The War Against Amalek – Part 3 – The awesome Midrash about the Jewish ‘pope’
So, no mitzvah is written in the Torah.
(Continuing the Rav’s shiur…. Read Part I and Part 2).
It’s just written “You shall not kindle fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day.”[1] And, “Let no man leave his place on the seventh day.”[2]
This is what is written, because the Pesikta [Rebbe] says that the non-Jews shouldn’t copy the Torah.
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When they founded America – in 1620 they founded America.
This is after the Spanish Armada, the Indians destroyed Virginia – all the settlements [of the Europeans] – they destroyed them.
It was in America.
So, they destroyed Virginia, and they already didn’t find anything.[3] They got to Cape Cod – they arrived in 1620, the governor was Bedford.
This is the street ‘Bedford’ in Williamsburg, and in every place: ‘Bedford Avenue’. He was the governor.
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He said here, we are going according to the Torah. There is no christianity, everything is a lie!
He said there is no ‘Xmas day’, he wasn’t born, and didn’t exist, and was never created. It’s all lies! He said there is no xmas day! On xmas day, we are working!
He said that Shabbat [i.e. Saturday] was a day of prayer, on Sunday we play football – not on Shabbat!
For five days we work, and that’s enough! On Shabbat, it’s just prayers, and sitting with the family, we sit in the churches and we sing. They put together special prayers.
This is how it was, between 1620 – 1670.
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Everyone want to go according to the Torah, there is nothing else.
All the non-Jews, everyone, they want to go according to the Torah. So, in the Torah no mitzvah is written down from the 613 mitzvoth, just a few mitzvoth are written down.
The rest is just hints… Because they were… The non-Jews wanted to copy the whole of the Torah from the Jews.
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There was Shimon HaPakoli, he changed this [the Sabbath day of the Christians], from Shabbat to Sunday.
Because, they were keeping Shabbat?! So the non-Jews said that they were also keeping Shabbat, what’s the difference?!
So, there was Shimon HaPekoli. He was a Tanna, and he become a Pope.
When he was the Pope, he moved it from Shabbat to Sunday. They called him Shimon HaPakoli. We need to read all the history about him.
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The following is a footnoted section, where the editors of the Shivivei Or went to ‘read all the history’ they could find about this character mentioned by the Rav, above.
IN THE TREASURY OF MIDRASHIM, IT’S FOUND THE LEGEND OF SHIMON KAIFA, ON PAGE 557 (TRANSLATION)
And it was after these things, an argument developed between the notzrim and the Jews, because when a notzri saw a Jew, he would kill him. And the suffering continued strongly for 30 years.
And the notzrim gathered in their thousands, and their tens of thousands, and they prevent Israel from aliyah le’regel (ascending to the Temple on the Festival Days). And it was a great suffering for Israel, like the day when the Golden Calf was made. And they didn’t know what to do.
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But, their [notzri] belief was strengthened, and 12 men went out with 12 malkiot and they prophesized in the camp their prophecy. And Israel erred after them.
And these were anshei shem (men of reknown), and they strengthened the belief in Yeshu, because they said that they were his messengers. And many of the Children of Israel failed, and went after them.
And the Sages saw this evil thing, and it was very evil in their eyes, and they said to one another oy lanu, woe to us, that we have sinned! That in in our days there is such an evil as this, in Israel! Which we and our forefathers have never heard of! And it caused them to suffer very much.
And they sat and they cried, and they lifted their eyes to the heavens, and they said, please Hashem, God of the heavens, give us advice, what to do! Because we don’t know what to do! And our eyes are turned to You, because innocent blood is being spilled within the nation of Israel on account of ‘oto ha-ish’ (that man).
For how long will this be a snare, that strengthens the hand of the notzrim over us?! And which kills so many of us while we remain few?! And because of our sin, this snare is made for the House of Israel, Your people. And You, for the sake of Your Name, give us some advice what to do, in order for us to be able to separate from this community of notzrim!
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And it was that when they finished speaking, one old man got up from amongst the Elders, and his name was Shimon Kaifa.
