A VISION
M. GLIKMAN, ISRAEL
4.09.2017
The
Almighty often directs our thoughts back to the distant or not so distant past.
The event described below occurred four months ago.
A
Saturday evening in Ashdod visiting friends. Usually it would be a ceremonial
reception with quite a few guests. But this time there were just us (my wife
and I) and an old friend of our hospitable hosts – an artist Vladimir Pain.
As
usually happens when we meet, the conversation turned to my research on the
stones of the breastplate of the High Priest. We discussed the topic of the stones
being inside the hoshen and the glowing letters. This was all new to Vladimir,
he neither read any of my articles nor did he know much about the breastplate. He listened with interest to my “popular
science” narrative. When I said that it was still not completely clear in which
way the names of the tribes (sons and grandsons of the forefather Jacob) had
been placed on the stone, he replied: “Wait a second, I’ll try to solve this
problem now.” I looked at him skeptically and thought to myself that since we already
had a few drinks there is no use to argue with the man, otherwise he might take
offense.
Meanwhile
Vladimir set about his “sacred ritual”. He covered his eyes with the left hand,
stretched his right hand in front of him slightly spreading the fingers and
started moving the hand from left to right while murmuring something to
himself. Unfortunately, I did not time him. When the artist “returned to us”,
he said: “Ok, it was like this: the stones served as kind of “a container” for
the letters. Remember your first grade in school, there was always a container
with letters hanging by the blackboard and each letter had its own slot. A
teacher would pick the letters necessary to make up a word. The students also had
such containers on their desks… When the High Priest received an answer from
the Almighty, the letters carved in the stones stood out and formed the words
of the answer. That’s what I just saw.”
I had a
very strange feeling. I thought about the story of King Shaul, especially its
end after he consulted the fortune-teller. I thanked Vladimir and changed the
subject of the conversation. During the following months I have not thought
about the encounter at all.
And yet,
the information sank in somewhere in the back of my mind and even came back to the
surface albeit in a different reinterpreted form.
THE
NAMES OF THE TRIBES OF ISRAEL HAD BEEN PLACED ON THE BREASTPLATE OF THE HIGH PRIEST
IN THE ALPHABETICAL ORDER from right to left on the stones attached to the
inner surface of the outer fold of the hoshen fabric in the following way:
Gad Benyamin (Benjamin) Asher Ephraim
אפרים אשר בנימין גד
Issachar Yehuda
(Judah) Zevulun (Zebulun) Dan
דן זבולן
יהודה יששכר
Shimon (Simeon) Reuven (Reuben) Naphtali Menashe
מנשה נפתלי
ראובן שמעון
Note. In Hebrew the name Ephraim begins with
“alef”, the first letter of the alphabet. The names are written in English
transliteration but from right to left. The stones are arranged in columns, the
first stone in the upper right corner is odem, in the upper left corner is
yashpe.
Perhaps,
the method of teaching children the Russian language using the containers with
letters goes back to the ancient times of the Exodus. The Russian alphabet has roots
in Greek, which, in turn, is related to the Phoenician letters and Hebrew.
I decided
to invite Vladimir to become my co-author and to believe in his assumption,
treating it as “the vision” for our own entertainment. Upon hearing my
suggestion (over the phone) he replied very seriously: “Prepare the questions.
I’ll do some more snooping if I get an access to the information field.”
However,
the story unexpectedly took a “mythical” turn. It would seem that it was
somehow influenced by the information
about the Torah codes. I simply wrote down all the first letters of the names
of the tribes in a columnar form:
א א
ב ג
ד
ז י י
מ
נ ר ש
Reading the Hebrew columns, I got quite an
intelligible sentence:
אדם
א זנב ירגיש
(adam a(alef) zanav
irgish) that could be translated as follows: “man will feel “a” a tail”. The
letter “alef: might mean the first letter of the name of the Creator “Adonai
Elohim - אלוחים אדוני".
Then the text acquires a special meaning: a man is the creation of the Creator
and must follow Him.
I
decided to check, what if the above-mentioned sentence has already been
featured in religious literature in one form or another and launched a search
on the Internet for the sentence in Hebrew. To my surprise, the search proofed successful.
In the Torah, the book of Devarim 28:13 it is
written: “And the Lord will make
you the head and not the tail; you shall be above only, and not be beneath, if
you heed the commandments of the Lord your God,
which I command you today, and are careful to observe them.” And should the
Israelites not heed the commandments then: “The alien who is among you
shall rise higher and higher above you… he shall be the head, and you shall be
the tail.” (ibid, 28:43-44)
In
the book of the Prophet Isaiah 9:14-15 we read the following: “Therefore, the Lord will cut off head and tail from
Israel … The elder and honorable, he is the head; The
prophet who teaches lies, he is the tail.”
On
a website dedicated to the Mishnah Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) ( משנה בפרקי אבות -
פ"ד מט"ו ),
there was a discussion dealing with the teaching by Rabbi Matya ben Charash that
one should always greet others first and that it is better to be the tail of a
lion than the head of a fox.
"רבי מתיא בן חרש
אומר : הוי מקדים בשלום כל אדם , והוי זנב
לאריות ואל תהי ראש לשועלים"
The discussion was concluded with the
following sentence:
.", והזנב ירגיש כי הוא זנב של הראש
ויחד יפעלו הראש יזקור כי יש מאחוריו זנב …"
Literally: the head will remember that there
is a tail behind it, while the tail will feel that it is the tail of the head
and they will act together. The greatest success is in the union between a man and
G-d.
Was
it a coincidence or a confirmation, albeit indirect, that the correct placement
of the names of the tribes on the hoshen stones has been discovered? I believe that
once again I received a gift from Heaven. A small crack opened up slightly and allowed
us to read the most ancient remainder to men: NEVERE FORGET THAT THE ALMIGHTY
IS THE HEAD OF EVERYTHING.
Thanks
to Y. Klingman for sound advice while discussing the article.
