malkah ascends the chariot

Someone called Malkah a mystic the other day. But I don't think so. Just because she romps around with letters of the Hebrew aleph-bet... Just because she's more comfortable in the cosmic... Just because she can't hold a pshat conversation, even about a movie like say Little Shop of Horrors (or a TV series like BSG)... Just because she sees people acting out letters of the Tetragrammaton and taking them on as archetypes... All that and more does not a mystic make.

Malkah once asked her mother, Mrs Tzaddik, what she had wanted for her when she grew up. It was a question Malkah had just never thought to ask before, but now was curious as hell. Ask it now or never. Mrs Tzaddik was not going to be long for this world.

"How could I have wanted anything for you?" Mrs Tzaddik told her, voice raised in operatic frenzy.  "You took drugs in the '60s!"

Ah. And there it was. No achievement was ever going to be good enough for Mrs Tzaddik, was it? Malkah took drugs in the '60s.  And actually, thereafter as well.

Malkah was calm about Mrs Tzaddik's outburst. As she was calm about just about everything. Equanimity was her primary practice.

She said, "Ma, everyone took drugs in the '60s." It was just a fact.

But Mrs Tzaddik was too steamed up in the tragedy of her own disappointment to hear it. And she didn't like facts.

I want to say "what happened in the '60s stays in the '60s" but you and I both know that's just not true. Berkeley in the '60s, and San Francisco in those days engaged a generation to see beyond the veil. And this was not just about pretty colors on the wall, or politics, or what the music really means. Malkah and her generation weren't just lying around reading Carlos Castaneda all day. They were also reading folks like Thomas Kuhn. The '60s were paradigm-shattering.

Now Malkah had been raised on storybook tales of how the Hebrew letters searched desperately for the Queen of Heaven, aka the Sabbath Bride, aka the Shekhinah, who had disappeared from the world. The letters were alive in those books when she was a child. And that didn't change. It was pure animism. She was raised with a living alphabet. Hebrew at her school was in the morning—vibrant, exciting, and alive. English was in the afternoons—dead as a door nail, just making words and nothing more. The English letters didn't run off trying to bring the Shekhinah back to Earth so that the world could be healed. They told baseball scores.

Something much later led her back to the tales of her childhood. The tales her father had told her. She needed to rethink them. Malkah discovered that these were no mere children's stories made up by imaginative children's authors. Instead, they were rooted in baudy ancient stories and serious medieval texts about the birth of God and the emergence of pre-biblical Creations. In other words, they were 'raw data,' and 'primary sources.'

And what those tales did was make Durkheim extremely dull. Durkheim, yes. But not Weber. Weber was all about charismatic figures rather than statistics.

Don't get me wrong.  LSD did not make Malkah religious or anything. God forbid. No. It just made her a better academic. It made her take those mystical texts seriously—as treatises on the miracles of grammar, ancient languages, and the formation of words.

Malkah became a better academic. She had fun with the material. And then she got out there and made something of herself. And Mrs Tzaddik was confused. Proud (sometimes), but grudgingly so. You can't possibly do well if you took drugs in the '60s.  Right?

So. On this election day, my vote's for Malkah's-no-mystic. She's just a product of her times. She seeks the whole above the particular. She privileges ancient tales over current events. And she loves the letters of the aleph-bet because they're still opening doors to the mysteries of Creation.

Along with Scientific American.

malkah's little crush on ba'al

She's not supposed to. He's not part of her tradition.  Except as a traditional enemy, I suppose. He's somebody else's god. And not even the top dog at that. So. I was asked the other day what drew Malkah to Ba'al. And I suppose I should come up with something that makes it all sound reasonable.

Believe it or not, it started with the Tetragrammaton. One night, a very long time ago, Malkah discovered that everyone she cared about seemed to act out one of the letters of the Tetragrammaton.

There were Yud people. They were El people. Frequently bullies in their insistence on (white) male privilege. They had created something (as a head of a pantheon ought) but then they didn't want any more change. "I made it.  Now leave it alone." Creation. Just as I put it there, and not a drop of evolution since. Yud people. Not very attractive.

There were Upper Hei people. As watery as El was fire. These folks just wallow. They gripe and moan, and nothing, just nothing, is ever quite right for them.  They sulk when they're supposed to be incubating.  They take a sabbatical and spend the whole time obsessing about how short it is.  And then they get nothing done.

I should say right now that we all do these things. Sometimes. But El people. Fucking control freaks. And Upper Hei people.  Too many anti-depressants.

And then there's Vav. Upright and slim. And tall, with his head held high. Ambitious Ba'al wanting to make a difference in the world. Baal people are fucking activists. Thwarted by the powers that be at every turn. And shadowed by the loving gaze of Upper Hei —Asherah (Athirat, if you will) at every other turn. Ba'al wants to change the world. He's the original ecologist. An agriculturalist. An inseminator. Of the earth, that is. He makes things fertile, if given half a chance. Not that El will leave him be. And, well, Ba'al's been shtupping the wife, Athirat, so yah, I guess El has kind of a reason to be pissed.

There's no reason to make such a fuss about Ba'al's peccadillos. It's in his nature to spread seed. That's what he's supposed to do. The real deal, though. No Monsanto for him.

