Did you know there are no rabbis? Or else that maybe there are only 70-ish rabbis in the world, all of whom are in Israel? Or maybe some other number? Sounds fake, but this is how I interpret https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semikhah .
Consider the difference between Protestant ministers and Catholic priests. Ministers are just people who passed all their classes at seminary and probably have good opinions about the Bible. Nobody claims otherwise. Priests are different. If you ask the Catholics, priests are special, holy, invested with mystical powers by God. You or I could perform the rite of confession, and it wouldn’t work - wouldn’t remove sins - because we don’t have mystical powers. It would be like a Muggle trying to cast avada kedavra. But priests are magic. They were ordained as priests by other priests, who were ordained by other priests, and so on back to Jesus himself, and this makes them a special class of humans.
Rabbis are like Protestant ministers. Trained in seminary, well-educated about Judaism, but no magic.
But that wasn’t always true. Up until 400 AD, there was a rabbinical ordination, similar to the Catholic priestly ordination, that supposedly formed a direct line back to Moses.
What happened? The Romans, in one of their periodic attempts to destroy the Jews, cracked down on rabbinical ordination. And Romans don’t do things halfway. They declared that if anyone gave rabbinical ordination, both the ordainer and the ordained would be killed, the town in which the ordination happened would be destroyed, and all crops within half a mile of the ordination would be burned.
But Jews also don’t do things halfway, so they kept doing rabbinical ordinations in secret for a few centuries, losing the occasional town along the way. It worked for a while, but eventually someone missed a step, and the line of rabbinical ordination probably died out around 400 AD.
After that, Jewish leaders stopped calling themselves rabbis, since even the most learned and important of them couldn’t get officially ordained. This state of affairs lasted a few centuries, until “rabbi” came back as kind of a colloquial usage, a sort of “we know he’s not a real rabbi, but he’s serving the rabbinical function, so we might as well use the title”, and then eventually everyone just forgot there could be another kind of rabbi and stopped caring.
The great Jewish scholar Maimonides wrote in the 1100s that if all the sages in Israel agreed someone was a rabbi, that would effectively confer upon them the true rabbinical ordination, and then they could ordain other people, and the line of rabbinical ordination would be back. In the 1500s, a scholar named Jacob Berab tried this. He moved to Israel, became universally recognized as the wisest and holiest person in the land, and then asked all the sages of Israel to declare him a real rabbi. The sages of Israel said yes, so he declared himself a real rabbi and started ordaining other people. But he had apparently forgotten to ask the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem was so angry at being left out that he said no, calling the whole thing into question. There was a lot of debate over Maimonides’ use of the word “all”, and whether it literally meant “everyone” or was a figurative word that could mean “most”. Anyway, after few generations for some reason Berab’s lineal descendants stopped ordaining other people, so that line of ordination died out too, and there stopped being real rabbis again sometime in the 1600s.
Which brings us to 2004! A group of rabbis met in Israel and decided to re-re-create rabbinical ordination. They selected one among them, Rabbi Moshe Halberstam, as their guinea pig. Then they launched an advertising blitz around Israel asking everybody to agree Rabbi Halberstam was a real rabbi. They sent letters to hundreds of “Israel’s leading rabbis”, and claim that “none of them objected” - which was interesting since the plan was very divisive and the Wikipedia page about it has a Controversy section with eight sub-headings and 1,500 words. Probably this was one of those miracles that happens to the Jewish people from time to time. Having satisfied themselves as to the unanimity of the sages of Israel, they declared Rabbi Halberstam a real rabbi. Rabbi Halberstam then ordained other people, who ordained other people, and so on.
This is important because only real rabbis can serve on the Sanhedrin, the traditional governing body of the Jewish people. You haven’t heard much about this lately because there were no real rabbis, hence no Sanhedrin, hence no unified Jewish government. But after Rabbi Halberstam ordained seventy other rabbis, the number of real rabbis reached 71, the requirement for a Sanhedrin, and they called a Sanhedrin in the Israeli city of Tiberias. This provoked so much criticism that the Sanhedrinites walked back their claim, asking journalists to refer to them as “the attempted Sanhedrin”, and specifying that they’re just going to do some Sanhedrin-like things and not make any stronger claims until the rest of the world catches up with them. You can read about what they’ve been doing here . One of their first decrees was a statement of opposition to gay pride parades in Israel, which if nothing else makes me nod my head and say “Yeah, that seems like a real religious organization”. Good work sounding convincing, attempted Sanhedrin!
Since then, they’ve come up with other exciting new Jewish laws, like “you must vote for a religious party in Israeli elections”, and “Israeli soldiers may never withdraw from their occupation of Palestine” and “right-wing politics good, left-wing politics bad”. Maybe participation in a sketchy attempt to revive a 1700-year dead regressive religious organization selects for a certain type of person, who knows?
More traditional Jews believe that the Messiah will re-establish the Sanhedrin when he comes to redeem the Jewish people. But it’s going to be awkward if the Messiah comes and there’s a Sanhedrin already. What happens if there are two Sanhedrins? Three? Ten? Will we have to regularly take a vote of all the Sanhedrins to see who wins?
If yes, can we call that form of government a regular polyhedrin?
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