as above, so below

I wrote an entry a few days ago that is having eerie resonances with a book I'm reading tonight, courtesy of AX; "The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed ben Clifford". Mind you, I'd been nattering on about the Golden Mean and all things being connected before I opened the book, which natters on about many of the same things.

But then, I shouldn't be surprised. It's to be expected, if in fact, as the learned Rabbi says, every lox unit has a special affinity with every other lox unit, and all the toes, bagels, delicatessens and floors in the universe are indeed connected. And reflect each other. And contain the blueprint of each other.

I am even now making up some Qabalah flash cards. It's funny, but I would have paid more attention to my aleph-bets in Sunday school if I'd known they could be mapped to the Tarot, the planets, the elements, and the Sephiroth. Instead of all that boring yammering on about the great privilege it was to be an Israeli (the teacher I remember best was a Sabra, and pretty much insufferable in it) and the endless recitation of sanitized history (the Maccabees weren't the nicest fellas.) The memorization of obscure holidays.

My mother passed an e-mail on once that summarized what you really need to know about Jewish holidays, if you're not a Jew. Ready? It's complicated. They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat. This is also helpful for Jews trying to explain our customs to outsiders. Imagine my surprise when I learned that First Communion did not automatically entail a nice catered luncheon, or even some kind of light snack after the service. No wonder goyim are so thin! As my (barely converted from Protestantism) grandmother went around saying, totally inappropriately, at my bat mitzvah: We Yids sure know how to party.

Anyway, this Yid is entertaining herself by drawing fairly elaborate flash cards. On one side, the properties of the letter. On the other, both the letter (neatly colored in) and a picture of the word associated with the letter.

So far, I've done two. And I'm ready to call it a night.