Jay Michaelson
Dr. Jay Michaelson is a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality and an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary. He holds a J.D. from Yale, a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination.
Previously, Jay has held positions at The Center for LGBTQ & Gender Studies in Religion, Boston University Law School, Harvard Divinity School, City College of New York, and Yale University. His book "The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth" won the 2023 National Jewish Book Award for scholarship.
Outside the academy, Jay is a journalist whose work appears on CNN, Rolling Stone and the Forward, among other publications. He is the author of ten books, including God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, which was an Amazon.com bestseller and Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Supervisors: Jacob Staub, Daniel Boyarin, and Rachel Elior
Previously, Jay has held positions at The Center for LGBTQ & Gender Studies in Religion, Boston University Law School, Harvard Divinity School, City College of New York, and Yale University. His book "The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth" won the 2023 National Jewish Book Award for scholarship.
Outside the academy, Jay is a journalist whose work appears on CNN, Rolling Stone and the Forward, among other publications. He is the author of ten books, including God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, which was an Amazon.com bestseller and Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Supervisors: Jacob Staub, Daniel Boyarin, and Rachel Elior
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The messianic heresies of Sabbetai Zevi (1626–1676) and Jacob Frank (1726–1791) were built on Kabbalistic foundations and understood sexual liberation as being an enactment of the messianic age. Having failed to bring about historical, collective redemption, these movements cultivated a new, messianic consciousness among their believers that shifted messianism from the public and historical to the private and experiential. Sexual antinomianism demarcated and enacted a new social, theological, and perhaps psychological reality: a messianic ecstasy which would later become domesticated under the vague rubric of “spirituality.” As such, though the available evidence suggests that sexual ritual was rare, it was imbued with theological and social meanings. And while these heretical sects eventually died out, the logic of eroticized messianic mysticism was eventually sublimated and domesticated by Hasidism into ecstatic prayer, to the point where, in the 21st century, seemingly innocuous practices like ecstatic chanting, swaying, and dance are common in contemporary synagogues. But the genealogy of this Jewish spirituality leads back to the eroticized messianism of Sabbateanism.
Note: A revised and expanded version of this paper was published in the Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism (2024). Please cite to that version in publications.
First, I explore Exodus’s presentation of solidarity and justice, arguing that the commandment to imaginatively “remember” one’s own oppression is both resonant with many queer experiences and a way to build solidarity with other oppressed groups, something that is particularly urgent at a time in which some LGBTQ people are safer and richer than ever, while others live in profound precarity. This exploration essentially affirms a core teaching of Exodus, applying it to queer experience and queer politics.
Next, I turn to some of the characters in Exodus who display queer or gender non-conforming characteristics, not to impute some ‘true’ sexual or gender identity to these characters, but to recognize them as potential spiritual ancestors, or perhaps dim gestures toward individuals and identities on the margins of mainstream Biblical commentary. Here, my commentary subverts the dominant assumptions about these Biblical texts, but retains a basic acceptance of the text itself; I read the texts from the margins, but still essentially maintain it.
Third, I address the way in which the legal material in Exodus anticipates the Deuteronomic imperative to “choose life” and see it as an avenue for queers to assert our humanity and the moral rightness of living our lives authentically and fully. Here, however, this general valorization of flourishing is at odds with the specific prohibitions and preoccupations of some Biblical passages. Indeed, for queers seeking to live out their lives in all their gendered and embodied complexities, such passages come, in the words of one Jewish heretic, “from the side of death,” Thus the text turns against itself.
Finally, and with a more radical querying of these problematic Biblical texts, I take up Judith Plaskow’s invitation to “stand again at Sinai” – issued, in her original presentation, to feminists revisioning the founding revelation of Jewish (or perhaps ‘Judeo-Christian’) religion and daring to reinterpret and reinvent it. This call seems relevant for queers of all stripes today, as we may reread some of these texts from the perspective Virginia Ramey Mollenkott called “low and outside.” My queer ancestors may be those who worshiped the Golden Calf, rather than the fundamentalists who wrote the texts condemning it as a sin. My queer ancestors may be precisely those beyond the Israelite-Canaanite boundary, which queer theologian Ken Stone has identified as the common agenda uniting the Torah’s fear of sex, fear of boundaries, and fear of Others. This commentary on Exodus is the opposite of apologetic; at times, where I do not find myself in the text, I find myself in that which the text seeks to extinguish. When I stand again at Sinai, often I find myself and my God among those who have been exiled from it.
