops say, "Yeah, beat him up. Beat him up." And so that's what he does and that's how the story ends. So it's this story that combines, there's Frank in a nutshell, combines a pretty interesting, daring ... No one tells stories like that. There's not a lot of people who told stories like that in 1784. Fascinating story, but also incredibly troubling, right? Violent and then bringing in the apparatus of the state to endorse that violence. And so it's in the shadow side for me of Frank, where I see the resonances with our political moment. Jacob Staub: I don't know if there's a good answer to this. We can always cut it. But let me go ahead. Do you have anything in the works in terms of your scholarly writing or what's your next book? Rabbi Jay Michelson: Well, yeah, I'll turn that into a pitch. As soon as I can find some funding to write A Queer Judaism, which is my queer Jewish theology book that's already mostly written. I just have to assemble it from different places where I've done it. That would be great. I just need a grant to make that happen. So Jacob, you have your finger on untold millions. It might be a queer Judaism. It may actually be, I could also sneak preview that, I guess I shouldn't name them because we haven't signed the contract, but a very cool alternative Jewish press maybe publishing my fiction, which is subtitled 10 Heretical Tales. Jacob, you've read it, right? You're one of the 10 people on the planet who've actually read my short story. Jacob Staub: Yeah. Rabbi Jay Michelson: Yeah. So that may actually end up being the next book, depending on how the timing goes. I don't think, I mean, A Queer Judaism is a scholarly book, so that would be my second and probably last scholarly book of this type. And that book is largely about the expansive big umbrella of queer, so including hybridity and boundary crossing. So that's where it intersects with Frank. He attempted to cross boundaries in a way that again, all of us can do now, right? I mean, I'm a hybrid human being, not just three or four careers, but three or four religious paths. There are a lot of hybridities in my existence, and that's just the world in which I live and I think a lot of other people do too. I don't think I'm unique in that by any stretch. And yet, Frank was also that, right? Jewish-Christian, Jewish-Muslim, heretical-temporal, spiritual-temporal. But we live in a very different moment than he did, in which I certainly haven't experienced the persecution that he has. Brian Schwartzman: I did get a virtual copy of the book and I saw you wrote that the problem with Frank wasn't that he was too radical, it's that he wasn't radical enough. And I feel like I maybe heard that in a couple of your, a couple things you said today, but I was wondering if you could say more, because I mean, he sounds pretty radical in a lot of ways. Rabbi Jay Michelson: Yeah, I don't know that it would've been possible for him to be more radical and live at that time. But what I was referring to there was, the way that he anticipates so much of 20th and 21st century, not just Judaism, but spiritual but not religious consciousness and transcending boundary consciousness. There are these very radical aspects of him, and yet there are also parts which are very not radical. That he did operate as a kind of patriarch. That he was still playing on what Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi used to call the reality map, the old reality map of myth and immortality and so forth. As in most of the conversations I've had around the book, we've mostly focused on the critique and less on the weird western esotericists, alchemical myth that Frank spins. But the idea that liberation was still going to come in this kind of very temporal way. Literally, the sect was supposed to gain immortality and live forever and never die and be youthful forever and so forth. In text after text, Frank says, "Oh, when my help comes to me, I'm going to furnish my court in gala dress and we're going to have great food and we're going to have great performances." And there's something, first, a little bit pathetic, I think about some of the ways that he's articulating his dream of the future. It's not a 21st century or 20th century wisdom, let's say. He's got his feet in these multiple worlds. There's one foot in the world that I think is relatable for us. And another that's still, look, he is an 18th century figure that's still very much tied to that time and to that place and to a more limited conception of what the world to come could really look like. Literally, down to the drapes and the fruit jam. He goes into a lot of specific detail in the text. So I think, and I'm building there just to close this piece, building there on a talk that Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi gave a few years ago, comparing Sabbateanism to Jewish renewal and saying that, while there are certain points of contact and similarity, which we've talked about, ultimately we are maybe more radical because we take for granted that this old reality map is insufficient. And this is certainly true for Kaplan, right? This map of the world, the way it's handed in a particular traditional way, just isn't true. It's not binding, it had value in the past, but not now. And so in a way, we're more radical. Not less radical than the wild sexual antinomian ritual Sabbateans with their bizarre Messianic ideas. Because the world in which they wanted to inhabit but also transcend, we've already left behind. Brian Schwartzman: So thank you so much. That was a wonderful conversation. Led us into a world I think a lot of us are unfamiliar with, and yet there's familiarity and then unfamiliarity. So thank you and I certainly hope we get to talk to you again when the next book comes out. Rabbi Jay Michelson: Thanks, I'm around. Brian Schwartzman: Thanks so much for listening to our interview with Jay Michelson. What did you think of today's episode? We want to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations and that includes you. Send me your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you have. You can reach me at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. We'll be back next month with an all new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu, is Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host Brian Schwartzman, and we'll see you next time.