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[metamorphosis]

I know i would have helped, i understand when there are disturbances of adults, and so i would not be so quick to help, but this was obviously a child, and i don't think a child would fake injury, or be a disturbance. I know i would have helped in this case. I could not even watch after the first second where she got hit by the car.

[Brainiac]

Bad news.

Chinese toddler left for dead in hit-and-run crash dies.

[metamorphosis]

Bad news.

Chinese toddler left for dead in hit-and-run crash dies.

Since that Video went "viral" the Chinese are enacting a "good Samaritan law" to try to get people to be more kind. The news made me cry for that girl, and again now. This world can be so cruel.

[Gerard]

View at Youtube

[Gerard]

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[Kalisurfer]

I think I need to take a long watery road trip across the ocean in search for that attic somewhere in Prague where the golem waits for reanimation into the modern age. In some ways the Gears Cube could be seen as a postmodern golem reanimating itself into life, changing form, whirling around like a dervish, expending its mystical energy, only to eventually stop and hide within the cube of the attic it originally came from!

[Homer]

Ouch!

View at Youtube

[Gerard]

I could start a thread on the Golem, but I leave it at this for the moment because it is bit of a niche-market, except when there is interest in what Gershom Sholem, mentioned in this poem, has to say.

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The Golem
Jorge Luis Borges 1958

Translated by James Honzik

If (as affirms the Greek in the Cratylus)
the name is archetype of the thing,
in the letters of “rose” is the rose,
and all the Nile flows through the word.

Made of consonants and vowels,
there is a terrible Name,
that in its essence encodes God’s all,
power, guarded in letters, in hidden syllables.

Adam and the stars knew it in the Garden.
It was corroded by sin (the Cabalists say),
time erased it, and generations
have forgotten.

The artifice and candor of man go on without end.
We know that there was a time in
which the people of God searched for the Name
through the ghetto’s midnight hours.

But not in that manner of those others
whose vague shades insinuate into vague history,
his memory is still green and lives,
Judá the Lion the rabbi of Prague.

In his thirst to know the knowledge of God
Judá permutated the alphabet through complex variations
and in the end
pronounced the name that is the Key

the Door, the Echo, the Guest, and the Palace,
over a mannequin shaped with awkward hands,
teaching it the arcane knowledge of
symbols, of Time and Space.

The simulacrum raised its sleepy eyelids,
saw forms and colors that it did not understand,
and confused by our babble
made fearful movements.

Gradually it was seen to be (as we are)
imprisoned in a reverberating net of
Before, Later, Yesterday, While, Now, Right, Left,
I, You, Those, Others.

The Cabalists who celebrated this mysterium,
this vast creature, named it Golem.
(Written about by Scholem,
in a learned passage of his volume.)

The rabbi explained the universe to him,
“This is my foot, this yours, and this the rope,”
but all that happened, after years,
was that the creature swept the synagogue badly.

Perhaps there was an error in the word
or in the articulation of the Sacred Name;
in spite of the highest esoteric arts
this apprentice of man did not learn to speak.

Its eyes uncanny,
less like man than dog and much less than dog but thing
following the rabbi through the doubtful
shadows of the stones of its confinement.

There was something
abnormal and coarse in the Golem,
at its step the rabbi’s cat fled in fear.
(That cat not from Scholem but of the blind seer)

It would ape the rabbi’s devotions,
raising its hands to the sky,
or bend over, stupidly smiling,
into hollow Eastern salaams.

The rabbi watched it tenderly but
with some horror. How (he said)
could I engender this laborious son?
Better to have done nothing, this is insanity.

Why did I give to the infinite
series a symbol more? To the coiled skein
on which the eternal thing is wound,
I gave another cause, another effect, another grief.

In this hour of anguish and vague light,
on the Golem our eyes have stopped.
Who will say the things to us that God felt,
at the sight of his rabbi in Prague?

[Gerard]

View at Youtube

[Kalisurfer]

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Wow, great presentation, so much possibility for real change, not political rhetoric, in producing social and environmental justice for future generations.

