Mystic Cabbage, Thumbprints and the Damn Almighty Zero

Maggid shir’Az, Shabbato
Bay Area Chevre

The glorious part of walking in Jewish shamanic consciousness is that you get to see G-d’s thumbprint on everything all around you. All of creation has that sometimes subtle, sometimes in-your-face Divine thumbprint all over it. Sometimes it is so subtle you can spend a lifetime trying to see it. Other times, it just screams out at you from the most unexpected places.

The screaming thumbprint of G-d jumped out at me in just such an unexpected place the other day as I was chopping cabbage. Red cabbage, to be exact. Now, the same thumbprint is visible in

any color of cabbage, it’s just more plain to see in the red variety. I cut the core out of half a cabbage, and looking at the back of the excised piece, I saw a pattern that reminded me of two things: fractals and thumbprints. Now, fractals are very special things. I don’t pretend to understand the exact mathematical nature of their reproductive patterns, but the key thing here is the word “pattern.” Patterns are all around us and they are not only visual but also auditory, and I would surmise olfactory as well… though I haven’t developed enough olfactory consciousness to recognize an olfactory pattern when I smell one. Or perhaps I do…walking through the neighborhood on any given day, I can identify certain smells…the frying donuts at Donut Corner, espresso brewing at the café, or the delicate nose of mixed bouquets at the flower stand… Yes, these too are patterns, all of which mirror their Source.

The Source… where does it all come from, overtly patterned or not? Any Jew will tell you, it all comes from G-d. The Sh’ma tells us, Adonai Echad, G-d is One. And any shaman will tell you, no matter how unique a particular manifestation appears to be, it has a common ancestor, root or source, most often not more than a generation or two earlier. In fact, the craft, art and science of the Jewish shaman is to identify/know/see the Source of any given thing, and to make use of that knowledge to manipulate the text, process or story of a particular reality.

So, getting back to the cabbage…

Cabbage, like a thumbprint, has a layered whorl pattern. There are relatively few basic patterns in the universe and everything is a variation on one or another of these. For example, our Star of David or Solomon’s Seal is based on a hexagon, as is the honeycomb, and the architectural wonder of the world, the eggshell– which is constructed of beveled hexagons, such that it’s structure actually becomes stronger when pressure is applied from the outside. (Caution: doors open out.) So now the cabbage with its overtly visible pattern of layered whorls has a visual rhythm of compression giving rise to expansion, occurring over and over again in a structure of sweeping horizontal layers. It has an almost finger-painted feel to it, despite its sharply defined lines and edges.

So here we have this pattern…cabbage, human thumbprint, similar design, similar message about the structure of the universe. The remez (cosmic wink) of it all can be illustrated by drawing lines in dry sand. Take two or three fingers and dip them half way into the sand. Now, with a sweeping motion, draw your fingers from right to left and curl the line under at the end, bringing it back about a third of the way toward the starting point, thus creating a flattened loop on the left side. Now make a similar line just above that, this time going left to right. Loosen up and get free with it, and pretty soon you have a pattern and a rhythm of sweeping and swirling, and the creation of empty loops. In the case of cabbage, the empty loops get filled up with the curly edges of new leaves as they form in their intricate convolutions, but consider for a moment the negative space we have created by drawing flattened loops in the sand. As is the case in the study of any rhythm or pattern, the negative space is just as important as the positive beat or line.

In order to create the negative space we call “loop” we must push aside some of the sand. This pushing aside of sand is what we call drawing the “line” that defines the loop. There is no actual loop nor is there actually a line…it’s all just sand. Nevertheless, the pattern exists and it’s plain to see. Adepts of early Kabbalah will know where I’m going with this, but for the general audience, let us move on to the next concept: The Damn Almighty Zero.

“Damn Almighty” is a phrase coined by my mentor, Rav Avram. It speaks to the awesome splendor and sometimes terror of the Divine Presence in the cosmos. I have taken that concept and applied it to the notion of Ayin (no-thing-ness) and the Ayn Sof (limitlessness) and come up with what I like to think of as the 73rd name of G-d: The Damn Almighty Zero. Some of our most ancient teachings deal with how the universe was created. It was hollowed out. Um…hollowed out of what? Yes, exactly. So consider this: The Damn Almighty Zero, the ultimate supreme IS (or ISN”T), started this whole thing by drawing lines in the cosmic sand of SELF. Just as we drew a “line” in the sand that defined a “loop” that was in essence “negative space,” yet it was all just sand. No line, no loop, no space, but at the same time, line, loop and space. The zero (0) itself is a negative space defined by an oval line. The empty spaces created by the lines of the cabbage leaves fill up with more cabbage leaf as the cabbage grows. The empty spaces within G-d, likewise, fill up with “G-d leaf” which takes on many, many forms. But each form retains a basic structure and pattern that is characteristic of its Source.

So the Jewish shaman walks through the world looking for patterns and rhythms and clues as to the mysteries of the universe. It’s all laid out in front of us if we know how to read what we are seeing. The Divine thumbprint is on everything, whether or not we are aware of it. The Grandmother is right there in front of you, smiling, winking and saying hello, straight from the cosmos, through the remez of an ordinary head of red cabbage. Praise the Damn Almighty Zero to Whom all Praise is Due.