Havaya-001

BS”D

The Havaya Express

Rabbi Moshe Yess

Prologue

I will not and can not reveal all. I will reveal some. The rest is up to you to pursue.

- Rabbi Moshe Yess

Arizona

January, 2005

Chapter One:

The Other

The new born baby is seemingly solely dependant upon its mother (sometimes its father or other care giver too) for survival. Who else will feed it and heed its crying? As this baby grows older it is compelled to relate to ever increasing larger physical areas. First the crib and its mother’s lap. Next its own room and later on more rooms in the house. The first look out of a window reveals that there is yet more outside the safety of the home. Trips outside in a stroller again present the baby with more world to ponder. The human eye encountering physical reality in ever increasing quantities.

Concurrent with this ever growing discovery of the physical world is the development of the baby’s sense of self. Somewhere in the teenage years a struggle for self definition usually occurs. The teen is no longer satisfied by being just the parent’s (or parents’ ) child. It wants its own identity. It seeks its own desires. One way or the other the young adult which that teen next becomes emerges as an independent member of society and seeks a mate, self sufficiency and in most cases money, power and dominance over its normally small portion of global reality.

In what is understood in secular sciences as a combination of genetic and environmental influences the adult now chooses its life’s goals and either succeeds or fails to greater or lesser degrees.

The adult’s sense of “I” is now firmly established. With its hierarchy of needs (shelter, food, clothing, income etc.) now in place there arises, thereupon, the liberty to contemplate. To react to, to question, to seek insights into its personal life experiences.

All along the way of this life’s journey Western society impregnates gross falsehoods into this adult’s acquired life outlook via many different media. A value system arising from the basest regions of the human heart becomes elevated and presented via various media as meaningful, empowering, worthy of pursuit and emulation. The females are probably the most frequent victims of pop media. They strive to compete with the less than 1% of female humanity who are endowed with stunning physical beauty. Comparing themselves to these beauty stars usually results in great feelings of being somehow lesser in personal worth for most women not so endowed. A similar circumstance occurs with men. The 1% of male humanity endowed with unimaginable wealth, physical prowess in sports, intelligence, or creative genius causes most other males to doubt their personal worth. Mention a more beautiful woman or a wealthier man and the egos of women and men respectively become threatened. Anger usually follows. The end result is a society that is spiritually hollow and doomed to looping forever in endless futile pursuits of an unachievable goal for most.

Added to the above is an inner sense of the meaninglessness of such a life. King Solomon called it “chasing the wind.”

While many find life’s purpose in striving to succeed at one endeavor or another it usually occurs that even upon achieving such a more realistic goal there again arises a sense of futility. The dreamed of and now achieved goal may cause champagne corks to pop for a while but the dream always glitters brighter than the reality of what is actually there upon its achievement. The song Is That All There Is? recounts these looping life struggle disappointments.

When I was an aspiring musician at the age of 17 living in Hollywood, California I entered a famous L.A. music night club called The Troubadour one afternoon. The place was empty for the most part except for a Mr. Jerry Yester and his group the Modern Folk Quartet who were on stage rehearsing a new song and developing its musical arrangement. I was astounded how Mr. Yester wove that arrangement seemingly out of thin air. He told the bass player to play such and such a note. He next told the guitarist to play a more complex chord and most impressive of all was Mr. Yester’s ability to select different notes for each of the four singing musicians to sing. When it was all properly assembled a knockout musical experience had been born.

Mr. Yester was able to do this before my eyes because he knew music theory…how notes and chords and tempos and rhythms can be assembled for maximum musical effect. I soon enrolled in university to study musical theory.

Becoming and being a star is understood as “coin of the realm” in Hollywood society. Stardom has local, state, national and international levels of achievement. Stars are usually rewarded with wealth and their stardom saves them from flipping hamburgers for minimum wages.

In a very limited way I later became the star I aspired to become at age 17. I was in steady demand as a performer at 5 star hotels. Three different booking agencies would call me regularly with offers to go to Chicago, Seattle, Reno or Kansas City to sing. I was seemingly on track for a nice long career in the field I loved until my third return engagement at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Kansas City happened. After some 6 years of non stop performing in clubs I had mastered how to keep a roomful of people entertained and therefore they would stay longer and drink more causing the cash register to ring more frequently. Management loved me more than the audiences did.

Believe it or not it happened for me in a bathtub in my luxurious room at that Crown Plaza Hotel of all places. I was soaking to gear up for another night of combat on stage. I had an arsenal of songs, routines and comedy lines that were hard won over many years of trying new ideas to wow an audience. The “enemy” was the audience…a seeming random group of people who decided to stop into that lounge for a drink and who’s attention I was determined to captivate and wow. After those 6 years of road apprenticeship 98 times out of a hundred I was successful. But back to the bathtub.

