I seem to remember a room in Brooklyn. Sometimes I think I've visited it, sometimes I'm sure I've not. In my mind's eye it seems like Elisha's room in II Kings 4:10: just a mittah (bed), a shulchan (table), a kisse (chair) and a menorah. At times I've seen that room, I've fixated on it, examined every square inch of it with a strange spiritual hunger, at least in my mind's eye. And often I look for that room when I walk the Jewish streets of Brooklyn late at night, the streets filled with Jewish youth, religious students, walking briskly, studying late and up at all hours of the night, lending the dark streets with a strange and wonderful kind of energy as they hurriedly pass me by. Sometimes in the shadows I look up at a large Jewish home in Brooklyn, probably owned by some elderly Jewish woman, and I peer up and spy a light burning in an upper window of the house. And I think some Yeshiva student has been given an upper room by a Jewish lady, like the Shunamite lady-- remember, she asked her husband to build an extra room, a prophet's chamber, a small aliyyah (upper room), for the prophet Elisha. Read II Kings chapter 4. And then I think about that and in my mind I enter the holy light of Elisha's room and I see the mittah (bed) where the Shunamite's son was laid out dead and Elisha's staff was placed on the little Jewish boy's head and then the breath of life was breathed into him in the Ruach Hakodesh, and the Jewish youth stood up alive from the dead. And I think of that Messianic resurrection and the coming spiritual resurrection of Israel. And I think of Israel's Techiyas HaMesim when all her true spiritual children will be kerovim el Hashem Eloheinu ("near ones of Adonoi our G-d"), with a new heart and a new spirit and a lev tahor and a ruach nekhon (steadfast spirit, see Psalm 51:11-12; Ezekiel 36:26; Yn 3:3,6 OJBC) and the Ruach Hakodesh and a ruach nedivah (a willing spirit, see Jeremiah 31:31-34). When I think about the dry, dead bones of zeal without knowledge, of Israel blind in unbelief, not recognizing her Moshiach, her Ben Elohim Ben Yosef Ben Dovid Moshi'a Moshiach, even though Moshiach also stood up alive from his mittah kever and was seen alive in Moshiach's Aliyyah (Upper Room) in Jerusalem (see Yn 20:19; Mk 14:15; Lk 22:12 OJBC), when I think about that... and when I think about this vast wonderful Orthodox Jewish population in Brooklyn, I somehow see an upper room of revival above the Brooklyn shtetl below: that is, the Brooklyn kosher butcher shop, the kosher baker, the Jewish bookstore, the mikveh, the shul, the bais midrash (house of study, rabbinical academy), the bais avot (old-age home), and all the "Fiddler on the Roof" New Vilna wonder of the fact that they still exist, in spite of every marked-for-death Hitler and Osama bin Laden who would kill them-- then when I think about all that, I ask G-d to build something beautiful in cyberspace, an upper room here for His Glory among His People. Thanks for stopping by. Dr. Phil Goble President Artists For Israel pgoble@gmail.com 646.460.5971 (cell) P.S.If you wanted to know James Joyce's definition of a word in Finnegan's Wake you would be forced to study the work just about word for word and that means the word in question in every context in the book. The lazy cheap way of popping open a dictionary would not work. Alas, so it is with you. If you are really interested in the word "Almah," you will have to put your dictionary away and actually read the entire Tanakh carefully word for word. I know this is a lot to ask but Hashem is the One asking. As for whether Hashem ever had His Memra/Chochmah that He could and would send to create and redeem the world in the power of the Ruach Hakodesh, that is not something we twisted the meaning of "Almah" to accommodate. Read more on Almah. Go to http://www.afii.org/pgnote.html THE ORTHODOX JEWISH BIBLE IS AN ENGLISH VERSION. 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