Marc Gafni is a cutting edge spiritual teacher, author, television personality, mediator, corporate consultant, iconoclast, and gentle provocateur. He has written seven books, including the national bestseller Soul Prints, which won the prestigious NAPRA award for Best Spirituality Book of 2001, and was a main selection of the One Spirit Book Club and the Amazon.com Best Book in the Jewish Thought category in 2001. This book was also made into a National PBS special and an audio series by Sounds True recordings. Soul Prints is published by Simon & Schuster. Marc Gafni’s second major English language book, also published by Simon & Schuster, is The Mystery of Love. It unpacks an esoteric Kabbalistic tradition about the profound relationship between the sexual, the erotic, and the sacred. The Mystery of Love was critically acclaimed and made into an audio series called The Erotic and the Holy, published by Sounds True. Marc Gafni has been teaching and leading spiritual seminars, learning communities, training programs, and spiritual movements since he was in his early twenties. During much of that time, Marc Gafni struggled with the question of whether to teach conventional spiritual wisdom in a conventional spiritual context, or to follow a more post-conventional style of teaching and living. This tension brought great dynamism to his work, but also caused some dissonance. Now and in the future, Marc Gafni is committed to teaching a post-conventional spirituality that is rooted in traditional wisdom, yet fully adapted to the needs of a postmodern spiritual world. Like some other leaders and teachers in this age of unregulated internet conversation, Gafni has been attacked on some private websites and blogs. He has chosen not to directly respond to the blatantly false or seriously distorted accounts of his life and relationships that appear on these sites. However, Gafni takes full responsibility for any and all of his actual words, actions and subtle creations, both intentional and unintentional. His intention, now and in the future, is to do everything possible to transmute all negative energy within his being and within his circle into love, responsibility, and healing. Marc Gafni is currently the director of a private foundation dedicated to producing a library of teachings on the human spirit, designed to help create a better future for our children and grandchildren. There are seven volumes in various stages of preparation, covering a range of topics. All of these books emerge from Marc Gafni’s own experience as a human being, teacher, and student on the path of life and liberation. Several are being written with co-authors. Topics include: The Unique Self and No Self; Non-dual Humanism; The Masculine and the Feminine; The Dance of Tears–the Path of Laughter; Sex, Ethics and Injury; Shadow Dancing in the Light; Tragedy and Transformation; Sexuality and Kabbalah; Integral Judaism; Integral Kabbalah; as well as a personal sacred autobiography. Marc Gafni is also preparing a series of books on the weekly biblical reading of the Hebrew tradition as well as the sacred cycle of time as a spiritual path in the ancient Hebrew tradition.
Realize Your Potential: A Beautiful Unique Manifestation of the Divine! www.marcgafni.com Who IS Marc Gafni?
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni is a cutting edge spiritual teacher, author, television personality, mediator, corporate consultant, iconoclast, and gentle provocateur. He has written seven books, including the national bestseller Soul Prints, which won the prestigious NAPRA award for Best Spirituality Book of 2001, and was a main selection of the One Spirit Book Club and the Amazon.com Best Book in the Jewish Thought category in 2001. This book was also made into a National PBS special and an audio series by Sounds True recordings. Soul Prints is published by Simon & Schuster.
Marc Gafni’s second major English language book, also published by Simon & Schuster, is The Mystery of Love. It unpacks an esoteric Kabbalistic tradition about the profound relationship between the sexual, the erotic, and the sacred. The Mystery of Love was critically acclaimed and made into an audio series called The Erotic and the Holy, published by Sounds True.
Marc Gafni has been teaching and leading spiritual seminars, learning communities, training programs, and spiritual movements since he was in his early twenties. During much of that time, Marc Gafni struggled with the question of whether to teach conventional spiritual wisdom in a conventional spiritual context, or to follow a more post-conventional style of teaching and living. This tension brought great dynamism to his work, but also caused some dissonance.
Now and in the future, Marc Gafni is committed to teaching a post-conventional spirituality that is rooted in traditional wisdom, yet fully adapted to the needs of a postmodern spiritual world. Like some other leaders and teachers in this age of unregulated internet conversation, Gafni has been attacked on some private websites and blogs. He has chosen not to directly respond to the blatantly false or seriously distorted accounts of his life and relationships that appear on these sites.However, Gafni takes full responsibility for any and all of his actual words, actions and subtle creations, both intentional and unintentional. His intention, now and in the future, is to do everything possible to transmute all negative energy within his being and within his circle into love, responsibility, and healing.
Marc Gafni is currently the director of a private foundation dedicated to producing a library of teachings on the human spirit, designed to help create a better future for our children and grandchildren. There are seven volumes in various stages of preparation, covering a range of topics. All of these books emerge from Marc Gafni’s own experience as a human being, teacher, and student on the path of life and liberation. Several are being written with co-authors. Topics include: The Unique Self and No Self; Non-dual Humanism; The Masculine and the Feminine; The Dance of Tears–the Path of Laughter; Sex, Ethics and Injury; Shadow Dancing in the Light; Tragedy and Transformation; Sexuality and Kabbalah; Integral Judaism; Integral Kabbalah; as well as a personal sacred autobiography. Marc Gafni is also preparing a series of books on the weekly biblical reading of the Hebrew tradition as well as the sacred cycle of time as a spiritual path in the ancient Hebrew tradition.
Marc Gafni could well turn out to be the hero of a spiritual epic—or, at least, a psychosexual whodunit blockbuster.
A rabbi and a Biblical scholar with several published books and a recently approved doctoral dissertation from Oxford, Gafni presently lives in Salt Lake City. (He anonymously authored “Spiritually Incorrect,” an occasional column that appeared last year in CATALYST.) He came to the new Zion two years ago from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he led a large, vibrant movement of Jews who lived on the alternative edge, beyond the fringes of organized religion. Perhaps too close to that edge, where dangerous things can happen—and for Gafni, they did.
Talking with people about Gafni, a certain pattern emerges: Here’s a guy you’ve hung out with, watching TV and knocking back almond crunch, someone who calls up in the middle of the day and talks your head off, someone who has the usual knotty relational history. He’s a friend of yours, a normal, somewhat eccentric guy. Then, little by little you realize that there’s something kind of, well, saintly about him.
Stories about Gafni’s actions lean toward the saintly as well: People say they have seen him go out of his way to bring estranged friends together. They’ve seen him take an entire room full of people through a journey of laughter and tears. They’ve felt an atmosphere around him so affectionate and wild that it sparks off energy most haven’t felt since childhood. They’ve heard him speaking about God and human responsibility and what it means to take care of others with a wisdom and nuance that makes them search their souls.
And even wilder—they know he is the subject of Internet stories that paint him as a guy who “harasses” women, a “sexual predator.”
Everything you observe and intuit about him says “Really good person.” The Internet gossip sites say “Really bad person.” Then you get to see hundreds of documents proving the Internet stories run the gamut from distortion to out-and-out lies, reflecting all the most shadowy sides of the blogosphere. It begins to occur to you that something deep is going on here.
On the surface, it’s a common story: A coalition of women accuse a charismatic spiritual leader of sexual misconduct. The stories sound convincing. It must be true. The leader falls.
Examine the evidence in this case, and you see something quite different: Years of recovered email and instant messages from the women involved, some as recent as three weeks before complaints were filed, flatly contradict their own stories. The messages show that every one of the women was quite enthusiastically involved with Gafni on her own initiative. What happened that caused them to band together and file complaints of harassment? And what caused their complaints to do so much damage? Spiritual politics, “victim feminism,” Gafni’s human complexities, and the Internet.
The more you get to know Gafni, the more you suspect he is being put through an epic spiritual test, what we might call the Test of Slander. It’s actually part of the biography of countless other teachers whose lives didn’t fit the “normal” social pattern and who ended up redefining a spiritual tradition. Gafni’s story is still in process. Perhaps 25 years from now it will be told as a saga of purification, trial by fire and, hopefully, ultimate liberation.
In the meantime, Gafni—this larger-than-life presence tucked into the compact body of a playful 47-year—old is living more or less anonymously in Salt Lake City.
The story we’re about to tell has certain all too familiar elements: one more example of how, in the Internet age, false accusations can become as established as fact, and how a gifted teacher with an anti-establishment bent and a bohemian lifestyle can find his private life subjected to what legal scholar Allen Dershowitz called “sexual McCarthyism.”
Rabbi Gafni—author of seven books, including the best-selling “Soul Prints,” and a popular lecturer and workshop leader—was founder of Bayit Hadash, an alternative spiritual movement in Israel. The organization held retreats, classes and massive services, often gathering hundreds of enthusiasts for Gafni’s celebratory Sabbath services, which included music, chanting and dancing. His lectures and classes on Jewish texts, and on the interface between spirituality, ethics, sexuality and what Western moral philosophers have called “the good life,” were not only widely attended, but had brought thousands of disaffected young Jews back into conversation with their tradition.
“Rabbi Gafni was doing something that had not been done in modern Israel,” says Dr. Gabriel Cousens, who attended his teachings in Israel. “He was presenting the traditional Jewish teachings in a way that revealed not only the mystical experience embedded in the tradition, but also offered a powerful experience of ecstasy and community. Most importantly, however, he was the first modern Jewish teacher I met who taught that Judaism was at its core a path to liberation.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1960, educated in a yeshiva (a Jewish religious high school), Gafni began teaching in the Orthodox community around New York City. From his early days as an apprentice rabbi and youth group leader, Gafni had a gift for bringing together the spiritual with the secular, working with people who wouldn’t normally talk to each other, and creating communities. He was known as a passionately committed teacher. He spent time as a rabbi in Florida, tripling the size of a young congregation. Then he moved with his second wife and two children to Israel, where he was rabbi in a settlement on the border of the West Bank. In the ’90s, he emerged as a popular public teacher in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv, writing books, lecturing to packed houses, and appearing at conferences and spiritual venues in the United States and Europe.
Gafni hosted a weekly hour-long national TV show in Israel for several years. In the U.S., he led crowded workshops on the alternative Jewish and spiritual scene. He taught around the world, including appearances at important synagogues and the Harvard Negotiation Project. When terrorists blew up school buses in Israel, he presented a series of spots on national television urging people to hold on to their humanity in the face of horror. He has recorded dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Byron Katie, Ken Wilber and other spiritual and philosophical leaders. “Soul Prints” was a best-seller in this country, won the prestigious NAPRA Nautilus award as the best spirituality book of 2001 and was made into a PBS special.
And in a conservative society, he supported gay rights and the ordination of women. His teaching pointed out the presence of a hidden goddess element in the Jewish religion, and called for the re-emergence of the feminine in spirituality.
A career like this tends to arouse envy—even, or perhaps especially, in spiritual communities. “People would complain that Gafni took up too much space,” says Gershon Winkler, himself an important Jewish teacher and author of many books, including “The Magic of the Ordinary.” “After he fell, one guy told me that he was actually relieved, because some of Gafni’s people now came to him.” There appears to have been a cadre of colleagues, older teachers and even a few students who wanted him out of the way.
Gafni’s main vulnerability was his counter-cultural and often bohemian lifestyle. Throughout his career, Gafni had several love affairs outside of marriage. “I tried to push the boundaries of what was possible. I experimented,” Gafni admits. “I sometimes chose a moment of love over other loyalties. Sometimes I was right, sometimes dead wrong. Where I was wrong, I’ve tried to ask forgiveness.”
During the period following his divorce from his third wife, his lovers included a few women who had worked with him in his community, taught with him, or served on the board of his organization. “I was working literally 24/7, teaching and traveling around the clock,” he says. “It seemed natural to be involved with people who were part of my circle. At the time, in my hubris, disguised even from myself, it felt to me that there wasn’t a moment free for anything like normal dating or personal life.”
He says he kept these relationships private, not because they seemed inappropriate or “wrong,” but because, like many people in his position, he preferred not to have his personal life the subject of gossip or attack.
One lover wrote after their relationship was over: “It’s easy to love you and it has been beautiful to discover you, to feel you, to explore you.” And added, “I’m grateful that we touched each other on this path.” She then thanked him for being in “full intention and clarity” in their relationship and honoring her “sacred autonomy.”
This woman would later file a complaint on the advice of a lawyer, saying that Gafni had promised to marry her to gain sexual relations—–a felony in Israel, where they lived. This claim, and the claim that Gafni somehow manipulated her, is refuted by both the tone and content of literally hundreds of her emails to him.
In 2005, Ha’Aretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, ran a glowing article on Gafni’s work, stressing his belief that the feminine godhead and the softer, more erotic aspects of spirituality need to be restored to contemporary Judaism. The article was widely quoted, causing an incendiary reaction among rabbis in the Orthodox community. Traditionalists who felt threatened by his influence and provocative personal style objected to his stress on the goddess in Judaism, and some of Gafni’s former teachers and colleagues denounced him for promoting “pagan Judaism.” The Wikipedia entry on Gafni credits him—or accuses, it depends on how you read it—with leading the movement to bring eros back into Judaism.
At about that time, and some say as a direct result of the Ha’Aretz spread, a rabbi who had clashed with Gafni in his youth gave a story about him to the proprietor of a website devoted to outing Jewish clerics alleged to be sexual predators. The site collects rumors, innuendos and complaints about rabbis, some of whom are undoubtedly people who indeed abused their position. But the site is also known for its maliciousness, venomous language, and for mixing fact with outright fiction.
The site’s proprietor is Vicki Polin, who in 1989, under the name Rachel, presented herself on national daytime television as the survivor of a Jewish satanic cult which sacrificed babies. She claims to have sacrificed—that is, murdered—at least one baby herself. She considers it her mission in life to report those whom she calls “Jewish abusers.” Ironically, the site so evokes the energy of anti-Semitic hate sites that several such hate sites link to hers.
In Gafni’s case, the stories described two relationships, one when Gafni was 19, the other a one-time encounter when he was 24. Gafni insists neither involved more then petting, and that both were mutually engaged. Couched in the hate-speech style that has become so familiar in the blogosphere, the stories called Gafni a “known predator” who had “molested young women” and included purportedly first-person interviews with both of these women by Luke Ford, a former pornographer and a gossip columnist for the porn industry. Gafni’s version of these events is supported by two polygraph tests administered by Dr. Gordon Barland, one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
The stories on the website make no attempt to distinguish fact from rumor, distorted memory, or skewed interpretation of events. Polin and Ford painted a teenage romance between 19-year-old Gafni and his 14-year-old girlfriend as “child molestation,” and among other things, accused him of changing his name to avoid his past. (In fact, Gafni had followed the common custom of hebraicizing his name when he moved to Israel, and always referred to his family name in his books and other publications.) All of this forms the complex background for what happened next.
On an evening in May 2006, Gafni landed in Tel Aviv after a 10-hour flight returning from a teaching trip to the United States. He expected to be met at the plane by his girlfriend.
As his plane touched down, he dialed the number of his program director to discuss logistics of a workshop scheduled for the next day. Instead he heard an unidentified feminine voice screeching, “You are finished! Go to [a certain lawyer's office in Tel Aviv] at midnight, or go to jail.” Gafni thought he had the wrong number. He called again. The same message. He began to tremble as he realized that something terrible was going on. Over the next several hours, he began to piece things together. A former personal assistant, who had been threatening the organization with legal action over back pay, and who over the previous year had sent him dozens of abusive emails, had gotten together with another woman to discuss Gafni. They discovered that Gafni had been intimately involved with both of them. We can’t know what exactly motivated them from there. We do know what they did: They went to the Tel Aviv police and filed a complaint.
Sexual harassment laws have given women much-needed legal protection and gone a long way to support civil treatment of women everywhere. But when a woman tells the story of a sexual encounter and claims harassment, the man—guilty or innocent—will likely be in deep trouble if he does not have physical proof to the contrary. The woman doesn’t even have to seek legal redress—the complaint alone can sometimes be enough to get a professor or executive reprimanded or even fired. To complicate matters for the man, in Israel, unlike anywhere else, sexual harassment is a criminal offense.
The women told the police that Gafni had, in one case, used his authority as an employer, and in the other, promised marriage to persuade her to have sex with him. They convinced other women, whom they discovered had been involved with Gafni over the years, to sign their affadavit. In fact, none of the women had been either employees or students of Gafni at the time the relationships began.
By the time Gafni arrived in Israel that night, the women had convinced his co-teacher, as well as key members of his staff, that they needed protection, and cited others as possible victims. Members of the community were prevented from speaking to Gafni by the women, who claimed that he was a danger to the community.
Gafni says no one asked for his side of the story or checked any facts with him. “It was like a weird dream. I had never sexually harassed anyone. I had proof. I went to my computer for the emails I’d exchanged with these women—there were tons of them.”
To his shock, a key batch of relevant emails and other correspondence between himself and one of the complainants—his former assistant—were gone. They had been erased from his computer.
Worse than a weird dream, it was now a nightmare. He had no way of refuting the complaints. By this time, the story had been leaked to the Jewish press. Though many people in his community felt that Gafni was being railroaded, hysteria prevailed. Without consulting Rabbi Gafni, without cross-questioning the complainants or checking into their motives, a chain reaction was set in motion which resulted in the dissolution of Gafni’s movement. Several newspapers published sensational articles chronicling Gafni’s “downfall.” One reported (falsely) that he had been accused of rape. Another (again, falsely) claimed that he had made promises to marry five women. Within a few days, Gafni’s teaching work and the organization to which he had dedicated his life had been discredited and destroyed.
A group of Salt Lake attorneys helped Gafni recover the deleted data from his computer and then carefully review his correspondence with the women. “There is not a credible basis for legal action against [Gafni],” writes attorney Fredrick Thaler of Ray, Quinney Nebeker, a Salt Lake law firm, in a letter posted on Gafni’s website. “The complaints have no merit,” writes Charlotte Miller, who also served as Gafni’s legal council.
However, like the many commentators who assumed that the accusations against the Duke lacrosse team were true, people moved to distance themselves from him immediately.
According to feminist writers such as Dafna Pattai, Cathy Young, Laura Kipnis and Bell Hooks, the key reason for this distancing is fear. In a culture where truth is less important than perception, people are afraid to be associated with someone accused of sexual misconduct, even when they know the accusations are untrue. Associates fear liability, or being perceived as not protecting the ostensible victims—two consequences of defending the accused in a culture that assumes that women or groups of women always tell the truth about sexual harassment.
This belief persists despite data to the contrary, including the recent collapse of the case against the Duke lacrosse players, not to mention the historic experience of black men lynched because a white woman interpreted a casual glance as sexual harassment.
Feminist writers such as Laura Kipnis and Cristina Hoff Summers have written extensively to expose this kind of “victim feminism”: a stance which assumes that in situations of this sort, the woman is always a helpless victim of male desire.
“His best friends basically left him for dead,” says Gershon Winkler.
Gafni felt he had no choice but to return to the United States to think through what he should do. In the pain and sorrow of those first few days, he decided that as the creator of the organization which had turned on him, he should take on himself responsibility for the dysfunctions that had led to the situation. He wrote a public letter claiming all spiritual responsibility for what had happened. Accepting the advice of a friend and mentor, he took personal responsibility for the “sickness” behind what had happened and volunteered to seek treatment. This seemed, at the time of trauma and confusion, to be the only way to defuse the growing frenzy. Without the missing emails, he had no proof of his innocence, and at that time he had no idea the disappeared computer files would be restored.
Gafni refused any interviews and for the next two years maintained public silence, allowing the stories that were circulating to stand as “truth.” In the meantime, he began an intensive formal process of self-examination and inner work.
It was about this time that Gafni came to Salt Lake City at the invitation of a friend and teaching colleague, mediator and Zen teacher Diane Hamilton and her husband, former Utah chief justice Michael Zimmerman. Gafni was living quietly in a small home in Sugar House. Soon after we met, he told us about a pivotal event that had shown him both the depths of his fall, and the painful but spiritually profound path to turning the pain into compassion.
He had gone several times to Sabbath dinners at the house of a local family, mainly for the sake of experiencing community. One night, the host took him aside. “One of our guests read the Internet and says she can’t sit at the table with you. I know it’s not true, but she thinks you are a child molester,” he told Gafni. “I have to ask you to leave and not come back. I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.”
Gafni realized that he—who just six months before would have been an honored guest at such a gathering—was in essence a pariah. “I was stunned at first to realize that people were looking at me through the lens of a hate site, and couldn’t see who I am,” he said. “That night, I was up all night, meditating about it, awash in agonized tears. Suddenly, in the midst of my grief, this profound feeling of joy came over me. In Hebrew wisdom, we speak of how the divine feminine, the Shekhinah, has been exiled by God, and lives as hidden sparks inside human souls. I realized that I was participating in the pain of the exiled Shekhinah, the sorrow of the divine feminine thrown out of the kingdom. I, like her, was wrongly exiled and sat in dust and ashes. We were together. As I realized this, my heart became so ecstatic that I began to dance.
“Then I remembered the hidden teaching about the old Hassidic masters. These famous rabbis would sometimes discard their robes and wander as beggars through the villages of Western Europe, knocking on the doors of wealthy devotees. Invariably, they would be thrown out by people who, if they had seen them in full regalia, would have honored them.
“It all fit together for me then.
“I had spent my life seeking after the goddess, trying to return the feminine to her place…and that in some extreme sense the Shekhinah was testing my love, and she had hurt me because in some sense I hadn’t seen something about her. These relationships had hurt women I loved. Even while she was hurting me, she was embracing me. And I was here on the back roads of Utah to discover something about the divine feminine so that I might speak of her in new ways. I danced in real ecstasy for hours on end.”
Gafni later shared the incident with his friend, Brother David Stendl-Rast, who was reminded of an anecdote about Saint Francis: A disciple once asked, “What would be for you the most perfect joy?” Francis replied that for him, perfect joy would be to seek shelter in a house, be rejected and thrown out, and left to lie in the mud with the dogs.
Gafni says this teaching, which might have seemed wildly extreme and weird to him previously, actually described the profound spiritual opportunity that he had begun to see in this moment of his life. So along with examining his part in what he called the “contribution system” that had created this situation, and the qualities in himself that needed to change, Gafni also began a powerful inner journey into the subtleties of the masculine-feminine relationship.
“Sexuality creates wounds—sometimes mortal ones,” he writes in an unpublished essay called “The Wounds of Love.” “But if we learn to live wide open even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy.”
Along with his inner work, Gafni began collecting documentary evidence to prove the falsity of the claims against him. He took polygraph tests with internationally recognized polygraph expert Gordon Barland which fully supported his assertion that the relationships with these women had been mutual, and had not resulted from any deception or inappropriate deployment of power on Gafni’s part.
He underwent an extensive psychological evaluation with three independent evaluators. Their conclusions and his own were summarized by by Paul J. Goodberg, M.A.: “I am convinced that Rabbi Gafni never abusively hurt or exploited anyone. He is completely reputable.”
Ray, Quinney Nebeker turned his computer over to PeakSpan, LLC, a Salt Lake data recovery firm, which recovered valuable information and proved data had been intentionally removed.
“Of course, I regret with all my heart that anyone experienced hurt through their relationship with me. And, remember what Bono sings? `We hurt each other and we do it again.’ The key is what we do with our hurt,” Gafni says. “But what I most deeply regret is that I allowed myself to jeopardize the work we were doing by engaging in these relationships. I believed that what we were doing was sharing love, and that therefore there was nothing ethically, and certainly not legally, wrong. I still believe that. But I also recognize that a spiritual teacher has to hold strong boundaries around his personal life. Even mutual relationships with powerful and autonomous women are a problem for a public teacher. Moreover, in retrospect, our relationship did not serve the highest growth of these women; it endangered our movement and let down my supporters, friends and partners. In that sense—although I was unconscious of it at the time—they were unethical relationships and I regret that deeply.”
But even by Israel’s strict standard, in no way did he break the law.
Gafni has contracts for several new books and is beginning to teach again. He has been invited to create and host a documentary movie that uses the frame of his story to look into contemporary sexual and spiritual politics, and how rumor, innuendo and hysteria can destroy a life. And to show how a life can be rebuilt in love without bitterness. Most of all, he seems committed to helping foster a social justice movement that works to end genocide, human trafficking and sexual slavery in the world. Gafni seems determined not to attack his accusers, unless they leave him with no choice, but rather to facilitate healing.
“It is the challenge of the spiritual practitioner,” says Diane Musho Hamilton, “and especially that of a teacher, to become intimate with the processes of life and death, of destruction and of transformation. In this way, everything that arises, whether it appears as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unjust, is regarded as the path. To walk it requires great fearlessness, an abundance of compassion, a willingness to accept blame, and the offering of forgiveness.”
Sally Kempton, a former journalist, leading spiritual teacher and second wave feminist was asked what good might come from this story. She responded, “Marc has gone through a deep evolution. He will be an even deeper, better teacher in the second half of his life than he was in the first. The question is, can the people involved move from victimhood to power and responsibility? If they can, then Marc, the women, and all the shadowy players behind the scenes, will offer us great hope for healing in our world.”
The third act of this drama has yet to be written. Can this spiritual teacher come back from the dead? The answer is most likely “yes,” due to Gafni’s unflagging persistence. Did the obloquy and ignominy of the last two years break his spirit? No, though it has left some scars. Yet, throughout the whole of this nightmare, in circumstances that could easily, and forgivably, break the spirit of nearly any other person, Gafni has managed to hold onto his chronic optimism and genuine love for humanity.
Jeff Bell is a writer, part-time indie filmmaker, musician, wonk and political consultant. He is the former Democratic National Committee communications director for Utah and former president of the Children’s Justice Corps. Greta deJong is editor and publisher of CATALYST. For more about Marc Gafni, visit www.marcgafni.com
The nexus of the Gafni story would appear to be women falsely claiming victim status, bent on exacting some form of retribution which, in their view, matched the suffering at having not obtained exclusivity to Gafni and his affections. That is the center and the catalyst of Gafni’s current nightmare. But it is, by no means, the whole of the problem.
Without the women who filed complaints against Marc Gafni, there would certainly be no story, at least not a story of this depth and magnitude. But without the Internet, and a few “move ahead at any cost” bloggers, the story would have faded away.
What has both haunted and hunted Gafni is the relative ease at which rumors and lies have been mixed with more accurate information to paint a picture of Gafni as evil and predatory. Blogs index on the search engines far faster than then traditional websites do. Repeat a phrase or a name, over and over again, link it to other blogs, stories and other articles, and it jumps to the top of the search results in a short amount of time.
Take a moment and think about search engine results. The majority of Internet users look no deeper than the first couple of pages of their search results. Top searches have a false weight of authority that can easily lead a reader to unconsciously lend credibility where none should exist.
The strange union of self-proclaimed advocate for The Awareness Center, Vicki Polin, and porn industry gossip blogger Luke Ford and their mutual effort to assail the reputation of Rabbi Gafni, and to continue those attacks despite the lack of anything new to write about, is bizarre at best and nefarious at worst.
A vocal member of the Memory Recovery Movement, which ruined thousands of lives in the 1980s, Vicki Polin has wrapped a skein of respectability around herself that, when viewed through the prism of her attacks on Gafni, seems patently false and hypocritical.
Polin maintains that she is the child of Satanic Jews who raped her on a regular basis and made her eat her own babies. She now claims to be a victim’s advocate; but her advocacy seems to have taken all the aspects of vigilante misanthrope, and the power of the blog is her weapon. Polin has a singular focus to not only expose, but to destroy the life and reputation of whatever person that falls into her sights, regardless of facts. Any Google search on her name serves up a fairly even return of Polin’s attacks on rabbinical leaders, and pages written by victims of Polin’s tactics.
Luke Ford has made a living as one of the world’s foremost porn industry gossip columnists and, over the years, has owned and operated several different sites full of lewd pictures, stories and first person familiarity with the adult film industry. Ford also has an alter ego in which he calls himself “Luke Ford: your moral leader,” and represents himself as a beacon of decency and Jewish activism.
Somehow, Ford and Polin have become compatriots and often work together in boosting their ratings. The cross-indexing between these two and their blogs has, most especially in the area of posts about Gafni and other Jewish leaders, helped push them further and further upward until, for the last two years, they’ve had ownership of the first page of most engines when their targets’ names were searched.
What emerges on the Internet is a false image, based on rumor, presented as fact; all in opposition of the axiom “innocent until proven guilty.”
What makes Gafni’s story so interesting to me is not so much that, with hundreds of pages of evidence that exonerate him from these false allegations, he can clear his name in a fair-minded setting, but, on the Internet, it will take him years of exhaustive effort and money to balance his innocence against the two-year head start of those who claim he’s guilty.
Despite the potential to harm, blogging is the quintessential and idyllic evolution of American and international freedom of expression. The growing influence of blogs and bloggers over the last handful of years speaks volumes about dissatisfaction with the media and generic culture. There also seems to be a need, sometimes nearing addiction, for mass distribution of self-expression held by these exhibitionists of the written word. The acceptance as “meaningful” granted to them by their own ever-expanding membership roster fuels the rapid growth of this amateur medium.
I wrote my first blog post in 1996; long before, in time measured by Internet standards, the word “weblog” or “blog” was universally known and accepted into the mainstream lexicon. At the time, some were calling the very public self-publishing of one’s own opinions, criticisms, thoughts and life stories to the Internet a “vanity page,” an “online journal.”
My early posts were mostly lengthy, often ranting missives about politics with a lot of time, effort and kilobytes dumped into the 1996 Presidential race. It wasn’t long before I received calls, during political primary season, from two different Republican campaigns asking who I was, who I worked for and what my website was about. They didn’t like my analysis and they wanted me to stop.
These two different campaign representatives could not wrap their heads around the idea that I was just a guy, sitting in his Denver basement, self-publishing his opinions and analysis on the field of Republican candidates fighting for the GOP nomination. While the number of readers I had at the time would be laughable by today’s standards, in 1996 it was enough to garner the attention of two presidential nomination campaigns.
There is power in the written word and that power is intensified when any person, from any background, can release those words, unfettered and unregulated, into the world for anyone to digest.
Telling the truth, no matter how partisan your opinion, is an awesome responsibility, if you choose to view it that way. As the community of bloggers and online journalists continues to grow, so, too, do the numbers of the nefarious, the deluded and the predatory. For every handful of personal, political, entertainment or technology blogs online, whatever their motivation may be, there are always some who use their writing for some form of gain at the expense of others. That would appear to be the case regarding Gafni.
Reputation has always been a fragile thing, but the future of reputation is uncertain. Blogs have emerged as a quick, cheap and anonymous means of mass communication that can be used to further an agenda, talk about politics, share pictures of your family picnic or a weapon to destroy someone else’s life. Things on the Internet never go away. Once you’ve been dragged through the mud, no matter how innocent you may be, somewhere, on the Internet, you’re guilty forever.
Jeff Bell is the author of JMBell.org, one of the highest rated political blogs in Utah.
Luke Ford in the Utah Desert With Rabbi Marc Gafni
Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue About Hate Speech Online Part 1
Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue About Hate Speech Online Part 2
Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue About Hate Speech Online Part 3
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni’s Teachings
Marc Gafni’s path of study and teaching has unfolded in several stages. In the first stage of his career, Marc Gafni was a progressive Orthodox rabbi, teaching Talmud, Kabbalah and Biblical Thought from within the Orthodox fundamentalist world in Israel and the United States. In the United States, Marc Gafni taught at Yeshiva University, serving congregations both as scholar in residence and rabbi. He founded a Jewish outreach movement in New York and Long Island public schools. Eventually, Marc Gafni moved to Israel where he served as a rabbi and taught classical Hebrew wisdom through study of the Talmud, Kabbalah, and biblical psychology. At this stage, he wrote two Hebrew books. The first, A Certain Spirit, redefines the idea of faith, moving from the old notion of the “dogma is true” to the more radical and profound idea “I am true.” In his second book during this period, An Uncertain Spirit, Marc Gafni challenged the age-old idea that spirit could provide certainty or explain suffering, and taught the spiritual path of dancing with the uncertainty as a way of realizing the highest human potential. At this stage, Marc Gafni began to read the Bible through the prism of what he called ‘biblical myth’ or ‘biblical archetypes.’ This work became the basis for the television shows that Marc Gafni created, wrote, and hosted for several years on National Israeli Television. During the second stage of his study and teaching, Marc Gafni shifted much of his focus to the teaching of Hasidism, particularly an esoteric Kabbalistic teaching described by Gafni as ‘Unique Self.’ This idea has been incorporated into the Integral seminars of Ken Wilber, the Big Mind process of Genpo Roshi, and the teachings of many other spiritual teachers who were exposed to Marc Gafni’s teaching through the Integral Institute. The idea of ‘Unique Self,’ which is the basis of his bestselling book Soul Prints, forms an important foil and
Soul Prints by Marc Gafni
Soul Prints by Marc Gafni
paradoxical complement to the classic Buddhist teaching of No Self. Marc Gafni’s teaching seeks the integration of these two seemingly disparate moments of realization. During this time, Marc Gafni also wrote a two-volume, 1200-page work on non-dual humanism and its expression as Unique Self. A small part of this work became his doctoral dissertation for Oxford University. These two volumes are now being prepared for publication as a project of the Idra Foundation. In the third stage of his work, Marc Gafni turned his attention to the interrelationship between the erotic, the sexual, and the sacred. Marc Gafni’s work here described four faces of Eros that underlie all evolved reality, and went on to unpack how the experience of the sexual mirrors and models the erotic in all other dimensions of living, including the dimension of the sacred. The
first book to emerge from this study was The Mystery of Love, followed by the Sounds True audio series On the Erotic and the Holy. Marc Gafni is currently preparing to release for publication The Erotic and the Holy, a more extended treatment of this topic. In the fourth stage of inquiry, Marc Gafni shifted his focus to the psychological and spiritual
‘Shadow Teachings,’ which he sees as being an esoteric strain within the Hebrew wisdom tradition. Here, he seeks to evolve the understanding of shadow beyond Jung’s conception, and to connect shadow work with the non-dual teachings of Kabbalah as well as with the ‘Unique Self’ teaching. Gafni’s work on shadow identifies three distinct primary forms of shadow, which include not only one’s hidden dark side, but also one’s distorted ‘Unique Self,’ and one’s unrealized divinity. A book of these teachings is currently under preparation. Marc Gafni’s fifth stage focused on the nature of enlightenment. In some groundbreaking dialogues with Ken Wilber, Moshe Idel, Andrew Cohen, and Jean Houston, Marc Gafni introduced the radical hermeneutic that all of Hebrew wisdom may be properly understood as an enlightenment tradition. Moreover, he showed that the most important single Kabbalistic idea, which lies at the heart of Luria’s Kabbalah, is what Abraham Kuk called Evolutionary Enlightenment. In Gafni’s understanding, the goal of this tradition is to achieve a democratization of enlightenment—an enlightened society, rather than simply an enlightened elite. Marc Gafni and Diane Musho Hamilton are now preparing a work on postmodern enlightenment teachings. Here, they will also address the enlightened relationship of the masculine and the feminine in the postmodern world. During this fifth phase, Marc Gafni engaged in a series of recorded dialogues with World Thought leaders including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ram Dass, Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, Michael Beckwith, Bill Ury, Don Beck, Father Thomas Keating, Byron Katie, and Jean Houston. Emerging out of some fifteen dialogues with Ken Wilber, Marc presented two lecture series entitled Integral Judaism and Integral Kabbalah, which are now being prepared as two separate books. In the present phase of Marc Gafni’s life, he has turned his attention in two paradoxically different directions. The first is intense inner spiritual and psychological reflection on the course of his life. The second is partnering with social activist leaders to create a new, grass roots human rights movement, which might effectively engage three major issues: genocide, human trafficking, and global warming. While Marc Gafni will continue teaching, he wishes to do so as a spiritual ‘artist’ rather than as a rabbi, guru, or formal teacher. (Keep reading for more on Marc Gafni’s rabbinical ordinations, academic background, and teachers.) “I am an aspiring Heart Master,” says Marc Gafni. According to the Master of Piacezna, a great Hasidic teacher who fought and loved in the Warsaw Ghetto and died in the Treblinka concentration camp, this is said to be the true goal of a human being. To master the heart means to own one’s own heart. To master the heart means to live with radical openness balanced with radical self-awareness and radical self-control. To be a Heart Master is to have the ability to inspire and help others to live this way as well. “However,’ says Marc Gafni, “if I never realize myself fully enough to be a Heart Master, I will be more than pleased to be a Heart Servant.” “So, if asked what I am, I would say, ‘I am Marc Gafni, the Heart Servant.’”
Gafni’s Rabbinic Ordination, Academic Background, and Teachers
I received Ordination many years ago from a well-regarded Orthodox institution in New York. Contrary to some rumors, that Ordination was never revoked. I retain a letter on my computer in which I wrote the president of the institution stating that our paths had parted in such a significant way that I no longer wished to hold Ordination from them. I also passed a several-hour oral exam with one of the great Rabbinic minds of Israel today, representing the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and authorizing me to be a rabbi―particularly what is termed a Rav Yishuv. I retain that document in my records as well. I have been asked whether I had, or have, Ordination from Reb Zalman Schachter. I retain in my records a document that Reb Zalman wrote for me several years ago. The document is not an Ordination, but rather an of my previous Ordination from the Orthodox institution mentioned above. When I returned that Ordination in 2004, Reb Zalman’s letter, which was based on my first Ordination, ceased to be valid. I have never held, nor do I seek, independent Ordination from Reb Zalman. I am not a student of Reb Zalman’s nor have I ever been. I have in some very important ways benefited from his work, and I have publically and privately thanked him for all this. I appreciate and respect some important contributions that he made to Jewish teaching. I have tried in many ways, large and small, to be of service to Reb Zalman and have sought a particular kind of relationship with him. I have failed in this respect. I have not been in substantive contact with Reb Zalman since March of 2006, other than a private exchange of two e-mails. I feel very connected to a close friend and chevruta, Rabbi Gershon Winkler. Reb Gershon, with grace and dignity, gave me the transmission of his lineage’s rabbinic ordination, as a friend. This Ordination may be found here in both English and Hebrew. I feel connected to the same soul root as Reb Gershon. His primary ordaining teacher was Rav Ben Zion Bruk of Jerusalem, a great Master of Mussar, whom I feel connected to both through Rabbi Hillel Goldberg’s transmission of his Torah and through Reb Gershon. At this time, I am working with Reb Gershon on a major work, which we hope will serve as a kind of Spiritual Code of Jewish Law for those who will seek its counsel. Regarding academia: Virtually everything I have learned has been in the classic auto didactic manner. However, my B.A. is from Edison College (a completely reputable joke of a school, which gives credit for non-academic work). I studied for one semester at Yeshiva University and one semester at Queens College. Neither worked for me. Back then, I wanted to study only what I wanted to study. So, I followed my heart and dropped out. I only received my degree from Edison later on so my mom would be happy. Later in life, I earned a Master’s degree in Jewish Philosophy from Bar Illan University. And still later, I wrote a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Professor Moshe Idel and Professor Norman Solomon at Oxford University. My doctoral dissertation was approved by Oxford University on April 2, 2008. Having said that, I have little interest in teaching today from the place of a rabbi or a professor. Instead, I want to share from the position of friend. We have plenty of rabbis and no shortage of professors. It seems to me that today we need teachers who can give us an authentic transmission, and at the same time love us as dear and close friends—though always with clear boundaries. Only recently in my life have I submitted to a teacher. My teacher is a very beautiful and great man who is the lineage holder of a stunning Jewish mystical tradition which was passed down from generation to generation for many hundreds of years. Most of the lineages of this nature were destroyed in the holocaust. His survived. He is a profound psychologist, teacher, guide, and as his many students will attest, a powerful shamanic figure as well. He is the transmitted lineage successor of a great contemporary Peruvian teacher, recognized formally as a peer by one of South America’s great shamans. He appeared and found me during the time of my heartbreak, and has helped put the pieces of my heart back together. He has encouraged me and instructed me to return to teaching. I will follow his instruction. He has had, over the years, hundreds of students who are―each in their own way ― receivers of his love and his wisdom. He teaches those who find their way to him. In this sense, he is quite similar to the teacher Don Juan, whom Carlos Castaneda describes in his work.
Reclaiming Your Reputation Online: Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue Part 1
Reclaiming Your Reputation Online: Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue Part 2
What is www.marcgafni.com all about? The purpose of this website is to share the teachings of Marc Gafni. Marc Gafni has been a beloved and sometimes controversial spiritual teacher on the cutting edge for many years. He has inspired many, comforted the afflicted, and afflicted the comfortable. He reflects back to people their most gorgeous selves, shares teachings of love, pricks egos, and calls others, by his very being, to truth and integrity. For some Marc is a teacher, for others a spiritual friend, for still others a spiritual artist, and for still others a revolutionary catalyst of social change and evolution. In the words of one leading American spiritual teacher and second wave feminist, “Marc Gafni combines radical brilliance with a willingness to be vulnerable, and radical kindness with an ability to probe deeply into texts―liberating the light and challenging the shadows of the human heart.” In his self-description, published several years ago in both his Hebrew and English books, Marc Gafni writes, “I, like every person, am a flawed yet ever evolving human being. I seek purification and healing, even as I delight in realization. I am a passionate lover of God, of people, of wisdom, and of all being. I am called to realize and help others to realize our potential for being the most gorgeous and unique manifestations of the divine, which is our true nature.” At this stage in his evolution, Marc Gafni seeks to merge the artistic sharing of wisdom with direct social action. The purpose of all of Marc Gafni’s creative endeavors and teachings is two-fold:
* To help individuals live better lives
* To contribute to the spiritual and ethical evolution of reality as we know it
‘Better’ might mean more ethical, open, healthy and loving. ‘Better’ might mean more enlightened, compassionate, or forgiving. ‘Better’” might mean more authentic or audacious. Marc Gafni’s teaching is filled with love of people, love of God, and love of all of creation. It is also scholarly, hip, serious, deep, funny, profound, sometimes startlingly original, and always invested with the intent to transmit not only insight but also, and especially, an open heart. Marc Gafni’s life of teaching is perhaps best captured in the following words:
I wish that I could show you When you are lonely or in darkness The astonishing light Of your own being- Hafiz
There are several kinds of teaching on the site:
* Old Teachings: Audio, Video and Writings
* New Teachings: Audio, Video and Writings
* New Course Offerings and Daily Podcasts
* Dialogues with other Spiritual Teachers and Friends
* Music, Stories and Chants
Most of the teachings are “in process”―ideas and teachings that are evolving in Marc Gafni’s heart, mind, and consciousness. Thus, many teachings have yet to be posted in the Articles section, which is still incomplete. In May 2006, Marc Gafni withdrew from public teaching and went into a long period of mourning, introspection, purification, and liberation. Complaints of sexual harassment reported in the Israeli press at that time were categorically not true; Marc Gafni never sexually harassed or abused anyone. Every one of these sexual relationships was unique, mutual, obviously consensual, based on affection, love, and the mutual play of pleasure and Eros. Nonetheless, Marc Gafni took full responsibility for participating in creating conditions which, in part, allowed these events to unfold the way they did. (For more on this conversation, and to hear Marc Gafni’s sharing in this regard, see statements and articles in Controversy, Pain of Eros, and Sex Ethics and Power and Spiritually Incorrect . This website is under construction. There are still many mistakes that need to be corrected and kinks that need to be worked out. This website will be updated continually with additional written, audio or video teachings. For new and old study courses, see Books, Products & Course Offerings under the marcgafni.com store tab. For almost two hundred teachings, which are our gift to you in love, see the free audio and video sections. Audio and video material in the store is of a more complete nature, containing complete lecture series. For Music, Chanting and Prayer see the Books, Products & Course Offerings section.
ARTICLE ON MARC GAFNI SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT
An article recently appeared in The Catalyst Magazine of Salt Lake City. Catalyst is an award-winning publication that has been published as a monthly spirituality magazine for twenty-five years and is considered a leader in its field. This is the first publication that Marc Gafni has spoken to since he began his two-year retreat in May 2006. The journalists worked for several months reviewing massive amounts of material that has not been released to the public. Marc Gafni agreed to participate with the article, after many hours of conversation with the authors about these issues, on the basis that it was not be an “attack” article, and that no one would be shamed. All too often it becomes impossible for people to climb down from their ’small self’ egoic trees, because escalating cycles of ‘us and them’ rhetoric kick in the ego’s desperate drive for survival. The spaciousness and emptiness required for reconciliation, healing, and wholeness is filled with the flailing of ego and malice, usually disguised in the sonorous tones of self-righteousness. The article’s intention is to set the record straight by telling the simple truth about Marc Gafni in a way that opens doors for evolution and growth, and in a way which allows everyone to move on with their lives in the best, most productive, and beautiful of ways. The article, while incomplete and imperfect, as is the nature of any article, for the first time since Marc went into silence in May 2006, sets the public record straight. The article provides a more accurate account of the events in Marc’s life, placing them in a larger and deeper context.
Luke Ford Talks to Marc Gafni About the Future of Reputation Part 1
Luke Ford Talks to Marc Gafni About the Future of Reputation Part 2
Luke Ford Talks to Marc Gafni About the Future of Reputation Part3
SPIRITUALLY INCORRECT
www.marcgafni.comRSS FEED for Spiritually Incorrect – http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpirituallyIncorrect
July 1, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Evolutionary Kabbalah
Dear Friends, It is wonderful to be able to share with you this new website, marcgafni.com, Evolutionary Kabbalah. For information about how to navigate the site, take a quick look at the tab on the left ‘about marcgafni’. The site is under construction. We are still in the middle of editing and getting it together. I am not much of a web person but we have a great group of people working on the site, and I am grateful to all of them for their effort, love, and dedication. If you find a typo or have a navigation suggestion, please feel free to contact us at our e-mail address, info@marcgafni.com. I pray the site serves you in a way that allows for and facilitates your growth as a fearless warrior in pursuit of your own and the world’s enlightenment. For on this, and this alone, depends the enlightenment of God. This is the most fundamental tenet of my teaching in my dharma tradition, which I have come to call by a new term, Evolutionary Kabbalah. The essence of Evolutionary Kabbalah, which is the core theme of our website and teaching, is that things change. That which was yesterday is not quite the same today. Every moment is new. To deny the radical newness of a moment is tantamount to heresy. For eternity resides in a moment. That which stands against evolution is idolatry. To worship idols is to freeze a moment. It is the freezing of imagination. It is the murder of possibility. Thus, the idolater worships what is often termed in English “a graven image.” That is to say, an image that is already in the grave. One who always has this really grave and serious face. The idolater dances in death. To serve god is to dance in life, which means to know that change is possible, and real, and happening all the time. Not only do the cells of our body fully change every seven years, the cells of our spirit change as well. However, they do not require seven years. They change fully and absolutely –at will. This belief in human evolution, in the genuine possibility of change, is at the core of Hebrew wisdom and particularly Hebrew mystical thought. One mystical thinker in the 12th century writes somewhere that the essence of the divinity of God is the possibility of possibility. God is ultimate possibility. God is a verb. We are all always Godding. We all are evolving. To realize our ability to change, to heal, and to transform is the source of the greatest joy. Sadly, few of us really believe it is possible. We hold grudges against others even as we hold grudges against ourselves. To truly inhale the possibility of possibility is one of the key pivoting points in the journey towards enlightenment. It is to this belief and to this end that my teaching and sharing is dedicated. People can change. Situations can change. Suffering can change. We do not have to stay stuck. We have the ability, as baby-faced divine, to stand in the abyss of darkness and say … No, No, No. It does not have to be this way. There is a better way. We can get beneath the surface of reality – enter the source code and make it better. It can change and it must. There is a better way to be. A better way to live. And if you go deep into the song of the now, you will hear its siren’s call. Today offers invitation in a way that yesterday simply could not and that tomorrow cannot yet. In the depths of HaYom, the Hebrew word for today, is the universal sound of Om… The Hebrew word for time is Zeman. Zeman also means in Hebrew – invitation. An invitation to break the tyranny of yesterday. The greatest slave driver in the world, the greatest idolatrous temptation, is the belief that yesterday determines not only today but also tomorrow. Let people out of the box in which you have put them. Love people out of the box in which you have put them. Love yourself out of the box in which you have put yourself. It is all in play. Anything and everything is possible
Blog Post Two - Marc Gafni
July 3, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
The Evolution of Love The Evolution of God Practicing the Wounds of Love
These will be the three topics which I hope to talk with you about in this blog. They are very much in my heart these days and nights. Two years ago, on May 19th, I arrived in exile in Salt Lake City. It is difficult for me to describe my internal state at the time. I felt like Caesar must have felt after his friends surrounded and stabbed him in the Senate, only unlike Caesar, I was still alive. Strangely and unexpectedly. Not that I mean any analogy to the grandeur of Caesar or even of my protagonists to Brutus and Cassius. Perhaps the analogy is to the complexity of it all. At least to my own personal complexity at that time in my life, almost two and a quarter years ago. I loved my friends, my students, my colleagues, and my lovers. The love was true and genuine. But, in many cases, it was a love that was not deep enough. Not grounded enough in what is called in India Hara. Not pure enough. Not free enough of my own human desire to be loved. I believed that I held a particular responsibility and obligation to shine my shakti in the world. To love everyone, to hug everyone in the most pure and sweetest and holiest of ways. It was an obligation that I knew to be true because it was as natural to me as breathing. I still believe this. I still feel it. I thank god for not taking away my gifts in exile. I also believed my love was powerful enough to transmute everything and everyone. I believed my love was so large and so good that it needed a world stage to hold it. There was the hubris. In two distinct forms. Each one different and subtle. There was the mistake. Love is powerful, but it cannot transmute everything. Love is simple and needs no world stage to play upon, for love itself is the stage and ground of the world. Love by itself is beautiful, but not enlightened. Love needs light to illuminate it. Love needs to evolve the spiral of consciousness in order to unleash it’s full potential to heal and transform. But more about the evolution of love in a later posting.
The Wounds of Love
Love needs vessels and boundaries, without which the intensity of the light shatters vessels. We live in a world of broken hearts and broken vessels.Some of those hearts have been shattered because they became brittle for lack of love. And to those people, and to those places in us, we must open our hearts in full radiance, even at the risk of suffering the wounds of love. The slings and arrows of outrageous loving. But some of those hearts are broken because love overflowed its boundaries. I speak not here―just to be clear―not of pathological boundary violations like incest, child molestation or rape, of which I know nothing and therefore cannot refer to. Rather, I speak of the boundary violations within beautiful and mutual loving relations, which are by themselves holy but which lack the vessels to hold the light of love to which they are exposed. I know something of these vessels, and I have learned something of their fragility. They too shatter. In Kabbalah, we talk of the fixing that comes after the shattering. The tikkun that comes after the shevirah. The word tikkun―as my brother and friend once pointed out to me based on a series of passages in the Tikkunei Zohar―the word Tikkun means healing or in some sense Evolution. Evolutionary Kabbalah is rooted in these passages. (If you are interested in this and if this word opens your heart and quickens your mind, see the entry by the same name in the articles section of this website.) In the teaching of Kabbalah, Tikkun―healing or evolution―emerges from the Shevirah―the shattering. The Hebrew word Shevirah, however, has another meaning hidden in its folds. Shevirah, Shever, also means sustenance. The sustenance that comes from the ability to engage in Meaning making. One biblical verse talks about Jacob, who saw that there was shever―in Egypt. Shever from the same root as Shevirah means both shattering and nourishment. In another biblical text, the author talks about “et ha-chalom ve-et shivro”―“the dream and its meaning”―or, the dream and the nourishment it gives through its interpretation and meaning. So shattering or breaking in Hebrew also carries meanings of nourishment, healing, and meaning making. We are all hurt in love. We are all shattered in love. The question always is, what do we do with our hurt? Do we turn it into insults of love that need to be repaid in kind? Do we replay and replay the ritual of mutual rejections that always escalates into violence and murder? Be it social murder or physical murder… Or do we suffer our hurt as the wounds of love! Do we transmute our hurt into compassion and raise our wounds unto the altar of healing and transformation. Life has gotten much simpler for me in the last two years. I have learned in the texts of life so much that was not possible to understand before the deluge of pain. Sometimes we have to close the door. But we almost never have to close our hearts. Close the door but always keep your heart open. We can practice the wounds of love with an open heart even as we hold our boundaries and protect ourselves from unnecessary hurt in the future. But not all hurt is unnecessary. “We hurt each other and we do it again,” sings Bono. Some hurt is part of the evolution of our hearts. How we “play” our hurt is part of the evolution of God. This is the tikkun―the healing of God―to which I referred above. You can find it if you read the passages carefully in the Tikkunei Zohar. This is the healing and the evolution of God: that we participate in the healing and evolution of God through the healing and evolution of both our own love and our own hurt. This is the great and wondrous esoteric teaching of Kabbalah!!!!!!!! -Marc Gafni
The Beauty that is YOU! – Marc Gafni
July 5, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com I received a funny e-mail today from someone. It said, “Who are you?” And that was the entire communication. What a wonderful question! So, a brief sharing is in order before we go into shabbot.
I am my story. I am. I am completely beyond my story. My spiritual teaching or sharing comes from moving beyond my story, and…. in the end, whatever spiritual teaching I have to share comes from my story.
I AM MADLY IN LOVE WITH GOD. I AM MADLY IN LOVE WITH HUMAN BEINGS. I THINK MEN AND WOMEN ARE SO TOTALLY BEAUTIFUL THAT IT OFTEN TAKES MY BREATH AWAY. I BELIEVE THAT THE UNMEDIATED EXPERIENCE OF THE DIVINE IS THE ESSENCE OF ALL RELIGION. I MEDITATE {sometimes}, PRAY {a lot}, AND ENGAGE IN SOCIAL ACTIVISM {whenever I can} AS MY WAY OF SERVING GOD. In the last decade or so, I was privileged to found a national spiritual community in Israel called Bayit Chadash. This, together with my work at Milah Institute, helped found a movement for Jewish Renewal in Israel. I spent ten intense, exhausting, and wonderful years of my life sowing the seeds of this movement. The movement did not last. There was too much light and not enought vessel. My own lack of wholeness, other peoples’ lack of wholeness, spiritual politics, sexual politics, Iago, and divine will all deemed that it be a short-lived and wondrous experiment. I am not planning to start another community, but rather to show up in the places where I am invited to share Torah and share the Dharma as I understand it. I now spend most of my time writing, or teaching, or consulting, or taking walks in Utah’s mountains, or learning, and I hope, loving. I have not achieved Nirvana by any stretch of the imagination, although I have tasted enlightenment for periods of time. I do not believe in Gurus. I SPEND ABOUT 16 HOURS A DAY DOING WHAT PEOPLE CALL WORK. I EXPERIENCE ALMOST NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN MY LIFE AND MY WORK. I LOVE PEOPLE. I LOVE BEING ALIVE. Sometimes in the last two years the pain was so unbearable that I prayed for death. I HOPE TO WRITE A NEW SCHOOL OF SPIRITUAL THOUGHT WHICH WILL … DO WHATEVER IT DOES… And, I think people who take themselves too seriously are dangerous. Umberto Ecco was right in his great book Name of the Rose. So, I laugh at myself a lot. I am also deeply lonely at times. At other times, the pain of existence―of all the suffering people―is so overwhelming that I can barely breathe. I desperately, insanely, and with deep tranquility, want to fullfill the Bodhisattva vow―even though I am not a Bodhisattva. But what is important about this post is not who am I but who are you? You are a spiritual hero. You are gorgeous and beautiful beyond any and all imagination.
I wish that I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the unberable depth of your own being… -Hafiz
Oh my God, can you see yourselfOh my God, can you hear yourself Oh my God, can you feel yourself Oh my God, Do you know how much good you can do in the world Oh my God, Do you know that god YEARNS for your service Oh my God, Do you know that God is sick when you are sick that God is in pain in your pain kissing your every wound into wholeness Do you know that God’s heart is a raging volcano of love for you Do you know that God is hiding in your heart waiting for you so that together you can dance i promise you it is all true -Marc Gafni
Imagination as the Next Step in Healing Pain – by Marc Gafni
July 6, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com It is Sunday morning. I am at home in Salt Lake City. I just woke up; said the morning blessing on the study of dharma and torah. I am sharing with you some initial musings of the morning. A gorgeous and wondrous day to you my friend… Yes, yes, I meant YOU! Good morning, good evening, good day, just that it should be good for you! Feel free to respond to this blog at info@marcgafni.com
Leadership and Imagination
Adam in Hebrew means, in one etymology, Imagination. Dancing with the Hebrew word Dimayon. Imagination.Most of what goes wrong in our world emerges from crisis. Crisis―when normal life is derailed and trauma and tragedy strike terror into our hearts and bodies―a crisis has taken place. More often than not, however, the source of our trauma is not a crisis of finance or economics; not a crisis of resources or power. More often than not, pain is caused by a crisis of imagination. A crisis of imagination. There are some Chinese linguists who suggest that in the original Chinese characters, the word crisis means both danger and opportunity. Whether or not this is an accurate read of the original Mandarin, a subject of some controversy among linguists, is beside the point. It is a simple and powerful truth. A crisis in imagination. An inability to feel into what or where is the possibility which lines the rupture. An inability to find the spark of light hidden in the apparently shattered vessel. What happens in crisis, when we have not evolved enough in love to call forth the power of imagination, is a freezing of images. Imagination, fantasy, that which calls forth the fantastic. When we lose touch with imagination, we get stuck in one image, one snapshot of reality, of the situation. This is called idolatry. We worship a frozen image―a graven image, as idols are sometimes called in the King James translation of the Bible. An image, which is already dead and in the grave. An image too grave and serious to find the power of laughter. For it is the faculty of laughter which so often unlocks the power of imagination. A crisis is unexpected. It is a surprise, and therefore a gift of the Gods. Surprise is the divine whisper caressing our ear softly yet insistently saying, “Grow, grow grow…” We need to imagine ourselves out of the old and tired “us and them” thinking. We need to imagine ourselves out of the ‘thinking’ in which we need to demonize the other, or make the other bad or wrong in order to make ourselves right. We need to imagine ourselves out of scenarios in which crisis produces devastation instead of development, humiliation instead of humility, hell and hatred instead of wholeness and healing. The essential task of the leader is to know how―in a time of crisis―to creatively access the faculty of imagination. To be not only homo hostilis, but what I like to call Homo Imaginus. The leader cannot be swept away by the crowd, lost in dark brutalities of mass malice or mob mendacity. The leader must free himself from the crowd in his mind and the mob in his heart. The leader guides and gods the crowd to its own highest self by offering a vision. This is what we mean when we say a true leader must be a visionary. The leader must offer the people an alternative imagining so that they might see what is possible. For divinity always lies in the possibility of possibility. The very definition of a mob is a large group mired in the muck of one possibility, one perspective… rushing headlong into the oblivion of dullness, failing to imagine a way out of their own anger, their own pain, or their own base egoic instincts. How we handle a crisis reveals a lot about who we are. Or at least who we were at that moment. Hopefully we evolve. Even if we did not handle the crisis in an evolved way that accessed the power of imagination, the ability to go back to the pivoting point of crisis and to re-imagine our course of action is―in an of itself―healing. It is never too late―as long as oxygen circulates in our lungs and life throbs in our hearts. Two years later, ten years later, if we can re-imagine the story, then the story begins to heal. For imagination gives birth to courage, which gives birth to right action. In Hebrew wisdom this is called the spiritual process of Teshuvah. Healing and Transformation. -Marc Gafni
Yearning and Nightmares – Marc Gafni
July 7, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Good morning! Marc Gafni here. Monday morning here in Salt Lake City. Sun is shining. The essay on imagination which is the core of this blog post is below; feel free to scroll down and skip my personal musings in the morning. Musings… How are you? Did you sleep well? Me …not bad. I had terrible nightmares last night, as I did almost every night for for the first 18 months or so after I left Israel in May 2006. There is a profound idea in Hebrew and Buddhist teaching, and I am sure in other traditions, which holds that natural “closure” is important. That can mean closure in a relationship, a business, a stage of life, or even the proper closure of life itself. When a person for example dies suddenly, the Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks of the Bardo as the in between place where the person dwells, unable to “rest in peace.” Hebrew sources in the Kabbalah have conceptions very similar to the Tibetan Bardo. Whenever there is a rupture in our lives that is sudden and brutal, we are left in a Bardo until we are able to create closure and completion for that part of our lives. There are people in my life, who, for a variety of reasons, I have been unable to create full closure with…. One of them is my former partner in Israel, Avraham Leader. There are others as well. People with whom I spent years in close if complex relationship, and who by force of karma and circumstance I am no longer in touch with. I miss them. What to do… The only practice that I know of which is effective and transformative is a kind of witnessing practice. Isaiah writes, “You are my witnesses,” meaning that to become evolved, divine beings, we must learn to witness. In this case that would mean: Step One: I am not my yearning, but I witness my yearning. I see it. I watch it rise and fall, ebb and flow. I learn from it. My yearning teaches me and guides me. But it never becomes me, so it can never consume me. Step Two: I then move into my longing, my yearning. I seek to penetrate my yearning and I pray for my yearning to open itself up to receive me. Step Three: At some point my yearning gives way and receives me, even as I allow myself to be penetrated by it, and I fall into divine yearning and divine longing. Step Four: My yearning gives way and I fall into the sweetness of God. Slowly, about eight months ago, the nightmares began to recede. I began to regain my natural energy and strength. I began to come back to life. I still miss everyone. I pray that at some magical point, rupture may once again become rapture. But I understand that it may take many weeks, many months, many years, even decades or lifetimes. I will wait. And in the meantime, there is so much good for all of us to do…. -Marc Gafni
Imagination Part Two
July 7, 2008
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Imagination – Part Two
Note for the scholarly reader of blogs: this is written in third person because I know scholars feel much better in third person.The following is an article by Marc Gafni published in Parabola magazine in 2007. It is an adaption of material published in Marc Gafni’s book The Mystery of Love in the chapter on imagination. The only difference being that in Parabola the imagination is discussed separately from the context of Eros, which is the major theme and context for the imagination discussion in The Mystery of Love. The Zohar, magnus opus of Hebrew mysticism, says it explicitly in many places: “Shechina [the feminine incarnation of the Godhead] is imagination.” In popular understanding, imagination is implicitly considered to be “unreal.” Indeed “unreal” and “imaginary” are virtual synonyms in common usage. To undermine the reality of an antagonist’s claim, we say it is “a figment of their imagination.” In marked contrast, the Hebrew mystics held imagination to be very real. It would not be unfair to say that they considered imagination to be “realer than real.” The power of imagination is its ability to give form to the deep truths and visions of the inner divine realm. Imagination gives expression to the higher visions of reality that derive from our divine selves. Language and rational thinking are generally unable to access this higher truth. It is the imagination that is our prophet, bringing us the word of the divine that speaks both through us and from beyond us. This is what the biblical mystic Hosea meant when he exclaimed the words of God, “By the hands of my prophets I am imagined.”
Crisis of Imagination
The greatest crisis of our lives is neither economic, intellectual, nor even what we usually call religious. It is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck on our paths because we are unable to reimagine our lives differently than they are right now. We hold on desperately to the status quo, afraid that if we let go, we will be swept away by the torrential undercurrents of our emptiness.The most important thing in the world, implies wisdom master Nachman of Bratzlav, is to be willing to give up who you are for who you might become. He calls this process the giving up of pnimi to reach for makkif. For Master Nachman, pnimi means the old familiar things that you hold onto even when they no longer serve you on your journey. Makkif is that which is beyond you, which you can reach only if you are willing to take a leap into the abyss. Find your risk and you will find your self. Sometimes that means leaving your home, your father’s house, and your birthplace, and traveling to strange lands. Both the biblical Abraham and the Buddha do this quite literally. But for the kabbalist, the true journey does not require dramatic breaks with past and home. It is rather a journey of the imagination. In the simple and literal meaning of the biblical text, Abraham’s command is Lech lecha…: “Go forth from your land, your birth place and your father’s house.” Interpreted by the Zohar, the command is taken to mean not “Go forth” but “Go to yourself.” For the kabbalist this means more than the mere quieting of the mind. The journey is inwards, and the vehicle is… imagination. For imagination is the tool that allows us to image a future radically different from the past or even the present. That is exactly what Abraham was called to do–to leave behind all of the yesterdays and todays and to leap into an unknown tomorrow. It is only in the fantasy of re-imagining that we can change our reality. It is only from this inside place that we can truly change our outside. The path of true wisdom is not necessarily to quit your job, leave your home, and travel across the country. Often such a radical break is a failure rather than a fulfillment of imagination. True wisdom is to change your life from where you are, through the power of imagination.
Think “Cookies!”
Virtually every crisis at its core is a failure of imagination. Some years back, I took off three years from “spiritual teaching” to get a sense of what the world tasted like as a householder. I took a job at a high-tech company, and from that relatively nondemanding perch began to rethink my life and beliefs.During this period, I did a bit of consulting with Israeli high-tech start-up firms. The truth is I had little good advice to offer, but some of the high-tech entrepreneurs who had been my students would call me anyway. At one point, I received a call from a small start-up firm in Ramat Gan, Israel. The problem: they were almost out of venture capital, their market window seemed to be rapidly closing, and their Research and Development team was simply not keeping pace with their need for solutions. Apparently the problem lay with the elevator. The company was on the top floor of an old warehouse. The elevator was small, hot, and inordinately pungent. By the time the R&D teams got through the daily morning gauntlet of the elevator, they had lost some of their creative sparkle. The president was convinced that this experience dulled their edge just enough to slow down the speed and elegance of their solutions. What to do? I had not the slightest idea. Our meeting was on a Friday. As was my custom, I went home for the Sabbath and spoke with my own private consultant, my eight-year-old son Eitan. When I asked him what I should tell the company, he laughed and said somewhat mockingly, “It’s simple, Dad. Cookies!” I did not find this particularly funny. I raised the subject with him several times, but he would only respond, with maddening gravitas, “Cookies.” Finally I gave up on him. Several days later I went to tell the president that I had found no solution. I was going up the same malodorous elevator, when in a blinding flash I realized what Eitan meant. Cookies! Of course! We had all been focused on elaborate ways to fix the elevator or to move locations. Eitan―with the simple brilliance of a child―reminded us of the true issue at stake. The crux of the matter was not the elevator, it was how the R&D team felt when they left the elevator. So what to do? Cookies. We set up a table with juices, fruit, and health cookies upstairs, right outside the elevator. So even though the ride up the elevator was terrible, people would spend the time in eager anticipation of the goodies that awaited them. No one had envisioned Eitan’s simple yet elegant solution because their imaginations were “stuck in the elevator.” His was a simple paradigm shift inspired by re-imagining. We fear imagination, for imagination holds out the image of a different life. It challenges our accommodations to the status quo. It suggests that the compromises that we have based our lives upon might not have been necessary. Our fear of imagination is our fear of our own greatness. It was Albert Einstein’s gift of imagination that allowed him to formulate the concept of relativity. Einstein literally imagined what it would be like to travel on a beam of light. What would things look like? What would another traveler, on another beam of light going in the opposite direction, look like to him? Without leaps of imagination, no growth is possible and the spirit petrifies.
The Possibility of Possibility
Nikos Kazantzakis writes, “You have your brush and your colors, paint paradise and in you go.” This is a near perfect description of the spirit that animates the biblical myth ritual that yearly celebrates the Exodus from Egypt. Every year, on the anniversary of the Hebrew Exodus, people gather for a uniquely dramatic biblical myth ritual, Passover. Unlike the Fourth of July or other freedom anniversaries, it revolves not around commemoration but imagination.The guiding principle of the holiday is, “Every person is obligated to see him/herself as if they left Egypt.” This Talmudic epigram, the guiding mantra of the ritual, is explained by the kabbalists as an invitation to personal re-imagining of the most fantastic kind. You are in Egypt―your own personal Egypt. Egypt, Mitzrayim in Hebrew, literally means “the narrow places,” the constricted passageway of our life’s flow. Egypt―kabbalistically said to incarnate the throat―symbolizes all the words that remain stuck in our throats: the words we never speak, the stories of our lives that remain unlived, unsung, unimagined. We are slaves. Slavery for the kabbalist is primarily a crisis of imagination. Consequently, the healing of slavery is a ritual of imagination. For an entire evening, we become dramatists, choreographers, and inspired actors. We re-imagine our lives as the first step on our path to freedom. God is the possibility of possibility―limitless imagination. The first of the Ten Commandments is “I am God.” When this God is asked to identify himself, He responds, “I will be what I will be.” That is, “You cannot capture me in the frozen image of any time or place. To do so would be to destroy me.” It would be to violate the Second Commandment, against idolatry. Idolatry is the freezing of God in a static image. To freeze God in an image is to violate the invitation of the imagination. It is to limit possibility.
Homo Imaginus
“It is for this reason that man was called Adam: He is formed of adama, the dust of the physical, yet he can ascend above the material world through the use of his imagination and reach the level of prophecy. The Hebrew word ‘I will imagine’ is adamah.”For Hebrew mystical master Nachman of Bratzlav, the core human movement that gives birth to our spirit is the evolution from adama to adameh. Adamah is ground, earth, Gaia. Yet it can also be read as adameh, I will imagine. Man emerges from Nature to live what philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik called “a fantasy-aroused existence.” Imagination is not a detail of our lives nor merely a methodological tool. It is the very essence of who we are. We generally regard ourselves as thinking animals, Homo sapiens. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is hardwired into our cultural genes. Yet biblical myth offers an alternative understanding of the concept of “humanness.” The closest Hebrew word to human, or the Latin homo, is “Adam.” The word “Adam” derives from the Hebrew root meaning imagination (d’mayon). The stunning implication is that the human being is not primarily Homo sapien, but “Homo imaginus.” At the very dawn of human existence, man is described as being created in the divine image. “Divine image” does not mean a fixed and idolatrous copy of divinity. God has no fixed form. God is, instead, the possibility of possibility. The human being’s creation in the divine image needs to be understood in two ways. First, humanity is not so much ‘made in God’s image’ as we are ‘made in God’s imagination’. A product of the divine fantasy. Second, the human being himself participates in divine imagination―Homo imaginus. We long for goodness, beauty, and kindness in a world perpetually marred by ugliness, evil, and injustice. For the biblical mystic, our imaginings of a world of justice and peace is the manifestation of the immanence of God in our lives. The creative discontent that drives us to imagine an alternative reality is the image/imagination of God beating in our breast. The cosmos is pregnant with hints that guide our imaginings. We are called to heal the world in the image of our most beautiful imaginings. Imagination is the elixir of God running through the universe.
Creating God
Imagination is powerful. Very powerful. “Think good and it will be good,” wrote Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last master of Chabad mysticism. This is true not merely because of the psychological power of positive thinking, but also because every imagining gives birth to something real that eventually manifests itself in the universe.Imagination is transformative not only on the human plane. It has a powerful effect on the divine scale as well. Kabbalists teach that each dimension of divinity, known as a sefira in kabbalah, has a color that incarnates it. By ecstatically imagining the colors of the sefirot and combining them according to the appropriate mystical instructions, one can actually have an impact on the inner workings of the divine force. The Zohar goes further in audacious formulations that, upon first reading, describe man creating God in his image―that it to say, in his imagination. For the Zohar such imagination simply reinforces the substantive reality of God. Or to put it slightly differently, while there is a limited truth in saying that God is a figment of human imagination, we need to remember that imagination is a figment of God. The difference is simple. For the kabbalist, imagination is not childish fancy. It is the spiritual reality called forth by the sacred child within. The God we do not create doesn’t exist. Yes, there is a divine force that exists beyond us. Yet there is also a powerfully manifest current of divinity that is nourished by our being. The act of nourishing, sustaining, and even creating divinity is called “theurgy” by scholars of mysticism. The term expresses the human ability to dramatically impact and even grow God. One of the great tools of theurgy is imagination. In fact, theurgic imagination is the medium and message of a kabbalistic re-reading of “In the beginning…” The first string of letters in the Bible, “bereshit bara elokim…” can be re-read as “b’roshi tbara elokim”―in my mind God is created.
-Marc Gafni
Blog Post Six. First in series: On Eros and Holiness
July 8, 2008
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On Eros and Holiness The light and the Shadow
Post One by Marc Gafni Copyright: Marc Gafni. (Under-construction version of forthcoming book.)
Introduction
The following one thousand pages―which I will share in a series of upcoming blog posts―are a version of a book I wrote many years ago called On the Erotic and the Holy. Part of this book, about 315 pages worth, was published as The Mystery of Love. Every so often I will add a section of the book to this website. It will appear both as a new article and as a blog post. This material in its entirety will, God willing, be published as a separate work under the title On Eros and Holiness: Shadows and Light. A couple of points to share: Avraham Leader and myself, way back when, in the context of our work together in Israel, footnoted The Mystery of Love, Soul Prints, and the first three chapters of this book. (The footnotes to Soul Prints are truly excellent; they deserve to be studied carefully. This material will be available to you in the Soul Print section of this website.) The footnotes to the first three chapters of this work are in part the same as the footnotes to The Mystery of Love, since the fundamental material is the same only more expanded and extended. The footnotes themselves are highly important and provide the rooting of these books in the classical Hebraic sources. These books represent a sacred unfolding and evolution of classic Hebraic sources, particularly Kabbalistic sources. There are some people whose role it is to translate the wisdom of their tradition. Others―far fewer―are intended to evolve the tradition even as it appears that they are only translating. That is what I am attempting to do in this book. I try to avoid, at almost all cost, getting lost in scholarly hubris. The language is simple and clear and the movements of evolution are, hopefully, relatively seamless in the fabric of the text.
FORTHCOMING NEW BOOK
A more elaborate version of this book, which has undergone a significant editorial process, is forthcoming as what I hope will be an exciting new book on Eros and Holiness, which takes into account everyting I have learned in the last two years. In the meantime, in response to many requests, I am sharing with you the original manuscript―replete with notes and questions to myself, and suggestions to myself about future directions and issues and the like. It seems that there is something to be said for seeing a work in progress, still rough and unfinished.
TITLE PAGE
The picture on the cover is an imaginative rendering of the Ashera tree, divine symbol of feminine eros in ancient paganism. It is now time for the contemporary prophets of biblical myth to reclaim the legacy of the sacred Ashera and reinstall her within the precincts of the temple. Note to me: Cite sources from Zohar; part 3, from Ramak/ Cordevero, Abraham Kuk on Ahserah; Pattai cites Ramak, thank Tamar Ross who first referred me to Rav Kuk source on Idolatry; see also important article by Gellman on Akedah and important sources there on relationship between Rav Kuk and idolatry; seems like Gellman did not fully understand the impact of the sources but not clear; I feel he always hides his true radicalism in order to remain relatively kosher; need to thank him. … and the ability to transmute the Asherah energy to the sacred. All of these sources in one way or another acknowledge that Ahserah participates in the energy of Shekinah. People have rejected Asherah. This is a mistake. Da Free John uses phrase in his work – Wilber picks up phrase – Transcend and Include- Wilber cites Hegel Negate and Preserve- when one ascends levels of consciousness. We need to negate that in Asherah which is pre-personal and include that which is, at its core, transpersonal. Level One Ahsera very problematic; Level three Ashera, which transcends and includes the personal, is messianic. Relate my level one level three confusion idea to Wilber’s Pre-Trans Fallacy. Wilber article on Pre-Trans excellent. Need to meet him and discuss. Perhaps D.F might make introduction. Will ask him. Lovely man.
Epigrams
“Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…” -John Keats
“Jerusalem’s Temple, the place where heaven and earth kiss.” -The Zohar
The Mystery of Love Leshem Yichud Kudsha Brich-hu u’Shechinateh.
May this be for the sake of uniting the masculine God with the feminine Goddess. -Kabbalistic meditation
The Hole in Wholeness
We are in pain. We are in pain because the world, and therefore God, is in pain.1 The Kabbalists call this divine wound the Exile of the Shekina. This is a wound born of love.{See Da Free John on Practicing the Wound of Love; My Kabbalistic re-read of Da Free John, I light of Gafni-is that practicing the wound of love is an act of imatatio dei; the wounds of love in human relations stem from the exile of the Shekina within the self – a form of self-contraction and alienation. Eros is so painful, but that is not the subject for this book. Need part two of the Erotic and the Holy on the Pain of Eros. I am publishing, God willing, a separate book called tentatively “The Pain of Eros: Practicing the Wounds of Love.” This book is about my personal experiences of spirit and love between May 11, 2006 and the present. It suggests a path in love, which, in my understanding, is the core of the Hebraic notion of enlightenment.} The Shechina is the sensual feminine God force that suffuses reality and knows our name. To be a Kabbalist is to participate in the pain of the Shechina. To feel Her hurt. For Her hurt is our hurt. But that is only the first step. The great ambition of the spirit is to heal Her pain, to fill her up with joy, ecstasy and meaning. To repair our broken world. To heal Her wound. For She is us. Shechina in the original Hebrew means “indwelling Presence.” She evokes the experience of fullness, presence, interconnectivity, and yearning. The Greeks called this experience ‘the erotic’ after the god Eros. Eros and Shechina are different expressions of the same core experience.2 One cannot define Shechina and Eros. To define Shechina is to kill her. Definitions are non-erotic. Shechina is evoked, intuited, felt, and experienced. And yet the mind needs maps and signposts. So, later in our journey (in chapter two), we will unfold together the four faces of Eros. But to begin, we seek rather to arouse her presence. The opposite of Eros and Shechina is void. Our lives are overflowing with the Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it hurts so much you can barely move. Usually it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We rush around, doing everything we can to fill the absence. We even have a handy word for this rushing about: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A–void–dance. A dance around the void. We develop the most elaborate maneuverings you can imagine―never realizing that it is all a-void–dance. That if we could but taste fullness for a moment, the empty dances of addiction, power, violence, and abusive sex(3) would be transformed into the erotic dance of Being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, with the Shechina. The dance in which we all have a place. This book is about sharing that dance with you.
The Great Dancer
The truly great dancer―like all lovers―flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right, so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so, she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul, which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila―forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity, and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah―fullness―used in the biblical myth texts to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.4Mehol, Hallul, Hallal = Dance, Empty, Full. The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and eros, absence and Shechina. Modern -day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra, and it is marketed to us in a million packages. Fill the emptiness―in any way at any price. We are desperate. We are so pained by our emptiness that we can hardly distinguish between our desires. The natural result is that we fill up with much that is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment―full-fill-ment―in all the wrong places.
Pseudo-Eros
The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being―the fullness of ourselves in every moment―we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time, to resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of dance. The movement between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”We live in an age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification―a quick fix: a book, a drug, a relationship, a job―anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. With a book, we read a few pages and if we don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo-eros, we move on to the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole that might fill up the yawning abyss we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide. On the outside, our mad dashing about may look like dance―but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an airtight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside, however, there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos-filled scramble for some snatches of authenticity in between the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance.
Erotic Living
The Dancing MasterThere is a wonderful story of eros and love that hints at many of the truths we will unpack in our journey together. It is about walking through the void and dancing with the Shechina. Every time we walk through and not around the void, we come out stronger.
Reports had reached the young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of kung fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet, converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this master of kung fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit.Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of kung fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The master of kung fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue-black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your Highness,” he began, “Have no worries, I wouldn’t think of doing you harm.” “Well, when you do want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “what kind of harm can you do?” “Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear.” The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may proceed,” he told the Master of kung fu. “Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If I had done it in slow motion, extremely slow motion, you would have seen how each touch of my hand would have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.” “Impressive. But I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama. “Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.” “Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king. “Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.” “If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master.” The Dancing Master entered. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of kung fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge. The Master of kung fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year when I finally caught him on the ear and destroyed him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire.” The two opponents faced off. The Master of kung fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack. The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his body. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. His fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows. The Master of kung fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time. The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of kung fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He was intoxicated by the aroma of the butter melting in the Dalai Lama’s fragrant tea. A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch. His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life. The Master of kung fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong.
What a holy tale of Eros. The darts and lunges of emptiness and violence become the erotic rhythms, soarings of fullness and love. Eros, as the story unfolds so gently, is not sex. Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety. When we are unable to live in Eros we become very frightened of the emptiness. The void either numbs us to the joy of living or we try and fill the void with the manifold forms of pseudo-Eros. We fill it with anger, competition, fanaticism, and excessive consumption of all kinds. The result, on a personal level, is either depression or an underlying deadness of spirit, which we hide under the facades of success. On a global level, the result is terrible wars that we fight to validate the superiority of our religions, to affirm our national pride, or to protect our economic power. At the same time, we rape the environment, forcing it to produce the glut of goods which we desperately require to provide us with more and more hits of pseudo-Eros. Spirit does not tolerate a vacuum. The inability to dance through the void always results in pathology. In the case of the kung fu master, pseudo-Eros manifested as raging ego, aggression and even violence. If we do not choose Eros, then pseudo-Eros will always choose us. The consequence is always great pain, personal, social, and cosmic. For anything less than Eros will almost assuredly destroy our planet. We abuse each other personally. Nations mass murder other nations. A lover demonizes her sexual, romantic or heart partner. She is devastated that she was not the only one. Even when there was no such promise or even its opposite. Feminine Shadow. S/he forgets that to love is not to own. Lovers who demonize the former beloved friend, refuse to recognize that they are scarring the face of God―within themselves. We abuse the earth and allow twenty million people to die of hunger or related diseases every year. The simple and essential cause is a lack of Eros. We desperately need to feel like we are full but we aren’t. So we settle for pseudo Eros. We pretend that we are in the inside by placing others on the outside. We do not feel embraced in real Eros of love so we grasp for the pseudo Eros of fear, war, and obsessive consumption. Life is a mess. Even if we could somehow put aside the starvation and the wars, even a superficial view of our society reveals that something is seriously askew. Not a detail problem but an essential flaw in the plumb line of our culture. Every forty seconds someone kills themselves. This year, upwards of one million people will experience a failure of love so intense and painful that they will violently end their lives. In the last 45 years, suicide rates have increased by sixty percent world wide. Among the countries with the highest rates are western democracies such as Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, and of course the United States. Suicide used to be largely limited to the elderly. People who had, at the end of their lives, looked back and been unable to make sense of their story. This is not particularly comforting news because all of us want to, and most of us will, reach old age. The even more jolting news, however, is that the average age is going down. Suicide is now one of the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44. Now, of course it would be nice to dismiss this slightly unpleasant information with the thought that only crazy or severely depressed people commit suicide. Note, however, that for every actual suicide there are ten suicide attempts. Suicide attempts have increased in the last 45 years to twenty times more than “successful” suicides. Add to this the easily inferred reality that for every person who attempts suicide, there are a lot more people in just as much pain; just as lonely; just as alienated; and just as depressed. They simply are unable to do anything about it. So they live in limbo―suspended between hells―all the while maintaining the façade of normal and even successful lives. And yet our guilty feet have no rhythm. Beneath our desperately dancing steps lurks a yawning abyss of emptiness that kills our joy and poisons our satisfactions. We need another way to dance. It is the old dancing master who shows us how. He reminds us that Eros is a genuine possibility in our lives. Stay in the emptiness, he tells us, and it will become full. Where before you danced to the music of competition and envy, you now begin to feel that you are part of the seamless coat of the divine universe. You no longer feel like you must obey God; you participate in the divine. Eros is the sound of a woman singing, the caress of a small deed of loving, a gentle tear, or rocking laughter. Shechina is genuinely felt pain and joy, anger and ecstasy. All of these fill your emptiness and enliven your days. You are no longer alienated from your own life―living externally―wondering: is this all there is? To dance with the Shechina is to step inside to the full erotic glory and wonder of your life. To live and love erotically in all the facets of your being is to live a sacred life.
The Path of Love
One cannot be told that life is worthwhile; one must experience the erotic love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity, and worth of their lives. It is, however, this very erotic sense that is so essential in making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second-hand consumers of second-hand joy―never touching love or Eros directly. And when love fails, there truly is nothing left to live for. For love―not the narrow romantic expressions of it, but erotic love in all areas of our existence―is the core of life itself.We are confronted, personally and globally, with a stark choice: Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury but an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half century, modern psychology has documented an age-old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So, too, our world, personal and global, even with all the resources, intelligence, and technology at our disposal, will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love. Life is a choice. What is the rhythm of our dance? Are we dancing masters or bottled bees? Who are our dancing partners― desperation and emptiness or Eros and Shechina? Are we lovers in all facets of our lives or are we apathetic, deadened, and indifferent? Are we sources of safety and caring or are we abusers and manipulators? Are we spreading wisdom and love or are we inflictors of emotional, spiritual and even physical pain on those closest to us? Bees in bottles always sting. But everyone knows that to sting is to die. The only way to not sting is to learn to be a dancing master. The great mystery tradition of Hebrew wisdom is about a radical and profound path towards becoming just such a dancing master. The ancient temple in Jerusalem was the center of a society where the Hebrew mysteries were practiced and taught. At the core of the temple mysteries lies an ancient set of radical understandings about sex, love, and eros. In the deep yet provocative temple mysteries, we are taught that sex is not eros. But as we shall see, in the esoteric temple mystery, sex models for us what it might look like to live erotically in all of the non-sexual dimensions of our lives. The temple mysteries are a unique Tantra, opening us to the possibility of becoming great lovers in all of the arenas of our lives. The Hebrew mysteries gently but powerfully chart a path which, if we but have the courage to walk it, will teach us how to live erotically in every facet of existence. We live in an age when ancient wisdoms long relegated to the dustbins of the spirit are being reclaimed. The Zohar, magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, teaches that our era is the one in which the “Gates of Wisdom will be opened.” We live at the dawn of a new age in which for the first time―after several aeons of intense spiritual evolution―we have the vessels to hold the light of the ancient secrets. The mystics suggest we may well be able to hold the light more deeply than even the ancients for whom the wisdom was initially intended. It is only now, after law, science, and ethics have been integrated into our psyches, that we can go back and reclaim Eros, Shechina and enchantment. Life is a choice. You can remain a bee trapped in a bottle and everyone―except yourself―will be convinced you are dancing. Or you can choose to be a dancing master. To dance yourself into your book of life. To be an erotic lover in every facet of your existence. A wonderful mantra from the biblical love book, the Song of Songs, reads, “I am love sick on my bed at night,” explains 19th century mystical master Nachum of Chernobyl, “I have fallen on my bed because my loving has become sick.” When being a great lover is limited to sexual performance, and wild erotic stories connote anonymous orgies, then love has become sick and we fall on our beds into the depths of emptiness and depression. The dance of Eros is to teach you how to be a great lover not only in the sexual but in all the dimensions of your life. That is the radical invitation issued by this book of Hebrew wisdom. You need not have studied mysticism or biblical myth before reading this tract. This is a book written for all seekers of transformation. This book is for you if you are not sated by pop culture and seek a passionate, joyful, yet deeply grounded and serious exploration of the mysteries as your guide. I am a biblical mystic. I have studied, taught, and tried to live the sacred texts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, nestled in the hills, of the Galilee in Israelin, Oxford University in England, and in exile in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Aramaic and Hebrew mystery texts have been my guides and friends for many years. Of course, like every mystic who engages sacred text, I hear the text in accordance with the inner melody of my soul. I now share this song with you in the form of this book. You are invited to find the place in your soul where you can receive and integrate this ancient wisdom into your own song. The invitation and the challenge of the spirit in our generation is to create a politics of Eros and love. That can only begin to happen when each person in the polis takes responsibility for the erotic quality of his or her life. We need to, and we can, realign our souls with the fountain of being. We can connect to the vital currents of loving energy that course though our universe. We can decide to enter the flow, and from that place on the inside we can transform first our lives, and ultimately, our world. The Next Entry will begin with the Paragraph below. Love until then… The mystery begins in the inner precincts of Solomon’s sacred temple in Jerusalem, unraveling the deep, wondrous and provocative relationship between sex, eros and love. It is the unpacking of this first stage of the mysteries that we devote the first three framing chapters. Emerging from the Hebrew mystery tradition, the following ten chapters each lay out a unique path of Hebrew Tantra. Each path will offer you a compelling spirit map for living erotically in every facet of your being. Cover Page Epigrams:
“Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…”-John Keats “Expanded consciousness is when the Taste of the Bark is as the Taste of the Tree.” -Abraham Kuk
shared by Marc Gafni
On the Wounds of Love: Part Two – Marc Gafni
July 10, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Good evening. It is close to midnight here in Salt Lake. Just spent a wonderful evening with five goddesses. A group of friends, all powerful feminine spiritual teachers who are on the way to their annual retreat in the Utah desert. This is the third year that we have met here in Salt Lake before and after their retreat. Each one is a strong, vulnerable, audacious figure. Each one comes with her unique gifts of spirit. They are, each one of them, deeply good, smart, wild, giving, sexy, modest, wounded, provocative, profound, healing, outrageous, and gentle. In short, they are Incarnations of Shekinah, the feminine goddess divine. It is with some of them, at different times, that I have over the past two years explored the wounds of love. It is they, together with my wonderful friend Dalit, who held me and challenged me, fought with me, supported me, and loved me as I loved them. I dedicate this sharing on the wounds of love to them.
On the Wounds of Love: Part Two
by Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.comThe way I will do an ongoing series of posts is to always start with the last couple of paragraphs from the previous post. In Zen, there is a famous koan about a master who teaches by giving student a thorough beating. No matter what question the student asks, the beating comes just the same. When the student attempts to answer the question, he receives a beating. When the student remains silent, he gets a beating. When the student attempts to escape or withdraw, he still gets a beating. Eros often teaches like that Zen master, giving a complete knock-out, foot-to-groin, nose-smashed-against-asphalt pummeling. It demands that we experience pain, injury, and the collapse of self–even that we recognize suffering itself as its loving touch. Our sexual and romantic lives are filled with an array of agonies not easily borne by the ego, by the body, or by the sense of (limited) self. There is the pain of not being seen or desired, and the pain of being seen starkly, in all of our most shame-inducing imperfections. There is the pain of not getting the affection we seek, or the pain of having it for a time, then losing it. There is the startling pain of realizing we were not our beloved’s only one–the fact that our beloved shared his love with others may cut into our desperately human need to be special. There is the pain of being asked for more than we are able to give, and the pain of trying to give and not being wanted. There is the pain of love which turns to hate, of affection which turns to contempt, and of the touch which, once desired, becomes repellent. Then there is the pain of betrayal. Betrayal is uniquely excruciating because only someone whom you really trust–someone who could never, you thought, betray you–can deliver this particularly devastating blow. Sex models life in that it hurts like hell. It’s no wonder that so much popular eroticism contains a twinning sex and pain, domination and submission. In sex, even with the best intentions, we often seem bound to inflict injury, and bound to receive it. We’re sure to be hurt in love, and we’re sure to hurt. We are subjected to injury against our will, and no matter how hard we fight against it, we injure others all the time. I don’t say this to be released of responsibility to others; ignorance, hubris, and grasping demand reckoning, and all transgressions against others must be known for what they are. (And who among us is without transgression.) What I’m saying is that even genuine sensitivity, even a radical willingness to take responsibility, even a vow to end suffering, does not take away pain. As the Irish mystic rock singer Bono sings,
“We’re one, but we’re not the same, You see, we hurt each other, then we do it again!”
Entering the Temple of Pain So, even though a stiff drink of good Irish whisky might seem like the best response to the pain of eros, medicating our suffering never works for long. In the end, we have to be willing to look into pain deeply and directly. We need to know it first-hand, entering the interior of pain as we enter the interior of sex – with full presence, with a yearning to see, feel, and know it, and with a mind and heart expanded enough to embrace the whole catastrophe at once. How does the hurt feel? What are its qualities? How do we engage the interiority of pain without violating our wholeness? How do we remain fully present to what is actually happening inside of us? How do we stay open in the midst of the pain, and even stay connected to the yearning that once animated our hearts? What is our pain telling us? If we could hear pain’s voice, what sacred wisdom might she whisper in our ear. Before pain reveals her secrets, we need to become her lover. As with a lover, we need to attend to our responses to pain with the same care and discrimination that we give our pleasure. What is our response to the feelings? What strategies arise to protect us against the experience of pain? Do we withdraw, attack and go to war, do we dull ourselves, do we immediately seek another love-fix, like the addicts we are? What exactly is going on here? Pain is a state of being. From a cognitive perspective, how we relate to the pain born of erotic or sexual betrayal is a decision. We choose the interpretive prism through which we will understand our pain, and that becomes the basis for our response to it. Sadly, we often use the prism of “I’m so hurt” to justify vengeful malice, either verbal or actual. We use our wounds as an excuse for hating an ex-lover or spouse, for seeking unwarranted financial or legal redress, for blackening their reputation. We twist the law to align with the twisted valves of our heart. Hurt becomes a free pass, a get-out-of-jail free card that we believe gives someone the right to take revenge. And of course, since malice cannot reveal it’s true motivations, it must plead false ones, hiding behind masks of piety and noble intention. Yes, all beings are hurt. We all carry some untransformed wound. But in the end we all must choose whether our wounds are to be allowed to fester in us, converted to malevolence, or transmuted into compassion. Suffering can lead us deeper into love or deeper into separation and hatred. It is always a choice. We each choose the prism for our pain, and the lens we choose is ultimately the mark of our level of consciousness. For a young child or a person at a certain level of consciousness, rage and pain can seem like reason to kill. The great revelation of the Axial Age lawgivers is that wounded honor is not to be personally avenged in spilled blood—and as the Talmud reminds us, there are many ways to spill a person’s blood. Some of them are so subtle that the person doesn’t know he’s been stabbed. Others may drain the blood from a person’s face in such a way that it takes years to set things right. To avoid translating pain into violence–whether physical, verbal, or imaginary–we need to pay close and unflinching attention to our interiority. We are required to clarify our pain through what a kabbalist might call the ten questions of Berur, the Clarification of Desire. THE END The next sharing On the Wounds of Love will be on the clarification of desire. Note to Reader: Just a little sharing about my education in blogs: I do not really know how to do this blog thing, but the advice I am getting is shorter blogs, which I have tried to do, and to find a template. So, if anyone has a template, please let me know. Marc Gafni
On the Wounds of Love: Part Three – Marc Gafni
July 12, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On the Wounds of Love: Part Three
continued from Blog Post NineYes, all beings are hurt. We all carry some untransformed wound. But in the end we all must choose whether our wounds are to be allowed to fester in us, converted to malevolence, or transmuted into compassion. Suffering can lead us deeper into love or deeper into separation and hatred. It is always a choice. We each choose the prism for our pain, and the lens we choose is ultimately the mark of our level of consciousness. For a young child or a person at a certain level of consciousness, rage and pain can seem like reason to kill. The great revelation of the Axial Age lawgivers is that wounded honor is not to be personally avenged in spilled blood—and as the Talmud reminds us, there are many ways to spill a person’s blood. Some of them are so subtle that the person doesn’t know he’s been stabbed. Others may drain the blood from a person’s face in such a way that it takes years to set things right. To avoid translating pain into violence—whether physical, verbal, or imaginary—we need to pay close and unflinching attention to our interiority. We are required to clarify our pain through what a kabbalist might call the questions of Berur, the Clarification of Desire. I have organized the questions on the page in a bit of confused way. Disorganized and disjointed, because that is how the questions come up in our minds. Let your mind roam from question to question until the questions enter the very core of your being. Try and let your mind become very still and let the depth and truth of these questions expand your heart and evolve your consciousness. 1) What thoughts arise regarding your pain? 2) Is the pain created by what happened or by your thoughts about what happened? 3) Who would you be if we without these thoughts about your pain? 4) What beliefs do we hold about what happened, at this very moment? 5)Are they true? 6) Are we sure that they are true? 7) If we were alone in a room with God and she said: Your eternity and the lives of our children rest on your telling the absolute truth at this moment—would you still hold your beliefs about “what happened” as true? 8) How does that belief serve your agenda in this moment? 9) What deeper truth does it cover up? 10) What or who would you be—or how would you feel—if you told yourself a different story about your pain? 11) How much of your identity is bound us with your pain? 12) Are you blaming someone for your pain? 13) What if you turned it all around and made yourself a responsible party instead of the victim in the story? 14) How does taking some responsibility help us loosen the weight of our anger and take some of the projection back? 15) How does it help us move from a blame frame to recognizing that everyone has a share in contributing to realities that created the pain? 16) What gain to we receive from our pain—what profit is there for us, what social capital do we earn in telling and re-telling the story of our pain? We long for certainty. But are we ever really certain of the correctness of our ideas about how the world should be? In moments of hurt and blame, if we can step out of our frame and go deeper, we might identify that behind our need to blame someone—even ourselves—for our pain is a feeling of being alone, of being cut off and isolated from the rest of reality. As we look into that deeper place then we might—often for the first time—be able to watch how the mechanism of ego works. Marc Gafni
On the Wounds of Love: Part Four – Marc Gafni
July 12, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On the Wounds of Love: Part Four
We long for certainty. But are we ever really certain of the correctness of our ideas about how the world should be? In moments of hurt and blame, if we can step out of our frame and go deeper, we might identify that behind our need to blame someone—even ourselves—for our pain is a feeling of being alone, of being cut off and isolated from the rest of reality. As we look into that deeper place then we might—often for the first time—be able to watch how the mechanism of ego works. And we might also notice how we quickly—almost desperately—move to cover over that isolated feeling. If we look closely, we might realize that when we feel cut off, separate diminished or abandoned, we often move to secure our version of how we would like the world to be. Sometimes simply seeing the ego at work, relaxing the struggle, and opening to the truth of the moment liberates our awareness. But in order for this to happen, we need the courage to be present with our own emotional and physical pain. In bioenergetics, and in certain traditions of tantric yoga, we are shown how to free pain through the body by breathing into the fullness of sensation, and feeling the alive quality in the sensation of pain itself. A yogini friend of mine once said, “Because you say “ow” instead of “ah”—because the sensation appears as a menace instead of a friend—doesn’t mean it’s not from the same source.” All phenomena arise from this same source, and the body itself is made of the substance of God. To recognize the divine substance in pain allows us to be present to it rather than resisting or fearing it. Normally (and naturally) we seek to assuage and heal pain—the body itself produces hormones whose very purpose is to make pain bearable. To heal the pain of an other is the sacred joy and obligation of every individual. Even so, we sometimes need to be careful not to numb our pain so quickly that it cannot give us its teaching. According to the mystics this was the meaning of Job’s teaching when he defiantly asserted, “Through my Body I Vision God.” Job— the archetypal sufferer—teaches the Yoga of entering the body in order to walk through, not around, our pain. “I am in your pain” cries out the divine, through the lips of Isaiah. The words of the prophet resonate with particular poignancy regarding emotional pain—the pain of eros. There is a divinity to be realized in staying open to the pain of Eros. We need to resist the seduction of closing off into the easy certainties of psychological dogma, explaining how some demonized other is the source of our pain. If the skew of earlier times was to close our heart by blaming the victim, then the sin of our times is in the assuaging of our own guilt through the deification of the alleged victim’s pain. Does our heart become so hardened that all counter narratives are reviled, crushed or simply ignored? Do we allow the powerful to masquerade as the powerless, and unjust pain beyond all measure is meted out simply because we refuse to challenge the idolatry of hurt. We need the capacity to sustain uncertainty without being psychologically seduced to adopt any dogmatic certainty about the way things are or ought to be, without choosing sides by asserting that someone is bad and someone else good. The capacity to hold open awareness within uncertainty, resisting the subtle but powerful impulse to close into one version of reality, is the gateway to enlightenment. All the great traditions of spirit, in their own way, show us that everything is one thing. Everything is one beautiful, radical, unknowable, ungraspable, vast, empty gorgeousness. Nothing, absolutely nothing needs to be rejected. But only a lover is willing to look directly into the eyes of reality, and see things exactly as they are. When we talk about spiritual courage—this is what we mean. When we talk about being a lover—this is what we mean. We do our best to embrace everything exactly as it is—in excruciating, gorgeous detail. We pay attention to all the ways we hide, slink away, or build up a solid story of breach and betrayal to assuage our feelings. Yet it is only when we give up our insistence on being right that we can begin to be alive and aligned. There is a time to wield Gabriel’s sword and demand justice. And there is a moment when our spiritual training instructs us to surrender instead, to let go, to relinquish our ideas, and to breathe into the unwanted sensations. Much as we would like to simply transcend devastating erotic experience, love tells us that the only way out is through. We cannot transcend painful experiences without going through them, without becoming them. Hafiz says that:
“Love is the funeral pyre Where the heart must lay Its body.”
Marc Gafni Feel free to respond to this blog at info@marcgafni.com.
The Wounds of Love: Part Five – Marc Gafni
July 13, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On the Wounds of Love: Part Five
All the great traditions of spirit, in their own way, show us that everything is one thing. Everything is one beautiful, radical, unknowable, ungraspable, vast, empty gorgeousness. Nothing, absolutely nothing needs to be rejected. But only a lover is willing to look directly into the eyes of reality, and see things exactly as they are. When we talk about spiritual courage—this is what we mean. When we talk about being a lover—this is what we mean. We do our best to embrace everything exactly as it is—in excruciating, gorgeous detail. We pay attention to all the ways we hide, slink away, or build up a solid story of breach and betrayal to assuage our feelings. Yet it is only when we give up our insistence on being right that we can begin to be alive and aligned. There is a time to wield Gabriel’s sword and demand justice. And there is a moment when our spiritual training instructs us to surrender instead, to let go, to relinquish our ideas, and to breathe into the unwanted sensations. Much as we would like to simply transcend devastating erotic experience, love tells us that the only way out is through. We cannot transcend painful experiences without going through them, without becoming them. Hafiz says that:
“Love is the funeral pyre Where the heart must lay Its body.”
***** How do we walk through the pain of Eros? There are three steps that I have been able to discern in my own pain. They are the three steps to God. And in each step you are already there. The First Step is surrender. The Second Step is to meet your brother and sister in the pain. The Third Step is to meet God in the pain. The First Step Too often we resist pain. But extreme pain insists that we accept it. “Do not imagine,” pain says to us, “that it should be different than this. Forget your ideas of how it should be. Surrender to me. Settle into me. Prostrate yourself in the most deeply humbling way before me.” Let yourself feel the next moment of pain, then breathe another step into surrender. Sometimes we are called to enter so deeply into the interiority of the pain—of erotic betrayal or the loss of a lover—that all our old certainties are completely destroyed. All of our constructs collapse, all of our idealized shrines to love fall apart. At these moments it hurts so much that there are no words to speak about it. The only thing we are able to do is let ourselves into the feeling, to live on the inside of the pain as it shifts and changes and ultimately, with grace, resolves. The Second Step Surrendering so deeply and unconditionally into the pain reveals another radical truth. Everyone is present within it. We are all hurt. In the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of pain, we realize the invisible lines of connection that weave us into an indestructible whole. It is the wholeness itself that has within it the erotic power to transmute and heal pain. Our suffering itself is born of the alienation that derives from the part and partial nature of our persons. Meeting the other in pain, receiving the dignity of another’s story is a movement towards redemption. The mute, silent, and dumb experience of pain is redeemed and embraced through the felt experience of one’s word spoken, heard and received. In the recognition that our pain is part of the larger Pain, something softens and opens with the healing power of Wholeness. In the invitation of Wholeness, we catch a glimmer of the enlightenment born of pain—a radically democratizing enlightenment. by Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Part Six – Marc Gafni
July 13, 2008
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On The Wounds of Love: Part Six
The Second Step Surrendering so deeply and unconditionally into the pain reveals another radical truth. Everyone is present within it. We are all hurt. In the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of pain, we realize the invisible lines of connection that weave us into an indestructible whole. It is the wholeness itself that has within it the erotic power to transmute and heal pain. Our suffering itself is born of the alienation that derives from the part and partial nature of our persons. Meeting the other in pain, receiving the dignity of another’s story is a movement towards redemption. The mute, silent, and dumb experience of pain is redeemed and embraced through the felt experience of one’s word spoken, heard and received. In the recognition that our pain is part of the larger Pain, something softens and opens with the healing power of Wholeness. In the invitation of Wholeness, we catch a glimmer of the enlightenment born of pain—a radically democratizing enlightenment. The Third Step Some things are just bigger than we are. Just as sex compels us beyond ordinary boundaries of self, so Eros in the guise of pain overcomes ego. When the hurt is so large all separative bets are off. When there’s no keeping pain at bay, when it hurts so much that explanations and stories won’t hold, when emotional escape isn’t possible, the dharma gate blows open and realization of all and everything becomes possible. There is no time, no past nor future. There is nothing at all—no hurt and no hurting, no transgression, nor betrayal. Everything is forgiven in the truth of complete surrender. If we are willing to feel into the pain so deeply that we as separate self no longer exist, there we will meet God. There we will be privileged to participate in the pain of the exiled Shekinah, the feminine face of God. In the Buddhist tradition, the divine feminine is called Kuan Yin, or Kanzeon Bodhisattva, hearer of the cries of the world. In Kabbalah, she is the Shekinah, God’s feminine face. We meet Shekinah in our pain. “Love is the funeral pyre where the heart must lay its body.” Here is the embrace of the Shekinah of Eros, the blessing of the divine feminine. She holds us in the deepest core of our being, rocking us, listening to our sobs, even as she caresses our head. Solomon wrote in The Song of Songs, “Her left hand is under my head even as her right hand embraces me.” The Shekinah holds us in our pain, and in pain itself she is present waiting to embrace, comfort and heal. We meet her there. In the comfort of her arms, with the soothing sounds of her voice, we realize that pain is none other than divine compassion herself. “In all of their pain, I am in pain…” cries out the Hebrew mystic Isaiah, and we feel her caress. There is a deep heart within all of us which knows how to hold others in their pain. That deep knowing is our birthright. It is the Shekina who lives in us, yet is only realized when our own overwhelming hurt is transposed into overwhelming compassion. This is what the Hebrew mystics in the Zohar referred to when they spoke of “the Shekinah which is called I.” In our evolved realization, we are, each of us, none other than the unique face of divine compassion herself. So, complete Surrender enfolds us into the feminine face of the divine—the most expansive, compassionate and full lover a being could hope for. Shekinah holds us in infinity. In the redemption of her arms, pain is none other then compassion itself. Most people do not know how to make love because they do not know how to truly open to emotional and physical pleasure. In the same way, most people do not know the felt experience of true compassion because they will not allow themselves to enter so deeply into hurt that pain itself gives way to the sweetness of the Shekina’s embrace. Whenever you truly collapse into your soul’s pain, the pain itself collapses into the infinite goodness of existence itself. This is its mystery. The pain of sexual and romantic heartbreak is an intense and exacting model for how we can engage pain in every facet of being. The sexual models the erotic. In the sexual, whether in her pain or pleasure, all the sacred secrets are held. It is only in opening ourselves to her wisdom that we can resist the temptation to turn secrets sacred into secrets sordid. by Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Part Seven – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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The Wounds of Love: Part Seven
“In all of their pain, I am in pain…” cries out the Hebrew mystic Isaiah, and we feel her caress. There is a deep heart within all of us which knows how to hold others in their pain. That deep knowing is our birthright. It is the Shekina who lives in us, yet is only realized when our own overwhelming hurt is transposed into overwhelming compassion. This is what the Hebrew mystics in the Zohar referred to when they spoke of “the Shekinah which is called I.” In our evolved realization, we are, each of us, none other than the unique face of divine compassion herself. So, complete Surrender enfolds us into the feminine face of the divine—the most expansive, compassionate and full lover a being could hope for. Shekinah holds us in infinity. In the redemption of her arms, pain is none other then compassion itself. Most people do not know how to make love because they do not know how to truly open to emotional and physical pleasure. In the same way, most people do not know the felt experience of true compassion because they will not allow themselves to enter so deeply into hurt that pain itself gives way to the sweetness of the Shekina’s embrace. Whenever you truly collapse into your soul’s pain, the pain itself collapses into the infinite goodness of existence itself. This is its mystery. The pain of sexual and romantic heartbreak is an intense and exacting model for how we can engage pain in every facet of being. The sexual models the erotic. In the sexual, whether in her pain or pleasure, all the sacred secrets are held. It is only in opening ourselves to her wisdom that we can resist the temptation to turn secrets sacred into secrets sordid. ***** As I said at the outset, there was a time when I believed that there was a way out of the pain of Eros. Some people may believe that I didn’t try hard enough; others are correct in ascertaining that I didn’t succeed. But I can tell you that I believe in a version of love that is fulfilled not only through clarity of intentions and shared power, but also through commitment which includes betrayal, through loving gestures which disappoint, and through allowing for the fullness of the other’s expansion and uniquely weird complexity. I am willing now to feel hurt. The deepest hurt for us all is the recognition of having hurt others. Even if unconsciously. We hurt each other and then we do it again. The second most powerful hurt is being betrayed, devastated, and even murdered by those we loved. When the genuine hurt of a broken relationship, the hurt that so often accompanies intimate engagement, is seen by one of the parties through the lens of his or her own untransformed wounds, the hurt can morph into malice. In that malicious spirit, the wounded person inflicts pain on the former lover that is often wildly disproportionate to the pain they may have suffered. When we are not willing to enter into our own pain, we demand reparations in a spiraling escalation of hurt. If we are going to allow pain to take us into love, it is utterly necessary to let go of the drama of our pain. Either our pain will evolve us to the divine or it will devolve us into the depths of hell on earth. We need to see clearly the mistake we so often make imagining that deeply feeling our pain means feeding our story about the pain. Feeding our sense of being wrong. Feeding our feeling of betrayal. Feeding our anger and above all our hurt. Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Part Eight – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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The Wounds of Love: Part Eight
I am willing now to feel hurt. The deepest hurt for us all is the recognition of having hurt others. Even if unconsciously. We hurt each other and then we do it again. The second most powerful hurt is being betrayed, devastated, and even murdered by those we loved. When the genuine hurt of a broken relationship, the hurt that so often accompanies intimate engagement, is seen by one of the parties through the lens of his or her own untransformed wounds, the hurt can morph into malice. In that malicious spirit, the wounded person inflicts pain on the former lover that is often wildly disproportionate to the pain they may have suffered. When we are not willing to enter into our own pain, we demand reparations in a spiraling escalation of hurt. If we are going to allow pain to take us into love, it is utterly necessary to let go of the drama of our pain. Either our pain will evolve us to the divine or it will devolve us into the depths of hell on earth. We need to see clearly the mistake we so often make imagining that deeply feeling our pain means feeding our story about the pain. Feeding our sense of being wrong. Feeding our feeling of betrayal. Feeding our anger and above all our hurt. ***** The paradoxical key to moving towards enlightenment through the door of pain is to retain a deep recognition of the importance of balance. Balance is the ultimate secret, by a thousand different names, of every great mystical tradition the world over. Whether it is Yin and Yang, Anima and Animus, pathos and comedy, wisdom and foolishness, Shekina and her consort Tiferet, Astarte and El, balance as the portal to goodness and love is the spirit that animates all of these pairs. It was Edith Hamilton who reminded us that for the ancient Greeks the ideal of the human being was the idea of utter proportion. It is only a deep felt sense of proportion and balance that can eliminate suffering. An understanding of what is sufficient and what is too much. Even if cannot evolve our pain to our enlightenment, we can at the very least hold the pain honestly without losing our balance. And so, when we look into the pain we suffer in love, it’s important to recognize that there are hierarchies of pain, and that there is a moment to move past our own pain. Here, I am moved to share with you the story of the Hassidic master Naftali of Ropshitz who was called to help the King. You see the King’s son was crying desperately. All of the wise men of the kingdom, the doctors, the psychologists (such as there were at the time), the magicians and Shamans, and all the rest―none of them could comfort him or stop his crying. Indeed, it seemed to always intensify after each failed attempt at healing. Until a wise old simple woman from the hinterland of the Kingdom came to the palace bringing milk. She happened past the boy who was wandering near the kitchen crying, as he was wont to do. Apparently hearing his tears, she approached him not realizing he was the son of the king. She whispered some few words in his ear. Lo and behold, he looked up, looked at her, and his crying little by little began to abate. Until, after a few minutes, he is not crying at all. The End. “The end!” said the Hassidim. “Please, holy master,” pleaded the disciples to their teacher, to the Ropshitzer Rebbe, “You must tell us; what magic, what amulet, what secret did the old wise woman―who we know must have been the Shekinah herself―what did she say?” The rebbe smiled. It was very simple, he said. She told the boy, “You must not cry more than it hurts.” Sometimes we hurt someone in a relatively small way and they respond with a cruelty and vengeance that we never imagined existed in their heart. I am always surprised by malice. I am devastated and on my knees for any pain which I have ever caused others. I am shattered by allowing others to hurt me. I am devastated to my core at having hurt others by participating in creating a situation in which others would have to bear the pain of their own great untruth. And all of us must not cry more than it hurts. If we learn to live wide open, even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness, even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy. I turn to Rabia, the great Indian mystic, Shekinah incarnate, to guide us home.
“My Body is covered with wounds this world made But I still long to kiss her, even when God said Could you also kiss the hand that caused each scar for you will not find me until you do.”
Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Two – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Two
About a week ago, I posted the first in a series of about a hundred posts on Eros and Holiness. The feedback was large and wonderful and very much appreciated. Part of the feedback was “bite-sized” Gafni; these are blog posts―not long essays. Okay―thanks for the feedback. So, while I will not repost the framing introduction to this material, which you can find on Blog Post Six, I will start again with the actual material and post in smaller segments with more explanation. Does that work? When I first wrote these words―the very first draft―I knew a lot about the joy of Eros, and not enough about the pain of Eros. I knew of feminine beauty, but not enough about feminine shadow. I unconsciously made the equation that many people in the progressive and New Age world make: the feminine = the spiritual. This is, of course, a false equation. Both feminine and masculine are filled with both light and shadow. While we fully recognize masculine shadow, we are in dangerous denial of feminine shadow. This has many implications in our contemporary understanding of sexuality, power, spirituality, and the relationship between the feminine and masculine in numerous spheres of both personal and public life. I have thought a lot about the different natures and tripwires of masculine and feminine shadow in the last two years, and will share with you a new understanding of all this over the coming months. I remain a fierce lover of the Shekinah even as I understand her and accept her in ways I never did. I owe great thanks to a group of powerful women; the kind of people that Naomi Wolf once referred to as Power Feminists―leading female spiritual teachers, feminist activists, writers, theorists, and simply great women who have held a container for me in these last two years. With some of them, I am now writing in partnership, and I pray that the fruit of our collaboration might make some small contribution to the evolution of love in our time. I have incorporated the understandings of the last two years into many of the upcoming blog posts. Much love to every one of you who is reading. I love every one of you more than you can know! The posts below begin to speak to ‘What is Eros?’ When I use the word Eros, I do not refer to the sexual. Rather to something much deeper, wider, and more powerful. On the relationship between the sexual and the erotic, please see later posts. Introduction The Shechina is the sensual feminine God force that suffuses reality and knows our name. To be a Kabbalist is to participate in the pain of the Shechina. To feel Her hurt. For Her hurt is our hurt. But that is only the first step. The great ambition of the spirit is to heal Her pain, to fill Her up with joy, ecstasy and meaning. To repair our broken world. To heal Her wound. For She is us. Shechina in the original Hebrew means “indwelling Presence.” She evokes the experience of fullness, presence, interconnectivity, and yearning. The Greeks called this experience ‘the erotic’ after the god Eros. Eros and Shechina are different expressions of the same core experience. One cannot define Shechina and Eros. To define Shechina is to kill her. Definitions are non-erotic. Shechina is evoked, intuited, felt, and experienced. And yet the mind needs maps and signposts. So, later in our journey (in chapter two), we will unfold together the four faces of Eros. But to begin, we seek rather to arouse her presence. The opposite of Eros and Shechina is void. Our lives are overflowing with the Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it hurts so much you can barely move. Usually, it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We rush around, doing everything we can to fill the absence. We even have a handy word for this rushing about: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A–void–dance. A dance around the void. We develop the most elaborate maneuverings you can imagine―never realizing that it is all a-void–dance. That if we could but taste fullness for a moment, the empty dances of addiction, power, violence, and abusive sex(3) would be transformed into the erotic dance of Being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, with the Shechina. The dance in which we all have a place. This sacred conversation is about sharing that dance with you. Marc Gafni Please feel free to send comments to info@marcgafni.com.
Eros and Holiness: Part Three – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Three
The Great Dancer
The truly great dancer―like all lovers―flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right, so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so, she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul, which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila―forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity, and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah―fullness―used in the biblical myth texts to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman. Mehol, Hallul, Hallal = Dance, Empty, Full. The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and Eros, absence and Shechina. Modern day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra, and it is marketed to us in a million packages. Fill the emptiness―in any way at any price. We are desperate. We are so pained by our emptiness that we can hardly distinguish between our desires. The natural result is that we fill up with much that is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment―full-fill-ment―in all the wrong places.
Pseudo-Eros
The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being―the fullness of ourselves in every moment―we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time, to resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of the dance. The movement between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”We live in an age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification―a quick fix: a book, a drug, a relationship, a job―anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. With a book, we read a few pages and if we don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo-eros, we move on to the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole that might fill up the yawning abyss we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide. On the outside, our mad dashing about may look like dance―but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an airtight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside, however, there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos-filled scramble for some snatches of authenticity in between the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Four – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Four
Erotic Living
The Dancing MasterThere is a wonderful story of Eros and love that hints at many of the truths we will unpack in our journey together. It is about walking through the void and dancing with the Shechina. Every time we walk through and not around the void, we come out stronger.
Reports had reached the young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of kung fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet, converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this master of kung fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit.Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of kung fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The master of kung fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue-black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your Highness,” he began, “Have no worries, I wouldn’t think of doing you harm.” “Well, when you do want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “what kind of harm can you do?” “Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear.” The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may proceed,” he told the Master of kung fu. “Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If I had done it in slow motion, extremely slow motion, you would have seen how each touch of my hand would have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.” “Impressive. But I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama. “Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.” “Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king. “Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.” “If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master.” The Dancing Master entered. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of kung fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge. The Master of kung fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year when I finally caught him on the ear and destroyed him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire.” The two opponents faced off. The Master of kung fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack. The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his body. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. His fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows. The Master of kung fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time. The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of kung fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He was intoxicated by the aroma of the butter melting in the Dalai Lama’s fragrant tea. A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch. His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life. The Master of kung fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong.
What a holy tale of Eros. The darts and lunges of emptiness and violence become the erotic rhythms, soarings of fullness and love. Eros, as the story unfolds so gently, is not sex. Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Five – Marc Gafni
July 17, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Five
Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety. When we are unable to live in Eros we become very frightened of the emptiness. The void either numbs us to the joy of living or we try and fill the void with the manifold forms of pseudo-Eros. We fill it with anger, competition, fanaticism, and excessive consumption of all kinds. The result, on a personal level, is either depression or an underlying deadness of spirit, which we hide under the facades of success. On a global level, the result is terrible wars that we fight to validate the superiority of our religions, to affirm our national pride, or to protect our economic power. At the same time, we rape the environment, forcing it to produce the glut of goods which we desperately require to provide us with more and more hits of pseudo-Eros. Spirit does not tolerate a vacuum. The inability to dance through the void always results in pathology. In the case of the kung fu master, pseudo-Eros manifested as raging ego, aggression and even violence. If we do not choose Eros, then pseudo-Eros will always choose us. The consequence is always great pain, personal, social, and cosmic. For anything less than Eros will almost assuredly destroy our planet. We abuse each other personally. Nations mass murder other nations. A lover demonizes her sexual, romantic or heart partner. She is devastated that she was not the only one. Feminine Shadow. S/he forgets that to love is not to own. Even when there was no such promise or even its opposite. Lovers who demonize the former beloved friend refuse to recognize that they are scarring the face of God―within themselves. A man makes contracts with the feminine, not realizing that, even if she agrees, those contracts may not serve her highest good. A man has too many lovers, failing to realize that boundaries might be a higher gift than boundless Eros, even when expressed in genuine moments of love, love-making, and sexual play. All of these are forms of pseudo-eros. None of them are Eros. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Seven – Marc Gafni
July 17, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Six
The Path of Love
One cannot be told that life is worthwhile; one must experience the erotic love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity, and worth of their lives. It is, however, this very erotic sense that is so essential in making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second-hand consumers of second-hand joy―never touching love or Eros directly. And when love fails, there truly is nothing left to live for. For love―not the narrow romantic expressions of it, but erotic love in all areas of our existence―is the core of life itself. We are confronted, personally and globally, with a stark choice: Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury but an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half century, modern psychology has documented an age-old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So, too, our world, personal and global, even with all the resources, intelligence, and technology at our disposal, will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love. Life is a choice. What is the rhythm of our dance? Are we dancing masters or bottled bees? Who are our dancing partners― desperation and emptiness or Eros and Shechina? Are we lovers in all facets of our lives or are we apathetic, deadened, and indifferent? Are we sources of safety and caring or are we abusers and manipulators? Are we spreading wisdom and love or are we inflictors of emotional, spiritual and even physical pain on those closest to us? Bees in bottles always sting. But everyone knows that to sting is to die. The only way to not sting is to learn to be a dancing master. The great mystery tradition of Hebrew wisdom is about a radical and profound path towards becoming just such a dancing master. The ancient temple in Jerusalem was the center of a society where the Hebrew mysteries were practiced and taught. At the core of the temple mysteries lies an ancient set of radical understandings about sex, love, and eros. In the deep yet provocative temple mysteries, we are taught that sex is not eros. But, as we shall see, in the esoteric temple mystery, sex models for us what it might look like to live erotically in all of the non-sexual dimensions of our lives. The temple mysteries are a unique Tantra, opening us to the possibility of becoming great lovers in all of the arenas of our lives. The Hebrew mysteries gently but powerfully chart a path, which, if we but have the courage to walk it, will teach us how to live erotically in every facet of existence. We live in an age when ancient wisdoms long relegated to the dustbins of the spirit are being reclaimed. The Zohar, magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, teaches that our era is the one in which the “Gates of Wisdom will be opened.” We live at the dawn of a new age in which for the first time―after several aeons of intense spiritual evolution―we have the vessels to hold the light of the ancient secrets. The mystics suggest we may well be able to hold the light more deeply than even the ancients for whom the wisdom was initially intended. It is only now, after law, science, and ethics have been integrated into our psyches, that we can go back and reclaim Eros, Shechina and enchantment. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Eight: Dance Me to the End of Love – Marc Gafni
July 17, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Seven
Dance Me to the End of Love
Life is a choice. You can remain a bee trapped in a bottle and everyone―except yourself―will be convinced you are dancing. Or you can choose to be a dancing master. To dance yourself into your book of life. To be an erotic lover in every facet of your existence. A wonderful mantra from the biblical love book, the Song of Songs, reads, “I am love sick on my bed at night,” explains 19th century mystical master Nachum of Chernobyl, “I have fallen on my bed because my loving has become sick.” When being a great lover is limited to sexual performance, and wild erotic stories connote anonymous orgies, then love has become sick and we fall on our beds into the depths of emptiness and depression. The dance of Eros is to teach you how to be a great lover not only in the sexual but in all the dimensions of your life. That is the radical invitation issued by this book of Hebrew wisdom. You need not have studied mysticism or biblical myth before reading this tract. This is a book written for all seekers of transformation. This book is for you if you are not sated by pop culture and seek a passionate, joyful, yet deeply grounded and serious exploration of the mysteries as your guide. I am a biblical mystic. I have studied, taught, and tried to live the sacred texts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, nestled in the hills, of the Galilee in Israel, Oxford University in England, and in exile in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Aramaic and Hebrew mystery texts have been my guides and friends for many years. Of course, like every mystic who engages sacred text, I hear the text in accordance with the inner melody of my soul. I now share this song with you in the form of this book. You are invited to find the place in your soul where you can receive and integrate this ancient wisdom into your own song. The invitation and the challenge of the spirit in our generation is to create a politics of Eros and love. That can only begin to happen when each person in the polis takes responsibility for the erotic quality of his or her life. We need to, and we can, realign our souls with the fountain of being. We can connect to the vital currents of loving energy that course though our universe. We can decide to enter the flow, and from that place on the inside we can transform first our lives, and ultimately, our world. The mystery begins in the inner precincts of Solomon’s sacred temple in Jerusalem, unraveling the deep, wondrous and provocative relationship between sex, eros and love. It is the unpacking of this first stage of the mysteries that we devote the first three framing chapters. Emerging from the Hebrew mystery tradition, the following ten chapters each lay out a unique path of Hebrew Tantra. Each path will offer you a compelling spirit map for living erotically in every facet of your being. Shared by Marc Gafni
Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni: Part Eight
July 19, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com When my life was devastated with personal tragedy two years ago, I made a commitment―together with a close friend―not to “do anything.” I wished, as much as possible, to move from doing to being, from the ‘masculine’ mode to the ‘feminine’ mode. Not that one is higher or better, but because the taste for intense activity which had guided my life had become bitter. The universe had shattered me into being. So, the commitment was that I would not initiate contact for 18 months with anyone whom the Kosmos did not in some way invite me to contact. I would not initiate relationships. Only to those people with whom I had some sudden, new, and intense contact during the time immediately before the trauma would I reach out. My heart told me that these were the people who had been sent by the universe as my friends and guides. And that is how it was. The Persian poet Hafiz guided me in that and in many other moments on this journey.
What is the difference Between your experience of existence And that of a saintThe Saint knows That the Spiritual path Is a sublime chess game with God And that the Beloved Has just made such a Fantastic Move That the saint is now continually Tripping over Joy And bursting out in Laughter And saying, “I surrender!” Whereas, my dear, I am afraid you still think You have a thousand serious moves. posted by Marc Gafni
Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni: Part Nine
July 19, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com There were times, and not a few, when I felt thrown out of all places. One Friday evening in Salt Lake, I went with my friend Dalit and her two children to eat at the home of a Jewish family. We had eaten there several times before. It was not a place in which I had a close connection or relationship. It was more of an open house, a Friday evening event, that I went to in order to give Dalit’s kids an experience of community and Shabbat. The host called me over in the midst of the meal and said, “Take a walk with me outside.” “Sure,” I replied. We walked. He was silent. Then he said, “You cannot come back. One of our guests has read on a blog that you are a ‘confessed child molester.’ I know that this is malicious nonsense. We have discussed this before. I tried to explain to her that this was nonsense. But she would not listen. You may never come back to our house.” I could not quite believe my ears. As I walked back into the house, it was clear that everyone present knew that this conversation was taking place. They all averted their eyes. I had never known the experience of the leper. The falsely accused. The contaminated one. At that moment people’s eyes bore into my back as if I was―God forbid―a rapist or a child molester. And my heart broke for all who are wrongly rejected and detested by a society filled with fear. I felt the pain of the falsely accused, of all those who die in prison―innocent, with no one to hear their pleas. I felt the pain also of those who are rightly rejected because they present a genuine danger. For, had we grown up in the brutality of their lives, who knows how our souls might have been formed? The pain was so intense that I fell on my bed unable to move for most of the night. But then, slowly, something shifted. A quiet yet unmistakable joy began to fill me. The image that filled my heart was that of the Hassidic masters who wandered the back roads of Europe. Often―unrecognized―they would be thrown out of all places of culture and learned society. In being rejected and thrown out, they were (according to their own testimonies) able to redeem the sparks of the Shekinah in exile. The Hassidic master was the servant of the sacred feminine. He liberated her by being thrown out of the company of good men just as she was thrown out of masculine culture and society, driven as it was by greed, ignorance, and fear. I began to understand that here I was, wandering the back roads of Utah, invited to be―as I always was―in the tradition of the great rebbes whom I love and revere. But not merely in the public and obviously delicious ways that I had been allowed to serve before―at prayer service, giving talks on wisdom, and receiving and loving people, but also in the hidden and more brutal byways of life. I was being invited, in fact, demanded by God to redeem the sparks of the sacred feminine, in myself, in relationship, in Torah, and in culture. And as morning rolled into afternoon, I began to dance. Slowly at first, but gradually building into a sweet ecstasy the like of which I had never known. That Sunday I had occasion to speak to a beloved friend, Brother David Steindl–Rast. I told him the story of that Sabbath. He introduced me to a story about St. Francis of Assisi called Perfect Joy. A beautiful gift from a gorgeous man. And then when I felt thrown out of all places, St. Francis picked up my shattered heart and guided me to joy. Not always, but sometimes, and that was enough. Perfect joy according to Saint Francis of Assisi: How Saint Francis, walking one day with brother Leo, explained to him which things are perfect joy.One day in winter, as Saint Francis was going with Brother Leo from Perugia to Saint Mary of the Angels, and was suffering greatly from the cold, he called to Brother Leo, who was walking on before him, and said to him: “Brother Leo, if it were to please God that the Friars Minor should give, in all lands, a great example of holiness and edification, write down, and note carefully, that this would not be perfect joy.” A little further on, Saint Francis called to him a second time: “O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor were to make the lame to walk, if they should make straight the crooked, chase away demons, give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and, what is even a far greater work, if they should raise the dead after four days, write that this would not be perfect joy.” Shortly after, he cried out again: “O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor knew all languages; if they were versed in all science; if they could explain all Scripture; if they had the gift of prophecy, and could reveal, not only all future things, but likewise the secrets of all consciences and all souls, write that this would not be perfect joy.” After proceeding a few steps farther, he cried out again with a loud voice: “O Brother Leo, thou little lamb of God! If the Friars Minor could speak with the tongues of angels; if they could explain the course of the stars; if they knew the virtues of all plants; if all the treasures of the earth were revealed to them; if they were acquainted with the various qualities of all birds, of all fish, of all animals, of men, of trees, of stones, of roots, and of waters―write that this would not be perfect joy.” Shortly after, he cried out again: “O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor had the gift of preaching so as to convert all infidels to the faith of Christ, write that this would not be perfect joy.” Now when this manner of discourse had lasted for the space of two miles, Brother Leo wondered much within himself; and, questioning the saint, he said: “Father, I pray thee teach me wherein is perfect joy.” Saint Francis answered: “If, when we shall arrive at Saint Mary of the Angels, all drenched with rain and trembling with cold, all covered with mud and exhausted from hunger; if, when we knock at the convent gate, the porter should come angrily and ask us who we are; if, after we have told him, “We are two of the brethren,” he should answer angrily, “What ye say is not the truth; ye are but two impostors going about to deceive the world, and take away the alms of the poor; begone I say;” if then he should refuse to open to us, and leave us outside, exposed to the snow and rain, suffering from cold and hunger till nightfall―then, if we accept such injustice, such cruelty and such contempt with patience, without being ruffled and without murmuring, believing with humility and charity that the porter really knows us, and that it is God who maketh him to speak thus against us, write down, O Brother Leo, that this is perfect joy. And if we knock again, and the porter should come out in anger to drive us away with oaths and blows, as if we were vile impostors, saying, “Begone, miserable robbers! To the hospital, for here you shall neither eat nor sleep!” And if we accept all this with patience, with joy, and with charity, O Brother Leo, write that this indeed is perfect joy. And if, urged by cold and hunger, we knock again, calling to the porter and entreating him with many tears to open to us and give us shelter, for the love of God, and if he should come out more angry than before, exclaiming, “These are but importunate rascals, I will deal with them as they deserve;” and taking a knotted stick, he seizes us by the hood, throwing us on the ground, rolling us in the snow, and shall beat and wound us with the knots in the stick―if we bear all these injuries with patience and joy, thinking of the sufferings of our Blessed Lord, which we would share out of love for him, write, O Brother Leo, that here, finally, is perfect joy. And now, brother, listen to the conclusion. Above all the graces and all the gifts of the Holy Spirit which Christ grants to his friends, is the grace of overcoming oneself, and accepting willingly, out of love for Christ, all suffering, injury, discomfort and contempt; for in all other gifts of God we cannot glory, seeing they proceed not from ourselves but from God, according to the words of the Apostle, “What hast thou that thou hast not received from God? And if thou hast received it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?” But in the cross of tribulation and affliction we may glory, because, as the Apostle says again, “I will not glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Amen. Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni: Part Ten
July 19, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com As I move forward, dear friends, I’d like to share a few final reflections about the last two years and the explosion that led up to it. For the past two years, I have not been able to go more than a short time without being overwhelmed by sharp pangs of pain, suffused with tears. I feel devastated anew each day by the radical and complete nature of certain betrayals. There is something so terrible and devastating about being betrayed by close friends; words cannot hold the immensity of the pain. One can, of course, only be betrayed by people one is certain could never betray one. It is only Judas, the most trusted and beloved of Jesus’ friends, who can betray him. Betrayal is intimately bound up with love and trust. Yet, paradoxically enough, it may be that we can be reborn only after having been betrayed. Perhaps it is only when all the cords we have attached to others are fully disentangled―when our mothers and fathers have abandoned us―that God can gather us up. I never had any idea that, even in the worst of circumstances, anyone could act as some people apparently did. I did not protect myself against them because I could not imagine that they would try to hurt me. I held my private life privately for fear it might be distorted, but never dreamed that the distortion might mean a shattering of a magnitude even vaguely similar to what took place. No part of me expected anything like what happened. Each time I think of it, a part of my heart is wounded, pierced, and stabbed anew. I experienced my death at the hands of those I loved a thousand times in my dreams, in the hallucinations of my waking hours, and in the indelibility of traumatized memory. Through all of it, but one prayer remained on my lips: God―do not take away my ability to love. God―do not make me bitter. Allow me to die into your arms and be reborn in your bosom, to do your will in love, in any and every way in which you command me. T.S. Eliot held my both my heart and my hand.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (East Coker, part III):I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth. You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.
Reading Psalms and the Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni
July 20, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com For me the way through the hardest of times of the last two years came from the book of Psalms. I tried meditation, taking refuge in the Buddha, as my colleague Genpo Roshi suggested. This was my path from May until July or August of 2006. I prayed. I had never been one for prayer. Mostly, because I loved to pray so much that when I would start I would so often fall into a kind of rapture that was hard for me to resist. So I denied myself―all too often―the gorgeous luxury of prayer. My feeling was that my life―in every waking and dreaming moment―was prayer. But at this time I began to pray again. But more than anything, I read psalms. By myself, in my apartment at night before I went to sleep, and when I could not sleep. With Dalit. And by myself again. I would read with tears streaming down my face, my heart screaming at the pain, at the injustice and betrayal even as I yearned for wholeness and embrace. To embrace every living thing. To embrace those who hurt me. To re-read the scripts where I had hurt my friends or let my students and supporters down through my naivete, mis-judgement or ambition. Who better then David understood Betrayal. Who better then David knew how to protest injustice even as he owned everything as being somehow a result of his own lack of wholeness. Who better then David knew how to reject the new age aphorisms of radical responsibility, rooted as they are in the denial of mystery and cleverly disguised hubris. Who better then David knew how to reject the easy platitudes of victimology and to claim his part in contribution system which created the palaces of his pain. David was my friend guiding me, confirming my own deepest held intuitions, holding me, giving me courage and audacity and gathering the torn shards of my shaterred heart. God in the second person. King David, in the subtle passages of power and complexity, agony and ecstasy, that make up Psalms understood me. More then anyone else I felt connected, loved, and understood by the energy of King David. He held me, gathered up my tears, and confirmed my very being. It was in David that I found the paradox of anger, outrage, and political perception brought together with broken heart, radical responsibility, grace, and hope. Reading Tehillim psalms almost every night in torrents of tears kept me alive and sane. ******** Slowly and gradually, the processes that I have engaged, the spiritual practices which guide my days, beautiful friends, and the gift of grace, have transmuted this pain. Slowly and gradually, I am emerging from a tunnel of such utter blackness and despair that I find it difficult to share or describe. Slowly and gradually, what initially looked like radical darkness is beginning to show faint glimmerings of light. What initially seemed to be utter slavery now reveals slivers of liberation and freedom. What was at first, for months on end, the most constricting and narrow of places is beginning to open, and I, once again but in a whole different way, begin to walk in the wide places. My soul yearns for the wide places. My life was for many years marked by victory after victory. The pleasure of accomplishment, loving, creativity, and manifestation were my chief joys. Surging forward in imitation of the divine explosion of creativity was the nobility which I sought to incarnate in the service of the divine. Then, in one fell swoop, my life was defeated. The only possible direction was inwards. A movement of radical contraction and recoil. Tzimtzum, in which all that I was holding needed to be let go. I was defeated by life. Yes Yes Yes became No No No. And in this defeat was the seed of new joy. I have been defeated by life and feel reborn in the very ashes of defeat. A man whose psychological work has been one of the touchstones on this journey, sent me a poem by Rilke sometime after I completed his “process.” Rilke has walked me through, and I am grateful. I have become the witness.
