Donald Traxler's Poetry: August 2022

Saturday, August 27, 2022

Which One Is the Real Me?

The other day I was playing around on Google, looking myself up. I learned some interesting things. Several sites have been re-posting my work, which is fine with me, as long as they give me credit. But what I enjoyed most were the images. If I searched for my name plus "writer" or "translator," I got one type of result; quite a different one if I searched for my name plus "#nsfw," or "udugi." Here are some examples, to show you what I mean:

Now, I am not what they call in Spanish a "corbata" (a "necktie guy," generally equated with being a "stuffed shirt"). The pic at top left was shot by Sandy in 2010, as an author pic for Inner Traditions. I do not believe I have worn a necktie since that day, but it was the desired image at the time. I was interested to see that Google found book-cover shots put out by Simon and Schuster, who have taken over the marketing of those titles. My sister Patricia, who knows far more about book publishing than I do, tells me that that is a big deal.

If you visited me on any given day, the black-and-white profile pic would fit me a lot better.

Next, I searched for my name plus "#nsfw," and got the results that I like best, the ones I consider most significant. Here, I've played with those results a bit:

Now we're talking! I relate much better to this guy.

I got another nice result when I searched for my name plus "udugi." Again, I relate well to the images:

I think we know which one is the real me. What I can't figure out is how my cat's rear end got into these these pictures.

Thursday, August 25, 2022

We Make Our Home

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

147,000 Visits, and 80 Trips around the Sun

Hello, my friends. I'm happy to say that today we passed the milestone of 147,000 visits to this blog, which has been in existence since early October, 2016. These visits (page-views) have come from more than 100 countries located all over the world.

In the beginning, the blog was just poetry. but soon the need for illustrations caused an expansion into photography, another of my interests. Soon prose articles, and sometimes long series of them, were also featured. All of the prose was, and is, my own writing.

But another milestone is just around the corner. The photograph at the end of this blog entry was taken yesterday, exactly one month shy of my eightieth birthday. I am fascinated by turning eighty, something I've never experienced before, at least in this life, and am trying to document it.

Is age really just a number? I would have to say that it is not. My doctor tells me that very few men my age can get an erection at all. I can, but it's nothing to shout about. I can do physical work for an hour, but that's about it. I can, on the other hand, do mental work all day and into the night. That's pretty much how I spend my days, and it's what I share with you, my readers. I intend to keep doing it as long as I can.

So thank you, once again, for your continued interest, your inferred enthusiasm, and your loyalty. Gracias, todah, wadó.

This Is Me

Monday, August 22, 2022

Light, Like Consciousness

Sunday, August 21, 2022

Well, what now?

Friday, August 19, 2022

Shabbat Shalom!

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Photo: It Is What It Is

Monday, August 15, 2022

Notes on the Zohar VIII - The Seventy-two Names

It's been a long time since I've written in this series. Being guided by Spirit has me skipping around. I was drawn to look into the "Seventy-two Names of God."

First of all, they are not names. Why should God, the combined and interconnected Consciousness of the creatures of the Cosmos, need a name? Truly, no name could be limitless or universal enough.

What, then, are they? In my view, they are groups of Hebrew letters into which many souls have poured their energy and consciousness for centuries. In that sense, they are like batteries. They are charged and ready for us to use as needed.

So what is the origin of the Seventy-two Names? The answer is in the Zohar (Beshalach), though it is not as explicit as it could be. There are several Youtube videos that deal with this subject, and I recommend those of Daily Zohar.

These "names" are derived from Exodus 14:19-21. These are crucial verses in the account of the parting of the Red Sea, the destruction of Pharaoh's chariots and soldiers, and the passing over of the Israelites out of Egypt. It is striking that each of these three verses has seventy-two letters, and the old kabbalists attached great significance to this, an inner meaning. Being experts at extracting inner meanings, they devised a way to extract this one.

To test the method of the ancient kabbalists, and to become imbued with it, I tried it for myself. It took hours of careful and detail-oriented work. The result is the table below.

This table gives the "Seventy-two Names." I have checked it against internet sources, and it is correct. It was not, however, copied from any source. It was created in the following way:

1) Into each cell of the table, beginning in the upper-right, place a letter of Exodus 14:19 (in Hebrew, of course, and in order). When this step has been completed, there will be one Hebrew letter in each cell of the table. These are the initial letters of the "names."

