ok @ksandvik you are my hero
the problem has been solved and I am posting the solution here so others might find it in the future
Taking @ksandvik’s advice i went to terminal and pasted the command above – immediately my bitdefender program issued a warning about “protected folders” – this startled me because I thought i disabled the antivirus – and when i checked in the menu bar it did say it was “OFF” but apparently NOT!
So I canceled the terminal command and instead uninstalled Bitdefender entirely – voila – the program works again and will sync and save
lesson - even if you think you turned antivirus off, it still is working for some things.
Now I have to figure out how to install it again and make sure Obsidian has access