[Kalisurfer]

I could start a thread on the Golem, but I leave it at this for the moment because it is bit of a niche-market, except when there is interest in what Gershom Sholem, mentioned in this poem, has to say.



The Golem
Jorge Luis Borges 1958


In this hour of anguish and vague light,
on the Golem our eyes have stopped.
Who will say the things to us that God felt,
at the sight of his rabbi in Prague?

I've been running from the Golem my while life, maybe that's the problem, time to look into the mirror once again.

Ohh, I so love niche markets.

[Gerard]

View at Youtube

Wow, great presentation, so much possibility for real change, not political rhetoric, in producing social and environmental justice for future generations.

This is indeed hopeful, and the funny thing is that these kind of people are more or less against the Occupy-movement because they only demand change and then start to wait for others to do that and the people in these organizations are changing things now.

[Gerard]

Ohh, I so love niche markets.

O well then, a few snippets from a niche. From Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1946):

It is to Hasidism that we owe the development of the legend of the Golem, or magical homunculus—this quintessential product of the spirit of German Jewry—and the theoretical foundations of this magical doctrine. In the writings of Eleazar of Worms, the most faithful of Jehudah's disciples, discourses on the essence of Hasiduth are to be found side by side with tracts on magic and the effectiveness of God's secret names, in one case even in the same book. There one also finds the oldest extant recipes for creating the Golem—a mixture of letter magic and practices obviously aimed at producing ecstatic states of consciousness. It would appear as though in the original conception the Golem came to life only while the ecstasy of his creator lasted. The creation of the Golem was, as it were, a particularly sublime experience felt by the mystic who became absorbed in the mysteries of the alphabetic combinations described in the "Book of Creation." It was only later that the popular legend attributed to the Golem an existence outside the ecstatic consciousness, and in later centuries a whole group of legends sprang up around such Golem figures and their creators.



And, with my apologies for my very limited PDF-making skills, from his Kabbalah (1988) :  Sholem__Kabbalah__Golem.pdf ( 716.3K ) Number of downloads: 2



and this article:  Gershom_Scholem___The_Golem_of_Prague_etc.pdf ( 149.77K ) Number of downloads: 2




I hope that, when you look in the mirror after reading this, you will not see this:



 golem.jpg ( 42.73K ) Number of downloads: 0

[Dhyana]

He looks like a Vulcan subverted by evil forces from Delta Quadrant :-)

[Kalisurfer]

Ohh, I so love niche markets.

O well then, a few snippets from a niche. From Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1946):

It is to Hasidism that we owe the development of the legend of the Golem, or magical homunculus—this quintessential product of the spirit of German Jewry—and the theoretical foundations of this magical doctrine. In the writings of Eleazar of Worms, the most faithful of Jehudah's disciples, discourses on the essence of Hasiduth are to be found side by side with tracts on magic and the effectiveness of God's secret names, in one case even in the same book. There one also finds the oldest extant recipes for creating the Golem—a mixture of letter magic and practices obviously aimed at producing ecstatic states of consciousness. It would appear as though in the original conception the Golem came to life only while the ecstasy of his creator lasted. The creation of the Golem was, as it were, a particularly sublime experience felt by the mystic who became absorbed in the mysteries of the alphabetic combinations described in the "Book of Creation." It was only later that the popular legend attributed to the Golem an existence outside the ecstatic consciousness, and in later centuries a whole group of legends sprang up around such Golem figures and their creators.



And, with my apologies for my very limited PDF-making skills, from his Kabbalah (1988) :  Sholem__Kabbalah__Golem.pdf ( 716.3K ) Number of downloads: 2



and this article:  Gershom_Scholem___The_Golem_of_Prague_etc.pdf ( 149.77K ) Number of downloads: 2




I hope that, when you look in the mirror after reading this, you will not see this:



 golem.jpg ( 42.73K ) Number of downloads: 0

Gerard, thank you so much for the PDF's on the story and history of the Golem. I will read these later today. I am only aware of the story as myth that comes without much reference to ecstatic experiences, magical tracts, and certain combinations of letterforms to create such experiences. As I usually play with letterforms as art, I am really fascinated by how in this story it was used as a way to transform consciousness and eventually led to the creation of the Golem legend and the making of the figure itself, a story that seems to become less mystical in time and is transformed into what seems like the whole Frankenstein legend.

