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Storming Heaven - The Perils of Jewish Messianism
by Arthur Hertzberg
Reform Judaism Magazine - May, 1999
http://reformjudaismmag.net/599ah.html
The Messiah will come and the world will be redeemed. This vision of a glorious "end of days" is the most inspiring -- and the most dangerous -- of all Jewish doctrines.
Jews have been able to keep going because we refuse to believe that our destiny is an endless repetition of defeats and disasters, a human treadmill from which we can never exit. Central to Jewish belief is the conviction that Jews will be around to experience the miracles and wonders of the coming of the Messiah. It is this hope that has given us the courage to continue. But Jewish messianism also has a destructive side, a mutant strain, that arises in times of upheaval. It strikes whenever apocalyptic Jewish movements have acted to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The result, almost always, has been fierce factionalism and violence. We are in the throes of a resurgent false messianism today, and it is undermining the chance for peace in Israel and shattering Jewish solidarity throughout the diaspora. If not checked, this latest outbreak of messianic madness will take a terrible toll on the Jewish people.
The rise of militant messianism among the Jews has followed an uncanny pattern: about sixty years after each great Jewish calamity, a messianic movement arises. In 132 CE, some sixty years after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, the Jews in Palestine revolted and Rabbi Akiva declared the rebel commander Bar Kokhba to be the Messiah. This sixty-year interval between catastrophe and the appearance of messianic fervor was evident again after all professing Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. In the middle of the next century, the messianic pretender David Reuveni traveled through Europe claiming to be an emissary of the ten lost tribes of Israel. His contemporary, the kabbalist Isaac Luria, proposed that the way to bring the Messiah and force the end of days was to storm heaven through prayer and various mystical acts.
Today, sixty years after the Nazis occupied Poland, preparing the ground for a disaster to be compared only with the destruction of the First and Second Temples, we are again witnessing a militant messianic reaction. This latest resurgence began in June 1967, when Jews feared that Israel would be wiped out by its Arab enemies in a second Holocaust. When Israel emerged triumphant -- winning a victory without parallel since the walls of Jericho fell to Joshua -- some Jews interpreted this "miracle" as a sign that we are living in the days of the Messiah.
Earliest Messianic Stirrings
The earliest evidence of Jewish belief in messianic redemption can be traced in the Bible to the tumultuous period following the death of King Solomon and the subsequent destruction of the two successor kingdoms -- Israel in the north (722 BCE) and Judea in the south (586 BCE). While Judea was still independent, the Prophet Isaiah had seen the ecstatic vision of a "descendant of the house of Jesse" (Isaiah 11:1), an heir of the Jewish royal line, who would lead his people, and the world, toward a time of peace "when the lion would lie down with the lamb."
This longing intensified after the Babylonians razed the First Temple in Jerusalem and drove the Jews into exile. As Jerusalem was about to fall, the Prophet Jeremiah calmed the Jews, promising them that God would restore them to their land and glory. "Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel; they will yet buy houses and vineyards and fields in this land" (Jeremiah 32,15). Thus did the promise of miraculous redemption take root in the Jewish imagination.
These prophetic visions made no mention of a superhuman messiah. It was approximately four centuries later (in the Book of Enoch, an apocalyptic work of the Second Temple period) that the personification of this idea crystallized: he would be a king, a descendant of David, who would bring the "end of days." Despair and its corollary, messianic hope, were at the center of the fervor that gave rise to several messianic cult figures referred to in the Dead Sea Scrolls, among them the "Righteous King," the "Righteous Priest," and the "Teacher of Righteousness." This messianism reached its climax after the middle of the first century CE, when messiah-intoxicated Zealots launched an apocalyptic rebellion against imperial Rome. Certain that God would not let Jerusalem fall, they tried to bring about the final redemption by forcing the hand of God. But the Messiah did not come. Jerusalem fell, and the Second Temple was destroyed.
The last major messianic figure in ancient Israel was the military commander Bar Kokhba ("son of a star"), who led a final war against Rome in 132 CE. At first Bar Kokhba's forces prevailed. For three years he presided over an independent Jewish government in Israel, but in 135 CE his forces were crushed. The Romans slaughtered a half million Jews, destroyed many Judean towns, and forbade the teaching of Judaism. Rabbis who defied the decree were tortured and executed, among them Rabbi Akiva, the foremost scholar of his age, who had pronounced Bar Kokhba to be the Messiah. In the end, the fall of Bar Kokhba was both a religious and a military debacle, and it marked the end of any serious Jewish armed struggle for almost two thousand years.
