The Ark of the Covenant

Every so often I’ve been urged to put up the results of my Bible studies up on the Web. While from one perspective that’s probably the last thing the world needs (yet another self-publisher on the Web), perhaps the articles I write and send in to the Living Church of God as background material will prove useful. I came up with such an article just this past week, and I think it may prove profitable to a wider audience. Later I think I will set up a dedicated blog for the purpose of putting up articles, and then link to that blog from here.

Update 2009-06-29: I have just created such a blog, and the article that was originally posted here is now posted here.

With a respectful tip of the hat to the well-established WordPress blog Church of God News, aka COGwriter (a very informative source managed by another member of the Living Church of God), I’ve decided to call it LCG Scribe. (The other possibilities that I would’ve chosen among first have already been taken, but I do like the name.) Unlike COGwriter, which deals with information pertaining to many different “Churches of God” past and present (and true and false, for that matter), LCG Scribe (so far as I foresee right now) will focus on information that pertains directly to the Living Church of God and its ongoing Work. Much of the content will involve information that I’ve been asked specificially to review and submit; other content to information that I think would be helpful for the LCG (and others of course) to know about. The views expressed, of course, should be taken to be my own and not necessarily the official positions of the LCG.

This setup should free “The Chronicles of Johanan Rakkav” to become and remain what it was intended to be: a truly personal blog. So with that clarification, I’d like to double back and explain what I’ve been doing all these months with the “strange” Hebrew signature given below…

שלום בישוע המשיח
יוחנן רכב

Paul did say that he who “speaks in a tongue” edifies himself and not the Church, unless someone translates what he says. Here then is the English followed by the Hebrew:

Peace in Jesus Christ (שלום בישוע המשיח),
Johanan Rakkav (יוחנן רכב)

In addition, I should explain that Johanan Rakkav is a KJV English-style transliteration of the Hebrew name Yohanan Rakkav, which in turn is a back-translation from my English given name John Wheeler. Johanan Rakkav is my literary pen name (one I’ve used since 1982), and is most prominent on my personal Web site and in my creative writing.

So now that I’ve rattled on endlessly in my typical ENFP manner, I leave you with the signature I’ll use henceforth…

– John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

Very briefly: My once-very-useful but long-broken Yahoo! 360 Blog has now been transferred to my spot on Yahoo! Profiles, and it looks as if it works there properly. So once I figure out how to grant the appropriate permissions and set up the appropriate link, you may read through my blog archives about last year’s trip to Jerusalem, and a whole lot else, once again.

(Update 2009-06-13: If you go to the above link and search for the profile of ”Johanan Rakkav”, it should come right up, the “My Blog” module should be visible, and (so far) anyone should be able to access it.)

(Update 2009-06-17: Lyndell R. found and successfully accessed my blog via My Yahoo! Profile.)

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Moshe Kai Cavalin, age 11

Truth really can be stranger than fiction. I thought it would be strange indeed if someone in the Real World could be like my fictional counterpart Chris Alan Starbright was at ten years old: preternaturally brilliant both in intellectual affairs and in the martial arts.

Surprise, surprise. Moshe Kai Cavalin, age 11, is exactly that. And like my protagonist, he doesn’t like being called a genius. (Sure you’re not. You just graduated from college, for pity’s sake.) Well, having a combination of two strong work and study ethics from his parents surely helped (and that’s probably all he’ll admit).

My only half-joking worry is that someone may try to make this only son of a Taiwanese mother and an Israeli father a “poster child” for a conspiracy theory…you know, the one that claims that the Chinese on the one hand and the Jews on the other are working together to take over the world. (I’m saying this because of some of the really insane thinking I encountered on YouTube last night.) Well, if we had ten thousand apparently noble guys like this one running the world, it would undoubtedly be a far better place.

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"The Spirit or Genius of the European" - Emil Pearson

After having written about the symposium, I must say this. When I first got a good look at the English countryside from my inbound plane, and even more when I got onto the Heathrow Express (and then the London Underground) to get to my final destination in downtown London, I was reminded of John Denver’s old line from “Rocky Mountain High”. I felt as if I was “coming home to a place I’d never been before”. It wasn’t just the obvious fact of countless cultural and botanical references coming to mind as I encountered them. No, from the beginning of my stay here I’ve felt that London and its inhabitants are  ”strange, and yet not at all strange”. And I think I know why.

There is such a thing as “national character”, and it can be argued that there’s such a thing as “national personality” too. The Brits would often say of themselves (fairly ingenuously, in my opinion) that introversion is more valued than extraversion, whereas in America it seems to be the reverse. I don’t find that as true as the Brits might think, not at least in London. At any rate, what I perceive is that the UK, or at least this part of it, is “ENFP-Land”. I say that because 1) London in particular draws its “data points” ecletically from the past, present and future, creates its worldview or Big Picture by “connecting the dots” between all those data points, and then presents that face to the world; 2) what choices it makes appear to be based on personal values of many different kinds, not on overarching group values. Pure ENFP, in the order of cognitive processes.