The Man WatchingI can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes that a storm is coming, and I hear the far-off fields say things I can’t bear without a friend, I can’t love without a sister. The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age: the landscape, like a line in the psalm book, is seriousness and weight and eternity. What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great! If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names. When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: when the wrestlers’ sinews grew long like metal strings, he felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music. Whoever was beaten by this Angel (who often simply declined the fight) went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand, that kneaded him as if to change his shape. Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings. posted by marc gafni
The Wounds of Love: A two year journey of pain, love and liberation: Marc Gafni
July 20, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com What I Have Done During the Past Two Years When a tragedy takes place, we seek to understand it. It is in understanding that we find some measure of comfort and safety. If we understand what happened, we can potentially avoid the tragedy next time around. If we understand the tragedy, we can extract meaning from the chaos, and depth and direction from what seems at first glance to be senseless carnage. We humans are condemned to the glory and pathos of meaning. Some two years ago a terrible tragedy took place in my life. A movement of teaching and spirit, which I had initiated in Israel, suddenly ended. The cause of the ending: complaints of sexual harassment, which were publicized in the Israeli media and the blogosphere. I first heard of the complaints when I stepped off an international flight into what can only be described as a cruelly orchestrated ambush. Thinking I was going to be picked up at the airport by my girlfriend, whom I loved and intended to marry, I was confronted instead by the report that complaints of sexual harassment had been filed by two people whom I knew well, and by a third person I had known some ten year earlier. I had no doubt that the complaints were false. And maybe they were never filed at all. I do know know and may never know what really happened or who said or did what. It has been blurred through the distorting prisms of press, egoic posturing, and fear. What is true? I had not sexually harassed anyone. I had not made any false promises of marriage or anything similar. I had not used my authority as an employer to explicitly, or in any implicit way, engage anyone sexually or gain sexual favors. It took months for me to discover, with the help of several friends who had been present, what had actually happened. Only slowly did I begin to understand who had initiated the process, who had encouraged it, and what persons came together to create the volatile combination that in one fell swoop ended almost a decade of virtually non-stop investment of heart love and life energy―effort of the kind necessary to create the movement. On that night and the weeks following, all was a blur of pain and tears. In a desire to stop the madness, I wrote a letter taking the responsibility for any and all sickness that had appeared in the system that I created upon myself. In the twenty-four months following, I engaged in three activities. First, a grief so intense and a pain so sharp that I will not attempt to describe it here overwhelmed me. Second, I looked carefully into the all-important question of Why. Why did this happen? What was it in me that allowed it to occur? How were my relationships flawed? I placed particular emphasis on finding out my own part in the contribution system that led to these events. Because of the l issues involved, I could have no direct contact with the parties themselves. So the weight of my process was an internal one. Part of this process was in formal settings, and part was in private spiritual practice with spiritual friends and teachers. Third, together with a group of friends and supporters, I gathered a team of professionals to bring together the necessary material to establish that the complaints reported in the media were categorically false. This process required almost 18 months of time and was fully successful. Now that this material is available, I prefer never to deploy it but rather to engage from a place of open heart in a healing process with the parties involved. Or as is sadly more likely to simply move on with my life and silently support everyone else in moving on with their lives. Unless absolutely necessary, I cannot see how reopening these issues would serve. If there is no choice, I will engage it, however, if we can avoid it and simply get on with constructive living and service, that seems immensely preferable for all concerned. These three processes have now ended. My energy and strength have slowly returned, thank God. I am now beginning a fourth process: To put on paper the teachings which have burned their way into my heart in the long days and longer nights of these past two years. The intensity of the pain took me to places I never dreamed possible. Let me state clearly at the outset that none of the teachings will mention specific people either directly or indirectly. Rather the teachings are about the broader and deeper issues that have emerged and clarified for me. Perspectives One of the key areas that became clear to me was that in any drama there are at least several different perspectives from which the events can be viewed. In Hebrew wisdom, we are fond of saying ‘Shivim Panim LeTorah.’ In my translation, which I will not elaborate on here, that means something like ‘Seventy Faces of Enlightenment.’ This means that if one can look at the same story in seventy different ways, fully inhabiting seventy different perspectives on the story, then one has moved an important step towards enlightened consciousness. The pivoting point that moves us from ego-centered personal consciousness to divine-centered enlightened consciousness is the ability to move with maximal fluidity between perspectives. The deep definition of idolatry in Hebrew wisdom is being locked in one particular value or view. In this story one can take many different perspectives. Holding all of the perspectives together begins to shed light on what happened. It begins to allow the full grace of the story to emerge in all of its meaning and magnificence. Becoming locked in only one perspective, on the other hand, darkens vision and usually leads to profoundly distorted and unethical actions in the world. In one of the books that I am currently preparing, I try to retell the story in ten different ways, each time from a radically different perspective. Each time the reader senses that he or she has grasped the story, the perspective shifts again. At the entrance to the Garden of Eden there is, according to tradition, a revolving sword of fire. The sword, which draws sharp distinctions and establishes right and wrong, is the archetype of the firmly entrenched perspective. In order for one to be able to enter the Garden, the sword of fire needs to be continually revolving: in short, constantly shifting perspectives are the entry ticket to the Edenic consciousness of enlightenment. In truth, this story is really just like every other significant and complex life story. By understanding the twenty-one possible perspectives, one may potentially obtain the twenty-one keys to enlightenment. You will notice that different systems and different people tend to focus on different perspectives, each one giving priority to a different view. A more enlightened view would be to hold all the perspectives together and to let a nuanced and compassionate view emerge from the integration. What is critical to note at the outset, however, is that not all perspectives are equal. There is clearly a hierarchy of perspectives. In some situations, for example, seventy five percent or more of the story is best explained from the injustice perspective. However, if one adopts only that perspective, one remains a victim. It is only in developing the other perspectives, through which one may have more power and influence, that one can begin to move from being a victim to a responsible player. While I will not list the perspectives here, I do discuss them briefly in my Dialogue with Dr. Cindy Golen and Sally Kempton, which is found in the Dialogues section of this site. Apologies That We All Might Owe Each Other Guided by a group of four spiritual friends who are all significant teachers in their own right, I have written letters of apology where appropriate and possible to anyone I feel I might have hurt in the course of my life. If I have not written you and you feel I should have, please contact me and we can discuss the matter. Anyone who feels that they might owe me such an apology is welcome to write me as well. There are some people with whom I would have liked to be in contact, however, once complaints were filed I was proscribed from making any contact with them. Guided by the best spiritual, psychological, and legal advice available, I have decided that it is time to move on. I have treated the events of the last two years as a death. I have engaged in full life review. I have engaged in a significant and serious process of internal reflection. I have lived in the pain and the regret daily. As well as in the joy, the gratitude, and the grace. My heart is open once again. I have made a commitment to more conventional boundaries. I have also made a commitment to transparency where appropriate about my personal life. Torah is flowing in my soul. Texts and chants burst from my being. I am filled with great love and desire to help people, to share the torah of liberation and grace with whoever wants to learn. I am filled with a burning desire to work with a group of friends in developing a new movement of social activism and political engagement, which will address three major issues. I will share in this regard at the appropriate time. I have pages and libraries of books welling up in me pleading to be put on the page. And Torah to share that dances in my heart. marc gafni
On Being a Spiritual Teacher or Spiritual Artist; On Changing my Name and the Hate Blogs of History: Part Two: Marc Gafni
July 21, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Truth be told, being a spiritual teacher or a spiritual artist in a particularly direct and open way is not at all easy. Your job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Depth is too easily dismissed as facile charisma. Primal jealousy breeds malice. And radical love and open heart will always be translated by some in ways that it is not intended. I have been teaching my whole life. The overwhelming relationship I have had with thousands of people has been wondrous, life affirming, profoundly loving, and beautiful. What a privilege for which I am grateful with every fiber of my being. And from the beginning of my path there were always a small group of people who responded negatively. Everything I did they interpreted negatively, through small eyes and small heart. And I am sure that parts of me which were not whole, which were distorted or not yet evolved or just plan off, served as a hook for their projections and critiques. I am a work in progress and I hope that I am evolving, refining, deepening, correcting, doing Teshuvah, returning to my most aligned self, every moment of every day. But the driving force was always a kind of primal malice. I am thankful to psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Berke who in personal conversation and in his published work helped me understand this dynamic in a far deeper way then I ever had. There were always more primal forces at play in these interactions then anyone would admit. Since malice can never truly be owned by the uninitiated, it goes by many more noble names. In the name of righteousness, nationalism, protecting women, perfecting society, all manner of evil is loosed in the world. There was, in the case of some teachers and colleagues and very occasionally in certain students, sometimes a sense that we were being nourished from the same soul root and somehow they felt that my nourishment was both undeserved and even worse, at their expense. The Veneer of civilization is very thin. When one is driven by primal malice, which one has no way of owning, one will say and do almost anything. Strangely the bearers of such malice are driven by a similar energy to the hate blogs. The difference is that the bearers of malice hide behind the veneer of respectability. However behind the scenes they work directly with the hate blogs in order to get the hate blogs to do there work for them. Some respectable folks have tried {unsuccessfully} to intimidate supporters and friends of mine by linking there names to hate blogs. Others have called up those who ran hate blogs, told them unspeakable lies, and then slunk back into the world of respectability, waiting for word that their hired character assassins, the suicide bombers of the Jewish community, aimed at the community itself, had done their dastardly deed. Let me share with you a few of the canards of the hate blogs just so you get a sense of the whole thing. 1) rumor has it that Gafni joined the sadomasochistic community in Salt Lake. 2) Rumor has it Gafni is now attracted to prepubescent children 3) Gafni is now going under the name Marc Israel 4) Gafni changed his name from Winiarz to Gafni “in order to hide his identity”. (The truth, by the way, is that Gafni hebraicized his name from Winiarz to Gafni, when he moved to Israel, like thousands of others have done – remember Barry who became Barrack – and that both names are mentioned on the author page of his book Soul Prints and in his other books as well as being mentioned in countless speeches and talks – not a great way to hide your identity – but then again truth or logic has nothing to do with the logic of hate blogs). 5) Gafni is dangerous to little boys and girls 6) Gafni is a confessed child molester or a confessed rapist Now while all of these canards come apparently from one particular source on the web, a source that once said on National Television that there is a national Jewish Satanic cult that murders babies, none the less, they are picked up by a web of like minded blogs and repeated without question. For the Jewish people throughout time to respond to the hate blogs of history by saying that these accusations are not true is to give them too much dignity. What are the Jews supposed to say…”No, we are not devils. No we do not molest and kill Christian children and suck their blood.” At a certain point, in a magnificent play of karma, the hate blogs, together with three or four other factors, created the hermeneutic prism which allowed natural mistakes which I made to be demonized, distorted, false claims to be reported or distorted in the press, and for all of this to coalesce in an absurdly serious sexual hysteria whose result was my spiritual murder. The great news however is that there is a lot to be said for being dead for two years. It is only in such radical pain and death that certain gifts can be received and life can be reborn. But that is all too intimate a conversation for now, so let us return to it at a another time if you will…. Back to our topic: How does one respond to the absurdity of hate blogs? If at all… This question comes up again and again in history. It’s most recent incarnation, as I have said above revolves around the Internet. On of the unacknowledged shadows of the Internet is the proliferation of hate speech. People hiding behind anonymity or the impersonal nature of blogging, have re-introduced the old and worn bigotry of hate speech, back into the center of culture. A blogger can say anything about anyone – For example, a website might say clearly or imply that Bill Clinton killed Vince Forster, his friend and staff member. Another blogger might repeat neo-Nazi canards about the “Jews sucking the blood of the world”. A third blogger might say as we have noted “Rabbi Gafni is attracted to pre-pubescent boys, a child molester, a confessed rapist or whatever sick fantasy the webmaster or mistress may have dreamed up or allowed to be published that day. In fact blogs of these last two natures not surprisingly link to each other. The hate blogs, which attack persons in the way I just described, are often linked to neo-Nazi and other hate sites. Not surprising at all. The core energy is the same. It involves latching on to natural characteristics of others, blowing them out of proportion and then demonizing them as the incarnation of abuse and evil. All of these are real examples of hate speech. Not rooted in the world of rational decency or fact, they cannot be responded to as such. For a host of reasons it is virtually impossible to file suit effectively for Internet libel. So what to do. 1) To ignore it. Definitely the best route. I have a friend who is a well-known spiritual teacher who was attacked with severe claims of abuse for many years. He is a tough teacher who calls people on their shadow and is, I am sure, imperfect himself. But the claims of abuse, which I asked him about directly, were far more understandable when he explained the depth and particulars of each relationship he had with the people making the complaints. Without that it was just out of context Internet libel that hurt him personally for many years. His response; Stay the course; stay focused on your mission and do not give any response to Internet abusers. Good Advice…. 2) To sue: Sometimes a possible route. 3) To Laugh – Always a good idea – something like, “No it is not true that I am a child molester, really I am into barnyard animals but shhh..Don’t tell anyone!” Or as a group of my woman friends suggested to me in laughter “We will start a website called “satisfied and speaking out.” Now laughter which points out the absurdity without getting drawn into the energy of hatred …that is really a good path and about that we will have to write more at another time…. ****** Posted by Marc Gafni
On Eros and Holiness, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part One: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com I just saw the movie Speed Racer. I want to thank Larry Wachowski and his brother for making the movie. You Rock! In an email or conversation I had with Larry some two years ago, he told me he had listened with his wonderful wife Karen to the DVD series of lectures that I gave at Naropa University one weekend called “On the Erotic and the Holy”. He said he was working on a new movie project in which he would incorporate some of those ideas into the movie. He did. He understood the teaching on a very deep level. He understood not because I taught it to him. He recognized the teaching because he already knew it. Luzatto, the wonderful kabbalist opens his major work by teaching us that, “All real teaching is but a reminder of what we already know”. But of course we already knew that. Larry returned the teaching of Eros to me in the movie Speed Racer. Not because he taught it to me, but because like Larry, I already knew it. But in reminding me of what I already know, filtered through the prism of his unique and open heart, he became my teacher this evening. And for that I am filled with gratitude. More then that; all of life is a unique teaching, designed in love to remind us of what we already know. Every single thing that happens to us in our lives, without exception, is only to remind us of what we already know. Except, of course, for the exceptions, which are to remind us of Mystery. Larry; I don’t know what happened at the Box Office. It is hard to beat the Matrix, you know. I saw the movie at the dollar theatre in Salt Lake City. If it did not bring down the box office it may be because Speed racer was a mystical movie in popular disguise. And people might have gotten lost – as we often do – in the disguise. The disguise was not the plot line. In the movie – the point was not the plot line which was simple and straightforward; rather Larry designed the movie as an evocation and invitation to Magic and Eros. To magic which is Eros and to Eros which is Magic. So thank you. Thank you Thank you. What a gift you gave us. Marc Gafni Please feel free to share your comments on info@marcgafni.com
On Eros and Holiness, Sanity, Speed Racer, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, the Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Two: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer is about teaching and transmission; Rex Racer, his father and mother and Trixie his girl friend since age seven or so are all Speed Racers teachers even as he is theirs. Speed Racer is about Eros. Not sex. Eros. It is about the Eros of the traditional family; It is about the Eros of Integrity. But most of all it is about the Eros of Aliveness in which the limited human being expands into his divine self. Speed Racer is about what it means to be alive. The meaning of life, not as theory but a lived experience. It is about the things that no one can take from you or from me. It is a mystical movie in the sense that it must be tasted and not merely watched or understood. Christian Theologian Thomas Aquinas and Kabbalist Isaac the Blind both wrote that the essence of the mystical was captured by the biblical David when he wrote Taste and See that God is Good. Speed Racer is about realizing your divine nature in the fullness of family, love, extreme danger, death, destruction, and rebirth. The plot is pretty simple even superficial. But that is because Larry did not want the plot to get in the way of the experience as it does so often in real life. There is a race car driver. Rex Racer. He races in order to race. He races in order to realize the pure gorgeousness of his divine being. When he races, he drives with more elegance, more beauty, and more grace then could possibly inhabit one skin encapsulated ego. He dies in the race only to be reborn into a different identity separated from his family and his brother. None the less he comes back to guide his younger brother, Speed Racer in the ways of the Erotic and the Ethical. When Rex or Speed Racer race they do not do so to compete with any other driver. When Speed racer races, he does not drive to win or be acclaimed. He drives Lishmah. Lishmah – a key word in ancient Hebrew wisdom means – “for it’s own sake”. It is the secret of liberation, of joy, of peace, and of courage – it is what can end suffering for every human being. Why do you eat ice cream? To bolster your ego, to fortify your fragile existence in samsara, in the world of illusion? to convince yourself that you exist? that you matter? that your life has meaning? Nope. You eat ice cream because in the moment of eating ice cream the world seems sane and good. You are fully present in the moment; You eat ice cream Lishmah, for it’s own sake. You eat exactly the amount of ice cream that you body can relish with dignity and grace and then you stop. This is of course completely different then eating ice cream from a place of desperation. Eating to cover up the emptiness instead of eating as an expression of the fullness of your being. Eating ice cream as a form of a- void –dance. When you eat to fill the emptiness you naturally eat way to often and way to much and you are never really satisfied. Emptiness is impossible to fill. You are not listening to the enlightenment which resides in your body which tells just when, how much and what to eat. As long as you eat as a form of pseudo eros- the dances of desperation we do to dance around the void – what I call, a-void –dance, you will need diet plan after diet plan and none of them will work. The second you give up screaming –I EXIST….and you let your fall into the depth of your being, you will wake up. You will know that you exist. You will no longer need to prove it. You can stop eating as way to dull the pain of your aloneness. You can stop eating as a substitute for love. You can stop to affirm your existence. Your existence and the value of your existence is the self-evident truth of your reality. For it is the truth of reality. You do not eat to exist. You Exist to Eat. Lishmah; For it’s own sake. It this simple moment of realization that will make you sane. Marc Gafni Share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On Eros and Holiness, Sanity, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Three: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer is about enlightenment realized in this world. In Buddhism this is the tenth Ox-Herding picture. In Hebrew wisdom it is Abraham after realization returning to the market place. At the moment of your realization you will become sane. And you will stop living like an insane person. Hebrew Wisdom teaches, “Any person who sins is insane”. To sin is to misperceive reality. {Do not have Talmud at my home here in Salt Lake, need to buy a set, but I think it is Talmud Sotah 4A.. If I remember wrong please write and let me know} No need for all the trauma and drama. We all sin. We all have moments of insanity when lose touch with what is really real. In those moments we sometimes hurt each other. And then we do it again. We forget what we already know about the structure of the self and the true nature of existence. Something in our heart closes and we become opaque to God. In Hebrew mysticism the goal is always Bittul. Literally that means nullification. Nullify the self. self-annihilation. Does not sound very attractive on the face of it. But writes an early mystic Rabbenu Nissim, some seven hundred years ago – and I am paraphrasing; “Bittul means to be –Shakuf = Transparent to God. For that is the truth of reality. When we are in Eros, and Speed Racer is all about Eros, we are transparent to God. That is why the crowds love him so much. He is a divine figure, a prophet and poet of Eros. Eros means being transparent God. Being transparent to God means… Living on the inside Participating in the yearning force of being Fullness of presence Radical Wholeness – where there is no separation between any part of reality- every part feels it’s place as part of the whole even as it retains it’s utter autonomy –and there is not contradiction – the paradox of whole plays out in the life of the human being in sacred laughter and joy. “There is no righteous person on the earth who does good and does not sin” writes King Solomon. And he knew. Eros is sanity. Eros heals sin. To be sane is to know reality. If I tell you I am the King of England. Oh my God, Gafni is insane you say. For he has lost touch with reality. That is to sin. Not to know yourself. Not to know your own reality. To somehow mis-identify yourself. Sin is the ultimate Identity crisis. It is to know your nature as a “part” but not to realize in your heart, in your mind, in your toenails, that the part, is a part of God. That in the Part is the Whole of God. “All Israel has a “part” of the world to come” writes one ancient text. Meaning – All those who are Israel- Israel speaks of three distinct experiences- Israel means three moments of God. The word Israel in the original Hebrew has three meanings! Shar El- those who see God, More then that; Those who See with God’s eyes To love is to see with God’s eyes. Yasahr El- those who live in direct and unmediated connection to God. To be Israel is to Source so much that you are not willing to let anything or anyone stand between you and Source. Shar El, those who struggle with God; who refuse to accept the easy aphorism of the old or new age; who seek the paradox and complexity that hold the simple truth. We can know re-read our ancient text. All Israel – that is every human being who is Israel, who sees with God’s eyes, who has not lost his knowledge that he is Source, who struggles with reality, reaching for paradox which is the name of God, in the name of God, as a manifestation of God, as God’s verb… Every human being who is Israel – realizes his Israel nature as soon as he knows That he or she is A PART of the “World To Come” – which in Hebrew mysticism means The Eternal world, the World of the Absolute, The World that is Always Becoming and Being, the world where being and becoming are One. The world in which the part and the whole are both separate and One. To know that I am, that You are part of the whole; to feel the whole move in you; move through you; animate you, penetrate you, receive you, speak from your throat {Zohar:The Shekinah speak though the voice of Moses} manifest in your smile, your tears your laughter- even as you maintain your autonomy and individuality as a unique and irreplaceable manifestation of divine joy and pleasure- that is what it means to be alive. That is what it means to live in Eros. That is the Messiah who is Speed Racer who is You. When you live from that place – you are Holiness. You are In what Plato called Eros. You are being and becoming as One. You are Speed Racer. You act in the world Lishmah. For it’s own sake. Marc Gafni Please share comments by emailing us at info@marcgafni.com
On Eros and Holiness, Sanity, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Four: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer Lives Lishmah; For its own Sake. Or in the second translation; Lishmah means – For the sake of the Name; You become a manifestation, a stunning, shimmering and glimmering diamond on the crown of God’s name. You become God’s name. For God’s name is the expression of every unique being – living their story – impressing their story on the lips of God, in divine kiss where giving and receiving are one, Eros, for it’s own sake –Lishmah, in the full aliveness and joy that is the birth right and natural state of every being. And if you live from that place, HaMakom, the place, then ultimately all of the posturing of power and pomposity, all of the corruptions in the leadership, all the failures of love, all of the duplicity, decadence and desperation of those who have betrayed and abandoned you no longer matter. Your heroic soul overcomes the hysterias of self-protection and contraction rooted in the hubris of the desperate and deluded self. Your heart expands and your re-member. You re-member who you are. Not merely in your mind. Not only in your heart. But in your body. In your toenails. The cowardice of those who betrayed you, those who were willing to leave to die in the streets does not matter. It does not matter if you might have gone to prison and been raped in the courtyard because you have been convicted on false complaints. These dreams of being raped in prison that haunted you – or is that me- that haunted for months evaporate into the grounded bliss of your self that has woken up to it’s true nature. Your true nature. My true nature. Teaches Isaac Chaver – 19th century mystic- Enter your true nature and you enter God. None of it matters. All of it matters. And it is all okay. You cannot go to prison because you are free. Fully free and Liberated. Song rises from your throat. You shatter all the prison cells of your soul. Your prayer rises and your song awakes the heavens that live in you. All of creation sings with you and through you even as you are the creator and all of creation at the same time. You forgive your betrayers even as you ask them to forgive you – for you realize together – that it is all all okay total good. The dance of desperation becomes the dance of eros. Simple compassion, loyalty, the private intimacy of a communication which is honest and true with a brother who betrayed you, left you to die, is enough to set your heart aflame with a fire so hot that it burns through all anger and hatred melts all of the walls and warms all the cold places in your heart in his heart as you realize that even the betrayal was an illusion. Yes the story matters. And so does forgiveness For we do not know the measure of our debt Nor the method of our atonement There simply is no separation. The Zohar, the canonical text of Hebrew wisdom writes- Sin is Separation. It is alienation from your true nature as a baby faced divine. Thank you Dante. God is beyond you. You –I –We fall on the ground fully prostrated in worship- faithful to all of the boundaries of the temple. And as we lay on the ground prostrated the spirit of the divine flows through raising us up to our feet, tall, proud with the pride of Source, fully alive, on fire, ecstatic, humble, living, loving and laughing with skillful means and open hearts through the pain. That is what it means to live for it’s own sake. To live for the Name. Lishmah. To live as the name. To look in the eyes of your lover- NO not merely your romantic partner – but in the eyes of the bus driver, the waiter, the postman- the persons who cuts you off in traffic – and cry out Oh God. Oh God… Oh God… Go Speed Racer. Go Speed Racer. Go Speed Racer Go… Marc Gafni Please feel free to share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On Eros, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Five: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer is Eros= Holiness= Sanity= Atonement= Joy Everyone has a place in life where they can be sane. That is the place where they know reality. Where part merges with whole in the fullness of presence, which wells up from the inside. This is Eros. This is Speed Racer. This is You and this is Me. Oh my God…. This is why I teach. I do not teach for fame and fortune. I do not teach for financial security. I do not teach to become embraced as a great wise man or profound and brilliant scholar and transmitter of the tradition. Although in more contracted moments each of these motivations has tried to find it’s way in and sometimes impacted the purity of a moment… But that has never been the core of it for me. And these two years –with their searing pain have purified something in me that thirty years on the mediation cushion – Which I would never do anyways☺ – Could never do. These two years stripped away much that was unnecessary and helped me hold core, not only in moments of ecstasy, but as part of an integrated and steadier realization of the Not me but I. I am the Lord your God. Humiliation has a way – if your surf it’s waves and do not drown- of becoming humility. Not self-abasement, which is but another strategy of hubris. But the humility in living the full audacity and courage of being transparent to God. I teach – because as I open the text and submit myself to it; the text of the great traditions, the text of torah, the text of the torah of life; If I am humble and open and in love…something happens. The me falls away and the texts –after checking to see if – I- am really present – begin to talk. In me. Through me. The I speaks. If I am willing to cry before I teach – then the tears cleanse the dross and the surface pain, opening up the palaces of realization, wisdom, insight, compassion, and joy. Sometimes… I can hear the Chassidic master whispering in my ear. I can feel the Talmudic master as his lips move and say torah – in complete unison with my lips. Every word becomes torah. Every word is chosen by the torah as it flows through me finding it’s way with a sure sense and song – completely beyond any ability, which resides in my skin encapsulated me ego. Sometimes.. As I begin to teach I can feel the room slowly fill up. A rabbi from the 14th century comes and sits in the back. A mystic from the 12 the century sits in the front row. Abraham Isaac and Jacob, Joseph, Rachel, Leah, Rebecca and Sarah find their places and smile as the teaching pours from me – the me which is not me, I, the self which is small and contracted falls away. The mind which is small expands to Big Mind- mochin de-gadlut and the heart which is closed opens and expands to Big heart – mochin de-gadult; and my heart is aflame as the heart of the spring which yearns towards its Source And in the yearning fully merges with Source. At some point in the story Speed Racer merges with his car. Hear O Israel. Listen to the Car. It will tell you.. The hills are alive with the sound of music… When one is in the fullness of Eros the animate and inanimate become whole and ultimate alienation between matter and spirit is overcome. Much as in the final scene in Larry’s movie Matrix Three, the Hero merges with the machine as he/we realize that there is truly no separation. All dualities are overcome. The text is no longer letters written on a page by men who have long died. The text is alive. It becomes a living breathing, pulsating organism. The separation between the reader of the text, the writer of the text, the inspiration that breathed the text into life, the words and even the very parchment is transcended and included; all become a seamless one. This is the hidden meaning – according a hidden kabalistic teaching of the Hebrew wisdom mantra – God Israel and Torah are One. Why I teach- whether as a rabbi, a spiritual teacher or spiritual artist it matters not at all… I teach because I am. I teach in order to teach. I teach because in teaching God breathes through me as he and she has inspired all the teachers in my lineage and in all the lineages. I teach for the same reason that I eat ice cream. Just because. JUST BECAUSE. For it’s own sake. Lishmah. For the sake of the name as an expression of the Name. Speed Racer. To live from the inside in the full wonder, true humility, radical amazement and holy audacity of realization. When I teach or paint words as a spiritual artist on the canvas of my life I am not better then you. It gives me no power over you. I am rather your servant, your friend, your brother and your sister. We do not need today more rabbis posturing and preening and powering and pushing, and pretending. We need not more spiritual teachers but more spiritual friends. Spiritual friends from whom we are willing to receive transmission. Spiritual friends that we will love even as they love us. We must stop all the trauma and drama. Trauma and drama are sometimes real, but all to often they are pseudo eros masquerading as piety, integrity and outrage. We need – all of us – to let go of the pathos of our selves in order to come INTO the full Power of our Selves. A spiritual friend is a spiritual teacher who becomes a spiritual artist when they renounce all power and live – truly live from the inside. For you see the essence of Art is Lishmah – for it’s own sake. For the sake of the Name. The true artist draws no distinction between his canvas and his life. His life is both his text and his canvas. From his life, from the particulars and concrete details of his unique and individual life he teaches. But only if he is willing to be utterly destroyed. To lose everything in order to find everything. To surrender into God even as he affirms his autonomy and acts with discernment and fierce grace on the stage of Samsara. In Hebrew we say that enlightenment is achieved when Ani- the small self – and Ayin, the no – thing nature of the Expanded self – realize their identity. When this happens you understand that you can enter the holy of holies at any time and any place. In the end it does not really matter where you teach. Whether on a stage to a thousand people or in an intimate circle of student’s Or in a casual conversation with a watier.. The holy of holies is everywhere. When Speed Racer races the last race of the movie he is in the holy of holies. He is in Zohar, in Eros, in Holiness. From that place of Eros – Fierce Grace is born. From that place of Eros, Ethics are born. From that place of Eros, in the teaching of the Zohar {Gen. 4a} God is born and reborn in the sacred play of hide and seek which God and Man stll play with each other. God hides because he desperately wants to be found. Man in search of God. God in search of Man Meet in Eros. This is the holy of holies. Marc Gafni Published on marcgafni.com Please feel free to leave comments on info@marcgafni.com ps. these five posts were written spontaneously very last night as tears streamed down my face. The voice of the “I” of love, channeled in human form wrote this note to myself. “I have also been crying all night…It is so much that we have been through, and there is still another year of work ahead.. I am tired and grateful and deeply sorrowful and grateful and humbled and wanting to walk the path of Love more fully. Thank you God for your gifts. Thank you God for the challenges you present to me.. Nothing about anything is bad…All good as they say”
Eros and Holiness: Marc Gafni: Part Nine: Feel free to start reading from here; the part numbers are only for those who want to follow the whole teaching all the way through…
July 24, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Epigrams below each capture the Dharma of Eros and Holiness. “Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…” -John Keats “Expanded consciousness is when the Taste of the Bark is as the Taste of the Tree.” -Abraham Kuk Leshem Yichud kushdha brich- hu uShehinateh. May this be for the sake of uniting the masculine God with the feminine Goddess. -Kabbalistic Meditation Ma Yafit Uma Naamt Ahavavh Betanugim. How beautiful and how pleasurable when love and eros are together. -Song of Songs Eros and Holiness: A soul reaches heaven. Or at least she thinks its heaven. It is a magnificent banquet hall. The tables are arrayed with all manners of delicacies. The guests have forks and knives in hands, ready to feast. A bell rings to begin the meal. There is a flurry of movement and then, to her astonishment, she sees that the guests arms are bound straight, unable to bend at the elbows, unable to take fork to mouth to partake in the great repast. The mob of hungry souls fling the food about frantically, cursing their predicament, shrieking at each other. A terrifying scene. The soul hurries away from what she is sure must have been a glimpse of hell, only to arrive at yet another banquet hall, identically decked with tables of food and guests waiting to feast. A bell rings, there is a flurry of movement. Here too, the guests arms are bound straight, unable to bring food to their own mouths. But to the soul’s astonishment, she see no fury and frustration here. Rather, each guest with outstretched arms is gently feeding the guest seated across from them. The banquet hall brims with pleasure and peace. Heaven indeed. If there is any truth to the myth – and myths are always true – we are in hell. Competition is the reigning paradigm. Getting ahead is the direction of our lives. But there is no finish line. So we collapse somewhere along the path and wonder if it had to be this way. Life is a mess ..but it doesn’t have to be. It could be heaven. * I am a Kabbalist. And I am in pain. I am in pain because the world and therefore God is in pain 1. To shatter the narrowness of my egocentricity and to feel both the pain and joy of world/God is essential to my spiritual quest. Kabbalists refer to this consciousness as “participating in the pain of the Shehina in Exile”. Shehina, like Shakti for the Hindus, is the sensual feminine God Force. The God force is in pain. Seemingly unnecessary and self inflicted pain. The primary response to pain however cannot be one of apportioning blame – either to human beings or to God. Although at first blush both seem to be more that a little bit at fault. The essential response to pain must be loving and healing. So I offer you these writings on Eros and Holiness as a gift in love. I pray that it will be healing, refreshing and ultimately transformational. **** footnotes: fn. 1 This idea, which was extensively developed in Kabbalistic and Midrashic sources, is held by the Talmud and Midrash to have its origin in the Torah. In Isaiah 63:9 it is written ”In all their sufferings He was lo [not] afflicted. The Hebrew word lo is read with a vav meaning Him, rather than with an aleph, which would mean “is not”. The verse can therefore be read as “In all their sufferings, He, too, suffers”. Others derive this principle from the verse from Psalm 91:15: “I am with him in suffering”. See TB tractate Sotah 31a, and Ta’anit 16a, where two sages use these two verses as a basis for this idea. See also Midrash Rabba Bereshit 2:5, or Midrash Tanhuma Beshalah 28. Marc Gafni please feel free to leave comments at info@marcgafni.com
Letter to Friends that went out today sharing the website and my public perspective on where we are and where we need to go: Marc Gafni
July 24, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com A Public Letter send to people on my mailing list inviting them to look at our website. Hi Friend, Shalom Chaver I hope this note finds you well. First a technical note: I do not have a formal mailing list – my technical assistant took these names from my old computer so if you should not be on this list or do not want to receive these messages just let us know. I am concluding a long and painful retreat which has lasted more then two years. There has been much learning in this time, many tears and not a little bit of laughter. I am surrounded by wonderful friends and I am grateful to them for their love and support. It is now necessary for many reasons to end my retreat and return to my more active life. I invite you to visit my website marcgafni.com. It is straightforward and almost self explanatory. So just a very short word of explanation at this juncture. First there is a Hebrew and English section. However, since I do not yet have a good Hebrew translator on staff here in Salt Lake City. the bulk of the material is in English. On the left hand side you will see a list of tabs marking different sections of the website. In the articles section you will find twenty categories of articles which I invite to you read and enjoy. In the section aboutmarcgafni.com you will get a general view of the website. In the section re-imagine library you will get a general sense on what I am working on these days. On the home page you will find at the top, an article which appeared recently in Catalyst Magazine, an award winning US publication which will give you a general sense of my last two years. The article clears my name of some of the distortions and falsehoods that have circulated on the internet and in some press forums for the past couple of years. Like all press articles it is partial and incomplete, but the reporters captured at least some sense of the last two years. The article is available on the home page. As the writers indicate, they spend several months and reviewed hundreds of pages of primary source documentation in order to reach their conclusions. The writers had direct and indirect contact with representatives of all the voices in the story. On the home page as well, you will find a musical and poetic welcome to the site; Together the poem, the music and the words share the intention of the website. There is also a large section of recorded dialogues with different spiritual teachers -many of which i recorded in the last year. There is as well, a large section of free audio and video teachings plus a store marcgafni.com where you can buy a more extensive lecture series as well as find links which will enable you to order other books and a cd series. There is also a section called Controversy where I give my perspective on events of the last two years. I try to do so from a place of open heart, even as I feel the full pain of the wounds of love. It was written very carefully, together with a relatively large team of people from diverse backgrounds, which had input and guided the process. The words are precise and chosen carefully. I tried to share my perspective without demonizing anyone and without attacking anyone even as I speak for the first time on these issues and decisively refute the idea that I sexually harassed anyone or the like in Israel. At the same time I own my personal responsibility for my part in the contribution system that created these events. In this writing I try and demonstrate the move from the old thinking of “blame frame” in which we point the finger and demonize, making ourselves victims in order to let ourselves off the hook. This kind of thinking while occasionally having some validity is ultimately far too limited and partial to be transformative or healing. At the same time, the facile new age nonsense that suggests that we are the sole creators of our reality and that therefore we should take full responsibility for everything that happens to us is also inappropriate. This kind of thinking while occasionally having some validity is ultimately far too limited and partial to be transformative or healing. This position also seemingly noble is rooted in a dangerous hubris, in which we arrogate to ourselves complete power over our lives, a seductive view which soothes the gnawing fears which haunt human beings, but which is ethically corrosive at its core. A more appropriate position would seem to be the third way. The move from blame frame to contribution system. In a contribution system everyone needs to see what their part in creating the reality that unfolded and to take appropriate responsibility for their part in that system. This allows one to identify their correct responsibility and directs one to the only place where we really have power over our part – whether five percent or fifty – in the contribution system. At the same time we have fully prepared these two years on many levels and will not sit by silently if I am falsely attacked. We will respond fully and effectively on many levels. This much is demanded by my love of my children, friends students and myself. I am hugely appreciative to all of you who have written me since the website came up. Your letters and your words, now and over the last two years have meant so so much to me. My family, colleagues, and I are moving on with our lives. I just got off the phone with my son Yair who was standing at a bus stop in Be’er Sheva and he said to me what my son Eytan said to me only two weeks before. “Abba, this is enough. We need our Abba back. This must end already. We really need you at this time in our lives” I promised them to do whatever I could to end this chapter, learn its lessons, and move to a more constructive and evolved chapter in our lives. On the website I share that these two years have been like a death for me. Before death we do a life review. As I said on the website, I apologize with heart and soul to anyone who feels that I might have hurt them in this life time. I invite anyone who feels they have unfinished business with me to contact me. My heart is open. I give you my forgiveness for any way in which you may have hurt me and I implore your forgiveness for any way in which I may have hurt you. And it is forbidden – for all of us – to cry more than it hurts. Let’s – all of us – and me first, give up the demonization game, take back our projected shadows, and transform the insults of love into the wounds of love, learning all the time to practice keeping our heart open in the midst – not only the joy of eros, but also the pain of eros. I also thank the thousands of people in my life time that I have been privileged to help and to serve in large or small ways. It has been a huge privilege to serve you and to bring joy to your life. There is so much that needs to be done. So much hurt and pain and suffering in the world. We are Gods verbs. We are God’s language. We must live as love. We must be love. We must act to realize love and open hearted discipline and compassion in our world. The future of the World and according to the teachings of the kabbalists, the future of God, depends in no small part, on you and me. I will seek to embody the divine life force in every situation I encounter. I will try and teach and embody the torah of boundaries and when the torah demands the expansion boundaries as it sometimes does, I will try and embody that demand in a direct and transparent way. I pray that in my day to day life, in my sharing, in my writing, my action and my being, I will be aligned to the will of God and serve as a source of love and compassion to all those whom I encounter. And if I die sooner then I would like to, I want to leave in the world only my love. Yours, Marc Gafni please feel free to share a comment on info@marcgafni.com
A New Library: Marc Gafni
July 25, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Introduction: The following modest proposal was submitted to the board of the foundation as an outline of the library that the foundation would like to produce. The lead writer and teacher for this library is Mordechai Gafni who has been designated as the teacher in residence for the foundation. Mordechai {Marc} will be working in close collaboration with teachers from many traditions in teaching and writing this library. We pray that this library serves to open the heart of all people. There is a great need for creative Jewish thinking which will chart the next steps in Jewish Thought and Practice in a way that is both compelling, original and accessible. There is very little of this kind of writing and teaching in the contemporary Jewish community. Most of the writing available is of one of two kinds. The first kind is geared towards the Orthodox community, offering learned analysis and guidance in observing the law with little in the way of a spiritual response or framework with which to grapple with the unique and ultimate issues of our generation. Most of the writers in this genre are deeply disconnected with the pulse and tenor of the times and view the Western world as just another exile to be survived before the coming of Messiah. This literature is important and makes a valuable contribution, but at the same time many people are thirsting for something more. The second type of literature is fully of creativity and modern parlance, but it is not rooted in any significant way in the unique texts, practices and frameworks of Hebrew Wisdom. Most of the writers are actually unable to competently read a Jewish text in it’s original form and that is often readily apparent in the book. Often this kind of material is what someone once termed “Buddhism with a Tallit”. This literature is important and makes a valuable contribution, but at the same time many people are thirsting for something more. Our library will seek to transcend and include the unique strengths of each of these writing genres while avoiding their very significant weaknesses. In the following posts I will suggest a few names for the library and then after the sabbath, lay out the intended content. I look forward to your comments. with love marc gafni comments on info@marcgafni.com
Possible Names for our New Library: Marc Gafni
July 25, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Library or Series that we are suggesting might be called by any one of the following names: Next Steps Library {or Series} New Jewish Thought Library {or Series} Library of Evolutionary Kabbalah {or Series} Jewish Spirituality Library {or Series} Jewish Enlightenment Teachings Library {or Series} Or the Library might be framed as a “Reclaiming Judaism” Library {or series.} Re-Vision Library or Re-Visioning Series Re-Imagine Library Idra Library Library of Integral Judaism and Integral Kabbalah We plan and God Laughs my mum used to always say. But still we must reach. For a “man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?” with love, marc gafni shabbot shalom please share your ideas, comments and critique at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: Part Ten: Marc Gafni
July 26, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com I am a Kabbalist. And I am in pain. I am in pain because the world and therefore God is in pain1. To shatter the narrowness of my egocentricity and to feel both the pain and joy of world/God is essential to my spiritual quest. Kabbalists refer to this consciousness as “participating in the pain of the Shehina in Exile”. Shehina, like Shakti for the Hindus, is the sensual feminine God Force. The God force is in pain. Seemingly unnecessary and self inflicted pain. The primary response to pain however cannot be one of apportioning blame – either to human beings or to God. Although at first blush both seem to be more that a little bit at fault. The essential response to pain must be loving and healing. So I offer you this book as a gift in love. I pray that it will be healing, refreshing and ultimately transformational. ****** I want to share with you an ancient reality map rooted in a secret tradition of the Hebrew mystics. This spirit map has within it to be, both the balm to our pain and the gateway to our bliss. ****** Our pain is not caused by technology overdose, nor by communication problems; certainly it is not punishment because we were bad. All human beings, good and not so good, experience some endemic pain as part of their ongoing reality. Our suffering is caused by a misreading of our reality map, which prevents us from accessing the full joy that is our birthright. Ultimately the painful mess we are in is rooted in a failure of love. ****** Now when I say life is a mess I am not only referring to the major and minor wars that rage around the globe. I could mention that in the past century over one hundred million people have been deliberately killed in wars whose goals we have long since forgotten. Strange wars fought from places of smallness and fear. Wars in which countries go about brutally massacring each others children for a few years then have a conference where everyone smiles and it is called peace. It also might be worth remembering that that these wars that once seemed so distant to us have become much closer. Non loving and repressive regimes in Afghanistan have very direct and painful impact on morning coffee in Manhattan. Indeed as our planet shrinks we begin to awaken – even if initially it is only a political awakening – to that old mystical truth: we are interconnected with every other being on the planet. Yet all this is not the full measure of the pain I describe. ******* I am also not ‘merely’ referring to the policies of non loving and alienation that leave twenty million people a year dead of hunger and hunger related diseases. Nor am I focusing primarily on the fact that the families of those twenty million people cannot help but despise the United States. They see us, the Western world as evil. We have the wealth and means to feed every mouth on the planet. But we don’t. We choose to let them remain hungry.. To a starving person or their brother all the complex explanations of inaction, rooted in sophisticated realpolitik, simply do not wash. Nor should they. They know that starving people in the world is a function of one cause only; a failure of love. ******** Even however if we could somehow put aside the starvation and the wars- an even superficial view of our own society reveals that something is seriously askew. Not a detail problem but an essential flaw in the core story line of our culture. Every forty seconds someone kills themselves. This year upwards of one million people will experience a failure of love so intense and painful that they will violently end their lives. In the last 45 years suicide rates have increased by sixty percent world wide. Among the leaders are western democracies like Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland and of course the United States. ******* Suicide used to be largely limited to the elderly. People who had, at the end of their lives, looked back and been unable to make sense of their story. Not particularly comforting news because all of us want to, and most of us will, reach old age. The even more jolting news, however, is that the average age is going down. Suicide is now one of the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44. Now of course it would be nice to dismiss this slightly unpleasant information with the thought that only crazy or severely depressed people commit suicide. Note, however, that for every actual suicide there are ten suicide attempts. Suicide attempts have increased in the last 45 years twenty times more – than “successful” suicides. ********* Add to this the easily inferred reality that for every person who attempts suicide there are a lot more people in just as much pain. Just as lonely – just as alienated and just as depressed. They simply are unable to do anything about it. So they live in limbo – suspended between hells – all the while maintaining the facade of normal and even successful lives. ******** Albert Camus once wrote “There is but one truly serious problem…judging whether or not, life is or is not worth living…”2 Tragically Camus, together with … answered the questions in the negative. The emptiness was to much to bear. He, like so many others could not find his way to the fullness of life. Marc Gafni comments are welcome on info@marcgafni.com
Original Sources for Parts Five, Six and Seven: Eros and Holiness:Marc Gafni:
July 26, 2008
posted by marc gafni on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com For an explanation about the nature of these notes and the nature of creating new spiritual thought in general particularly from ancient and sacred sources, see please Eros and Holiness: Post Ten: 1 This idea, which was extensively developed in Kabbalistic and Midrashic sources, is held by the Talmud and Midrash to have its origin in the Torah. In Isaiah 63:9 it is written :”In all their sufferings He was lo [not] afflicted. The Hebrew word lo is read with a vav meaning Him, rather than with an aleph, which would mean “is not”. The verse can therefore be read as “In all their sufferings, He, too, suffers”. Others derive this principle from the verse from Psalm 91:15: “I am with him in suffering”. See TB tractate Sotah 31a, and Ta’anit 16a, where two sages use these two verses as a basis for this idea. See also Midrash Rabba Bereshit 2:5, or Midrash Tanhuma Beshalah 28. For a more extensive treatment of the human obligation to participate in the pain of the Shehina, see Meir Eyal’s article on this subject (have any idea where this is? Should I have n search?) 2 The sense of human participation in the loss of erotic union of divinity, is beautifully expressed in the Zohar, vol. 3, p. 213b. “What is meant by “remembering Zion”? (This may be compared) to a man who had a beautiful and precious palace that marauders came and burned. Who is in pain? Is it not the master of the palace? Simalarly, the Shehina is in exile. Is not this the pain of the tzaddiq? (tzaddiq refers to the sfira of yesod)…When we remember Zion, we remember His pain over His union (with the Shehina, which has been lost).” 3 In the Zohar, the “code name” for the Shehina is “Knesset Yisrael”, the congregation or gathering of Israel – Shehina is the group soul – see also Ethics of the Fathers chap. 3 mishna 6. 4 This core idea is the subject of much of the present work, and will be developed and elaborated upon in its course. At this point I would note that I am not claiming that Shehina is always used in this manner. I am rather making a more limited claim that Shechina is sometimes used in Zoharic texts as a virtual synonym for the Greek idea of eros. For a more extensive treatment of this subject, see Y. Liebes’ classical article “Zohar and Eros”. 5 When Shehina is not with her Lover, she is called “desolate” or “dry”, void of growth, incapable of intimate sexual contact in which the feminine waters are aroused. This is an oft-repeated idea in the Zohar, and especially in Tiqunei Zohar. See, for example, Zohar vol. 1, p. 23b, or Tiqunei Zohar 58a, and 73b. In this state, her garments are those of the qlipot, (see footnote 99). 6 Another of the seemingly endless unfoldings of this Hebrew root is hillul – desecration. The connection between these two states that I suggest in this chapter is in fact a recurring theme in Tiqunei Zohar, where the term hilul Shabbat, desecration of the Sabbath, is interpreted as “desecrating her emptiness” (hilul, desecration, and halal, emptiness). The Sabbath is of course the Shehina, whom we have identified as Eros. See, for example, the comment on the biblical verse “Keep (protect) My Sabbaths” (Lev. 19:3): “Concerning whoever introduces a foreign presence in her emptiness, (making her into) public property, or as wine that was used for forbidden libations, or even as a prostitute, it is written (Numbers 19:13): “He has defiled the Sanctuary of the Lord, that soul shall be cut off from its people” (Tiqunei Zohar, p. 77b-78a). See also Tiqunei Zohar 24b. 7 Isaiah 54:1 and 66:8. 8 8 This echoes the Lurrianic idea of the “empty void” which was the first move of the Infinite preceding creation. This Void was created as a result of a “withdrawal” of all-encompassing Divinity into Itself, creating a space void of infinity, where the creation of finity could unfold. 9 Leonard Cohen, in his album “Various Positions”. 10 In the beginning of the Idra Rabba, one of the core sections of the Zohar, Rabbi Shimon asks the assembly: “How long are we to sit in the existence of one pillar?” (Zohar, vol. 3, p. 127b). There are many different interpretations as to the meaning of “one pillar”. One of them, based on various sources, identifies “pillar” as a phallic symbol, hence an expression of the Kabbalistic sefira of yesod, the seat of the sexual organs (see Y. Liebes, “The Messiah of the Zohar”, for a detailed discussion of this and other interpretations, along with relevant sourcing). If this is in fact the case, then we can understand R. Shimon’s cry as a call against Eros being limited to Yesod, the sexual. A careful reading of the Idras and the Sifra deTzniyuta sections of the Zohar indicates that for the Zohar, the meaning of creation in tikkun is Erotic Union. R. Shimon is therefore declaring that we should not view Erotic Union as being limited to sex. 11 “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, the word of God: I have placed My Torah within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be for them a God, and they will be for me as a people. And no longer will a man say to his comrade and to his brother, Know God, for they will all know Me, from the small to the great, this is the word of God. For I will forgive their sin and I will no longer remember their iniquity” (Jeremiah 31:64-65). 12 Zohar vol. 1, p. 116b. 13 A conflation of two verses: Song of Songs 2:5 and 3:1. I am following Me’or Ainayim, who also combines these two verses. See following footnote. 14 Me’or Ainayim, in the Anthology of Quotes (Liqutim). posted by marc gafni please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Love or Die: A Politics of Love: Eros and Holiness: Part Eleven:
July 27, 2008
marc gafni posted by marc gafni please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Path of Love One cannot be told that life is worth while –one must experience the love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity and worth of their lives. The sense that is so essential to making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second hand consumers of second hand joy – never touching love or life directly. And when love fails their truly is nothing left to live for. For love – not the narrow romantic expressions of it – but love as it’s core is life itself. We have so much. Most of us have a roof over our heads, a thousand foods to choose from a day, all sorts of dress options for every season, a number of friends and of course, infinite varieties of entertainment available. Many of us have fulfilled the goals and objectives we have sought to achieve. Some even have realized far more than they thought possible. And yet it remains– the gnawing sense of emptiness that will not go away. We can ignore it – we can find a thousand ways to kill time hoping to fill or kill the emptiness. And yet we remain – at our core – unful-filled. What do you do when everything you always wanted isn’t enough? What do you do when you are surrounded by people and yet at the end of the day you still feel almost unbearably lonely? It comes then as no surprise that the leading cause of death – by far – is heart disease. Heart in Hebrew – the language of the mystics – is Lev. Lev is the Hebrew source for our English word- Love. Love is under attack- it is experiencing often fatal dis-ease. Heart Failure. The failures of love. We are confronted, personally and globally with a stark choice – Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury – it is an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half a century modern psychology has documented an age old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So too our world, personal and global – even with all the resources, intelligence and technology at our disposal- will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love. Eros. marc gafni please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: Part Thirteen: To Love is to Know REALITY: Marc Gafni
July 28, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com To Love is to Know REALITY. I wrote yesterday of the path of Love. {Eros and Holiness: Blog Post Nine; The Path of Love}. But what is love? Love is the inner reality of the universe when all else is stripped away. The lack of love is the source of all that creates evil in the universe. Evil results from the denial of love in all of it’s forms. Love is a denial of reality. To Love therefore is to know reality. The lover is the most realistic person around. And the lover sometimes also appears as dreamy eyed, wistful and star struck. Because sometime reality in it’s surface manifestation is unreal. We then need to wist, dream and passion, verbs all, in order to find our way back to what is real. This writing is in some sense a work of ideas. But it would be a mistake, unreal, to call it merely an intellectual work. It comes from the heart as much as from the head. Sometimes I thought so hard it hurt, at other times my heart danced with ecstasy, even touching on two occasions on what Buddhist and Hebrew mystics have termed enlightenment. At other times the pain was so radical and intense that I prayed for my own death. By the time you reach the end of these writings I hope you will have experienced a taste of enlightenment yourself. In tomorrow’s blog post I will write a word or two of what I mean by the word Enlightenment. A word that is frightening to many people but whose meaning is simple, direct and core to many important teachings in the Hebrew wisdom tradition, particularly those of my teacher Mordechai Lainer of Izbica.
Eros and Holiness: Part Fourteen: Life is a Recovery Movement: Marc Gafni:
July 28, 2008
Life is a Recovery Movement: Marc Gafni Published on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In reaching for the awakening of love we do well to bear in mind the teaching of mystical master Menachem Mendel of Kutz. Writing in eastern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, he offers an original deeply resonant re-reading of a biblical myth text. “These words which I command you this day should be on your hearts”. How do words sit on a heart? Do they not either enter in or stay outside? What could it means to have words sit “on the heart”? Answers the master, ‘When dealing in issues of heart – lev – love – one cannot force the heart’s opening.’ Love is mystery – the word mystery deriving originally from the Hebrew word Seter – meaning secret. The greatest secret, the most wondrous mystery, is the openings and closings of the heart. ‘The best we can hope to do – and that is a lot – is to place our words on the heart—and when the heart opens the words fall in.’ These writings are about truths deeper than logic and impenetrable by the limited tools of reason. The truths we seek to touch are not irrational but trans-rational, beyond the feeble grasp of the merely rational mind. They are about a knowing beyond knowing. Listen with all five senses but also with faculties beyond the five we usually employ. Listen with love. In the Hebrew language, the first letter of the alphabet is Aleph. Aleph is a love letter. The following three letters are Beit, Gimel and Dalet. In Hebrew, those three letters also form a word, “Beged,” meaning both clothing and betrayal. For we all know that there are two kinds of clothing. Occasionally we have clothes that really express who we are on the inside and that is good. But all too often clothes are a place in which we hide, betraying our truer selves. Betraying our Aleph, our silent places. And so it is with language. The first letter – the silent letter – is Aleph. It is the place beyond words and… And then comes Beit-Gimel-Dalet. And come they must, for language is magical. With language, the mystics tell us, our world was created. For as quantum physics teaches us, the core construct of our reality is information and language, the medium of information. And yet as you read these words, know that they point beyond themselves towards the Aleph. Towards the lover in you. Because of this, I will often speak directly to the knower in you relying always on the truth of two kabalistic koans. The first truth: ‘The words of truth are recognized’. Re –cognized. For in reality… we already know all truth. We recognize truth as one would a long lost lover. Biblical myth mystic Abraham Kuk teaches that life is not a journey but a return. Our goal is not perfect health but deep healing. All learning is not discovery – it is rather re-covery. Life is A Recovery Movement. Life is the movement towards Recovery. The second Koan: ‘Words that come from the heart enter the heart’. So open your hearts even as I open mine. And let us begin. Marc Gafni Published on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Liberation and Enlightenment: The Democratization of Enlightenment: Marc Gafni
July 29, 2008
Hebrew Wisdom as a Path to Liberation: Part One. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In yesterday’s post I mentioned the idea of enlightenment. The common wisdom is that enlightenment is not a Jewish idea. One example of many for this anti – enlightenment prejudice in Jewish circles might be author Rodger Kamenetz in his book who makes the blithe confident and wrong assertion, in his book Stalking Elijah, that enlightenment is not a Jewish term. Of course this is simply not true. R. Tzadok HaCchen from Lublin regularly uses the term HeArah –which is the literal Hebrew equivalent of enlightenment. Of course the word Zohar – the name of the 13th century locus classicus of Hebrew mysticism which unfolded from the soul of second century master Shimon Bar Yochai- could also be literally be translated as enlightenment. The great teaching of Hebrew wisdom is The Democratization of Enlightenment, what we call in Hebrew He’arah or Devekut. In this teaching Self Liberation or enlightenment or Devekut is not the province of the elite few but is a genuine option for every person. It is towards the re- activation of this Jewish Liberation Wisdom that are initiative is dedicated. In line with a great lineage of Hebrew wisdom masters, we read the Torah as a guidebook to liberation. We subscribe to the ancient Hebrew wisdom teaching that all ethical failure, is ultimately rooted in a failure of realization. The potential for realizing one’s true nature is the birth right of every human being. Every human being has the potential and possibility to realize their true nature as part of the God field and to act – compassionately and courageously – from the integrity of that realization. Because realization is the potential and possibility of every human being it is not merely an option but it is the very purpose and invitation of our lives. In the Jewish liberation tradition the words of the divine to Abraham, Lech Lecha; are literally translated to mean ,“Go to Your Self. Realize the your Divine self is “literally part of God”. Once the human beings solves the perpetual identity crisis by realizing his identity with Divine, he or she is able to act with courage, compassion, wisdom, responsibility and holy audacity. It is this courage and audacity of human action, which activates the indwelling Shekinah energy, that opens us to the realization of Liberation and Devekut, necessary to bring about the most evolved vision of Tikkun Olam, the healing and transformation of the world. The goal is not merely the liberation of the elite; When we understand the Torah as a handbook for the Liberation of every human being, we realize that the intention of Biblical ideal, of “Kingdom of Priests”- is no less then what we have called, The Democratization of Enlightenment. The Hebrew tradition is a four thousand year old transmitted lineage of Liberation. Beginning with Abraham Isaac Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, continuing to Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, David and Solomon, transmitted to the communities of elders, prophets, priests and sages, the inner transmission is one of liberation. From Akiva to Hillel to Judah the Prince, from Abulafia to Maimonides, Luria and Cordevero, Luzattto and Meir Ibn Gabbai, from the Gaon of Vilna to the Baal Shem Tov, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk and Mordechai Lainer of Izbica, to Menachem Mendel of Schneerson in our time. The tradition teaches that none of these people were perfect. Perfection and absolute piety is a tyrannical ideal that ultimately separates us from the divine. Toxic shame undermines the liberation process. All of these liberated figures were flawed, some dramatically so, at different times in their lives. In the words of the ancient teaching, “The Tzadik falls seven times and rises, the wicked falls and does not rise”. The ability to rise like a Phoenix from the fire and to transform human failing into human greatness is core to the shadow work of Hebrew Liberation technology. As the schools of Kutzk and Izbica taught, one’s unique flaw in transmuted into one’s unique gift and gorgeousness. We are all unique flames emerging from the same fire. It is in the realization of one’s authentic unique self that the human being merges with the God field. If one tries to round out the curves of a puzzle piece it cannot fit into the great puzzle of the Kosmos. It is only by highlighting the unique curvature of your self that your merge with the larger divine Self. What I would like to talk about later tonight in the next blog post is what exactly does enlightenment mean? And to clear up a rumor I heard going around that two and half years ago at a shabbot with Andrew Cohen, i proclaimed myself enlightened:) mmm…. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Enlightenment and Liberation: Part Two:Marc Gafni
July 29, 2008
Enlightenment and Liberation: Post Two: Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com So what is enlightenment? The answer of course is that anyone and everyone makes up there own definition…to such an extent that the word loses all meaning. I will share with you how I understand enlightenment based on the teachings of the Hebrew Wisdom Tradition. That is of course pretty important because once we establish, as we did in the last post, that enlightenment, of some form or another, is a major goal of Hebrew Wisdom practice, then it becomes more then helpful to know what it means. So here we go: Enlightenment is Peace. To be enlightened is to Be Peace and to Be Love. Shalom! Shalem…..to be whole. Jacob wrestles with the angel in the darkness of the night and wrestles his enlightenment from the shadows. This is expressed by Jacob coming to Shalem; the place of peace and wholeness. Peace of the Body Peace of the Mind Peace of Relationship and Community Peace with Spirit Peace of Emotions Peace with the World Peace with Structures of the Body Peace with Structures of Society To be enlightened is to be committed to act in a way which achieves peace in each of the distinct arenas of our lives. That does not mean that if you are enlightened you will necessarily accomplish peace in all these eight strata of living. Rather it means that you act in a way that is aligned to peace in each of these spheres. You must, yourself, Be Peace, {as the ancient Essenes liked to say it}, in all of these ways. Of course, sometimes in order to achieve peace you must first go to war. Peace is an integral value – it integrates the polarities and raises them to a higher level of integration and evolution. A second way to tell the same story, to answer the question of What is enlightenment, is to deploy Integral Thinking. Integral talk points out the simple truth that there are many different levels and lines on which we all develop. For example, there is a moral line of development as well as a physical motor line, an intellectual line, a social line, an emotional line etc. Each line of development is distinct. Now here is the key… One can be very advanced in one line and developmentally disabled in another line. For example: one might be a great peace activist, engaged always in activities for Shalom, And yet in one’s true center one may not be Peace at all. This kind of person is not holding enlightened consciousness. This kind of person may talk about freedom all the time but they are sadly not at all liberated. Rather they remain slaves to their fear, ego, pettiness and malice, almost always disguised as noble rhetoric and ethical integrity. Even while they talk peace they may behave in the most obnoxious of manners, bullying, mean-spirited, frothing at the mouth in a frenzy of words, self-righteousness and domination. We all know the archetype. This archetype may well be sincerely interested in peace in the world. In that line they are very developed. They may be willing to take enormous risks, on a conceptual level, to achieve peace with their enemies. These enemies may be people who have brutally murdered many of their own people. And this willingness to make peace may come from an evolved and noble place in the soul. {Or it may come from a callousness and contracted circle of caring which his egocentric at its core, but that is a separate conversation} But let’s assume for now that it indeed comes from a refined and evolved place in the person consciousness. That same person may be completely unwilling to make peace, or to even engage in dialogue with a person who was once their good friend and who did not do anything similar to the genuine evil perpetrated by there real enemies with whom they rush to make peace. How could this be? The answer: This person may very advanced on the line of development called peace with the world but retarded in the line of development called peace with community, with other or even peace with self. When it comes to their own life, disowned shadow, disassociated malice, fear, jealousy, and mean spiritedness may prevent all conversation, compassion, courage or integrity. The person is very advanced on in one line of development; “peace with the world” but very developmentally disabled in the “peace with self” line of development. The result is that the fear of being outshone, of having their legacy threatened, old neural pathways of jealousy and inadequacy may be triggered and the simply humanity that one extends to a friend may be crushed in a frenzy of domination and cruelty even though this very same person is willing to dialogue with all of the most vicious enemies who have done his people genuine harm and evil. The person is very developed in one line of development but regressed and even retarded in a second line. This is to be a slave. To be enlightened- meaning to be liberated, means to be as maximally evolved as possible at this moment in history in all levels of peace, or said differently, in all lines of development. Okay so that was part one… More depth on this later tonight or tomorrow. Big love to everyone… Interesting article on Being Open to Growth HERE Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: Part Fifteen: A Better Way to Dance: Marc Gafni:
July 30, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Dancing Master A-Void-Dance Our lives are overflowing with The Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it has hurt so much you can barely move. Usually it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We do everything we can to fill the Void. We even have a handy word for it: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A –void –dance. We develop the most elaborate dances you can imagine – never realizing – that it is all a-void –dance. That if we could but taste fullness a moment – the empty dances of addiction, power, violence and abusive sex would be transformed into the erotic dance of being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, whom the Hebrew mystics called the Shehina. The dance in which we all have a place. The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being – the fullness of ourselves in every moment – we need to first stay in the emptiness for a while. To resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo eros. This is the secret of dance. Dance me to the end of love. The best metaphor for this book is a dance whose goal is no less than to choreograph the ancient mystery of love. I hope to unfold for you a great and secret kabalistic path which shows you a way beyond the emptiness to the fullness of presence. The merciless rule of the market has undermined even the art of spiritual teaching. We live in age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification – the quick fix – a book a drug a relationship a job –anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. In a book you reads a few pages- If you don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo Eros you move on the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole which might fill up the gaping fissure we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide. We might seem on the outside to be dancing –but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an air tight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside however there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos filled scramble to grab some snatches of authenticity in between all the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: The Dancing Master: Part Sixteen: Marc Gafni
July 30, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share your comments on info@marcgafni.com The Dancing Master There is a wonderful story of Eros and love which I told my students at a special Kabbalistic ceremony the day before Cary and I were married. It is a story which hints at many of the truths we will play with in our journey together. It is about walking through the void. Every time we walk through and not around the void we come out stronger. Reports had reached a young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of Kung Fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this Master of Kung Fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit. Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of Kung Fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The Master of Kung Fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your highness,” he began, “know that you are beautiful people. I wouldn’t think of doing you harm.” “When you want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “what kind of harm can you do?” “Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear. The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may process,” he told the Master of Kung Fu. “Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If it please your Highness, this was a demonstration in slow motion, extremely slow motion, of the way I could have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.. I could have taken them all out during that one little dance.” “I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama. “Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.” “Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king. “Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.” “If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master. And while were waiting, lets have some tea.” The tea ceremony was just about over when the Regent returned with the Dancing Master. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of Kung Fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge. The Master of Kung Fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year. I could have finished him easily had I ever been able to touch him, but he moved too fast. Only last year did I finally catch him on the ear and destroy him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire. To show that I know your methods and wont be tricked into exhausting my energy, I shall first let you strike me at will. Your frail little hands can do me no harm while I’m at full strength.” The two opponents faced off. The Master of Kung Fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack. The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his head. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. Their fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows. The master of Kung Fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time. The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of Kung Fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He could smell butter melting in the most fragrant of teas, as the Dalai Lama, incomparably beautiful, sipped tea and watched him calmly. A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch. His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He could hear the great long horns resounding in a thousand rooms of the Potala, praising creation. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life. The Master of Kung Fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share your comments on info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: The Great Dancer: Marc Gafni
July 31, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com side bar personal note before body of post: I am not a great dancer:) Grew up in Yeshiva, Orthodox Jewish School where dancing was kind of primitive even if wild and ecstatic. But the ability to trust the movement of the body in dance is something that is new to me. Recently I went dancing in Salt Lake City, with three friends. First time in my life. What a beautiful spiritual practice is dance. Total Gorgeous. The Great Dancer The truly great dancer is a great lover who flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is Mechol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mechol is etymologically identical with the word Challul which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word Mechila –forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the fullness of wonder, complexity and imperfection of another. Mechol however also means Chalah-fullness – used in the biblical myth text to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.5 Mechol =Dance. Dance, then, is the movement between emptiness and fullness. Modern day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra – marketed to us in a million packages. To fill the emptiness. In any way at any price. We are desperate. We can hardly distinguish between our desires we are so pained by our emptiness. The natural result is that we fill our selves with much which is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment – full-fill-ment – in all the wrong places. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: White Fire on Black Fire: A Journey of Love: Marc Gafni:
July 31, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The White Spaces We are on a journey to Love. For as the Zohar writes ‘All the Paths (Shvilin) lead to the Temple of love’. Wherever you are, wherever you are standing or kneeling or crouching – the place where you are is on your path to love. Love requires Depth. Superficiality and love are antonyms. The search for depth requires effort that we are often afraid to expend. However I can promise you – in he name of all the great traditions of the spirit – the energy you invest in your own depth will come back to you a thousand fold. In this book I want to invite you to reach a little beyond what you thought you could do. How did Browning say it? “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.” The mystics say that the Torah (Biblical Myth Text) has two different strands. The first is the letters – the black spaces, what the Zohar calls the Black fire. These are the ideas and concepts that speak to the mind and psyche. The second strand however is the white letters. These are the white spaces between the words, what the Zohar calls the white fire. Remember what Mozart said – the music that makes a symphony great is the white spaces between the notes. So as we begin our journey to love I want you to know that I will do my best in the black fire. I have tried to make everything clear and accessible in a way that will help us both on our paths to love. But I want to invite you to enter not only the words of Black fire but also and especially the white fire. For is it in the white fire and that you taste the rawness of Eros and the sweetness of love for which your soul yearns. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – The White Fire of Eros: Let it open all the doors for you…
August 1, 2008
The White Fire of Eros: Let it open all the doors for you… marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com So as we begin our journey to love I want you to know that I will do my best in the black fire. I have tried to make everything clear and accessible in a way that will help us both on our paths to love. But I want to invite you to enter not only the words of Black fire but also and especially the white fire. For is it in the white fire and that you taste the rawness of Eros and the sweetness of love for which your soul yearns. The Berdichever Passport A White Fire story told by the Kabbalists: It happened in Eastern Europe in the mid 19th century. Wolfie had to travel to St. Petersburg and he was afraid. He knew it was a place which was not safe. And he did not have the papers he needed. But he needed to make the journey for his very life depended on it. He went to his teacher –the greater master Levi Isaac of Berdichev. Please –please he said help me and he poured out his woe. The master listened intently and then left room bidding him to wait. He could hear the master tears in the next room. When Levi Isaac returned he gave him a blank piece of paper still wet with tears. This will be your passport. Take it with you and it will open all the doors. Wolfie was not sure what to do – but he trusted his teacher. He took the paper and set out on his journey. When he arrived at the first border he was stopped by the guards. Shaking –knowing they could kill him on the spot he takes out the passport he has received form his the master Levi Isaac of Berdichev. They look down to examine it and then up at him again with the most intent of looks. He is about to faint. And one of the Guards begins to talk. “We had no idea it was you he said. We apologize for even stopping you at the border. What an honor it is to have you travel on our road. Please accept our apologies sir.” Well –you can imagine how absolutely shocked Wolfie was. Mumbling his thanks about to faint-this time from disbelief and joy he traveled on. Well, they got to the next border and pretty much the same thing happened. Only this time the guards were so overwhelmed that Wolfie was traveling their road that they gave him and escort of four white stallions. And so it went- at each border crossing he would show the blank piece of paper with the tears of his masters – his Berdichever passport. He arrived in St Petersburg traveling like a prince, with full escort and laden with Gifts. A story of mystery to be sure. Passports that open all the gates but not with words or letters. Not a tale of Black fire. A white empty space. The magic of the White Fire. As you read, I want to gently remind you that there are many borders you need to cross when you go on a true quest. There are many guards – internal and external who would block your way. This book –although filled with letters of black fire is really a Berdichever Passport. Let it open all the doors for you. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – EROS
August 1, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com EROS: O Taste and See The world is not with us enough O taste and see the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning if anything all that lives to the imagination’s tongue, grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince, living in the orchard and being hungry, and plucking the fruit.—Denise Levertov LOSS OF EROS Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of Passionate intensity Surely some revelation is at hand… W.B Yeats THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION WHILE THE WORST ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY MAN…WAY TOO MUCH TRAUMA AND DRAMA RELAX EVERYONE KEEP HEART OPEN GET A LIFE …. – Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni – CHERUBS IN THE TEMPLE
August 2, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Imagine the scene: You walk into your local place of worship – church, synagogue, mosque, meditation center or whatever. The pastor or rabbi has apparently decided to redecorate while you were away on vacation. You find that he has installed atop the ark or altar a statue of sexually intertwined golden figures. In addition he positions another free standing set of sexually embraced figures among the pews. And just in case you missed the point, vivid pictures of these effigies adorn most of the sanctuary walls. I daresay that sexually open as we are, much as we affirm sexuality as a wonder and central good in our lives, the pastor’s contract would not be renewed. However, in the pastor’s defense, let me share with you a secret. These precise images were the central display in the archetype of all holy places – the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. The figures were called cherubs. The primary set was positioned in the center of the Temple, atop the Ark of the Covenant. According to Hebrew myth this spot is the earth’s epicenter, the axis mundi, the place where heaven and earth kiss. A second set of golden cherubs was freestanding and the rest were in pictographic form on the walls and even on some of the Temple vessels. These provocatively entwined cherubs were for the mystics the very key to the mystery of love, a mystery that lay at the heart of the Jerusalem Temple, a mystery that lays at the heart of all of our lives. – Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni – ILLUMINATION, CARE AND CAREFUL
August 2, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The unraveling of this mystery of the Cherubs is the purpose of our journey together. It will require on your part patience, passion and care. Patience as we construct the intricate yet gorgeous scaffolding which will be required for us to reach higher than perhaps we have every reached before. Passion – because passion is the torch that will guide our steps on this hallowed ground of ancient texts. It is the balance between passion and patience which will allow us to receive this stunning wisdom tradition. And of course care, for no such sacred terrain can be tread without care. Z’herut’ – the Hebrew word for Careful – connotes much more than timid watchfulness, for its root word is ‘zohar’, which is no less than the name of the central Kabbalistic text. Zohar means ‘Illumination’. Suggests the wisdom of the original Hebrew –only through care can you come to illumination. Even for hallowed publishing goal of well read blog posts I cannot unfold the essence of it all in the first chapter. Foreplay is essential to mysticism. In this way that when we do finally enter the inner chambers we will be prepared to fully revel in the power and beauty of the wisdom that is there. Thus when touching this sacred body of wisdom may we be blessed with the venerable tools of patience, passion and a great illumined care. Let the mysteries begin!
Marc Gafni – MEN WHOSE NAME WAS LOVE
August 3, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Hebrew mysticism, beginning with Abraham, gave birth to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three religions in their pure forms are rooted in the Temple of Jerusalem. Hence the mythic power of the Christian Templars , the Islamic Dome of the Rock and the Hebrew Temple mount. Further, kabbalistic tradition tells of the sons of Abraham who in the book of Genesis are sent eastward, to the land of the Buddha. Abraham’s heirs, teach the Kabbalists, are the progenitors of Buddhism. There is even an old oral kabbalistic tradition which claims that the builder of the Temple, King Solomon, and the Buddha are, if not the same person, at least masters in the same sacred tradition. While historically inaccurate, it points to the deep spiritual affinity between Solomon’s teachings and those of the Buddha hundreds of years later. So the Hebrew Temple with her eternal flame is the source of the fire which sparked, and continues to light, so many of the pure wicks of the spirit which illuminate our world. But what is the great wisdom hidden in the Temple myth? What perennial message of the spirit does she yearn to share with us? And how can this message heal and transform us, our families and the widespread family of the world? The simple yet superficial answer is Love. Indeed, the Temple plans were drawn up by David and manifested by his son Yedidya, better known as Solomon. Both names, David and Yedidya, mean ‘Loved by the spirit’. These kings are the great lovers of biblical myth. They love greatly and are greatly loved, Solomon by God, the Queen of Sheba and a thousand wives; David by God, the people, Jonathan, and biblical myth readers throughout history. The Temple mystery was thus born and sired by men whose name was love.
Marc Gafni – RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
August 3, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Remember the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring Indiana Jones adventuring through the dusty Middle East in search of the Ark of the Covenant? Lives are lost, blood is let. One was tempted to ask why he shouldn’t just let the ark stay lost! The answer: the ark, perhaps more than any other earthly object, is of overwhelming mystical significance. The ark was an elegant container which held the original tablets on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments. Described in the sources as something akin to a spiritually creative, life giving nuclear reactor, it was lost when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed some 2,000 years ago (or perhaps we should say, 2400 years, since the ark was not in second temple) . It has been sought after – physically and metaphysically – ever since. The search for the ark is the original grail quest of Biblical myth. Jerusalem holds the secret. It is the cradle of three faiths, each today in its own way in desperate need of renewal and re-souling. At the center of Jerusalem stood the Temple built by Solomon and destroyed by the Greeks, then rebuilt by Ezra and destroyed by the Romans. A Temple that awaits rebuilding in our own inner lives, for the Temple in the Hebrew mystery tradition of the Kabbalah is not so much a place on earth as a powerful idea of the spirit . Those who have lost touch with the mystery kill each other today in order to control the Temple’s geographical site, a sad betrayal of the spirit which the Temple incarnated. The Temple myth is so powerful, so fertile and teeming with life, that it has given birth to virtually all the great systems of the spirit created by humanity. The essence of Hebrew mysticism lays hidden in the grain of the Temple’s wood and the folds of her curtains. The loss of the temple is considered by the biblical mystery tradition to be the greatest spiritual disaster in history. The re-building of the temple through the reclaiming of temple energy in our lives is the overarching goal of the entire biblical project. This is the desire which is expressed time and again in a thousand different ways in Hebrew ritual and liturgy. It is the idea that shaped all of the spiritual offspring of Hebrew religion- that is to say virtually all of civilization as we know it.
Virtual Reality is not Virtuous Reality:Marc Gafni: evoked by the New York Sunday Times essay aug. 3. 08. on the Dark Side of the Internet
August 3, 2008
Some brief notes written in Paris at four thirty in the morning on my way to Auschwitz with a group of twelve friends and my teacher…. My friend Mary who is a great corporate consultant, clinical therapist and highly accomplished business woman send me an article from today’s New York Tmes which she thought would interest me. I am writing a book about hate posts, slander and social murder on the, who runs them, who sits on their boards, who links to them, and how they are deployed by “respectable” folks {who use them much like respectable businessmen hire assassins and profit arms dealing even as they maintain their social veneer of decency}, how they are ignored by spiritual leaders and good men and women who simply look the other way because they are afraid of being attacked themselves and are to lost in their own spiritual entrepreneur ego games to be genuinely offended by the degradation of others who are not themselves or not necessary to their advancing in the world. So she thought I would be interested in the article. And I was. Thanks Mary! So here are some brief notes, which I wrote, down as fast as I could type this morning and am sharing with you unedited, although I did run the document through spell check:) Al Gore in a recent book became another in a long list of writers in the last decade or so. to extol the redemptive virtues of Virtual Reality, the Word Wide Web. And clearly there is much that is deserving of praise. Information, which can save lives and inform life, is available democratically on the Internet in a way that is unparalleled in human history. That is a big beautiful deal. Wow. Moreover the internet has the greatest potential in human history to expose the invisible lines of connection that naturally exist between people and peoples but up till know have been hard to see because of the challenges of distance and the alienation it naturally breeds. Internet allows for instant non-local communication around the planet thus showing the way to global unity and wholeness, which heretofore seemed impossible. Total Good. And yet the web has a profound and much ignored dark side, which can be no less destructive if we do not pay notice. The machinery of the Web has monstrous Frankenstein energy no less then it has potentially enlightened Messianic energy. The New York times article on trolling and the dark side of the web is important as a cautionary tale both about the nature of web, but more important it is a reminder in the context of the web, about the dark part of human nature that we do not want to see – and if we occasionally do see – we deny it, ignore it or dress it up in New Age pabulum. This morning’s story needs to be read together with another New York Times Magazine cover story at the end of May which tells the tale of a woman posting every manner of private information about her lover and friends on her blog, attaining celebrity in the destruction and degradation of others and all the while thinking that blogging is not subject to the laws of spiritual karma, ethical integrity, or just plain compassion and decency. There is this strange sense that because it is on the web, because you never see my your victim, the hurt and heartbreak you cause for him or her and his or her family never need to figure in my moral calculus; indeed there is no moral calculus; it is all somehow okay. You, the gossip or hate blogger, {there is however a huge moral difference between the two – sloppy thinking forgets the value of holistic hierarchy and rejects all hierarchy, it loses the art of distinctions which are the source of all relative wisdom- a gossip blogger is not a hate blogger } You rationalize to myself that you was just telling the truth, or you was just repeating what you heard, or that if you had not done it, someone else would have done it, or that your are somehow pious because you am exposing someone else’s clay feet – {ignore the fact that you really have no idea what your are talking about –have not talked to all sides, have not checked facts carefully if at all –and that if thought you would lose money for posting –or would somehow be penalized or shamed if you were not telling the truth – you would never post, shaming others however does not bother me at all, you cannot feel their pain. You are a hate blogger sociopath, a new brand of American man or woman} Somehow the internet because of it’s vast and impersonal nature – allows the worst elements of the mob to emerge as people act cruelly, faces hidden behind a flickering screen that gives the impotent the addictive thrill of potency and gives those who feel empty and dull the truly illusory and pathetic thrill of power that comes not from Eros and creative gesture, nor from service or authentic love – but which comes from the diabolic pleasure of the child who destroys the sandcastle of his sister to alleviate the momentary pain of his abandonment or frustration. The author tries to find the source for capricious Internet cruelty. Her conclusion which responds to this question, is something like, he hated his mother and father. Somehow we think today that if we can psychologize evil it become okay. She tells the story of Mitchell Henderson a young man, 13 years old who found life so painful that he took a gun to his head and killed himself. His classmates used his My Space page to build him a memorial, which would honor him. The Internet hordes, often referred to as trolls, found something funny about his death and for nearly 18 months defaced his grave on My Space, contacted his parent, aroused people to hurl bricks through their windows, along with every manner of cruel mockery of his death. What kind of person calls the mother of a boy who committed suicide, or writes notes to the mother on the Internet, which are cruel and mocking? The answer is of course –someone who has something terrible and demonic in them. We would like to think however that demons are extra terrestrials that sometimes walk among us seeking to suck our energy and passion for their nefarious and virulent ends. They are not. Demons are all to often, us ourselves. Demons exist in everyman and woman. The Internet with its lack of accountability, and the virtual inability to sue for damages, is like nighttime for the demonic in human beings; the human demonic abounds on the Internet, feeding of the fear, malice and emptiness whose dull glow illuminates the fiber optic cables. The demonic feeds human fear and ignorance and that most denied of human traits Malice. Dr. Joseph Berke is one of the great psychologists working in England today. Nearly seventy years old he came to England in 1965 to work with the legendary R.D. Laing. About a year ago after being viciously attacked on the internet, a well known Jewish leader privately send me a recommendation via spiritual teacher Jean Houston, that I go see Joe Berke who might do an evaluation of my inner state and the of the situation I found myself in. Berke is said to be both a great evaluator of human beings and complex human intersubjective dynamics, this is what he has done for forty years in the most demanding professional contexts. I did an extensive and intense evaluation with Dr. Joe, the result of which was his urging me in a formal eval letter and in many phone conversations, to return to a full life of spiritual teaching. He grasped in both spiritual and psychological terms the injustice that Karma has sent my way, particularly in the form of the psychic attack or false slanders on the Internet, which at the time I had no way to counter. {Thank god that has all changed and I have developed the resources both inner and outer to not only withstand the perfidy of the hate blog but also even to raise them into teaching, torah and dharma} I did not know it at the time but part of Joe’s life work is a study of Malice. {He has written and published dozens of academic articles and empirical studies on Malice as Motivation. His total great book. Malice Through the Looking Glass originally published as Tyranny of Malice collects a lot of this material.} Malice and Envy are according to Joe prime motivators of human behavior. People driven by fear, seek to destroy other people who they feel are somehow taking up space; space which they feel should be theirs. Luria goes on to say that we hate people –are driven to act with malice towards those who we feel our living our story more fully then we are. We feel that their abundance is at our expense. In an implied corollary of this teaching by Kabbalist Isaac Luria in the late 16th century, all great teachers have a small body of people, whom they have met at different stages of their life –who interpret everything they do through the lens of what we would call today, abuse. Sometimes they are right. We know all to well of corrupt teachers. But just as often they are wrong. They are projecting their own corruption on to the teacher. The dynamics are simple. The love or rigor of he teacher evokes his or her own shadow. The shadow is disowned and projected on the teacher who made them uncomfortable. Since the job of a teacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, an authentic teacher will always have to deal with this very real challenge. Or in a third teaching of the Kabbalah, the mob led by particularly wounded individuals, attacks people who incarnate life force. For the life force of certain individuals, leaders, teachers or artists, somehow indicts what they feel deep inside, is the emptiness and vacuity of their own lives. Wilhelm Reich termed this inner need to kill life force – The Murder of Christ – in a penetrating and disturbing book by the same name. All of this is part of what the kabbalists refer to as the Demonic quality in human beings. Milan Kundera quoted by Dr. Joe in his “off the charts blow away” book, Malice through the Looking Glass, points out something else about the nature of this demonic quality in human beings. It can never acknowledge itself. Malice always hides under the guise of more noble motivations. It refuses to see its own ugliness. This is the true source of the demonic. When folks are unable to own the complexity of their inner motivations, a recognition utterly necessary in order to enlighten and purify those very motivations, which when purified hold the key to greatness, then those motivations remain in the dark, festering in the shadows. Since viciousness festering in the shadows makes us profoundly uncomfortable we need to get it out of ourselves and direct it somewhere. This is the process that the ancients all described and Freud gave a name to; Projection. We project our shadow unto someone else, using someone who holds Shakhti and life force, often someone who is good and loving as the blank screen for our projection. What is the dynamic of shadow projection? We project shadow by finding what may well be legitimate weaknesses in the person; we are all wounded healers, we are all, at times in our lives less then whole, and our lack of wholeness sometimes hurts others and ourselves. It is often our own lack of wholeness which create the hooks for the shadow projections of our enemies. So while they need take their projections back we would do well to remove our hooks and replace them with open hearts. The rationalization most often offered by the trolls I have interviewed for the pain they inflict on people they have never met or spoken too, is that they are merely exposing human ugliness. There general metaphysical assumption about life. “All people are creeps”. The good person is the rare exception and even he –deep down- can be exposed as a creep. Naturally then, when the shadow projectors focus their poisonous projector on a person the goal is not to engage in conversation, which is honest, compassionate, balanced or healing. Rather their goal like that of the Internet trolls is defilement, defacing and demonizing. When we see demonization taking place –as Hitler’s demonization of the Jews fueled by hate blogs of European history, or the extreme right wing demonization of Clinton, with websites galore implying that he was somehow responsible for the death of Vince Foster as well as every other form of venal violation, or the extreme left wings demonization of George Bush implicitly compared to Hitler in websites all over the web, we know that the demonic in human beings is running amok. Demonization is the surest sign that the demonic in the demonizer is running the show. The demonic always stems from our inability to own the demonic in ourselves. Those demonic moments or impulses – which can only truly be met by laughter, which dissolves and heals them- are denied. We are frightened of our own face so we move to demonize defile and deface the other. Our own pathetic lack of life force is thus hidden from ourselves and others. In trying to bring down and destroy those who are truly lovers at the very core of our being we are desperately trying to cover up our own unlove. I am a Jew, a rabbi; a spiritual artist and someone who has been wrongly and terribly attacked by hate blogs on the web. Somehow spiritual people think you are not allowed to say that so clearly. Lighten up everyone. To much trauma and drama. Of course I can and should say that; Bearing false witness – the favored activity of hate blogs In discussing the nature of some of those people who stand behind the hate blogs the word which came up time and again was demonic. That is why I have deployed that word. Demons are not from some other world. The demonic is very much a part of us. For two years, I bore the attacks on my person in silence, went inward and tried to find an inner center of being that was not subject to any external force, whim or caprice. I understood in the depth of my pain, that somehow I had lived too much on the outside. That the only true path to enlightenment and liberation, which is the core goal of many schools of Kabbalah, was to go so deeply inside and realize my own love, goodness and the wonder of being, and to know that none of these could eever be taken from me. Along the way I had to encounter every manner of demon in my interior castle. Every manner of demon, which the hate blogs had foisted on me. I needed to find any source, any root of the distortions, make them conscious in the container of radical self love and rigorous inner work….. ….. until my interior castle was freed of unconscious shadow and literally sang out with joy the love of life, and my heart once again flowed with the yearning force of being, with the fullness of presence and with the wondrous wholeness of reality which lived in me humbly and consciously –even as it lives in every being, in every moment. And when you tear away the last veil you know with certainty that love is the foundation of human consciousness, that there really is nothing else. And that is our betrayal of love, which drives us insane with fear, fright greed and malice. For the reality of our existence is that we are all part of one pulsating and loving wholeness. It is only this realization which can heal our identity crisis which seeks to find relief of it’s own pathos by the destroying the identity of others. When we get up in the morning and we cannot answer with a resounding Yes, the question of our own existence then we begin the spiritual or physical murder of other to remind ourselves that we exist. Of course the murder might take place in words, in Internet posts, or in yellow journalism disguised as courage. This is what Kundera whom I cited above reminds us. Malice and envy can never admit of themselves. They are as the ancient Hebrew texts said of the evil inclination –the demonic in man-they are the “masters of disguise”. The worst manner of degradations are always hidden under some noble guise. We were protecting the state, the honor of the constitution, the fatherland, we are protecting the women, the feminine, and we are protecting the dignity of white American males of the purity of the Aryan race or America against communism…. I am as I write this morning in transit on my way to the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz Poland. I will be here for two weeks. I have come with a group of twelve friends and my spiritual mentor. We have come to spend two weeks praying and engaging in what is called in the Hassidic tradition, “freeing souls”; souls who have been trapped in this place of horror which bears witness to man’s extreme cruelty against his follow man. Of course we would like to believe that there was a small German Elite, which killed six million Jews, millions of Gypsies and caused the death of more then fifty million people. But as Daniel Golhagen reminded us in his book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, it was an entire people that participated in the Genocide either actively or by pretending it was not happening. It takes village to raise a child and it took an entire people, with the cooperation of haters all over Europe, from Poland to France to the Czech republic, to commit genocide and slowly gas to death over a million children as but the opening act of the horror show produced by human emptiness and unlove. In order for evil to triumph it is not enough for small bands of devils and demons in human form to do their dastardly deeds. Evil only triumphs, whether in Auschwitz or on the Internet, when hordes of human beings feed off of the pseudo-erotic charge it gives them and when good men and women look away and do nothing. The national enquirer which regularly engages in character assassination of the most vile kind, which deals out deathly doses of unlove, is read by millions of good Americans, standing at the counter picking up their groceries at Wal Mart. The national enquirer and other tabloids are carried by virtually all of the “all American apple pie super markets – and carried prominently and proudly. “Good people” own many of the supermarkets. The shoppers are certainly good people. So why is it that they all revel in reading what they know are at least partial and usually total lies about other people’s misfortune. It is this same black hole in human nature, this same tabloid mentality that has reproduced itself in the Internet in hate blogs of numerous kinds, all too often hiding under respectable garb, pushing a respectable and even important cause. Remember McCarthyism. Or it’s new American face in Sexual McCarthyism. But more about that in a moment. But first we must deal with a prior question. The Question!! What makes people dance and delight –in their most hidden heart – at the destruction of others? Why is the hidden cause of that uniquely human propensity for Murder? Social, spiritual or physical Murder is not an animal characteristic. It is rather the product of evolved consciousness. Animals kill for food, sometimes for aggression in defending their space or status necessary for survival. Of course the coyote kills. But not out of hatred. Ashley Montague reminds us that the coyote does not kill because he hates the rabbit but because he loves the rabbit, in the same way as Ken Wilber has pointed out, the human being loves ice cream. It is only the evolved and conscious human being, who kills, in the street, on the Internet and in cocktail conversation, out of hatred. Only the human being kills out of Malice and envy. The animal kingdom does not produce Iago. It is only human beings who build gas chambers. It is only major corporations who develop the gas for the gas chambers. It is only Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen who participate in developing the technology for the gas chambers. It is only the entire German Nation of Hitler Willing Executioners who either derives some vicarious pleasure in the betrayal of the Jews or simply through diabolical inactivity, looking away and occupying themselves with their own lives and goodness, allow it to happen. But why? But why? But why? Is it not true that the human being is evolved? Do we not know that spirit and body and mind are part of one greater whole? Can the human being evolve in body and mind and yet devolve in spirit? It is true that the heart of man is evil from your according to the biblical teachers. But this is only the untrained and closed heart of man. Can man not open his heart? Is man not also a baby faced divine who is but a little lower then God in the exalted song of the Psalmist. Is not the human being created in the image of God and according to the sages and mystics of every great system of insight and wisdom, is not man literally part of the divine him/herself. If this is all true then how can Auschwitz be built? What curse is there built into man’s evolution that can unleash such depravity? Where do the demons come from- for if we cannot answer this question –if man hates simply because he hates then there is little hope any of us at all. So here it is. All hatred – on the Interent and in Auschwitz, stems from man’s loss of personal identity. Man sense of self is unplugged and he goes haywire with viciousness. But if we can identity the source of man’s loss of identity; if we can trace hatred back to its source, then perhaps there might be some hope of healing. Same thing said differently: If love stands against fear then fear in it’s insidious and demonic power will always overcome love. But if fear itself, if hatred itself, is at it’s core love denied, love crushed and quashed, love ignored, love yearned for and unfulfilled, then perhaps just perhaps there is a hidden story of transcendence even in our evil which might yet be the source of our redemption –of our healing and transformation. So here it is. A great and hidden teaching. An esoteric teaching. Esoteric comes from the root Hebrew word seter. Seter means hidden, and Seter means Thanatos or destruction. Because this hidden teaching is both the full glory of the human being, of human Eros, and the hidden and most true understanding of what we have come to call Thanatos. The human urge for destruction. There are always two forces playing in the hearts and affairs of men. They have been given a thousand names by a thousand wise men and women – holders and teachers of the perennial philosophy but I will refer to them in their more recent incarnations with their ancient but modern names of Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the drive towards wholeness. Eros is the drive to uncover the deeper interconnectivity of the all with the all. Eros is in the great teaching of the perennial philosophy – the desire to reclaim the original wholeness of reality which was lost when the first fence was built –when the boundary –pink Floyd’s wall – between self and other was erected. Eros is the drive then, not towards Union, but towards Re-Union. Eros heals the disassociation and fragmentation which characterizes the thinking that gives birth to hatred, hate blogs, hate camps of death which gas children, all the while with the social and physical murders assured that they are somehow behaving righteously, acting to “protect the innocent helpless women of the third Reich {and the powerful women of modernity} from the Jewish molesters and sexual predators”. Eros shows up to heal this deadly illusion. It is the fullness of presence; it is living on the inside, is the recovery of prior wholeness; it is the participation in yearning force of being which reaches towards the love that is always and already is. The problem with Eros is that it is often frustrated. It cannot find original union. It feels the ache of no longer being awake. It is desperate, lovesick for the arms of the beloved. And in it’s desperation it is driven to addiction and drink. The addictions of Eros, what I like to call Pseudo Eros are the source of all evil. Desperation for love, paradoxically produces demonization, degradation and destruction. The temple was destroyed in the Jewish tradition because of causeless hatred. The temple-incarnated love built by David and Solomon the two great lovers whose very names in the original Hebrew mean love and wholeness. Yet the experience of true Eros and the wholeness in the temple also produced desperation when it was not available as a stable realization and inner experience. To stabilize the realization requires work and practice and human beings are lazy. So when the true love of existence is available and then disappears, then the pseudo Eros of hatred, causeless hatred rooted in our projections and fear –runs rampant and the temple is destroyed. When I cannot find true wholeness then I find refuge in the idolatrous Buddha of Pseudo Wholeness and Pseudo Eros. Those who practiced causeless hatred at the time of the second temple were of course not aware that this is what they were doing. Each was convinced that they were fighting the good fight, that their hatred was respectable because it was for a good cause. They were fighting those who were impure, those who were defiled. The fought for the pride of Judea, the integrity of the state or to protect the women and children from lurking dangers, which were really but their own distorted and degraded selves disassociated and projected outward on the face of the enemy – the face of the enemy who becomes the enemy only through the hiding of the divine face and the defacing of the divine image. So this is Eros and its clever but counterfeit companion, Pseudo Eros. Now Thanatos would seem to be the drive for destruction. But in reality it is not an independent drive. Thanatos is actually but Eros frustrated. Thanatos at its core seeks the destruction of all of the false boundaries that exist between people. Thanatos feels, intuits, and smells the clay feet of those would be prophets of Eros who are really but hawking the wares of pseudo Eros. Thanatos seeks destruction because at it’s core thanatos seeks to return to love – to remove the false boundaries that separate us form our delicious and deep need for mutual love, holding, compassion and forgiveness. Eros and Thanatos both express themselves as hatred as well. Thanatos by destroying all boundaries and seeking to evolve the world to essence. Thanatos by destroying all superficial and artificial distinctions. Eros in the form of Pseudo Eros. You see the great illusion of existence is the separate self. The skin encapsulated ego, that in the words of the kabala, says I am the king, I will rule by myself. Eros seeks the wholeness of the self. Thanatos destroys the false sense of separateness and the creations that support that false sense of self. In the loss of memory is the source of all evil. When we lose our memory of the once and future world then we are exiled from Eden. In this loss of memory we experience our very survival as dependent on the survival of our separate sense selves. So we build walls and castles and fortresses around this separate self-ego afraid that if we let go for but a moment we will be hurled into the ultimate devastation of eternal non-existence. It is those walls which are destroyed the catapult machines of Thanatos. But this feeling of alienation is sourced only in our separation from source. So it can only be healed in one way. It is only in saying I AM SOURCE in realizing I am sources that our cravings and strivings can be healed in the peace of I am –I am the lord your god. Read by the Abraham Kook, a kind of Jewish aurobindo, to mean- my true I, is the Lord your God, My true I, is I AM. I AM SOURCE. Any thing less then that realization of identity results in an identify crisis of massive and destructive proportions. When I lose site of the experience that I am –then I am, only if you are not. When I am not in the circle of Eros then I turn towards Pseudo Eros. And pseudo Eros at its core always manifests through me pretending to be in the circle by placing you outside of the circle. It is only in your being the enemy and the other that I can be the friend and the chosen one. My existence, lacking connection to source, no longer bathing in the radiance of my original face – is defiled and defaced, and can only be felt by violently demanding your non existence. It is only if I offer you up to death that I feel life. And this is the root of all manner of depredations. So…. If I can expose your clay feet and thereby justify my demonizing of you, then I can deny the demonic in me which rises from the gaping hole in my wholeness – which is more easily filled with the junk food of your destruction then with the sacred practice courage and discipline required for my evolution, which is but the recovery of my original face, the realization that I AM SOURCE. The journey Up and away from Eden. Beware of crusades and holy wars. Holy people rarely fight them. The most ulterior motive of all is the ulterior motive of piety. Wholes and Parts: Now it is true that in every cause there is some truth. In every attack there is some part, which is true, and it is that part which sustains the hatred. But the very act of hatred is in denying the whole. Hatred is always born when we deny reality. And reality is context. Reality is the knowledge –the sensual alive and carnal knowledge that every part is part of a greater whole. Te separate the part from the whole –to exile the part from the whole is to deface god and exile the Shekinah. The face of God which is true Eros and which pushes us to our evolution and pulls us to our wholeness. All evil is based on some partial truth, which has been made into a whole. The hater returns time and again to the root source of his evil which is usually some good value – torn from it’s larger context in a constellation of competing truth and values –and made into an absolute truth –an absolute perspective. It is the part denying it’s partness and saying in the language of the kabbalists Ana Emloch – I am whole and I will rule, that is the source of evil and human suffering. To return to love is to return to wholeness. Wholeness involves taking all the available parts –all of the perspectives – listening deeply to each of them –giving each one its deep truth and honor, and then creating peace, shalom – by integrating all of the perspectives into the most holistic possible hierarchy of action and truth. Shalom in Hebrew means whole or integral or peace. Peace is made with my enemy not my friend. My enemy who hates me – if I can hold his perspective for just enough time to feel into its root source which is always some frustration of love and dignity –always it is some way in which my existence makes my enemy feel that he does not exists – then from that place I can love my enemy and affirm his existence without giving up my truth and my integrity and from this place I can make love, I can make peace. The sure sign that behind the righteous cause is evil is the unwillingness to talk. Because in talking I risk feeling into the perspective of my enemy. To talk to face to face is already the end of defacing. So in refusing to talk I maintain my commitment to my enemies defacing and defilement. All to often I have seen peace activists who talk peace but are not peace. To make peace I must Be Peace. This was the teaching my friend Gabriel tells me, of the ancient Essenes. To Be peace I must own the demonic in my self – trace it to it’s root, and find the core sweetness at the root, which is the part – originally part of the whole, which holds a partial value and truth which has been distorted from it’s partness and is now disguised as a whole. All to often the peace maker will make peace with the enemies of his people – those who have massacred children and tortured prisoners and rapes and dismembered the elderly and weak- with those people he is wiling to sit and talk peace for they do not threaten his psychic structure, but with his brother whom he has kissed on the lips –but whose very life force and Eros – whose existence somehow makes him feel less special less alive, he refuses to talk! Great peace maker, Do you recognize malice and envy and primal jealousy or are you really convinced that you act justly and righteously? Are you ready to awake?.. for it is only that way that you will be redeemed of your ache which moves you to hatred, murder, and war even as you speak of peace, love, and prophetic justice Always the sure sign of malice and fear – cleverly disguised as righteousness, love and peace is the refusal to hear all the stories. To hear all the perspectives. To hear all of the sides of the issue and hold them all in love. When we reify one story –when we take one story as the dogmatic truth then we ignore all of the love and truths held in the other stories. Then even when we hear new facts we cannot climb down out trees blinded as we are by our cognitive dissonance, which at core is our inability to own the pettiness and smallness of our limited perspective, caused directly by the pain of our closed heart and the choking of our true nature. If we will speak to our obvious enemy, but will not speak to our brothers, then we are not healthy lovers but lost in the sickness of our hatreds, however well we have disguised them. We wallow in the partial truth of our experience, masturbate our hurt into a false god of war that guides us and drives us, losing our ability to make love with perspectives which emerge from the faces of god we have made other, and therefore unable to give birth to the god of higher integration and truth dying to be born Internet evil is in some respects similar to other evils. It is driven by the same Eros and Thanatos that drives all orgies of creativity, destruction, Eros and pseudo Eros. However it is also unique in several ways. The first is in the instant albeit pathetic gratification afforded by the power which one can wield on the internet. While power, much like a gourmet meal, generally requires years of effort and practice, the Internet is the greasy, non-nourishing fast food junkie of power. As is usually the case the most instantly available power is destructive and not creative. The second is the virtual absence of consequences. The third is the democratizations of great evil. Fourth is the unusual cruelty of expression. It used to be that you had to be in a position of genuine power to inflict profound hurt and suffering. Let’s look at one example citing in this morning’s times. Meagan Meir commits suicide. Her friend’s mother has made up a personality on the Internet who flirts with Meagan offering her love and then rejects her cruelly. This boy does not exist. It is the demonic in Lori Drew mother of Megan’s friend. Meagan commits suicide. As Daniel Solove points out there is little that one can do to prosecute. What about Meagan made Lori Drew feel less then whole? What about Meagan offended Loris daughter in such a way that she sought Meagan’s destruction. That she sought to inflict the cruelty of love withdrawn – that she sought to inflict pain on Meagan and reveled in that pain. I am sure there was some lack of wholeness in Meagan. Maybe she even caused Lori’s daughter great pain. But Lori became god’s helper and deemed it her right to inflict punishment and pain on Meagan. She took what might have been some part of Meagan, the part of Meagan she felt hurt her daughter, the part of Meagan that was not whole, took that part and made it into a whole and committed spiritual murder against Meagan in a way so cruel and brutal that Meagan killed herself. Again, Daniel Solove, author of the Future of Reputation, points out that this is not illegal. The law is not to be identified with justice or the good or god. The law which is by it nature general and impersonal all often allows for great cruelty and malice. This story shows Lori Drew a woman who is Meagan’s mother, who does not live with you, upon whom Meagan did not depend for her support, is able to enter Meagan’s life, cause enormous damage and pain, with no real culpability. A second example from this morning times. Jason Fortuny takes out an add, posts it on the Internet where he identifies himself as a woman. He/She then invites men to apply for the job as a Dom in sexual relationship. Please send picture and personal information he/ she asks. A hundred men write in to this private add. Jason published their names and pictures on the Internet. Some lose their jobs, others their loves and other perhaps the love of their children. Jason – another assistant to God is satisfied – he has exposed the sexual desires of these men, which he has deemed rapacious and make them pay. A very limited and partial truth about male sexuality is exposed and used to destroy men he did not know –whose complexity beauty and love and goodness he could not know. Jason disassociated from his own sexuality, perhaps from what was demonic in his own sexuality – demonizes and destroys… Like Lori, Jason is able to inflict great on harm on people he does not know. Like Lori he acts with apparent impunity. Like Lori Drew he is able to become a squatter in someone else’s virtual reality. The internet has also become the weapon choice for what I have come to refer too, following Alan Dershowtiz, as Sexual McCarthyism. Structurally Sexual McCarthyism is precisely parallel to its spiritual father, McCarthyism McCarthyism in person of Sen. Joe McCarthy and his minions, took a good value – the fight against communism- communism which killed 17 million collective farmers –communism which vies with Nazism as the most destructive evil in the history of man, communism which in the fifties in the united states rightly aroused fear and loathing – and used that fear of loathing for the petty purposes of his own vicious political ends, to attack and destroy and persecute, to be ulove and malice, all under the guise of a noble cause. Good men and women looked away because they were afraid that if they stood up for their falsely accused friends –they too be labeled as communists, attacked and blacklisted. Some of their friends may have made a mistake and attended a communist party meeting. Some may have flirted with communism and even joined the party, but McCarthy seized on their mistakes and used them to distort, defame, degrade and destroy. And all because Joe McCarthy himself was pathetically seeking to affirm his own existence through the spiritual and social murder of others –all of course disguised as the good fight and the good cause. Sexual McCarthyism operates the same way. It takes a good value, the fight against sexual abuse, something we all believe in heart and soul, it accesses our natural revulsion at child molestation, rape, human trafficking and sexual slavery etc. and uses them to commit it’s own terrible abuses. Hiding behind sexual purity many forms of vicious attack and maligning take place. It encourages sexual abuse, that is the abuse of sexuality through distorted and even false recounting of sexual relationships years and even decades after they took place, with the intent to defame and defile, all the while pretending like the true aim is to “protect future women against male predators”. The sexual McCarthyites themselves know this is not their true aim but it allows them to masquerade on the cover of piety and righteousness hoping to obscure the true pettiness and malevolence of their ends. When they attack they hide behind the cover of sexually correct talk but in fact it is almost never about sex. Troy is attacked ostensibly because Paris son of King Priam and prince of Troy had an affair with Helen wife of Menlaueus and Queen of Sparta. But an only slightly deeper read reveals something else entirely. Paris’s affair with Helen was the excuse but not the reason for the Trojan War. The difference between a reason and an excuse is that a reason is the cause of the event. Remove the reason, you will remove the cause and the event will not take place. An excuse is not a cause; it is a pseudo cause designed to hide or obscure the real cause –so remove the excuse and another excuse rises to take its place. Agamemnon brother of Menelaus King of Sparta wants to defeat Troy and it’s mighty king Priam and it’s great Hero Hector. He want to do so because it is his Atman Project, his desperate and pathetic bid for the immortality of the separate self of Agamemnon. This is his true reason; the ravings of his ego run wild and his demonic desire for conquest, war and destruction, which are for him the road to personal immortality. He cannot admit of these base desires for they are unseemly. He needs a noble cause and he needs to enlist this Brother Menelaus and the armies of Sparta. Along come Paris and Helen who fall in love or lust, it is not clear which, and Agamemnon has his pious excuse. The feminine has been violated. Sparta has been violated. “I must defend the women of Greece against the predation of the Trojans modeled by the violation of Helen by the Trojan Prince”. This however is not the reason for the Trojan war it is merely the excuse. Accuse a man of sexual sin; do not check the veracity of the accusation. After all, goes the dogma of what Prof. Daphne Pattai has derisively referred to as the Sexual Harassment Industry, after all “Women after always tell the truth about sex and certainly this is true of groups of women”. Deny feminine shadow because you have an agenda. You want someone out of the way. He takes up too much space. Take a part of him, the part that is not whole, that is a work in progress, exaggerate it, distort it, lie about it and make it all of whom he is. Distort his love and his goodness. Deny his integrity and the thousands of deeds of love and good that defined his waking hours. Use the virulence of virtual reality to erase his virtue. Bear false witness if your must. Try and insure that no one talks to him so that you can hold him prison in the hermeneutic prism of his hijacked virtue, hijacked by a carefully gathered group of the hurt and wounded who cry far more the it hearts seeking to seduce the power of their tears and alleged devestation, reify hurt which is normal in human relationships and turn it into blunt weapon, weave around him, deploying the Internet as your chief tool, the web of Maya and virtual illusion which darkens all that is light and prevents everyone and anyone from touching his essence directly or experiencing his integrity in the first person. Deploy vicious and virulent hate blogs; post it on the Internet as truth, without bothering to verify true of false. Let the hate blogs Internet serve as the tabloid of the Internet. Better yet let the Internet become the roman coliseum where good people are fed to lions to feed the trolling frenzy of the scandal starved crowds. The hate bloggers and websites are easily aroused. They feel alive in dealing death. By seeking to ruin people’s lives or work or relationships they are lifted from what is often the empty dis-ease truth of their lives, and filled with a pathetic sense of pseudo power. This pseudo power, manifests in the most sadistic impulses in the human being which send an aroused demonic thrill through their body. They are aroused and alive through their sadism and addicted to the almost sexual charge that it sends through them. Their sites are linked to neo Nazi sites and anti – Semitic sites because the both share in the same energy of hate. But do not just blame the hate sites or the gossip bloggers; The bloggers are but the suicide bombers of the respectable people who hide behind them, preening respectability while reeking of putrid cowardice. The respectable people go to synagogue and church, pray with fervor and concentration even as they, behind the scenes post their letters of hatred and revenge, filled with calumny and lies, on the hate sites or gossip blogs. I was talking recently with a blogger who had attacked me for years. In a strange twist of fate we have become friends. He has shown some genuine integrity and I have taken him deep into my confidence trusting his integrity as he has trusted mine. He has written many things about me that were not true in a long rambling essay written in 2004. At some point he responded to his own inner sense of integrity and offered to change all factual statements that were clearly false. I asked him; “Hey Tom, did you make all those things up?”. “No” he said, “a group of people told me those things”. Now all of those things were vicious lies that were verifiably false. My friend Tom went on to say that in the city he lives which is filled with Jews he is never invited for a Shabbat meal. My heart broke in a thousand pieces even as it filled with rage. I understood now what had happened. For the last ten years respectable people with axes to grind, primal malice to spare, holy wars to fight and damsels in distress to protect, had called my new friend tom and slandered me. My friend Tom at the time had a policy of just publishing whatever people told him. He has – like myself –evolved since then, we all evolve, and we all make mistakes and we are all works in progress. So I realized that all the lies he had published on the web were told to him by ostensibly respectable and god fearing men and women. Not dearth of Rabbis among them I am sure. They send him out to do the dirty work. To put his name, the name of his blog on the lies and on the line. Then they cast him out as disreputable and for ten years forgot to invite him for shabbot; after all they said my friend is a pornographer and gossip columnist. They, the respectable, sat and enjoyed their meals with there children for every shabot for those entire ten years even as my friend ate alone. A woman I once knew cries her eyes out as she prays even as she, through back channels posts a letter filled with slander and distortion on the hate blogs of the internet and then denies that she has anything to do with posting it. “I am respectable” she protests in feigned innocence and hurt. Who me? A group of rabbis, each with their own agenda work regularly with the hate blogs behind the scenes. They count on the hate blogs to do their dirty work for them while they keep their hands clean. In the end, my new friend has more decency and integrity then all of them. I am aware that who was using whom in this story, is unclear. Was he using them to make his blog popular with salacious details, whose only problem was that they were not true, or were they using him as their suicide bomber even as they maintained the veneer of home and respectability. Either way, the vehicle of hate that allowed them to do their dastardly deeds was the Internet. And none of this would matter if the Internet consumers did not go first to the gossip blogs like Gawker.com, driven by the vicarious pleasure of seeing people shamed and exposed, what Hebrew wisdom calls miniature murder, and then to the tabloid hate blogs and only much later to all the positive content of the web. The trolls feed the respectable people. The hate blogs are but the face we deny. The Nazis but the manifestation of European anti Semitism which has festered and exploded a thousand violent times and soaked the blood of European soil making it a fertile land to be plowed by holocaust and gas chambers. The holocaust is the rape and murder of millions of people by those who could get away with it. Internet violence is the name rape and spiritual murder of people who would not normally rape and murder but who do it because they feel that the Internet is a Free Pass Zone with no consequences. Because the internet name rapist and murderers feel like they can get away with it. The trolls are our face, which we deny While many come to Auschwitz inspired by the anti Semitic hate blogs of history, in future years it is completely reasonable to assume that virulent mobs will be stirred up and people burned and killed because the hatred stirred fomented and disseminated on the world wide web. And all this will be possible because good men and women will do nothing. Marc Gafni Posted by marc gafni Please leave comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – MYSTERY OF THE LOST ARK
August 4, 2008
Marc Gafni – MYSTERY OF THE LOST ARK Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com What is the secret of this ancient love hidden in the Temple’s origins? What is the mystery of the Lost Ark, crowned by her sexually intertwined cherubic lovers? Why is the mythic ark’s metaphorical recovery so absolutely crucial for our lives? Could this ancient and esoteric wisdom have something radically new and important to say about the love lost in our lives and the road to its recovery? In a word, can the cherubs lead us back to love? The Approach To understand the mystery of the Temple and what it has to teach us, we need to approach her more carefully. Indeed, the gradual approach towards the center is always the essential formula in the quest of the spirit. The Temple itself was built somewhat like an exquisite mandala. The mandala invites the gazer to pass through layer after layer of imagery before beholding its wondrous core. Similarly, we find that the Temple was a layered structure. The High Priest would ascend the great staircase to the outer Courtyard of Song, pass through the courtyard, into the chamber called the Holy, and from there into the inner most sanctum – the Holy of Holies. In this sanctum sanctorum of the Temple, behind fine brocaded curtains, stood the golden ark of the covenant. The ark contained within it the two tablets of stone upon which were carved the Ten Commandments. Magical lapidary tablets, sculpted by the God-gripped hand of Moses himself. Most essential though is that which rests atop the ark. Sitting perched aloft the ark are our two winged figures – the celebrated cherubs. Indeed, their cherubic faces have graced everything from the greatest works of art to countless covers of Hallmark cards. Yet here, according to the esoteric tradition, these images were not of the Hallmark variety. As we mentioned at the outset, these two cherubs were male and female, face to face, meurim zeh b’zeh – intertwined in sexual embrace. In the language of the Biblical source text the cherubs were, “As one embraced with his lover.” These carved creatures are the focal point, the epicenter of the mandala-like Temple space. They sit, like the guarded pupil of the eye, at the source of the sacred. That such provocatively sexual figurines would have such prominence in the Holy of Holies is mystery indeed. It is called by the Kabbalistic initiates the sod hakeruvim – the Secret of the cherubs. And though full initiation into this secret cannot be wholly transmitted in the pages of a book, together we can at least hint to its wonder and strive to scrutinize the inscrutable.
Marc Gafni – The Lion of Fire
August 4, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The best way to behold such mysteries is through the gleaming prism of story. Thus we begin with a spell-binding ancient text which sits at the core of the mystery tradition. This esoteric tale describes an extraordinary scene which takes place in Jerusalem in roughly 500 BCE, almost two centuries before Plato and Aristotle, The masters of the day were distressed. Adultery was spreading rampant as plagues among the people. The authorities were at a loss as to how to curb this powerful drive. Finally, driven to desperation, they began to pray. For three days, they fasted, weeping and pleading with God, “Let us slay the sexual drive before it slays us.” Finally God acquiesced. The masters then witnessed a lion of fire leap out from within the Temple’s Holy of Holies. A prophet among them identified the lion as the personification of the primal sexual drive. They sought to slay the lion of fire. But the result was that for three days thereafter the entire society ground to a standstill. Hens did not lay eggs, artists ceased creating, businesses faltered, and all spiritual activity came to a halt. Realizing that the sexual drive was about more than just sex, that it somehow echoed with the divine, the masters relented. They prayed that only its destructive shadow be removed, while retaining its creative force. Their request was denied on high with the insightful psychological response,“You cannot have only half a drive.” The greater the sacred power of a quality, the greater its shadow; the two are inseparable. So they prayed that the lion at least be weakened, and their prayer was granted. The lion, less potent but no less present, re-entered the Holy of Holies.
Marc Gafni – myth, magic and mystery
August 5, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The masters of the day were distressed. Adultery was spreading as rampant as plagues among the people. The authorities were at a loss as to how to curb this powerful drive. Finally, driven to desperation, they began to pray. For three days, they fasted, weeping and pleading with God, “Let us slay the sexual drive before it slays us.” Finally God acquiesced. The masters then witnessed a lion of fire leap out from within the Temple’s Holy of Holies. A prophet among them identified the lion as the personification of the primal sexual drive. They sought to slay the lion of fire. But the result was that for three days thereafter the entire society ground to a standstill. Hens did not lay eggs, artists ceased creating, businesses faltered, and all spiritual activity came to a halt. Realizing that the sexual drive was about more than just sex, that it somehow echoed with the divine, the masters relented. They prayed that only its destructive shadow be removed, while retaining its creative force. Their request was denied on high with the insightful psychological response,“You cannot have only half a drive.” The greater the sacred power of a quality, the greater its shadow; the two are inseparable. So they prayed that the lion at least be weakened, and their prayer was granted. The lion, less potent but no less present, re-entered the Holy of Holies. The text is alive with myth, magic and mystery. The most startling revelation is the radical claim of the text as to the originating place of the sexual drive. Why does this drive, personified as a lion of fire, emerge from the Temple’s Holy of Holies? Apparently this is its eternal abode. Thus, remarkably, the text is telling us that the seat and source of the sexual drive is none other than the Holy of Holies. In fact the Holy of Holies is often depicted in the mystical sources as the marriage bed. The tablets and the ark are depicted respectively as the phallus and the vagina. This sexual model of eros and the virtual identity between the erotic and the holy are perhaps the most vital and provocative insights of the kabbalists. They teach it implicitly in a thousand different ways in their writings. They would rarely say it overtly for fear the message would be misunderstood, leading to a kind of sexual anarchy which would bring in its wake the collapse of family. So the dominant impression we are left with is that while sex is good, as it is created by God, it is exceedingly dangerous and is to be handled with great caution. One gets the impression that the attendant dangers may even override the essential good. Thus, nothing as audacious as the secret of the cherubs was written about openly. And, yet, once you see it you realize it is there, subtly calling out, whispering from the folds of literally hundreds of texts.
Marc Gafni – SEX IN THE TEMPLE?
August 5, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Sex in the temple!? Sexually entwined cherubs atop the ark, and a fiery feline sexual drive living in the Holy of Holies? What are these mythic images trying to express? At first blush they seem to describe sex as a central preoccupation of the Holy of Holies, portraying the Temple as some kind of ancient Hebrew Playboy mansion. While Hebrew mysticism may wholeheartedly embrace a positive and healthy sexual ethic, one would not have thought that sex is the essence of the sacred!! The answer lies in the story itself. When the lion is subdued, the world does not wake up with just its sexual drive lobotomized. Rather, the world wakes up to an overwhelmingly dull and drive-less existence. The passionate engagement in all activity has suddenly withered and vanished. Whether it be in sex, art, work, or creativity, the thrill of existence is gone. Clearly, that fiery feline inhabitant of the Holy of Holies represents not merely sexuality. Rather, she is the incarnation of a more potent energy force. She is the embodiment of the Shechina. The Shechina is the feminine Divine. Her name means Indwelling Presence, ‘the one who dwells in you.’ She is presence, poetry, passion. She is the sustaining God force which runs through and wombs the world. A living mythic presence not wholly dissimilar to ‘the Force’, of Star Wars fame. She is the underlying erotic, sensual and loving force that knows our name and nurtures all being.
Marc Gafni – SHEKINAH, PRESENCE POETRY AND PASSION
August 6, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The Shechina is the feminine Divine. Her name means Indwelling Presence, ‘the one who dwells in you.’ She is presence, poetry, passion. She is the sustaining God force which runs through and wombs the world. A living mythic presence not wholly dissimilar to ‘the Force’, of Star Wars fame. She is the underlying erotic, sensual and loving force that knows our name and nurtures all being. Shechina captures an experience, a way of being in the world, for which we do not yet have an English word. For this is a way of being which we in the West are hard pressed to articulate. It is the experience of waking up in the morning full of utter joy for the arrival of the day. It is weeping over the splendor of the sunset or the scent of the ocean or the fragility of a newborn. It is a way of living in love. Indeed, it is one of the great failures of love that we do not possess such a word for this fully charged way of living. The main reason we lack a word for the type of love we will be exploring in this book, is that such an expanded notion of love is still so foreign to the fabric of our lives. Our vocabulary reflects our reality. Just as the Eskimo has an ample supply of words to describe different types of snow, a society infused with love would likewise have a menagerie of terms for different types of love. We should wonder over the paucity in the English language for our ‘terms of endearment.’
Marc Gafni – RECLAIMING EROS BEYOND THE SEXUAL
August 6, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Just as the Eskimo has an ample supply of words to describe different types of snow, a society infused with love would likewise have a menagerie of terms for different types of love. We should wonder over the paucity in the English language for our ‘terms of endearment’. Our best move in the English language is to turn towards the term Plato introduced in the Symposium: Eros. For Plato eros is love plus. It is precisely the kind of fully charged life experience which is evoked by the Hebrew term Shekhina. But over time the term Eros has been so narrowed and limited that it has lost most of its original intention. Usually when we hear the word erotic it evokes only the sexual. And although the sexual is a part of eros, it is only a limited part. The type of full Eros we will be describing in this book is way and beyond the merely sexual. Together we will work to reclaim this original meaning of eros, a meaning infused by its Hebrew counterpart Shechina. May the claiming of our erotic birthright in these pages in-form a richer and deeper life for ourselves, our loved ones and our communities.
Eros Not Sex / or The Faces of Eros – Marc Gafni
August 7, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Eros has many expressions. Each expression is hinted at in the temple mysteries. There are four faces of eros which, when taken together, form the essence of the Shechina experience. These four faces are the very stuff of eros. In this chapter we will explore the erotic understanding which forms the matrix of the secret of the cherubs and informs every arena of our existence. We will unmask the four face of eros and reveal why they are so vitally important for anyone who wants to experience the full joy, depth and aliveness of being. After we understand the eros which lays at the heart of the Temple mysteries we can then turn to answering our core question. If, as we shall show, the essence of the Temple – and of every journey of the spirit – is eros not sex, then why is sex such a prominent feature of the temple? It is in response to this question that in Chapter Three we will unpack the mystical secret of the cherubs. As we shall see, at the very heart of Hebrew tantra was a very precise and provocative understanding of the relationship between love, sex and eros. This understanding will open us up to a whole new understanding of our sexuality. This understanding will show us the way to erotically reweave the very fabric of our lives in more vivid patterns, sensual textures and brilliant hues.
Marc Gafni – The First face of Eros: On the Inside
August 7, 2008
The Interior Castle “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson The cherubs in the magical mystery of Temple myth were not stationary fixtures. No, these statues were expressive, emotive. They moved. When integrity and goodness ruled the land the cherubs were face to face. In these times the focal point of Shechina energy rested erotically, ecstatically, between the cherubs. When discord and evil held sway in the kingdom the cherubs turned from each other, appearing back to back instead of face to face. Back to back, the world was amiss, alienated, ruptured. Face to face, the world was harmonized, hopeful, embraced. Thus, face to face in biblical myth text is the most highly desirable state. It is the gem stone state of being, the jeweled summit of all creation. Face to face, to be fully explicit, is a state of eros. As we shall see, face to face means first and foremost, being on the inside. Indeed the God force said to rest between the cherubs in the Holy of Holies, the Shechina, is no less than the radically profound experience of being on the inside. Eros is aroused whenever we move so deeply into what we do, who we are with, or where we are, that its interiority stirs our heart and imagination. Being on the inside is of course not about a geographical place, but about a soul terrain, a place inside ourselves. Socrates writes at the end of the Phaedro, “Beloved Pan and all ye other Gods that haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the inward and outward man be at one.” For the Temple mystics, exile is when one’s inside and outside are not connected in the day to day of living. Or, said differently, exile is non-erotic living. The first, although by no means the only, problem with exile is that it is extraordinarily difficult. When I am not living from the inside, I am not living naturally. My choices, reactions and responses do not emerge spontaneously from what Teresa of Avila called one’s “interior castle”. I am not in the flow of my own life. Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore writes, “Where is the fountain that throws out these flowers in such a ceaseless flow of ecstasy?” Eros is to be in the flow of the fountain, what the Zohar calls in one of its evocative mantras, “The River of Light that flows from Eden.” Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
August 7, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com comments at info@marcgafni.com We are in Poland. The fellowship. We are here to witness. To give honor. To discern and live in the invisible lines of connection between us. And in that service to witness each other, to witness our teacher as he dances in the upper worlds. Our community is a crucible for witnessing. You are my witnesses says God. If you are my witnesses I am God. If you are not my witnesses I am not God. The witnesses and the witnesses are one. Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah all came to the world to remind us only of that. Tat Tvam Asi. Thou art that. You are. I am. The consciousness that I witness. Witnessing is deeply personal. The person, which lies under the personality. It is neither a series of complexes nor the wandering of monkey mind. It is the full resplendent glory of the unique authentic self daring to be present, in a moment-to-moment disclosure of its naked and unspeakable glory. The witness, that which is witnesses and the act of witnessing are one. We are grounded. Heart and Hara are one song of praise. The brain stem is relaxed and expanded as the right brain purrs it’s flowing contentment and left brain moves with agility and skill through on the path with heart. The heart is wide open, feeling, noticing, sharp alert and aware, yet gently soft and yielding. The group moves as one even as each member of the group holds the integrity of autonomy with bursts of aware personality occasionally lighting up our exchanges. The teacher is in the lead. He incarnates the light. Commands the column of light even as he moves in and out of his personality. An enlightened one with a California driver’s license. His teaching mirrors my teaching. His realization mirrors my realization. In the mirror I can see that he is true. In the mirror he reminds that I am true and invites me to live that truth. Beneath and through the trauma and pain. That is his gift. My teaching is his teaching. His teaching is my teaching. The teaching. God Is In You as You. Yet he commands the column of light. In this way he is far beyond me on the path. I joyfully submit to him as teacher in this way. I promise to learn from him this mastery. He promises to teach it to me. This is our contract and covenant. Wordless. It is understood. It is not personal at all. It is necessity. What is. Much of my personality was blown away and devastated to allow this simple necessity to be realized. I follow him on the path. I love our group. Not generally but personally. Each person. My personality is drawn to some more then others. But each one I love. Each person in the group, called by a different muse. Drawn by a distinct destiny of which some are not yet aware. There is a sense of urgency among us. Even as we laugh and play in the prayer of our journey. Each is Pulled by destiny’s personal address Yet we realize that we need each other. In the freedom of our love is community that holds us all. We are in the cemetery in Warsaw. We are here bearing gifts for Poland even as we know she bears gifts for us. We have come from Treblinka. We are on our way to Maidanek, Auschwitz. Our true goal however is Cracow. For their lies the pearl awaiting redemption. Krakow is the maiden of Europe, hidden from eyes of history by a cloak of invisibility. But for those with eyes to see. For the lovers it is clear. They know. For to love is to see with the eyes of God. We know. Our teacher is our eyes as we learn to see. On the way to Krakow is Lublin. You can see Lublin from the camp in Maidanek. Let no one claim not to have known. The name of the camps, and of the mystical masters named after their hamlets, mix with each other. Lublin, Treblinka Bialystok, Warsaw, Omshinov, Madianek, Slonim, Sobibor, Cracow and Auschwitz. We are in the cemetery in Warsaw. It is beautiful. There no other way to describe it. Magical sensual and alive. Two hundred and fifty thousand individual graves. The greatest of masters and their children and heirs. We do not come alone. We walk with the nine Lords of Palanque, with the wise men of Chaco. We carry greetings from masters of the new world to the masters of the old world. This part of our mission. Reb Chaim Solovetichik from Brisk, Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin known as the Netziv…whose words nourished and tantalized the first twenty five years of my adult life. Yeruchem son of the Rebbe of Kutzk, the two rebbes of Omshinov, The master of Modshitz…. The family and heirs of the all the great Polish Dynasties of Hassidism who knew how to dance in the upper worlds. The illustrious heads of the rabbinic court of Warsaw whose scholarship was only rivaled by their open heart and humility. The graves stones are infinite and everywhere, virtually on top of each other. But not in the open sun or in a barren field. No, not at all. The graveyard is grown over with greenery, plants, wild greenery and growth everywhere. As many tall trees as gravestones, the trees dancing together to create a canopy of life and living energy which holds in it’s bosom the stones. The stones and green, they caress each other, flow into each other, the lush wild ecstatic greenery and the wise irony of the headstones. One gets the feeling that when the graveyard is empty they whisper to each other in the nights. All of me wants sleep in the graveyard tonight to overhear their secrets but I know one must not intrude on their intimacy. And it is in the midst of this that we hear his call. I knew he was here. I was just not sure which one he was. We are walking on the path and he calls. My teacher veers off the path. Drawn to a small broken down hut like structure. It is in these structures that the headstones and graves of the mystical masters of Hassidism lay. It is the grave of the Rebbe of Slonim. Shmuel Wienberg of Slonim. My teacher is struck. A look of joy crosses his faith. His face lights up with pure presence. Shmuel of Slonim is fully present. Alive, radiating presence. My teacher stops. He approaches the headstone. Not tentatively. Naturally. In a kind of quiet ecstasy. He has met a friend. He recognized the master. He has been called. And in the recognition the master’s radiance is disclosed. “This master”, he turns to me for his name, “this master is the highest level of evolution possible for a human being”. “He moved beyond his limited humanity and become the perfect vessel for the divine. A grave is often a portal for the upper worlds. This is not the case in for this grave. This is the upper world. You are meeting God here at this moment.” The group listens. Everyone understands the importance of this moment. No one is asleep. “In the tradition we call this kind of realized master, A Merkava La-Shekinah. A chariot for the Shekinah”, I tell my teacher and the group. We look at each other. It is clear. The entire pilgrimage was realized in giving honor to this master. To God in human form. To Shmuel of Slonim in whom God is a Verb. To a man who so moved through his personality, that he became transparent to God. His will was the divine will. He tears the tears of God and his laughter the laughter of the upper worlds. When he made love with his wife, when he washed his hands in ritual blessings or received his students, the shekina and kudsha Brik hu, the divine masculine and feminine met in holy union. He has not left his world. He is fully present… even as he is lonely. He has been watching over the souls here. They are now all in his care. When the Nazis destroyed Warsaw, razing it to the ground in orgies of destruction, he stood watch at the gate of the cemetery and refuses to grant them entrance. Try as they might they could not move past him. The cemetery remained untouched, virginal in death. Protected by Shmuel of Slonim. We received his blessings. He had individual blessings for each of our group of twelve. We need the dead who are alive. It is from them we draw blessing. They need us because they need to be needed. It is through us that they have impact. In us the speak. Reb Shmuel was so delighted to see us. He had waited a very long time. He was pleased with our heart and hara practice. “It gives me hope” he said. He was overjoyed to see our teacher. “I knew your grandmother well,” he said to him. Your first teacher”. “She said you would come”. “I have waited for you a very long time”. “Thank you for taking care of Mordechai, I could almost hear him saying. We were not there for him when he grew up. He needed us but we could not come. I entrust him to your care. He is one of us but needs guidance now. Trust him”. “I know”, said our teacher. “I want you to give him your blessings now” Reb Shmuel Weinberg of Slonim”, and he did. They went on talking. I could not hear all of it. Some was not for my ears. I will wait till my teacher is ready to tell me. I did hear snatches however. “There is a living soul field. The souls know you are here. It is good. I need your help. I cannot watch over them but I cannot release them” Shmuel says to my teacher, tears steaming down his radiance. “I know” says the teacher. “I will do that for you”. They embrace. My teacher and Shmuel of Slonim. Long lost brothers, separated by so much and yet so totally natural and intimate with each other. “I have been looking for you” says my teacher in parting. “Thank you for calling to me. I will not stop. This is my promise to you”. And we go back to the main path, bathed in the radiance. Grateful. In quiet joy. It is enough. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com comment at info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – MERGING WITH THE MOUNTAIN
August 8, 2008
There is a wonderful Zen story about two mountain climbers. The first, old and slightly bent, slowly makes his way up the mountain. The second, young and in good form, bounds past him, racing confidently to the summit. In late afternoon they meet again. The older man still climbs gently, step after step, towards the summit. The younger man lies exhausted, unable to move, at the side of the path. As they pass each the younger cries out to the older, “I don’t understand – What do you know that I don’t?” Responds the old man, eyes twinkling with compassion and laughter, “The difference between us is simple. You come to conquer the mountain but the mountain is stronger than you, so you are conquered. I come to merge with the mountain – so the mountain loves me and lifts me to her summit.” To merge is to traverse the chasm that separates object and subject. It is to become one with your reality, to be on the inside of the experience. Erotic living is living on the inside. The opposite of Eros is therefore alienation. To be alienated is to always feel that you are an outsider with no safe place to call home. The result of non-erotic living is always bad choices, betrayals and pain. I am not in the flow. I wind up always having to watch my back. I am on the outside – exiled from my inner castle. I have lost face. The face is the truest reflection of the erotic. To lose face is to become de-eroticized. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – TO SEE GOD IN YOUR FACE
August 8, 2008
There is a tale told of the Master Nahman Kossover. His mystical practice was to meditate on the divine name. It is said that when he taught he could actually see –reflected back to him- the divine name on the faces of his listeners. At some point Nachman fell on rough times and was forced to leave teaching and become a merchant. He was greatly saddened because he found it very difficult to fully concentrate on the divine name amidst the buy sell atmosphere of the market. Until he hit upon a solution. He hired an assistant to travel with him with no other job than to be present. When he would at the face of his assistant he would be reconnected with the name of God. Was the assistant particularly beautiful? I doubt it. The assistant was every man and every woman. You and me. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Freeing My soul from the Trauma of Death in Life is the same process as freeing Souls from a Traumatic Death: Marc Gafni on the road from Warsaw to Lublin:
August 9, 2008
Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Comments welcome on info@marcafni.com Today we were in Maidanek, Lublin and arrived for Shabbat in Krakow. About Maidanek Lublin after shabbot. A word before sundown. The purpose of our trip is to participate in an ancient spiritual technology of healing. The freeing of Souls. Some say this is why the Master Nachman went to Oman, the place of a great massacre. We know of certain tales of the Baal Shem Tov where the freeing of a trapped soul is the underlying spiritual plot in the story. To free souls, is what is referred to the by tradition as Chesed shel Emet. True Love. Totally real love. Total Good. One does not free soul in order to gain some advantage in this world from the souls. They are dead to the worlds of networking and skillful means. They contribute little to the life strategies of our egoic survival in all of its layers and disguises. To free souls is a Bodhisattva act of compassion. There are too few Bodhisattvas these days. The Dali Lama told me something a few years back, visiting him in at this home in Dharamsala, that really moved me. We always think that someone else should be the Bodhisattva. Never us. But paradoxically if I begin to view myself as a Bodhisattva then I might also be called to live as a Bodhisattva. To be a Bodhisattva is to live as a manifestation of compassion. It is the destiny of the Tzadkk, the esoteric master. And in the words of the biblical mantra, “my nation are all Tzadikim” – that is to say – “If not me then who and if not now then when”. We are on the road to Maidanek and Lublin. There is a sense that we are driving through kililng fields. One can sense the souls pushing on the bus from the sides of the roads. They have heard we are coming, informed by the living soul field and perhaps also by the special messenger of the great master Shmuel of Slonim with whom we had a dramatic meeting yesterday at the cemetery in Warsaw. We are in southeast Poland on the road from Warsaw to Lublin. This is the place of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that preceded the gas chambers of the Nazi Concentration camps. The consisted of trucks in which the gas exhaust was turned inside, in the flat storage space on the back of the truck. As many as thirty boys and girls could be stuffed screaming in terror into the back of such a van and slowly gassed to death. If the mobile units were out of gas on a particular day then the children, hundreds of them might be thrown alive into a ditch and buried, let to die the horrible death of slow suffocation amidst the bloodcurdling screams of fear and agony as the last breath of life were viciously squeezed from the young bodies. We stop the bus at a gas station, adjacent to a large filed where we can gather in a semi circle and clear the souls. We take our place as witnesses. The souls are cleared. There is a lot of joy on the bus limned with a serious and purposeful determination. Our hearts are open but we refuse to drown in the grief. We are here because this is where we need to be. Everyone knows themselves why this is so for them. We live under and behind our personalities. Never leaving them behind, just holding the personality lightly. No trauma, No Drama. No hope, No fear. The souls of the children remain trapped. Trapped in the unspeakable trauma of life. Death in horror is a moment of life. Being stuck in that trauma is not that different from being stuck in a moment- a moment in which the soul is murdered in life. What we normally refer to as psychological or spiritual trauma. Think about it for a second. If you suffer terrible abuse of whatever kind perhaps it is chronic the abuse of being falsely accused or name raped, perhaps it is the abuse of being horribly beaten by your mother, or violently raped by your father. {I talk here of genuine abuse, not the pseudo victim hood of those who cry far more then it hurts and desecrate their tears by deploying them in the most cynical fashion, as lethal weapons of abuse themselves}. The moment of intense pain in which the abuse occurs invades, violates and ruptures something of our connection to reality. We become alienated, often in an internally grisly sort of way, with the reality of love, which lies behind the veil and remains the true and ultimate nature of all that is. We lost touch with reality. We become insane. To be insane is to lost touch with reality. To forget the true nature of all things. Even if we appear to be perfectly functional, rational and well adjusted we are just beneath the surface- Insane. The veneer of civilization is very thin. To free a living being from trauma we need to re- ligare, to reweave the person’s soul back into the large field of being. To re-quilt their life force in seamless coat of the Kosmos, which is all, good, all love and all eros. When this happens the soul is able to continue its growth and evolution, which is the true pleasure of every soul. Life is for pleasure. The ultimate pleasure is the ultimate growth. Life is Growth is Pleasure. To free the souls of those who were traumatized in death, is emotionally and spiritually not that different from healing souls traumatized life. The greatest healing is to transmit to the soul the experience of profound heart and hara. Big Heart grounded in the full power and stability of the divine embrace. To clear a physical space of it’s trauma is in turn not that different from freeing souls. The one who does the clearing, supported by a group of witnesses relates to the land of physical structure needed to be cleared much the same as one would relate to a human or sentient being in need of a healing. It all depends of Love. We came to Poland to free souls. Knowing as well that according to the law of reciprocity, which governs spirit – in which giving is receiving and receiving is giving – that this would also free something in our souls. It all depends on Love. It is before shabbot. I have asked a friend to post this for me. Thank You. Shabbat Shalom
Marc Gafni – ON BETRAYAL
August 9, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The result of non-erotic living is always bad choices, betrayals and pain. I am not in the flow. I wind up always having to watch my back. I am on the outside – exiled from my inner castle. I have lost face. As Sufi Poet Rumi says so well: The real orchards and fruits are within the heart; the reflection of their beauty is falling upon this water and earth (the external world) all the deceived ones come to gaze on this reflection in the opinion that this is the place of Paradise. They are fleeing from the origins of the orchards; they are Making merry over a phantom.
KNOCKING FROM THE INSIDE – Marc Gafni
August 10, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In the Hebrew mystical tradition, language is not the mere random designation of sounds and letters in a particular pattern . For the mystic, words are vital portals to meaning. Language is the spiritual DNA of reality. Thus when one root word is used for seemingly disparate ideas you can rest assured that these different ideas are in fact integrally related. So let’s watch for a moment as the magic of languages dances before us. The Hebrew term for the Holy of Holies is lefnie u’lefnim. Literally rendered into English this means ‘the inside of the inside’. This was not merely a reflection of the physical fact that it was the inner most point in the Temple. Indeed, teach the mystics, the opposite is true – it was situated in the inner most physical point in order to evoke the sense of interiority that is the very key to eros. In another architectural expression of this idea, the Temples of the Masonic order have doors which open only from the inside. One must insert their hand through an opening in the door to grasp the handle on the inside. The point – in order to open the portals to mystery, one must approach from the inside. What’s more, this opening was shaped like a heart. Eros – the yearning for the inside – is the essence of love. The Masonic order of course springs from the Templars, a monastic order of Christian mystics in Jerusalem who fell in love with and understood deeply the eros of the Temple. We keep knocking at the door until we remember that we are knocking from the inside. END
Marc Gafni – The Spell of Spelling – Panim
August 10, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The last post however was just for starters. Hold on, for the magic of language, the spell of spelling – has just begun. The Hebrew word for “inside,” panim, has two other meanings as well. The first not surprisingly, is face. Face is the place where my insides are revealed. There are forty five muscles in the face. Most of them unnecessary for the biological functioning of the face. Their major purpose it would seem is to express emotional depth and nuance. They are the muscles of the soul. Every muscle of the face reflects another nuance of depth and interiority. When I say, “I need to speak face to face,” I am in erotic need of an inside conversation. At this point all of the cell phones and sophisticated internet hook-ups won’t give me what I need, for while amazingly efficient and effective, they are non-erotic. True erotic conversations rarely happen on the Internet. The spell continues. There is a third meaning to the Hebrew root panim. In a slightly modified form it means ”before,” in the sense of appearing before God. Specifically, the biblical myth text in Leviticus tells of the Temple’s high priest – who on the biblical Yom Kippur, the Day of At-one-ment, appear Lifnei Hashem: ‘Before God’ . Read in the English this appears similar to a summons to appear “before” a judging court, generally not a joyous occasion. For the Hebrew mystics, however, rooted as they are in the magic and spells of language, it is an entirely different affair. Remember that all three English words, face, inside and before, share the same Hebrew root. The essence then of the day of at-one-ment then is not a commandment to appear ”before God” in the magistrate sense. It is rather an invitation to live on the inside of God’s face. Once the journey to God is finished, the infinite journey in God begins
Marc Gafni – Everyman’s Eros
August 11, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The eros experience is the province of mystics, artists and scholars. But not only. It awaits all of us in every arena of endeavor. Have you ever gone jogging? You get up not at all enthusiastic about running but somehow feeling obligated. You reluctantly get dressed and begin your route. Slowly the discomfort fades and you begin to enjoy yourself. You find yourself in the rhythm. And then, on good days, at some point you break through an invisible barrier and begin to fly. Ecstatic, you lose yourself in the wind. Your body, the earth, the wind, the rhythms of your pace, the sound of your feet, all merge into one. It is no longer accurate, even if but for the briefest of moments, to say “I am running.” Rather, you are the wind, you are running.
Marc Gafni – In Every Stitch
August 11, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com It was the middle of the 19th century . Heaven was joyous, hell was in an uproar, for it seems that one Hanoch the Shoemaker was about to usher in the Messiah. The Master of Rishin, tells the story to his disciples something like this, “Hanoch the shoemaker used to sit every day intent in the stitching of his leather shoes. It was known that with every stitch Hanoch was ‘meyached yichudim elyonim.’ That is, he was unifying higher unities. Now ‘yichudim’, my holy disciples, in Kabbalah always means ‘zivug’ (coupling). {Zivug is an ultimate erotic term. It refers not to the sexual person, but to the cosmic love affair between the masculine God presence and the feminine Shechina presence. A love affair brought about by human action.} Now the strange secret of the story, my holy community, is that Hanoch wasn’t doing anything which should have caused such ecstatic yichudim. He wasn’t fulfilling any religious commandment, he was engaged in no ritual or pious act. “Perhaps,” said one of the disciples, “he was meditating on a passage of Zohar as he stitched.” Another chimed in, “Perhaps he was doing the spiritual exercises of Luria’s Kabbalah which cause pleasure above?” “No, nothing of the sort,” replied the master. “Then what was he doing while he stitched?” pressed the disciples. “Nothing!” responded the master with a slight smile. “Hanoch was doing nothing…nothing other than being fully inside in every single stitch.” “Fully inside in every stitch?!” Duly impressed, the eager disciples now had another confusion. “So then, Master, why is it that the Messiah has not yet announced his arrival?” The master of Rishin sighed and said, “The force of evil discovered the cause and countered it. Sadly he seems to have gotten the best of our holy shoemaker.” “But how?” the crestfallen disciples asked. The reply, “With plenty of good business.” And so it was, rushing to fulfill his flood of orders, Hanoch became the busiest and most prosperous cobbler in the region, mindlessly producing shoe after cookie-cut shoe, and the Messiah still has not yet come.
Marc Gafni – Poetess, Prophetess and Priestess
August 12, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Eros is the birthright of everyman and everywoman. Though we may search long and hard for priests and prophets who can guide and counsel us, in the end we must return time and again to our own inner sanctum. There the priest and prophet we seek sleep in our depths, waiting to be stirred and finally woken. I will never forget one of my early dates with Cary. We were walking Jerusalem’s streets. It was late, the silence was luminous. It was one of those moments when intimacy lets you enter for a moment. I asked Cary, ‘What do you pray for, in your heart of hearts, what do you most want to be?’ She became very quiet, I could tell she was deciding whether or not she was ready to offer up her truest, most vulnerable, answer to me. We walked on. She started a sentence, but faltered, silent. Finally, mustering a whisper, she told me, “When I pray for who I most want to be…” glancing over at me uncertainly, “I pray…to be God’s poetess, prophetess and priestess.” Her sincerity was so precious, so deep. I knew she felt silly, her most inside place exposed. I also knew then this was the woman I would marry. Sadly as time went on I realized that it was not all that it seemed to be. But that is another story. Not for the blogs. I hope one day we will be able to work out how we hurt each other in our marriage and more significantly how we hurt each other after our marriage. One of the dangers of eros is the inability to face our own darkness. It is not all sweetness and light. Sometimes the desire to be a poetess is eros in pure form. And sometimes it is pseudo eros hiding a deep knowing fear that we are not the special one. And it was no less true that I was so caught up in my mission and my desire for the great partner, the great love, that I did not take care of Cary. She needed care and nourishing. I was distracted by the siren’s song. I betrayed her and in doing so betrayed Eros. That the betrayal was mutual and in the end, her mask dropped to reveal for a time not Kali but Kali in disheveled and distorted form, only makes me feel better when I am contracted. I wish her blessing.
Marc Gafni – GOD’S POETS
August 12, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In our deepest erotic longings, so many of us do want to be God’s poets, God’s prophets and priests. Yet we are ashamed to admit it –sometimes even to ourselves. We fear to appear ridiculous or grandiose even in our own eyes. Yet the biblical myth insists that we are all priests and prophets in potential. We can all enter the Holy of Holies for it is within us. In contradistinction to the priestly class and prophetic elites of the ancient Near East, Biblical myth talks of a kingdom of priests and a people who are all prophets . Life itself is the only real Temple of the spirit. Eros is everywhere. Churches and synagogues are a pallid, even if important, compromise for our dis-enchanted age. The Zohar teaches that every erotic inside experience is a Shechina experience of the Holy of Holies. It is when we become one with the way,Mark when we have moved from the outside to the inside. It is in this sense that the Temple is called in Hebrew the Bayit. Bayit means, quite simply, Home . The holiest place in the world – is home. Eros is about coming home. We all live split off from our selves. We feel all too often like imposters in our own lives, wearing masks and wondering when, and if, it will ever start to feel like home. That is what it means to live on the outside.
Victim or Player: Marc Gafni
August 13, 2008
Victim or Player Auschwitz Birkenhau Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Share comments on info@marcgafni.com The dance of the subject and object, the movement between the two is the great and undulating dance of our lives. It is the perpetual dance between the victim and the player. If we are an object then we are acted upon and done to- we are not actors and doers. The larger mysteries of life are beyond our ability to fully grasp and we seek to find whatever subjectivity we can in the midst of the sometimes gracious and all to often cruel objectivity of human life. The tragic inadequacy of the being in object relation to the world is that we lose so much of our aliveness, not to mention our power and dignity. The object all to easily becomes the victim who ceases to be a player in his or her own destiny. Naturally then, when we wind up in places that hurt we blame drivers other then ourselves for the choice of our destination. While this has the advantage of perpetually reaffirming our innocence it has the shadow of forever confirming our impotence. For the price of innocence is impotence. If you are not part of the problem then you most certainly cannot be part of the solution. All that remains is escalating cycles of recrimination and demonization. And yet life is filled with realities in which one is in fact, a victim. I spend all of yesterday in Auschwitz-Birkdenhau, the extermination factory. It is a story I know well and have lived in the innermost cells of my body as long as breath has moved in me. But to see and walk through the women’s barracks, a place not fit for any sentient being, designed to degrade and crush all that is human and holy, is to be pierced by pain and sorrow so intense that it cannot find location in the garb of words. Victims who were reduced to objects. Yes, some of these men, women and children were able to retain their subjectivity, their humanity and to silently defy their objectifiers. Many,some say most, were not. What is clear however is that we owe them everything in their victimhood. It is not only Auschwitz however. We are sometimes, not often but sometimes, faced with oppression of terrible nature and consequence in our lives which at its core renders us victims; objects of a karma, or dehumanizing wave of hatred or negative energy that we can do little to stand against. We are victims. We are objectified, reduced and de-humanized. Often by the most respectable of people under the guise of the most noble of goals. In these situations as well there are places and pockets in it all, in which we can retain our humanity, our subjectivity. We can do this by holding on to our sanity and joy in face of the blackness insanity; we can do it by being love- by being love even in the face of fear and its fabrications. We might also be able to do so by identifying the ways in which we contributed to our own suffering. All this is not to excuse the torturer but to locate the locus of our own dignity and power. For it is only that which we have created, which might be a pivoting point for change and healing. At the same time we dare not over extend our subjectivity. This is the great mistake both of classical religion and contemporary New Age dogma. Both place the human being at the center of his or her own reality. Both gorgeously reject the stance of victimhood and demand that the human being accept responsibility for the circumstances of his life. In different ways they both loudly and proudly assert, “Your life is your creation”. In every moment you are creating or dis-creating the reality of your life. Do not cry more then it hurts. You think you are victim; perhaps – but now turn it around and realize that perhaps you are the predator and victimizer, a reality you have hidden from, in the dogged insistence on your victim status. Yet this seemingly noble teaching and world view is infected with hubris of enormous proportion. It is a denial of all humility and all mystery. It is the usurpation of the role of the creator, Prometheus unbound. In the desperate apotheosis of the subject, the object moment in human life and relations is heretically denied. We begin to blame the victim, desperately seeking his culpability in order to ward off our own vulnerability. We need the amulet of the guilty verdict of the sufferer to protect us from the fear that we might be the next of victim- objects of the mysterious and seemingly arbitrary working of cruel and capricious circumstance. We become callous and indifferent and invent every manner of reason to re-betray the betrayed; in the word of Wilihem Riech, to murder Christ again and again. It is only in embrace of the object and subject together that sacred union is realized and balance is achieved. It is the dance of the subject and object that integrity shows its face, ethical integrity, psychological integrity and spiritual integrity. It is in this context and with this backdrop in mind and heart, that I want to share with you a liberation moment of some two hours in duration which suffused my being yesterday morning before our trip to Auschwitz. In this liberation experience a space of insight was opened and I realized again what I already knew but this time from a deeper and more real place. The realization entered my body. It moved from being merely an intellectual position or even a heart murmur to being a fully embodied incarnate reality. More later… Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – Coming Home
August 13, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Once a year in a spine tingling mystery rite the priest would enter the Holy of Holies. On this day, every person was forgiven . On this day, every person was to re-experience themselves in the depths of their own true innocence. For on the inside we are all innocent. This day is called in Biblical myth tradition Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement: At-One-Ment. The core erotic idea of the Bayit – the Temple – was that every person could and needs to access the Shechina experience . Every human being needs to live erotically in all facets of being. Every human being has a primary erotic need to move beyond the imposter into his or her own deepest place of oneness, oneness with themselves, their relationships, and their reality. The Zohar refers to the exile from one’s deepest self as alma depiruda, the world of separation . The most tragic separation is not from mother, not from community, but from self. The journey of a lifetime is to move from alma depiruda to alma deyichuda, from separation to oneness – At-one-ment. Love is the path back home. We are not talking about superficial love, not merely sexual love, but erotic love.
Marc Gafni – The litmus of an erotic lover
August 13, 2008
The litmus of an erotic lover is this: Does this person lead you back to your inner self? Are you able to share with him or her your most vulnerable, fledgling, faltering dreams? Every person has a Holy of Holies which, in those most intimate of times, we let another enter as the priest to worship at our altar. And in the gorgeous paradox of the spirit, by letting a lover enter we ourselves are let in as well. For when the Temple door is open and the lover enters, we ourselves trail behind. We gain uncommon access to our inner selves, a place which we alone are often unable to reach. The true lover always takes you home. As Emily Dickinson notes, Eden is that old fashioned house We dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode until we drive away Love lets us realize the Eden we are dwelling in every day. That is what it means to feel at home in your life, the greatest feeling in the world. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – Left Outside
August 14, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Much of modernity militates against the eros of being on the inside. Indeed, the whole psychological stance of fortifying the ego is about keeping people on the outside. Our way of thinking about this all was powerfully influenced by the work of the child psychologist Margaret Mahler. She taught that the primary goal of growing up and out of being a baby is to achieve what she termed individuation and separation. The healthy human baby’s journey must be towards ever ascending levels of autonomy and separateness. That mantra which rings at least partially true in the infant years is unfortunately taken as the mantra for our lives. We achieve every increasing levels of separateness and autonomy until we are at the top, all alone. Yes, we do need to reinforce the ego, but we also need to let the ego boundaries drop. It is the only way to let others, and sometimes even ourselves, inside. When psychology defines a person’s real self as ego then we begin to view the breakdown of ego as a breakdown in normality. We erect our fortress so high and so ‘healthy’ that no one, including ourselves, can get inside. And yet are not most of the great experiences we seek in life dependent on the ego breaking down? From falling in love to orgasm to spiritual connection, the most sought after experiences can happen only when the ego boundaries soften to allow entry to these welcome guests. When we spend our lives under the spell of the separate individuate mantra we block access to the Eros our souls so desperately crave. We all need lovers to let us in. They may be lovers, teachers, friends, students and hopefully parents. No one can survive on the outside.
