By the time we had gotten this far, everyone was kind of tired. My wife was falling asleep. My older boy, who had not asked the Big Question, couldn't wait to say grace over a meal long eaten (Jews bless the food before they eat it and say grace - known as "Birkát haMazón" - afterwards). All this was a lot for my younger son, a twelve year old, to absorb. Heck! It was a lot for this poor uneducated Jew to try to figure out!
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
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Article comments
1 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
[This is originally from Silas Kain.]
Ruvy, now comes my question with regard to the Ark of the Covenant. There have always been rumblings that it does indeed exist somewhere in the recesses of Ethiopia. Where do the Falashas fit in to the whole scenario? It's said that they observe the most ancient forms of Judaism.
2 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Answering Silas,
The folks you term Falasha prefer to be called "Etyópim" (Ethiopians) or "Sh'hhorím" (blacks). Falasha is Amaharic for "stranger" and the Etyópim in our country are certainly not strangers HERE.
They claim to be refugees from one of the tribes which fled south when the Kingdom of Israel was overrun by Senhharív (Sennecharib) two and a half millenia ago. They lost Hebrew but kept the basic customs of the faith.
In my son's school, they do not face dicrimination - occasionally kids would call them "kúshi" (nigger). Generally if they did it more than once, they got hurt. The Etyópim don't take crap from anyone, and do not turn the other cheek. But there is not a culture of failure and guilt and violence here - yet.
Unfortunately, they face discrimination in jobs and housing - generally (but not always) from the same élite that ru(i)ns the country. As bad as it all is here for them, they still stand proud and a lot freer (and safer) than they ould have been in Ethiopia. Just a few days ago, they gathered in Jerusalem for a holiday of theirs, Séged (the vowels vary on this word).
Thosusands of them converged on the city, both the Old City and on the Tayelet (promenade)overlooking the Old City where I live.
The elders (késsim) wore white robes and turbans, the youth, more often than not, had army uniforms on. There were only two languages I heard that day on the Tayelet - Hebrew and Amharic.
I walked home on a warm day through the Tayelet, making my way through the Séged crowd, feeling great to be an Israeli.
Now to the Ark of the Covenant.
It is not in Ethiopia. It is either in this country - hidden in the desert or in Jerusalem - or in Egypt, in the northern Sinai.
It is being searched for by two people. One named Vendyl Jones, who is the fellow "Indiana Jones" is based on. The other is a fellow in the US Coast Guard. He is using the Torah Codes to attempt ot find it. He is using the Torah Codes as a map, in a most fascinating way, using the angles and relationships in the data in the arrays.
I'm not presently at liberty to say where he is searching. Vendyl Jones exects to find it in Jerusalem.
When it is discovered, it will be a red letter day in Judaism.
3 - Nancy
One huge advantage & gift for anyone who has kids, is that in educating them, you also have to educate yourself, if you do it properly. They do tend to get right to the core of the matter, don't they?
But, for us uninitiated/non-Jews, what exactly is the 'torah code'? You write as if it were something like a commentary on the torah, like the talmud?
One of the words I think I may recognize: "m'kubalim" - kabbalah? I thought that kabbalah was an estoric superstition involving magic numerology, creations like the golem, etc.?
Re: the ark, I should think by now anything that important that could be discovered would have been...but then look how long the dead sea scrolls went undiscovered...maybe not, after all. It certainly would be a 'shazzam!' moment in the fields of history, archeology, & middle eastern studies, as well as Judaism.
4 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Nancy,
The Torah Code is the child of the computer. The computer is the child of the effort to encode. Read the book I recommended at Amazon, "Cracking the Bible Code," and that is what you'll discover (along with a lot of other things).
But first to the m'kubalím. L'kabél, in Hebrew, means to receive (or to accept). A kabbalá is a receipt - any receipt. So kabbalót (plural for kabbalá) are receipts of wisdom. A m'kubál is one who does the receiving.
Kabbala is received wisdom. Period. It is based on the idea that the Torah has more data in it than appears obvious to the eye. There are many "mistakes" in the Torah. They are not errors but red flags for the student to look further into the text for information.
This looking further resulted in the Zohar, much of which was written nigh 2,000 years ago. But that is only a fundamental work. People keep "receiving" wisdom and much of it is kept secret for various reasons. One of them is to prevent it being misused by people like the idiots who run the "Kabbalah Center" that Madonna has made famous.
Part of the Hebrew language is the fact that the letters used also have numerical values. They had to in order for people to write numbers. This was true in Greek as well until the Roman numeral system became common in Europe, and afterwards was replaced by Arabic numbers - which originally come from India. But Hebrew has retained the number values given to the letters. There are several systems for numbering letters - all are called gematria. Numerology descends from people misusing gematria and attempting to adapt it to Latin letters. Numerology is nonsense. Gematria isn't. It is a second or third line for proof of data.
Finally comes the issue of digging into the Torah for encoded information. This is the kind of information that got passed from priest to priest orally in ancient days. When the Romans started making a habit of killing Jewish priests in order to kill off Judaism, the Jewish priests started to reduce the priest to priest information to writing. Part of this reduction to writing resulted in the Talmud. Another part resulted in notes made on how to calculate the Hebrew calendar. Another part dealt with codes found in the Torah through equally skipping letters.
It is this final part that the Torah Code deals with. Rabbi Michael Weissmandl, reading into this deeply, took the entire Book of Genesis, and wrote in on file cards 10 letters by ten letters. He was able to find some information encoded in the Torah looking at his file cards of 100 letters each. But he eventually lost this collection, and had to deal with larger issues like saving trying to save Slovakian Jews from the Nazis.
Rabbi Weissmandl, after failing to save very many Slovakian Jews, managed to get to the States and ran a yeshiva. Every now and again, he'd mention the presence of codes in the Torah. Finding coded information only really became pssible with the development of the computer because of the number of calculations needed. A Latvian Jewish mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, who had emigrated here, teamed up with a native Israeli mathematician, Doron Witztum, and the two of them started to do serious research on coded information in the Torah. It is their work I've referred to..