I had a student once who burst into tears when I started talking about Ba'al. Really wailing. And shaking too. She was of African origins and was raised to believe that Ba'al was the devil himself. So. Just speaking his name gave her the willies. And hearing something positive about him —like that he was just one of the top four deities in the pre-Abrahamic pantheon of Ugarit— just was too much to bear. I might as well have been talking about Saddam Hussein (more of an El character than a Ba'al one, for sure, but you get the idea). Say something good about the devil and you've got to expect a bit of a rocky response.

In all fairness, I must say Malkah was drawn to Ba'al's sister, Anat, (the lower Hei on the Tetragrammaton)—but she didn't have a crush.  No.  Instead she wanted to be the fierce and loyal lady of the hunt. A natural born killer.  I think Malkah didn't take that part too seriously though.  She saw Anat as just incredibly competent and able to get shit done. She killed. But she didn't kill. Can you hear the difference?

So. Malkah's crush on Ba'al is a bit weird, I suppose, in that she started with YHVH and worked her way backwards in time instead of going along with the program.  Back and back and back until she met Abrahams's contemporaries in the land of Cana'an. And found those top four, El, Asherah, Ba'al, and Anat had all gotten carried over into the Judaic godhead, sight unseen, having a good laugh, maybe, and blithely going about their business in the god department as if they hadn't been slaughtered by the invasion of the monotheists.

So. What's the problem with telling Malkah's secret? I think it's that almost nobody's going to believe it.  But if they do, there's sure to be someone saying she took up with the devil. Or that she's gone all pagan on us. But I'd like to think that she's just gone deeper. Deeper into the history of her own tradition.

She came up for air, and there he was.

I know, I know. Alchemy makes for pretty crappy punchlines.  Either that, or I'm just very bad at it.

the kuf and the caff

I heard them speaking, and so I stopped them.

"Excuse me," I said, "could you please tell me whether the word 'kavod' starts with a kuf or a caff?"

"What do you need it for?" he said, looking suddenly like Mossad agents look when they ask questions.

"I need it," I said. "I just need it." But I thought the better of my dumb-ass paranoid answer, and decided to give some semblance of the truth. "I was writing 'kol ha-kavod' and I think I spelled it wrong."

Then the woman stepped in, looking nervously at the man. "It's caff," she said. I looked at her red hoodie. It spelled out Boston University with Hebrew letters — with one letter a mistake. It had a ם instead of a ס. Which made it fairly insane to try to read. But a pretty typical kind of problem as secular tranliterations go.

"It feels like it should be a kuf — ק —" I said, "and not a caff — כ —." The ק after all, is a sacred letter, making things holy. And so I had guessed wrong and written כל הקבוד when it should have been כל הכבוד. Do you have any idea how embarrassed I was? No. Well, they didn't either.

The man didn't let it go.

"They've ruined the language," he said. "There's more English in it than there is Hebrew. Nothing sounds the same anymore. Nobody knows how the letters should be pronounced. Kavod used to be spelled differently."

"Arabic held on to the pronunciation," I said, trying to be helpful.

He grunted.

"It used to be pure. Kavod was honor. Now it means power." He spat.

Ah, that explains it, I thought. I had associated honor with the sacred. But in Hebrew today, honor was a military term. I remember an old hobbled half blind man on the Eged bus in Jerusalem get up out of his seat and offer it to my friend David, thinking he was a soldier rather than a student. My friend had been wearing olive green. And he was the age that would have been a soldier — whether in Jerusalem or in Vietnam — had he not been a) an American and b) a conscientious objector. I wonder if the olive green was unconscious identification. He was, after all, a psych major.

"כל הכבוד לחילים" he said. Which I was sure, given his deference, meant he was honoring soldiers by offering up his seat. It was the day after the Six Day War. It was the Seventh Day. It was the day we all walked to the Wall for the first time since pre-1948. There had been houses all along the way. Houses with white flags waving from the windows, and terrified eyes peaking out. It was my last look at Jerusalem. On that day in June, 1967, I vowed not to come back until there was a permanent resolution to those petrified faces behind the white flags.

But the old man, according to the Israeli stickler I met today was honoring power, pure and simple. Thus the caff and not the kuf.

An interesting midrash for just walking the dog.

We were at Fort Funston, by the drinking fountain. The fountain where twenty to thirty dogs can congregate thirstily around the five or six stainless steel doggie bowls of slopping water.

Their dog's name was Melech — King — a funny enough name for an Israeli dog. Israelis being outrageously anti-authoritarian, and King being so pedestrian a doggie name here. Or maybe that was the point. Maybe the only King they would recognize would be their beloved dog.

We were breaking Fort Funston protocol talking the kuf and the caff when we could have been talking feces and foxtails. But I couldn't let it go.

"The language wasn't so pure," I said, "even in ancient times. Aramaic —"

"Don't give me Aramaic," he bellowed, as his wife tried to calm him down. And I got a 45 minute lecture on the impurities of Aramaic and the common people — as distinct from the Sacred Tongue.

The dogs were perfect angels. They sniffed each others' butts and genitals congenially, slurped in the collective water bowls, found their own balls, and curled up to wait patiently. The Mossad agent guy was still ranting about the impurities of language. Until at last he looked around, and the enemies of linguistic correctness did not seem to be in sight. The dogs perked up, and we went our separate ways.

"כל הקבוד" I called after him, as he left, hoping that he could hear the Arabized kuff instead of caff in my voice. He didn't turn around as he waved a disgusted wave. His wife smiled apologetically as she scurried off. Melech trotted obediently behind.

Rosh and I continued up the hill and into the sand trail on the cliff.

Spelling, I thought. It matters.