The rabbis of succeeding generations turned to study and matters of the spirit to preserve the Jewish way of life. They insisted that the Messiah would come only when God decided to send him. Any act that would hasten that event, or even speculation about the date, was forbidden. This quietism was enjoined in the Talmud by Rabbi Zera, who forbade Jews from attempting to regain the Holy Land by ascending "in a wall" -- that is, in military formation -- to reconquer the land (Ketubot 111a). In the meantime, Jews were expected to put their faith in God by living in strict obedience to the commandments. Hopefully, Jewish piety and atonement would move Heaven to shorten the time of exile, which was viewed by the rabbis as punishment for Jewish factionalism in the Second Temple period. This view is reinforced in the Mussaf (the additional service that is added to the traditional liturgy on all the major festivals), in which the worshiper is assured that the redemption will come when God judges that our suffering and our repentance have expiated our wrongdoing.
Kabbalistic Messianism
With force of arms no longer an option, Jewish messianism in times of loss and sorrow took a mystical course. In the crushing aftermath of the expulsion from Spain, then the world's greatest Jewish diaspora community, Isaac Luria (1534®¢1572) redefined kabbalah, which until that time had been a means by which the individual Jew could strive to closeness with God. Luria endowed kabbalah with apocalyptic powers. The followers of Luria would "storm heaven," with their prayers and "ascents" toward God, to push the Creator to "bring the end."
The new kabbalah became an instrument to bring about national redemption of the Jews and tikkun olam, the repair of the world as a whole. According to Luria, when God created the world, some of the sparks of divine light became trapped by klippot -- shells or husks of matter -- which encased them and hid their light. It therefore became the task of humans to break open the husks and release the hidden sparks. Having accomplished this tikkun, the Jews would be redeemed from their exile and take the lead in "redeeming the world."
The Rise and Fall of Shabbetai Zvi
Luria's apocalyptic kabbalah did not bring the Messiah, but it succeeded in creating a climate of messianic expectation that would engulf much of the Jewish world less than a century later, when a kabbalist from Smyrna (Ismir) in the Ottoman Empire declared himself the Messiah. His career as "the anointed one" began when his prophet, Nathan of Gaza, broadcast a letter announcing that "our Messiah is come to life in the city of Ismir and his name is Shabbetai Zvi. Soon he will show forth his Kingdom to all and will take the royal crown from the Sultan and place it on his own head."
The two men had met in 1665 while Shabbetai was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Suffering from alternating bouts of ecstatic delusions and debilitating depressions, Shabbetai Zvi sought out a fellow kabbalist, Nathan of Gaza, a reputed healer. But instead of bringing peace to Shabbetai Zvi's troubled soul, Nathan convinced the man from Smyrna that he truly was the long-awaited redeemer of Israel. Declaring himself to be the "anointed of the God of Jacob," the redeemer of Israel, Shabbetai Zvi proclaimed June 18, 1666 as the date of the redemption, and promised that, on that date, he would end the long, bitter exile of the Jews by leading them back to the Promised Land. His solution followed the classic Jewish script of redemption: the Messiah (played by Shabbetai Zvi) would restore the Jews to God's favor, and they would be returned to Zion. At least half of the Jews of Europe and the Near East, from bankers and merchants to scholars and beggars, packed their bags and prepared for their imminent ascent to the Promised Land.
When June 18, 1666 arrived, the would-be messiah was locked in a Turkish prison and charged with treason. The sultan offered him a choice: death or conversion to Islam. Shabbetai Zvi chose to convert and took the name Aziz Mehmed Effendi. He was given the honorary title "Keeper of the Palace Gates" and granted a royal pension. Nathan of Gaza defended Shabbetai Zvi's decision, explaining that his master had descended through the "forty-nine gates of impurity" in order to recover the holy sparks trapped in the klippot, which were now concentrated in Islam. Only the Messiah Shabbetai Zvi, argued Nathan, could perform the formidable task of repairing the world and effect universal redemption. The belief that Shabbetai Zvi was the Messiah lasted underground among professing Jews, including eminent rabbis, for at least another century. But the miracles did not come. Life for the Jews remained unchanged, and so the dream shattered.
A hundred years after the death of Shabbetai Zvi, a new messianic pretender, Jacob Frank, appeared in Poland. He proclaimed that the "end of days" would be realized in a world in which the commandments of the Bible were no longer operative. This was not a new idea; in the Talmud, Rabbi Joseph declared that the commandments would be void at the time of the redemption (Niddah 61b). But Jacob Frank went further, making abolition of the "law" into a preamble to the redemption. He and his followers went so far as to engage in orgies and incest in order to begin the Messianic era, a time in which all that was forbidden would supposedly be permitted. Condemned by the leading rabbis of his day, Frank sought refuge in Catholicism. As in the case of the Shabbateans (the followers of Shabbetai Zvi), some of Frank's disciples continued to believe that he would reappear as the Messiah, but, of course, he did not. Once again, false messianism took its toll in lost hopes and despair.
