Devarim Hakodesh - Words Of A Leader

כ"ב בשבט תש"ע
Imbolgen 23

A snowstorm happened here Thursday night and all day Friday.

It snowed several inches here in the midwest USA over both times (both times together constituting 'Friday' locally according to Jewish and Celtic timekeeping), where on Thursday night, I dreamt of being on the uppermost floor of a high tower (where I was looking for an apartment home) chanting an ancient archaic form of ritual Hebrew (Specialized Archaic Hebrew Dialect), and the snowstorm, as it increased moving east from the midwest, was blamed for the deaths of father-son Samaritans in Virginia. The Samaritans' car had stopped to help at the scene of a snowstorm-related traffic accident because a passenger in their car was a nurse who could help with any injuries to the people in the automobile resting in the left northbound lane. I am a nurse. Mount Hermon, a mountain tower of snow, is the source of water for the Land of Israel. The dream vision of chanted words (Devarim on Mount Hermon) Thursday night is like melted snow and dew.

The Samaritan Cohen Gadol was mourned Thursday, having passed away Wednesday at his home at the age of 83. The Jerusalem Post reports:

Samaritans mourn their high priest
BY BEN HARTMAN
05/02/2010 05:00 (Jerusalem Post)

Elazar ben Tsedaka, 83, ‘wise’ and ‘selfless,’ traced his office back to Aaron.

Snow flurries drifted to the ground on Mount Gerizim overlooking Nablus on Thursday, as mourners gathered to bury the spiritual leader of the Samaritans, who passed away the previous day.

High Priest Elazar ben Tsedaka ben Yitzhaq was born during a snowstorm 83 years ago, one mourner said. On Thursday, as he was being laid to rest at the holiest site in the Samaritan religion, the snow began to fall again.

According to Samaritan tradition he was the 131st holder of the post since Aaron. This is not be accepted by all historians, but the office may well go back to the Hellenistic period, which would still make it the oldest office in the world. One account in Josephus suggest that it is an offshoot of the Zadokite high priests in Jerusalem from around the time of Alexander the Great.

Mourner Menashe Tsadaka described Elazar as “a wise man in the community who people always came to for answers.”

The Samaritans are a tiny, largely misunderstood sect that practices a religion that is a close parallel to Judaism. Samaritans believe theirs is the true religion of the Israelites and follow their own Samarian Torah, written in an ancient form of Hebrew largely alien to modern Israeli eyes. Today’s Samarians trace their lineage to Israelites who have lived in northern Samaria before the Babylonian exile, and they still view Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem, as the center of their religion.

Mourners took shelter from the storm inside the community center in the hilltop neighborhood of Kiryat Luza, where much of the ethnoreligious group of 730 lives. Nearly all the rest live in Holon’s Neveh Pinchas neighborhood.

As the procession hurriedly left the cemetery, people headed to the shiva ceremony at the high priest’s home, where over heaping plates of rice and lamb, mourners wept for the loss of the leader of one of Israel’s tiniest communities atop the mountain that has been the center of their religion for millennia.

Read the entire article at link above.