IF YOU CAN HEAR YOURSELF TALKING SIT DOWN – Marc Gafni
August 14, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Teachers can take us home, but only if they teach from the inside. It is reported that Ziv Hirsch of Zhitomir, charismatic mystical master of the 19th century, would occasionally in the middle of his speech, sit down, abruptly ending his address in mid thought. When pressed for explanation he responded, “My master – the Maggid of Mezritch – taught me, ‘If when giving a sicha (spiritual lesson) you can hear yourself talking, sit down.’” In A Movable Feast, Hemingway remarks on the difference between his telling a story and the story telling itself. When he begins to tell the story, he knows it is time to quit for the day. This is a true echo of the temple tradition. Sit down when you can hear yourself speak
Marc Gafni – Eros & Zohar – Expanding our Limited Vocabulary Part 1
August 15, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The word eros entered Western consciousness through Socrates’ best student. Plato, in his wonderful dialogue “The Symposium”, calls the inner state which we have been describing eros. To be a lover, implies Plato, is to passionately enter the inside of reality. Eros is love but not in the casual, pallid and sometimes anemic way we often talk of love. On the inside of things all is aflame. In Hebrew the term for Love is Ahavah, rooted in the word lahav – torch. Similarly the Hebrew word source for Love, Lev, meaning heart, is used in the sense of ‘Labat Eish’ – heart of fire . For lev – origin of the English word lava – is expressive of the sometimes volcanic heat that erupts from one’s inner depths when erotically engaged in any endeavor. Thus the Hebrew word Ahava and the Greek Eros enrich our limited (western) vocabulary of love. For vocabulary always reflects reality. We don’t have an English word for the type of fully expanded Eros we will be revealing in this book, because such expanded Eros is still so foreign to the fabric of our lives. Yet in Hebrew, there are a plethora of such words. The most important word which we have discussed at length is Shechina. There is also Ahavah, fiery love, as we just learned together.
Marc Gafni – EROS: PLATO AND THE ZOHAR PART 2
August 15, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Kabala scholar Yehuda Libes reminds us of a third word. He suggests that the word Zohar, the name of the great magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, is roughly synonymous with the Greek word eros. For the authors of the Zohar were not dry medieval scholastics; they were rather men of great passion and depth who believed that by entering the inside of the moment, the text, or the relationship, they could recreate and heal the world. Zohar, like eros, is powerful, intense and deep. It is the source of all creativity and pleasure. *B – Further, the Zohar masters understood Eros to be the essential goal of the spiritual journey. Often in Hebrew mystical texts the erotic is called a Messiah experience. For them Messiah was not a historical happening as much as an inner event. The Hebrew word for messiah derives from the root word Siach. Siach means no more and no less than ‘conversation’. The core of the Zohar text is basically a series of sacred conversations. The messiah, they taught, lingers whenever we so fully enter conversation that the boundaries of ego fall away and we are left only with the raw joy of fellowship. One of the most profound and difficult sections of the Zohar is called the Idra Rabba, the Great Gathering. Similar to the Symposium of Plato, it is the story of seven close friends came together for the holy fellowship. And like the Symposium, it is the passionate conversation and camaraderie of friends reveling in each other’s company as they search for depth which infused the gathering with Eros. In truth any conversation which is true, authentic and deep is erotic conversation. In the great gathering of the men of the Zohar, as in the Symposium, both the form and content is about Eros . The value of the gathering then is the gathering itself. It need not justify itself in terms of any other standard or value. When one is willing to let go of agendas, stop networking and enter the depth of conversation, then one is on the inside. When the other person’s talk is no longer merely the time to work out what I will say next, when deep listening becomes mutual, when words begin to flow and time stands still, when a few hours seems but a few minutes, then the Gods of Zohar and Eros have been invoked. When Diotima – the old wise woman in the Symposium – talks about Eros and Shimon Bar Yochai, hero of the Idra, talk about Zohar- clearly neither is referring to the narrow modern sense of sex. Rather, Zohar and Eros evoke a sense of merging with the flow of the moment, of moving from outside observer to passionate participant; Eros in the sense of being on the inside. Thus, “Zohar” is not merely the name of the work; it is an evocative word which seeks to capture glimmerings of Eros. The ultimate paradigm of identity between medium and message. Process and content merge in the word. The Zohar experience is the Erotic experience
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Marc Gafni -RECAPITULATION
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
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Let us take a moment to see the full beauty of where we’ve gone on our journey thus far. Till now we have understood that the Temple is the archetype of eros. We have understood eros, the Greek term for loving, as the experience of being on the inside. This is the name of the Temple’s Holy of Holies – lefnai lefnim – the inside of the inside, the face of all faces. The experience of Shechina – the sensual divine force which rests between the cherubs in the Holy of Holies – is the erotic experience. In fact the mystics often use the word Shechina as a synonym for eros.
Now lets add one dramatic step: The Hebrew word for Temple is Mikdash – literally translated as Holiness. If you put it all together it is radical, revolutionary and overwhelmingly relevant to our lives.
What it means is that the erotic and the holy are the same thing, or to put it in more mathematical form:
Eros = = Shechina = the Inside = Zohar = Holy.
Finally, we have a definition of holiness. So many people use the word holy but virtually no one knows what it really means. Ask someone for a definition and you will likely get a fuzzy, nebulous response which will leave you no richer than before. So here –at last- is a definition of holiness. To be holy is to be on the inside. The opposite of holiness therefore is not un-holiness or anti- holiness. It is not impurity or the demonic possession of the devil. The opposite of the holy is the superficial. Eros is about depth. Depth is an inside experience. It has its own unique nuance, texture and richness. The superficial is bland and common.
Holiness is eroticism. Sin is superficiality.
The Second Face of Eros: Fullness of Presence – Marc Gafni
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
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The second face of eros is the ‘fullness of presence’
. This is not a distinct and different quality but flows naturally and even overlaps with the erotic qualities of being on the inside. And yet it is not quite the same. Of course being on the inside requires the fullness of presence. But we can experience full presence even when we have not merged with the moment or crossed over to the inside. Full presence is about showing up. You can show up and be fully present in a conversation without necessarily losing yourself in the encounter’s flow. Full presence at work can mean that you derive joy, satisfaction and self worth from your vocation. It means you feel full and not empty.
Marc Gafni – SUN AUG 17
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
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When I would lead prayers at our retreat center overlooking the Sea of Galilee in Israel, we often do a face-to-face prayer. In this prayer, people sit in twos and read Psalms to one another. They each are singing praises to the God point in the other. Before we start the chanting, I ask each pair to look deeply into each other’s face. ”Begin by being wordlessly present for each other. Experience the full presence of another waiting for you.
At this point I would often tell a particular mystical tale which I love very much.
The Chassidim, adherents of a powerful kabbalistic myth movement which reached its apex in mid-nineteenth century, tell of a girl – Sarah – who had run away from home to a convent. Now convents are beautiful – for nuns, but not for Sarah. Everyone knew where she was, yet no one could persuade her to leave the convent and return home. Finally the distraught parents turned to the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name.
It is reported that the Baal Shem went and sat behind a tree not far from the convent. He brought with him no books , no ritual prayer objects, and only the bare amount of food necessary to sustain him. One day goes by, Sarah does not come. A second day – no sign of her. A third – no girl… But wait, the sun is setting – Sarah runs out, looks around and eventually finds her way to the master, sitting quietly behind his tree. They look at each other, wordlessly, and she goes back home, ultimately growing up to be one of the great holy women of her day.
Late in life she was asked what the Baal Shem did to make her leave the convent. She responded. ‘On the first day I felt him there, waiting, and I was angry with him. What right did he have?! On the second day I was no longer angry, just curious – who was he, and why is he waiting for me? But I was determined not to let him trap me with my own curiosity. On the third day I felt him waiting and I was engulfed by an overwhelming sense of love. I tried to resist it but my desire grew and grew until I could resist it no longer. And I ran outside to see his face.”
What a magnificent moment of eros!
Marc Gafni – SUN AUG 17 – Part 2
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
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To live erotically is to be fully present
to each other’s richness, complexity and ultimate grandeur. It is to fully wait for the other to appear. The Shechina in the Temple is termed the indwelling presence. The erotic is always the experience of full presence. The Shechina, say the mystics, is waiting for us to show up.
The Shechina is presence waiting for us to be present
. She is eros, standing outside of our window, waiting. Waiting for us to feel her presence. Waiting for us to be overwhelmed by her love. Waiting for us to run out and behold with wonder – her face.
How many people have come up to me after those uncommon sessions of looking into another’s face. They come in tears, in joy, in awe, each with a different story. But they all share a common theme. ‘First I felt uncomfortable. I kept shifting my gaze. Looking at her necklace, her earlobes, her hair, but it was so hard to look at her face. Finally, our eyes fell into sync. It was uncomfortable, but we kept at it. Eyes – brown, with freckles of color. A funny, imperfect face. And then suddenly, something gave. A rush of emotion. A moment of release into the other person’s gaze.’ Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, you never forget it.
Have you ever looked, but really looked, into another person’s face? Have you ever witnessed that moment when the soul comes rushing up from its inner chambers and opens wide the windows of the eyes to see you, seeing her? To greet you like the day light? This is the mystery of love, of the eyes and their eros.
Feel the face of your partner as a sculptor would his clay. Run your hands – erotically, not sexually- over the skin, the bone structure, and then look again deeply into the eyes. In the eros of face touched and felt, the God point of the other emerges and we are moved with full heart to sing praise.
Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions
August 18, 2008
Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions
Marc Gafni
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Eros is about feeling the fullness of being, the opposite of emptiness. Every human being has met emptiness; that feeling we experience in the late night, home alone or in the hotel room we return to after a long day’s work on a business trip. We enter the room and are often overwhelmed by intense feelings of emptiness. It makes me wonder if the originators of MTV had this in mind when they named their station something that sounds precisely like EmptyTV. For that’s what we do in the void. We flip on the cable or order up dinner and entertainment – anything to not stay in the emptiness. Indeed the sentence that I probably repeat to my students more than any other is “Life is what you do with your emptiness”.
Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions Part 2
August 18, 2008
Marc Gafni
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In our society which sadly defines human beings as consumers and not lovers, denial is the primary strategy for coping with emptiness. We are sold ful-fill-ment at every turn and in every guise. We buy buy buy, hoping that one of the hawked elixirs might finally full-fill us. And yet the emptiness lingers.
This is the great paradox of emptiness. The first relation to emptiness must not be to fill it but simply to be mindful of it. To notice the emptiness. The goal is to move beyond the void to the fullness of eros and Shechina. Yet, paradoxically, you can only access the fullness of being if you are willing to stay in the emptiness long enough to find your way. The path to eros is filled with detours to pseudo-eros, but they are all dead ends. When we are so desperate for fullness, when the emptiness hurts too much, these detours seduce us off the path, often spinning us to painful places we never wanted to go.
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, Spiritual Director
http://www.bayitchadash.org/staff.shtml Reb Gafni is the Rosh Bayit of Bayit Chadash. His primary affiliations include being a Visiting Fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and Senior Scholar at the Melitz Educational Institution. Additionally, Reb Gafni was a fellow at the Oriental Institute of Oxford University, he is currently completing the writing of a commentary on the Hasidic text “Mei Ha’Shiloach.” Reb Gafni serves as a contributing editor to the American Tikkun magazine, a bimonthly journal critiquing politics, culture and society from a Jewish perspective. He is also a contributing editor of Chayim Acherim, Israel’s leading spirituality magazine.
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni
Together with colleagues, Reb Gafni is developing a new school of Jewish thought which is coming to be called “The School of Personal Myth”. This proposes a marked shift from national to personal myth as the center of Jewish consciousness. Reb Gafni is reformulating and extending the core constructs of Post-Lurianic thought in a modern Neo-Hasidic context. Also the host and creator of a highly acclaimed national Israeli television program on ethics and spirituality, Reb Gafni’s work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher: wise, deep, compassionate, accessible, and universal.
His English book, Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment was released by Pocket Books in 2001 and is accompanied by a national PBS Special of the same title. The book is a best seller and is now being translated into numerous languages. In Hebrew, his two volume set of New Jewish Thought -entitled Certainty and Uncertainty is published by Modan Publishers. Written in collaboration with Ohad Ezrachi, Lilith and Sacred Feminism is slated for release in 2005. The Mystery of Love was also recently released in English in the spring of 2003 by Atria books. Reb Gafni is married to Chaya Kaplan, his full partner in all endeavors, and he is the father of Eytan and Yair. Articles on Rabbi Gafni Cover of Maariv October 15, 2004 Read More More Marc Gafni As Spiritual Hero In Catalyst Magazine My July 3, 2008 Dialogue With R. Gafni My July 18-20, 2008 Weekend With R. Gafni For 30 years, Marc Winiarz (Gafni) has been on the cutting edge of Modern Orthodoxy. He’s been an incarnation of its twists and turns. Between 1977-85, Gafni seemed like the Second Coming of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin when Rabbi Riskin represented the cutting edge of Modern Orthodoxy. Then he was the Second Coming of Rav Yosef Soloveitchik. Then he was a West Bank settler in Israel and chief rabbi of his own town (Beit Tzufim). Then he was the Second Coming of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (in English-language radio broadcasts in Israel around 1992-1993). Then Marc got into Eastern thinking (Buddhism, Hinduism), the sacred feminine, and the integration of pagan energy with prophetic Judaism. And now he’s a spiritual artist. “I don’t know where to start,” says my friend Joe* (an acquaintance of Winiarz’s for about 30 years) July 4, 2008. “This guy is just so goddamn fascinating. A year doesn’t go by when he doesn’t do something outrageous. For the last 48 hours [since Gafni returned to public life with MarcGafni.com], I’ve been intoxicated.” Luke: “It was a great experience [meeting Marc Gafni in Salt Lake City July 3, 2008]. He’s a fascinating guy.” In 2008, Marc received his doctorate of Philosophy (with a speciality in Hebrew mysticism) from Oxford University. His Oxford advisor was Dr. Norman Solomon (a retired 73-year old Orthodox Jew) and his external supervisor was Dr. Moshe Idel (the successor to Gershom Scholem as the leading scholar on kabbalah). Marc Winiarz (sometimes mistakenly spelled “Winyarz”) was born in Pittsfield, Massachuestts in 1960 to an Orthodox family of Holocaust survivors. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio. “At age six or seven, I knew that I wanted to be a rabbi,” Marc told the March 4, 2004 issue of Haaretz. “Because I really loved the world of the book, which I’d known since I began learning at age three.” Luke to Marc: “I heard your mother stuck your head in an oven?” Marc: “I’ve heard that story also. Completely not true. My poor mother.” From 1973-1977, Marc went to Ohr Torah aka Manhattan Hebrew High School, which was overseen by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and run by Vancouver rabbi Pinchas Bak (who died on Purim 1977 at age 32). Marc Belzberg was Winiarz’s dorm counselor in high school. Belzberg (who came to Judaism through Rabbi Bak) adored Winiarz. Some source say he wanted Winiarz to marry his sister Lisa. Winiarz has been married three times. When he was 18, he was engaged to a woman he never married. At age 20, Marc married for the first time (to Shifra from Maine). It lasted two years. (Winiarz has a daughter from his first marriage named Rachel. When she became an adult, she went on a quest to find her father. Though they met once, they’ve never had a relationship.) Joe* emails July 4, 2008:
During those years (circa 1980), a group of YU kids, all post a year or two at the prestigious yeshivot in Israel, would spend their summers doing sort of social work/kiruv in troubled areas in Israel. The groups were in cities like Zefat, Migdal Haemek, and the Hatikva quarter of Tel Aviv. The leader of this program, then called “techiya” (renaissance), was R. Muskin, then a dorm counselor at YU. Gafni never did the program, nor did he spend time in the yeshivot, so in that sense he was always an outsider. However, the social organization that yeshiva and techiya volunteers founded, Chevrat Aliyah Toranit, a sort of elitist dating program, really, was the first Gafni coup. At some point, just about the time he married (his first wife Shifra, who did spend time in Israel and I think was on Techiya as well), he [gave some popular lectures for the] organisation [led by Shifra circa 1982], leading to quite a bit of resentment among the “in” crowd, and actually, shortly thereafter, the organisation disappeared.
Winiarz attended Yeshiva University for one semester around 1981. He attended Queens College for one semester. “I transferred all my credits to Edison College,” says Marc. “It’s one of those places that give you life credit. I got my degree from Edison College (circa 1985) so that my mom would be happy.” Winiarz ran an organization called JPSY (Jewish Public School Youth) circa 1983-1986. It was funded by such major Jewish philanthropists as Jeffrey Glick, Michael Steinhardt and Marc Belzberg. Winiarz was hired at JPSY by Ellen Lieberman (who is now married to South African rabbi Ian Azizolohof). When Ellen left on maternity leave, Gafni took over. He moved it from an organization with two full-time employees and a budget of $25,000 a year to ten full-time employees and a budget around $500,000 a year. He renamed it “The Jewish Youth Movement.” He’d walk into public schools and recruited Jewish kids for JPSY. Due to the equal access law promulgated by President Reagen, you could teach religion in public school at an after-school club. Marc: “I went into the New York City superintendent of schools and asked to develop this JPSY program. He turns his back to me in this swivel arm chair like he’s thinking, then swivels back to me and he says in yiddish, ‘A shaila’s trafe,’ which means, ‘Don’t ask, just go do it.’ As long as we weren’t proselytizing, we could do what we wanted. “We didn’t go in with a shofar. We would walk in and get a ton of pizza. We’d hire a guy who’d play Billy Joel music. Gerson Veroba. He played Billy Joel better than Billy Joel. We’d announce, ‘Billy Joel concert. Pizza. Judaism.’ All the Jewish kids would come. They were all embarrassed to be Jewish. “Our big thing was Jewish pride. It wasn’t content. It was just, ‘Be proud that you’re Jewish. Don’t slink around your public school.’” “I was a young, full of energy, arrogant. I thought I could do anything, solve anything, but I didn’t have any protection. I was a complete outsider from Columbus, Ohio. When NCSY was getting 40 public school kids to some its program, we were getting 400 kids to JPSY. We were threatening the outreach establishment. “I received a phone call from one of the leaders of NCSY at the time telling me as much in rather harsh terms. “I was the summer rabbi at Lincoln Square Synagogue. They had over a thousand people a week coming to synagogue. I was an out of control, loving, talented, committed to everyone, arrogant kid who didn’t send people thank you notes and didn’t play the political game and didn’t cozy up to the right people. “I’ve raised a million dollars for JPSY. So picture how people looked at me.” In 1984, Marc and his wife brought a 16-year old girl named Judy into their home. She later said that Marc came on to her. Marc: “Judy’s version of events is false. It is completely distorted in substance, fact and tone.” A polygraph test in 2007 supported Marc’s claims, according to MarcGafni.com. Judy told her story to Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He chose to believe Winiarz. Judy told one of her counselors in JPSY, Susan. Susan brought Judy to Rabbi Blau who put out the word that Winiarz was dangerous. I’m told by anti-Winiarz sources that an informal Beit Din was convenened in New York about Marc and Judy. That Winiarz was told to quit his job and move from New York to some unsuspecting community and make a new life (that was how these things were handled until recently). Marc: “This New York Beit Din story is a complete fabrication. The Judy encounter should’ve been dealt with and healed immediately. I kept running JPSY for a couple of years [after the Judy controversy].” Rabbi Yosef Blau’s wife Rivkah worked for R. Shlomo Riskin in the 1970s and early 1980s (she ran his girls’ high school). She frequently found it distressing and burned out twice. She and her husband appeared to have a tense relationship with R. Riskin (though they’ve all since buried the hatchet, and R. Blau has a son who works for R. Riskin). Marc Winiarz was R. Riskin’s poster boy. R. Riskin was trying to raise money to show that he could produce a new generation of rabbis. The first (and only in the United States?) guy R. Riskin ordained was Winiarz. Yeshiva University’s backbenchers were furious at R. Riskin for starting his own Hebrew high school (Ohr Torah). R. Riskin was talking about starting his own ordination program up the road from YU. R. Riskin was taking funding that used to go to YU. The guy who funded Ohr Torah was Max Stern of Stern College (the women’s branch of YU) fame. Rabbi Blau and Marc Winiarz had a confrontation in 1985 in a hallway on the third or fourth floor of YU. According to sources, the confrontation went like this: Marc. “Rabbi Blau, what are you doing? Are you crazy? Why haven’t you come to talk to me to heal this thing? You’re spreading stories that are not true.” Rabbi Blau says: “I’m going to get you.” Marc responds: “Why don’t you first take care of problems in your own home before you start throwing stones at other people?” I hear that Rabbi Blau then threw a punch at Marc and said, “I’ll bring you down.” On Oct. 12, 2004, R. Blau told me: “At one point, Mordechai came into my office and told me he’d get my wife. I was stern with him. He was threatening.” In July 2008, I ask Marc about all this. He replies: “This was a long time ago. I wish the Blaus well. I no longer live in their world. Perhaps one day in the future we will all be able to sit down like human beings and heal this.” In early 1986, Winiarz finished his term at JPSY. Marc: “I ended JPSY for a simple reason. A lot of people who do youth work does it between 18 and 26 and then you burn out.” Luke: “Weren’t you exiled to Boca? Wasn’t there a Beit Din convened?” Marc: “It never happened.” Luke: “So you went to Boca voluntarily?” Marc: “Of course. “It’s a natural transition. I went to Rabbi Kenny Hain, who was head of communal services at YU. I was ready to take a pulpit. He suggested Boca Raton.” The rabbi in Boca Raton before Winiarz was Mark Dratch, Rabbi Norman Lamm’s son-in-law. The congregation (Boca Raton Community Synagogue) had about 20 families. They’d been brutal to R. Dratch. One guy was particularly vicious — attorney Steve Marcus who was murdered in a gay bar ten years later. Rabbi Lamm came down to help his son-in-law. When he got up to speak, four people turned their chairs to face the wall. Nobody wanted to take the pulpit that R. Lamm had ostracized. Winiarz moved to Boca Raton around 1986. He did a great job in outreach. He was charismatic. The size of the congregation tripled. Marc ruffled feathers. Before the high holidays, he took out full page ads in the local Jewish newspaper that said, ‘Are you bored with impersonal and monotonous services? Come join Rabbi Marc.’ “The other rabbis in town were furious with me,” says Marc, “because they felt I was describing their congregation, which of course I was.” Marc took on other rabbis over the lack of rabbinic certification on the sale of meat. “The meat would be stamped kosher,” says Marc, “but the rabbis who were giving the kosher stamp never stopped by to check. It was completely corrupt. I got up in a meeting and said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe in kosher or not, people are trusting us that this is kosher.’ “They fluffed me off. I said I would publicly say this is a fraud, which I did. That did not get anyone happy there.” “The pope had come to South Florida. The local rabbis went. They kissed his ring. I felt it was wrong. The pope had been inappropriate vis-a-vis the Jews in Auschwitz, without acknowledging directly what had happened there. I published a long list of the Pope’s refusals to recognize the integrity of the Holocaust and papal responsibility for being silent during the Nazi regime. “With a group of other rabbis, we dressed in concentartion camp suits and blocked the pope’s motorcade. The other ecumenical rabbis were furious with me.” “Michael Dukakis was running for president. Jews were important voters. Florida is always a swing state. I announced I would hold a mock funeral for integrity in the Democratic party because of Dukakis’s affiliation with Jesse Jackson. I wrote an article called, ‘Hymietown is not the issue.’ Dennis Prager did something similar at the same time. I detailed Jackson’s record of significant anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. “I received death threats for this.” “To this day, I hear from people who say they were at the funeral. I never held it. But it became a legendary event.” “I was blocked from speaking venues for the next decade because of that. Jewish Democrats were absolutely furious.” Luke: “The other rabbis censured you for something?” Marc: “It was for one of these four things. I held a press conference where I held up the censure and said that this document is more precious to me than my ordination because it is a testament to my integrity. That didn’t make anyone very happy.” “The positions we took were ones of integrity… They were correct. There’s a way to take them and still honor the other rabbis in the community (better than I did). I hope that if I were to take those same positions today, it would be with more grace and less youthful impudence.” In Boca in 1986, Winiarz got to know a single wealthy 48-year old woman (not part of his shul) who turned him on to contemporary spirituality. She opened Marc up to music and art. “I knew philosophy like a yeshiva boy would,” says Marc. “I’d read Plato and Socrates and Nietzsche. I had never heard of Ram Dass. I’d never heard of New Thought. I’d never heard of anything that wasn’t a classic.” He read “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. “I never got into New Age thinking, but more the East-West meeting.” Winiarz built up the shul that Rabbi Kenneth Brander (a poor speaker but a straight arrow) inherited in 1987. Winiarz left the Boca Raton shul after 18 months. He says he clashed with the board on about ten different issues, none of which had to do with sex. Marc: “There was a sigificant disagreeent between the board and me over the direction of the synagogue. It was a question about who was running the synagogue — was it me or was it the board? There was a vote in the synagogue about whether I was to go on as the rabbi or not. There was a mediation between me and the synagogue after I left in which we signed a document that neither side felt the other had behaved inappropriately because there were rumors about that then. This [conflict] was about control of the synagogue. I was very controversial in town. The synagogue was much larger. I was not interested in having a fight over who controlled the synagogue. I withdrew without a fight and I started The Center for Jewish Living (CJL).” It was funded by Jerry Hahn, Lynn Kesselman and other laity (most of them from the synagogue Marc had just left). “It was less of a classical Orthodox synagogue and more of a community outreach center, closer to the vision of what Dennis would’ve created as a synagogue. I wanted a cutting edge creative experimental outreach synagogue.” “I wanted to stay in Boca and develop this. My wife Lisa was committed to moving to Israel and we had to make a decision. I felt that the Jewish destiny in the 20th Century was bound up in Israel. I wanted to be able to do what I taught. Like every good Modern Orthodox rabbi, I had been talking for years about the miracle of the modern state of Israel. Lisa and I felt hypocritical [living in the United States]. We had a wonderful opportunity there to do something significant.” They moved in the summer of 1989. Winiarz had been considering a career in public service in the United States, including a possible run for Congress. Luke: “Were you considering becoming a TV anchorman?” Marc: “No.” Luke: “Did you keep a scrapbook with all your press clippings?” Marc: “My secretary did.” Luke: “Were you looking for love?” Marc: “All of us want to love and all of us want to be loved. The question is — what do we do to get love. I hope that I and the rest of us do our best to get love by loving. Erich Fromm wrote about this in his book ‘The Art of Loving.’” When Winiarz moved to Israel in 1989, he Hebraized his name to “Mordecai Gafni.” “Winiarz” is short for “vineyard” which in Hebrew is “Gafni.” The Jewish settlement of Beit Tzufim (it is two miles east of the Israeli city of Kefar Sava) sent Winiarz a formal offer to be their rabbi for two years. He accepted. The contractor for the town was close to R. Riskin who connected Winiarz with him. In Israel, to become a rabbi of a city, it takes a lot of political savvy and support. If you wanted to become the rabbi of Jerusalem, you’d have to hire a PR firm and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and have major support in political places. Major Torah scholarship won’t be enough to make it happen. Rabbi Gafni gave ad hoc shiurim around the settler world. In 1991, Lisa and Marc decided to divorce. Marc met a 24-year old woman. “It was a sad tragic love story,” says Marc. “She was a singer. “In the Ma’ariv article, she said we had no physical relationship. I was never her counselor. She was going to Bar Ilan. “We fell in love. We had some intention to marry. She shared that with her mother. Her mother was very happy. Her mother shared it with her father and her father did indeed go berserk. That’s correct. He called me and said, ‘If you go out with my daughter, I’ll destroy you. I’ll work with Rabbi Blau to destroy you.’ “I told him that I was in love with his daughter and she was in love with me and this was our issue. I hung up the phone. “He moved aggressively to prevent his daughter from seeing me. There was a lot of trauma and drama for about four months. “We met at Bar Ilan about four months later. She said to me, ‘I’ll always love you.’ “Two months later, she got engaged to someone else. I believe she’s happily married.” “After my second, I wanted to leave the rabbinate. As a professional Jew, I didn’t have any sense of my own Judaism. I was so locked into the system, I couldn’t think clearly about what I believed. My whole move out of classical Orthodoxy happened during those years. The core of most of my books (such as Mystery of Love, Soul Prints, etc) emerged from those years. I spent three years (largely) without teaching. I took a vow of three years away from teaching so I could think.” “[Circa 1992,] Rabbi Riskin was interested in building affiliates on the Aish HaTorah model. “He had laity in Australia. We talked about the possibility of my going to Australia. I did a lecture tour there for 15 days (in Sydney). In the end, it didn’t come through. The funding to create the branch system didn’t come through.” Luke: “I heard that some people in Australia called some of your critics and that put a kabosh on your move to Australia.” Marc: “I don’t know anything about that.” R. Gafni has two kids from his second marriage (1984 -1991). He has no kids from his third marriage (to poet Cary Chaya Kaplan 1998-2005). In 1991, Marc Belzberg hired Mordy (they’d known each other from high school, Belzberg was a surrogate older brother for Winiarz) as a software salesman aka marketing director. Belzberg had a business partner, a wealthy lawyer baal teshuva who moved to Israel. “The company I was working for for three years was called MicroGuard. I was the marketing director. MicroGuard was owned by Marc’s venture capital firm, Belanet. MicroGuard didn’t make it.” Marc Belzberg made a connection between Winiarz and Yitzhak Shamir’s son and Israeli businessman and CEO of one of Mark’s companies and social activist (let’s-all-get-along). Gafni adopted many of Belzberg’s customs as he went from the Young Israel rabbi type to a Carlebachian to a bohemian. On Shabbat, Belzberg began wearing this long white smoking jacket that the Reb Arele Hasidim in Jerusalem wear on Shabbat. Then Gafni started wearing it too (he bought one for his third wedding in 1998) before transitioning to the Indian garb below. Marc: “You can take a normal sweet picture and make it look like a cult picture. We were lighting the Chanukkah candles. If you look at the picture, you’ll see no crazy people. Just straight middle-class secular Israelis who’d been disaffected from Judaism. Instead of having a menorah, we had eight big candles. Everyone held one. We went around and lit them. We always did things halakhicly (according to the law), but creatively. I was trying to create an alternative to the Indian Eastern street. This comes not from the rational side but from the mystical side.” Around 1993, Gafni helped start a political party in Israel called Derech HaShishi (The Third Way). It was Marc Belzberg’s money (in part) but Gafni was near the front of it. Yehuda HaRel ran the show. Marc Gafni got his master’s degree from Bar Ilan University circa 1993 in Jewish Philosophy. Around 1996, Marc began teaching a couple of courses for R. David Aaron’s Jerusalem program Isralight. After R. Gafni finished teaching a course at Isralight, he started dating a 23 year old former student. The relationship lasted 18 months. Some of R. Gafni’s critics tried to make this a story. The woman then wrote R. Gafni a letter saying there was nothing inappropriate about their relationship. R. David Aaron won’t speak about R. Gafni. They were never close. R. Gafni got a job with a group called Milah (Jerusalem Institute for Education, founded and funded by David Morrison and his wife Jo). Gafni became high profile in Jerusalem around 1998. (A source writes: “Milah was an adult education ulpan for Americans and ethiopians who finished the regular ulpan and were still not comfortable in Hebrew. Gafni used this role as head of the organization, not to teach Hebrew, but to teach his theories of Judaism and a parashat hashavua class.”) Marc: “I wanted to expand Milah to be something different. To be a teaching organization and outreach center. To teach spirituality and Torah in a much broader sense than the original mandate. “I was a poor administrator. At some point, David wanted to run Milah as he wanted to run it. As was his right. He basically took it back. David wrote me a letter saying there were no issues of financial impropriety. “David was right. We did not do a good job with administration. We had a different vision. We weren’t able to work it out. At the time, I didn’t have the skill to work with David appropriately. I wish him a complete blessing with running Milah.” Sources say David was under a lot of pressure from Gafni’s critics to fire him. Marc dated around from 1991-1998. “That’s when PAG started,” Marc jokes July 4, 2008. “Parents Against Gafni.” Marc Gafni has led more of a bohemian than a rabbinic lifestyle. Some of his supporters, such as Marc Belzberg (from the wealthy Canadian family) have said, “Yeah, Mordechai has a yetzer hora.” Luke: “Are you a Zelig for our time?” Marc: “No. Zelig means someone who doesn’t have depth or a personal center. He’s someone who shifts to please a crowd. My story is one of evolution and unfolding. Over the years, I’ve read and studied hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books. I’ve studied wide and broad in my own search for an authentic and living teaching. Naturally, I evolved beyond a narrow Orthodoxy to a much broader worldview. That was a hard walk.” Luke: “What does Mordecai Gafni the teacher today have in common with Marc Winiarz the teacher from 25 years ago?” Marc: “A passionate love of Judaism and its texts and practices. I remain committed to Hebrew practices. To miztvot. I remain in love with mitzvot. At the same time, the way I practice them has changed from when I was living in a narrow insular Orthodox mindset. My horizons have broadened. A number of important systems of thought I’ve engaged have challenged some of my original Jewish understandings.” Luke: “So what are the most important challenges?” Marc: “The particularity of the Jewish people. The notion that Judaism is the superior system. “The highly rigid vision of family and sexuality, which has great beauty and great shadow. “The shadow of the gorgeous Jewish ethical commitment is an enormous amount of self-righteous judgment, verbal violence and ugly ways of conflict. I’m strongly drawn to more holistic and inclusive ways of dealing with each other.” From The Jewish Week, Sept. 24, 2004: I first saw Mordecai Gafni at UCLA during Passover week 2002. He lectured for an hour. Gafni chatted with Dennis Prager afterwards. They appeared friendly. The next week, Gafni appeared on Prager’s radio show for half an hour to talk about his book The Mystery of Love. During the show, Prager seemed to shift his position on the book, concluding that it was important. Prager’s (former) wife Fran loved Gafni’s book The Mystery of Love, but Dennis had a harder time with it. Marc describes Mystery as his best book. From Publishers Weekly: “From the author of Soul Prints comes this book about the profound link between sex and spirituality. Gafni, a Kabbalah scholar, television host and rabbi, argues thoughtfully and thoroughly that the erotic and the holy are one and the same. If readers can get past the initial shock of Gafni’s claim that the cherubs on the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies were in fact locked in sexual embrace (a provocative suggestion supported by some Kabbalistic texts), then the book is sure to be a mind opener. Gafni writes: the secret of the cherubs is that sex is our spiritual guide. He carefully reclaims the word eros, broadening it from the narrow sexual meaning it has today to encompass a larger life force: eros is the source of all creativity and pleasure. In this context, eros is synonymous with the divine and the sacred. Sexuality (e.g., as portrayed in the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon) is a model for the larger concept of eros and holiness. Gafni meticulously builds on this central argument with generous helpings of parables and stories from mystical texts, observing that we often lead nonerotic (although not necessarily nonsexual) lives. He invites readers to learn to fill their emptiness with eros rather than its pale imitations. Those frustrated with the spare documentation of his argument can look forward to his upcoming two-volume scholarly work expanding on the material in this fascinating book.” The most important kabbalah expert in America, Professor Elliot Wolfson of New York University, blurbed the book: “[A] beautiful book that will undoubtedly inspire many people and perhaps even bring some healing to a desperately ill world.” An ex-girlfriend told me in 2002 that Soul Prints was the best book she’d read on Judaism. From Publishers Weekly: “Just as fingerprints are unique, so, too, says Rabbi Gafni, are soul prints: each human soul has an individual mark that it leaves behind on everyone it touches. Gafni, dean of the Merlitz Public Culture Center in Israel, weaves together autobiographical reflections with tips and exercises designed to help readers discover their soul prints and find fulfillment. Gafni begins with the premise that everyone is lonely and many people look for cures in places where they will never find them, such as sexual encounters. Many of the exercises in this splendid book are designed to help readers confront, and then cure, that loneliness. Gafni suggests that readers share what they learn while reading this book with a lonely person they know. Readers are then asked to make a “Soul Print box” that contains the things that are most important to them, and then to show the contents of that box to one other person. Gafni advocates the practice of random acts of kindness: “Bring happiness to one person each week, for no apparent reason.” His tremendous breadth distinguishes this volume from so many spiritualized self-help tomes. He draws on the fantasy novella Flatlands and the teachings of Talmudic rabbis, on psychologists and prophets. He tells his own stories and biblical stories. Though steeped in Jewish wisdom, this book will be accessible and helpful to readers of many faiths. Gafni occasionally states the obvious (as when he notes that if “after a long day of living your life, you feel as if you are on the verge of tears,” something might be amiss). But those few banalities can’t ruin this insightful book. (Mar.)Forecast: This book is being published in conjunction with a major PBS special by the same title, scheduled to air in early March; this should have a significant impact on book sales. Gafni will be doing a 10-city author tour later that month.” Prager was chummy with Gafni for years (until 2006 when Gafni’s Bayit Chadash scandal broke open and all the Jewish leaders such as rabbis Telushkin and Berman who’d been in his corner left him). They regularly greet each other with a hug. When Dennis sent his step-daughter Anya to Israel circa 1998, he asked Gafni to look after her. Like Shlomo Carlebach, Gafni feels a mission to hug everybody he can. Gafni had a three hour meeting with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin circa 1998. Gafni told his life story in a convincing fashion and Telushkin moved into his corner for the next eight years. Prager and Telushkin vouched for Gafni for many years (until 2006). (Joseph Telushkin began backing Gafni at the request of his friend, who had a romance with Gafni. Telushkin then turned against Gafni May 10, 2006 when she turned against Gafni.) Rabbi Telushkin wrote this cover blurb for Soul Prints: “A radical, profound, and important guide to enable each reader to find out why he is on earth — and what he can do to make sure that he actualizes the person he or she is meant to be.” In the Acknowledgements section of Soul Prints, Gafni calls Telushkin a “friend” and “colleague.” Though they were never close, Telushkin, a secondary sources guy (he writes popular books on Judaism but does little original scholarship), was impressed by Gafni’s abilities with primary sources. Many of Gafni’s followers say he’s a genius. This July 2008 article in Catalyst magazine promotes him as the hero of a spiritual epic. I would say Gafni knows more Torah than 99% of non-Orthodox Jews (and probably more than 90% of Orthodox Jews). Gafni’s been to yeshiva. He’s well read. He knows how to speak. He’s charismatic. Non-Orthodox Jews are dying for a guy like him. Rabbi Gafni and his other supporters, are convinced that there is a small group of people who are destroying his career. They are right. There is a small group of people (such Rabbi Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University) wanting to end his career as a religious leader. They pushed Gary Rosenblatt — Rabbi Blau’s longtime friend — to write that 2004 article in The Jewish Week. They’ve known or known of Gafni since around 1980 (though none of his detractors have had an ongoing close relationship with Gafni). They say Gafni is a dangerous man. On October 21, 2004, I left messages with rabbis Berman and Telushkin on their home phone numbers to talk about their defense of Gafni. They’ve yet to return my call. Though Gafni does develop his own ideas, his detractors love to point to his ability to take the ideas of others and restate them in a way that’s more compelling. When he was young (from about 1976 to 1989), Marc seemed like the second coming of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He was delivering Rabbi Riskin’s talks, word-for-word, better than Rabbi Riskin. Rabbi Riskin didn’t mind this. On the contrary, he was flattered to have a protege. Rabbi Riskin speaks personally, as if he is giving you some secret (with the way he uses his delivery and moves around the room). For a couple of years, Mordechai matched this style (though not the high-pitched voice). Winiarz wore a suit. His hair was short. He wore a white shirt. He looked like a respectable Young Israel Orthodox rabbi. “I never tried to be Rabbi Riskin,” Gafni tells me July 4, 2008. “For a time, I was his protege.” For years, Winiarz was fascinated by Rav Yosef Soloveitchik. Around 1986, Winiarz published in Daat (a scholarly publication out of Bar Ilan) the first annotated bibliography of the Rav’s works. “An annotated bibliography means you read everything,” says Gafni. “I read every word the man wrote. I was going to write my doctorate on Solveitchik. I have four huge boxes organizing his thought into different categories. I probably know his thought better than anybody else in the world today.” “I read voraciously. I’ve picked about ten thinkers in my life and done zibbug. It’s a spiritual and intellectual process where you completely merge with the thought of a thinker. I did that with about three or four Hasidic masters. The first person I did it with was Rav. Soloveitchik. You’re not so much studying their thought. You’re entering into their spiritual dept. You are intuitively in their field. “I lectured on him extensively for a period of time. I was madly in love with his thought. At a certain point, it didn’t quite do it for me. It was missing an emotional tenor, an emotional ecstasy, loving. It became too conceptual for me. “When I was like 17, I would hang out outside his apartment at YU and wait for him to come out so I could just see him. I was like a 17 year old in love with a baseball player. I was madly in love with him. “I wasn’t about becoming the next Soloveitchik. I was deeply reverentially in love with his thought and with him. I submitted my doctoral thesis proposal to write on him — ‘Kabbalah in the thought of Rabbi Soloveitchik.’ I wanted to show that underneath all the rational categories, he was actually a kabbalist. Whenever there was a clash between rational thought and kabbalistic thought, he used kabbalistic thought. That proposal was approved by Bar Ilan. In the end, I went in a different direction.” “My heart opened to Hasidism. It’s a normal development.” In 1989, Gafni moved into his Shlomo Carlebach phase. “I never had a relationship with Shlomo Carlebach,” says Gafni. “A bunch of his students and my students wanted us to meet. We had made up to meet several weeks after Simchat Torah, and he died just before.” Gafni’s third marriage was to Cary Chaya Kaplan (13 years younger than he, an Oxford graduate student who made an early decision to never have kids, they married circa 1998 and divorced circa 2005) lives in San Francisco while Winiarz lived in Israel until 2006. Cary Kaplan-Gafni attempted a PhD at Oxford’s Jewish Studies department (St Catherine’s) on the interpretation of Biblical figures in contemporary Jewish movements of renewal. Her supervisor was the same as Gafni’s — Dr. Norman Solomon. Cary didn’t cut it at Oxford and she moved on to a New Age school in San Francisco — the California Institute of Integral Studies. “My third marriage was not one of convenience,” Marc tells me in reaction to earlier versions of this posting. “I wanted to teach in Orthodox institutions. Blau (or people connected with him) would call up every institution and tell them not to have me. He was like Inspector Javert in Les Miserables (to use the description of Rabb Joseph Telushkin). Blau would call women I was going out with. Three women over a period of eight years — Rachel, Sharon and Chana. Each one I could’ve married. Each time, he called their parents. That’s how I made up the joke about Parents Against Gafni. It was so painful to me. “I was 37. Everyone I would try to go out with in Jerusalem would get a call from Blau or one of his minions. I met Chaya. She was fresh, beautiful. Not in the Blau influence. I was exhausted from going out. I got married way too fast.” Starting in 2004, R. Gafni started coming under public attack for his private life. “For most of my teaching career,” says Marc July 14, 2008, “I did not discuss my private life. Most rabbis don’t. “When asked about my private life, my first instinct was not to engage it. “When many false things were said about my private life, I had no choice but to address it directly, which I’ve done in full on my website (MarcGafni.com).” Luke: “You’re great at identifying people with money.” Marc: “You’re obviously saying that sarcastically, but any leader needs to be great at identifying funding sources.” Luke: “And what they believe, you believe and preach?” Marc: “That’s just made up. I don’t know where that came from.” Luke: “You did paid television in Israel?” Marc: “It was not paid television. I did several seasons. I made about 50 shows (“Under His Vine” in Hebrew). In Israel, you can’t buy a television show. This was on Channel 2, Israel’s key channel. Because they give you a small budget, Israeli TV on that budget looks like crap. So sometimes people raise extra money to do the show better. “During the situation, when busses were blowing up in Israel, how do you go on with your day? I called my rabbi friends and said, ‘We need to say something about this. Busses are blowing up and we are still talking about whether tuna fish is kosher.’ “No one moved on it. “At that point, there was a suggestion that I make a series of television spots, not to explain what happened, you can’t explain why a bus blows up, but to talk about it in a way that we can have a conversation about it. What are we doing here? Why are we in this country? How is it that we’re being responsible to our kids and yet endangering them? To have a spiritual conversation to give people the sense that Judaism is dealing with their lives. “I raised a bunch of money and we made for Channel 2 these spots and when terrorism would happen, they’d play this spot. “Those spots were paid for by me and by Israeli TV. We raised extra money to do them right. “The third set of spots were 25 spots I did that started the morning. They were on dance, creativity, tears, laughter. They were five minute spots. They’re going up on my website. You can’t buy spots. These were not infomercials. They were regular programming of Israeli TV. “Nobody paid for me to be on TV.” Since 2000, R. Gafni has publicly defined himself as post-denominational.
Morning News Pop/Rock
Los Angeles Times – August 18, 1987 http://jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2005/01/rabbi-mordechai-gafni-series-part-3.html#comments Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation’s press Entertainment Desk An Orthodox rabbi in Boca Raton, Fla., is reaching out to young people in an unorthodox way–with rock ‘n’ roll. Mordechai Winyarz, 26, paid New York songwriter Lenny Solomon $30,000 to write songs with contemporary Jewish themes and hired young Jewish musicians to perform and record an album for $12,000. The album, “Jewish Pride,” set for release Sept. 1, includes a rap song “Rappin’ Jewish” written by Danny Furst. A sample of the lyrics: La-die-doo, I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool Yeah, I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
Rabbi’s Rap Sings Praises of Judaism – Jewish Rap
Sun-Sentinel – August 28, 1987 By Carol Brzozowski, Staff Writer Imagine hearing a Jewish rap song to the beat of ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, boom, ch-ch boom. Imagine it played full blast from the stereos of the cars of Jewish teens as they cruise around town. An Orthodox rabbi from Boca Raton is content in imagining that. He helped to make the album on which the song appears. Imagine that! Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz, a freshly ordained transplant from New York and the first rabbi for the newly established Boca Raton Synagogue, is in the sanctuary, playing the music at full volume, making motions with his hands as if he were beating on drums. The album, Jewish Pride, is scheduled to be released on Tuesday in Palm Beach County and then in New York. ”This is going to have an impact!” he exclaimed. ”Take cantorial music and throw it out the window!” Later, Winyarz conceded that he liked cantorial music, but added that he thinks it cannot reach out to young Jews the way modern music can, if set to ”Jewish” lyrics. ”I like cantorial music, but it doesn’t express Jewish pride in the ’80s,” Winyarz said. ”Ritual expression is critical, but it’s not the end-all. If it doesn’t create a certain kind of person, a certain kind of society, then what is ritual for?” To know a bit about Winyarz’ history is to understand why an Orthodox rabbi would be backing a project to reach out to unaffiliated Jews through rock music. Winyarz, 26, was responsible for initiating an outreach into New York schools. He would walk into a school holding a shofar — the ram’s horn used in sacred services — and would recruit any Jewish child into his youth programs who recognized the shofar. He became the second rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue, leaving behind the program in New York after building it into a host of youth groups with a budget of $500,000. The album was done through the cooperation of JPSY, an acronym for Jewish Public School Youth, a program Winyarz initiated in New York. Winyarz and his small group of musicians scouted for young Jewish musicians to perform on the album.
The group worked six hours during the weekdays from midnight to 6 a.m. for two weeks at Eastside Sound Studio in New York.
In making the album, Winyarz convinced Lenny Solomon, an accountant, to go into Jewish rock music full time. ”His mother is real thrilled,” Winyarz said, tongue in cheek. Solomon has dropped his job to lead the organization’s musical outreach program. Not every song on Jewish Pride is the type that’s only understood when played full-blast from an oversized radio. Some have the traditional Hebrew folk music beat. Some talk of familiar themes in Judaism. Minyan Man is about a group of nine Jewish men in search of a 10th man to have a minyan, the ”quorum” needed to conduct Jewish worship. The title song is Jewish Pride. Winyarz said that the album is a pioneering one in Jewish music, and representatives of national Jewish music organizations say they can’t argue one way or another. Although he concedes that Jewish music has been ”updated” with every generation, the rabbi said the album is a first in its combination of a variety of modern styles and its use of Jewish messages for lyrics. He hopes it will start a trend such as the one Christians began in the 1960s with religious rock music, featuring such musicians as Randy Stonehill, Larry Norman and Amy Grant. Winyarz will introduce the album through Jewish cultural radio programs and in Jewish book and record stores, but he has his eyes set on secular radio as well. ”This is religious music, there’s no question about it,” Winyarz said of Jewish Pride. Jews’ pride in themselves is shrinking, Winyarz says. He said that many Jews are ”trying to be WASP-y” in an attempt to cover their Jewish heritage, following the cue of their parents who have done so in order to assimilate. ”We’re saying, ‘Don’t do that. Chuck it,”’ Winyarz said. ”The 11th commandment of a Jew in America has been, ‘Thou shalt melt (into the melting pot).’ ”We’ve … been comfortable in our Judaism and pay lip service to Judaism. Our direction is complete confrontation — in the most positive way.” Winyarz figures that confrontation is done best through music. The lyrics from Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz’ new Jewish rap song, Rappin’ Jewish, which is on his album Jewish Pride. ”La-die-do I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool Yeah I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool Ask me anything you want to but I will repeat I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
Got a son who’s a doctor, a daughter who’s a lawyer My wife teaches English and reads Tom Sawyer Each morning I sit at my breakfast table Eatin’ ‘filte fish with lox and bagels. I’m a Jewish man been all over the map That’s why I’m singing my Jewish rap Y’see I’ve been rappin’ since the age of three When my home boys rocked across the Red Sea. Chorus: Jewish Pride keeps ya going strong Makes our people last real long So don’t ignore what comes from inside Let it grow, ’cause it’s Jewish Pride.” Here Marc Gafni’s latest musical masterpiece here!
Live and Be Free (Hip Hop Remix)
In between appointments one day, at Marc Gafni’s home in Israel, which was also the center of the movement, a beautiful brother and musician, who often played with Marc Gafni at Sabbath prayer services in Tel Aviv, came in and said: “Hey, Rabbi, Say some Torah Dharma for this music disco CD I am doing. I want this to be heard in dance floors all over the world!” We did it in about twenty minutes, no planning, directly from the heart. And this is a piece of what spontaneously came out. The ancient teachers taught, “Words that come from the Heart, Enter the Heart.” Let It Be So. -Marc Gafni
Rabbi To Mark Papal Visit By Walking A Picket Line
by Dexter Filkins – Herald Staff Writer
The Miami Herald (FL) – September 10, 1987
When Pope John Paul II meets with Jewish leaders Friday, Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz will greet him, but not like everyone else. Instead of waving and cheering, the rabbi will shout and walk a picket line — in the uniform of a concentration camp survivor.
Winyarz, who will join 15 other rabbis in the Miami International Airport protest, has some questions for the pontiff, and he wants them answered:
Why did the pope meet with and praise Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, the former Nazi? Why was the Vatican silent during the Holocaust, when six million Jews perished? Why does the Vatican refuse to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel? Why did the pope embrace the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose group is dedicated to the destruction of Israel?
Winyarz said he is not angry; just suspicious, and driven.
“The pope is playing on both sides of the fence,” said Winyarz, 26, rabbi of the orthodox Boca Raton Synagogue. “This is not pope-bashing. I just want to know where he really stands.”
To find out, Winyarz and others will don concentration camp uniforms and get as close as they can to the pope when he lands. Tonight, the group will lecture on “the history of church anti- Semitism” outside the Omni Hotel, where the pope and several Catholic leaders will gather. And when Jewish leaders meet John Paul II Friday at the Cultural Arts Center, Winyarz will be outside.
“It is important that the Jewish leaders are there,” Winyarz said. “But it is just as important that we are there to let our leaders know that there is a constituency outside.”
To the rabbi, the pope is wading in murky moral waters. Past actions of the church and the pope, he said, raise the specter of anti-Semitism, and as the spiritual leader of 900 million Roman Catholics, the pope is obliged to put the questions to rest.
“(Yassar) Arafat’s methodology is killing women and children. Waldheim is a documented Nazi,” said Winyarz, whose mother survived the Holocaust. “What does that say when the pope welcomes these men and embraces them?”
For Winyarz, the heart of the matter is whether the church is anti-Semitic. On this, Winyarz is undecided, but he asserts that some actions — such as the Vatican’s refusal to recognize Israel — suggest that it is.
“The recognition of Israel is, I think, a theological problem,” Winyarz said. “The church used to teach that the Jews, as the killers of Christ, are condemned to eternal damnation.”
What could Pope John Paul do to placate Winyarz? Simple, said the rabbi:
Recognize Israel, repudiate Arafat and Waldheim and explain the Vatican’s behavior during the Holocaust.
Winyarz doesn’t think that will happen, but to him, the pope must know. The rabbi does not claim to speak for his congregation, but he is certain that many Jews share his views, and that he won’t be ostracized.
“We all have to take the path that our consciences dictate,” Winyarz said. “I don’t think my fellow Jews will be offended by that.”
“Never Again!’ Pope Says Holocaust Condemned in Talk to Jewish Leaders
Sun-Sentinel – September 12, 1987
By James D. Davis, Religion Editor
MIAMI — Pope John Paul II, in a major address on Catholic-Jewish relations, gave his clearest statement thus far that Jews were the primary targets of the Holocaust.
The pontiff, in a historic speech Friday to 175 national and South Florida Jewish leaders at the Center for the Fine Arts, passionately called the World War II Nazi slaughter a ”ruthless and inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish people … only because they were Jews.”
The remark was an apparent attempt to allay Jewish fears that the Vatican was trying to ”universalize” the Holocaust and play down its special victimization of Jews. Many Jews have voiced concern that such an approach might make Catholics less sensitive to anti-Semitism.
The statements were the ”first time any Vatican official has said it with such clarity,” said Burton Levinson, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, in a news conference afterward.
In his second summit-style meeting with Jewish leaders in a week and a half — the first was at Castel Gandolfo, his summer home in Italy — the pope pledged to have his church fight bigotry, teach positive Jewish images in Catholic schools, and explore the historical roots of anti-Semitism.
As for the Holocaust horrors, ”Never again!” he vowed, to spontaneous applause, the only time his address was so interrupted. The phrase has become a standard rallying cry for world Jewry.
The pope also defended Pope Pius XII, who reigned during World War II, against charges that he remained silent during the Holocaust.
Pope John Paul II said he was ”convinced that history will reveal more clearly and convincingly how deeply Pius XII felt the tragedy of the Jewish people, and how hard and effectively he worked to assist them.”
The pontiff spoke on a raised dais in the center, eye-level with Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, head of a group that keeps in touch with Vatican officials. It was a symbolic departure from the pope’s usual raised throne.
In his own talk, Waxman mentioned ”recent tendencies to obscure the fact that Jews were the major target of Nazi genocidal policies.” However, he also said Jewish-Catholic talks are ”one of this century’s most positive developments.”
The delegates were a cross-section of mainstream Jewry. They represented the Synagogue Council of America, an umbrella of most U.S. Jewish groups; and the interdenominational American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League.
The Catholic side included several Vatican cardinals, including its secretaries of state, education and interfaith relations. Also present were Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, and four American cardinals.
A small group of people demonstrated outside the Spanish-style center. The protesters, some wearing concentration camp garb, waved Israeli flags and placards with slogans such as ”Arafat, Waldheim, what next?”
The protest was over an audience granted by the pontiff on June 25 to Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who has denied accusations that he helped deport Jews and partisans when when he was a German army officer in World War II, and one granted in 1982 to Palestinian guerrilla leader Yasser Arafat.
In his address, the pope made no reference to the Waldheim affair, which Waxman said still causes ”pain and distress.” But the pontiff told reporters on the trip from Rome that it had been his duty to meet Waldheim, since he came ”as a president, democratically elected, of a people, of a nation.”
Although the pope said the Jewish people ”have a right to a homeland,” the delegates greeted with stony silence his assertion that this ”also applies to the Palestinian people, so many of whom remain homeless and refugees.” Delegates were only slightly more receptive when he mentioned the ”state of Israel,” with which the Vatican still has not exchanged ambassadors.
The response was warmer when the pontiff said that the suffering of Israel’s children reminds the church of its common bond with the Jewish people. It was a clear theological rationale for making Holocaust studies a Catholic priority.
The pope repeated his announcement of last week that he was planning a major document on the Holocaust. He also reminded the listeners of a Jewish-Catholic workshop on the significance of the Holocaust, set for December in Washington, D.C. He said it would explore ”religious and historical implications of the Shoah” for both faiths. ”Shoah,” which means ”destruction,” is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.
Rabbi Waxman’s talk was more specific, urging more attention to ”the Christian roots of anti-Semitism.” He said the Holocaust was the climax of centuries of bigotry ”for which Christian teachings bear a heavy responsibility.”
Waxman voiced Jewish concern at the lack of full Vatican diplomatic relations for Israel, a matter that many Jews take as a lack of Catholic understanding of what Israel means to them. The Jewish state often is called a last refuge for persecuted Jews worldwide.
”Obviously, the differences have not been resolved,” Waxman said. But he acknowledged a Vatican promise to keep in closer touch with Jewish leaders on actions that might affect them.
”We live in an historic moment. The last quarter-century has irreversibly changed the way we perceive and act towards each other,” Waxman said.
But even among the mainstream Jewish groups, there were signs of divisions. An Orthodox rabbinical group boycotted the Friday dialogue because the previous talks failed to mention the Holocaust and recognition of Israel.
The Orthodox group also forbade Synagogue Council president Gilbert Klaperman to read the main statement to the pope Friday. Waxman, a Conservative, got the job instead.
Klaperman came to the meeting, anyway, because ”I felt the process is important and that it must continue.” Saying that the church had specifically acknowledged Jewish anger, he said the dialogue now must get beyond that.
The New Orthodoxy: The New Rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue Expects to Make Waves
The name Mordechai Winyarz may not ring a bell in Palm Beach County yet.
But as the Orthodox rabbi settles into his new position as the first full-time rabbi for the Boca Raton Synagogue, he has hopes of being a ”clanging cymbal” for God.
Winyarz, 26, just may do that. If he were a Christian, his style would be called evangelical.
Winyarz immediately is forthright about his lifestyle, should there be any questions on the topic: ”I’ll be making about $40,000 to $44,000, I drive a 1984 Topaz and I own eight suits.”
Winyarz has come from New York to the fledgling Boca Raton Synagogue, the only Orthodox synagogue in Boca Raton, and one of three in Palm Beach county.
Its construction is the bloodline for the Orthodox body. Orthodox Jews walk to the synagogue on the Sabbath and its construction has made it easier for the Jews to worship.
”People were moving here because they knew we were here,” said Dr. Gary Lieber, a spokesman and founding member of the synagogue.
Just a few weeks into his position, Winyarz is making plans in an effort to get involved. He is constantly on the telephone, talking with religious and secular community leaders. On the drawing board is a plan for some type of ”demonstration” in regards to the papal visit.
”Judaism has got to be a moral and social force,” Winyarz said. ”Not just to make pronouncements, but to become involved.”
”We were looking for someone to shake the bushes, to make the synagogue a dynamic place,” Lieber said of the search for a rabbi. ”We’re looking to make the congregation the Jewish center in south county. With a mouthpiece like him, we want to let people know we’re here. We’ve essentially done the groundwork.”
Winyarz ambitiously speaks of a few of his plans, one of which is to create a national Jewish retreat center on the synagogue’s property.
”Why not?” he said. ”The assumption is that everything operates out of New York. (Studies show) there are 75,000 Jews in Palm Beach County.”
Yet South County Jewish Federation studies also show that the affiliation rate of local Jews is 13 percent, half the national average.
”Boca in general is extremely materialistic and completely self-involved,” Winyarz said in interpreting the statistics.
”Younger people come to Florida to escape and be unaffiliated.”
Winyarz said he doesn’t condemn the acquisition of material goods and adds that Hebrew scriptures show that God created the world and the world is to be enjoyed.
As a spiritual leader, Winyarz said he will attempt to guide his congregation into emphasizing aspects of life that transcend material goods.
”So you’ve got the Porsche, the pool and the boat. What happens when you die? What do you have then? What did life mean? There must be a purpose to life. Living a meaningful existence is more pleasurable than owning a Porsche.”
Thus, the synagogue becomes what he calls the ”pleasure center.”
Winyarz did not say how much membership in the synagogue will cost, but said, ”Any Jew can come to High Holy Days even if they can’t pay. And no Jew ever will be turned away for lack of funds — ever, ever.”
Although the Boca Raton synagogue structure is complete, Winyarz said there is still more work to do on the inside and the work that is being planned will introduce some new twists on established ideas.
For instance, men and women are seated separately in Orthodox synagogues and typically women are out of the sight of the men, either behind a screen or in the back of the synagogue.
Plans for Boca Raton Synagogue (the word ”Orthodox” is intentionally omitted) still separate men and women, but women are not out of sight. Structurally, the synagogue is in a semicircle, focusing on the center of worship: the Torah and the Eternal Light.
”There will be an opportunity within the synagogue context for women to express themselves in a public manner, which is completely within the (Hebrew) law,” Winyarz said. ”Men or women will be able to get up and give a talk about a religious issue.
”We will have orthodoxy with a small ‘o’ and Halakhah (Jewish law) with a capital ‘H.’ ”
He calls it the new Orthodoxy. Orthodox Judaism usually evokes the stereotypical image of long beards, curly sideburns and black coats — and a separation from the rest of society.
The ”new” Orthodox Jew is the upwardly mobile doctor, lawyer, stockbroker or other person integrally involved in society, yet set apart from others in similiar professions by a belief system that emphasizes religious law and spiritual values.
A prime example of that was Winyarz’s ”outreach” lectures on Wall Street. He once did a lecture on Wall Street called ”Jewish Sexual Ethics.” He also conducted lunchtime scripture studies in a prestigious Manhattan law firm.
Orthodox Judaism is attractive to young Jews, Winyarz said, because ”young people are looking for something that’s real. People intuitively sense that which is authentic and I think there’s a desperate yearning for authenticity.”
Winyarz is an example of the attractiveness of Orthodoxy to young Jews. He had become so immersed in it that by 23 he was teaching Bible at Yeshiva University.
”There’s nothing as exciting as traditional Judaism,” Winyarz said. He wants to turn what he feels is a stereotype of Orthodox Judaism from ”backward, anti-feminist, anti-science” to ”real exciting, progressive system of life.”
In New York, winyarz recruited young people by walking into public schools with a shofar (the administration did not know of his actions). Children who recognized the shofar — a ram’s horn used for ceremonies — were targeted as recruits for his Jewish Public School Youth Project. He turned his efforts into a string of clubs with a budget of $500,000.
If Winyarz initiates the project in Florida, he won’t be staging any press conferences.
”It would be difficult to do it in Florida schools,” he said. ”If I do it, I won’t announce it.”
Winyarz is critical of some other Jewish and non-Jewish religious groups (For instance, he asks, ”What’s Jewish about Reform Judaism?”) although he adds that he believes he will have a good working relationship with other clergy.
”I believe we have the most correct system,” he said of Orthodox Judaism. ”I believe there are moments of truth in others.”
The Rabbi Rocks
by Tracey Wong Briggs
USA Today – August 17, 1987
Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz of Boca Raton, Fla., has produced Jewish Pride, a rock album appealing to Jewish youth. The LP, set for USA-wide release Sept. 1, includes songs written by Lenny Solomon and performed by young Jewish musicians. Rappin’ Jewish, by Danny Furst, says: “La-die-doo, I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool/ Yeah, I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool/ Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat/ I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.”
Rabbi rolls out Jewish rock album
Associated Press/St. Petersburg Times – August 17, 1987
BOCA RATON – A 26-year-old rabbi is using rock ‘n’ roll to appeal to Jewish youth in a way they can understand.
Mordechai Winyarz, spiritual leader of the Boca Raton Community Synagogue, has produced what he calls the first Jewish rock ‘n’ roll album, set for national release Sept. 1.
I’m looking to create a revolution in Jewish life,he said. Music speaks to people. I want this to become a major outreach tool to bring young people back to Judaism.
The album, titled Jewish Pride, includes a danceable theme song of the same name, a ballad called Minyan Man and a rap song Rappin’ Jewish written by Danny Furst.
A sample of the lyrics:
La-die-doo, I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool
Yeah, I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool
Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat
I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
PBS Special – Soul Prints – Your Path to Fulfillment (DVD)
Starring Marc Gafni
Fox Lorber (Publisher) – April 10, 2001
http://dvd.idealo.com/prices/P20008840135K2.html
Soul Prints – Your Path to Fulfillment – MARC GAFNI 790658993808 Rabbi Marc Gafni compares a person’s individual spirit to the uniqueness of their fingerprint, dubbing the former a “soul print.” In this 73-minute lecture, he describes the principles and practical applications of his philosophy culled from his study of many religious and ethnic traditions. The essence is to better appreciate the life you have and redirect your energy in the parts that make you unhappy. He promises the viewer “access to the precise and gorgeous nature of your spirit,” suggesting exercises like making a list of the 10 most important things in your life. He offers mantras and stories from Buddhism, Russia, West Africa, and his own ministry–even singing a short “soul print song” a cappella. Much of his advice is common sense (If you treat the waiter badly, he will treat you badly), but he presents it in an energetic and inspiring manner. However, this PBS Special is interrupted so frequently with shots of an enthusiastically applauding audience that one might think he was selling a food preparation gadget rather than inner peace. Unfortunately, the effect is that of a hard sell for material that should speak for itself. –Kimberly Heinrichs
Publisher Fox Lorber
UPC 790658993808
Release 2001-04-10
Format DVD
Mpaa rating NR (Not Rated)
Primary Contributor Marc Gafni
The Erotic and the Ethical
By Mordechai Gafni
Tikkun Magazine – March/April 2003
WARNING: The following may be found offensive
The Temple of the ancient Israelites is the original Hebrew _expression of pagan consciousness. Now—as we will see later in this essay—the difference between Temple and pagan consciousness is very crucial. But it is a difference that is only important because of their profound similarity. Both the Temple and the pagan cults shared an intoxication with the feminine Goddess, symbol of sacred eros.
The relationship with the Goddess was not a hobby for the Israelites like modern religious affiliation often tends to be. It was an all-consuming desire to be on the inside, to feel the infinite fullness of reality in every moment and in every encounter—it was an attempt to fully experience eros. Because the ancients were so aware of the depth of reality, to live without being able to access the infinite in this erotic way was enormously painful. (For an example, read the story of the idolatrous King Menashe, as retold in the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 92A.)
The prophets of the Temple period opposed paganism with all of their ethical fire and passion. For them, it was inconceivable that the ecstatic and primal Temple experience, religiously powerful and important as it might be, should become primary. When eros overrode ethos, the prophet exploded in divine rage. In moments of clash, the prophet taught that the ethical always needed to trump the erotic.
Modern Judaism has developed from the ethical teachings of the prophets. In the process, however, we have overlooked the erotic, present in the pagan consciousness of the Temple service. We have forgotten the Goddess, a vital presence in the life of ancient Israel. Hebrew liturgy reflects the virtually inconsolable longing of the Hebrew spirit for the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. This longing is not a dream of proprietorship over this or that hill in Jerusalem. Indeed, ownership and holiness are mutually exclusive. Instead, it is a yearning to reclaim sacred eros as part of the fabric of our lives. And, in the way of the circle, our longing for eros is also a longing for ethos. All ethical breakdown emerges from a dearth of eros. When we are overwhelmed by an erotic vacuum, ethics collapse.
Both the vitality and metaphysics of a pagan eros were understood by Israeli mystic Abraham Kook to be essential to the reclaiming of a religious sensibility which reflected both the depth and need of modernity. It is in large part for this pagan sensibility that we yearn when we speak of the dream of a re-built Temple.
To find our way back to eros and the feminine, we must yearn back and forward to the Hebrew mystical tradition, whose masters kept these ideas alive in the form of esoteric tradition, practice and lore.
Eros
In the kabbalistic tradition, as in Plato, the erotic is not a mere synonym for the sexual, but an _expression of inner passion which sexuality models but does not begin to exhaust. In Hebrew myth and mysticism, eros has four faces. The first face of eros is being fully present on the inside, traversing the chasm that separates subject and object. To use the imagery of the Zohar, the magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, eros is to be in the flow of “the river which swells forth from Eden,” the fountain of life; when I am not in the flow of my own life, I am not living naturally. The opposite of eros is alienation, the feeling that you are an outsider with no safe place to call home.
Kabbalah scholar Yehuda Libes suggests that the word “zohar” is roughly synonymous with the Greek word “eros.” The authors of the Zohar were not dry medieval scholastics; they were rather men of great passion and depth who believed that by entering the inside of the moment, the text, or the relationship, they could recreate and heal the world. Eros is aroused whenever we move so deeply into what we do, who we are with, or where we are, that its interiority stirs our heart and imagination. Shechinah, the Hebrew mystical term for the indwelling feminine presence of God, is no less than the erotic merged with the Holy. Shechinah is the radically profound experience of being on the inside.
The second face of eros is the “fullness of presence.” This is not a distinct and different quality from the first but flows naturally and even overlaps with the erotic quality of being on the inside. And yet it is not quite the same. Of course, being on the inside requires the fullness of presence. But we can experience full presence even when we have not merged with the moment or crossed over to the inside. Full presence is about showing up. You can show up and be fully present in a conversation without necessarily losing yourself in the encounter’s flow. Full presence at work can mean that you derive joy, satisfaction, and self worth from your vocation. It means you feel full and not empty.
To live erotically is to be fully present to each other’s richness, complexity, and ultimate grandeur. It is to fully wait for the other to appear. The Shechinah, say the mystics, is presence waiting for us to be present. She is eros, standing outside of our window, waiting. Waiting for us to run out and behold, with wonder, her face.
The third face of eros is desire. Eros is the yearning force of being. I yearn, therefore I am. As long as I am on the outside, I can ignore my deepest desires and stifle my longing. When I am on the inside, however, when I am fully present, I am able to access my yearning. For the Hebrew mystic, unlike his Buddhist or Greek cousins, desire and longing are sacred. To be cut off from the eros of yearning is to be left in the cold of non-existence. To yearn is to be aflame.
Depression is at its core the depression of desire. When we lose touch with our authentic desire, we become listless and apathetic. There is wonderful eros in desire. It is what connects us most powerfully with our own pulsating aliveness. Longing is a vital strand in the textured fabric of the erotic. It is of the essence of the Holy of Holies.
The fourth face of eros is the interconnectivity of being. Longing, desire, and tears remind us of the fourth strand in the erotic weave. They whisper to us that we are all interconnected. No human stands alone. The word “religion” traces its source to the Latin root ligare which, as we can hear in the word “ligament,” is about connectivity. Religion’s goal is to re-ligare—to reconnect us. Religion’s original intention was to take us to that inside place where we could indeed experience the essential interconnectivity of all reality. All of existence is one great quilt of being and we are all patches in its magnificent intertextured pattern.
Eros is what allows us to move past the feeling of isolation and separation and experience ourselves as part of the quilt. To sunder our connection to eros is therefore to sin. Sin is but the illusion of separation. Sin is not evil; it is merely tragic. Not only do we lose the source of life’s greatest pleasure, but we would undermine the building blocks of connection without which the world would ultimately collapse.
The Merging of Male and Female
One of the most obvious yet profound qualities that the sexual models for the erotic is the merging of the feminine and the masculine. The drive towards union between the female and the male is the essential underlying force that powers the universe. Although it is often expressed in the merging of man and woman, it is by no means limited to that _expression. For the Hebrew mystics, the sexual union of man and woman both models and participates in the more primal union of Shechinah (the Divine Feminine) and Tiferet (the Divine Masculine). Whether understood as Yin and Yang, as in Taoist thought, or Shiva and Shakti in Hindu mythology, masculine and feminine are different faces of the greater union, the force of divinity that courses through the cosmos and beyond. The kabbalistic archetype of the integrated male-female are the two cherubs, one male and one female, present in the Holy of Holies in the ancient Temple. Described in the Book of Kings and unpacked in the Babylonian Talmud, these golden cherubs were twined in sexual embrace. For the kabbalists, their integration is the highest erotic _expression of a healed world.
What is the difference between masculine and feminine?
The core cosmic intuition of Hebrew mystic Isaac Luria, later developed by mystics Isaac Chaver and Abraham Kook, offers a deceptively simple paradigm. Men are lines, “yosher” or “kav” and women are circles, “iggulim.” Or, more accurately, line is a masculine image and circle is a feminine _expression. Every man and woman is a unique interpenetration of line and circle.
Let us look at the nature of a circle. Circles are characterized by suppleness, intimacy, egalitarian sensibility, connection, and communication. The feminine circle is defined by relatedness. It surrounds, embraces and envelopes. It is a symbol of intimacy, loyalty, and a capacity to forgive and renew. The circle moves round and round, in a constant flow of re-newal, re-membering, and re-cognition. It always comes home again
Already it is clear to us that a circle is naturally erotic. In a circle, everyone can see each other. In Luria’s language, everyone is face to face. There is intimacy in circle.
The masculine line is far more rigid than the circle. Judgment and distinction are natural line functions. With a line, there is a clear hierarchy. One is either higher on the line or lower. If people are moving in the same direction on a line, then they will not be face to face. Instead, they will be face-to-back or back-to-face. A line signals a clear lack of intimacy. A line is forward moving, goal-oriented, directed, and focused. It spends a lot more time looking ahead than looking around. The line’s natural movement is to thrust forward.
Luria writes, “Every world of world and every detail of detail in every world of world is made up of these two principles, circles and lines.” Lines and circles in various permutations and balances are the DNA of spiritual reality. It is the unique blending of their energies that gives contour, character, and depth to every unit of reality. It is a blending in which neither the circle nor the line ever disappears. Each is fully absorbed in the bliss of merging with other while never losing its own integrity.
Does the union of masculine and feminine mean that, after total integration, gender will dissolve as an issue? That a kind of transvestite existentialism is the kabbalistic dream of an evolved world? Well, yes … and absolutely not.
There is a core paradigm in Hebrew mystical sources and many other traditions which provides a clear reality map for the integration of circle and line. It is a trinity of stages.
Simple (Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water)
Complex (Enlightenment)
Simple (After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water)
The linchpin of the idea is that the third stage and the first, although externally similar, are really worlds apart. For stage three deeply integrates the new consciousness of stage two. So while the simplicity of stage one might be naïve, superficial, and even irresponsible, the simplicity of stage three is deep, wise, and responsible. In the reality map of eros, level one is the natural eros of the circle. Level two is the line, which occasionally opposes and even overrides certain circle manifestations. Level three is the return to a higher eros, where circle and line interpenetrate, yielding a sensual symphony of flowing spirit and precise form, unimaginable in the initial erotic offering of level one.
Lines and circles, the masculine and the feminine, are cosmic principles whose roots are in our souls. Neither New Age spirituality (circle) or the old religious Orthodoxies (lines) alone have within them the power to heal our souls and our planet. It is only a deeper erotic vision unpacked from both, the paradox of holding lines and circles together as one that can heal us.
We need to fully embrace the truth of the line, then roundly challenge it with circle consciousness, only to re-embrace the line from a more supple and rounded place. Similarly, we need to rejoice in the circle, only to bisect it with the power of the line and then re-turn again to the circle. This is the trinity paradigm in which level two rejects level one, only to be transcended and absorbed by level three, which is always an evolved version of level one. Circle, line, circle. Line, circle, line.
We begin in the middle—in the glory of the circle.
The Power of the Circle
Phallic line consciousness has proved impotent for so many of us. It has not given birth to the reality for which we dreamed. We have competed, failed, and succeeded. Yet we have found the process debilitating and the prize woefully insufficient. Even if we’ve “gotten” what we were always supposed to want, we have realized that it isn’t enough.
On the most personal level, the rat race of line consciousness has failed us. The radical focus on our place in the hierarchy has exhausted us. For many years we have ignored Lily Tomlin’s truism: “Even if you finish first, you are still a rat.”
On the global level, line consciousness has failed us as well. We live on the edge of unprecedented ecological disaster. The imbalanced Genesis Chapter One ethics of “fill the earth and conquer” is not innocent in this. The ecological disaster is driven by corporations who take advantage of the core emptiness in the heart of the West, by feeding it with an obscene overabundance of goods and foods. Corporations driven by line consciousness form the crux of our world’s economy. These corporations are sadly driven by basically only one desire: that of accumulating maximal power through maximal profit. Unhappily, the natural result of this posture is a virtual rape of the environment for the sake of climbing higher on the line’s ladder. Tragically, it is the line consciousness of probably not more than 10,000 people (nice people) that is having this devastating impact on the world’s environment.
The driving force behind the corporate ethos is fear of emptiness. When we lose the sense of the world being divine and full of meaning, we risk falling into the void—we “lose touch” with our own essential self-worth and value. So we learn a-void-dance, doing everything we can to deny the lurking emptiness. In order to stifle those voices we work hard at producing and climbing in the line world. Somehow, the eros of productivity and competition give our lives a veneer of meaning, at least until a crisis when our vulnerability is exposed and we plummet into the void.
It is only by raising a new generation on the eros of the circle that we can hope to truly effect a transformation in the world. Only by unpacking and internalizing our erotic experiences of interconnectivity, interiority, and the fullness of being can we move towards healing and change. This is the call of circle consciousness. This is the ethos of redeemed paganism. This is Temple consciousness.
Temple Consciousness
The Jerusalem Temple is the place where the Shechinah dwells between the cherubs. The Shechinah is known in the kabbalistic sources as the great feminine. She is mother, daughter, and lover. She is the force that allows the human being to feel at home in the world. The Temple is the place of eros; it is the experience of being on the inside.
The biblical story is based on the line. In this account, the world is God’s place. God’s relationship to world is that of father, king, or even husband. In biblical myth, God creates world outside of Himself, even as he dwells in world. For the pagan and the Temple mystic, however, the world is not God’s place; instead, God is the place of the world. To be in Temple consciousness is to be in God. Eros pure and simple.
This shift in consciousness is hidden within the folds of biblical myth text. The central biblical term which describes Temple consciousness is “lifnei hashem,” usually translated as “before God,” (as in “standing before God”). A closer reading, however, yields the hidden eros in the term. The word “lifnei” derives from the Hebrew word “pnimi” meaning “inside,” the first face of eros.
This same Hebrew word for “inside,” and “before” has a third meaning as well. The third meaning is “face,” “panim.” Face is the place where my insides are revealed. There are forty-five muscles in the face, most of them unnecessary for the biological functioning of the face. Their major purpose is to express emotional depth and nuance. They are the muscles of the soul. When I say, “I need to speak face to face,” I am in erotic need of an inside conversation.
All three English words, “face,” “inside,” and “before,” share the same Hebrew root. The essence then of the biblical Temple phrase “lifnei Hashem,” before God, is not a commandment to appear “before God” in the magistrate sense. It is an invitation to enter the inside of God’s face.
To be on the inside of God is precisely the vision of the pagan circle.
It was paganism which understood well the primal human need to feel at home in the world. The erotic pagan imagination was able to uncover divinity in every nook and cranny of existence. For the pagan, there was an understanding that the Goddess is “on every hill and under every tree.” For the pagan, the hills were literally alive with the sound of music. Nature is the music of divinity undressed to the human ear. Every hill, brook, tree, and blade of grass was invested with its own divine muse.
In the ancient world the tree in particular, in all of its lush sensuality, was a primary manifestation of the erotic Goddess. The central symbol of much of the ancient pagan cult in biblical Canaan was the Ashera tree, symbol of the Goddess Ashera incarnate. Unadulterated paganism is the eros of level one circle consciousness.
It is clear from the biblical record itself that Ashera worship was the norm in ancient Judah and Israel. Occasionally, someone would intervene. King Josiah attempted the most radical reform, after finding a new book—very possibly the book of Deuteronomy—that explicitly prohibited having an Ashera tree in the precincts of the Temple. The discovery of this “new book” is the greatest indication that there were many Ashera trees in the temple. New texts only emerge to outlaw popular practice. Josiah’s goal was to fully obliterate the Ashera goddess’ presence. Only a few years after his death, however, the Ashera was back in the Temple once more.
No one could deny the people their goddess. A careful reading of the biblical sources reveals that of the 370 years which Solomon’s temple stood in Jerusalem, for at least 236 of those years—two-thirds of the time—the statue of Ashera was present in the Temple. Her worship was not some underground cult, but part of what was understood to be the legitimate Hebrew spirit itself.
Ashera, who began as a foreign interloper, became, in Raphael Patai’s phrase, a beloved “Hebrew Goddess.” She was worshipped openly and with great joy as part of the official religion by kings, the court, the priesthood and most of the people. She was opposed only by a few prophets crying against her and even then only at relatively long intervals. Indeed, the erotic passion for the Goddess was so essential to the people’s spirit that when the great reformer Elijah challenged the pagan god Baal, Ashera’s son, he pointedly avoided challenging Ashera. The text in Kings tell of 400 prophets of Ashera and 450 prophets of Baal who eat at the table of the Queen Jezebel, wife of Ahab. Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal but somehow doesn’t touch the prophets of Ashera. The Ashera has become too much of a Hebrew Goddess to be challenged even by Elijah.
The pagan Goddess was not viewed by Solomon or the people as a compromise of the Hebrew spirit. On the contrary, she was experienced as an organic deepening of the Hebrew spirit. In the pagan world, as we have noted, the Goddess erotically merged with her male counterpart. Hieros gamos—the marriage the God and Goddess. Ashera has divine intercourse with El, notably the very name of the Hebrew god! Her daughter, Astarte, copulates with Baal, her brother. This marriage of the gods—symbolizing the mythical merging of the primal masculine and feminine—brings blessing and joy to the world.
The Hebrew version of this Heiros Gamos—marriage of divine principles—was personified in the union of the biblical male God with the Goddess Ashera. We know from relatively recent archaeological excavations that many people served the Biblical male God image and the Ashera together. One of the most fascinating finds is that of Kuntillat Ajrud in the northeastern Sinai desert. Two storage jars were found, and one of them carried the inscription (in anthropologist Raphael Patai’s translation) “Amarayhu says to my Lord … may you be blessed by Yah-weh and his Ashera.”
There is evidence that the worship of Ashera extended even into the Holy of Holies. Pattai supports our intuition that the two cherubs intertwined in sexual union in the Holy of Holies are an evolved _expression of the Hebrew-pagan marriage between the biblical Yah-weh and pagan Ashera. That is to say, the spirit of biblical text, which rejected some of the essential dimensions of paganism, nevertheless accepted the core feminine erotic principle that powered paganism and recognized the essential need to integrate it with the masculine principle. So Ashera was transmuted into the female cherub in erotic union with the male cherub. While the prophets rejected the Ashera they embraced the cherubs. Indeed, biblical prophecy taught that the space between the sexually entwined cherubs was the source of prophecy.
The erotic and pagan nature of the female cherub was clearly apparent to the wisdom masters of Babylon. They understood that the cherubs were the Hebrew embrace of the sacred moment in paganism and thought it essential to the Hebrew spirit. In a post-Temple world where survival depended on the Law, the wisdom masters were not willing or able to openly embrace the pagan moment in Temple consciousness. So, in a classical literary device, they placed in the mouths of foreign interlopers their profound perception of the cherubs as purified expressions of the pagan archetype. The Babylonian Talmud in Yoma 54b tells us that when the Temple was conquered and Nebuchadnezzar’s army sees the cherubs, the Jewish religion was immediately cheapened in their eyes. “Said Reish Lakish: When the foreigners entered the temple and saw the cherubs sexually intertwined they took them out to the market place. Israel whose blessing is blessing and curse is curse—is this what they were engaged in?” A parallel text in the Midrash (Lamentations Raba, 9) is more explicit in relating the cherubs to paganism. The Babylonians were sure that the Cherubs were pagan Gods and the Jews had laid claim to a more pure faith: “Ammonites and Moabites entered the holy of holies and found the two cherubs. They … paraded them around the streets of Jerusalem … did you not say that this nation does not worship idols? See what we have found. What they were serving.”
The cherubs atop the ark went underground after the destruction of the Temples. However, they re-appear in public consciousness centuries later as the masculine and feminine _expression of the divine in the kabbalistic books of the Bahir, the Zohar, and in virtually every subsequent kabbalistic text. This divine pair are called Malchut and Tiferet, Shechinah and Tiferet, and a host of other appellations. They reach their apex in kabbalistic consciousness in the mystical works of Isaac Luria and his one-time teacher, Moses Cordovero. In Isaac Luria’s graphic and daring vision, the world is not formed by a forward-thrusting male movement which creates outside of itself. Quite the contrary—Divinity creates within itself a sacred void in the form of a circle. This is the creation not of the masculine God but of the Goddess, of the Shechinah! This is the Great Circle of Creation.
In Luria’s vision, all of being is within the womb of the Goddess. Life is born not by expelling the baby, but by making room for offspring within the Goddess’ eternal womb. Nature is not outside of the Goddess but instead is a daughter _expression of the divine. Luria’s teacher, Moses Cordovero, was even clearer about the identity of this Goddess. In a passing comment in one of his works he says explicitly, “Malchut (Shechinah) is Ashera.” Cordevero’s statement emerges from a powerful and radical passage in the Zohar (Vol. 1, 49A) which suggests that the altar in the Temple itself was an Ashera tree!! The deep intention of the Zohar is not that this was an actual Ashera tree. Rather the Zohar is teaching that the Temple was deeply connected to the primal power of the sacred Ashera Goddess.
So we have come full circle. The Canaanite pagan Ashera has been reclaimed as a Hebrew Goddess. Primal circle consciousness has been rewoven into the rich fabric of a resurgent Hebrew myth.
Sod HaYichud
If the circle is so wonderful, why not live in circle consciousness and just jettison the jagged and cutting line once and for all? Why not simply return to the Goddess?
The answer is that the circle alone is not sufficient. Indeed, followers of both the biblical line and the mystical path have been quick to point out that the circle not integrated by the line not only lacks integrity, but is a primary ontological cause of evil. Master Nachman of Bratzlav writes that the source of evil in the world is the primal chalal reik, the empty void. The chalal reik is a circle image drawn from Lurianic Kabbalah which has not yet been penetrated by the kav, the line.
We are used to viewing the source of evil as being somehow external to man. Both capitalists and communists of the last century insisted that market conditions and economic opportunity were the prime cause for evil. Others blame evil on parents, schools, television violence or handguns. Many varieties of religion have long spoken about a Satan or tempter force that moves men to “the dark side.” The common denominator is the location of evil somewhere outside the human being. If that is true, then we only have to fix that external system and everything will be okay. Economic reform, social engineering, gun control, parent education, school reform, are all potential messiahs.
While all those may be good things, the core premise of Hebrew myth is that none of them will prevent evil. Biblical mysticism has an entirely different view of the human being. Evil comes from the failure to integrate the feminine circle and masculine line. This is called in Kabbalah Sod HaYichud, the secret of the union. More accurately it means the secret of the integration which is no more and no less than the secret of the cherubs. This is our life’s work: to achieve full eros through the deep integration of our circles and lines. Or to say it differently, we need to move from the eros of the first level circle, which is pre-line, to the eros of the third level circle, which is transline. To confuse the two would be to fall prey to the pre/trans fallacy which so often marks contemporary New Age philosophies. To know how to move to third level circle eros we must expose the shadow of the first level pagan circle from the perspective of the prophetic line.
The Closed Circle and History
Intellectual historian Yehezkel Kaufman is correct in reminding us that the opposition to paganism—the opposition to pure circle consciousness—may well be the singularly most important theme of the entire Hebrew biblical project. The prophets exposed the two great shadows of pagan circle thinking. The first shadow stems precisely from its circle nature! The pagan myth believed as an absolute given of reality in the great wheel of Being. Mircea Eliade’s great work The Myth of Eternal Return is probably the best modern statement of this powerful cyclical motif which is shot through all pagan reality maps. The problem with the cycle, however, as Buddha already pointed out, is that it is a trap. The circle is by very definition not open, but closed. There is no way out. It is to this circle consciousness that the wisdom masters referred when they said, “Until the Exodus no slave had ever succeeded in leaving Egypt.” In the pagan circle consciousness of Egypt, no one could ever leave his or her place. You were born into your circle and destined to go round and round within it.
In contrast to the stasis of the circle, the line of evolution—beginning with the gradual unfolding of creation from simple to complex in the Genesis creation story—is essential to the biblical spirit. Biblical myth in the story of the Exodus introduces line consciousness into the mind and heart stream of the world. It is the creation of the very ideas of history, progress, and therefore hope. Love desires growth, healing, and transformation. For the circle to exist without being bisected by the line would be the greatest failure of love.
In biblical myth consciousness the story of the Exodus is the story of the second great escape from the tyranny of the circle. The first great escape is the story of the first Hebrew, Abraham. In fact, it is precisely Abraham’s ability to make the great escape from the circle that makes him the first Hebrew, for the very word “Hebrew” (Ivri) means the “one who crossed over.” The line consciousness of Abraham introduces to the world the notion of journey. The clear implication, against virtually all of pagan thought, is that you can actually go someplace. Line consciousness is history. The idea of a plot, suspense, and ultimate resolution introduced by the Hebrews and so engrained in us today was unknown to the circle consciousness of the pagan.
In Hebrew, there is no word for “history”; instead, the word is zachor—remember. Not accidentally, zachor in Hebrew has a second meaning: the masculine. His-story is a function of line consciousness, the masculine thrusting-forward property of the spirit. It is biblical mysticism that gives birth to the notion of tikkun olam, “the world’s fixing”—which a very close reading of Isaac Luria’s works reveals to mean the evolving and healing of all consciousness—human and divine. It is only when the journey to God is over that the journey in God begins.
What we are talking about is much more than the evolution of humankind. It was the kabbalists who introduced the idea of an evolving divine consciousness. The unfolding of divine consciousness is not a purely intra-divine process. The great privilege of being a human being is that we participate in the evolution and healing of God. The Zohar, in Vol 1 Genesis 4A, even imagines the human being as a creator of God. It is the evolution of the human spirit that catalyzes the evolution of God. As biblical mystic Zecharia says, “On that day [in the future] God will be one and his name will be one.” When God and man meet in an evolutionary embrace, redemption is achieved. In the words of Nikos Kazantzaikos, “We are the saviors of God.”
This is the great messianic idea, the climax of all history and evolution. “Messiah” in biblical mysticism is more than a person. It is a destination which we arrive at after the long and often arduous journey. It is the hope and the vision of a better tomorrow. It is the possibility of possibility.
Until this shaft of the line cut across human consciousness, human existence was fundamentally determined. All that happened was thought to be revealed in the astrological wisdom of the stars in their heavenly cycles, or in the guts of animals when you killed them. The key was that there was “nothing new under the sun.”
The freedom implied in line consciousness means not only that a slave people can throw off the shackles of the oppressor. It also means that each of us can throw off the shackles of our own personal taskmasters. There is no greater slave master than the idea that yesterday determines today. This is precisely the shadow of circle consciousness. The line sets us free. It pierces the circular bubble, shattering the “realities” that want to hold us back and keep us down.
God and Nature
We now come to the second great shadow of pagan circle consciousness. The pagan insisted that divinity was in trees and in all of nature. But the essential biblical idea is that God is also beyond nature. God is the creator of nature and therefore not trapped within it. Biblical myth therefore opens with the Genesis story, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The powerful and revolutionary implication is that God is not merely nature. Unlike the Greek, Roman, pagan, or Buddhist pantheons, biblical myth insists on a God who is both within and infinitely beyond the circle, radically immanent as well as transcendent.
When we say that God is infinitely beyond trees, we are also saying that if you can connect to God, God can free you from the ensnaring web of nature. The notion that a human being is created in the image of God means for the Hebrew mystic that a person has it within them to reach beyond the natural to the moral.
The reason this is so critical is because in biblical consciousness, the loving God’s primary demand is ethical behavior. The single most important _expression of love—and the most important principle of Hebrew ethics—is how we treat each other, not how we think about each other. Sixteenth-century master Aron of Barcelona wrote, “A person is formed by their actions.” Treat a person lovingly and you will love them in the end. Love a person passionately and treat them unethically and you will be alienated from them in the end. Paradoxically, there is no eros without ethics.
Ethical behavior always requires that we be able to act against our primal instinctive natures. We must be able to step out of the level one pagan circle and become response-able for actions, able to respond to and control our instinctive nature. If we were part of nature, then clearly we could not be expected to ever control or direct our nature. We are both part of nature, and parting from nature. It is only because of this paradox that we are capable of self-control. Of course, it is giving up control which is essential in the classic frameworks of circle consciousness. Sex and emotionally vulnerable relationships are two good examples. Giving up control, however, is only possible in the context of a safe environment created by people who can be trusted to exercise self-control. The circle integrates with the line to foster the integrity of higher eros, a level three circle.
Circle consciousness claims that people are naturally the best that they can be. The problem, argues the circle, is not goodness but alienation, and in circle consciousness the greatest evil is to be cut off, distant, disenchanted, out of the circle. Line consciousness disagrees with the circle and says that people are potentially good but not naturally good. In biblical myth people are born innocent, but they are not born good. The most important act of love, according to the Hebrew gospel, is to develop a training system for goodness. For biblical myth the belief that people are naturally the best that they can be is not only wrong but destructive. If people were naturally good, then evil would be the result of some set of external forces. Here we return to the idea of Sod HaYichud, the secret of union. Biblical myth, then as now, says no to this thinking. Hebrew gospel teaches that only the control and refinement of our internal nature, the integration of line with circle, can bring the good.
There is, however, a second critical reason why the line-driven ethical prophet does not experience God as being exclusively in nature. If God were in nature and not beyond Nature, then Nature would be our source of ethics. It is clear though that, for all of her splendor in reflecting a pale cast of divine beauty, nature is amoral. The law of nature is nearly always that the strong kill the weak. Social services, hospitals, help for the disabled are all profoundly “unnatural,” at least according to the law of nature in the non-human world. In fact, the hospital is a direct corollary of line and not (first level) circle consciousness. The morality of the line insists that those higher on the line—that is to say stronger and with more means—take care of those lower on the line. This is the faith and God experience of the prophets.
The Prophet & the Pagan
Let’s frame the clash between circle and line in the most striking possible terms.
The prophet, the hero of the Hebrew bible, represents ethics, the line. The pagan, hero of the ancient world into which biblical thought was born, represents eros, the circle. The clash between the prophet and the pagan—the circle and the line—is in the end the clash between the erotic and the ethical. (That is to say, between first level circle eros and second level line ethics.)
Having said that, I want to make a radical claim—which, as is often the case, is patently obvious once you see it. On the essential interpretation of reality, the prophet actually was closer to circle consciousness than to line consciousness. The difference was that the pagan was a first stage circle archetype and the prophet a third stage circle archetype.
The prophet’s line _expression is a necessary corrective response to the pagan consciousness that dominated the world at the time. The prophet saw his role to be overturning a pagan ethic which was bound up with so much cruelty. For example, built into the pagan ritual are demands for parents to burn their children as a sacrifice to the gods. “They have set their pagan abominations in my house … to burn their sons and daughters in fire.” (Jeremiah 7:30, 31) The burning of children was not the exception in pagan worship. Rather it was the model of the pagan idea that erotic abandonment to the God must, by its very definition, overrun all intuitive human ethical boundaries.
In the picture of the prophet as a social reformer, it is, however, too easy to lose sight that, at core, he was an erotic mystic. The prophet is actually the archetype of the feminine. The “most beautiful among women,” according to King Solomon, are the prophets. The phrase is drawn from Canticles, King Solomon’s love song to the erotic Shechinah, whose deep essence is modeled, but never exhausted, by the sexual.
Yes, the prophet insisted that nature was not all of God, yet he experienced with all his being that God was all of nature. Even as he decried the pagan claim that identified God with the Ashera tree, he knew and rejoiced in the truth that God was fully present and accessible “on every hill and under every tree.” God was not only reflected in nature as the external creator. God was fully present in nature—in the words of the later mystics, mamash, meaning literally—”actually,” for real, not just in metaphor or symbol. The words of later Hebrew mystics capture accurately prophetic consciousness. Schneur Zalman of Liadi writes that “Trees and stones are mamash divine.” Nachman of Bratzlav told his disciples that “Every blade of grass has its own (divine) song.”
It is critical to understand that God is paradoxically within and beyond. Dennis Prager, generally a brilliant polemicist for the core intuitions of biblical religion, dismisses any possibility of a mainstream Jewish position which embraces pantheism in his “Is God in Trees.” However the overwhelming majority of classical Jewish thinkers in the past 500 years have categorically refused to choose between pantheism and monotheism. To give but one example, Abraham Kook consistently and intentionally embraces a paradoxical dialectic between pantheism and monotheism throughout his writings, so much so that in his letters he refuses to term Judaism as monotheistic (Orot Hakodesh Vol. 3 pp. 399).
The goal of the prophet is integration. The erotic and ethical, the line and circle, must merge. This is the secret of the cherubs and the model of the sexual.
What the prophet and the pagan respectively incarnate, however, is made manifest when the erotic and the ethical clash. An oft-quoted line from Jung, modern heir to the pagan myth tradition, is the best summation I have ever heard of the pagan position: “I’d rather be whole than good.” For the pagan, the alienation from divinity is so palpable and painful that it must be overcome at all costs, even if ethics are the price. This is where the balanced scales start precariously to slip. It was Jung who was sadly seduced by the pagan Goddess Ashera into a flirtation with Nazism, that menacing shadow of eros which horrifically darkened our world just a few short decades ago.
The prophet always responds, “I’d like to be whole. Indeed I yearn to be whole. But if I have to choose, I’d rather be good than whole.” It is for this reason that the prophet is the great critic of the pagan consciousness intrinsic to the Temple experience. The erotic fulfillment of the Temple experience was all too often a replacement for the kind of direct ethical action which could heal the world. It is the widow and the orphan, the vulnerable and the dispossessed, who must be the primary concern of the homo religious, according to the prophets. Thus Isaiah declaims:
I do not want your multitude of sacrifices
I delight not in the blood of bullocks or goats or rams.
Do not come to seek my face …
as you trample my courts of justice …
your hands are full of blood …
wash yourselves, make yourselves clean …
cease your evil doings … seek fair judgment,
argue the case of the widow and the orphan …
Zion will be redeemed
by justice and … integrity.
For Isaiah, the ecstatic pagan service of the Temple, with its blood sacrifices, has led Israelites to forget the ethical imperative to feed the hungry and clothe the poor. Isaiah refuses to allow eros to trump ethos.
Rebuilding Temple Consciousness
In my spiritual community of Bayit Chadash in the hills around Israel’s Sea of Galilee, we are committed to reclaiming the spark of sacred paganism. We return to the pagan when we practice deep ecology, because for the pagan “Love your mother” means not only your human biological mother, but mother earth who nurtures you, balances you, and grounds you in her embrace. We reclaim the pagan in meditation, ecstatic service and passionate love of the Shechinah in all of her myriad manifestations. It is in large part for this pagan sensibility that we yearn when we speak of the dream of a re-built Temple.
The Temple in its ideal state was supposed to manifest the third stage circle moment in Hebrew consciousness. What the prophets realized, however, was that the people had not incorporated second stage line consciousness. The erotic was overrunning the ethical. In principle, however, the Temple was meant to be a balance between line and circle, erotic and ethical.
Only a short distance from the seat of eros—the holy of holies with her sexually intertwined cherubs—was the lishkat hagazit, the room of hewn stone. This was the Chamber of Justice whose passionate concern was the ethical—the creation of a just society. On the face of it, its sensibilities seem far removed from the erotic motifs of the sensual and the sacred that permeated the Temple’s aura. What, after all, do ethics and eros have to do with each other?
The answer is—everything. In the short run we can train people through behaviorist ritual, social engineering, and a good deal of guilt to behave ethically. However, in the final analysis, non-erotic ethics will always collapse under the weight of contracts and contacts it cannot fulfill. The Room of Hewn Stone must necessarily be housed in the eroticized temple in order for its ethics to truly thrive.
In the end all ethical failure is a violation of eros—your own or someone else’s. Ethics without eros cannot hold. Ethics which are not rooted in eros ultimately fall … apart. We yearn for eros. By exiling God from nature and secularizing the sexual, we condemn ourselves to emptiness and vacuity. Ethical collapse always occurs when we are overwhelmed by our emptiness. The failure of ethics is always rooted in a failure of eros. When we talk only about a God giving rules that run counter to our nature, the rules cannot hold. The eros of our nature will always overrun them. But if we come to understand that ethics is an erotic _expression of our deeper divinity, we are truly moved to the ethical. For at that point we realize that the ethical is an _expression of our deepest selves, a response to the call of our own voice. Ethics, to be compelling and powerful, must be an _expression of our erotic divine nature and not a contradiction to it. So when the prophets insist that God and the God within us is beyond nature, and can therefore act ethically against nature, they are referring only to our first nature, not to our deeper second nature. Our deeper nature is God.
At the same time that ethics cannot live without eros, eros cannot live without ethics. The erotic dies without the ethical. The circle cannot survive without the line.
Circle consciousness rejects the non-bi-sected circle not only as ethically flawed but as ontologically inadequate and existentially unsatisfying.
Humanity is life become aware of itself. It is this very self-awareness that moves us from the harmony of the natural to the tension of the confronted. We are at once part of nature, subject to her laws, even as we are free, confronting, controlling, and healing nature. The human being is the only creature in nature whose very existence poses a problem to itself. It is a problem from which we cannot escape. Living our merely natural circle life is both impossible and boring to us. It is this sense of boredom, even ennui, which makes us feel alienated, evicted from paradise. We are moved both by reason and soul to struggle endlessly not only with questions of the techne, of how and what, but also with the mysterious why and ultimately we long to see the Who!
The divinity of humanity—that which makes us not only within but also beyond nature—is precisely what assures that nature alone will not ful-fill. Line consciousness suggests that a non-accomplished person can never be satisfied. We require for our psychic-spiritual wholeness the pursuit of a goal. Meditation is insufficient for bliss. But not just any goal will do.
The goal must be an ethical one; an ambition that promises the greater good. Without such an objective, we ultimately get lost in our ennui and overwhelmed by our emptiness. The circle is incapable of captivating us by herself.
Eros always needs to in-corporate ethics. What this points to is that the good is not only an ethical need, it is an erotic need as well. At the same time, all ethical collapse is caused by un-ful-filled eros.
The modern mystic who understood this best was Abraham Kook.
Morality not guided by the sacred is not deep,
and does not enter into the inwardness of the soul; …
Such a weak morality
does not have the power to guide …
the polis, the human community,
to penetrate to the depth of the soul
and to transform the heart
of universal man and of individual man
from stone to flesh.
There is no alternative plan for humanity
other than that it be guided by the erotic morality….
It is the same Kook who refused to term Judaism a monotheistic religion, believing as he did that strains of purified pagan pantheism were essential to the essence of Hebrew religion. The prophet in us needs to reclaim holy paganism. The pagan within must be open to hearing the call of the prophet. When the prophet and pagan meet, the Temple of the heart will be rebuilt.
Post-Orthodoxy Journey
By Neri Livneh
Haaretz – March 4, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/401222.html
CORRECTION: In “What is the question?” (Haaretz Magazine, March 5, 2004) Rabbi Mordechai Gafni should have been described as being 43 years old, married for the third time, and due to complete his doctorate at the end of the year.
“We’ve forgotten the Ela [the Goddess],” says Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, founder of Bayit Chadash, a community that aspires to be a new stream in Judaism, and, in his words, “to restore the spark of holy paganism.” Judaism was once an erotic religion, he argues, in the sense that the Divinity had two experiential sides or dimensions: a male side called “God” and a female side called “Shekhina,” the Goddess. The sense of the Divinity is achieved by a fusing of the two elements, as between a man and a woman, yin and yang, Shakti and Shiva. In the Temple, the Holy of Holies, there were two cherubim – male and female. To kabbalists, the blending of the divine male, called “Tiferet” and the divine female, called “Shekhina,” a unity described in the Babylonian Talmud in reference to the cherubim on the Holy Ark, represents the Divine Power. Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook described the fusing of these two elements as the combination of a (male) straight line with a (female) circle.
To Gafni, the line without a circle represents Ethos without Eros, i.e., rational life, without emotion, disconnected from Mother Earth and from natural impulse. The circle without the line represents an immersion in the erotic or spiritual, as in New Age practices. The fusion of the line and the circle represents Eros purified by the encounter with the rational and ethical foundation – a desirable encounter that is necessary for the building of the “Bayit Chadash” (“new home”) or the new Judaism.
“Orthodox Judaism developed out of the ethical teachings of the Prophets, who tried to obscure the Eros for the sake of nurturing the Ethos,” he says. This is how we’ve gotten the ultra-Orthodox Judaism that we’re familiar with, a religion that tries to suppress the impulse and whose rabbis are supposed to supply absolute truths and answers to every question. Gafni, who calls himself “post-Orthodox,” takes an opposite view of what religiosity ought to mean: “To me, the religious duty is to ask questions. I think it smacks of great arrogance to give pat answers to ultimate issues.”
Gafni is not an anonymous personality by any means. His Channel 2 television program, “Tahat Gafno,” attracted many viewers. He says that thousands of people have attended his community’s encounters. He also writes a regular column in the magazine Hayim Aherim and has published five books in the United States in recent years. One of them, “Soul Prints,” will soon appear in Hebrew translation, with an introduction by the religious poet Admiel Kosman. Gafni’s television show is due back for a new season, and he recently finished taping segments for the Keshet broadcasting network “about the situation and questions related to the situation – for Keshet to use on days when there is a terror attack.”
In addition to his rabbinical ordination, he also holds a Ph.D. from Oxford. And no, he says, he is not at all inclined to become a guru. He says that he’s as far from New Age as he is from Reform Judaism. His “new Orthodoxy” does not offer any breaks when it comes to observance of the 613 commandments, or mitzvot. What makes him unique are the additions he makes to Judaism, the changes of emphasis, the way he relates it to modern life and the special focus he puts on commandments related to human dignity and love of fellow human beings. He also invites non-Jews to the Shabbat weekends he runs at the Bayit Chadash center in Poriya, overlooking Lake Kinneret. He officiates at same-sex marriages, and sees feminism and equality for women as key Jewish values. He plans to ordain women as rabbis and women in his community can be called up to the Torah. Every blessing in the community’s prayer book and every blessing recited at community ceremonies open, as usual, with “Baruch ata adonai eloheinu” and then continues with “ve’berukha at hashekhina” (“And blessed art thou, the Shekhina”). “I’m not talking about Judaism-lite, like the Reform or the settlers,” says Gafni. “I’m talking about whole Judaism that has both Ethos and Eros, both faith and a full life, both male and female.”
Gafni divides his time between the new Bayit Chadash center in Jaffa, where this conversation took place, and the older center in Poriya – and between Israel and the U.S. He is 42, married to Chaya (his second wife), and father of three children from his previous marriage. He radiates warmth, and is not the type of rabbi who is reluctant to shake a woman’s hand. On the contrary, he does not shy away from physical contact. “Someone who wanted to study with me said, `I have a problem with you. I’ve heard that you love women.’ As if loving women is a bad thing. I told him that I’m very happy that I’m a loving person and also that I love women. I think love is a very important thing.”
He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to a family of Holocaust survivors that lived an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. “At age six or seven, I knew that I wanted to be a rabbi,” he relates. “Because I really oved the world of the book, which I’d known since I began learning at age 3.” He went to a yeshiva high school in New York, then to Yeshiva University. He also took courses at Queens College and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy (“I majored in Sartre, Heidegger and Nietzsche”). At the same time, he also set up a network of Jewish clubs within the New York public school system, to draw in Jewish youth that had left the synagogue and Judaism behind.
After being ordained as a rabbi, he moved to Florida and served as the rabbi of South Palm Beach. Then, at age 29, he decided that it was time to make aliyah. “To me, the Divine call of our generation was to participate in the destiny of the Jewish people in our generation, and that’s hard to do from Florida,” he says.
What happens in Israel will either shape or answer an essential question: “Is Judaism a relevant and important instrument in the symphony of the spirit of the modern world? Or is it just another fundamentalist approach that does not grapple with this generation in a substantial way? Of course, I’d prefer for us to develop a Judaism that has relevance and contributes to life in our era.”
New look at kashrut
Gafni describes his main occupation as “clarifying the issue of the place and contribution of the Jewish instrument in the world symphony of the spirit.” To this end, he participates in discussions with a group of philosophers and “international sages,” as he calls them, who conduct a dialogue, by means of e-mail, on theological and philosophical subjects. One member of this group is philosopher Ken Wilbur, whom Gafni calls “the Aristotle of our time.” “We examine Judaism’s place and contribution, starting with the premise that there is no competition between religions,” he says. “It’s not the old idea of seeking to prove that Judaism is better than other religions. That outlook has to be uprooted.”
Another question he addresses is the purpose of Judaism. “The standard argument is a circular one – that Judaism must be preserved so that Jews will be preserved so that they will preserve Judaism. If the whole purpose of Judaism is merely the survival of people as Jews without any ethical or spiritual content, then Judaism is essentially a kind of `enlightened racism.’ In my opinion, the answer to the question of what is the purpose of Judaism has to come from questions about the essence of Judaism. The question that all the big rabbis are concerned with now – whether the tuna is a kosher fish or not – is not, in my view, an essential Jewish question. An essential Jewish question is a question that shapes life.”
His transition from Orthodox to post-Orthodox began even before he received his rabbinical ordination. “We were studying `The Letter of Rav Shrira Gaon,’ and in it he says that everything that happens in the world is for the sake of the Jewish people. I asked the rabbi a simple question: When a couple in China, on a beautiful moonlit night, feels a great physical attraction to each other and makes love – are they also making love for the sake of the Jewish people? The rabbi said, `Indirectly, yes.’ That’s when I realized that there was something twisted in this Jewish outlook that is incapable of seeing anything that happens in the world as distinct from it, but instead sees everything as somehow enslaved to the needs of Judaism. To me, that means that as a Jew you cannot see the Other, and I don’t accept that.”
Gafni sees the world as rich and varied and ever-changing. “The classic Jewish outlook tries to freeze everything in order to fit the changes to its needs, instead of fitting itself to the needs of the world,” he says. “I thought that it was necessary to seek a new Jewish outlook that would try to deal with our place in this world and in this generation. For example, the matter of kashrut. I don’t give myself any breaks in terms of kashrut, but I have a different understanding of the meaning of kashrut than the standard one.”
In speaking of kashrut, Gafni includes ecological and humanistic considerations with the halakhic [Jewish legal] system: “Meat is considered kosher if it comes from a kosher animal that has been slaughtered according to Jewish law. Everyone knows this, and that suffices for them. But I say, let’s ask another question: A goose that is slaughtered in accordance with Jewish law is kosher according to the classical outlook, but is the fact that it was cruelly fattened in such a way that its entire internal system was wrecked of no significance? How can that not detract from its kashrut? Or if the vegetable that we eat was previously sprayed with a substance that harms the soil and poisons the groundwater, can it be kosher?”
And he adds another, social consideration: “What I mean to say is that there needs to be kashrut not only in the accepted halakhic sense, but also `eco-kashrut.’ Judaism must also be expressed in concern for the world and for life, for ecology in other words. And another question: If someone eats food that was grown by people employed in slave conditions at starvation wages, how can it be kosher?”
You’re adding a moral dimension to kashrut.
“Yes, and not just to the kashrut of food. I’m saying that we have to find the kashrut in every aspect of human life. For example, I need to check into my mutual fund and make sure that I’m not investing in the world of globalization that is impoverishing people and companies.”
What else do you consider an essential Jewish question?
“For example, how do I see my world: Do I divide the world into the enlightened and the primitive, the secular and the religious, the Jews and the goyim, or is my world more complex than that – one in which no one possesses the absolute truth, in which each one contributes something to the symphony of the spirit and in which everyone must ask himself questions. In my view, the most essential part of the spiritual quest has to be doubt – to begin every effort to understand something not from the classical Jewish starting point that says either I or my rabbi has the right answers to all the questions, but to cast doubt on all the answers, and from this point to begin asking questions.”
Male and female He created them
Another essential question on Gafni’s mind is where the feminine voice has disappeared to in Judaism. This question, he says, is especially urgent in this generation, in which the feminine voice has great importance. “The Orthodox public is so worried about `kol be’isha erva’ (the provocativeness of a woman’s voice) that it also doesn’t listen to the Bat-Kol (the Heavenly Voice) and erases the Goddess.”
What exactly is the connection between God and the Goddess?
“First of all, these are two different elements of one Divine essence. The masculine God creates the world outside of himself and the feminine Goddess creates the world within herself. The masculine God is rational, judgmental, ethical. The Goddess is more giving, more encompassing, more accepting. I don’t advocate annulling the masculine God, but there has to be a holy mating. Meaning, a combination of the male and the female – in experience, in prayer, in equality. And all this isn’t my own personal invention, it comes from the sources of Jewish thought, from the Talmud and the kabbala and Jewish mysticism.”
What do you have against neo-liberalism?
“That’s another essential question. We live in a world today in which no one truly lives solely in his own place – economically, ecologically or culturally. But what happens is that in the New Age world, which is all superficiality, and in the academic world, which is completely disconnected from life, and also in the world of intellectualism, there is no real discussion of globalization and its meaning for the life of the spirit, government and economics. This discussion has to take place, and that’s what we’re trying to do in Bayit Chadash.”
Is Bayit Chadash a group of `sages’ conducting a discussion, or it is a type of Jewish community?
“Both. Bayit Chadash is comprised of several parts. First of all, it’s a spiritual-cultural stream that currently has about 2,500 adherents and aspires to be a new stream in Judaism. There’s the aspect of the community, which is built on the model of the Buddhist community, or the way the Hasidic community was built once upon a time. The original Hasidic community wasn’t in the community center: A person would go to his rabbi a few times a year or a month, or every Shabbat. In our community, there are people who come a few times a year for Shabbat and there are those who come for the festivals and those who come every week or every few days and study in our Beit Midrash or take a class.
“In the inner circle of the community, there is our ordination program and our leadership program. I decided that we have to ordain people for the rabbinate and we currently have 17 men and women in our program. In our leadership program, we try to train people for social leadership. Outside of this inner circle, there is the public, cultural circle, which is composed of our activities in the media.”
What is pleasure?
People who have been to Gafni’s center in Poriya and to the new center in Jaffa describe Shabbat there as an especially pleasurable experience. “I had seen Rabbi Gafni on television and read his articles in Hayim Aherim, and I was intrigued,” says Ziv Barnea, a student in the rabbinical ordination program. “I come from a Marxist, very non-religious background. I went to the Bayit Chadash center in Poriya and discovered that I’d come to a warm and accepting and interesting place. Gafni greeted me and hugged me and also said it was an honor for him to meet me. He’s a very warm and loving and loved man, and on the other hand, has no pretensions at all of being a guru.
“One hundred and sixty people came that Shabbat. I kept coming for weekend retreats and there was usually a big crowd. I take my children and my wife there, too. One Shabbat, my wife was called up to the Torah and this had tremendous meaning for me, because the value of equality is something that has very great meaning in my life: equality between men and women, between Jews and Muslims, between straights and gays. Gafni applies this in his life, too. His wife, Chaya, is his equal partner in leading the community. She gives classes and workshops.”
Bayit Chadash is registered as a nonprofit organization and also has a center in New York. Gafni is the director-general of the NPO and when he is abroad, Rabbi Avraham Leader, who also grew up in America, substitutes for him at Bayit Chadash.
The organization pays a salary to several teachers and a director. Money to fund the centers comes from fees paid for lessons and – primarily – from contributions raised by Friends of Bayit Chadash, which operates in Israel and the United States.
“I don’t make my money from religion,” says Gafni. “Most of what I earn comes from lectures abroad and from my books.” He lectures, among other places, at the Harvard University business school and teaches several times a year at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. “And even though they’re Reform there, they accept me as an Orthodox rabbi,” he says.
“Judaism needs to be liberated from all the religious establishments. The establishments are a desecration of God’s name. If buses have to travel on Shabbat for the non-Orthodox majority, then there should be buses. And if the needs of this majority require civil marriages, then there should be civil marriages. And if gays and lesbians want to live together in love, then there should be marriages between them. Only if we throw off all the shackles of the religious establishment will Judaism be able to freely contend in the ideological market without cloaking itself in a mantle of establishment-based superiority. Tommy Lapid is always saying `no.’ I agree with most of his `nos.’ The problem is: What does he say `yes’ to?”
And what do you say?
“I say: The security of the State of Israel depends on our ability to recount a narrative that the country’s non-Orthodox majority will feel a part of. If there is no such narrative, then you can make one kind of fence or another, set borders here or there, and it won’t work. Because what will be inside the borders? This, by the way, is a very Zionist and not a right-wing thesis. Now, in order to search for this narrative, you need seriousness first of all. New Age populism and kabbala centers won’t help. The insularity of the yeshiva world and the alienation of the academic world won’t help either. And another thing, we have to create the kind of philosophy in which a person feels that he is developing and growing in his inner spiritual and ethical world, that he is on an inner journey.
“The kabbalists say that the primary ideal in life is pleasure. But what is pleasure? Pleasure is to develop. Today, the Orthodox Jewish world has become a kind of gym or training program where a person marks off pluses and minuses on a card and calculates how many pluses he needs to check off in order to get to heaven. I’ve done such and such mitzvot – okay, I’ve completed my quota. It’s a rigid approach that doesn’t contribute a lot to one’s inner life, and we need to return to the inner view that says that Judaism is a journey that can be expressed in many areas outside of religion: culture, science, you name it.”
You’re opposed to the rabbinical establishment and yet you ordain rabbis yourself?
“Yes, but a different type of rabbi. They won’t be rabbis whose job is to give halakhic answers. In Orthodox Judaism, the rabbi serves as a kind of alter-ego whose role is to underscore the imperfection of anyone who isn’t the rabbi. I say that anyone looking for this kind of rabbi should not come to me. I’ve made and am making a lot of mistakes in life. A rabbi has to be a person who genuinely loves people, who loves the Torah and is a person who has courage and is not just another kind of political person. He has to be outside the establishment and outside the political system and must be capable of admitting mistakes.
“I tell my people that I fall down and pick myself up every day. I’m no better than anyone else. But if you want to go on a spiritual journey together with me, then let’s do it. The whole philosophy of Bayit Chadash is that the rabbi is not a guru, the rabbi is essentially the community as a whole. Our philosophy is a kind of new Hasidism. We’re the successors of the Ba’al Shem Tov in this sense. Naturally, I’m aware that this approach is threatening to all the traditional approaches.”
Gafni may not want to be a guru, but he has not shown any special reluctance to establish a Hasidic-style court. A picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe – “when he was still young and modest” – in other words, before he was crowned as the Messiah by his admirers – adorns the wall of his study. The approach of Bayit Chadash could reopen the war between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, if it comes to be perceived as a real threat to Orthodox Judaism. The Hasidim of the Ba’al Shem Tov were accused by the Mitnagdim of engaging in a form of paganism, and the emphasis that Gafni places on the existence of the Goddess and her importance certainly could invite such accusations.
It’s not that hard to see the study methods at Bayit Chadash as a kind of almost idolatrous cult. Gafni himself described this in an article he wrote for Hayim Aherim: “In the Bayit Chadash spiritual community, located at Poriya overlooking Lake Kinneret, we are committed, in the spirit of Rav Kook’s teachings, to restoring the spark of holy paganism. We return to the pagan when we reconnect to Mother Earth … We restore the pagan in meditation, in ecstatic rituals and in passionate love of the Shekhina in her many manifestations. According to the kabbalist Cordovero, we yearn for the consciousness of this Goddess, when we speak of the dream of rebuilding the Temple.”n
Gafni: “I’m not talking about Judaism-lite, like the Reform or the settlers. I’m talking about whole Judaism that has both Ethos and Eros.”
Integral Naked
An Introduction to Integral Kabbalah: Study, Prayer, and Meditation.
Rabbi Marc Gafni and Ken Wilber
Kabbalah—the mystical branch of Judaism—is concerned with the ultimate knowledge of God. In this series of clips from a gathering in Boulder, Rabbi Marc Gafni and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—the world’s foremost proponents of Integral Kabbalah—discuss with Ken three of the main practices within their tradition that constitute the means of this knowledge: Study, Prayer, and Meditation.
In this introductory clip, Ken sets the context by noting that in the world’s great spiritual traditions, the process of God-realization is often divided into three stages: ethics, meditation, and nondual awareness. The second stage, meditation, can be understood to have a variety of forms, one of which is study. According to Gafni and Zalman, “study” is not merely cognitive book-learning, but ecstatic surrender to the Divine via union with a sacred text.
Rabbi Marc (Mordechai) Gafni has emerged as an exciting new voice in Israeli and international religious life and spirituality.
In addition to teaching graduate seminars on mysticism at Oxford University in England, R’Gafni is the founder and head of Bayit Chadash. Overlooking Israel’s Sea of Galilee, Bayit Chadash is an international spiritual community retreat center committed to Jewish renaissance.
Additionally, Gafni is the host and creator of a highly acclaimed national Israeli television program on ethics and spirituality. The show, with hundreds of thousands of viewers, has become an important weaver of the Israeli spirit.
Besides contributing to a number of American journals, R’Gafni is a contributing editor to Chayim Acherim, Israel’s leading spirituality magazine.
An acknowledged master of the ancient texts as well as the texts of the heart, Gafni has published three works of Jewish thought in Hebrew.
Gafni’s work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher and spiritual master: wise, compassionate, accessible, and universal.
Along with Gafni’s two English-written books listed below, a two-volume work with extensive primary source footnotes, entitled The Erotic and the Holy, is soon to be published.
Gafni’s written work in English includes:
Soul Prints
Gafni’s fourth book, written for a broader English-speaking public, was the subject of a National PBS Special. The book hit the bestseller list, has been translated into numerous languages, and was chosen for the prestigious Napra Nautilus Award for the Best Spirituality Book of 2001. It will be re-released shortly, with an extensive section of primary source footnotes drawn from the Kabbalistic tradition.
The Mystery of Love
Gafni’s latest—highly acclaimed.
Rabbi Marc has appeared on Integral Naked:
A Prayer for Malka · 4/12/2004
Your Own Letter in the Torah · 4/5/2004
A Second Person Relationship to God · 3/29/2004
A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self. Part 2. · 3/29/2004
The Ultimate Erotic Act · 2/16/2004
A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self. Part 1. · 12/22/2003
When the Rabbi Met Lilith
by Rabbi Marc Gafni
Monday July 11, 9:00 am ET
TEL AVIV, Israel, July 11 /PRNewswire/ — Last month, a riveting and controversial text was published by Modan Publishing House in Israel. Together, Rabbi Mordechai (Marc) Gafni and Rabbi Ohad Ezrachi co-authored the book, Who is afraid of Lilith? Rereading the Kabbalah of the Feminine Shadow.
It was met with shock by many readers, as it takes a radical path to understand the fullness of Lilith. Lilith is the mythological figure of the Jewish tradition embodying the fears of men towards the perception of a sexually liberated temptress. Most books focus solely on Lilith’s shadow aspects. This book, though, includes the process of Lilith’s redemption through a re-examination of Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalistic sources. The authors recognize not only the problematic aspects of Lilith, but are also attuned to her essential spiritual quality.
The book begins with a scholarly examination of the Lilith character and myth, then turns to other female figures of the Hebrew Bible which represent her many aspects, each one through her own unique story.
Society is used to hearing feminist literature only through the female voice. This book offers the much-needed perspective of the male feminist viewpoint. Hearing the male feminist voice, especially that of a rabbi, is a direct rectification of the past when male rabbinic voices originally created the demonization of Lilith. The book has been published in Hebrew, and the English translation of this modern mystical text should be released soon.
For more details please visit www.marcgafni.com
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, Director of Bayit Chadash, has emerged as an exciting voice in Israeli and international religious life and spirituality. Rabbi Gafni’s work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher and spiritual teacher: wise, compassionate, inspired, and universal.
Ohad Ezrahi, the Rabbi and the founder of Hamakom spiritual community.
Ohad’s path goes through nature, Zen, years of learning Torah and Kabala in the ultra-orthodox Hassidic communities in Jerusalem, teaching Kabala in the Yeshiva world, “graduating” from orthodoxy and being one of the leading figures in the renaissance of Jewish liberal spirituality in Israel.
Bayit Chadash is a spiritual community in Israel, focused on reclaiming inner Eros and the wonder of Hebrew wisdom as an essential and vital guiding source in the service of human spiritual evolution and physical survival. For further details on Bayit Chadash activities in Israel or abroad, please email zvi@bayitchadash.org or call us at +972-3-683-972. Visit us online at www.bayitchadash.org
Wisdom Chair – Jewish Studies at Stephen S. Wise Temple (Los Angeles, CA)
http://www.sswt.org/@wise/0904/@wise0904.pdf
The Chair will be held by Rabbi Mordechai (Marc) Gafni who over the last tow years has become a beloved part of our Stephen S. Wise Temple community.
Rabbi Gafni is the Dean of the Bayit Chadash Community and Think Tank in Israel, an Oxford Scholar, and important new voice in spirit in the international community, as well as the author of a growinglibrary of both new Jewish Thought and best selling volumes on Modern Jewish Spirituality.
Rabbi Gafni will be in residence at Stephen S. Wise Temple for three months between Septemeber 2004 and July 2005.
Visit One: September 11 -22, 2004
The Dance of Laughter and Tears; Towards a Vision of New Jewish Spirituality
Visit Two: October 31 – November 12, 2004
The Mystery of Love
Visit Three: February 23 – March 8, 2004
The Mystery of Love – The Next Level
Visit Four: May 1 – June 14, 2005
The Psychology of Judaism Through the Prism of the Book of Genesis
Herscher: Gafni Still Welcome in L.A.
by Julie Gruenbaum Fax, Religion Editor
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles – October 1, 2004
(see sidebar to right of reprinted Jewish Week article)
Rabbi Eli Herscher has an emphatic answer to Gary Rosenblatt’s question about when persistent “rumors and allegations” add up to a story: They don’t.
Herscher, senior rabbi at Stephen S. Wise Temple, says The New York Jewish Week and The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles have stepped from responsible journalism to outright lashon hara, or gossip, by printing and reprinting an article that looks into alleged sexual abuse by Rabbi Mordechai Gafni.
Gafni has become an important part of the Reform congregation’s educational program as a frequent scholar-in-residence, and Herscher has no plans to break off a burgeoning relationship based on allegations he says are unfounded and malicious.
“`Rumors and allegations’ are not going to be the basis for bringing down one of the great Jewish teachers of this generation,” Herscher said.
But Herscher may have to watch his back legally.
“If the congregation brings him out now with full knowledge of these allegations, and if something were to happen now, they may have culpability,” said Anthony DeMarco of the Beverly Hills law firm Kiesel, Boucher and Larson, which is handling 300 abuse cases for victims in the Catholic church and serves as liaison counsel for all such cases in Southern California.
But Herscher hasn’t found any substance to the rumors he said he personally checked out after Gafni himself brought the issue up soon after they met.
The article, Herscher points out, brings up incidents alleged to have occurred more than 25 years ago, when Gafni was 19, and even those are based on allegations that have never been proven and that Gafni denies.
The fact that the alleged cases are 25 years old does not mean they shouldn’t be acted upon, Demarco said.
“What we find in childhood sexual abuse is there is a latency period for when people come forward, and that is why years will go by until these kids finally speak out,” Demarco said. Often adults speak out when their own children reach the age they were when they were abused.
Rosenblatt, once nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is one of the most respected editors in Jewish journalism. He printed the story, based on more than 50 interviews over several years, after months of deliberation.
Herscher takes The Jewish Week to task for implying that Gafni has admitted to wrongdoing or done teshuvah, or repentence, for specific incidents.
For instance, Rosenblatt says that Gafni has done teshuvah by agreeing not to work with children, to do private counseling or to be alone with a woman.
But Herscher said he discussed those self-imposed ground rules with Gafni, and it was clear to him that Gafni was not trying to avoid temptation, but only trying to preclude even the appearance of wrongdoing, given the rumors that have haunted him for two decades.
“There are people who could be learning with him and being counseled by him who don’t have that opportunity,” Herscher said.
Herscher has invited Gafni to teach frequently over the last two years at Stephen S. Wise. This past Rosh Hashanah, 1,000 people came to hear him even on the second day — traditionally a low-attendance day at Reform congregations — and hundreds more came to evening lectures during the week.
Gafni’s appearance on Rosh Hashanah kicked off his tenure holding the newly created wisdom chair of Jewish studies at Stephen S. Wise, where he will be returning to teach this year for two weeks in November, two weeks in March and six weeks in May and June.
“Rabbi Gafni has inspired people who might have never been engaged in serious Jewish learning were it not for him,” Herscher said. “I’ve seen him move them, challenge them, uplift them and have been amazed at his greatness as a teacher.”
None of that, Herscher said, would matter if Gafni were, in fact, an abusive man.
“There would be one reason and one reason only to publish such an article, and that would be if factual evidence, and not allegation and innuendo, determined that Rabbi Gafni was in some way a danger,” he said.
Attorney Demarco said he has seen this response before — that priests confronted with allegations about their colleagues are often unwilling to believe that fellow men of God could have committed such crimes.
Gafni’s support is coming from a list of prominent rabbis, including ethicist Joseph Telushkin and Modern Orthodox scholar Saul Berman.
Among his supporters in Israel is Rabbi Daniel Landes, director of the Pardes Institute, who led the upstairs minyan at Beth Jacob in Beverly Hills and Congregation B’nai David-Judea in Pico-Robertson.
Although Landes has never worked professionally with Gafni, the two have been acquainted since Landes moved to Israel nine years ago. Landes officiated when Gafni and his third wife married a few years ago.
When Landes first befriended Gafni, people approached him to let him know Gafni was the subject of persistent rumors. Landes chose not to believe hearsay and tracked the stories back down the grapevine until he got to the sources. He spoke to three women in Israel.
“Their response was, `Why are people telling such stories? They’re just not true,’” Landes said in a phone interview from Jerusalem. He did not investigate any of the cases alleged to have happened in the United States 25 years ago.
Herscher thinks the public’s eagerness to unearth and believe such stories goes back to years’ worth of people not believing victims of abuse.
“What has happened now, I fear, is that the pendulum has swung the other way, so that when there is an accusation there is an assumption that the accused is in fact guilty,” Herscher said.
Herscher said that now it is even more important to continue to support Gafni and bring him to Los Angeles to teach.
“Rabbi Gafni coming to teach here makes a deeply important Jewish statement — that if rumors and allegations and innuendo are allowed to destroy someone who only wants to teach, Jewishly, that is tragic.”
Rabbi Marc Gafni & Andrew Cohen
Enlightenment, Evolution, and the Future of Judaism
January 1, 2005
http://www.wie.org/unbound/media.asp?ifr=ra&id=50
Enlightenment, Evolution, and the Future of Judaism Rabbi Marc Gafni is not your average Rabbi. He’s an unorthodox Orthodox Rabbi, a passionate Kabbalist, a popular Israeli television host, and the founder of Bayit Chadash, an international spiritual community and retreat center committed to Jewish renaissance. Yet no matter how far from the established order he may travel, Gafni never loses sight of those most basic Judaic tenets: pray to God and live a moral, ethical, and generous life, because this life is the one that matters most!
In this videotaped conversation between two spiritual masters, Andrew’s original conception of an evolutionary enlightenment engages with Rabbi Gafni’s soul-level understanding of Judaism’s timeless mystical teachings. Together, these two free-thinkers propel an enduring ancient tradition into the exhilarating and uncharted terrain of the future.
Why am I not a Buddhist?
By Gil Kopatch
Haaretz – June 2, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/583841.html
Both Moses and Buddha grew up without a mother’s love and apparently longed for it all their lives. Buddha was orphaned at an early age; the infant Moses got a one-way ticket for a Nile cruise. Both of them grew up in palaces as pampered princes. Both of them ventured out of the royal hothouse and were astounded to encounter the suffering of their fellows. Both of them turned to meditation for many years – Buddha under a tree, Moses in the wilderness of Midian.
So much for the similarities between these two spiritual giants. But what are the differences? And if there are no differences, why am I not a Buddhist?
I decide to pay a two-week visit to India. To find myself with alacrity. And to return as enlightened – and as delighted – as possible.
The king-god
On the day after Pesach, at 6 A.M., I pick up Rabbi Mordechai Marc Gafni from his beit midrash (house of study) in Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood. The rabbi is impossible to categorize. He is certainly not Reform. He is committed to Jewish law, but could not be considered classically Orthodox. He’s spontaneous, ecstatic, profound, filled with joy – and embraces and loves everyone he meets. Gafni is among the most important of the new generation of religious leaders in Israel today, a profound teacher and thinker, a serious scholar and an original philosopher who addresses and provokes both mind and heart. He is much more of an Eastern-style spiritual master, a kind of Jewish Bodhisattva, than an establishment rabbi. Together with fellow scholar Avraham Leader and businessman Jacob Nir David, he founded Bayit Chadash (literally, New Home), a new national spiritual movement, which includes a research center and rabbinic certification program, and appeals to people who are dissatisfied with the world of the religious establishment. Many of his students are former India backpackers, who are now yuppies and part of the mainstream of contemporary Israeli society. The rabbi is also my good friend and partner on a Channel 2 program about the weekly Torah reading, in which he usually explains and I usually nod.
A few weeks earlier, he told me about a dialogue he had intended to hold with a friend he met at a meeting of clerics in Rome and asked if I wanted to be the moderator. His friend’s name? Tenzin Gyatso, better known as the Dalai Lama – the great ocean of compassion, guardian of the white lotus, who looks down with mercy.
According to the tradition, the 14th Dalai Lama, who will turn 70 on July 6, is the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama and, in fact, of all those who preceded him. He is a Bodhisattva – a soul who, because of his love and compassion, does not seek liberation from the cycle of human suffering, but remains within it in order to help others end their suffering. The Dalai Lama is the political as well as the religious leader of the Tibetan nation, and for his struggle to hold a peaceful dialogue with China, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He is admired around the world and is sought out by Hollywood’s top stars. For his believers, who call him “Kundun,” he is more than the pope for Catholics: He is the king-god. He himself has said that he is “simply a human being and, incidentally, a Tibetan who chooses to be a Buddhist monk.”
On the flight to Jordan, from where we will proceed to Delhi, are three Israeli Buddhists who are going on a pilgrimage to Dharamsala, the city in northern India where the Dalai Lama’s temple is located. Rabbi Gafni immediately invites them to a kabbalat Shabbat (the ceremony welcoming the Sabbath) that he is planning to hold there. They recoil. It sounds too Jewish. They don’t need it. They are already very spiritual without that; they have already done Vipassana and they have incense and everything.
“Rabbi, why the Dalai Lama? Why now?” I ask him.
“Today Tibetan Buddhism is flowering in the Western world,” he replies, “and therefore a Jerusalem-Tibet conversation is the spiritual dialogue of the generation. Just as in the past there was the Greece-Jerusalem conversation through Maimonides, who dialogued with Aristotle in his writings.”
And why Buddhism?
Gafni: “Tibetan Buddhism is, in certain dimensions, very close to some forms of kabbala [Jewish mysticism]. Both kabbala and Buddhism share some common language that speaks to the heart of the modern seeker.”
But isn’t it true that there is no god in Buddhism?
“It is true that the term `God’ in Buddhism is different from our understanding according to biblical Judaism. It is not the God of the Bible who speaks in a thunderous voice and reprimands everyone. They do not have an external God who is above nature. He is not external to creation, but is interiorized. From this point of view, Buddhism is close to Hasidism – in terms of the internal work, the work you do on yourself, from which emerges your relationship to the world around you.”
It’s clear to you, is it not, that all the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] rabbis will assail you for meeting with idol worshipers?
“Anyone who says that simply does not understand Buddhism; he is speaking from ignorance. The Buddha was a human being, he is not God, and therefore it is clear that his statue is also not God, but only a symbol. So there is no idol worship here.”
Travel as thriller
Our hotel is situated in a good neighborhood of New Delhi, meaning that people do not live on the street, but in grimy, neglected apartments. Connaught Place, one of the most magnificent of the city’s squares, looks like Kikar Hamedina in Tel Aviv and more especially like “Bread Square,” the former protest site of the poor and homeless there. My fastidiousness surges. My only nourishment is nuts and hermetically sealed water.
At night we tour Old Delhi. It’s not crowded here at night, only 7.3 Indians per square meter. All of whom are wandering the street in groups. No one suffers from loneliness here. In the West people feel alone in villas; here they sleep two-three to a porter’s wagon and don’t look especially sad. It’s hard to find an Indian depressive who is hooked on Prozac or its ilk. They don’t have the leisure for that.
Carpets of people are sleeping on the traffic islands. The drivers of the three-wheeled cabs sleep in their vehicles. It’s astonishing, the balance that is needed to sleep on the seat of a bicycle.
The next day we set out in the most expensive taxi we could find; the important thing is just to get out of here. Traveling on the roads of India is like being in a thriller. You watch the developments on the road with disbelief, waiting for the catharsis that will purge you of your fear. It’s a terrific movie. Anything can happen. Driving against the traffic, veering out of the way a split second before a bicycle holding an entire family splatters all over you.
To the drivers’ credit, they obviously feel their car. They probably live in it. The car is part of their body and they behave on the highway as on the street, in a state of patient, moderate, smiling chaos. Not that there are no accidents. Here and there we see overturned buses along the road. But they, too, are accepted with equanimity.
Many of the vehicles sport a sign saying “Honk, please.” In driving there is nothing like the sense of hearing. In Israel every honk can send the honkee out of his car and spark a blood-drenched incident. Here it’s a happy thing – people merrily honk at one another. You could mistakenly think that driving here is an ear-splitting experience until you realize that honking is like saying “hello.”
At a “workers’” restaurant by the roadside we are careful not to enter the stinking pit called a “lavatory.” A large indifferent bull strides in. Guess who’s coming to dinner. They feed it fresh chapati and in response it oozes a lot of spittle and strolls off, languidly escorted by an entourage of 200 flies.
Our driver Pablo, an Indian hunk who looks like singer Eyal Golan, travels this road every day for 13 straight hours. His favorite god, he says, is Ganesh, the mischievous Hindu god with the head of an elephant. Ganesh is the most popular god in India. He is responsible for pranks and intrigues.
We crossed the rich state of Punjab and the poor state of Uttar Pradesh and we arrive in the north, in the state of Hiamachal Pradesh, the paradise of India. The weather is far more pleasant. Which is to say, the air moves. In Delhi it’s different: There the mosquitoes hold the air between their teeth.
We start to climb the Himalayas. Pablo is very tired – he hasn’t slept in three days. Rabbi Gafni encourages him with sacred songs and some tunes by Simon and Garfunkel, too. Pablo has never heard of them but he wakes up, no doubt also aided by the light massage the rabbi applies to his shoulders.
The road bends sharply and the turns begin. Dharamsala is at an altitude of 2,000 meters. High, but still only considered to be at the foothills of the Himalayas. The turns are terribly sharp. Good thing it’s been dark for some time. That way we don’t see the potholes or the abyss alongside the road.
At 3 A.M. we reach upper Dharamsala. After the Dalai Lama fled from the Chinese and made his way stealthily across the Himalayas on the back of a yak, the Indian government granted him political asylum and this village, Macleod Ganj, adjacent to Dharamsala. Here, like our Yohanan Ben Zakkai, he reinvigorated the Tibetan people and its culture after the terrible destruction.
The Chinese killed more than one million Tibetans and destroyed some 6,000 monasteries. Holocaust is something else we have in common with them.
Your original face
Already during the tour of Macleod Ganj in the morning I was ripped off by shoe-shining Rajasthani kids. The rabbi hinted that I should upgrade my appearance before going to see the Bodhisattva of compassion. So I abandoned my shoes to the kids. They asked for 350 rupees, which is about NIS 35. I paid them a month’s salary without haggling and got a serious scolding from the owner of a Tibetan store, who said I was spoiling the young generation. Fortunately it’s Rajasthani youth, not Tibetan, so there isn’t much to spoil.
There is tension between the different communities in the village. The Tibetans are angry at the Indians and call them slothful, while the Indians are vexed by the industrious Tibetans. They arrived only 50 years ago and already have developed the village and made it one of the major tourist centers of India. It’s a small village, with a population of 6,000, of whom about 1,000 are Israelis.
There are three lanes in the village and they all lead upward. The homes snake their way up the side of a green hill and on the rooftops are cafes with a view that makes your heart go pitter-pat. In front of the central house of worship are cylinders on which are drawn colorful verses of prayer. When you turn them they create a kind of mantra, which is delivered to the ears of the universe.
There are fine restaurants in Macleod Ganj. Italian, Japanese, Korean and of course Tibetan and Israeli. True, the lanes are narrow and the cows crap, but it is clean here, the air is clear and the water fresh, direct from the Himalayas. It rains twice a day and the drops are heavy.
The Israelis are concentrated in the neighboring villages of Dharamkot and Bhagsu, which are less crowded. The view is a lot better there, too, but the monkeys are more impertinent. Surprisingly, most of the Israelis here have a busy schedule. A meditation course in the morning, followed immediately by a massage lesson, then cooking and drumming. They don’t have time for shanti (total tranquillity) here – that they reserve for Israel.
The next day it was pretty clear that the hawks were looking for food. Because we are situated on the edge of an abyss, they fly pretty much at eye level, just meters from me. Today we have a meeting with Tenzin Geyche Tethong, the secretary of the Tibetan government, about the rules of protocol and the content of the meeting with the Dalai Lama.
Rabbi Gafni wears his special Hasidic garb. The Tibetan government has a special minister in charge of robes and they attribute great significance to this. We don’t want to foment a diplomatic scandal because of mistaken fashion considerations.
In the government compound soldiers are playing badminton. There is a great splash of flowers here and their aroma accompanies us to the bureau. The secretary, formal but smiling, waxes enthusiastic over the rabbi’s Hasidic robe. “The Dalai Lama is in the middle of writing a book,” he says, “but he loves Rabbi Gafni and has specially made time for him. He has an interest in being in contact with the Israeli community. You are our neighbors here and we should get to know you.”
He asks about the Israelis, why there are so many of them here. Rabbi Gafni replies that they feel a deep connection to the spirit of the place, perhaps because both the Tibetans and the Jews have suffered oppression and sought to maintain their identity in difficult conditions of exile. I ask why the Tibetans are always laughing. His eyes lighting up, he replies: “The original face of people, beneath all the masks, is a smiling face.”
Amen.
The encounter
The Tsuglagkhang compound, the Dalai Lama’s official residence, is a few minutes’ walk from the center of the village. The morning of the meeting, a Friday, finds the rabbi in good spirits. He takes bills out of his pocket and distributes them to the lepers of the neighborhood. They smile, happy with their lot.
In the Namgyal temple, Tibetan monks are conducting a lively argument. They clap their hands vigorously to emphasize a solid point and snort mockingly to disparage their adversary’s argument. Just like the hair-splitting debates that took place in the plaza of our Temple.
The conference room contains luxurious low sofas and silkscreen prints on the wall. Even though this is supposed to be an intimate encounter, a few Israelis who were born again in Indian ashrams have managed to infiltrate the gathering. They are on the verge of a mild orgasm at the meeting with their God.
The Dalai Lama enters. He has nice eyes, his presence is pleasant, that is clear. He and Rabbi Gafni embrace, bow to each other and place cheek by cheek, showing more affection than what is customary. Both the rabbi and the Dalai Lama laugh heartily; indeed, they seem to share a great love for laughter.
After the greetings the rabbi reminds the Dalai Lama that he gave His Holiness his skullcap in Rome. “I hope you still have it,” he says. The Dalai Lama nods in affirmation. “I hope that one day it will be useful to me when I visit Jerusalem or Jewish institutions,” he says in English, and laughs.
Following are some excerpts from the conversation.