The Rebbe as Messiah
Hasidism, the next major development in Jewish messianism, emerged from the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov (Elijah ben Shlomo) in the eighteenth century. One of his early disciples, Shneur Zalman, the first Lubavitcher rebbe, wrote in the Tanya (the only systematic work of early Hasidic thought) that Jewish acts of piety would remove the husks that keep the divine sparks imprisoned and thereby deliver the Messiah. It is within each individual's power to bring the redemption closer, he asserted, by the godliness of his or her life. To bring the Messiah, therefore, Jews must be made to observe more of the commandments willingly and with joyful hearts.
Shneur Zalman democratized the apocalyptic kabbalah of Isaac Luria by giving every Jew a necessary role to play in the messianic drama. The Messiah will not be hastened by the kabbalistic exercises and meditations of the few who are capable of such ascents toward the Infinite, the rebbe said; on the contrary, he will come when all Jews, from the most ignorant and alienated to the most learned and pious, observe God's commandments (Tanya, chapter 37). Today, the Lubavitcher Hasidim travel the world to induce Jewish individuals to partake in a ritual or promise to adopt one more religious practice as part of their daily lives. Often these emissaries step out of "Mitzvah Mobiles," vehicles with signs announcing that their occupants "want the Moshiach (Messiah) now."
Shneur Zalman had prophesied that the "Sabbath of the world" would come in the seventh millennium according to the traditional Hebrew calendar (he lived in the middle of the sixth). No wonder that his seventh-generation descendant, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who lived and died as the seventh millennium was approaching, was so intoxicated with the expectation that the Messiah was poised to appear. Schneerson, who died in 1994, had hoped that his generation could be made worthy of the coming of the Messiah, and his Hasidim keep asking: Is there a more worthy candidate for Messiah than our sainted rebbe? Many continue to believe that Schneerson, who selected no heir, will rise from the dead as the Redeemer of Israel. Until that day arrives, they will continue to scour the world for Jews who have strayed from their religion, asking men to don tefillin and women to light Shabbos candles. For the Lubavitcher Hasidim, this is the shortest path to messianic deliverance.
Kook Prepares for the Messiah
The major arena of militant messianism today is Israel, where, since 1967, an explosive convergence of the militant and mystical strains of messianism has forced Israeli political leaders to wear bullet-proof vests. To understand the development of this latest chapter in destructive messianism, we need to understand its origins in pre-state Palestine.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who served as the first chief rabbi of Palestine from 1921 to 1933, saw the Zionist enterprise as a sign that the Messiah was ready to come. For Kook, even the atheist kibbutzniks, by virtue of their resettling the biblical land of Israel, were unwitting instruments in the long-awaited denouement about to unfold. So certain was he that the end of days was at hand, the chief rabbi established a school in Jerusalem to train priests and other officials for service in the rebuilt Third Temple. The gentle Abraham Isaac Kook did not live to witness the end of days, but his messianism was passed down to his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda. Unlike his father, however, the militant Zvi Yehuda had no use for secularist ideologies or democratic principles. Israel's capture of Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria in six days convinced Zvi Yehuda that he had witnessed the miracle signaling the advent of the Messiah. To insure that not an inch of the Holy Land be returned to Arab rule, he inspired the establishment of the settlers movement, Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful), whose adherents believe that any Israeli government official who makes a move toward compromise on the territories is transgressing a divine commandment; in their view, the Messiah's coming requires Jewish possession of all biblical lands promised to our ancestors. Eighteen years later, in 1995, this very theology was invoked by Yigal Amir and his defenders as religious justification for the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Clear and Present Danger
To act out this messianic wish today in the occupied West Bank is to court unending war. But the messianic zealots of Gush Emunim are not concerned about Israeli-Arab relations. If the Messiah is coming soon, why negotiate? Why give up an inch of the Holy Land? These armed prophets and their ultranationalist supporters are staking the Jewish future on the same bet wagered by the Zealots who rose up against Rome -- that God would save them from the consequences of their messianic excesses. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now. The famous historian of the kabbalah and of Jewish messianism, Gershom Scholem, was right when he warned against calling the State of Israel "the first root of our redemption." The Jewish nation, he insisted, was created as a human solution to the problems of Jewish statelessness. To make of it an instrument of the messianic drama is the greatest of heresies. The foremost threat to the Jewish people today comes from those elements of the Jewish people who are convinced that the manifest destiny of Israel is bound up in the terrible vision of the battles of Gog and Magog -- a vision of the "end of days" in which Israel is laid waste and the Jewish people is largely destroyed. Contemplating this terrifying scenario, the talmudic sage Rabbi Ulla said: "If this is the precondition for the coming of the Messiah, I will refuse to greet him when he comes" (Sanhedrin 98b).
