The Peoples Gate
Moses only saw the Promised Land from a distance. We enter via The Final Age Testament. Read exactly. Remember, I will be right here when you return.
A Concise Readers Guide to The Final Age Testament
This work will be the death of me. My personal holocaust.
Why a Final Age Testament?
Google Final Testament and you will find links to the noble scripture of Islam, the Quran (Koran). Why Final? If the Old Testament is replaced by the New Testament then the Final Testament gets the last word.
Did the New Testament announce a New Covenant and a New Age?
Is the New Age two thousand years old?
Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores now have New Age sections that are not dedicated to a new covenant of Christianity. They are filled with volumes on the Occult, the Kaballah, Tarot, Wicca and pop spirituality.
Is this the New New Age?
Is America a promised land based on the final testament, the Constitution?
Is America Zion, a haven for later day saints?
Did Freud create a New Judaism? Marx?
Back to the Bible, from the Greek ta biblia, “the Books”, which are more accurately called a library. Written over a period of ten centuries this library contains the original classics of the Western literary canon.
What is authoritative in this library?
The Hebrew Bible ends with 2 Chronicles and the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple. Rabbinic Judaism continues, to this day, choosing forms of worship and practice based on The Original Testaments poetic tales. The Rabbis defined study as worship since everything is contained in the canon, and it is turned upside down and inside out in the process of Midrashic interpretation. Our Rabbis of blessed memory creative reading also acknowledged the great sense of humor of the Yahwist.
The first expansion of the Hebrew Bible library occurred with the addition of Gospels, Epistles, and Revelation. These additions required a new floor plan so the Christian “Old” Testament ends with The Book of Malachi and Elijah the prophet so the final word is an announcing of the Christian Messiah. The “Old” and The “New” are theological fictions.
To review, first we have the Hebrew bible, then the Greek New Testament and finally an Arabic Koran. Literally the word of God to believers, the Koran is a Final Testament since Muhammad declares a seal to prophecy, “There shall be no further prophets.”
This did not stop Joseph Smith from his new revelation, the latest addition (and edition) to the library of scriptures. The Book of Mormon is another Final Testament. Both are works of genius, but the Koran is glorious in the original Arabic because of its literary power as a prose poem which is the word of God, while The Book of Mormon is readable only to initiates.
The Founding Fathers rewrote the Bible. The Jefferson Bible is a pure American redaction. Torah continues with amendments to the original covenant and new principle teachings, including separation of church and state. This is crucial, since, as Rabbi Kafka teaches, religions, like people, get lost.
The Final Age Testament is the grand finale, the newest but not final wing to the Bible as library.
Read From Present to Past to Present
Our first reading of The Final Age Testament is from after to before.
Read the screenplay Consider Me A Dream first.
The script announces the Final (Kafka) Age, and portrays a rather unkafka-esque Kafka. Kafka’s “Final Testament” to burn his works is understandable in light of those interpreters who do not grasp that true religion and humor walk hand in hand. Kafka knew that playfulness turns irreverence into an act of faith.
Dreams have a logic of their own, so one may film the screenplay scenes in any order. The Ten Dreams:
The Grooming (Wedding)
In the Promised Land
The Funeral (Amerika)
Kafka’s Bar Mitzvah
The Metamorphosis
The Eden of Belz
Rabbi Kafka
Golems
The Tribunal
The End (Sanatorium and Cemetery)
The scenes overlay the Ten Sefirot each containing the essence of the others. Read front to back then back to front again. All is possible in Consider Me A dream.
Since there is no before or after in the truth of Torah read Final Kabballah next, in fact read it twice. Continue with Final Revelation.
Final Revelation is not the end of the word or the end of the world. Next read Final Acts.
Final Acts renews the new. Continue with The Psalms of Final Testament.
The Psalms of Final Testament announces the merging of the two Jerusalem’s, One Old, One New.
Finally, read Final Testament, also known as Blessed Spinoza’s De-scription and Isaac’s Last Laugh.
Then begin again, from before to after, from beginning to end, avoiding any designation of before or after, old or new, or final.
Do all this once a year and we have a classic.
Do it with joy and we have a religious classic. The Final Age Testament.
Finally!
Next we will lay the final Final Age Testament, home study edition, on our dining room table as we dedicate our homes as sanctuaries. This edition begins in Genesis and ends with Consider Me a Dream. The Five Book are now Ten. The Bible is complete.
Then my people arrange your sanctification of food and conversation according to the Seders of Temple Shabbat Shalom. The domestic church is for all the people of the earth. This is all much more than Jewish.