“I represent not only Gafni, but the Jewish tradition,” the rabbi said, “and I want to thank you for receiving us in your home. The subject we want to talk to you about is how the world of the spirit can have a practical influence and change the very real world of politics and economics.”
Dalai Lama: “That is a good subject. It is very important.”
Gafni, with a smile: “That is why I brought Gil with me – he’s the Richard Gere of Israel [Gere is active in the movement to free Tibet], because he gets better ratings than I do.”
“Your Holiness,” I said, “I have a few questions that are bothering me. My first question is what love is, actually. And how do we teach people to love in a practical way?”
Dalai Lama: “I cannot say what the exact meaning of love is. But when I use that word, it means that something is very precious to me. I feel not only closeness, but also caring and respect. For example, I love my watch but there are no relations of closeness between us, we do not share the same experiences. Love is for people who have the same experience as mine – feelings, pain, pleasure. That is why we should respect others, because they are part of myself.
“We learn our first experience of love from our mother,” he continued. “The infant wants to be close to its mother. Sometimes, unfortunately, there are unwanted children, but in general the mother sees the baby as part of her body. That is the height of closeness. This feeling is essential in reality for survival. This feeling becomes an important part of our life and it continues until our death. All the spiritual concepts speak about this being the most important feeling.”
Gafni: “I want to offer from the kabbala a comment on the words of wisdom of His Holiness.”
Dalai Lama: “So I can learn, very good!”
Gafni: “To learn from the tradition of our forefathers. The kabbala says that love, at its core, is not an emotion, but a perception, a way of seeing the world. The emotion then wells up from the perception. Once we understand that, we can train a perception, and we can also train ourselves to be lovers. Love is to see with the eyes of God. To love someone is to see them in their highest, most beautiful place. To love someone is to perceive their infinite specialness, with that divinity. The model for love in this sense is the way the mother sees her child. Even if the baby grows up and falls, the mother will always hold that at his core, he is beautiful and holy, and divine. This is why in Hebrew mysticism we call God `shaddai’ – it is the divine breast of the mother who nourishes us all. And because we are all part of God. We are all divine miniatures. So we all have the ability to be lovers, that is, to access our divine perception and see others with the eyes of God.”
The Dalai Lama was impressed: “Beautiful! The idea that love is a type of seeing, that it is possible to train it, is a good idea. It is hard to train a feeling, but sight is easier. We are all creatures of God. God is everlasting love. If I love God, I have to maintain a loving feeling toward all creatures, who are part of God. These feelings should be cultivated by logic, by meditation – there are methods for doing that. What is certain is that even people who do not have an interest in religion need a warm heart. A warm heart leads to inner quiet and to a tranquil and meaningful life. If the parents grow up in this atmosphere, they will educate their children accordingly. And that is the right way to change humanity.”
“If all the religions talk about love of mankind and compassion,” I asked, “how is it that so much hatred and wars are the fruit of religious education?”
The Dalai Lama laughed. “Religion has a big umbrella and under it you can do what you want,” he said. “The spiritual tradition represents good values for the long range. When people are in a desperate situation, their emotions become more negative. When anger is strong, the long-range considerations are forgotten. Therefore it is easier to believe in the values of the spirit when you have a comfortable life, but the wisdom is to do that during hardships.
“There are people who use religion for political or financial purposes and manipulate human belief. In Northern Ireland, for example. The naive people have stronger feelings and it is easier to work them up. That is why certain conflicts in history happened because of religion. But if you look closely you will see that the real considerations were different.
“The fundamentalist believes only in his religion and is afflicted with lack of knowledge and lack of esteem for the other traditions. He feels sincerely that he is serving God – and destroys and lays waste. The method to dissolve this is by means of talks between the traditions. Knowledge should be increased. Harmony should be created between the faiths. I was in Jerusalem twice, not only as a tourist but as a pilgrim, and I spoke with Jews and Muslims and Christians. Despite the different philosophy, they all carry the same idea. A message of love, compassion, forgiveness and self-meaning. That is why I feel more contact is needed. More dialogue. I have friends from all religions. If I am ever exiled from here, I will have somewhere to go.”
Gafni: “The most important idea I want to share with you is about why people who are deeply religious can behave in a terrible way. In what I call integral kabbala, and in modern integral thought, we say there are stages and states. States mean that which I achieve and lose – like an altered state or mystical state. A stage is a permanent achievement; I have developed to a particular stage of achievement and I do not lose it. In moral development, there are four major stages: egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric (feeling care and compassion for all people), and also the stage of being compassionate for all living beings and not only human beings.
“Now here is the deep idea. All states, mystical ones included, are interpreted through the prism of stages. If I am at one level – let’s say, egocentric – and I have a mystical experience, I might think I am Jesus. If I am at the ethnocentric stage, then I might think that only my people is holy … The secret is that all states are interpreted through the prism of stages, one’s moral stage of development. Therefore, even people who reach genuine mystical states can behave in morally reprehensible ways.”
The Dalai Lama listened carefully, nodding, seemingly excited to hear this new wisdom.
Gil: “Politicians and businessmen only want to be in control all the time, whereas one of the principles of the spirit is precisely to give up control. How is it possible to combine the two?”
Dalai Lama: “The success of the modern economy depends on other elements, such as clients. A good politician is usually voted into office in elections, so he depends on people. Therefore, they are not actually in control. Politics and the economy need a great many people. Religion, in the end, is the business of one person. Religion depends on the individual.
“If your belief is clean, if you have a healthy and true motivation, all your actions can be constructive, filled with compassion and beneficial to the world. It does not matter what your profession is – politician, scientist or teacher. If your motivation is to be self-centered, then every religion becomes dirty and destructive. All human activity depends on the individual who does it. Therefore, religion has an important role. To instill values in those who make the economy and the politics, to change the way of thinking toward compassion and love.
“Not long ago we had a state meeting with the government of India. And one of the country’s most important ministers was there, too. Humbly he said that he is a politician and therefore does not have enough spiritual knowledge. I said to him that a person who is a public figure needs religion more than someone who lives alone in a remote place. Someone like that does not cause much harm even if he goes crazy [laughs loudly]. But the leaders, if they are not mentally balanced, if their brain is complicated and sophisticated, but their heart is poor and wretched, that has serious implications” (laughs in satisfaction).
Sexuality and divinity
Gil: “Let’s talk about sexuality in Buddhism and kabbala.”
Gafni: “I want to offer from Jerusalem a scientific method of how religion can teach the individual change. Because I do not have the courage to speak in my name, I ask all the angels and sages to speak through me and they will do it better than I can by myself.”
The Dalai Lama listens attentively. Gafni concentrates silently for a few seconds and continues:
“In the Temple in Jerusalem, above the Holy Ark, were pictures of two angels. They were embracing in a kind of sexual tantric yoga posture. In the kabbala we call this `the secret of the Cherubim.’ The secret is that one of the ways to teach personal transformation and love is through using the principles of sexuality as a spiritual model. Why? Because sexuality illustrates all the principles of religion.
“For example, giving up control, which Gil asked about. In sex it is not good to be always in control. Sex works only if we are willing at times to give up control. So sexuality exemplifies a spiritual principle. There is also another element in kabbala, which is called `the secret of the kisses.’ Let’s say I go to the bank and ask the teller to record that I as though deposited money. He will look at me as though I am crazy. In this world, after all, either you take or you receive. But in sexuality, giving and receiving are collapsed into one. So the sexual models the holy, the holy way of living.”
The Dalai Lama was a bit surprised by what seemed to be a new approach, but listened carefully.
Gafni: “Another spiritual thing that is illustrated by the sexual: to do something for its own sake, not in order to gain some other advantage extraneous to itself. Sex according to the kabbala is meditation of the ordinary person. Because sexuality is for the thing itself. These are but examples of a core kabbalistic idea. The kabbala says that sexuality, which the whole world is afraid of, actually incorporates astounding spiritual principles that should be applied as the model for living in all the nonsexual areas of life.”
The Dalai Lama laughs appreciatively. He bursts with laughter. It takes him time to calm down. Sex is something that Tibetan monks of his level are not supposed to take an interest in.
Dalai Lama: “It’s complicated. Sex is mainly a matter of culture. That is its main role in nature. We cannot say that there is any religious meaning in it. Animals do it and we cannot say that they are religious.”
Gafni: “But animals have a soul, too. You see? I am a good Buddhist.”
Dalai Lama (laughing): “In the Indian tradition there may be something similar to what you are saying. But in Buddhism it is different. All the internal feelings and the sexual feelings are related to `internal air,’ and we have to control this internal air, the movement of this internal energy. We use the sexual organs to create movement, to make the energy flow, not for the purpose of culture, but to achieve a deeper experience of consciousness. And then the sexual energy melts away. Only trained people are capable of this.
“Good and proper sexual relations are a way to get close to one another,” he adds. “but they are also the source of a problem. You are happy for a few months and then the problems come up.”
“There seems to be a lot of energy in envy, in ego and in violence,” I ask, “and the energy to do well by others is far less powerful. Is it possible to learn how to channel the energy of evil toward the doing of good?”
Dalai Lama: “That is very clear. A negative feeling creates energy immediately. So negative feelings are stronger than positive ones. Through training, positive feelings can also give energy. Compassion, for example, by training one’s thinking, can give endless energy. But it is not easy. You need a sharp mind and a developed consciousness to make these distinctions.”
Gafni: “There is the story about the founder of Hasidism who was approached because an infant had fallen ill, and instead of going to 10 righteous men, he asked 10 thieves to pray for him. All the Jews were angry with him, and he said, `The gates of heaven are locked and only a thief knows how to pick the locks of heaven.’ Maybe that means that we need the highest level of consciousness to access the energy of the thief in us in order to storm heaven.”
The Dalai Lama laughs and stamps his feet. “God is nice,” he says, “and he may be especially nice to the sinners. That is very true.”
The rabbi takes out the fabric he bought in the market the day before, orange silk cloth such as the Tibetan monks use. He asked an Israeli woman named Idit to sew tzitzit (ritual fringes) in each corner and then he had a totally kosher tallit (prayer shawl). With much grace and decorum, he presents it to the Dalai Lama.
“Ho!” the Dalai Lama calls out, moved. “This is wonderful Jewish-Tibetan merger. How wonderful.” After the rabbi explains its kabbalistic meaning to a very attentive Dalai Lama, he wraps himself in it, chortling delightedly. Then he gives us white silk scarves, as is the custom when parting – and gets a skullcap. He and the rabbi embrace and their love for each other is felt by everyone. Everyone bows to the Dalai Lama; he bows in return and leaves.
I was caught in the garden. Suddenly the Dalai Lama emerged from behind me, wearing the skullcap and prayer shawl, on the way to his next meeting. “I am a Tibetan Jew! A Tibetan Jew!” Pleased as punch he was.
The differences
The rumor of the visit spread through the foothills of the Himalayas. Dozens of Israelis, young people in search of serenity, arrive for the kabbalat Shabbat at the Hotel OM (symbol of the presence of the universal in the individual). On the porch, which seemed to be suspended in mid-air between the tops of green pine trees, Rabbi Gafni – warmly greeted by many travelers who knew him from Israel – succeeds in creating a moving experience for them, in part thanks to India, which has milked the Zionism out of them. During “Shir Lama’alot” (Song of Degrees), they all lift their eyes to the snowcapped peaks, knowing whence their help shall come.
In our last conversation en route to the airport, I talk with the rabbi again about the differences. Buddha said: Elimination of suffering is all. Suffering is my identification with this world. And this world perishes. The more I am attached to this world, the more I suffer. It is better to sit under the tree, concentrate on one’s breathing, do stretching exercises and not identify too much.
Moses, in contrast, foments a political and cultural revolution that is called the Exodus from Egypt. He is a political activist. He operates in this world, influences history, repairs reality and not just one’s personal karma.
And there is another difference: What a beautiful land it turned out to be for Moses here. Only when you get back from India do you see it. The streets here are so clean. I feel like getting out of the car and licking the road. Allenby Street never looked so polished. The houses are so white. The dogs are so sated and the flies are so lonely. More power to a sense of perspective. More power to Moses. More power to the Israel Defense Forces.
Faith and Values on TV – Marc Gafni
STILL THINKING ABOUT
Rabbi Marc Gafni
Naomi’s New Morning – May 17, 2006
http://www.newmorningtv.tv/rabbimarcgafni.jsp
“We all have a box, and in that box is our stuff, it’s our things, and it’s not our degrees and it’s not our status, and it’s not our job and it’s not our piety, and it’s not our religiosity, and it’s none of our credits in the world.
It’s our fears, our hopes, our dreams, our pathologies, our unique silliness, it’s the stuff that we are. That’s the stuff that I wanna call with you, not our finger print, but our soul print.
We have a soul print. And “the inability to share my soul print with another human being is the definition of loneliness.” That’s what loneliness means. My soul print is the DNA of my soul. My soul print is the unique, swirls and curves that make up my infinite specialness and uniqueness. Right, that box that I carry around with me, that’s who I am in the world.”
“What is love? Love is not an emotion at its core. The core of loving is to perceive the infinite specialness in another human being. Love is a perception. I perceive your infinite specialness. I see you at your highest. I experience your soul print.
All right, love is – is to see with God’s eyes. To see with God’s eyes means to see you at your highest. I’m packed and I’m folded by your very being in my presence, your soul print comes to the fore, I see you soul print and I identify you with that soul print. I know that’s who you really are.
Right, love is a soul print vocation. Now, not just love. When you think deeply, all that we look for in the world – joy is a soul print vocation. product of actively and passionately pursuing some other activity.
To be joyous means that I can only attain joy as the by-product of the pursuit of something else and that something else can only be ultimately to live my story. To live my soul print in the world.
So why are there lonely people? (claps) OK let’s learn. Well, A: there are lonely people because there’s no one available to receive those people’s soul print. I need someone to receive my soul print, what gets in the way, in our world, of soul print receiving? What gets in the way? The first thing that gets in the way is labels. Labels prevent me from seeing you as you are.
The second I lock someone into a label, I no longer am able to see them with God’s eyes. The essence of soul print receiving is to go on a journey where I can receive the [Hebrew] right the deep soul print self of other.”
A disgraced American rabbi with a tangled history of alleged sexual misdeeds is relaunching his career as a spiritual mentor and backtracking from an apparent confession he signed two years ago
Marc Gafni, left, visits with author Luke Ford in Salt Lake City on July 3, 2008
NEW YORK (JTA) — A disgraced American rabbi with a tangled history of alleged sexual misdeeds is relaunching his career as a spiritual mentor and backtracking from an apparent confession he signed two years ago.
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni acknowledged his “sickness” in 2006 after several students at his Israeli institute claimed they were lured into sexual liaisons through deception and psychological manipulation. For decades Gafni had been dogged by claims he engaged in improper sexual activities, including allegations that he molested two teenage girls.
Now Gafni is back with a new Web site that directly challenges the claims against him.
Based in Salt Lake City, Gafni, now known as Marc, is a practitioner of a Kabbalah-inspired philosophy called evolutionary spirituality.
In a statement on the controversy posted to his Web site, Gafni said the relationships he engaged in while in Israel were all “mutual and consensual,” broke no laws and did not involve an abuse of authority.
He said the letter he wrote was misunderstood to be a confession that he acted improperly.
“I believed that writing the letter would, in some measure, end the attacks, and give me time to heal and think things through,” Gafni wrote on his site, MarcGafni.com.
Gafni did not respond to requests for an interview.
A former Orthodox rabbi and later a leading figure in the Jewish Renewal movement, Gafni first gained attention in 2004 when The New York Jewish Week reported on longstanding accusations against him.
Gafni told the newspaper that one of the girls was troubled and had made up the story, but he did acknowledge a sexual relationship with the other girl when he was a 19-year-old rabbinical student.
“I was a stupid kid and we were in love,” Gafni told The Jewish Week. “She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her.”
In response to The Jewish Week’s reporting, several prominent rabbis — including Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Arthur Green, Joseph Telushkin, Saul Berman, Tirzah Firestone and Arthur Waskow — rallied to Gafni’s defense, saying the evidence of impropriety was not convincing.
Two years later, after the news broke in Israel, several of those same rabbis backtracked, arguing that the new accusations were different from the old ones.
Waskow recently told JTA that he has reviewed the material on Gafni’s Web site and still sees “nothing whatsoever to change my mind about the wisdom of the decision that several organizations made two years ago that he should not continue to teach under their auspices.”
A section of Gafni’s new site dedicated to the controversy includes letters on his behalf from several spiritual leaders, attorneys and counselors, as well as the report of a forensic psychologist who administered a polygraph test.
Several references to e-mails and instant messages between Gafni and the Israeli women that supposedly prove the nature of their relationships were not exploitative. The correspondence is not available on the site.
“In each of these relationships, as is usually the case between men and women, there were complex power dynamics in which each side had power and vulnerability,” Gafni wrote regarding the Israel controversy. “While I never promised exclusivity to any, in retrospect I see I did fail to recognize two things. First, that my non-exclusivity might in itself be experienced as hurtful. Secondly, that these involvements themselves, and particularly the lack of transparency around them, might be experienced as painful or problematic.”
Gafni’s Web site is filled with allusions to his problems and explanations.
“Marc Gafni struggled with the question of whether to teach conventional spiritual wisdom in a conventional spiritual context, or to follow a more post-conventional style of teaching and living,” his biography says. “This tension brought great dynamism to his work, but also caused some dissonance.”
Now the biography says that Gafni will focus on “intense inner spiritual and psychological reflection on the course of his life” and “partnering with social activist leaders to create a new, grass-roots human rights movement.”
“While Marc Gafni will continue teaching, he wishes to do so as a spiritual `artist’ rather than as a rabbi, guru, or formal teacher,” the Web site says.
One of Gafni’s defenders is Rabbi Gershon Winkler, a New Mexico rabbi who runs Walking Stick, an organization that combines Jewish teachings with Native American wisdom.
“Do I believe that the women here experienced pain? Yes I do,” Winkler wrote in a letter posted on Gafni’s site. “Do I know that this is not a story of abuse of sexual harassment as it was reported in public forums? I am sure it is not. Do I believe that the pain caused by all of us to Rabbi Gafni far exceeds the pain that anyone else can claim to have experienced? Absolutely.”
In the letter, Winkler acknowledged that he fathered a child with a student, carried on several “intimate relationships” with students over the years and said he is currently in a relationship with two women.
Many in the Jewish Renewal leadership, he asserted, have engaged in similar sexual behavior, including some who are now critics of Gafni.
Waskow, one of the leading figures in the Renewal movement, rejected that line of argument.
“If there were, years and years ago, people in this or any other movement who did behave in ways that we would now find ethically prohibited, it was precisely because of the experience of the pain and emotional disasters and spiritual disasters created by that kind of behavior that we adopted the ethical rules that now apply,” Waskow said.
“Maybe some of that did take place, but we grew enough to decide this was not a good idea,” he said. “What he’s describing as hypocrisy is a shift over a 25-year period of time in which our movement and people in our movement grew considerably.”
Winkler told JTA that he believes it is wrong to insist on an “across-the-board” ban on sexual relationships involving rabbis and followers, teachers and students, and counselors and patients.
Gafni, he added, is a victim of sexual McCarthyism.
“I think it’s extreme,” Winkler said. “I think it’s a sexual ethic that’s made out of paranoia.”
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* Registration and Price
The International Jewish Liberation School is grateful and delighted to offer a training course in Liberation (Deveikut, God-Merging) based on the principles and practices of Hebrew Wisdom.
Our school is a reactivation of this great and lost Hebrew Liberation wisdom. This school is dedicated to sharing the great mission of Hebrew wisdom; the Democratization of Enlightenment (which is called in Hebrew wisdom sources Deveikut or He’arah). In this teaching Deveikut (Self-Liberation) is not the province of the great masters, but a genuine option for every person. The potential for realizing one’s true nature is the birthright of every human being. Every human being has the potential and possibility to realize their true nature as part of the God field and to act – compassionately and courageously – from the integrity of that realization.
Because realization is the potential and possibility of every human being it is not merely an option but it is the very purpose and invitation of our lives. In line with the four-thousand year lineage of Hebrew wisdom masters, we use the Torah as a guidebook to liberation. Once we understand the Torah as a handbook for the Liberation of every human being, we realize that the intention of the Biblical ideal, of “Kingdom of Priests”- is no less then what we have called, The Democratization of Enlightenment.
Why is this so overwhelmingly important to us? Because we subscribe to the hidden corollary of Hebrew Liberation teaching…that all ethical failure is ultimately rooted in a failure of realization.
A core practice of Hebrew wisdom is called Mitzvah. Although Mitzvah is usually translated as commandment, the Hebrew mystics also read it as being related to the word Tzavtah, meaning intimacy. Mitzvah is the path of intimacy in which the skin-encapsulated ego expands to include all that exists. At the level of Liberation, Mitzvah acts as a channel to draw down the light (shefa) and activate the divine flow of life.
Particularly, we see Shabbat as a day spiritual renewal and Liberation in which the primary mitzvah is creating a quiet mind to receive the higher energies of Liberation. In this context Shabbat is integral to the teachings of Jewish Liberation. In the Jewish liberation tradition, the words of the divine to Abraham, “Lech Lecha,” are literally translated to mean, “Go to Your Self. Realize that your Divine self is “literally part of God.” Once the human beings solves the perpetual identity crisis by realizing his identity with Divine, he or she is able to act with courage, compassion, wisdom, responsibility and holy audacity. It is this courage and audacity of human action, which supports the activation of the indwelling Shekhinah energy that opens us to the experiential awareness of Deveikut. It is this awareness, which naturally manifests the most evolved vision of Tikkun Olam (the healing and transformation of the world).
The International Jewish Liberation School’s course honors, receives, and transmits the four thousand year-old Hebrew lineage of Liberation. Beginning with Abraham Isaac Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah; continuing to Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, David and Solomon; transmitted to the communities of elders, prophets, priests and sages, there has been an energetic transmission of deveikut (liberation). The lineage transmission includes some of the most wondrous illuminated beings to walk the earth, including Akiva, Judah the Prince, Abulafia, Maimonides, Cordovero, Yitzchak Luria, Chaim Luzatto, Meir Ibn Gabbai, the Gaon of Vilna, the Baal Shem Tov, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, Mordechai Laine of Izbica, Rav Shalom Sharabi, Rav Yehuda Fatima, Ben Ish Hai, Menachem Mendel of Schneerson and Rav Kaduri in modern times.
A remarkable and powerful teaching of this tradition and modern times is that none of these people were perfect. Perfection and absolute piety is a tyrannical ideal that ultimately separates us from the divine. Toxic shame undermines the deveikut (Liberation) process. All of these liberated figures were flawed, some dramatically so, at different times in their lives. In the words of the ancient teaching, “The Tzadik falls seven times and rises, the wicked falls and does not rise.” The ability to rise like a Phoenix from the fire and to transform human failing into human greatness is core to the shadow work of Hebrew Liberation technology. As the schools of Kutzk and Izbica taught, one’s unique flaw is transmuted into one’s unique gift and gorgeousness. We are all unique flames emerging from the same fire. It is in the realization of one’s authentic unique self that the human being merges with the God field. If one tries to round out the curves of a puzzle piece it cannot fit into the great puzzle of the Kosmos. It is only by highlighting the unique curvature of your self that your merge with the larger divine Self.
Who
The International Jewish Liberation School is co-led by Rebbe Gabriel Cousens, M.D and Rebbe Marc Gafni, Ph.D.
When
Opening Week
The opening week of the Jewish Liberation School will be six nights, seven days, between Dec. 24-30, 2008. This week will be our first annual “open for all” study/ practice/ meditation intensive focused on touching into the eternal joy and internal glimpse of Jewish Liberation.
Annual Summer Course
The annual IJLS One-Year Course will start every summer, approximately in the middle two weeks of August. The length will be 13 nights and 14 days, and continue throughout the year via live video telecasts. In 2009 it will be August 9-23.
For registration and information, please contact the Tree of Life at 520-394-2520 x201.
Why Rebbe Gabriel Cousens, MD, is Co-creating the International Jewish Liberation School, and Gabriel’s Bio
In 1983 on the fortieth day of a fast, while spending the last 3 days on little or no water and meditating 9 hours or more a day, Gabriel dissolved into the nothing in deep deveikut; about ready to leave the physical body as one can only stay in this state of inner dissolvement for 72 hours without leaving more permanently, a chasmal voice strongly spoke out that Gabriel was to return to his roots and serve Am Israel. Somewhat surprised at this assignment, yet surrendered to it, Gabriel began the deep journey into mystical Judaism. Raised as a reform Jew and as one who attended the North Shore Congregation of Israel in Glenco, Illinois from kindergarten through 10th grade and scoring the highest graduating grades out of 300 people, there was a strong feeling that he knew nothing about Judaism. But had a deep feeling for it, which was supported by the local conservative Rabbi Lippis, who had pushed Gabriel hard from the age of 11 to become a rabbi. The truth at the time was that, although drawn to what he strongly suggested, Gabriel was more interested in playing football than studying Hebrew, as football spiritually turned him on and he had known he would become a doctor since the age of four.
A major boost in his spiritual life happened at the age of 16 his older brother, with whom he was extremely close, was killed in an auto accident. Although many rabbis came to console his family, no one could speak to the meaning of death. Gabriel realized, at that time, that a sign that he had found his spiritual teacher was that that association would have to give him a direct apperception of the answer to this question. For the next two years he spent many long hours in his brother’s room contemplating and meditating while he symbolically reconstructed life by building a heart lung machine, which ended up winning the state science fair in 1959. After Amherst College, where he played out his football karma as the captain of an undefeated Amherst football team and was picked as all-new England guard and middle line backer and was elected into the National Football hall of fame as one of 11 All-American Scholar Athletes, he went on to Columbia Medical School to begin his doctor dharma. He did vaguely connect with Abraham Joshua Heschel at JTS, but missed the rest of the New York Jewish experience. He could not seem to find a place in the Jewish world and became interested in the Essenes, the Kabbalah, and Kundalini. In 1975, at the age of 33 when he received Shaktipat (the equivalent of Smicha l’Shefa, or Haniha) from the liberated being Swami Muktananda and received a direct knowledge of the answer to his question about death, he and gave up everything in the outer world to become an intense yogi meditating 6 hours per day, chanting 4.5 hours, and servings as a holistic physician for the thousands of yogis traveling with Sw. Muktananda, living in primarily in India, South Fallsburg, Oakland, and Santa Monica for seven years. The last 3.5 years were spent daily with Sw. Muktananda, without any break. In addition he took on a close “guru uncle” relationship with Sw. Prakashananda, the first person acknowledged by Sw. Muktananda as liberated in 1969.
At the end of the seven-years, at the age of 40, he was declared liberated by Sw. Prakashananda three times: once in front of a group of his devotees; once in front of his 12 year old son in Praskashananda’s ashram. These first two times Gabriel thought Prakashananda simply was testing; but the third time he made it intensely clear that it was the truth. He then spent a day in private instructing Gabriel about the meaning of Liberation and the dharma of it; making it clear that although Gabriel was the only liberated Western person in his lineage as a successor, his path may be in his original spiritual roots. A few weeks later Gabriel was acknowledged as liberated by Sw. Muktananda, who also empowered him to be a vehicle of grace for Shaktipat. A few days later, Sw. Muktananda left his body. It was a dramatic and beautiful end to a most intense and profound cycle. The next year, in 1983 Gabriel began the forty day fast that had the surprise redirection back into Judaism by what appeared to be a Divine, but not sought after, command.
Attempting to move into Judaism at best was strange. He became Bar Mitzvah’ed at the age of 44 under the direction of Rabbi Hanan Sills and the training of Irv Newman. Reuven and Yehudit Goldfarb attended the ceremony in Petaluma California. Irv, who was in his late 70’s, cried for the first time ever at a Bar Mitzvah as he was so touched by what he thought was the most profound one he had ever attended.
After that, Gabriel tried to explain Kundalini, Liberation, Shaktipat, and non-dual awareness to five of his Rabbi friends, and no one had a clue what he was talking about. Finally he got referred to Rabbi Gershon Winkler, who also did not know what Gabriel was talking about, but felt open enough to try and find a language in Hebrew to translate these yogic terms and experiences into Hebrew. Over time Gershon became Gabriel’s rabbinic mentor, and over the past eleven years has guided him in preparation to become a Rabbi. Although he first met Shlomo Carlebach in 1979, after 1983 Gabriel also became one of Rebbe Shlomo Carlebach’s physicians and spent many wonderful personal hours with him and was greatly inspired by his profundity He was a great soul.
In 1993 Gabriel founded the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Patagonia, AZ, and also the Tree of Life Foundation, a religious 501c3. In 1996, after a 21-day water fast, on the 21st day, Gabriel was initiated with the hagiya of the Tetragrammatron in which these letters became burning symbols that permeated every aspect of Gabriel’s being. It was after this that he began speaking in the third person to more formally acknowledge that although he traveled in the body-mind complex, it was not who he was. This, he later found out, was similar to Reb Zusha and Reb Meir of Premishlan, who both also spoke in the third person. Gabriel also began to study Shamanic Judaism with Gershon, and after one joint Native American-Jewish conference with Gershon, Gabriel became a 4-year sundancer and was adapted into the Lakota Tribe as a clan chief, for bravery as he was the only one to go without any food or water for the three years of Sundance in the hot Nevada desert and stand attached to the Tree for four days from sunrise to sunset. Later Gabriel became head of the Spirit Dance, which is a universal dance for world peace, which we now do at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center and Foundation (a non-profit religious corporation in Patagonia, AZ, and in Israel through our Tree of Light Foundation. In 2001, Gershon ordained Gabriel as a pastoral rabbi, which is one who is empowered to do all the ceremonies and holidays, but not one who was ready to interpret the Halachah. Inspired by Gershon and other Kabbalistic masters Gabriel deepened his studies of the Kabbalah, which he actually lightly began in 1970’s and more seriously began in 1983. He also began living a modern orthodox lifestyle and has been Shomer Shabbat for about 12 years. Somewhere in this process Gabriel was directed to Aliyah in Israel and is now an Israeli citizen and has been teaching, creating Shamanic Shabbats, running spiritual fasting retreats, and teaching live foods in Israel since 2004.
It was during a big Israeli retreat, Lev Tahor, where he co-led a Shabbat with Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, that they met and became instant brothers. Mordechai was the first Rabbi who deeply understood the Jewish Liberation Theology that Gabriel was talking about. Their bond of mutual understanding and commitment was to awaken the ancient teaching and lineage of Jewish Liberation that began with Avraham Avinu, with “Lech Lecha,” as the first liberated Jew; followed by Yitzchak as the second liberated Jew in the lineage. Over time Marc and Gabriel began serious dialogue of their individual and eventually joint vision to create a Jewish Liberation School, which is now manifesting. Gabriel deeply appreciates Mark’s deep Jewish mystical wisdom and philosophical knowledge (the philosophical Kabbalah), which is sparked, inspired and powered by his active Ruach HaKodesh. What Gabriel brings to the teachings are his 27 years as a liberated Shaktipat master; his experiential knowledge of the how to help people build a foundation for the total whole person liberation and the ethical process of Jewish Liberation (almost continuous deveikut) to manifest. Although the author of ten books on nutrition, peace, and spirituality, his book Spiritual Nutrition: Six Foundations for Spiritual Life gives the best synthesis of his yogic revelations into the Jewish-Kabbalistic experience. It is clear to Gabriel that he had to go into the realm of Yogic Liberation in order to see the Torah as a manual for Jewish Liberation. Presently he is writing a book on the Torah as a manual for Jewish Liberation, interpreting each parasha from that perspective. Though he enjoys the three levels of Kabbalah and will be teaching some of the fundamentals of Jewish healing and to the Ma’aseh Bereshit (magical-practical Kabbalah) as well as of the Ma’aseh Merkava Kabbalah (mystical Kabbalah), his deep love is the Torah, which is the practical foundation for Jewish Liberation from his point of view. He is strongly inspired by Rabbi Akiba and the Baal Shem Tov, whom he considers great Jewish liberated beings. Mordechai and Gabriel are deeply inspired and committed to reactive this most profound aspect and lineage of the great Jewish Way of Deveikut. We joyously invite you to join us in this incredible unfolding and undertaking.
Shalom,
Gabriel
Why is Rabbi Marc Gafni, Ph.D., Co-Creating the International Jewish Liberation School, and Marc’s Bio
To answer this question on would have to enquire of Marc’s background from an intellectual, emotional, spiritual, psychological, karmic, physical, social, familial and biographical perspective. Each would require its own essay and only an integration of the entire essay would yield some glimmering of an answer to this question. One answer, which transcends all of the above, is the Hebrew word. Kachah: Meaning: Just Because. The word Kachah in Hebrew is made of Hebrew letters which the Baal Shem Tov teaches are the acronym for Keter Kol Ha-ketarim. The crown of all crowns. Crown is the luminous divine essence or divine story called in Hebrew Keter, which is the highest reason, the highest will, the highest mystery on the border of the infinite. Just Because.
If however this does not fully satisfy you, then Marc will share you a personal reason; a reason that is personal and transpersonal in the sense that the latter transcends and includes the former. Marc feels that to consistently hold a deep and profound recognition of the true nature of the self and the true nature of reality one must at least taste liberated consciousness. This taste of liberated consciousness must then be integrated with intense shadow work, ethical practice, physical practice, eating practice, and social and spiritual artistry. Each of these is a separate track of service which we will address unpack and unfold in the International Jewish Liberation School. In Marc’s understanding this is the core teaching of Hebrew wisdom. Hebrew wisdom at its core is an enlightenment teaching; a Liberation teaching designed to gift the experience of enlightened and liberated consciousness to the largest amount of people with the greatest possible depth. This is what Marc has referred to as the Democratization of Enlightenment. This was a core theme in Marc’s teaching and his writing on Mordechai Lainer of Izbica. It is a teaching which reflects the idea of evolutionary enlightenment core the teachings of the Kabbalah of Luria which receive pristine formulation in the Torah and Dharma of Avraham Isaac HaKohen Kuk. It is this teaching on the evolutionary edge- the teaching that Liberation is both a potential, a promise and the birthright of every individual that lies at the core of Marc’s teaching.
Marc discussed this idea in depth with Moshe Idel and Ken Wilber in two dialogues in 2005 and 2006. At around the same time Marc and Gabriel met and led a sabot at a retreat in Israel. There was a deep and profound mutual recognition and love born on that Shabbat. Marc recognized the depth of Gabriel’s practice and liberated core. Marc also recognized the areas of spiritual practice that Gabriel had developed in this incarnation, which had not been available to Marc, and Gabriel did the same with Marc. Gabriel and Marc then lost contact as Marc went through his painful trial by fire. Gabriel and Marc reconnected and did a process of deep internal work around Marc’s trial by fire. Marc also joined Gershon in becoming a mentor, studying with Gabriel to prepare him for the next stage in the Rabbinate even as Gabriel became Marc’s mentor in psychological and healing work which helped Marc move through the pain towards a place of transmutation and transformation. In this cauldron of non-dual reality, where earth and heaven kisses, where the relative and the absolute revealed their oneness, the vision of the Liberation school was born in love. This is the personal / transpersonal story.
A deeper glimpse at Rabbi Kuk and his teaching of Evolutionary Kabbalah as a ground to our intention in the International Jewish Liberation School brings us to R. Kuk’s principle of Evolutionary Enlightenment [the phrase "Evolutionary Enlightenment" is a precise translation of R. Kuk's phrase in his works Lights of Holiness]. Thirty years ago I became seriously interested in the writing of Abraham Kuk. Kuk was a great Kabbalist and revolutionary thinker who lived a paradoxically and often beautifully conservative lifestyle. In my recent work on Mordechai Lainer of Izbica, who is in many ways my teacher, I began to realize that a number of the key ideas expressed in the Izbica lineage had direct and clear influence on Kuk. One of the most important of such ideas is what R. Kuk calls explicitly in the Hebrew “evolutionary enlightenment”. As I studied more over the years I realized two things. First, the Evolutionary motif was core to Kuk’s entire experience as well as to his conceptual vision of the ultimate nature of reality. Second, I realized that this idea was far from limited to Kuk. In fact it is the single most important idea in Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah. And finally I have– together with students friends and study partners, traced this idea backwards to the very foundational sources of the Kabbalah. Kabbalah is the opposite of Adavaita. Kabbalah is evolutionary spirituality.
What does it all mean? It is very simple. One view of reality suggests that the way to perfection is what the philosopher Lovejoy called the ascending path. One needs to leave the world of flux and change and enter into the world of eternal and unchanging form, which ultimately gives way to unchanging formlessness. . It is there and only there that redemption can be achieved. It is only by leaving behind the fluidity and instability of reality in all of its expression of chaos and uncertainty that we may achieve any measure of stability safety and ultimately realize bliss and perfection. A second view of reality makes an almost diametrically opposed claim. This school champions what Lovejoy called the descending path. This is a very different way indeed. In this understanding redemption is to be found in the constantly changing and transforming nature of concrete reality which in its ever-dynamic dance sings the praise of spirit in motion.
Monotheistic religion is usually identified with the first view. More pagan orientations in both their ancient and moderns expression are more readily identified with the second view.
Kabbalah forges a more integral view by embracing the primal intuition of spirit held in each of these experiences and conceptions of world. One expression of divinity is the splendid order of eternal forms, which transcend the mad confusion of samsara: the world of truth which transcends the world of lies.
And yet the eternal divine, which is one, incarnates and manifests in the world of plurality. Moreover this manifestation and incarnation of the one in the many, of the infinite in the finite, is not merely an expression of divinity; it is the divine invitation to its own great unfolding. For Luria, reality is spirit. Spirit is absolute eternal and unchanging. And yet –as all of us have experienced in our own mystical initiation, reality—which is spirit—is evolving no less then it is absolute. God – reality – ultimate spirit is both ever-present and already always the ground of all being even as spirit evolves through her incarnation in form. This, for the Kabbalist, is the evolutionary meaning of Nagargun’s reading of the Heart Sutra’s: Emptiness is Form and Form is Emptiness. All is one; God is one—meaning, explain the Kabbalists, God will be One. Reality will be integrated and unified in an obvious tapestry of gorgeous interconnectivity and wholeness when we –baby faced divine incarnation of the godhead realizes God’s evolution. In the words of Nikos Kazanzakis, cited by at least on Luria Scholar to explain the essence of Lurianic Kabbalah, “We are the saviors of God”.
What is Evolutionary Kabbalah? Evolutionary Kabbalah deploys the most advanced wisdom available in the world today from all of the great traditions as well as from the hard and soft sciences, in order to understand, evolve and apply the principles of Kabbalah to contemporary life.
Marc Gafni Bio
Marc Gafni is a cutting edge, gentle and provocative spiritual teacher, as well as an author and television personality, a mediator, an iconoclast, a lover of people, troublemaker, and corporate consultant. Marc is the author of seven books including the National Best Seller Soul Prints which won the prestigious Napra award for best spirituality book of 2001. It was a main selection of the One Spirit Book Club, and the Amazon.com best book in the Jewish thought category in 2001. This book was also made into a National PBS special and an audio series by Sounds True recordings. Soul Prints is published by Simon and Schuster. Marc’s second major English language book, also published by Simon and Schuster is The Mystery of Love. Beautifully written, it unpacks an esoteric Kabbalistic tradition, which teaches of the profound relationship between the sexual, the erotic and the sacred. Mystery of Love was met with much critical acclaim and was also made an audio series called The Erotic and the Holy, published by Sounds True.
Marc has been successfully involved in manifesting and leading spiritual context, including seminars, learning communities, training programs and spiritual movements since he was in his early twenties. He has struggled his whole life between his ability and desire to teach conventional spiritual wisdom and in conventional spiritual contexts, and his post-conventional styles of teaching and being. This tension has created the gorgeousness of much of his work and has caused some significant dissonance over the years. His commitment for the future is to be fully present and committed in the post conventional contexts in which he manifests and teaches. Marc is currently the director of a private foundation dedicated to producing a great library of teaching on the human spirit with real implications for creating a better world for all of the children and grandchildren on our planet.
There are several stages in the unfolding study and teaching path of Marc Gafni. In the first stage of his career, he was an Orthodox progressive Rabbi teaching Talmud Kabbalah and Biblical thought deep within the Orthodox fundamentalist world in Israel and in the United States. In the United States, Marc taught at Yeshiva University, serving congregations both as scholar in residence and Rabbi. He founded an outreach movement in the New York and Long Island Public schools. Eventually, Marc moved to Israel where he served as a Rabbi and taught classical Hebrew wisdom in the form of Talmud, Kabbalah and Biblical psychology. In this stage, he wrote two Hebrew books. The first, A Certain Spirit, re-defines the idea of faith from the old notion of the “dogma is true” to a more radical and profound idea that “I am true”. In his second book during this period, An Uncertain Spirit, Marc challenged the age old idea that spirit could provide certainty or explain suffering, and he taught the spiritual path of dancing with the uncertainty as the realization of highest human potential. In this stage, he also began to explore the spiritual path of laughter and tears. He also began to read bible through the prism of what he called biblical myth or the biblical archetypes. This work became the basis for the National Television shows that Marc created, wrote, and hosted for several years on National Israeli Television.
In the second stage of his study and teaching, Marc shifted much of his focus to the teaching of Hassidism and particularly, to a little known Kabbalistic lineage, which taught the idea of what Marc, has termed the Unique Self. This idea has been incorporated into the Integral Seminars of Ken Wilber and the Big Mind Process of Genpo Roshi and the teaching of many other spiritual teachers who were exposed to Marc’s teaching through the Integral Institute. The Unique Self is an important foil and paradoxical complement to the classic Buddhist teaching of No Self. Marc’s teaching seeks the integration of these two seemingly disparate moments of realization. Emerging from the Hassidic teaching on Unique Self is the bestseller, Soul Prints, which was released in many languages. He also wrote a two volume 1200-page work on Non Dual Humanism, and it’s expression as Unique Self. A small part of this work was submitted as a doctoral dissertation to Oxford University. These two volumes are now being prepared for publication as a project of the Foundation.
In the third stage of work, Marc turned his heart and attention to the Nature of the Erotic. In particular he taught of the interrelationship between the erotic, the sexual, and the sacred. Marc’s basic teaching was to unpack the four faces of Eros that underlie all evolved reality. He then moved to unpack the deep nature of the sexual as the model of living in Eros in all of the non-sexual dimensions of living. The first book to emerge from this study was the book: Mystery of Love and the Sounds True Audio series on The Erotic and the Holy. Marc is currently preparing for publication and more extended treatment of this topic to be released on the title The Erotic and the Holy.
In the fourth stage of inquiry, Marc shifted his focus to the psychological and spiritual “Shadow teachings” which he saw as being an esoteric strain within the Hebrew wisdom tradition. In this work, Marc sought to evolve the understanding of Shadow beyond Jung’s conception and to connect Shadow-work with the non-dual teachings of Kabbalah as well as with the Unique Self teaching. In this teaching Marc identified three distinct primary forms of shadow, which included not only one’s hidden dark side, but also one’s distorted Unique Self and Unrealized divinity. A book of these teachings is currently under preparation.
Next, in the fifth stage, Marc focused his attention and love on the nature of enlightenment. In some groundbreaking dialogues with Ken Wilber, Moshe Idel, Andrew Cohen, Jean Houston, the Dalai Llama, and Byron Katie. Marc introduced the radical hermeneutic that all of Hebrew wisdom maybe be properly understood as an enlightenment tradition. Moreover, he showed that the most important single Kabbalistic idea which lies at the heart of Luria’s Kabbalah is what Abraham Kuk called Evolutionary Enlightenment. The goal of the tradition in Gafni’s understanding was to achieve maximal depth for maximal span- that is enlightenment is not just for the elite but seeks the democratization of enlightenment. Marc Gafni and a number of other leading spiritual teachers are now preparing a series of books called The Spiritually Incorrect Series on on Postmodern Enlightenment Teachings. In this work, they will also address the enlightened relationship of the masculine and the feminine in the postmodern world. In this fifth phase Marc engaged in a series of recorded dialogues with World Thought leaders including his Holiness the Dali Lama, Ram Dass Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, Michael Beckwith, Bill Ury, Don Beck, Father Thomas Keating and Jean Houston. During this phase, emerging out of some fifteen dialogues with Ken Wilber, Marc presented two lecture series entitled Integral Judaism and Integral Kabbalah which now being prepared as two separate books.
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The course has four components:
1. The actual two-week course, whose content is described below.
2. Ten video yihiduts during the year after the summer course. Each will be on a different topic which will be open to participants and graduates of the Liberation School.
3. Creation of small sub communities formed for study, practice and support.
4. 2008 Winter Opening Kick-Off Week
In 2009 and onward, the Winter Program will be a gathering, a time to get re-inspired, and to continue to deepen, for graduates of the International Jewish Liberation School. Graduates will be invited to attend the winter retreat and to re-attend summer intensive annually.
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Annual Winter Week Intensive:
The annual winter week intensive will weave together ecstatic study in the method of the ancient study hall, cleansing, mitzvah and Shabbat practice, meditation, chanting, prayer, dance, and sacred community. Texts studied and deployed will include, Mystical, Kabbalistic, Hassidic, Talmudic and Torah.
Topic for Year One: The Liberation of the Masculine and the Feminine
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Annual Summer Two-Week Liberation Course:
Jewish Liberation is Whole Person Liberation. The summer Liberation Course is therefore designed around what we have called the Seven Levels of Shalom {Peace} through which one becomes Shalem; A Whole Human Being. It includes: Peace with the Body, Peace with the Mind, Peace with the Family, Peace with the Community, Peace with all Cultures, Peace with the Earth, Peace with God.
In the ancient Hebrew tradition of Spiritual Fasting, the first week includes a seven day green juice fast, haniha meditation, prayer, some Ophanim and yoga, and Liberation studies and philosophy, and kabbalat Shabbat.
The second week includes: Principles and practices of Hebrew Liberation: Jewish Liberation Philosophy, Inspired Sacred Text Study, Meditation, Prayer, Service, Kabbalat Shabbat, Spiritual Nutrition for Powerful and Effective Prayer and Meditation, Ophanim (the yoga and energetics of the Aleph-Bet of the Hebrew Letters Hebrew Song and dance, Kabbalah Study, and development of midot by exploring psycho-spiritual development including: Unique Self and levels of Shadow, and the Liberation understanding that the “Personality Is A Case Of Mistaken Identity”.
The International Jewish Liberation School is sponsored by the Tree of Life Foundation, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit foundation, under the Division of the Human School of Living Arts (HSLA). The International Jewish Liberation School is currently confirming its accreditation applicable to a 2-year Master’s Degree in Jewish Liberation
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Masters Academic Degree:
The International Jewish Libeation School is currently confirming its accreditation applicable to a two-year master’s degree in Jewish Liberation.
Those participating in the Liberation School who wish to receive a master’s degree are required to come to attend two consecutive December programs, the Summer Jewish Liberation School, the ten monthly sichot (teaching sessions), and write a master thesis supervised by Rebbe Cousens and Rebbe Gafni.
Those who do not want to pursue the master track are not required to come to the second winter intensive or to write a masters thesis.
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Registration and Price
To register for the IJLS programs, please book your limited space at 1-520-394-2520 x. 201.
by Jeff Bell and Greta DeJong
Catalyst Magazine – July 2008
Marc Gafni could well turn out to be the hero of a spiritual epic—or, at least, a psychosexual whodunit blockbuster.
A rabbi and a Biblical scholar with several published books and a recently approved doctoral dissertation from Oxford, Gafni presently lives in Salt Lake City. (He anonymously authored “Spiritually Incorrect,” an occasional column that appeared last year in CATALYST.) He came to the new Zion two years ago from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he led a large, vibrant movement of Jews who lived on the alternative edge, beyond the fringes of organized religion. Perhaps too close to that edge, where dangerous things can happen—and for Gafni, they did.
Talking with people about Gafni, a certain pattern emerges: Here’s a guy you’ve hung out with, watching TV and knocking back almond crunch, someone who calls up in the middle of the day and talks your head off, someone who has the usual knotty relational history. He’s a friend of yours, a normal, somewhat eccentric guy. Then, little by little you realize that there’s something kind of, well, saintly about him.
Stories about Gafni’s actions lean toward the saintly as well: People say they have seen him go out of his way to bring estranged friends together. They’ve seen him take an entire room full of people through a journey of laughter and tears. They’ve felt an atmosphere around him so affectionate and wild that it sparks off energy most haven’t felt since childhood. They’ve heard him speaking about God and human responsibility and what it means to take care of others with a wisdom and nuance that makes them search their souls.
And even wilder—they know he is the subject of Internet stories that paint him as a guy who “harasses” women, a “sexual predator.”
Everything you observe and intuit about him says “Really good person.” The Internet gossip sites say “Really bad person.” Then you get to see hundreds of documents proving the Internet stories run the gamut from distortion to out-and-out lies, reflecting all the most shadowy sides of the blogosphere. It begins to occur to you that something deep is going on here.
On the surface, it’s a common story: A coalition of women accuse a charismatic spiritual leader of sexual misconduct. The stories sound convincing. It must be true. The leader falls.
Examine the evidence in this case, and you see something quite different: Years of recovered email and instant messages from the women involved, some as recent as three weeks before complaints were filed, flatly contradict their own stories. The messages show that every one of the women was quite enthusiastically involved with Gafni on her own initiative. What happened that caused them to band together and file complaints of harassment? And what caused their complaints to do so much damage? Spiritual politics, “victim feminism,” Gafni’s human complexities, and the Internet.
The more you get to know Gafni, the more you suspect he is being put through an epic spiritual test, what we might call the Test of Slander. It’s actually part of the biography of countless other teachers whose lives didn’t fit the “normal” social pattern and who ended up redefining a spiritual tradition. Gafni’s story is still in process. Perhaps 25 years from now it will be told as a saga of purification, trial by fire and, hopefully, ultimate liberation.
In the meantime, Gafni—this larger-than-life presence tucked into the compact body of a playful 47-year—old is living more or less anonymously in Salt Lake City.
The story we’re about to tell has certain all too familiar elements: one more example of how, in the Internet age, false accusations can become as established as fact, and how a gifted teacher with an anti-establishment bent and a bohemian lifestyle can find his private life subjected to what legal scholar Allen Dershowitz called “sexual McCarthyism.”
Rabbi Gafni—author of seven books, including the best-selling “Soul Prints,” and a popular lecturer and workshop leader—was founder of Bayit Hadash, an alternative spiritual movement in Israel. The organization held retreats, classes and massive services, often gathering hundreds of enthusiasts for Gafni’s celebratory Sabbath services, which included music, chanting and dancing. His lectures and classes on Jewish texts, and on the interface between spirituality, ethics, sexuality and what Western moral philosophers have called “the good life,” were not only widely attended, but had brought thousands of disaffected young Jews back into conversation with their tradition.
“Rabbi Gafni was doing something that had not been done in modern Israel,” says Dr. Gabriel Cousens, who attended his teachings in Israel. “He was presenting the traditional Jewish teachings in a way that revealed not only the mystical experience embedded in the tradition, but also offered a powerful experience of ecstasy and community. Most importantly, however, he was the first modern Jewish teacher I met who taught that Judaism was at its core a path to liberation.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1960, educated in a yeshiva (a Jewish religious high school), Gafni began teaching in the Orthodox community around New York City. From his early days as an apprentice rabbi and youth group leader, Gafni had a gift for bringing together the spiritual with the secular, working with people who wouldn’t normally talk to each other, and creating communities. He was known as a passionately committed teacher. He spent time as a rabbi in Florida, tripling the size of a young congregation. Then he moved with his second wife and two children to Israel, where he was rabbi in a settlement on the border of the West Bank. In the ’90s, he emerged as a popular public teacher in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv, writing books, lecturing to packed houses, and appearing at conferences and spiritual venues in the United States and Europe.
Gafni hosted a weekly hour-long national TV show in Israel for several years. In the U.S., he led crowded workshops on the alternative Jewish and spiritual scene. He taught around the world, including appearances at important synagogues and the Harvard Negotiation Project. When terrorists blew up school buses in Israel, he presented a series of spots on national television urging people to hold on to their humanity in the face of horror. He has recorded dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Byron Katie, Ken Wilber and other spiritual and philosophical leaders. “Soul Prints” was a best-seller in this country, won the prestigious NAPRA Nautilus award as the best spirituality book of 2001 and was made into a PBS special.
And in a conservative society, he supported gay rights and the ordination of women. His teaching pointed out the presence of a hidden goddess element in the Jewish religion, and called for the re-emergence of the feminine in spirituality.
A career like this tends to arouse envy—even, or perhaps especially, in spiritual communities. “People would complain that Gafni took up too much space,” says Gershon Winkler, himself an important Jewish teacher and author of many books, including “The Magic of the Ordinary.” “After he fell, one guy told me that he was actually relieved, because some of Gafni’s people now came to him.” There appears to have been a cadre of colleagues, older teachers and even a few students who wanted him out of the way.
Gafni’s main vulnerability was his counter-cultural and often bohemian lifestyle. Throughout his career, Gafni had several love affairs outside of marriage. “I tried to push the boundaries of what was possible. I experimented,” Gafni admits. “I sometimes chose a moment of love over other loyalties. Sometimes I was right, sometimes dead wrong. Where I was wrong, I’ve tried to ask forgiveness.”
During the period following his divorce from his third wife, his lovers included a few women who had worked with him in his community, taught with him, or served on the board of his organization. “I was working literally 24/7, teaching and traveling around the clock,” he says. “It seemed natural to be involved with people who were part of my circle. At the time, in my hubris, disguised even from myself, it felt to me that there wasn’t a moment free for anything like normal dating or personal life.”
He says he kept these relationships private, not because they seemed inappropriate or “wrong,” but because, like many people in his position, he preferred not to have his personal life the subject of gossip or attack.
One lover wrote after their relationship was over: “It’s easy to love you and it has been beautiful to discover you, to feel you, to explore you.” And added, “I’m grateful that we touched each other on this path.” She then thanked him for being in “full intention and clarity” in their relationship and honoring her “sacred autonomy.”
This woman would later file a complaint on the advice of a lawyer, saying that Gafni had promised to marry her to gain sexual relations—–a felony in Israel, where they lived. This claim, and the claim that Gafni somehow manipulated her, is refuted by both the tone and content of literally hundreds of her emails to him.
In 2005, Ha’Aretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, ran a glowing article on Gafni’s work, stressing his belief that the feminine godhead and the softer, more erotic aspects of spirituality need to be restored to contemporary Judaism. The article was widely quoted, causing an incendiary reaction among rabbis in the Orthodox community. Traditionalists who felt threatened by his influence and provocative personal style objected to his stress on the goddess in Judaism, and some of Gafni’s former teachers and colleagues denounced him for promoting “pagan Judaism.” The Wikipedia entry on Gafni credits him—or accuses, it depends on how you read it—with leading the movement to bring eros back into Judaism.
At about that time, and some say as a direct result of the Ha’Aretz spread, a rabbi who had clashed with Gafni in his youth gave a story about him to the proprietor of a website devoted to outing Jewish clerics alleged to be sexual predators. The site collects rumors, innuendos and complaints about rabbis, some of whom are undoubtedly people who indeed abused their position. But the site is also known for its maliciousness, venomous language, and for mixing fact with outright fiction.
The site’s proprietor is Vicki Polin, who in 1989, under the name Rachel, presented herself on national daytime television as the survivor of a Jewish satanic cult which sacrificed babies. She claims to have sacrificed—that is, murdered—at least one baby herself. She considers it her mission in life to report those whom she calls “Jewish abusers.” Ironically, the site so evokes the energy of anti-Semitic hate sites that several such hate sites link to hers.
In Gafni’s case, the stories described two relationships, one when Gafni was 19, the other a one-time encounter when he was 24. Gafni insists neither involved more then petting, and that both were mutually engaged. Couched in the hate-speech style that has become so familiar in the blogosphere, the stories called Gafni a “known predator” who had “molested young women” and included purportedly first-person interviews with both of these women by Luke Ford, a former pornographer and a gossip columnist for the porn industry. Gafni’s version of these events is supported by two polygraph tests administered by Dr. Gordon Barland, one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
The stories on the website make no attempt to distinguish fact from rumor, distorted memory, or skewed interpretation of events. Polin and Ford painted a teenage romance between 19-year-old Gafni and his 14-year-old girlfriend as “child molestation,” and among other things, accused him of changing his name to avoid his past. (In fact, Gafni had followed the common custom of hebraicizing his name when he moved to Israel, and always referred to his family name in his books and other publications.) All of this forms the complex background for what happened next.
On an evening in May 2006, Gafni landed in Tel Aviv after a 10-hour flight returning from a teaching trip to the United States. He expected to be met at the plane by his girlfriend.
As his plane touched down, he dialed the number of his program director to discuss logistics of a workshop scheduled for the next day. Instead he heard an unidentified feminine voice screeching, “You are finished! Go to [a certain lawyer's office in Tel Aviv] at midnight, or go to jail.” Gafni thought he had the wrong number. He called again. The same message. He began to tremble as he realized that something terrible was going on. Over the next several hours, he began to piece things together. A former personal assistant, who had been threatening the organization with legal action over back pay, and who over the previous year had sent him dozens of abusive emails, had gotten together with another woman to discuss Gafni. They discovered that Gafni had been intimately involved with both of them. We can’t know what exactly motivated them from there. We do know what they did: They went to the Tel Aviv police and filed a complaint.
Sexual harassment laws have given women much-needed legal protection and gone a long way to support civil treatment of women everywhere. But when a woman tells the story of a sexual encounter and claims harassment, the man—guilty or innocent—will likely be in deep trouble if he does not have physical proof to the contrary. The woman doesn’t even have to seek legal redress—the complaint alone can sometimes be enough to get a professor or executive reprimanded or even fired. To complicate matters for the man, in Israel, unlike anywhere else, sexual harassment is a criminal offense.
The women told the police that Gafni had, in one case, used his authority as an employer, and in the other, promised marriage to persuade her to have sex with him. They convinced other women, whom they discovered had been involved with Gafni over the years, to sign their affadavit. In fact, none of the women had been either employees or students of Gafni at the time the relationships began.
By the time Gafni arrived in Israel that night, the women had convinced his co-teacher, as well as key members of his staff, that they needed protection, and cited others as possible victims. Members of the community were prevented from speaking to Gafni by the women, who claimed that he was a danger to the community.
Gafni says no one asked for his side of the story or checked any facts with him. “It was like a weird dream. I had never sexually harassed anyone. I had proof. I went to my computer for the emails I’d exchanged with these women—there were tons of them.”
To his shock, a key batch of relevant emails and other correspondence between himself and one of the complainants—his former assistant—were gone. They had been erased from his computer.
Worse than a weird dream, it was now a nightmare. He had no way of refuting the complaints. By this time, the story had been leaked to the Jewish press. Though many people in his community felt that Gafni was being railroaded, hysteria prevailed. Without consulting Rabbi Gafni, without cross-questioning the complainants or checking into their motives, a chain reaction was set in motion which resulted in the dissolution of Gafni’s movement. Several newspapers published sensational articles chronicling Gafni’s “downfall.” One reported (falsely) that he had been accused of rape. Another (again, falsely) claimed that he had made promises to marry five women. Within a few days, Gafni’s teaching work and the organization to which he had dedicated his life had been discredited and destroyed.
A group of Salt Lake attorneys helped Gafni recover the deleted data from his computer and then carefully review his correspondence with the women. “There is not a credible basis for legal action against [Gafni],” writes attorney Fredrick Thaler of Ray, Quinney Nebeker, a Salt Lake law firm, in a letter posted on Gafni’s website. “The complaints have no merit,” writes Charlotte Miller, who also served as Gafni’s legal council.
However, like the many commentators who assumed that the accusations against the Duke lacrosse team were true, people moved to distance themselves from him immediately.
According to feminist writers such as Dafna Pattai, Cathy Young, Laura Kipnis and Bell Hooks, the key reason for this distancing is fear. In a culture where truth is less important than perception, people are afraid to be associated with someone accused of sexual misconduct, even when they know the accusations are untrue. Associates fear liability, or being perceived as not protecting the ostensible victims—two consequences of defending the accused in a culture that assumes that women or groups of women always tell the truth about sexual harassment.
This belief persists despite data to the contrary, including the recent collapse of the case against the Duke lacrosse players, not to mention the historic experience of black men lynched because a white woman interpreted a casual glance as sexual harassment.
Feminist writers such as Laura Kipnis and Cristina Hoff Summers have written extensively to expose this kind of “victim feminism”: a stance which assumes that in situations of this sort, the woman is always a helpless victim of male desire.
“His best friends basically left him for dead,” says Gershon Winkler.
Gafni felt he had no choice but to return to the United States to think through what he should do. In the pain and sorrow of those first few days, he decided that as the creator of the organization which had turned on him, he should take on himself responsibility for the dysfunctions that had led to the situation. He wrote a public letter claiming all spiritual responsibility for what had happened. Accepting the advice of a friend and mentor, he took personal responsibility for the “sickness” behind what had happened and volunteered to seek treatment. This seemed, at the time of trauma and confusion, to be the only way to defuse the growing frenzy. Without the missing emails, he had no proof of his innocence, and at that time he had no idea the disappeared computer files would be restored.
Gafni refused any interviews and for the next two years maintained public silence, allowing the stories that were circulating to stand as “truth.” In the meantime, he began an intensive formal process of self-examination and inner work.
It was about this time that Gafni came to Salt Lake City at the invitation of a friend and teaching colleague, mediator and Zen teacher Diane Hamilton and her husband, former Utah chief justice Michael Zimmerman. Gafni was living quietly in a small home in Sugar House. Soon after we met, he told us about a pivotal event that had shown him both the depths of his fall, and the painful but spiritually profound path to turning the pain into compassion.
He had gone several times to Sabbath dinners at the house of a local family, mainly for the sake of experiencing community. One night, the host took him aside. “One of our guests read the Internet and says she can’t sit at the table with you. I know it’s not true, but she thinks you are a child molester,” he told Gafni. “I have to ask you to leave and not come back. I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.”
Gafni realized that he—who just six months before would have been an honored guest at such a gathering—was in essence a pariah. “I was stunned at first to realize that people were looking at me through the lens of a hate site, and couldn’t see who I am,” he said. “That night, I was up all night, meditating about it, awash in agonized tears. Suddenly, in the midst of my grief, this profound feeling of joy came over me. In Hebrew wisdom, we speak of how the divine feminine, the Shekhinah, has been exiled by God, and lives as hidden sparks inside human souls. I realized that I was participating in the pain of the exiled Shekhinah, the sorrow of the divine feminine thrown out of the kingdom. I, like her, was wrongly exiled and sat in dust and ashes. We were together. As I realized this, my heart became so ecstatic that I began to dance.
“Then I remembered the hidden teaching about the old Hassidic masters. These famous rabbis would sometimes discard their robes and wander as beggars through the villages of Western Europe, knocking on the doors of wealthy devotees. Invariably, they would be thrown out by people who, if they had seen them in full regalia, would have honored them.
“It all fit together for me then.
“I had spent my life seeking after the goddess, trying to return the feminine to her place…and that in some extreme sense the Shekhinah was testing my love, and she had hurt me because in some sense I hadn’t seen something about her. These relationships had hurt women I loved. Even while she was hurting me, she was embracing me. And I was here on the back roads of Utah to discover something about the divine feminine so that I might speak of her in new ways. I danced in real ecstasy for hours on end.”
Gafni later shared the incident with his friend, Brother David Stendl-Rast, who was reminded of an anecdote about Saint Francis: A disciple once asked, “What would be for you the most perfect joy?” Francis replied that for him, perfect joy would be to seek shelter in a house, be rejected and thrown out, and left to lie in the mud with the dogs.
Gafni says this teaching, which might have seemed wildly extreme and weird to him previously, actually described the profound spiritual opportunity that he had begun to see in this moment of his life. So along with examining his part in what he called the “contribution system” that had created this situation, and the qualities in himself that needed to change, Gafni also began a powerful inner journey into the subtleties of the masculine-feminine relationship.
“Sexuality creates wounds—sometimes mortal ones,” he writes in an unpublished essay called “The Wounds of Love.” “But if we learn to live wide open even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy.”
Along with his inner work, Gafni began collecting documentary evidence to prove the falsity of the claims against him. He took polygraph tests with internationally recognized polygraph expert Gordon Barland which fully supported his assertion that the relationships with these women had been mutual, and had not resulted from any deception or inappropriate deployment of power on Gafni’s part.
He underwent an extensive psychological evaluation with three independent evaluators. Their conclusions and his own were summarized by by Paul J. Goodberg, M.A.: “I am convinced that Rabbi Gafni never abusively hurt or exploited anyone. He is completely reputable.”
Ray, Quinney Nebeker turned his computer over to PeakSpan, LLC, a Salt Lake data recovery firm, which recovered valuable information and proved data had been intentionally removed.
“Of course, I regret with all my heart that anyone experienced hurt through their relationship with me. And, remember what Bono sings? `We hurt each other and we do it again.’ The key is what we do with our hurt,” Gafni says. “But what I most deeply regret is that I allowed myself to jeopardize the work we were doing by engaging in these relationships. I believed that what we were doing was sharing love, and that therefore there was nothing ethically, and certainly not legally, wrong. I still believe that. But I also recognize that a spiritual teacher has to hold strong boundaries around his personal life. Even mutual relationships with powerful and autonomous women are a problem for a public teacher. Moreover, in retrospect, our relationship did not serve the highest growth of these women; it endangered our movement and let down my supporters, friends and partners. In that sense—although I was unconscious of it at the time—they were unethical relationships and I regret that deeply.”
But even by Israel’s strict standard, in no way did he break the law.
Gafni has contracts for several new books and is beginning to teach again. He has been invited to create and host a documentary movie that uses the frame of his story to look into contemporary sexual and spiritual politics, and how rumor, innuendo and hysteria can destroy a life. And to show how a life can be rebuilt in love without bitterness. Most of all, he seems committed to helping foster a social justice movement that works to end genocide, human trafficking and sexual slavery in the world. Gafni seems determined not to attack his accusers, unless they leave him with no choice, but rather to facilitate healing.
“It is the challenge of the spiritual practitioner,” says Diane Musho Hamilton, “and especially that of a teacher, to become intimate with the processes of life and death, of destruction and of transformation. In this way, everything that arises, whether it appears as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unjust, is regarded as the path. To walk it requires great fearlessness, an abundance of compassion, a willingness to accept blame, and the offering of forgiveness.”
Sally Kempton, a former journalist, leading spiritual teacher and second wave feminist was asked what good might come from this story. She responded, “Marc has gone through a deep evolution. He will be an even deeper, better teacher in the second half of his life than he was in the first. The question is, can the people involved move from victimhood to power and responsibility? If they can, then Marc, the women, and all the shadowy players behind the scenes, will offer us great hope for healing in our world.”
The third act of this drama has yet to be written. Can this spiritual teacher come back from the dead? The answer is most likely “yes,” due to Gafni’s unflagging persistence. Did the obloquy and ignominy of the last two years break his spirit? No, though it has left some scars. Yet, throughout the whole of this nightmare, in circumstances that could easily, and forgivably, break the spirit of nearly any other person, Gafni has managed to hold onto his chronic optimism and genuine love for humanity.
Jeff Bell is a writer, part-time indie filmmaker, musician, wonk and political consultant. He is the former Democratic National Committee communications director for Utah and former president of the Children’s Justice Corps. Greta deJong is editor and publisher of CATALYST. For more about Marc Gafni, visit www.marcgafni.com
by Jeff Bell
Catalist Magazine – July, 2008
The nexus of the Gafni story would appear to be women falsely claiming victim status, bent on exacting some form of retribution which, in their view, matched the suffering at having not obtained exclusivity to Gafni and his affections. That is the center and the catalyst of Gafni’s current nightmare. But it is, by no means, the whole of the problem.
Without the women who filed complaints against Marc Gafni, there would certainly be no story, at least not a story of this depth and magnitude. But without the Internet, and a few “move ahead at any cost” bloggers, the story would have faded away.
What has both haunted and hunted Gafni is the relative ease at which rumors and lies have been mixed with more accurate information to paint a picture of Gafni as evil and predatory. Blogs index on the search engines far faster than then traditional websites do. Repeat a phrase or a name, over and over again, link it to other blogs, stories and other articles, and it jumps to the top of the search results in a short amount of time.
Take a moment and think about search engine results. The majority of Internet users look no deeper than the first couple of pages of their search results. Top searches have a false weight of authority that can easily lead a reader to unconsciously lend credibility where none should exist.
The strange union of self-proclaimed advocate for The Awareness Center, Vicki Polin, and porn industry gossip blogger Luke Ford and their mutual effort to assail the reputation of Rabbi Gafni, and to continue those attacks despite the lack of anything new to write about, is bizarre at best and nefarious at worst.
A vocal member of the Memory Recovery Movement, which ruined thousands of lives in the 1980s, Vicki Polin has wrapped a skein of respectability around herself that, when viewed through the prism of her attacks on Gafni, seems patently false and hypocritical.
Polin maintains that she is the child of Satanic Jews who raped her on a regular basis and made her eat her own babies. She now claims to be a victim’s advocate; but her advocacy seems to have taken all the aspects of vigilante misanthrope, and the power of the blog is her weapon. Polin has a singular focus to not only expose, but to destroy the life and reputation of whatever person that falls into her sights, regardless of facts. Any Google search on her name serves up a fairly even return of Polin’s attacks on rabbinical leaders, and pages written by victims of Polin’s tactics.
Luke Ford has made a living as one of the world’s foremost porn industry gossip columnists and, over the years, has owned and operated several different sites full of lewd pictures, stories and first person familiarity with the adult film industry. Ford also has an alter ego in which he calls himself “Luke Ford: your moral leader,” and represents himself as a beacon of decency and Jewish activism.
Somehow, Ford and Polin have become compatriots and often work together in boosting their ratings. The cross-indexing between these two and their blogs has, most especially in the area of posts about Gafni and other Jewish leaders, helped push them further and further upward until, for the last two years, they’ve had ownership of the first page of most engines when their targets’ names were searched.
What emerges on the Internet is a false image, based on rumor, presented as fact; all in opposition of the axiom “innocent until proven guilty.”
What makes Gafni’s story so interesting to me is not so much that, with hundreds of pages of evidence that exonerate him from these false allegations, he can clear his name in a fair-minded setting, but, on the Internet, it will take him years of exhaustive effort and money to balance his innocence against the two-year head start of those who claim he’s guilty.
Despite the potential to harm, blogging is the quintessential and idyllic evolution of American and international freedom of expression. The growing influence of blogs and bloggers over the last handful of years speaks volumes about dissatisfaction with the media and generic culture. There also seems to be a need, sometimes nearing addiction, for mass distribution of self-expression held by these exhibitionists of the written word. The acceptance as “meaningful” granted to them by their own ever-expanding membership roster fuels the rapid growth of this amateur medium.
I wrote my first blog post in 1996; long before, in time measured by Internet standards, the word “weblog” or “blog” was universally known and accepted into the mainstream lexicon. At the time, some were calling the very public self-publishing of one’s own opinions, criticisms, thoughts and life stories to the Internet a “vanity page,” an “online journal.”
My early posts were mostly lengthy, often ranting missives about politics with a lot of time, effort and kilobytes dumped into the 1996 Presidential race. It wasn’t long before I received calls, during political primary season, from two different Republican campaigns asking who I was, who I worked for and what my website was about. They didn’t like my analysis and they wanted me to stop.
These two different campaign representatives could not wrap their heads around the idea that I was just a guy, sitting in his Denver basement, self-publishing his opinions and analysis on the field of Republican candidates fighting for the GOP nomination. While the number of readers I had at the time would be laughable by today’s standards, in 1996 it was enough to garner the attention of two presidential nomination campaigns.
There is power in the written word and that power is intensified when any person, from any background, can release those words, unfettered and unregulated, into the world for anyone to digest.
Telling the truth, no matter how partisan your opinion, is an awesome responsibility, if you choose to view it that way. As the community of bloggers and online journalists continues to grow, so, too, do the numbers of the nefarious, the deluded and the predatory. For every handful of personal, political, entertainment or technology blogs online, whatever their motivation may be, there are always some who use their writing for some form of gain at the expense of others. That would appear to be the case regarding Gafni.
Reputation has always been a fragile thing, but the future of reputation is uncertain. Blogs have emerged as a quick, cheap and anonymous means of mass communication that can be used to further an agenda, talk about politics, share pictures of your family picnic or a weapon to destroy someone else’s life. Things on the Internet never go away. Once you’ve been dragged through the mud, no matter how innocent you may be, somewhere, on the Internet, you’re guilty forever.
Jeff Bell is the author of JMBell.org, one of the highest rated political blogs in Utah.
Realize Your Potential: A Beautiful Unique Manifestation of the Divine! www.marcgafni.com Who IS Marc Gafni?
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni is a cutting edge spiritual teacher, author, television personality, mediator, corporate consultant, iconoclast, and gentle provocateur. He has written seven books, including the national bestseller Soul Prints, which won the prestigious NAPRA award for Best Spirituality Book of 2001, and was a main selection of the One Spirit Book Club and the Amazon.com Best Book in the Jewish Thought category in 2001. This book was also made into a National PBS special and an audio series by Sounds True recordings. Soul Prints is published by Simon & Schuster.
Marc Gafni’s second major English language book, also published by Simon & Schuster, is The Mystery of Love. It unpacks an esoteric Kabbalistic tradition about the profound relationship between the sexual, the erotic, and the sacred. The Mystery of Love was critically acclaimed and made into an audio series called The Erotic and the Holy, published by Sounds True.
Marc Gafni has been teaching and leading spiritual seminars, learning communities, training programs, and spiritual movements since he was in his early twenties. During much of that time, Marc Gafni struggled with the question of whether to teach conventional spiritual wisdom in a conventional spiritual context, or to follow a more post-conventional style of teaching and living. This tension brought great dynamism to his work, but also caused some dissonance.
Now and in the future, Marc Gafni is committed to teaching a post-conventional spirituality that is rooted in traditional wisdom, yet fully adapted to the needs of a postmodern spiritual world. Like some other leaders and teachers in this age of unregulated internet conversation, Gafni has been attacked on some private websites and blogs. He has chosen not to directly respond to the blatantly false or seriously distorted accounts of his life and relationships that appear on these sites.However, Gafni takes full responsibility for any and all of his actual words, actions and subtle creations, both intentional and unintentional. His intention, now and in the future, is to do everything possible to transmute all negative energy within his being and within his circle into love, responsibility, and healing.
Marc Gafni is currently the director of a private foundation dedicated to producing a library of teachings on the human spirit, designed to help create a better future for our children and grandchildren. There are seven volumes in various stages of preparation, covering a range of topics. All of these books emerge from Marc Gafni’s own experience as a human being, teacher, and student on the path of life and liberation. Several are being written with co-authors. Topics include: The Unique Self and No Self; Non-dual Humanism; The Masculine and the Feminine; The Dance of Tears–the Path of Laughter; Sex, Ethics and Injury; Shadow Dancing in the Light; Tragedy and Transformation; Sexuality and Kabbalah; Integral Judaism; Integral Kabbalah; as well as a personal sacred autobiography. Marc Gafni is also preparing a series of books on the weekly biblical reading of the Hebrew tradition as well as the sacred cycle of time as a spiritual path in the ancient Hebrew tradition.
Marc Gafni could well turn out to be the hero of a spiritual epic—or, at least, a psychosexual whodunit blockbuster.
A rabbi and a Biblical scholar with several published books and a recently approved doctoral dissertation from Oxford, Gafni presently lives in Salt Lake City. (He anonymously authored “Spiritually Incorrect,” an occasional column that appeared last year in CATALYST.) He came to the new Zion two years ago from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he led a large, vibrant movement of Jews who lived on the alternative edge, beyond the fringes of organized religion. Perhaps too close to that edge, where dangerous things can happen—and for Gafni, they did.
Talking with people about Gafni, a certain pattern emerges: Here’s a guy you’ve hung out with, watching TV and knocking back almond crunch, someone who calls up in the middle of the day and talks your head off, someone who has the usual knotty relational history. He’s a friend of yours, a normal, somewhat eccentric guy. Then, little by little you realize that there’s something kind of, well, saintly about him.
Stories about Gafni’s actions lean toward the saintly as well: People say they have seen him go out of his way to bring estranged friends together. They’ve seen him take an entire room full of people through a journey of laughter and tears. They’ve felt an atmosphere around him so affectionate and wild that it sparks off energy most haven’t felt since childhood. They’ve heard him speaking about God and human responsibility and what it means to take care of others with a wisdom and nuance that makes them search their souls.
And even wilder—they know he is the subject of Internet stories that paint him as a guy who “harasses” women, a “sexual predator.”
Everything you observe and intuit about him says “Really good person.” The Internet gossip sites say “Really bad person.” Then you get to see hundreds of documents proving the Internet stories run the gamut from distortion to out-and-out lies, reflecting all the most shadowy sides of the blogosphere. It begins to occur to you that something deep is going on here.
On the surface, it’s a common story: A coalition of women accuse a charismatic spiritual leader of sexual misconduct. The stories sound convincing. It must be true. The leader falls.
Examine the evidence in this case, and you see something quite different: Years of recovered email and instant messages from the women involved, some as recent as three weeks before complaints were filed, flatly contradict their own stories. The messages show that every one of the women was quite enthusiastically involved with Gafni on her own initiative. What happened that caused them to band together and file complaints of harassment? And what caused their complaints to do so much damage? Spiritual politics, “victim feminism,” Gafni’s human complexities, and the Internet.
The more you get to know Gafni, the more you suspect he is being put through an epic spiritual test, what we might call the Test of Slander. It’s actually part of the biography of countless other teachers whose lives didn’t fit the “normal” social pattern and who ended up redefining a spiritual tradition. Gafni’s story is still in process. Perhaps 25 years from now it will be told as a saga of purification, trial by fire and, hopefully, ultimate liberation.
In the meantime, Gafni—this larger-than-life presence tucked into the compact body of a playful 47-year—old is living more or less anonymously in Salt Lake City.
The story we’re about to tell has certain all too familiar elements: one more example of how, in the Internet age, false accusations can become as established as fact, and how a gifted teacher with an anti-establishment bent and a bohemian lifestyle can find his private life subjected to what legal scholar Allen Dershowitz called “sexual McCarthyism.”
Rabbi Gafni—author of seven books, including the best-selling “Soul Prints,” and a popular lecturer and workshop leader—was founder of Bayit Hadash, an alternative spiritual movement in Israel. The organization held retreats, classes and massive services, often gathering hundreds of enthusiasts for Gafni’s celebratory Sabbath services, which included music, chanting and dancing. His lectures and classes on Jewish texts, and on the interface between spirituality, ethics, sexuality and what Western moral philosophers have called “the good life,” were not only widely attended, but had brought thousands of disaffected young Jews back into conversation with their tradition.
“Rabbi Gafni was doing something that had not been done in modern Israel,” says Dr. Gabriel Cousens, who attended his teachings in Israel. “He was presenting the traditional Jewish teachings in a way that revealed not only the mystical experience embedded in the tradition, but also offered a powerful experience of ecstasy and community. Most importantly, however, he was the first modern Jewish teacher I met who taught that Judaism was at its core a path to liberation.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1960, educated in a yeshiva (a Jewish religious high school), Gafni began teaching in the Orthodox community around New York City. From his early days as an apprentice rabbi and youth group leader, Gafni had a gift for bringing together the spiritual with the secular, working with people who wouldn’t normally talk to each other, and creating communities. He was known as a passionately committed teacher. He spent time as a rabbi in Florida, tripling the size of a young congregation. Then he moved with his second wife and two children to Israel, where he was rabbi in a settlement on the border of the West Bank. In the ’90s, he emerged as a popular public teacher in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv, writing books, lecturing to packed houses, and appearing at conferences and spiritual venues in the United States and Europe.
Gafni hosted a weekly hour-long national TV show in Israel for several years. In the U.S., he led crowded workshops on the alternative Jewish and spiritual scene. He taught around the world, including appearances at important synagogues and the Harvard Negotiation Project. When terrorists blew up school buses in Israel, he presented a series of spots on national television urging people to hold on to their humanity in the face of horror. He has recorded dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Byron Katie, Ken Wilber and other spiritual and philosophical leaders. “Soul Prints” was a best-seller in this country, won the prestigious NAPRA Nautilus award as the best spirituality book of 2001 and was made into a PBS special.
And in a conservative society, he supported gay rights and the ordination of women. His teaching pointed out the presence of a hidden goddess element in the Jewish religion, and called for the re-emergence of the feminine in spirituality.
A career like this tends to arouse envy—even, or perhaps especially, in spiritual communities. “People would complain that Gafni took up too much space,” says Gershon Winkler, himself an important Jewish teacher and author of many books, including “The Magic of the Ordinary.” “After he fell, one guy told me that he was actually relieved, because some of Gafni’s people now came to him.” There appears to have been a cadre of colleagues, older teachers and even a few students who wanted him out of the way.
Gafni’s main vulnerability was his counter-cultural and often bohemian lifestyle. Throughout his career, Gafni had several love affairs outside of marriage. “I tried to push the boundaries of what was possible. I experimented,” Gafni admits. “I sometimes chose a moment of love over other loyalties. Sometimes I was right, sometimes dead wrong. Where I was wrong, I’ve tried to ask forgiveness.”
During the period following his divorce from his third wife, his lovers included a few women who had worked with him in his community, taught with him, or served on the board of his organization. “I was working literally 24/7, teaching and traveling around the clock,” he says. “It seemed natural to be involved with people who were part of my circle. At the time, in my hubris, disguised even from myself, it felt to me that there wasn’t a moment free for anything like normal dating or personal life.”
He says he kept these relationships private, not because they seemed inappropriate or “wrong,” but because, like many people in his position, he preferred not to have his personal life the subject of gossip or attack.
One lover wrote after their relationship was over: “It’s easy to love you and it has been beautiful to discover you, to feel you, to explore you.” And added, “I’m grateful that we touched each other on this path.” She then thanked him for being in “full intention and clarity” in their relationship and honoring her “sacred autonomy.”
This woman would later file a complaint on the advice of a lawyer, saying that Gafni had promised to marry her to gain sexual relations—–a felony in Israel, where they lived. This claim, and the claim that Gafni somehow manipulated her, is refuted by both the tone and content of literally hundreds of her emails to him.
In 2005, Ha’Aretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, ran a glowing article on Gafni’s work, stressing his belief that the feminine godhead and the softer, more erotic aspects of spirituality need to be restored to contemporary Judaism. The article was widely quoted, causing an incendiary reaction among rabbis in the Orthodox community. Traditionalists who felt threatened by his influence and provocative personal style objected to his stress on the goddess in Judaism, and some of Gafni’s former teachers and colleagues denounced him for promoting “pagan Judaism.” The Wikipedia entry on Gafni credits him—or accuses, it depends on how you read it—with leading the movement to bring eros back into Judaism.
At about that time, and some say as a direct result of the Ha’Aretz spread, a rabbi who had clashed with Gafni in his youth gave a story about him to the proprietor of a website devoted to outing Jewish clerics alleged to be sexual predators. The site collects rumors, innuendos and complaints about rabbis, some of whom are undoubtedly people who indeed abused their position. But the site is also known for its maliciousness, venomous language, and for mixing fact with outright fiction.
The site’s proprietor is Vicki Polin, who in 1989, under the name Rachel, presented herself on national daytime television as the survivor of a Jewish satanic cult which sacrificed babies. She claims to have sacrificed—that is, murdered—at least one baby herself. She considers it her mission in life to report those whom she calls “Jewish abusers.” Ironically, the site so evokes the energy of anti-Semitic hate sites that several such hate sites link to hers.
In Gafni’s case, the stories described two relationships, one when Gafni was 19, the other a one-time encounter when he was 24. Gafni insists neither involved more then petting, and that both were mutually engaged. Couched in the hate-speech style that has become so familiar in the blogosphere, the stories called Gafni a “known predator” who had “molested young women” and included purportedly first-person interviews with both of these women by Luke Ford, a former pornographer and a gossip columnist for the porn industry. Gafni’s version of these events is supported by two polygraph tests administered by Dr. Gordon Barland, one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
The stories on the website make no attempt to distinguish fact from rumor, distorted memory, or skewed interpretation of events. Polin and Ford painted a teenage romance between 19-year-old Gafni and his 14-year-old girlfriend as “child molestation,” and among other things, accused him of changing his name to avoid his past. (In fact, Gafni had followed the common custom of hebraicizing his name when he moved to Israel, and always referred to his family name in his books and other publications.) All of this forms the complex background for what happened next.
On an evening in May 2006, Gafni landed in Tel Aviv after a 10-hour flight returning from a teaching trip to the United States. He expected to be met at the plane by his girlfriend.
As his plane touched down, he dialed the number of his program director to discuss logistics of a workshop scheduled for the next day. Instead he heard an unidentified feminine voice screeching, “You are finished! Go to [a certain lawyer's office in Tel Aviv] at midnight, or go to jail.” Gafni thought he had the wrong number. He called again. The same message. He began to tremble as he realized that something terrible was going on. Over the next several hours, he began to piece things together. A former personal assistant, who had been threatening the organization with legal action over back pay, and who over the previous year had sent him dozens of abusive emails, had gotten together with another woman to discuss Gafni. They discovered that Gafni had been intimately involved with both of them. We can’t know what exactly motivated them from there. We do know what they did: They went to the Tel Aviv police and filed a complaint.
Sexual harassment laws have given women much-needed legal protection and gone a long way to support civil treatment of women everywhere. But when a woman tells the story of a sexual encounter and claims harassment, the man—guilty or innocent—will likely be in deep trouble if he does not have physical proof to the contrary. The woman doesn’t even have to seek legal redress—the complaint alone can sometimes be enough to get a professor or executive reprimanded or even fired. To complicate matters for the man, in Israel, unlike anywhere else, sexual harassment is a criminal offense.
The women told the police that Gafni had, in one case, used his authority as an employer, and in the other, promised marriage to persuade her to have sex with him. They convinced other women, whom they discovered had been involved with Gafni over the years, to sign their affadavit. In fact, none of the women had been either employees or students of Gafni at the time the relationships began.
By the time Gafni arrived in Israel that night, the women had convinced his co-teacher, as well as key members of his staff, that they needed protection, and cited others as possible victims. Members of the community were prevented from speaking to Gafni by the women, who claimed that he was a danger to the community.
Gafni says no one asked for his side of the story or checked any facts with him. “It was like a weird dream. I had never sexually harassed anyone. I had proof. I went to my computer for the emails I’d exchanged with these women—there were tons of them.”
To his shock, a key batch of relevant emails and other correspondence between himself and one of the complainants—his former assistant—were gone. They had been erased from his computer.
Worse than a weird dream, it was now a nightmare. He had no way of refuting the complaints. By this time, the story had been leaked to the Jewish press. Though many people in his community felt that Gafni was being railroaded, hysteria prevailed. Without consulting Rabbi Gafni, without cross-questioning the complainants or checking into their motives, a chain reaction was set in motion which resulted in the dissolution of Gafni’s movement. Several newspapers published sensational articles chronicling Gafni’s “downfall.” One reported (falsely) that he had been accused of rape. Another (again, falsely) claimed that he had made promises to marry five women. Within a few days, Gafni’s teaching work and the organization to which he had dedicated his life had been discredited and destroyed.
A group of Salt Lake attorneys helped Gafni recover the deleted data from his computer and then carefully review his correspondence with the women. “There is not a credible basis for legal action against [Gafni],” writes attorney Fredrick Thaler of Ray, Quinney Nebeker, a Salt Lake law firm, in a letter posted on Gafni’s website. “The complaints have no merit,” writes Charlotte Miller, who also served as Gafni’s legal council.
However, like the many commentators who assumed that the accusations against the Duke lacrosse team were true, people moved to distance themselves from him immediately.
According to feminist writers such as Dafna Pattai, Cathy Young, Laura Kipnis and Bell Hooks, the key reason for this distancing is fear. In a culture where truth is less important than perception, people are afraid to be associated with someone accused of sexual misconduct, even when they know the accusations are untrue. Associates fear liability, or being perceived as not protecting the ostensible victims—two consequences of defending the accused in a culture that assumes that women or groups of women always tell the truth about sexual harassment.
This belief persists despite data to the contrary, including the recent collapse of the case against the Duke lacrosse players, not to mention the historic experience of black men lynched because a white woman interpreted a casual glance as sexual harassment.
Feminist writers such as Laura Kipnis and Cristina Hoff Summers have written extensively to expose this kind of “victim feminism”: a stance which assumes that in situations of this sort, the woman is always a helpless victim of male desire.
“His best friends basically left him for dead,” says Gershon Winkler.
Gafni felt he had no choice but to return to the United States to think through what he should do. In the pain and sorrow of those first few days, he decided that as the creator of the organization which had turned on him, he should take on himself responsibility for the dysfunctions that had led to the situation. He wrote a public letter claiming all spiritual responsibility for what had happened. Accepting the advice of a friend and mentor, he took personal responsibility for the “sickness” behind what had happened and volunteered to seek treatment. This seemed, at the time of trauma and confusion, to be the only way to defuse the growing frenzy. Without the missing emails, he had no proof of his innocence, and at that time he had no idea the disappeared computer files would be restored.
Gafni refused any interviews and for the next two years maintained public silence, allowing the stories that were circulating to stand as “truth.” In the meantime, he began an intensive formal process of self-examination and inner work.
It was about this time that Gafni came to Salt Lake City at the invitation of a friend and teaching colleague, mediator and Zen teacher Diane Hamilton and her husband, former Utah chief justice Michael Zimmerman. Gafni was living quietly in a small home in Sugar House. Soon after we met, he told us about a pivotal event that had shown him both the depths of his fall, and the painful but spiritually profound path to turning the pain into compassion.
He had gone several times to Sabbath dinners at the house of a local family, mainly for the sake of experiencing community. One night, the host took him aside. “One of our guests read the Internet and says she can’t sit at the table with you. I know it’s not true, but she thinks you are a child molester,” he told Gafni. “I have to ask you to leave and not come back. I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.”
Gafni realized that he—who just six months before would have been an honored guest at such a gathering—was in essence a pariah. “I was stunned at first to realize that people were looking at me through the lens of a hate site, and couldn’t see who I am,” he said. “That night, I was up all night, meditating about it, awash in agonized tears. Suddenly, in the midst of my grief, this profound feeling of joy came over me. In Hebrew wisdom, we speak of how the divine feminine, the Shekhinah, has been exiled by God, and lives as hidden sparks inside human souls. I realized that I was participating in the pain of the exiled Shekhinah, the sorrow of the divine feminine thrown out of the kingdom. I, like her, was wrongly exiled and sat in dust and ashes. We were together. As I realized this, my heart became so ecstatic that I began to dance.
“Then I remembered the hidden teaching about the old Hassidic masters. These famous rabbis would sometimes discard their robes and wander as beggars through the villages of Western Europe, knocking on the doors of wealthy devotees. Invariably, they would be thrown out by people who, if they had seen them in full regalia, would have honored them.
“It all fit together for me then.
“I had spent my life seeking after the goddess, trying to return the feminine to her place…and that in some extreme sense the Shekhinah was testing my love, and she had hurt me because in some sense I hadn’t seen something about her. These relationships had hurt women I loved. Even while she was hurting me, she was embracing me. And I was here on the back roads of Utah to discover something about the divine feminine so that I might speak of her in new ways. I danced in real ecstasy for hours on end.”
Gafni later shared the incident with his friend, Brother David Stendl-Rast, who was reminded of an anecdote about Saint Francis: A disciple once asked, “What would be for you the most perfect joy?” Francis replied that for him, perfect joy would be to seek shelter in a house, be rejected and thrown out, and left to lie in the mud with the dogs.
Gafni says this teaching, which might have seemed wildly extreme and weird to him previously, actually described the profound spiritual opportunity that he had begun to see in this moment of his life. So along with examining his part in what he called the “contribution system” that had created this situation, and the qualities in himself that needed to change, Gafni also began a powerful inner journey into the subtleties of the masculine-feminine relationship.
“Sexuality creates wounds—sometimes mortal ones,” he writes in an unpublished essay called “The Wounds of Love.” “But if we learn to live wide open even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy.”
Along with his inner work, Gafni began collecting documentary evidence to prove the falsity of the claims against him. He took polygraph tests with internationally recognized polygraph expert Gordon Barland which fully supported his assertion that the relationships with these women had been mutual, and had not resulted from any deception or inappropriate deployment of power on Gafni’s part.
He underwent an extensive psychological evaluation with three independent evaluators. Their conclusions and his own were summarized by by Paul J. Goodberg, M.A.: “I am convinced that Rabbi Gafni never abusively hurt or exploited anyone. He is completely reputable.”
Ray, Quinney Nebeker turned his computer over to PeakSpan, LLC, a Salt Lake data recovery firm, which recovered valuable information and proved data had been intentionally removed.
“Of course, I regret with all my heart that anyone experienced hurt through their relationship with me. And, remember what Bono sings? `We hurt each other and we do it again.’ The key is what we do with our hurt,” Gafni says. “But what I most deeply regret is that I allowed myself to jeopardize the work we were doing by engaging in these relationships. I believed that what we were doing was sharing love, and that therefore there was nothing ethically, and certainly not legally, wrong. I still believe that. But I also recognize that a spiritual teacher has to hold strong boundaries around his personal life. Even mutual relationships with powerful and autonomous women are a problem for a public teacher. Moreover, in retrospect, our relationship did not serve the highest growth of these women; it endangered our movement and let down my supporters, friends and partners. In that sense—although I was unconscious of it at the time—they were unethical relationships and I regret that deeply.”
But even by Israel’s strict standard, in no way did he break the law.
Gafni has contracts for several new books and is beginning to teach again. He has been invited to create and host a documentary movie that uses the frame of his story to look into contemporary sexual and spiritual politics, and how rumor, innuendo and hysteria can destroy a life. And to show how a life can be rebuilt in love without bitterness. Most of all, he seems committed to helping foster a social justice movement that works to end genocide, human trafficking and sexual slavery in the world. Gafni seems determined not to attack his accusers, unless they leave him with no choice, but rather to facilitate healing.
“It is the challenge of the spiritual practitioner,” says Diane Musho Hamilton, “and especially that of a teacher, to become intimate with the processes of life and death, of destruction and of transformation. In this way, everything that arises, whether it appears as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unjust, is regarded as the path. To walk it requires great fearlessness, an abundance of compassion, a willingness to accept blame, and the offering of forgiveness.”
Sally Kempton, a former journalist, leading spiritual teacher and second wave feminist was asked what good might come from this story. She responded, “Marc has gone through a deep evolution. He will be an even deeper, better teacher in the second half of his life than he was in the first. The question is, can the people involved move from victimhood to power and responsibility? If they can, then Marc, the women, and all the shadowy players behind the scenes, will offer us great hope for healing in our world.”
The third act of this drama has yet to be written. Can this spiritual teacher come back from the dead? The answer is most likely “yes,” due to Gafni’s unflagging persistence. Did the obloquy and ignominy of the last two years break his spirit? No, though it has left some scars. Yet, throughout the whole of this nightmare, in circumstances that could easily, and forgivably, break the spirit of nearly any other person, Gafni has managed to hold onto his chronic optimism and genuine love for humanity.
Jeff Bell is a writer, part-time indie filmmaker, musician, wonk and political consultant. He is the former Democratic National Committee communications director for Utah and former president of the Children’s Justice Corps. Greta deJong is editor and publisher of CATALYST. For more about Marc Gafni, visit www.marcgafni.com
The nexus of the Gafni story would appear to be women falsely claiming victim status, bent on exacting some form of retribution which, in their view, matched the suffering at having not obtained exclusivity to Gafni and his affections. That is the center and the catalyst of Gafni’s current nightmare. But it is, by no means, the whole of the problem.
Without the women who filed complaints against Marc Gafni, there would certainly be no story, at least not a story of this depth and magnitude. But without the Internet, and a few “move ahead at any cost” bloggers, the story would have faded away.
What has both haunted and hunted Gafni is the relative ease at which rumors and lies have been mixed with more accurate information to paint a picture of Gafni as evil and predatory. Blogs index on the search engines far faster than then traditional websites do. Repeat a phrase or a name, over and over again, link it to other blogs, stories and other articles, and it jumps to the top of the search results in a short amount of time.
Take a moment and think about search engine results. The majority of Internet users look no deeper than the first couple of pages of their search results. Top searches have a false weight of authority that can easily lead a reader to unconsciously lend credibility where none should exist.
The strange union of self-proclaimed advocate for The Awareness Center, Vicki Polin, and porn industry gossip blogger Luke Ford and their mutual effort to assail the reputation of Rabbi Gafni, and to continue those attacks despite the lack of anything new to write about, is bizarre at best and nefarious at worst.
A vocal member of the Memory Recovery Movement, which ruined thousands of lives in the 1980s, Vicki Polin has wrapped a skein of respectability around herself that, when viewed through the prism of her attacks on Gafni, seems patently false and hypocritical.
Polin maintains that she is the child of Satanic Jews who raped her on a regular basis and made her eat her own babies. She now claims to be a victim’s advocate; but her advocacy seems to have taken all the aspects of vigilante misanthrope, and the power of the blog is her weapon. Polin has a singular focus to not only expose, but to destroy the life and reputation of whatever person that falls into her sights, regardless of facts. Any Google search on her name serves up a fairly even return of Polin’s attacks on rabbinical leaders, and pages written by victims of Polin’s tactics.
Luke Ford has made a living as one of the world’s foremost porn industry gossip columnists and, over the years, has owned and operated several different sites full of lewd pictures, stories and first person familiarity with the adult film industry. Ford also has an alter ego in which he calls himself “Luke Ford: your moral leader,” and represents himself as a beacon of decency and Jewish activism.
Somehow, Ford and Polin have become compatriots and often work together in boosting their ratings. The cross-indexing between these two and their blogs has, most especially in the area of posts about Gafni and other Jewish leaders, helped push them further and further upward until, for the last two years, they’ve had ownership of the first page of most engines when their targets’ names were searched.
What emerges on the Internet is a false image, based on rumor, presented as fact; all in opposition of the axiom “innocent until proven guilty.”
What makes Gafni’s story so interesting to me is not so much that, with hundreds of pages of evidence that exonerate him from these false allegations, he can clear his name in a fair-minded setting, but, on the Internet, it will take him years of exhaustive effort and money to balance his innocence against the two-year head start of those who claim he’s guilty.
Despite the potential to harm, blogging is the quintessential and idyllic evolution of American and international freedom of expression. The growing influence of blogs and bloggers over the last handful of years speaks volumes about dissatisfaction with the media and generic culture. There also seems to be a need, sometimes nearing addiction, for mass distribution of self-expression held by these exhibitionists of the written word. The acceptance as “meaningful” granted to them by their own ever-expanding membership roster fuels the rapid growth of this amateur medium.
I wrote my first blog post in 1996; long before, in time measured by Internet standards, the word “weblog” or “blog” was universally known and accepted into the mainstream lexicon. At the time, some were calling the very public self-publishing of one’s own opinions, criticisms, thoughts and life stories to the Internet a “vanity page,” an “online journal.”
My early posts were mostly lengthy, often ranting missives about politics with a lot of time, effort and kilobytes dumped into the 1996 Presidential race. It wasn’t long before I received calls, during political primary season, from two different Republican campaigns asking who I was, who I worked for and what my website was about. They didn’t like my analysis and they wanted me to stop.
These two different campaign representatives could not wrap their heads around the idea that I was just a guy, sitting in his Denver basement, self-publishing his opinions and analysis on the field of Republican candidates fighting for the GOP nomination. While the number of readers I had at the time would be laughable by today’s standards, in 1996 it was enough to garner the attention of two presidential nomination campaigns.
There is power in the written word and that power is intensified when any person, from any background, can release those words, unfettered and unregulated, into the world for anyone to digest.
Telling the truth, no matter how partisan your opinion, is an awesome responsibility, if you choose to view it that way. As the community of bloggers and online journalists continues to grow, so, too, do the numbers of the nefarious, the deluded and the predatory. For every handful of personal, political, entertainment or technology blogs online, whatever their motivation may be, there are always some who use their writing for some form of gain at the expense of others. That would appear to be the case regarding Gafni.
Reputation has always been a fragile thing, but the future of reputation is uncertain. Blogs have emerged as a quick, cheap and anonymous means of mass communication that can be used to further an agenda, talk about politics, share pictures of your family picnic or a weapon to destroy someone else’s life. Things on the Internet never go away. Once you’ve been dragged through the mud, no matter how innocent you may be, somewhere, on the Internet, you’re guilty forever.
Jeff Bell is the author of JMBell.org, one of the highest rated political blogs in Utah.
Luke Ford in the Utah Desert With Rabbi Marc Gafni
Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue About Hate Speech Online Part 1
Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue About Hate Speech Online Part 2
Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue About Hate Speech Online Part 3
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni’s Teachings
Marc Gafni’s path of study and teaching has unfolded in several stages. In the first stage of his career, Marc Gafni was a progressive Orthodox rabbi, teaching Talmud, Kabbalah and Biblical Thought from within the Orthodox fundamentalist world in Israel and the United States. In the United States, Marc Gafni taught at Yeshiva University, serving congregations both as scholar in residence and rabbi. He founded a Jewish outreach movement in New York and Long Island public schools. Eventually, Marc Gafni moved to Israel where he served as a rabbi and taught classical Hebrew wisdom through study of the Talmud, Kabbalah, and biblical psychology. At this stage, he wrote two Hebrew books. The first, A Certain Spirit, redefines the idea of faith, moving from the old notion of the “dogma is true” to the more radical and profound idea “I am true.” In his second book during this period, An Uncertain Spirit, Marc Gafni challenged the age-old idea that spirit could provide certainty or explain suffering, and taught the spiritual path of dancing with the uncertainty as a way of realizing the highest human potential. At this stage, Marc Gafni began to read the Bible through the prism of what he called ‘biblical myth’ or ‘biblical archetypes.’ This work became the basis for the television shows that Marc Gafni created, wrote, and hosted for several years on National Israeli Television. During the second stage of his study and teaching, Marc Gafni shifted much of his focus to the teaching of Hasidism, particularly an esoteric Kabbalistic teaching described by Gafni as ‘Unique Self.’ This idea has been incorporated into the Integral seminars of Ken Wilber, the Big Mind process of Genpo Roshi, and the teachings of many other spiritual teachers who were exposed to Marc Gafni’s teaching through the Integral Institute. The idea of ‘Unique Self,’ which is the basis of his bestselling book Soul Prints, forms an important foil and
Soul Prints by Marc Gafni
Soul Prints by Marc Gafni
paradoxical complement to the classic Buddhist teaching of No Self. Marc Gafni’s teaching seeks the integration of these two seemingly disparate moments of realization. During this time, Marc Gafni also wrote a two-volume, 1200-page work on non-dual humanism and its expression as Unique Self. A small part of this work became his doctoral dissertation for Oxford University. These two volumes are now being prepared for publication as a project of the Idra Foundation. In the third stage of his work, Marc Gafni turned his attention to the interrelationship between the erotic, the sexual, and the sacred. Marc Gafni’s work here described four faces of Eros that underlie all evolved reality, and went on to unpack how the experience of the sexual mirrors and models the erotic in all other dimensions of living, including the dimension of the sacred. The
first book to emerge from this study was The Mystery of Love, followed by the Sounds True audio series On the Erotic and the Holy. Marc Gafni is currently preparing to release for publication The Erotic and the Holy, a more extended treatment of this topic. In the fourth stage of inquiry, Marc Gafni shifted his focus to the psychological and spiritual
‘Shadow Teachings,’ which he sees as being an esoteric strain within the Hebrew wisdom tradition. Here, he seeks to evolve the understanding of shadow beyond Jung’s conception, and to connect shadow work with the non-dual teachings of Kabbalah as well as with the ‘Unique Self’ teaching. Gafni’s work on shadow identifies three distinct primary forms of shadow, which include not only one’s hidden dark side, but also one’s distorted ‘Unique Self,’ and one’s unrealized divinity. A book of these teachings is currently under preparation. Marc Gafni’s fifth stage focused on the nature of enlightenment. In some groundbreaking dialogues with Ken Wilber, Moshe Idel, Andrew Cohen, and Jean Houston, Marc Gafni introduced the radical hermeneutic that all of Hebrew wisdom may be properly understood as an enlightenment tradition. Moreover, he showed that the most important single Kabbalistic idea, which lies at the heart of Luria’s Kabbalah, is what Abraham Kuk called Evolutionary Enlightenment. In Gafni’s understanding, the goal of this tradition is to achieve a democratization of enlightenment—an enlightened society, rather than simply an enlightened elite. Marc Gafni and Diane Musho Hamilton are now preparing a work on postmodern enlightenment teachings. Here, they will also address the enlightened relationship of the masculine and the feminine in the postmodern world. During this fifth phase, Marc Gafni engaged in a series of recorded dialogues with World Thought leaders including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ram Dass, Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, Michael Beckwith, Bill Ury, Don Beck, Father Thomas Keating, Byron Katie, and Jean Houston. Emerging out of some fifteen dialogues with Ken Wilber, Marc presented two lecture series entitled Integral Judaism and Integral Kabbalah, which are now being prepared as two separate books. In the present phase of Marc Gafni’s life, he has turned his attention in two paradoxically different directions. The first is intense inner spiritual and psychological reflection on the course of his life. The second is partnering with social activist leaders to create a new, grass roots human rights movement, which might effectively engage three major issues: genocide, human trafficking, and global warming. While Marc Gafni will continue teaching, he wishes to do so as a spiritual ‘artist’ rather than as a rabbi, guru, or formal teacher. (Keep reading for more on Marc Gafni’s rabbinical ordinations, academic background, and teachers.) “I am an aspiring Heart Master,” says Marc Gafni. According to the Master of Piacezna, a great Hasidic teacher who fought and loved in the Warsaw Ghetto and died in the Treblinka concentration camp, this is said to be the true goal of a human being. To master the heart means to own one’s own heart. To master the heart means to live with radical openness balanced with radical self-awareness and radical self-control. To be a Heart Master is to have the ability to inspire and help others to live this way as well. “However,’ says Marc Gafni, “if I never realize myself fully enough to be a Heart Master, I will be more than pleased to be a Heart Servant.” “So, if asked what I am, I would say, ‘I am Marc Gafni, the Heart Servant.’”
Gafni’s Rabbinic Ordination, Academic Background, and Teachers
I received Ordination many years ago from a well-regarded Orthodox institution in New York. Contrary to some rumors, that Ordination was never revoked. I retain a letter on my computer in which I wrote the president of the institution stating that our paths had parted in such a significant way that I no longer wished to hold Ordination from them. I also passed a several-hour oral exam with one of the great Rabbinic minds of Israel today, representing the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and authorizing me to be a rabbi―particularly what is termed a Rav Yishuv. I retain that document in my records as well. I have been asked whether I had, or have, Ordination from Reb Zalman Schachter. I retain in my records a document that Reb Zalman wrote for me several years ago. The document is not an Ordination, but rather an of my previous Ordination from the Orthodox institution mentioned above. When I returned that Ordination in 2004, Reb Zalman’s letter, which was based on my first Ordination, ceased to be valid. I have never held, nor do I seek, independent Ordination from Reb Zalman. I am not a student of Reb Zalman’s nor have I ever been. I have in some very important ways benefited from his work, and I have publically and privately thanked him for all this. I appreciate and respect some important contributions that he made to Jewish teaching. I have tried in many ways, large and small, to be of service to Reb Zalman and have sought a particular kind of relationship with him. I have failed in this respect. I have not been in substantive contact with Reb Zalman since March of 2006, other than a private exchange of two e-mails. I feel very connected to a close friend and chevruta, Rabbi Gershon Winkler. Reb Gershon, with grace and dignity, gave me the transmission of his lineage’s rabbinic ordination, as a friend. This Ordination may be found here in both English and Hebrew. I feel connected to the same soul root as Reb Gershon. His primary ordaining teacher was Rav Ben Zion Bruk of Jerusalem, a great Master of Mussar, whom I feel connected to both through Rabbi Hillel Goldberg’s transmission of his Torah and through Reb Gershon. At this time, I am working with Reb Gershon on a major work, which we hope will serve as a kind of Spiritual Code of Jewish Law for those who will seek its counsel. Regarding academia: Virtually everything I have learned has been in the classic auto didactic manner. However, my B.A. is from Edison College (a completely reputable joke of a school, which gives credit for non-academic work). I studied for one semester at Yeshiva University and one semester at Queens College. Neither worked for me. Back then, I wanted to study only what I wanted to study. So, I followed my heart and dropped out. I only received my degree from Edison later on so my mom would be happy. Later in life, I earned a Master’s degree in Jewish Philosophy from Bar Illan University. And still later, I wrote a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Professor Moshe Idel and Professor Norman Solomon at Oxford University. My doctoral dissertation was approved by Oxford University on April 2, 2008. Having said that, I have little interest in teaching today from the place of a rabbi or a professor. Instead, I want to share from the position of friend. We have plenty of rabbis and no shortage of professors. It seems to me that today we need teachers who can give us an authentic transmission, and at the same time love us as dear and close friends—though always with clear boundaries. Only recently in my life have I submitted to a teacher. My teacher is a very beautiful and great man who is the lineage holder of a stunning Jewish mystical tradition which was passed down from generation to generation for many hundreds of years. Most of the lineages of this nature were destroyed in the holocaust. His survived. He is a profound psychologist, teacher, guide, and as his many students will attest, a powerful shamanic figure as well. He is the transmitted lineage successor of a great contemporary Peruvian teacher, recognized formally as a peer by one of South America’s great shamans. He appeared and found me during the time of my heartbreak, and has helped put the pieces of my heart back together. He has encouraged me and instructed me to return to teaching. I will follow his instruction. He has had, over the years, hundreds of students who are―each in their own way ― receivers of his love and his wisdom. He teaches those who find their way to him. In this sense, he is quite similar to the teacher Don Juan, whom Carlos Castaneda describes in his work.
Reclaiming Your Reputation Online: Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue Part 1
Reclaiming Your Reputation Online: Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue Part 2
What is www.marcgafni.com all about? The purpose of this website is to share the teachings of Marc Gafni. Marc Gafni has been a beloved and sometimes controversial spiritual teacher on the cutting edge for many years. He has inspired many, comforted the afflicted, and afflicted the comfortable. He reflects back to people their most gorgeous selves, shares teachings of love, pricks egos, and calls others, by his very being, to truth and integrity. For some Marc is a teacher, for others a spiritual friend, for still others a spiritual artist, and for still others a revolutionary catalyst of social change and evolution. In the words of one leading American spiritual teacher and second wave feminist, “Marc Gafni combines radical brilliance with a willingness to be vulnerable, and radical kindness with an ability to probe deeply into texts―liberating the light and challenging the shadows of the human heart.” In his self-description, published several years ago in both his Hebrew and English books, Marc Gafni writes, “I, like every person, am a flawed yet ever evolving human being. I seek purification and healing, even as I delight in realization. I am a passionate lover of God, of people, of wisdom, and of all being. I am called to realize and help others to realize our potential for being the most gorgeous and unique manifestations of the divine, which is our true nature.” At this stage in his evolution, Marc Gafni seeks to merge the artistic sharing of wisdom with direct social action. The purpose of all of Marc Gafni’s creative endeavors and teachings is two-fold:
* To help individuals live better lives
* To contribute to the spiritual and ethical evolution of reality as we know it
‘Better’ might mean more ethical, open, healthy and loving. ‘Better’ might mean more enlightened, compassionate, or forgiving. ‘Better’” might mean more authentic or audacious. Marc Gafni’s teaching is filled with love of people, love of God, and love of all of creation. It is also scholarly, hip, serious, deep, funny, profound, sometimes startlingly original, and always invested with the intent to transmit not only insight but also, and especially, an open heart. Marc Gafni’s life of teaching is perhaps best captured in the following words:
I wish that I could show you When you are lonely or in darkness The astonishing light Of your own being- Hafiz
There are several kinds of teaching on the site:
* Old Teachings: Audio, Video and Writings
* New Teachings: Audio, Video and Writings
* New Course Offerings and Daily Podcasts
* Dialogues with other Spiritual Teachers and Friends
* Music, Stories and Chants
Most of the teachings are “in process”―ideas and teachings that are evolving in Marc Gafni’s heart, mind, and consciousness. Thus, many teachings have yet to be posted in the Articles section, which is still incomplete. In May 2006, Marc Gafni withdrew from public teaching and went into a long period of mourning, introspection, purification, and liberation. Complaints of sexual harassment reported in the Israeli press at that time were categorically not true; Marc Gafni never sexually harassed or abused anyone. Every one of these sexual relationships was unique, mutual, obviously consensual, based on affection, love, and the mutual play of pleasure and Eros. Nonetheless, Marc Gafni took full responsibility for participating in creating conditions which, in part, allowed these events to unfold the way they did. (For more on this conversation, and to hear Marc Gafni’s sharing in this regard, see statements and articles in Controversy, Pain of Eros, and Sex Ethics and Power and Spiritually Incorrect . This website is under construction. There are still many mistakes that need to be corrected and kinks that need to be worked out. This website will be updated continually with additional written, audio or video teachings. For new and old study courses, see Books, Products & Course Offerings under the marcgafni.com store tab. For almost two hundred teachings, which are our gift to you in love, see the free audio and video sections. Audio and video material in the store is of a more complete nature, containing complete lecture series. For Music, Chanting and Prayer see the Books, Products & Course Offerings section.
ARTICLE ON MARC GAFNI SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT
An article recently appeared in The Catalyst Magazine of Salt Lake City. Catalyst is an award-winning publication that has been published as a monthly spirituality magazine for twenty-five years and is considered a leader in its field. This is the first publication that Marc Gafni has spoken to since he began his two-year retreat in May 2006. The journalists worked for several months reviewing massive amounts of material that has not been released to the public. Marc Gafni agreed to participate with the article, after many hours of conversation with the authors about these issues, on the basis that it was not be an “attack” article, and that no one would be shamed. All too often it becomes impossible for people to climb down from their ’small self’ egoic trees, because escalating cycles of ‘us and them’ rhetoric kick in the ego’s desperate drive for survival. The spaciousness and emptiness required for reconciliation, healing, and wholeness is filled with the flailing of ego and malice, usually disguised in the sonorous tones of self-righteousness. The article’s intention is to set the record straight by telling the simple truth about Marc Gafni in a way that opens doors for evolution and growth, and in a way which allows everyone to move on with their lives in the best, most productive, and beautiful of ways. The article, while incomplete and imperfect, as is the nature of any article, for the first time since Marc went into silence in May 2006, sets the public record straight. The article provides a more accurate account of the events in Marc’s life, placing them in a larger and deeper context.
Luke Ford Talks to Marc Gafni About the Future of Reputation Part 1
Luke Ford Talks to Marc Gafni About the Future of Reputation Part 2
Luke Ford Talks to Marc Gafni About the Future of Reputation Part3
SPIRITUALLY INCORRECT
www.marcgafni.comRSS FEED for Spiritually Incorrect – http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpirituallyIncorrect
July 1, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Evolutionary Kabbalah
Dear Friends, It is wonderful to be able to share with you this new website, marcgafni.com, Evolutionary Kabbalah. For information about how to navigate the site, take a quick look at the tab on the left ‘about marcgafni’. The site is under construction. We are still in the middle of editing and getting it together. I am not much of a web person but we have a great group of people working on the site, and I am grateful to all of them for their effort, love, and dedication. If you find a typo or have a navigation suggestion, please feel free to contact us at our e-mail address, info@marcgafni.com. I pray the site serves you in a way that allows for and facilitates your growth as a fearless warrior in pursuit of your own and the world’s enlightenment. For on this, and this alone, depends the enlightenment of God. This is the most fundamental tenet of my teaching in my dharma tradition, which I have come to call by a new term, Evolutionary Kabbalah. The essence of Evolutionary Kabbalah, which is the core theme of our website and teaching, is that things change. That which was yesterday is not quite the same today. Every moment is new. To deny the radical newness of a moment is tantamount to heresy. For eternity resides in a moment. That which stands against evolution is idolatry. To worship idols is to freeze a moment. It is the freezing of imagination. It is the murder of possibility. Thus, the idolater worships what is often termed in English “a graven image.” That is to say, an image that is already in the grave. One who always has this really grave and serious face. The idolater dances in death. To serve god is to dance in life, which means to know that change is possible, and real, and happening all the time. Not only do the cells of our body fully change every seven years, the cells of our spirit change as well. However, they do not require seven years. They change fully and absolutely –at will. This belief in human evolution, in the genuine possibility of change, is at the core of Hebrew wisdom and particularly Hebrew mystical thought. One mystical thinker in the 12th century writes somewhere that the essence of the divinity of God is the possibility of possibility. God is ultimate possibility. God is a verb. We are all always Godding. We all are evolving. To realize our ability to change, to heal, and to transform is the source of the greatest joy. Sadly, few of us really believe it is possible. We hold grudges against others even as we hold grudges against ourselves. To truly inhale the possibility of possibility is one of the key pivoting points in the journey towards enlightenment. It is to this belief and to this end that my teaching and sharing is dedicated. People can change. Situations can change. Suffering can change. We do not have to stay stuck. We have the ability, as baby-faced divine, to stand in the abyss of darkness and say … No, No, No. It does not have to be this way. There is a better way. We can get beneath the surface of reality – enter the source code and make it better. It can change and it must. There is a better way to be. A better way to live. And if you go deep into the song of the now, you will hear its siren’s call. Today offers invitation in a way that yesterday simply could not and that tomorrow cannot yet. In the depths of HaYom, the Hebrew word for today, is the universal sound of Om… The Hebrew word for time is Zeman. Zeman also means in Hebrew – invitation. An invitation to break the tyranny of yesterday. The greatest slave driver in the world, the greatest idolatrous temptation, is the belief that yesterday determines not only today but also tomorrow. Let people out of the box in which you have put them. Love people out of the box in which you have put them. Love yourself out of the box in which you have put yourself. It is all in play. Anything and everything is possible
Blog Post Two - Marc Gafni
July 3, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
The Evolution of Love The Evolution of God Practicing the Wounds of Love
These will be the three topics which I hope to talk with you about in this blog. They are very much in my heart these days and nights. Two years ago, on May 19th, I arrived in exile in Salt Lake City. It is difficult for me to describe my internal state at the time. I felt like Caesar must have felt after his friends surrounded and stabbed him in the Senate, only unlike Caesar, I was still alive. Strangely and unexpectedly. Not that I mean any analogy to the grandeur of Caesar or even of my protagonists to Brutus and Cassius. Perhaps the analogy is to the complexity of it all. At least to my own personal complexity at that time in my life, almost two and a quarter years ago. I loved my friends, my students, my colleagues, and my lovers. The love was true and genuine. But, in many cases, it was a love that was not deep enough. Not grounded enough in what is called in India Hara. Not pure enough. Not free enough of my own human desire to be loved. I believed that I held a particular responsibility and obligation to shine my shakti in the world. To love everyone, to hug everyone in the most pure and sweetest and holiest of ways. It was an obligation that I knew to be true because it was as natural to me as breathing. I still believe this. I still feel it. I thank god for not taking away my gifts in exile. I also believed my love was powerful enough to transmute everything and everyone. I believed my love was so large and so good that it needed a world stage to hold it. There was the hubris. In two distinct forms. Each one different and subtle. There was the mistake. Love is powerful, but it cannot transmute everything. Love is simple and needs no world stage to play upon, for love itself is the stage and ground of the world. Love by itself is beautiful, but not enlightened. Love needs light to illuminate it. Love needs to evolve the spiral of consciousness in order to unleash it’s full potential to heal and transform. But more about the evolution of love in a later posting.
The Wounds of Love
Love needs vessels and boundaries, without which the intensity of the light shatters vessels. We live in a world of broken hearts and broken vessels.Some of those hearts have been shattered because they became brittle for lack of love. And to those people, and to those places in us, we must open our hearts in full radiance, even at the risk of suffering the wounds of love. The slings and arrows of outrageous loving. But some of those hearts are broken because love overflowed its boundaries. I speak not here―just to be clear―not of pathological boundary violations like incest, child molestation or rape, of which I know nothing and therefore cannot refer to. Rather, I speak of the boundary violations within beautiful and mutual loving relations, which are by themselves holy but which lack the vessels to hold the light of love to which they are exposed. I know something of these vessels, and I have learned something of their fragility. They too shatter. In Kabbalah, we talk of the fixing that comes after the shattering. The tikkun that comes after the shevirah. The word tikkun―as my brother and friend once pointed out to me based on a series of passages in the Tikkunei Zohar―the word Tikkun means healing or in some sense Evolution. Evolutionary Kabbalah is rooted in these passages. (If you are interested in this and if this word opens your heart and quickens your mind, see the entry by the same name in the articles section of this website.) In the teaching of Kabbalah, Tikkun―healing or evolution―emerges from the Shevirah―the shattering. The Hebrew word Shevirah, however, has another meaning hidden in its folds. Shevirah, Shever, also means sustenance. The sustenance that comes from the ability to engage in Meaning making. One biblical verse talks about Jacob, who saw that there was shever―in Egypt. Shever from the same root as Shevirah means both shattering and nourishment. In another biblical text, the author talks about “et ha-chalom ve-et shivro”―“the dream and its meaning”―or, the dream and the nourishment it gives through its interpretation and meaning. So shattering or breaking in Hebrew also carries meanings of nourishment, healing, and meaning making. We are all hurt in love. We are all shattered in love. The question always is, what do we do with our hurt? Do we turn it into insults of love that need to be repaid in kind? Do we replay and replay the ritual of mutual rejections that always escalates into violence and murder? Be it social murder or physical murder… Or do we suffer our hurt as the wounds of love! Do we transmute our hurt into compassion and raise our wounds unto the altar of healing and transformation. Life has gotten much simpler for me in the last two years. I have learned in the texts of life so much that was not possible to understand before the deluge of pain. Sometimes we have to close the door. But we almost never have to close our hearts. Close the door but always keep your heart open. We can practice the wounds of love with an open heart even as we hold our boundaries and protect ourselves from unnecessary hurt in the future. But not all hurt is unnecessary. “We hurt each other and we do it again,” sings Bono. Some hurt is part of the evolution of our hearts. How we “play” our hurt is part of the evolution of God. This is the tikkun―the healing of God―to which I referred above. You can find it if you read the passages carefully in the Tikkunei Zohar. This is the healing and the evolution of God: that we participate in the healing and evolution of God through the healing and evolution of both our own love and our own hurt. This is the great and wondrous esoteric teaching of Kabbalah!!!!!!!! -Marc Gafni
The Beauty that is YOU! – Marc Gafni
July 5, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com I received a funny e-mail today from someone. It said, “Who are you?” And that was the entire communication. What a wonderful question! So, a brief sharing is in order before we go into shabbot.
I am my story. I am. I am completely beyond my story. My spiritual teaching or sharing comes from moving beyond my story, and…. in the end, whatever spiritual teaching I have to share comes from my story.
I AM MADLY IN LOVE WITH GOD. I AM MADLY IN LOVE WITH HUMAN BEINGS. I THINK MEN AND WOMEN ARE SO TOTALLY BEAUTIFUL THAT IT OFTEN TAKES MY BREATH AWAY. I BELIEVE THAT THE UNMEDIATED EXPERIENCE OF THE DIVINE IS THE ESSENCE OF ALL RELIGION. I MEDITATE {sometimes}, PRAY {a lot}, AND ENGAGE IN SOCIAL ACTIVISM {whenever I can} AS MY WAY OF SERVING GOD. In the last decade or so, I was privileged to found a national spiritual community in Israel called Bayit Chadash. This, together with my work at Milah Institute, helped found a movement for Jewish Renewal in Israel. I spent ten intense, exhausting, and wonderful years of my life sowing the seeds of this movement. The movement did not last. There was too much light and not enought vessel. My own lack of wholeness, other peoples’ lack of wholeness, spiritual politics, sexual politics, Iago, and divine will all deemed that it be a short-lived and wondrous experiment. I am not planning to start another community, but rather to show up in the places where I am invited to share Torah and share the Dharma as I understand it. I now spend most of my time writing, or teaching, or consulting, or taking walks in Utah’s mountains, or learning, and I hope, loving. I have not achieved Nirvana by any stretch of the imagination, although I have tasted enlightenment for periods of time. I do not believe in Gurus. I SPEND ABOUT 16 HOURS A DAY DOING WHAT PEOPLE CALL WORK. I EXPERIENCE ALMOST NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN MY LIFE AND MY WORK. I LOVE PEOPLE. I LOVE BEING ALIVE. Sometimes in the last two years the pain was so unbearable that I prayed for death. I HOPE TO WRITE A NEW SCHOOL OF SPIRITUAL THOUGHT WHICH WILL … DO WHATEVER IT DOES… And, I think people who take themselves too seriously are dangerous. Umberto Ecco was right in his great book Name of the Rose. So, I laugh at myself a lot. I am also deeply lonely at times. At other times, the pain of existence―of all the suffering people―is so overwhelming that I can barely breathe. I desperately, insanely, and with deep tranquility, want to fullfill the Bodhisattva vow―even though I am not a Bodhisattva. But what is important about this post is not who am I but who are you? You are a spiritual hero. You are gorgeous and beautiful beyond any and all imagination.
I wish that I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the unberable depth of your own being… -Hafiz
Oh my God, can you see yourselfOh my God, can you hear yourself Oh my God, can you feel yourself Oh my God, Do you know how much good you can do in the world Oh my God, Do you know that god YEARNS for your service Oh my God, Do you know that God is sick when you are sick that God is in pain in your pain kissing your every wound into wholeness Do you know that God’s heart is a raging volcano of love for you Do you know that God is hiding in your heart waiting for you so that together you can dance i promise you it is all true -Marc Gafni
Imagination as the Next Step in Healing Pain – by Marc Gafni
July 6, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com It is Sunday morning. I am at home in Salt Lake City. I just woke up; said the morning blessing on the study of dharma and torah. I am sharing with you some initial musings of the morning. A gorgeous and wondrous day to you my friend… Yes, yes, I meant YOU! Good morning, good evening, good day, just that it should be good for you! Feel free to respond to this blog at info@marcgafni.com
Leadership and Imagination
Adam in Hebrew means, in one etymology, Imagination. Dancing with the Hebrew word Dimayon. Imagination.Most of what goes wrong in our world emerges from crisis. Crisis―when normal life is derailed and trauma and tragedy strike terror into our hearts and bodies―a crisis has taken place. More often than not, however, the source of our trauma is not a crisis of finance or economics; not a crisis of resources or power. More often than not, pain is caused by a crisis of imagination. A crisis of imagination. There are some Chinese linguists who suggest that in the original Chinese characters, the word crisis means both danger and opportunity. Whether or not this is an accurate read of the original Mandarin, a subject of some controversy among linguists, is beside the point. It is a simple and powerful truth. A crisis in imagination. An inability to feel into what or where is the possibility which lines the rupture. An inability to find the spark of light hidden in the apparently shattered vessel. What happens in crisis, when we have not evolved enough in love to call forth the power of imagination, is a freezing of images. Imagination, fantasy, that which calls forth the fantastic. When we lose touch with imagination, we get stuck in one image, one snapshot of reality, of the situation. This is called idolatry. We worship a frozen image―a graven image, as idols are sometimes called in the King James translation of the Bible. An image, which is already dead and in the grave. An image too grave and serious to find the power of laughter. For it is the faculty of laughter which so often unlocks the power of imagination. A crisis is unexpected. It is a surprise, and therefore a gift of the Gods. Surprise is the divine whisper caressing our ear softly yet insistently saying, “Grow, grow grow…” We need to imagine ourselves out of the old and tired “us and them” thinking. We need to imagine ourselves out of the ‘thinking’ in which we need to demonize the other, or make the other bad or wrong in order to make ourselves right. We need to imagine ourselves out of scenarios in which crisis produces devastation instead of development, humiliation instead of humility, hell and hatred instead of wholeness and healing. The essential task of the leader is to know how―in a time of crisis―to creatively access the faculty of imagination. To be not only homo hostilis, but what I like to call Homo Imaginus. The leader cannot be swept away by the crowd, lost in dark brutalities of mass malice or mob mendacity. The leader must free himself from the crowd in his mind and the mob in his heart. The leader guides and gods the crowd to its own highest self by offering a vision. This is what we mean when we say a true leader must be a visionary. The leader must offer the people an alternative imagining so that they might see what is possible. For divinity always lies in the possibility of possibility. The very definition of a mob is a large group mired in the muck of one possibility, one perspective… rushing headlong into the oblivion of dullness, failing to imagine a way out of their own anger, their own pain, or their own base egoic instincts. How we handle a crisis reveals a lot about who we are. Or at least who we were at that moment. Hopefully we evolve. Even if we did not handle the crisis in an evolved way that accessed the power of imagination, the ability to go back to the pivoting point of crisis and to re-imagine our course of action is―in an of itself―healing. It is never too late―as long as oxygen circulates in our lungs and life throbs in our hearts. Two years later, ten years later, if we can re-imagine the story, then the story begins to heal. For imagination gives birth to courage, which gives birth to right action. In Hebrew wisdom this is called the spiritual process of Teshuvah. Healing and Transformation. -Marc Gafni
Yearning and Nightmares – Marc Gafni
July 7, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Good morning! Marc Gafni here. Monday morning here in Salt Lake City. Sun is shining. The essay on imagination which is the core of this blog post is below; feel free to scroll down and skip my personal musings in the morning. Musings… How are you? Did you sleep well? Me …not bad. I had terrible nightmares last night, as I did almost every night for for the first 18 months or so after I left Israel in May 2006. There is a profound idea in Hebrew and Buddhist teaching, and I am sure in other traditions, which holds that natural “closure” is important. That can mean closure in a relationship, a business, a stage of life, or even the proper closure of life itself. When a person for example dies suddenly, the Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks of the Bardo as the in between place where the person dwells, unable to “rest in peace.” Hebrew sources in the Kabbalah have conceptions very similar to the Tibetan Bardo. Whenever there is a rupture in our lives that is sudden and brutal, we are left in a Bardo until we are able to create closure and completion for that part of our lives. There are people in my life, who, for a variety of reasons, I have been unable to create full closure with…. One of them is my former partner in Israel, Avraham Leader. There are others as well. People with whom I spent years in close if complex relationship, and who by force of karma and circumstance I am no longer in touch with. I miss them. What to do… The only practice that I know of which is effective and transformative is a kind of witnessing practice. Isaiah writes, “You are my witnesses,” meaning that to become evolved, divine beings, we must learn to witness. In this case that would mean: Step One: I am not my yearning, but I witness my yearning. I see it. I watch it rise and fall, ebb and flow. I learn from it. My yearning teaches me and guides me. But it never becomes me, so it can never consume me. Step Two: I then move into my longing, my yearning. I seek to penetrate my yearning and I pray for my yearning to open itself up to receive me. Step Three: At some point my yearning gives way and receives me, even as I allow myself to be penetrated by it, and I fall into divine yearning and divine longing. Step Four: My yearning gives way and I fall into the sweetness of God. Slowly, about eight months ago, the nightmares began to recede. I began to regain my natural energy and strength. I began to come back to life. I still miss everyone. I pray that at some magical point, rupture may once again become rapture. But I understand that it may take many weeks, many months, many years, even decades or lifetimes. I will wait. And in the meantime, there is so much good for all of us to do…. -Marc Gafni
Imagination Part Two
July 7, 2008
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Imagination – Part Two
Note for the scholarly reader of blogs: this is written in third person because I know scholars feel much better in third person.The following is an article by Marc Gafni published in Parabola magazine in 2007. It is an adaption of material published in Marc Gafni’s book The Mystery of Love in the chapter on imagination. The only difference being that in Parabola the imagination is discussed separately from the context of Eros, which is the major theme and context for the imagination discussion in The Mystery of Love. The Zohar, magnus opus of Hebrew mysticism, says it explicitly in many places: “Shechina [the feminine incarnation of the Godhead] is imagination.” In popular understanding, imagination is implicitly considered to be “unreal.” Indeed “unreal” and “imaginary” are virtual synonyms in common usage. To undermine the reality of an antagonist’s claim, we say it is “a figment of their imagination.” In marked contrast, the Hebrew mystics held imagination to be very real. It would not be unfair to say that they considered imagination to be “realer than real.” The power of imagination is its ability to give form to the deep truths and visions of the inner divine realm. Imagination gives expression to the higher visions of reality that derive from our divine selves. Language and rational thinking are generally unable to access this higher truth. It is the imagination that is our prophet, bringing us the word of the divine that speaks both through us and from beyond us. This is what the biblical mystic Hosea meant when he exclaimed the words of God, “By the hands of my prophets I am imagined.”
Crisis of Imagination
The greatest crisis of our lives is neither economic, intellectual, nor even what we usually call religious. It is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck on our paths because we are unable to reimagine our lives differently than they are right now. We hold on desperately to the status quo, afraid that if we let go, we will be swept away by the torrential undercurrents of our emptiness.The most important thing in the world, implies wisdom master Nachman of Bratzlav, is to be willing to give up who you are for who you might become. He calls this process the giving up of pnimi to reach for makkif. For Master Nachman, pnimi means the old familiar things that you hold onto even when they no longer serve you on your journey. Makkif is that which is beyond you, which you can reach only if you are willing to take a leap into the abyss. Find your risk and you will find your self. Sometimes that means leaving your home, your father’s house, and your birthplace, and traveling to strange lands. Both the biblical Abraham and the Buddha do this quite literally. But for the kabbalist, the true journey does not require dramatic breaks with past and home. It is rather a journey of the imagination. In the simple and literal meaning of the biblical text, Abraham’s command is Lech lecha…: “Go forth from your land, your birth place and your father’s house.” Interpreted by the Zohar, the command is taken to mean not “Go forth” but “Go to yourself.” For the kabbalist this means more than the mere quieting of the mind. The journey is inwards, and the vehicle is… imagination. For imagination is the tool that allows us to image a future radically different from the past or even the present. That is exactly what Abraham was called to do–to leave behind all of the yesterdays and todays and to leap into an unknown tomorrow. It is only in the fantasy of re-imagining that we can change our reality. It is only from this inside place that we can truly change our outside. The path of true wisdom is not necessarily to quit your job, leave your home, and travel across the country. Often such a radical break is a failure rather than a fulfillment of imagination. True wisdom is to change your life from where you are, through the power of imagination.
Think “Cookies!”
Virtually every crisis at its core is a failure of imagination. Some years back, I took off three years from “spiritual teaching” to get a sense of what the world tasted like as a householder. I took a job at a high-tech company, and from that relatively nondemanding perch began to rethink my life and beliefs.During this period, I did a bit of consulting with Israeli high-tech start-up firms. The truth is I had little good advice to offer, but some of the high-tech entrepreneurs who had been my students would call me anyway. At one point, I received a call from a small start-up firm in Ramat Gan, Israel. The problem: they were almost out of venture capital, their market window seemed to be rapidly closing, and their Research and Development team was simply not keeping pace with their need for solutions. Apparently the problem lay with the elevator. The company was on the top floor of an old warehouse. The elevator was small, hot, and inordinately pungent. By the time the R&D teams got through the daily morning gauntlet of the elevator, they had lost some of their creative sparkle. The president was convinced that this experience dulled their edge just enough to slow down the speed and elegance of their solutions. What to do? I had not the slightest idea. Our meeting was on a Friday. As was my custom, I went home for the Sabbath and spoke with my own private consultant, my eight-year-old son Eitan. When I asked him what I should tell the company, he laughed and said somewhat mockingly, “It’s simple, Dad. Cookies!” I did not find this particularly funny. I raised the subject with him several times, but he would only respond, with maddening gravitas, “Cookies.” Finally I gave up on him. Several days later I went to tell the president that I had found no solution. I was going up the same malodorous elevator, when in a blinding flash I realized what Eitan meant. Cookies! Of course! We had all been focused on elaborate ways to fix the elevator or to move locations. Eitan―with the simple brilliance of a child―reminded us of the true issue at stake. The crux of the matter was not the elevator, it was how the R&D team felt when they left the elevator. So what to do? Cookies. We set up a table with juices, fruit, and health cookies upstairs, right outside the elevator. So even though the ride up the elevator was terrible, people would spend the time in eager anticipation of the goodies that awaited them. No one had envisioned Eitan’s simple yet elegant solution because their imaginations were “stuck in the elevator.” His was a simple paradigm shift inspired by re-imagining. We fear imagination, for imagination holds out the image of a different life. It challenges our accommodations to the status quo. It suggests that the compromises that we have based our lives upon might not have been necessary. Our fear of imagination is our fear of our own greatness. It was Albert Einstein’s gift of imagination that allowed him to formulate the concept of relativity. Einstein literally imagined what it would be like to travel on a beam of light. What would things look like? What would another traveler, on another beam of light going in the opposite direction, look like to him? Without leaps of imagination, no growth is possible and the spirit petrifies.
The Possibility of Possibility
Nikos Kazantzakis writes, “You have your brush and your colors, paint paradise and in you go.” This is a near perfect description of the spirit that animates the biblical myth ritual that yearly celebrates the Exodus from Egypt. Every year, on the anniversary of the Hebrew Exodus, people gather for a uniquely dramatic biblical myth ritual, Passover. Unlike the Fourth of July or other freedom anniversaries, it revolves not around commemoration but imagination.The guiding principle of the holiday is, “Every person is obligated to see him/herself as if they left Egypt.” This Talmudic epigram, the guiding mantra of the ritual, is explained by the kabbalists as an invitation to personal re-imagining of the most fantastic kind. You are in Egypt―your own personal Egypt. Egypt, Mitzrayim in Hebrew, literally means “the narrow places,” the constricted passageway of our life’s flow. Egypt―kabbalistically said to incarnate the throat―symbolizes all the words that remain stuck in our throats: the words we never speak, the stories of our lives that remain unlived, unsung, unimagined. We are slaves. Slavery for the kabbalist is primarily a crisis of imagination. Consequently, the healing of slavery is a ritual of imagination. For an entire evening, we become dramatists, choreographers, and inspired actors. We re-imagine our lives as the first step on our path to freedom. God is the possibility of possibility―limitless imagination. The first of the Ten Commandments is “I am God.” When this God is asked to identify himself, He responds, “I will be what I will be.” That is, “You cannot capture me in the frozen image of any time or place. To do so would be to destroy me.” It would be to violate the Second Commandment, against idolatry. Idolatry is the freezing of God in a static image. To freeze God in an image is to violate the invitation of the imagination. It is to limit possibility.
Homo Imaginus
“It is for this reason that man was called Adam: He is formed of adama, the dust of the physical, yet he can ascend above the material world through the use of his imagination and reach the level of prophecy. The Hebrew word ‘I will imagine’ is adamah.”For Hebrew mystical master Nachman of Bratzlav, the core human movement that gives birth to our spirit is the evolution from adama to adameh. Adamah is ground, earth, Gaia. Yet it can also be read as adameh, I will imagine. Man emerges from Nature to live what philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik called “a fantasy-aroused existence.” Imagination is not a detail of our lives nor merely a methodological tool. It is the very essence of who we are. We generally regard ourselves as thinking animals, Homo sapiens. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is hardwired into our cultural genes. Yet biblical myth offers an alternative understanding of the concept of “humanness.” The closest Hebrew word to human, or the Latin homo, is “Adam.” The word “Adam” derives from the Hebrew root meaning imagination (d’mayon). The stunning implication is that the human being is not primarily Homo sapien, but “Homo imaginus.” At the very dawn of human existence, man is described as being created in the divine image. “Divine image” does not mean a fixed and idolatrous copy of divinity. God has no fixed form. God is, instead, the possibility of possibility. The human being’s creation in the divine image needs to be understood in two ways. First, humanity is not so much ‘made in God’s image’ as we are ‘made in God’s imagination’. A product of the divine fantasy. Second, the human being himself participates in divine imagination―Homo imaginus. We long for goodness, beauty, and kindness in a world perpetually marred by ugliness, evil, and injustice. For the biblical mystic, our imaginings of a world of justice and peace is the manifestation of the immanence of God in our lives. The creative discontent that drives us to imagine an alternative reality is the image/imagination of God beating in our breast. The cosmos is pregnant with hints that guide our imaginings. We are called to heal the world in the image of our most beautiful imaginings. Imagination is the elixir of God running through the universe.
Creating God
Imagination is powerful. Very powerful. “Think good and it will be good,” wrote Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last master of Chabad mysticism. This is true not merely because of the psychological power of positive thinking, but also because every imagining gives birth to something real that eventually manifests itself in the universe.Imagination is transformative not only on the human plane. It has a powerful effect on the divine scale as well. Kabbalists teach that each dimension of divinity, known as a sefira in kabbalah, has a color that incarnates it. By ecstatically imagining the colors of the sefirot and combining them according to the appropriate mystical instructions, one can actually have an impact on the inner workings of the divine force. The Zohar goes further in audacious formulations that, upon first reading, describe man creating God in his image―that it to say, in his imagination. For the Zohar such imagination simply reinforces the substantive reality of God. Or to put it slightly differently, while there is a limited truth in saying that God is a figment of human imagination, we need to remember that imagination is a figment of God. The difference is simple. For the kabbalist, imagination is not childish fancy. It is the spiritual reality called forth by the sacred child within. The God we do not create doesn’t exist. Yes, there is a divine force that exists beyond us. Yet there is also a powerfully manifest current of divinity that is nourished by our being. The act of nourishing, sustaining, and even creating divinity is called “theurgy” by scholars of mysticism. The term expresses the human ability to dramatically impact and even grow God. One of the great tools of theurgy is imagination. In fact, theurgic imagination is the medium and message of a kabbalistic re-reading of “In the beginning…” The first string of letters in the Bible, “bereshit bara elokim…” can be re-read as “b’roshi tbara elokim”―in my mind God is created.
-Marc Gafni
Blog Post Six. First in series: On Eros and Holiness
July 8, 2008
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On Eros and Holiness The light and the Shadow
Post One by Marc Gafni Copyright: Marc Gafni. (Under-construction version of forthcoming book.)
Introduction
The following one thousand pages―which I will share in a series of upcoming blog posts―are a version of a book I wrote many years ago called On the Erotic and the Holy. Part of this book, about 315 pages worth, was published as The Mystery of Love. Every so often I will add a section of the book to this website. It will appear both as a new article and as a blog post. This material in its entirety will, God willing, be published as a separate work under the title On Eros and Holiness: Shadows and Light. A couple of points to share: Avraham Leader and myself, way back when, in the context of our work together in Israel, footnoted The Mystery of Love, Soul Prints, and the first three chapters of this book. (The footnotes to Soul Prints are truly excellent; they deserve to be studied carefully. This material will be available to you in the Soul Print section of this website.) The footnotes to the first three chapters of this work are in part the same as the footnotes to The Mystery of Love, since the fundamental material is the same only more expanded and extended. The footnotes themselves are highly important and provide the rooting of these books in the classical Hebraic sources. These books represent a sacred unfolding and evolution of classic Hebraic sources, particularly Kabbalistic sources. There are some people whose role it is to translate the wisdom of their tradition. Others―far fewer―are intended to evolve the tradition even as it appears that they are only translating. That is what I am attempting to do in this book. I try to avoid, at almost all cost, getting lost in scholarly hubris. The language is simple and clear and the movements of evolution are, hopefully, relatively seamless in the fabric of the text.
FORTHCOMING NEW BOOK
A more elaborate version of this book, which has undergone a significant editorial process, is forthcoming as what I hope will be an exciting new book on Eros and Holiness, which takes into account everyting I have learned in the last two years. In the meantime, in response to many requests, I am sharing with you the original manuscript―replete with notes and questions to myself, and suggestions to myself about future directions and issues and the like. It seems that there is something to be said for seeing a work in progress, still rough and unfinished.
TITLE PAGE
The picture on the cover is an imaginative rendering of the Ashera tree, divine symbol of feminine eros in ancient paganism. It is now time for the contemporary prophets of biblical myth to reclaim the legacy of the sacred Ashera and reinstall her within the precincts of the temple. Note to me: Cite sources from Zohar; part 3, from Ramak/ Cordevero, Abraham Kuk on Ahserah; Pattai cites Ramak, thank Tamar Ross who first referred me to Rav Kuk source on Idolatry; see also important article by Gellman on Akedah and important sources there on relationship between Rav Kuk and idolatry; seems like Gellman did not fully understand the impact of the sources but not clear; I feel he always hides his true radicalism in order to remain relatively kosher; need to thank him. … and the ability to transmute the Asherah energy to the sacred. All of these sources in one way or another acknowledge that Ahserah participates in the energy of Shekinah. People have rejected Asherah. This is a mistake. Da Free John uses phrase in his work – Wilber picks up phrase – Transcend and Include- Wilber cites Hegel Negate and Preserve- when one ascends levels of consciousness. We need to negate that in Asherah which is pre-personal and include that which is, at its core, transpersonal. Level One Ahsera very problematic; Level three Ashera, which transcends and includes the personal, is messianic. Relate my level one level three confusion idea to Wilber’s Pre-Trans Fallacy. Wilber article on Pre-Trans excellent. Need to meet him and discuss. Perhaps D.F might make introduction. Will ask him. Lovely man.