About the only counter to that assessment I could make is the genteel yet pervasive intrusion of government authority for the sake of security and safety, but then, ENFPs and INFPs do value security more than most. ENFPs are not overfond of either submitting to or of imposing authority either, but overall that seems to fit London society as it stands too. Even the famous abuses of authority that sometimes have happened over here (at the moment I’m thinking of abuses in school discipline) seems to be consistent with responses of ENFPs under stress, although I could be completely wrong about that. Perhaps there we see an emphasis on other aspects of the human psyche.

This description of the typical ENFP personality seems so much like the general “gestalt” of London, England, UK that I think it’s worth reading in full. London, were she personified, would be (again in my opinion) just like this. I could come to really appreciate this town as a resident, for all its quirks. Now if only the weather were less humid, and more sunny generally, I might actually enjoy living here. (Famously among my closest friends, I hate rain and hate humidity even more.)

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The 2nd Temple

The title of this blog is the title of a symposium which was held in London’s Temple Church on Saturday, May 30. A friend tipped me off about the symposium; I contacted its organizer, Dr. Margaret Barker, and asked if she’d be interested in hearing about Suzanne Haik-Vantoura’s work at this symposium; and between us and my most worthy sponsor, we worked out the details.

At this writing, I’m still in London. It is early morning on Monday, my one day set aside for touring before I leave on Tuesday. Yesterday was Pentecost, so I was celebrating it with the local congregation of the Living Church of God — and that was a wonderful experience. But today is for my own adventures, so I must be brief about what happened on Friday evening and Saturday.

On Friday evening there was an informal dinner at the “flat” of Lawrence Henning, where I met a number of the speakers including Dr. Barker. One of the unexpected highlights of the evening was a request from Dr. Barker to perform a “Jewish blessing” over the meal (after it had been blessed Catholic-style by our host). I chose the Priestly Blessing, complete with reconstructed supporting gestures, from Numbers 6. This melody was of course that restituted for the words by Mme. Haik-Vantoura. That little presentation led to quite a discussion for a while — and given all the other points of view at the table, it was a fascinating evening. The fact that the food was so excellent (including poached salmon for the main course and trifle for dessert) didn’t hurt one bit.

The list of speakers on Saturday is given here (as already noted). Dr. Barker designed her opening overview as a lead-in to what the other speakers were saying, while sticking mostly to her own point of view. It was interesting to me to hear what she knew and what she didn’t know about how Hebrew Scripture was recited in antiquity, and I played on that later.

Dr. Crispin Fletcher-Louis came next, and in a way his was the most “spare” of the presentations. He focused on an apparent connection between the biblical verses related to the Feast of Trumpets, comments in Pseudo-Philo on the alleged significance of the day, the verses in Job concerning the angels shouting at the creation of the world, and some pertinent Psalm texts. I was left with an avenue of research to explore, yet by comparison to what followed his presentation was but an appetizer.

Jill Purce had, I believe, the longest presentation, and the one which by far focused the most on audience participation. Now the Temple Church (associated so closely with the Knights Templar) has close associations on various symbolic levels with Jerusalem and its Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in fact it reminded me of things I saw in Jerusalem. I believe that what one would call its “nave” is circular, which is unusual. There the acoustics are very good for singing or speaking, and Ms. Purce chose that venue for her presentation, which focused on the chanting of vowels and their various implications and types of significance in different religious traditions. I thought that she’d stolen the show right there and then.

Imagine my total shock (and total delight), then, when the next speaker, Canon Lucy Winkett, the precentor of no less than St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, spent at least half of her speech discussing the implications of Suzanne Haik-Vantoura’s work and comparing it to the music of the famous Hildegard of Bingen. As it happened, Canon Winkett had seen my YouTube channel and was deeply impressed by what she found there. As a professional singer, she could say things about Haik-Vantoura’s discovery that I could never have said remotely, not having anything like the same training. So hers was the perfect introduction to my presentation, which followed after lunch.

I had lunch (and also an outstanding organic wheat beer) at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which is not far from Temple Church. Going down Fleet Street to that pub, one sees the awe-inspiring dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I had no idea that it was so large; I’d seen nothing like it since I’d seen the Capitol in Washington, DC. Of course the pub itself was its own delight; the atmosphere was unique, and the fish and chips weren’t half bad either.

Murphy’s Law follows me like a hound dog, and despite all my efforts to evade its effects I almost didn’t get to put on this video (followed by videos of Isaiah 60:1-5 and Psalms 148). However, the “sound man” and I found a workaround for my lack of proper extension cord (and his breakdown in sound connection wiring), and we got my video up and running. And lo and behold, I had more time than I expected (45 minutes, not 30 minutes), so after the video I was able to perform samples of the reconstructed biblical chant “live”, complete with the reconstructed gestural system behind the written notation. It was that portion, even more than the video, that the audience found gripping (as I was told). Plus, I got to address a number of points brought up in earlier presentations.

[Update 2009-06-04: See this updated page on my Web site for the video and the text of the paper. This page on Photobucket contains all the photos that turned out from my trip, plus four photos taken by someone else at the Symposium.]

