Gamaliel II

Rabban Gamaliel II (also spelled Gamliel; Hebrew: רבן גמליאל דיבנה‎) was the first person to lead the Sanhedrin as Nasi after the fall of the second temple, which occurred in 70 CE. Gamliel was appointed nasi approximately 10 years later. Gamaliel II was the son of Shimon ben Gamaliel, one of Jerusalem's foremost men in the war against the Romans, and grandson of Gamaliel I. To distinguish him from the latter he is also called Gamliel of Yavne.

Leadership skills

In Yavne, during the siege of Jerusalem, the scribes of the school of Hillel had taken refuge by permission of Vespasian, and a new centre of Judaism arose under the leadership of the aged Johanan ben Zakkai, a school whose members inherited the authority of the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem. Gamaliel II became Johanan ben Zakkai's successor, and rendered immense service in the strengthening and reintegration of Judaism, which had been deprived of its former basis by the destruction of the Second Temple and by the entire loss of its political autonomy. He put an end to the division which had arisen between the spiritual leaders of Judaism by the separation of the scribes into the two schools called respectively after Hillel and Shammai, and took care to enforce his own authority as the president of the chief legal assembly of Judaism with energy and often with severity. He did this, as he himself said, not for his own honor nor for that of his family, but in order that disunion should not prevail in Israel.

Gamaliel

Gamaliel the Elder (/ɡəˈmeɪljəl/; also spelled Gamliel; Hebrew: רבן גמליאל הזקן; Greek: Γαμαλιὴλ ὁ Πρεσβύτερος) or Rabban Gamaliel I, was a leading authority in the Sanhedrin in the early 1st century CE. He was the son of Simeon ben Hillel, and grandson of the great Jewish teacher Hillel the Elder, and died twenty years before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (70 CE). He fathered a son, whom he called Simeon, after his father, and a daughter, who married a priest named Simon ben Nathanael. In Christian tradition, he is said to have converted to Christianity and is venerated as a Saint along with his second son, Abibo (also Abibas, Abibus). Jewish sources do not record a conversion to Christianity.

In the Christian tradition, Gamaliel is recognized as a Pharisee doctor of Jewish Law. The Acts of the Apostles chapter 5 speaks of Gamaliel as a man of great honor by all Jews who spoke to not condemn the apostles of Jesus in Acts 5:34, to death and the Jewish law teacher of Paul the Apostle in Acts 22:3.

Gamaliel (disambiguation)

Gamaliel, also spelled Gamliel and Gamiliel, is the Greek form of the Hebrew name meaning "God is my reward/recompense" indicating the loss of one or more earlier children in the family. A number of influential individuals have had the name:

Hebrew Bible

New Testament

Other Rabbinical authorities

Gamaliel (Qliphah)

Gamaliel is the Qliphah associated with the Sephirah Yesod on the kabbalistic Tree of Life. It translates as 'The Obscene Ones'.

Function

Yesod is the Sephirah that collects all the energy from the Sephiroth above it, stores these archetypal ideas in the unconscious, and expresses them in their correct time. It is associated with the sexual organs, and unconscious sexual desire. It can be seen that without the correct expression of the images stored in Yesod, either through physical expression in Malkuth, or by transcending them in Tiphereth, an unhealthy sexual repression exists. The unconscious imagery in Yesod therefore becomes more and more perverse, eventually becoming Gamaliel, the obscene.

See also