Epigrams
“Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…” -John Keats
“Jerusalem’s Temple, the place where heaven and earth kiss.” -The Zohar
The Mystery of Love Leshem Yichud Kudsha Brich-hu u’Shechinateh.
May this be for the sake of uniting the masculine God with the feminine Goddess. -Kabbalistic meditation
The Hole in Wholeness
We are in pain. We are in pain because the world, and therefore God, is in pain.1 The Kabbalists call this divine wound the Exile of the Shekina. This is a wound born of love.{See Da Free John on Practicing the Wound of Love; My Kabbalistic re-read of Da Free John, I light of Gafni-is that practicing the wound of love is an act of imatatio dei; the wounds of love in human relations stem from the exile of the Shekina within the self – a form of self-contraction and alienation. Eros is so painful, but that is not the subject for this book. Need part two of the Erotic and the Holy on the Pain of Eros. I am publishing, God willing, a separate book called tentatively “The Pain of Eros: Practicing the Wounds of Love.” This book is about my personal experiences of spirit and love between May 11, 2006 and the present. It suggests a path in love, which, in my understanding, is the core of the Hebraic notion of enlightenment.} The Shechina is the sensual feminine God force that suffuses reality and knows our name. To be a Kabbalist is to participate in the pain of the Shechina. To feel Her hurt. For Her hurt is our hurt. But that is only the first step. The great ambition of the spirit is to heal Her pain, to fill her up with joy, ecstasy and meaning. To repair our broken world. To heal Her wound. For She is us. Shechina in the original Hebrew means “indwelling Presence.” She evokes the experience of fullness, presence, interconnectivity, and yearning. The Greeks called this experience ‘the erotic’ after the god Eros. Eros and Shechina are different expressions of the same core experience.2 One cannot define Shechina and Eros. To define Shechina is to kill her. Definitions are non-erotic. Shechina is evoked, intuited, felt, and experienced. And yet the mind needs maps and signposts. So, later in our journey (in chapter two), we will unfold together the four faces of Eros. But to begin, we seek rather to arouse her presence. The opposite of Eros and Shechina is void. Our lives are overflowing with the Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it hurts so much you can barely move. Usually it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We rush around, doing everything we can to fill the absence. We even have a handy word for this rushing about: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A–void–dance. A dance around the void. We develop the most elaborate maneuverings you can imagine―never realizing that it is all a-void–dance. That if we could but taste fullness for a moment, the empty dances of addiction, power, violence, and abusive sex(3) would be transformed into the erotic dance of Being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, with the Shechina. The dance in which we all have a place. This book is about sharing that dance with you.
The Great Dancer
The truly great dancer―like all lovers―flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right, so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so, she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul, which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila―forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity, and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah―fullness―used in the biblical myth texts to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.4Mehol, Hallul, Hallal = Dance, Empty, Full. The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and eros, absence and Shechina. Modern -day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra, and it is marketed to us in a million packages. Fill the emptiness―in any way at any price. We are desperate. We are so pained by our emptiness that we can hardly distinguish between our desires. The natural result is that we fill up with much that is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment―full-fill-ment―in all the wrong places.
Pseudo-Eros
The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being―the fullness of ourselves in every moment―we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time, to resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of dance. The movement between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”We live in an age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification―a quick fix: a book, a drug, a relationship, a job―anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. With a book, we read a few pages and if we don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo-eros, we move on to the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole that might fill up the yawning abyss we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide. On the outside, our mad dashing about may look like dance―but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an airtight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside, however, there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos-filled scramble for some snatches of authenticity in between the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance.
Erotic Living
The Dancing MasterThere is a wonderful story of eros and love that hints at many of the truths we will unpack in our journey together. It is about walking through the void and dancing with the Shechina. Every time we walk through and not around the void, we come out stronger.
Reports had reached the young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of kung fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet, converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this master of kung fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit.Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of kung fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The master of kung fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue-black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your Highness,” he began, “Have no worries, I wouldn’t think of doing you harm.” “Well, when you do want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “what kind of harm can you do?” “Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear.” The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may proceed,” he told the Master of kung fu. “Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If I had done it in slow motion, extremely slow motion, you would have seen how each touch of my hand would have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.” “Impressive. But I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama. “Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.” “Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king. “Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.” “If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master.” The Dancing Master entered. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of kung fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge. The Master of kung fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year when I finally caught him on the ear and destroyed him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire.” The two opponents faced off. The Master of kung fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack. The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his body. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. His fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows. The Master of kung fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time. The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of kung fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He was intoxicated by the aroma of the butter melting in the Dalai Lama’s fragrant tea. A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch. His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life. The Master of kung fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong.
What a holy tale of Eros. The darts and lunges of emptiness and violence become the erotic rhythms, soarings of fullness and love. Eros, as the story unfolds so gently, is not sex. Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety. When we are unable to live in Eros we become very frightened of the emptiness. The void either numbs us to the joy of living or we try and fill the void with the manifold forms of pseudo-Eros. We fill it with anger, competition, fanaticism, and excessive consumption of all kinds. The result, on a personal level, is either depression or an underlying deadness of spirit, which we hide under the facades of success. On a global level, the result is terrible wars that we fight to validate the superiority of our religions, to affirm our national pride, or to protect our economic power. At the same time, we rape the environment, forcing it to produce the glut of goods which we desperately require to provide us with more and more hits of pseudo-Eros. Spirit does not tolerate a vacuum. The inability to dance through the void always results in pathology. In the case of the kung fu master, pseudo-Eros manifested as raging ego, aggression and even violence. If we do not choose Eros, then pseudo-Eros will always choose us. The consequence is always great pain, personal, social, and cosmic. For anything less than Eros will almost assuredly destroy our planet. We abuse each other personally. Nations mass murder other nations. A lover demonizes her sexual, romantic or heart partner. She is devastated that she was not the only one. Even when there was no such promise or even its opposite. Feminine Shadow. S/he forgets that to love is not to own. Lovers who demonize the former beloved friend, refuse to recognize that they are scarring the face of God―within themselves. We abuse the earth and allow twenty million people to die of hunger or related diseases every year. The simple and essential cause is a lack of Eros. We desperately need to feel like we are full but we aren’t. So we settle for pseudo Eros. We pretend that we are in the inside by placing others on the outside. We do not feel embraced in real Eros of love so we grasp for the pseudo Eros of fear, war, and obsessive consumption. Life is a mess. Even if we could somehow put aside the starvation and the wars, even a superficial view of our society reveals that something is seriously askew. Not a detail problem but an essential flaw in the plumb line of our culture. Every forty seconds someone kills themselves. This year, upwards of one million people will experience a failure of love so intense and painful that they will violently end their lives. In the last 45 years, suicide rates have increased by sixty percent world wide. Among the countries with the highest rates are western democracies such as Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, and of course the United States. Suicide used to be largely limited to the elderly. People who had, at the end of their lives, looked back and been unable to make sense of their story. This is not particularly comforting news because all of us want to, and most of us will, reach old age. The even more jolting news, however, is that the average age is going down. Suicide is now one of the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44. Now, of course it would be nice to dismiss this slightly unpleasant information with the thought that only crazy or severely depressed people commit suicide. Note, however, that for every actual suicide there are ten suicide attempts. Suicide attempts have increased in the last 45 years to twenty times more than “successful” suicides. Add to this the easily inferred reality that for every person who attempts suicide, there are a lot more people in just as much pain; just as lonely; just as alienated; and just as depressed. They simply are unable to do anything about it. So they live in limbo―suspended between hells―all the while maintaining the façade of normal and even successful lives. And yet our guilty feet have no rhythm. Beneath our desperately dancing steps lurks a yawning abyss of emptiness that kills our joy and poisons our satisfactions. We need another way to dance. It is the old dancing master who shows us how. He reminds us that Eros is a genuine possibility in our lives. Stay in the emptiness, he tells us, and it will become full. Where before you danced to the music of competition and envy, you now begin to feel that you are part of the seamless coat of the divine universe. You no longer feel like you must obey God; you participate in the divine. Eros is the sound of a woman singing, the caress of a small deed of loving, a gentle tear, or rocking laughter. Shechina is genuinely felt pain and joy, anger and ecstasy. All of these fill your emptiness and enliven your days. You are no longer alienated from your own life―living externally―wondering: is this all there is? To dance with the Shechina is to step inside to the full erotic glory and wonder of your life. To live and love erotically in all the facets of your being is to live a sacred life.
The Path of Love
One cannot be told that life is worthwhile; one must experience the erotic love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity, and worth of their lives. It is, however, this very erotic sense that is so essential in making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second-hand consumers of second-hand joy―never touching love or Eros directly. And when love fails, there truly is nothing left to live for. For love―not the narrow romantic expressions of it, but erotic love in all areas of our existence―is the core of life itself.We are confronted, personally and globally, with a stark choice: Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury but an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half century, modern psychology has documented an age-old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So, too, our world, personal and global, even with all the resources, intelligence, and technology at our disposal, will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love. Life is a choice. What is the rhythm of our dance? Are we dancing masters or bottled bees? Who are our dancing partners― desperation and emptiness or Eros and Shechina? Are we lovers in all facets of our lives or are we apathetic, deadened, and indifferent? Are we sources of safety and caring or are we abusers and manipulators? Are we spreading wisdom and love or are we inflictors of emotional, spiritual and even physical pain on those closest to us? Bees in bottles always sting. But everyone knows that to sting is to die. The only way to not sting is to learn to be a dancing master. The great mystery tradition of Hebrew wisdom is about a radical and profound path towards becoming just such a dancing master. The ancient temple in Jerusalem was the center of a society where the Hebrew mysteries were practiced and taught. At the core of the temple mysteries lies an ancient set of radical understandings about sex, love, and eros. In the deep yet provocative temple mysteries, we are taught that sex is not eros. But as we shall see, in the esoteric temple mystery, sex models for us what it might look like to live erotically in all of the non-sexual dimensions of our lives. The temple mysteries are a unique Tantra, opening us to the possibility of becoming great lovers in all of the arenas of our lives. The Hebrew mysteries gently but powerfully chart a path which, if we but have the courage to walk it, will teach us how to live erotically in every facet of existence. We live in an age when ancient wisdoms long relegated to the dustbins of the spirit are being reclaimed. The Zohar, magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, teaches that our era is the one in which the “Gates of Wisdom will be opened.” We live at the dawn of a new age in which for the first time―after several aeons of intense spiritual evolution―we have the vessels to hold the light of the ancient secrets. The mystics suggest we may well be able to hold the light more deeply than even the ancients for whom the wisdom was initially intended. It is only now, after law, science, and ethics have been integrated into our psyches, that we can go back and reclaim Eros, Shechina and enchantment. Life is a choice. You can remain a bee trapped in a bottle and everyone―except yourself―will be convinced you are dancing. Or you can choose to be a dancing master. To dance yourself into your book of life. To be an erotic lover in every facet of your existence. A wonderful mantra from the biblical love book, the Song of Songs, reads, “I am love sick on my bed at night,” explains 19th century mystical master Nachum of Chernobyl, “I have fallen on my bed because my loving has become sick.” When being a great lover is limited to sexual performance, and wild erotic stories connote anonymous orgies, then love has become sick and we fall on our beds into the depths of emptiness and depression. The dance of Eros is to teach you how to be a great lover not only in the sexual but in all the dimensions of your life. That is the radical invitation issued by this book of Hebrew wisdom. You need not have studied mysticism or biblical myth before reading this tract. This is a book written for all seekers of transformation. This book is for you if you are not sated by pop culture and seek a passionate, joyful, yet deeply grounded and serious exploration of the mysteries as your guide. I am a biblical mystic. I have studied, taught, and tried to live the sacred texts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, nestled in the hills, of the Galilee in Israelin, Oxford University in England, and in exile in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Aramaic and Hebrew mystery texts have been my guides and friends for many years. Of course, like every mystic who engages sacred text, I hear the text in accordance with the inner melody of my soul. I now share this song with you in the form of this book. You are invited to find the place in your soul where you can receive and integrate this ancient wisdom into your own song. The invitation and the challenge of the spirit in our generation is to create a politics of Eros and love. That can only begin to happen when each person in the polis takes responsibility for the erotic quality of his or her life. We need to, and we can, realign our souls with the fountain of being. We can connect to the vital currents of loving energy that course though our universe. We can decide to enter the flow, and from that place on the inside we can transform first our lives, and ultimately, our world. The Next Entry will begin with the Paragraph below. Love until then… The mystery begins in the inner precincts of Solomon’s sacred temple in Jerusalem, unraveling the deep, wondrous and provocative relationship between sex, eros and love. It is the unpacking of this first stage of the mysteries that we devote the first three framing chapters. Emerging from the Hebrew mystery tradition, the following ten chapters each lay out a unique path of Hebrew Tantra. Each path will offer you a compelling spirit map for living erotically in every facet of your being. Cover Page Epigrams:
“Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…”-John Keats “Expanded consciousness is when the Taste of the Bark is as the Taste of the Tree.” -Abraham Kuk
shared by Marc Gafni
On the Wounds of Love: Part Two – Marc Gafni
July 10, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Good evening. It is close to midnight here in Salt Lake. Just spent a wonderful evening with five goddesses. A group of friends, all powerful feminine spiritual teachers who are on the way to their annual retreat in the Utah desert. This is the third year that we have met here in Salt Lake before and after their retreat. Each one is a strong, vulnerable, audacious figure. Each one comes with her unique gifts of spirit. They are, each one of them, deeply good, smart, wild, giving, sexy, modest, wounded, provocative, profound, healing, outrageous, and gentle. In short, they are Incarnations of Shekinah, the feminine goddess divine. It is with some of them, at different times, that I have over the past two years explored the wounds of love. It is they, together with my wonderful friend Dalit, who held me and challenged me, fought with me, supported me, and loved me as I loved them. I dedicate this sharing on the wounds of love to them.
On the Wounds of Love: Part Two
by Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.comThe way I will do an ongoing series of posts is to always start with the last couple of paragraphs from the previous post. In Zen, there is a famous koan about a master who teaches by giving student a thorough beating. No matter what question the student asks, the beating comes just the same. When the student attempts to answer the question, he receives a beating. When the student remains silent, he gets a beating. When the student attempts to escape or withdraw, he still gets a beating. Eros often teaches like that Zen master, giving a complete knock-out, foot-to-groin, nose-smashed-against-asphalt pummeling. It demands that we experience pain, injury, and the collapse of self–even that we recognize suffering itself as its loving touch. Our sexual and romantic lives are filled with an array of agonies not easily borne by the ego, by the body, or by the sense of (limited) self. There is the pain of not being seen or desired, and the pain of being seen starkly, in all of our most shame-inducing imperfections. There is the pain of not getting the affection we seek, or the pain of having it for a time, then losing it. There is the startling pain of realizing we were not our beloved’s only one–the fact that our beloved shared his love with others may cut into our desperately human need to be special. There is the pain of being asked for more than we are able to give, and the pain of trying to give and not being wanted. There is the pain of love which turns to hate, of affection which turns to contempt, and of the touch which, once desired, becomes repellent. Then there is the pain of betrayal. Betrayal is uniquely excruciating because only someone whom you really trust–someone who could never, you thought, betray you–can deliver this particularly devastating blow. Sex models life in that it hurts like hell. It’s no wonder that so much popular eroticism contains a twinning sex and pain, domination and submission. In sex, even with the best intentions, we often seem bound to inflict injury, and bound to receive it. We’re sure to be hurt in love, and we’re sure to hurt. We are subjected to injury against our will, and no matter how hard we fight against it, we injure others all the time. I don’t say this to be released of responsibility to others; ignorance, hubris, and grasping demand reckoning, and all transgressions against others must be known for what they are. (And who among us is without transgression.) What I’m saying is that even genuine sensitivity, even a radical willingness to take responsibility, even a vow to end suffering, does not take away pain. As the Irish mystic rock singer Bono sings,
“We’re one, but we’re not the same, You see, we hurt each other, then we do it again!”
Entering the Temple of Pain So, even though a stiff drink of good Irish whisky might seem like the best response to the pain of eros, medicating our suffering never works for long. In the end, we have to be willing to look into pain deeply and directly. We need to know it first-hand, entering the interior of pain as we enter the interior of sex – with full presence, with a yearning to see, feel, and know it, and with a mind and heart expanded enough to embrace the whole catastrophe at once. How does the hurt feel? What are its qualities? How do we engage the interiority of pain without violating our wholeness? How do we remain fully present to what is actually happening inside of us? How do we stay open in the midst of the pain, and even stay connected to the yearning that once animated our hearts? What is our pain telling us? If we could hear pain’s voice, what sacred wisdom might she whisper in our ear. Before pain reveals her secrets, we need to become her lover. As with a lover, we need to attend to our responses to pain with the same care and discrimination that we give our pleasure. What is our response to the feelings? What strategies arise to protect us against the experience of pain? Do we withdraw, attack and go to war, do we dull ourselves, do we immediately seek another love-fix, like the addicts we are? What exactly is going on here? Pain is a state of being. From a cognitive perspective, how we relate to the pain born of erotic or sexual betrayal is a decision. We choose the interpretive prism through which we will understand our pain, and that becomes the basis for our response to it. Sadly, we often use the prism of “I’m so hurt” to justify vengeful malice, either verbal or actual. We use our wounds as an excuse for hating an ex-lover or spouse, for seeking unwarranted financial or legal redress, for blackening their reputation. We twist the law to align with the twisted valves of our heart. Hurt becomes a free pass, a get-out-of-jail free card that we believe gives someone the right to take revenge. And of course, since malice cannot reveal it’s true motivations, it must plead false ones, hiding behind masks of piety and noble intention. Yes, all beings are hurt. We all carry some untransformed wound. But in the end we all must choose whether our wounds are to be allowed to fester in us, converted to malevolence, or transmuted into compassion. Suffering can lead us deeper into love or deeper into separation and hatred. It is always a choice. We each choose the prism for our pain, and the lens we choose is ultimately the mark of our level of consciousness. For a young child or a person at a certain level of consciousness, rage and pain can seem like reason to kill. The great revelation of the Axial Age lawgivers is that wounded honor is not to be personally avenged in spilled blood—and as the Talmud reminds us, there are many ways to spill a person’s blood. Some of them are so subtle that the person doesn’t know he’s been stabbed. Others may drain the blood from a person’s face in such a way that it takes years to set things right. To avoid translating pain into violence–whether physical, verbal, or imaginary–we need to pay close and unflinching attention to our interiority. We are required to clarify our pain through what a kabbalist might call the ten questions of Berur, the Clarification of Desire. THE END The next sharing On the Wounds of Love will be on the clarification of desire. Note to Reader: Just a little sharing about my education in blogs: I do not really know how to do this blog thing, but the advice I am getting is shorter blogs, which I have tried to do, and to find a template. So, if anyone has a template, please let me know. Marc Gafni
On the Wounds of Love: Part Three – Marc Gafni
July 12, 2008
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On the Wounds of Love: Part Three
continued from Blog Post NineYes, all beings are hurt. We all carry some untransformed wound. But in the end we all must choose whether our wounds are to be allowed to fester in us, converted to malevolence, or transmuted into compassion. Suffering can lead us deeper into love or deeper into separation and hatred. It is always a choice. We each choose the prism for our pain, and the lens we choose is ultimately the mark of our level of consciousness. For a young child or a person at a certain level of consciousness, rage and pain can seem like reason to kill. The great revelation of the Axial Age lawgivers is that wounded honor is not to be personally avenged in spilled blood—and as the Talmud reminds us, there are many ways to spill a person’s blood. Some of them are so subtle that the person doesn’t know he’s been stabbed. Others may drain the blood from a person’s face in such a way that it takes years to set things right. To avoid translating pain into violence—whether physical, verbal, or imaginary—we need to pay close and unflinching attention to our interiority. We are required to clarify our pain through what a kabbalist might call the questions of Berur, the Clarification of Desire. I have organized the questions on the page in a bit of confused way. Disorganized and disjointed, because that is how the questions come up in our minds. Let your mind roam from question to question until the questions enter the very core of your being. Try and let your mind become very still and let the depth and truth of these questions expand your heart and evolve your consciousness. 1) What thoughts arise regarding your pain? 2) Is the pain created by what happened or by your thoughts about what happened? 3) Who would you be if we without these thoughts about your pain? 4) What beliefs do we hold about what happened, at this very moment? 5)Are they true? 6) Are we sure that they are true? 7) If we were alone in a room with God and she said: Your eternity and the lives of our children rest on your telling the absolute truth at this moment—would you still hold your beliefs about “what happened” as true? 8) How does that belief serve your agenda in this moment? 9) What deeper truth does it cover up? 10) What or who would you be—or how would you feel—if you told yourself a different story about your pain? 11) How much of your identity is bound us with your pain? 12) Are you blaming someone for your pain? 13) What if you turned it all around and made yourself a responsible party instead of the victim in the story? 14) How does taking some responsibility help us loosen the weight of our anger and take some of the projection back? 15) How does it help us move from a blame frame to recognizing that everyone has a share in contributing to realities that created the pain? 16) What gain to we receive from our pain—what profit is there for us, what social capital do we earn in telling and re-telling the story of our pain? We long for certainty. But are we ever really certain of the correctness of our ideas about how the world should be? In moments of hurt and blame, if we can step out of our frame and go deeper, we might identify that behind our need to blame someone—even ourselves—for our pain is a feeling of being alone, of being cut off and isolated from the rest of reality. As we look into that deeper place then we might—often for the first time—be able to watch how the mechanism of ego works. Marc Gafni
On the Wounds of Love: Part Four – Marc Gafni
July 12, 2008
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On the Wounds of Love: Part Four
We long for certainty. But are we ever really certain of the correctness of our ideas about how the world should be? In moments of hurt and blame, if we can step out of our frame and go deeper, we might identify that behind our need to blame someone—even ourselves—for our pain is a feeling of being alone, of being cut off and isolated from the rest of reality. As we look into that deeper place then we might—often for the first time—be able to watch how the mechanism of ego works. And we might also notice how we quickly—almost desperately—move to cover over that isolated feeling. If we look closely, we might realize that when we feel cut off, separate diminished or abandoned, we often move to secure our version of how we would like the world to be. Sometimes simply seeing the ego at work, relaxing the struggle, and opening to the truth of the moment liberates our awareness. But in order for this to happen, we need the courage to be present with our own emotional and physical pain. In bioenergetics, and in certain traditions of tantric yoga, we are shown how to free pain through the body by breathing into the fullness of sensation, and feeling the alive quality in the sensation of pain itself. A yogini friend of mine once said, “Because you say “ow” instead of “ah”—because the sensation appears as a menace instead of a friend—doesn’t mean it’s not from the same source.” All phenomena arise from this same source, and the body itself is made of the substance of God. To recognize the divine substance in pain allows us to be present to it rather than resisting or fearing it. Normally (and naturally) we seek to assuage and heal pain—the body itself produces hormones whose very purpose is to make pain bearable. To heal the pain of an other is the sacred joy and obligation of every individual. Even so, we sometimes need to be careful not to numb our pain so quickly that it cannot give us its teaching. According to the mystics this was the meaning of Job’s teaching when he defiantly asserted, “Through my Body I Vision God.” Job— the archetypal sufferer—teaches the Yoga of entering the body in order to walk through, not around, our pain. “I am in your pain” cries out the divine, through the lips of Isaiah. The words of the prophet resonate with particular poignancy regarding emotional pain—the pain of eros. There is a divinity to be realized in staying open to the pain of Eros. We need to resist the seduction of closing off into the easy certainties of psychological dogma, explaining how some demonized other is the source of our pain. If the skew of earlier times was to close our heart by blaming the victim, then the sin of our times is in the assuaging of our own guilt through the deification of the alleged victim’s pain. Does our heart become so hardened that all counter narratives are reviled, crushed or simply ignored? Do we allow the powerful to masquerade as the powerless, and unjust pain beyond all measure is meted out simply because we refuse to challenge the idolatry of hurt. We need the capacity to sustain uncertainty without being psychologically seduced to adopt any dogmatic certainty about the way things are or ought to be, without choosing sides by asserting that someone is bad and someone else good. The capacity to hold open awareness within uncertainty, resisting the subtle but powerful impulse to close into one version of reality, is the gateway to enlightenment. All the great traditions of spirit, in their own way, show us that everything is one thing. Everything is one beautiful, radical, unknowable, ungraspable, vast, empty gorgeousness. Nothing, absolutely nothing needs to be rejected. But only a lover is willing to look directly into the eyes of reality, and see things exactly as they are. When we talk about spiritual courage—this is what we mean. When we talk about being a lover—this is what we mean. We do our best to embrace everything exactly as it is—in excruciating, gorgeous detail. We pay attention to all the ways we hide, slink away, or build up a solid story of breach and betrayal to assuage our feelings. Yet it is only when we give up our insistence on being right that we can begin to be alive and aligned. There is a time to wield Gabriel’s sword and demand justice. And there is a moment when our spiritual training instructs us to surrender instead, to let go, to relinquish our ideas, and to breathe into the unwanted sensations. Much as we would like to simply transcend devastating erotic experience, love tells us that the only way out is through. We cannot transcend painful experiences without going through them, without becoming them. Hafiz says that:
“Love is the funeral pyre Where the heart must lay Its body.”
Marc Gafni Feel free to respond to this blog at info@marcgafni.com.
The Wounds of Love: Part Five – Marc Gafni
July 13, 2008
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On the Wounds of Love: Part Five
All the great traditions of spirit, in their own way, show us that everything is one thing. Everything is one beautiful, radical, unknowable, ungraspable, vast, empty gorgeousness. Nothing, absolutely nothing needs to be rejected. But only a lover is willing to look directly into the eyes of reality, and see things exactly as they are. When we talk about spiritual courage—this is what we mean. When we talk about being a lover—this is what we mean. We do our best to embrace everything exactly as it is—in excruciating, gorgeous detail. We pay attention to all the ways we hide, slink away, or build up a solid story of breach and betrayal to assuage our feelings. Yet it is only when we give up our insistence on being right that we can begin to be alive and aligned. There is a time to wield Gabriel’s sword and demand justice. And there is a moment when our spiritual training instructs us to surrender instead, to let go, to relinquish our ideas, and to breathe into the unwanted sensations. Much as we would like to simply transcend devastating erotic experience, love tells us that the only way out is through. We cannot transcend painful experiences without going through them, without becoming them. Hafiz says that:
“Love is the funeral pyre Where the heart must lay Its body.”
***** How do we walk through the pain of Eros? There are three steps that I have been able to discern in my own pain. They are the three steps to God. And in each step you are already there. The First Step is surrender. The Second Step is to meet your brother and sister in the pain. The Third Step is to meet God in the pain. The First Step Too often we resist pain. But extreme pain insists that we accept it. “Do not imagine,” pain says to us, “that it should be different than this. Forget your ideas of how it should be. Surrender to me. Settle into me. Prostrate yourself in the most deeply humbling way before me.” Let yourself feel the next moment of pain, then breathe another step into surrender. Sometimes we are called to enter so deeply into the interiority of the pain—of erotic betrayal or the loss of a lover—that all our old certainties are completely destroyed. All of our constructs collapse, all of our idealized shrines to love fall apart. At these moments it hurts so much that there are no words to speak about it. The only thing we are able to do is let ourselves into the feeling, to live on the inside of the pain as it shifts and changes and ultimately, with grace, resolves. The Second Step Surrendering so deeply and unconditionally into the pain reveals another radical truth. Everyone is present within it. We are all hurt. In the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of pain, we realize the invisible lines of connection that weave us into an indestructible whole. It is the wholeness itself that has within it the erotic power to transmute and heal pain. Our suffering itself is born of the alienation that derives from the part and partial nature of our persons. Meeting the other in pain, receiving the dignity of another’s story is a movement towards redemption. The mute, silent, and dumb experience of pain is redeemed and embraced through the felt experience of one’s word spoken, heard and received. In the recognition that our pain is part of the larger Pain, something softens and opens with the healing power of Wholeness. In the invitation of Wholeness, we catch a glimmer of the enlightenment born of pain—a radically democratizing enlightenment. by Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Part Six – Marc Gafni
July 13, 2008
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On The Wounds of Love: Part Six
The Second Step Surrendering so deeply and unconditionally into the pain reveals another radical truth. Everyone is present within it. We are all hurt. In the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of pain, we realize the invisible lines of connection that weave us into an indestructible whole. It is the wholeness itself that has within it the erotic power to transmute and heal pain. Our suffering itself is born of the alienation that derives from the part and partial nature of our persons. Meeting the other in pain, receiving the dignity of another’s story is a movement towards redemption. The mute, silent, and dumb experience of pain is redeemed and embraced through the felt experience of one’s word spoken, heard and received. In the recognition that our pain is part of the larger Pain, something softens and opens with the healing power of Wholeness. In the invitation of Wholeness, we catch a glimmer of the enlightenment born of pain—a radically democratizing enlightenment. The Third Step Some things are just bigger than we are. Just as sex compels us beyond ordinary boundaries of self, so Eros in the guise of pain overcomes ego. When the hurt is so large all separative bets are off. When there’s no keeping pain at bay, when it hurts so much that explanations and stories won’t hold, when emotional escape isn’t possible, the dharma gate blows open and realization of all and everything becomes possible. There is no time, no past nor future. There is nothing at all—no hurt and no hurting, no transgression, nor betrayal. Everything is forgiven in the truth of complete surrender. If we are willing to feel into the pain so deeply that we as separate self no longer exist, there we will meet God. There we will be privileged to participate in the pain of the exiled Shekinah, the feminine face of God. In the Buddhist tradition, the divine feminine is called Kuan Yin, or Kanzeon Bodhisattva, hearer of the cries of the world. In Kabbalah, she is the Shekinah, God’s feminine face. We meet Shekinah in our pain. “Love is the funeral pyre where the heart must lay its body.” Here is the embrace of the Shekinah of Eros, the blessing of the divine feminine. She holds us in the deepest core of our being, rocking us, listening to our sobs, even as she caresses our head. Solomon wrote in The Song of Songs, “Her left hand is under my head even as her right hand embraces me.” The Shekinah holds us in our pain, and in pain itself she is present waiting to embrace, comfort and heal. We meet her there. In the comfort of her arms, with the soothing sounds of her voice, we realize that pain is none other than divine compassion herself. “In all of their pain, I am in pain…” cries out the Hebrew mystic Isaiah, and we feel her caress. There is a deep heart within all of us which knows how to hold others in their pain. That deep knowing is our birthright. It is the Shekina who lives in us, yet is only realized when our own overwhelming hurt is transposed into overwhelming compassion. This is what the Hebrew mystics in the Zohar referred to when they spoke of “the Shekinah which is called I.” In our evolved realization, we are, each of us, none other than the unique face of divine compassion herself. So, complete Surrender enfolds us into the feminine face of the divine—the most expansive, compassionate and full lover a being could hope for. Shekinah holds us in infinity. In the redemption of her arms, pain is none other then compassion itself. Most people do not know how to make love because they do not know how to truly open to emotional and physical pleasure. In the same way, most people do not know the felt experience of true compassion because they will not allow themselves to enter so deeply into hurt that pain itself gives way to the sweetness of the Shekina’s embrace. Whenever you truly collapse into your soul’s pain, the pain itself collapses into the infinite goodness of existence itself. This is its mystery. The pain of sexual and romantic heartbreak is an intense and exacting model for how we can engage pain in every facet of being. The sexual models the erotic. In the sexual, whether in her pain or pleasure, all the sacred secrets are held. It is only in opening ourselves to her wisdom that we can resist the temptation to turn secrets sacred into secrets sordid. by Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Part Seven – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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The Wounds of Love: Part Seven
“In all of their pain, I am in pain…” cries out the Hebrew mystic Isaiah, and we feel her caress. There is a deep heart within all of us which knows how to hold others in their pain. That deep knowing is our birthright. It is the Shekina who lives in us, yet is only realized when our own overwhelming hurt is transposed into overwhelming compassion. This is what the Hebrew mystics in the Zohar referred to when they spoke of “the Shekinah which is called I.” In our evolved realization, we are, each of us, none other than the unique face of divine compassion herself. So, complete Surrender enfolds us into the feminine face of the divine—the most expansive, compassionate and full lover a being could hope for. Shekinah holds us in infinity. In the redemption of her arms, pain is none other then compassion itself. Most people do not know how to make love because they do not know how to truly open to emotional and physical pleasure. In the same way, most people do not know the felt experience of true compassion because they will not allow themselves to enter so deeply into hurt that pain itself gives way to the sweetness of the Shekina’s embrace. Whenever you truly collapse into your soul’s pain, the pain itself collapses into the infinite goodness of existence itself. This is its mystery. The pain of sexual and romantic heartbreak is an intense and exacting model for how we can engage pain in every facet of being. The sexual models the erotic. In the sexual, whether in her pain or pleasure, all the sacred secrets are held. It is only in opening ourselves to her wisdom that we can resist the temptation to turn secrets sacred into secrets sordid. ***** As I said at the outset, there was a time when I believed that there was a way out of the pain of Eros. Some people may believe that I didn’t try hard enough; others are correct in ascertaining that I didn’t succeed. But I can tell you that I believe in a version of love that is fulfilled not only through clarity of intentions and shared power, but also through commitment which includes betrayal, through loving gestures which disappoint, and through allowing for the fullness of the other’s expansion and uniquely weird complexity. I am willing now to feel hurt. The deepest hurt for us all is the recognition of having hurt others. Even if unconsciously. We hurt each other and then we do it again. The second most powerful hurt is being betrayed, devastated, and even murdered by those we loved. When the genuine hurt of a broken relationship, the hurt that so often accompanies intimate engagement, is seen by one of the parties through the lens of his or her own untransformed wounds, the hurt can morph into malice. In that malicious spirit, the wounded person inflicts pain on the former lover that is often wildly disproportionate to the pain they may have suffered. When we are not willing to enter into our own pain, we demand reparations in a spiraling escalation of hurt. If we are going to allow pain to take us into love, it is utterly necessary to let go of the drama of our pain. Either our pain will evolve us to the divine or it will devolve us into the depths of hell on earth. We need to see clearly the mistake we so often make imagining that deeply feeling our pain means feeding our story about the pain. Feeding our sense of being wrong. Feeding our feeling of betrayal. Feeding our anger and above all our hurt. Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Part Eight – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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The Wounds of Love: Part Eight
I am willing now to feel hurt. The deepest hurt for us all is the recognition of having hurt others. Even if unconsciously. We hurt each other and then we do it again. The second most powerful hurt is being betrayed, devastated, and even murdered by those we loved. When the genuine hurt of a broken relationship, the hurt that so often accompanies intimate engagement, is seen by one of the parties through the lens of his or her own untransformed wounds, the hurt can morph into malice. In that malicious spirit, the wounded person inflicts pain on the former lover that is often wildly disproportionate to the pain they may have suffered. When we are not willing to enter into our own pain, we demand reparations in a spiraling escalation of hurt. If we are going to allow pain to take us into love, it is utterly necessary to let go of the drama of our pain. Either our pain will evolve us to the divine or it will devolve us into the depths of hell on earth. We need to see clearly the mistake we so often make imagining that deeply feeling our pain means feeding our story about the pain. Feeding our sense of being wrong. Feeding our feeling of betrayal. Feeding our anger and above all our hurt. ***** The paradoxical key to moving towards enlightenment through the door of pain is to retain a deep recognition of the importance of balance. Balance is the ultimate secret, by a thousand different names, of every great mystical tradition the world over. Whether it is Yin and Yang, Anima and Animus, pathos and comedy, wisdom and foolishness, Shekina and her consort Tiferet, Astarte and El, balance as the portal to goodness and love is the spirit that animates all of these pairs. It was Edith Hamilton who reminded us that for the ancient Greeks the ideal of the human being was the idea of utter proportion. It is only a deep felt sense of proportion and balance that can eliminate suffering. An understanding of what is sufficient and what is too much. Even if cannot evolve our pain to our enlightenment, we can at the very least hold the pain honestly without losing our balance. And so, when we look into the pain we suffer in love, it’s important to recognize that there are hierarchies of pain, and that there is a moment to move past our own pain. Here, I am moved to share with you the story of the Hassidic master Naftali of Ropshitz who was called to help the King. You see the King’s son was crying desperately. All of the wise men of the kingdom, the doctors, the psychologists (such as there were at the time), the magicians and Shamans, and all the rest―none of them could comfort him or stop his crying. Indeed, it seemed to always intensify after each failed attempt at healing. Until a wise old simple woman from the hinterland of the Kingdom came to the palace bringing milk. She happened past the boy who was wandering near the kitchen crying, as he was wont to do. Apparently hearing his tears, she approached him not realizing he was the son of the king. She whispered some few words in his ear. Lo and behold, he looked up, looked at her, and his crying little by little began to abate. Until, after a few minutes, he is not crying at all. The End. “The end!” said the Hassidim. “Please, holy master,” pleaded the disciples to their teacher, to the Ropshitzer Rebbe, “You must tell us; what magic, what amulet, what secret did the old wise woman―who we know must have been the Shekinah herself―what did she say?” The rebbe smiled. It was very simple, he said. She told the boy, “You must not cry more than it hurts.” Sometimes we hurt someone in a relatively small way and they respond with a cruelty and vengeance that we never imagined existed in their heart. I am always surprised by malice. I am devastated and on my knees for any pain which I have ever caused others. I am shattered by allowing others to hurt me. I am devastated to my core at having hurt others by participating in creating a situation in which others would have to bear the pain of their own great untruth. And all of us must not cry more than it hurts. If we learn to live wide open, even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness, even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy. I turn to Rabia, the great Indian mystic, Shekinah incarnate, to guide us home.
“My Body is covered with wounds this world made But I still long to kiss her, even when God said Could you also kiss the hand that caused each scar for you will not find me until you do.”
Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Two – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Two
About a week ago, I posted the first in a series of about a hundred posts on Eros and Holiness. The feedback was large and wonderful and very much appreciated. Part of the feedback was “bite-sized” Gafni; these are blog posts―not long essays. Okay―thanks for the feedback. So, while I will not repost the framing introduction to this material, which you can find on Blog Post Six, I will start again with the actual material and post in smaller segments with more explanation. Does that work? When I first wrote these words―the very first draft―I knew a lot about the joy of Eros, and not enough about the pain of Eros. I knew of feminine beauty, but not enough about feminine shadow. I unconsciously made the equation that many people in the progressive and New Age world make: the feminine = the spiritual. This is, of course, a false equation. Both feminine and masculine are filled with both light and shadow. While we fully recognize masculine shadow, we are in dangerous denial of feminine shadow. This has many implications in our contemporary understanding of sexuality, power, spirituality, and the relationship between the feminine and masculine in numerous spheres of both personal and public life. I have thought a lot about the different natures and tripwires of masculine and feminine shadow in the last two years, and will share with you a new understanding of all this over the coming months. I remain a fierce lover of the Shekinah even as I understand her and accept her in ways I never did. I owe great thanks to a group of powerful women; the kind of people that Naomi Wolf once referred to as Power Feminists―leading female spiritual teachers, feminist activists, writers, theorists, and simply great women who have held a container for me in these last two years. With some of them, I am now writing in partnership, and I pray that the fruit of our collaboration might make some small contribution to the evolution of love in our time. I have incorporated the understandings of the last two years into many of the upcoming blog posts. Much love to every one of you who is reading. I love every one of you more than you can know! The posts below begin to speak to ‘What is Eros?’ When I use the word Eros, I do not refer to the sexual. Rather to something much deeper, wider, and more powerful. On the relationship between the sexual and the erotic, please see later posts. Introduction The Shechina is the sensual feminine God force that suffuses reality and knows our name. To be a Kabbalist is to participate in the pain of the Shechina. To feel Her hurt. For Her hurt is our hurt. But that is only the first step. The great ambition of the spirit is to heal Her pain, to fill Her up with joy, ecstasy and meaning. To repair our broken world. To heal Her wound. For She is us. Shechina in the original Hebrew means “indwelling Presence.” She evokes the experience of fullness, presence, interconnectivity, and yearning. The Greeks called this experience ‘the erotic’ after the god Eros. Eros and Shechina are different expressions of the same core experience. One cannot define Shechina and Eros. To define Shechina is to kill her. Definitions are non-erotic. Shechina is evoked, intuited, felt, and experienced. And yet the mind needs maps and signposts. So, later in our journey (in chapter two), we will unfold together the four faces of Eros. But to begin, we seek rather to arouse her presence. The opposite of Eros and Shechina is void. Our lives are overflowing with the Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it hurts so much you can barely move. Usually, it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We rush around, doing everything we can to fill the absence. We even have a handy word for this rushing about: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A–void–dance. A dance around the void. We develop the most elaborate maneuverings you can imagine―never realizing that it is all a-void–dance. That if we could but taste fullness for a moment, the empty dances of addiction, power, violence, and abusive sex(3) would be transformed into the erotic dance of Being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, with the Shechina. The dance in which we all have a place. This sacred conversation is about sharing that dance with you. Marc Gafni Please feel free to send comments to info@marcgafni.com.
Eros and Holiness: Part Three – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Three
The Great Dancer
The truly great dancer―like all lovers―flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right, so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so, she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul, which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila―forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity, and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah―fullness―used in the biblical myth texts to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman. Mehol, Hallul, Hallal = Dance, Empty, Full. The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and Eros, absence and Shechina. Modern day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra, and it is marketed to us in a million packages. Fill the emptiness―in any way at any price. We are desperate. We are so pained by our emptiness that we can hardly distinguish between our desires. The natural result is that we fill up with much that is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment―full-fill-ment―in all the wrong places.
Pseudo-Eros
The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being―the fullness of ourselves in every moment―we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time, to resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of the dance. The movement between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”We live in an age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification―a quick fix: a book, a drug, a relationship, a job―anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. With a book, we read a few pages and if we don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo-eros, we move on to the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole that might fill up the yawning abyss we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide. On the outside, our mad dashing about may look like dance―but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an airtight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside, however, there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos-filled scramble for some snatches of authenticity in between the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Four – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Four
Erotic Living
The Dancing MasterThere is a wonderful story of Eros and love that hints at many of the truths we will unpack in our journey together. It is about walking through the void and dancing with the Shechina. Every time we walk through and not around the void, we come out stronger.
Reports had reached the young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of kung fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet, converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this master of kung fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit.Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of kung fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The master of kung fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue-black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your Highness,” he began, “Have no worries, I wouldn’t think of doing you harm.” “Well, when you do want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “what kind of harm can you do?” “Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear.” The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may proceed,” he told the Master of kung fu. “Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If I had done it in slow motion, extremely slow motion, you would have seen how each touch of my hand would have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.” “Impressive. But I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama. “Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.” “Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king. “Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.” “If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master.” The Dancing Master entered. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of kung fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge. The Master of kung fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year when I finally caught him on the ear and destroyed him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire.” The two opponents faced off. The Master of kung fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack. The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his body. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. His fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows. The Master of kung fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time. The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of kung fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He was intoxicated by the aroma of the butter melting in the Dalai Lama’s fragrant tea. A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch. His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life. The Master of kung fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong.
What a holy tale of Eros. The darts and lunges of emptiness and violence become the erotic rhythms, soarings of fullness and love. Eros, as the story unfolds so gently, is not sex. Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Five – Marc Gafni
July 17, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Five
Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety. When we are unable to live in Eros we become very frightened of the emptiness. The void either numbs us to the joy of living or we try and fill the void with the manifold forms of pseudo-Eros. We fill it with anger, competition, fanaticism, and excessive consumption of all kinds. The result, on a personal level, is either depression or an underlying deadness of spirit, which we hide under the facades of success. On a global level, the result is terrible wars that we fight to validate the superiority of our religions, to affirm our national pride, or to protect our economic power. At the same time, we rape the environment, forcing it to produce the glut of goods which we desperately require to provide us with more and more hits of pseudo-Eros. Spirit does not tolerate a vacuum. The inability to dance through the void always results in pathology. In the case of the kung fu master, pseudo-Eros manifested as raging ego, aggression and even violence. If we do not choose Eros, then pseudo-Eros will always choose us. The consequence is always great pain, personal, social, and cosmic. For anything less than Eros will almost assuredly destroy our planet. We abuse each other personally. Nations mass murder other nations. A lover demonizes her sexual, romantic or heart partner. She is devastated that she was not the only one. Feminine Shadow. S/he forgets that to love is not to own. Even when there was no such promise or even its opposite. Lovers who demonize the former beloved friend refuse to recognize that they are scarring the face of God―within themselves. A man makes contracts with the feminine, not realizing that, even if she agrees, those contracts may not serve her highest good. A man has too many lovers, failing to realize that boundaries might be a higher gift than boundless Eros, even when expressed in genuine moments of love, love-making, and sexual play. All of these are forms of pseudo-eros. None of them are Eros. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Seven – Marc Gafni
July 17, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Six
The Path of Love
One cannot be told that life is worthwhile; one must experience the erotic love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity, and worth of their lives. It is, however, this very erotic sense that is so essential in making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second-hand consumers of second-hand joy―never touching love or Eros directly. And when love fails, there truly is nothing left to live for. For love―not the narrow romantic expressions of it, but erotic love in all areas of our existence―is the core of life itself. We are confronted, personally and globally, with a stark choice: Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury but an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half century, modern psychology has documented an age-old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So, too, our world, personal and global, even with all the resources, intelligence, and technology at our disposal, will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love. Life is a choice. What is the rhythm of our dance? Are we dancing masters or bottled bees? Who are our dancing partners― desperation and emptiness or Eros and Shechina? Are we lovers in all facets of our lives or are we apathetic, deadened, and indifferent? Are we sources of safety and caring or are we abusers and manipulators? Are we spreading wisdom and love or are we inflictors of emotional, spiritual and even physical pain on those closest to us? Bees in bottles always sting. But everyone knows that to sting is to die. The only way to not sting is to learn to be a dancing master. The great mystery tradition of Hebrew wisdom is about a radical and profound path towards becoming just such a dancing master. The ancient temple in Jerusalem was the center of a society where the Hebrew mysteries were practiced and taught. At the core of the temple mysteries lies an ancient set of radical understandings about sex, love, and eros. In the deep yet provocative temple mysteries, we are taught that sex is not eros. But, as we shall see, in the esoteric temple mystery, sex models for us what it might look like to live erotically in all of the non-sexual dimensions of our lives. The temple mysteries are a unique Tantra, opening us to the possibility of becoming great lovers in all of the arenas of our lives. The Hebrew mysteries gently but powerfully chart a path, which, if we but have the courage to walk it, will teach us how to live erotically in every facet of existence. We live in an age when ancient wisdoms long relegated to the dustbins of the spirit are being reclaimed. The Zohar, magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, teaches that our era is the one in which the “Gates of Wisdom will be opened.” We live at the dawn of a new age in which for the first time―after several aeons of intense spiritual evolution―we have the vessels to hold the light of the ancient secrets. The mystics suggest we may well be able to hold the light more deeply than even the ancients for whom the wisdom was initially intended. It is only now, after law, science, and ethics have been integrated into our psyches, that we can go back and reclaim Eros, Shechina and enchantment. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Eight: Dance Me to the End of Love – Marc Gafni
July 17, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Seven
Dance Me to the End of Love
Life is a choice. You can remain a bee trapped in a bottle and everyone―except yourself―will be convinced you are dancing. Or you can choose to be a dancing master. To dance yourself into your book of life. To be an erotic lover in every facet of your existence. A wonderful mantra from the biblical love book, the Song of Songs, reads, “I am love sick on my bed at night,” explains 19th century mystical master Nachum of Chernobyl, “I have fallen on my bed because my loving has become sick.” When being a great lover is limited to sexual performance, and wild erotic stories connote anonymous orgies, then love has become sick and we fall on our beds into the depths of emptiness and depression. The dance of Eros is to teach you how to be a great lover not only in the sexual but in all the dimensions of your life. That is the radical invitation issued by this book of Hebrew wisdom. You need not have studied mysticism or biblical myth before reading this tract. This is a book written for all seekers of transformation. This book is for you if you are not sated by pop culture and seek a passionate, joyful, yet deeply grounded and serious exploration of the mysteries as your guide. I am a biblical mystic. I have studied, taught, and tried to live the sacred texts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, nestled in the hills, of the Galilee in Israel, Oxford University in England, and in exile in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Aramaic and Hebrew mystery texts have been my guides and friends for many years. Of course, like every mystic who engages sacred text, I hear the text in accordance with the inner melody of my soul. I now share this song with you in the form of this book. You are invited to find the place in your soul where you can receive and integrate this ancient wisdom into your own song. The invitation and the challenge of the spirit in our generation is to create a politics of Eros and love. That can only begin to happen when each person in the polis takes responsibility for the erotic quality of his or her life. We need to, and we can, realign our souls with the fountain of being. We can connect to the vital currents of loving energy that course though our universe. We can decide to enter the flow, and from that place on the inside we can transform first our lives, and ultimately, our world. The mystery begins in the inner precincts of Solomon’s sacred temple in Jerusalem, unraveling the deep, wondrous and provocative relationship between sex, eros and love. It is the unpacking of this first stage of the mysteries that we devote the first three framing chapters. Emerging from the Hebrew mystery tradition, the following ten chapters each lay out a unique path of Hebrew Tantra. Each path will offer you a compelling spirit map for living erotically in every facet of your being. Shared by Marc Gafni
Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni: Part Eight
July 19, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com When my life was devastated with personal tragedy two years ago, I made a commitment―together with a close friend―not to “do anything.” I wished, as much as possible, to move from doing to being, from the ‘masculine’ mode to the ‘feminine’ mode. Not that one is higher or better, but because the taste for intense activity which had guided my life had become bitter. The universe had shattered me into being. So, the commitment was that I would not initiate contact for 18 months with anyone whom the Kosmos did not in some way invite me to contact. I would not initiate relationships. Only to those people with whom I had some sudden, new, and intense contact during the time immediately before the trauma would I reach out. My heart told me that these were the people who had been sent by the universe as my friends and guides. And that is how it was. The Persian poet Hafiz guided me in that and in many other moments on this journey.
What is the difference Between your experience of existence And that of a saintThe Saint knows That the Spiritual path Is a sublime chess game with God And that the Beloved Has just made such a Fantastic Move That the saint is now continually Tripping over Joy And bursting out in Laughter And saying, “I surrender!” Whereas, my dear, I am afraid you still think You have a thousand serious moves. posted by Marc Gafni
Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni: Part Nine
July 19, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com There were times, and not a few, when I felt thrown out of all places. One Friday evening in Salt Lake, I went with my friend Dalit and her two children to eat at the home of a Jewish family. We had eaten there several times before. It was not a place in which I had a close connection or relationship. It was more of an open house, a Friday evening event, that I went to in order to give Dalit’s kids an experience of community and Shabbat. The host called me over in the midst of the meal and said, “Take a walk with me outside.” “Sure,” I replied. We walked. He was silent. Then he said, “You cannot come back. One of our guests has read on a blog that you are a ‘confessed child molester.’ I know that this is malicious nonsense. We have discussed this before. I tried to explain to her that this was nonsense. But she would not listen. You may never come back to our house.” I could not quite believe my ears. As I walked back into the house, it was clear that everyone present knew that this conversation was taking place. They all averted their eyes. I had never known the experience of the leper. The falsely accused. The contaminated one. At that moment people’s eyes bore into my back as if I was―God forbid―a rapist or a child molester. And my heart broke for all who are wrongly rejected and detested by a society filled with fear. I felt the pain of the falsely accused, of all those who die in prison―innocent, with no one to hear their pleas. I felt the pain also of those who are rightly rejected because they present a genuine danger. For, had we grown up in the brutality of their lives, who knows how our souls might have been formed? The pain was so intense that I fell on my bed unable to move for most of the night. But then, slowly, something shifted. A quiet yet unmistakable joy began to fill me. The image that filled my heart was that of the Hassidic masters who wandered the back roads of Europe. Often―unrecognized―they would be thrown out of all places of culture and learned society. In being rejected and thrown out, they were (according to their own testimonies) able to redeem the sparks of the Shekinah in exile. The Hassidic master was the servant of the sacred feminine. He liberated her by being thrown out of the company of good men just as she was thrown out of masculine culture and society, driven as it was by greed, ignorance, and fear. I began to understand that here I was, wandering the back roads of Utah, invited to be―as I always was―in the tradition of the great rebbes whom I love and revere. But not merely in the public and obviously delicious ways that I had been allowed to serve before―at prayer service, giving talks on wisdom, and receiving and loving people, but also in the hidden and more brutal byways of life. I was being invited, in fact, demanded by God to redeem the sparks of the sacred feminine, in myself, in relationship, in Torah, and in culture. And as morning rolled into afternoon, I began to dance. Slowly at first, but gradually building into a sweet ecstasy the like of which I had never known. That Sunday I had occasion to speak to a beloved friend, Brother David Steindl–Rast. I told him the story of that Sabbath. He introduced me to a story about St. Francis of Assisi called Perfect Joy. A beautiful gift from a gorgeous man. And then when I felt thrown out of all places, St. Francis picked up my shattered heart and guided me to joy. Not always, but sometimes, and that was enough. Perfect joy according to Saint Francis of Assisi: How Saint Francis, walking one day with brother Leo, explained to him which things are perfect joy.One day in winter, as Saint Francis was going with Brother Leo from Perugia to Saint Mary of the Angels, and was suffering greatly from the cold, he called to Brother Leo, who was walking on before him, and said to him: “Brother Leo, if it were to please God that the Friars Minor should give, in all lands, a great example of holiness and edification, write down, and note carefully, that this would not be perfect joy.” A little further on, Saint Francis called to him a second time: “O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor were to make the lame to walk, if they should make straight the crooked, chase away demons, give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and, what is even a far greater work, if they should raise the dead after four days, write that this would not be perfect joy.” Shortly after, he cried out again: “O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor knew all languages; if they were versed in all science; if they could explain all Scripture; if they had the gift of prophecy, and could reveal, not only all future things, but likewise the secrets of all consciences and all souls, write that this would not be perfect joy.” After proceeding a few steps farther, he cried out again with a loud voice: “O Brother Leo, thou little lamb of God! If the Friars Minor could speak with the tongues of angels; if they could explain the course of the stars; if they knew the virtues of all plants; if all the treasures of the earth were revealed to them; if they were acquainted with the various qualities of all birds, of all fish, of all animals, of men, of trees, of stones, of roots, and of waters―write that this would not be perfect joy.” Shortly after, he cried out again: “O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor had the gift of preaching so as to convert all infidels to the faith of Christ, write that this would not be perfect joy.” Now when this manner of discourse had lasted for the space of two miles, Brother Leo wondered much within himself; and, questioning the saint, he said: “Father, I pray thee teach me wherein is perfect joy.” Saint Francis answered: “If, when we shall arrive at Saint Mary of the Angels, all drenched with rain and trembling with cold, all covered with mud and exhausted from hunger; if, when we knock at the convent gate, the porter should come angrily and ask us who we are; if, after we have told him, “We are two of the brethren,” he should answer angrily, “What ye say is not the truth; ye are but two impostors going about to deceive the world, and take away the alms of the poor; begone I say;” if then he should refuse to open to us, and leave us outside, exposed to the snow and rain, suffering from cold and hunger till nightfall―then, if we accept such injustice, such cruelty and such contempt with patience, without being ruffled and without murmuring, believing with humility and charity that the porter really knows us, and that it is God who maketh him to speak thus against us, write down, O Brother Leo, that this is perfect joy. And if we knock again, and the porter should come out in anger to drive us away with oaths and blows, as if we were vile impostors, saying, “Begone, miserable robbers! To the hospital, for here you shall neither eat nor sleep!” And if we accept all this with patience, with joy, and with charity, O Brother Leo, write that this indeed is perfect joy. And if, urged by cold and hunger, we knock again, calling to the porter and entreating him with many tears to open to us and give us shelter, for the love of God, and if he should come out more angry than before, exclaiming, “These are but importunate rascals, I will deal with them as they deserve;” and taking a knotted stick, he seizes us by the hood, throwing us on the ground, rolling us in the snow, and shall beat and wound us with the knots in the stick―if we bear all these injuries with patience and joy, thinking of the sufferings of our Blessed Lord, which we would share out of love for him, write, O Brother Leo, that here, finally, is perfect joy. And now, brother, listen to the conclusion. Above all the graces and all the gifts of the Holy Spirit which Christ grants to his friends, is the grace of overcoming oneself, and accepting willingly, out of love for Christ, all suffering, injury, discomfort and contempt; for in all other gifts of God we cannot glory, seeing they proceed not from ourselves but from God, according to the words of the Apostle, “What hast thou that thou hast not received from God? And if thou hast received it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?” But in the cross of tribulation and affliction we may glory, because, as the Apostle says again, “I will not glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Amen. Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni: Part Ten
July 19, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com As I move forward, dear friends, I’d like to share a few final reflections about the last two years and the explosion that led up to it. For the past two years, I have not been able to go more than a short time without being overwhelmed by sharp pangs of pain, suffused with tears. I feel devastated anew each day by the radical and complete nature of certain betrayals. There is something so terrible and devastating about being betrayed by close friends; words cannot hold the immensity of the pain. One can, of course, only be betrayed by people one is certain could never betray one. It is only Judas, the most trusted and beloved of Jesus’ friends, who can betray him. Betrayal is intimately bound up with love and trust. Yet, paradoxically enough, it may be that we can be reborn only after having been betrayed. Perhaps it is only when all the cords we have attached to others are fully disentangled―when our mothers and fathers have abandoned us―that God can gather us up. I never had any idea that, even in the worst of circumstances, anyone could act as some people apparently did. I did not protect myself against them because I could not imagine that they would try to hurt me. I held my private life privately for fear it might be distorted, but never dreamed that the distortion might mean a shattering of a magnitude even vaguely similar to what took place. No part of me expected anything like what happened. Each time I think of it, a part of my heart is wounded, pierced, and stabbed anew. I experienced my death at the hands of those I loved a thousand times in my dreams, in the hallucinations of my waking hours, and in the indelibility of traumatized memory. Through all of it, but one prayer remained on my lips: God―do not take away my ability to love. God―do not make me bitter. Allow me to die into your arms and be reborn in your bosom, to do your will in love, in any and every way in which you command me. T.S. Eliot held my both my heart and my hand.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (East Coker, part III):I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth. You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.
Reading Psalms and the Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni
July 20, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com For me the way through the hardest of times of the last two years came from the book of Psalms. I tried meditation, taking refuge in the Buddha, as my colleague Genpo Roshi suggested. This was my path from May until July or August of 2006. I prayed. I had never been one for prayer. Mostly, because I loved to pray so much that when I would start I would so often fall into a kind of rapture that was hard for me to resist. So I denied myself―all too often―the gorgeous luxury of prayer. My feeling was that my life―in every waking and dreaming moment―was prayer. But at this time I began to pray again. But more than anything, I read psalms. By myself, in my apartment at night before I went to sleep, and when I could not sleep. With Dalit. And by myself again. I would read with tears streaming down my face, my heart screaming at the pain, at the injustice and betrayal even as I yearned for wholeness and embrace. To embrace every living thing. To embrace those who hurt me. To re-read the scripts where I had hurt my friends or let my students and supporters down through my naivete, mis-judgement or ambition. Who better then David understood Betrayal. Who better then David knew how to protest injustice even as he owned everything as being somehow a result of his own lack of wholeness. Who better then David knew how to reject the new age aphorisms of radical responsibility, rooted as they are in the denial of mystery and cleverly disguised hubris. Who better then David knew how to reject the easy platitudes of victimology and to claim his part in contribution system which created the palaces of his pain. David was my friend guiding me, confirming my own deepest held intuitions, holding me, giving me courage and audacity and gathering the torn shards of my shaterred heart. God in the second person. King David, in the subtle passages of power and complexity, agony and ecstasy, that make up Psalms understood me. More then anyone else I felt connected, loved, and understood by the energy of King David. He held me, gathered up my tears, and confirmed my very being. It was in David that I found the paradox of anger, outrage, and political perception brought together with broken heart, radical responsibility, grace, and hope. Reading Tehillim psalms almost every night in torrents of tears kept me alive and sane. ******** Slowly and gradually, the processes that I have engaged, the spiritual practices which guide my days, beautiful friends, and the gift of grace, have transmuted this pain. Slowly and gradually, I am emerging from a tunnel of such utter blackness and despair that I find it difficult to share or describe. Slowly and gradually, what initially looked like radical darkness is beginning to show faint glimmerings of light. What initially seemed to be utter slavery now reveals slivers of liberation and freedom. What was at first, for months on end, the most constricting and narrow of places is beginning to open, and I, once again but in a whole different way, begin to walk in the wide places. My soul yearns for the wide places. My life was for many years marked by victory after victory. The pleasure of accomplishment, loving, creativity, and manifestation were my chief joys. Surging forward in imitation of the divine explosion of creativity was the nobility which I sought to incarnate in the service of the divine. Then, in one fell swoop, my life was defeated. The only possible direction was inwards. A movement of radical contraction and recoil. Tzimtzum, in which all that I was holding needed to be let go. I was defeated by life. Yes Yes Yes became No No No. And in this defeat was the seed of new joy. I have been defeated by life and feel reborn in the very ashes of defeat. A man whose psychological work has been one of the touchstones on this journey, sent me a poem by Rilke sometime after I completed his “process.” Rilke has walked me through, and I am grateful. I have become the witness.
The Man WatchingI can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes that a storm is coming, and I hear the far-off fields say things I can’t bear without a friend, I can’t love without a sister. The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age: the landscape, like a line in the psalm book, is seriousness and weight and eternity. What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great! If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names. When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: when the wrestlers’ sinews grew long like metal strings, he felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music. Whoever was beaten by this Angel (who often simply declined the fight) went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand, that kneaded him as if to change his shape. Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings. posted by marc gafni
The Wounds of Love: A two year journey of pain, love and liberation: Marc Gafni
July 20, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com What I Have Done During the Past Two Years When a tragedy takes place, we seek to understand it. It is in understanding that we find some measure of comfort and safety. If we understand what happened, we can potentially avoid the tragedy next time around. If we understand the tragedy, we can extract meaning from the chaos, and depth and direction from what seems at first glance to be senseless carnage. We humans are condemned to the glory and pathos of meaning. Some two years ago a terrible tragedy took place in my life. A movement of teaching and spirit, which I had initiated in Israel, suddenly ended. The cause of the ending: complaints of sexual harassment, which were publicized in the Israeli media and the blogosphere. I first heard of the complaints when I stepped off an international flight into what can only be described as a cruelly orchestrated ambush. Thinking I was going to be picked up at the airport by my girlfriend, whom I loved and intended to marry, I was confronted instead by the report that complaints of sexual harassment had been filed by two people whom I knew well, and by a third person I had known some ten year earlier. I had no doubt that the complaints were false. And maybe they were never filed at all. I do know know and may never know what really happened or who said or did what. It has been blurred through the distorting prisms of press, egoic posturing, and fear. What is true? I had not sexually harassed anyone. I had not made any false promises of marriage or anything similar. I had not used my authority as an employer to explicitly, or in any implicit way, engage anyone sexually or gain sexual favors. It took months for me to discover, with the help of several friends who had been present, what had actually happened. Only slowly did I begin to understand who had initiated the process, who had encouraged it, and what persons came together to create the volatile combination that in one fell swoop ended almost a decade of virtually non-stop investment of heart love and life energy―effort of the kind necessary to create the movement. On that night and the weeks following, all was a blur of pain and tears. In a desire to stop the madness, I wrote a letter taking the responsibility for any and all sickness that had appeared in the system that I created upon myself. In the twenty-four months following, I engaged in three activities. First, a grief so intense and a pain so sharp that I will not attempt to describe it here overwhelmed me. Second, I looked carefully into the all-important question of Why. Why did this happen? What was it in me that allowed it to occur? How were my relationships flawed? I placed particular emphasis on finding out my own part in the contribution system that led to these events. Because of the l issues involved, I could have no direct contact with the parties themselves. So the weight of my process was an internal one. Part of this process was in formal settings, and part was in private spiritual practice with spiritual friends and teachers. Third, together with a group of friends and supporters, I gathered a team of professionals to bring together the necessary material to establish that the complaints reported in the media were categorically false. This process required almost 18 months of time and was fully successful. Now that this material is available, I prefer never to deploy it but rather to engage from a place of open heart in a healing process with the parties involved. Or as is sadly more likely to simply move on with my life and silently support everyone else in moving on with their lives. Unless absolutely necessary, I cannot see how reopening these issues would serve. If there is no choice, I will engage it, however, if we can avoid it and simply get on with constructive living and service, that seems immensely preferable for all concerned. These three processes have now ended. My energy and strength have slowly returned, thank God. I am now beginning a fourth process: To put on paper the teachings which have burned their way into my heart in the long days and longer nights of these past two years. The intensity of the pain took me to places I never dreamed possible. Let me state clearly at the outset that none of the teachings will mention specific people either directly or indirectly. Rather the teachings are about the broader and deeper issues that have emerged and clarified for me. Perspectives One of the key areas that became clear to me was that in any drama there are at least several different perspectives from which the events can be viewed. In Hebrew wisdom, we are fond of saying ‘Shivim Panim LeTorah.’ In my translation, which I will not elaborate on here, that means something like ‘Seventy Faces of Enlightenment.’ This means that if one can look at the same story in seventy different ways, fully inhabiting seventy different perspectives on the story, then one has moved an important step towards enlightened consciousness. The pivoting point that moves us from ego-centered personal consciousness to divine-centered enlightened consciousness is the ability to move with maximal fluidity between perspectives. The deep definition of idolatry in Hebrew wisdom is being locked in one particular value or view. In this story one can take many different perspectives. Holding all of the perspectives together begins to shed light on what happened. It begins to allow the full grace of the story to emerge in all of its meaning and magnificence. Becoming locked in only one perspective, on the other hand, darkens vision and usually leads to profoundly distorted and unethical actions in the world. In one of the books that I am currently preparing, I try to retell the story in ten different ways, each time from a radically different perspective. Each time the reader senses that he or she has grasped the story, the perspective shifts again. At the entrance to the Garden of Eden there is, according to tradition, a revolving sword of fire. The sword, which draws sharp distinctions and establishes right and wrong, is the archetype of the firmly entrenched perspective. In order for one to be able to enter the Garden, the sword of fire needs to be continually revolving: in short, constantly shifting perspectives are the entry ticket to the Edenic consciousness of enlightenment. In truth, this story is really just like every other significant and complex life story. By understanding the twenty-one possible perspectives, one may potentially obtain the twenty-one keys to enlightenment. You will notice that different systems and different people tend to focus on different perspectives, each one giving priority to a different view. A more enlightened view would be to hold all the perspectives together and to let a nuanced and compassionate view emerge from the integration. What is critical to note at the outset, however, is that not all perspectives are equal. There is clearly a hierarchy of perspectives. In some situations, for example, seventy five percent or more of the story is best explained from the injustice perspective. However, if one adopts only that perspective, one remains a victim. It is only in developing the other perspectives, through which one may have more power and influence, that one can begin to move from being a victim to a responsible player. While I will not list the perspectives here, I do discuss them briefly in my Dialogue with Dr. Cindy Golen and Sally Kempton, which is found in the Dialogues section of this site. Apologies That We All Might Owe Each Other Guided by a group of four spiritual friends who are all significant teachers in their own right, I have written letters of apology where appropriate and possible to anyone I feel I might have hurt in the course of my life. If I have not written you and you feel I should have, please contact me and we can discuss the matter. Anyone who feels that they might owe me such an apology is welcome to write me as well. There are some people with whom I would have liked to be in contact, however, once complaints were filed I was proscribed from making any contact with them. Guided by the best spiritual, psychological, and legal advice available, I have decided that it is time to move on. I have treated the events of the last two years as a death. I have engaged in full life review. I have engaged in a significant and serious process of internal reflection. I have lived in the pain and the regret daily. As well as in the joy, the gratitude, and the grace. My heart is open once again. I have made a commitment to more conventional boundaries. I have also made a commitment to transparency where appropriate about my personal life. Torah is flowing in my soul. Texts and chants burst from my being. I am filled with great love and desire to help people, to share the torah of liberation and grace with whoever wants to learn. I am filled with a burning desire to work with a group of friends in developing a new movement of social activism and political engagement, which will address three major issues. I will share in this regard at the appropriate time. I have pages and libraries of books welling up in me pleading to be put on the page. And Torah to share that dances in my heart. marc gafni
On Being a Spiritual Teacher or Spiritual Artist; On Changing my Name and the Hate Blogs of History: Part Two: Marc Gafni
July 21, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Truth be told, being a spiritual teacher or a spiritual artist in a particularly direct and open way is not at all easy. Your job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Depth is too easily dismissed as facile charisma. Primal jealousy breeds malice. And radical love and open heart will always be translated by some in ways that it is not intended. I have been teaching my whole life. The overwhelming relationship I have had with thousands of people has been wondrous, life affirming, profoundly loving, and beautiful. What a privilege for which I am grateful with every fiber of my being. And from the beginning of my path there were always a small group of people who responded negatively. Everything I did they interpreted negatively, through small eyes and small heart. And I am sure that parts of me which were not whole, which were distorted or not yet evolved or just plan off, served as a hook for their projections and critiques. I am a work in progress and I hope that I am evolving, refining, deepening, correcting, doing Teshuvah, returning to my most aligned self, every moment of every day. But the driving force was always a kind of primal malice. I am thankful to psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Berke who in personal conversation and in his published work helped me understand this dynamic in a far deeper way then I ever had. There were always more primal forces at play in these interactions then anyone would admit. Since malice can never truly be owned by the uninitiated, it goes by many more noble names. In the name of righteousness, nationalism, protecting women, perfecting society, all manner of evil is loosed in the world. There was, in the case of some teachers and colleagues and very occasionally in certain students, sometimes a sense that we were being nourished from the same soul root and somehow they felt that my nourishment was both undeserved and even worse, at their expense. The Veneer of civilization is very thin. When one is driven by primal malice, which one has no way of owning, one will say and do almost anything. Strangely the bearers of such malice are driven by a similar energy to the hate blogs. The difference is that the bearers of malice hide behind the veneer of respectability. However behind the scenes they work directly with the hate blogs in order to get the hate blogs to do there work for them. Some respectable folks have tried {unsuccessfully} to intimidate supporters and friends of mine by linking there names to hate blogs. Others have called up those who ran hate blogs, told them unspeakable lies, and then slunk back into the world of respectability, waiting for word that their hired character assassins, the suicide bombers of the Jewish community, aimed at the community itself, had done their dastardly deed. Let me share with you a few of the canards of the hate blogs just so you get a sense of the whole thing. 1) rumor has it that Gafni joined the sadomasochistic community in Salt Lake. 2) Rumor has it Gafni is now attracted to prepubescent children 3) Gafni is now going under the name Marc Israel 4) Gafni changed his name from Winiarz to Gafni “in order to hide his identity”. (The truth, by the way, is that Gafni hebraicized his name from Winiarz to Gafni, when he moved to Israel, like thousands of others have done – remember Barry who became Barrack – and that both names are mentioned on the author page of his book Soul Prints and in his other books as well as being mentioned in countless speeches and talks – not a great way to hide your identity – but then again truth or logic has nothing to do with the logic of hate blogs). 5) Gafni is dangerous to little boys and girls 6) Gafni is a confessed child molester or a confessed rapist Now while all of these canards come apparently from one particular source on the web, a source that once said on National Television that there is a national Jewish Satanic cult that murders babies, none the less, they are picked up by a web of like minded blogs and repeated without question. For the Jewish people throughout time to respond to the hate blogs of history by saying that these accusations are not true is to give them too much dignity. What are the Jews supposed to say…”No, we are not devils. No we do not molest and kill Christian children and suck their blood.” At a certain point, in a magnificent play of karma, the hate blogs, together with three or four other factors, created the hermeneutic prism which allowed natural mistakes which I made to be demonized, distorted, false claims to be reported or distorted in the press, and for all of this to coalesce in an absurdly serious sexual hysteria whose result was my spiritual murder. The great news however is that there is a lot to be said for being dead for two years. It is only in such radical pain and death that certain gifts can be received and life can be reborn. But that is all too intimate a conversation for now, so let us return to it at a another time if you will…. Back to our topic: How does one respond to the absurdity of hate blogs? If at all… This question comes up again and again in history. It’s most recent incarnation, as I have said above revolves around the Internet. On of the unacknowledged shadows of the Internet is the proliferation of hate speech. People hiding behind anonymity or the impersonal nature of blogging, have re-introduced the old and worn bigotry of hate speech, back into the center of culture. A blogger can say anything about anyone – For example, a website might say clearly or imply that Bill Clinton killed Vince Forster, his friend and staff member. Another blogger might repeat neo-Nazi canards about the “Jews sucking the blood of the world”. A third blogger might say as we have noted “Rabbi Gafni is attracted to pre-pubescent boys, a child molester, a confessed rapist or whatever sick fantasy the webmaster or mistress may have dreamed up or allowed to be published that day. In fact blogs of these last two natures not surprisingly link to each other. The hate blogs, which attack persons in the way I just described, are often linked to neo-Nazi and other hate sites. Not surprising at all. The core energy is the same. It involves latching on to natural characteristics of others, blowing them out of proportion and then demonizing them as the incarnation of abuse and evil. All of these are real examples of hate speech. Not rooted in the world of rational decency or fact, they cannot be responded to as such. For a host of reasons it is virtually impossible to file suit effectively for Internet libel. So what to do. 1) To ignore it. Definitely the best route. I have a friend who is a well-known spiritual teacher who was attacked with severe claims of abuse for many years. He is a tough teacher who calls people on their shadow and is, I am sure, imperfect himself. But the claims of abuse, which I asked him about directly, were far more understandable when he explained the depth and particulars of each relationship he had with the people making the complaints. Without that it was just out of context Internet libel that hurt him personally for many years. His response; Stay the course; stay focused on your mission and do not give any response to Internet abusers. Good Advice…. 2) To sue: Sometimes a possible route. 3) To Laugh – Always a good idea – something like, “No it is not true that I am a child molester, really I am into barnyard animals but shhh..Don’t tell anyone!” Or as a group of my woman friends suggested to me in laughter “We will start a website called “satisfied and speaking out.” Now laughter which points out the absurdity without getting drawn into the energy of hatred …that is really a good path and about that we will have to write more at another time…. ****** Posted by Marc Gafni
On Eros and Holiness, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part One: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com I just saw the movie Speed Racer. I want to thank Larry Wachowski and his brother for making the movie. You Rock! In an email or conversation I had with Larry some two years ago, he told me he had listened with his wonderful wife Karen to the DVD series of lectures that I gave at Naropa University one weekend called “On the Erotic and the Holy”. He said he was working on a new movie project in which he would incorporate some of those ideas into the movie. He did. He understood the teaching on a very deep level. He understood not because I taught it to him. He recognized the teaching because he already knew it. Luzatto, the wonderful kabbalist opens his major work by teaching us that, “All real teaching is but a reminder of what we already know”. But of course we already knew that. Larry returned the teaching of Eros to me in the movie Speed Racer. Not because he taught it to me, but because like Larry, I already knew it. But in reminding me of what I already know, filtered through the prism of his unique and open heart, he became my teacher this evening. And for that I am filled with gratitude. More then that; all of life is a unique teaching, designed in love to remind us of what we already know. Every single thing that happens to us in our lives, without exception, is only to remind us of what we already know. Except, of course, for the exceptions, which are to remind us of Mystery. Larry; I don’t know what happened at the Box Office. It is hard to beat the Matrix, you know. I saw the movie at the dollar theatre in Salt Lake City. If it did not bring down the box office it may be because Speed racer was a mystical movie in popular disguise. And people might have gotten lost – as we often do – in the disguise. The disguise was not the plot line. In the movie – the point was not the plot line which was simple and straightforward; rather Larry designed the movie as an evocation and invitation to Magic and Eros. To magic which is Eros and to Eros which is Magic. So thank you. Thank you Thank you. What a gift you gave us. Marc Gafni Please feel free to share your comments on info@marcgafni.com
On Eros and Holiness, Sanity, Speed Racer, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, the Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Two: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer is about teaching and transmission; Rex Racer, his father and mother and Trixie his girl friend since age seven or so are all Speed Racers teachers even as he is theirs. Speed Racer is about Eros. Not sex. Eros. It is about the Eros of the traditional family; It is about the Eros of Integrity. But most of all it is about the Eros of Aliveness in which the limited human being expands into his divine self. Speed Racer is about what it means to be alive. The meaning of life, not as theory but a lived experience. It is about the things that no one can take from you or from me. It is a mystical movie in the sense that it must be tasted and not merely watched or understood. Christian Theologian Thomas Aquinas and Kabbalist Isaac the Blind both wrote that the essence of the mystical was captured by the biblical David when he wrote Taste and See that God is Good. Speed Racer is about realizing your divine nature in the fullness of family, love, extreme danger, death, destruction, and rebirth. The plot is pretty simple even superficial. But that is because Larry did not want the plot to get in the way of the experience as it does so often in real life. There is a race car driver. Rex Racer. He races in order to race. He races in order to realize the pure gorgeousness of his divine being. When he races, he drives with more elegance, more beauty, and more grace then could possibly inhabit one skin encapsulated ego. He dies in the race only to be reborn into a different identity separated from his family and his brother. None the less he comes back to guide his younger brother, Speed Racer in the ways of the Erotic and the Ethical. When Rex or Speed Racer race they do not do so to compete with any other driver. When Speed racer races, he does not drive to win or be acclaimed. He drives Lishmah. Lishmah – a key word in ancient Hebrew wisdom means – “for it’s own sake”. It is the secret of liberation, of joy, of peace, and of courage – it is what can end suffering for every human being. Why do you eat ice cream? To bolster your ego, to fortify your fragile existence in samsara, in the world of illusion? to convince yourself that you exist? that you matter? that your life has meaning? Nope. You eat ice cream because in the moment of eating ice cream the world seems sane and good. You are fully present in the moment; You eat ice cream Lishmah, for it’s own sake. You eat exactly the amount of ice cream that you body can relish with dignity and grace and then you stop. This is of course completely different then eating ice cream from a place of desperation. Eating to cover up the emptiness instead of eating as an expression of the fullness of your being. Eating ice cream as a form of a- void –dance. When you eat to fill the emptiness you naturally eat way to often and way to much and you are never really satisfied. Emptiness is impossible to fill. You are not listening to the enlightenment which resides in your body which tells just when, how much and what to eat. As long as you eat as a form of pseudo eros- the dances of desperation we do to dance around the void – what I call, a-void –dance, you will need diet plan after diet plan and none of them will work. The second you give up screaming –I EXIST….and you let your fall into the depth of your being, you will wake up. You will know that you exist. You will no longer need to prove it. You can stop eating as way to dull the pain of your aloneness. You can stop eating as a substitute for love. You can stop to affirm your existence. Your existence and the value of your existence is the self-evident truth of your reality. For it is the truth of reality. You do not eat to exist. You Exist to Eat. Lishmah; For it’s own sake. It this simple moment of realization that will make you sane. Marc Gafni Share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On Eros and Holiness, Sanity, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Three: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer is about enlightenment realized in this world. In Buddhism this is the tenth Ox-Herding picture. In Hebrew wisdom it is Abraham after realization returning to the market place. At the moment of your realization you will become sane. And you will stop living like an insane person. Hebrew Wisdom teaches, “Any person who sins is insane”. To sin is to misperceive reality. {Do not have Talmud at my home here in Salt Lake, need to buy a set, but I think it is Talmud Sotah 4A.. If I remember wrong please write and let me know} No need for all the trauma and drama. We all sin. We all have moments of insanity when lose touch with what is really real. In those moments we sometimes hurt each other. And then we do it again. We forget what we already know about the structure of the self and the true nature of existence. Something in our heart closes and we become opaque to God. In Hebrew mysticism the goal is always Bittul. Literally that means nullification. Nullify the self. self-annihilation. Does not sound very attractive on the face of it. But writes an early mystic Rabbenu Nissim, some seven hundred years ago – and I am paraphrasing; “Bittul means to be –Shakuf = Transparent to God. For that is the truth of reality. When we are in Eros, and Speed Racer is all about Eros, we are transparent to God. That is why the crowds love him so much. He is a divine figure, a prophet and poet of Eros. Eros means being transparent God. Being transparent to God means… Living on the inside Participating in the yearning force of being Fullness of presence Radical Wholeness – where there is no separation between any part of reality- every part feels it’s place as part of the whole even as it retains it’s utter autonomy –and there is not contradiction – the paradox of whole plays out in the life of the human being in sacred laughter and joy. “There is no righteous person on the earth who does good and does not sin” writes King Solomon. And he knew. Eros is sanity. Eros heals sin. To be sane is to know reality. If I tell you I am the King of England. Oh my God, Gafni is insane you say. For he has lost touch with reality. That is to sin. Not to know yourself. Not to know your own reality. To somehow mis-identify yourself. Sin is the ultimate Identity crisis. It is to know your nature as a “part” but not to realize in your heart, in your mind, in your toenails, that the part, is a part of God. That in the Part is the Whole of God. “All Israel has a “part” of the world to come” writes one ancient text. Meaning – All those who are Israel- Israel speaks of three distinct experiences- Israel means three moments of God. The word Israel in the original Hebrew has three meanings! Shar El- those who see God, More then that; Those who See with God’s eyes To love is to see with God’s eyes. Yasahr El- those who live in direct and unmediated connection to God. To be Israel is to Source so much that you are not willing to let anything or anyone stand between you and Source. Shar El, those who struggle with God; who refuse to accept the easy aphorism of the old or new age; who seek the paradox and complexity that hold the simple truth. We can know re-read our ancient text. All Israel – that is every human being who is Israel, who sees with God’s eyes, who has not lost his knowledge that he is Source, who struggles with reality, reaching for paradox which is the name of God, in the name of God, as a manifestation of God, as God’s verb… Every human being who is Israel – realizes his Israel nature as soon as he knows That he or she is A PART of the “World To Come” – which in Hebrew mysticism means The Eternal world, the World of the Absolute, The World that is Always Becoming and Being, the world where being and becoming are One. The world in which the part and the whole are both separate and One. To know that I am, that You are part of the whole; to feel the whole move in you; move through you; animate you, penetrate you, receive you, speak from your throat {Zohar:The Shekinah speak though the voice of Moses} manifest in your smile, your tears your laughter- even as you maintain your autonomy and individuality as a unique and irreplaceable manifestation of divine joy and pleasure- that is what it means to be alive. That is what it means to live in Eros. That is the Messiah who is Speed Racer who is You. When you live from that place – you are Holiness. You are In what Plato called Eros. You are being and becoming as One. You are Speed Racer. You act in the world Lishmah. For it’s own sake. Marc Gafni Please share comments by emailing us at info@marcgafni.com
On Eros and Holiness, Sanity, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Four: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer Lives Lishmah; For its own Sake. Or in the second translation; Lishmah means – For the sake of the Name; You become a manifestation, a stunning, shimmering and glimmering diamond on the crown of God’s name. You become God’s name. For God’s name is the expression of every unique being – living their story – impressing their story on the lips of God, in divine kiss where giving and receiving are one, Eros, for it’s own sake –Lishmah, in the full aliveness and joy that is the birth right and natural state of every being. And if you live from that place, HaMakom, the place, then ultimately all of the posturing of power and pomposity, all of the corruptions in the leadership, all the failures of love, all of the duplicity, decadence and desperation of those who have betrayed and abandoned you no longer matter. Your heroic soul overcomes the hysterias of self-protection and contraction rooted in the hubris of the desperate and deluded self. Your heart expands and your re-member. You re-member who you are. Not merely in your mind. Not only in your heart. But in your body. In your toenails. The cowardice of those who betrayed you, those who were willing to leave to die in the streets does not matter. It does not matter if you might have gone to prison and been raped in the courtyard because you have been convicted on false complaints. These dreams of being raped in prison that haunted you – or is that me- that haunted for months evaporate into the grounded bliss of your self that has woken up to it’s true nature. Your true nature. My true nature. Teaches Isaac Chaver – 19th century mystic- Enter your true nature and you enter God. None of it matters. All of it matters. And it is all okay. You cannot go to prison because you are free. Fully free and Liberated. Song rises from your throat. You shatter all the prison cells of your soul. Your prayer rises and your song awakes the heavens that live in you. All of creation sings with you and through you even as you are the creator and all of creation at the same time. You forgive your betrayers even as you ask them to forgive you – for you realize together – that it is all all okay total good. The dance of desperation becomes the dance of eros. Simple compassion, loyalty, the private intimacy of a communication which is honest and true with a brother who betrayed you, left you to die, is enough to set your heart aflame with a fire so hot that it burns through all anger and hatred melts all of the walls and warms all the cold places in your heart in his heart as you realize that even the betrayal was an illusion. Yes the story matters. And so does forgiveness For we do not know the measure of our debt Nor the method of our atonement There simply is no separation. The Zohar, the canonical text of Hebrew wisdom writes- Sin is Separation. It is alienation from your true nature as a baby faced divine. Thank you Dante. God is beyond you. You –I –We fall on the ground fully prostrated in worship- faithful to all of the boundaries of the temple. And as we lay on the ground prostrated the spirit of the divine flows through raising us up to our feet, tall, proud with the pride of Source, fully alive, on fire, ecstatic, humble, living, loving and laughing with skillful means and open hearts through the pain. That is what it means to live for it’s own sake. To live for the Name. Lishmah. To live as the name. To look in the eyes of your lover- NO not merely your romantic partner – but in the eyes of the bus driver, the waiter, the postman- the persons who cuts you off in traffic – and cry out Oh God. Oh God… Oh God… Go Speed Racer. Go Speed Racer. Go Speed Racer Go… Marc Gafni Please feel free to share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On Eros, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Five: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer is Eros= Holiness= Sanity= Atonement= Joy Everyone has a place in life where they can be sane. That is the place where they know reality. Where part merges with whole in the fullness of presence, which wells up from the inside. This is Eros. This is Speed Racer. This is You and this is Me. Oh my God…. This is why I teach. I do not teach for fame and fortune. I do not teach for financial security. I do not teach to become embraced as a great wise man or profound and brilliant scholar and transmitter of the tradition. Although in more contracted moments each of these motivations has tried to find it’s way in and sometimes impacted the purity of a moment… But that has never been the core of it for me. And these two years –with their searing pain have purified something in me that thirty years on the mediation cushion – Which I would never do anyways☺ – Could never do. These two years stripped away much that was unnecessary and helped me hold core, not only in moments of ecstasy, but as part of an integrated and steadier realization of the Not me but I. I am the Lord your God. Humiliation has a way – if your surf it’s waves and do not drown- of becoming humility. Not self-abasement, which is but another strategy of hubris. But the humility in living the full audacity and courage of being transparent to God. I teach – because as I open the text and submit myself to it; the text of the great traditions, the text of torah, the text of the torah of life; If I am humble and open and in love…something happens. The me falls away and the texts –after checking to see if – I- am really present – begin to talk. In me. Through me. The I speaks. If I am willing to cry before I teach – then the tears cleanse the dross and the surface pain, opening up the palaces of realization, wisdom, insight, compassion, and joy. Sometimes… I can hear the Chassidic master whispering in my ear. I can feel the Talmudic master as his lips move and say torah – in complete unison with my lips. Every word becomes torah. Every word is chosen by the torah as it flows through me finding it’s way with a sure sense and song – completely beyond any ability, which resides in my skin encapsulated me ego. Sometimes.. As I begin to teach I can feel the room slowly fill up. A rabbi from the 14th century comes and sits in the back. A mystic from the 12 the century sits in the front row. Abraham Isaac and Jacob, Joseph, Rachel, Leah, Rebecca and Sarah find their places and smile as the teaching pours from me – the me which is not me, I, the self which is small and contracted falls away. The mind which is small expands to Big Mind- mochin de-gadlut and the heart which is closed opens and expands to Big heart – mochin de-gadult; and my heart is aflame as the heart of the spring which yearns towards its Source And in the yearning fully merges with Source. At some point in the story Speed Racer merges with his car. Hear O Israel. Listen to the Car. It will tell you.. The hills are alive with the sound of music… When one is in the fullness of Eros the animate and inanimate become whole and ultimate alienation between matter and spirit is overcome. Much as in the final scene in Larry’s movie Matrix Three, the Hero merges with the machine as he/we realize that there is truly no separation. All dualities are overcome. The text is no longer letters written on a page by men who have long died. The text is alive. It becomes a living breathing, pulsating organism. The separation between the reader of the text, the writer of the text, the inspiration that breathed the text into life, the words and even the very parchment is transcended and included; all become a seamless one. This is the hidden meaning – according a hidden kabalistic teaching of the Hebrew wisdom mantra – God Israel and Torah are One. Why I teach- whether as a rabbi, a spiritual teacher or spiritual artist it matters not at all… I teach because I am. I teach in order to teach. I teach because in teaching God breathes through me as he and she has inspired all the teachers in my lineage and in all the lineages. I teach for the same reason that I eat ice cream. Just because. JUST BECAUSE. For it’s own sake. Lishmah. For the sake of the name as an expression of the Name. Speed Racer. To live from the inside in the full wonder, true humility, radical amazement and holy audacity of realization. When I teach or paint words as a spiritual artist on the canvas of my life I am not better then you. It gives me no power over you. I am rather your servant, your friend, your brother and your sister. We do not need today more rabbis posturing and preening and powering and pushing, and pretending. We need not more spiritual teachers but more spiritual friends. Spiritual friends from whom we are willing to receive transmission. Spiritual friends that we will love even as they love us. We must stop all the trauma and drama. Trauma and drama are sometimes real, but all to often they are pseudo eros masquerading as piety, integrity and outrage. We need – all of us – to let go of the pathos of our selves in order to come INTO the full Power of our Selves. A spiritual friend is a spiritual teacher who becomes a spiritual artist when they renounce all power and live – truly live from the inside. For you see the essence of Art is Lishmah – for it’s own sake. For the sake of the Name. The true artist draws no distinction between his canvas and his life. His life is both his text and his canvas. From his life, from the particulars and concrete details of his unique and individual life he teaches. But only if he is willing to be utterly destroyed. To lose everything in order to find everything. To surrender into God even as he affirms his autonomy and acts with discernment and fierce grace on the stage of Samsara. In Hebrew we say that enlightenment is achieved when Ani- the small self – and Ayin, the no – thing nature of the Expanded self – realize their identity. When this happens you understand that you can enter the holy of holies at any time and any place. In the end it does not really matter where you teach. Whether on a stage to a thousand people or in an intimate circle of student’s Or in a casual conversation with a watier.. The holy of holies is everywhere. When Speed Racer races the last race of the movie he is in the holy of holies. He is in Zohar, in Eros, in Holiness. From that place of Eros – Fierce Grace is born. From that place of Eros, Ethics are born. From that place of Eros, in the teaching of the Zohar {Gen. 4a} God is born and reborn in the sacred play of hide and seek which God and Man stll play with each other. God hides because he desperately wants to be found. Man in search of God. God in search of Man Meet in Eros. This is the holy of holies. Marc Gafni Published on marcgafni.com Please feel free to leave comments on info@marcgafni.com ps. these five posts were written spontaneously very last night as tears streamed down my face. The voice of the “I” of love, channeled in human form wrote this note to myself. “I have also been crying all night…It is so much that we have been through, and there is still another year of work ahead.. I am tired and grateful and deeply sorrowful and grateful and humbled and wanting to walk the path of Love more fully. Thank you God for your gifts. Thank you God for the challenges you present to me.. Nothing about anything is bad…All good as they say”
Eros and Holiness: Marc Gafni: Part Nine: Feel free to start reading from here; the part numbers are only for those who want to follow the whole teaching all the way through…
July 24, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Epigrams below each capture the Dharma of Eros and Holiness. “Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…” -John Keats “Expanded consciousness is when the Taste of the Bark is as the Taste of the Tree.” -Abraham Kuk Leshem Yichud kushdha brich- hu uShehinateh. May this be for the sake of uniting the masculine God with the feminine Goddess. -Kabbalistic Meditation Ma Yafit Uma Naamt Ahavavh Betanugim. How beautiful and how pleasurable when love and eros are together. -Song of Songs Eros and Holiness: A soul reaches heaven. Or at least she thinks its heaven. It is a magnificent banquet hall. The tables are arrayed with all manners of delicacies. The guests have forks and knives in hands, ready to feast. A bell rings to begin the meal. There is a flurry of movement and then, to her astonishment, she sees that the guests arms are bound straight, unable to bend at the elbows, unable to take fork to mouth to partake in the great repast. The mob of hungry souls fling the food about frantically, cursing their predicament, shrieking at each other. A terrifying scene. The soul hurries away from what she is sure must have been a glimpse of hell, only to arrive at yet another banquet hall, identically decked with tables of food and guests waiting to feast. A bell rings, there is a flurry of movement. Here too, the guests arms are bound straight, unable to bring food to their own mouths. But to the soul’s astonishment, she see no fury and frustration here. Rather, each guest with outstretched arms is gently feeding the guest seated across from them. The banquet hall brims with pleasure and peace. Heaven indeed. If there is any truth to the myth – and myths are always true – we are in hell. Competition is the reigning paradigm. Getting ahead is the direction of our lives. But there is no finish line. So we collapse somewhere along the path and wonder if it had to be this way. Life is a mess ..but it doesn’t have to be. It could be heaven. * I am a Kabbalist. And I am in pain. I am in pain because the world and therefore God is in pain 1. To shatter the narrowness of my egocentricity and to feel both the pain and joy of world/God is essential to my spiritual quest. Kabbalists refer to this consciousness as “participating in the pain of the Shehina in Exile”. Shehina, like Shakti for the Hindus, is the sensual feminine God Force. The God force is in pain. Seemingly unnecessary and self inflicted pain. The primary response to pain however cannot be one of apportioning blame – either to human beings or to God. Although at first blush both seem to be more that a little bit at fault. The essential response to pain must be loving and healing. So I offer you these writings on Eros and Holiness as a gift in love. I pray that it will be healing, refreshing and ultimately transformational. **** footnotes: fn. 1 This idea, which was extensively developed in Kabbalistic and Midrashic sources, is held by the Talmud and Midrash to have its origin in the Torah. In Isaiah 63:9 it is written ”In all their sufferings He was lo [not] afflicted. The Hebrew word lo is read with a vav meaning Him, rather than with an aleph, which would mean “is not”. The verse can therefore be read as “In all their sufferings, He, too, suffers”. Others derive this principle from the verse from Psalm 91:15: “I am with him in suffering”. See TB tractate Sotah 31a, and Ta’anit 16a, where two sages use these two verses as a basis for this idea. See also Midrash Rabba Bereshit 2:5, or Midrash Tanhuma Beshalah 28. Marc Gafni please feel free to leave comments at info@marcgafni.com
Letter to Friends that went out today sharing the website and my public perspective on where we are and where we need to go: Marc Gafni
July 24, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com A Public Letter send to people on my mailing list inviting them to look at our website. Hi Friend, Shalom Chaver I hope this note finds you well. First a technical note: I do not have a formal mailing list – my technical assistant took these names from my old computer so if you should not be on this list or do not want to receive these messages just let us know. I am concluding a long and painful retreat which has lasted more then two years. There has been much learning in this time, many tears and not a little bit of laughter. I am surrounded by wonderful friends and I am grateful to them for their love and support. It is now necessary for many reasons to end my retreat and return to my more active life. I invite you to visit my website marcgafni.com. It is straightforward and almost self explanatory. So just a very short word of explanation at this juncture. First there is a Hebrew and English section. However, since I do not yet have a good Hebrew translator on staff here in Salt Lake City. the bulk of the material is in English. On the left hand side you will see a list of tabs marking different sections of the website. In the articles section you will find twenty categories of articles which I invite to you read and enjoy. In the section aboutmarcgafni.com you will get a general view of the website. In the section re-imagine library you will get a general sense on what I am working on these days. On the home page you will find at the top, an article which appeared recently in Catalyst Magazine, an award winning US publication which will give you a general sense of my last two years. The article clears my name of some of the distortions and falsehoods that have circulated on the internet and in some press forums for the past couple of years. Like all press articles it is partial and incomplete, but the reporters captured at least some sense of the last two years. The article is available on the home page. As the writers indicate, they spend several months and reviewed hundreds of pages of primary source documentation in order to reach their conclusions. The writers had direct and indirect contact with representatives of all the voices in the story. On the home page as well, you will find a musical and poetic welcome to the site; Together the poem, the music and the words share the intention of the website. There is also a large section of recorded dialogues with different spiritual teachers -many of which i recorded in the last year. There is as well, a large section of free audio and video teachings plus a store marcgafni.com where you can buy a more extensive lecture series as well as find links which will enable you to order other books and a cd series. There is also a section called Controversy where I give my perspective on events of the last two years. I try to do so from a place of open heart, even as I feel the full pain of the wounds of love. It was written very carefully, together with a relatively large team of people from diverse backgrounds, which had input and guided the process. The words are precise and chosen carefully. I tried to share my perspective without demonizing anyone and without attacking anyone even as I speak for the first time on these issues and decisively refute the idea that I sexually harassed anyone or the like in Israel. At the same time I own my personal responsibility for my part in the contribution system that created these events. In this writing I try and demonstrate the move from the old thinking of “blame frame” in which we point the finger and demonize, making ourselves victims in order to let ourselves off the hook. This kind of thinking while occasionally having some validity is ultimately far too limited and partial to be transformative or healing. At the same time, the facile new age nonsense that suggests that we are the sole creators of our reality and that therefore we should take full responsibility for everything that happens to us is also inappropriate. This kind of thinking while occasionally having some validity is ultimately far too limited and partial to be transformative or healing. This position also seemingly noble is rooted in a dangerous hubris, in which we arrogate to ourselves complete power over our lives, a seductive view which soothes the gnawing fears which haunt human beings, but which is ethically corrosive at its core. A more appropriate position would seem to be the third way. The move from blame frame to contribution system. In a contribution system everyone needs to see what their part in creating the reality that unfolded and to take appropriate responsibility for their part in that system. This allows one to identify their correct responsibility and directs one to the only place where we really have power over our part – whether five percent or fifty – in the contribution system. At the same time we have fully prepared these two years on many levels and will not sit by silently if I am falsely attacked. We will respond fully and effectively on many levels. This much is demanded by my love of my children, friends students and myself. I am hugely appreciative to all of you who have written me since the website came up. Your letters and your words, now and over the last two years have meant so so much to me. My family, colleagues, and I are moving on with our lives. I just got off the phone with my son Yair who was standing at a bus stop in Be’er Sheva and he said to me what my son Eytan said to me only two weeks before. “Abba, this is enough. We need our Abba back. This must end already. We really need you at this time in our lives” I promised them to do whatever I could to end this chapter, learn its lessons, and move to a more constructive and evolved chapter in our lives. On the website I share that these two years have been like a death for me. Before death we do a life review. As I said on the website, I apologize with heart and soul to anyone who feels that I might have hurt them in this life time. I invite anyone who feels they have unfinished business with me to contact me. My heart is open. I give you my forgiveness for any way in which you may have hurt me and I implore your forgiveness for any way in which I may have hurt you. And it is forbidden – for all of us – to cry more than it hurts. Let’s – all of us – and me first, give up the demonization game, take back our projected shadows, and transform the insults of love into the wounds of love, learning all the time to practice keeping our heart open in the midst – not only the joy of eros, but also the pain of eros. I also thank the thousands of people in my life time that I have been privileged to help and to serve in large or small ways. It has been a huge privilege to serve you and to bring joy to your life. There is so much that needs to be done. So much hurt and pain and suffering in the world. We are Gods verbs. We are God’s language. We must live as love. We must be love. We must act to realize love and open hearted discipline and compassion in our world. The future of the World and according to the teachings of the kabbalists, the future of God, depends in no small part, on you and me. I will seek to embody the divine life force in every situation I encounter. I will try and teach and embody the torah of boundaries and when the torah demands the expansion boundaries as it sometimes does, I will try and embody that demand in a direct and transparent way. I pray that in my day to day life, in my sharing, in my writing, my action and my being, I will be aligned to the will of God and serve as a source of love and compassion to all those whom I encounter. And if I die sooner then I would like to, I want to leave in the world only my love. Yours, Marc Gafni please feel free to share a comment on info@marcgafni.com
A New Library: Marc Gafni
July 25, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Introduction: The following modest proposal was submitted to the board of the foundation as an outline of the library that the foundation would like to produce. The lead writer and teacher for this library is Mordechai Gafni who has been designated as the teacher in residence for the foundation. Mordechai {Marc} will be working in close collaboration with teachers from many traditions in teaching and writing this library. We pray that this library serves to open the heart of all people. There is a great need for creative Jewish thinking which will chart the next steps in Jewish Thought and Practice in a way that is both compelling, original and accessible. There is very little of this kind of writing and teaching in the contemporary Jewish community. Most of the writing available is of one of two kinds. The first kind is geared towards the Orthodox community, offering learned analysis and guidance in observing the law with little in the way of a spiritual response or framework with which to grapple with the unique and ultimate issues of our generation. Most of the writers in this genre are deeply disconnected with the pulse and tenor of the times and view the Western world as just another exile to be survived before the coming of Messiah. This literature is important and makes a valuable contribution, but at the same time many people are thirsting for something more. The second type of literature is fully of creativity and modern parlance, but it is not rooted in any significant way in the unique texts, practices and frameworks of Hebrew Wisdom. Most of the writers are actually unable to competently read a Jewish text in it’s original form and that is often readily apparent in the book. Often this kind of material is what someone once termed “Buddhism with a Tallit”. This literature is important and makes a valuable contribution, but at the same time many people are thirsting for something more. Our library will seek to transcend and include the unique strengths of each of these writing genres while avoiding their very significant weaknesses. In the following posts I will suggest a few names for the library and then after the sabbath, lay out the intended content. I look forward to your comments. with love marc gafni comments on info@marcgafni.com
Possible Names for our New Library: Marc Gafni
July 25, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Library or Series that we are suggesting might be called by any one of the following names: Next Steps Library {or Series} New Jewish Thought Library {or Series} Library of Evolutionary Kabbalah {or Series} Jewish Spirituality Library {or Series} Jewish Enlightenment Teachings Library {or Series} Or the Library might be framed as a “Reclaiming Judaism” Library {or series.} Re-Vision Library or Re-Visioning Series Re-Imagine Library Idra Library Library of Integral Judaism and Integral Kabbalah We plan and God Laughs my mum used to always say. But still we must reach. For a “man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?” with love, marc gafni shabbot shalom please share your ideas, comments and critique at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: Part Ten: Marc Gafni
July 26, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com I am a Kabbalist. And I am in pain. I am in pain because the world and therefore God is in pain1. To shatter the narrowness of my egocentricity and to feel both the pain and joy of world/God is essential to my spiritual quest. Kabbalists refer to this consciousness as “participating in the pain of the Shehina in Exile”. Shehina, like Shakti for the Hindus, is the sensual feminine God Force. The God force is in pain. Seemingly unnecessary and self inflicted pain. The primary response to pain however cannot be one of apportioning blame – either to human beings or to God. Although at first blush both seem to be more that a little bit at fault. The essential response to pain must be loving and healing. So I offer you this book as a gift in love. I pray that it will be healing, refreshing and ultimately transformational. ****** I want to share with you an ancient reality map rooted in a secret tradition of the Hebrew mystics. This spirit map has within it to be, both the balm to our pain and the gateway to our bliss. ****** Our pain is not caused by technology overdose, nor by communication problems; certainly it is not punishment because we were bad. All human beings, good and not so good, experience some endemic pain as part of their ongoing reality. Our suffering is caused by a misreading of our reality map, which prevents us from accessing the full joy that is our birthright. Ultimately the painful mess we are in is rooted in a failure of love. ****** Now when I say life is a mess I am not only referring to the major and minor wars that rage around the globe. I could mention that in the past century over one hundred million people have been deliberately killed in wars whose goals we have long since forgotten. Strange wars fought from places of smallness and fear. Wars in which countries go about brutally massacring each others children for a few years then have a conference where everyone smiles and it is called peace. It also might be worth remembering that that these wars that once seemed so distant to us have become much closer. Non loving and repressive regimes in Afghanistan have very direct and painful impact on morning coffee in Manhattan. Indeed as our planet shrinks we begin to awaken – even if initially it is only a political awakening – to that old mystical truth: we are interconnected with every other being on the planet. Yet all this is not the full measure of the pain I describe. ******* I am also not ‘merely’ referring to the policies of non loving and alienation that leave twenty million people a year dead of hunger and hunger related diseases. Nor am I focusing primarily on the fact that the families of those twenty million people cannot help but despise the United States. They see us, the Western world as evil. We have the wealth and means to feed every mouth on the planet. But we don’t. We choose to let them remain hungry.. To a starving person or their brother all the complex explanations of inaction, rooted in sophisticated realpolitik, simply do not wash. Nor should they. They know that starving people in the world is a function of one cause only; a failure of love. ******** Even however if we could somehow put aside the starvation and the wars- an even superficial view of our own society reveals that something is seriously askew. Not a detail problem but an essential flaw in the core story line of our culture. Every forty seconds someone kills themselves. This year upwards of one million people will experience a failure of love so intense and painful that they will violently end their lives. In the last 45 years suicide rates have increased by sixty percent world wide. Among the leaders are western democracies like Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland and of course the United States. ******* Suicide used to be largely limited to the elderly. People who had, at the end of their lives, looked back and been unable to make sense of their story. Not particularly comforting news because all of us want to, and most of us will, reach old age. The even more jolting news, however, is that the average age is going down. Suicide is now one of the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44. Now of course it would be nice to dismiss this slightly unpleasant information with the thought that only crazy or severely depressed people commit suicide. Note, however, that for every actual suicide there are ten suicide attempts. Suicide attempts have increased in the last 45 years twenty times more – than “successful” suicides. ********* Add to this the easily inferred reality that for every person who attempts suicide there are a lot more people in just as much pain. Just as lonely – just as alienated and just as depressed. They simply are unable to do anything about it. So they live in limbo – suspended between hells – all the while maintaining the facade of normal and even successful lives. ******** Albert Camus once wrote “There is but one truly serious problem…judging whether or not, life is or is not worth living…”2 Tragically Camus, together with … answered the questions in the negative. The emptiness was to much to bear. He, like so many others could not find his way to the fullness of life. Marc Gafni comments are welcome on info@marcgafni.com
Original Sources for Parts Five, Six and Seven: Eros and Holiness:Marc Gafni:
July 26, 2008
posted by marc gafni on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com For an explanation about the nature of these notes and the nature of creating new spiritual thought in general particularly from ancient and sacred sources, see please Eros and Holiness: Post Ten: 1 This idea, which was extensively developed in Kabbalistic and Midrashic sources, is held by the Talmud and Midrash to have its origin in the Torah. In Isaiah 63:9 it is written :”In all their sufferings He was lo [not] afflicted. The Hebrew word lo is read with a vav meaning Him, rather than with an aleph, which would mean “is not”. The verse can therefore be read as “In all their sufferings, He, too, suffers”. Others derive this principle from the verse from Psalm 91:15: “I am with him in suffering”. See TB tractate Sotah 31a, and Ta’anit 16a, where two sages use these two verses as a basis for this idea. See also Midrash Rabba Bereshit 2:5, or Midrash Tanhuma Beshalah 28. For a more extensive treatment of the human obligation to participate in the pain of the Shehina, see Meir Eyal’s article on this subject (have any idea where this is? Should I have n search?) 2 The sense of human participation in the loss of erotic union of divinity, is beautifully expressed in the Zohar, vol. 3, p. 213b. “What is meant by “remembering Zion”? (This may be compared) to a man who had a beautiful and precious palace that marauders came and burned. Who is in pain? Is it not the master of the palace? Simalarly, the Shehina is in exile. Is not this the pain of the tzaddiq? (tzaddiq refers to the sfira of yesod)…When we remember Zion, we remember His pain over His union (with the Shehina, which has been lost).” 3 In the Zohar, the “code name” for the Shehina is “Knesset Yisrael”, the congregation or gathering of Israel – Shehina is the group soul – see also Ethics of the Fathers chap. 3 mishna 6. 4 This core idea is the subject of much of the present work, and will be developed and elaborated upon in its course. At this point I would note that I am not claiming that Shehina is always used in this manner. I am rather making a more limited claim that Shechina is sometimes used in Zoharic texts as a virtual synonym for the Greek idea of eros. For a more extensive treatment of this subject, see Y. Liebes’ classical article “Zohar and Eros”. 5 When Shehina is not with her Lover, she is called “desolate” or “dry”, void of growth, incapable of intimate sexual contact in which the feminine waters are aroused. This is an oft-repeated idea in the Zohar, and especially in Tiqunei Zohar. See, for example, Zohar vol. 1, p. 23b, or Tiqunei Zohar 58a, and 73b. In this state, her garments are those of the qlipot, (see footnote 99). 6 Another of the seemingly endless unfoldings of this Hebrew root is hillul – desecration. The connection between these two states that I suggest in this chapter is in fact a recurring theme in Tiqunei Zohar, where the term hilul Shabbat, desecration of the Sabbath, is interpreted as “desecrating her emptiness” (hilul, desecration, and halal, emptiness). The Sabbath is of course the Shehina, whom we have identified as Eros. See, for example, the comment on the biblical verse “Keep (protect) My Sabbaths” (Lev. 19:3): “Concerning whoever introduces a foreign presence in her emptiness, (making her into) public property, or as wine that was used for forbidden libations, or even as a prostitute, it is written (Numbers 19:13): “He has defiled the Sanctuary of the Lord, that soul shall be cut off from its people” (Tiqunei Zohar, p. 77b-78a). See also Tiqunei Zohar 24b. 7 Isaiah 54:1 and 66:8. 8 8 This echoes the Lurrianic idea of the “empty void” which was the first move of the Infinite preceding creation. This Void was created as a result of a “withdrawal” of all-encompassing Divinity into Itself, creating a space void of infinity, where the creation of finity could unfold. 9 Leonard Cohen, in his album “Various Positions”. 10 In the beginning of the Idra Rabba, one of the core sections of the Zohar, Rabbi Shimon asks the assembly: “How long are we to sit in the existence of one pillar?” (Zohar, vol. 3, p. 127b). There are many different interpretations as to the meaning of “one pillar”. One of them, based on various sources, identifies “pillar” as a phallic symbol, hence an expression of the Kabbalistic sefira of yesod, the seat of the sexual organs (see Y. Liebes, “The Messiah of the Zohar”, for a detailed discussion of this and other interpretations, along with relevant sourcing). If this is in fact the case, then we can understand R. Shimon’s cry as a call against Eros being limited to Yesod, the sexual. A careful reading of the Idras and the Sifra deTzniyuta sections of the Zohar indicates that for the Zohar, the meaning of creation in tikkun is Erotic Union. R. Shimon is therefore declaring that we should not view Erotic Union as being limited to sex. 11 “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, the word of God: I have placed My Torah within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be for them a God, and they will be for me as a people. And no longer will a man say to his comrade and to his brother, Know God, for they will all know Me, from the small to the great, this is the word of God. For I will forgive their sin and I will no longer remember their iniquity” (Jeremiah 31:64-65). 12 Zohar vol. 1, p. 116b. 13 A conflation of two verses: Song of Songs 2:5 and 3:1. I am following Me’or Ainayim, who also combines these two verses. See following footnote. 14 Me’or Ainayim, in the Anthology of Quotes (Liqutim). posted by marc gafni please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Love or Die: A Politics of Love: Eros and Holiness: Part Eleven:
July 27, 2008
marc gafni posted by marc gafni please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Path of Love One cannot be told that life is worth while –one must experience the love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity and worth of their lives. The sense that is so essential to making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second hand consumers of second hand joy – never touching love or life directly. And when love fails their truly is nothing left to live for. For love – not the narrow romantic expressions of it – but love as it’s core is life itself. We have so much. Most of us have a roof over our heads, a thousand foods to choose from a day, all sorts of dress options for every season, a number of friends and of course, infinite varieties of entertainment available. Many of us have fulfilled the goals and objectives we have sought to achieve. Some even have realized far more than they thought possible. And yet it remains– the gnawing sense of emptiness that will not go away. We can ignore it – we can find a thousand ways to kill time hoping to fill or kill the emptiness. And yet we remain – at our core – unful-filled. What do you do when everything you always wanted isn’t enough? What do you do when you are surrounded by people and yet at the end of the day you still feel almost unbearably lonely? It comes then as no surprise that the leading cause of death – by far – is heart disease. Heart in Hebrew – the language of the mystics – is Lev. Lev is the Hebrew source for our English word- Love. Love is under attack- it is experiencing often fatal dis-ease. Heart Failure. The failures of love. We are confronted, personally and globally with a stark choice – Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury – it is an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half a century modern psychology has documented an age old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So too our world, personal and global – even with all the resources, intelligence and technology at our disposal- will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love. Eros. marc gafni please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: Part Thirteen: To Love is to Know REALITY: Marc Gafni
July 28, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com To Love is to Know REALITY. I wrote yesterday of the path of Love. {Eros and Holiness: Blog Post Nine; The Path of Love}. But what is love? Love is the inner reality of the universe when all else is stripped away. The lack of love is the source of all that creates evil in the universe. Evil results from the denial of love in all of it’s forms. Love is a denial of reality. To Love therefore is to know reality. The lover is the most realistic person around. And the lover sometimes also appears as dreamy eyed, wistful and star struck. Because sometime reality in it’s surface manifestation is unreal. We then need to wist, dream and passion, verbs all, in order to find our way back to what is real. This writing is in some sense a work of ideas. But it would be a mistake, unreal, to call it merely an intellectual work. It comes from the heart as much as from the head. Sometimes I thought so hard it hurt, at other times my heart danced with ecstasy, even touching on two occasions on what Buddhist and Hebrew mystics have termed enlightenment. At other times the pain was so radical and intense that I prayed for my own death. By the time you reach the end of these writings I hope you will have experienced a taste of enlightenment yourself. In tomorrow’s blog post I will write a word or two of what I mean by the word Enlightenment. A word that is frightening to many people but whose meaning is simple, direct and core to many important teachings in the Hebrew wisdom tradition, particularly those of my teacher Mordechai Lainer of Izbica.
Eros and Holiness: Part Fourteen: Life is a Recovery Movement: Marc Gafni:
July 28, 2008
Life is a Recovery Movement: Marc Gafni Published on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In reaching for the awakening of love we do well to bear in mind the teaching of mystical master Menachem Mendel of Kutz. Writing in eastern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, he offers an original deeply resonant re-reading of a biblical myth text. “These words which I command you this day should be on your hearts”. How do words sit on a heart? Do they not either enter in or stay outside? What could it means to have words sit “on the heart”? Answers the master, ‘When dealing in issues of heart – lev – love – one cannot force the heart’s opening.’ Love is mystery – the word mystery deriving originally from the Hebrew word Seter – meaning secret. The greatest secret, the most wondrous mystery, is the openings and closings of the heart. ‘The best we can hope to do – and that is a lot – is to place our words on the heart—and when the heart opens the words fall in.’ These writings are about truths deeper than logic and impenetrable by the limited tools of reason. The truths we seek to touch are not irrational but trans-rational, beyond the feeble grasp of the merely rational mind. They are about a knowing beyond knowing. Listen with all five senses but also with faculties beyond the five we usually employ. Listen with love. In the Hebrew language, the first letter of the alphabet is Aleph. Aleph is a love letter. The following three letters are Beit, Gimel and Dalet. In Hebrew, those three letters also form a word, “Beged,” meaning both clothing and betrayal. For we all know that there are two kinds of clothing. Occasionally we have clothes that really express who we are on the inside and that is good. But all too often clothes are a place in which we hide, betraying our truer selves. Betraying our Aleph, our silent places. And so it is with language. The first letter – the silent letter – is Aleph. It is the place beyond words and… And then comes Beit-Gimel-Dalet. And come they must, for language is magical. With language, the mystics tell us, our world was created. For as quantum physics teaches us, the core construct of our reality is information and language, the medium of information. And yet as you read these words, know that they point beyond themselves towards the Aleph. Towards the lover in you. Because of this, I will often speak directly to the knower in you relying always on the truth of two kabalistic koans. The first truth: ‘The words of truth are recognized’. Re –cognized. For in reality… we already know all truth. We recognize truth as one would a long lost lover. Biblical myth mystic Abraham Kuk teaches that life is not a journey but a return. Our goal is not perfect health but deep healing. All learning is not discovery – it is rather re-covery. Life is A Recovery Movement. Life is the movement towards Recovery. The second Koan: ‘Words that come from the heart enter the heart’. So open your hearts even as I open mine. And let us begin. Marc Gafni Published on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Liberation and Enlightenment: The Democratization of Enlightenment: Marc Gafni
July 29, 2008
Hebrew Wisdom as a Path to Liberation: Part One. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In yesterday’s post I mentioned the idea of enlightenment. The common wisdom is that enlightenment is not a Jewish idea. One example of many for this anti – enlightenment prejudice in Jewish circles might be author Rodger Kamenetz in his book who makes the blithe confident and wrong assertion, in his book Stalking Elijah, that enlightenment is not a Jewish term. Of course this is simply not true. R. Tzadok HaCchen from Lublin regularly uses the term HeArah –which is the literal Hebrew equivalent of enlightenment. Of course the word Zohar – the name of the 13th century locus classicus of Hebrew mysticism which unfolded from the soul of second century master Shimon Bar Yochai- could also be literally be translated as enlightenment. The great teaching of Hebrew wisdom is The Democratization of Enlightenment, what we call in Hebrew He’arah or Devekut. In this teaching Self Liberation or enlightenment or Devekut is not the province of the elite few but is a genuine option for every person. It is towards the re- activation of this Jewish Liberation Wisdom that are initiative is dedicated. In line with a great lineage of Hebrew wisdom masters, we read the Torah as a guidebook to liberation. We subscribe to the ancient Hebrew wisdom teaching that all ethical failure, is ultimately rooted in a failure of realization. The potential for realizing one’s true nature is the birth right of every human being. Every human being has the potential and possibility to realize their true nature as part of the God field and to act – compassionately and courageously – from the integrity of that realization. Because realization is the potential and possibility of every human being it is not merely an option but it is the very purpose and invitation of our lives. In the Jewish liberation tradition the words of the divine to Abraham, Lech Lecha; are literally translated to mean ,“Go to Your Self. Realize the your Divine self is “literally part of God”. Once the human beings solves the perpetual identity crisis by realizing his identity with Divine, he or she is able to act with courage, compassion, wisdom, responsibility and holy audacity. It is this courage and audacity of human action, which activates the indwelling Shekinah energy, that opens us to the realization of Liberation and Devekut, necessary to bring about the most evolved vision of Tikkun Olam, the healing and transformation of the world. The goal is not merely the liberation of the elite; When we understand the Torah as a handbook for the Liberation of every human being, we realize that the intention of Biblical ideal, of “Kingdom of Priests”- is no less then what we have called, The Democratization of Enlightenment. The Hebrew tradition is a four thousand year old transmitted lineage of Liberation. Beginning with Abraham Isaac Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, continuing to Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, David and Solomon, transmitted to the communities of elders, prophets, priests and sages, the inner transmission is one of liberation. From Akiva to Hillel to Judah the Prince, from Abulafia to Maimonides, Luria and Cordevero, Luzattto and Meir Ibn Gabbai, from the Gaon of Vilna to the Baal Shem Tov, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk and Mordechai Lainer of Izbica, to Menachem Mendel of Schneerson in our time. The tradition teaches that none of these people were perfect. Perfection and absolute piety is a tyrannical ideal that ultimately separates us from the divine. Toxic shame undermines the liberation process. All of these liberated figures were flawed, some dramatically so, at different times in their lives. In the words of the ancient teaching, “The Tzadik falls seven times and rises, the wicked falls and does not rise”. The ability to rise like a Phoenix from the fire and to transform human failing into human greatness is core to the shadow work of Hebrew Liberation technology. As the schools of Kutzk and Izbica taught, one’s unique flaw in transmuted into one’s unique gift and gorgeousness. We are all unique flames emerging from the same fire. It is in the realization of one’s authentic unique self that the human being merges with the God field. If one tries to round out the curves of a puzzle piece it cannot fit into the great puzzle of the Kosmos. It is only by highlighting the unique curvature of your self that your merge with the larger divine Self. What I would like to talk about later tonight in the next blog post is what exactly does enlightenment mean? And to clear up a rumor I heard going around that two and half years ago at a shabbot with Andrew Cohen, i proclaimed myself enlightened:) mmm…. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Enlightenment and Liberation: Part Two:Marc Gafni
July 29, 2008
Enlightenment and Liberation: Post Two: Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com So what is enlightenment? The answer of course is that anyone and everyone makes up there own definition…to such an extent that the word loses all meaning. I will share with you how I understand enlightenment based on the teachings of the Hebrew Wisdom Tradition. That is of course pretty important because once we establish, as we did in the last post, that enlightenment, of some form or another, is a major goal of Hebrew Wisdom practice, then it becomes more then helpful to know what it means. So here we go: Enlightenment is Peace. To be enlightened is to Be Peace and to Be Love. Shalom! Shalem…..to be whole. Jacob wrestles with the angel in the darkness of the night and wrestles his enlightenment from the shadows. This is expressed by Jacob coming to Shalem; the place of peace and wholeness. Peace of the Body Peace of the Mind Peace of Relationship and Community Peace with Spirit Peace of Emotions Peace with the World Peace with Structures of the Body Peace with Structures of Society To be enlightened is to be committed to act in a way which achieves peace in each of the distinct arenas of our lives. That does not mean that if you are enlightened you will necessarily accomplish peace in all these eight strata of living. Rather it means that you act in a way that is aligned to peace in each of these spheres. You must, yourself, Be Peace, {as the ancient Essenes liked to say it}, in all of these ways. Of course, sometimes in order to achieve peace you must first go to war. Peace is an integral value – it integrates the polarities and raises them to a higher level of integration and evolution. A second way to tell the same story, to answer the question of What is enlightenment, is to deploy Integral Thinking. Integral talk points out the simple truth that there are many different levels and lines on which we all develop. For example, there is a moral line of development as well as a physical motor line, an intellectual line, a social line, an emotional line etc. Each line of development is distinct. Now here is the key… One can be very advanced in one line and developmentally disabled in another line. For example: one might be a great peace activist, engaged always in activities for Shalom, And yet in one’s true center one may not be Peace at all. This kind of person is not holding enlightened consciousness. This kind of person may talk about freedom all the time but they are sadly not at all liberated. Rather they remain slaves to their fear, ego, pettiness and malice, almost always disguised as noble rhetoric and ethical integrity. Even while they talk peace they may behave in the most obnoxious of manners, bullying, mean-spirited, frothing at the mouth in a frenzy of words, self-righteousness and domination. We all know the archetype. This archetype may well be sincerely interested in peace in the world. In that line they are very developed. They may be willing to take enormous risks, on a conceptual level, to achieve peace with their enemies. These enemies may be people who have brutally murdered many of their own people. And this willingness to make peace may come from an evolved and noble place in the soul. {Or it may come from a callousness and contracted circle of caring which his egocentric at its core, but that is a separate conversation} But let’s assume for now that it indeed comes from a refined and evolved place in the person consciousness. That same person may be completely unwilling to make peace, or to even engage in dialogue with a person who was once their good friend and who did not do anything similar to the genuine evil perpetrated by there real enemies with whom they rush to make peace. How could this be? The answer: This person may very advanced on the line of development called peace with the world but retarded in the line of development called peace with community, with other or even peace with self. When it comes to their own life, disowned shadow, disassociated malice, fear, jealousy, and mean spiritedness may prevent all conversation, compassion, courage or integrity. The person is very advanced on in one line of development; “peace with the world” but very developmentally disabled in the “peace with self” line of development. The result is that the fear of being outshone, of having their legacy threatened, old neural pathways of jealousy and inadequacy may be triggered and the simply humanity that one extends to a friend may be crushed in a frenzy of domination and cruelty even though this very same person is willing to dialogue with all of the most vicious enemies who have done his people genuine harm and evil. The person is very developed in one line of development but regressed and even retarded in a second line. This is to be a slave. To be enlightened- meaning to be liberated, means to be as maximally evolved as possible at this moment in history in all levels of peace, or said differently, in all lines of development. Okay so that was part one… More depth on this later tonight or tomorrow. Big love to everyone… Interesting article on Being Open to Growth HERE Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: Part Fifteen: A Better Way to Dance: Marc Gafni:
July 30, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Dancing Master A-Void-Dance Our lives are overflowing with The Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it has hurt so much you can barely move. Usually it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We do everything we can to fill the Void. We even have a handy word for it: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A –void –dance. We develop the most elaborate dances you can imagine – never realizing – that it is all a-void –dance. That if we could but taste fullness a moment – the empty dances of addiction, power, violence and abusive sex would be transformed into the erotic dance of being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, whom the Hebrew mystics called the Shehina. The dance in which we all have a place. The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being – the fullness of ourselves in every moment – we need to first stay in the emptiness for a while. To resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo eros. This is the secret of dance. Dance me to the end of love. The best metaphor for this book is a dance whose goal is no less than to choreograph the ancient mystery of love. I hope to unfold for you a great and secret kabalistic path which shows you a way beyond the emptiness to the fullness of presence. The merciless rule of the market has undermined even the art of spiritual teaching. We live in age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification – the quick fix – a book a drug a relationship a job –anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. In a book you reads a few pages- If you don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo Eros you move on the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole which might fill up the gaping fissure we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide. We might seem on the outside to be dancing –but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an air tight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside however there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos filled scramble to grab some snatches of authenticity in between all the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: The Dancing Master: Part Sixteen: Marc Gafni
July 30, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share your comments on info@marcgafni.com The Dancing Master There is a wonderful story of Eros and love which I told my students at a special Kabbalistic ceremony the day before Cary and I were married. It is a story which hints at many of the truths we will play with in our journey together. It is about walking through the void. Every time we walk through and not around the void we come out stronger. Reports had reached a young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of Kung Fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this Master of Kung Fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit. Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of Kung Fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The Master of Kung Fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your highness,” he began, “know that you are beautiful people. I wouldn’t think of doing you harm.” “When you want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “what kind of harm can you do?” “Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear. The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may process,” he told the Master of Kung Fu. “Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If it please your Highness, this was a demonstration in slow motion, extremely slow motion, of the way I could have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.. I could have taken them all out during that one little dance.” “I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama. “Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.” “Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king. “Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.” “If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master. And while were waiting, lets have some tea.” The tea ceremony was just about over when the Regent returned with the Dancing Master. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of Kung Fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge. The Master of Kung Fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year. I could have finished him easily had I ever been able to touch him, but he moved too fast. Only last year did I finally catch him on the ear and destroy him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire. To show that I know your methods and wont be tricked into exhausting my energy, I shall first let you strike me at will. Your frail little hands can do me no harm while I’m at full strength.” The two opponents faced off. The Master of Kung Fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack. The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his head. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. Their fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows. The master of Kung Fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time. The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of Kung Fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He could smell butter melting in the most fragrant of teas, as the Dalai Lama, incomparably beautiful, sipped tea and watched him calmly. A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch. His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He could hear the great long horns resounding in a thousand rooms of the Potala, praising creation. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life. The Master of Kung Fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share your comments on info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: The Great Dancer: Marc Gafni
July 31, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com side bar personal note before body of post: I am not a great dancer:) Grew up in Yeshiva, Orthodox Jewish School where dancing was kind of primitive even if wild and ecstatic. But the ability to trust the movement of the body in dance is something that is new to me. Recently I went dancing in Salt Lake City, with three friends. First time in my life. What a beautiful spiritual practice is dance. Total Gorgeous. The Great Dancer The truly great dancer is a great lover who flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is Mechol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mechol is etymologically identical with the word Challul which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word Mechila –forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the fullness of wonder, complexity and imperfection of another. Mechol however also means Chalah-fullness – used in the biblical myth text to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.5 Mechol =Dance. Dance, then, is the movement between emptiness and fullness. Modern day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra – marketed to us in a million packages. To fill the emptiness. In any way at any price. We are desperate. We can hardly distinguish between our desires we are so pained by our emptiness. The natural result is that we fill our selves with much which is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment – full-fill-ment – in all the wrong places. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: White Fire on Black Fire: A Journey of Love: Marc Gafni:
July 31, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The White Spaces We are on a journey to Love. For as the Zohar writes ‘All the Paths (Shvilin) lead to the Temple of love’. Wherever you are, wherever you are standing or kneeling or crouching – the place where you are is on your path to love. Love requires Depth. Superficiality and love are antonyms. The search for depth requires effort that we are often afraid to expend. However I can promise you – in he name of all the great traditions of the spirit – the energy you invest in your own depth will come back to you a thousand fold. In this book I want to invite you to reach a little beyond what you thought you could do. How did Browning say it? “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.” The mystics say that the Torah (Biblical Myth Text) has two different strands. The first is the letters – the black spaces, what the Zohar calls the Black fire. These are the ideas and concepts that speak to the mind and psyche. The second strand however is the white letters. These are the white spaces between the words, what the Zohar calls the white fire. Remember what Mozart said – the music that makes a symphony great is the white spaces between the notes. So as we begin our journey to love I want you to know that I will do my best in the black fire. I have tried to make everything clear and accessible in a way that will help us both on our paths to love. But I want to invite you to enter not only the words of Black fire but also and especially the white fire. For is it in the white fire and that you taste the rawness of Eros and the sweetness of love for which your soul yearns. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – The White Fire of Eros: Let it open all the doors for you…
August 1, 2008
The White Fire of Eros: Let it open all the doors for you… marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com So as we begin our journey to love I want you to know that I will do my best in the black fire. I have tried to make everything clear and accessible in a way that will help us both on our paths to love. But I want to invite you to enter not only the words of Black fire but also and especially the white fire. For is it in the white fire and that you taste the rawness of Eros and the sweetness of love for which your soul yearns. The Berdichever Passport A White Fire story told by the Kabbalists: It happened in Eastern Europe in the mid 19th century. Wolfie had to travel to St. Petersburg and he was afraid. He knew it was a place which was not safe. And he did not have the papers he needed. But he needed to make the journey for his very life depended on it. He went to his teacher –the greater master Levi Isaac of Berdichev. Please –please he said help me and he poured out his woe. The master listened intently and then left room bidding him to wait. He could hear the master tears in the next room. When Levi Isaac returned he gave him a blank piece of paper still wet with tears. This will be your passport. Take it with you and it will open all the doors. Wolfie was not sure what to do – but he trusted his teacher. He took the paper and set out on his journey. When he arrived at the first border he was stopped by the guards. Shaking –knowing they could kill him on the spot he takes out the passport he has received form his the master Levi Isaac of Berdichev. They look down to examine it and then up at him again with the most intent of looks. He is about to faint. And one of the Guards begins to talk. “We had no idea it was you he said. We apologize for even stopping you at the border. What an honor it is to have you travel on our road. Please accept our apologies sir.” Well –you can imagine how absolutely shocked Wolfie was. Mumbling his thanks about to faint-this time from disbelief and joy he traveled on. Well, they got to the next border and pretty much the same thing happened. Only this time the guards were so overwhelmed that Wolfie was traveling their road that they gave him and escort of four white stallions. And so it went- at each border crossing he would show the blank piece of paper with the tears of his masters – his Berdichever passport. He arrived in St Petersburg traveling like a prince, with full escort and laden with Gifts. A story of mystery to be sure. Passports that open all the gates but not with words or letters. Not a tale of Black fire. A white empty space. The magic of the White Fire. As you read, I want to gently remind you that there are many borders you need to cross when you go on a true quest. There are many guards – internal and external who would block your way. This book –although filled with letters of black fire is really a Berdichever Passport. Let it open all the doors for you. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – EROS
August 1, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com EROS: O Taste and See The world is not with us enough O taste and see the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning if anything all that lives to the imagination’s tongue, grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince, living in the orchard and being hungry, and plucking the fruit.—Denise Levertov LOSS OF EROS Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of Passionate intensity Surely some revelation is at hand… W.B Yeats THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION WHILE THE WORST ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY MAN…WAY TOO MUCH TRAUMA AND DRAMA RELAX EVERYONE KEEP HEART OPEN GET A LIFE …. – Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni – CHERUBS IN THE TEMPLE
August 2, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Imagine the scene: You walk into your local place of worship – church, synagogue, mosque, meditation center or whatever. The pastor or rabbi has apparently decided to redecorate while you were away on vacation. You find that he has installed atop the ark or altar a statue of sexually intertwined golden figures. In addition he positions another free standing set of sexually embraced figures among the pews. And just in case you missed the point, vivid pictures of these effigies adorn most of the sanctuary walls. I daresay that sexually open as we are, much as we affirm sexuality as a wonder and central good in our lives, the pastor’s contract would not be renewed. However, in the pastor’s defense, let me share with you a secret. These precise images were the central display in the archetype of all holy places – the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. The figures were called cherubs. The primary set was positioned in the center of the Temple, atop the Ark of the Covenant. According to Hebrew myth this spot is the earth’s epicenter, the axis mundi, the place where heaven and earth kiss. A second set of golden cherubs was freestanding and the rest were in pictographic form on the walls and even on some of the Temple vessels. These provocatively entwined cherubs were for the mystics the very key to the mystery of love, a mystery that lay at the heart of the Jerusalem Temple, a mystery that lays at the heart of all of our lives. – Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni – ILLUMINATION, CARE AND CAREFUL
August 2, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The unraveling of this mystery of the Cherubs is the purpose of our journey together. It will require on your part patience, passion and care. Patience as we construct the intricate yet gorgeous scaffolding which will be required for us to reach higher than perhaps we have every reached before. Passion – because passion is the torch that will guide our steps on this hallowed ground of ancient texts. It is the balance between passion and patience which will allow us to receive this stunning wisdom tradition. And of course care, for no such sacred terrain can be tread without care. Z’herut’ – the Hebrew word for Careful – connotes much more than timid watchfulness, for its root word is ‘zohar’, which is no less than the name of the central Kabbalistic text. Zohar means ‘Illumination’. Suggests the wisdom of the original Hebrew –only through care can you come to illumination. Even for hallowed publishing goal of well read blog posts I cannot unfold the essence of it all in the first chapter. Foreplay is essential to mysticism. In this way that when we do finally enter the inner chambers we will be prepared to fully revel in the power and beauty of the wisdom that is there. Thus when touching this sacred body of wisdom may we be blessed with the venerable tools of patience, passion and a great illumined care. Let the mysteries begin!
Marc Gafni – MEN WHOSE NAME WAS LOVE
August 3, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Hebrew mysticism, beginning with Abraham, gave birth to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three religions in their pure forms are rooted in the Temple of Jerusalem. Hence the mythic power of the Christian Templars , the Islamic Dome of the Rock and the Hebrew Temple mount. Further, kabbalistic tradition tells of the sons of Abraham who in the book of Genesis are sent eastward, to the land of the Buddha. Abraham’s heirs, teach the Kabbalists, are the progenitors of Buddhism. There is even an old oral kabbalistic tradition which claims that the builder of the Temple, King Solomon, and the Buddha are, if not the same person, at least masters in the same sacred tradition. While historically inaccurate, it points to the deep spiritual affinity between Solomon’s teachings and those of the Buddha hundreds of years later. So the Hebrew Temple with her eternal flame is the source of the fire which sparked, and continues to light, so many of the pure wicks of the spirit which illuminate our world. But what is the great wisdom hidden in the Temple myth? What perennial message of the spirit does she yearn to share with us? And how can this message heal and transform us, our families and the widespread family of the world? The simple yet superficial answer is Love. Indeed, the Temple plans were drawn up by David and manifested by his son Yedidya, better known as Solomon. Both names, David and Yedidya, mean ‘Loved by the spirit’. These kings are the great lovers of biblical myth. They love greatly and are greatly loved, Solomon by God, the Queen of Sheba and a thousand wives; David by God, the people, Jonathan, and biblical myth readers throughout history. The Temple mystery was thus born and sired by men whose name was love.
Marc Gafni – RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
August 3, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Remember the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring Indiana Jones adventuring through the dusty Middle East in search of the Ark of the Covenant? Lives are lost, blood is let. One was tempted to ask why he shouldn’t just let the ark stay lost! The answer: the ark, perhaps more than any other earthly object, is of overwhelming mystical significance. The ark was an elegant container which held the original tablets on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments. Described in the sources as something akin to a spiritually creative, life giving nuclear reactor, it was lost when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed some 2,000 years ago (or perhaps we should say, 2400 years, since the ark was not in second temple) . It has been sought after – physically and metaphysically – ever since. The search for the ark is the original grail quest of Biblical myth. Jerusalem holds the secret. It is the cradle of three faiths, each today in its own way in desperate need of renewal and re-souling. At the center of Jerusalem stood the Temple built by Solomon and destroyed by the Greeks, then rebuilt by Ezra and destroyed by the Romans. A Temple that awaits rebuilding in our own inner lives, for the Temple in the Hebrew mystery tradition of the Kabbalah is not so much a place on earth as a powerful idea of the spirit . Those who have lost touch with the mystery kill each other today in order to control the Temple’s geographical site, a sad betrayal of the spirit which the Temple incarnated. The Temple myth is so powerful, so fertile and teeming with life, that it has given birth to virtually all the great systems of the spirit created by humanity. The essence of Hebrew mysticism lays hidden in the grain of the Temple’s wood and the folds of her curtains. The loss of the temple is considered by the biblical mystery tradition to be the greatest spiritual disaster in history. The re-building of the temple through the reclaiming of temple energy in our lives is the overarching goal of the entire biblical project. This is the desire which is expressed time and again in a thousand different ways in Hebrew ritual and liturgy. It is the idea that shaped all of the spiritual offspring of Hebrew religion- that is to say virtually all of civilization as we know it.