2) Now, be sure that your word processor is set for right-to-left writing (at first I neglected to do this). Then, following Exodus 14:20 IN REVERSE ORDER, beginning in the upper-right cell, place one Hebrew letter at a time into the cells of the table. I suggest checking your work at the end of every eight letters. If you end up using the exact number of letters, your work MAY be correct, but it has to be proofed. Note: Up to this point we have not used any "sopheet" (final) forms of letters, even if they so appear in the original verse. Because you are working backwards through the Hebrew verse and it's easy to get lost, this is the most difficult step. You now have the initial and medial letters of each "name."

3) Now, following Exodus 14:21 (in normal order) place one Hebrew letter at a time into each cell of the table. This will give you the final letters of the "names." Since they are final letters, you must use the "sopheet" form of each letter that has such a form. When you have finished, the table will have a three-letter "name" in each cell, and you will not have any letters left over, nor will you be short any letters. Now check all of your work.

In case you don't have a Tanakh handy, here are the verses in question:

This image is from the Pentateuch that belonged to Israel Regardie, which I've mentioned before in this series. The book fell open to the beginning of Exodus 14, not from my use, but from his.

Thursday, August 11, 2022

The Million-dollar Question

I've been experimenting with fonts for ancient languages that are meaningful to me, those with which I feel a deep connection. Why do I feel those deep connections? That is the million-dollar question. In my mind it has to do with past lives, if such there be (as many experiences lead me to believe). That, I suppose, is really what I am delving into.

When I first started learning to read, the teacher said, "See, this one looks like a chair, and it sounds like 'huh'." I remember thinking, "this means nothing to me." Not only that, but I strongly resisted learning to read in this writing system that I use every day. I just did not grok it at all. Nor did I want to. When, on the other hand, they started teaching us about China, the teacher made up a sort of ideographic script, and I totally got it. I wanted to write that way all the time.

I've had a lot of what I would call reincarnational flashes. When I was about four and a half, I was playing outside, mashing some ice plant leaves. While I was doing that, I mentally saw an old man in a skull cap, working with plant parts, as a physician or herbalist might have done in the Middle Ages. This was before television had come into our lives, and I don't think I had yet seen a movie, so I don't know where I would have gotten such ideas.

When I was five (I didn't go to kindergarten or any kind of preschool), my mother decided it was time for little heathen me to learn about God. When she told me what she was going to tell me about, it sounded very interesting, and I was ready. But my excitement turned to disappointment when she said, "A long time ago, longer than you can even imagine, a man died for our sins, nailed to a cross." I remember thinking, "Oh no, not that old story again!" It was a letdown for me, so I must have been expecting something different. By the time my father came home from work and asked her what she was doing, she was singing "Tantum Ergo" to me in Latin. I must have adapted to "that old story," because right after high school I spent a few months in a Jesuit novitiate. I had a need for spirituality--I just didn't know where to look for it.

When I was about nine or ten, I returned to class after recess or lunch one day, winded from exertion on the playground and experiencing head congestion, and I thought to myself, "that's what I don't like about this." The "this" I was referring to was physical embodiment. Even at that age, I recognized it as a strange thought, since I would supposedly have had nothing to compare it to.

Over the years, there have been many such "flashes."

At the age of twenty-one, I developed a strong interest in Jewish mysticism and pietism. especially Hasidism. At that time I did not know that I had any Jewish heritage. My midwestern father, from whose ancestors in Sweden it had come, had never told any of us, except my mother. When he proposed to her he had said, in his artless way, "I have Jew." I didn't find out until I was thirty, and wouldn't have then, except that I was doing genealogy and he figured I'd find out anyway. He was right, I would have,

Now, of course, we have DNA evidence. I have known for years that I have a "DNA cousin" in the Ukraine, where many of the Hasidim lived, who is half Jewish. And there are hundreds of others. The relevant names in my family history are Jacobson and Bloomquist (earlier it was just Bloom/Blom, the latter being the Scandinavian spelling, also pronounced "Blum"). Recently, an automated "Super Search" on My Heritage turned up a whole family of apparent DNA cousins who carried the name "Blom" (spelled in the Scandinavian way). Most of them were early Zionists; all of them were Jewish.

Does it matter? Well, to me it does. This is a connection that has been screaming in my blood for decades. I have already added the name Jacobson to my writing pseudonym; now I'm adding "Bloom" to it, too.