Wisdom, Knowledge and Understanding (Chabad)
Chassidism was for the am ha aretz. Lacking the wisdom and knowledge and understanding of the rabbinic elite the people still wanted to be righteous, each inheriting this land and life in the world to come. The opponents excommunicated the Chassidic leadership and inspired The Old Rabbi to found a more intellectual Chassidism.
In the end we are all Chassidim in the spirit of the final Baal Shem Tov.
A: Mastering the Final Name. Be a Baal Shem Tov
Say A,
The Final Name,
or Ah, Aleph God
In A Beginning
add lamed L say Ale,
or A lah
Plural of majesty Al o heam, in A
Beginning creating continuously, in your goodness
Ma ah say B ray sheet, The Working Story
Of our Genesis.
Genesis One One
In A Beginning
God is Al o heam
Who is one
Al one.
In the original
Beraysheet Bara Aloheam ,( B. B. A).
The Gate
At Hashamayem V At Ha-aretz. (A. H.V.H.)
To Heaven and Earth
A to Z.
A.H.V.H.
Is Final Name
Hidden since creation.
Say ah, say ha, say va
The great ah ha
The Good name
Love, God
So, now you are a Bal Shem Tov and are now ready for your first lesson in leadership and rebbehood:
Beyond Credo and Doctrine
Belive the Temple of your mind
Beyond doctoro, ten poems sublime
Belive Zion in Jerusalem
Struggle ends, all is real, then
Belive in holy of holies living room in that
It is where you hang a picture and your hat
Belive your doorposts marked with word
A muse, the joy, of household God
Belive the blessed virgin birth
Every mothers smile and baby’s mirth
Belive Eternal Promised Land
Holy ground where you stand.
Thus we announce Neo (Final) Chassidism, the Am Ha aretz Movement.
The original am ha aretz Franz Amschel Kafka started his own movement,
Modernity.
Franz is the first modern and the first modern Jew.
Universally misunderstood we say Kaddish for the Kafkan (which is not a Kaddish for Kafka), Consider Me A Dream is Kafka’s true Kaddish.
Kaddish for the Kafkan
“I represent the negative element of my age”
Franz Kafka
“We covet your free will, you our wings.”
The Angel Gabriel
Yiskadal veyiskadsh shmay raba
Diminished and Profaned- The Great Name
The Lords decree: Death, The End. Your life is death your history destruction,
Your destiny is real, Death, and add, a Curse, revolving wheels, spoke
Speak, spoken, say Ka Ka Ka and carrion, again
We all proclaim the name of your God, now and forever- “The Shame”
Cursed and cursed, uglified and defamed
Belittled an belittled, lowered and lowered once again
Unutterable, you say ineffable, for you know not The Name.
Kafkas’s all, you haven’t a prayer,
The firmament proclaims:
No Peace on Earth, as it is
Better for you never
To have been,
So we all say together. Amen.
Being a Bowen disciple I really do not like explaining myself, but this poem is ripe for misinterpretation.
This is Gabriel speaking for the angels who have no Peace in heaven because of the existence of humanity. Every one of them clamors to be the angel of death.
They have a point, since we humans have squandered our wisdom knowledge understanding and free will, ourselves choosing war and death over and over and over again. Religion, which should be the medicine, becomes diseased itself. Politics is the charlatans’ art. This leaves Freud’s couch or Jung’s Nazism.
Gabriel declares that we are all Kafka’s. Yes, he has a point. We are all am haaretz, we have this Earth.
All the angels have is heaven.
From Prose to Prophesy which is always Poetic
I am ready to speak prophecy and not prose. Even in my guidebooks for Torah observance I speak in Elijah’s voice. We all need a hero.
Elijah our messenger gets the final words of the Christian fiction the Old Testament. We are to remember the Torah of Moses, Laws, and Principle Teachings. Actually Elijah is silent and we are told he will turn the hearts of the fathers’ to the sons and sons to the fathers. We note the process begins with the fathers. The land has been smitten with a curse because the fathers’ heart is hard and the sons’ heart unturned.
History has become one long dreadful day.
This father turns to his son and says prophecy has not ended. Poetry is possible after Auschwitz, although I am unsure of prose.
We have all the questions, not all the answers.
Beware the oracles who know.
Praise the poets their ambiguity and for speaking in Psalms. The Hebrew Bible continues with” Blessed are the people… who delight in the Torah of the Lord meditating on truth every day and evening” after the Elijah prophecy which ends the prophetic section.
“Every day” includes the day little Pavel Friedman wrote about the last butterfly:
“It went away,
I’m sure, because it wished to,
kiss the world goodbye.”
Three thousand inmates at Therensientadt entered poems in a contest in the early spring of 1944. If Jews in the camps wrote poetry, who is to say we cannot write poetry after the holocaust?
