You Got That Right

Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri was born in Baghdad around the turn of the century (various sources place his birth anywhere from the early 1890s to as late as 1902), and as a youth he excelled in the study of the Torah and kabbalah. He moved to Israel in 1922 or 1923, and continued his training with some of the world's leading Talmudic scholars and kabbalists. Following the death of renowned kabbalist Rabbi Efraim Hakohen in 1989, Kaduri was widely recognized as the world's leading kabbalist.

Kabbalah is an ancient form of Jewish mysticism, and as a non-Jew I'm not even going to attempt to give you a precise definition of it. If you ask five Jewish scholars what kabbalah is, you're likely to get seven different answers. Suffice it to say it is mysticism, and so like any form of mysticism from any country or culture, it deals primarily with secret, esoteric knowledge that is accessible only to a handful of trained adepts.

"Mysticism? A rabbi? Wait a second...doesn't the Bible condemn mysticism because it opens people up to demonic influence?"

You got that right.

For decades Rabbi Kaduri taught students at his Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva in Jerusalem (a yeshiva being the Jewish equivalent of a seminary), and during the last year or two of his life he would routinely relate to his spellbound students some of the visions he had concerning the Messiah. These visions/trances finally came to a climax on October 13, 2005, on the Jewish holy day known as the Day of Atonement.

In the yeshiva on that particular day, Rabbi Kaduri sat in a trance for a full 45 minutes, and when he finally came out of it he had a stunning announcement for his spellbound students:

"I have met the Messiah."

The rabbi went on to tell his breathless students that not only had he met the Messiah in this and previous visions, but that the Messiah would appear shortly after the death of then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Rabbi Kaduri also told his students that he had encoded the actual name of the Messiah in a short handwritten note that he had sealed, with strict instructions that it not be opened and read until one year after his death.

And then things started to get a little weird.

The lion stops roaring

At the time of Rabbi Kaduri's vision in October 2005, a robust 77-year-old Ariel Sharon was the prime minister of Israel. For people far removed from Israeli society, it's not easy to get a sense of the contextual impact of these events. For Americans, it would be a bit like evangelist Billy Graham saying around 1984 or 1985 that Jesus would return shortly after the death of Ronald Reagan, who at the time was an immensely popular (and healthy) president.

Ariel "Arik" Sharon was a true Israeli war hero, having played an important role in every Israeli conflict since the war that immediately followed their establishment as an independent nation in May of 1948 (a war in which he was seriously wounded). He commanded a paratrooper brigade during the Sinai War in 1956, and steadily rose through the ranks to the upper echelons of military command. During the Six Day War in 1967 he was instrumental in the victory that saw Israel reclaim Jerusalem as its capital, and it was his brilliantly daring action in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 that literally saved the nation of Israel from annihilation.

To the Israeli public, he became affectionately known as the "Lion of God."

Not surprisingly, Ariel Sharon's illustrious military career led to a career in politics. In 2001 he was elected Prime Minister of Israel, and he was re-elected in 2003. In August of 2005, a matter of weeks before Rabbi Kaduri's vision, Prime Minister Sharon oversaw the highly contentious evacuation of Israeli citizens living in Gaza in an ultimately futile attempt to move closer to peace with the Palestinians by making way for the creation of the Palestinian Authority. Some in Israel saw Sharon's move as appeasement that weakened the country by emboldening Israel's enemies and making it more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

In later years, that last assessment turned out to be prophetic. The Gaza Strip quickly became a veritable launching pad for missiles aimed at Israeli civilians, which serves to prove the old saying often quoted in the Middle East:

If the Arabs put down their weapons, there would be no more war.
If the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be no more Israel.

But on December 18, 2005, just two months after Rabbi Kaduri's stunning announcement that the Messiah would come shortly after the Prime Minister's death, Ariel Sharon suffered a minor stroke. He was released from the hospital, but a couple of weeks later, on January 4, 2006, he suffered a more serious stroke. Doctors worked to save his life and stabilize his condition by putting him into a medically induced coma—a coma from which he never awoke.

Then, a little over three weeks later on January 28, 2006, Rabbi Kaduri died at an age that, although subject to dispute, is widely agreed to be well over 100 (106 and 108 seem to be the most frequently quoted estimates). His funeral in Jerusalem was attended by over a quarter of a million people.

The note...and its fallout

In accordance with his instructions, the sealed note Rabbi Kaduri had left was opened and read in early 2007, one year after his death.