We dare not provoke unending war with the Arabs in the nuclear age. It is a disastrous delusion to presume that the Messiah will arrive before the bill for such actions will come due. We must prevent these new Shabbateans from sacrificing other people to their vision of a perfect world.
When will the true Messiah come? In Sanhedrin 97b it is written that any Jew who claims to have figured out the time of the "end of days" will be punished with a short life. Perhaps the most Jewish answer to this question was given by the twentieth-century Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who said: the Messiah who appears and announces himself is always a false Messiah. We do not know what guise the Messiah may take, and we cannot force him to arrive to suit our will or needs. As humans we have it within our control to effect only one contribution in helping to redeem the world: to work for more justice and more decency so that we humans will survive our capacity for self-destruction.
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg is Bronfman Visiting Professor of the Humanities at New York University and the author of nine books, including The Zionist Idea.
How to know when someone is trying to convert
you.
By Author Unknown
http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/cjso/untitled_folder/Watchout.html
If someone asks you any or all of these questions, it is wise to assume that they are trying to convert you.
1)"Now that there are no more sacrifices, how do you have your sins forgiven?" One of the first lines of a attack by some missionaries is to scare you into converting by trying to show that your sins can not me removed(HV) by yourself and you need J.c to save you from Hell.
2)"Do you read the Bible?" "Have you ever read the prophets?" These are set up questions, firstly for them to show you their "knowledge" of scripture and secondly to begin discussing messianic prophecy.
3)"Who do you think the prophets(esp. Isaiah) were talking about?" This is question will lead directly into quoting Tanach and showing how J.c(HV) fulfilled them.
4)"Do you have a personal relationship with G-d?" Christians believe that sins separate us from G-d and that there is no way for us to return accept through faith in J.c(HV)
5)"Do you believe in Yeshua Ha Mashiach?" This is the Hebrew version of Jesus Christ. This switch to make it more comfortable for Jews and to make it sound more authentic.
6)"Are you happy with your life?" Christians missionaries seek out those in trouble or who are at a week moment in order to catch you will your defenses down.
7)"Do you feel separated from G-d?" Christians believe that we are all separated from G-d and that only through faith in J.c can we come close.
8)"Have you found the L-rd"
A few hints on how to debate with a Missionary
1) The first trick the missionary will use is redirection. If a missionary senses that he will be refuted, he will immediately change the subject and switch to another verse.
Do not allow him to change the subject or to go to another verse. Hold your ground and finish explaining the verse in question. Only when the verse has been completely explained, should you continue in the debate.
2) The missionary will use speed, quickly quoting and making his point quickly. This is an attempt to show you his knowledge and to keep you from thinking. You don't have to race! Slow done the pace and take your time. The last thing a missionary wants is for you to think .
3) The Missionary will almost always start in the middle or end of a chapter.
Check the beginning of the chapter and verse which follow the one in question. Nine times out of ten it will be enough to refute him.
4) Missionaries will try to make connections between unrelated things using logic. Think!Think!Think! Then respond, for if you listen closely to what he has said you will see the trick and be able to us it against him.
5) Do try to debate someone, unless you are knowledgeable in the proper responses. This applies more to public debates than to personal. If you do debate and the missionaries brings a point that you can not answer tell him that you don't have all the answers and just because I can't answer does mean that there isn't an answer.
By: Rabbi Avi Shafran
http://homepage.mac.com/chirper/missionaries.html
"Jews for Jesus," perhaps the best known of an assortment of Christian missionary groups that target Jews for conversion efforts, has adopted a creative new advertising campaign. It has enlisted a Holocaust survivor to convince Jews to consider accepting the Christian messiah.
The group, possessed no doubt of deep convictions and apparently of deep pockets, has purchased space in a number of national media to feature a close-up of the kindly face of a Jewish woman of a certain age who spent part of the war years in a concentration camp. "Before you judge my belief, listen to my story," she implores the reader, and then proceeds to tell of her personal adoption of Christianity. The ad offers a video featuring footage of cattle-car trains and corpses with voices-over of Holocaust survivors who embraced Christianity. Verses from the Jewish Bible appear on the screen, and the viewer is told to say a prayer in acceptance of Jesus. The words "Mazel Tov" then flash on the screen.