And he made use of a bat kol, and he said listen up, my brothers and my people! If my words are good in your eyes, I will separate these people out from amongst the community of the Children of Israel, and they will not have a portion nor an inheritance amongst Israel!
Only if you accept upon yourselves the sin.[1]
And they all answered him and said, we accept upon ourselves the sin, but what you said, you should do!
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So Shimon Kaifa went into the Sanctuary and he wrote the Great Name [of Hashem], and he tore his flesh.[2]
And he put the writing inside it [i.e. his torn flesh], and he went out of the Mikdash, and then he took out the parchment, and he learned the Name.
And he went to the main city of the notzrim, he cried out with a great cry, and he said, all those who believe in Yeshu, come to me, because I am his messenger!
And they said to him, give us a sign or a miracle! And he said to them, what sign do you want from me? And they said, the signs that Yeshu did in his lifetime, you also perform them for us!
And he said to them, bring me a leper! And they brought him one, and he put his hands on him and he was healed. And he said to them, bring a dead person to me! And they brought him before him, and he put his hands on him, and he lived and stood upon his feet.
And the people saw this, and they fell on the face, to the ground, and they said to him, you are truly a messenger of Yeshu, because he did these things in his lifetime!
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And Shimon Kaifa said to them, I am the messenger of Yeshu, and he commanded me to come to you, and he made me swear to him that you will do all the things that I will command you!
And they all answered and said, everything that you command, we will do!
And Shimon Kaifa said to them, no! Know that Yeshu hated Israel and their Torah, like Isaiah prophesized, ‘Your months and your festivals My soul despises’. And also know, that he doesn’t desire Israel, as Hoshea prophesized, that ‘you are not My nation’.
And even though he has the ability to uproot them from the world in one moment, in any event he doesn’t want their destruction. Rather, he wants to leave them in order that his hanging and stoning will be remembered from generation to generation.
And most of the great torment that he suffered, all the suffering, is in order to redeem you from gehinnom. And now, he is warning you and commanding you not to do any more evil to any Jew! And if a Jew says to a notzri ‘go with me for a parsa’ – then he should go two parsot with him!
And if a Jew hits him on the cheek, he should also turn his right cheek to him! So that they [i.e. the Jews] will get their reward in this world, and in the world to come they will be judged in gehinnom.
And if you will do this, you will merit to sit with him in his courtyard.
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And behold, he commands you to not celebrate the festival of Pesach!
Rather, to celebrate the day of his death! And instead of the festival of Shavuot, to celebrate 40 days from his stoning and his going up to the heavens afterwards!
And instead of the festival of Succot, celebrate the day of his birth! And the eighth day of his birth, celebrate the day on which he was circumcised!
And they all answered and said, everything you said, we will do! But only if you stay with us!
And he said, I will dwell amongst you, if you do for me as I was commanded to act, not to eat any food except for the bread of affliction and the water of oppression. And you need to build me a tower in the city, and I will stay there until the day of my death.
And they said, we will do as you say!
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And they built him a tower, and the tower was a residence for him.
And they gave him bread and water every day, as a rule, until the day of his death, and he remained amongst them.
And he served the God of our forefathers, Avraham, Yitzhak and Yaakov, and he wrote piyutim (religious poetry), lots of them. And he sent them to all the orders of Israel, in order that it would be a remembrance for him in each generation.
And every piyut that he made, he would send to his rabbis.
And Shimon dwelled in the tower for six years, and he died. And he commanded them to bury him in the tower, and they did this. Afterwards, they built for him a beautiful building, and this tower is still in Rome. And they call it ‘Peter’.
And this is the name of a stone that he sat on, until the day of his death.
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FOOTNOTES FROM THE MIDRASH:
[1] As we read on, we understand that he’s referring to the ‘sin’ that he himself is forced to undertake in order to do this.