Here is an image of Rabbi Kaduri's note, written in Hebrew:

Here is what the note said, translated from Hebrew into English:

Concerning the letter abbreviation of the Messiah’s name:

"He will lift the people and prove that his word and law are valid."

This I have signed in the month of mercy,
Yitzhak Kaduri

The key sentence above is in bold type. The sentence in Hebrew that contains the name of the Messiah encoded in the initial letters of each word reads as follows (from right to left):

These six letters form

...which spells out the Hebrew name "Yehoshua," which is equivalent to "Yeshua." You may be more familiar with the English version of this name:

Jesus

By the way, this type of acronymic first-letter encoding of a word or phrase is quite common in Jewish tradition and in kabbalah, so it's not as if people were desperately straining to find some screwy way to read "Yehoshua" or "Yeshua" into it. It's there, and the Jewish people who saw the note knew it.

Trust me, they didn't want it to be there, but there it was.

The message was crystal clear. There was no way to weasel around it. The most beloved and venerated Jewish rabbi in all of Israel had spoken:

The Messiah's name is Yeshua—Jesus.

Needless to say, many people in Israel were stunned. The story of Rabbi Kaduri's note naming the Messiah, which had generated considerable media attention prior to being opened and read, was promptly dropped like a hot hamantasch by the mainstream Israeli media, which went into damage control mode and tried to completely bury the story. Almost over night, it suddenly became "Note? What note?"

Jews in Israel and around the world responded to the contents of the note in various ways. Some claimed the rabbi must have been suffering from senile dementia (not so, according to those close to him, who said his mind was as sharp as a tack until the day he died). Some insisted the note was either a forgery or had been tampered with in some way. Rabbi Kaduri's own son, himself a rabbi, was adamant that the handwriting was not his father's (and still is to this day). Some attacked it as a Christian conspiracy. Some claimed the note had simply been misinterpreted or misunderstood, or dismissed the encoding of the name "Yehoshua" as a bizarre coincidence.

And some just blew the whole thing off. After all, Israel today is largely a secular nation. Many young Israelis see such things as the Torah and the Talmud as anachronisms, and some would just as soon see the Temple Mount paved over and turned into a parking lot. Some see it as something from the past that has brought them nothing but trouble in the present, and that will bring them nothing but conflict in the future.

No matter how Jews responded, however, it irked them beyond measure that Christians were dancing in the streets.

As soon as Christians got wind of the story, it spread faster than cold germs in a kindergarten. Web pages and YouTube videos sprang up like toadstools:

Jewish rabbi claims he met Messiah in a vision—and it's Jesus!

Carl Gallups, a well-known Christian author, wrote a book entitled The Rabbi Who Found Messiah, a book which boldly claims to "objectively" report the facts, and without "affirming or denying" anything, manages to artfully dangle under the noses of readers the distinct possibility that Rabbi Kaduri really did meet Jesus! (I mean, the title says it all.)

Christians were beside themselves—the Jews are finally going to start embracing Jesus as their Messiah! Glory to God!

"Hate to say we told ya so, but we told ya so!"

Jews were dumbfounded. It was unthinkable. Christians were delighted. It was inevitable. Rabbi Kaduri had ID'ed the Messiah as none other than Yeshua...and everybody knows that's Jesus Christ. Born in a manger, died on a cross. You know, Jesus. Right?

But as it turns out, that wasn't quite all Rabbi Kaduri had to say.

A case of mistaken identity

I first ran across the Rabbi Kaduri story on YouTube a couple of years ago, and of course I was thrilled. Yep, God is getting ready to begin revealing Himself to the Jews! But with Ariel Sharon in stable condition, I didn't hear much more about the story until very recently, and it was in connection with a news report about the former Prime Minister.

He was dying.

After eight years in a coma, the now 85-year-old Ariel Sharon's condition was suddenly taking a serious turn for the worse, and his organs were beginning to shut down. Most reports were saying that he likely had only days to live.

That rekindled my interest in the story and set me off searching for more information, and I found a few articles related to Rabbi Kaduri on various websites. It didn't take long for me to come across a couple of articles that contained some of Rabbi Kaduri's teaching that had been translated into English from the original Hebrew—and some of what I found deeply disturbed me. In less than an hour I finally began to realize something that I had missed the first time around:

Whoever or whatever Rabbi Kaduri met in his visions, it sure wasn't the Jesus of the Bible!