No, I have not seen this figure looking back at me when I look into the mirror, yet anyway, the closest is something almost as disturbing that looks back in early morning hours! I don't have a mirror by my computer, but some threads on this forum may have indeed created this transformation, which I can only tell by the taste in my mouth and radiating energy field of disturbance surrounding me, so perhaps ... it is happening?

[metamorphosis]

Bad news.

Chinese toddler left for dead in hit-and-run crash dies.

Since that Video went "viral" the Chinese are enacting a "good Samaritan law" to try to get people to be more kind. The news made me cry for that girl, and again now. This world can be so cruel.

Nicer ending story here China Child Ran Over, Still Goes to Kindergarten

[Homer]

Wonderful! What a fantastic contrast to the first tragic event.

[Gerard]

View at Youtube

the dog survived the accident

[Gerard]

The Dybbuk (a malicious spirit), one of the most important Polish-Yiddisch plays, about life in a sthetl, written by S. Ansky, directed by Michał Waszyński. I have this on video tape and really liked it.

View at Youtube

Act 1: Hannan, a brilliant talmudic scholar, falls in love with Leah'le, the daughter of Sender, a rich merchant. Sender opposes a marriage between the two, as he prefers a rich suitor for his daughter. In desperation, Hannan decides to study the mystical arts of the Kabbalah, in the hopes of finding a way to win back Leah'le, whom he feels is his predestined bride. When Sender announces that he has found a suitable bridegroom for Leah'le, Hannan drops dead in a state of mystical ecstasy.

Act 2: On the day of her wedding, Leah'le goes to the graveyard, for the purpose of inviting the spirit of her dead mother to attend the wedding. She stops by the graves of a bride and groom who were murdered together before their marriage was consummated, and invites their spirits to the wedding. Finally she is drawn to the grave of Hannan, and leaves the graveyard appearing somehow "changed". Under the wedding canopy, Leah'le suddenly cries out to her intended: "You are not my bridegroom!" and rushes to the grave of the slaughtered bride and groom. A man's voice issues from her mouth, saying "I have returned to my predestined bride, and I shall not leave her". She has been possessed by the Dybbuk.

Act 3: Leah'le is brought to the home of a Hassidic sage who is to exorcise the dybbuk from her body. Several attempts fail, and finally the sage calls upon the chief rabbi of the city for assistance. The chief rabbi arrives and tells of a dream he had, in which Nisn, the long-dead father of Hannan, demanded that Sender, father of Leah'le, be called before the rabbinical court.

Act 4: The room is prepared as a court, and the spirit of Hannan's father is invited to plead its case from within a chalk circle drawn upon the floor. The spirit speaks to the rabbi, and tells him of a pact made between him and Sender, many years ago, that their two children shall be wed. By denying Hannan his daughter's hand in marriage, Sender broke the pact. The rabbis attempt to appease the spirit, and order that Sender must give half of his worldly goods and money to the poor, and say Kaddish over the spirits of Hannan and his father. But the dybbuk does not acknowledge that it has been appeased. Leah'le is left within the chalk circle of protection while the others leave to prepare for her wedding. The image of Hannan appears before her, and she leaves the safety of the circle to unite with her beloved—presumably, in death.

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Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide:

Dybbuk, The (1938-Polish) 125m. *** D: Michael Waszynsky. Leon Liebgold, Lili Liliana, Max Bozyk, Abraham Morevsky, Dina Halpern. Fascinating, beautifully detailed (and restored) Yiddish-language version of Sholom Anski's famous folktale of a restless, disembodied spirit who enters the body of the woman he was pledged to wed. Of special interest as a look at a culture made extinct by Hitler. One of a dozen or so Yiddish features made in Poland prior to the Holocaust.

[Gerard]

Jonah Lehrer on creativity