[2] He did this in order to ‘remember’ the Name, which ordinarily a person would forget as soon as they left the Temple. But by writing the Name on a piece of parchment and hiding the parchment in the cut he made on his body, he could then use Hashem’s Great Name to perform miracles outside of the Temple. This is similar to how Chazal explain Yeshu himself was able to do his ‘miracles’ – but there is a machloket over whether Yeshu used Hashem’s Name to perform his black magic, or impure names that he learned during his sojourn in Egypt.
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FOOTNOTES FROM THE RAV’S COMMENTS, ABOVE THE MIDRASH:
[1] Shemot 35:3.
[2] Shemot 16:29.
[3] It’s not clear what the Rav is referring to here. The history of the founding of ‘America’ is perhaps not as straightforward as we are typically taught.
Interesting that just today, April 3rd, as you quoted about the suffering of Am Yisrael at the hands of the notzrim during the days of the Beth HaMikdash, I had the same experience – dealing with the followers of Mike Adams: they are so Yoshk’oriented, that’s all they can see and think of. They call us delusional, that we will end up in gehinnom, etc. etc, all the parsha…. It is going on among non-muslim goyim to this day. No wonder there is so much opposition to Am Yisrael winning this war against Amalek: they want Israel to be finished, to disappear! They literally say that: not all of them, but the real Israel/Torah/Hashem haters – whether in America or probably in other countries too. Any wonder Biden helped Iran with tons of money? Any wonder they are so offended and irate about Israel destroying the Iranian generals in Damascus? It all goes hand in hand. Typical Yoshke followers stuff.
They killed Torah followers then? Well they still do although by proxy.
Some of them, though, have a purer soul, and they understand the truth about the situation. But they are a small minority.
אין חדש תחת השמש
Nothing new under the sun!
The more you learn, the more you understand that ‘xtianity’ is literally satanic.
It’s going to be a very big birur.
And Mike Adams is a deep-state puppet, connected to the CIA-created ‘scientology’ brainwashing gig.
The deep state controls most of the so-called ‘alt media’ too. Anyone with a big following, even above say 10 – 20k followers – they are most likely controlled opposition.
Interesting, and thank you Rivka.
Do you have any sources about Mike being connected to scientology please?
Re: Yoshke though, I don’t hear that they are pro-satan: rather, they consider the Yoshke doctrine to be truth, REAL love, while on the other hand they call our ‘Abrahamic religion” violent, and written by violent people whom we emulate. They really believe that the Torah was written by violent men, not from a Divine source!…..While they believe that he is literally _ chas veshalom -“god” ,, so good, and that his/their love is the only true love. Yeah, right – while they are trying to destroy us.
So twisted! Yet the brainwashing has been successful. Sick stuff, and sick people. They love the man so much, pray to him and are convinced that their prayers are fulfilled by him, not by Hashem ( lo aleinu)…. yet they reject his origins – Am Yisrael and Torat Yisrael.
Can you understand that? I just don’t get it. Crazy nuts!
https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/06/23/scientology-and-mike-adams-it-all-become
This is a good starting point.
I’ve actually heard a portion of this story before! But the version I heard was saying that this trick with HaShem’s name and the miracles were done by Jes himself. How fascinating that someone volunteered to draw the Christian’s away from the Jewish people. So I guess he named himself Peter? The Catholics call him Peter and claim he was one of the original 12 disciples.
Yes, there’s a discussion in the Gemara about whether Yoshki used Hashem’s name for his ‘miracles’, or impure names he smuggled out from Egypt.
Either way, it was just black magic.
The timing on this is funny – though certainly no coincidence. I was having a small crisis of faith, and was about to begin a study project to go through the Torah from Beresheit through to Sinai, and rederive the ethical and normative laws from people’s interactions between themselves and between them and Hashem. The Rav doesn’t talk about non-Jews very often, and it can sometimes be hard to try to read between the lines about what non-Jews like myself should be doing. Truth be told, sometimes it feels like we’re not seen at all. So when he does talk about us, it really stands out. This really clarified some things for me.