In fact, none of this is correct. We now know that the Frankist apostasy was forced on the sect by rabbinic leaders who could no longer suppress Sabbatean sects from within. Frankist sexual ritual was not an orgy, but tightly controlled, limited in scope, and apparently quite rare – the most famous instance of it may not have even occurred. And most importantly, Frankist antinomianism is neither Sabbatean nor nihilistic in nature.
As reflected in the primary collection of Frank’s oral teachings, recorded in 1784 and transcribed in a work known in Polish as Zbior Słow Panskich (“The Collection of the Words of the Lord”), in Hebrew as Divrei HaAdon, and in English as Words of the Lord, Jacob Frank’s critique of religion is a surprisingly modern one, albeit one framed within a pre-modern mythic framework. In this text, Frank espouses a skeptical materialism, grounded in the belief that the supernatural claims of religion are false, and that only the material is real. Religion is at best ineffectual, at worst, actively evil, insofar as it holds people back from living a full life. Even as Frank replaces Judaism and Christianity with his own elaborate, esoteric religion of Das (da’at, gnosis), that esotericism is a materialistic quest with the goal of attaining this-worldly immortality and power. Frankist antinomianism is not Sabbatean; it is anti-Sabbatean.
My purpose in this article is twofold: firstly, I am interested in developing a typology of antinomianism that can help us understand cases such as Jacob Frank, and secondly, I am interested in the case of Jacob Frank precisely because it causes us to reconsider antinomianism as a religious phenomenon. Here, I begin by briefly tracing the history of the concept of antinomianism, then propose a four-part taxonomy for understanding it, and then, in Part III, apply this taxonomy to the case of Jacob Frank, in whose work three of the four types are found.
small selection of Zoharic and Hasidic texts to explore the surprising ways in which these theological currents are accommodated. Insisting on both a (nearly) heretofore unknown radical monism and a radical explosion of theological polymorphism, Zoharic literature at once retrieves the henotheistic language of myth, and proposes a monism more radical even than that of the philosophers. And later, the Hasidic masters of Chabad at once fashion a rigorous monism and insist that the greatest “unity” occurs in the diversity of manifestation.
Finally, I argue that the theological radicalism of those texts, which incorporates the greatest avodah zara of all—polytheism—within a nondualistic framework, does more than merely accommodate earlier mythic conceptions of the Divine. It provides a post-philosophical permission for the overwhelming majority of Zoharic textuality, itself a recovery and perhaps reification of myth. The supercessionist model of one theology displacing another is thus itself replaced by a more permissive and inclusive theological imagination which might, in the contemporary moment, promote a horizontal as well as vertical pluralism.
Way,” love is love, etc.). Fourth, what about God: the queer, ironic, eroticized God of queer theology remains, thus far, incomprehensible in the public square where only the unreconstructed God is known. These tensions have erupted in numerous political and social contexts in the two decades since Bob Goss tried to bring radical theology and mainstream activism together, though I conclude by noting that only now might the public square be ready for what he and other queer theologians have to offer.
constructing a contemporary queer theology?
In the last few decades, Kabbalah has enjoyed an unlikely resurgence, from highprofile
celebrities such as Madonna to many ‘‘New Age’’ seekers, including,
notably, feminists and queer people interested in alternatives to traditional
Western religious discourse. And Kabbalah often delivers: feminine God-language,
experiential mysticism and mythic esotericism, and a richer notion of eros than one
typically finds in mainline synagogues or churches.
Yet theosophical Kabbalah, particularly during the period of its greatest
flowering, between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain, Provence,
Italy, and the Near East, is an extremely heteronormative discourse. The binarism
of masculine and feminine, in theosophical Kabbalistic literature, embody, reflect,
and actualize the processes of world-maintenance on the one hand and theurgy on
the other. Should Kabbalah be left to pop culture, then, and set aside by reflective
queer theologians? Or is it possible to attempt queer readings of Kabbalistic text
and symbolism that are at once honest with the texts and yet of use to a
contemporary queer theology?
After setting some parameters, I propose three such readings here.2 Ironically,
my site is Kabbalistic gender dimorphism itself. For while such binarism is
reinscribed over and over again, the ways in which it is configured may provide
fertile ground for queer critiques of some gender categories.