Virtual Reality is not Virtuous Reality:Marc Gafni: evoked by the New York Sunday Times essay aug. 3. 08. on the Dark Side of the Internet
August 3, 2008
Some brief notes written in Paris at four thirty in the morning on my way to Auschwitz with a group of twelve friends and my teacher…. My friend Mary who is a great corporate consultant, clinical therapist and highly accomplished business woman send me an article from today’s New York Tmes which she thought would interest me. I am writing a book about hate posts, slander and social murder on the, who runs them, who sits on their boards, who links to them, and how they are deployed by “respectable” folks {who use them much like respectable businessmen hire assassins and profit arms dealing even as they maintain their social veneer of decency}, how they are ignored by spiritual leaders and good men and women who simply look the other way because they are afraid of being attacked themselves and are to lost in their own spiritual entrepreneur ego games to be genuinely offended by the degradation of others who are not themselves or not necessary to their advancing in the world. So she thought I would be interested in the article. And I was. Thanks Mary! So here are some brief notes, which I wrote, down as fast as I could type this morning and am sharing with you unedited, although I did run the document through spell check:) Al Gore in a recent book became another in a long list of writers in the last decade or so. to extol the redemptive virtues of Virtual Reality, the Word Wide Web. And clearly there is much that is deserving of praise. Information, which can save lives and inform life, is available democratically on the Internet in a way that is unparalleled in human history. That is a big beautiful deal. Wow. Moreover the internet has the greatest potential in human history to expose the invisible lines of connection that naturally exist between people and peoples but up till know have been hard to see because of the challenges of distance and the alienation it naturally breeds. Internet allows for instant non-local communication around the planet thus showing the way to global unity and wholeness, which heretofore seemed impossible. Total Good. And yet the web has a profound and much ignored dark side, which can be no less destructive if we do not pay notice. The machinery of the Web has monstrous Frankenstein energy no less then it has potentially enlightened Messianic energy. The New York times article on trolling and the dark side of the web is important as a cautionary tale both about the nature of web, but more important it is a reminder in the context of the web, about the dark part of human nature that we do not want to see – and if we occasionally do see – we deny it, ignore it or dress it up in New Age pabulum. This morning’s story needs to be read together with another New York Times Magazine cover story at the end of May which tells the tale of a woman posting every manner of private information about her lover and friends on her blog, attaining celebrity in the destruction and degradation of others and all the while thinking that blogging is not subject to the laws of spiritual karma, ethical integrity, or just plain compassion and decency. There is this strange sense that because it is on the web, because you never see my your victim, the hurt and heartbreak you cause for him or her and his or her family never need to figure in my moral calculus; indeed there is no moral calculus; it is all somehow okay. You, the gossip or hate blogger, {there is however a huge moral difference between the two – sloppy thinking forgets the value of holistic hierarchy and rejects all hierarchy, it loses the art of distinctions which are the source of all relative wisdom- a gossip blogger is not a hate blogger } You rationalize to myself that you was just telling the truth, or you was just repeating what you heard, or that if you had not done it, someone else would have done it, or that your are somehow pious because you am exposing someone else’s clay feet – {ignore the fact that you really have no idea what your are talking about –have not talked to all sides, have not checked facts carefully if at all –and that if thought you would lose money for posting –or would somehow be penalized or shamed if you were not telling the truth – you would never post, shaming others however does not bother me at all, you cannot feel their pain. You are a hate blogger sociopath, a new brand of American man or woman} Somehow the internet because of it’s vast and impersonal nature – allows the worst elements of the mob to emerge as people act cruelly, faces hidden behind a flickering screen that gives the impotent the addictive thrill of potency and gives those who feel empty and dull the truly illusory and pathetic thrill of power that comes not from Eros and creative gesture, nor from service or authentic love – but which comes from the diabolic pleasure of the child who destroys the sandcastle of his sister to alleviate the momentary pain of his abandonment or frustration. The author tries to find the source for capricious Internet cruelty. Her conclusion which responds to this question, is something like, he hated his mother and father. Somehow we think today that if we can psychologize evil it become okay. She tells the story of Mitchell Henderson a young man, 13 years old who found life so painful that he took a gun to his head and killed himself. His classmates used his My Space page to build him a memorial, which would honor him. The Internet hordes, often referred to as trolls, found something funny about his death and for nearly 18 months defaced his grave on My Space, contacted his parent, aroused people to hurl bricks through their windows, along with every manner of cruel mockery of his death. What kind of person calls the mother of a boy who committed suicide, or writes notes to the mother on the Internet, which are cruel and mocking? The answer is of course –someone who has something terrible and demonic in them. We would like to think however that demons are extra terrestrials that sometimes walk among us seeking to suck our energy and passion for their nefarious and virulent ends. They are not. Demons are all to often, us ourselves. Demons exist in everyman and woman. The Internet with its lack of accountability, and the virtual inability to sue for damages, is like nighttime for the demonic in human beings; the human demonic abounds on the Internet, feeding of the fear, malice and emptiness whose dull glow illuminates the fiber optic cables. The demonic feeds human fear and ignorance and that most denied of human traits Malice. Dr. Joseph Berke is one of the great psychologists working in England today. Nearly seventy years old he came to England in 1965 to work with the legendary R.D. Laing. About a year ago after being viciously attacked on the internet, a well known Jewish leader privately send me a recommendation via spiritual teacher Jean Houston, that I go see Joe Berke who might do an evaluation of my inner state and the of the situation I found myself in. Berke is said to be both a great evaluator of human beings and complex human intersubjective dynamics, this is what he has done for forty years in the most demanding professional contexts. I did an extensive and intense evaluation with Dr. Joe, the result of which was his urging me in a formal eval letter and in many phone conversations, to return to a full life of spiritual teaching. He grasped in both spiritual and psychological terms the injustice that Karma has sent my way, particularly in the form of the psychic attack or false slanders on the Internet, which at the time I had no way to counter. {Thank god that has all changed and I have developed the resources both inner and outer to not only withstand the perfidy of the hate blog but also even to raise them into teaching, torah and dharma} I did not know it at the time but part of Joe’s life work is a study of Malice. {He has written and published dozens of academic articles and empirical studies on Malice as Motivation. His total great book. Malice Through the Looking Glass originally published as Tyranny of Malice collects a lot of this material.} Malice and Envy are according to Joe prime motivators of human behavior. People driven by fear, seek to destroy other people who they feel are somehow taking up space; space which they feel should be theirs. Luria goes on to say that we hate people –are driven to act with malice towards those who we feel our living our story more fully then we are. We feel that their abundance is at our expense. In an implied corollary of this teaching by Kabbalist Isaac Luria in the late 16th century, all great teachers have a small body of people, whom they have met at different stages of their life –who interpret everything they do through the lens of what we would call today, abuse. Sometimes they are right. We know all to well of corrupt teachers. But just as often they are wrong. They are projecting their own corruption on to the teacher. The dynamics are simple. The love or rigor of he teacher evokes his or her own shadow. The shadow is disowned and projected on the teacher who made them uncomfortable. Since the job of a teacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, an authentic teacher will always have to deal with this very real challenge. Or in a third teaching of the Kabbalah, the mob led by particularly wounded individuals, attacks people who incarnate life force. For the life force of certain individuals, leaders, teachers or artists, somehow indicts what they feel deep inside, is the emptiness and vacuity of their own lives. Wilhelm Reich termed this inner need to kill life force – The Murder of Christ – in a penetrating and disturbing book by the same name. All of this is part of what the kabbalists refer to as the Demonic quality in human beings. Milan Kundera quoted by Dr. Joe in his “off the charts blow away” book, Malice through the Looking Glass, points out something else about the nature of this demonic quality in human beings. It can never acknowledge itself. Malice always hides under the guise of more noble motivations. It refuses to see its own ugliness. This is the true source of the demonic. When folks are unable to own the complexity of their inner motivations, a recognition utterly necessary in order to enlighten and purify those very motivations, which when purified hold the key to greatness, then those motivations remain in the dark, festering in the shadows. Since viciousness festering in the shadows makes us profoundly uncomfortable we need to get it out of ourselves and direct it somewhere. This is the process that the ancients all described and Freud gave a name to; Projection. We project our shadow unto someone else, using someone who holds Shakhti and life force, often someone who is good and loving as the blank screen for our projection. What is the dynamic of shadow projection? We project shadow by finding what may well be legitimate weaknesses in the person; we are all wounded healers, we are all, at times in our lives less then whole, and our lack of wholeness sometimes hurts others and ourselves. It is often our own lack of wholeness which create the hooks for the shadow projections of our enemies. So while they need take their projections back we would do well to remove our hooks and replace them with open hearts. The rationalization most often offered by the trolls I have interviewed for the pain they inflict on people they have never met or spoken too, is that they are merely exposing human ugliness. There general metaphysical assumption about life. “All people are creeps”. The good person is the rare exception and even he –deep down- can be exposed as a creep. Naturally then, when the shadow projectors focus their poisonous projector on a person the goal is not to engage in conversation, which is honest, compassionate, balanced or healing. Rather their goal like that of the Internet trolls is defilement, defacing and demonizing. When we see demonization taking place –as Hitler’s demonization of the Jews fueled by hate blogs of European history, or the extreme right wing demonization of Clinton, with websites galore implying that he was somehow responsible for the death of Vince Foster as well as every other form of venal violation, or the extreme left wings demonization of George Bush implicitly compared to Hitler in websites all over the web, we know that the demonic in human beings is running amok. Demonization is the surest sign that the demonic in the demonizer is running the show. The demonic always stems from our inability to own the demonic in ourselves. Those demonic moments or impulses – which can only truly be met by laughter, which dissolves and heals them- are denied. We are frightened of our own face so we move to demonize defile and deface the other. Our own pathetic lack of life force is thus hidden from ourselves and others. In trying to bring down and destroy those who are truly lovers at the very core of our being we are desperately trying to cover up our own unlove. I am a Jew, a rabbi; a spiritual artist and someone who has been wrongly and terribly attacked by hate blogs on the web. Somehow spiritual people think you are not allowed to say that so clearly. Lighten up everyone. To much trauma and drama. Of course I can and should say that; Bearing false witness – the favored activity of hate blogs In discussing the nature of some of those people who stand behind the hate blogs the word which came up time and again was demonic. That is why I have deployed that word. Demons are not from some other world. The demonic is very much a part of us. For two years, I bore the attacks on my person in silence, went inward and tried to find an inner center of being that was not subject to any external force, whim or caprice. I understood in the depth of my pain, that somehow I had lived too much on the outside. That the only true path to enlightenment and liberation, which is the core goal of many schools of Kabbalah, was to go so deeply inside and realize my own love, goodness and the wonder of being, and to know that none of these could eever be taken from me. Along the way I had to encounter every manner of demon in my interior castle. Every manner of demon, which the hate blogs had foisted on me. I needed to find any source, any root of the distortions, make them conscious in the container of radical self love and rigorous inner work….. ….. until my interior castle was freed of unconscious shadow and literally sang out with joy the love of life, and my heart once again flowed with the yearning force of being, with the fullness of presence and with the wondrous wholeness of reality which lived in me humbly and consciously –even as it lives in every being, in every moment. And when you tear away the last veil you know with certainty that love is the foundation of human consciousness, that there really is nothing else. And that is our betrayal of love, which drives us insane with fear, fright greed and malice. For the reality of our existence is that we are all part of one pulsating and loving wholeness. It is only this realization which can heal our identity crisis which seeks to find relief of it’s own pathos by the destroying the identity of others. When we get up in the morning and we cannot answer with a resounding Yes, the question of our own existence then we begin the spiritual or physical murder of other to remind ourselves that we exist. Of course the murder might take place in words, in Internet posts, or in yellow journalism disguised as courage. This is what Kundera whom I cited above reminds us. Malice and envy can never admit of themselves. They are as the ancient Hebrew texts said of the evil inclination –the demonic in man-they are the “masters of disguise”. The worst manner of degradations are always hidden under some noble guise. We were protecting the state, the honor of the constitution, the fatherland, we are protecting the women, the feminine, and we are protecting the dignity of white American males of the purity of the Aryan race or America against communism…. I am as I write this morning in transit on my way to the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz Poland. I will be here for two weeks. I have come with a group of twelve friends and my spiritual mentor. We have come to spend two weeks praying and engaging in what is called in the Hassidic tradition, “freeing souls”; souls who have been trapped in this place of horror which bears witness to man’s extreme cruelty against his follow man. Of course we would like to believe that there was a small German Elite, which killed six million Jews, millions of Gypsies and caused the death of more then fifty million people. But as Daniel Golhagen reminded us in his book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, it was an entire people that participated in the Genocide either actively or by pretending it was not happening. It takes village to raise a child and it took an entire people, with the cooperation of haters all over Europe, from Poland to France to the Czech republic, to commit genocide and slowly gas to death over a million children as but the opening act of the horror show produced by human emptiness and unlove. In order for evil to triumph it is not enough for small bands of devils and demons in human form to do their dastardly deeds. Evil only triumphs, whether in Auschwitz or on the Internet, when hordes of human beings feed off of the pseudo-erotic charge it gives them and when good men and women look away and do nothing. The national enquirer which regularly engages in character assassination of the most vile kind, which deals out deathly doses of unlove, is read by millions of good Americans, standing at the counter picking up their groceries at Wal Mart. The national enquirer and other tabloids are carried by virtually all of the “all American apple pie super markets – and carried prominently and proudly. “Good people” own many of the supermarkets. The shoppers are certainly good people. So why is it that they all revel in reading what they know are at least partial and usually total lies about other people’s misfortune. It is this same black hole in human nature, this same tabloid mentality that has reproduced itself in the Internet in hate blogs of numerous kinds, all too often hiding under respectable garb, pushing a respectable and even important cause. Remember McCarthyism. Or it’s new American face in Sexual McCarthyism. But more about that in a moment. But first we must deal with a prior question. The Question!! What makes people dance and delight –in their most hidden heart – at the destruction of others? Why is the hidden cause of that uniquely human propensity for Murder? Social, spiritual or physical Murder is not an animal characteristic. It is rather the product of evolved consciousness. Animals kill for food, sometimes for aggression in defending their space or status necessary for survival. Of course the coyote kills. But not out of hatred. Ashley Montague reminds us that the coyote does not kill because he hates the rabbit but because he loves the rabbit, in the same way as Ken Wilber has pointed out, the human being loves ice cream. It is only the evolved and conscious human being, who kills, in the street, on the Internet and in cocktail conversation, out of hatred. Only the human being kills out of Malice and envy. The animal kingdom does not produce Iago. It is only human beings who build gas chambers. It is only major corporations who develop the gas for the gas chambers. It is only Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen who participate in developing the technology for the gas chambers. It is only the entire German Nation of Hitler Willing Executioners who either derives some vicarious pleasure in the betrayal of the Jews or simply through diabolical inactivity, looking away and occupying themselves with their own lives and goodness, allow it to happen. But why? But why? But why? Is it not true that the human being is evolved? Do we not know that spirit and body and mind are part of one greater whole? Can the human being evolve in body and mind and yet devolve in spirit? It is true that the heart of man is evil from your according to the biblical teachers. But this is only the untrained and closed heart of man. Can man not open his heart? Is man not also a baby faced divine who is but a little lower then God in the exalted song of the Psalmist. Is not the human being created in the image of God and according to the sages and mystics of every great system of insight and wisdom, is not man literally part of the divine him/herself. If this is all true then how can Auschwitz be built? What curse is there built into man’s evolution that can unleash such depravity? Where do the demons come from- for if we cannot answer this question –if man hates simply because he hates then there is little hope any of us at all. So here it is. All hatred – on the Interent and in Auschwitz, stems from man’s loss of personal identity. Man sense of self is unplugged and he goes haywire with viciousness. But if we can identity the source of man’s loss of identity; if we can trace hatred back to its source, then perhaps there might be some hope of healing. Same thing said differently: If love stands against fear then fear in it’s insidious and demonic power will always overcome love. But if fear itself, if hatred itself, is at it’s core love denied, love crushed and quashed, love ignored, love yearned for and unfulfilled, then perhaps just perhaps there is a hidden story of transcendence even in our evil which might yet be the source of our redemption –of our healing and transformation. So here it is. A great and hidden teaching. An esoteric teaching. Esoteric comes from the root Hebrew word seter. Seter means hidden, and Seter means Thanatos or destruction. Because this hidden teaching is both the full glory of the human being, of human Eros, and the hidden and most true understanding of what we have come to call Thanatos. The human urge for destruction. There are always two forces playing in the hearts and affairs of men. They have been given a thousand names by a thousand wise men and women – holders and teachers of the perennial philosophy but I will refer to them in their more recent incarnations with their ancient but modern names of Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the drive towards wholeness. Eros is the drive to uncover the deeper interconnectivity of the all with the all. Eros is in the great teaching of the perennial philosophy – the desire to reclaim the original wholeness of reality which was lost when the first fence was built –when the boundary –pink Floyd’s wall – between self and other was erected. Eros is the drive then, not towards Union, but towards Re-Union. Eros heals the disassociation and fragmentation which characterizes the thinking that gives birth to hatred, hate blogs, hate camps of death which gas children, all the while with the social and physical murders assured that they are somehow behaving righteously, acting to “protect the innocent helpless women of the third Reich {and the powerful women of modernity} from the Jewish molesters and sexual predators”. Eros shows up to heal this deadly illusion. It is the fullness of presence; it is living on the inside, is the recovery of prior wholeness; it is the participation in yearning force of being which reaches towards the love that is always and already is. The problem with Eros is that it is often frustrated. It cannot find original union. It feels the ache of no longer being awake. It is desperate, lovesick for the arms of the beloved. And in it’s desperation it is driven to addiction and drink. The addictions of Eros, what I like to call Pseudo Eros are the source of all evil. Desperation for love, paradoxically produces demonization, degradation and destruction. The temple was destroyed in the Jewish tradition because of causeless hatred. The temple-incarnated love built by David and Solomon the two great lovers whose very names in the original Hebrew mean love and wholeness. Yet the experience of true Eros and the wholeness in the temple also produced desperation when it was not available as a stable realization and inner experience. To stabilize the realization requires work and practice and human beings are lazy. So when the true love of existence is available and then disappears, then the pseudo Eros of hatred, causeless hatred rooted in our projections and fear –runs rampant and the temple is destroyed. When I cannot find true wholeness then I find refuge in the idolatrous Buddha of Pseudo Wholeness and Pseudo Eros. Those who practiced causeless hatred at the time of the second temple were of course not aware that this is what they were doing. Each was convinced that they were fighting the good fight, that their hatred was respectable because it was for a good cause. They were fighting those who were impure, those who were defiled. The fought for the pride of Judea, the integrity of the state or to protect the women and children from lurking dangers, which were really but their own distorted and degraded selves disassociated and projected outward on the face of the enemy – the face of the enemy who becomes the enemy only through the hiding of the divine face and the defacing of the divine image. So this is Eros and its clever but counterfeit companion, Pseudo Eros. Now Thanatos would seem to be the drive for destruction. But in reality it is not an independent drive. Thanatos is actually but Eros frustrated. Thanatos at its core seeks the destruction of all of the false boundaries that exist between people. Thanatos feels, intuits, and smells the clay feet of those would be prophets of Eros who are really but hawking the wares of pseudo Eros. Thanatos seeks destruction because at it’s core thanatos seeks to return to love – to remove the false boundaries that separate us form our delicious and deep need for mutual love, holding, compassion and forgiveness. Eros and Thanatos both express themselves as hatred as well. Thanatos by destroying all boundaries and seeking to evolve the world to essence. Thanatos by destroying all superficial and artificial distinctions. Eros in the form of Pseudo Eros. You see the great illusion of existence is the separate self. The skin encapsulated ego, that in the words of the kabala, says I am the king, I will rule by myself. Eros seeks the wholeness of the self. Thanatos destroys the false sense of separateness and the creations that support that false sense of self. In the loss of memory is the source of all evil. When we lose our memory of the once and future world then we are exiled from Eden. In this loss of memory we experience our very survival as dependent on the survival of our separate sense selves. So we build walls and castles and fortresses around this separate self-ego afraid that if we let go for but a moment we will be hurled into the ultimate devastation of eternal non-existence. It is those walls which are destroyed the catapult machines of Thanatos. But this feeling of alienation is sourced only in our separation from source. So it can only be healed in one way. It is only in saying I AM SOURCE in realizing I am sources that our cravings and strivings can be healed in the peace of I am –I am the lord your god. Read by the Abraham Kook, a kind of Jewish aurobindo, to mean- my true I, is the Lord your God, My true I, is I AM. I AM SOURCE. Any thing less then that realization of identity results in an identify crisis of massive and destructive proportions. When I lose site of the experience that I am –then I am, only if you are not. When I am not in the circle of Eros then I turn towards Pseudo Eros. And pseudo Eros at its core always manifests through me pretending to be in the circle by placing you outside of the circle. It is only in your being the enemy and the other that I can be the friend and the chosen one. My existence, lacking connection to source, no longer bathing in the radiance of my original face – is defiled and defaced, and can only be felt by violently demanding your non existence. It is only if I offer you up to death that I feel life. And this is the root of all manner of depredations. So…. If I can expose your clay feet and thereby justify my demonizing of you, then I can deny the demonic in me which rises from the gaping hole in my wholeness – which is more easily filled with the junk food of your destruction then with the sacred practice courage and discipline required for my evolution, which is but the recovery of my original face, the realization that I AM SOURCE. The journey Up and away from Eden. Beware of crusades and holy wars. Holy people rarely fight them. The most ulterior motive of all is the ulterior motive of piety. Wholes and Parts: Now it is true that in every cause there is some truth. In every attack there is some part, which is true, and it is that part which sustains the hatred. But the very act of hatred is in denying the whole. Hatred is always born when we deny reality. And reality is context. Reality is the knowledge –the sensual alive and carnal knowledge that every part is part of a greater whole. Te separate the part from the whole –to exile the part from the whole is to deface god and exile the Shekinah. The face of God which is true Eros and which pushes us to our evolution and pulls us to our wholeness. All evil is based on some partial truth, which has been made into a whole. The hater returns time and again to the root source of his evil which is usually some good value – torn from it’s larger context in a constellation of competing truth and values –and made into an absolute truth –an absolute perspective. It is the part denying it’s partness and saying in the language of the kabbalists Ana Emloch – I am whole and I will rule, that is the source of evil and human suffering. To return to love is to return to wholeness. Wholeness involves taking all the available parts –all of the perspectives – listening deeply to each of them –giving each one its deep truth and honor, and then creating peace, shalom – by integrating all of the perspectives into the most holistic possible hierarchy of action and truth. Shalom in Hebrew means whole or integral or peace. Peace is made with my enemy not my friend. My enemy who hates me – if I can hold his perspective for just enough time to feel into its root source which is always some frustration of love and dignity –always it is some way in which my existence makes my enemy feel that he does not exists – then from that place I can love my enemy and affirm his existence without giving up my truth and my integrity and from this place I can make love, I can make peace. The sure sign that behind the righteous cause is evil is the unwillingness to talk. Because in talking I risk feeling into the perspective of my enemy. To talk to face to face is already the end of defacing. So in refusing to talk I maintain my commitment to my enemies defacing and defilement. All to often I have seen peace activists who talk peace but are not peace. To make peace I must Be Peace. This was the teaching my friend Gabriel tells me, of the ancient Essenes. To Be peace I must own the demonic in my self – trace it to it’s root, and find the core sweetness at the root, which is the part – originally part of the whole, which holds a partial value and truth which has been distorted from it’s partness and is now disguised as a whole. All to often the peace maker will make peace with the enemies of his people – those who have massacred children and tortured prisoners and rapes and dismembered the elderly and weak- with those people he is wiling to sit and talk peace for they do not threaten his psychic structure, but with his brother whom he has kissed on the lips –but whose very life force and Eros – whose existence somehow makes him feel less special less alive, he refuses to talk! Great peace maker, Do you recognize malice and envy and primal jealousy or are you really convinced that you act justly and righteously? Are you ready to awake?.. for it is only that way that you will be redeemed of your ache which moves you to hatred, murder, and war even as you speak of peace, love, and prophetic justice Always the sure sign of malice and fear – cleverly disguised as righteousness, love and peace is the refusal to hear all the stories. To hear all the perspectives. To hear all of the sides of the issue and hold them all in love. When we reify one story –when we take one story as the dogmatic truth then we ignore all of the love and truths held in the other stories. Then even when we hear new facts we cannot climb down out trees blinded as we are by our cognitive dissonance, which at core is our inability to own the pettiness and smallness of our limited perspective, caused directly by the pain of our closed heart and the choking of our true nature. If we will speak to our obvious enemy, but will not speak to our brothers, then we are not healthy lovers but lost in the sickness of our hatreds, however well we have disguised them. We wallow in the partial truth of our experience, masturbate our hurt into a false god of war that guides us and drives us, losing our ability to make love with perspectives which emerge from the faces of god we have made other, and therefore unable to give birth to the god of higher integration and truth dying to be born Internet evil is in some respects similar to other evils. It is driven by the same Eros and Thanatos that drives all orgies of creativity, destruction, Eros and pseudo Eros. However it is also unique in several ways. The first is in the instant albeit pathetic gratification afforded by the power which one can wield on the internet. While power, much like a gourmet meal, generally requires years of effort and practice, the Internet is the greasy, non-nourishing fast food junkie of power. As is usually the case the most instantly available power is destructive and not creative. The second is the virtual absence of consequences. The third is the democratizations of great evil. Fourth is the unusual cruelty of expression. It used to be that you had to be in a position of genuine power to inflict profound hurt and suffering. Let’s look at one example citing in this morning’s times. Meagan Meir commits suicide. Her friend’s mother has made up a personality on the Internet who flirts with Meagan offering her love and then rejects her cruelly. This boy does not exist. It is the demonic in Lori Drew mother of Megan’s friend. Meagan commits suicide. As Daniel Solove points out there is little that one can do to prosecute. What about Meagan made Lori Drew feel less then whole? What about Meagan offended Loris daughter in such a way that she sought Meagan’s destruction. That she sought to inflict the cruelty of love withdrawn – that she sought to inflict pain on Meagan and reveled in that pain. I am sure there was some lack of wholeness in Meagan. Maybe she even caused Lori’s daughter great pain. But Lori became god’s helper and deemed it her right to inflict punishment and pain on Meagan. She took what might have been some part of Meagan, the part of Meagan she felt hurt her daughter, the part of Meagan that was not whole, took that part and made it into a whole and committed spiritual murder against Meagan in a way so cruel and brutal that Meagan killed herself. Again, Daniel Solove, author of the Future of Reputation, points out that this is not illegal. The law is not to be identified with justice or the good or god. The law which is by it nature general and impersonal all often allows for great cruelty and malice. This story shows Lori Drew a woman who is Meagan’s mother, who does not live with you, upon whom Meagan did not depend for her support, is able to enter Meagan’s life, cause enormous damage and pain, with no real culpability. A second example from this morning times. Jason Fortuny takes out an add, posts it on the Internet where he identifies himself as a woman. He/She then invites men to apply for the job as a Dom in sexual relationship. Please send picture and personal information he/ she asks. A hundred men write in to this private add. Jason published their names and pictures on the Internet. Some lose their jobs, others their loves and other perhaps the love of their children. Jason – another assistant to God is satisfied – he has exposed the sexual desires of these men, which he has deemed rapacious and make them pay. A very limited and partial truth about male sexuality is exposed and used to destroy men he did not know –whose complexity beauty and love and goodness he could not know. Jason disassociated from his own sexuality, perhaps from what was demonic in his own sexuality – demonizes and destroys… Like Lori, Jason is able to inflict great on harm on people he does not know. Like Lori he acts with apparent impunity. Like Lori Drew he is able to become a squatter in someone else’s virtual reality. The internet has also become the weapon choice for what I have come to refer too, following Alan Dershowtiz, as Sexual McCarthyism. Structurally Sexual McCarthyism is precisely parallel to its spiritual father, McCarthyism McCarthyism in person of Sen. Joe McCarthy and his minions, took a good value – the fight against communism- communism which killed 17 million collective farmers –communism which vies with Nazism as the most destructive evil in the history of man, communism which in the fifties in the united states rightly aroused fear and loathing – and used that fear of loathing for the petty purposes of his own vicious political ends, to attack and destroy and persecute, to be ulove and malice, all under the guise of a noble cause. Good men and women looked away because they were afraid that if they stood up for their falsely accused friends –they too be labeled as communists, attacked and blacklisted. Some of their friends may have made a mistake and attended a communist party meeting. Some may have flirted with communism and even joined the party, but McCarthy seized on their mistakes and used them to distort, defame, degrade and destroy. And all because Joe McCarthy himself was pathetically seeking to affirm his own existence through the spiritual and social murder of others –all of course disguised as the good fight and the good cause. Sexual McCarthyism operates the same way. It takes a good value, the fight against sexual abuse, something we all believe in heart and soul, it accesses our natural revulsion at child molestation, rape, human trafficking and sexual slavery etc. and uses them to commit it’s own terrible abuses. Hiding behind sexual purity many forms of vicious attack and maligning take place. It encourages sexual abuse, that is the abuse of sexuality through distorted and even false recounting of sexual relationships years and even decades after they took place, with the intent to defame and defile, all the while pretending like the true aim is to “protect future women against male predators”. The sexual McCarthyites themselves know this is not their true aim but it allows them to masquerade on the cover of piety and righteousness hoping to obscure the true pettiness and malevolence of their ends. When they attack they hide behind the cover of sexually correct talk but in fact it is almost never about sex. Troy is attacked ostensibly because Paris son of King Priam and prince of Troy had an affair with Helen wife of Menlaueus and Queen of Sparta. But an only slightly deeper read reveals something else entirely. Paris’s affair with Helen was the excuse but not the reason for the Trojan War. The difference between a reason and an excuse is that a reason is the cause of the event. Remove the reason, you will remove the cause and the event will not take place. An excuse is not a cause; it is a pseudo cause designed to hide or obscure the real cause –so remove the excuse and another excuse rises to take its place. Agamemnon brother of Menelaus King of Sparta wants to defeat Troy and it’s mighty king Priam and it’s great Hero Hector. He want to do so because it is his Atman Project, his desperate and pathetic bid for the immortality of the separate self of Agamemnon. This is his true reason; the ravings of his ego run wild and his demonic desire for conquest, war and destruction, which are for him the road to personal immortality. He cannot admit of these base desires for they are unseemly. He needs a noble cause and he needs to enlist this Brother Menelaus and the armies of Sparta. Along come Paris and Helen who fall in love or lust, it is not clear which, and Agamemnon has his pious excuse. The feminine has been violated. Sparta has been violated. “I must defend the women of Greece against the predation of the Trojans modeled by the violation of Helen by the Trojan Prince”. This however is not the reason for the Trojan war it is merely the excuse. Accuse a man of sexual sin; do not check the veracity of the accusation. After all, goes the dogma of what Prof. Daphne Pattai has derisively referred to as the Sexual Harassment Industry, after all “Women after always tell the truth about sex and certainly this is true of groups of women”. Deny feminine shadow because you have an agenda. You want someone out of the way. He takes up too much space. Take a part of him, the part that is not whole, that is a work in progress, exaggerate it, distort it, lie about it and make it all of whom he is. Distort his love and his goodness. Deny his integrity and the thousands of deeds of love and good that defined his waking hours. Use the virulence of virtual reality to erase his virtue. Bear false witness if your must. Try and insure that no one talks to him so that you can hold him prison in the hermeneutic prism of his hijacked virtue, hijacked by a carefully gathered group of the hurt and wounded who cry far more the it hearts seeking to seduce the power of their tears and alleged devestation, reify hurt which is normal in human relationships and turn it into blunt weapon, weave around him, deploying the Internet as your chief tool, the web of Maya and virtual illusion which darkens all that is light and prevents everyone and anyone from touching his essence directly or experiencing his integrity in the first person. Deploy vicious and virulent hate blogs; post it on the Internet as truth, without bothering to verify true of false. Let the hate blogs Internet serve as the tabloid of the Internet. Better yet let the Internet become the roman coliseum where good people are fed to lions to feed the trolling frenzy of the scandal starved crowds. The hate bloggers and websites are easily aroused. They feel alive in dealing death. By seeking to ruin people’s lives or work or relationships they are lifted from what is often the empty dis-ease truth of their lives, and filled with a pathetic sense of pseudo power. This pseudo power, manifests in the most sadistic impulses in the human being which send an aroused demonic thrill through their body. They are aroused and alive through their sadism and addicted to the almost sexual charge that it sends through them. Their sites are linked to neo Nazi sites and anti – Semitic sites because the both share in the same energy of hate. But do not just blame the hate sites or the gossip bloggers; The bloggers are but the suicide bombers of the respectable people who hide behind them, preening respectability while reeking of putrid cowardice. The respectable people go to synagogue and church, pray with fervor and concentration even as they, behind the scenes post their letters of hatred and revenge, filled with calumny and lies, on the hate sites or gossip blogs. I was talking recently with a blogger who had attacked me for years. In a strange twist of fate we have become friends. He has shown some genuine integrity and I have taken him deep into my confidence trusting his integrity as he has trusted mine. He has written many things about me that were not true in a long rambling essay written in 2004. At some point he responded to his own inner sense of integrity and offered to change all factual statements that were clearly false. I asked him; “Hey Tom, did you make all those things up?”. “No” he said, “a group of people told me those things”. Now all of those things were vicious lies that were verifiably false. My friend Tom went on to say that in the city he lives which is filled with Jews he is never invited for a Shabbat meal. My heart broke in a thousand pieces even as it filled with rage. I understood now what had happened. For the last ten years respectable people with axes to grind, primal malice to spare, holy wars to fight and damsels in distress to protect, had called my new friend tom and slandered me. My friend Tom at the time had a policy of just publishing whatever people told him. He has – like myself –evolved since then, we all evolve, and we all make mistakes and we are all works in progress. So I realized that all the lies he had published on the web were told to him by ostensibly respectable and god fearing men and women. Not dearth of Rabbis among them I am sure. They send him out to do the dirty work. To put his name, the name of his blog on the lies and on the line. Then they cast him out as disreputable and for ten years forgot to invite him for shabbot; after all they said my friend is a pornographer and gossip columnist. They, the respectable, sat and enjoyed their meals with there children for every shabot for those entire ten years even as my friend ate alone. A woman I once knew cries her eyes out as she prays even as she, through back channels posts a letter filled with slander and distortion on the hate blogs of the internet and then denies that she has anything to do with posting it. “I am respectable” she protests in feigned innocence and hurt. Who me? A group of rabbis, each with their own agenda work regularly with the hate blogs behind the scenes. They count on the hate blogs to do their dirty work for them while they keep their hands clean. In the end, my new friend has more decency and integrity then all of them. I am aware that who was using whom in this story, is unclear. Was he using them to make his blog popular with salacious details, whose only problem was that they were not true, or were they using him as their suicide bomber even as they maintained the veneer of home and respectability. Either way, the vehicle of hate that allowed them to do their dastardly deeds was the Internet. And none of this would matter if the Internet consumers did not go first to the gossip blogs like Gawker.com, driven by the vicarious pleasure of seeing people shamed and exposed, what Hebrew wisdom calls miniature murder, and then to the tabloid hate blogs and only much later to all the positive content of the web. The trolls feed the respectable people. The hate blogs are but the face we deny. The Nazis but the manifestation of European anti Semitism which has festered and exploded a thousand violent times and soaked the blood of European soil making it a fertile land to be plowed by holocaust and gas chambers. The holocaust is the rape and murder of millions of people by those who could get away with it. Internet violence is the name rape and spiritual murder of people who would not normally rape and murder but who do it because they feel that the Internet is a Free Pass Zone with no consequences. Because the internet name rapist and murderers feel like they can get away with it. The trolls are our face, which we deny While many come to Auschwitz inspired by the anti Semitic hate blogs of history, in future years it is completely reasonable to assume that virulent mobs will be stirred up and people burned and killed because the hatred stirred fomented and disseminated on the world wide web. And all this will be possible because good men and women will do nothing. Marc Gafni Posted by marc gafni Please leave comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – MYSTERY OF THE LOST ARK
August 4, 2008
Marc Gafni – MYSTERY OF THE LOST ARK Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com What is the secret of this ancient love hidden in the Temple’s origins? What is the mystery of the Lost Ark, crowned by her sexually intertwined cherubic lovers? Why is the mythic ark’s metaphorical recovery so absolutely crucial for our lives? Could this ancient and esoteric wisdom have something radically new and important to say about the love lost in our lives and the road to its recovery? In a word, can the cherubs lead us back to love? The Approach To understand the mystery of the Temple and what it has to teach us, we need to approach her more carefully. Indeed, the gradual approach towards the center is always the essential formula in the quest of the spirit. The Temple itself was built somewhat like an exquisite mandala. The mandala invites the gazer to pass through layer after layer of imagery before beholding its wondrous core. Similarly, we find that the Temple was a layered structure. The High Priest would ascend the great staircase to the outer Courtyard of Song, pass through the courtyard, into the chamber called the Holy, and from there into the inner most sanctum – the Holy of Holies. In this sanctum sanctorum of the Temple, behind fine brocaded curtains, stood the golden ark of the covenant. The ark contained within it the two tablets of stone upon which were carved the Ten Commandments. Magical lapidary tablets, sculpted by the God-gripped hand of Moses himself. Most essential though is that which rests atop the ark. Sitting perched aloft the ark are our two winged figures – the celebrated cherubs. Indeed, their cherubic faces have graced everything from the greatest works of art to countless covers of Hallmark cards. Yet here, according to the esoteric tradition, these images were not of the Hallmark variety. As we mentioned at the outset, these two cherubs were male and female, face to face, meurim zeh b’zeh – intertwined in sexual embrace. In the language of the Biblical source text the cherubs were, “As one embraced with his lover.” These carved creatures are the focal point, the epicenter of the mandala-like Temple space. They sit, like the guarded pupil of the eye, at the source of the sacred. That such provocatively sexual figurines would have such prominence in the Holy of Holies is mystery indeed. It is called by the Kabbalistic initiates the sod hakeruvim – the Secret of the cherubs. And though full initiation into this secret cannot be wholly transmitted in the pages of a book, together we can at least hint to its wonder and strive to scrutinize the inscrutable.
Marc Gafni – The Lion of Fire
August 4, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The best way to behold such mysteries is through the gleaming prism of story. Thus we begin with a spell-binding ancient text which sits at the core of the mystery tradition. This esoteric tale describes an extraordinary scene which takes place in Jerusalem in roughly 500 BCE, almost two centuries before Plato and Aristotle, The masters of the day were distressed. Adultery was spreading rampant as plagues among the people. The authorities were at a loss as to how to curb this powerful drive. Finally, driven to desperation, they began to pray. For three days, they fasted, weeping and pleading with God, “Let us slay the sexual drive before it slays us.” Finally God acquiesced. The masters then witnessed a lion of fire leap out from within the Temple’s Holy of Holies. A prophet among them identified the lion as the personification of the primal sexual drive. They sought to slay the lion of fire. But the result was that for three days thereafter the entire society ground to a standstill. Hens did not lay eggs, artists ceased creating, businesses faltered, and all spiritual activity came to a halt. Realizing that the sexual drive was about more than just sex, that it somehow echoed with the divine, the masters relented. They prayed that only its destructive shadow be removed, while retaining its creative force. Their request was denied on high with the insightful psychological response,“You cannot have only half a drive.” The greater the sacred power of a quality, the greater its shadow; the two are inseparable. So they prayed that the lion at least be weakened, and their prayer was granted. The lion, less potent but no less present, re-entered the Holy of Holies.
Marc Gafni – myth, magic and mystery
August 5, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The masters of the day were distressed. Adultery was spreading as rampant as plagues among the people. The authorities were at a loss as to how to curb this powerful drive. Finally, driven to desperation, they began to pray. For three days, they fasted, weeping and pleading with God, “Let us slay the sexual drive before it slays us.” Finally God acquiesced. The masters then witnessed a lion of fire leap out from within the Temple’s Holy of Holies. A prophet among them identified the lion as the personification of the primal sexual drive. They sought to slay the lion of fire. But the result was that for three days thereafter the entire society ground to a standstill. Hens did not lay eggs, artists ceased creating, businesses faltered, and all spiritual activity came to a halt. Realizing that the sexual drive was about more than just sex, that it somehow echoed with the divine, the masters relented. They prayed that only its destructive shadow be removed, while retaining its creative force. Their request was denied on high with the insightful psychological response,“You cannot have only half a drive.” The greater the sacred power of a quality, the greater its shadow; the two are inseparable. So they prayed that the lion at least be weakened, and their prayer was granted. The lion, less potent but no less present, re-entered the Holy of Holies. The text is alive with myth, magic and mystery. The most startling revelation is the radical claim of the text as to the originating place of the sexual drive. Why does this drive, personified as a lion of fire, emerge from the Temple’s Holy of Holies? Apparently this is its eternal abode. Thus, remarkably, the text is telling us that the seat and source of the sexual drive is none other than the Holy of Holies. In fact the Holy of Holies is often depicted in the mystical sources as the marriage bed. The tablets and the ark are depicted respectively as the phallus and the vagina. This sexual model of eros and the virtual identity between the erotic and the holy are perhaps the most vital and provocative insights of the kabbalists. They teach it implicitly in a thousand different ways in their writings. They would rarely say it overtly for fear the message would be misunderstood, leading to a kind of sexual anarchy which would bring in its wake the collapse of family. So the dominant impression we are left with is that while sex is good, as it is created by God, it is exceedingly dangerous and is to be handled with great caution. One gets the impression that the attendant dangers may even override the essential good. Thus, nothing as audacious as the secret of the cherubs was written about openly. And, yet, once you see it you realize it is there, subtly calling out, whispering from the folds of literally hundreds of texts.
Marc Gafni – SEX IN THE TEMPLE?
August 5, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Sex in the temple!? Sexually entwined cherubs atop the ark, and a fiery feline sexual drive living in the Holy of Holies? What are these mythic images trying to express? At first blush they seem to describe sex as a central preoccupation of the Holy of Holies, portraying the Temple as some kind of ancient Hebrew Playboy mansion. While Hebrew mysticism may wholeheartedly embrace a positive and healthy sexual ethic, one would not have thought that sex is the essence of the sacred!! The answer lies in the story itself. When the lion is subdued, the world does not wake up with just its sexual drive lobotomized. Rather, the world wakes up to an overwhelmingly dull and drive-less existence. The passionate engagement in all activity has suddenly withered and vanished. Whether it be in sex, art, work, or creativity, the thrill of existence is gone. Clearly, that fiery feline inhabitant of the Holy of Holies represents not merely sexuality. Rather, she is the incarnation of a more potent energy force. She is the embodiment of the Shechina. The Shechina is the feminine Divine. Her name means Indwelling Presence, ‘the one who dwells in you.’ She is presence, poetry, passion. She is the sustaining God force which runs through and wombs the world. A living mythic presence not wholly dissimilar to ‘the Force’, of Star Wars fame. She is the underlying erotic, sensual and loving force that knows our name and nurtures all being.
Marc Gafni – SHEKINAH, PRESENCE POETRY AND PASSION
August 6, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The Shechina is the feminine Divine. Her name means Indwelling Presence, ‘the one who dwells in you.’ She is presence, poetry, passion. She is the sustaining God force which runs through and wombs the world. A living mythic presence not wholly dissimilar to ‘the Force’, of Star Wars fame. She is the underlying erotic, sensual and loving force that knows our name and nurtures all being. Shechina captures an experience, a way of being in the world, for which we do not yet have an English word. For this is a way of being which we in the West are hard pressed to articulate. It is the experience of waking up in the morning full of utter joy for the arrival of the day. It is weeping over the splendor of the sunset or the scent of the ocean or the fragility of a newborn. It is a way of living in love. Indeed, it is one of the great failures of love that we do not possess such a word for this fully charged way of living. The main reason we lack a word for the type of love we will be exploring in this book, is that such an expanded notion of love is still so foreign to the fabric of our lives. Our vocabulary reflects our reality. Just as the Eskimo has an ample supply of words to describe different types of snow, a society infused with love would likewise have a menagerie of terms for different types of love. We should wonder over the paucity in the English language for our ‘terms of endearment.’
Marc Gafni – RECLAIMING EROS BEYOND THE SEXUAL
August 6, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Just as the Eskimo has an ample supply of words to describe different types of snow, a society infused with love would likewise have a menagerie of terms for different types of love. We should wonder over the paucity in the English language for our ‘terms of endearment’. Our best move in the English language is to turn towards the term Plato introduced in the Symposium: Eros. For Plato eros is love plus. It is precisely the kind of fully charged life experience which is evoked by the Hebrew term Shekhina. But over time the term Eros has been so narrowed and limited that it has lost most of its original intention. Usually when we hear the word erotic it evokes only the sexual. And although the sexual is a part of eros, it is only a limited part. The type of full Eros we will be describing in this book is way and beyond the merely sexual. Together we will work to reclaim this original meaning of eros, a meaning infused by its Hebrew counterpart Shechina. May the claiming of our erotic birthright in these pages in-form a richer and deeper life for ourselves, our loved ones and our communities.
Eros Not Sex / or The Faces of Eros – Marc Gafni
August 7, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Eros has many expressions. Each expression is hinted at in the temple mysteries. There are four faces of eros which, when taken together, form the essence of the Shechina experience. These four faces are the very stuff of eros. In this chapter we will explore the erotic understanding which forms the matrix of the secret of the cherubs and informs every arena of our existence. We will unmask the four face of eros and reveal why they are so vitally important for anyone who wants to experience the full joy, depth and aliveness of being. After we understand the eros which lays at the heart of the Temple mysteries we can then turn to answering our core question. If, as we shall show, the essence of the Temple – and of every journey of the spirit – is eros not sex, then why is sex such a prominent feature of the temple? It is in response to this question that in Chapter Three we will unpack the mystical secret of the cherubs. As we shall see, at the very heart of Hebrew tantra was a very precise and provocative understanding of the relationship between love, sex and eros. This understanding will open us up to a whole new understanding of our sexuality. This understanding will show us the way to erotically reweave the very fabric of our lives in more vivid patterns, sensual textures and brilliant hues.
Marc Gafni – The First face of Eros: On the Inside
August 7, 2008
The Interior Castle “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson The cherubs in the magical mystery of Temple myth were not stationary fixtures. No, these statues were expressive, emotive. They moved. When integrity and goodness ruled the land the cherubs were face to face. In these times the focal point of Shechina energy rested erotically, ecstatically, between the cherubs. When discord and evil held sway in the kingdom the cherubs turned from each other, appearing back to back instead of face to face. Back to back, the world was amiss, alienated, ruptured. Face to face, the world was harmonized, hopeful, embraced. Thus, face to face in biblical myth text is the most highly desirable state. It is the gem stone state of being, the jeweled summit of all creation. Face to face, to be fully explicit, is a state of eros. As we shall see, face to face means first and foremost, being on the inside. Indeed the God force said to rest between the cherubs in the Holy of Holies, the Shechina, is no less than the radically profound experience of being on the inside. Eros is aroused whenever we move so deeply into what we do, who we are with, or where we are, that its interiority stirs our heart and imagination. Being on the inside is of course not about a geographical place, but about a soul terrain, a place inside ourselves. Socrates writes at the end of the Phaedro, “Beloved Pan and all ye other Gods that haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the inward and outward man be at one.” For the Temple mystics, exile is when one’s inside and outside are not connected in the day to day of living. Or, said differently, exile is non-erotic living. The first, although by no means the only, problem with exile is that it is extraordinarily difficult. When I am not living from the inside, I am not living naturally. My choices, reactions and responses do not emerge spontaneously from what Teresa of Avila called one’s “interior castle”. I am not in the flow of my own life. Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore writes, “Where is the fountain that throws out these flowers in such a ceaseless flow of ecstasy?” Eros is to be in the flow of the fountain, what the Zohar calls in one of its evocative mantras, “The River of Light that flows from Eden.” Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
August 7, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com comments at info@marcgafni.com We are in Poland. The fellowship. We are here to witness. To give honor. To discern and live in the invisible lines of connection between us. And in that service to witness each other, to witness our teacher as he dances in the upper worlds. Our community is a crucible for witnessing. You are my witnesses says God. If you are my witnesses I am God. If you are not my witnesses I am not God. The witnesses and the witnesses are one. Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah all came to the world to remind us only of that. Tat Tvam Asi. Thou art that. You are. I am. The consciousness that I witness. Witnessing is deeply personal. The person, which lies under the personality. It is neither a series of complexes nor the wandering of monkey mind. It is the full resplendent glory of the unique authentic self daring to be present, in a moment-to-moment disclosure of its naked and unspeakable glory. The witness, that which is witnesses and the act of witnessing are one. We are grounded. Heart and Hara are one song of praise. The brain stem is relaxed and expanded as the right brain purrs it’s flowing contentment and left brain moves with agility and skill through on the path with heart. The heart is wide open, feeling, noticing, sharp alert and aware, yet gently soft and yielding. The group moves as one even as each member of the group holds the integrity of autonomy with bursts of aware personality occasionally lighting up our exchanges. The teacher is in the lead. He incarnates the light. Commands the column of light even as he moves in and out of his personality. An enlightened one with a California driver’s license. His teaching mirrors my teaching. His realization mirrors my realization. In the mirror I can see that he is true. In the mirror he reminds that I am true and invites me to live that truth. Beneath and through the trauma and pain. That is his gift. My teaching is his teaching. His teaching is my teaching. The teaching. God Is In You as You. Yet he commands the column of light. In this way he is far beyond me on the path. I joyfully submit to him as teacher in this way. I promise to learn from him this mastery. He promises to teach it to me. This is our contract and covenant. Wordless. It is understood. It is not personal at all. It is necessity. What is. Much of my personality was blown away and devastated to allow this simple necessity to be realized. I follow him on the path. I love our group. Not generally but personally. Each person. My personality is drawn to some more then others. But each one I love. Each person in the group, called by a different muse. Drawn by a distinct destiny of which some are not yet aware. There is a sense of urgency among us. Even as we laugh and play in the prayer of our journey. Each is Pulled by destiny’s personal address Yet we realize that we need each other. In the freedom of our love is community that holds us all. We are in the cemetery in Warsaw. We are here bearing gifts for Poland even as we know she bears gifts for us. We have come from Treblinka. We are on our way to Maidanek, Auschwitz. Our true goal however is Cracow. For their lies the pearl awaiting redemption. Krakow is the maiden of Europe, hidden from eyes of history by a cloak of invisibility. But for those with eyes to see. For the lovers it is clear. They know. For to love is to see with the eyes of God. We know. Our teacher is our eyes as we learn to see. On the way to Krakow is Lublin. You can see Lublin from the camp in Maidanek. Let no one claim not to have known. The name of the camps, and of the mystical masters named after their hamlets, mix with each other. Lublin, Treblinka Bialystok, Warsaw, Omshinov, Madianek, Slonim, Sobibor, Cracow and Auschwitz. We are in the cemetery in Warsaw. It is beautiful. There no other way to describe it. Magical sensual and alive. Two hundred and fifty thousand individual graves. The greatest of masters and their children and heirs. We do not come alone. We walk with the nine Lords of Palanque, with the wise men of Chaco. We carry greetings from masters of the new world to the masters of the old world. This part of our mission. Reb Chaim Solovetichik from Brisk, Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin known as the Netziv…whose words nourished and tantalized the first twenty five years of my adult life. Yeruchem son of the Rebbe of Kutzk, the two rebbes of Omshinov, The master of Modshitz…. The family and heirs of the all the great Polish Dynasties of Hassidism who knew how to dance in the upper worlds. The illustrious heads of the rabbinic court of Warsaw whose scholarship was only rivaled by their open heart and humility. The graves stones are infinite and everywhere, virtually on top of each other. But not in the open sun or in a barren field. No, not at all. The graveyard is grown over with greenery, plants, wild greenery and growth everywhere. As many tall trees as gravestones, the trees dancing together to create a canopy of life and living energy which holds in it’s bosom the stones. The stones and green, they caress each other, flow into each other, the lush wild ecstatic greenery and the wise irony of the headstones. One gets the feeling that when the graveyard is empty they whisper to each other in the nights. All of me wants sleep in the graveyard tonight to overhear their secrets but I know one must not intrude on their intimacy. And it is in the midst of this that we hear his call. I knew he was here. I was just not sure which one he was. We are walking on the path and he calls. My teacher veers off the path. Drawn to a small broken down hut like structure. It is in these structures that the headstones and graves of the mystical masters of Hassidism lay. It is the grave of the Rebbe of Slonim. Shmuel Wienberg of Slonim. My teacher is struck. A look of joy crosses his faith. His face lights up with pure presence. Shmuel of Slonim is fully present. Alive, radiating presence. My teacher stops. He approaches the headstone. Not tentatively. Naturally. In a kind of quiet ecstasy. He has met a friend. He recognized the master. He has been called. And in the recognition the master’s radiance is disclosed. “This master”, he turns to me for his name, “this master is the highest level of evolution possible for a human being”. “He moved beyond his limited humanity and become the perfect vessel for the divine. A grave is often a portal for the upper worlds. This is not the case in for this grave. This is the upper world. You are meeting God here at this moment.” The group listens. Everyone understands the importance of this moment. No one is asleep. “In the tradition we call this kind of realized master, A Merkava La-Shekinah. A chariot for the Shekinah”, I tell my teacher and the group. We look at each other. It is clear. The entire pilgrimage was realized in giving honor to this master. To God in human form. To Shmuel of Slonim in whom God is a Verb. To a man who so moved through his personality, that he became transparent to God. His will was the divine will. He tears the tears of God and his laughter the laughter of the upper worlds. When he made love with his wife, when he washed his hands in ritual blessings or received his students, the shekina and kudsha Brik hu, the divine masculine and feminine met in holy union. He has not left his world. He is fully present… even as he is lonely. He has been watching over the souls here. They are now all in his care. When the Nazis destroyed Warsaw, razing it to the ground in orgies of destruction, he stood watch at the gate of the cemetery and refuses to grant them entrance. Try as they might they could not move past him. The cemetery remained untouched, virginal in death. Protected by Shmuel of Slonim. We received his blessings. He had individual blessings for each of our group of twelve. We need the dead who are alive. It is from them we draw blessing. They need us because they need to be needed. It is through us that they have impact. In us the speak. Reb Shmuel was so delighted to see us. He had waited a very long time. He was pleased with our heart and hara practice. “It gives me hope” he said. He was overjoyed to see our teacher. “I knew your grandmother well,” he said to him. Your first teacher”. “She said you would come”. “I have waited for you a very long time”. “Thank you for taking care of Mordechai, I could almost hear him saying. We were not there for him when he grew up. He needed us but we could not come. I entrust him to your care. He is one of us but needs guidance now. Trust him”. “I know”, said our teacher. “I want you to give him your blessings now” Reb Shmuel Weinberg of Slonim”, and he did. They went on talking. I could not hear all of it. Some was not for my ears. I will wait till my teacher is ready to tell me. I did hear snatches however. “There is a living soul field. The souls know you are here. It is good. I need your help. I cannot watch over them but I cannot release them” Shmuel says to my teacher, tears steaming down his radiance. “I know” says the teacher. “I will do that for you”. They embrace. My teacher and Shmuel of Slonim. Long lost brothers, separated by so much and yet so totally natural and intimate with each other. “I have been looking for you” says my teacher in parting. “Thank you for calling to me. I will not stop. This is my promise to you”. And we go back to the main path, bathed in the radiance. Grateful. In quiet joy. It is enough. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com comment at info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – MERGING WITH THE MOUNTAIN
August 8, 2008
There is a wonderful Zen story about two mountain climbers. The first, old and slightly bent, slowly makes his way up the mountain. The second, young and in good form, bounds past him, racing confidently to the summit. In late afternoon they meet again. The older man still climbs gently, step after step, towards the summit. The younger man lies exhausted, unable to move, at the side of the path. As they pass each the younger cries out to the older, “I don’t understand – What do you know that I don’t?” Responds the old man, eyes twinkling with compassion and laughter, “The difference between us is simple. You come to conquer the mountain but the mountain is stronger than you, so you are conquered. I come to merge with the mountain – so the mountain loves me and lifts me to her summit.” To merge is to traverse the chasm that separates object and subject. It is to become one with your reality, to be on the inside of the experience. Erotic living is living on the inside. The opposite of Eros is therefore alienation. To be alienated is to always feel that you are an outsider with no safe place to call home. The result of non-erotic living is always bad choices, betrayals and pain. I am not in the flow. I wind up always having to watch my back. I am on the outside – exiled from my inner castle. I have lost face. The face is the truest reflection of the erotic. To lose face is to become de-eroticized. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – TO SEE GOD IN YOUR FACE
August 8, 2008
There is a tale told of the Master Nahman Kossover. His mystical practice was to meditate on the divine name. It is said that when he taught he could actually see –reflected back to him- the divine name on the faces of his listeners. At some point Nachman fell on rough times and was forced to leave teaching and become a merchant. He was greatly saddened because he found it very difficult to fully concentrate on the divine name amidst the buy sell atmosphere of the market. Until he hit upon a solution. He hired an assistant to travel with him with no other job than to be present. When he would at the face of his assistant he would be reconnected with the name of God. Was the assistant particularly beautiful? I doubt it. The assistant was every man and every woman. You and me. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Freeing My soul from the Trauma of Death in Life is the same process as freeing Souls from a Traumatic Death: Marc Gafni on the road from Warsaw to Lublin:
August 9, 2008
Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Comments welcome on info@marcafni.com Today we were in Maidanek, Lublin and arrived for Shabbat in Krakow. About Maidanek Lublin after shabbot. A word before sundown. The purpose of our trip is to participate in an ancient spiritual technology of healing. The freeing of Souls. Some say this is why the Master Nachman went to Oman, the place of a great massacre. We know of certain tales of the Baal Shem Tov where the freeing of a trapped soul is the underlying spiritual plot in the story. To free souls, is what is referred to the by tradition as Chesed shel Emet. True Love. Totally real love. Total Good. One does not free soul in order to gain some advantage in this world from the souls. They are dead to the worlds of networking and skillful means. They contribute little to the life strategies of our egoic survival in all of its layers and disguises. To free souls is a Bodhisattva act of compassion. There are too few Bodhisattvas these days. The Dali Lama told me something a few years back, visiting him in at this home in Dharamsala, that really moved me. We always think that someone else should be the Bodhisattva. Never us. But paradoxically if I begin to view myself as a Bodhisattva then I might also be called to live as a Bodhisattva. To be a Bodhisattva is to live as a manifestation of compassion. It is the destiny of the Tzadkk, the esoteric master. And in the words of the biblical mantra, “my nation are all Tzadikim” – that is to say – “If not me then who and if not now then when”. We are on the road to Maidanek and Lublin. There is a sense that we are driving through kililng fields. One can sense the souls pushing on the bus from the sides of the roads. They have heard we are coming, informed by the living soul field and perhaps also by the special messenger of the great master Shmuel of Slonim with whom we had a dramatic meeting yesterday at the cemetery in Warsaw. We are in southeast Poland on the road from Warsaw to Lublin. This is the place of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that preceded the gas chambers of the Nazi Concentration camps. The consisted of trucks in which the gas exhaust was turned inside, in the flat storage space on the back of the truck. As many as thirty boys and girls could be stuffed screaming in terror into the back of such a van and slowly gassed to death. If the mobile units were out of gas on a particular day then the children, hundreds of them might be thrown alive into a ditch and buried, let to die the horrible death of slow suffocation amidst the bloodcurdling screams of fear and agony as the last breath of life were viciously squeezed from the young bodies. We stop the bus at a gas station, adjacent to a large filed where we can gather in a semi circle and clear the souls. We take our place as witnesses. The souls are cleared. There is a lot of joy on the bus limned with a serious and purposeful determination. Our hearts are open but we refuse to drown in the grief. We are here because this is where we need to be. Everyone knows themselves why this is so for them. We live under and behind our personalities. Never leaving them behind, just holding the personality lightly. No trauma, No Drama. No hope, No fear. The souls of the children remain trapped. Trapped in the unspeakable trauma of life. Death in horror is a moment of life. Being stuck in that trauma is not that different from being stuck in a moment- a moment in which the soul is murdered in life. What we normally refer to as psychological or spiritual trauma. Think about it for a second. If you suffer terrible abuse of whatever kind perhaps it is chronic the abuse of being falsely accused or name raped, perhaps it is the abuse of being horribly beaten by your mother, or violently raped by your father. {I talk here of genuine abuse, not the pseudo victim hood of those who cry far more then it hurts and desecrate their tears by deploying them in the most cynical fashion, as lethal weapons of abuse themselves}. The moment of intense pain in which the abuse occurs invades, violates and ruptures something of our connection to reality. We become alienated, often in an internally grisly sort of way, with the reality of love, which lies behind the veil and remains the true and ultimate nature of all that is. We lost touch with reality. We become insane. To be insane is to lost touch with reality. To forget the true nature of all things. Even if we appear to be perfectly functional, rational and well adjusted we are just beneath the surface- Insane. The veneer of civilization is very thin. To free a living being from trauma we need to re- ligare, to reweave the person’s soul back into the large field of being. To re-quilt their life force in seamless coat of the Kosmos, which is all, good, all love and all eros. When this happens the soul is able to continue its growth and evolution, which is the true pleasure of every soul. Life is for pleasure. The ultimate pleasure is the ultimate growth. Life is Growth is Pleasure. To free the souls of those who were traumatized in death, is emotionally and spiritually not that different from healing souls traumatized life. The greatest healing is to transmit to the soul the experience of profound heart and hara. Big Heart grounded in the full power and stability of the divine embrace. To clear a physical space of it’s trauma is in turn not that different from freeing souls. The one who does the clearing, supported by a group of witnesses relates to the land of physical structure needed to be cleared much the same as one would relate to a human or sentient being in need of a healing. It all depends of Love. We came to Poland to free souls. Knowing as well that according to the law of reciprocity, which governs spirit – in which giving is receiving and receiving is giving – that this would also free something in our souls. It all depends on Love. It is before shabbot. I have asked a friend to post this for me. Thank You. Shabbat Shalom
Marc Gafni – ON BETRAYAL
August 9, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The result of non-erotic living is always bad choices, betrayals and pain. I am not in the flow. I wind up always having to watch my back. I am on the outside – exiled from my inner castle. I have lost face. As Sufi Poet Rumi says so well: The real orchards and fruits are within the heart; the reflection of their beauty is falling upon this water and earth (the external world) all the deceived ones come to gaze on this reflection in the opinion that this is the place of Paradise. They are fleeing from the origins of the orchards; they are Making merry over a phantom.
KNOCKING FROM THE INSIDE – Marc Gafni
August 10, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In the Hebrew mystical tradition, language is not the mere random designation of sounds and letters in a particular pattern . For the mystic, words are vital portals to meaning. Language is the spiritual DNA of reality. Thus when one root word is used for seemingly disparate ideas you can rest assured that these different ideas are in fact integrally related. So let’s watch for a moment as the magic of languages dances before us. The Hebrew term for the Holy of Holies is lefnie u’lefnim. Literally rendered into English this means ‘the inside of the inside’. This was not merely a reflection of the physical fact that it was the inner most point in the Temple. Indeed, teach the mystics, the opposite is true – it was situated in the inner most physical point in order to evoke the sense of interiority that is the very key to eros. In another architectural expression of this idea, the Temples of the Masonic order have doors which open only from the inside. One must insert their hand through an opening in the door to grasp the handle on the inside. The point – in order to open the portals to mystery, one must approach from the inside. What’s more, this opening was shaped like a heart. Eros – the yearning for the inside – is the essence of love. The Masonic order of course springs from the Templars, a monastic order of Christian mystics in Jerusalem who fell in love with and understood deeply the eros of the Temple. We keep knocking at the door until we remember that we are knocking from the inside. END
Marc Gafni – The Spell of Spelling – Panim
August 10, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The last post however was just for starters. Hold on, for the magic of language, the spell of spelling – has just begun. The Hebrew word for “inside,” panim, has two other meanings as well. The first not surprisingly, is face. Face is the place where my insides are revealed. There are forty five muscles in the face. Most of them unnecessary for the biological functioning of the face. Their major purpose it would seem is to express emotional depth and nuance. They are the muscles of the soul. Every muscle of the face reflects another nuance of depth and interiority. When I say, “I need to speak face to face,” I am in erotic need of an inside conversation. At this point all of the cell phones and sophisticated internet hook-ups won’t give me what I need, for while amazingly efficient and effective, they are non-erotic. True erotic conversations rarely happen on the Internet. The spell continues. There is a third meaning to the Hebrew root panim. In a slightly modified form it means ”before,” in the sense of appearing before God. Specifically, the biblical myth text in Leviticus tells of the Temple’s high priest – who on the biblical Yom Kippur, the Day of At-one-ment, appear Lifnei Hashem: ‘Before God’ . Read in the English this appears similar to a summons to appear “before” a judging court, generally not a joyous occasion. For the Hebrew mystics, however, rooted as they are in the magic and spells of language, it is an entirely different affair. Remember that all three English words, face, inside and before, share the same Hebrew root. The essence then of the day of at-one-ment then is not a commandment to appear ”before God” in the magistrate sense. It is rather an invitation to live on the inside of God’s face. Once the journey to God is finished, the infinite journey in God begins
Marc Gafni – Everyman’s Eros
August 11, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The eros experience is the province of mystics, artists and scholars. But not only. It awaits all of us in every arena of endeavor. Have you ever gone jogging? You get up not at all enthusiastic about running but somehow feeling obligated. You reluctantly get dressed and begin your route. Slowly the discomfort fades and you begin to enjoy yourself. You find yourself in the rhythm. And then, on good days, at some point you break through an invisible barrier and begin to fly. Ecstatic, you lose yourself in the wind. Your body, the earth, the wind, the rhythms of your pace, the sound of your feet, all merge into one. It is no longer accurate, even if but for the briefest of moments, to say “I am running.” Rather, you are the wind, you are running.
Marc Gafni – In Every Stitch
August 11, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com It was the middle of the 19th century . Heaven was joyous, hell was in an uproar, for it seems that one Hanoch the Shoemaker was about to usher in the Messiah. The Master of Rishin, tells the story to his disciples something like this, “Hanoch the shoemaker used to sit every day intent in the stitching of his leather shoes. It was known that with every stitch Hanoch was ‘meyached yichudim elyonim.’ That is, he was unifying higher unities. Now ‘yichudim’, my holy disciples, in Kabbalah always means ‘zivug’ (coupling). {Zivug is an ultimate erotic term. It refers not to the sexual person, but to the cosmic love affair between the masculine God presence and the feminine Shechina presence. A love affair brought about by human action.} Now the strange secret of the story, my holy community, is that Hanoch wasn’t doing anything which should have caused such ecstatic yichudim. He wasn’t fulfilling any religious commandment, he was engaged in no ritual or pious act. “Perhaps,” said one of the disciples, “he was meditating on a passage of Zohar as he stitched.” Another chimed in, “Perhaps he was doing the spiritual exercises of Luria’s Kabbalah which cause pleasure above?” “No, nothing of the sort,” replied the master. “Then what was he doing while he stitched?” pressed the disciples. “Nothing!” responded the master with a slight smile. “Hanoch was doing nothing…nothing other than being fully inside in every single stitch.” “Fully inside in every stitch?!” Duly impressed, the eager disciples now had another confusion. “So then, Master, why is it that the Messiah has not yet announced his arrival?” The master of Rishin sighed and said, “The force of evil discovered the cause and countered it. Sadly he seems to have gotten the best of our holy shoemaker.” “But how?” the crestfallen disciples asked. The reply, “With plenty of good business.” And so it was, rushing to fulfill his flood of orders, Hanoch became the busiest and most prosperous cobbler in the region, mindlessly producing shoe after cookie-cut shoe, and the Messiah still has not yet come.
Marc Gafni – Poetess, Prophetess and Priestess
August 12, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Eros is the birthright of everyman and everywoman. Though we may search long and hard for priests and prophets who can guide and counsel us, in the end we must return time and again to our own inner sanctum. There the priest and prophet we seek sleep in our depths, waiting to be stirred and finally woken. I will never forget one of my early dates with Cary. We were walking Jerusalem’s streets. It was late, the silence was luminous. It was one of those moments when intimacy lets you enter for a moment. I asked Cary, ‘What do you pray for, in your heart of hearts, what do you most want to be?’ She became very quiet, I could tell she was deciding whether or not she was ready to offer up her truest, most vulnerable, answer to me. We walked on. She started a sentence, but faltered, silent. Finally, mustering a whisper, she told me, “When I pray for who I most want to be…” glancing over at me uncertainly, “I pray…to be God’s poetess, prophetess and priestess.” Her sincerity was so precious, so deep. I knew she felt silly, her most inside place exposed. I also knew then this was the woman I would marry. Sadly as time went on I realized that it was not all that it seemed to be. But that is another story. Not for the blogs. I hope one day we will be able to work out how we hurt each other in our marriage and more significantly how we hurt each other after our marriage. One of the dangers of eros is the inability to face our own darkness. It is not all sweetness and light. Sometimes the desire to be a poetess is eros in pure form. And sometimes it is pseudo eros hiding a deep knowing fear that we are not the special one. And it was no less true that I was so caught up in my mission and my desire for the great partner, the great love, that I did not take care of Cary. She needed care and nourishing. I was distracted by the siren’s song. I betrayed her and in doing so betrayed Eros. That the betrayal was mutual and in the end, her mask dropped to reveal for a time not Kali but Kali in disheveled and distorted form, only makes me feel better when I am contracted. I wish her blessing.
Marc Gafni – GOD’S POETS
August 12, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In our deepest erotic longings, so many of us do want to be God’s poets, God’s prophets and priests. Yet we are ashamed to admit it –sometimes even to ourselves. We fear to appear ridiculous or grandiose even in our own eyes. Yet the biblical myth insists that we are all priests and prophets in potential. We can all enter the Holy of Holies for it is within us. In contradistinction to the priestly class and prophetic elites of the ancient Near East, Biblical myth talks of a kingdom of priests and a people who are all prophets . Life itself is the only real Temple of the spirit. Eros is everywhere. Churches and synagogues are a pallid, even if important, compromise for our dis-enchanted age. The Zohar teaches that every erotic inside experience is a Shechina experience of the Holy of Holies. It is when we become one with the way,Mark when we have moved from the outside to the inside. It is in this sense that the Temple is called in Hebrew the Bayit. Bayit means, quite simply, Home . The holiest place in the world – is home. Eros is about coming home. We all live split off from our selves. We feel all too often like imposters in our own lives, wearing masks and wondering when, and if, it will ever start to feel like home. That is what it means to live on the outside.
Victim or Player: Marc Gafni
August 13, 2008
Victim or Player Auschwitz Birkenhau Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Share comments on info@marcgafni.com The dance of the subject and object, the movement between the two is the great and undulating dance of our lives. It is the perpetual dance between the victim and the player. If we are an object then we are acted upon and done to- we are not actors and doers. The larger mysteries of life are beyond our ability to fully grasp and we seek to find whatever subjectivity we can in the midst of the sometimes gracious and all to often cruel objectivity of human life. The tragic inadequacy of the being in object relation to the world is that we lose so much of our aliveness, not to mention our power and dignity. The object all to easily becomes the victim who ceases to be a player in his or her own destiny. Naturally then, when we wind up in places that hurt we blame drivers other then ourselves for the choice of our destination. While this has the advantage of perpetually reaffirming our innocence it has the shadow of forever confirming our impotence. For the price of innocence is impotence. If you are not part of the problem then you most certainly cannot be part of the solution. All that remains is escalating cycles of recrimination and demonization. And yet life is filled with realities in which one is in fact, a victim. I spend all of yesterday in Auschwitz-Birkdenhau, the extermination factory. It is a story I know well and have lived in the innermost cells of my body as long as breath has moved in me. But to see and walk through the women’s barracks, a place not fit for any sentient being, designed to degrade and crush all that is human and holy, is to be pierced by pain and sorrow so intense that it cannot find location in the garb of words. Victims who were reduced to objects. Yes, some of these men, women and children were able to retain their subjectivity, their humanity and to silently defy their objectifiers. Many,some say most, were not. What is clear however is that we owe them everything in their victimhood. It is not only Auschwitz however. We are sometimes, not often but sometimes, faced with oppression of terrible nature and consequence in our lives which at its core renders us victims; objects of a karma, or dehumanizing wave of hatred or negative energy that we can do little to stand against. We are victims. We are objectified, reduced and de-humanized. Often by the most respectable of people under the guise of the most noble of goals. In these situations as well there are places and pockets in it all, in which we can retain our humanity, our subjectivity. We can do this by holding on to our sanity and joy in face of the blackness insanity; we can do it by being love- by being love even in the face of fear and its fabrications. We might also be able to do so by identifying the ways in which we contributed to our own suffering. All this is not to excuse the torturer but to locate the locus of our own dignity and power. For it is only that which we have created, which might be a pivoting point for change and healing. At the same time we dare not over extend our subjectivity. This is the great mistake both of classical religion and contemporary New Age dogma. Both place the human being at the center of his or her own reality. Both gorgeously reject the stance of victimhood and demand that the human being accept responsibility for the circumstances of his life. In different ways they both loudly and proudly assert, “Your life is your creation”. In every moment you are creating or dis-creating the reality of your life. Do not cry more then it hurts. You think you are victim; perhaps – but now turn it around and realize that perhaps you are the predator and victimizer, a reality you have hidden from, in the dogged insistence on your victim status. Yet this seemingly noble teaching and world view is infected with hubris of enormous proportion. It is a denial of all humility and all mystery. It is the usurpation of the role of the creator, Prometheus unbound. In the desperate apotheosis of the subject, the object moment in human life and relations is heretically denied. We begin to blame the victim, desperately seeking his culpability in order to ward off our own vulnerability. We need the amulet of the guilty verdict of the sufferer to protect us from the fear that we might be the next of victim- objects of the mysterious and seemingly arbitrary working of cruel and capricious circumstance. We become callous and indifferent and invent every manner of reason to re-betray the betrayed; in the word of Wilihem Riech, to murder Christ again and again. It is only in embrace of the object and subject together that sacred union is realized and balance is achieved. It is the dance of the subject and object that integrity shows its face, ethical integrity, psychological integrity and spiritual integrity. It is in this context and with this backdrop in mind and heart, that I want to share with you a liberation moment of some two hours in duration which suffused my being yesterday morning before our trip to Auschwitz. In this liberation experience a space of insight was opened and I realized again what I already knew but this time from a deeper and more real place. The realization entered my body. It moved from being merely an intellectual position or even a heart murmur to being a fully embodied incarnate reality. More later… Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – Coming Home
August 13, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Once a year in a spine tingling mystery rite the priest would enter the Holy of Holies. On this day, every person was forgiven . On this day, every person was to re-experience themselves in the depths of their own true innocence. For on the inside we are all innocent. This day is called in Biblical myth tradition Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement: At-One-Ment. The core erotic idea of the Bayit – the Temple – was that every person could and needs to access the Shechina experience . Every human being needs to live erotically in all facets of being. Every human being has a primary erotic need to move beyond the imposter into his or her own deepest place of oneness, oneness with themselves, their relationships, and their reality. The Zohar refers to the exile from one’s deepest self as alma depiruda, the world of separation . The most tragic separation is not from mother, not from community, but from self. The journey of a lifetime is to move from alma depiruda to alma deyichuda, from separation to oneness – At-one-ment. Love is the path back home. We are not talking about superficial love, not merely sexual love, but erotic love.
Marc Gafni – The litmus of an erotic lover
August 13, 2008
The litmus of an erotic lover is this: Does this person lead you back to your inner self? Are you able to share with him or her your most vulnerable, fledgling, faltering dreams? Every person has a Holy of Holies which, in those most intimate of times, we let another enter as the priest to worship at our altar. And in the gorgeous paradox of the spirit, by letting a lover enter we ourselves are let in as well. For when the Temple door is open and the lover enters, we ourselves trail behind. We gain uncommon access to our inner selves, a place which we alone are often unable to reach. The true lover always takes you home. As Emily Dickinson notes, Eden is that old fashioned house We dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode until we drive away Love lets us realize the Eden we are dwelling in every day. That is what it means to feel at home in your life, the greatest feeling in the world. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – Left Outside
August 14, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Much of modernity militates against the eros of being on the inside. Indeed, the whole psychological stance of fortifying the ego is about keeping people on the outside. Our way of thinking about this all was powerfully influenced by the work of the child psychologist Margaret Mahler. She taught that the primary goal of growing up and out of being a baby is to achieve what she termed individuation and separation. The healthy human baby’s journey must be towards ever ascending levels of autonomy and separateness. That mantra which rings at least partially true in the infant years is unfortunately taken as the mantra for our lives. We achieve every increasing levels of separateness and autonomy until we are at the top, all alone. Yes, we do need to reinforce the ego, but we also need to let the ego boundaries drop. It is the only way to let others, and sometimes even ourselves, inside. When psychology defines a person’s real self as ego then we begin to view the breakdown of ego as a breakdown in normality. We erect our fortress so high and so ‘healthy’ that no one, including ourselves, can get inside. And yet are not most of the great experiences we seek in life dependent on the ego breaking down? From falling in love to orgasm to spiritual connection, the most sought after experiences can happen only when the ego boundaries soften to allow entry to these welcome guests. When we spend our lives under the spell of the separate individuate mantra we block access to the Eros our souls so desperately crave. We all need lovers to let us in. They may be lovers, teachers, friends, students and hopefully parents. No one can survive on the outside.
IF YOU CAN HEAR YOURSELF TALKING SIT DOWN – Marc Gafni
August 14, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Teachers can take us home, but only if they teach from the inside. It is reported that Ziv Hirsch of Zhitomir, charismatic mystical master of the 19th century, would occasionally in the middle of his speech, sit down, abruptly ending his address in mid thought. When pressed for explanation he responded, “My master – the Maggid of Mezritch – taught me, ‘If when giving a sicha (spiritual lesson) you can hear yourself talking, sit down.’” In A Movable Feast, Hemingway remarks on the difference between his telling a story and the story telling itself. When he begins to tell the story, he knows it is time to quit for the day. This is a true echo of the temple tradition. Sit down when you can hear yourself speak
Marc Gafni – Eros & Zohar – Expanding our Limited Vocabulary Part 1
August 15, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The word eros entered Western consciousness through Socrates’ best student. Plato, in his wonderful dialogue “The Symposium”, calls the inner state which we have been describing eros. To be a lover, implies Plato, is to passionately enter the inside of reality. Eros is love but not in the casual, pallid and sometimes anemic way we often talk of love. On the inside of things all is aflame. In Hebrew the term for Love is Ahavah, rooted in the word lahav – torch. Similarly the Hebrew word source for Love, Lev, meaning heart, is used in the sense of ‘Labat Eish’ – heart of fire . For lev – origin of the English word lava – is expressive of the sometimes volcanic heat that erupts from one’s inner depths when erotically engaged in any endeavor. Thus the Hebrew word Ahava and the Greek Eros enrich our limited (western) vocabulary of love. For vocabulary always reflects reality. We don’t have an English word for the type of fully expanded Eros we will be revealing in this book, because such expanded Eros is still so foreign to the fabric of our lives. Yet in Hebrew, there are a plethora of such words. The most important word which we have discussed at length is Shechina. There is also Ahavah, fiery love, as we just learned together.
Marc Gafni – EROS: PLATO AND THE ZOHAR PART 2
August 15, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Kabala scholar Yehuda Libes reminds us of a third word. He suggests that the word Zohar, the name of the great magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, is roughly synonymous with the Greek word eros. For the authors of the Zohar were not dry medieval scholastics; they were rather men of great passion and depth who believed that by entering the inside of the moment, the text, or the relationship, they could recreate and heal the world. Zohar, like eros, is powerful, intense and deep. It is the source of all creativity and pleasure. *B – Further, the Zohar masters understood Eros to be the essential goal of the spiritual journey. Often in Hebrew mystical texts the erotic is called a Messiah experience. For them Messiah was not a historical happening as much as an inner event. The Hebrew word for messiah derives from the root word Siach. Siach means no more and no less than ‘conversation’. The core of the Zohar text is basically a series of sacred conversations. The messiah, they taught, lingers whenever we so fully enter conversation that the boundaries of ego fall away and we are left only with the raw joy of fellowship. One of the most profound and difficult sections of the Zohar is called the Idra Rabba, the Great Gathering. Similar to the Symposium of Plato, it is the story of seven close friends came together for the holy fellowship. And like the Symposium, it is the passionate conversation and camaraderie of friends reveling in each other’s company as they search for depth which infused the gathering with Eros. In truth any conversation which is true, authentic and deep is erotic conversation. In the great gathering of the men of the Zohar, as in the Symposium, both the form and content is about Eros . The value of the gathering then is the gathering itself. It need not justify itself in terms of any other standard or value. When one is willing to let go of agendas, stop networking and enter the depth of conversation, then one is on the inside. When the other person’s talk is no longer merely the time to work out what I will say next, when deep listening becomes mutual, when words begin to flow and time stands still, when a few hours seems but a few minutes, then the Gods of Zohar and Eros have been invoked. When Diotima – the old wise woman in the Symposium – talks about Eros and Shimon Bar Yochai, hero of the Idra, talk about Zohar- clearly neither is referring to the narrow modern sense of sex. Rather, Zohar and Eros evoke a sense of merging with the flow of the moment, of moving from outside observer to passionate participant; Eros in the sense of being on the inside. Thus, “Zohar” is not merely the name of the work; it is an evocative word which seeks to capture glimmerings of Eros. The ultimate paradigm of identity between medium and message. Process and content merge in the word. The Zohar experience is the Erotic experience
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Marc Gafni -RECAPITULATION
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
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Let us take a moment to see the full beauty of where we’ve gone on our journey thus far. Till now we have understood that the Temple is the archetype of eros. We have understood eros, the Greek term for loving, as the experience of being on the inside. This is the name of the Temple’s Holy of Holies – lefnai lefnim – the inside of the inside, the face of all faces. The experience of Shechina – the sensual divine force which rests between the cherubs in the Holy of Holies – is the erotic experience. In fact the mystics often use the word Shechina as a synonym for eros.
Now lets add one dramatic step: The Hebrew word for Temple is Mikdash – literally translated as Holiness. If you put it all together it is radical, revolutionary and overwhelmingly relevant to our lives.
What it means is that the erotic and the holy are the same thing, or to put it in more mathematical form:
Eros = = Shechina = the Inside = Zohar = Holy.
Finally, we have a definition of holiness. So many people use the word holy but virtually no one knows what it really means. Ask someone for a definition and you will likely get a fuzzy, nebulous response which will leave you no richer than before. So here –at last- is a definition of holiness. To be holy is to be on the inside. The opposite of holiness therefore is not un-holiness or anti- holiness. It is not impurity or the demonic possession of the devil. The opposite of the holy is the superficial. Eros is about depth. Depth is an inside experience. It has its own unique nuance, texture and richness. The superficial is bland and common.
Holiness is eroticism. Sin is superficiality.
The Second Face of Eros: Fullness of Presence – Marc Gafni
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
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The second face of eros is the ‘fullness of presence’
. This is not a distinct and different quality but flows naturally and even overlaps with the erotic qualities of being on the inside. And yet it is not quite the same. Of course being on the inside requires the fullness of presence. But we can experience full presence even when we have not merged with the moment or crossed over to the inside. Full presence is about showing up. You can show up and be fully present in a conversation without necessarily losing yourself in the encounter’s flow. Full presence at work can mean that you derive joy, satisfaction and self worth from your vocation. It means you feel full and not empty.
Marc Gafni – SUN AUG 17
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
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When I would lead prayers at our retreat center overlooking the Sea of Galilee in Israel, we often do a face-to-face prayer. In this prayer, people sit in twos and read Psalms to one another. They each are singing praises to the God point in the other. Before we start the chanting, I ask each pair to look deeply into each other’s face. ”Begin by being wordlessly present for each other. Experience the full presence of another waiting for you.
At this point I would often tell a particular mystical tale which I love very much.
The Chassidim, adherents of a powerful kabbalistic myth movement which reached its apex in mid-nineteenth century, tell of a girl – Sarah – who had run away from home to a convent. Now convents are beautiful – for nuns, but not for Sarah. Everyone knew where she was, yet no one could persuade her to leave the convent and return home. Finally the distraught parents turned to the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name.
It is reported that the Baal Shem went and sat behind a tree not far from the convent. He brought with him no books , no ritual prayer objects, and only the bare amount of food necessary to sustain him. One day goes by, Sarah does not come. A second day – no sign of her. A third – no girl… But wait, the sun is setting – Sarah runs out, looks around and eventually finds her way to the master, sitting quietly behind his tree. They look at each other, wordlessly, and she goes back home, ultimately growing up to be one of the great holy women of her day.
Late in life she was asked what the Baal Shem did to make her leave the convent. She responded. ‘On the first day I felt him there, waiting, and I was angry with him. What right did he have?! On the second day I was no longer angry, just curious – who was he, and why is he waiting for me? But I was determined not to let him trap me with my own curiosity. On the third day I felt him waiting and I was engulfed by an overwhelming sense of love. I tried to resist it but my desire grew and grew until I could resist it no longer. And I ran outside to see his face.”
What a magnificent moment of eros!
Marc Gafni – SUN AUG 17 – Part 2
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
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To live erotically is to be fully present
to each other’s richness, complexity and ultimate grandeur. It is to fully wait for the other to appear. The Shechina in the Temple is termed the indwelling presence. The erotic is always the experience of full presence. The Shechina, say the mystics, is waiting for us to show up.
The Shechina is presence waiting for us to be present
. She is eros, standing outside of our window, waiting. Waiting for us to feel her presence. Waiting for us to be overwhelmed by her love. Waiting for us to run out and behold with wonder – her face.
How many people have come up to me after those uncommon sessions of looking into another’s face. They come in tears, in joy, in awe, each with a different story. But they all share a common theme. ‘First I felt uncomfortable. I kept shifting my gaze. Looking at her necklace, her earlobes, her hair, but it was so hard to look at her face. Finally, our eyes fell into sync. It was uncomfortable, but we kept at it. Eyes – brown, with freckles of color. A funny, imperfect face. And then suddenly, something gave. A rush of emotion. A moment of release into the other person’s gaze.’ Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, you never forget it.
Have you ever looked, but really looked, into another person’s face? Have you ever witnessed that moment when the soul comes rushing up from its inner chambers and opens wide the windows of the eyes to see you, seeing her? To greet you like the day light? This is the mystery of love, of the eyes and their eros.
Feel the face of your partner as a sculptor would his clay. Run your hands – erotically, not sexually- over the skin, the bone structure, and then look again deeply into the eyes. In the eros of face touched and felt, the God point of the other emerges and we are moved with full heart to sing praise.
Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions
August 18, 2008
Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions
Marc Gafni
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Eros is about feeling the fullness of being, the opposite of emptiness. Every human being has met emptiness; that feeling we experience in the late night, home alone or in the hotel room we return to after a long day’s work on a business trip. We enter the room and are often overwhelmed by intense feelings of emptiness. It makes me wonder if the originators of MTV had this in mind when they named their station something that sounds precisely like EmptyTV. For that’s what we do in the void. We flip on the cable or order up dinner and entertainment – anything to not stay in the emptiness. Indeed the sentence that I probably repeat to my students more than any other is “Life is what you do with your emptiness”.
Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions Part 2
August 18, 2008
Marc Gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
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In our society which sadly defines human beings as consumers and not lovers, denial is the primary strategy for coping with emptiness. We are sold ful-fill-ment at every turn and in every guise. We buy buy buy, hoping that one of the hawked elixirs might finally full-fill us. And yet the emptiness lingers.
This is the great paradox of emptiness. The first relation to emptiness must not be to fill it but simply to be mindful of it. To notice the emptiness. The goal is to move beyond the void to the fullness of eros and Shechina. Yet, paradoxically, you can only access the fullness of being if you are willing to stay in the emptiness long enough to find your way. The path to eros is filled with detours to pseudo-eros, but they are all dead ends. When we are so desperate for fullness, when the emptiness hurts too much, these detours seduce us off the path, often spinning us to painful places we never wanted to go.
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, Spiritual Director
http://www.bayitchadash.org/staff.shtml Reb Gafni is the Rosh Bayit of Bayit Chadash. His primary affiliations include being a Visiting Fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and Senior Scholar at the Melitz Educational Institution. Additionally, Reb Gafni was a fellow at the Oriental Institute of Oxford University, he is currently completing the writing of a commentary on the Hasidic text “Mei Ha’Shiloach.” Reb Gafni serves as a contributing editor to the American Tikkun magazine, a bimonthly journal critiquing politics, culture and society from a Jewish perspective. He is also a contributing editor of Chayim Acherim, Israel’s leading spirituality magazine.
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni
Together with colleagues, Reb Gafni is developing a new school of Jewish thought which is coming to be called “The School of Personal Myth”. This proposes a marked shift from national to personal myth as the center of Jewish consciousness. Reb Gafni is reformulating and extending the core constructs of Post-Lurianic thought in a modern Neo-Hasidic context. Also the host and creator of a highly acclaimed national Israeli television program on ethics and spirituality, Reb Gafni’s work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher: wise, deep, compassionate, accessible, and universal.
His English book, Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment was released by Pocket Books in 2001 and is accompanied by a national PBS Special of the same title. The book is a best seller and is now being translated into numerous languages. In Hebrew, his two volume set of New Jewish Thought -entitled Certainty and Uncertainty is published by Modan Publishers. Written in collaboration with Ohad Ezrachi, Lilith and Sacred Feminism is slated for release in 2005. The Mystery of Love was also recently released in English in the spring of 2003 by Atria books. Reb Gafni is married to Chaya Kaplan, his full partner in all endeavors, and he is the father of Eytan and Yair. Articles on Rabbi Gafni Cover of Maariv October 15, 2004 Read More More Marc Gafni As Spiritual Hero In Catalyst Magazine My July 3, 2008 Dialogue With R. Gafni My July 18-20, 2008 Weekend With R. Gafni For 30 years, Marc Winiarz (Gafni) has been on the cutting edge of Modern Orthodoxy. He’s been an incarnation of its twists and turns. Between 1977-85, Gafni seemed like the Second Coming of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin when Rabbi Riskin represented the cutting edge of Modern Orthodoxy. Then he was the Second Coming of Rav Yosef Soloveitchik. Then he was a West Bank settler in Israel and chief rabbi of his own town (Beit Tzufim). Then he was the Second Coming of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (in English-language radio broadcasts in Israel around 1992-1993). Then Marc got into Eastern thinking (Buddhism, Hinduism), the sacred feminine, and the integration of pagan energy with prophetic Judaism. And now he’s a spiritual artist. “I don’t know where to start,” says my friend Joe* (an acquaintance of Winiarz’s for about 30 years) July 4, 2008. “This guy is just so goddamn fascinating. A year doesn’t go by when he doesn’t do something outrageous. For the last 48 hours [since Gafni returned to public life with MarcGafni.com], I’ve been intoxicated.” Luke: “It was a great experience [meeting Marc Gafni in Salt Lake City July 3, 2008]. He’s a fascinating guy.” In 2008, Marc received his doctorate of Philosophy (with a speciality in Hebrew mysticism) from Oxford University. His Oxford advisor was Dr. Norman Solomon (a retired 73-year old Orthodox Jew) and his external supervisor was Dr. Moshe Idel (the successor to Gershom Scholem as the leading scholar on kabbalah). Marc Winiarz (sometimes mistakenly spelled “Winyarz”) was born in Pittsfield, Massachuestts in 1960 to an Orthodox family of Holocaust survivors. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio. “At age six or seven, I knew that I wanted to be a rabbi,” Marc told the March 4, 2004 issue of Haaretz. “Because I really loved the world of the book, which I’d known since I began learning at age three.” Luke to Marc: “I heard your mother stuck your head in an oven?” Marc: “I’ve heard that story also. Completely not true. My poor mother.” From 1973-1977, Marc went to Ohr Torah aka Manhattan Hebrew High School, which was overseen by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and run by Vancouver rabbi Pinchas Bak (who died on Purim 1977 at age 32). Marc Belzberg was Winiarz’s dorm counselor in high school. Belzberg (who came to Judaism through Rabbi Bak) adored Winiarz. Some source say he wanted Winiarz to marry his sister Lisa. Winiarz has been married three times. When he was 18, he was engaged to a woman he never married. At age 20, Marc married for the first time (to Shifra from Maine). It lasted two years. (Winiarz has a daughter from his first marriage named Rachel. When she became an adult, she went on a quest to find her father. Though they met once, they’ve never had a relationship.) Joe* emails July 4, 2008:
During those years (circa 1980), a group of YU kids, all post a year or two at the prestigious yeshivot in Israel, would spend their summers doing sort of social work/kiruv in troubled areas in Israel. The groups were in cities like Zefat, Migdal Haemek, and the Hatikva quarter of Tel Aviv. The leader of this program, then called “techiya” (renaissance), was R. Muskin, then a dorm counselor at YU. Gafni never did the program, nor did he spend time in the yeshivot, so in that sense he was always an outsider. However, the social organization that yeshiva and techiya volunteers founded, Chevrat Aliyah Toranit, a sort of elitist dating program, really, was the first Gafni coup. At some point, just about the time he married (his first wife Shifra, who did spend time in Israel and I think was on Techiya as well), he [gave some popular lectures for the] organisation [led by Shifra circa 1982], leading to quite a bit of resentment among the “in” crowd, and actually, shortly thereafter, the organisation disappeared.
Winiarz attended Yeshiva University for one semester around 1981. He attended Queens College for one semester. “I transferred all my credits to Edison College,” says Marc. “It’s one of those places that give you life credit. I got my degree from Edison College (circa 1985) so that my mom would be happy.” Winiarz ran an organization called JPSY (Jewish Public School Youth) circa 1983-1986. It was funded by such major Jewish philanthropists as Jeffrey Glick, Michael Steinhardt and Marc Belzberg. Winiarz was hired at JPSY by Ellen Lieberman (who is now married to South African rabbi Ian Azizolohof). When Ellen left on maternity leave, Gafni took over. He moved it from an organization with two full-time employees and a budget of $25,000 a year to ten full-time employees and a budget around $500,000 a year. He renamed it “The Jewish Youth Movement.” He’d walk into public schools and recruited Jewish kids for JPSY. Due to the equal access law promulgated by President Reagen, you could teach religion in public school at an after-school club. Marc: “I went into the New York City superintendent of schools and asked to develop this JPSY program. He turns his back to me in this swivel arm chair like he’s thinking, then swivels back to me and he says in yiddish, ‘A shaila’s trafe,’ which means, ‘Don’t ask, just go do it.’ As long as we weren’t proselytizing, we could do what we wanted. “We didn’t go in with a shofar. We would walk in and get a ton of pizza. We’d hire a guy who’d play Billy Joel music. Gerson Veroba. He played Billy Joel better than Billy Joel. We’d announce, ‘Billy Joel concert. Pizza. Judaism.’ All the Jewish kids would come. They were all embarrassed to be Jewish. “Our big thing was Jewish pride. It wasn’t content. It was just, ‘Be proud that you’re Jewish. Don’t slink around your public school.’” “I was a young, full of energy, arrogant. I thought I could do anything, solve anything, but I didn’t have any protection. I was a complete outsider from Columbus, Ohio. When NCSY was getting 40 public school kids to some its program, we were getting 400 kids to JPSY. We were threatening the outreach establishment. “I received a phone call from one of the leaders of NCSY at the time telling me as much in rather harsh terms. “I was the summer rabbi at Lincoln Square Synagogue. They had over a thousand people a week coming to synagogue. I was an out of control, loving, talented, committed to everyone, arrogant kid who didn’t send people thank you notes and didn’t play the political game and didn’t cozy up to the right people. “I’ve raised a million dollars for JPSY. So picture how people looked at me.” In 1984, Marc and his wife brought a 16-year old girl named Judy into their home. She later said that Marc came on to her. Marc: “Judy’s version of events is false. It is completely distorted in substance, fact and tone.” A polygraph test in 2007 supported Marc’s claims, according to MarcGafni.com. Judy told her story to Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He chose to believe Winiarz. Judy told one of her counselors in JPSY, Susan. Susan brought Judy to Rabbi Blau who put out the word that Winiarz was dangerous. I’m told by anti-Winiarz sources that an informal Beit Din was convenened in New York about Marc and Judy. That Winiarz was told to quit his job and move from New York to some unsuspecting community and make a new life (that was how these things were handled until recently). Marc: “This New York Beit Din story is a complete fabrication. The Judy encounter should’ve been dealt with and healed immediately. I kept running JPSY for a couple of years [after the Judy controversy].” Rabbi Yosef Blau’s wife Rivkah worked for R. Shlomo Riskin in the 1970s and early 1980s (she ran his girls’ high school). She frequently found it distressing and burned out twice. She and her husband appeared to have a tense relationship with R. Riskin (though they’ve all since buried the hatchet, and R. Blau has a son who works for R. Riskin). Marc Winiarz was R. Riskin’s poster boy. R. Riskin was trying to raise money to show that he could produce a new generation of rabbis. The first (and only in the United States?) guy R. Riskin ordained was Winiarz. Yeshiva University’s backbenchers were furious at R. Riskin for starting his own Hebrew high school (Ohr Torah). R. Riskin was talking about starting his own ordination program up the road from YU. R. Riskin was taking funding that used to go to YU. The guy who funded Ohr Torah was Max Stern of Stern College (the women’s branch of YU) fame. Rabbi Blau and Marc Winiarz had a confrontation in 1985 in a hallway on the third or fourth floor of YU. According to sources, the confrontation went like this: Marc. “Rabbi Blau, what are you doing? Are you crazy? Why haven’t you come to talk to me to heal this thing? You’re spreading stories that are not true.” Rabbi Blau says: “I’m going to get you.” Marc responds: “Why don’t you first take care of problems in your own home before you start throwing stones at other people?” I hear that Rabbi Blau then threw a punch at Marc and said, “I’ll bring you down.” On Oct. 12, 2004, R. Blau told me: “At one point, Mordechai came into my office and told me he’d get my wife. I was stern with him. He was threatening.” In July 2008, I ask Marc about all this. He replies: “This was a long time ago. I wish the Blaus well. I no longer live in their world. Perhaps one day in the future we will all be able to sit down like human beings and heal this.” In early 1986, Winiarz finished his term at JPSY. Marc: “I ended JPSY for a simple reason. A lot of people who do youth work does it between 18 and 26 and then you burn out.” Luke: “Weren’t you exiled to Boca? Wasn’t there a Beit Din convened?” Marc: “It never happened.” Luke: “So you went to Boca voluntarily?” Marc: “Of course. “It’s a natural transition. I went to Rabbi Kenny Hain, who was head of communal services at YU. I was ready to take a pulpit. He suggested Boca Raton.” The rabbi in Boca Raton before Winiarz was Mark Dratch, Rabbi Norman Lamm’s son-in-law. The congregation (Boca Raton Community Synagogue) had about 20 families. They’d been brutal to R. Dratch. One guy was particularly vicious — attorney Steve Marcus who was murdered in a gay bar ten years later. Rabbi Lamm came down to help his son-in-law. When he got up to speak, four people turned their chairs to face the wall. Nobody wanted to take the pulpit that R. Lamm had ostracized. Winiarz moved to Boca Raton around 1986. He did a great job in outreach. He was charismatic. The size of the congregation tripled. Marc ruffled feathers. Before the high holidays, he took out full page ads in the local Jewish newspaper that said, ‘Are you bored with impersonal and monotonous services? Come join Rabbi Marc.’ “The other rabbis in town were furious with me,” says Marc, “because they felt I was describing their congregation, which of course I was.” Marc took on other rabbis over the lack of rabbinic certification on the sale of meat. “The meat would be stamped kosher,” says Marc, “but the rabbis who were giving the kosher stamp never stopped by to check. It was completely corrupt. I got up in a meeting and said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe in kosher or not, people are trusting us that this is kosher.’ “They fluffed me off. I said I would publicly say this is a fraud, which I did. That did not get anyone happy there.” “The pope had come to South Florida. The local rabbis went. They kissed his ring. I felt it was wrong. The pope had been inappropriate vis-a-vis the Jews in Auschwitz, without acknowledging directly what had happened there. I published a long list of the Pope’s refusals to recognize the integrity of the Holocaust and papal responsibility for being silent during the Nazi regime. “With a group of other rabbis, we dressed in concentartion camp suits and blocked the pope’s motorcade. The other ecumenical rabbis were furious with me.” “Michael Dukakis was running for president. Jews were important voters. Florida is always a swing state. I announced I would hold a mock funeral for integrity in the Democratic party because of Dukakis’s affiliation with Jesse Jackson. I wrote an article called, ‘Hymietown is not the issue.’ Dennis Prager did something similar at the same time. I detailed Jackson’s record of significant anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. “I received death threats for this.” “To this day, I hear from people who say they were at the funeral. I never held it. But it became a legendary event.” “I was blocked from speaking venues for the next decade because of that. Jewish Democrats were absolutely furious.” Luke: “The other rabbis censured you for something?” Marc: “It was for one of these four things. I held a press conference where I held up the censure and said that this document is more precious to me than my ordination because it is a testament to my integrity. That didn’t make anyone very happy.” “The positions we took were ones of integrity… They were correct. There’s a way to take them and still honor the other rabbis in the community (better than I did). I hope that if I were to take those same positions today, it would be with more grace and less youthful impudence.” In Boca in 1986, Winiarz got to know a single wealthy 48-year old woman (not part of his shul) who turned him on to contemporary spirituality. She opened Marc up to music and art. “I knew philosophy like a yeshiva boy would,” says Marc. “I’d read Plato and Socrates and Nietzsche. I had never heard of Ram Dass. I’d never heard of New Thought. I’d never heard of anything that wasn’t a classic.” He read “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. “I never got into New Age thinking, but more the East-West meeting.” Winiarz built up the shul that Rabbi Kenneth Brander (a poor speaker but a straight arrow) inherited in 1987. Winiarz left the Boca Raton shul after 18 months. He says he clashed with the board on about ten different issues, none of which had to do with sex. Marc: “There was a sigificant disagreeent between the board and me over the direction of the synagogue. It was a question about who was running the synagogue — was it me or was it the board? There was a vote in the synagogue about whether I was to go on as the rabbi or not. There was a mediation between me and the synagogue after I left in which we signed a document that neither side felt the other had behaved inappropriately because there were rumors about that then. This [conflict] was about control of the synagogue. I was very controversial in town. The synagogue was much larger. I was not interested in having a fight over who controlled the synagogue. I withdrew without a fight and I started The Center for Jewish Living (CJL).” It was funded by Jerry Hahn, Lynn Kesselman and other laity (most of them from the synagogue Marc had just left). “It was less of a classical Orthodox synagogue and more of a community outreach center, closer to the vision of what Dennis would’ve created as a synagogue. I wanted a cutting edge creative experimental outreach synagogue.” “I wanted to stay in Boca and develop this. My wife Lisa was committed to moving to Israel and we had to make a decision. I felt that the Jewish destiny in the 20th Century was bound up in Israel. I wanted to be able to do what I taught. Like every good Modern Orthodox rabbi, I had been talking for years about the miracle of the modern state of Israel. Lisa and I felt hypocritical [living in the United States]. We had a wonderful opportunity there to do something significant.” They moved in the summer of 1989. Winiarz had been considering a career in public service in the United States, including a possible run for Congress. Luke: “Were you considering becoming a TV anchorman?” Marc: “No.” Luke: “Did you keep a scrapbook with all your press clippings?” Marc: “My secretary did.” Luke: “Were you looking for love?” Marc: “All of us want to love and all of us want to be loved. The question is — what do we do to get love. I hope that I and the rest of us do our best to get love by loving. Erich Fromm wrote about this in his book ‘The Art of Loving.’” When Winiarz moved to Israel in 1989, he Hebraized his name to “Mordecai Gafni.” “Winiarz” is short for “vineyard” which in Hebrew is “Gafni.” The Jewish settlement of Beit Tzufim (it is two miles east of the Israeli city of Kefar Sava) sent Winiarz a formal offer to be their rabbi for two years. He accepted. The contractor for the town was close to R. Riskin who connected Winiarz with him. In Israel, to become a rabbi of a city, it takes a lot of political savvy and support. If you wanted to become the rabbi of Jerusalem, you’d have to hire a PR firm and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and have major support in political places. Major Torah scholarship won’t be enough to make it happen. Rabbi Gafni gave ad hoc shiurim around the settler world. In 1991, Lisa and Marc decided to divorce. Marc met a 24-year old woman. “It was a sad tragic love story,” says Marc. “She was a singer. “In the Ma’ariv article, she said we had no physical relationship. I was never her counselor. She was going to Bar Ilan. “We fell in love. We had some intention to marry. She shared that with her mother. Her mother was very happy. Her mother shared it with her father and her father did indeed go berserk. That’s correct. He called me and said, ‘If you go out with my daughter, I’ll destroy you. I’ll work with Rabbi Blau to destroy you.’ “I told him that I was in love with his daughter and she was in love with me and this was our issue. I hung up the phone. “He moved aggressively to prevent his daughter from seeing me. There was a lot of trauma and drama for about four months. “We met at Bar Ilan about four months later. She said to me, ‘I’ll always love you.’ “Two months later, she got engaged to someone else. I believe she’s happily married.” “After my second, I wanted to leave the rabbinate. As a professional Jew, I didn’t have any sense of my own Judaism. I was so locked into the system, I couldn’t think clearly about what I believed. My whole move out of classical Orthodoxy happened during those years. The core of most of my books (such as Mystery of Love, Soul Prints, etc) emerged from those years. I spent three years (largely) without teaching. I took a vow of three years away from teaching so I could think.” “[Circa 1992,] Rabbi Riskin was interested in building affiliates on the Aish HaTorah model. “He had laity in Australia. We talked about the possibility of my going to Australia. I did a lecture tour there for 15 days (in Sydney). In the end, it didn’t come through. The funding to create the branch system didn’t come through.” Luke: “I heard that some people in Australia called some of your critics and that put a kabosh on your move to Australia.” Marc: “I don’t know anything about that.” R. Gafni has two kids from his second marriage (1984 -1991). He has no kids from his third marriage (to poet Cary Chaya Kaplan 1998-2005). In 1991, Marc Belzberg hired Mordy (they’d known each other from high school, Belzberg was a surrogate older brother for Winiarz) as a software salesman aka marketing director. Belzberg had a business partner, a wealthy lawyer baal teshuva who moved to Israel. “The company I was working for for three years was called MicroGuard. I was the marketing director. MicroGuard was owned by Marc’s venture capital firm, Belanet. MicroGuard didn’t make it.” Marc Belzberg made a connection between Winiarz and Yitzhak Shamir’s son and Israeli businessman and CEO of one of Mark’s companies and social activist (let’s-all-get-along). Gafni adopted many of Belzberg’s customs as he went from the Young Israel rabbi type to a Carlebachian to a bohemian. On Shabbat, Belzberg began wearing this long white smoking jacket that the Reb Arele Hasidim in Jerusalem wear on Shabbat. Then Gafni started wearing it too (he bought one for his third wedding in 1998) before transitioning to the Indian garb below. Marc: “You can take a normal sweet picture and make it look like a cult picture. We were lighting the Chanukkah candles. If you look at the picture, you’ll see no crazy people. Just straight middle-class secular Israelis who’d been disaffected from Judaism. Instead of having a menorah, we had eight big candles. Everyone held one. We went around and lit them. We always did things halakhicly (according to the law), but creatively. I was trying to create an alternative to the Indian Eastern street. This comes not from the rational side but from the mystical side.” Around 1993, Gafni helped start a political party in Israel called Derech HaShishi (The Third Way). It was Marc Belzberg’s money (in part) but Gafni was near the front of it. Yehuda HaRel ran the show. Marc Gafni got his master’s degree from Bar Ilan University circa 1993 in Jewish Philosophy. Around 1996, Marc began teaching a couple of courses for R. David Aaron’s Jerusalem program Isralight. After R. Gafni finished teaching a course at Isralight, he started dating a 23 year old former student. The relationship lasted 18 months. Some of R. Gafni’s critics tried to make this a story. The woman then wrote R. Gafni a letter saying there was nothing inappropriate about their relationship. R. David Aaron won’t speak about R. Gafni. They were never close. R. Gafni got a job with a group called Milah (Jerusalem Institute for Education, founded and funded by David Morrison and his wife Jo). Gafni became high profile in Jerusalem around 1998. (A source writes: “Milah was an adult education ulpan for Americans and ethiopians who finished the regular ulpan and were still not comfortable in Hebrew. Gafni used this role as head of the organization, not to teach Hebrew, but to teach his theories of Judaism and a parashat hashavua class.”) Marc: “I wanted to expand Milah to be something different. To be a teaching organization and outreach center. To teach spirituality and Torah in a much broader sense than the original mandate. “I was a poor administrator. At some point, David wanted to run Milah as he wanted to run it. As was his right. He basically took it back. David wrote me a letter saying there were no issues of financial impropriety. “David was right. We did not do a good job with administration. We had a different vision. We weren’t able to work it out. At the time, I didn’t have the skill to work with David appropriately. I wish him a complete blessing with running Milah.” Sources say David was under a lot of pressure from Gafni’s critics to fire him. Marc dated around from 1991-1998. “That’s when PAG started,” Marc jokes July 4, 2008. “Parents Against Gafni.” Marc Gafni has led more of a bohemian than a rabbinic lifestyle. Some of his supporters, such as Marc Belzberg (from the wealthy Canadian family) have said, “Yeah, Mordechai has a yetzer hora.” Luke: “Are you a Zelig for our time?” Marc: “No. Zelig means someone who doesn’t have depth or a personal center. He’s someone who shifts to please a crowd. My story is one of evolution and unfolding. Over the years, I’ve read and studied hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books. I’ve studied wide and broad in my own search for an authentic and living teaching. Naturally, I evolved beyond a narrow Orthodoxy to a much broader worldview. That was a hard walk.” Luke: “What does Mordecai Gafni the teacher today have in common with Marc Winiarz the teacher from 25 years ago?” Marc: “A passionate love of Judaism and its texts and practices. I remain committed to Hebrew practices. To miztvot. I remain in love with mitzvot. At the same time, the way I practice them has changed from when I was living in a narrow insular Orthodox mindset. My horizons have broadened. A number of important systems of thought I’ve engaged have challenged some of my original Jewish understandings.” Luke: “So what are the most important challenges?” Marc: “The particularity of the Jewish people. The notion that Judaism is the superior system. “The highly rigid vision of family and sexuality, which has great beauty and great shadow. “The shadow of the gorgeous Jewish ethical commitment is an enormous amount of self-righteous judgment, verbal violence and ugly ways of conflict. I’m strongly drawn to more holistic and inclusive ways of dealing with each other.” From The Jewish Week, Sept. 24, 2004: I first saw Mordecai Gafni at UCLA during Passover week 2002. He lectured for an hour. Gafni chatted with Dennis Prager afterwards. They appeared friendly. The next week, Gafni appeared on Prager’s radio show for half an hour to talk about his book The Mystery of Love. During the show, Prager seemed to shift his position on the book, concluding that it was important. Prager’s (former) wife Fran loved Gafni’s book The Mystery of Love, but Dennis had a harder time with it. Marc describes Mystery as his best book. From Publishers Weekly: “From the author of Soul Prints comes this book about the profound link between sex and spirituality. Gafni, a Kabbalah scholar, television host and rabbi, argues thoughtfully and thoroughly that the erotic and the holy are one and the same. If readers can get past the initial shock of Gafni’s claim that the cherubs on the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies were in fact locked in sexual embrace (a provocative suggestion supported by some Kabbalistic texts), then the book is sure to be a mind opener. Gafni writes: the secret of the cherubs is that sex is our spiritual guide. He carefully reclaims the word eros, broadening it from the narrow sexual meaning it has today to encompass a larger life force: eros is the source of all creativity and pleasure. In this context, eros is synonymous with the divine and the sacred. Sexuality (e.g., as portrayed in the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon) is a model for the larger concept of eros and holiness. Gafni meticulously builds on this central argument with generous helpings of parables and stories from mystical texts, observing that we often lead nonerotic (although not necessarily nonsexual) lives. He invites readers to learn to fill their emptiness with eros rather than its pale imitations. Those frustrated with the spare documentation of his argument can look forward to his upcoming two-volume scholarly work expanding on the material in this fascinating book.” The most important kabbalah expert in America, Professor Elliot Wolfson of New York University, blurbed the book: “[A] beautiful book that will undoubtedly inspire many people and perhaps even bring some healing to a desperately ill world.” An ex-girlfriend told me in 2002 that Soul Prints was the best book she’d read on Judaism. From Publishers Weekly: “Just as fingerprints are unique, so, too, says Rabbi Gafni, are soul prints: each human soul has an individual mark that it leaves behind on everyone it touches. Gafni, dean of the Merlitz Public Culture Center in Israel, weaves together autobiographical reflections with tips and exercises designed to help readers discover their soul prints and find fulfillment. Gafni begins with the premise that everyone is lonely and many people look for cures in places where they will never find them, such as sexual encounters. Many of the exercises in this splendid book are designed to help readers confront, and then cure, that loneliness. Gafni suggests that readers share what they learn while reading this book with a lonely person they know. Readers are then asked to make a “Soul Print box” that contains the things that are most important to them, and then to show the contents of that box to one other person. Gafni advocates the practice of random acts of kindness: “Bring happiness to one person each week, for no apparent reason.” His tremendous breadth distinguishes this volume from so many spiritualized self-help tomes. He draws on the fantasy novella Flatlands and the teachings of Talmudic rabbis, on psychologists and prophets. He tells his own stories and biblical stories. Though steeped in Jewish wisdom, this book will be accessible and helpful to readers of many faiths. Gafni occasionally states the obvious (as when he notes that if “after a long day of living your life, you feel as if you are on the verge of tears,” something might be amiss). But those few banalities can’t ruin this insightful book. (Mar.)Forecast: This book is being published in conjunction with a major PBS special by the same title, scheduled to air in early March; this should have a significant impact on book sales. Gafni will be doing a 10-city author tour later that month.” Prager was chummy with Gafni for years (until 2006 when Gafni’s Bayit Chadash scandal broke open and all the Jewish leaders such as rabbis Telushkin and Berman who’d been in his corner left him). They regularly greet each other with a hug. When Dennis sent his step-daughter Anya to Israel circa 1998, he asked Gafni to look after her. Like Shlomo Carlebach, Gafni feels a mission to hug everybody he can. Gafni had a three hour meeting with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin circa 1998. Gafni told his life story in a convincing fashion and Telushkin moved into his corner for the next eight years. Prager and Telushkin vouched for Gafni for many years (until 2006). (Joseph Telushkin began backing Gafni at the request of his friend, who had a romance with Gafni. Telushkin then turned against Gafni May 10, 2006 when she turned against Gafni.) Rabbi Telushkin wrote this cover blurb for Soul Prints: “A radical, profound, and important guide to enable each reader to find out why he is on earth — and what he can do to make sure that he actualizes the person he or she is meant to be.” In the Acknowledgements section of Soul Prints, Gafni calls Telushkin a “friend” and “colleague.” Though they were never close, Telushkin, a secondary sources guy (he writes popular books on Judaism but does little original scholarship), was impressed by Gafni’s abilities with primary sources. Many of Gafni’s followers say he’s a genius. This July 2008 article in Catalyst magazine promotes him as the hero of a spiritual epic. I would say Gafni knows more Torah than 99% of non-Orthodox Jews (and probably more than 90% of Orthodox Jews). Gafni’s been to yeshiva. He’s well read. He knows how to speak. He’s charismatic. Non-Orthodox Jews are dying for a guy like him. Rabbi Gafni and his other supporters, are convinced that there is a small group of people who are destroying his career. They are right. There is a small group of people (such Rabbi Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University) wanting to end his career as a religious leader. They pushed Gary Rosenblatt — Rabbi Blau’s longtime friend — to write that 2004 article in The Jewish Week. They’ve known or known of Gafni since around 1980 (though none of his detractors have had an ongoing close relationship with Gafni). They say Gafni is a dangerous man. On October 21, 2004, I left messages with rabbis Berman and Telushkin on their home phone numbers to talk about their defense of Gafni. They’ve yet to return my call. Though Gafni does develop his own ideas, his detractors love to point to his ability to take the ideas of others and restate them in a way that’s more compelling. When he was young (from about 1976 to 1989), Marc seemed like the second coming of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He was delivering Rabbi Riskin’s talks, word-for-word, better than Rabbi Riskin. Rabbi Riskin didn’t mind this. On the contrary, he was flattered to have a protege. Rabbi Riskin speaks personally, as if he is giving you some secret (with the way he uses his delivery and moves around the room). For a couple of years, Mordechai matched this style (though not the high-pitched voice). Winiarz wore a suit. His hair was short. He wore a white shirt. He looked like a respectable Young Israel Orthodox rabbi. “I never tried to be Rabbi Riskin,” Gafni tells me July 4, 2008. “For a time, I was his protege.” For years, Winiarz was fascinated by Rav Yosef Soloveitchik. Around 1986, Winiarz published in Daat (a scholarly publication out of Bar Ilan) the first annotated bibliography of the Rav’s works. “An annotated bibliography means you read everything,” says Gafni. “I read every word the man wrote. I was going to write my doctorate on Solveitchik. I have four huge boxes organizing his thought into different categories. I probably know his thought better than anybody else in the world today.” “I read voraciously. I’ve picked about ten thinkers in my life and done zibbug. It’s a spiritual and intellectual process where you completely merge with the thought of a thinker. I did that with about three or four Hasidic masters. The first person I did it with was Rav. Soloveitchik. You’re not so much studying their thought. You’re entering into their spiritual dept. You are intuitively in their field. “I lectured on him extensively for a period of time. I was madly in love with his thought. At a certain point, it didn’t quite do it for me. It was missing an emotional tenor, an emotional ecstasy, loving. It became too conceptual for me. “When I was like 17, I would hang out outside his apartment at YU and wait for him to come out so I could just see him. I was like a 17 year old in love with a baseball player. I was madly in love with him. “I wasn’t about becoming the next Soloveitchik. I was deeply reverentially in love with his thought and with him. I submitted my doctoral thesis proposal to write on him — ‘Kabbalah in the thought of Rabbi Soloveitchik.’ I wanted to show that underneath all the rational categories, he was actually a kabbalist. Whenever there was a clash between rational thought and kabbalistic thought, he used kabbalistic thought. That proposal was approved by Bar Ilan. In the end, I went in a different direction.” “My heart opened to Hasidism. It’s a normal development.” In 1989, Gafni moved into his Shlomo Carlebach phase. “I never had a relationship with Shlomo Carlebach,” says Gafni. “A bunch of his students and my students wanted us to meet. We had made up to meet several weeks after Simchat Torah, and he died just before.” Gafni’s third marriage was to Cary Chaya Kaplan (13 years younger than he, an Oxford graduate student who made an early decision to never have kids, they married circa 1998 and divorced circa 2005) lives in San Francisco while Winiarz lived in Israel until 2006. Cary Kaplan-Gafni attempted a PhD at Oxford’s Jewish Studies department (St Catherine’s) on the interpretation of Biblical figures in contemporary Jewish movements of renewal. Her supervisor was the same as Gafni’s — Dr. Norman Solomon. Cary didn’t cut it at Oxford and she moved on to a New Age school in San Francisco — the California Institute of Integral Studies. “My third marriage was not one of convenience,” Marc tells me in reaction to earlier versions of this posting. “I wanted to teach in Orthodox institutions. Blau (or people connected with him) would call up every institution and tell them not to have me. He was like Inspector Javert in Les Miserables (to use the description of Rabb Joseph Telushkin). Blau would call women I was going out with. Three women over a period of eight years — Rachel, Sharon and Chana. Each one I could’ve married. Each time, he called their parents. That’s how I made up the joke about Parents Against Gafni. It was so painful to me. “I was 37. Everyone I would try to go out with in Jerusalem would get a call from Blau or one of his minions. I met Chaya. She was fresh, beautiful. Not in the Blau influence. I was exhausted from going out. I got married way too fast.” Starting in 2004, R. Gafni started coming under public attack for his private life. “For most of my teaching career,” says Marc July 14, 2008, “I did not discuss my private life. Most rabbis don’t. “When asked about my private life, my first instinct was not to engage it. “When many false things were said about my private life, I had no choice but to address it directly, which I’ve done in full on my website (MarcGafni.com).” Luke: “You’re great at identifying people with money.” Marc: “You’re obviously saying that sarcastically, but any leader needs to be great at identifying funding sources.” Luke: “And what they believe, you believe and preach?” Marc: “That’s just made up. I don’t know where that came from.” Luke: “You did paid television in Israel?” Marc: “It was not paid television. I did several seasons. I made about 50 shows (“Under His Vine” in Hebrew). In Israel, you can’t buy a television show. This was on Channel 2, Israel’s key channel. Because they give you a small budget, Israeli TV on that budget looks like crap. So sometimes people raise extra money to do the show better. “During the situation, when busses were blowing up in Israel, how do you go on with your day? I called my rabbi friends and said, ‘We need to say something about this. Busses are blowing up and we are still talking about whether tuna fish is kosher.’ “No one moved on it. “At that point, there was a suggestion that I make a series of television spots, not to explain what happened, you can’t explain why a bus blows up, but to talk about it in a way that we can have a conversation about it. What are we doing here? Why are we in this country? How is it that we’re being responsible to our kids and yet endangering them? To have a spiritual conversation to give people the sense that Judaism is dealing with their lives. “I raised a bunch of money and we made for Channel 2 these spots and when terrorism would happen, they’d play this spot. “Those spots were paid for by me and by Israeli TV. We raised extra money to do them right. “The third set of spots were 25 spots I did that started the morning. They were on dance, creativity, tears, laughter. They were five minute spots. They’re going up on my website. You can’t buy spots. These were not infomercials. They were regular programming of Israeli TV. “Nobody paid for me to be on TV.” Since 2000, R. Gafni has publicly defined himself as post-denominational.
Morning News Pop/Rock
Los Angeles Times – August 18, 1987 http://jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2005/01/rabbi-mordechai-gafni-series-part-3.html#comments Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation’s press Entertainment Desk An Orthodox rabbi in Boca Raton, Fla., is reaching out to young people in an unorthodox way–with rock ‘n’ roll. Mordechai Winyarz, 26, paid New York songwriter Lenny Solomon $30,000 to write songs with contemporary Jewish themes and hired young Jewish musicians to perform and record an album for $12,000. The album, “Jewish Pride,” set for release Sept. 1, includes a rap song “Rappin’ Jewish” written by Danny Furst. A sample of the lyrics: La-die-doo, I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool Yeah, I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
Rabbi’s Rap Sings Praises of Judaism – Jewish Rap
Sun-Sentinel – August 28, 1987 By Carol Brzozowski, Staff Writer Imagine hearing a Jewish rap song to the beat of ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, boom, ch-ch boom. Imagine it played full blast from the stereos of the cars of Jewish teens as they cruise around town. An Orthodox rabbi from Boca Raton is content in imagining that. He helped to make the album on which the song appears. Imagine that! Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz, a freshly ordained transplant from New York and the first rabbi for the newly established Boca Raton Synagogue, is in the sanctuary, playing the music at full volume, making motions with his hands as if he were beating on drums. The album, Jewish Pride, is scheduled to be released on Tuesday in Palm Beach County and then in New York. ”This is going to have an impact!” he exclaimed. ”Take cantorial music and throw it out the window!” Later, Winyarz conceded that he liked cantorial music, but added that he thinks it cannot reach out to young Jews the way modern music can, if set to ”Jewish” lyrics. ”I like cantorial music, but it doesn’t express Jewish pride in the ’80s,” Winyarz said. ”Ritual expression is critical, but it’s not the end-all. If it doesn’t create a certain kind of person, a certain kind of society, then what is ritual for?” To know a bit about Winyarz’ history is to understand why an Orthodox rabbi would be backing a project to reach out to unaffiliated Jews through rock music. Winyarz, 26, was responsible for initiating an outreach into New York schools. He would walk into a school holding a shofar — the ram’s horn used in sacred services — and would recruit any Jewish child into his youth programs who recognized the shofar. He became the second rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue, leaving behind the program in New York after building it into a host of youth groups with a budget of $500,000. The album was done through the cooperation of JPSY, an acronym for Jewish Public School Youth, a program Winyarz initiated in New York. Winyarz and his small group of musicians scouted for young Jewish musicians to perform on the album.
The group worked six hours during the weekdays from midnight to 6 a.m. for two weeks at Eastside Sound Studio in New York.
In making the album, Winyarz convinced Lenny Solomon, an accountant, to go into Jewish rock music full time. ”His mother is real thrilled,” Winyarz said, tongue in cheek. Solomon has dropped his job to lead the organization’s musical outreach program. Not every song on Jewish Pride is the type that’s only understood when played full-blast from an oversized radio. Some have the traditional Hebrew folk music beat. Some talk of familiar themes in Judaism. Minyan Man is about a group of nine Jewish men in search of a 10th man to have a minyan, the ”quorum” needed to conduct Jewish worship. The title song is Jewish Pride. Winyarz said that the album is a pioneering one in Jewish music, and representatives of national Jewish music organizations say they can’t argue one way or another. Although he concedes that Jewish music has been ”updated” with every generation, the rabbi said the album is a first in its combination of a variety of modern styles and its use of Jewish messages for lyrics. He hopes it will start a trend such as the one Christians began in the 1960s with religious rock music, featuring such musicians as Randy Stonehill, Larry Norman and Amy Grant. Winyarz will introduce the album through Jewish cultural radio programs and in Jewish book and record stores, but he has his eyes set on secular radio as well. ”This is religious music, there’s no question about it,” Winyarz said of Jewish Pride. Jews’ pride in themselves is shrinking, Winyarz says. He said that many Jews are ”trying to be WASP-y” in an attempt to cover their Jewish heritage, following the cue of their parents who have done so in order to assimilate. ”We’re saying, ‘Don’t do that. Chuck it,”’ Winyarz said. ”The 11th commandment of a Jew in America has been, ‘Thou shalt melt (into the melting pot).’ ”We’ve … been comfortable in our Judaism and pay lip service to Judaism. Our direction is complete confrontation — in the most positive way.” Winyarz figures that confrontation is done best through music. The lyrics from Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz’ new Jewish rap song, Rappin’ Jewish, which is on his album Jewish Pride. ”La-die-do I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool Yeah I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool Ask me anything you want to but I will repeat I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
Got a son who’s a doctor, a daughter who’s a lawyer My wife teaches English and reads Tom Sawyer Each morning I sit at my breakfast table Eatin’ ‘filte fish with lox and bagels. I’m a Jewish man been all over the map That’s why I’m singing my Jewish rap Y’see I’ve been rappin’ since the age of three When my home boys rocked across the Red Sea. Chorus: Jewish Pride keeps ya going strong Makes our people last real long So don’t ignore what comes from inside Let it grow, ’cause it’s Jewish Pride.” Here Marc Gafni’s latest musical masterpiece here!
Live and Be Free (Hip Hop Remix)
In between appointments one day, at Marc Gafni’s home in Israel, which was also the center of the movement, a beautiful brother and musician, who often played with Marc Gafni at Sabbath prayer services in Tel Aviv, came in and said: “Hey, Rabbi, Say some Torah Dharma for this music disco CD I am doing. I want this to be heard in dance floors all over the world!” We did it in about twenty minutes, no planning, directly from the heart. And this is a piece of what spontaneously came out. The ancient teachers taught, “Words that come from the Heart, Enter the Heart.” Let It Be So. -Marc Gafni
Rabbi To Mark Papal Visit By Walking A Picket Line
by Dexter Filkins – Herald Staff Writer
The Miami Herald (FL) – September 10, 1987
When Pope John Paul II meets with Jewish leaders Friday, Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz will greet him, but not like everyone else. Instead of waving and cheering, the rabbi will shout and walk a picket line — in the uniform of a concentration camp survivor.
Winyarz, who will join 15 other rabbis in the Miami International Airport protest, has some questions for the pontiff, and he wants them answered:
Why did the pope meet with and praise Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, the former Nazi? Why was the Vatican silent during the Holocaust, when six million Jews perished? Why does the Vatican refuse to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel? Why did the pope embrace the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose group is dedicated to the destruction of Israel?
Winyarz said he is not angry; just suspicious, and driven.
“The pope is playing on both sides of the fence,” said Winyarz, 26, rabbi of the orthodox Boca Raton Synagogue. “This is not pope-bashing. I just want to know where he really stands.”
To find out, Winyarz and others will don concentration camp uniforms and get as close as they can to the pope when he lands. Tonight, the group will lecture on “the history of church anti- Semitism” outside the Omni Hotel, where the pope and several Catholic leaders will gather. And when Jewish leaders meet John Paul II Friday at the Cultural Arts Center, Winyarz will be outside.
“It is important that the Jewish leaders are there,” Winyarz said. “But it is just as important that we are there to let our leaders know that there is a constituency outside.”
To the rabbi, the pope is wading in murky moral waters. Past actions of the church and the pope, he said, raise the specter of anti-Semitism, and as the spiritual leader of 900 million Roman Catholics, the pope is obliged to put the questions to rest.
“(Yassar) Arafat’s methodology is killing women and children. Waldheim is a documented Nazi,” said Winyarz, whose mother survived the Holocaust. “What does that say when the pope welcomes these men and embraces them?”
For Winyarz, the heart of the matter is whether the church is anti-Semitic. On this, Winyarz is undecided, but he asserts that some actions — such as the Vatican’s refusal to recognize Israel — suggest that it is.
“The recognition of Israel is, I think, a theological problem,” Winyarz said. “The church used to teach that the Jews, as the killers of Christ, are condemned to eternal damnation.”
What could Pope John Paul do to placate Winyarz? Simple, said the rabbi:
Recognize Israel, repudiate Arafat and Waldheim and explain the Vatican’s behavior during the Holocaust.
Winyarz doesn’t think that will happen, but to him, the pope must know. The rabbi does not claim to speak for his congregation, but he is certain that many Jews share his views, and that he won’t be ostracized.
“We all have to take the path that our consciences dictate,” Winyarz said. “I don’t think my fellow Jews will be offended by that.”
“Never Again!’ Pope Says Holocaust Condemned in Talk to Jewish Leaders
Sun-Sentinel – September 12, 1987
By James D. Davis, Religion Editor
MIAMI — Pope John Paul II, in a major address on Catholic-Jewish relations, gave his clearest statement thus far that Jews were the primary targets of the Holocaust.
The pontiff, in a historic speech Friday to 175 national and South Florida Jewish leaders at the Center for the Fine Arts, passionately called the World War II Nazi slaughter a ”ruthless and inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish people … only because they were Jews.”
The remark was an apparent attempt to allay Jewish fears that the Vatican was trying to ”universalize” the Holocaust and play down its special victimization of Jews. Many Jews have voiced concern that such an approach might make Catholics less sensitive to anti-Semitism.
The statements were the ”first time any Vatican official has said it with such clarity,” said Burton Levinson, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, in a news conference afterward.
In his second summit-style meeting with Jewish leaders in a week and a half — the first was at Castel Gandolfo, his summer home in Italy — the pope pledged to have his church fight bigotry, teach positive Jewish images in Catholic schools, and explore the historical roots of anti-Semitism.
As for the Holocaust horrors, ”Never again!” he vowed, to spontaneous applause, the only time his address was so interrupted. The phrase has become a standard rallying cry for world Jewry.
The pope also defended Pope Pius XII, who reigned during World War II, against charges that he remained silent during the Holocaust.
Pope John Paul II said he was ”convinced that history will reveal more clearly and convincingly how deeply Pius XII felt the tragedy of the Jewish people, and how hard and effectively he worked to assist them.”
The pontiff spoke on a raised dais in the center, eye-level with Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, head of a group that keeps in touch with Vatican officials. It was a symbolic departure from the pope’s usual raised throne.
In his own talk, Waxman mentioned ”recent tendencies to obscure the fact that Jews were the major target of Nazi genocidal policies.” However, he also said Jewish-Catholic talks are ”one of this century’s most positive developments.”
The delegates were a cross-section of mainstream Jewry. They represented the Synagogue Council of America, an umbrella of most U.S. Jewish groups; and the interdenominational American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League.
The Catholic side included several Vatican cardinals, including its secretaries of state, education and interfaith relations. Also present were Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, and four American cardinals.
A small group of people demonstrated outside the Spanish-style center. The protesters, some wearing concentration camp garb, waved Israeli flags and placards with slogans such as ”Arafat, Waldheim, what next?”
The protest was over an audience granted by the pontiff on June 25 to Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who has denied accusations that he helped deport Jews and partisans when when he was a German army officer in World War II, and one granted in 1982 to Palestinian guerrilla leader Yasser Arafat.
In his address, the pope made no reference to the Waldheim affair, which Waxman said still causes ”pain and distress.” But the pontiff told reporters on the trip from Rome that it had been his duty to meet Waldheim, since he came ”as a president, democratically elected, of a people, of a nation.”
Although the pope said the Jewish people ”have a right to a homeland,” the delegates greeted with stony silence his assertion that this ”also applies to the Palestinian people, so many of whom remain homeless and refugees.” Delegates were only slightly more receptive when he mentioned the ”state of Israel,” with which the Vatican still has not exchanged ambassadors.
The response was warmer when the pontiff said that the suffering of Israel’s children reminds the church of its common bond with the Jewish people. It was a clear theological rationale for making Holocaust studies a Catholic priority.
The pope repeated his announcement of last week that he was planning a major document on the Holocaust. He also reminded the listeners of a Jewish-Catholic workshop on the significance of the Holocaust, set for December in Washington, D.C. He said it would explore ”religious and historical implications of the Shoah” for both faiths. ”Shoah,” which means ”destruction,” is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.
Rabbi Waxman’s talk was more specific, urging more attention to ”the Christian roots of anti-Semitism.” He said the Holocaust was the climax of centuries of bigotry ”for which Christian teachings bear a heavy responsibility.”
Waxman voiced Jewish concern at the lack of full Vatican diplomatic relations for Israel, a matter that many Jews take as a lack of Catholic understanding of what Israel means to them. The Jewish state often is called a last refuge for persecuted Jews worldwide.
”Obviously, the differences have not been resolved,” Waxman said. But he acknowledged a Vatican promise to keep in closer touch with Jewish leaders on actions that might affect them.
”We live in an historic moment. The last quarter-century has irreversibly changed the way we perceive and act towards each other,” Waxman said.
But even among the mainstream Jewish groups, there were signs of divisions. An Orthodox rabbinical group boycotted the Friday dialogue because the previous talks failed to mention the Holocaust and recognition of Israel.
The Orthodox group also forbade Synagogue Council president Gilbert Klaperman to read the main statement to the pope Friday. Waxman, a Conservative, got the job instead.
Klaperman came to the meeting, anyway, because ”I felt the process is important and that it must continue.” Saying that the church had specifically acknowledged Jewish anger, he said the dialogue now must get beyond that.
The New Orthodoxy: The New Rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue Expects to Make Waves
The name Mordechai Winyarz may not ring a bell in Palm Beach County yet.
But as the Orthodox rabbi settles into his new position as the first full-time rabbi for the Boca Raton Synagogue, he has hopes of being a ”clanging cymbal” for God.
Winyarz, 26, just may do that. If he were a Christian, his style would be called evangelical.
Winyarz immediately is forthright about his lifestyle, should there be any questions on the topic: ”I’ll be making about $40,000 to $44,000, I drive a 1984 Topaz and I own eight suits.”
Winyarz has come from New York to the fledgling Boca Raton Synagogue, the only Orthodox synagogue in Boca Raton, and one of three in Palm Beach county.
Its construction is the bloodline for the Orthodox body. Orthodox Jews walk to the synagogue on the Sabbath and its construction has made it easier for the Jews to worship.
”People were moving here because they knew we were here,” said Dr. Gary Lieber, a spokesman and founding member of the synagogue.
Just a few weeks into his position, Winyarz is making plans in an effort to get involved. He is constantly on the telephone, talking with religious and secular community leaders. On the drawing board is a plan for some type of ”demonstration” in regards to the papal visit.
”Judaism has got to be a moral and social force,” Winyarz said. ”Not just to make pronouncements, but to become involved.”
”We were looking for someone to shake the bushes, to make the synagogue a dynamic place,” Lieber said of the search for a rabbi. ”We’re looking to make the congregation the Jewish center in south county. With a mouthpiece like him, we want to let people know we’re here. We’ve essentially done the groundwork.”
Winyarz ambitiously speaks of a few of his plans, one of which is to create a national Jewish retreat center on the synagogue’s property.
”Why not?” he said. ”The assumption is that everything operates out of New York. (Studies show) there are 75,000 Jews in Palm Beach County.”
Yet South County Jewish Federation studies also show that the affiliation rate of local Jews is 13 percent, half the national average.
”Boca in general is extremely materialistic and completely self-involved,” Winyarz said in interpreting the statistics.
”Younger people come to Florida to escape and be unaffiliated.”
Winyarz said he doesn’t condemn the acquisition of material goods and adds that Hebrew scriptures show that God created the world and the world is to be enjoyed.
As a spiritual leader, Winyarz said he will attempt to guide his congregation into emphasizing aspects of life that transcend material goods.
”So you’ve got the Porsche, the pool and the boat. What happens when you die? What do you have then? What did life mean? There must be a purpose to life. Living a meaningful existence is more pleasurable than owning a Porsche.”
Thus, the synagogue becomes what he calls the ”pleasure center.”
Winyarz did not say how much membership in the synagogue will cost, but said, ”Any Jew can come to High Holy Days even if they can’t pay. And no Jew ever will be turned away for lack of funds — ever, ever.”
Although the Boca Raton synagogue structure is complete, Winyarz said there is still more work to do on the inside and the work that is being planned will introduce some new twists on established ideas.
For instance, men and women are seated separately in Orthodox synagogues and typically women are out of the sight of the men, either behind a screen or in the back of the synagogue.
Plans for Boca Raton Synagogue (the word ”Orthodox” is intentionally omitted) still separate men and women, but women are not out of sight. Structurally, the synagogue is in a semicircle, focusing on the center of worship: the Torah and the Eternal Light.
”There will be an opportunity within the synagogue context for women to express themselves in a public manner, which is completely within the (Hebrew) law,” Winyarz said. ”Men or women will be able to get up and give a talk about a religious issue.
”We will have orthodoxy with a small ‘o’ and Halakhah (Jewish law) with a capital ‘H.’ ”
He calls it the new Orthodoxy. Orthodox Judaism usually evokes the stereotypical image of long beards, curly sideburns and black coats — and a separation from the rest of society.
The ”new” Orthodox Jew is the upwardly mobile doctor, lawyer, stockbroker or other person integrally involved in society, yet set apart from others in similiar professions by a belief system that emphasizes religious law and spiritual values.
A prime example of that was Winyarz’s ”outreach” lectures on Wall Street. He once did a lecture on Wall Street called ”Jewish Sexual Ethics.” He also conducted lunchtime scripture studies in a prestigious Manhattan law firm.
Orthodox Judaism is attractive to young Jews, Winyarz said, because ”young people are looking for something that’s real. People intuitively sense that which is authentic and I think there’s a desperate yearning for authenticity.”
Winyarz is an example of the attractiveness of Orthodoxy to young Jews. He had become so immersed in it that by 23 he was teaching Bible at Yeshiva University.
”There’s nothing as exciting as traditional Judaism,” Winyarz said. He wants to turn what he feels is a stereotype of Orthodox Judaism from ”backward, anti-feminist, anti-science” to ”real exciting, progressive system of life.”
In New York, winyarz recruited young people by walking into public schools with a shofar (the administration did not know of his actions). Children who recognized the shofar — a ram’s horn used for ceremonies — were targeted as recruits for his Jewish Public School Youth Project. He turned his efforts into a string of clubs with a budget of $500,000.
If Winyarz initiates the project in Florida, he won’t be staging any press conferences.
”It would be difficult to do it in Florida schools,” he said. ”If I do it, I won’t announce it.”
Winyarz is critical of some other Jewish and non-Jewish religious groups (For instance, he asks, ”What’s Jewish about Reform Judaism?”) although he adds that he believes he will have a good working relationship with other clergy.
”I believe we have the most correct system,” he said of Orthodox Judaism. ”I believe there are moments of truth in others.”
The Rabbi Rocks
by Tracey Wong Briggs
USA Today – August 17, 1987
Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz of Boca Raton, Fla., has produced Jewish Pride, a rock album appealing to Jewish youth. The LP, set for USA-wide release Sept. 1, includes songs written by Lenny Solomon and performed by young Jewish musicians. Rappin’ Jewish, by Danny Furst, says: “La-die-doo, I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool/ Yeah, I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool/ Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat/ I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.”
Rabbi rolls out Jewish rock album
Associated Press/St. Petersburg Times – August 17, 1987
BOCA RATON – A 26-year-old rabbi is using rock ‘n’ roll to appeal to Jewish youth in a way they can understand.
Mordechai Winyarz, spiritual leader of the Boca Raton Community Synagogue, has produced what he calls the first Jewish rock ‘n’ roll album, set for national release Sept. 1.
I’m looking to create a revolution in Jewish life,he said. Music speaks to people. I want this to become a major outreach tool to bring young people back to Judaism.
The album, titled Jewish Pride, includes a danceable theme song of the same name, a ballad called Minyan Man and a rap song Rappin’ Jewish written by Danny Furst.
A sample of the lyrics:
La-die-doo, I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool
Yeah, I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool
Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat
I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
PBS Special – Soul Prints – Your Path to Fulfillment (DVD)
Starring Marc Gafni
Fox Lorber (Publisher) – April 10, 2001
http://dvd.idealo.com/prices/P20008840135K2.html
Soul Prints – Your Path to Fulfillment – MARC GAFNI 790658993808 Rabbi Marc Gafni compares a person’s individual spirit to the uniqueness of their fingerprint, dubbing the former a “soul print.” In this 73-minute lecture, he describes the principles and practical applications of his philosophy culled from his study of many religious and ethnic traditions. The essence is to better appreciate the life you have and redirect your energy in the parts that make you unhappy. He promises the viewer “access to the precise and gorgeous nature of your spirit,” suggesting exercises like making a list of the 10 most important things in your life. He offers mantras and stories from Buddhism, Russia, West Africa, and his own ministry–even singing a short “soul print song” a cappella. Much of his advice is common sense (If you treat the waiter badly, he will treat you badly), but he presents it in an energetic and inspiring manner. However, this PBS Special is interrupted so frequently with shots of an enthusiastically applauding audience that one might think he was selling a food preparation gadget rather than inner peace. Unfortunately, the effect is that of a hard sell for material that should speak for itself. –Kimberly Heinrichs
Publisher Fox Lorber
UPC 790658993808
Release 2001-04-10
Format DVD
Mpaa rating NR (Not Rated)
Primary Contributor Marc Gafni
The Erotic and the Ethical
By Mordechai Gafni
Tikkun Magazine – March/April 2003
WARNING: The following may be found offensive
The Temple of the ancient Israelites is the original Hebrew _expression of pagan consciousness. Now—as we will see later in this essay—the difference between Temple and pagan consciousness is very crucial. But it is a difference that is only important because of their profound similarity. Both the Temple and the pagan cults shared an intoxication with the feminine Goddess, symbol of sacred eros.
The relationship with the Goddess was not a hobby for the Israelites like modern religious affiliation often tends to be. It was an all-consuming desire to be on the inside, to feel the infinite fullness of reality in every moment and in every encounter—it was an attempt to fully experience eros. Because the ancients were so aware of the depth of reality, to live without being able to access the infinite in this erotic way was enormously painful. (For an example, read the story of the idolatrous King Menashe, as retold in the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 92A.)
The prophets of the Temple period opposed paganism with all of their ethical fire and passion. For them, it was inconceivable that the ecstatic and primal Temple experience, religiously powerful and important as it might be, should become primary. When eros overrode ethos, the prophet exploded in divine rage. In moments of clash, the prophet taught that the ethical always needed to trump the erotic.
Modern Judaism has developed from the ethical teachings of the prophets. In the process, however, we have overlooked the erotic, present in the pagan consciousness of the Temple service. We have forgotten the Goddess, a vital presence in the life of ancient Israel. Hebrew liturgy reflects the virtually inconsolable longing of the Hebrew spirit for the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. This longing is not a dream of proprietorship over this or that hill in Jerusalem. Indeed, ownership and holiness are mutually exclusive. Instead, it is a yearning to reclaim sacred eros as part of the fabric of our lives. And, in the way of the circle, our longing for eros is also a longing for ethos. All ethical breakdown emerges from a dearth of eros. When we are overwhelmed by an erotic vacuum, ethics collapse.
Both the vitality and metaphysics of a pagan eros were understood by Israeli mystic Abraham Kook to be essential to the reclaiming of a religious sensibility which reflected both the depth and need of modernity. It is in large part for this pagan sensibility that we yearn when we speak of the dream of a re-built Temple.
To find our way back to eros and the feminine, we must yearn back and forward to the Hebrew mystical tradition, whose masters kept these ideas alive in the form of esoteric tradition, practice and lore.
Eros
In the kabbalistic tradition, as in Plato, the erotic is not a mere synonym for the sexual, but an _expression of inner passion which sexuality models but does not begin to exhaust. In Hebrew myth and mysticism, eros has four faces. The first face of eros is being fully present on the inside, traversing the chasm that separates subject and object. To use the imagery of the Zohar, the magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, eros is to be in the flow of “the river which swells forth from Eden,” the fountain of life; when I am not in the flow of my own life, I am not living naturally. The opposite of eros is alienation, the feeling that you are an outsider with no safe place to call home.
Kabbalah scholar Yehuda Libes suggests that the word “zohar” is roughly synonymous with the Greek word “eros.” The authors of the Zohar were not dry medieval scholastics; they were rather men of great passion and depth who believed that by entering the inside of the moment, the text, or the relationship, they could recreate and heal the world. Eros is aroused whenever we move so deeply into what we do, who we are with, or where we are, that its interiority stirs our heart and imagination. Shechinah, the Hebrew mystical term for the indwelling feminine presence of God, is no less than the erotic merged with the Holy. Shechinah is the radically profound experience of being on the inside.
The second face of eros is the “fullness of presence.” This is not a distinct and different quality from the first but flows naturally and even overlaps with the erotic quality of being on the inside. And yet it is not quite the same. Of course, being on the inside requires the fullness of presence. But we can experience full presence even when we have not merged with the moment or crossed over to the inside. Full presence is about showing up. You can show up and be fully present in a conversation without necessarily losing yourself in the encounter’s flow. Full presence at work can mean that you derive joy, satisfaction, and self worth from your vocation. It means you feel full and not empty.
To live erotically is to be fully present to each other’s richness, complexity, and ultimate grandeur. It is to fully wait for the other to appear. The Shechinah, say the mystics, is presence waiting for us to be present. She is eros, standing outside of our window, waiting. Waiting for us to run out and behold, with wonder, her face.
The third face of eros is desire. Eros is the yearning force of being. I yearn, therefore I am. As long as I am on the outside, I can ignore my deepest desires and stifle my longing. When I am on the inside, however, when I am fully present, I am able to access my yearning. For the Hebrew mystic, unlike his Buddhist or Greek cousins, desire and longing are sacred. To be cut off from the eros of yearning is to be left in the cold of non-existence. To yearn is to be aflame.
Depression is at its core the depression of desire. When we lose touch with our authentic desire, we become listless and apathetic. There is wonderful eros in desire. It is what connects us most powerfully with our own pulsating aliveness. Longing is a vital strand in the textured fabric of the erotic. It is of the essence of the Holy of Holies.
The fourth face of eros is the interconnectivity of being. Longing, desire, and tears remind us of the fourth strand in the erotic weave. They whisper to us that we are all interconnected. No human stands alone. The word “religion” traces its source to the Latin root ligare which, as we can hear in the word “ligament,” is about connectivity. Religion’s goal is to re-ligare—to reconnect us. Religion’s original intention was to take us to that inside place where we could indeed experience the essential interconnectivity of all reality. All of existence is one great quilt of being and we are all patches in its magnificent intertextured pattern.
Eros is what allows us to move past the feeling of isolation and separation and experience ourselves as part of the quilt. To sunder our connection to eros is therefore to sin. Sin is but the illusion of separation. Sin is not evil; it is merely tragic. Not only do we lose the source of life’s greatest pleasure, but we would undermine the building blocks of connection without which the world would ultimately collapse.
The Merging of Male and Female
One of the most obvious yet profound qualities that the sexual models for the erotic is the merging of the feminine and the masculine. The drive towards union between the female and the male is the essential underlying force that powers the universe. Although it is often expressed in the merging of man and woman, it is by no means limited to that _expression. For the Hebrew mystics, the sexual union of man and woman both models and participates in the more primal union of Shechinah (the Divine Feminine) and Tiferet (the Divine Masculine). Whether understood as Yin and Yang, as in Taoist thought, or Shiva and Shakti in Hindu mythology, masculine and feminine are different faces of the greater union, the force of divinity that courses through the cosmos and beyond. The kabbalistic archetype of the integrated male-female are the two cherubs, one male and one female, present in the Holy of Holies in the ancient Temple. Described in the Book of Kings and unpacked in the Babylonian Talmud, these golden cherubs were twined in sexual embrace. For the kabbalists, their integration is the highest erotic _expression of a healed world.
What is the difference between masculine and feminine?
The core cosmic intuition of Hebrew mystic Isaac Luria, later developed by mystics Isaac Chaver and Abraham Kook, offers a deceptively simple paradigm. Men are lines, “yosher” or “kav” and women are circles, “iggulim.” Or, more accurately, line is a masculine image and circle is a feminine _expression. Every man and woman is a unique interpenetration of line and circle.
Let us look at the nature of a circle. Circles are characterized by suppleness, intimacy, egalitarian sensibility, connection, and communication. The feminine circle is defined by relatedness. It surrounds, embraces and envelopes. It is a symbol of intimacy, loyalty, and a capacity to forgive and renew. The circle moves round and round, in a constant flow of re-newal, re-membering, and re-cognition. It always comes home again
Already it is clear to us that a circle is naturally erotic. In a circle, everyone can see each other. In Luria’s language, everyone is face to face. There is intimacy in circle.
The masculine line is far more rigid than the circle. Judgment and distinction are natural line functions. With a line, there is a clear hierarchy. One is either higher on the line or lower. If people are moving in the same direction on a line, then they will not be face to face. Instead, they will be face-to-back or back-to-face. A line signals a clear lack of intimacy. A line is forward moving, goal-oriented, directed, and focused. It spends a lot more time looking ahead than looking around. The line’s natural movement is to thrust forward.
Luria writes, “Every world of world and every detail of detail in every world of world is made up of these two principles, circles and lines.” Lines and circles in various permutations and balances are the DNA of spiritual reality. It is the unique blending of their energies that gives contour, character, and depth to every unit of reality. It is a blending in which neither the circle nor the line ever disappears. Each is fully absorbed in the bliss of merging with other while never losing its own integrity.
Does the union of masculine and feminine mean that, after total integration, gender will dissolve as an issue? That a kind of transvestite existentialism is the kabbalistic dream of an evolved world? Well, yes … and absolutely not.