My son has taken just about every German class offered at Amherst College. He spent his junior year abroad in Freiberg, Germany. The Alperns are not finished with Germany yet. My newly discovered relatives in France went into the archives of Karlshrue and found the birth records of Adolph’s father Nathan and he was born in Berlin in 1890.
The People, the Earth, the Holocaust
And the Final Age
Why a Final Age Testament?
The Final Solution.
For over two millennia, the New Age, it has been taught that The Jews, the Old Israel, worship The Law and a God of Justice and Wrath. A New Covenant based on The New Testament supercedes and replaces The Old. My final fiction is that all this is trumped by the Final Age. I get the last word as I remind you that the myth of displacement led directly to genocide.
What are Semitic fossils for? Fuel for the smokestacks of the crematoria.
Hitler and his Nazi’s wrote their own version of the Gospels. This final testament purged the Christian Bible of anything that appeared positive concerning the Jews.
Hitler also new he must murder the witnesses to destroy the message of The Ten Principle Teachings which are called “The Ten Commandments.”
In fact Hitler rewrote the Ten, beginning with “I, Adolf Hitler am the Lord your God.” He led his people into Egypt by inspiring plagues and destroying principles and convincing his disciples that “to live and die for Adolf Hitler means to say Yes to the Path of Christ.” All of this is explained in one of the ten most important books ever written, The Crucifixion of The Jews by Franklin H. Littell, Harper and Row 1975. Not exactly a best seller, the hardback is out of print, I work from the Rose Reprints of Scholarly Excellence Edition. My best friend Ezra the Book finder of Aardvark Books sent me a rare hardcover edition. I think the poetry and essays in Final Kabballah also explain why the very concept of A Final Age Testament confronts the theological underpinnings of the Holocaust.
The People of the Earth declare, in The Final Age, that we are all awaiting teachings that open the private family history of Abraham and his sons. We the people seek descendents and not stones. The promise of people and land ,and the promise of the son rising to the father, and the promise of a submission to Peace, are the basis for the trialogue between the monotheisms.
This trialogue begins with the confession that Old, New and Final Testaments are fictions.
Ahad Haam, a spiritual am ha aretz argued convincingly that the historical reality of the life of Moses cannot be proved. We add, more so Abraham’, who may or may not be a mythical character.
Four gospels tell four stories of the life of Christ, most of which is Midrashic and the Submission of the Son and the Father in The Quran is a classic rewrite of a biblical tale. All historical fiction at best.
Returning to the telling of the first Exodus in the Haggaddah we marvel at the fact that Moses is not mentioned once in the narrative. Blame Philo who worshipped a Moses who was almost divine. The Rabbis were not receptive to the overly exalted Moses of Hellenistic Judaism or the divine man of Christianity. As the Quran rewrites the original saga of Abraham and his son and the sacrifice, we rewrite that final testament.
Returning to the original phrase, is a final solution to the ills of the world possible? Awaiting the Messiah, are we all delusional? Is the dream of a better world also a fiction, the plot that drives book sales and movie scripts?
Would you spend your money on a movie in which no character learned something about self , no person was redeemed, and the plot never resolved?
The prophets promise a Zion of Peace. Is no war, no poverty, no strife, not your dream? We will get there only by rewriting our myths and stories.
We are all people of one earth, and with the power of the Atom to destroy, the lesson of the holocaust is to find a real final solution.
Abraham, Our Father
I long for my true father. Religious people direct me to Abraham and say we all follow Abrahamic traditions. What about Sarah? Sarahic or Sarahitic sounds bizarre. What of Hagar?
I love the Abraham who haggles with God about the destruction of Sodom. The Abraham of the twenty second chapter of Genesis troubles me till this day. Who will circumcise my lips so I may speak coherently of this text? How will I find good news in the Gospels if they are a story of a Father sacrificing his son? How will I ever know if the unspecified son in the Quran submits to authority or to peace?
Suspend belief, not the ethical.
What could Jung do, as Freuds disciple and spiritual son, but murder his father. Oedipus was blissfully ignorant of his complex. Freudian remembering is a type of forgetting when we ignore the Laius complex.
My Father insisted I give my life for my country, even in an unjust war. Why does the Father bind the son? Why does father Abraham obey a command that suspends the ethical?
Why does he believe the voice that says “sacrifice your son.”? If sacrifice is submission to the will of God, who will be the first father to say “I see the image of God that is my sons face and I will not sacrifice my son and murder God.”
Who will be the first to declare hatred of the God of religious orders?
We cannot recreate the old centuries anew until we answer this question.
This is the entire point of the Final Age Testament.