Law Review Articles
The messianic heresies of Sabbetai Zevi (1626–1676) and Jacob Frank (1726–1791) were built on Kabbalistic foundations and understood sexual liberation as being an enactment of the messianic age. Having failed to bring about historical, collective redemption, these movements cultivated a new, messianic consciousness among their believers that shifted messianism from the public and historical to the private and experiential. Sexual antinomianism demarcated and enacted a new social, theological, and perhaps psychological reality: a messianic ecstasy which would later become domesticated under the vague rubric of “spirituality.” As such, though the available evidence suggests that sexual ritual was rare, it was imbued with theological and social meanings. And while these heretical sects eventually died out, the logic of eroticized messianic mysticism was eventually sublimated and domesticated by Hasidism into ecstatic prayer, to the point where, in the 21st century, seemingly innocuous practices like ecstatic chanting, swaying, and dance are common in contemporary synagogues. But the genealogy of this Jewish spirituality leads back to the eroticized messianism of Sabbateanism.
Note: A revised and expanded version of this paper was published in the Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism (2024). Please cite to that version in publications.
First, I explore Exodus’s presentation of solidarity and justice, arguing that the commandment to imaginatively “remember” one’s own oppression is both resonant with many queer experiences and a way to build solidarity with other oppressed groups, something that is particularly urgent at a time in which some LGBTQ people are safer and richer than ever, while others live in profound precarity. This exploration essentially affirms a core teaching of Exodus, applying it to queer experience and queer politics.
Next, I turn to some of the characters in Exodus who display queer or gender non-conforming characteristics, not to impute some ‘true’ sexual or gender identity to these characters, but to recognize them as potential spiritual ancestors, or perhaps dim gestures toward individuals and identities on the margins of mainstream Biblical commentary. Here, my commentary subverts the dominant assumptions about these Biblical texts, but retains a basic acceptance of the text itself; I read the texts from the margins, but still essentially maintain it.
Third, I address the way in which the legal material in Exodus anticipates the Deuteronomic imperative to “choose life” and see it as an avenue for queers to assert our humanity and the moral rightness of living our lives authentically and fully. Here, however, this general valorization of flourishing is at odds with the specific prohibitions and preoccupations of some Biblical passages. Indeed, for queers seeking to live out their lives in all their gendered and embodied complexities, such passages come, in the words of one Jewish heretic, “from the side of death,” Thus the text turns against itself.
Finally, and with a more radical querying of these problematic Biblical texts, I take up Judith Plaskow’s invitation to “stand again at Sinai” – issued, in her original presentation, to feminists revisioning the founding revelation of Jewish (or perhaps ‘Judeo-Christian’) religion and daring to reinterpret and reinvent it. This call seems relevant for queers of all stripes today, as we may reread some of these texts from the perspective Virginia Ramey Mollenkott called “low and outside.” My queer ancestors may be those who worshiped the Golden Calf, rather than the fundamentalists who wrote the texts condemning it as a sin. My queer ancestors may be precisely those beyond the Israelite-Canaanite boundary, which queer theologian Ken Stone has identified as the common agenda uniting the Torah’s fear of sex, fear of boundaries, and fear of Others. This commentary on Exodus is the opposite of apologetic; at times, where I do not find myself in the text, I find myself in that which the text seeks to extinguish. When I stand again at Sinai, often I find myself and my God among those who have been exiled from it.
In fact, none of this is correct. We now know that the Frankist apostasy was forced on the sect by rabbinic leaders who could no longer suppress Sabbatean sects from within. Frankist sexual ritual was not an orgy, but tightly controlled, limited in scope, and apparently quite rare – the most famous instance of it may not have even occurred. And most importantly, Frankist antinomianism is neither Sabbatean nor nihilistic in nature.
As reflected in the primary collection of Frank’s oral teachings, recorded in 1784 and transcribed in a work known in Polish as Zbior Słow Panskich (“The Collection of the Words of the Lord”), in Hebrew as Divrei HaAdon, and in English as Words of the Lord, Jacob Frank’s critique of religion is a surprisingly modern one, albeit one framed within a pre-modern mythic framework. In this text, Frank espouses a skeptical materialism, grounded in the belief that the supernatural claims of religion are false, and that only the material is real. Religion is at best ineffectual, at worst, actively evil, insofar as it holds people back from living a full life. Even as Frank replaces Judaism and Christianity with his own elaborate, esoteric religion of Das (da’at, gnosis), that esotericism is a materialistic quest with the goal of attaining this-worldly immortality and power. Frankist antinomianism is not Sabbatean; it is anti-Sabbatean.
