Judaism, Now and Then

Please note that I do not pretend to be an expert on Judaism. I'm just a knowledgeable amateur, an armchair historian and cultural anthropologist, as it were. I'm not even Jewish. I'm nominally Episcopalian, but for an Episcopalian, I am probably as close to being Jewish as any Gentile is likely to get without actually converting. I considered it because I think that Judaism is a lot more forgiving and less rigid than Christianity, but the way that Israel has been behaving toward the Palestinians, I could not, in all good conscience, throw my hat in with Israel, so there goes my conversion. Anyway....

I read an article in Yahoo News today about Jewish men in prison, written by a Jewish man who had gone to prison, so I guess he would know. And he talked, in this article, about the Lubavitchers, the Bobovers, the Sephardim, the Falasha, the Satmars and the Sabras, and I am thinking, "What the hell are those???"

So I looked them up. A Lubavitcher is a follower of a certain Orthodox Hasidic sect. They are, according to the Online Dictionary, formerly Eastern European, optimistic and hospitable missionaries who stress the importance of studying the Torah and/or the Talmud. Sounds pretty reasonable to me. A Bobover is a follower of another peaceful Hasidic sect who follow the teachings of a particular dynasty of rabbis from another Eastern European village. (I really should have written down which villages these sects came from, but I didn't, and my computer connection has been sketchy.)  The Sephardim are Jews from Southern Europe. "Falasha" refers derogatorily to Ethiopian Jews. The Satmars follow the teachings of yet another strictly Orthodox Hasidic sect, from yet another rabbinic dynasty from yet another Eastern European village, and they tend to be very antagonistic toward other Jewish sects, anti-Zionists, and anti-assimilation.

While back in the day, two thousand years ago, there were the Sadducees (Tzaddikim), the Pharisees (Perushim), the Essenes (Hasidim), the Zealots (the Malkhut beit David), the followers of John the Baptist (Mandaeans), and the Nazarenes (Notzrim), today, there are other groups, as there are many streams that flow into the river that leads to God, and ever has it been thus. The Hasidim have changed considerably from the days when they were all New Age-y, environmentalist, and touchy-feely.  Now, they are a distinctly clannish part of the Orthodox movement, which is kind of like being an extremist version of Evangelistic Christianity or radical Islam. There is also the Conservative movement, the Reform movement, the Reconstructionist movement and the Humanistic Judaism movement. All of these movements reflect certain philosophies that try to answer the question of God's existence, how people can best get close to and serve God, how to further the cause of civilization, and how to make the world a better place.