My current understanding, that I knew before and that is being massively reinforced by this shiur (as well as a very long hitbodedeut session I was able to do on the weekend), is that we non-Jews are supposed to be following the Seven Noahide Laws. Not Orthodox Judaism Lite, not even Reform Judaism Lite, and chas v’shalom not xtianity! We are not supposed to be taking extra d’Rabbanan stringencies on ourselves, and we should definitely not be taking mitzvot on ourselves that are the unique heritage of the Jews – tzitzit, deep Torah study, and Shabbat specifically. We are not in any way to represent ourselves as, nor pretend to be Jewish, if we are not.
For myself, I’m in a weird place. I /might/ be matrilineally Jewish, but it would be via a great-great grandmother or great-great-great grandmother who married out in Ukraine in the late 1800s. My great-grandmother was [publicly, at least] a Ukrainian Catholic, and my grandmother and mother were never members of a Jewish community and never knew themselves to have Jewish ancestry,
And that, very clearly, makes me halakhically non-Jewish, ancestry notwithstanding. Moreover, I live in a city with a microscopic Orthodox community who lack the resources to support conversion, and I’m very happily married to a beautiful amazing woman with no trace whatsoever of Jewish background and zero interest in converting, whom Hashem virtually dropped into my lap just as I was first drawing close to Rav Arush’s teachings. Rav Arush would be the first – and every respectable Beis Din on the planet would be right next in line – to say that under no circumstances should a Noahide end an otherwise happy marriage to convert. I would be strongly inclined to convert, personally, but I’m clearly pinned right where Hashem wants me – non-Jewish. Maybe this is what it what it means to be kareis from a previous gilgul, who knows?
I don’t know what the transition to geulah looks like. I see so much sin – real, unambiguous, phyiscal sins between people like violence, theft and murder – that it feels like tznius and brit violations (if they’re applicable to non-Jews at all) are about a thousand items down on the list. I live in part of the US where the dominant religion is a form of xtianity that manages to be even more idolatrous [and deeply intertwined with a badly corrupt local government] than the baseline. It’s hard to see any kind of “knowledge of Hashem covering the world like the waters of the ocean” happening any time soon, and I can’t even imagine what that would look like.
But just as Jews within Breslov are called to be “simple Jews”, I’ll just try to keep being a “simple Noahide”.
See part 4, that I’m putting up now…. You’ll get more of a steer. And God sees you, Darin, all the time, and appreciates your sincerity to serve Him, however God decided to ‘design your life’ this time around.
I’ve heard of a similar version years ago, however, your write up is way more thorough and informative.
The version I heard noted that Shimon Kaifa (whom the Notzrim would call Simon Peter) went on this spiritual suicide mission to separate the Notzrim from the Yehudim by altering their religion enough to be visibly different from Judaism, so as to prevent Jews from falling prey to its heresy.
The condition for Shimon Kaifa to do this was that the elders of Yisrael would pray for him to be forgiven and remember his sacrifice for the Bnei Yisrael.
The story continued that the Nishmat piyut of Shabbat and Yom Tov was actually (one of the piyutim) composed by Shimon Kaifa.
Surprisingly even Wikipedia cites Shimon Kaifa as Nishmat’s possible author:
“Some scholars have suggested that the author’s name may have been Shimon (שמעון, Simon) from an acrostic within the prayer, and have considered this could be Shimon ben Shetach or perhaps the Apostle Peter, whose Hebrew name was Shimon, which would place the date of authorship in the first century C.E. The latter theory is often cited in conjunction with a rabbinic legend that Simon Peter was an agent of the Sanhedrin who infiltrated early Christianity in order to differentiate it from Judaism so that Jews would not be easily attracted to it.”
– https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishmat
It’s interesting. Once you know that all the ‘early church writings’ were not history at all, but a politicised version of events with a very definite aim of ‘winning converts to the cause’ – and then turning that into political control – it opens up the whole question of ‘which character was really based on what / who’.
Maybe, this is also an echo of the roman-xtian response to ‘Shimon Kaifa’ – there’s a lot of similarity with the midrash:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Magus