My purpose in this article is twofold: firstly, I am interested in developing a typology of antinomianism that can help us understand cases such as Jacob Frank, and secondly, I am interested in the case of Jacob Frank precisely because it causes us to reconsider antinomianism as a religious phenomenon. Here, I begin by briefly tracing the history of the concept of antinomianism, then propose a four-part taxonomy for understanding it, and then, in Part III, apply this taxonomy to the case of Jacob Frank, in whose work three of the four types are found.
small selection of Zoharic and Hasidic texts to explore the surprising ways in which these theological currents are accommodated. Insisting on both a (nearly) heretofore unknown radical monism and a radical explosion of theological polymorphism, Zoharic literature at once retrieves the henotheistic language of myth, and proposes a monism more radical even than that of the philosophers. And later, the Hasidic masters of Chabad at once fashion a rigorous monism and insist that the greatest “unity” occurs in the diversity of manifestation.
Finally, I argue that the theological radicalism of those texts, which incorporates the greatest avodah zara of all—polytheism—within a nondualistic framework, does more than merely accommodate earlier mythic conceptions of the Divine. It provides a post-philosophical permission for the overwhelming majority of Zoharic textuality, itself a recovery and perhaps reification of myth. The supercessionist model of one theology displacing another is thus itself replaced by a more permissive and inclusive theological imagination which might, in the contemporary moment, promote a horizontal as well as vertical pluralism.
Way,” love is love, etc.). Fourth, what about God: the queer, ironic, eroticized God of queer theology remains, thus far, incomprehensible in the public square where only the unreconstructed God is known. These tensions have erupted in numerous political and social contexts in the two decades since Bob Goss tried to bring radical theology and mainstream activism together, though I conclude by noting that only now might the public square be ready for what he and other queer theologians have to offer.
constructing a contemporary queer theology?
In the last few decades, Kabbalah has enjoyed an unlikely resurgence, from highprofile
celebrities such as Madonna to many ‘‘New Age’’ seekers, including,
notably, feminists and queer people interested in alternatives to traditional
Western religious discourse. And Kabbalah often delivers: feminine God-language,
experiential mysticism and mythic esotericism, and a richer notion of eros than one
typically finds in mainline synagogues or churches.
Yet theosophical Kabbalah, particularly during the period of its greatest
flowering, between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain, Provence,
Italy, and the Near East, is an extremely heteronormative discourse. The binarism
of masculine and feminine, in theosophical Kabbalistic literature, embody, reflect,
and actualize the processes of world-maintenance on the one hand and theurgy on
the other. Should Kabbalah be left to pop culture, then, and set aside by reflective
queer theologians? Or is it possible to attempt queer readings of Kabbalistic text
and symbolism that are at once honest with the texts and yet of use to a
contemporary queer theology?
After setting some parameters, I propose three such readings here.2 Ironically,
my site is Kabbalistic gender dimorphism itself. For while such binarism is
reinscribed over and over again, the ways in which it is configured may provide
fertile ground for queer critiques of some gender categories.
Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, Paul Lerner, eds. Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
Ofer Nordheimer Nur. Eros and Tragedy: Jewish Male Fantasies and the Masculine Revolution of Zionism. Israel: Society, Culture, and History Series. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2014.
To what extent have altered states of consciousness been theologically significant for Jewish theology and practice? Does this depend on what types of practices or settings triggered those states? If so, what about new spiritual techniques adopted by Jewish communities, perhaps even drawn from other religious cultures? In what ways, if at all, have ingestions of psychoactive substances transformed Jewish theology? And how might this all relate to contemporary Jewish experiments with psychedelics?
In this panel, such questions animated discussion among scholars of Jewish mysticism. Through considerations of historical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical dimensions of Jewish theology, these critics reflected together on the cultural significance of Jewish psychedelia today.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQPTb5u9F-U
Podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/harvard-divinity-school/id1042749225?i=1000616187450
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2eVwtqa0GrlS7BeqRMMOcx?si=19e7cc8bc18e4287