Frederick M. Huchel’s paper (his slideshow he couldn’t get to work at all) was in its way the most challenging, dealing with the “cosmic dance” as portrayed in various religious traditions, including (allegedly) the First Temple in Jerusalem. The roots of this particular kind of dance appear to be in Egypt. It made great inroads into post-New Testament Christianity, yet to me the question went begging as to whether the original, “primitive” Church would’ve rejected such dancing as paganism [Update 2009-06-04: as it was introduced by the confederacy of Rome, Alexandria, Samaria and the altered Jerusalem church]. He thinks not, as I gather from his paper. The fact that he is a Mormon and drew upon the traditions of his own church in the course of his own presentation certainly added spice to the presentation, and I wondered how others reacted to this.

László Dobszay of Hungary is a specialist in early Christian chant and its connections with early Jewish synagogue chant, and his presentation was perhaps the least accessible, both because of his accent and because of the nature of the material. One excellent thing he did was to give us a handout; and then (for he was able to get his soundtrack to work) he walked us through the structure of an extended early Christian chant, showing how various ornamental cadences were used to mark out the syntax of the Latin phrases.

Ater all that, there was a “tea” in the garden in the back of the Temple Church. After a lot of further discussion, I went home, had a good dinner at the Raddisson near the British Museum where I’m presently staying, and went to bed.

שלום בישוע המשיח
יוחנן רכב

Two REALLY fast-moving stars

OK, I know, don’t ever trust a “Top 10″ list…but I really wanted to save this article for posterity, I’m short on time (because I’m getting ready to leave for the UK tomorrow), and I think you’ll like this article too.

What caught my attention was the content of the first two paragraphs:

The more we look among the stars and galaxies, the weirder things seem to get.

Even space itself is puzzling. Recent studies suggest that the fabric of the universe stretches more than 150 billion light-years across — in spite of the fact that the cosmos is 13.7 billion years old.

Oh, really? 150 billion light-years across? Who knew? (Now there’s cosmic hyper-inflation for you…or something.)

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Two photos by NEAR

New category: “Who Knew?” I don’t know how I missed this, but only tonight have I learned that the near-Earth asteroid Eros (like stony meteorites generally, smaller fragments of the same sort of collision that produced Eros) contains substantial quantities of base and precious metals. But “who knew” that Eros contains tremendous amounts of gold?

This BBC article puts it this way:

If Eros is typical of stony meteorites, then it contains about 3% metal. With the known abundance’s of metals in meteorites, even a very cautious estimate suggests 20,000 million tonnes of aluminium along with similar amounts of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.

In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth’s crust.

That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there.

Now if we could just get to all that wealth…not only would it pay off the world’s current debt and make possible an economy based on real and not fiat value, it would actully risk crashing the commodities markets. (And now I understand why asteroid mining is such a staple of science fiction…there really is gold — and much else — in them thar space rocks.)

Art by Robert Neubecker (from Slate.com)

Just for the record, I thought I’d bring this article from Slate.com to your attention. CAUTION: High Level of Weirdness Ahead (not to overlook a  High Pathos Quotient near the end).

If nothing else, I now know (thanks to this article) where the term “cognitive dissonance” came from.

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Kingon Defense Academy Badge

I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff in our Galaxy, but this ad page by BURGER KING (The Kingon Defense Academy) looks to top everything put in my book so far. (N.B.: Kingons appear to have arisen as the result of a “special moment” between “The King” — BK’s mascot — and a Klingon woman. Since both are so high on the scale of unmitigated gall, it’s all too possible.)

If one has the endurance to sit through all three online “training sessions” (and in real life, the techniques shown are often rather cruel, although others are simply silly), one can download a package that includes this badge (which I’ve framed). You are thus duly certified as fully able to defend the STAR TREK collector’s glasses which are being offered at BURGER KING right now. (Yes, I have two such glasses: those for Kirk and Uhura. The local store was out of the other two.)

One has to wonder what went through the minds of the Powers That Be at both Paramount Pictures and Burger King Inc. (or whatever that company is called) when they came up with this. Oh well, it’s not more screwball in the end than the “College Trek” skit that some friends and I created, long, long ago in a college far, far away…

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Betty, Archie & Veronica

You have to wonder what prompted this. Archie Andrews, the most indecisive lover since (or should I say before?) Capt. James T. Kirk, is due to choose — finally — between “girl-next-door” Betty Cooper and “high-maintenance” Veronica Lodge. He’ll propose to one of them in the September 1, 2009 issue of Archie (issue 600 – hm, that might be a clue right there).

I’ve always rooted for Betty..but then, I have a “thing” for blondes and underdogs anyway. It’s always been made pretty obvious that Betty is just as cute as Veronica, has better character than Veronica, is better suited temperamentally for Archie than Veronica, and yet almost always gets the distant angle of this enduring love triangle…which of course is why it’s been so enduring (and for many, so endearing).

Archie, do the right thing for once. Marry Betty. Let Reggie have Veronica. They deserve each other.

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