The Jewish community's encounter with the Christian one has a long and largely inglorious history. From the harsh anti-Jewish rhetoric of early Church fathers (the apostle John claimed Jews are born of "their father the devil"; Chrysostom of Antioch, that they "murder their own offspring to worship the avenging devils") and Protestant leaders (like Martin Luther, who asserted that the devil "through the Jews his saints... mocks and curses God and man") down to the pogroms, blood libels and "Christian Identity"-genre internet hate-sites of more recent years, the Prince of Peace has all too often been invoked to provide Jewish people anything but peace.
Jews, as a noted basketball player/theologian recently reminded us, are stubborn folks, and one of our adamant stances is our refusal to divest ourselves of our religious heritage, including the conviction that the Messiah, at present writing, still tarries - a belief that, while it threatens to harm no one, has resulted over the centuries in untold hatred and violence on the part of countless Christians. The Holocaust itself can be traced in part to the religion-based Jew-hatred that was so endemic and deeply rooted in European lands.
To be sure, here on this side of Vatican II and the Lieberman candidacy, relations between Christians and Jews are much improved. Both the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches have straightforwardly rejected anti-Semitism, and that is deeply appreciated by all Jews. But the past cannot but continue to inform the present.
Jews have suffered beyond belief at Christian hands. And Judaism, in the end, remains a faith entirely apart from Christianity.
With its new ad campaign, Jews for Jesus cynically overlooks the former fact in an effort to deny the latter one. For Jewishly-conscious Jews, nothing could be more outrageous or insulting.
The contemporary Jewish religious world is famously fractious. There are deep ideological and theological differences among Jews today. But one belief that Orthodox, Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews share entirely in common is that the assertion that the Messiah has arrived in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is simply incompatible with Judaism.
Which is why the claim of missionary groups that one can be a good Jew by accepting the fundamental belief of Christianity - indeed that one can be a "fulfilled" one only by embracing Jesus as Messiah - is anathema to the broad Jewish community.
As members of a faith that eschews the proselytizing of others and counsels "outreach" only in the sense of helping our own brothers and sisters come closer to our religious heritage, most of us Jews are irked when others target our coreligionists for conversion efforts. And the irk turns to irritation, even outrage, when misleading tactics are employed, when "sharing the good news" becomes "suckering the uninformed," when groups like Jews for Jesus adopt, as they do, Jewish holidays, symbols and trappings like prayer shawls and phylacteries in an effort to convince Jews that being a good Jew can include, indeed requires, adopting Christianity.
And when they go further still in their attempts to lure Jews from their ancestral heritage, and seek to enlist the Holocaust - a horrific happening that fed heartily on the fecund medium of a Europe steeped in centuries of Christian anti-Semitism - their efforts creep, slowly but unmistakably, beyond the bounds of even outrage, and enter the realm of the grotesque.
With thanks to Am Echad Resources
By Merry M. Eisenstadt
Washington Jewish Week/Jewish World Review - September 1, 1999 / 20 Elul, 5759
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0999/cults1.asp
http://www.jewishworldreview.com
Though based at the University of Maryland, this story, and the issues it raises, have national implications.
-- LES AND NORA BAKER aren't Jewish, but say the story of how their daughter got sucked into a controversial cult operating on the University of Maryland College Park campus should resonate deeply with Jewish parents.
Jewish students purportedly swell the ranks of cults disproportionate to their representation in the overall population.
As students head back to school this fall, Les Baker believes "parents, be they Jewish parents or whatever, should address the subject of dangerous groups with their children with the same seriousness and importance that they would talk about sex, drugs, or alcohol."
A recent university department of resident life survey of 366 students found that 35 percent of students had been asked to join a group they thought to be a cult. Twenty-one percent of students knew a peer who had joined an organization they believed to be a cult.
The new edition of KAPLAN/Newsweek's How to Get into College guide includes a section on how "colleges have become prime recruiting grounds for the nation's more than 3,000 cults, which seem to promise security and support to vulnerable students, many away from home and family for the first time."
Les Baker says he and his wife "knew nothing about destructive groups" or that their daughter, "Ellen" (the couple has requested that their daughter's real name not be used), was involved in a controversial sect until "we woke up one Sunday morning, and we looked at The Washington Post, and there was an expose on the group with a picture. ... And so, we said, `Oh my God.' "
Explaining that the Bethesda couple had been uneasy about their daughter, "because we had seen some dramatic changes in her," Baker says, "We knew about this group that she was very interested in. And when she would come to visit, every 10 minutes that she would be at home, the phone would ring and there would be another group member talking with her. So we thought that was unusual, but we couldn't put our finger on it."