There is a core paradigm in Hebrew mystical sources and many other traditions which provides a clear reality map for the integration of circle and line. It is a trinity of stages.
Simple (Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water)
Complex (Enlightenment)
Simple (After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water)
The linchpin of the idea is that the third stage and the first, although externally similar, are really worlds apart. For stage three deeply integrates the new consciousness of stage two. So while the simplicity of stage one might be naïve, superficial, and even irresponsible, the simplicity of stage three is deep, wise, and responsible. In the reality map of eros, level one is the natural eros of the circle. Level two is the line, which occasionally opposes and even overrides certain circle manifestations. Level three is the return to a higher eros, where circle and line interpenetrate, yielding a sensual symphony of flowing spirit and precise form, unimaginable in the initial erotic offering of level one.
Lines and circles, the masculine and the feminine, are cosmic principles whose roots are in our souls. Neither New Age spirituality (circle) or the old religious Orthodoxies (lines) alone have within them the power to heal our souls and our planet. It is only a deeper erotic vision unpacked from both, the paradox of holding lines and circles together as one that can heal us.
We need to fully embrace the truth of the line, then roundly challenge it with circle consciousness, only to re-embrace the line from a more supple and rounded place. Similarly, we need to rejoice in the circle, only to bisect it with the power of the line and then re-turn again to the circle. This is the trinity paradigm in which level two rejects level one, only to be transcended and absorbed by level three, which is always an evolved version of level one. Circle, line, circle. Line, circle, line.
We begin in the middle—in the glory of the circle.
The Power of the Circle
Phallic line consciousness has proved impotent for so many of us. It has not given birth to the reality for which we dreamed. We have competed, failed, and succeeded. Yet we have found the process debilitating and the prize woefully insufficient. Even if we’ve “gotten” what we were always supposed to want, we have realized that it isn’t enough.
On the most personal level, the rat race of line consciousness has failed us. The radical focus on our place in the hierarchy has exhausted us. For many years we have ignored Lily Tomlin’s truism: “Even if you finish first, you are still a rat.”
On the global level, line consciousness has failed us as well. We live on the edge of unprecedented ecological disaster. The imbalanced Genesis Chapter One ethics of “fill the earth and conquer” is not innocent in this. The ecological disaster is driven by corporations who take advantage of the core emptiness in the heart of the West, by feeding it with an obscene overabundance of goods and foods. Corporations driven by line consciousness form the crux of our world’s economy. These corporations are sadly driven by basically only one desire: that of accumulating maximal power through maximal profit. Unhappily, the natural result of this posture is a virtual rape of the environment for the sake of climbing higher on the line’s ladder. Tragically, it is the line consciousness of probably not more than 10,000 people (nice people) that is having this devastating impact on the world’s environment.
The driving force behind the corporate ethos is fear of emptiness. When we lose the sense of the world being divine and full of meaning, we risk falling into the void—we “lose touch” with our own essential self-worth and value. So we learn a-void-dance, doing everything we can to deny the lurking emptiness. In order to stifle those voices we work hard at producing and climbing in the line world. Somehow, the eros of productivity and competition give our lives a veneer of meaning, at least until a crisis when our vulnerability is exposed and we plummet into the void.
It is only by raising a new generation on the eros of the circle that we can hope to truly effect a transformation in the world. Only by unpacking and internalizing our erotic experiences of interconnectivity, interiority, and the fullness of being can we move towards healing and change. This is the call of circle consciousness. This is the ethos of redeemed paganism. This is Temple consciousness.
Temple Consciousness
The Jerusalem Temple is the place where the Shechinah dwells between the cherubs. The Shechinah is known in the kabbalistic sources as the great feminine. She is mother, daughter, and lover. She is the force that allows the human being to feel at home in the world. The Temple is the place of eros; it is the experience of being on the inside.
The biblical story is based on the line. In this account, the world is God’s place. God’s relationship to world is that of father, king, or even husband. In biblical myth, God creates world outside of Himself, even as he dwells in world. For the pagan and the Temple mystic, however, the world is not God’s place; instead, God is the place of the world. To be in Temple consciousness is to be in God. Eros pure and simple.
This shift in consciousness is hidden within the folds of biblical myth text. The central biblical term which describes Temple consciousness is “lifnei hashem,” usually translated as “before God,” (as in “standing before God”). A closer reading, however, yields the hidden eros in the term. The word “lifnei” derives from the Hebrew word “pnimi” meaning “inside,” the first face of eros.
This same Hebrew word for “inside,” and “before” has a third meaning as well. The third meaning is “face,” “panim.” Face is the place where my insides are revealed. There are forty-five muscles in the face, most of them unnecessary for the biological functioning of the face. Their major purpose is to express emotional depth and nuance. They are the muscles of the soul. When I say, “I need to speak face to face,” I am in erotic need of an inside conversation.
All three English words, “face,” “inside,” and “before,” share the same Hebrew root. The essence then of the biblical Temple phrase “lifnei Hashem,” before God, is not a commandment to appear “before God” in the magistrate sense. It is an invitation to enter the inside of God’s face.
To be on the inside of God is precisely the vision of the pagan circle.
It was paganism which understood well the primal human need to feel at home in the world. The erotic pagan imagination was able to uncover divinity in every nook and cranny of existence. For the pagan, there was an understanding that the Goddess is “on every hill and under every tree.” For the pagan, the hills were literally alive with the sound of music. Nature is the music of divinity undressed to the human ear. Every hill, brook, tree, and blade of grass was invested with its own divine muse.
In the ancient world the tree in particular, in all of its lush sensuality, was a primary manifestation of the erotic Goddess. The central symbol of much of the ancient pagan cult in biblical Canaan was the Ashera tree, symbol of the Goddess Ashera incarnate. Unadulterated paganism is the eros of level one circle consciousness.
It is clear from the biblical record itself that Ashera worship was the norm in ancient Judah and Israel. Occasionally, someone would intervene. King Josiah attempted the most radical reform, after finding a new book—very possibly the book of Deuteronomy—that explicitly prohibited having an Ashera tree in the precincts of the Temple. The discovery of this “new book” is the greatest indication that there were many Ashera trees in the temple. New texts only emerge to outlaw popular practice. Josiah’s goal was to fully obliterate the Ashera goddess’ presence. Only a few years after his death, however, the Ashera was back in the Temple once more.
No one could deny the people their goddess. A careful reading of the biblical sources reveals that of the 370 years which Solomon’s temple stood in Jerusalem, for at least 236 of those years—two-thirds of the time—the statue of Ashera was present in the Temple. Her worship was not some underground cult, but part of what was understood to be the legitimate Hebrew spirit itself.
Ashera, who began as a foreign interloper, became, in Raphael Patai’s phrase, a beloved “Hebrew Goddess.” She was worshipped openly and with great joy as part of the official religion by kings, the court, the priesthood and most of the people. She was opposed only by a few prophets crying against her and even then only at relatively long intervals. Indeed, the erotic passion for the Goddess was so essential to the people’s spirit that when the great reformer Elijah challenged the pagan god Baal, Ashera’s son, he pointedly avoided challenging Ashera. The text in Kings tell of 400 prophets of Ashera and 450 prophets of Baal who eat at the table of the Queen Jezebel, wife of Ahab. Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal but somehow doesn’t touch the prophets of Ashera. The Ashera has become too much of a Hebrew Goddess to be challenged even by Elijah.
The pagan Goddess was not viewed by Solomon or the people as a compromise of the Hebrew spirit. On the contrary, she was experienced as an organic deepening of the Hebrew spirit. In the pagan world, as we have noted, the Goddess erotically merged with her male counterpart. Hieros gamos—the marriage the God and Goddess. Ashera has divine intercourse with El, notably the very name of the Hebrew god! Her daughter, Astarte, copulates with Baal, her brother. This marriage of the gods—symbolizing the mythical merging of the primal masculine and feminine—brings blessing and joy to the world.
The Hebrew version of this Heiros Gamos—marriage of divine principles—was personified in the union of the biblical male God with the Goddess Ashera. We know from relatively recent archaeological excavations that many people served the Biblical male God image and the Ashera together. One of the most fascinating finds is that of Kuntillat Ajrud in the northeastern Sinai desert. Two storage jars were found, and one of them carried the inscription (in anthropologist Raphael Patai’s translation) “Amarayhu says to my Lord … may you be blessed by Yah-weh and his Ashera.”
There is evidence that the worship of Ashera extended even into the Holy of Holies. Pattai supports our intuition that the two cherubs intertwined in sexual union in the Holy of Holies are an evolved _expression of the Hebrew-pagan marriage between the biblical Yah-weh and pagan Ashera. That is to say, the spirit of biblical text, which rejected some of the essential dimensions of paganism, nevertheless accepted the core feminine erotic principle that powered paganism and recognized the essential need to integrate it with the masculine principle. So Ashera was transmuted into the female cherub in erotic union with the male cherub. While the prophets rejected the Ashera they embraced the cherubs. Indeed, biblical prophecy taught that the space between the sexually entwined cherubs was the source of prophecy.
The erotic and pagan nature of the female cherub was clearly apparent to the wisdom masters of Babylon. They understood that the cherubs were the Hebrew embrace of the sacred moment in paganism and thought it essential to the Hebrew spirit. In a post-Temple world where survival depended on the Law, the wisdom masters were not willing or able to openly embrace the pagan moment in Temple consciousness. So, in a classical literary device, they placed in the mouths of foreign interlopers their profound perception of the cherubs as purified expressions of the pagan archetype. The Babylonian Talmud in Yoma 54b tells us that when the Temple was conquered and Nebuchadnezzar’s army sees the cherubs, the Jewish religion was immediately cheapened in their eyes. “Said Reish Lakish: When the foreigners entered the temple and saw the cherubs sexually intertwined they took them out to the market place. Israel whose blessing is blessing and curse is curse—is this what they were engaged in?” A parallel text in the Midrash (Lamentations Raba, 9) is more explicit in relating the cherubs to paganism. The Babylonians were sure that the Cherubs were pagan Gods and the Jews had laid claim to a more pure faith: “Ammonites and Moabites entered the holy of holies and found the two cherubs. They … paraded them around the streets of Jerusalem … did you not say that this nation does not worship idols? See what we have found. What they were serving.”
The cherubs atop the ark went underground after the destruction of the Temples. However, they re-appear in public consciousness centuries later as the masculine and feminine _expression of the divine in the kabbalistic books of the Bahir, the Zohar, and in virtually every subsequent kabbalistic text. This divine pair are called Malchut and Tiferet, Shechinah and Tiferet, and a host of other appellations. They reach their apex in kabbalistic consciousness in the mystical works of Isaac Luria and his one-time teacher, Moses Cordovero. In Isaac Luria’s graphic and daring vision, the world is not formed by a forward-thrusting male movement which creates outside of itself. Quite the contrary—Divinity creates within itself a sacred void in the form of a circle. This is the creation not of the masculine God but of the Goddess, of the Shechinah! This is the Great Circle of Creation.
In Luria’s vision, all of being is within the womb of the Goddess. Life is born not by expelling the baby, but by making room for offspring within the Goddess’ eternal womb. Nature is not outside of the Goddess but instead is a daughter _expression of the divine. Luria’s teacher, Moses Cordovero, was even clearer about the identity of this Goddess. In a passing comment in one of his works he says explicitly, “Malchut (Shechinah) is Ashera.” Cordevero’s statement emerges from a powerful and radical passage in the Zohar (Vol. 1, 49A) which suggests that the altar in the Temple itself was an Ashera tree!! The deep intention of the Zohar is not that this was an actual Ashera tree. Rather the Zohar is teaching that the Temple was deeply connected to the primal power of the sacred Ashera Goddess.
So we have come full circle. The Canaanite pagan Ashera has been reclaimed as a Hebrew Goddess. Primal circle consciousness has been rewoven into the rich fabric of a resurgent Hebrew myth.
Sod HaYichud
If the circle is so wonderful, why not live in circle consciousness and just jettison the jagged and cutting line once and for all? Why not simply return to the Goddess?
The answer is that the circle alone is not sufficient. Indeed, followers of both the biblical line and the mystical path have been quick to point out that the circle not integrated by the line not only lacks integrity, but is a primary ontological cause of evil. Master Nachman of Bratzlav writes that the source of evil in the world is the primal chalal reik, the empty void. The chalal reik is a circle image drawn from Lurianic Kabbalah which has not yet been penetrated by the kav, the line.
We are used to viewing the source of evil as being somehow external to man. Both capitalists and communists of the last century insisted that market conditions and economic opportunity were the prime cause for evil. Others blame evil on parents, schools, television violence or handguns. Many varieties of religion have long spoken about a Satan or tempter force that moves men to “the dark side.” The common denominator is the location of evil somewhere outside the human being. If that is true, then we only have to fix that external system and everything will be okay. Economic reform, social engineering, gun control, parent education, school reform, are all potential messiahs.
While all those may be good things, the core premise of Hebrew myth is that none of them will prevent evil. Biblical mysticism has an entirely different view of the human being. Evil comes from the failure to integrate the feminine circle and masculine line. This is called in Kabbalah Sod HaYichud, the secret of the union. More accurately it means the secret of the integration which is no more and no less than the secret of the cherubs. This is our life’s work: to achieve full eros through the deep integration of our circles and lines. Or to say it differently, we need to move from the eros of the first level circle, which is pre-line, to the eros of the third level circle, which is transline. To confuse the two would be to fall prey to the pre/trans fallacy which so often marks contemporary New Age philosophies. To know how to move to third level circle eros we must expose the shadow of the first level pagan circle from the perspective of the prophetic line.
The Closed Circle and History
Intellectual historian Yehezkel Kaufman is correct in reminding us that the opposition to paganism—the opposition to pure circle consciousness—may well be the singularly most important theme of the entire Hebrew biblical project. The prophets exposed the two great shadows of pagan circle thinking. The first shadow stems precisely from its circle nature! The pagan myth believed as an absolute given of reality in the great wheel of Being. Mircea Eliade’s great work The Myth of Eternal Return is probably the best modern statement of this powerful cyclical motif which is shot through all pagan reality maps. The problem with the cycle, however, as Buddha already pointed out, is that it is a trap. The circle is by very definition not open, but closed. There is no way out. It is to this circle consciousness that the wisdom masters referred when they said, “Until the Exodus no slave had ever succeeded in leaving Egypt.” In the pagan circle consciousness of Egypt, no one could ever leave his or her place. You were born into your circle and destined to go round and round within it.
In contrast to the stasis of the circle, the line of evolution—beginning with the gradual unfolding of creation from simple to complex in the Genesis creation story—is essential to the biblical spirit. Biblical myth in the story of the Exodus introduces line consciousness into the mind and heart stream of the world. It is the creation of the very ideas of history, progress, and therefore hope. Love desires growth, healing, and transformation. For the circle to exist without being bisected by the line would be the greatest failure of love.
In biblical myth consciousness the story of the Exodus is the story of the second great escape from the tyranny of the circle. The first great escape is the story of the first Hebrew, Abraham. In fact, it is precisely Abraham’s ability to make the great escape from the circle that makes him the first Hebrew, for the very word “Hebrew” (Ivri) means the “one who crossed over.” The line consciousness of Abraham introduces to the world the notion of journey. The clear implication, against virtually all of pagan thought, is that you can actually go someplace. Line consciousness is history. The idea of a plot, suspense, and ultimate resolution introduced by the Hebrews and so engrained in us today was unknown to the circle consciousness of the pagan.
In Hebrew, there is no word for “history”; instead, the word is zachor—remember. Not accidentally, zachor in Hebrew has a second meaning: the masculine. His-story is a function of line consciousness, the masculine thrusting-forward property of the spirit. It is biblical mysticism that gives birth to the notion of tikkun olam, “the world’s fixing”—which a very close reading of Isaac Luria’s works reveals to mean the evolving and healing of all consciousness—human and divine. It is only when the journey to God is over that the journey in God begins.
What we are talking about is much more than the evolution of humankind. It was the kabbalists who introduced the idea of an evolving divine consciousness. The unfolding of divine consciousness is not a purely intra-divine process. The great privilege of being a human being is that we participate in the evolution and healing of God. The Zohar, in Vol 1 Genesis 4A, even imagines the human being as a creator of God. It is the evolution of the human spirit that catalyzes the evolution of God. As biblical mystic Zecharia says, “On that day [in the future] God will be one and his name will be one.” When God and man meet in an evolutionary embrace, redemption is achieved. In the words of Nikos Kazantzaikos, “We are the saviors of God.”
This is the great messianic idea, the climax of all history and evolution. “Messiah” in biblical mysticism is more than a person. It is a destination which we arrive at after the long and often arduous journey. It is the hope and the vision of a better tomorrow. It is the possibility of possibility.
Until this shaft of the line cut across human consciousness, human existence was fundamentally determined. All that happened was thought to be revealed in the astrological wisdom of the stars in their heavenly cycles, or in the guts of animals when you killed them. The key was that there was “nothing new under the sun.”
The freedom implied in line consciousness means not only that a slave people can throw off the shackles of the oppressor. It also means that each of us can throw off the shackles of our own personal taskmasters. There is no greater slave master than the idea that yesterday determines today. This is precisely the shadow of circle consciousness. The line sets us free. It pierces the circular bubble, shattering the “realities” that want to hold us back and keep us down.
God and Nature
We now come to the second great shadow of pagan circle consciousness. The pagan insisted that divinity was in trees and in all of nature. But the essential biblical idea is that God is also beyond nature. God is the creator of nature and therefore not trapped within it. Biblical myth therefore opens with the Genesis story, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The powerful and revolutionary implication is that God is not merely nature. Unlike the Greek, Roman, pagan, or Buddhist pantheons, biblical myth insists on a God who is both within and infinitely beyond the circle, radically immanent as well as transcendent.
When we say that God is infinitely beyond trees, we are also saying that if you can connect to God, God can free you from the ensnaring web of nature. The notion that a human being is created in the image of God means for the Hebrew mystic that a person has it within them to reach beyond the natural to the moral.
The reason this is so critical is because in biblical consciousness, the loving God’s primary demand is ethical behavior. The single most important _expression of love—and the most important principle of Hebrew ethics—is how we treat each other, not how we think about each other. Sixteenth-century master Aron of Barcelona wrote, “A person is formed by their actions.” Treat a person lovingly and you will love them in the end. Love a person passionately and treat them unethically and you will be alienated from them in the end. Paradoxically, there is no eros without ethics.
Ethical behavior always requires that we be able to act against our primal instinctive natures. We must be able to step out of the level one pagan circle and become response-able for actions, able to respond to and control our instinctive nature. If we were part of nature, then clearly we could not be expected to ever control or direct our nature. We are both part of nature, and parting from nature. It is only because of this paradox that we are capable of self-control. Of course, it is giving up control which is essential in the classic frameworks of circle consciousness. Sex and emotionally vulnerable relationships are two good examples. Giving up control, however, is only possible in the context of a safe environment created by people who can be trusted to exercise self-control. The circle integrates with the line to foster the integrity of higher eros, a level three circle.
Circle consciousness claims that people are naturally the best that they can be. The problem, argues the circle, is not goodness but alienation, and in circle consciousness the greatest evil is to be cut off, distant, disenchanted, out of the circle. Line consciousness disagrees with the circle and says that people are potentially good but not naturally good. In biblical myth people are born innocent, but they are not born good. The most important act of love, according to the Hebrew gospel, is to develop a training system for goodness. For biblical myth the belief that people are naturally the best that they can be is not only wrong but destructive. If people were naturally good, then evil would be the result of some set of external forces. Here we return to the idea of Sod HaYichud, the secret of union. Biblical myth, then as now, says no to this thinking. Hebrew gospel teaches that only the control and refinement of our internal nature, the integration of line with circle, can bring the good.
There is, however, a second critical reason why the line-driven ethical prophet does not experience God as being exclusively in nature. If God were in nature and not beyond Nature, then Nature would be our source of ethics. It is clear though that, for all of her splendor in reflecting a pale cast of divine beauty, nature is amoral. The law of nature is nearly always that the strong kill the weak. Social services, hospitals, help for the disabled are all profoundly “unnatural,” at least according to the law of nature in the non-human world. In fact, the hospital is a direct corollary of line and not (first level) circle consciousness. The morality of the line insists that those higher on the line—that is to say stronger and with more means—take care of those lower on the line. This is the faith and God experience of the prophets.
The Prophet & the Pagan
Let’s frame the clash between circle and line in the most striking possible terms.
The prophet, the hero of the Hebrew bible, represents ethics, the line. The pagan, hero of the ancient world into which biblical thought was born, represents eros, the circle. The clash between the prophet and the pagan—the circle and the line—is in the end the clash between the erotic and the ethical. (That is to say, between first level circle eros and second level line ethics.)
Having said that, I want to make a radical claim—which, as is often the case, is patently obvious once you see it. On the essential interpretation of reality, the prophet actually was closer to circle consciousness than to line consciousness. The difference was that the pagan was a first stage circle archetype and the prophet a third stage circle archetype.
The prophet’s line _expression is a necessary corrective response to the pagan consciousness that dominated the world at the time. The prophet saw his role to be overturning a pagan ethic which was bound up with so much cruelty. For example, built into the pagan ritual are demands for parents to burn their children as a sacrifice to the gods. “They have set their pagan abominations in my house … to burn their sons and daughters in fire.” (Jeremiah 7:30, 31) The burning of children was not the exception in pagan worship. Rather it was the model of the pagan idea that erotic abandonment to the God must, by its very definition, overrun all intuitive human ethical boundaries.
In the picture of the prophet as a social reformer, it is, however, too easy to lose sight that, at core, he was an erotic mystic. The prophet is actually the archetype of the feminine. The “most beautiful among women,” according to King Solomon, are the prophets. The phrase is drawn from Canticles, King Solomon’s love song to the erotic Shechinah, whose deep essence is modeled, but never exhausted, by the sexual.
Yes, the prophet insisted that nature was not all of God, yet he experienced with all his being that God was all of nature. Even as he decried the pagan claim that identified God with the Ashera tree, he knew and rejoiced in the truth that God was fully present and accessible “on every hill and under every tree.” God was not only reflected in nature as the external creator. God was fully present in nature—in the words of the later mystics, mamash, meaning literally—”actually,” for real, not just in metaphor or symbol. The words of later Hebrew mystics capture accurately prophetic consciousness. Schneur Zalman of Liadi writes that “Trees and stones are mamash divine.” Nachman of Bratzlav told his disciples that “Every blade of grass has its own (divine) song.”
It is critical to understand that God is paradoxically within and beyond. Dennis Prager, generally a brilliant polemicist for the core intuitions of biblical religion, dismisses any possibility of a mainstream Jewish position which embraces pantheism in his “Is God in Trees.” However the overwhelming majority of classical Jewish thinkers in the past 500 years have categorically refused to choose between pantheism and monotheism. To give but one example, Abraham Kook consistently and intentionally embraces a paradoxical dialectic between pantheism and monotheism throughout his writings, so much so that in his letters he refuses to term Judaism as monotheistic (Orot Hakodesh Vol. 3 pp. 399).
The goal of the prophet is integration. The erotic and ethical, the line and circle, must merge. This is the secret of the cherubs and the model of the sexual.
What the prophet and the pagan respectively incarnate, however, is made manifest when the erotic and the ethical clash. An oft-quoted line from Jung, modern heir to the pagan myth tradition, is the best summation I have ever heard of the pagan position: “I’d rather be whole than good.” For the pagan, the alienation from divinity is so palpable and painful that it must be overcome at all costs, even if ethics are the price. This is where the balanced scales start precariously to slip. It was Jung who was sadly seduced by the pagan Goddess Ashera into a flirtation with Nazism, that menacing shadow of eros which horrifically darkened our world just a few short decades ago.
The prophet always responds, “I’d like to be whole. Indeed I yearn to be whole. But if I have to choose, I’d rather be good than whole.” It is for this reason that the prophet is the great critic of the pagan consciousness intrinsic to the Temple experience. The erotic fulfillment of the Temple experience was all too often a replacement for the kind of direct ethical action which could heal the world. It is the widow and the orphan, the vulnerable and the dispossessed, who must be the primary concern of the homo religious, according to the prophets. Thus Isaiah declaims:
I do not want your multitude of sacrifices
I delight not in the blood of bullocks or goats or rams.
Do not come to seek my face …
as you trample my courts of justice …
your hands are full of blood …
wash yourselves, make yourselves clean …
cease your evil doings … seek fair judgment,
argue the case of the widow and the orphan …
Zion will be redeemed
by justice and … integrity.
For Isaiah, the ecstatic pagan service of the Temple, with its blood sacrifices, has led Israelites to forget the ethical imperative to feed the hungry and clothe the poor. Isaiah refuses to allow eros to trump ethos.
Rebuilding Temple Consciousness
In my spiritual community of Bayit Chadash in the hills around Israel’s Sea of Galilee, we are committed to reclaiming the spark of sacred paganism. We return to the pagan when we practice deep ecology, because for the pagan “Love your mother” means not only your human biological mother, but mother earth who nurtures you, balances you, and grounds you in her embrace. We reclaim the pagan in meditation, ecstatic service and passionate love of the Shechinah in all of her myriad manifestations. It is in large part for this pagan sensibility that we yearn when we speak of the dream of a re-built Temple.
The Temple in its ideal state was supposed to manifest the third stage circle moment in Hebrew consciousness. What the prophets realized, however, was that the people had not incorporated second stage line consciousness. The erotic was overrunning the ethical. In principle, however, the Temple was meant to be a balance between line and circle, erotic and ethical.
Only a short distance from the seat of eros—the holy of holies with her sexually intertwined cherubs—was the lishkat hagazit, the room of hewn stone. This was the Chamber of Justice whose passionate concern was the ethical—the creation of a just society. On the face of it, its sensibilities seem far removed from the erotic motifs of the sensual and the sacred that permeated the Temple’s aura. What, after all, do ethics and eros have to do with each other?
The answer is—everything. In the short run we can train people through behaviorist ritual, social engineering, and a good deal of guilt to behave ethically. However, in the final analysis, non-erotic ethics will always collapse under the weight of contracts and contacts it cannot fulfill. The Room of Hewn Stone must necessarily be housed in the eroticized temple in order for its ethics to truly thrive.
In the end all ethical failure is a violation of eros—your own or someone else’s. Ethics without eros cannot hold. Ethics which are not rooted in eros ultimately fall … apart. We yearn for eros. By exiling God from nature and secularizing the sexual, we condemn ourselves to emptiness and vacuity. Ethical collapse always occurs when we are overwhelmed by our emptiness. The failure of ethics is always rooted in a failure of eros. When we talk only about a God giving rules that run counter to our nature, the rules cannot hold. The eros of our nature will always overrun them. But if we come to understand that ethics is an erotic _expression of our deeper divinity, we are truly moved to the ethical. For at that point we realize that the ethical is an _expression of our deepest selves, a response to the call of our own voice. Ethics, to be compelling and powerful, must be an _expression of our erotic divine nature and not a contradiction to it. So when the prophets insist that God and the God within us is beyond nature, and can therefore act ethically against nature, they are referring only to our first nature, not to our deeper second nature. Our deeper nature is God.
At the same time that ethics cannot live without eros, eros cannot live without ethics. The erotic dies without the ethical. The circle cannot survive without the line.
Circle consciousness rejects the non-bi-sected circle not only as ethically flawed but as ontologically inadequate and existentially unsatisfying.
Humanity is life become aware of itself. It is this very self-awareness that moves us from the harmony of the natural to the tension of the confronted. We are at once part of nature, subject to her laws, even as we are free, confronting, controlling, and healing nature. The human being is the only creature in nature whose very existence poses a problem to itself. It is a problem from which we cannot escape. Living our merely natural circle life is both impossible and boring to us. It is this sense of boredom, even ennui, which makes us feel alienated, evicted from paradise. We are moved both by reason and soul to struggle endlessly not only with questions of the techne, of how and what, but also with the mysterious why and ultimately we long to see the Who!
The divinity of humanity—that which makes us not only within but also beyond nature—is precisely what assures that nature alone will not ful-fill. Line consciousness suggests that a non-accomplished person can never be satisfied. We require for our psychic-spiritual wholeness the pursuit of a goal. Meditation is insufficient for bliss. But not just any goal will do.
The goal must be an ethical one; an ambition that promises the greater good. Without such an objective, we ultimately get lost in our ennui and overwhelmed by our emptiness. The circle is incapable of captivating us by herself.
Eros always needs to in-corporate ethics. What this points to is that the good is not only an ethical need, it is an erotic need as well. At the same time, all ethical collapse is caused by un-ful-filled eros.
The modern mystic who understood this best was Abraham Kook.
Morality not guided by the sacred is not deep,
and does not enter into the inwardness of the soul; …
Such a weak morality
does not have the power to guide …
the polis, the human community,
to penetrate to the depth of the soul
and to transform the heart
of universal man and of individual man
from stone to flesh.
There is no alternative plan for humanity
other than that it be guided by the erotic morality….
It is the same Kook who refused to term Judaism a monotheistic religion, believing as he did that strains of purified pagan pantheism were essential to the essence of Hebrew religion. The prophet in us needs to reclaim holy paganism. The pagan within must be open to hearing the call of the prophet. When the prophet and pagan meet, the Temple of the heart will be rebuilt.
Post-Orthodoxy Journey
By Neri Livneh
Haaretz – March 4, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/401222.html
CORRECTION: In “What is the question?” (Haaretz Magazine, March 5, 2004) Rabbi Mordechai Gafni should have been described as being 43 years old, married for the third time, and due to complete his doctorate at the end of the year.
“We’ve forgotten the Ela [the Goddess],” says Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, founder of Bayit Chadash, a community that aspires to be a new stream in Judaism, and, in his words, “to restore the spark of holy paganism.” Judaism was once an erotic religion, he argues, in the sense that the Divinity had two experiential sides or dimensions: a male side called “God” and a female side called “Shekhina,” the Goddess. The sense of the Divinity is achieved by a fusing of the two elements, as between a man and a woman, yin and yang, Shakti and Shiva. In the Temple, the Holy of Holies, there were two cherubim – male and female. To kabbalists, the blending of the divine male, called “Tiferet” and the divine female, called “Shekhina,” a unity described in the Babylonian Talmud in reference to the cherubim on the Holy Ark, represents the Divine Power. Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook described the fusing of these two elements as the combination of a (male) straight line with a (female) circle.
To Gafni, the line without a circle represents Ethos without Eros, i.e., rational life, without emotion, disconnected from Mother Earth and from natural impulse. The circle without the line represents an immersion in the erotic or spiritual, as in New Age practices. The fusion of the line and the circle represents Eros purified by the encounter with the rational and ethical foundation – a desirable encounter that is necessary for the building of the “Bayit Chadash” (“new home”) or the new Judaism.
“Orthodox Judaism developed out of the ethical teachings of the Prophets, who tried to obscure the Eros for the sake of nurturing the Ethos,” he says. This is how we’ve gotten the ultra-Orthodox Judaism that we’re familiar with, a religion that tries to suppress the impulse and whose rabbis are supposed to supply absolute truths and answers to every question. Gafni, who calls himself “post-Orthodox,” takes an opposite view of what religiosity ought to mean: “To me, the religious duty is to ask questions. I think it smacks of great arrogance to give pat answers to ultimate issues.”
Gafni is not an anonymous personality by any means. His Channel 2 television program, “Tahat Gafno,” attracted many viewers. He says that thousands of people have attended his community’s encounters. He also writes a regular column in the magazine Hayim Aherim and has published five books in the United States in recent years. One of them, “Soul Prints,” will soon appear in Hebrew translation, with an introduction by the religious poet Admiel Kosman. Gafni’s television show is due back for a new season, and he recently finished taping segments for the Keshet broadcasting network “about the situation and questions related to the situation – for Keshet to use on days when there is a terror attack.”
In addition to his rabbinical ordination, he also holds a Ph.D. from Oxford. And no, he says, he is not at all inclined to become a guru. He says that he’s as far from New Age as he is from Reform Judaism. His “new Orthodoxy” does not offer any breaks when it comes to observance of the 613 commandments, or mitzvot. What makes him unique are the additions he makes to Judaism, the changes of emphasis, the way he relates it to modern life and the special focus he puts on commandments related to human dignity and love of fellow human beings. He also invites non-Jews to the Shabbat weekends he runs at the Bayit Chadash center in Poriya, overlooking Lake Kinneret. He officiates at same-sex marriages, and sees feminism and equality for women as key Jewish values. He plans to ordain women as rabbis and women in his community can be called up to the Torah. Every blessing in the community’s prayer book and every blessing recited at community ceremonies open, as usual, with “Baruch ata adonai eloheinu” and then continues with “ve’berukha at hashekhina” (“And blessed art thou, the Shekhina”). “I’m not talking about Judaism-lite, like the Reform or the settlers,” says Gafni. “I’m talking about whole Judaism that has both Ethos and Eros, both faith and a full life, both male and female.”
Gafni divides his time between the new Bayit Chadash center in Jaffa, where this conversation took place, and the older center in Poriya – and between Israel and the U.S. He is 42, married to Chaya (his second wife), and father of three children from his previous marriage. He radiates warmth, and is not the type of rabbi who is reluctant to shake a woman’s hand. On the contrary, he does not shy away from physical contact. “Someone who wanted to study with me said, `I have a problem with you. I’ve heard that you love women.’ As if loving women is a bad thing. I told him that I’m very happy that I’m a loving person and also that I love women. I think love is a very important thing.”
He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to a family of Holocaust survivors that lived an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. “At age six or seven, I knew that I wanted to be a rabbi,” he relates. “Because I really oved the world of the book, which I’d known since I began learning at age 3.” He went to a yeshiva high school in New York, then to Yeshiva University. He also took courses at Queens College and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy (“I majored in Sartre, Heidegger and Nietzsche”). At the same time, he also set up a network of Jewish clubs within the New York public school system, to draw in Jewish youth that had left the synagogue and Judaism behind.
After being ordained as a rabbi, he moved to Florida and served as the rabbi of South Palm Beach. Then, at age 29, he decided that it was time to make aliyah. “To me, the Divine call of our generation was to participate in the destiny of the Jewish people in our generation, and that’s hard to do from Florida,” he says.
What happens in Israel will either shape or answer an essential question: “Is Judaism a relevant and important instrument in the symphony of the spirit of the modern world? Or is it just another fundamentalist approach that does not grapple with this generation in a substantial way? Of course, I’d prefer for us to develop a Judaism that has relevance and contributes to life in our era.”
New look at kashrut
Gafni describes his main occupation as “clarifying the issue of the place and contribution of the Jewish instrument in the world symphony of the spirit.” To this end, he participates in discussions with a group of philosophers and “international sages,” as he calls them, who conduct a dialogue, by means of e-mail, on theological and philosophical subjects. One member of this group is philosopher Ken Wilbur, whom Gafni calls “the Aristotle of our time.” “We examine Judaism’s place and contribution, starting with the premise that there is no competition between religions,” he says. “It’s not the old idea of seeking to prove that Judaism is better than other religions. That outlook has to be uprooted.”
Another question he addresses is the purpose of Judaism. “The standard argument is a circular one – that Judaism must be preserved so that Jews will be preserved so that they will preserve Judaism. If the whole purpose of Judaism is merely the survival of people as Jews without any ethical or spiritual content, then Judaism is essentially a kind of `enlightened racism.’ In my opinion, the answer to the question of what is the purpose of Judaism has to come from questions about the essence of Judaism. The question that all the big rabbis are concerned with now – whether the tuna is a kosher fish or not – is not, in my view, an essential Jewish question. An essential Jewish question is a question that shapes life.”
His transition from Orthodox to post-Orthodox began even before he received his rabbinical ordination. “We were studying `The Letter of Rav Shrira Gaon,’ and in it he says that everything that happens in the world is for the sake of the Jewish people. I asked the rabbi a simple question: When a couple in China, on a beautiful moonlit night, feels a great physical attraction to each other and makes love – are they also making love for the sake of the Jewish people? The rabbi said, `Indirectly, yes.’ That’s when I realized that there was something twisted in this Jewish outlook that is incapable of seeing anything that happens in the world as distinct from it, but instead sees everything as somehow enslaved to the needs of Judaism. To me, that means that as a Jew you cannot see the Other, and I don’t accept that.”
Gafni sees the world as rich and varied and ever-changing. “The classic Jewish outlook tries to freeze everything in order to fit the changes to its needs, instead of fitting itself to the needs of the world,” he says. “I thought that it was necessary to seek a new Jewish outlook that would try to deal with our place in this world and in this generation. For example, the matter of kashrut. I don’t give myself any breaks in terms of kashrut, but I have a different understanding of the meaning of kashrut than the standard one.”
In speaking of kashrut, Gafni includes ecological and humanistic considerations with the halakhic [Jewish legal] system: “Meat is considered kosher if it comes from a kosher animal that has been slaughtered according to Jewish law. Everyone knows this, and that suffices for them. But I say, let’s ask another question: A goose that is slaughtered in accordance with Jewish law is kosher according to the classical outlook, but is the fact that it was cruelly fattened in such a way that its entire internal system was wrecked of no significance? How can that not detract from its kashrut? Or if the vegetable that we eat was previously sprayed with a substance that harms the soil and poisons the groundwater, can it be kosher?”
And he adds another, social consideration: “What I mean to say is that there needs to be kashrut not only in the accepted halakhic sense, but also `eco-kashrut.’ Judaism must also be expressed in concern for the world and for life, for ecology in other words. And another question: If someone eats food that was grown by people employed in slave conditions at starvation wages, how can it be kosher?”
You’re adding a moral dimension to kashrut.
“Yes, and not just to the kashrut of food. I’m saying that we have to find the kashrut in every aspect of human life. For example, I need to check into my mutual fund and make sure that I’m not investing in the world of globalization that is impoverishing people and companies.”
What else do you consider an essential Jewish question?
“For example, how do I see my world: Do I divide the world into the enlightened and the primitive, the secular and the religious, the Jews and the goyim, or is my world more complex than that – one in which no one possesses the absolute truth, in which each one contributes something to the symphony of the spirit and in which everyone must ask himself questions. In my view, the most essential part of the spiritual quest has to be doubt – to begin every effort to understand something not from the classical Jewish starting point that says either I or my rabbi has the right answers to all the questions, but to cast doubt on all the answers, and from this point to begin asking questions.”
Male and female He created them
Another essential question on Gafni’s mind is where the feminine voice has disappeared to in Judaism. This question, he says, is especially urgent in this generation, in which the feminine voice has great importance. “The Orthodox public is so worried about `kol be’isha erva’ (the provocativeness of a woman’s voice) that it also doesn’t listen to the Bat-Kol (the Heavenly Voice) and erases the Goddess.”
What exactly is the connection between God and the Goddess?
“First of all, these are two different elements of one Divine essence. The masculine God creates the world outside of himself and the feminine Goddess creates the world within herself. The masculine God is rational, judgmental, ethical. The Goddess is more giving, more encompassing, more accepting. I don’t advocate annulling the masculine God, but there has to be a holy mating. Meaning, a combination of the male and the female – in experience, in prayer, in equality. And all this isn’t my own personal invention, it comes from the sources of Jewish thought, from the Talmud and the kabbala and Jewish mysticism.”
What do you have against neo-liberalism?
“That’s another essential question. We live in a world today in which no one truly lives solely in his own place – economically, ecologically or culturally. But what happens is that in the New Age world, which is all superficiality, and in the academic world, which is completely disconnected from life, and also in the world of intellectualism, there is no real discussion of globalization and its meaning for the life of the spirit, government and economics. This discussion has to take place, and that’s what we’re trying to do in Bayit Chadash.”
Is Bayit Chadash a group of `sages’ conducting a discussion, or it is a type of Jewish community?
“Both. Bayit Chadash is comprised of several parts. First of all, it’s a spiritual-cultural stream that currently has about 2,500 adherents and aspires to be a new stream in Judaism. There’s the aspect of the community, which is built on the model of the Buddhist community, or the way the Hasidic community was built once upon a time. The original Hasidic community wasn’t in the community center: A person would go to his rabbi a few times a year or a month, or every Shabbat. In our community, there are people who come a few times a year for Shabbat and there are those who come for the festivals and those who come every week or every few days and study in our Beit Midrash or take a class.
“In the inner circle of the community, there is our ordination program and our leadership program. I decided that we have to ordain people for the rabbinate and we currently have 17 men and women in our program. In our leadership program, we try to train people for social leadership. Outside of this inner circle, there is the public, cultural circle, which is composed of our activities in the media.”
What is pleasure?
People who have been to Gafni’s center in Poriya and to the new center in Jaffa describe Shabbat there as an especially pleasurable experience. “I had seen Rabbi Gafni on television and read his articles in Hayim Aherim, and I was intrigued,” says Ziv Barnea, a student in the rabbinical ordination program. “I come from a Marxist, very non-religious background. I went to the Bayit Chadash center in Poriya and discovered that I’d come to a warm and accepting and interesting place. Gafni greeted me and hugged me and also said it was an honor for him to meet me. He’s a very warm and loving and loved man, and on the other hand, has no pretensions at all of being a guru.
“One hundred and sixty people came that Shabbat. I kept coming for weekend retreats and there was usually a big crowd. I take my children and my wife there, too. One Shabbat, my wife was called up to the Torah and this had tremendous meaning for me, because the value of equality is something that has very great meaning in my life: equality between men and women, between Jews and Muslims, between straights and gays. Gafni applies this in his life, too. His wife, Chaya, is his equal partner in leading the community. She gives classes and workshops.”
Bayit Chadash is registered as a nonprofit organization and also has a center in New York. Gafni is the director-general of the NPO and when he is abroad, Rabbi Avraham Leader, who also grew up in America, substitutes for him at Bayit Chadash.
The organization pays a salary to several teachers and a director. Money to fund the centers comes from fees paid for lessons and – primarily – from contributions raised by Friends of Bayit Chadash, which operates in Israel and the United States.
“I don’t make my money from religion,” says Gafni. “Most of what I earn comes from lectures abroad and from my books.” He lectures, among other places, at the Harvard University business school and teaches several times a year at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. “And even though they’re Reform there, they accept me as an Orthodox rabbi,” he says.
“Judaism needs to be liberated from all the religious establishments. The establishments are a desecration of God’s name. If buses have to travel on Shabbat for the non-Orthodox majority, then there should be buses. And if the needs of this majority require civil marriages, then there should be civil marriages. And if gays and lesbians want to live together in love, then there should be marriages between them. Only if we throw off all the shackles of the religious establishment will Judaism be able to freely contend in the ideological market without cloaking itself in a mantle of establishment-based superiority. Tommy Lapid is always saying `no.’ I agree with most of his `nos.’ The problem is: What does he say `yes’ to?”
And what do you say?
“I say: The security of the State of Israel depends on our ability to recount a narrative that the country’s non-Orthodox majority will feel a part of. If there is no such narrative, then you can make one kind of fence or another, set borders here or there, and it won’t work. Because what will be inside the borders? This, by the way, is a very Zionist and not a right-wing thesis. Now, in order to search for this narrative, you need seriousness first of all. New Age populism and kabbala centers won’t help. The insularity of the yeshiva world and the alienation of the academic world won’t help either. And another thing, we have to create the kind of philosophy in which a person feels that he is developing and growing in his inner spiritual and ethical world, that he is on an inner journey.
“The kabbalists say that the primary ideal in life is pleasure. But what is pleasure? Pleasure is to develop. Today, the Orthodox Jewish world has become a kind of gym or training program where a person marks off pluses and minuses on a card and calculates how many pluses he needs to check off in order to get to heaven. I’ve done such and such mitzvot – okay, I’ve completed my quota. It’s a rigid approach that doesn’t contribute a lot to one’s inner life, and we need to return to the inner view that says that Judaism is a journey that can be expressed in many areas outside of religion: culture, science, you name it.”
You’re opposed to the rabbinical establishment and yet you ordain rabbis yourself?
“Yes, but a different type of rabbi. They won’t be rabbis whose job is to give halakhic answers. In Orthodox Judaism, the rabbi serves as a kind of alter-ego whose role is to underscore the imperfection of anyone who isn’t the rabbi. I say that anyone looking for this kind of rabbi should not come to me. I’ve made and am making a lot of mistakes in life. A rabbi has to be a person who genuinely loves people, who loves the Torah and is a person who has courage and is not just another kind of political person. He has to be outside the establishment and outside the political system and must be capable of admitting mistakes.
“I tell my people that I fall down and pick myself up every day. I’m no better than anyone else. But if you want to go on a spiritual journey together with me, then let’s do it. The whole philosophy of Bayit Chadash is that the rabbi is not a guru, the rabbi is essentially the community as a whole. Our philosophy is a kind of new Hasidism. We’re the successors of the Ba’al Shem Tov in this sense. Naturally, I’m aware that this approach is threatening to all the traditional approaches.”
Gafni may not want to be a guru, but he has not shown any special reluctance to establish a Hasidic-style court. A picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe – “when he was still young and modest” – in other words, before he was crowned as the Messiah by his admirers – adorns the wall of his study. The approach of Bayit Chadash could reopen the war between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, if it comes to be perceived as a real threat to Orthodox Judaism. The Hasidim of the Ba’al Shem Tov were accused by the Mitnagdim of engaging in a form of paganism, and the emphasis that Gafni places on the existence of the Goddess and her importance certainly could invite such accusations.
It’s not that hard to see the study methods at Bayit Chadash as a kind of almost idolatrous cult. Gafni himself described this in an article he wrote for Hayim Aherim: “In the Bayit Chadash spiritual community, located at Poriya overlooking Lake Kinneret, we are committed, in the spirit of Rav Kook’s teachings, to restoring the spark of holy paganism. We return to the pagan when we reconnect to Mother Earth … We restore the pagan in meditation, in ecstatic rituals and in passionate love of the Shekhina in her many manifestations. According to the kabbalist Cordovero, we yearn for the consciousness of this Goddess, when we speak of the dream of rebuilding the Temple.”n
Gafni: “I’m not talking about Judaism-lite, like the Reform or the settlers. I’m talking about whole Judaism that has both Ethos and Eros.”
Integral Naked
An Introduction to Integral Kabbalah: Study, Prayer, and Meditation.
Rabbi Marc Gafni and Ken Wilber
Kabbalah—the mystical branch of Judaism—is concerned with the ultimate knowledge of God. In this series of clips from a gathering in Boulder, Rabbi Marc Gafni and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—the world’s foremost proponents of Integral Kabbalah—discuss with Ken three of the main practices within their tradition that constitute the means of this knowledge: Study, Prayer, and Meditation.
In this introductory clip, Ken sets the context by noting that in the world’s great spiritual traditions, the process of God-realization is often divided into three stages: ethics, meditation, and nondual awareness. The second stage, meditation, can be understood to have a variety of forms, one of which is study. According to Gafni and Zalman, “study” is not merely cognitive book-learning, but ecstatic surrender to the Divine via union with a sacred text.
Rabbi Marc (Mordechai) Gafni has emerged as an exciting new voice in Israeli and international religious life and spirituality.
In addition to teaching graduate seminars on mysticism at Oxford University in England, R’Gafni is the founder and head of Bayit Chadash. Overlooking Israel’s Sea of Galilee, Bayit Chadash is an international spiritual community retreat center committed to Jewish renaissance.
Additionally, Gafni is the host and creator of a highly acclaimed national Israeli television program on ethics and spirituality. The show, with hundreds of thousands of viewers, has become an important weaver of the Israeli spirit.
Besides contributing to a number of American journals, R’Gafni is a contributing editor to Chayim Acherim, Israel’s leading spirituality magazine.
An acknowledged master of the ancient texts as well as the texts of the heart, Gafni has published three works of Jewish thought in Hebrew.
Gafni’s work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher and spiritual master: wise, compassionate, accessible, and universal.
Along with Gafni’s two English-written books listed below, a two-volume work with extensive primary source footnotes, entitled The Erotic and the Holy, is soon to be published.
Gafni’s written work in English includes:
Soul Prints
Gafni’s fourth book, written for a broader English-speaking public, was the subject of a National PBS Special. The book hit the bestseller list, has been translated into numerous languages, and was chosen for the prestigious Napra Nautilus Award for the Best Spirituality Book of 2001. It will be re-released shortly, with an extensive section of primary source footnotes drawn from the Kabbalistic tradition.
The Mystery of Love
Gafni’s latest—highly acclaimed.
Rabbi Marc has appeared on Integral Naked:
A Prayer for Malka · 4/12/2004
Your Own Letter in the Torah · 4/5/2004
A Second Person Relationship to God · 3/29/2004
A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self. Part 2. · 3/29/2004
The Ultimate Erotic Act · 2/16/2004
A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self. Part 1. · 12/22/2003
When the Rabbi Met Lilith
by Rabbi Marc Gafni
Monday July 11, 9:00 am ET
TEL AVIV, Israel, July 11 /PRNewswire/ — Last month, a riveting and controversial text was published by Modan Publishing House in Israel. Together, Rabbi Mordechai (Marc) Gafni and Rabbi Ohad Ezrachi co-authored the book, Who is afraid of Lilith? Rereading the Kabbalah of the Feminine Shadow.
It was met with shock by many readers, as it takes a radical path to understand the fullness of Lilith. Lilith is the mythological figure of the Jewish tradition embodying the fears of men towards the perception of a sexually liberated temptress. Most books focus solely on Lilith’s shadow aspects. This book, though, includes the process of Lilith’s redemption through a re-examination of Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalistic sources. The authors recognize not only the problematic aspects of Lilith, but are also attuned to her essential spiritual quality.
The book begins with a scholarly examination of the Lilith character and myth, then turns to other female figures of the Hebrew Bible which represent her many aspects, each one through her own unique story.
Society is used to hearing feminist literature only through the female voice. This book offers the much-needed perspective of the male feminist viewpoint. Hearing the male feminist voice, especially that of a rabbi, is a direct rectification of the past when male rabbinic voices originally created the demonization of Lilith. The book has been published in Hebrew, and the English translation of this modern mystical text should be released soon.
For more details please visit www.marcgafni.com
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, Director of Bayit Chadash, has emerged as an exciting voice in Israeli and international religious life and spirituality. Rabbi Gafni’s work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher and spiritual teacher: wise, compassionate, inspired, and universal.
Ohad Ezrahi, the Rabbi and the founder of Hamakom spiritual community.
Ohad’s path goes through nature, Zen, years of learning Torah and Kabala in the ultra-orthodox Hassidic communities in Jerusalem, teaching Kabala in the Yeshiva world, “graduating” from orthodoxy and being one of the leading figures in the renaissance of Jewish liberal spirituality in Israel.
Bayit Chadash is a spiritual community in Israel, focused on reclaiming inner Eros and the wonder of Hebrew wisdom as an essential and vital guiding source in the service of human spiritual evolution and physical survival. For further details on Bayit Chadash activities in Israel or abroad, please email zvi@bayitchadash.org or call us at +972-3-683-972. Visit us online at www.bayitchadash.org
Wisdom Chair – Jewish Studies at Stephen S. Wise Temple (Los Angeles, CA)
http://www.sswt.org/@wise/0904/@wise0904.pdf
The Chair will be held by Rabbi Mordechai (Marc) Gafni who over the last tow years has become a beloved part of our Stephen S. Wise Temple community.
Rabbi Gafni is the Dean of the Bayit Chadash Community and Think Tank in Israel, an Oxford Scholar, and important new voice in spirit in the international community, as well as the author of a growinglibrary of both new Jewish Thought and best selling volumes on Modern Jewish Spirituality.
Rabbi Gafni will be in residence at Stephen S. Wise Temple for three months between Septemeber 2004 and July 2005.
Visit One: September 11 -22, 2004
The Dance of Laughter and Tears; Towards a Vision of New Jewish Spirituality
Visit Two: October 31 – November 12, 2004
The Mystery of Love
Visit Three: February 23 – March 8, 2004
The Mystery of Love – The Next Level
Visit Four: May 1 – June 14, 2005
The Psychology of Judaism Through the Prism of the Book of Genesis
Herscher: Gafni Still Welcome in L.A.
by Julie Gruenbaum Fax, Religion Editor
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles – October 1, 2004
(see sidebar to right of reprinted Jewish Week article)
Rabbi Eli Herscher has an emphatic answer to Gary Rosenblatt’s question about when persistent “rumors and allegations” add up to a story: They don’t.
Herscher, senior rabbi at Stephen S. Wise Temple, says The New York Jewish Week and The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles have stepped from responsible journalism to outright lashon hara, or gossip, by printing and reprinting an article that looks into alleged sexual abuse by Rabbi Mordechai Gafni.
Gafni has become an important part of the Reform congregation’s educational program as a frequent scholar-in-residence, and Herscher has no plans to break off a burgeoning relationship based on allegations he says are unfounded and malicious.
“`Rumors and allegations’ are not going to be the basis for bringing down one of the great Jewish teachers of this generation,” Herscher said.
But Herscher may have to watch his back legally.
“If the congregation brings him out now with full knowledge of these allegations, and if something were to happen now, they may have culpability,” said Anthony DeMarco of the Beverly Hills law firm Kiesel, Boucher and Larson, which is handling 300 abuse cases for victims in the Catholic church and serves as liaison counsel for all such cases in Southern California.
But Herscher hasn’t found any substance to the rumors he said he personally checked out after Gafni himself brought the issue up soon after they met.
The article, Herscher points out, brings up incidents alleged to have occurred more than 25 years ago, when Gafni was 19, and even those are based on allegations that have never been proven and that Gafni denies.
The fact that the alleged cases are 25 years old does not mean they shouldn’t be acted upon, Demarco said.
“What we find in childhood sexual abuse is there is a latency period for when people come forward, and that is why years will go by until these kids finally speak out,” Demarco said. Often adults speak out when their own children reach the age they were when they were abused.
Rosenblatt, once nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is one of the most respected editors in Jewish journalism. He printed the story, based on more than 50 interviews over several years, after months of deliberation.
Herscher takes The Jewish Week to task for implying that Gafni has admitted to wrongdoing or done teshuvah, or repentence, for specific incidents.
For instance, Rosenblatt says that Gafni has done teshuvah by agreeing not to work with children, to do private counseling or to be alone with a woman.
But Herscher said he discussed those self-imposed ground rules with Gafni, and it was clear to him that Gafni was not trying to avoid temptation, but only trying to preclude even the appearance of wrongdoing, given the rumors that have haunted him for two decades.
“There are people who could be learning with him and being counseled by him who don’t have that opportunity,” Herscher said.
Herscher has invited Gafni to teach frequently over the last two years at Stephen S. Wise. This past Rosh Hashanah, 1,000 people came to hear him even on the second day — traditionally a low-attendance day at Reform congregations — and hundreds more came to evening lectures during the week.
Gafni’s appearance on Rosh Hashanah kicked off his tenure holding the newly created wisdom chair of Jewish studies at Stephen S. Wise, where he will be returning to teach this year for two weeks in November, two weeks in March and six weeks in May and June.
“Rabbi Gafni has inspired people who might have never been engaged in serious Jewish learning were it not for him,” Herscher said. “I’ve seen him move them, challenge them, uplift them and have been amazed at his greatness as a teacher.”
None of that, Herscher said, would matter if Gafni were, in fact, an abusive man.
“There would be one reason and one reason only to publish such an article, and that would be if factual evidence, and not allegation and innuendo, determined that Rabbi Gafni was in some way a danger,” he said.
Attorney Demarco said he has seen this response before — that priests confronted with allegations about their colleagues are often unwilling to believe that fellow men of God could have committed such crimes.
Gafni’s support is coming from a list of prominent rabbis, including ethicist Joseph Telushkin and Modern Orthodox scholar Saul Berman.
Among his supporters in Israel is Rabbi Daniel Landes, director of the Pardes Institute, who led the upstairs minyan at Beth Jacob in Beverly Hills and Congregation B’nai David-Judea in Pico-Robertson.
Although Landes has never worked professionally with Gafni, the two have been acquainted since Landes moved to Israel nine years ago. Landes officiated when Gafni and his third wife married a few years ago.
When Landes first befriended Gafni, people approached him to let him know Gafni was the subject of persistent rumors. Landes chose not to believe hearsay and tracked the stories back down the grapevine until he got to the sources. He spoke to three women in Israel.
“Their response was, `Why are people telling such stories? They’re just not true,’” Landes said in a phone interview from Jerusalem. He did not investigate any of the cases alleged to have happened in the United States 25 years ago.
Herscher thinks the public’s eagerness to unearth and believe such stories goes back to years’ worth of people not believing victims of abuse.
“What has happened now, I fear, is that the pendulum has swung the other way, so that when there is an accusation there is an assumption that the accused is in fact guilty,” Herscher said.
Herscher said that now it is even more important to continue to support Gafni and bring him to Los Angeles to teach.
“Rabbi Gafni coming to teach here makes a deeply important Jewish statement — that if rumors and allegations and innuendo are allowed to destroy someone who only wants to teach, Jewishly, that is tragic.”
Rabbi Marc Gafni & Andrew Cohen
Enlightenment, Evolution, and the Future of Judaism
January 1, 2005
http://www.wie.org/unbound/media.asp?ifr=ra&id=50
Enlightenment, Evolution, and the Future of Judaism Rabbi Marc Gafni is not your average Rabbi. He’s an unorthodox Orthodox Rabbi, a passionate Kabbalist, a popular Israeli television host, and the founder of Bayit Chadash, an international spiritual community and retreat center committed to Jewish renaissance. Yet no matter how far from the established order he may travel, Gafni never loses sight of those most basic Judaic tenets: pray to God and live a moral, ethical, and generous life, because this life is the one that matters most!
In this videotaped conversation between two spiritual masters, Andrew’s original conception of an evolutionary enlightenment engages with Rabbi Gafni’s soul-level understanding of Judaism’s timeless mystical teachings. Together, these two free-thinkers propel an enduring ancient tradition into the exhilarating and uncharted terrain of the future.
Why am I not a Buddhist?
By Gil Kopatch
Haaretz – June 2, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/583841.html
Both Moses and Buddha grew up without a mother’s love and apparently longed for it all their lives. Buddha was orphaned at an early age; the infant Moses got a one-way ticket for a Nile cruise. Both of them grew up in palaces as pampered princes. Both of them ventured out of the royal hothouse and were astounded to encounter the suffering of their fellows. Both of them turned to meditation for many years – Buddha under a tree, Moses in the wilderness of Midian.
So much for the similarities between these two spiritual giants. But what are the differences? And if there are no differences, why am I not a Buddhist?
I decide to pay a two-week visit to India. To find myself with alacrity. And to return as enlightened – and as delighted – as possible.
The king-god
On the day after Pesach, at 6 A.M., I pick up Rabbi Mordechai Marc Gafni from his beit midrash (house of study) in Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood. The rabbi is impossible to categorize. He is certainly not Reform. He is committed to Jewish law, but could not be considered classically Orthodox. He’s spontaneous, ecstatic, profound, filled with joy – and embraces and loves everyone he meets. Gafni is among the most important of the new generation of religious leaders in Israel today, a profound teacher and thinker, a serious scholar and an original philosopher who addresses and provokes both mind and heart. He is much more of an Eastern-style spiritual master, a kind of Jewish Bodhisattva, than an establishment rabbi. Together with fellow scholar Avraham Leader and businessman Jacob Nir David, he founded Bayit Chadash (literally, New Home), a new national spiritual movement, which includes a research center and rabbinic certification program, and appeals to people who are dissatisfied with the world of the religious establishment. Many of his students are former India backpackers, who are now yuppies and part of the mainstream of contemporary Israeli society. The rabbi is also my good friend and partner on a Channel 2 program about the weekly Torah reading, in which he usually explains and I usually nod.
A few weeks earlier, he told me about a dialogue he had intended to hold with a friend he met at a meeting of clerics in Rome and asked if I wanted to be the moderator. His friend’s name? Tenzin Gyatso, better known as the Dalai Lama – the great ocean of compassion, guardian of the white lotus, who looks down with mercy.
According to the tradition, the 14th Dalai Lama, who will turn 70 on July 6, is the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama and, in fact, of all those who preceded him. He is a Bodhisattva – a soul who, because of his love and compassion, does not seek liberation from the cycle of human suffering, but remains within it in order to help others end their suffering. The Dalai Lama is the political as well as the religious leader of the Tibetan nation, and for his struggle to hold a peaceful dialogue with China, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He is admired around the world and is sought out by Hollywood’s top stars. For his believers, who call him “Kundun,” he is more than the pope for Catholics: He is the king-god. He himself has said that he is “simply a human being and, incidentally, a Tibetan who chooses to be a Buddhist monk.”
On the flight to Jordan, from where we will proceed to Delhi, are three Israeli Buddhists who are going on a pilgrimage to Dharamsala, the city in northern India where the Dalai Lama’s temple is located. Rabbi Gafni immediately invites them to a kabbalat Shabbat (the ceremony welcoming the Sabbath) that he is planning to hold there. They recoil. It sounds too Jewish. They don’t need it. They are already very spiritual without that; they have already done Vipassana and they have incense and everything.
“Rabbi, why the Dalai Lama? Why now?” I ask him.
“Today Tibetan Buddhism is flowering in the Western world,” he replies, “and therefore a Jerusalem-Tibet conversation is the spiritual dialogue of the generation. Just as in the past there was the Greece-Jerusalem conversation through Maimonides, who dialogued with Aristotle in his writings.”
And why Buddhism?
Gafni: “Tibetan Buddhism is, in certain dimensions, very close to some forms of kabbala [Jewish mysticism]. Both kabbala and Buddhism share some common language that speaks to the heart of the modern seeker.”
But isn’t it true that there is no god in Buddhism?
“It is true that the term `God’ in Buddhism is different from our understanding according to biblical Judaism. It is not the God of the Bible who speaks in a thunderous voice and reprimands everyone. They do not have an external God who is above nature. He is not external to creation, but is interiorized. From this point of view, Buddhism is close to Hasidism – in terms of the internal work, the work you do on yourself, from which emerges your relationship to the world around you.”
It’s clear to you, is it not, that all the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] rabbis will assail you for meeting with idol worshipers?
“Anyone who says that simply does not understand Buddhism; he is speaking from ignorance. The Buddha was a human being, he is not God, and therefore it is clear that his statue is also not God, but only a symbol. So there is no idol worship here.”
Travel as thriller
Our hotel is situated in a good neighborhood of New Delhi, meaning that people do not live on the street, but in grimy, neglected apartments. Connaught Place, one of the most magnificent of the city’s squares, looks like Kikar Hamedina in Tel Aviv and more especially like “Bread Square,” the former protest site of the poor and homeless there. My fastidiousness surges. My only nourishment is nuts and hermetically sealed water.
At night we tour Old Delhi. It’s not crowded here at night, only 7.3 Indians per square meter. All of whom are wandering the street in groups. No one suffers from loneliness here. In the West people feel alone in villas; here they sleep two-three to a porter’s wagon and don’t look especially sad. It’s hard to find an Indian depressive who is hooked on Prozac or its ilk. They don’t have the leisure for that.
Carpets of people are sleeping on the traffic islands. The drivers of the three-wheeled cabs sleep in their vehicles. It’s astonishing, the balance that is needed to sleep on the seat of a bicycle.
The next day we set out in the most expensive taxi we could find; the important thing is just to get out of here. Traveling on the roads of India is like being in a thriller. You watch the developments on the road with disbelief, waiting for the catharsis that will purge you of your fear. It’s a terrific movie. Anything can happen. Driving against the traffic, veering out of the way a split second before a bicycle holding an entire family splatters all over you.
To the drivers’ credit, they obviously feel their car. They probably live in it. The car is part of their body and they behave on the highway as on the street, in a state of patient, moderate, smiling chaos. Not that there are no accidents. Here and there we see overturned buses along the road. But they, too, are accepted with equanimity.
Many of the vehicles sport a sign saying “Honk, please.” In driving there is nothing like the sense of hearing. In Israel every honk can send the honkee out of his car and spark a blood-drenched incident. Here it’s a happy thing – people merrily honk at one another. You could mistakenly think that driving here is an ear-splitting experience until you realize that honking is like saying “hello.”
At a “workers’” restaurant by the roadside we are careful not to enter the stinking pit called a “lavatory.” A large indifferent bull strides in. Guess who’s coming to dinner. They feed it fresh chapati and in response it oozes a lot of spittle and strolls off, languidly escorted by an entourage of 200 flies.
Our driver Pablo, an Indian hunk who looks like singer Eyal Golan, travels this road every day for 13 straight hours. His favorite god, he says, is Ganesh, the mischievous Hindu god with the head of an elephant. Ganesh is the most popular god in India. He is responsible for pranks and intrigues.
We crossed the rich state of Punjab and the poor state of Uttar Pradesh and we arrive in the north, in the state of Hiamachal Pradesh, the paradise of India. The weather is far more pleasant. Which is to say, the air moves. In Delhi it’s different: There the mosquitoes hold the air between their teeth.
We start to climb the Himalayas. Pablo is very tired – he hasn’t slept in three days. Rabbi Gafni encourages him with sacred songs and some tunes by Simon and Garfunkel, too. Pablo has never heard of them but he wakes up, no doubt also aided by the light massage the rabbi applies to his shoulders.
The road bends sharply and the turns begin. Dharamsala is at an altitude of 2,000 meters. High, but still only considered to be at the foothills of the Himalayas. The turns are terribly sharp. Good thing it’s been dark for some time. That way we don’t see the potholes or the abyss alongside the road.
At 3 A.M. we reach upper Dharamsala. After the Dalai Lama fled from the Chinese and made his way stealthily across the Himalayas on the back of a yak, the Indian government granted him political asylum and this village, Macleod Ganj, adjacent to Dharamsala. Here, like our Yohanan Ben Zakkai, he reinvigorated the Tibetan people and its culture after the terrible destruction.
The Chinese killed more than one million Tibetans and destroyed some 6,000 monasteries. Holocaust is something else we have in common with them.
Your original face
Already during the tour of Macleod Ganj in the morning I was ripped off by shoe-shining Rajasthani kids. The rabbi hinted that I should upgrade my appearance before going to see the Bodhisattva of compassion. So I abandoned my shoes to the kids. They asked for 350 rupees, which is about NIS 35. I paid them a month’s salary without haggling and got a serious scolding from the owner of a Tibetan store, who said I was spoiling the young generation. Fortunately it’s Rajasthani youth, not Tibetan, so there isn’t much to spoil.
There is tension between the different communities in the village. The Tibetans are angry at the Indians and call them slothful, while the Indians are vexed by the industrious Tibetans. They arrived only 50 years ago and already have developed the village and made it one of the major tourist centers of India. It’s a small village, with a population of 6,000, of whom about 1,000 are Israelis.
There are three lanes in the village and they all lead upward. The homes snake their way up the side of a green hill and on the rooftops are cafes with a view that makes your heart go pitter-pat. In front of the central house of worship are cylinders on which are drawn colorful verses of prayer. When you turn them they create a kind of mantra, which is delivered to the ears of the universe.
There are fine restaurants in Macleod Ganj. Italian, Japanese, Korean and of course Tibetan and Israeli. True, the lanes are narrow and the cows crap, but it is clean here, the air is clear and the water fresh, direct from the Himalayas. It rains twice a day and the drops are heavy.
The Israelis are concentrated in the neighboring villages of Dharamkot and Bhagsu, which are less crowded. The view is a lot better there, too, but the monkeys are more impertinent. Surprisingly, most of the Israelis here have a busy schedule. A meditation course in the morning, followed immediately by a massage lesson, then cooking and drumming. They don’t have time for shanti (total tranquillity) here – that they reserve for Israel.
The next day it was pretty clear that the hawks were looking for food. Because we are situated on the edge of an abyss, they fly pretty much at eye level, just meters from me. Today we have a meeting with Tenzin Geyche Tethong, the secretary of the Tibetan government, about the rules of protocol and the content of the meeting with the Dalai Lama.
Rabbi Gafni wears his special Hasidic garb. The Tibetan government has a special minister in charge of robes and they attribute great significance to this. We don’t want to foment a diplomatic scandal because of mistaken fashion considerations.
In the government compound soldiers are playing badminton. There is a great splash of flowers here and their aroma accompanies us to the bureau. The secretary, formal but smiling, waxes enthusiastic over the rabbi’s Hasidic robe. “The Dalai Lama is in the middle of writing a book,” he says, “but he loves Rabbi Gafni and has specially made time for him. He has an interest in being in contact with the Israeli community. You are our neighbors here and we should get to know you.”
He asks about the Israelis, why there are so many of them here. Rabbi Gafni replies that they feel a deep connection to the spirit of the place, perhaps because both the Tibetans and the Jews have suffered oppression and sought to maintain their identity in difficult conditions of exile. I ask why the Tibetans are always laughing. His eyes lighting up, he replies: “The original face of people, beneath all the masks, is a smiling face.”
Amen.
The encounter
The Tsuglagkhang compound, the Dalai Lama’s official residence, is a few minutes’ walk from the center of the village. The morning of the meeting, a Friday, finds the rabbi in good spirits. He takes bills out of his pocket and distributes them to the lepers of the neighborhood. They smile, happy with their lot.
In the Namgyal temple, Tibetan monks are conducting a lively argument. They clap their hands vigorously to emphasize a solid point and snort mockingly to disparage their adversary’s argument. Just like the hair-splitting debates that took place in the plaza of our Temple.
The conference room contains luxurious low sofas and silkscreen prints on the wall. Even though this is supposed to be an intimate encounter, a few Israelis who were born again in Indian ashrams have managed to infiltrate the gathering. They are on the verge of a mild orgasm at the meeting with their God.
The Dalai Lama enters. He has nice eyes, his presence is pleasant, that is clear. He and Rabbi Gafni embrace, bow to each other and place cheek by cheek, showing more affection than what is customary. Both the rabbi and the Dalai Lama laugh heartily; indeed, they seem to share a great love for laughter.
After the greetings the rabbi reminds the Dalai Lama that he gave His Holiness his skullcap in Rome. “I hope you still have it,” he says. The Dalai Lama nods in affirmation. “I hope that one day it will be useful to me when I visit Jerusalem or Jewish institutions,” he says in English, and laughs.
Following are some excerpts from the conversation.
“I represent not only Gafni, but the Jewish tradition,” the rabbi said, “and I want to thank you for receiving us in your home. The subject we want to talk to you about is how the world of the spirit can have a practical influence and change the very real world of politics and economics.”
Dalai Lama: “That is a good subject. It is very important.”
Gafni, with a smile: “That is why I brought Gil with me – he’s the Richard Gere of Israel [Gere is active in the movement to free Tibet], because he gets better ratings than I do.”
“Your Holiness,” I said, “I have a few questions that are bothering me. My first question is what love is, actually. And how do we teach people to love in a practical way?”
Dalai Lama: “I cannot say what the exact meaning of love is. But when I use that word, it means that something is very precious to me. I feel not only closeness, but also caring and respect. For example, I love my watch but there are no relations of closeness between us, we do not share the same experiences. Love is for people who have the same experience as mine – feelings, pain, pleasure. That is why we should respect others, because they are part of myself.
“We learn our first experience of love from our mother,” he continued. “The infant wants to be close to its mother. Sometimes, unfortunately, there are unwanted children, but in general the mother sees the baby as part of her body. That is the height of closeness. This feeling is essential in reality for survival. This feeling becomes an important part of our life and it continues until our death. All the spiritual concepts speak about this being the most important feeling.”
Gafni: “I want to offer from the kabbala a comment on the words of wisdom of His Holiness.”
Dalai Lama: “So I can learn, very good!”
Gafni: “To learn from the tradition of our forefathers. The kabbala says that love, at its core, is not an emotion, but a perception, a way of seeing the world. The emotion then wells up from the perception. Once we understand that, we can train a perception, and we can also train ourselves to be lovers. Love is to see with the eyes of God. To love someone is to see them in their highest, most beautiful place. To love someone is to perceive their infinite specialness, with that divinity. The model for love in this sense is the way the mother sees her child. Even if the baby grows up and falls, the mother will always hold that at his core, he is beautiful and holy, and divine. This is why in Hebrew mysticism we call God `shaddai’ – it is the divine breast of the mother who nourishes us all. And because we are all part of God. We are all divine miniatures. So we all have the ability to be lovers, that is, to access our divine perception and see others with the eyes of God.”
The Dalai Lama was impressed: “Beautiful! The idea that love is a type of seeing, that it is possible to train it, is a good idea. It is hard to train a feeling, but sight is easier. We are all creatures of God. God is everlasting love. If I love God, I have to maintain a loving feeling toward all creatures, who are part of God. These feelings should be cultivated by logic, by meditation – there are methods for doing that. What is certain is that even people who do not have an interest in religion need a warm heart. A warm heart leads to inner quiet and to a tranquil and meaningful life. If the parents grow up in this atmosphere, they will educate their children accordingly. And that is the right way to change humanity.”
“If all the religions talk about love of mankind and compassion,” I asked, “how is it that so much hatred and wars are the fruit of religious education?”
The Dalai Lama laughed. “Religion has a big umbrella and under it you can do what you want,” he said. “The spiritual tradition represents good values for the long range. When people are in a desperate situation, their emotions become more negative. When anger is strong, the long-range considerations are forgotten. Therefore it is easier to believe in the values of the spirit when you have a comfortable life, but the wisdom is to do that during hardships.
“There are people who use religion for political or financial purposes and manipulate human belief. In Northern Ireland, for example. The naive people have stronger feelings and it is easier to work them up. That is why certain conflicts in history happened because of religion. But if you look closely you will see that the real considerations were different.
“The fundamentalist believes only in his religion and is afflicted with lack of knowledge and lack of esteem for the other traditions. He feels sincerely that he is serving God – and destroys and lays waste. The method to dissolve this is by means of talks between the traditions. Knowledge should be increased. Harmony should be created between the faiths. I was in Jerusalem twice, not only as a tourist but as a pilgrim, and I spoke with Jews and Muslims and Christians. Despite the different philosophy, they all carry the same idea. A message of love, compassion, forgiveness and self-meaning. That is why I feel more contact is needed. More dialogue. I have friends from all religions. If I am ever exiled from here, I will have somewhere to go.”
Gafni: “The most important idea I want to share with you is about why people who are deeply religious can behave in a terrible way. In what I call integral kabbala, and in modern integral thought, we say there are stages and states. States mean that which I achieve and lose – like an altered state or mystical state. A stage is a permanent achievement; I have developed to a particular stage of achievement and I do not lose it. In moral development, there are four major stages: egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric (feeling care and compassion for all people), and also the stage of being compassionate for all living beings and not only human beings.
“Now here is the deep idea. All states, mystical ones included, are interpreted through the prism of stages. If I am at one level – let’s say, egocentric – and I have a mystical experience, I might think I am Jesus. If I am at the ethnocentric stage, then I might think that only my people is holy … The secret is that all states are interpreted through the prism of stages, one’s moral stage of development. Therefore, even people who reach genuine mystical states can behave in morally reprehensible ways.”
The Dalai Lama listened carefully, nodding, seemingly excited to hear this new wisdom.
Gil: “Politicians and businessmen only want to be in control all the time, whereas one of the principles of the spirit is precisely to give up control. How is it possible to combine the two?”
Dalai Lama: “The success of the modern economy depends on other elements, such as clients. A good politician is usually voted into office in elections, so he depends on people. Therefore, they are not actually in control. Politics and the economy need a great many people. Religion, in the end, is the business of one person. Religion depends on the individual.
“If your belief is clean, if you have a healthy and true motivation, all your actions can be constructive, filled with compassion and beneficial to the world. It does not matter what your profession is – politician, scientist or teacher. If your motivation is to be self-centered, then every religion becomes dirty and destructive. All human activity depends on the individual who does it. Therefore, religion has an important role. To instill values in those who make the economy and the politics, to change the way of thinking toward compassion and love.
“Not long ago we had a state meeting with the government of India. And one of the country’s most important ministers was there, too. Humbly he said that he is a politician and therefore does not have enough spiritual knowledge. I said to him that a person who is a public figure needs religion more than someone who lives alone in a remote place. Someone like that does not cause much harm even if he goes crazy [laughs loudly]. But the leaders, if they are not mentally balanced, if their brain is complicated and sophisticated, but their heart is poor and wretched, that has serious implications” (laughs in satisfaction).
Sexuality and divinity
Gil: “Let’s talk about sexuality in Buddhism and kabbala.”
Gafni: “I want to offer from Jerusalem a scientific method of how religion can teach the individual change. Because I do not have the courage to speak in my name, I ask all the angels and sages to speak through me and they will do it better than I can by myself.”
The Dalai Lama listens attentively. Gafni concentrates silently for a few seconds and continues:
“In the Temple in Jerusalem, above the Holy Ark, were pictures of two angels. They were embracing in a kind of sexual tantric yoga posture. In the kabbala we call this `the secret of the Cherubim.’ The secret is that one of the ways to teach personal transformation and love is through using the principles of sexuality as a spiritual model. Why? Because sexuality illustrates all the principles of religion.
“For example, giving up control, which Gil asked about. In sex it is not good to be always in control. Sex works only if we are willing at times to give up control. So sexuality exemplifies a spiritual principle. There is also another element in kabbala, which is called `the secret of the kisses.’ Let’s say I go to the bank and ask the teller to record that I as though deposited money. He will look at me as though I am crazy. In this world, after all, either you take or you receive. But in sexuality, giving and receiving are collapsed into one. So the sexual models the holy, the holy way of living.”
The Dalai Lama was a bit surprised by what seemed to be a new approach, but listened carefully.
Gafni: “Another spiritual thing that is illustrated by the sexual: to do something for its own sake, not in order to gain some other advantage extraneous to itself. Sex according to the kabbala is meditation of the ordinary person. Because sexuality is for the thing itself. These are but examples of a core kabbalistic idea. The kabbala says that sexuality, which the whole world is afraid of, actually incorporates astounding spiritual principles that should be applied as the model for living in all the nonsexual areas of life.”
The Dalai Lama laughs appreciatively. He bursts with laughter. It takes him time to calm down. Sex is something that Tibetan monks of his level are not supposed to take an interest in.
Dalai Lama: “It’s complicated. Sex is mainly a matter of culture. That is its main role in nature. We cannot say that there is any religious meaning in it. Animals do it and we cannot say that they are religious.”
Gafni: “But animals have a soul, too. You see? I am a good Buddhist.”
Dalai Lama (laughing): “In the Indian tradition there may be something similar to what you are saying. But in Buddhism it is different. All the internal feelings and the sexual feelings are related to `internal air,’ and we have to control this internal air, the movement of this internal energy. We use the sexual organs to create movement, to make the energy flow, not for the purpose of culture, but to achieve a deeper experience of consciousness. And then the sexual energy melts away. Only trained people are capable of this.
“Good and proper sexual relations are a way to get close to one another,” he adds. “but they are also the source of a problem. You are happy for a few months and then the problems come up.”
“There seems to be a lot of energy in envy, in ego and in violence,” I ask, “and the energy to do well by others is far less powerful. Is it possible to learn how to channel the energy of evil toward the doing of good?”
Dalai Lama: “That is very clear. A negative feeling creates energy immediately. So negative feelings are stronger than positive ones. Through training, positive feelings can also give energy. Compassion, for example, by training one’s thinking, can give endless energy. But it is not easy. You need a sharp mind and a developed consciousness to make these distinctions.”
Gafni: “There is the story about the founder of Hasidism who was approached because an infant had fallen ill, and instead of going to 10 righteous men, he asked 10 thieves to pray for him. All the Jews were angry with him, and he said, `The gates of heaven are locked and only a thief knows how to pick the locks of heaven.’ Maybe that means that we need the highest level of consciousness to access the energy of the thief in us in order to storm heaven.”
The Dalai Lama laughs and stamps his feet. “God is nice,” he says, “and he may be especially nice to the sinners. That is very true.”
The rabbi takes out the fabric he bought in the market the day before, orange silk cloth such as the Tibetan monks use. He asked an Israeli woman named Idit to sew tzitzit (ritual fringes) in each corner and then he had a totally kosher tallit (prayer shawl). With much grace and decorum, he presents it to the Dalai Lama.
“Ho!” the Dalai Lama calls out, moved. “This is wonderful Jewish-Tibetan merger. How wonderful.” After the rabbi explains its kabbalistic meaning to a very attentive Dalai Lama, he wraps himself in it, chortling delightedly. Then he gives us white silk scarves, as is the custom when parting – and gets a skullcap. He and the rabbi embrace and their love for each other is felt by everyone. Everyone bows to the Dalai Lama; he bows in return and leaves.
I was caught in the garden. Suddenly the Dalai Lama emerged from behind me, wearing the skullcap and prayer shawl, on the way to his next meeting. “I am a Tibetan Jew! A Tibetan Jew!” Pleased as punch he was.
The differences
The rumor of the visit spread through the foothills of the Himalayas. Dozens of Israelis, young people in search of serenity, arrive for the kabbalat Shabbat at the Hotel OM (symbol of the presence of the universal in the individual). On the porch, which seemed to be suspended in mid-air between the tops of green pine trees, Rabbi Gafni – warmly greeted by many travelers who knew him from Israel – succeeds in creating a moving experience for them, in part thanks to India, which has milked the Zionism out of them. During “Shir Lama’alot” (Song of Degrees), they all lift their eyes to the snowcapped peaks, knowing whence their help shall come.
In our last conversation en route to the airport, I talk with the rabbi again about the differences. Buddha said: Elimination of suffering is all. Suffering is my identification with this world. And this world perishes. The more I am attached to this world, the more I suffer. It is better to sit under the tree, concentrate on one’s breathing, do stretching exercises and not identify too much.
Moses, in contrast, foments a political and cultural revolution that is called the Exodus from Egypt. He is a political activist. He operates in this world, influences history, repairs reality and not just one’s personal karma.
And there is another difference: What a beautiful land it turned out to be for Moses here. Only when you get back from India do you see it. The streets here are so clean. I feel like getting out of the car and licking the road. Allenby Street never looked so polished. The houses are so white. The dogs are so sated and the flies are so lonely. More power to a sense of perspective. More power to Moses. More power to the Israel Defense Forces.
Faith and Values on TV – Marc Gafni
STILL THINKING ABOUT
Rabbi Marc Gafni
Naomi’s New Morning – May 17, 2006
http://www.newmorningtv.tv/rabbimarcgafni.jsp
“We all have a box, and in that box is our stuff, it’s our things, and it’s not our degrees and it’s not our status, and it’s not our job and it’s not our piety, and it’s not our religiosity, and it’s none of our credits in the world.
It’s our fears, our hopes, our dreams, our pathologies, our unique silliness, it’s the stuff that we are. That’s the stuff that I wanna call with you, not our finger print, but our soul print.
We have a soul print. And “the inability to share my soul print with another human being is the definition of loneliness.” That’s what loneliness means. My soul print is the DNA of my soul. My soul print is the unique, swirls and curves that make up my infinite specialness and uniqueness. Right, that box that I carry around with me, that’s who I am in the world.”
“What is love? Love is not an emotion at its core. The core of loving is to perceive the infinite specialness in another human being. Love is a perception. I perceive your infinite specialness. I see you at your highest. I experience your soul print.
All right, love is – is to see with God’s eyes. To see with God’s eyes means to see you at your highest. I’m packed and I’m folded by your very being in my presence, your soul print comes to the fore, I see you soul print and I identify you with that soul print. I know that’s who you really are.
Right, love is a soul print vocation. Now, not just love. When you think deeply, all that we look for in the world – joy is a soul print vocation. product of actively and passionately pursuing some other activity.
To be joyous means that I can only attain joy as the by-product of the pursuit of something else and that something else can only be ultimately to live my story. To live my soul print in the world.
So why are there lonely people? (claps) OK let’s learn. Well, A: there are lonely people because there’s no one available to receive those people’s soul print. I need someone to receive my soul print, what gets in the way, in our world, of soul print receiving? What gets in the way? The first thing that gets in the way is labels. Labels prevent me from seeing you as you are.
The second I lock someone into a label, I no longer am able to see them with God’s eyes. The essence of soul print receiving is to go on a journey where I can receive the [Hebrew] right the deep soul print self of other.”
A disgraced American rabbi with a tangled history of alleged sexual misdeeds is relaunching his career as a spiritual mentor and backtracking from an apparent confession he signed two years ago
Marc Gafni, left, visits with author Luke Ford in Salt Lake City on July 3, 2008
NEW YORK (JTA) — A disgraced American rabbi with a tangled history of alleged sexual misdeeds is relaunching his career as a spiritual mentor and backtracking from an apparent confession he signed two years ago.
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni acknowledged his “sickness” in 2006 after several students at his Israeli institute claimed they were lured into sexual liaisons through deception and psychological manipulation. For decades Gafni had been dogged by claims he engaged in improper sexual activities, including allegations that he molested two teenage girls.
Now Gafni is back with a new Web site that directly challenges the claims against him.
Based in Salt Lake City, Gafni, now known as Marc, is a practitioner of a Kabbalah-inspired philosophy called evolutionary spirituality.
In a statement on the controversy posted to his Web site, Gafni said the relationships he engaged in while in Israel were all “mutual and consensual,” broke no laws and did not involve an abuse of authority.
He said the letter he wrote was misunderstood to be a confession that he acted improperly.
“I believed that writing the letter would, in some measure, end the attacks, and give me time to heal and think things through,” Gafni wrote on his site, MarcGafni.com.
Gafni did not respond to requests for an interview.
A former Orthodox rabbi and later a leading figure in the Jewish Renewal movement, Gafni first gained attention in 2004 when The New York Jewish Week reported on longstanding accusations against him.
Gafni told the newspaper that one of the girls was troubled and had made up the story, but he did acknowledge a sexual relationship with the other girl when he was a 19-year-old rabbinical student.
“I was a stupid kid and we were in love,” Gafni told The Jewish Week. “She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her.”
In response to The Jewish Week’s reporting, several prominent rabbis — including Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Arthur Green, Joseph Telushkin, Saul Berman, Tirzah Firestone and Arthur Waskow — rallied to Gafni’s defense, saying the evidence of impropriety was not convincing.
Two years later, after the news broke in Israel, several of those same rabbis backtracked, arguing that the new accusations were different from the old ones.
Waskow recently told JTA that he has reviewed the material on Gafni’s Web site and still sees “nothing whatsoever to change my mind about the wisdom of the decision that several organizations made two years ago that he should not continue to teach under their auspices.”
A section of Gafni’s new site dedicated to the controversy includes letters on his behalf from several spiritual leaders, attorneys and counselors, as well as the report of a forensic psychologist who administered a polygraph test.
Several references to e-mails and instant messages between Gafni and the Israeli women that supposedly prove the nature of their relationships were not exploitative. The correspondence is not available on the site.
“In each of these relationships, as is usually the case between men and women, there were complex power dynamics in which each side had power and vulnerability,” Gafni wrote regarding the Israel controversy. “While I never promised exclusivity to any, in retrospect I see I did fail to recognize two things. First, that my non-exclusivity might in itself be experienced as hurtful. Secondly, that these involvements themselves, and particularly the lack of transparency around them, might be experienced as painful or problematic.”
Gafni’s Web site is filled with allusions to his problems and explanations.
“Marc Gafni struggled with the question of whether to teach conventional spiritual wisdom in a conventional spiritual context, or to follow a more post-conventional style of teaching and living,” his biography says. “This tension brought great dynamism to his work, but also caused some dissonance.”
Now the biography says that Gafni will focus on “intense inner spiritual and psychological reflection on the course of his life” and “partnering with social activist leaders to create a new, grass-roots human rights movement.”
“While Marc Gafni will continue teaching, he wishes to do so as a spiritual `artist’ rather than as a rabbi, guru, or formal teacher,” the Web site says.
One of Gafni’s defenders is Rabbi Gershon Winkler, a New Mexico rabbi who runs Walking Stick, an organization that combines Jewish teachings with Native American wisdom.
“Do I believe that the women here experienced pain? Yes I do,” Winkler wrote in a letter posted on Gafni’s site. “Do I know that this is not a story of abuse of sexual harassment as it was reported in public forums? I am sure it is not. Do I believe that the pain caused by all of us to Rabbi Gafni far exceeds the pain that anyone else can claim to have experienced? Absolutely.”
In the letter, Winkler acknowledged that he fathered a child with a student, carried on several “intimate relationships” with students over the years and said he is currently in a relationship with two women.
Many in the Jewish Renewal leadership, he asserted, have engaged in similar sexual behavior, including some who are now critics of Gafni.
Waskow, one of the leading figures in the Renewal movement, rejected that line of argument.
“If there were, years and years ago, people in this or any other movement who did behave in ways that we would now find ethically prohibited, it was precisely because of the experience of the pain and emotional disasters and spiritual disasters created by that kind of behavior that we adopted the ethical rules that now apply,” Waskow said.
“Maybe some of that did take place, but we grew enough to decide this was not a good idea,” he said. “What he’s describing as hypocrisy is a shift over a 25-year period of time in which our movement and people in our movement grew considerably.”
Winkler told JTA that he believes it is wrong to insist on an “across-the-board” ban on sexual relationships involving rabbis and followers, teachers and students, and counselors and patients.
Gafni, he added, is a victim of sexual McCarthyism.
“I think it’s extreme,” Winkler said. “I think it’s a sexual ethic that’s made out of paranoia.”
International Jewish Liberation School
Under the Auspices of the Tree of Life Foundation
A 501(c)3 Religious Not-for-Profit Corporation
As a Division of the Human School of Living Arts
We Celebrate the Founding Of
The International Jewish Liberation School (IJLS)
* What
* Who
* When
* Message from Rebbe Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
* Message from Rebbe Marc Gafni, Ph.D.
* Course Components
* Registration and Price
The International Jewish Liberation School is grateful and delighted to offer a training course in Liberation (Deveikut, God-Merging) based on the principles and practices of Hebrew Wisdom.
Our school is a reactivation of this great and lost Hebrew Liberation wisdom. This school is dedicated to sharing the great mission of Hebrew wisdom; the Democratization of Enlightenment (which is called in Hebrew wisdom sources Deveikut or He’arah). In this teaching Deveikut (Self-Liberation) is not the province of the great masters, but a genuine option for every person. The potential for realizing one’s true nature is the birthright of every human being. Every human being has the potential and possibility to realize their true nature as part of the God field and to act – compassionately and courageously – from the integrity of that realization.
Because realization is the potential and possibility of every human being it is not merely an option but it is the very purpose and invitation of our lives. In line with the four-thousand year lineage of Hebrew wisdom masters, we use the Torah as a guidebook to liberation. Once we understand the Torah as a handbook for the Liberation of every human being, we realize that the intention of the Biblical ideal, of “Kingdom of Priests”- is no less then what we have called, The Democratization of Enlightenment.
Why is this so overwhelmingly important to us? Because we subscribe to the hidden corollary of Hebrew Liberation teaching…that all ethical failure is ultimately rooted in a failure of realization.
A core practice of Hebrew wisdom is called Mitzvah. Although Mitzvah is usually translated as commandment, the Hebrew mystics also read it as being related to the word Tzavtah, meaning intimacy. Mitzvah is the path of intimacy in which the skin-encapsulated ego expands to include all that exists. At the level of Liberation, Mitzvah acts as a channel to draw down the light (shefa) and activate the divine flow of life.
Particularly, we see Shabbat as a day spiritual renewal and Liberation in which the primary mitzvah is creating a quiet mind to receive the higher energies of Liberation. In this context Shabbat is integral to the teachings of Jewish Liberation. In the Jewish liberation tradition, the words of the divine to Abraham, “Lech Lecha,” are literally translated to mean, “Go to Your Self. Realize that your Divine self is “literally part of God.” Once the human beings solves the perpetual identity crisis by realizing his identity with Divine, he or she is able to act with courage, compassion, wisdom, responsibility and holy audacity. It is this courage and audacity of human action, which supports the activation of the indwelling Shekhinah energy that opens us to the experiential awareness of Deveikut. It is this awareness, which naturally manifests the most evolved vision of Tikkun Olam (the healing and transformation of the world).
The International Jewish Liberation School’s course honors, receives, and transmits the four thousand year-old Hebrew lineage of Liberation. Beginning with Abraham Isaac Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah; continuing to Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, David and Solomon; transmitted to the communities of elders, prophets, priests and sages, there has been an energetic transmission of deveikut (liberation). The lineage transmission includes some of the most wondrous illuminated beings to walk the earth, including Akiva, Judah the Prince, Abulafia, Maimonides, Cordovero, Yitzchak Luria, Chaim Luzatto, Meir Ibn Gabbai, the Gaon of Vilna, the Baal Shem Tov, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, Mordechai Laine of Izbica, Rav Shalom Sharabi, Rav Yehuda Fatima, Ben Ish Hai, Menachem Mendel of Schneerson and Rav Kaduri in modern times.
A remarkable and powerful teaching of this tradition and modern times is that none of these people were perfect. Perfection and absolute piety is a tyrannical ideal that ultimately separates us from the divine. Toxic shame undermines the deveikut (Liberation) process. All of these liberated figures were flawed, some dramatically so, at different times in their lives. In the words of the ancient teaching, “The Tzadik falls seven times and rises, the wicked falls and does not rise.” The ability to rise like a Phoenix from the fire and to transform human failing into human greatness is core to the shadow work of Hebrew Liberation technology. As the schools of Kutzk and Izbica taught, one’s unique flaw is transmuted into one’s unique gift and gorgeousness. We are all unique flames emerging from the same fire. It is in the realization of one’s authentic unique self that the human being merges with the God field. If one tries to round out the curves of a puzzle piece it cannot fit into the great puzzle of the Kosmos. It is only by highlighting the unique curvature of your self that your merge with the larger divine Self.
Who
The International Jewish Liberation School is co-led by Rebbe Gabriel Cousens, M.D and Rebbe Marc Gafni, Ph.D.
When
Opening Week
The opening week of the Jewish Liberation School will be six nights, seven days, between Dec. 24-30, 2008. This week will be our first annual “open for all” study/ practice/ meditation intensive focused on touching into the eternal joy and internal glimpse of Jewish Liberation.
Annual Summer Course
The annual IJLS One-Year Course will start every summer, approximately in the middle two weeks of August. The length will be 13 nights and 14 days, and continue throughout the year via live video telecasts. In 2009 it will be August 9-23.
For registration and information, please contact the Tree of Life at 520-394-2520 x201.
Why Rebbe Gabriel Cousens, MD, is Co-creating the International Jewish Liberation School, and Gabriel’s Bio
In 1983 on the fortieth day of a fast, while spending the last 3 days on little or no water and meditating 9 hours or more a day, Gabriel dissolved into the nothing in deep deveikut; about ready to leave the physical body as one can only stay in this state of inner dissolvement for 72 hours without leaving more permanently, a chasmal voice strongly spoke out that Gabriel was to return to his roots and serve Am Israel. Somewhat surprised at this assignment, yet surrendered to it, Gabriel began the deep journey into mystical Judaism. Raised as a reform Jew and as one who attended the North Shore Congregation of Israel in Glenco, Illinois from kindergarten through 10th grade and scoring the highest graduating grades out of 300 people, there was a strong feeling that he knew nothing about Judaism. But had a deep feeling for it, which was supported by the local conservative Rabbi Lippis, who had pushed Gabriel hard from the age of 11 to become a rabbi. The truth at the time was that, although drawn to what he strongly suggested, Gabriel was more interested in playing football than studying Hebrew, as football spiritually turned him on and he had known he would become a doctor since the age of four.
A major boost in his spiritual life happened at the age of 16 his older brother, with whom he was extremely close, was killed in an auto accident. Although many rabbis came to console his family, no one could speak to the meaning of death. Gabriel realized, at that time, that a sign that he had found his spiritual teacher was that that association would have to give him a direct apperception of the answer to this question. For the next two years he spent many long hours in his brother’s room contemplating and meditating while he symbolically reconstructed life by building a heart lung machine, which ended up winning the state science fair in 1959. After Amherst College, where he played out his football karma as the captain of an undefeated Amherst football team and was picked as all-new England guard and middle line backer and was elected into the National Football hall of fame as one of 11 All-American Scholar Athletes, he went on to Columbia Medical School to begin his doctor dharma. He did vaguely connect with Abraham Joshua Heschel at JTS, but missed the rest of the New York Jewish experience. He could not seem to find a place in the Jewish world and became interested in the Essenes, the Kabbalah, and Kundalini. In 1975, at the age of 33 when he received Shaktipat (the equivalent of Smicha l’Shefa, or Haniha) from the liberated being Swami Muktananda and received a direct knowledge of the answer to his question about death, he and gave up everything in the outer world to become an intense yogi meditating 6 hours per day, chanting 4.5 hours, and servings as a holistic physician for the thousands of yogis traveling with Sw. Muktananda, living in primarily in India, South Fallsburg, Oakland, and Santa Monica for seven years. The last 3.5 years were spent daily with Sw. Muktananda, without any break. In addition he took on a close “guru uncle” relationship with Sw. Prakashananda, the first person acknowledged by Sw. Muktananda as liberated in 1969.
At the end of the seven-years, at the age of 40, he was declared liberated by Sw. Prakashananda three times: once in front of a group of his devotees; once in front of his 12 year old son in Praskashananda’s ashram. These first two times Gabriel thought Prakashananda simply was testing; but the third time he made it intensely clear that it was the truth. He then spent a day in private instructing Gabriel about the meaning of Liberation and the dharma of it; making it clear that although Gabriel was the only liberated Western person in his lineage as a successor, his path may be in his original spiritual roots. A few weeks later Gabriel was acknowledged as liberated by Sw. Muktananda, who also empowered him to be a vehicle of grace for Shaktipat. A few days later, Sw. Muktananda left his body. It was a dramatic and beautiful end to a most intense and profound cycle. The next year, in 1983 Gabriel began the forty day fast that had the surprise redirection back into Judaism by what appeared to be a Divine, but not sought after, command.
Attempting to move into Judaism at best was strange. He became Bar Mitzvah’ed at the age of 44 under the direction of Rabbi Hanan Sills and the training of Irv Newman. Reuven and Yehudit Goldfarb attended the ceremony in Petaluma California. Irv, who was in his late 70’s, cried for the first time ever at a Bar Mitzvah as he was so touched by what he thought was the most profound one he had ever attended.
After that, Gabriel tried to explain Kundalini, Liberation, Shaktipat, and non-dual awareness to five of his Rabbi friends, and no one had a clue what he was talking about. Finally he got referred to Rabbi Gershon Winkler, who also did not know what Gabriel was talking about, but felt open enough to try and find a language in Hebrew to translate these yogic terms and experiences into Hebrew. Over time Gershon became Gabriel’s rabbinic mentor, and over the past eleven years has guided him in preparation to become a Rabbi. Although he first met Shlomo Carlebach in 1979, after 1983 Gabriel also became one of Rebbe Shlomo Carlebach’s physicians and spent many wonderful personal hours with him and was greatly inspired by his profundity He was a great soul.
In 1993 Gabriel founded the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Patagonia, AZ, and also the Tree of Life Foundation, a religious 501c3. In 1996, after a 21-day water fast, on the 21st day, Gabriel was initiated with the hagiya of the Tetragrammatron in which these letters became burning symbols that permeated every aspect of Gabriel’s being. It was after this that he began speaking in the third person to more formally acknowledge that although he traveled in the body-mind complex, it was not who he was. This, he later found out, was similar to Reb Zusha and Reb Meir of Premishlan, who both also spoke in the third person. Gabriel also began to study Shamanic Judaism with Gershon, and after one joint Native American-Jewish conference with Gershon, Gabriel became a 4-year sundancer and was adapted into the Lakota Tribe as a clan chief, for bravery as he was the only one to go without any food or water for the three years of Sundance in the hot Nevada desert and stand attached to the Tree for four days from sunrise to sunset. Later Gabriel became head of the Spirit Dance, which is a universal dance for world peace, which we now do at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center and Foundation (a non-profit religious corporation in Patagonia, AZ, and in Israel through our Tree of Light Foundation. In 2001, Gershon ordained Gabriel as a pastoral rabbi, which is one who is empowered to do all the ceremonies and holidays, but not one who was ready to interpret the Halachah. Inspired by Gershon and other Kabbalistic masters Gabriel deepened his studies of the Kabbalah, which he actually lightly began in 1970’s and more seriously began in 1983. He also began living a modern orthodox lifestyle and has been Shomer Shabbat for about 12 years. Somewhere in this process Gabriel was directed to Aliyah in Israel and is now an Israeli citizen and has been teaching, creating Shamanic Shabbats, running spiritual fasting retreats, and teaching live foods in Israel since 2004.
It was during a big Israeli retreat, Lev Tahor, where he co-led a Shabbat with Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, that they met and became instant brothers. Mordechai was the first Rabbi who deeply understood the Jewish Liberation Theology that Gabriel was talking about. Their bond of mutual understanding and commitment was to awaken the ancient teaching and lineage of Jewish Liberation that began with Avraham Avinu, with “Lech Lecha,” as the first liberated Jew; followed by Yitzchak as the second liberated Jew in the lineage. Over time Marc and Gabriel began serious dialogue of their individual and eventually joint vision to create a Jewish Liberation School, which is now manifesting. Gabriel deeply appreciates Mark’s deep Jewish mystical wisdom and philosophical knowledge (the philosophical Kabbalah), which is sparked, inspired and powered by his active Ruach HaKodesh. What Gabriel brings to the teachings are his 27 years as a liberated Shaktipat master; his experiential knowledge of the how to help people build a foundation for the total whole person liberation and the ethical process of Jewish Liberation (almost continuous deveikut) to manifest. Although the author of ten books on nutrition, peace, and spirituality, his book Spiritual Nutrition: Six Foundations for Spiritual Life gives the best synthesis of his yogic revelations into the Jewish-Kabbalistic experience. It is clear to Gabriel that he had to go into the realm of Yogic Liberation in order to see the Torah as a manual for Jewish Liberation. Presently he is writing a book on the Torah as a manual for Jewish Liberation, interpreting each parasha from that perspective. Though he enjoys the three levels of Kabbalah and will be teaching some of the fundamentals of Jewish healing and to the Ma’aseh Bereshit (magical-practical Kabbalah) as well as of the Ma’aseh Merkava Kabbalah (mystical Kabbalah), his deep love is the Torah, which is the practical foundation for Jewish Liberation from his point of view. He is strongly inspired by Rabbi Akiba and the Baal Shem Tov, whom he considers great Jewish liberated beings. Mordechai and Gabriel are deeply inspired and committed to reactive this most profound aspect and lineage of the great Jewish Way of Deveikut. We joyously invite you to join us in this incredible unfolding and undertaking.
Shalom,
Gabriel
Why is Rabbi Marc Gafni, Ph.D., Co-Creating the International Jewish Liberation School, and Marc’s Bio
To answer this question on would have to enquire of Marc’s background from an intellectual, emotional, spiritual, psychological, karmic, physical, social, familial and biographical perspective. Each would require its own essay and only an integration of the entire essay would yield some glimmering of an answer to this question. One answer, which transcends all of the above, is the Hebrew word. Kachah: Meaning: Just Because. The word Kachah in Hebrew is made of Hebrew letters which the Baal Shem Tov teaches are the acronym for Keter Kol Ha-ketarim. The crown of all crowns. Crown is the luminous divine essence or divine story called in Hebrew Keter, which is the highest reason, the highest will, the highest mystery on the border of the infinite. Just Because.
If however this does not fully satisfy you, then Marc will share you a personal reason; a reason that is personal and transpersonal in the sense that the latter transcends and includes the former. Marc feels that to consistently hold a deep and profound recognition of the true nature of the self and the true nature of reality one must at least taste liberated consciousness. This taste of liberated consciousness must then be integrated with intense shadow work, ethical practice, physical practice, eating practice, and social and spiritual artistry. Each of these is a separate track of service which we will address unpack and unfold in the International Jewish Liberation School. In Marc’s understanding this is the core teaching of Hebrew wisdom. Hebrew wisdom at its core is an enlightenment teaching; a Liberation teaching designed to gift the experience of enlightened and liberated consciousness to the largest amount of people with the greatest possible depth. This is what Marc has referred to as the Democratization of Enlightenment. This was a core theme in Marc’s teaching and his writing on Mordechai Lainer of Izbica. It is a teaching which reflects the idea of evolutionary enlightenment core the teachings of the Kabbalah of Luria which receive pristine formulation in the Torah and Dharma of Avraham Isaac HaKohen Kuk. It is this teaching on the evolutionary edge- the teaching that Liberation is both a potential, a promise and the birthright of every individual that lies at the core of Marc’s teaching.
Marc discussed this idea in depth with Moshe Idel and Ken Wilber in two dialogues in 2005 and 2006. At around the same time Marc and Gabriel met and led a sabot at a retreat in Israel. There was a deep and profound mutual recognition and love born on that Shabbat. Marc recognized the depth of Gabriel’s practice and liberated core. Marc also recognized the areas of spiritual practice that Gabriel had developed in this incarnation, which had not been available to Marc, and Gabriel did the same with Marc. Gabriel and Marc then lost contact as Marc went through his painful trial by fire. Gabriel and Marc reconnected and did a process of deep internal work around Marc’s trial by fire. Marc also joined Gershon in becoming a mentor, studying with Gabriel to prepare him for the next stage in the Rabbinate even as Gabriel became Marc’s mentor in psychological and healing work which helped Marc move through the pain towards a place of transmutation and transformation. In this cauldron of non-dual reality, where earth and heaven kisses, where the relative and the absolute revealed their oneness, the vision of the Liberation school was born in love. This is the personal / transpersonal story.
A deeper glimpse at Rabbi Kuk and his teaching of Evolutionary Kabbalah as a ground to our intention in the International Jewish Liberation School brings us to R. Kuk’s principle of Evolutionary Enlightenment [the phrase "Evolutionary Enlightenment" is a precise translation of R. Kuk's phrase in his works Lights of Holiness]. Thirty years ago I became seriously interested in the writing of Abraham Kuk. Kuk was a great Kabbalist and revolutionary thinker who lived a paradoxically and often beautifully conservative lifestyle. In my recent work on Mordechai Lainer of Izbica, who is in many ways my teacher, I began to realize that a number of the key ideas expressed in the Izbica lineage had direct and clear influence on Kuk. One of the most important of such ideas is what R. Kuk calls explicitly in the Hebrew “evolutionary enlightenment”. As I studied more over the years I realized two things. First, the Evolutionary motif was core to Kuk’s entire experience as well as to his conceptual vision of the ultimate nature of reality. Second, I realized that this idea was far from limited to Kuk. In fact it is the single most important idea in Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah. And finally I have– together with students friends and study partners, traced this idea backwards to the very foundational sources of the Kabbalah. Kabbalah is the opposite of Adavaita. Kabbalah is evolutionary spirituality.
What does it all mean? It is very simple. One view of reality suggests that the way to perfection is what the philosopher Lovejoy called the ascending path. One needs to leave the world of flux and change and enter into the world of eternal and unchanging form, which ultimately gives way to unchanging formlessness. . It is there and only there that redemption can be achieved. It is only by leaving behind the fluidity and instability of reality in all of its expression of chaos and uncertainty that we may achieve any measure of stability safety and ultimately realize bliss and perfection. A second view of reality makes an almost diametrically opposed claim. This school champions what Lovejoy called the descending path. This is a very different way indeed. In this understanding redemption is to be found in the constantly changing and transforming nature of concrete reality which in its ever-dynamic dance sings the praise of spirit in motion.
Monotheistic religion is usually identified with the first view. More pagan orientations in both their ancient and moderns expression are more readily identified with the second view.
Kabbalah forges a more integral view by embracing the primal intuition of spirit held in each of these experiences and conceptions of world. One expression of divinity is the splendid order of eternal forms, which transcend the mad confusion of samsara: the world of truth which transcends the world of lies.
And yet the eternal divine, which is one, incarnates and manifests in the world of plurality. Moreover this manifestation and incarnation of the one in the many, of the infinite in the finite, is not merely an expression of divinity; it is the divine invitation to its own great unfolding. For Luria, reality is spirit. Spirit is absolute eternal and unchanging. And yet –as all of us have experienced in our own mystical initiation, reality—which is spirit—is evolving no less then it is absolute. God – reality – ultimate spirit is both ever-present and already always the ground of all being even as spirit evolves through her incarnation in form. This, for the Kabbalist, is the evolutionary meaning of Nagargun’s reading of the Heart Sutra’s: Emptiness is Form and Form is Emptiness. All is one; God is one—meaning, explain the Kabbalists, God will be One. Reality will be integrated and unified in an obvious tapestry of gorgeous interconnectivity and wholeness when we –baby faced divine incarnation of the godhead realizes God’s evolution. In the words of Nikos Kazanzakis, cited by at least on Luria Scholar to explain the essence of Lurianic Kabbalah, “We are the saviors of God”.
What is Evolutionary Kabbalah? Evolutionary Kabbalah deploys the most advanced wisdom available in the world today from all of the great traditions as well as from the hard and soft sciences, in order to understand, evolve and apply the principles of Kabbalah to contemporary life.
Marc Gafni Bio
Marc Gafni is a cutting edge, gentle and provocative spiritual teacher, as well as an author and television personality, a mediator, an iconoclast, a lover of people, troublemaker, and corporate consultant. Marc is the author of seven books including the National Best Seller Soul Prints which won the prestigious Napra award for best spirituality book of 2001. It was a main selection of the One Spirit Book Club, and the Amazon.com best book in the Jewish thought category in 2001. This book was also made into a National PBS special and an audio series by Sounds True recordings. Soul Prints is published by Simon and Schuster. Marc’s second major English language book, also published by Simon and Schuster is The Mystery of Love. Beautifully written, it unpacks an esoteric Kabbalistic tradition, which teaches of the profound relationship between the sexual, the erotic and the sacred. Mystery of Love was met with much critical acclaim and was also made an audio series called The Erotic and the Holy, published by Sounds True.
Marc has been successfully involved in manifesting and leading spiritual context, including seminars, learning communities, training programs and spiritual movements since he was in his early twenties. He has struggled his whole life between his ability and desire to teach conventional spiritual wisdom and in conventional spiritual contexts, and his post-conventional styles of teaching and being. This tension has created the gorgeousness of much of his work and has caused some significant dissonance over the years. His commitment for the future is to be fully present and committed in the post conventional contexts in which he manifests and teaches. Marc is currently the director of a private foundation dedicated to producing a great library of teaching on the human spirit with real implications for creating a better world for all of the children and grandchildren on our planet.
There are several stages in the unfolding study and teaching path of Marc Gafni. In the first stage of his career, he was an Orthodox progressive Rabbi teaching Talmud Kabbalah and Biblical thought deep within the Orthodox fundamentalist world in Israel and in the United States. In the United States, Marc taught at Yeshiva University, serving congregations both as scholar in residence and Rabbi. He founded an outreach movement in the New York and Long Island Public schools. Eventually, Marc moved to Israel where he served as a Rabbi and taught classical Hebrew wisdom in the form of Talmud, Kabbalah and Biblical psychology. In this stage, he wrote two Hebrew books. The first, A Certain Spirit, re-defines the idea of faith from the old notion of the “dogma is true” to a more radical and profound idea that “I am true”. In his second book during this period, An Uncertain Spirit, Marc challenged the age old idea that spirit could provide certainty or explain suffering, and he taught the spiritual path of dancing with the uncertainty as the realization of highest human potential. In this stage, he also began to explore the spiritual path of laughter and tears. He also began to read bible through the prism of what he called biblical myth or the biblical archetypes. This work became the basis for the National Television shows that Marc created, wrote, and hosted for several years on National Israeli Television.
In the second stage of his study and teaching, Marc shifted much of his focus to the teaching of Hassidism and particularly, to a little known Kabbalistic lineage, which taught the idea of what Marc, has termed the Unique Self. This idea has been incorporated into the Integral Seminars of Ken Wilber and the Big Mind Process of Genpo Roshi and the teaching of many other spiritual teachers who were exposed to Marc’s teaching through the Integral Institute. The Unique Self is an important foil and paradoxical complement to the classic Buddhist teaching of No Self. Marc’s teaching seeks the integration of these two seemingly disparate moments of realization. Emerging from the Hassidic teaching on Unique Self is the bestseller, Soul Prints, which was released in many languages. He also wrote a two volume 1200-page work on Non Dual Humanism, and it’s expression as Unique Self. A small part of this work was submitted as a doctoral dissertation to Oxford University. These two volumes are now being prepared for publication as a project of the Foundation.
In the third stage of work, Marc turned his heart and attention to the Nature of the Erotic. In particular he taught of the interrelationship between the erotic, the sexual, and the sacred. Marc’s basic teaching was to unpack the four faces of Eros that underlie all evolved reality. He then moved to unpack the deep nature of the sexual as the model of living in Eros in all of the non-sexual dimensions of living. The first book to emerge from this study was the book: Mystery of Love and the Sounds True Audio series on The Erotic and the Holy. Marc is currently preparing for publication and more extended treatment of this topic to be released on the title The Erotic and the Holy.
In the fourth stage of inquiry, Marc shifted his focus to the psychological and spiritual “Shadow teachings” which he saw as being an esoteric strain within the Hebrew wisdom tradition. In this work, Marc sought to evolve the understanding of Shadow beyond Jung’s conception and to connect Shadow-work with the non-dual teachings of Kabbalah as well as with the Unique Self teaching. In this teaching Marc identified three distinct primary forms of shadow, which included not only one’s hidden dark side, but also one’s distorted Unique Self and Unrealized divinity. A book of these teachings is currently under preparation.
Next, in the fifth stage, Marc focused his attention and love on the nature of enlightenment. In some groundbreaking dialogues with Ken Wilber, Moshe Idel, Andrew Cohen, Jean Houston, the Dalai Llama, and Byron Katie. Marc introduced the radical hermeneutic that all of Hebrew wisdom maybe be properly understood as an enlightenment tradition. Moreover, he showed that the most important single Kabbalistic idea which lies at the heart of Luria’s Kabbalah is what Abraham Kuk called Evolutionary Enlightenment. The goal of the tradition in Gafni’s understanding was to achieve maximal depth for maximal span- that is enlightenment is not just for the elite but seeks the democratization of enlightenment. Marc Gafni and a number of other leading spiritual teachers are now preparing a series of books called The Spiritually Incorrect Series on on Postmodern Enlightenment Teachings. In this work, they will also address the enlightened relationship of the masculine and the feminine in the postmodern world. In this fifth phase Marc engaged in a series of recorded dialogues with World Thought leaders including his Holiness the Dali Lama, Ram Dass Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, Michael Beckwith, Bill Ury, Don Beck, Father Thomas Keating and Jean Houston. During this phase, emerging out of some fifteen dialogues with Ken Wilber, Marc presented two lecture series entitled Integral Judaism and Integral Kabbalah which now being prepared as two separate books.
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The course has four components:
1. The actual two-week course, whose content is described below.
2. Ten video yihiduts during the year after the summer course. Each will be on a different topic which will be open to participants and graduates of the Liberation School.
3. Creation of small sub communities formed for study, practice and support.
4. 2008 Winter Opening Kick-Off Week
In 2009 and onward, the Winter Program will be a gathering, a time to get re-inspired, and to continue to deepen, for graduates of the International Jewish Liberation School. Graduates will be invited to attend the winter retreat and to re-attend summer intensive annually.
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Annual Winter Week Intensive:
The annual winter week intensive will weave together ecstatic study in the method of the ancient study hall, cleansing, mitzvah and Shabbat practice, meditation, chanting, prayer, dance, and sacred community. Texts studied and deployed will include, Mystical, Kabbalistic, Hassidic, Talmudic and Torah.
Topic for Year One: The Liberation of the Masculine and the Feminine
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Annual Summer Two-Week Liberation Course:
Jewish Liberation is Whole Person Liberation. The summer Liberation Course is therefore designed around what we have called the Seven Levels of Shalom {Peace} through which one becomes Shalem; A Whole Human Being. It includes: Peace with the Body, Peace with the Mind, Peace with the Family, Peace with the Community, Peace with all Cultures, Peace with the Earth, Peace with God.
In the ancient Hebrew tradition of Spiritual Fasting, the first week includes a seven day green juice fast, haniha meditation, prayer, some Ophanim and yoga, and Liberation studies and philosophy, and kabbalat Shabbat.
The second week includes: Principles and practices of Hebrew Liberation: Jewish Liberation Philosophy, Inspired Sacred Text Study, Meditation, Prayer, Service, Kabbalat Shabbat, Spiritual Nutrition for Powerful and Effective Prayer and Meditation, Ophanim (the yoga and energetics of the Aleph-Bet of the Hebrew Letters Hebrew Song and dance, Kabbalah Study, and development of midot by exploring psycho-spiritual development including: Unique Self and levels of Shadow, and the Liberation understanding that the “Personality Is A Case Of Mistaken Identity”.
The International Jewish Liberation School is sponsored by the Tree of Life Foundation, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit foundation, under the Division of the Human School of Living Arts (HSLA). The International Jewish Liberation School is currently confirming its accreditation applicable to a 2-year Master’s Degree in Jewish Liberation
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Masters Academic Degree:
The International Jewish Libeation School is currently confirming its accreditation applicable to a two-year master’s degree in Jewish Liberation.
Those participating in the Liberation School who wish to receive a master’s degree are required to come to attend two consecutive December programs, the Summer Jewish Liberation School, the ten monthly sichot (teaching sessions), and write a master thesis supervised by Rebbe Cousens and Rebbe Gafni.
Those who do not want to pursue the master track are not required to come to the second winter intensive or to write a masters thesis.
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Registration and Price
To register for the IJLS programs, please book your limited space at 1-520-394-2520 x. 201.
by Jeff Bell and Greta DeJong
Catalyst Magazine – July 2008
Marc Gafni could well turn out to be the hero of a spiritual epic—or, at least, a psychosexual whodunit blockbuster.
A rabbi and a Biblical scholar with several published books and a recently approved doctoral dissertation from Oxford, Gafni presently lives in Salt Lake City. (He anonymously authored “Spiritually Incorrect,” an occasional column that appeared last year in CATALYST.) He came to the new Zion two years ago from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he led a large, vibrant movement of Jews who lived on the alternative edge, beyond the fringes of organized religion. Perhaps too close to that edge, where dangerous things can happen—and for Gafni, they did.
Talking with people about Gafni, a certain pattern emerges: Here’s a guy you’ve hung out with, watching TV and knocking back almond crunch, someone who calls up in the middle of the day and talks your head off, someone who has the usual knotty relational history. He’s a friend of yours, a normal, somewhat eccentric guy. Then, little by little you realize that there’s something kind of, well, saintly about him.
Stories about Gafni’s actions lean toward the saintly as well: People say they have seen him go out of his way to bring estranged friends together. They’ve seen him take an entire room full of people through a journey of laughter and tears. They’ve felt an atmosphere around him so affectionate and wild that it sparks off energy most haven’t felt since childhood. They’ve heard him speaking about God and human responsibility and what it means to take care of others with a wisdom and nuance that makes them search their souls.
And even wilder—they know he is the subject of Internet stories that paint him as a guy who “harasses” women, a “sexual predator.”
Everything you observe and intuit about him says “Really good person.” The Internet gossip sites say “Really bad person.” Then you get to see hundreds of documents proving the Internet stories run the gamut from distortion to out-and-out lies, reflecting all the most shadowy sides of the blogosphere. It begins to occur to you that something deep is going on here.
On the surface, it’s a common story: A coalition of women accuse a charismatic spiritual leader of sexual misconduct. The stories sound convincing. It must be true. The leader falls.
Examine the evidence in this case, and you see something quite different: Years of recovered email and instant messages from the women involved, some as recent as three weeks before complaints were filed, flatly contradict their own stories. The messages show that every one of the women was quite enthusiastically involved with Gafni on her own initiative. What happened that caused them to band together and file complaints of harassment? And what caused their complaints to do so much damage? Spiritual politics, “victim feminism,” Gafni’s human complexities, and the Internet.
The more you get to know Gafni, the more you suspect he is being put through an epic spiritual test, what we might call the Test of Slander. It’s actually part of the biography of countless other teachers whose lives didn’t fit the “normal” social pattern and who ended up redefining a spiritual tradition. Gafni’s story is still in process. Perhaps 25 years from now it will be told as a saga of purification, trial by fire and, hopefully, ultimate liberation.
In the meantime, Gafni—this larger-than-life presence tucked into the compact body of a playful 47-year—old is living more or less anonymously in Salt Lake City.
The story we’re about to tell has certain all too familiar elements: one more example of how, in the Internet age, false accusations can become as established as fact, and how a gifted teacher with an anti-establishment bent and a bohemian lifestyle can find his private life subjected to what legal scholar Allen Dershowitz called “sexual McCarthyism.”
Rabbi Gafni—author of seven books, including the best-selling “Soul Prints,” and a popular lecturer and workshop leader—was founder of Bayit Hadash, an alternative spiritual movement in Israel. The organization held retreats, classes and massive services, often gathering hundreds of enthusiasts for Gafni’s celebratory Sabbath services, which included music, chanting and dancing. His lectures and classes on Jewish texts, and on the interface between spirituality, ethics, sexuality and what Western moral philosophers have called “the good life,” were not only widely attended, but had brought thousands of disaffected young Jews back into conversation with their tradition.
“Rabbi Gafni was doing something that had not been done in modern Israel,” says Dr. Gabriel Cousens, who attended his teachings in Israel. “He was presenting the traditional Jewish teachings in a way that revealed not only the mystical experience embedded in the tradition, but also offered a powerful experience of ecstasy and community. Most importantly, however, he was the first modern Jewish teacher I met who taught that Judaism was at its core a path to liberation.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1960, educated in a yeshiva (a Jewish religious high school), Gafni began teaching in the Orthodox community around New York City. From his early days as an apprentice rabbi and youth group leader, Gafni had a gift for bringing together the spiritual with the secular, working with people who wouldn’t normally talk to each other, and creating communities. He was known as a passionately committed teacher. He spent time as a rabbi in Florida, tripling the size of a young congregation. Then he moved with his second wife and two children to Israel, where he was rabbi in a settlement on the border of the West Bank. In the ’90s, he emerged as a popular public teacher in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv, writing books, lecturing to packed houses, and appearing at conferences and spiritual venues in the United States and Europe.
Gafni hosted a weekly hour-long national TV show in Israel for several years. In the U.S., he led crowded workshops on the alternative Jewish and spiritual scene. He taught around the world, including appearances at important synagogues and the Harvard Negotiation Project. When terrorists blew up school buses in Israel, he presented a series of spots on national television urging people to hold on to their humanity in the face of horror. He has recorded dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Byron Katie, Ken Wilber and other spiritual and philosophical leaders. “Soul Prints” was a best-seller in this country, won the prestigious NAPRA Nautilus award as the best spirituality book of 2001 and was made into a PBS special.
And in a conservative society, he supported gay rights and the ordination of women. His teaching pointed out the presence of a hidden goddess element in the Jewish religion, and called for the re-emergence of the feminine in spirituality.
A career like this tends to arouse envy—even, or perhaps especially, in spiritual communities. “People would complain that Gafni took up too much space,” says Gershon Winkler, himself an important Jewish teacher and author of many books, including “The Magic of the Ordinary.” “After he fell, one guy told me that he was actually relieved, because some of Gafni’s people now came to him.” There appears to have been a cadre of colleagues, older teachers and even a few students who wanted him out of the way.
Gafni’s main vulnerability was his counter-cultural and often bohemian lifestyle. Throughout his career, Gafni had several love affairs outside of marriage. “I tried to push the boundaries of what was possible. I experimented,” Gafni admits. “I sometimes chose a moment of love over other loyalties. Sometimes I was right, sometimes dead wrong. Where I was wrong, I’ve tried to ask forgiveness.”
During the period following his divorce from his third wife, his lovers included a few women who had worked with him in his community, taught with him, or served on the board of his organization. “I was working literally 24/7, teaching and traveling around the clock,” he says. “It seemed natural to be involved with people who were part of my circle. At the time, in my hubris, disguised even from myself, it felt to me that there wasn’t a moment free for anything like normal dating or personal life.”
He says he kept these relationships private, not because they seemed inappropriate or “wrong,” but because, like many people in his position, he preferred not to have his personal life the subject of gossip or attack.
One lover wrote after their relationship was over: “It’s easy to love you and it has been beautiful to discover you, to feel you, to explore you.” And added, “I’m grateful that we touched each other on this path.” She then thanked him for being in “full intention and clarity” in their relationship and honoring her “sacred autonomy.”
This woman would later file a complaint on the advice of a lawyer, saying that Gafni had promised to marry her to gain sexual relations—–a felony in Israel, where they lived. This claim, and the claim that Gafni somehow manipulated her, is refuted by both the tone and content of literally hundreds of her emails to him.
In 2005, Ha’Aretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, ran a glowing article on Gafni’s work, stressing his belief that the feminine godhead and the softer, more erotic aspects of spirituality need to be restored to contemporary Judaism. The article was widely quoted, causing an incendiary reaction among rabbis in the Orthodox community. Traditionalists who felt threatened by his influence and provocative personal style objected to his stress on the goddess in Judaism, and some of Gafni’s former teachers and colleagues denounced him for promoting “pagan Judaism.” The Wikipedia entry on Gafni credits him—or accuses, it depends on how you read it—with leading the movement to bring eros back into Judaism.
At about that time, and some say as a direct result of the Ha’Aretz spread, a rabbi who had clashed with Gafni in his youth gave a story about him to the proprietor of a website devoted to outing Jewish clerics alleged to be sexual predators. The site collects rumors, innuendos and complaints about rabbis, some of whom are undoubtedly people who indeed abused their position. But the site is also known for its maliciousness, venomous language, and for mixing fact with outright fiction.
The site’s proprietor is Vicki Polin, who in 1989, under the name Rachel, presented herself on national daytime television as the survivor of a Jewish satanic cult which sacrificed babies. She claims to have sacrificed—that is, murdered—at least one baby herself. She considers it her mission in life to report those whom she calls “Jewish abusers.” Ironically, the site so evokes the energy of anti-Semitic hate sites that several such hate sites link to hers.
In Gafni’s case, the stories described two relationships, one when Gafni was 19, the other a one-time encounter when he was 24. Gafni insists neither involved more then petting, and that both were mutually engaged. Couched in the hate-speech style that has become so familiar in the blogosphere, the stories called Gafni a “known predator” who had “molested young women” and included purportedly first-person interviews with both of these women by Luke Ford, a former pornographer and a gossip columnist for the porn industry. Gafni’s version of these events is supported by two polygraph tests administered by Dr. Gordon Barland, one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
The stories on the website make no attempt to distinguish fact from rumor, distorted memory, or skewed interpretation of events. Polin and Ford painted a teenage romance between 19-year-old Gafni and his 14-year-old girlfriend as “child molestation,” and among other things, accused him of changing his name to avoid his past. (In fact, Gafni had followed the common custom of hebraicizing his name when he moved to Israel, and always referred to his family name in his books and other publications.) All of this forms the complex background for what happened next.
On an evening in May 2006, Gafni landed in Tel Aviv after a 10-hour flight returning from a teaching trip to the United States. He expected to be met at the plane by his girlfriend.
As his plane touched down, he dialed the number of his program director to discuss logistics of a workshop scheduled for the next day. Instead he heard an unidentified feminine voice screeching, “You are finished! Go to [a certain lawyer's office in Tel Aviv] at midnight, or go to jail.” Gafni thought he had the wrong number. He called again. The same message. He began to tremble as he realized that something terrible was going on. Over the next several hours, he began to piece things together. A former personal assistant, who had been threatening the organization with legal action over back pay, and who over the previous year had sent him dozens of abusive emails, had gotten together with another woman to discuss Gafni. They discovered that Gafni had been intimately involved with both of them. We can’t know what exactly motivated them from there. We do know what they did: They went to the Tel Aviv police and filed a complaint.
Sexual harassment laws have given women much-needed legal protection and gone a long way to support civil treatment of women everywhere. But when a woman tells the story of a sexual encounter and claims harassment, the man—guilty or innocent—will likely be in deep trouble if he does not have physical proof to the contrary. The woman doesn’t even have to seek legal redress—the complaint alone can sometimes be enough to get a professor or executive reprimanded or even fired. To complicate matters for the man, in Israel, unlike anywhere else, sexual harassment is a criminal offense.
The women told the police that Gafni had, in one case, used his authority as an employer, and in the other, promised marriage to persuade her to have sex with him. They convinced other women, whom they discovered had been involved with Gafni over the years, to sign their affadavit. In fact, none of the women had been either employees or students of Gafni at the time the relationships began.
By the time Gafni arrived in Israel that night, the women had convinced his co-teacher, as well as key members of his staff, that they needed protection, and cited others as possible victims. Members of the community were prevented from speaking to Gafni by the women, who claimed that he was a danger to the community.
Gafni says no one asked for his side of the story or checked any facts with him. “It was like a weird dream. I had never sexually harassed anyone. I had proof. I went to my computer for the emails I’d exchanged with these women—there were tons of them.”
To his shock, a key batch of relevant emails and other correspondence between himself and one of the complainants—his former assistant—were gone. They had been erased from his computer.
Worse than a weird dream, it was now a nightmare. He had no way of refuting the complaints. By this time, the story had been leaked to the Jewish press. Though many people in his community felt that Gafni was being railroaded, hysteria prevailed. Without consulting Rabbi Gafni, without cross-questioning the complainants or checking into their motives, a chain reaction was set in motion which resulted in the dissolution of Gafni’s movement. Several newspapers published sensational articles chronicling Gafni’s “downfall.” One reported (falsely) that he had been accused of rape. Another (again, falsely) claimed that he had made promises to marry five women. Within a few days, Gafni’s teaching work and the organization to which he had dedicated his life had been discredited and destroyed.
A group of Salt Lake attorneys helped Gafni recover the deleted data from his computer and then carefully review his correspondence with the women. “There is not a credible basis for legal action against [Gafni],” writes attorney Fredrick Thaler of Ray, Quinney Nebeker, a Salt Lake law firm, in a letter posted on Gafni’s website. “The complaints have no merit,” writes Charlotte Miller, who also served as Gafni’s legal council.
However, like the many commentators who assumed that the accusations against the Duke lacrosse team were true, people moved to distance themselves from him immediately.
According to feminist writers such as Dafna Pattai, Cathy Young, Laura Kipnis and Bell Hooks, the key reason for this distancing is fear. In a culture where truth is less important than perception, people are afraid to be associated with someone accused of sexual misconduct, even when they know the accusations are untrue. Associates fear liability, or being perceived as not protecting the ostensible victims—two consequences of defending the accused in a culture that assumes that women or groups of women always tell the truth about sexual harassment.
This belief persists despite data to the contrary, including the recent collapse of the case against the Duke lacrosse players, not to mention the historic experience of black men lynched because a white woman interpreted a casual glance as sexual harassment.
Feminist writers such as Laura Kipnis and Cristina Hoff Summers have written extensively to expose this kind of “victim feminism”: a stance which assumes that in situations of this sort, the woman is always a helpless victim of male desire.
“His best friends basically left him for dead,” says Gershon Winkler.
Gafni felt he had no choice but to return to the United States to think through what he should do. In the pain and sorrow of those first few days, he decided that as the creator of the organization which had turned on him, he should take on himself responsibility for the dysfunctions that had led to the situation. He wrote a public letter claiming all spiritual responsibility for what had happened. Accepting the advice of a friend and mentor, he took personal responsibility for the “sickness” behind what had happened and volunteered to seek treatment. This seemed, at the time of trauma and confusion, to be the only way to defuse the growing frenzy. Without the missing emails, he had no proof of his innocence, and at that time he had no idea the disappeared computer files would be restored.
Gafni refused any interviews and for the next two years maintained public silence, allowing the stories that were circulating to stand as “truth.” In the meantime, he began an intensive formal process of self-examination and inner work.
It was about this time that Gafni came to Salt Lake City at the invitation of a friend and teaching colleague, mediator and Zen teacher Diane Hamilton and her husband, former Utah chief justice Michael Zimmerman. Gafni was living quietly in a small home in Sugar House. Soon after we met, he told us about a pivotal event that had shown him both the depths of his fall, and the painful but spiritually profound path to turning the pain into compassion.
He had gone several times to Sabbath dinners at the house of a local family, mainly for the sake of experiencing community. One night, the host took him aside. “One of our guests read the Internet and says she can’t sit at the table with you. I know it’s not true, but she thinks you are a child molester,” he told Gafni. “I have to ask you to leave and not come back. I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.”
Gafni realized that he—who just six months before would have been an honored guest at such a gathering—was in essence a pariah. “I was stunned at first to realize that people were looking at me through the lens of a hate site, and couldn’t see who I am,” he said. “That night, I was up all night, meditating about it, awash in agonized tears. Suddenly, in the midst of my grief, this profound feeling of joy came over me. In Hebrew wisdom, we speak of how the divine feminine, the Shekhinah, has been exiled by God, and lives as hidden sparks inside human souls. I realized that I was participating in the pain of the exiled Shekhinah, the sorrow of the divine feminine thrown out of the kingdom. I, like her, was wrongly exiled and sat in dust and ashes. We were together. As I realized this, my heart became so ecstatic that I began to dance.
“Then I remembered the hidden teaching about the old Hassidic masters. These famous rabbis would sometimes discard their robes and wander as beggars through the villages of Western Europe, knocking on the doors of wealthy devotees. Invariably, they would be thrown out by people who, if they had seen them in full regalia, would have honored them.
“It all fit together for me then.
“I had spent my life seeking after the goddess, trying to return the feminine to her place…and that in some extreme sense the Shekhinah was testing my love, and she had hurt me because in some sense I hadn’t seen something about her. These relationships had hurt women I loved. Even while she was hurting me, she was embracing me. And I was here on the back roads of Utah to discover something about the divine feminine so that I might speak of her in new ways. I danced in real ecstasy for hours on end.”
Gafni later shared the incident with his friend, Brother David Stendl-Rast, who was reminded of an anecdote about Saint Francis: A disciple once asked, “What would be for you the most perfect joy?” Francis replied that for him, perfect joy would be to seek shelter in a house, be rejected and thrown out, and left to lie in the mud with the dogs.
Gafni says this teaching, which might have seemed wildly extreme and weird to him previously, actually described the profound spiritual opportunity that he had begun to see in this moment of his life. So along with examining his part in what he called the “contribution system” that had created this situation, and the qualities in himself that needed to change, Gafni also began a powerful inner journey into the subtleties of the masculine-feminine relationship.
“Sexuality creates wounds—sometimes mortal ones,” he writes in an unpublished essay called “The Wounds of Love.” “But if we learn to live wide open even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy.”
Along with his inner work, Gafni began collecting documentary evidence to prove the falsity of the claims against him. He took polygraph tests with internationally recognized polygraph expert Gordon Barland which fully supported his assertion that the relationships with these women had been mutual, and had not resulted from any deception or inappropriate deployment of power on Gafni’s part.
He underwent an extensive psychological evaluation with three independent evaluators. Their conclusions and his own were summarized by by Paul J. Goodberg, M.A.: “I am convinced that Rabbi Gafni never abusively hurt or exploited anyone. He is completely reputable.”
Ray, Quinney Nebeker turned his computer over to PeakSpan, LLC, a Salt Lake data recovery firm, which recovered valuable information and proved data had been intentionally removed.
“Of course, I regret with all my heart that anyone experienced hurt through their relationship with me. And, remember what Bono sings? `We hurt each other and we do it again.’ The key is what we do with our hurt,” Gafni says. “But what I most deeply regret is that I allowed myself to jeopardize the work we were doing by engaging in these relationships. I believed that what we were doing was sharing love, and that therefore there was nothing ethically, and certainly not legally, wrong. I still believe that. But I also recognize that a spiritual teacher has to hold strong boundaries around his personal life. Even mutual relationships with powerful and autonomous women are a problem for a public teacher. Moreover, in retrospect, our relationship did not serve the highest growth of these women; it endangered our movement and let down my supporters, friends and partners. In that sense—although I was unconscious of it at the time—they were unethical relationships and I regret that deeply.”
But even by Israel’s strict standard, in no way did he break the law.
Gafni has contracts for several new books and is beginning to teach again. He has been invited to create and host a documentary movie that uses the frame of his story to look into contemporary sexual and spiritual politics, and how rumor, innuendo and hysteria can destroy a life. And to show how a life can be rebuilt in love without bitterness. Most of all, he seems committed to helping foster a social justice movement that works to end genocide, human trafficking and sexual slavery in the world. Gafni seems determined not to attack his accusers, unless they leave him with no choice, but rather to facilitate healing.
“It is the challenge of the spiritual practitioner,” says Diane Musho Hamilton, “and especially that of a teacher, to become intimate with the processes of life and death, of destruction and of transformation. In this way, everything that arises, whether it appears as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unjust, is regarded as the path. To walk it requires great fearlessness, an abundance of compassion, a willingness to accept blame, and the offering of forgiveness.”
Sally Kempton, a former journalist, leading spiritual teacher and second wave feminist was asked what good might come from this story. She responded, “Marc has gone through a deep evolution. He will be an even deeper, better teacher in the second half of his life than he was in the first. The question is, can the people involved move from victimhood to power and responsibility? If they can, then Marc, the women, and all the shadowy players behind the scenes, will offer us great hope for healing in our world.”
The third act of this drama has yet to be written. Can this spiritual teacher come back from the dead? The answer is most likely “yes,” due to Gafni’s unflagging persistence. Did the obloquy and ignominy of the last two years break his spirit? No, though it has left some scars. Yet, throughout the whole of this nightmare, in circumstances that could easily, and forgivably, break the spirit of nearly any other person, Gafni has managed to hold onto his chronic optimism and genuine love for humanity.
Jeff Bell is a writer, part-time indie filmmaker, musician, wonk and political consultant. He is the former Democratic National Committee communications director for Utah and former president of the Children’s Justice Corps. Greta deJong is editor and publisher of CATALYST. For more about Marc Gafni, visit www.marcgafni.com
by Jeff Bell
Catalist Magazine – July, 2008
The nexus of the Gafni story would appear to be women falsely claiming victim status, bent on exacting some form of retribution which, in their view, matched the suffering at having not obtained exclusivity to Gafni and his affections. That is the center and the catalyst of Gafni’s current nightmare. But it is, by no means, the whole of the problem.
Without the women who filed complaints against Marc Gafni, there would certainly be no story, at least not a story of this depth and magnitude. But without the Internet, and a few “move ahead at any cost” bloggers, the story would have faded away.
What has both haunted and hunted Gafni is the relative ease at which rumors and lies have been mixed with more accurate information to paint a picture of Gafni as evil and predatory. Blogs index on the search engines far faster than then traditional websites do. Repeat a phrase or a name, over and over again, link it to other blogs, stories and other articles, and it jumps to the top of the search results in a short amount of time.
Take a moment and think about search engine results. The majority of Internet users look no deeper than the first couple of pages of their search results. Top searches have a false weight of authority that can easily lead a reader to unconsciously lend credibility where none should exist.
The strange union of self-proclaimed advocate for The Awareness Center, Vicki Polin, and porn industry gossip blogger Luke Ford and their mutual effort to assail the reputation of Rabbi Gafni, and to continue those attacks despite the lack of anything new to write about, is bizarre at best and nefarious at worst.
A vocal member of the Memory Recovery Movement, which ruined thousands of lives in the 1980s, Vicki Polin has wrapped a skein of respectability around herself that, when viewed through the prism of her attacks on Gafni, seems patently false and hypocritical.
Polin maintains that she is the child of Satanic Jews who raped her on a regular basis and made her eat her own babies. She now claims to be a victim’s advocate; but her advocacy seems to have taken all the aspects of vigilante misanthrope, and the power of the blog is her weapon. Polin has a singular focus to not only expose, but to destroy the life and reputation of whatever person that falls into her sights, regardless of facts. Any Google search on her name serves up a fairly even return of Polin’s attacks on rabbinical leaders, and pages written by victims of Polin’s tactics.
Luke Ford has made a living as one of the world’s foremost porn industry gossip columnists and, over the years, has owned and operated several different sites full of lewd pictures, stories and first person familiarity with the adult film industry. Ford also has an alter ego in which he calls himself “Luke Ford: your moral leader,” and represents himself as a beacon of decency and Jewish activism.
Somehow, Ford and Polin have become compatriots and often work together in boosting their ratings. The cross-indexing between these two and their blogs has, most especially in the area of posts about Gafni and other Jewish leaders, helped push them further and further upward until, for the last two years, they’ve had ownership of the first page of most engines when their targets’ names were searched.
What emerges on the Internet is a false image, based on rumor, presented as fact; all in opposition of the axiom “innocent until proven guilty.”
What makes Gafni’s story so interesting to me is not so much that, with hundreds of pages of evidence that exonerate him from these false allegations, he can clear his name in a fair-minded setting, but, on the Internet, it will take him years of exhaustive effort and money to balance his innocence against the two-year head start of those who claim he’s guilty.
Despite the potential to harm, blogging is the quintessential and idyllic evolution of American and international freedom of expression. The growing influence of blogs and bloggers over the last handful of years speaks volumes about dissatisfaction with the media and generic culture. There also seems to be a need, sometimes nearing addiction, for mass distribution of self-expression held by these exhibitionists of the written word. The acceptance as “meaningful” granted to them by their own ever-expanding membership roster fuels the rapid growth of this amateur medium.
I wrote my first blog post in 1996; long before, in time measured by Internet standards, the word “weblog” or “blog” was universally known and accepted into the mainstream lexicon. At the time, some were calling the very public self-publishing of one’s own opinions, criticisms, thoughts and life stories to the Internet a “vanity page,” an “online journal.”
My early posts were mostly lengthy, often ranting missives about politics with a lot of time, effort and kilobytes dumped into the 1996 Presidential race. It wasn’t long before I received calls, during political primary season, from two different Republican campaigns asking who I was, who I worked for and what my website was about. They didn’t like my analysis and they wanted me to stop.
These two different campaign representatives could not wrap their heads around the idea that I was just a guy, sitting in his Denver basement, self-publishing his opinions and analysis on the field of Republican candidates fighting for the GOP nomination. While the number of readers I had at the time would be laughable by today’s standards, in 1996 it was enough to garner the attention of two presidential nomination campaigns.
There is power in the written word and that power is intensified when any person, from any background, can release those words, unfettered and unregulated, into the world for anyone to digest.
Telling the truth, no matter how partisan your opinion, is an awesome responsibility, if you choose to view it that way. As the community of bloggers and online journalists continues to grow, so, too, do the numbers of the nefarious, the deluded and the predatory. For every handful of personal, political, entertainment or technology blogs online, whatever their motivation may be, there are always some who use their writing for some form of gain at the expense of others. That would appear to be the case regarding Gafni.
Reputation has always been a fragile thing, but the future of reputation is uncertain. Blogs have emerged as a quick, cheap and anonymous means of mass communication that can be used to further an agenda, talk about politics, share pictures of your family picnic or a weapon to destroy someone else’s life. Things on the Internet never go away. Once you’ve been dragged through the mud, no matter how innocent you may be, somewhere, on the Internet, you’re guilty forever.
Jeff Bell is the author of JMBell.org, one of the highest rated political blogs in Utah.
Now the moralist will be quick to say, “Yes, he is right! Sex isn’t the answer!” Yet, I for one, as teacher and a human being, do not go with the moralists. That is precisely the point of the secret of the cherubs. Sex is the answer.
The secret of the cherubs was an explicit tantric mystery studied, taught and practiced by ancient Hebrew initiates. Solomon was the great tantric master. It was Solomon who took a thousand wives.
It was Solomon who wrote the Song of Songs – an explicitly sexual love story which is understood by the tradition to be the holiest book of the Hebrew canon. Indeed the Song of Songs is referred to by the masters as the Holy of Holies.
This is not merely a literary turn of phrase to emphasize its absolute centrality in Hebrew spirituality. It is that and much more than that. It is also a veiled reference to the cherubs in the Temple’s Holy of Holies who stand as symbols of the Hebrew Tantric mystery.
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What is clear is that neither of the approaches that we described in the last couple of blogs honor the mystery of sex in our lives. It is at this point that we turn to the Temple mystics who affirm a radically different vision of the sexual. The Secret of the Cherubs. Sod Hakeruvim. The Kabbalistic Tantra of Hebrew mysticism. This is what I have called Hebrew Tantra.
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Marc Gafni could well turn out to be the hero of a spiritual epic—or, at least, a psychosexual whodunit blockbuster.
A rabbi and a Biblical scholar with several published books and a recently approved doctoral dissertation from Oxford, Gafni presently lives in Salt Lake City. (He anonymously authored “Spiritually Incorrect,” an occasional column that appeared last year in CATALYST.) He came to the new Zion two years ago from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he led a large, vibrant movement of Jews who lived on the alternative edge, beyond the fringes of organized religion. Perhaps too close to that edge, where dangerous things can happen—and for Gafni, they did.