I was 30. Before the bath water made my hands look like prunes I noticed for the first time that my hands were more wrinkled than they were when I was 17. My knee jerk reaction to this observation was “I guess I am getting older.”

But there was a deeper issue involved in my reaction to that observation. In my secular upbringing in Hollywood (and earlier in Canada) it was taught to me and therefore assumed by myself without question as being undeniable axiomatic truth that I was in sole and total control of my life. If I succeeded then I was deserving of pats on my back. If I failed then I was solely to blame for that. I had been thoroughly indoctrinated in self determinism.

But those wrinkles were not my doing. Were I truly in total control of my life I would choose to stay young, handsome and without wrinkles forever. Something else was quietly (and now noticed for the first time) acting upon my physical body with each passing day. It was giving me unwanted wrinkles on my hands and elsewhere. I had been lied to. Something else was pulling strings upon me without my even being attentive to it let alone with it having my consent. So much for the alleged axiomatic “truth” of self determinism. I had encountered irrefutable evidence of the Other. That “non I entity” messing with my life.

Upon deeper reflection in the following days I decided to have a heart to heart talk with myself. I decided to take stock. What events of my life had I lived through that were truly not of my choosing? My first wife had decided a few years before that she wanted no more of road travel and left me. It broke my heart. That was one unwanted event I did not choose to happen. On a few occasions I had gotten sick. That’s two. Certain career opportunities came and vanished leaving me still in clubs instead of on national TV or with a hit record. That’s three. I was determined to get to the bottom of this. What was/is this other? Was it luck…be it good or bad? Was it merely random occurrences that all humans are subject or victim to? Was it a higher power affecting my destiny and that of all mankind?

No books that I soon bought on the topics of luck in life or the randomness of life satisfied my question. I was forced to buy an English Bible and study it for the first time in my life. I was embarrassed in doing so. Nothing could have been less “hip” in Hollywood than to state publicly that one was studying the Bible. This admired musician had of his own choosing become a closet Bible student studying privately and alone.

My newly acquired Bible had what is called the Old and New Testaments and this particular Bible had four adjacent English translations of the Hebrew original. The reading of it raised more questions than it answered. Was everything in it to be assumed as literal historical truth? Who authored this work? Did a group of wise old men construct this alleged Divine Communication in an effort to control and prevent (via its morality teachings) the herds of humanity from acting like animals of the jungle?

And what if this Holy Book indeed was a body of information about the Other.... from the Other?

I knew that I was Jewish. Religious my family was certainly not. I was given the usual meaningless Bar Mitzvah ceremony where all the distant family arrives and dumps fountain pens and $18 checks on you, shakes your hand, tells you that today you are a man etc. The next day it was back to the “real” world. So long Judaism. As a result of my minimal Jewish education in preparation for that Bar Mitzvah I was taught how to read Hebrew…but barely.

Within a year of that bath I had discovered another English Bible (this one being of Orthodox Judaism origin) which had explanatory commentary in its foot notes. Those footnote explanations came from some of Judaism’s greatest Bible Sages. Bingo! Questions arising out of the literal text were suddenly being answered. Here’s a quick example:-

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|Genesis|

Chapter 1

26) And Elohim [God] said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:

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Whaddya mean “our image”? Throughout the entirety of Judaism the axiom of axioms is that God is one. “Hear Oh Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One.” Whaddya mean “our image”? This word “our” implies that there is more than one God!

The footnotes in my Jewish Bible went on to explain that this Gen: 1:26 passage was teaching about God’s humility. Although entirely self sufficient God chose to consult with His angels prior to God alone creating man. And why so? Since man was [created] in the image of the angels they were jealous of man. God, therefore, consulted with the angels. Though the angels did not help in man’s creation and this passage may give the heretics an opportunity to rebel claiming that there are numerous deities nevertheless, Scripture does not refrain from teaching courtesy and the attribute of humility. That the greater one [God] consulted and asked permission of a smaller one [the angels]. Had it been written "I will make man," we would not have learned that He consulted with His [Heavenly] court, but only with Himself. The response to the heretics is written alongside: "God created man" and it does not say "They created."

That Hebrew word for God I bolded in italics above, Elohim, is also a problem. It has a plural ending! Hmmm….what is going on here?

Later on in the Jewish Bible God’s Name is stated as a four letter Hebrew word Name which is pronounced Havayah. [the letters “vay” of this word Name rhyme with “my”]

And lest you think that all of this is but interpretive Biblical theory with no practical relevance to current world events allow me to possibly be the first to inform you that the recent devastating tsunami in S. E. Asia was no random event, was no bad luck but rather was the first of many “cars” making up a Heavenly “train” of imminent events headed our way at full throttle that I now call The Havaya Express.