When the Bakers learned that their daughter was preparing to go to Iran as a missionary and risk martyrdom in the fundamentalist Islamic country, they arranged a non-coercive exit-counseling during a ski trip. Former group members came to their cabin to share their findings about the group's finances and the high lifestyle and earnings of the group's leader. "She was free to leave at any time," Baker says. "The intervention was certainly the most gut-wrenching event in our family life. She made the decision to leave the group." The counseling was successful and Ellen is today working and living in the local area.
Then the details of their daughter's recruitment unfolded. At follow-up counseling in support groups, the Bakers heard similar stories from other parents with children at Maryland state universities and learned that other complaints to university officials had gone ignored, Baker says. The couple became angry.
Ellen had been recruited by her college dormitory resident assistant, or adviser, when she sought advice on a personal problem during the fall of her sophomore year in 1994. Instead of referring their daughter to a university health system counselor or another bona fide campus employee, the RA brought in an outside group member and recruited Ellen into the Upside Down Club, a registered student group.
But Ellen had no idea at the time that Upside Down was a part of the International Churches of Christ, a manipulative, "destructive group," according to Mark Powers, executive director of Jews for Judaism, the Baltimore-based, anti-missionary and anti-cult organization.
The ICOC has been banned from recruiting on a number of private university campuses, according to the Christian Science Monitor. (The ICOC is not related to the mainstream Christian, United Church of Christ.)
Ellen's RA was still serving in her paraprofessional position despite complaints the previous year to both the assistant director of university resident life and the vice president of student affairs about the RA's proselytizing. Two articles had appeared in the Diamondback student newspaper, outlining cult recruitment tactics and complaints against the RA.
The RA, in fact, had been recruited by her own resident assistant.
While in the group for little more than a year, Ellen handed her entire $2,322 savings to the group and her grades plummeted, says Baker. She was submitting a daily and weekly schedule of virtually all of her activities to her RA — her "discipler"— for approval. She was encouraged to sleep less. And she began feeding group recruiters on her campus meal card. The RA had acted as a scribe during a protracted "sin confession" and passed the document on to group leaders. The RA also organized Ellen's door-to-door dorm recruiting, which is "unlawful," according to university policy.
The RA, in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, said it was natural for her to discuss her personal interests with fellow dorm residents and that she never unduly pressured students to join in events. A high-ranking church official also said the group deplores deception.
The Bakers have taken their complaints up the long chain of command at the University System of Maryland. Officials have repeatedly refused to investigate his complaints, says Baker, leafing through documents meticulously organized in an alphabetized, thick binder.
University officials note that students and staff have First-Amendment rights to affiliate and participate in any group and may not be denied positions because of any membership.
"The university has a very strongly worded policy relating to the separation of the resident adviser's personal and professional lives," says Warren E. Kelley, executive assistant to University of Maryland, College Park, vice president of student affairs.
Explaining why the university does not ban proselytizing outright, Kelley says, "Trying to tell a student that we are going to prohibit their ability to talk about a topic of personal interest to them just is not enforceable, or practical or desirable. The individual RA also has protections of free speech."
The university's orientation program also warns students about certain sect behaviors without naming specific groups. A brochure, Friends Are Everywhere, gives students information on "making judgments about groups" and is handed out at orientation and available at other locations on campus. Another brochure, Could this happen to you? A Guide to Making Safe Judgments About Groups, is distributed on campus through the campus ministries. RAs also receive training on dangerous groups.
"What the university has done with resident assistants now is excellent," agrees Les Baker. But, he says, when he and his wife complained, they were told that not only was the group membership "a good experience for our daughter, but that they were constitutionally constrained from doing ... anything regarding it."
One longtime College Park faculty member, mathematics professor Denny Gulick, is sympathetic with the Bakers' plight and has carried on his own campaign to sensitize university officials about cult recruitment. Long before Ellen was approached, Gulick and another student had notified leading campus administrators about cults' targeting of resident assistant jobs for recruiting access to students and about the specific RA in question.
Gulick became involved in cult-awareness efforts in the mid-1980s when a controversial sect, which he declines to name publicly, moved into his neighborhood within walking distance of the campus. Friends and acquaintances warned him that his three young children could be vulnerable.
He began researching cults. "One thing led to another and the more I new, the angrier I got. I met people who had lost family members to destructive groups. I could see the pathos. I could see the disorientation of ex-members. I could see the lies, the coercion, the deception by cult people," he says.
"So I went to the university and I said, `Oh my God, there are cults proselytizing on campus' — sort of like the cockroaches in your kitchen. And I thought they were going to say, `Get them out!' When in fact, they pretended that there was no such thing," he recalls. "I had proof that they were there and that they had been there. So, it didn't make any sense. So I said, somebody is covering up; there's a crisis here."
