Al Ha veDa על הא ודא

I realized much too late that the last two posts have the wrong title. It’s actually called Hebrew Book Week, (שבוע הספר העברי), not Jewish Book Week.

Neither title is really totally appropriate. There are lots of Hebrew books on sale that aren’t in any way Jewish, in fact my impression is that about 75% of what’s available are cookery books and travel guides, and there are plenty of books in other languages. Just for example, the book I was raving about yesterday is mostly in Aramaic. It’s a shame that there isn’t an Aramaic Book Week. They could sell the screenplay of The Passion of the Christ. Talking of Aramaic, it’s a real כיסופא that Mozilla doesn’t recognize content marked up with lang="arc" as being in Aramaic. Klingon was more important?

P.S.: I apologize if the title of this post messed up anybody’s RSS feed.

Thanks to Hagahot, I picked up the bargain of my life today: the Magnes Press facsimile edition of Gershom Scholem’s own copy of the Zohar.

According to the introduction Scholem bought this Zohar in 1915 when he was 17, and it never left his desk for the rest of his life. At some point when the margins were too full of his annotations, he had it rebound with blank pages interleaved, and he went on to fill most of those with annotations as well, and also stuffed the volumes with notes on separate sheets. The whole lot is reproduced in the facsimile, six fat volumes weighing in at 10.3 kg.

And this was going for ₪185, about $50 Canadian, or less than the list price of one volume of the Pritzker Zohar.

Let’s look at one of the annotations, on something which puzzles me in the very first paragraph of the Zohar, which I had been meaning to blog about if I had found a good answer to my question:

There are a lot of numbers in that paragraph: two colours in the rose (which represent justice and mercy), thirteen petals (which represent thirteen measures of compassion), five leaves (which are five gates and which are symbolized by five fingers holding the kiddush cup).

These numbers are hidden in a “figure/ground” kind of way in the first verses of Genesis: if you take the occurences of God’s name, אלהים, and count the words in between them, you get:

בראשית ברא — 2 
את השמים ואת הארץ והארץ היתה תהו ובהו וחשך על פני תהום ורוח — 13
מרחפת על פני המים ויאמר — 5 

So far I follow. But then in the last line we get another number appearing out of left field:

וכמה דדיוקנא דברית אזדרע בארבעין ותרין זווגין דההוא זרעא. כך אזדרע שמא גליפא מפרש במ”ב אתוון דעובדא דבראשית

And just as the image of the covenant sows that seed in forty-two couplings so the engraved, explicit Name sows in forty-two letters of the Work of Creation.

Which forty-two letters are those exactly? The commentary I linked to above has a few suggestions, but none of them really seem to me to fit the description “forty-two letters of the Work of Creation”. Because of the “couplings”, I tried to work out a theory that it was a calculation of the number of possible pairings of the seven days of the week (or the seven lower sefirot), 7 × 6 = 42 but never came up with anything totally convincing.

So let’s see what Scholem says:

מ”ב זווגים (צ”ל גוונין^?) דהיינו לב אלהים + י’ מאמרות

First, he suggests emending זווגין, couplings, to גוונין, colours, and then he explains 42 as the sum of 32 times that אלהים occurs in the whole chapter plus the “10 sayings”, i.e. the 10 occurences of ויאמר אלהים, “and God said”. (Actually there are 9 but let’s not get sidetracked. There are several ways of resolving this difficulty, trust me on this.)

He then points to an earlier work that lists the 32 occurences of אלהים, Sha’arei Orah (I think this is by Yosef Gikatilla, an important Spanish Kabbalist from a generation or two before the first appearance of the Zohar), and then there is a note in German which I can’t really read and wouldn’t be able to understand if I could (the notes are mostly in very clearly written Hebrew, interspersed with quite illegible German), but I can at least see that it points to a parallel passage on page 30a. Turning to there, I see more notes pointing to two more parallel passages …

… and so it goes on. This clearly doesn’t represent anything like a systematic course on the Zohar, but it’s a huge resource of information, and a great acquisition, and did I say it was a huge bargain?

I stopped by the Jewish Book Week on the way home. It’s the first day, so I’m still comparing prices and looking at titles and haven’t bought anything yet. One title really made my mind boggle: חכמי טרנסילבניה, The Sages of Transylvania. I wonder what they were studying. I didn’t open it, because I thought it would be an anti-climax, but wouldn’t it be great if there was a section on ולד הטומאה?

I try to avoid filling up with petrol on a Friday morning. There’s a universal custom at filling stations here that anyone who buys more than a certain amount of petrol gets a free paper. Since the Friday paper is much larger than on the other days of the week, and costs more, most of the population makes a point of filling up early on a Friday, since it’s obviously worth while to save ₪9.60 (about $2.20), right?

Well, only if your time has no value. Since everybody else is doing exactly the same thing, the queue at the petrol station on a Friday morning stretches right down the street, and you can wait a good 15 minutes for the privilege of your free paper. And it’s not as if Israelis don’t mind wasting time. These are the same people who will hoot at you as soon as the traffic light turns green, or even a few seconds before; the same people who will cut round you if you stop at an intersection to let a child finish crossing the street; the same people who will swerve up on to the pavement to get to a right turn instead of waiting for the car in front of them to clear the intersection. העיקר לא להיות פרייר של אף אחד. Sorry, that’s not really translatable. It means something like “don’t ever let anyone take advantage of you”, and is used to justify every possible kind of selfish and aggressive behaviour, like jumping queues, littering the streets, falsifying income tax returns, and standing stock still in narrow gangways so that other people have to push past you instead of getting out of their way.

Today I encountered a new refinement in the free newspaper game. Instead of someone walking round the filling station handing out newspapers to the drivers, there was someone walking round the filling station handing out scraps of paper with “Newspaper” printed on them, and all the drivers had to take their scraps of paper to a little room in a shack over at the side and push past each other (of course) to collect their papers. I wonder what brought this on. Had people found a way to fool the attendants into giving them two papers? Were the attendants complaining because the papers were too heavy to distribute? Is it all a setup to create an opportunity to pilfer from the unattended vehicles? Did the manager think that it would reduce expenses because some customers would think it not worth the trouble to get out of the car and walk 10 yards for their paper? (Not as unlikely as it sounds, these are the same people who park their cars outside a shop on an intersection blocking all traffic while they dash in to buy something (and then try to use this as a justification for jumping the queue) instead of driving 10 yards down the street to park sensibly.)