Names Spelled In Hebrew

Myth and murder in Israeli street names

On the stage was a girl, not 20 years of age, with a pistol to her head. “A gun hanging on the wall in the first act will shoot in the third” is Chekhov’s brilliant tip-turned-clichee, but in a play dealing with Israeli/Palestinian realities it needn’t even hand on the wall literally. A gun hangs on the wall always, and every shot echos for decades.

The shot in this case served as climax in “A Railroad to Damascus” a new play at Israel’s national theatre, “Habima”. The play was written by Hillel Mittlepunkt, an esteemed Israeli playwright in his early 60s and its action takes place in Haifa during the early forties.

Near the closing of the final act, a group of militants with Extremist Zionist organization “ Lehi ” is shown assasinating a young Jewish girl who was rumored to be dating a British officer. I left the theatre shocked and began to conduct an amatuer historical research into the matter. Were such murders indeed committed? Older people who have witnessed the turbulant Forties seemed a bit surprised by my uquestion. Why even ask? Of course they were. The Lehi (or “Stern Gang”) famously killed Jewish girls for dating Brits.

How to stomach this? When I was a child in the 80s, former Lehi commander Itzhak Shamir was my country’s prime minister. Not only this, but one of my best friends is to this day the grandson of the Lehi’s legendary (or infamous, depending on your politics) founder Avraham Stern. His family is known as the “fighting family” and while he doesn’t hold on to reactionary political views, his last name remains a source of pride.

Most strikingly: “Lehi” was the name  of a major street in the Jerusalem neighborhood in which I spent my childhood. Following the rise of the Israeli right to power in 1977, pre-statehood terrorist organizations quickly became cannonized in an effective manner. I decided to return to the map of my neighborhood and find what other groups and individuals were chosen to adorn its street signs, and what have I learned about them over the years that passed.

Where the sidewalk ends

French Hill, located on the range of hills encircling Old Jerusalem from the north and east, is not just any other Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem. It is an East Jerualem settlement, having been build after the 1967 war on land conquered in that campaign.

Celestial versus Hebrew « The Digital Ambler

From a Hermetic point of view, the abilities to communicate and write are awesome things.  Heck, the philosophy’s named after Hermes Trismegistus, a form of Hermes, the Greek god of language.  He was also worshiped in a syncretic form as Thoth-Hermes, combined with the Egyptian god of scribes and the written word, face shaped like a reed pen (the dude literally speaks the written language).  And ever since those ancient days when Hermeticism was first coming around, we’ve had this idea of magical tomes and scrolls of power, with wizards writing arcane formulae to achieve great changes in the world.

Of course, the medium in which those arcane formulae is just as important as the content, and that medium is the kind of script to be used.  Hebrew and Greek, for a long time, were the default liturgical or magical languages, but as the Catholic Church gained in power throughout western Europe, Latin became the primary medium for occult knowledge.  However, some things were kept more-or-less the same, such as the “barbarous words” that are sometimes bastardized renditions of Coptic words or Aramaic names.  Sometimes, magicians just kept using a particular language for its heritage and vocabulary, which is a good reason Hebrew has been so persistent in Hermetic/qabbalistic/theurgic practice.

Of course, even within Hebrew, there are different ways to write things down: namely, the square script (what we think of as Hebrew printed letters) and the Celestial script.  The latter is a styled form of Hebrew script, more angular and with little dots instead of serifs.  It was the language that the stars themselves spelled out in the night sky, and was preferred for use with angelic or celestial beings instead of the more base, earthly square script.

I only realized this when I compared instructions to make lamens for the angelic kings of the elements and for the angelic governors of the planets.  The former take their names written in Hebrew square script, since they’re “of this world” and closer to human contact; thus, we use a script that says the same.  The governors of the planets, on the other hand, use the Celestial script, since they’re from a supralunar realm, above the earth and belonging to the stars.  The script, again, says as much.  The letters may look similar, but it’s like speaking with a different accent: Californians may use one set of pronunciations and slang, while someone from Manchester would use a radically different set.  Altering one’s accent and dialect to be made more understood by the listener would be important to getting across ideas and establishing a clear channel of communication.

Intimate Moments with the Hebrew Names of God

Studies in Hebrew proper names

His Name Is One

Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible

Bible Code II, The Countdown