First, a piece of advice: when anyone — Jew or Gentile
— invokes the ancient mystical knowledge of Kabbalah to either
modify your behavior or extract money from your pocket, that’s your
cue to quickly run in the opposite direction. Sometimes, however,
the present situation is so clear that you don’t need a sorcerer to
decode the omens: an apprentice — or even an apprentice’s
apprentice — can take a crack at the low-hanging metaphysical
fruit. To derive mystical but useful information about the war in
Southern Lebanon, no crystal ball or red thread is necessary — all
you need is a calendar.
Of course, the calendar you’ll want is not the kind found at a
Hallmark shop or embedded into your Microsoft Outlook. Those
calendars are mono-dimensional, solar-based thingies. Life is a 3D
movie — do you expect to see nuance with one eye closed? No,
you’ll need more sophisticated time construct.
These days, it doesn’t take an Einstein to know that space and
time are actually the same concept. Observing a date anniversary is
therefore potentially as profound and concrete as returning to a
specific geographic place. But think it through — how useful would
your Volvo GPS be if it tracked longitude but not latitude? In
order to get back to the same “place” in time, you also will need
two coordinates. You’re going to have to find a calendar that
inter-calculates both solar time and lunar time.
In the old days, people had wizards. Today they use websites (try
hebcal.com). Or, save yourself
some time and stay with me for a minute.
Judeo-Christian civilization is based on an astrologically
integrated, twelve-month calendar that factors in both lunar and
solar cycles. While the Western world now uses a solar based
calendar, the annual reminder of the more sophisticated calculation
is the so-called “moveable feast” of Easter — which is moving only
relative to the current simplistic calendar — but is in fact
static in a lunar/solar place. Thus (like always?), it falls to the
Jews to hang on to the older-type calendar, which is why all their
fixed-date holidays “move” each year across the secular
calendar.
A simple overlay of this month’s events on top of the classic
calendar would suggest that current hostilities are “right on
schedule” — coinciding with what are traditionally considered the
darkest, most blood-stained time of the year. The current war began
in earnest ten days ago, on June 12, just as the Jewish calendar
began a period called (with intentional banality) “the three
weeks”. Beginning with the 17th of the month of Tammuz and ending
on the ninth of the next month of Av, these 22 days constitute the
lowest, darkest point of the annual journey through time. Starting
in biblical times and moving right through to the present, Jewish
scholarship asserts that bad events occur here
over-frequently, concentrated on the final day — the 9th
of Av. A few examples are the destruction of the two Jerusalem
Temples in Jerusalem, the Spanish expulsion in 1492, and the
beginning of World War 1. (Curiously, July 4, 1776 fell on the 17th
of Tammuz, but I digress.)
Do not expect Israel to take extraordinary risks — diplomatic
or military — until this three-week period ends on August 4. While
not externally the most “religious” of Jews, Menachem Begin
understood the profundity if not the divinity of the calendar,
avoiding and postponing decisions during this time without ever
alluding as to why. Similarly, the current leader, Olmert is
certainly well aware of the calendar. Even with a superficial
understanding of the deeper meanings, the history of this time
period anticipates and explains the current hardships — and
provides a “timemap” on how to work out of them.
As seen from the halfway point, Israel’s war will be remembered
has having begun and ripened over the Three Weeks. Whether that
will be the entire arc of the saga, or merely a preface to a wider
conflict requires a prophet and not a pundit. And while abstract
thinking should never be offered as consolation to someone
suffering personal pain, from a distance the calendar whispers that
the time to cry will not last forever.
Back to July 4, 1776: The sin of the golden calf, which
culminated on the 17th of Tammuz, should have triggered the
on-the-spot destruction of the Israelites. Their fate was reversed
only by the intervention and petition of their leader Moses —
invoking the 13 attributes of divine mercy, corresponding to the
13-day run up to the beginning of the month of Av. In classic
Kabbalistic numerology, the value of the word “one” — which is the
essence of the Creator — is equal to 13. Thirteen becoming one
through divine mercy on July 4, 1776. Hmmm. (Make all checks
payable to Judd Z. Magilnick - Santa Monica CA)