Over time, Gulick's approach has shifted. "Initially, I thought, `Get them out! Just get the lawyers and get them out.' And then I realized it's not so simple and that isn't the right kind of approach.
"The right kind of approach," continues Gulick, "is to educate people. If they want to join, so they should be able to join. If you tell them, here's a bridge, be careful, then you've done your job."
Gulick objects to "apologists" who use the euphemism "new religious movements" or "minority religions" to talk about destructive groups. Such groups oppose the term cult, saying it has a pejorative connotation. "The whole flock of those representing destructive groups say that a cult is a `new religious movement.' And that's as phony as the day is long," says Gulick.
"One assistant dean told me, `One man's cult is another person's Rotary Club.' Well, I'm not a Rotarian, but I took great umbrage at that. A destructive group to my way of thinking is a group that has a hidden agenda of controlling the minds and lives of its members," Gulick says.
Gulick believes that during any given semester on the College Park campus, there are between 50 to 100 students involved in destructive groups.
He now gives the College Park campus "a lot of credit for some new procedures," but says, "There still is some room for increased legitimate [cult-awareness] activity on our campus. Still, very few staff know anything about destructive groups. The mental health professionals, the counselors, the campus police force, the financial people who give student loans" need to be better informed.
Although the Bakers never sued College Park campus officials or the university system, they hired attorney David J. Bardin of the Arent Fox law firm in Washington, D.C. to prepare a "demand letter" that accused the university of misconduct and "gross negligence" for allowing the RA to stay in her paraprofessional, supervisory position despite the record of harassment complaints. The Bakers asked for about $7,000 compensation for Ellen's squandered savings and tuition during the time she was a group member. The couple also wanted their daughter to be given special consideration for admittance to a selective graduate school program.
Bardin also argued that labor laws and court precedent prohibiting supervisors and employees from soliciting in the workplace and creating a hostile work environment should apply in this case.
The university rejected the Bakers' requests. The university's attorney, Diane Krejsa, wrote that "presumably, in devoting her energies and time to the church rather than her studies, [Ellen] received certain benefits in the form of spiritual nourishment, a meaningful life philosophy and/or individual and communal companionship."
Krejsa also argued that the institution has no legal obligation to stand in loco parentis [in the place of a parent] or oversee a student's "choice of activities, including religion."
Baker is particularly disturbed by the "front" names groups use on campus: "The group's point is that they are young students and they don't want to be called [a formal organizational name]. They want to be called something a little more hip. But how can you keep up with names that change frequently? You can't."
Baker says students and parents must be made aware of "smooth" recruitment tactics. Groups use the ploy of world harmony-music concerts, peace-run marathons or volley ball games on the quad to lure in unsuspecting students. Fake dates are set up where good-looking students ask out less-attractive peers and heap on the flattery.
Students need to learn how to scrutinize whether praise and compliments seem inappropriately excessive, says Baker.
"It's only a matter of time before we have another Heaven's Gate or Jonestown. We have to recognize that this is an issue that we have to treat seriously. It's not a religious issue," Baker says. "It's an issue of how we as parents help educate our children to make good decisions and be sensitive about the groups they choose or choose not to join."
By Jan Groenveld
IT HURTS to discover you were deceived - that what you thought was the "one true religion," the "path to total fredom," or "truth" was in reality a cult.
IT HURTS when you learn that people you trusted implicitly - whom you were taught not to question - were "pulling the wool over your eyes" albeit unwittingly.
IT HURTS when you learn that those you were taught were your "enemies" were telling the truth after all -- but you had been told they were liars, deceivers, repressive, satanic etc and not to listen to them.
IT HURTS when you know your faith in God hasn't changed - only your trust in an organization - yet you are accused of apostasy, being a trouble maker. It hurts even more when it is your family and friends making these accusations.
IT HURTS to realize their love and acceptance was conditional on you remaining a member of good standing. This cuts so deeply you try and suppress it. All you want to do is forget - but how can you forget your family and friends?
IT HURTS to see the looks of hatred coming from the faces of those you love - to hear the deafening silence when you try and talk to them. It cuts deeply when you try and give your child a hug and they stand like a statue, pretending you aren't there. It stabs like a knife when you know your spouse looks upon you as demonised and teaches your children to hate you.
IT HURTS to know you must start all over again. You feel you have wasted so much time. You feel betrayed, disillusioned, suspicious of everyone including family, friends and other former members.
IT HURTS when you find yourself feeling guilty or ashamed of what you were - even about leaving them. You feel depressed, confused, lonely. You find it difficult to make decisions. You don't know what to do with yourself because you have so much time on your hands now - yet you still feel guilty for spending time on recreation.
IT HURTS when you feel as though you have lost touch with reality. You feel as though you are "floating" and wonder if you really are better off and long for the security you had in the organization and yet you know you cannot go back.