Donald Jacobson Bloom Traxler (or simply, Yakov Bloom Traxler)

Saturday, August 6, 2022

He Has Carried the Covenant

Friday, August 5, 2022

SS Paleo

Thursday, August 4, 2022

The Secrets of Psalm 22 - Part II

In my last blog entry I reviewed Dr. Seth Postell's excellent theory that explains the difference between the Masoretic Text reading "like a lion" and the older Septuagint reading "they dug," or "they gouged" in Psalms 22.16 (22.17 in Hebrew). I agreed with Dr. Postell's theory, but said it didn't go far enough. I presented evidence for an actual original reading of "they bound my hands and my feet," which makes more sense and is supported by "vinxerunt" in Jerome's second translation of the Psalms, which he based on the Hebrew text of his time. Others may have presented this latter theory, but since I haven't read them, I'll simply refer to it as mine, at least for now. I am, after all, a naked poet, not an academic.

There will be those who will be quick (and rightly so) to point out the weaknesses in my theory. I'll head them off by doing it myself.

1) The verb כרך is now only used in the sense of "to bind a book." It does not appear elsewhere in the Bible, but a possibly related Aramaic verb does, in Daniel 3.20-1, referring to the binding of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

2) In my comparisons of the verbs כרה and כרכ, I have shown the former as a plural, but not the latter. This makes them appear more similar. This is true, but the only Hebrew text I have, the Masoretic Text, does not have a verb at all in that part of the verse, and I didn't want to take it upon myself to decide whether it should be singular or plural. The plural form is כרכו. (See the illustration below for the Paleo.) Since this verb does not appear anywhere else in the Bible, the copyist may not have known how to interpret it, and may have opted for כרו instead (from כרה), which does occur about a dozen times in the Bible, always with the meaning "to dig." It NEVER means "to pierce."

Dr. Postell ends his video by giving kudos to modern Bible translators and making the statement that "you can trust your Bible." I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with this statement. For an example, I'll list the ways in which English-language Bibles in use today have handled the verse we have been discussing. Please bear in mind that there is no support in ANY ancient text for the reading "pierced."

KJV "pierced"

NASB "pierced"

NIV "pierced"

Confraternity "pierced"

NAB "So wasted"

NWT "they are at"

RSV "pierced"

The reader may remember that the title of this piece is "The Secrets (plural) of Psalm 22." So let's look at another example.

The last line of this Psalm says (KJV): They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this." This is quite a good translation, and it agrees with the Hebrew (the word צִדְקָתוֹ literally means "his justice," or "his righteousness"). But in many Christian Bibles the meaning has been changed to "his deliverance," which in Hebrew would be a completely different word. Let's take a look at the ways in which several English-language Bibles in common use have translated this word:

KJV "righteousness"

NASB "righteousness"

NIV "righteousness"

Confraternity "justice"

NAB "deliverance"

NWT "righteousness"

RSV "deliverance"

Now, I was raised a Catholic, though I no longer practice that religion, and it really galls me that the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine changed their translation (in 1991) from "justice" in the Confraternity version to "deliverance" in the NAB, thus falling in line with the RSV and its descendants. After all, they had the correct translation for at least 1,600 years (and reconfirmed it in the Liber Psalmorum of 1945), and there is NO support for "deliverance" in any ancient text. The Confraternity would no doubt say that they did it for "ecumenical reasons," but it is obviously a change made for theological, not linguistic reasons. All who know Hebrew will grimace when they see that obviously tendentious translation.

So, if I know so much about it, why haven't I done a new translation of the Psalms? Well, I considered it, and in fact I did translate about thirty of them. But one of my Jewish friends said that she knew people who would not accept my translation because it was not based on the Masoretic Text. Well, if those unnamed people prefer "like a lion my hands and my feet" to "they bound my hands and my feet," they can have it. I believe God gave us intelligence, expecting us to use it.

Nu, have I covered all the secrets of Psalm 22? Not really, but its greatest secret is that it is three-thousand-year-old Hebrew religious poetry that has absolutely NOTHING to do with events of a thousand years later, including the Passion Narrative of the Christian Gospels. It is clear that Christian writers forced their narrative onto Psalm 22. I do not deny the possibility that the Psalmist may have foreseen events of a thousand years later, but I am a strong believer in Occam's Razor.

