Light, Like Consciousness

 

Copyright © 2022 by Donald C. Traxler aka Yakov Bloom Traxler aka Yablom.

Well, what now?

 

Copyright © 2022 by Donald C. Traxler aka Yakov Bloom Traxler aka Yablom.

Shabbat Shalom!

 

Shabbat Shalom!

Photo: It Is What It Is

 

Copyright © 2022 by Donald C. Traxler aka Yakov Bloom Traxler.

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.

Copyright © MMXXII by Donald C. Traxler aka Yakov Bloom Traxler.

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)

Copyright © 2022 by Donald C. Traxler aka Yakov Bloom Traxler.

He Has Carried the Covenant

 

Text and image Copyright © MMXXII by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.