I began to get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I read some of the things the rabbi claimed "Yeshua" had revealed to him. This needs to be emphasized, because these points were not simply Rabbi Kaduri's personal opinions, thoughts, or interpretations.

If that were the case, then people could just say, "Oh, Rabbi Kaduri really did meet Jesus, but hey...give him a break. He was a 108-year-old rabbi. He just got a little confused on a couple of points because, you know, it's New Testament stuff and all that. Whaddya expect?"

Oh no. The good rabbi wasn't a little confused. He was a lot deceived, because these are things the rabbi said this "messiah" revealed to him in his visions. In other words, this is coming straight from the mouth of an entity that later identified itself as "Yehoshua," or Jesus. These are ideas that did not originate from Rabbi Kaduri—according to Rabbi Kaduri.

As I read over some of the rabbi's comments, there was simply no way to wiggle around it. Rabbi Kaduri no more met Jesus Christ—the Yeshua of the Bible—than the man on the moon. I began to realize that a lot of people were being deceived, because...

The rabbi's Yeshua is not the Bible's Yeshua!

Several months before he died, Rabbi Kaduri revealed that he had actually been visited by the "messiah" a number of times over the previous year or two, and one particular article I came across contained some of the information this "messiah" had revealed to him, summarized in a list of 18 points. I won't waste your time with all 18 because most are vague, useless, or both.

For example:

"His rule will be free of all lust."

Well, that's nice. Imagine that—a government free of lust...

(phone rings) "Yeshua's office, may I help you? Yes, Mr. Clinton...yes, we did receive your résumé. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid we don't have any openings at the present time. OK, bye bye." (click)

Or this:

"His true test will not be His ability to perform miracles, but the very essence of His being and His actions."

Huh? So, will he perform miracles or not? I'm genuinely not sure what that's supposed to mean, but something tells me that brunch for five thousand people from a couple of toasted bagels and a latte macchiato is out of the question.

Of all the 18 points listed by Rabbi Kaduri, I'd like to comment on two items in particular that I think are worthy of attention. One has to do with an apparent multiplicity of Messiahs:

1. "The union of the two Messiahs (Messiah son of Joseph and Messiah son of David) has taken place."

Uh, I'm sorry, but we seem to have one too many Messiahs here.

Due to the fact that they rejected Jesus as their prophesied Messiah when He came the first time two thousand years ago, Jews have traditionally argued that there will come two future Messiahs: Messiah son of Joseph (MJ) and Messiah son of David (MD). They believe MJ will appear first, and will arise as some sort of political/military leader and will wage war against Israel's enemies. MJ will prepare the way for the arrival of MD, but MJ will be killed. When MD appears, he will resurrect MJ (along with everybody else, apparently), and then MD will usher in the messianic era of everlasting peace.

Or something like that.

The one and only: Born-again Christians believe, based on a grammatically and historically consistent (and literal) interpretation of Scripture, that Jesus is the one and only Messiah. Biblically knowledgeable Christians understand that Jesus is the fulfillment of both of these roles: "Messiah son of Joseph" as well as "Messiah son of David."

The idea of two Messiahs, or even two Messiahs that have merged into one, blatantly contradicts the most fundamental teachings of the Bible and of Christianity. There is, has been, and will always be one and only one Messiah. There have never been two Messiahs to merge! Throughout both the Old and New Testaments, the fact that God sent His one and only Son into the world to redeem sinful mankind is driven home with a clarity that cuts to the bone.

Not only that, but God's one and only Son came the first time two thousand years ago as a Suffering Servant—the Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world, and He will come back in the future as a Conquering King—the Lion of Judah who will establish His kingdom on earth.

Not two Messiahs—one Messiah who comes twice.

First to bring redemption, then to bring retribution.

If you miss this, you've missed the fundamental message of the entire the Bible. It's that simple.

So, if two Messiahs have merged into one soul and that soul is the Yeshua that Rabbi Kaduri supposedly met in some vision or trance, then I can once again state emphatically that...

The rabbi's Yeshua is not the Bible's Yeshua!

2. "The soul of Messiah is conceived inside a person of the Israelite nation."

This is another absolute non-starter. OK, so according to the rabbi's "messiah," there's some guy in Israel today walking around who has had the soul of the Messiah dropped in him, and who will soon step forward and begin to do Messiah-like things.

