Malkah’s tales first emerged in the 1990s as blog posts on “And this part is true,” then in a novel that followed Malkah’s disappearance on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific at the same time her father, the Tzaddik, got stuck in southern Tunisia unable to cross the Sahara. Mrs Tzaddik also appears in many of the original tales, so if you read them, you’ll know why she was omitted from Malkah’s Notebook: she would have completely taken over.
Talks, Readings & Workshops
Topics may be scheduled as talks, workshops, or courses. To schedule, contact Sarah Elovich: sarahelovich@gmail.com
Teaching Malkah: The Secrets of Malkah’s Journey
- Book: Malkah’s Notebook: A Journey into the Mystical Aleph-Bet
- Film Screening: The Day before Creation
- Jewish mystical principles from Torah, Talmud, Sefer Yetzirah and Zohar
- Ancient Near Eastern archaeological motifs: ancient deities, tales, and practices
- The Tetragrammaton
The Mystical Aleph-Bet
- Learning the aleph-bet letters the ‘old’ way
- The את of Creation: alternate Creation stories
- The emergence of the mystical aleph-bet
- Animism — the letters as alive, and imbued with purpose
- Mother letters, Father letters, Doubles, and Elementals
- The Shekhinah and the letters
- Gamatria — mystical numbers and numerical equivalences
- The nature of the Divine
The Journey of Your Hebrew Name
- The example of Abraham and Sarah
- Given names and taken names
- Intro to Aleph-Bet letters, symbols and meaning
- Finding your letters, right or wrong
- Following the path of the letters
- Telling the tale vs walking the walk
Pardes: Lessons of the Sages
- The tale of the Four Sages who Ascended into Paradise
- Pardes: The Hebrew equivalent of the ‘chakra’ system
- Four types of Jewish consciousness
- Shifting consciousness from Pshat to Sod
- Navigating the Four Worlds, the Ten Sephirot, the 32 Paths
- Living Pardes consciousness
Ancient Roots of the Aleph-Bet
- Ancient Near Eastern deities as forces of nature
- From imagery to pictograms and sound; the lives of the ancient letters
- Semitic languages, roots across language boundaries; baraka vs bracha
- What happens when you change the spelling? The case of ‘Islam’
- Hybrids and ancient roots
The Healing Letters*
- Ancient practices: mezuzot, shvitis, amulets, incantations, prayer
- Shaping letters properly in written practices
- Sound, frequency and resonance of letters.
- Location and the shape of dis-ease
- The energies of letters and words
- Alchemical transformations
*Prerequisite: One previous workshop.
Annotated Bibliography
Part V (Crumbling Old Books in the Dusty Old Library) is a personal annotated bibliography covering archaeology of the Mediterranean and Ancient Near East, Jewish Mystical Texts, and anthropological works —along with personal reflections on each.
Malkah’s Study Guide
Outline of study questions addressed, intended, or alluded to in the book and/or the movie, designed for further exploration.
A Glossary of Hebrew Aleph-Bet Letters
Selected Meanings, Symbols and Associations.
Jewish Mysticism, Magic, and Folklore Syllabus
This course introduces Jewish sacred texts, cosmological concepts, mystical language, folklore, and magical beliefs and practices from ancient times to the present.
The Original Version
Note that the original version of Malkah is not here. In it, all the white space of our pages are filled with midrash, alternate stories (that is the stories of my life, studies, and travels) in contrast to Malkah’s.
This alternate Malkah can be found under Drafts in my academia.edu site. The alternate text may one day occupy a volume of its own, but it really was designed to be with Malkah’s, and the illustrations were all designed to go with both Malkah’s journey and my own, even when they’re opposites.