Autonomous Jewish Authority in Yesha

In the spring of 1993, ben Yoseif was approached by right wing rabbis and Jewish settlers who were opposed to a Palestinian State in Judea-Samaria on biblical grounds. The Autonomous Jewish Authority in Yesha (an abbreviation for Judea-Samaria and the Gaza) was infiltrated from the start, however, by Shabach (Israeli secret police) plant, Avishai Raviv, who was later implicated in the assassination plot of former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. When the leadership of the Authority -- which was not involved in the plot, but which had been persuaded by Aviv to institute a "dirty tricks" campaign -- was arrested and imprisoned or placed under house arrest, ben Yoseif was on his own and began meeting with various rabbis across the U.S. hoping to stimulate interest from stateside rabbonim in non-Jewish Zionists to begin populating Judea-Samaria as an alternative to a Palestinian State in this region.

This led to his association with the late Rabbi Terbe Gilner, z"l, who had relocated from New York to the Dallas area and was a member of the Supreme Rabbinical Council of the United States, headed by Rabbi Moshe Antelman, who was the same physicist who analyzed the sample of incense.

"'This is all well and good,' R. Gilner told me of non-Jewish Zionists living in the unannexed territories , 'but what are we going to do with You Know Who?' or as R. Gilner called him, 'Y'hoshua ben Yoseif?'"

ben Yoseif said he had reconciled this question of Jesus on a personal basis but would not speak collectively for anyone at that time. He said that he returned to a farmhouse he was fixing up in Cherokee County, TX., between Palestine and Jacksonville, TX., in exchange for rent, broke and discouraged.

A man from Houston who ben Yoseif said he had met on one occasion several months earlier called to tell him that he had been praying earlier that day and ben Yoseif's face appeared to him with the word to call him with a word which both took as a rebuke.

 "The question is not who is the messiah. That is not the question. The question is who are you?" was the riddle God posed to me by this man who knew nothing of the days' events nor did I tell him of them.

That night I could not sleep. I went into the next room. I prayed. I repented telling Hashem I was sorry that I had gotten ahead of Him again and was doing something without His sanction. Then I cried out to Him in response to the word from the man in Houston: "OK, so who am I? Why did I live all of those years in Israel? What do you want me to do now?" The next thing I remember was lying in an altered state of consciousness not quite fully aware but not asleep either on a couch looking outside the screen window at the starlit sky.

Suddenly, these life-changing clarifying words sounded from deep in my belly in the lower abdomen:

"You are the son of Joseph, your father.  I have given you your father Joseph's heart for his brother, Judah. And I am turning the hearts of the sons of Joseph to their father Joseph; and I am turning the hearts of the sons of Judah to their father, Judah. Because, there was no enmity or vexation between Joseph and Judah who were reconciled in Egypt, but the enmity and vexation is between their sons.

ben Yoseif said he returned the next day to visit with Rabbi Gilner, who upon hearing this word, hugged him and cried tears and said "This is family. One thing the Jewish people understand is family. I will help you however I can."  ben Yoseif moved his family to within walking distance of the rabbi, who was handicapped and with whom he learned for about 18 months and helped conduct a weekly Orthodox shul in the rabbi's home.  Rabbi Gilner also encouraged him to begin a personal study of the Torah to locate points of enmity and vexation and determine the "middot" or actions that caused them and the Halachah to remedy them.

This led to a 7-year study in which ben Yoseif recorded 156  90-minute audio cassettes of his study on this topic from all of the Torah and Haftorah portions. You can see a compilation of the major points in his online manuscript entitled, Od Yoseif Chai, or "Joseph still lives."