IT HURTS when you feel you are all alone - that no one seems to understand what you are feeling. It hurts when you realize your self confidence and self worth are almost non-existent.
IT HURTS when you have to front up to friends and family to hear their "I told you so" whether that statement is verbal or not. It makes you feel even more stupid than you already do - your confidence and self worth plummet even further.
IT HURTS when you realize you gave up everything for the cult - your education, career, finances, time and energy - and now have to seek employment or restart your education. How do you explain all those missing years?
IT HURTS because you know that even though you were deceived, you are responsible for being taken in. All that wasted time........ at least that is what it seems to you - wasted time.
THE PAIN OF GRIEF
Leaving a cult is like experiencing the death of a close relative or a broken relationship. The feeling is often described as like having been betrayed by someone with whom you were in love. You feel you were simply used.
There is a grieving process to pass through. Whereas most people understand that a person must grieve after a death etc, they find it difficult to understand the same applies in this situation. There is no instant cure for the grief, confusion and pain. Like all grieving periods, time is the healer. Some feel guilty, or wrong about this grief. They shouldn't -- It IS normal. It is NOT wrong to feel confused, uncertain, disillusioned, guilty, angry, untrusting - these are all part of the process. In time the negative feelings will be replaced with clear thinking, joy, peace, and trust.
YES - IT HURTS BUT THE HURTS WILL HEAL WITH TIME, PATIENCE & UNDERSTANDING
There is life after the cult
by Kathy Ward
Recovery from spiritual abuse and cultic thinking is like recovery from a lot of damaging things in life. It's hard to do it alone and there are many things that are helpful along the way.
Find someone to talk to who understands.
Work on not judging yourself - no one sets out to become a member of a cult, a person who others can guilt-manipulate. We join with these groups because we think that we're going to learn about God, find ways to serve God and our fellow man. we join for reasons that are not bad.
It's okay that you see good things about the cult. Just as it's hard to find people who are totally 100 percent malignant, few cults or abusive religious systems are 100 percent in the wrong. It's okay to acknowledge that there are wonderful people there or that something good was there. It's okay to sit down and figure out any good things that have come into your life from the cult.
Understand that your cult experience was a stage in your development as a spiritual person. You are going to grow from here.
Don't be afraid to seek counseling outside of the cult parameters. Religious, don't be afraid to go to a respectful nonReligious counselor. There are organizations who have lists of counselors (Religious and non) who are well-versed in recovery from restrictive, cultic religious systems.
Find and be around people who will support you, not condemn you, in exploring the world outside of the cult. If you want to examine other belief systems, philosophies, ways of thinking find supportive people to back you up.
Expect to have BIG doubts from time to time. Relapses. Thoughts about going back to the cult. We all do. It's normal. It gets better with time. Sometimes it takes a lot of time - but it does get better. It's lonely on the outside. When shunning or other forms of punitive behavior is manifested toward you it can be almost unbearable. We all go through it. This is why having someone to talk to who understands can help.
Expect to feel lost sometimes, like you're between two worlds.
"Without the unequivocal pronouncements that once guided them, former members of restrictive groups are apt to feel lost and confused. In any transition, there is usually a period of time between the collapse of old beliefs and their replacement by a new set of guiding principles. Kuhn's (1970) account of the disorientation that occurs when a scientific viewpoint once thought to be definitive fails to fit emergent facts can be applied to the similar confusion that comes with shifts in religious belief. Bridge's (1980) concept of an "empty" middle phase as a stage in any transition can also be helpful in normalizing the ex-believer's sense of confusion and inner emptiness as a natural part of the process of moving beyond outmoded views about self and the world."
Psychological Issues of Former Members of Restrictive Religious Groups by Jim Moyers, MA, MFCC
Realize that you may be depressed sometimes. There is a grieving process going on here. You've lost big chunks of your life and although you're going to be moving into some new, exciting, even exhilarating territory, you're going to also be grieving for some of the things you've left behind. Take care of yourself and don't forget about the things that help depression, like a healthy diet, enough and regular exercise (even a daily walk), getting out and doing things that you enjoy, indulge yourself, make opportunities to visit with friendly, supportive people. If it begins to feel like too much - tell someone you trust - get some help!
Remember that your feelings are just that - your feelings. They aren't evil or sinful. Because you feel something doesn't mean that you're going to act on it. Feelings are okay.
If there was a time before the cult when you had a creative interest or enjoyed reading, art, music, or any kind of hobby or pursuit that you left behind - take the time to enjoy it again. There's healing for the soul in these places.
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Last Updated: 03/30/2008
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
--Margaret Mead