Shortly after Ariel Sharon dies, that is.

This is what "Yeshua" supposedly revealed to Rabbi Kaduri while the rabbi was in a trance. Uh, excuse me, but...

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

I mean, what else do you need to hear? What else do you need to know? How many more flashing red lights do you need?

This is so absurdly unbiblical that I scarcely feel the need to comment any further. From a Christian point of view, Rabbi Kaduri may as well have claimed the Messiah would appear as a purple dinosaur named Barney.

Not a word: In all of Rabbi Kaduri's commentary that I found translated from the Hebrew—the entire list of 18 points, there is not one single word about the Messiah being the Son of God. There is not one single word about the Messiah dying on the cross to redeem sinners so they could be reconciled to a holy God by grace through faith.

In other words, there is not one single word about the gospel. In fact, it is clear that the rabbi knows essentially nothing of the gospel.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can read over the rabbi's commentary and still believe that he met Jesus Christ, then neither do you.

The book of Acts records the Ascension, when Jesus was taken up into heaven after waiting 40 days for the Jews to change their minds and accept Him as their Messiah.

Jesus is coming back (as Jesus, not a TV repairman from Tel Aviv), and He's coming back in power and glory to establish His kingdom on earth that was promised to Israel thousands of years ago.

The bottom line is that the Jews missed the real Messiah two thousand years ago, and their hardened hearts have been blinded to Him ever since. If they believe Rabbi Kaduri, they are going to miss Him again and be deceived by someone who is most definitely not the Messiah.

"Do you see what I see?"

As a matter of fact, Rabbi Kaduri is not the first person to claim to have met the Messiah in a vision. The Bible records one other such incident in Acts 9 (and also in Acts 22), in which a murderously zealous Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus was on his way to Damascus to arrest members of some upstart gaggle of heretics who would come to be known as Christians.

Along the way, Saul (later Paul) met Yeshua in a vision, and his response to the Lord changed the course of history. Here is a man who one moment before was Jew among Jews. A Pharisee, an über-Jew, highly trained in the Torah and on his way to hunt down suspected members this subversive cult, arrest them, tie them up, and take them back to Jerusalem to stand trial before the chief priests and face at least imprisonment, and possibly death.

Now, he experiences a vision on the road to Damascus and meets Jesus, the real Yeshua. A moment later he falls on his face and all he can say is:

"What shall I do, Lord?"

After coming face to face with the risen Christ in his vision, Paul is radically transformed in a moment, and after recuperating for a few days...

From that day forward until the day he died, Paul did nothing but preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, relentlessly proving from the Jews' own Scripture that the Yeshua they had crucified was the prophesied Messiah (and ironically there was no one better equipped to do it than a Pharisee).

Yeshua—foretold throughout the Old Testament, born of a virgin, sinless, crucified, raised from the dead, ascended into heaven, and whose perfect sacrifice satisfied God the Father's justice on our behalf, purchased our forgiveness of sin, and provided the one and only way for us to be reconciled to God by believing in faith in what the real Messiah did for us.

Jesus the Messiah. Yeshua Ha'Mashiach.

Paul got right in the face of those who hated him and sought to kill him and boldly proclaimed that...

Now, let's see...what effect did Rabbi Kaduri's vision have on him?

Did he receive a revelation that this Yeshua he met was the one and only Son of God, like Paul did? Did he start proclaiming the gospel of this Yeshua, like Paul did? Did he begin proving from the Jewish Scripture to other Jews that this Yeshua was the prophesied Messiah, like Paul did? Did he urge everyone (or anyone) to believe that this Yeshua's death and resurrection provided the only way to be forgiven of sin and reconciled to God, like Paul did?

Uhm...no. Not exactly.

Well, what effect did Rabbi Kaduri's vision of this alleged Yeshua have on him?

He spouted a bunch of specious mumbo jumbo, and what isn't pointlessly vague is patently unscriptural. Oh, and he left a cryptic note that wasn't to be opened for a year that spells out the name "Yehoshua" which translates to the name "Jesus," but even a cursory knowledge of the Bible reveals that none of this translates to the Jesus of God's Word.

Not quite the same, wouldn't you agree?

Of course, you can always argue that it's apples and oranges. You can always argue that you can't really compare the two. Different times, different contexts, different purposes, whatever.

OK, fine. Maybe it is apples and oranges.

But I still think the difference is telling, and what it's telling me is that there's an apple here that's rotten to the core.