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

The Secrets of Psalm 22 - Part I

The other night I watched an interesting video on Youtube. Its title was "The Secret of Psalm 22." If you look closely at this blog entry, you'll see that I've given it the title "The Secrets of Psalm 22," with "Secrets" in the plural. I believe that Psalm 22 holds several secrets, not just one. Here's a link to the Youtube video:

The Secret of Psalm 22

The video is not only very interesting: it's quite pleasant to watch. A young woman ("Anastasia") interacts with Dr. Seth Postell. I enjoyed the dialog between them as he made his exposition concerning Psalms 22.16 (22.17 in the Hebrew text). As it turns out, there is a huge controversy concerning this verse. In the NASB it reads:

For dogs have surrounded me,

A band of evildoers has encompassed me;

They pierced my hands and my feet.

This verse (and others as well) is believed by Christians to refer to the Passion of Christ. But in the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text it says nothing about piercing; instead it says, "Like a lion my hands and my feet." This discrepancy has caused the Christians of trying to hide the Messiah, and the Jews to accuse the Christians of twisting the text to fit their agenda.

Dr. Postell presents a good case for a possible resolution of the problem in which there is no blame for either side. I'll try to reconstruct his case as best I can, since it is one that I can agree with, as far as it goes.

All of the Christian translations are ultimately based on the Septuagint (LXX), a Jewish translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, which is almost a thousand years older than our oldest copy of the Masoretic Text, and is based on an earlier form of the Hebrew text. That earlier form is not very different, but there are differences. The Greek of the Septuagint says, "They gouged my hands and my feet.." Nothing about a lion, nor does it say, "pierced." How are we to explain this?

Well, we can explain it with the help of some very old Hebrew manuscripts. The verb in two of them is

כרו (pronounced "karu"), meaning "they dug," causing that part of the verse to read "They dug my hands and my feet." This earlier form of the Hebrew text is no doubt where the Greek "they gouged" came from. But this verb normally means "to dig," as in the dirt. It doesn't mean "to pierce," which would require a different Hebrew verb.

The corresponding word in the other old Hebrew manuscript is כארו. We have to remember that when the psalm was written there were no vowel-pointing systems. Even today (in Yiddish, for example) one puts in an aleph (א) to represent an "a" vowel. But this apparently confused one of the Masoretes, who did not recognize it as another "karu." But looking at another verse in the psalm, he saw mention of lions, and thought it must be כארי (like a lion), differing only in the length of one stroke. This causes the line in the Masoretic Text to read, "like a lion, my hands and my feet." This is awkward, since there is no verb (which can happen in poetry), so most translators add a word or phrase in italics: "mauled," or "seized," or "at my," and so on. But these words are not in the Hebrew.

Dr. Postell's theory is brilliant, and I believe it sufficiently explains the variant reading in the Masoretic Text. But I don't believe it goes far enough. We are still left with "dug," which does not mean "pierced."

If I open my copy of the Vulgate to pp. 792 and 793 of Vol. I, I see, on the left side, Jerome's Latin according to the Septuagint. In that part of the verse it says, "foderunt manus meas et pedes meos" (they dug my hands and my feet." When I look at the righthand page, which has his translation according to the Hebrew text of his time, I see "vinxerunt manus meas et pedes meos" (they bound my hands and my feet). Apparently the Hebrew text of his time, or at least his copy of it, had a much more reasonable reading than "dug." Consulting my Hebrew dictionary, I find that one of the verbs meaning "to bind" looks very similar to "karu," but it is now used only for "binding books." That verb is כָּרַךְ, which without pointing would simply be כרך. Although that Hebrew verb is not, apparently, used in the Bible, a possibly related Aramaic verb is, in Daniel 3:20-1, where it refers to the binding of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. כרך is very similar in appearance to כרו, which could cause a confusion between "bound" and "dug." Further, the similarity is at least as strong in Paleo Hebrew as it is in Square Hebrew writing.

It is well known that the Evangelists used mostly the Septuagint (LXX) for their quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures. The meaning "gouged" Greek probably indicates that the LXX translators had before them a Hebrew text containing the misreading "dug" for "bound." St. Jerome, in the Vulgate, was too honest to change "dug" to "pierced." Others though, including the translators of the KJV and many later translators, did so.

(to be continued)