Holy power of word and vibration

I often think about the studies we had with the Chevra around power and magic of word. We have learned before that G’d created this World with the words, but in our class we also learned that each one of us has a power of creating and destroying our own world using “magic” of words. Every one of you probably experienced your world destroyed by ugly, cruel words spoken carelessly by someone who is/was important in your life. All of us were uplifted by inspirational words of great, enlightened souls, and by just simple, kind words offered to us by our friends or just by-passers. Personally I know these were not by-passers at all, it was Elijah, but I digress.

In a spirit of “The Evolution meets Tradition”, motto articulated to me by Maggid Shir’az, I would like to pose a question – What is a word? from a perspective of the world of matter.

word �� (w�rd) KEY �
NOUN:

1. A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes.

and then Sound?

sound ¹ �� (sound) KEY �
NOUN:

1. Vibrations transmitted through an elastic solid or a liquid or gas, with frequencies in the approximate range of 20 to 20,000 hertz, capable of being detected by human organs of hearing.
2. Transmitted vibrations of any frequency.
3. The sensation stimulated in the organs of hearing by such vibrations in the air or other medium.

Now we are up to something – Sound, Vibration. Modern physics teaches us that all known matter is a vibration, and that includes the matter of my body. So when the sounds of a right music combine with a sounds of right words and resonate with vibration of my body, it can create a magic phenomena of harmonic resonance, and these words just give me chills:

There’s a blaze of light in every word.
It doesn’t matter which you heard.
The holy or the broken Hallelujah.

I did my best, it wasn’t much.
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch.
I told the truth. I didn’t come to fool ya.
And even though it all went wrong,
I’ll stand before the lord of song
with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.

Now try them with the music – The video.

 

Musing on ecology, economics, and Mishna

I am subscribing to a very interesting blog, which often publish thought provoking posts. The latest one is touching on social and economic cost of our behavior. You can click here to link to the post so you can read it in it’s entirety. The comments are also quite interesting.

…anything that is a commons will have this tendency to retain and increase value, as long as the cost of repair is kept at least as low as the cost of damage.

I started kicking it around in other contexts and the answer seemed to come out the same. It made me understand more about urban graffiti and about vandalism. Then, more recently, I saw this article, about chewing gum. So it costs 3p to buy a piece of chewing gum and 10p to clean up after it.

And it made me think. Wouldn’t that look a little unfair to a non-chewer? The chewer gets the benefit, the manufacturer makes the profit, and the taxpayer foots the bill.

We are inheritors of the tradition which values social justice and communal fairness so much, that our forefathers invested uncounted years in documenting seemingly minute details of fair and just ways to relate to each other, and to community. Today we seem to satisfy our desires for improvements by protesting the status quo and hotly debating issues we have no control over instead of “noodling” over specific, constructive ideas for change we can actualize in our own personal lives.

 

Jewish cyber-community is here

Reb Avram shared this with us this article from Jerusalem Post. Michal Lando, JP NYC correspondent writes:

More US Jews today are "uncoupled" in two senses of the term -unmarried and unconnected to organized Jewry – according to the latest study by researchers Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman, who call this data "disturbing," though not for the reasons one might expect.

In 1990, 33 percent of non-Orthodox Jews aged 25-39 were single. By 2000-01, the number had grown to 50%. In fact "never in Jewish demographic history have we seen so many young adults unmarried, or ‘uncoupled,’" the study says. That in itself is not surprising, because Americans as a whole are getting married much later.

The good news is that single Jews are as interested as ever in connecting Jewishly. The bad news is that they shy away from available Jewish institutions in part because synagogues, Jewish community centers and federations "remain geared to the conventional family unit," the study claims.

As many as 67 percent of non-Orthodox singles say they are "proud to be a Jew," slightly surpassing the 66% of in-married (Jews married to Jews) who agree.

Given the high level of Jewish interest and low rate of communal and ritual involvement among young adult, single Jews, this uncoupled population represents the "greatest opportunity and the greatest risk" of Judaism in the United States, the study claims. "Single Jews are akin to ’swing voters’- they can go either way," the two sociologists suggest. "How they ‘vote,’ how they make Jewish (or non-Jewish) choices, will determine the future of Jews, Judaism and Jewishness in the United States."

One of the quintessential things of being Jewish is to continue study of the Holy Texts, and we would like to invite everyone who is “thirsty” to join us here at Wisdom Heart in doing so. I just left an invitation at the Comments section of the JP on line.

 

פּושׁקנצא- the she-raven

B”H

Don’t bother looking up pushkantza in your Hebrew dictionary. It ain’t there. You can tell by the spelling (the final alef) that this is not a native Hebrew word. The modern Hebrew term for raven is orev shachor עור שׁחור, literally, a black crow. I wondered if pushkantza might be of Aramaic origin, or possibly even Polish. But a quick look in the Aramaic/Hebrew/English dictionary answered the question. It’s Aramaic.

There are three ways to spell (and say) this word:

1. As it appears in our text: פּוּשְׁקָנְצא pushkantza
2. פִּישְׁקָצא pishkatza
3. פֻּשְׁקְצא pushk’tza

Likutei Moharan 3:1 quotes the agadah of Rabbah bar bar Chanah in Bava Basra 73b. There’s an interesting daf yomi on Bava Basra 73 that not only has an explanation of how we might frame the agados of Rabbah bar bar Chanah, but also speaks to the meaning of the story itself, with interpretations by the Vilna Ga’on and Marharsha.

IN DEFENSE OF THE RAVEN — I must say these folks did not have a very good understanding of the corvids. Ravens are very social birds. They maintain familial ties and young birds stay with their parents for up to two years before setting off on their own. Not only is it untrue that ravens don’t feed their young, but in fact, juvenile ravens stay with their parents and help raise their younger siblings. The young ones not only have parents to feed them but brothers and sisters also. So… while the analogies in the agadic interpretations are interesting, they not based on any real understanding of corvid behavior.

shir ‘Az

 

Moshiach ben Yosef

B”H

Greetings, all:

In the last class we continued our study of Likutei Moharan. In this text, reference is made to Moshiach ben Yosef. R. Avram assigned us to research Moshiach ben Yosef.

I wanted to point everyone to an article on Moshiach.com by R. Emanuel Schochet that gives a nice, fairly detailed but not laborious treatment of the subject. I found it a useful overview.

The specific article is located at: http://www.moshiach.com/topics/in-depth/moshiach-ben-yossef.php

Please add your findings on this topic by subnitting a comment to this post.

b’shalom,

shir ‘Az