Where do we go from here?

And now it begins. On January 11, 2014, one week after marking the eighth anniversary of slipping into a coma, Ariel Sharon died at the age of 85.

So now what?

For one thing, the deterioration of Ariel Sharon's condition starting about January 1 started creating a heightened sense of anticipation, and now that he's passed away I expect to see a significant uptick in the messianic buzz coming not only from Israel and Jews around the world, but from a lot of zealous if misinformed Christians who are still under the impression that Rabbi Kaduri actually met Jesus Christ simply because he allegedly encoded the name "Yehoshua" on a scrap of paper.

You've been warned: Please understand that if you seriously entertain the notion that Rabbi Kaduri met the real Messiah in his visions, you are effectively linking the name of Jesus with a demonic entity (if not Satan himself).

Are you sure you want to do that?

The question on the minds of a lot of Christians (at least those with enough sense to realize Kaduri's "messiah" was not really Jesus) is whether Kaduri's messianic individual (assuming he shows up) will in fact be the individual who ultimately turns out to be the Antichrist.

According to Kaduri, the Messiah will be a Torah-observant Jew. Actually, he got that right. Jesus was a Torah-observant Jew, but Jesus also said that the Jews would reject Him and receive another:

Rabbi Kaduri's false prophecy may well be setting the Jews up to receive the one Jesus was referring to.

On the other hand, many current Bible prophecy experts lean toward the idea that the Antichrist will be a Muslim.

So, which is it? Who will be the one to arise and ultimately be accepted by Israel as her (false) Messiah? A Torah-observant Jew or a Muslim? Or someone else? Honestly, there's not much point in speculating, because the way things are going we may not have to wait too much longer to find out (assuming we'll be here long enough to see what happens).

Then again, maybe this whole Rabbi Kaduri business will blow over like so much apocalyptic hype, much like the whole 2012 Mayan palooza.

Are you ready to be 'lifted'?

There is one thing about Rabbi Kaduri's note, however, that I couldn't help but notice. Read again the sentence that spells out the name "Yehoshua":

"He will lift the people and prove that his word and law are valid."

Some English translations of the Hebrew read "He will lift His people."

Lift His people? Oh, yeah...big time. That's exactly what He's going to do—He's going to lift His people to meet Him in the air at the Rapture:

It is exquisitely ironic that a rabbi who met a demonic entity (if not Satan himself) masquerading as the Messiah would leave a cryptic note naming it as Jesus, but with an unintentional reference to what the real Jesus is going to do to those who have trusted in Him for their salvation at the Rapture, an event that Rabbi Kaduri presumably knew nothing about.

Assuming it was unintentional, that is. After all, Satan is fully aware of the Rapture. Why wouldn't he be? He knows God's Word.

Since we're on the subject, please keep two things in mind about Satan:

• He is highly intelligent and knows Scripture. That explains why he knows about the Rapture—he can read. Duh...

• Although he is currently being restrained by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in believers, he does have some power—he can cause death and disaster to some extent (read the book of Job). That's why he can cause false prophets to appear to be right occasionally.

After all, the Bible doesn't call him "the god of this world" and "the prince of the power of the air" for nothing. He may be sinister, but he's no slacker.

But I have no reason to believe Rabbi Kaduri knew anything about the rapture of the Church—the body of Christ. Why should he? He didn't even know Christ. Satan sure does—they've met.

Millions of born-again believers around the world are looking forward with growing anticipation to this incredible event that is undeniably taught in Scripture. It will include all the people, both dead and those alive at the time, who have changed their minds about the fact that they are sinners separated from a holy, loving God and stand in need of the Savior, and have believed in faith that Jesus Christ—the real Yeshua—died and rose again according to Scripture to pay the penalty for their sins.

That is, everyone who has ever believed the gospel—and that includes me.

I just want to go on record with that so that after the Rapture occurs and I'm among those missing, everyone who knows me—and knows that I believe the Bible and am a born-again Christian—will know what happened to me. My prayer is that no one who knows me will end up believing The Lie that will attempt to explain it away, whatever form it may take.

So, Rabbi Kaduri, you actually did name the Messiah correctly. Yehoshua really is the Messiah.

You got that right.

Congratulations. But I'm genuinely sorry that you never got to meet the real Messiah. You know, the one you said was going to lift His people.

You got that right, too.

Greg Lauer — JAN '14

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