Talking with people about Gafni, a certain pattern emerges: Here’s a guy you’ve hung out with, watching TV and knocking back almond crunch, someone who calls up in the middle of the day and talks your head off, someone who has the usual knotty relational history. He’s a friend of yours, a normal, somewhat eccentric guy. Then, little by little you realize that there’s something kind of, well, saintly about him.
Stories about Gafni’s actions lean toward the saintly as well: People say they have seen him go out of his way to bring estranged friends together. They’ve seen him take an entire room full of people through a journey of laughter and tears. They’ve felt an atmosphere around him so affectionate and wild that it sparks off energy most haven’t felt since childhood. They’ve heard him speaking about God and human responsibility and what it means to take care of others with a wisdom and nuance that makes them search their souls.
And even wilder—they know he is the subject of Internet stories that paint him as a guy who “harasses” women, a “sexual predator.”
Everything you observe and intuit about him says “Really good person.” The Internet gossip sites say “Really bad person.” Then you get to see hundreds of documents proving the Internet stories run the gamut from distortion to out-and-out lies, reflecting all the most shadowy sides of the blogosphere. It begins to occur to you that something deep is going on here.
On the surface, it’s a common story: A coalition of women accuse a charismatic spiritual leader of sexual misconduct. The stories sound convincing. It must be true. The leader falls.
Examine the evidence in this case, and you see something quite different: Years of recovered email and instant messages from the women involved, some as recent as three weeks before complaints were filed, flatly contradict their own stories. The messages show that every one of the women was quite enthusiastically involved with Gafni on her own initiative. What happened that caused them to band together and file complaints of harassment? And what caused their complaints to do so much damage? Spiritual politics, “victim feminism,” Gafni’s human complexities, and the Internet.
The more you get to know Gafni, the more you suspect he is being put through an epic spiritual test, what we might call the Test of Slander. It’s actually part of the biography of countless other teachers whose lives didn’t fit the “normal” social pattern and who ended up redefining a spiritual tradition. Gafni’s story is still in process. Perhaps 25 years from now it will be told as a saga of purification, trial by fire and, hopefully, ultimate liberation.
In the meantime, Gafni—this larger-than-life presence tucked into the compact body of a playful 47-year—old is living more or less anonymously in Salt Lake City.
The story we’re about to tell has certain all too familiar elements: one more example of how, in the Internet age, false accusations can become as established as fact, and how a gifted teacher with an anti-establishment bent and a bohemian lifestyle can find his private life subjected to what legal scholar Allen Dershowitz called “sexual McCarthyism.”
Rabbi Gafni—author of seven books, including the best-selling “Soul Prints,” and a popular lecturer and workshop leader—was founder of Bayit Hadash, an alternative spiritual movement in Israel. The organization held retreats, classes and massive services, often gathering hundreds of enthusiasts for Gafni’s celebratory Sabbath services, which included music, chanting and dancing. His lectures and classes on Jewish texts, and on the interface between spirituality, ethics, sexuality and what Western moral philosophers have called “the good life,” were not only widely attended, but had brought thousands of disaffected young Jews back into conversation with their tradition.
“Rabbi Gafni was doing something that had not been done in modern Israel,” says Dr. Gabriel Cousens, who attended his teachings in Israel. “He was presenting the traditional Jewish teachings in a way that revealed not only the mystical experience embedded in the tradition, but also offered a powerful experience of ecstasy and community. Most importantly, however, he was the first modern Jewish teacher I met who taught that Judaism was at its core a path to liberation.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1960, educated in a yeshiva (a Jewish religious high school), Gafni began teaching in the Orthodox community around New York City. From his early days as an apprentice rabbi and youth group leader, Gafni had a gift for bringing together the spiritual with the secular, working with people who wouldn’t normally talk to each other, and creating communities. He was known as a passionately committed teacher. He spent time as a rabbi in Florida, tripling the size of a young congregation. Then he moved with his second wife and two children to Israel, where he was rabbi in a settlement on the border of the West Bank. In the ’90s, he emerged as a popular public teacher in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv, writing books, lecturing to packed houses, and appearing at conferences and spiritual venues in the United States and Europe.
Gafni hosted a weekly hour-long national TV show in Israel for several years. In the U.S., he led crowded workshops on the alternative Jewish and spiritual scene. He taught around the world, including appearances at important synagogues and the Harvard Negotiation Project. When terrorists blew up school buses in Israel, he presented a series of spots on national television urging people to hold on to their humanity in the face of horror. He has recorded dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Byron Katie, Ken Wilber and other spiritual and philosophical leaders. “Soul Prints” was a best-seller in this country, won the prestigious NAPRA Nautilus award as the best spirituality book of 2001 and was made into a PBS special.
And in a conservative society, he supported gay rights and the ordination of women. His teaching pointed out the presence of a hidden goddess element in the Jewish religion, and called for the re-emergence of the feminine in spirituality.
A career like this tends to arouse envy—even, or perhaps especially, in spiritual communities. “People would complain that Gafni took up too much space,” says Gershon Winkler, himself an important Jewish teacher and author of many books, including “The Magic of the Ordinary.” “After he fell, one guy told me that he was actually relieved, because some of Gafni’s people now came to him.” There appears to have been a cadre of colleagues, older teachers and even a few students who wanted him out of the way.
Gafni’s main vulnerability was his counter-cultural and often bohemian lifestyle. Throughout his career, Gafni had several love affairs outside of marriage. “I tried to push the boundaries of what was possible. I experimented,” Gafni admits. “I sometimes chose a moment of love over other loyalties. Sometimes I was right, sometimes dead wrong. Where I was wrong, I’ve tried to ask forgiveness.”
During the period following his divorce from his third wife, his lovers included a few women who had worked with him in his community, taught with him, or served on the board of his organization. “I was working literally 24/7, teaching and traveling around the clock,” he says. “It seemed natural to be involved with people who were part of my circle. At the time, in my hubris, disguised even from myself, it felt to me that there wasn’t a moment free for anything like normal dating or personal life.”
He says he kept these relationships private, not because they seemed inappropriate or “wrong,” but because, like many people in his position, he preferred not to have his personal life the subject of gossip or attack.
One lover wrote after their relationship was over: “It’s easy to love you and it has been beautiful to discover you, to feel you, to explore you.” And added, “I’m grateful that we touched each other on this path.” She then thanked him for being in “full intention and clarity” in their relationship and honoring her “sacred autonomy.”
This woman would later file a complaint on the advice of a lawyer, saying that Gafni had promised to marry her to gain sexual relations—–a felony in Israel, where they lived. This claim, and the claim that Gafni somehow manipulated her, is refuted by both the tone and content of literally hundreds of her emails to him.
In 2005, Ha’Aretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, ran a glowing article on Gafni’s work, stressing his belief that the feminine godhead and the softer, more erotic aspects of spirituality need to be restored to contemporary Judaism. The article was widely quoted, causing an incendiary reaction among rabbis in the Orthodox community. Traditionalists who felt threatened by his influence and provocative personal style objected to his stress on the goddess in Judaism, and some of Gafni’s former teachers and colleagues denounced him for promoting “pagan Judaism.” The Wikipedia entry on Gafni credits him—or accuses, it depends on how you read it—with leading the movement to bring eros back into Judaism.
At about that time, and some say as a direct result of the Ha’Aretz spread, a rabbi who had clashed with Gafni in his youth gave a story about him to the proprietor of a website devoted to outing Jewish clerics alleged to be sexual predators. The site collects rumors, innuendos and complaints about rabbis, some of whom are undoubtedly people who indeed abused their position. But the site is also known for its maliciousness, venomous language, and for mixing fact with outright fiction.
The site’s proprietor is Vicki Polin, who in 1989, under the name Rachel, presented herself on national daytime television as the survivor of a Jewish satanic cult which sacrificed babies. She claims to have sacrificed—that is, murdered—at least one baby herself. She considers it her mission in life to report those whom she calls “Jewish abusers.” Ironically, the site so evokes the energy of anti-Semitic hate sites that several such hate sites link to hers.
In Gafni’s case, the stories described two relationships, one when Gafni was 19, the other a one-time encounter when he was 24. Gafni insists neither involved more then petting, and that both were mutually engaged. Couched in the hate-speech style that has become so familiar in the blogosphere, the stories called Gafni a “known predator” who had “molested young women” and included purportedly first-person interviews with both of these women by Luke Ford, a former pornographer and a gossip columnist for the porn industry. Gafni’s version of these events is supported by two polygraph tests administered by Dr. Gordon Barland, one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
The stories on the website make no attempt to distinguish fact from rumor, distorted memory, or skewed interpretation of events. Polin and Ford painted a teenage romance between 19-year-old Gafni and his 14-year-old girlfriend as “child molestation,” and among other things, accused him of changing his name to avoid his past. (In fact, Gafni had followed the common custom of hebraicizing his name when he moved to Israel, and always referred to his family name in his books and other publications.) All of this forms the complex background for what happened next.
On an evening in May 2006, Gafni landed in Tel Aviv after a 10-hour flight returning from a teaching trip to the United States. He expected to be met at the plane by his girlfriend.
As his plane touched down, he dialed the number of his program director to discuss logistics of a workshop scheduled for the next day. Instead he heard an unidentified feminine voice screeching, “You are finished! Go to [a certain lawyer's office in Tel Aviv] at midnight, or go to jail.” Gafni thought he had the wrong number. He called again. The same message. He began to tremble as he realized that something terrible was going on. Over the next several hours, he began to piece things together. A former personal assistant, who had been threatening the organization with legal action over back pay, and who over the previous year had sent him dozens of abusive emails, had gotten together with another woman to discuss Gafni. They discovered that Gafni had been intimately involved with both of them. We can’t know what exactly motivated them from there. We do know what they did: They went to the Tel Aviv police and filed a complaint.
Sexual harassment laws have given women much-needed legal protection and gone a long way to support civil treatment of women everywhere. But when a woman tells the story of a sexual encounter and claims harassment, the man—guilty or innocent—will likely be in deep trouble if he does not have physical proof to the contrary. The woman doesn’t even have to seek legal redress—the complaint alone can sometimes be enough to get a professor or executive reprimanded or even fired. To complicate matters for the man, in Israel, unlike anywhere else, sexual harassment is a criminal offense.
The women told the police that Gafni had, in one case, used his authority as an employer, and in the other, promised marriage to persuade her to have sex with him. They convinced other women, whom they discovered had been involved with Gafni over the years, to sign their affadavit. In fact, none of the women had been either employees or students of Gafni at the time the relationships began.
By the time Gafni arrived in Israel that night, the women had convinced his co-teacher, as well as key members of his staff, that they needed protection, and cited others as possible victims. Members of the community were prevented from speaking to Gafni by the women, who claimed that he was a danger to the community.
Gafni says no one asked for his side of the story or checked any facts with him. “It was like a weird dream. I had never sexually harassed anyone. I had proof. I went to my computer for the emails I’d exchanged with these women—there were tons of them.”
To his shock, a key batch of relevant emails and other correspondence between himself and one of the complainants—his former assistant—were gone. They had been erased from his computer.
Worse than a weird dream, it was now a nightmare. He had no way of refuting the complaints. By this time, the story had been leaked to the Jewish press. Though many people in his community felt that Gafni was being railroaded, hysteria prevailed. Without consulting Rabbi Gafni, without cross-questioning the complainants or checking into their motives, a chain reaction was set in motion which resulted in the dissolution of Gafni’s movement. Several newspapers published sensational articles chronicling Gafni’s “downfall.” One reported (falsely) that he had been accused of rape. Another (again, falsely) claimed that he had made promises to marry five women. Within a few days, Gafni’s teaching work and the organization to which he had dedicated his life had been discredited and destroyed.
A group of Salt Lake attorneys helped Gafni recover the deleted data from his computer and then carefully review his correspondence with the women. “There is not a credible basis for legal action against [Gafni],” writes attorney Fredrick Thaler of Ray, Quinney Nebeker, a Salt Lake law firm, in a letter posted on Gafni’s website. “The complaints have no merit,” writes Charlotte Miller, who also served as Gafni’s legal council.
However, like the many commentators who assumed that the accusations against the Duke lacrosse team were true, people moved to distance themselves from him immediately.
According to feminist writers such as Dafna Pattai, Cathy Young, Laura Kipnis and Bell Hooks, the key reason for this distancing is fear. In a culture where truth is less important than perception, people are afraid to be associated with someone accused of sexual misconduct, even when they know the accusations are untrue. Associates fear liability, or being perceived as not protecting the ostensible victims—two consequences of defending the accused in a culture that assumes that women or groups of women always tell the truth about sexual harassment.
This belief persists despite data to the contrary, including the recent collapse of the case against the Duke lacrosse players, not to mention the historic experience of black men lynched because a white woman interpreted a casual glance as sexual harassment.
Feminist writers such as Laura Kipnis and Cristina Hoff Summers have written extensively to expose this kind of “victim feminism”: a stance which assumes that in situations of this sort, the woman is always a helpless victim of male desire.
“His best friends basically left him for dead,” says Gershon Winkler.
Gafni felt he had no choice but to return to the United States to think through what he should do. In the pain and sorrow of those first few days, he decided that as the creator of the organization which had turned on him, he should take on himself responsibility for the dysfunctions that had led to the situation. He wrote a public letter claiming all spiritual responsibility for what had happened. Accepting the advice of a friend and mentor, he took personal responsibility for the “sickness” behind what had happened and volunteered to seek treatment. This seemed, at the time of trauma and confusion, to be the only way to defuse the growing frenzy. Without the missing emails, he had no proof of his innocence, and at that time he had no idea the disappeared computer files would be restored.
Gafni refused any interviews and for the next two years maintained public silence, allowing the stories that were circulating to stand as “truth.” In the meantime, he began an intensive formal process of self-examination and inner work.
It was about this time that Gafni came to Salt Lake City at the invitation of a friend and teaching colleague, mediator and Zen teacher Diane Hamilton and her husband, former Utah chief justice Michael Zimmerman. Gafni was living quietly in a small home in Sugar House. Soon after we met, he told us about a pivotal event that had shown him both the depths of his fall, and the painful but spiritually profound path to turning the pain into compassion.
He had gone several times to Sabbath dinners at the house of a local family, mainly for the sake of experiencing community. One night, the host took him aside. “One of our guests read the Internet and says she can’t sit at the table with you. I know it’s not true, but she thinks you are a child molester,” he told Gafni. “I have to ask you to leave and not come back. I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.”
Gafni realized that he—who just six months before would have been an honored guest at such a gathering—was in essence a pariah. “I was stunned at first to realize that people were looking at me through the lens of a hate site, and couldn’t see who I am,” he said. “That night, I was up all night, meditating about it, awash in agonized tears. Suddenly, in the midst of my grief, this profound feeling of joy came over me. In Hebrew wisdom, we speak of how the divine feminine, the Shekhinah, has been exiled by God, and lives as hidden sparks inside human souls. I realized that I was participating in the pain of the exiled Shekhinah, the sorrow of the divine feminine thrown out of the kingdom. I, like her, was wrongly exiled and sat in dust and ashes. We were together. As I realized this, my heart became so ecstatic that I began to dance.
“Then I remembered the hidden teaching about the old Hassidic masters. These famous rabbis would sometimes discard their robes and wander as beggars through the villages of Western Europe, knocking on the doors of wealthy devotees. Invariably, they would be thrown out by people who, if they had seen them in full regalia, would have honored them.
“It all fit together for me then.
“I had spent my life seeking after the goddess, trying to return the feminine to her place…and that in some extreme sense the Shekhinah was testing my love, and she had hurt me because in some sense I hadn’t seen something about her. These relationships had hurt women I loved. Even while she was hurting me, she was embracing me. And I was here on the back roads of Utah to discover something about the divine feminine so that I might speak of her in new ways. I danced in real ecstasy for hours on end.”
Gafni later shared the incident with his friend, Brother David Stendl-Rast, who was reminded of an anecdote about Saint Francis: A disciple once asked, “What would be for you the most perfect joy?” Francis replied that for him, perfect joy would be to seek shelter in a house, be rejected and thrown out, and left to lie in the mud with the dogs.
Gafni says this teaching, which might have seemed wildly extreme and weird to him previously, actually described the profound spiritual opportunity that he had begun to see in this moment of his life. So along with examining his part in what he called the “contribution system” that had created this situation, and the qualities in himself that needed to change, Gafni also began a powerful inner journey into the subtleties of the masculine-feminine relationship.
“Sexuality creates wounds—sometimes mortal ones,” he writes in an unpublished essay called “The Wounds of Love.” “But if we learn to live wide open even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy.”
Along with his inner work, Gafni began collecting documentary evidence to prove the falsity of the claims against him. He took polygraph tests with internationally recognized polygraph expert Gordon Barland which fully supported his assertion that the relationships with these women had been mutual, and had not resulted from any deception or inappropriate deployment of power on Gafni’s part.
He underwent an extensive psychological evaluation with three independent evaluators. Their conclusions and his own were summarized by by Paul J. Goodberg, M.A.: “I am convinced that Rabbi Gafni never abusively hurt or exploited anyone. He is completely reputable.”
Ray, Quinney Nebeker turned his computer over to PeakSpan, LLC, a Salt Lake data recovery firm, which recovered valuable information and proved data had been intentionally removed.
“Of course, I regret with all my heart that anyone experienced hurt through their relationship with me. And, remember what Bono sings? `We hurt each other and we do it again.’ The key is what we do with our hurt,” Gafni says. “But what I most deeply regret is that I allowed myself to jeopardize the work we were doing by engaging in these relationships. I believed that what we were doing was sharing love, and that therefore there was nothing ethically, and certainly not legally, wrong. I still believe that. But I also recognize that a spiritual teacher has to hold strong boundaries around his personal life. Even mutual relationships with powerful and autonomous women are a problem for a public teacher. Moreover, in retrospect, our relationship did not serve the highest growth of these women; it endangered our movement and let down my supporters, friends and partners. In that sense—although I was unconscious of it at the time—they were unethical relationships and I regret that deeply.”
But even by Israel’s strict standard, in no way did he break the law.
Gafni has contracts for several new books and is beginning to teach again. He has been invited to create and host a documentary movie that uses the frame of his story to look into contemporary sexual and spiritual politics, and how rumor, innuendo and hysteria can destroy a life. And to show how a life can be rebuilt in love without bitterness. Most of all, he seems committed to helping foster a social justice movement that works to end genocide, human trafficking and sexual slavery in the world. Gafni seems determined not to attack his accusers, unless they leave him with no choice, but rather to facilitate healing.
“It is the challenge of the spiritual practitioner,” says Diane Musho Hamilton, “and especially that of a teacher, to become intimate with the processes of life and death, of destruction and of transformation. In this way, everything that arises, whether it appears as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unjust, is regarded as the path. To walk it requires great fearlessness, an abundance of compassion, a willingness to accept blame, and the offering of forgiveness.”
Sally Kempton, a former journalist, leading spiritual teacher and second wave feminist was asked what good might come from this story. She responded, “Marc has gone through a deep evolution. He will be an even deeper, better teacher in the second half of his life than he was in the first. The question is, can the people involved move from victimhood to power and responsibility? If they can, then Marc, the women, and all the shadowy players behind the scenes, will offer us great hope for healing in our world.”
The third act of this drama has yet to be written. Can this spiritual teacher come back from the dead? The answer is most likely “yes,” due to Gafni’s unflagging persistence. Did the obloquy and ignominy of the last two years break his spirit? No, though it has left some scars. Yet, throughout the whole of this nightmare, in circumstances that could easily, and forgivably, break the spirit of nearly any other person, Gafni has managed to hold onto his chronic optimism and genuine love for humanity.
Jeff Bell is a writer, part-time indie filmmaker, musician, wonk and political consultant. He is the former Democratic National Committee communications director for Utah and former president of the Children’s Justice Corps. Greta deJong is editor and publisher of CATALYST. For more about Marc Gafni, visit www.marcgafni.com
Realize Your Potential: A Beautiful Unique Manifestation of the Divine! www.marcgafni.com Who IS Marc Gafni?
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni is a cutting edge spiritual teacher, author, television personality, mediator, corporate consultant, iconoclast, and gentle provocateur. He has written seven books, including the national bestseller Soul Prints, which won the prestigious NAPRA award for Best Spirituality Book of 2001, and was a main selection of the One Spirit Book Club and the Amazon.com Best Book in the Jewish Thought category in 2001. This book was also made into a National PBS special and an audio series by Sounds True recordings. Soul Prints is published by Simon & Schuster.
Marc Gafni’s second major English language book, also published by Simon & Schuster, is The Mystery of Love. It unpacks an esoteric Kabbalistic tradition about the profound relationship between the sexual, the erotic, and the sacred. The Mystery of Love was critically acclaimed and made into an audio series called The Erotic and the Holy, published by Sounds True.
Marc Gafni has been teaching and leading spiritual seminars, learning communities, training programs, and spiritual movements since he was in his early twenties. During much of that time, Marc Gafni struggled with the question of whether to teach conventional spiritual wisdom in a conventional spiritual context, or to follow a more post-conventional style of teaching and living. This tension brought great dynamism to his work, but also caused some dissonance.
Now and in the future, Marc Gafni is committed to teaching a post-conventional spirituality that is rooted in traditional wisdom, yet fully adapted to the needs of a postmodern spiritual world. Like some other leaders and teachers in this age of unregulated internet conversation, Gafni has been attacked on some private websites and blogs. He has chosen not to directly respond to the blatantly false or seriously distorted accounts of his life and relationships that appear on these sites.However, Gafni takes full responsibility for any and all of his actual words, actions and subtle creations, both intentional and unintentional. His intention, now and in the future, is to do everything possible to transmute all negative energy within his being and within his circle into love, responsibility, and healing.
Marc Gafni is currently the director of a private foundation dedicated to producing a library of teachings on the human spirit, designed to help create a better future for our children and grandchildren. There are seven volumes in various stages of preparation, covering a range of topics. All of these books emerge from Marc Gafni’s own experience as a human being, teacher, and student on the path of life and liberation. Several are being written with co-authors. Topics include: The Unique Self and No Self; Non-dual Humanism; The Masculine and the Feminine; The Dance of Tears–the Path of Laughter; Sex, Ethics and Injury; Shadow Dancing in the Light; Tragedy and Transformation; Sexuality and Kabbalah; Integral Judaism; Integral Kabbalah; as well as a personal sacred autobiography. Marc Gafni is also preparing a series of books on the weekly biblical reading of the Hebrew tradition as well as the sacred cycle of time as a spiritual path in the ancient Hebrew tradition.
Marc Gafni could well turn out to be the hero of a spiritual epic—or, at least, a psychosexual whodunit blockbuster.
A rabbi and a Biblical scholar with several published books and a recently approved doctoral dissertation from Oxford, Gafni presently lives in Salt Lake City. (He anonymously authored “Spiritually Incorrect,” an occasional column that appeared last year in CATALYST.) He came to the new Zion two years ago from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he led a large, vibrant movement of Jews who lived on the alternative edge, beyond the fringes of organized religion. Perhaps too close to that edge, where dangerous things can happen—and for Gafni, they did.
Talking with people about Gafni, a certain pattern emerges: Here’s a guy you’ve hung out with, watching TV and knocking back almond crunch, someone who calls up in the middle of the day and talks your head off, someone who has the usual knotty relational history. He’s a friend of yours, a normal, somewhat eccentric guy. Then, little by little you realize that there’s something kind of, well, saintly about him.
Stories about Gafni’s actions lean toward the saintly as well: People say they have seen him go out of his way to bring estranged friends together. They’ve seen him take an entire room full of people through a journey of laughter and tears. They’ve felt an atmosphere around him so affectionate and wild that it sparks off energy most haven’t felt since childhood. They’ve heard him speaking about God and human responsibility and what it means to take care of others with a wisdom and nuance that makes them search their souls.
And even wilder—they know he is the subject of Internet stories that paint him as a guy who “harasses” women, a “sexual predator.”
Everything you observe and intuit about him says “Really good person.” The Internet gossip sites say “Really bad person.” Then you get to see hundreds of documents proving the Internet stories run the gamut from distortion to out-and-out lies, reflecting all the most shadowy sides of the blogosphere. It begins to occur to you that something deep is going on here.
On the surface, it’s a common story: A coalition of women accuse a charismatic spiritual leader of sexual misconduct. The stories sound convincing. It must be true. The leader falls.
Examine the evidence in this case, and you see something quite different: Years of recovered email and instant messages from the women involved, some as recent as three weeks before complaints were filed, flatly contradict their own stories. The messages show that every one of the women was quite enthusiastically involved with Gafni on her own initiative. What happened that caused them to band together and file complaints of harassment? And what caused their complaints to do so much damage? Spiritual politics, “victim feminism,” Gafni’s human complexities, and the Internet.
The more you get to know Gafni, the more you suspect he is being put through an epic spiritual test, what we might call the Test of Slander. It’s actually part of the biography of countless other teachers whose lives didn’t fit the “normal” social pattern and who ended up redefining a spiritual tradition. Gafni’s story is still in process. Perhaps 25 years from now it will be told as a saga of purification, trial by fire and, hopefully, ultimate liberation.
In the meantime, Gafni—this larger-than-life presence tucked into the compact body of a playful 47-year—old is living more or less anonymously in Salt Lake City.
The story we’re about to tell has certain all too familiar elements: one more example of how, in the Internet age, false accusations can become as established as fact, and how a gifted teacher with an anti-establishment bent and a bohemian lifestyle can find his private life subjected to what legal scholar Allen Dershowitz called “sexual McCarthyism.”
Rabbi Gafni—author of seven books, including the best-selling “Soul Prints,” and a popular lecturer and workshop leader—was founder of Bayit Hadash, an alternative spiritual movement in Israel. The organization held retreats, classes and massive services, often gathering hundreds of enthusiasts for Gafni’s celebratory Sabbath services, which included music, chanting and dancing. His lectures and classes on Jewish texts, and on the interface between spirituality, ethics, sexuality and what Western moral philosophers have called “the good life,” were not only widely attended, but had brought thousands of disaffected young Jews back into conversation with their tradition.
“Rabbi Gafni was doing something that had not been done in modern Israel,” says Dr. Gabriel Cousens, who attended his teachings in Israel. “He was presenting the traditional Jewish teachings in a way that revealed not only the mystical experience embedded in the tradition, but also offered a powerful experience of ecstasy and community. Most importantly, however, he was the first modern Jewish teacher I met who taught that Judaism was at its core a path to liberation.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1960, educated in a yeshiva (a Jewish religious high school), Gafni began teaching in the Orthodox community around New York City. From his early days as an apprentice rabbi and youth group leader, Gafni had a gift for bringing together the spiritual with the secular, working with people who wouldn’t normally talk to each other, and creating communities. He was known as a passionately committed teacher. He spent time as a rabbi in Florida, tripling the size of a young congregation. Then he moved with his second wife and two children to Israel, where he was rabbi in a settlement on the border of the West Bank. In the ’90s, he emerged as a popular public teacher in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv, writing books, lecturing to packed houses, and appearing at conferences and spiritual venues in the United States and Europe.
Gafni hosted a weekly hour-long national TV show in Israel for several years. In the U.S., he led crowded workshops on the alternative Jewish and spiritual scene. He taught around the world, including appearances at important synagogues and the Harvard Negotiation Project. When terrorists blew up school buses in Israel, he presented a series of spots on national television urging people to hold on to their humanity in the face of horror. He has recorded dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Byron Katie, Ken Wilber and other spiritual and philosophical leaders. “Soul Prints” was a best-seller in this country, won the prestigious NAPRA Nautilus award as the best spirituality book of 2001 and was made into a PBS special.
And in a conservative society, he supported gay rights and the ordination of women. His teaching pointed out the presence of a hidden goddess element in the Jewish religion, and called for the re-emergence of the feminine in spirituality.
A career like this tends to arouse envy—even, or perhaps especially, in spiritual communities. “People would complain that Gafni took up too much space,” says Gershon Winkler, himself an important Jewish teacher and author of many books, including “The Magic of the Ordinary.” “After he fell, one guy told me that he was actually relieved, because some of Gafni’s people now came to him.” There appears to have been a cadre of colleagues, older teachers and even a few students who wanted him out of the way.
Gafni’s main vulnerability was his counter-cultural and often bohemian lifestyle. Throughout his career, Gafni had several love affairs outside of marriage. “I tried to push the boundaries of what was possible. I experimented,” Gafni admits. “I sometimes chose a moment of love over other loyalties. Sometimes I was right, sometimes dead wrong. Where I was wrong, I’ve tried to ask forgiveness.”
During the period following his divorce from his third wife, his lovers included a few women who had worked with him in his community, taught with him, or served on the board of his organization. “I was working literally 24/7, teaching and traveling around the clock,” he says. “It seemed natural to be involved with people who were part of my circle. At the time, in my hubris, disguised even from myself, it felt to me that there wasn’t a moment free for anything like normal dating or personal life.”
He says he kept these relationships private, not because they seemed inappropriate or “wrong,” but because, like many people in his position, he preferred not to have his personal life the subject of gossip or attack.
One lover wrote after their relationship was over: “It’s easy to love you and it has been beautiful to discover you, to feel you, to explore you.” And added, “I’m grateful that we touched each other on this path.” She then thanked him for being in “full intention and clarity” in their relationship and honoring her “sacred autonomy.”
This woman would later file a complaint on the advice of a lawyer, saying that Gafni had promised to marry her to gain sexual relations—–a felony in Israel, where they lived. This claim, and the claim that Gafni somehow manipulated her, is refuted by both the tone and content of literally hundreds of her emails to him.
In 2005, Ha’Aretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, ran a glowing article on Gafni’s work, stressing his belief that the feminine godhead and the softer, more erotic aspects of spirituality need to be restored to contemporary Judaism. The article was widely quoted, causing an incendiary reaction among rabbis in the Orthodox community. Traditionalists who felt threatened by his influence and provocative personal style objected to his stress on the goddess in Judaism, and some of Gafni’s former teachers and colleagues denounced him for promoting “pagan Judaism.” The Wikipedia entry on Gafni credits him—or accuses, it depends on how you read it—with leading the movement to bring eros back into Judaism.
At about that time, and some say as a direct result of the Ha’Aretz spread, a rabbi who had clashed with Gafni in his youth gave a story about him to the proprietor of a website devoted to outing Jewish clerics alleged to be sexual predators. The site collects rumors, innuendos and complaints about rabbis, some of whom are undoubtedly people who indeed abused their position. But the site is also known for its maliciousness, venomous language, and for mixing fact with outright fiction.
The site’s proprietor is Vicki Polin, who in 1989, under the name Rachel, presented herself on national daytime television as the survivor of a Jewish satanic cult which sacrificed babies. She claims to have sacrificed—that is, murdered—at least one baby herself. She considers it her mission in life to report those whom she calls “Jewish abusers.” Ironically, the site so evokes the energy of anti-Semitic hate sites that several such hate sites link to hers.
In Gafni’s case, the stories described two relationships, one when Gafni was 19, the other a one-time encounter when he was 24. Gafni insists neither involved more then petting, and that both were mutually engaged. Couched in the hate-speech style that has become so familiar in the blogosphere, the stories called Gafni a “known predator” who had “molested young women” and included purportedly first-person interviews with both of these women by Luke Ford, a former pornographer and a gossip columnist for the porn industry. Gafni’s version of these events is supported by two polygraph tests administered by Dr. Gordon Barland, one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
The stories on the website make no attempt to distinguish fact from rumor, distorted memory, or skewed interpretation of events. Polin and Ford painted a teenage romance between 19-year-old Gafni and his 14-year-old girlfriend as “child molestation,” and among other things, accused him of changing his name to avoid his past. (In fact, Gafni had followed the common custom of hebraicizing his name when he moved to Israel, and always referred to his family name in his books and other publications.) All of this forms the complex background for what happened next.
On an evening in May 2006, Gafni landed in Tel Aviv after a 10-hour flight returning from a teaching trip to the United States. He expected to be met at the plane by his girlfriend.
As his plane touched down, he dialed the number of his program director to discuss logistics of a workshop scheduled for the next day. Instead he heard an unidentified feminine voice screeching, “You are finished! Go to [a certain lawyer's office in Tel Aviv] at midnight, or go to jail.” Gafni thought he had the wrong number. He called again. The same message. He began to tremble as he realized that something terrible was going on. Over the next several hours, he began to piece things together. A former personal assistant, who had been threatening the organization with legal action over back pay, and who over the previous year had sent him dozens of abusive emails, had gotten together with another woman to discuss Gafni. They discovered that Gafni had been intimately involved with both of them. We can’t know what exactly motivated them from there. We do know what they did: They went to the Tel Aviv police and filed a complaint.
Sexual harassment laws have given women much-needed legal protection and gone a long way to support civil treatment of women everywhere. But when a woman tells the story of a sexual encounter and claims harassment, the man—guilty or innocent—will likely be in deep trouble if he does not have physical proof to the contrary. The woman doesn’t even have to seek legal redress—the complaint alone can sometimes be enough to get a professor or executive reprimanded or even fired. To complicate matters for the man, in Israel, unlike anywhere else, sexual harassment is a criminal offense.
The women told the police that Gafni had, in one case, used his authority as an employer, and in the other, promised marriage to persuade her to have sex with him. They convinced other women, whom they discovered had been involved with Gafni over the years, to sign their affadavit. In fact, none of the women had been either employees or students of Gafni at the time the relationships began.
By the time Gafni arrived in Israel that night, the women had convinced his co-teacher, as well as key members of his staff, that they needed protection, and cited others as possible victims. Members of the community were prevented from speaking to Gafni by the women, who claimed that he was a danger to the community.
Gafni says no one asked for his side of the story or checked any facts with him. “It was like a weird dream. I had never sexually harassed anyone. I had proof. I went to my computer for the emails I’d exchanged with these women—there were tons of them.”
To his shock, a key batch of relevant emails and other correspondence between himself and one of the complainants—his former assistant—were gone. They had been erased from his computer.
Worse than a weird dream, it was now a nightmare. He had no way of refuting the complaints. By this time, the story had been leaked to the Jewish press. Though many people in his community felt that Gafni was being railroaded, hysteria prevailed. Without consulting Rabbi Gafni, without cross-questioning the complainants or checking into their motives, a chain reaction was set in motion which resulted in the dissolution of Gafni’s movement. Several newspapers published sensational articles chronicling Gafni’s “downfall.” One reported (falsely) that he had been accused of rape. Another (again, falsely) claimed that he had made promises to marry five women. Within a few days, Gafni’s teaching work and the organization to which he had dedicated his life had been discredited and destroyed.
A group of Salt Lake attorneys helped Gafni recover the deleted data from his computer and then carefully review his correspondence with the women. “There is not a credible basis for legal action against [Gafni],” writes attorney Fredrick Thaler of Ray, Quinney Nebeker, a Salt Lake law firm, in a letter posted on Gafni’s website. “The complaints have no merit,” writes Charlotte Miller, who also served as Gafni’s legal council.
However, like the many commentators who assumed that the accusations against the Duke lacrosse team were true, people moved to distance themselves from him immediately.
According to feminist writers such as Dafna Pattai, Cathy Young, Laura Kipnis and Bell Hooks, the key reason for this distancing is fear. In a culture where truth is less important than perception, people are afraid to be associated with someone accused of sexual misconduct, even when they know the accusations are untrue. Associates fear liability, or being perceived as not protecting the ostensible victims—two consequences of defending the accused in a culture that assumes that women or groups of women always tell the truth about sexual harassment.
This belief persists despite data to the contrary, including the recent collapse of the case against the Duke lacrosse players, not to mention the historic experience of black men lynched because a white woman interpreted a casual glance as sexual harassment.
Feminist writers such as Laura Kipnis and Cristina Hoff Summers have written extensively to expose this kind of “victim feminism”: a stance which assumes that in situations of this sort, the woman is always a helpless victim of male desire.
“His best friends basically left him for dead,” says Gershon Winkler.
Gafni felt he had no choice but to return to the United States to think through what he should do. In the pain and sorrow of those first few days, he decided that as the creator of the organization which had turned on him, he should take on himself responsibility for the dysfunctions that had led to the situation. He wrote a public letter claiming all spiritual responsibility for what had happened. Accepting the advice of a friend and mentor, he took personal responsibility for the “sickness” behind what had happened and volunteered to seek treatment. This seemed, at the time of trauma and confusion, to be the only way to defuse the growing frenzy. Without the missing emails, he had no proof of his innocence, and at that time he had no idea the disappeared computer files would be restored.
Gafni refused any interviews and for the next two years maintained public silence, allowing the stories that were circulating to stand as “truth.” In the meantime, he began an intensive formal process of self-examination and inner work.
It was about this time that Gafni came to Salt Lake City at the invitation of a friend and teaching colleague, mediator and Zen teacher Diane Hamilton and her husband, former Utah chief justice Michael Zimmerman. Gafni was living quietly in a small home in Sugar House. Soon after we met, he told us about a pivotal event that had shown him both the depths of his fall, and the painful but spiritually profound path to turning the pain into compassion.
He had gone several times to Sabbath dinners at the house of a local family, mainly for the sake of experiencing community. One night, the host took him aside. “One of our guests read the Internet and says she can’t sit at the table with you. I know it’s not true, but she thinks you are a child molester,” he told Gafni. “I have to ask you to leave and not come back. I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.”
Gafni realized that he—who just six months before would have been an honored guest at such a gathering—was in essence a pariah. “I was stunned at first to realize that people were looking at me through the lens of a hate site, and couldn’t see who I am,” he said. “That night, I was up all night, meditating about it, awash in agonized tears. Suddenly, in the midst of my grief, this profound feeling of joy came over me. In Hebrew wisdom, we speak of how the divine feminine, the Shekhinah, has been exiled by God, and lives as hidden sparks inside human souls. I realized that I was participating in the pain of the exiled Shekhinah, the sorrow of the divine feminine thrown out of the kingdom. I, like her, was wrongly exiled and sat in dust and ashes. We were together. As I realized this, my heart became so ecstatic that I began to dance.
“Then I remembered the hidden teaching about the old Hassidic masters. These famous rabbis would sometimes discard their robes and wander as beggars through the villages of Western Europe, knocking on the doors of wealthy devotees. Invariably, they would be thrown out by people who, if they had seen them in full regalia, would have honored them.
“It all fit together for me then.
“I had spent my life seeking after the goddess, trying to return the feminine to her place…and that in some extreme sense the Shekhinah was testing my love, and she had hurt me because in some sense I hadn’t seen something about her. These relationships had hurt women I loved. Even while she was hurting me, she was embracing me. And I was here on the back roads of Utah to discover something about the divine feminine so that I might speak of her in new ways. I danced in real ecstasy for hours on end.”
Gafni later shared the incident with his friend, Brother David Stendl-Rast, who was reminded of an anecdote about Saint Francis: A disciple once asked, “What would be for you the most perfect joy?” Francis replied that for him, perfect joy would be to seek shelter in a house, be rejected and thrown out, and left to lie in the mud with the dogs.
Gafni says this teaching, which might have seemed wildly extreme and weird to him previously, actually described the profound spiritual opportunity that he had begun to see in this moment of his life. So along with examining his part in what he called the “contribution system” that had created this situation, and the qualities in himself that needed to change, Gafni also began a powerful inner journey into the subtleties of the masculine-feminine relationship.
“Sexuality creates wounds—sometimes mortal ones,” he writes in an unpublished essay called “The Wounds of Love.” “But if we learn to live wide open even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy.”
Along with his inner work, Gafni began collecting documentary evidence to prove the falsity of the claims against him. He took polygraph tests with internationally recognized polygraph expert Gordon Barland which fully supported his assertion that the relationships with these women had been mutual, and had not resulted from any deception or inappropriate deployment of power on Gafni’s part.
He underwent an extensive psychological evaluation with three independent evaluators. Their conclusions and his own were summarized by by Paul J. Goodberg, M.A.: “I am convinced that Rabbi Gafni never abusively hurt or exploited anyone. He is completely reputable.”
Ray, Quinney Nebeker turned his computer over to PeakSpan, LLC, a Salt Lake data recovery firm, which recovered valuable information and proved data had been intentionally removed.
“Of course, I regret with all my heart that anyone experienced hurt through their relationship with me. And, remember what Bono sings? `We hurt each other and we do it again.’ The key is what we do with our hurt,” Gafni says. “But what I most deeply regret is that I allowed myself to jeopardize the work we were doing by engaging in these relationships. I believed that what we were doing was sharing love, and that therefore there was nothing ethically, and certainly not legally, wrong. I still believe that. But I also recognize that a spiritual teacher has to hold strong boundaries around his personal life. Even mutual relationships with powerful and autonomous women are a problem for a public teacher. Moreover, in retrospect, our relationship did not serve the highest growth of these women; it endangered our movement and let down my supporters, friends and partners. In that sense—although I was unconscious of it at the time—they were unethical relationships and I regret that deeply.”
But even by Israel’s strict standard, in no way did he break the law.
Gafni has contracts for several new books and is beginning to teach again. He has been invited to create and host a documentary movie that uses the frame of his story to look into contemporary sexual and spiritual politics, and how rumor, innuendo and hysteria can destroy a life. And to show how a life can be rebuilt in love without bitterness. Most of all, he seems committed to helping foster a social justice movement that works to end genocide, human trafficking and sexual slavery in the world. Gafni seems determined not to attack his accusers, unless they leave him with no choice, but rather to facilitate healing.
“It is the challenge of the spiritual practitioner,” says Diane Musho Hamilton, “and especially that of a teacher, to become intimate with the processes of life and death, of destruction and of transformation. In this way, everything that arises, whether it appears as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unjust, is regarded as the path. To walk it requires great fearlessness, an abundance of compassion, a willingness to accept blame, and the offering of forgiveness.”
Sally Kempton, a former journalist, leading spiritual teacher and second wave feminist was asked what good might come from this story. She responded, “Marc has gone through a deep evolution. He will be an even deeper, better teacher in the second half of his life than he was in the first. The question is, can the people involved move from victimhood to power and responsibility? If they can, then Marc, the women, and all the shadowy players behind the scenes, will offer us great hope for healing in our world.”
The third act of this drama has yet to be written. Can this spiritual teacher come back from the dead? The answer is most likely “yes,” due to Gafni’s unflagging persistence. Did the obloquy and ignominy of the last two years break his spirit? No, though it has left some scars. Yet, throughout the whole of this nightmare, in circumstances that could easily, and forgivably, break the spirit of nearly any other person, Gafni has managed to hold onto his chronic optimism and genuine love for humanity.
Jeff Bell is a writer, part-time indie filmmaker, musician, wonk and political consultant. He is the former Democratic National Committee communications director for Utah and former president of the Children’s Justice Corps. Greta deJong is editor and publisher of CATALYST. For more about Marc Gafni, visit www.marcgafni.com
The nexus of the Gafni story would appear to be women falsely claiming victim status, bent on exacting some form of retribution which, in their view, matched the suffering at having not obtained exclusivity to Gafni and his affections. That is the center and the catalyst of Gafni’s current nightmare. But it is, by no means, the whole of the problem.
Without the women who filed complaints against Marc Gafni, there would certainly be no story, at least not a story of this depth and magnitude. But without the Internet, and a few “move ahead at any cost” bloggers, the story would have faded away.
What has both haunted and hunted Gafni is the relative ease at which rumors and lies have been mixed with more accurate information to paint a picture of Gafni as evil and predatory. Blogs index on the search engines far faster than then traditional websites do. Repeat a phrase or a name, over and over again, link it to other blogs, stories and other articles, and it jumps to the top of the search results in a short amount of time.
Take a moment and think about search engine results. The majority of Internet users look no deeper than the first couple of pages of their search results. Top searches have a false weight of authority that can easily lead a reader to unconsciously lend credibility where none should exist.
The strange union of self-proclaimed advocate for The Awareness Center, Vicki Polin, and porn industry gossip blogger Luke Ford and their mutual effort to assail the reputation of Rabbi Gafni, and to continue those attacks despite the lack of anything new to write about, is bizarre at best and nefarious at worst.
A vocal member of the Memory Recovery Movement, which ruined thousands of lives in the 1980s, Vicki Polin has wrapped a skein of respectability around herself that, when viewed through the prism of her attacks on Gafni, seems patently false and hypocritical.
Polin maintains that she is the child of Satanic Jews who raped her on a regular basis and made her eat her own babies. She now claims to be a victim’s advocate; but her advocacy seems to have taken all the aspects of vigilante misanthrope, and the power of the blog is her weapon. Polin has a singular focus to not only expose, but to destroy the life and reputation of whatever person that falls into her sights, regardless of facts. Any Google search on her name serves up a fairly even return of Polin’s attacks on rabbinical leaders, and pages written by victims of Polin’s tactics.
Luke Ford has made a living as one of the world’s foremost porn industry gossip columnists and, over the years, has owned and operated several different sites full of lewd pictures, stories and first person familiarity with the adult film industry. Ford also has an alter ego in which he calls himself “Luke Ford: your moral leader,” and represents himself as a beacon of decency and Jewish activism.
Somehow, Ford and Polin have become compatriots and often work together in boosting their ratings. The cross-indexing between these two and their blogs has, most especially in the area of posts about Gafni and other Jewish leaders, helped push them further and further upward until, for the last two years, they’ve had ownership of the first page of most engines when their targets’ names were searched.
What emerges on the Internet is a false image, based on rumor, presented as fact; all in opposition of the axiom “innocent until proven guilty.”
What makes Gafni’s story so interesting to me is not so much that, with hundreds of pages of evidence that exonerate him from these false allegations, he can clear his name in a fair-minded setting, but, on the Internet, it will take him years of exhaustive effort and money to balance his innocence against the two-year head start of those who claim he’s guilty.
Despite the potential to harm, blogging is the quintessential and idyllic evolution of American and international freedom of expression. The growing influence of blogs and bloggers over the last handful of years speaks volumes about dissatisfaction with the media and generic culture. There also seems to be a need, sometimes nearing addiction, for mass distribution of self-expression held by these exhibitionists of the written word. The acceptance as “meaningful” granted to them by their own ever-expanding membership roster fuels the rapid growth of this amateur medium.
I wrote my first blog post in 1996; long before, in time measured by Internet standards, the word “weblog” or “blog” was universally known and accepted into the mainstream lexicon. At the time, some were calling the very public self-publishing of one’s own opinions, criticisms, thoughts and life stories to the Internet a “vanity page,” an “online journal.”
My early posts were mostly lengthy, often ranting missives about politics with a lot of time, effort and kilobytes dumped into the 1996 Presidential race. It wasn’t long before I received calls, during political primary season, from two different Republican campaigns asking who I was, who I worked for and what my website was about. They didn’t like my analysis and they wanted me to stop.
These two different campaign representatives could not wrap their heads around the idea that I was just a guy, sitting in his Denver basement, self-publishing his opinions and analysis on the field of Republican candidates fighting for the GOP nomination. While the number of readers I had at the time would be laughable by today’s standards, in 1996 it was enough to garner the attention of two presidential nomination campaigns.
There is power in the written word and that power is intensified when any person, from any background, can release those words, unfettered and unregulated, into the world for anyone to digest.
Telling the truth, no matter how partisan your opinion, is an awesome responsibility, if you choose to view it that way. As the community of bloggers and online journalists continues to grow, so, too, do the numbers of the nefarious, the deluded and the predatory. For every handful of personal, political, entertainment or technology blogs online, whatever their motivation may be, there are always some who use their writing for some form of gain at the expense of others. That would appear to be the case regarding Gafni.
Reputation has always been a fragile thing, but the future of reputation is uncertain. Blogs have emerged as a quick, cheap and anonymous means of mass communication that can be used to further an agenda, talk about politics, share pictures of your family picnic or a weapon to destroy someone else’s life. Things on the Internet never go away. Once you’ve been dragged through the mud, no matter how innocent you may be, somewhere, on the Internet, you’re guilty forever.
Jeff Bell is the author of JMBell.org, one of the highest rated political blogs in Utah.
Luke Ford in the Utah Desert With Rabbi Marc Gafni
Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue About Hate Speech Online Part 1
Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue About Hate Speech Online Part 2
Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue About Hate Speech Online Part 3
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni’s Teachings
Marc Gafni’s path of study and teaching has unfolded in several stages. In the first stage of his career, Marc Gafni was a progressive Orthodox rabbi, teaching Talmud, Kabbalah and Biblical Thought from within the Orthodox fundamentalist world in Israel and the United States. In the United States, Marc Gafni taught at Yeshiva University, serving congregations both as scholar in residence and rabbi. He founded a Jewish outreach movement in New York and Long Island public schools. Eventually, Marc Gafni moved to Israel where he served as a rabbi and taught classical Hebrew wisdom through study of the Talmud, Kabbalah, and biblical psychology. At this stage, he wrote two Hebrew books. The first, A Certain Spirit, redefines the idea of faith, moving from the old notion of the “dogma is true” to the more radical and profound idea “I am true.” In his second book during this period, An Uncertain Spirit, Marc Gafni challenged the age-old idea that spirit could provide certainty or explain suffering, and taught the spiritual path of dancing with the uncertainty as a way of realizing the highest human potential. At this stage, Marc Gafni began to read the Bible through the prism of what he called ‘biblical myth’ or ‘biblical archetypes.’ This work became the basis for the television shows that Marc Gafni created, wrote, and hosted for several years on National Israeli Television. During the second stage of his study and teaching, Marc Gafni shifted much of his focus to the teaching of Hasidism, particularly an esoteric Kabbalistic teaching described by Gafni as ‘Unique Self.’ This idea has been incorporated into the Integral seminars of Ken Wilber, the Big Mind process of Genpo Roshi, and the teachings of many other spiritual teachers who were exposed to Marc Gafni’s teaching through the Integral Institute. The idea of ‘Unique Self,’ which is the basis of his bestselling book Soul Prints, forms an important foil and
Soul Prints by Marc Gafni
Soul Prints by Marc Gafni
paradoxical complement to the classic Buddhist teaching of No Self. Marc Gafni’s teaching seeks the integration of these two seemingly disparate moments of realization. During this time, Marc Gafni also wrote a two-volume, 1200-page work on non-dual humanism and its expression as Unique Self. A small part of this work became his doctoral dissertation for Oxford University. These two volumes are now being prepared for publication as a project of the Idra Foundation. In the third stage of his work, Marc Gafni turned his attention to the interrelationship between the erotic, the sexual, and the sacred. Marc Gafni’s work here described four faces of Eros that underlie all evolved reality, and went on to unpack how the experience of the sexual mirrors and models the erotic in all other dimensions of living, including the dimension of the sacred. The
first book to emerge from this study was The Mystery of Love, followed by the Sounds True audio series On the Erotic and the Holy. Marc Gafni is currently preparing to release for publication The Erotic and the Holy, a more extended treatment of this topic. In the fourth stage of inquiry, Marc Gafni shifted his focus to the psychological and spiritual
‘Shadow Teachings,’ which he sees as being an esoteric strain within the Hebrew wisdom tradition. Here, he seeks to evolve the understanding of shadow beyond Jung’s conception, and to connect shadow work with the non-dual teachings of Kabbalah as well as with the ‘Unique Self’ teaching. Gafni’s work on shadow identifies three distinct primary forms of shadow, which include not only one’s hidden dark side, but also one’s distorted ‘Unique Self,’ and one’s unrealized divinity. A book of these teachings is currently under preparation. Marc Gafni’s fifth stage focused on the nature of enlightenment. In some groundbreaking dialogues with Ken Wilber, Moshe Idel, Andrew Cohen, and Jean Houston, Marc Gafni introduced the radical hermeneutic that all of Hebrew wisdom may be properly understood as an enlightenment tradition. Moreover, he showed that the most important single Kabbalistic idea, which lies at the heart of Luria’s Kabbalah, is what Abraham Kuk called Evolutionary Enlightenment. In Gafni’s understanding, the goal of this tradition is to achieve a democratization of enlightenment—an enlightened society, rather than simply an enlightened elite. Marc Gafni and Diane Musho Hamilton are now preparing a work on postmodern enlightenment teachings. Here, they will also address the enlightened relationship of the masculine and the feminine in the postmodern world. During this fifth phase, Marc Gafni engaged in a series of recorded dialogues with World Thought leaders including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ram Dass, Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, Michael Beckwith, Bill Ury, Don Beck, Father Thomas Keating, Byron Katie, and Jean Houston. Emerging out of some fifteen dialogues with Ken Wilber, Marc presented two lecture series entitled Integral Judaism and Integral Kabbalah, which are now being prepared as two separate books. In the present phase of Marc Gafni’s life, he has turned his attention in two paradoxically different directions. The first is intense inner spiritual and psychological reflection on the course of his life. The second is partnering with social activist leaders to create a new, grass roots human rights movement, which might effectively engage three major issues: genocide, human trafficking, and global warming. While Marc Gafni will continue teaching, he wishes to do so as a spiritual ‘artist’ rather than as a rabbi, guru, or formal teacher. (Keep reading for more on Marc Gafni’s rabbinical ordinations, academic background, and teachers.) “I am an aspiring Heart Master,” says Marc Gafni. According to the Master of Piacezna, a great Hasidic teacher who fought and loved in the Warsaw Ghetto and died in the Treblinka concentration camp, this is said to be the true goal of a human being. To master the heart means to own one’s own heart. To master the heart means to live with radical openness balanced with radical self-awareness and radical self-control. To be a Heart Master is to have the ability to inspire and help others to live this way as well. “However,’ says Marc Gafni, “if I never realize myself fully enough to be a Heart Master, I will be more than pleased to be a Heart Servant.” “So, if asked what I am, I would say, ‘I am Marc Gafni, the Heart Servant.’”
Gafni’s Rabbinic Ordination, Academic Background, and Teachers
I received Ordination many years ago from a well-regarded Orthodox institution in New York. Contrary to some rumors, that Ordination was never revoked. I retain a letter on my computer in which I wrote the president of the institution stating that our paths had parted in such a significant way that I no longer wished to hold Ordination from them. I also passed a several-hour oral exam with one of the great Rabbinic minds of Israel today, representing the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and authorizing me to be a rabbi―particularly what is termed a Rav Yishuv. I retain that document in my records as well. I have been asked whether I had, or have, Ordination from Reb Zalman Schachter. I retain in my records a document that Reb Zalman wrote for me several years ago. The document is not an Ordination, but rather an of my previous Ordination from the Orthodox institution mentioned above. When I returned that Ordination in 2004, Reb Zalman’s letter, which was based on my first Ordination, ceased to be valid. I have never held, nor do I seek, independent Ordination from Reb Zalman. I am not a student of Reb Zalman’s nor have I ever been. I have in some very important ways benefited from his work, and I have publically and privately thanked him for all this. I appreciate and respect some important contributions that he made to Jewish teaching. I have tried in many ways, large and small, to be of service to Reb Zalman and have sought a particular kind of relationship with him. I have failed in this respect. I have not been in substantive contact with Reb Zalman since March of 2006, other than a private exchange of two e-mails. I feel very connected to a close friend and chevruta, Rabbi Gershon Winkler. Reb Gershon, with grace and dignity, gave me the transmission of his lineage’s rabbinic ordination, as a friend. This Ordination may be found here in both English and Hebrew. I feel connected to the same soul root as Reb Gershon. His primary ordaining teacher was Rav Ben Zion Bruk of Jerusalem, a great Master of Mussar, whom I feel connected to both through Rabbi Hillel Goldberg’s transmission of his Torah and through Reb Gershon. At this time, I am working with Reb Gershon on a major work, which we hope will serve as a kind of Spiritual Code of Jewish Law for those who will seek its counsel. Regarding academia: Virtually everything I have learned has been in the classic auto didactic manner. However, my B.A. is from Edison College (a completely reputable joke of a school, which gives credit for non-academic work). I studied for one semester at Yeshiva University and one semester at Queens College. Neither worked for me. Back then, I wanted to study only what I wanted to study. So, I followed my heart and dropped out. I only received my degree from Edison later on so my mom would be happy. Later in life, I earned a Master’s degree in Jewish Philosophy from Bar Illan University. And still later, I wrote a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Professor Moshe Idel and Professor Norman Solomon at Oxford University. My doctoral dissertation was approved by Oxford University on April 2, 2008. Having said that, I have little interest in teaching today from the place of a rabbi or a professor. Instead, I want to share from the position of friend. We have plenty of rabbis and no shortage of professors. It seems to me that today we need teachers who can give us an authentic transmission, and at the same time love us as dear and close friends—though always with clear boundaries. Only recently in my life have I submitted to a teacher. My teacher is a very beautiful and great man who is the lineage holder of a stunning Jewish mystical tradition which was passed down from generation to generation for many hundreds of years. Most of the lineages of this nature were destroyed in the holocaust. His survived. He is a profound psychologist, teacher, guide, and as his many students will attest, a powerful shamanic figure as well. He is the transmitted lineage successor of a great contemporary Peruvian teacher, recognized formally as a peer by one of South America’s great shamans. He appeared and found me during the time of my heartbreak, and has helped put the pieces of my heart back together. He has encouraged me and instructed me to return to teaching. I will follow his instruction. He has had, over the years, hundreds of students who are―each in their own way ― receivers of his love and his wisdom. He teaches those who find their way to him. In this sense, he is quite similar to the teacher Don Juan, whom Carlos Castaneda describes in his work.
Reclaiming Your Reputation Online: Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue Part 1
Reclaiming Your Reputation Online: Luke Ford and Marc Gafni in Dialogue Part 2
What is www.marcgafni.com all about? The purpose of this website is to share the teachings of Marc Gafni. Marc Gafni has been a beloved and sometimes controversial spiritual teacher on the cutting edge for many years. He has inspired many, comforted the afflicted, and afflicted the comfortable. He reflects back to people their most gorgeous selves, shares teachings of love, pricks egos, and calls others, by his very being, to truth and integrity. For some Marc is a teacher, for others a spiritual friend, for still others a spiritual artist, and for still others a revolutionary catalyst of social change and evolution. In the words of one leading American spiritual teacher and second wave feminist, “Marc Gafni combines radical brilliance with a willingness to be vulnerable, and radical kindness with an ability to probe deeply into texts―liberating the light and challenging the shadows of the human heart.” In his self-description, published several years ago in both his Hebrew and English books, Marc Gafni writes, “I, like every person, am a flawed yet ever evolving human being. I seek purification and healing, even as I delight in realization. I am a passionate lover of God, of people, of wisdom, and of all being. I am called to realize and help others to realize our potential for being the most gorgeous and unique manifestations of the divine, which is our true nature.” At this stage in his evolution, Marc Gafni seeks to merge the artistic sharing of wisdom with direct social action. The purpose of all of Marc Gafni’s creative endeavors and teachings is two-fold:
* To help individuals live better lives
* To contribute to the spiritual and ethical evolution of reality as we know it
‘Better’ might mean more ethical, open, healthy and loving. ‘Better’ might mean more enlightened, compassionate, or forgiving. ‘Better’” might mean more authentic or audacious. Marc Gafni’s teaching is filled with love of people, love of God, and love of all of creation. It is also scholarly, hip, serious, deep, funny, profound, sometimes startlingly original, and always invested with the intent to transmit not only insight but also, and especially, an open heart. Marc Gafni’s life of teaching is perhaps best captured in the following words:
I wish that I could show you When you are lonely or in darkness The astonishing light Of your own being- Hafiz
There are several kinds of teaching on the site:
* Old Teachings: Audio, Video and Writings
* New Teachings: Audio, Video and Writings
* New Course Offerings and Daily Podcasts
* Dialogues with other Spiritual Teachers and Friends
* Music, Stories and Chants
Most of the teachings are “in process”―ideas and teachings that are evolving in Marc Gafni’s heart, mind, and consciousness. Thus, many teachings have yet to be posted in the Articles section, which is still incomplete. In May 2006, Marc Gafni withdrew from public teaching and went into a long period of mourning, introspection, purification, and liberation. Complaints of sexual harassment reported in the Israeli press at that time were categorically not true; Marc Gafni never sexually harassed or abused anyone. Every one of these sexual relationships was unique, mutual, obviously consensual, based on affection, love, and the mutual play of pleasure and Eros. Nonetheless, Marc Gafni took full responsibility for participating in creating conditions which, in part, allowed these events to unfold the way they did. (For more on this conversation, and to hear Marc Gafni’s sharing in this regard, see statements and articles in Controversy, Pain of Eros, and Sex Ethics and Power and Spiritually Incorrect . This website is under construction. There are still many mistakes that need to be corrected and kinks that need to be worked out. This website will be updated continually with additional written, audio or video teachings. For new and old study courses, see Books, Products & Course Offerings under the marcgafni.com store tab. For almost two hundred teachings, which are our gift to you in love, see the free audio and video sections. Audio and video material in the store is of a more complete nature, containing complete lecture series. For Music, Chanting and Prayer see the Books, Products & Course Offerings section.
ARTICLE ON MARC GAFNI SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT
An article recently appeared in The Catalyst Magazine of Salt Lake City. Catalyst is an award-winning publication that has been published as a monthly spirituality magazine for twenty-five years and is considered a leader in its field. This is the first publication that Marc Gafni has spoken to since he began his two-year retreat in May 2006. The journalists worked for several months reviewing massive amounts of material that has not been released to the public. Marc Gafni agreed to participate with the article, after many hours of conversation with the authors about these issues, on the basis that it was not be an “attack” article, and that no one would be shamed. All too often it becomes impossible for people to climb down from their ’small self’ egoic trees, because escalating cycles of ‘us and them’ rhetoric kick in the ego’s desperate drive for survival. The spaciousness and emptiness required for reconciliation, healing, and wholeness is filled with the flailing of ego and malice, usually disguised in the sonorous tones of self-righteousness. The article’s intention is to set the record straight by telling the simple truth about Marc Gafni in a way that opens doors for evolution and growth, and in a way which allows everyone to move on with their lives in the best, most productive, and beautiful of ways. The article, while incomplete and imperfect, as is the nature of any article, for the first time since Marc went into silence in May 2006, sets the public record straight. The article provides a more accurate account of the events in Marc’s life, placing them in a larger and deeper context.
Luke Ford Talks to Marc Gafni About the Future of Reputation Part 1
Luke Ford Talks to Marc Gafni About the Future of Reputation Part 2
Luke Ford Talks to Marc Gafni About the Future of Reputation Part3
SPIRITUALLY INCORRECT
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July 1, 2008
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Evolutionary Kabbalah
Dear Friends, It is wonderful to be able to share with you this new website, marcgafni.com, Evolutionary Kabbalah. For information about how to navigate the site, take a quick look at the tab on the left ‘about marcgafni’. The site is under construction. We are still in the middle of editing and getting it together. I am not much of a web person but we have a great group of people working on the site, and I am grateful to all of them for their effort, love, and dedication. If you find a typo or have a navigation suggestion, please feel free to contact us at our e-mail address, info@marcgafni.com. I pray the site serves you in a way that allows for and facilitates your growth as a fearless warrior in pursuit of your own and the world’s enlightenment. For on this, and this alone, depends the enlightenment of God. This is the most fundamental tenet of my teaching in my dharma tradition, which I have come to call by a new term, Evolutionary Kabbalah. The essence of Evolutionary Kabbalah, which is the core theme of our website and teaching, is that things change. That which was yesterday is not quite the same today. Every moment is new. To deny the radical newness of a moment is tantamount to heresy. For eternity resides in a moment. That which stands against evolution is idolatry. To worship idols is to freeze a moment. It is the freezing of imagination. It is the murder of possibility. Thus, the idolater worships what is often termed in English “a graven image.” That is to say, an image that is already in the grave. One who always has this really grave and serious face. The idolater dances in death. To serve god is to dance in life, which means to know that change is possible, and real, and happening all the time. Not only do the cells of our body fully change every seven years, the cells of our spirit change as well. However, they do not require seven years. They change fully and absolutely –at will. This belief in human evolution, in the genuine possibility of change, is at the core of Hebrew wisdom and particularly Hebrew mystical thought. One mystical thinker in the 12th century writes somewhere that the essence of the divinity of God is the possibility of possibility. God is ultimate possibility. God is a verb. We are all always Godding. We all are evolving. To realize our ability to change, to heal, and to transform is the source of the greatest joy. Sadly, few of us really believe it is possible. We hold grudges against others even as we hold grudges against ourselves. To truly inhale the possibility of possibility is one of the key pivoting points in the journey towards enlightenment. It is to this belief and to this end that my teaching and sharing is dedicated. People can change. Situations can change. Suffering can change. We do not have to stay stuck. We have the ability, as baby-faced divine, to stand in the abyss of darkness and say … No, No, No. It does not have to be this way. There is a better way. We can get beneath the surface of reality – enter the source code and make it better. It can change and it must. There is a better way to be. A better way to live. And if you go deep into the song of the now, you will hear its siren’s call. Today offers invitation in a way that yesterday simply could not and that tomorrow cannot yet. In the depths of HaYom, the Hebrew word for today, is the universal sound of Om… The Hebrew word for time is Zeman. Zeman also means in Hebrew – invitation. An invitation to break the tyranny of yesterday. The greatest slave driver in the world, the greatest idolatrous temptation, is the belief that yesterday determines not only today but also tomorrow. Let people out of the box in which you have put them. Love people out of the box in which you have put them. Love yourself out of the box in which you have put yourself. It is all in play. Anything and everything is possible
Blog Post Two - Marc Gafni
July 3, 2008
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The Evolution of Love The Evolution of God Practicing the Wounds of Love
These will be the three topics which I hope to talk with you about in this blog. They are very much in my heart these days and nights. Two years ago, on May 19th, I arrived in exile in Salt Lake City. It is difficult for me to describe my internal state at the time. I felt like Caesar must have felt after his friends surrounded and stabbed him in the Senate, only unlike Caesar, I was still alive. Strangely and unexpectedly. Not that I mean any analogy to the grandeur of Caesar or even of my protagonists to Brutus and Cassius. Perhaps the analogy is to the complexity of it all. At least to my own personal complexity at that time in my life, almost two and a quarter years ago. I loved my friends, my students, my colleagues, and my lovers. The love was true and genuine. But, in many cases, it was a love that was not deep enough. Not grounded enough in what is called in India Hara. Not pure enough. Not free enough of my own human desire to be loved. I believed that I held a particular responsibility and obligation to shine my shakti in the world. To love everyone, to hug everyone in the most pure and sweetest and holiest of ways. It was an obligation that I knew to be true because it was as natural to me as breathing. I still believe this. I still feel it. I thank god for not taking away my gifts in exile. I also believed my love was powerful enough to transmute everything and everyone. I believed my love was so large and so good that it needed a world stage to hold it. There was the hubris. In two distinct forms. Each one different and subtle. There was the mistake. Love is powerful, but it cannot transmute everything. Love is simple and needs no world stage to play upon, for love itself is the stage and ground of the world. Love by itself is beautiful, but not enlightened. Love needs light to illuminate it. Love needs to evolve the spiral of consciousness in order to unleash it’s full potential to heal and transform. But more about the evolution of love in a later posting.
The Wounds of Love
Love needs vessels and boundaries, without which the intensity of the light shatters vessels. We live in a world of broken hearts and broken vessels.Some of those hearts have been shattered because they became brittle for lack of love. And to those people, and to those places in us, we must open our hearts in full radiance, even at the risk of suffering the wounds of love. The slings and arrows of outrageous loving. But some of those hearts are broken because love overflowed its boundaries. I speak not here―just to be clear―not of pathological boundary violations like incest, child molestation or rape, of which I know nothing and therefore cannot refer to. Rather, I speak of the boundary violations within beautiful and mutual loving relations, which are by themselves holy but which lack the vessels to hold the light of love to which they are exposed. I know something of these vessels, and I have learned something of their fragility. They too shatter. In Kabbalah, we talk of the fixing that comes after the shattering. The tikkun that comes after the shevirah. The word tikkun―as my brother and friend once pointed out to me based on a series of passages in the Tikkunei Zohar―the word Tikkun means healing or in some sense Evolution. Evolutionary Kabbalah is rooted in these passages. (If you are interested in this and if this word opens your heart and quickens your mind, see the entry by the same name in the articles section of this website.) In the teaching of Kabbalah, Tikkun―healing or evolution―emerges from the Shevirah―the shattering. The Hebrew word Shevirah, however, has another meaning hidden in its folds. Shevirah, Shever, also means sustenance. The sustenance that comes from the ability to engage in Meaning making. One biblical verse talks about Jacob, who saw that there was shever―in Egypt. Shever from the same root as Shevirah means both shattering and nourishment. In another biblical text, the author talks about “et ha-chalom ve-et shivro”―“the dream and its meaning”―or, the dream and the nourishment it gives through its interpretation and meaning. So shattering or breaking in Hebrew also carries meanings of nourishment, healing, and meaning making. We are all hurt in love. We are all shattered in love. The question always is, what do we do with our hurt? Do we turn it into insults of love that need to be repaid in kind? Do we replay and replay the ritual of mutual rejections that always escalates into violence and murder? Be it social murder or physical murder… Or do we suffer our hurt as the wounds of love! Do we transmute our hurt into compassion and raise our wounds unto the altar of healing and transformation. Life has gotten much simpler for me in the last two years. I have learned in the texts of life so much that was not possible to understand before the deluge of pain. Sometimes we have to close the door. But we almost never have to close our hearts. Close the door but always keep your heart open. We can practice the wounds of love with an open heart even as we hold our boundaries and protect ourselves from unnecessary hurt in the future. But not all hurt is unnecessary. “We hurt each other and we do it again,” sings Bono. Some hurt is part of the evolution of our hearts. How we “play” our hurt is part of the evolution of God. This is the tikkun―the healing of God―to which I referred above. You can find it if you read the passages carefully in the Tikkunei Zohar. This is the healing and the evolution of God: that we participate in the healing and evolution of God through the healing and evolution of both our own love and our own hurt. This is the great and wondrous esoteric teaching of Kabbalah!!!!!!!! -Marc Gafni
The Beauty that is YOU! – Marc Gafni
July 5, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com I received a funny e-mail today from someone. It said, “Who are you?” And that was the entire communication. What a wonderful question! So, a brief sharing is in order before we go into shabbot.
I am my story. I am. I am completely beyond my story. My spiritual teaching or sharing comes from moving beyond my story, and…. in the end, whatever spiritual teaching I have to share comes from my story.
I AM MADLY IN LOVE WITH GOD. I AM MADLY IN LOVE WITH HUMAN BEINGS. I THINK MEN AND WOMEN ARE SO TOTALLY BEAUTIFUL THAT IT OFTEN TAKES MY BREATH AWAY. I BELIEVE THAT THE UNMEDIATED EXPERIENCE OF THE DIVINE IS THE ESSENCE OF ALL RELIGION. I MEDITATE {sometimes}, PRAY {a lot}, AND ENGAGE IN SOCIAL ACTIVISM {whenever I can} AS MY WAY OF SERVING GOD. In the last decade or so, I was privileged to found a national spiritual community in Israel called Bayit Chadash. This, together with my work at Milah Institute, helped found a movement for Jewish Renewal in Israel. I spent ten intense, exhausting, and wonderful years of my life sowing the seeds of this movement. The movement did not last. There was too much light and not enought vessel. My own lack of wholeness, other peoples’ lack of wholeness, spiritual politics, sexual politics, Iago, and divine will all deemed that it be a short-lived and wondrous experiment. I am not planning to start another community, but rather to show up in the places where I am invited to share Torah and share the Dharma as I understand it. I now spend most of my time writing, or teaching, or consulting, or taking walks in Utah’s mountains, or learning, and I hope, loving. I have not achieved Nirvana by any stretch of the imagination, although I have tasted enlightenment for periods of time. I do not believe in Gurus. I SPEND ABOUT 16 HOURS A DAY DOING WHAT PEOPLE CALL WORK. I EXPERIENCE ALMOST NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN MY LIFE AND MY WORK. I LOVE PEOPLE. I LOVE BEING ALIVE. Sometimes in the last two years the pain was so unbearable that I prayed for death. I HOPE TO WRITE A NEW SCHOOL OF SPIRITUAL THOUGHT WHICH WILL … DO WHATEVER IT DOES… And, I think people who take themselves too seriously are dangerous. Umberto Ecco was right in his great book Name of the Rose. So, I laugh at myself a lot. I am also deeply lonely at times. At other times, the pain of existence―of all the suffering people―is so overwhelming that I can barely breathe. I desperately, insanely, and with deep tranquility, want to fullfill the Bodhisattva vow―even though I am not a Bodhisattva. But what is important about this post is not who am I but who are you? You are a spiritual hero. You are gorgeous and beautiful beyond any and all imagination.
I wish that I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the unberable depth of your own being… -Hafiz
Oh my God, can you see yourselfOh my God, can you hear yourself Oh my God, can you feel yourself Oh my God, Do you know how much good you can do in the world Oh my God, Do you know that god YEARNS for your service Oh my God, Do you know that God is sick when you are sick that God is in pain in your pain kissing your every wound into wholeness Do you know that God’s heart is a raging volcano of love for you Do you know that God is hiding in your heart waiting for you so that together you can dance i promise you it is all true -Marc Gafni
Imagination as the Next Step in Healing Pain – by Marc Gafni
July 6, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com It is Sunday morning. I am at home in Salt Lake City. I just woke up; said the morning blessing on the study of dharma and torah. I am sharing with you some initial musings of the morning. A gorgeous and wondrous day to you my friend… Yes, yes, I meant YOU! Good morning, good evening, good day, just that it should be good for you! Feel free to respond to this blog at info@marcgafni.com
Leadership and Imagination
Adam in Hebrew means, in one etymology, Imagination. Dancing with the Hebrew word Dimayon. Imagination.Most of what goes wrong in our world emerges from crisis. Crisis―when normal life is derailed and trauma and tragedy strike terror into our hearts and bodies―a crisis has taken place. More often than not, however, the source of our trauma is not a crisis of finance or economics; not a crisis of resources or power. More often than not, pain is caused by a crisis of imagination. A crisis of imagination. There are some Chinese linguists who suggest that in the original Chinese characters, the word crisis means both danger and opportunity. Whether or not this is an accurate read of the original Mandarin, a subject of some controversy among linguists, is beside the point. It is a simple and powerful truth. A crisis in imagination. An inability to feel into what or where is the possibility which lines the rupture. An inability to find the spark of light hidden in the apparently shattered vessel. What happens in crisis, when we have not evolved enough in love to call forth the power of imagination, is a freezing of images. Imagination, fantasy, that which calls forth the fantastic. When we lose touch with imagination, we get stuck in one image, one snapshot of reality, of the situation. This is called idolatry. We worship a frozen image―a graven image, as idols are sometimes called in the King James translation of the Bible. An image, which is already dead and in the grave. An image too grave and serious to find the power of laughter. For it is the faculty of laughter which so often unlocks the power of imagination. A crisis is unexpected. It is a surprise, and therefore a gift of the Gods. Surprise is the divine whisper caressing our ear softly yet insistently saying, “Grow, grow grow…” We need to imagine ourselves out of the old and tired “us and them” thinking. We need to imagine ourselves out of the ‘thinking’ in which we need to demonize the other, or make the other bad or wrong in order to make ourselves right. We need to imagine ourselves out of scenarios in which crisis produces devastation instead of development, humiliation instead of humility, hell and hatred instead of wholeness and healing. The essential task of the leader is to know how―in a time of crisis―to creatively access the faculty of imagination. To be not only homo hostilis, but what I like to call Homo Imaginus. The leader cannot be swept away by the crowd, lost in dark brutalities of mass malice or mob mendacity. The leader must free himself from the crowd in his mind and the mob in his heart. The leader guides and gods the crowd to its own highest self by offering a vision. This is what we mean when we say a true leader must be a visionary. The leader must offer the people an alternative imagining so that they might see what is possible. For divinity always lies in the possibility of possibility. The very definition of a mob is a large group mired in the muck of one possibility, one perspective… rushing headlong into the oblivion of dullness, failing to imagine a way out of their own anger, their own pain, or their own base egoic instincts. How we handle a crisis reveals a lot about who we are. Or at least who we were at that moment. Hopefully we evolve. Even if we did not handle the crisis in an evolved way that accessed the power of imagination, the ability to go back to the pivoting point of crisis and to re-imagine our course of action is―in an of itself―healing. It is never too late―as long as oxygen circulates in our lungs and life throbs in our hearts. Two years later, ten years later, if we can re-imagine the story, then the story begins to heal. For imagination gives birth to courage, which gives birth to right action. In Hebrew wisdom this is called the spiritual process of Teshuvah. Healing and Transformation. -Marc Gafni
Yearning and Nightmares – Marc Gafni
July 7, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Good morning! Marc Gafni here. Monday morning here in Salt Lake City. Sun is shining. The essay on imagination which is the core of this blog post is below; feel free to scroll down and skip my personal musings in the morning. Musings… How are you? Did you sleep well? Me …not bad. I had terrible nightmares last night, as I did almost every night for for the first 18 months or so after I left Israel in May 2006. There is a profound idea in Hebrew and Buddhist teaching, and I am sure in other traditions, which holds that natural “closure” is important. That can mean closure in a relationship, a business, a stage of life, or even the proper closure of life itself. When a person for example dies suddenly, the Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks of the Bardo as the in between place where the person dwells, unable to “rest in peace.” Hebrew sources in the Kabbalah have conceptions very similar to the Tibetan Bardo. Whenever there is a rupture in our lives that is sudden and brutal, we are left in a Bardo until we are able to create closure and completion for that part of our lives. There are people in my life, who, for a variety of reasons, I have been unable to create full closure with…. One of them is my former partner in Israel, Avraham Leader. There are others as well. People with whom I spent years in close if complex relationship, and who by force of karma and circumstance I am no longer in touch with. I miss them. What to do… The only practice that I know of which is effective and transformative is a kind of witnessing practice. Isaiah writes, “You are my witnesses,” meaning that to become evolved, divine beings, we must learn to witness. In this case that would mean: Step One: I am not my yearning, but I witness my yearning. I see it. I watch it rise and fall, ebb and flow. I learn from it. My yearning teaches me and guides me. But it never becomes me, so it can never consume me. Step Two: I then move into my longing, my yearning. I seek to penetrate my yearning and I pray for my yearning to open itself up to receive me. Step Three: At some point my yearning gives way and receives me, even as I allow myself to be penetrated by it, and I fall into divine yearning and divine longing. Step Four: My yearning gives way and I fall into the sweetness of God. Slowly, about eight months ago, the nightmares began to recede. I began to regain my natural energy and strength. I began to come back to life. I still miss everyone. I pray that at some magical point, rupture may once again become rapture. But I understand that it may take many weeks, many months, many years, even decades or lifetimes. I will wait. And in the meantime, there is so much good for all of us to do…. -Marc Gafni
Imagination Part Two
July 7, 2008
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Imagination – Part Two
Note for the scholarly reader of blogs: this is written in third person because I know scholars feel much better in third person.The following is an article by Marc Gafni published in Parabola magazine in 2007. It is an adaption of material published in Marc Gafni’s book The Mystery of Love in the chapter on imagination. The only difference being that in Parabola the imagination is discussed separately from the context of Eros, which is the major theme and context for the imagination discussion in The Mystery of Love. The Zohar, magnus opus of Hebrew mysticism, says it explicitly in many places: “Shechina [the feminine incarnation of the Godhead] is imagination.” In popular understanding, imagination is implicitly considered to be “unreal.” Indeed “unreal” and “imaginary” are virtual synonyms in common usage. To undermine the reality of an antagonist’s claim, we say it is “a figment of their imagination.” In marked contrast, the Hebrew mystics held imagination to be very real. It would not be unfair to say that they considered imagination to be “realer than real.” The power of imagination is its ability to give form to the deep truths and visions of the inner divine realm. Imagination gives expression to the higher visions of reality that derive from our divine selves. Language and rational thinking are generally unable to access this higher truth. It is the imagination that is our prophet, bringing us the word of the divine that speaks both through us and from beyond us. This is what the biblical mystic Hosea meant when he exclaimed the words of God, “By the hands of my prophets I am imagined.”
Crisis of Imagination
The greatest crisis of our lives is neither economic, intellectual, nor even what we usually call religious. It is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck on our paths because we are unable to reimagine our lives differently than they are right now. We hold on desperately to the status quo, afraid that if we let go, we will be swept away by the torrential undercurrents of our emptiness.The most important thing in the world, implies wisdom master Nachman of Bratzlav, is to be willing to give up who you are for who you might become. He calls this process the giving up of pnimi to reach for makkif. For Master Nachman, pnimi means the old familiar things that you hold onto even when they no longer serve you on your journey. Makkif is that which is beyond you, which you can reach only if you are willing to take a leap into the abyss. Find your risk and you will find your self. Sometimes that means leaving your home, your father’s house, and your birthplace, and traveling to strange lands. Both the biblical Abraham and the Buddha do this quite literally. But for the kabbalist, the true journey does not require dramatic breaks with past and home. It is rather a journey of the imagination. In the simple and literal meaning of the biblical text, Abraham’s command is Lech lecha…: “Go forth from your land, your birth place and your father’s house.” Interpreted by the Zohar, the command is taken to mean not “Go forth” but “Go to yourself.” For the kabbalist this means more than the mere quieting of the mind. The journey is inwards, and the vehicle is… imagination. For imagination is the tool that allows us to image a future radically different from the past or even the present. That is exactly what Abraham was called to do–to leave behind all of the yesterdays and todays and to leap into an unknown tomorrow. It is only in the fantasy of re-imagining that we can change our reality. It is only from this inside place that we can truly change our outside. The path of true wisdom is not necessarily to quit your job, leave your home, and travel across the country. Often such a radical break is a failure rather than a fulfillment of imagination. True wisdom is to change your life from where you are, through the power of imagination.
Think “Cookies!”
Virtually every crisis at its core is a failure of imagination. Some years back, I took off three years from “spiritual teaching” to get a sense of what the world tasted like as a householder. I took a job at a high-tech company, and from that relatively nondemanding perch began to rethink my life and beliefs.During this period, I did a bit of consulting with Israeli high-tech start-up firms. The truth is I had little good advice to offer, but some of the high-tech entrepreneurs who had been my students would call me anyway. At one point, I received a call from a small start-up firm in Ramat Gan, Israel. The problem: they were almost out of venture capital, their market window seemed to be rapidly closing, and their Research and Development team was simply not keeping pace with their need for solutions. Apparently the problem lay with the elevator. The company was on the top floor of an old warehouse. The elevator was small, hot, and inordinately pungent. By the time the R&D teams got through the daily morning gauntlet of the elevator, they had lost some of their creative sparkle. The president was convinced that this experience dulled their edge just enough to slow down the speed and elegance of their solutions. What to do? I had not the slightest idea. Our meeting was on a Friday. As was my custom, I went home for the Sabbath and spoke with my own private consultant, my eight-year-old son Eitan. When I asked him what I should tell the company, he laughed and said somewhat mockingly, “It’s simple, Dad. Cookies!” I did not find this particularly funny. I raised the subject with him several times, but he would only respond, with maddening gravitas, “Cookies.” Finally I gave up on him. Several days later I went to tell the president that I had found no solution. I was going up the same malodorous elevator, when in a blinding flash I realized what Eitan meant. Cookies! Of course! We had all been focused on elaborate ways to fix the elevator or to move locations. Eitan―with the simple brilliance of a child―reminded us of the true issue at stake. The crux of the matter was not the elevator, it was how the R&D team felt when they left the elevator. So what to do? Cookies. We set up a table with juices, fruit, and health cookies upstairs, right outside the elevator. So even though the ride up the elevator was terrible, people would spend the time in eager anticipation of the goodies that awaited them. No one had envisioned Eitan’s simple yet elegant solution because their imaginations were “stuck in the elevator.” His was a simple paradigm shift inspired by re-imagining. We fear imagination, for imagination holds out the image of a different life. It challenges our accommodations to the status quo. It suggests that the compromises that we have based our lives upon might not have been necessary. Our fear of imagination is our fear of our own greatness. It was Albert Einstein’s gift of imagination that allowed him to formulate the concept of relativity. Einstein literally imagined what it would be like to travel on a beam of light. What would things look like? What would another traveler, on another beam of light going in the opposite direction, look like to him? Without leaps of imagination, no growth is possible and the spirit petrifies.
The Possibility of Possibility
Nikos Kazantzakis writes, “You have your brush and your colors, paint paradise and in you go.” This is a near perfect description of the spirit that animates the biblical myth ritual that yearly celebrates the Exodus from Egypt. Every year, on the anniversary of the Hebrew Exodus, people gather for a uniquely dramatic biblical myth ritual, Passover. Unlike the Fourth of July or other freedom anniversaries, it revolves not around commemoration but imagination.The guiding principle of the holiday is, “Every person is obligated to see him/herself as if they left Egypt.” This Talmudic epigram, the guiding mantra of the ritual, is explained by the kabbalists as an invitation to personal re-imagining of the most fantastic kind. You are in Egypt―your own personal Egypt. Egypt, Mitzrayim in Hebrew, literally means “the narrow places,” the constricted passageway of our life’s flow. Egypt―kabbalistically said to incarnate the throat―symbolizes all the words that remain stuck in our throats: the words we never speak, the stories of our lives that remain unlived, unsung, unimagined. We are slaves. Slavery for the kabbalist is primarily a crisis of imagination. Consequently, the healing of slavery is a ritual of imagination. For an entire evening, we become dramatists, choreographers, and inspired actors. We re-imagine our lives as the first step on our path to freedom. God is the possibility of possibility―limitless imagination. The first of the Ten Commandments is “I am God.” When this God is asked to identify himself, He responds, “I will be what I will be.” That is, “You cannot capture me in the frozen image of any time or place. To do so would be to destroy me.” It would be to violate the Second Commandment, against idolatry. Idolatry is the freezing of God in a static image. To freeze God in an image is to violate the invitation of the imagination. It is to limit possibility.
Homo Imaginus
“It is for this reason that man was called Adam: He is formed of adama, the dust of the physical, yet he can ascend above the material world through the use of his imagination and reach the level of prophecy. The Hebrew word ‘I will imagine’ is adamah.”For Hebrew mystical master Nachman of Bratzlav, the core human movement that gives birth to our spirit is the evolution from adama to adameh. Adamah is ground, earth, Gaia. Yet it can also be read as adameh, I will imagine. Man emerges from Nature to live what philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik called “a fantasy-aroused existence.” Imagination is not a detail of our lives nor merely a methodological tool. It is the very essence of who we are. We generally regard ourselves as thinking animals, Homo sapiens. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is hardwired into our cultural genes. Yet biblical myth offers an alternative understanding of the concept of “humanness.” The closest Hebrew word to human, or the Latin homo, is “Adam.” The word “Adam” derives from the Hebrew root meaning imagination (d’mayon). The stunning implication is that the human being is not primarily Homo sapien, but “Homo imaginus.” At the very dawn of human existence, man is described as being created in the divine image. “Divine image” does not mean a fixed and idolatrous copy of divinity. God has no fixed form. God is, instead, the possibility of possibility. The human being’s creation in the divine image needs to be understood in two ways. First, humanity is not so much ‘made in God’s image’ as we are ‘made in God’s imagination’. A product of the divine fantasy. Second, the human being himself participates in divine imagination―Homo imaginus. We long for goodness, beauty, and kindness in a world perpetually marred by ugliness, evil, and injustice. For the biblical mystic, our imaginings of a world of justice and peace is the manifestation of the immanence of God in our lives. The creative discontent that drives us to imagine an alternative reality is the image/imagination of God beating in our breast. The cosmos is pregnant with hints that guide our imaginings. We are called to heal the world in the image of our most beautiful imaginings. Imagination is the elixir of God running through the universe.
Creating God
Imagination is powerful. Very powerful. “Think good and it will be good,” wrote Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last master of Chabad mysticism. This is true not merely because of the psychological power of positive thinking, but also because every imagining gives birth to something real that eventually manifests itself in the universe.Imagination is transformative not only on the human plane. It has a powerful effect on the divine scale as well. Kabbalists teach that each dimension of divinity, known as a sefira in kabbalah, has a color that incarnates it. By ecstatically imagining the colors of the sefirot and combining them according to the appropriate mystical instructions, one can actually have an impact on the inner workings of the divine force. The Zohar goes further in audacious formulations that, upon first reading, describe man creating God in his image―that it to say, in his imagination. For the Zohar such imagination simply reinforces the substantive reality of God. Or to put it slightly differently, while there is a limited truth in saying that God is a figment of human imagination, we need to remember that imagination is a figment of God. The difference is simple. For the kabbalist, imagination is not childish fancy. It is the spiritual reality called forth by the sacred child within. The God we do not create doesn’t exist. Yes, there is a divine force that exists beyond us. Yet there is also a powerfully manifest current of divinity that is nourished by our being. The act of nourishing, sustaining, and even creating divinity is called “theurgy” by scholars of mysticism. The term expresses the human ability to dramatically impact and even grow God. One of the great tools of theurgy is imagination. In fact, theurgic imagination is the medium and message of a kabbalistic re-reading of “In the beginning…” The first string of letters in the Bible, “bereshit bara elokim…” can be re-read as “b’roshi tbara elokim”―in my mind God is created.
-Marc Gafni
Blog Post Six. First in series: On Eros and Holiness
July 8, 2008
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On Eros and Holiness The light and the Shadow
Post One by Marc Gafni Copyright: Marc Gafni. (Under-construction version of forthcoming book.)
Introduction
The following one thousand pages―which I will share in a series of upcoming blog posts―are a version of a book I wrote many years ago called On the Erotic and the Holy. Part of this book, about 315 pages worth, was published as The Mystery of Love. Every so often I will add a section of the book to this website. It will appear both as a new article and as a blog post. This material in its entirety will, God willing, be published as a separate work under the title On Eros and Holiness: Shadows and Light. A couple of points to share: Avraham Leader and myself, way back when, in the context of our work together in Israel, footnoted The Mystery of Love, Soul Prints, and the first three chapters of this book. (The footnotes to Soul Prints are truly excellent; they deserve to be studied carefully. This material will be available to you in the Soul Print section of this website.) The footnotes to the first three chapters of this work are in part the same as the footnotes to The Mystery of Love, since the fundamental material is the same only more expanded and extended. The footnotes themselves are highly important and provide the rooting of these books in the classical Hebraic sources. These books represent a sacred unfolding and evolution of classic Hebraic sources, particularly Kabbalistic sources. There are some people whose role it is to translate the wisdom of their tradition. Others―far fewer―are intended to evolve the tradition even as it appears that they are only translating. That is what I am attempting to do in this book. I try to avoid, at almost all cost, getting lost in scholarly hubris. The language is simple and clear and the movements of evolution are, hopefully, relatively seamless in the fabric of the text.
FORTHCOMING NEW BOOK
A more elaborate version of this book, which has undergone a significant editorial process, is forthcoming as what I hope will be an exciting new book on Eros and Holiness, which takes into account everyting I have learned in the last two years. In the meantime, in response to many requests, I am sharing with you the original manuscript―replete with notes and questions to myself, and suggestions to myself about future directions and issues and the like. It seems that there is something to be said for seeing a work in progress, still rough and unfinished.
TITLE PAGE
The picture on the cover is an imaginative rendering of the Ashera tree, divine symbol of feminine eros in ancient paganism. It is now time for the contemporary prophets of biblical myth to reclaim the legacy of the sacred Ashera and reinstall her within the precincts of the temple. Note to me: Cite sources from Zohar; part 3, from Ramak/ Cordevero, Abraham Kuk on Ahserah; Pattai cites Ramak, thank Tamar Ross who first referred me to Rav Kuk source on Idolatry; see also important article by Gellman on Akedah and important sources there on relationship between Rav Kuk and idolatry; seems like Gellman did not fully understand the impact of the sources but not clear; I feel he always hides his true radicalism in order to remain relatively kosher; need to thank him. … and the ability to transmute the Asherah energy to the sacred. All of these sources in one way or another acknowledge that Ahserah participates in the energy of Shekinah. People have rejected Asherah. This is a mistake. Da Free John uses phrase in his work – Wilber picks up phrase – Transcend and Include- Wilber cites Hegel Negate and Preserve- when one ascends levels of consciousness. We need to negate that in Asherah which is pre-personal and include that which is, at its core, transpersonal. Level One Ahsera very problematic; Level three Ashera, which transcends and includes the personal, is messianic. Relate my level one level three confusion idea to Wilber’s Pre-Trans Fallacy. Wilber article on Pre-Trans excellent. Need to meet him and discuss. Perhaps D.F might make introduction. Will ask him. Lovely man.
Epigrams
“Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…” -John Keats
“Jerusalem’s Temple, the place where heaven and earth kiss.” -The Zohar
The Mystery of Love Leshem Yichud Kudsha Brich-hu u’Shechinateh.
May this be for the sake of uniting the masculine God with the feminine Goddess. -Kabbalistic meditation
The Hole in Wholeness
We are in pain. We are in pain because the world, and therefore God, is in pain.1 The Kabbalists call this divine wound the Exile of the Shekina. This is a wound born of love.{See Da Free John on Practicing the Wound of Love; My Kabbalistic re-read of Da Free John, I light of Gafni-is that practicing the wound of love is an act of imatatio dei; the wounds of love in human relations stem from the exile of the Shekina within the self – a form of self-contraction and alienation. Eros is so painful, but that is not the subject for this book. Need part two of the Erotic and the Holy on the Pain of Eros. I am publishing, God willing, a separate book called tentatively “The Pain of Eros: Practicing the Wounds of Love.” This book is about my personal experiences of spirit and love between May 11, 2006 and the present. It suggests a path in love, which, in my understanding, is the core of the Hebraic notion of enlightenment.} The Shechina is the sensual feminine God force that suffuses reality and knows our name. To be a Kabbalist is to participate in the pain of the Shechina. To feel Her hurt. For Her hurt is our hurt. But that is only the first step. The great ambition of the spirit is to heal Her pain, to fill her up with joy, ecstasy and meaning. To repair our broken world. To heal Her wound. For She is us. Shechina in the original Hebrew means “indwelling Presence.” She evokes the experience of fullness, presence, interconnectivity, and yearning. The Greeks called this experience ‘the erotic’ after the god Eros. Eros and Shechina are different expressions of the same core experience.2 One cannot define Shechina and Eros. To define Shechina is to kill her. Definitions are non-erotic. Shechina is evoked, intuited, felt, and experienced. And yet the mind needs maps and signposts. So, later in our journey (in chapter two), we will unfold together the four faces of Eros. But to begin, we seek rather to arouse her presence. The opposite of Eros and Shechina is void. Our lives are overflowing with the Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it hurts so much you can barely move. Usually it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We rush around, doing everything we can to fill the absence. We even have a handy word for this rushing about: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A–void–dance. A dance around the void. We develop the most elaborate maneuverings you can imagine―never realizing that it is all a-void–dance. That if we could but taste fullness for a moment, the empty dances of addiction, power, violence, and abusive sex(3) would be transformed into the erotic dance of Being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, with the Shechina. The dance in which we all have a place. This book is about sharing that dance with you.
The Great Dancer
The truly great dancer―like all lovers―flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right, so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so, she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul, which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila―forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity, and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah―fullness―used in the biblical myth texts to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.4Mehol, Hallul, Hallal = Dance, Empty, Full. The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and eros, absence and Shechina. Modern -day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra, and it is marketed to us in a million packages. Fill the emptiness―in any way at any price. We are desperate. We are so pained by our emptiness that we can hardly distinguish between our desires. The natural result is that we fill up with much that is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment―full-fill-ment―in all the wrong places.
Pseudo-Eros
The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being―the fullness of ourselves in every moment―we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time, to resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of dance. The movement between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”We live in an age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification―a quick fix: a book, a drug, a relationship, a job―anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. With a book, we read a few pages and if we don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo-eros, we move on to the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole that might fill up the yawning abyss we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide. On the outside, our mad dashing about may look like dance―but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an airtight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside, however, there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos-filled scramble for some snatches of authenticity in between the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance.
Erotic Living
The Dancing MasterThere is a wonderful story of eros and love that hints at many of the truths we will unpack in our journey together. It is about walking through the void and dancing with the Shechina. Every time we walk through and not around the void, we come out stronger.
Reports had reached the young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of kung fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet, converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this master of kung fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit.Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of kung fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The master of kung fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue-black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your Highness,” he began, “Have no worries, I wouldn’t think of doing you harm.” “Well, when you do want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “what kind of harm can you do?” “Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear.” The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may proceed,” he told the Master of kung fu. “Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If I had done it in slow motion, extremely slow motion, you would have seen how each touch of my hand would have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.” “Impressive. But I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama. “Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.” “Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king. “Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.” “If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master.” The Dancing Master entered. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of kung fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge. The Master of kung fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year when I finally caught him on the ear and destroyed him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire.” The two opponents faced off. The Master of kung fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack. The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his body. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. His fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows. The Master of kung fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time. The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of kung fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He was intoxicated by the aroma of the butter melting in the Dalai Lama’s fragrant tea. A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch. His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life. The Master of kung fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong.
What a holy tale of Eros. The darts and lunges of emptiness and violence become the erotic rhythms, soarings of fullness and love. Eros, as the story unfolds so gently, is not sex. Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety. When we are unable to live in Eros we become very frightened of the emptiness. The void either numbs us to the joy of living or we try and fill the void with the manifold forms of pseudo-Eros. We fill it with anger, competition, fanaticism, and excessive consumption of all kinds. The result, on a personal level, is either depression or an underlying deadness of spirit, which we hide under the facades of success. On a global level, the result is terrible wars that we fight to validate the superiority of our religions, to affirm our national pride, or to protect our economic power. At the same time, we rape the environment, forcing it to produce the glut of goods which we desperately require to provide us with more and more hits of pseudo-Eros. Spirit does not tolerate a vacuum. The inability to dance through the void always results in pathology. In the case of the kung fu master, pseudo-Eros manifested as raging ego, aggression and even violence. If we do not choose Eros, then pseudo-Eros will always choose us. The consequence is always great pain, personal, social, and cosmic. For anything less than Eros will almost assuredly destroy our planet. We abuse each other personally. Nations mass murder other nations. A lover demonizes her sexual, romantic or heart partner. She is devastated that she was not the only one. Even when there was no such promise or even its opposite. Feminine Shadow. S/he forgets that to love is not to own. Lovers who demonize the former beloved friend, refuse to recognize that they are scarring the face of God―within themselves. We abuse the earth and allow twenty million people to die of hunger or related diseases every year. The simple and essential cause is a lack of Eros. We desperately need to feel like we are full but we aren’t. So we settle for pseudo Eros. We pretend that we are in the inside by placing others on the outside. We do not feel embraced in real Eros of love so we grasp for the pseudo Eros of fear, war, and obsessive consumption. Life is a mess. Even if we could somehow put aside the starvation and the wars, even a superficial view of our society reveals that something is seriously askew. Not a detail problem but an essential flaw in the plumb line of our culture. Every forty seconds someone kills themselves. This year, upwards of one million people will experience a failure of love so intense and painful that they will violently end their lives. In the last 45 years, suicide rates have increased by sixty percent world wide. Among the countries with the highest rates are western democracies such as Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, and of course the United States. Suicide used to be largely limited to the elderly. People who had, at the end of their lives, looked back and been unable to make sense of their story. This is not particularly comforting news because all of us want to, and most of us will, reach old age. The even more jolting news, however, is that the average age is going down. Suicide is now one of the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44. Now, of course it would be nice to dismiss this slightly unpleasant information with the thought that only crazy or severely depressed people commit suicide. Note, however, that for every actual suicide there are ten suicide attempts. Suicide attempts have increased in the last 45 years to twenty times more than “successful” suicides. Add to this the easily inferred reality that for every person who attempts suicide, there are a lot more people in just as much pain; just as lonely; just as alienated; and just as depressed. They simply are unable to do anything about it. So they live in limbo―suspended between hells―all the while maintaining the façade of normal and even successful lives. And yet our guilty feet have no rhythm. Beneath our desperately dancing steps lurks a yawning abyss of emptiness that kills our joy and poisons our satisfactions. We need another way to dance. It is the old dancing master who shows us how. He reminds us that Eros is a genuine possibility in our lives. Stay in the emptiness, he tells us, and it will become full. Where before you danced to the music of competition and envy, you now begin to feel that you are part of the seamless coat of the divine universe. You no longer feel like you must obey God; you participate in the divine. Eros is the sound of a woman singing, the caress of a small deed of loving, a gentle tear, or rocking laughter. Shechina is genuinely felt pain and joy, anger and ecstasy. All of these fill your emptiness and enliven your days. You are no longer alienated from your own life―living externally―wondering: is this all there is? To dance with the Shechina is to step inside to the full erotic glory and wonder of your life. To live and love erotically in all the facets of your being is to live a sacred life.
The Path of Love
One cannot be told that life is worthwhile; one must experience the erotic love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity, and worth of their lives. It is, however, this very erotic sense that is so essential in making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second-hand consumers of second-hand joy―never touching love or Eros directly. And when love fails, there truly is nothing left to live for. For love―not the narrow romantic expressions of it, but erotic love in all areas of our existence―is the core of life itself.We are confronted, personally and globally, with a stark choice: Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury but an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half century, modern psychology has documented an age-old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So, too, our world, personal and global, even with all the resources, intelligence, and technology at our disposal, will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love. Life is a choice. What is the rhythm of our dance? Are we dancing masters or bottled bees? Who are our dancing partners― desperation and emptiness or Eros and Shechina? Are we lovers in all facets of our lives or are we apathetic, deadened, and indifferent? Are we sources of safety and caring or are we abusers and manipulators? Are we spreading wisdom and love or are we inflictors of emotional, spiritual and even physical pain on those closest to us? Bees in bottles always sting. But everyone knows that to sting is to die. The only way to not sting is to learn to be a dancing master. The great mystery tradition of Hebrew wisdom is about a radical and profound path towards becoming just such a dancing master. The ancient temple in Jerusalem was the center of a society where the Hebrew mysteries were practiced and taught. At the core of the temple mysteries lies an ancient set of radical understandings about sex, love, and eros. In the deep yet provocative temple mysteries, we are taught that sex is not eros. But as we shall see, in the esoteric temple mystery, sex models for us what it might look like to live erotically in all of the non-sexual dimensions of our lives. The temple mysteries are a unique Tantra, opening us to the possibility of becoming great lovers in all of the arenas of our lives. The Hebrew mysteries gently but powerfully chart a path which, if we but have the courage to walk it, will teach us how to live erotically in every facet of existence. We live in an age when ancient wisdoms long relegated to the dustbins of the spirit are being reclaimed. The Zohar, magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, teaches that our era is the one in which the “Gates of Wisdom will be opened.” We live at the dawn of a new age in which for the first time―after several aeons of intense spiritual evolution―we have the vessels to hold the light of the ancient secrets. The mystics suggest we may well be able to hold the light more deeply than even the ancients for whom the wisdom was initially intended. It is only now, after law, science, and ethics have been integrated into our psyches, that we can go back and reclaim Eros, Shechina and enchantment. Life is a choice. You can remain a bee trapped in a bottle and everyone―except yourself―will be convinced you are dancing. Or you can choose to be a dancing master. To dance yourself into your book of life. To be an erotic lover in every facet of your existence. A wonderful mantra from the biblical love book, the Song of Songs, reads, “I am love sick on my bed at night,” explains 19th century mystical master Nachum of Chernobyl, “I have fallen on my bed because my loving has become sick.” When being a great lover is limited to sexual performance, and wild erotic stories connote anonymous orgies, then love has become sick and we fall on our beds into the depths of emptiness and depression. The dance of Eros is to teach you how to be a great lover not only in the sexual but in all the dimensions of your life. That is the radical invitation issued by this book of Hebrew wisdom. You need not have studied mysticism or biblical myth before reading this tract. This is a book written for all seekers of transformation. This book is for you if you are not sated by pop culture and seek a passionate, joyful, yet deeply grounded and serious exploration of the mysteries as your guide. I am a biblical mystic. I have studied, taught, and tried to live the sacred texts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, nestled in the hills, of the Galilee in Israelin, Oxford University in England, and in exile in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Aramaic and Hebrew mystery texts have been my guides and friends for many years. Of course, like every mystic who engages sacred text, I hear the text in accordance with the inner melody of my soul. I now share this song with you in the form of this book. You are invited to find the place in your soul where you can receive and integrate this ancient wisdom into your own song. The invitation and the challenge of the spirit in our generation is to create a politics of Eros and love. That can only begin to happen when each person in the polis takes responsibility for the erotic quality of his or her life. We need to, and we can, realign our souls with the fountain of being. We can connect to the vital currents of loving energy that course though our universe. We can decide to enter the flow, and from that place on the inside we can transform first our lives, and ultimately, our world. The Next Entry will begin with the Paragraph below. Love until then… The mystery begins in the inner precincts of Solomon’s sacred temple in Jerusalem, unraveling the deep, wondrous and provocative relationship between sex, eros and love. It is the unpacking of this first stage of the mysteries that we devote the first three framing chapters. Emerging from the Hebrew mystery tradition, the following ten chapters each lay out a unique path of Hebrew Tantra. Each path will offer you a compelling spirit map for living erotically in every facet of your being. Cover Page Epigrams:
“Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…”-John Keats “Expanded consciousness is when the Taste of the Bark is as the Taste of the Tree.” -Abraham Kuk
shared by Marc Gafni
On the Wounds of Love: Part Two – Marc Gafni
July 10, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Good evening. It is close to midnight here in Salt Lake. Just spent a wonderful evening with five goddesses. A group of friends, all powerful feminine spiritual teachers who are on the way to their annual retreat in the Utah desert. This is the third year that we have met here in Salt Lake before and after their retreat. Each one is a strong, vulnerable, audacious figure. Each one comes with her unique gifts of spirit. They are, each one of them, deeply good, smart, wild, giving, sexy, modest, wounded, provocative, profound, healing, outrageous, and gentle. In short, they are Incarnations of Shekinah, the feminine goddess divine. It is with some of them, at different times, that I have over the past two years explored the wounds of love. It is they, together with my wonderful friend Dalit, who held me and challenged me, fought with me, supported me, and loved me as I loved them. I dedicate this sharing on the wounds of love to them.
On the Wounds of Love: Part Two
by Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.comThe way I will do an ongoing series of posts is to always start with the last couple of paragraphs from the previous post. In Zen, there is a famous koan about a master who teaches by giving student a thorough beating. No matter what question the student asks, the beating comes just the same. When the student attempts to answer the question, he receives a beating. When the student remains silent, he gets a beating. When the student attempts to escape or withdraw, he still gets a beating. Eros often teaches like that Zen master, giving a complete knock-out, foot-to-groin, nose-smashed-against-asphalt pummeling. It demands that we experience pain, injury, and the collapse of self–even that we recognize suffering itself as its loving touch. Our sexual and romantic lives are filled with an array of agonies not easily borne by the ego, by the body, or by the sense of (limited) self. There is the pain of not being seen or desired, and the pain of being seen starkly, in all of our most shame-inducing imperfections. There is the pain of not getting the affection we seek, or the pain of having it for a time, then losing it. There is the startling pain of realizing we were not our beloved’s only one–the fact that our beloved shared his love with others may cut into our desperately human need to be special. There is the pain of being asked for more than we are able to give, and the pain of trying to give and not being wanted. There is the pain of love which turns to hate, of affection which turns to contempt, and of the touch which, once desired, becomes repellent. Then there is the pain of betrayal. Betrayal is uniquely excruciating because only someone whom you really trust–someone who could never, you thought, betray you–can deliver this particularly devastating blow. Sex models life in that it hurts like hell. It’s no wonder that so much popular eroticism contains a twinning sex and pain, domination and submission. In sex, even with the best intentions, we often seem bound to inflict injury, and bound to receive it. We’re sure to be hurt in love, and we’re sure to hurt. We are subjected to injury against our will, and no matter how hard we fight against it, we injure others all the time. I don’t say this to be released of responsibility to others; ignorance, hubris, and grasping demand reckoning, and all transgressions against others must be known for what they are. (And who among us is without transgression.) What I’m saying is that even genuine sensitivity, even a radical willingness to take responsibility, even a vow to end suffering, does not take away pain. As the Irish mystic rock singer Bono sings,
“We’re one, but we’re not the same, You see, we hurt each other, then we do it again!”
Entering the Temple of Pain So, even though a stiff drink of good Irish whisky might seem like the best response to the pain of eros, medicating our suffering never works for long. In the end, we have to be willing to look into pain deeply and directly. We need to know it first-hand, entering the interior of pain as we enter the interior of sex – with full presence, with a yearning to see, feel, and know it, and with a mind and heart expanded enough to embrace the whole catastrophe at once. How does the hurt feel? What are its qualities? How do we engage the interiority of pain without violating our wholeness? How do we remain fully present to what is actually happening inside of us? How do we stay open in the midst of the pain, and even stay connected to the yearning that once animated our hearts? What is our pain telling us? If we could hear pain’s voice, what sacred wisdom might she whisper in our ear. Before pain reveals her secrets, we need to become her lover. As with a lover, we need to attend to our responses to pain with the same care and discrimination that we give our pleasure. What is our response to the feelings? What strategies arise to protect us against the experience of pain? Do we withdraw, attack and go to war, do we dull ourselves, do we immediately seek another love-fix, like the addicts we are? What exactly is going on here? Pain is a state of being. From a cognitive perspective, how we relate to the pain born of erotic or sexual betrayal is a decision. We choose the interpretive prism through which we will understand our pain, and that becomes the basis for our response to it. Sadly, we often use the prism of “I’m so hurt” to justify vengeful malice, either verbal or actual. We use our wounds as an excuse for hating an ex-lover or spouse, for seeking unwarranted financial or legal redress, for blackening their reputation. We twist the law to align with the twisted valves of our heart. Hurt becomes a free pass, a get-out-of-jail free card that we believe gives someone the right to take revenge. And of course, since malice cannot reveal it’s true motivations, it must plead false ones, hiding behind masks of piety and noble intention. Yes, all beings are hurt. We all carry some untransformed wound. But in the end we all must choose whether our wounds are to be allowed to fester in us, converted to malevolence, or transmuted into compassion. Suffering can lead us deeper into love or deeper into separation and hatred. It is always a choice. We each choose the prism for our pain, and the lens we choose is ultimately the mark of our level of consciousness. For a young child or a person at a certain level of consciousness, rage and pain can seem like reason to kill. The great revelation of the Axial Age lawgivers is that wounded honor is not to be personally avenged in spilled blood—and as the Talmud reminds us, there are many ways to spill a person’s blood. Some of them are so subtle that the person doesn’t know he’s been stabbed. Others may drain the blood from a person’s face in such a way that it takes years to set things right. To avoid translating pain into violence–whether physical, verbal, or imaginary–we need to pay close and unflinching attention to our interiority. We are required to clarify our pain through what a kabbalist might call the ten questions of Berur, the Clarification of Desire. THE END The next sharing On the Wounds of Love will be on the clarification of desire. Note to Reader: Just a little sharing about my education in blogs: I do not really know how to do this blog thing, but the advice I am getting is shorter blogs, which I have tried to do, and to find a template. So, if anyone has a template, please let me know. Marc Gafni
On the Wounds of Love: Part Three – Marc Gafni
July 12, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On the Wounds of Love: Part Three
continued from Blog Post NineYes, all beings are hurt. We all carry some untransformed wound. But in the end we all must choose whether our wounds are to be allowed to fester in us, converted to malevolence, or transmuted into compassion. Suffering can lead us deeper into love or deeper into separation and hatred. It is always a choice. We each choose the prism for our pain, and the lens we choose is ultimately the mark of our level of consciousness. For a young child or a person at a certain level of consciousness, rage and pain can seem like reason to kill. The great revelation of the Axial Age lawgivers is that wounded honor is not to be personally avenged in spilled blood—and as the Talmud reminds us, there are many ways to spill a person’s blood. Some of them are so subtle that the person doesn’t know he’s been stabbed. Others may drain the blood from a person’s face in such a way that it takes years to set things right. To avoid translating pain into violence—whether physical, verbal, or imaginary—we need to pay close and unflinching attention to our interiority. We are required to clarify our pain through what a kabbalist might call the questions of Berur, the Clarification of Desire. I have organized the questions on the page in a bit of confused way. Disorganized and disjointed, because that is how the questions come up in our minds. Let your mind roam from question to question until the questions enter the very core of your being. Try and let your mind become very still and let the depth and truth of these questions expand your heart and evolve your consciousness. 1) What thoughts arise regarding your pain? 2) Is the pain created by what happened or by your thoughts about what happened? 3) Who would you be if we without these thoughts about your pain? 4) What beliefs do we hold about what happened, at this very moment? 5)Are they true? 6) Are we sure that they are true? 7) If we were alone in a room with God and she said: Your eternity and the lives of our children rest on your telling the absolute truth at this moment—would you still hold your beliefs about “what happened” as true? 8) How does that belief serve your agenda in this moment? 9) What deeper truth does it cover up? 10) What or who would you be—or how would you feel—if you told yourself a different story about your pain? 11) How much of your identity is bound us with your pain? 12) Are you blaming someone for your pain? 13) What if you turned it all around and made yourself a responsible party instead of the victim in the story? 14) How does taking some responsibility help us loosen the weight of our anger and take some of the projection back? 15) How does it help us move from a blame frame to recognizing that everyone has a share in contributing to realities that created the pain? 16) What gain to we receive from our pain—what profit is there for us, what social capital do we earn in telling and re-telling the story of our pain? We long for certainty. But are we ever really certain of the correctness of our ideas about how the world should be? In moments of hurt and blame, if we can step out of our frame and go deeper, we might identify that behind our need to blame someone—even ourselves—for our pain is a feeling of being alone, of being cut off and isolated from the rest of reality. As we look into that deeper place then we might—often for the first time—be able to watch how the mechanism of ego works. Marc Gafni
On the Wounds of Love: Part Four – Marc Gafni
July 12, 2008
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On the Wounds of Love: Part Four
We long for certainty. But are we ever really certain of the correctness of our ideas about how the world should be? In moments of hurt and blame, if we can step out of our frame and go deeper, we might identify that behind our need to blame someone—even ourselves—for our pain is a feeling of being alone, of being cut off and isolated from the rest of reality. As we look into that deeper place then we might—often for the first time—be able to watch how the mechanism of ego works. And we might also notice how we quickly—almost desperately—move to cover over that isolated feeling. If we look closely, we might realize that when we feel cut off, separate diminished or abandoned, we often move to secure our version of how we would like the world to be. Sometimes simply seeing the ego at work, relaxing the struggle, and opening to the truth of the moment liberates our awareness. But in order for this to happen, we need the courage to be present with our own emotional and physical pain. In bioenergetics, and in certain traditions of tantric yoga, we are shown how to free pain through the body by breathing into the fullness of sensation, and feeling the alive quality in the sensation of pain itself. A yogini friend of mine once said, “Because you say “ow” instead of “ah”—because the sensation appears as a menace instead of a friend—doesn’t mean it’s not from the same source.” All phenomena arise from this same source, and the body itself is made of the substance of God. To recognize the divine substance in pain allows us to be present to it rather than resisting or fearing it. Normally (and naturally) we seek to assuage and heal pain—the body itself produces hormones whose very purpose is to make pain bearable. To heal the pain of an other is the sacred joy and obligation of every individual. Even so, we sometimes need to be careful not to numb our pain so quickly that it cannot give us its teaching. According to the mystics this was the meaning of Job’s teaching when he defiantly asserted, “Through my Body I Vision God.” Job— the archetypal sufferer—teaches the Yoga of entering the body in order to walk through, not around, our pain. “I am in your pain” cries out the divine, through the lips of Isaiah. The words of the prophet resonate with particular poignancy regarding emotional pain—the pain of eros. There is a divinity to be realized in staying open to the pain of Eros. We need to resist the seduction of closing off into the easy certainties of psychological dogma, explaining how some demonized other is the source of our pain. If the skew of earlier times was to close our heart by blaming the victim, then the sin of our times is in the assuaging of our own guilt through the deification of the alleged victim’s pain. Does our heart become so hardened that all counter narratives are reviled, crushed or simply ignored? Do we allow the powerful to masquerade as the powerless, and unjust pain beyond all measure is meted out simply because we refuse to challenge the idolatry of hurt. We need the capacity to sustain uncertainty without being psychologically seduced to adopt any dogmatic certainty about the way things are or ought to be, without choosing sides by asserting that someone is bad and someone else good. The capacity to hold open awareness within uncertainty, resisting the subtle but powerful impulse to close into one version of reality, is the gateway to enlightenment. All the great traditions of spirit, in their own way, show us that everything is one thing. Everything is one beautiful, radical, unknowable, ungraspable, vast, empty gorgeousness. Nothing, absolutely nothing needs to be rejected. But only a lover is willing to look directly into the eyes of reality, and see things exactly as they are. When we talk about spiritual courage—this is what we mean. When we talk about being a lover—this is what we mean. We do our best to embrace everything exactly as it is—in excruciating, gorgeous detail. We pay attention to all the ways we hide, slink away, or build up a solid story of breach and betrayal to assuage our feelings. Yet it is only when we give up our insistence on being right that we can begin to be alive and aligned. There is a time to wield Gabriel’s sword and demand justice. And there is a moment when our spiritual training instructs us to surrender instead, to let go, to relinquish our ideas, and to breathe into the unwanted sensations. Much as we would like to simply transcend devastating erotic experience, love tells us that the only way out is through. We cannot transcend painful experiences without going through them, without becoming them. Hafiz says that:
“Love is the funeral pyre Where the heart must lay Its body.”
Marc Gafni Feel free to respond to this blog at info@marcgafni.com.
The Wounds of Love: Part Five – Marc Gafni
July 13, 2008
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On the Wounds of Love: Part Five
All the great traditions of spirit, in their own way, show us that everything is one thing. Everything is one beautiful, radical, unknowable, ungraspable, vast, empty gorgeousness. Nothing, absolutely nothing needs to be rejected. But only a lover is willing to look directly into the eyes of reality, and see things exactly as they are. When we talk about spiritual courage—this is what we mean. When we talk about being a lover—this is what we mean. We do our best to embrace everything exactly as it is—in excruciating, gorgeous detail. We pay attention to all the ways we hide, slink away, or build up a solid story of breach and betrayal to assuage our feelings. Yet it is only when we give up our insistence on being right that we can begin to be alive and aligned. There is a time to wield Gabriel’s sword and demand justice. And there is a moment when our spiritual training instructs us to surrender instead, to let go, to relinquish our ideas, and to breathe into the unwanted sensations. Much as we would like to simply transcend devastating erotic experience, love tells us that the only way out is through. We cannot transcend painful experiences without going through them, without becoming them. Hafiz says that:
“Love is the funeral pyre Where the heart must lay Its body.”
***** How do we walk through the pain of Eros? There are three steps that I have been able to discern in my own pain. They are the three steps to God. And in each step you are already there. The First Step is surrender. The Second Step is to meet your brother and sister in the pain. The Third Step is to meet God in the pain. The First Step Too often we resist pain. But extreme pain insists that we accept it. “Do not imagine,” pain says to us, “that it should be different than this. Forget your ideas of how it should be. Surrender to me. Settle into me. Prostrate yourself in the most deeply humbling way before me.” Let yourself feel the next moment of pain, then breathe another step into surrender. Sometimes we are called to enter so deeply into the interiority of the pain—of erotic betrayal or the loss of a lover—that all our old certainties are completely destroyed. All of our constructs collapse, all of our idealized shrines to love fall apart. At these moments it hurts so much that there are no words to speak about it. The only thing we are able to do is let ourselves into the feeling, to live on the inside of the pain as it shifts and changes and ultimately, with grace, resolves. The Second Step Surrendering so deeply and unconditionally into the pain reveals another radical truth. Everyone is present within it. We are all hurt. In the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of pain, we realize the invisible lines of connection that weave us into an indestructible whole. It is the wholeness itself that has within it the erotic power to transmute and heal pain. Our suffering itself is born of the alienation that derives from the part and partial nature of our persons. Meeting the other in pain, receiving the dignity of another’s story is a movement towards redemption. The mute, silent, and dumb experience of pain is redeemed and embraced through the felt experience of one’s word spoken, heard and received. In the recognition that our pain is part of the larger Pain, something softens and opens with the healing power of Wholeness. In the invitation of Wholeness, we catch a glimmer of the enlightenment born of pain—a radically democratizing enlightenment. by Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Part Six – Marc Gafni
July 13, 2008
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On The Wounds of Love: Part Six
The Second Step Surrendering so deeply and unconditionally into the pain reveals another radical truth. Everyone is present within it. We are all hurt. In the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of pain, we realize the invisible lines of connection that weave us into an indestructible whole. It is the wholeness itself that has within it the erotic power to transmute and heal pain. Our suffering itself is born of the alienation that derives from the part and partial nature of our persons. Meeting the other in pain, receiving the dignity of another’s story is a movement towards redemption. The mute, silent, and dumb experience of pain is redeemed and embraced through the felt experience of one’s word spoken, heard and received. In the recognition that our pain is part of the larger Pain, something softens and opens with the healing power of Wholeness. In the invitation of Wholeness, we catch a glimmer of the enlightenment born of pain—a radically democratizing enlightenment. The Third Step Some things are just bigger than we are. Just as sex compels us beyond ordinary boundaries of self, so Eros in the guise of pain overcomes ego. When the hurt is so large all separative bets are off. When there’s no keeping pain at bay, when it hurts so much that explanations and stories won’t hold, when emotional escape isn’t possible, the dharma gate blows open and realization of all and everything becomes possible. There is no time, no past nor future. There is nothing at all—no hurt and no hurting, no transgression, nor betrayal. Everything is forgiven in the truth of complete surrender. If we are willing to feel into the pain so deeply that we as separate self no longer exist, there we will meet God. There we will be privileged to participate in the pain of the exiled Shekinah, the feminine face of God. In the Buddhist tradition, the divine feminine is called Kuan Yin, or Kanzeon Bodhisattva, hearer of the cries of the world. In Kabbalah, she is the Shekinah, God’s feminine face. We meet Shekinah in our pain. “Love is the funeral pyre where the heart must lay its body.” Here is the embrace of the Shekinah of Eros, the blessing of the divine feminine. She holds us in the deepest core of our being, rocking us, listening to our sobs, even as she caresses our head. Solomon wrote in The Song of Songs, “Her left hand is under my head even as her right hand embraces me.” The Shekinah holds us in our pain, and in pain itself she is present waiting to embrace, comfort and heal. We meet her there. In the comfort of her arms, with the soothing sounds of her voice, we realize that pain is none other than divine compassion herself. “In all of their pain, I am in pain…” cries out the Hebrew mystic Isaiah, and we feel her caress. There is a deep heart within all of us which knows how to hold others in their pain. That deep knowing is our birthright. It is the Shekina who lives in us, yet is only realized when our own overwhelming hurt is transposed into overwhelming compassion. This is what the Hebrew mystics in the Zohar referred to when they spoke of “the Shekinah which is called I.” In our evolved realization, we are, each of us, none other than the unique face of divine compassion herself. So, complete Surrender enfolds us into the feminine face of the divine—the most expansive, compassionate and full lover a being could hope for. Shekinah holds us in infinity. In the redemption of her arms, pain is none other then compassion itself. Most people do not know how to make love because they do not know how to truly open to emotional and physical pleasure. In the same way, most people do not know the felt experience of true compassion because they will not allow themselves to enter so deeply into hurt that pain itself gives way to the sweetness of the Shekina’s embrace. Whenever you truly collapse into your soul’s pain, the pain itself collapses into the infinite goodness of existence itself. This is its mystery. The pain of sexual and romantic heartbreak is an intense and exacting model for how we can engage pain in every facet of being. The sexual models the erotic. In the sexual, whether in her pain or pleasure, all the sacred secrets are held. It is only in opening ourselves to her wisdom that we can resist the temptation to turn secrets sacred into secrets sordid. by Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Part Seven – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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The Wounds of Love: Part Seven
“In all of their pain, I am in pain…” cries out the Hebrew mystic Isaiah, and we feel her caress. There is a deep heart within all of us which knows how to hold others in their pain. That deep knowing is our birthright. It is the Shekina who lives in us, yet is only realized when our own overwhelming hurt is transposed into overwhelming compassion. This is what the Hebrew mystics in the Zohar referred to when they spoke of “the Shekinah which is called I.” In our evolved realization, we are, each of us, none other than the unique face of divine compassion herself. So, complete Surrender enfolds us into the feminine face of the divine—the most expansive, compassionate and full lover a being could hope for. Shekinah holds us in infinity. In the redemption of her arms, pain is none other then compassion itself. Most people do not know how to make love because they do not know how to truly open to emotional and physical pleasure. In the same way, most people do not know the felt experience of true compassion because they will not allow themselves to enter so deeply into hurt that pain itself gives way to the sweetness of the Shekina’s embrace. Whenever you truly collapse into your soul’s pain, the pain itself collapses into the infinite goodness of existence itself. This is its mystery. The pain of sexual and romantic heartbreak is an intense and exacting model for how we can engage pain in every facet of being. The sexual models the erotic. In the sexual, whether in her pain or pleasure, all the sacred secrets are held. It is only in opening ourselves to her wisdom that we can resist the temptation to turn secrets sacred into secrets sordid. ***** As I said at the outset, there was a time when I believed that there was a way out of the pain of Eros. Some people may believe that I didn’t try hard enough; others are correct in ascertaining that I didn’t succeed. But I can tell you that I believe in a version of love that is fulfilled not only through clarity of intentions and shared power, but also through commitment which includes betrayal, through loving gestures which disappoint, and through allowing for the fullness of the other’s expansion and uniquely weird complexity. I am willing now to feel hurt. The deepest hurt for us all is the recognition of having hurt others. Even if unconsciously. We hurt each other and then we do it again. The second most powerful hurt is being betrayed, devastated, and even murdered by those we loved. When the genuine hurt of a broken relationship, the hurt that so often accompanies intimate engagement, is seen by one of the parties through the lens of his or her own untransformed wounds, the hurt can morph into malice. In that malicious spirit, the wounded person inflicts pain on the former lover that is often wildly disproportionate to the pain they may have suffered. When we are not willing to enter into our own pain, we demand reparations in a spiraling escalation of hurt. If we are going to allow pain to take us into love, it is utterly necessary to let go of the drama of our pain. Either our pain will evolve us to the divine or it will devolve us into the depths of hell on earth. We need to see clearly the mistake we so often make imagining that deeply feeling our pain means feeding our story about the pain. Feeding our sense of being wrong. Feeding our feeling of betrayal. Feeding our anger and above all our hurt. Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Part Eight – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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The Wounds of Love: Part Eight
I am willing now to feel hurt. The deepest hurt for us all is the recognition of having hurt others. Even if unconsciously. We hurt each other and then we do it again. The second most powerful hurt is being betrayed, devastated, and even murdered by those we loved. When the genuine hurt of a broken relationship, the hurt that so often accompanies intimate engagement, is seen by one of the parties through the lens of his or her own untransformed wounds, the hurt can morph into malice. In that malicious spirit, the wounded person inflicts pain on the former lover that is often wildly disproportionate to the pain they may have suffered. When we are not willing to enter into our own pain, we demand reparations in a spiraling escalation of hurt. If we are going to allow pain to take us into love, it is utterly necessary to let go of the drama of our pain. Either our pain will evolve us to the divine or it will devolve us into the depths of hell on earth. We need to see clearly the mistake we so often make imagining that deeply feeling our pain means feeding our story about the pain. Feeding our sense of being wrong. Feeding our feeling of betrayal. Feeding our anger and above all our hurt. ***** The paradoxical key to moving towards enlightenment through the door of pain is to retain a deep recognition of the importance of balance. Balance is the ultimate secret, by a thousand different names, of every great mystical tradition the world over. Whether it is Yin and Yang, Anima and Animus, pathos and comedy, wisdom and foolishness, Shekina and her consort Tiferet, Astarte and El, balance as the portal to goodness and love is the spirit that animates all of these pairs. It was Edith Hamilton who reminded us that for the ancient Greeks the ideal of the human being was the idea of utter proportion. It is only a deep felt sense of proportion and balance that can eliminate suffering. An understanding of what is sufficient and what is too much. Even if cannot evolve our pain to our enlightenment, we can at the very least hold the pain honestly without losing our balance. And so, when we look into the pain we suffer in love, it’s important to recognize that there are hierarchies of pain, and that there is a moment to move past our own pain. Here, I am moved to share with you the story of the Hassidic master Naftali of Ropshitz who was called to help the King. You see the King’s son was crying desperately. All of the wise men of the kingdom, the doctors, the psychologists (such as there were at the time), the magicians and Shamans, and all the rest―none of them could comfort him or stop his crying. Indeed, it seemed to always intensify after each failed attempt at healing. Until a wise old simple woman from the hinterland of the Kingdom came to the palace bringing milk. She happened past the boy who was wandering near the kitchen crying, as he was wont to do. Apparently hearing his tears, she approached him not realizing he was the son of the king. She whispered some few words in his ear. Lo and behold, he looked up, looked at her, and his crying little by little began to abate. Until, after a few minutes, he is not crying at all. The End. “The end!” said the Hassidim. “Please, holy master,” pleaded the disciples to their teacher, to the Ropshitzer Rebbe, “You must tell us; what magic, what amulet, what secret did the old wise woman―who we know must have been the Shekinah herself―what did she say?” The rebbe smiled. It was very simple, he said. She told the boy, “You must not cry more than it hurts.” Sometimes we hurt someone in a relatively small way and they respond with a cruelty and vengeance that we never imagined existed in their heart. I am always surprised by malice. I am devastated and on my knees for any pain which I have ever caused others. I am shattered by allowing others to hurt me. I am devastated to my core at having hurt others by participating in creating a situation in which others would have to bear the pain of their own great untruth. And all of us must not cry more than it hurts. If we learn to live wide open, even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness, even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy. I turn to Rabia, the great Indian mystic, Shekinah incarnate, to guide us home.
“My Body is covered with wounds this world made But I still long to kiss her, even when God said Could you also kiss the hand that caused each scar for you will not find me until you do.”
Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Two – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Two
About a week ago, I posted the first in a series of about a hundred posts on Eros and Holiness. The feedback was large and wonderful and very much appreciated. Part of the feedback was “bite-sized” Gafni; these are blog posts―not long essays. Okay―thanks for the feedback. So, while I will not repost the framing introduction to this material, which you can find on Blog Post Six, I will start again with the actual material and post in smaller segments with more explanation. Does that work? When I first wrote these words―the very first draft―I knew a lot about the joy of Eros, and not enough about the pain of Eros. I knew of feminine beauty, but not enough about feminine shadow. I unconsciously made the equation that many people in the progressive and New Age world make: the feminine = the spiritual. This is, of course, a false equation. Both feminine and masculine are filled with both light and shadow. While we fully recognize masculine shadow, we are in dangerous denial of feminine shadow. This has many implications in our contemporary understanding of sexuality, power, spirituality, and the relationship between the feminine and masculine in numerous spheres of both personal and public life. I have thought a lot about the different natures and tripwires of masculine and feminine shadow in the last two years, and will share with you a new understanding of all this over the coming months. I remain a fierce lover of the Shekinah even as I understand her and accept her in ways I never did. I owe great thanks to a group of powerful women; the kind of people that Naomi Wolf once referred to as Power Feminists―leading female spiritual teachers, feminist activists, writers, theorists, and simply great women who have held a container for me in these last two years. With some of them, I am now writing in partnership, and I pray that the fruit of our collaboration might make some small contribution to the evolution of love in our time. I have incorporated the understandings of the last two years into many of the upcoming blog posts. Much love to every one of you who is reading. I love every one of you more than you can know! The posts below begin to speak to ‘What is Eros?’ When I use the word Eros, I do not refer to the sexual. Rather to something much deeper, wider, and more powerful. On the relationship between the sexual and the erotic, please see later posts. Introduction The Shechina is the sensual feminine God force that suffuses reality and knows our name. To be a Kabbalist is to participate in the pain of the Shechina. To feel Her hurt. For Her hurt is our hurt. But that is only the first step. The great ambition of the spirit is to heal Her pain, to fill Her up with joy, ecstasy and meaning. To repair our broken world. To heal Her wound. For She is us. Shechina in the original Hebrew means “indwelling Presence.” She evokes the experience of fullness, presence, interconnectivity, and yearning. The Greeks called this experience ‘the erotic’ after the god Eros. Eros and Shechina are different expressions of the same core experience. One cannot define Shechina and Eros. To define Shechina is to kill her. Definitions are non-erotic. Shechina is evoked, intuited, felt, and experienced. And yet the mind needs maps and signposts. So, later in our journey (in chapter two), we will unfold together the four faces of Eros. But to begin, we seek rather to arouse her presence. The opposite of Eros and Shechina is void. Our lives are overflowing with the Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it hurts so much you can barely move. Usually, it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We rush around, doing everything we can to fill the absence. We even have a handy word for this rushing about: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A–void–dance. A dance around the void. We develop the most elaborate maneuverings you can imagine―never realizing that it is all a-void–dance. That if we could but taste fullness for a moment, the empty dances of addiction, power, violence, and abusive sex(3) would be transformed into the erotic dance of Being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, with the Shechina. The dance in which we all have a place. This sacred conversation is about sharing that dance with you. Marc Gafni Please feel free to send comments to info@marcgafni.com.
Eros and Holiness: Part Three – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Three
The Great Dancer
The truly great dancer―like all lovers―flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right, so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so, she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul, which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila―forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity, and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah―fullness―used in the biblical myth texts to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman. Mehol, Hallul, Hallal = Dance, Empty, Full. The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and Eros, absence and Shechina. Modern day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra, and it is marketed to us in a million packages. Fill the emptiness―in any way at any price. We are desperate. We are so pained by our emptiness that we can hardly distinguish between our desires. The natural result is that we fill up with much that is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment―full-fill-ment―in all the wrong places.
Pseudo-Eros
The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being―the fullness of ourselves in every moment―we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time, to resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of the dance. The movement between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”We live in an age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification―a quick fix: a book, a drug, a relationship, a job―anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. With a book, we read a few pages and if we don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo-eros, we move on to the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole that might fill up the yawning abyss we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide. On the outside, our mad dashing about may look like dance―but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an airtight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside, however, there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos-filled scramble for some snatches of authenticity in between the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Four – Marc Gafni
July 15, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Four
Erotic Living
The Dancing MasterThere is a wonderful story of Eros and love that hints at many of the truths we will unpack in our journey together. It is about walking through the void and dancing with the Shechina. Every time we walk through and not around the void, we come out stronger.
Reports had reached the young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of kung fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet, converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this master of kung fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit.Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of kung fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The master of kung fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue-black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your Highness,” he began, “Have no worries, I wouldn’t think of doing you harm.” “Well, when you do want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “what kind of harm can you do?” “Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear.” The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may proceed,” he told the Master of kung fu. “Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If I had done it in slow motion, extremely slow motion, you would have seen how each touch of my hand would have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.” “Impressive. But I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama. “Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.” “Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king. “Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.” “If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master.” The Dancing Master entered. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of kung fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge. The Master of kung fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year when I finally caught him on the ear and destroyed him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire.” The two opponents faced off. The Master of kung fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack. The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his body. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. His fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows. The Master of kung fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time. The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of kung fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He was intoxicated by the aroma of the butter melting in the Dalai Lama’s fragrant tea. A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch. His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life. The Master of kung fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong.
What a holy tale of Eros. The darts and lunges of emptiness and violence become the erotic rhythms, soarings of fullness and love. Eros, as the story unfolds so gently, is not sex. Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Five – Marc Gafni
July 17, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Five
Because our society has so lost touch with the erotic, we identify it with the sexual. But Eros is so much more. To dance with the Shechina is to live and love erotically in all the arenas of our lives―beyond the merely sexual. Eros is to live the life of a lover in every room of our being. That is what it means to be holy. Eros is to open your eyes and see for the first time the full beauty and gorgeousness of a friend. To be fully present to what is. It is to smell the richness of aroma, and to feel the fullness of throbbing desire, to taste the erotic Shechina experience that connects you with every being. It is to feel the palpable love which dissolves the walls of ego, anger and anxiety. When we are unable to live in Eros we become very frightened of the emptiness. The void either numbs us to the joy of living or we try and fill the void with the manifold forms of pseudo-Eros. We fill it with anger, competition, fanaticism, and excessive consumption of all kinds. The result, on a personal level, is either depression or an underlying deadness of spirit, which we hide under the facades of success. On a global level, the result is terrible wars that we fight to validate the superiority of our religions, to affirm our national pride, or to protect our economic power. At the same time, we rape the environment, forcing it to produce the glut of goods which we desperately require to provide us with more and more hits of pseudo-Eros. Spirit does not tolerate a vacuum. The inability to dance through the void always results in pathology. In the case of the kung fu master, pseudo-Eros manifested as raging ego, aggression and even violence. If we do not choose Eros, then pseudo-Eros will always choose us. The consequence is always great pain, personal, social, and cosmic. For anything less than Eros will almost assuredly destroy our planet. We abuse each other personally. Nations mass murder other nations. A lover demonizes her sexual, romantic or heart partner. She is devastated that she was not the only one. Feminine Shadow. S/he forgets that to love is not to own. Even when there was no such promise or even its opposite. Lovers who demonize the former beloved friend refuse to recognize that they are scarring the face of God―within themselves. A man makes contracts with the feminine, not realizing that, even if she agrees, those contracts may not serve her highest good. A man has too many lovers, failing to realize that boundaries might be a higher gift than boundless Eros, even when expressed in genuine moments of love, love-making, and sexual play. All of these are forms of pseudo-eros. None of them are Eros. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Seven – Marc Gafni
July 17, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Six
The Path of Love
One cannot be told that life is worthwhile; one must experience the erotic love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity, and worth of their lives. It is, however, this very erotic sense that is so essential in making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second-hand consumers of second-hand joy―never touching love or Eros directly. And when love fails, there truly is nothing left to live for. For love―not the narrow romantic expressions of it, but erotic love in all areas of our existence―is the core of life itself. We are confronted, personally and globally, with a stark choice: Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury but an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half century, modern psychology has documented an age-old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So, too, our world, personal and global, even with all the resources, intelligence, and technology at our disposal, will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love. Life is a choice. What is the rhythm of our dance? Are we dancing masters or bottled bees? Who are our dancing partners― desperation and emptiness or Eros and Shechina? Are we lovers in all facets of our lives or are we apathetic, deadened, and indifferent? Are we sources of safety and caring or are we abusers and manipulators? Are we spreading wisdom and love or are we inflictors of emotional, spiritual and even physical pain on those closest to us? Bees in bottles always sting. But everyone knows that to sting is to die. The only way to not sting is to learn to be a dancing master. The great mystery tradition of Hebrew wisdom is about a radical and profound path towards becoming just such a dancing master. The ancient temple in Jerusalem was the center of a society where the Hebrew mysteries were practiced and taught. At the core of the temple mysteries lies an ancient set of radical understandings about sex, love, and eros. In the deep yet provocative temple mysteries, we are taught that sex is not eros. But, as we shall see, in the esoteric temple mystery, sex models for us what it might look like to live erotically in all of the non-sexual dimensions of our lives. The temple mysteries are a unique Tantra, opening us to the possibility of becoming great lovers in all of the arenas of our lives. The Hebrew mysteries gently but powerfully chart a path, which, if we but have the courage to walk it, will teach us how to live erotically in every facet of existence. We live in an age when ancient wisdoms long relegated to the dustbins of the spirit are being reclaimed. The Zohar, magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, teaches that our era is the one in which the “Gates of Wisdom will be opened.” We live at the dawn of a new age in which for the first time―after several aeons of intense spiritual evolution―we have the vessels to hold the light of the ancient secrets. The mystics suggest we may well be able to hold the light more deeply than even the ancients for whom the wisdom was initially intended. It is only now, after law, science, and ethics have been integrated into our psyches, that we can go back and reclaim Eros, Shechina and enchantment. Marc Gafni
Eros and Holiness: Part Eight: Dance Me to the End of Love – Marc Gafni
July 17, 2008
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Eros and Holiness: Part Seven
Dance Me to the End of Love
Life is a choice. You can remain a bee trapped in a bottle and everyone―except yourself―will be convinced you are dancing. Or you can choose to be a dancing master. To dance yourself into your book of life. To be an erotic lover in every facet of your existence. A wonderful mantra from the biblical love book, the Song of Songs, reads, “I am love sick on my bed at night,” explains 19th century mystical master Nachum of Chernobyl, “I have fallen on my bed because my loving has become sick.” When being a great lover is limited to sexual performance, and wild erotic stories connote anonymous orgies, then love has become sick and we fall on our beds into the depths of emptiness and depression. The dance of Eros is to teach you how to be a great lover not only in the sexual but in all the dimensions of your life. That is the radical invitation issued by this book of Hebrew wisdom. You need not have studied mysticism or biblical myth before reading this tract. This is a book written for all seekers of transformation. This book is for you if you are not sated by pop culture and seek a passionate, joyful, yet deeply grounded and serious exploration of the mysteries as your guide. I am a biblical mystic. I have studied, taught, and tried to live the sacred texts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, nestled in the hills, of the Galilee in Israel, Oxford University in England, and in exile in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Aramaic and Hebrew mystery texts have been my guides and friends for many years. Of course, like every mystic who engages sacred text, I hear the text in accordance with the inner melody of my soul. I now share this song with you in the form of this book. You are invited to find the place in your soul where you can receive and integrate this ancient wisdom into your own song. The invitation and the challenge of the spirit in our generation is to create a politics of Eros and love. That can only begin to happen when each person in the polis takes responsibility for the erotic quality of his or her life. We need to, and we can, realign our souls with the fountain of being. We can connect to the vital currents of loving energy that course though our universe. We can decide to enter the flow, and from that place on the inside we can transform first our lives, and ultimately, our world. The mystery begins in the inner precincts of Solomon’s sacred temple in Jerusalem, unraveling the deep, wondrous and provocative relationship between sex, eros and love. It is the unpacking of this first stage of the mysteries that we devote the first three framing chapters. Emerging from the Hebrew mystery tradition, the following ten chapters each lay out a unique path of Hebrew Tantra. Each path will offer you a compelling spirit map for living erotically in every facet of your being. Shared by Marc Gafni
Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni: Part Eight
July 19, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com When my life was devastated with personal tragedy two years ago, I made a commitment―together with a close friend―not to “do anything.” I wished, as much as possible, to move from doing to being, from the ‘masculine’ mode to the ‘feminine’ mode. Not that one is higher or better, but because the taste for intense activity which had guided my life had become bitter. The universe had shattered me into being. So, the commitment was that I would not initiate contact for 18 months with anyone whom the Kosmos did not in some way invite me to contact. I would not initiate relationships. Only to those people with whom I had some sudden, new, and intense contact during the time immediately before the trauma would I reach out. My heart told me that these were the people who had been sent by the universe as my friends and guides. And that is how it was. The Persian poet Hafiz guided me in that and in many other moments on this journey.
What is the difference Between your experience of existence And that of a saintThe Saint knows That the Spiritual path Is a sublime chess game with God And that the Beloved Has just made such a Fantastic Move That the saint is now continually Tripping over Joy And bursting out in Laughter And saying, “I surrender!” Whereas, my dear, I am afraid you still think You have a thousand serious moves. posted by Marc Gafni
Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni: Part Nine
July 19, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com There were times, and not a few, when I felt thrown out of all places. One Friday evening in Salt Lake, I went with my friend Dalit and her two children to eat at the home of a Jewish family. We had eaten there several times before. It was not a place in which I had a close connection or relationship. It was more of an open house, a Friday evening event, that I went to in order to give Dalit’s kids an experience of community and Shabbat. The host called me over in the midst of the meal and said, “Take a walk with me outside.” “Sure,” I replied. We walked. He was silent. Then he said, “You cannot come back. One of our guests has read on a blog that you are a ‘confessed child molester.’ I know that this is malicious nonsense. We have discussed this before. I tried to explain to her that this was nonsense. But she would not listen. You may never come back to our house.” I could not quite believe my ears. As I walked back into the house, it was clear that everyone present knew that this conversation was taking place. They all averted their eyes. I had never known the experience of the leper. The falsely accused. The contaminated one. At that moment people’s eyes bore into my back as if I was―God forbid―a rapist or a child molester. And my heart broke for all who are wrongly rejected and detested by a society filled with fear. I felt the pain of the falsely accused, of all those who die in prison―innocent, with no one to hear their pleas. I felt the pain also of those who are rightly rejected because they present a genuine danger. For, had we grown up in the brutality of their lives, who knows how our souls might have been formed? The pain was so intense that I fell on my bed unable to move for most of the night. But then, slowly, something shifted. A quiet yet unmistakable joy began to fill me. The image that filled my heart was that of the Hassidic masters who wandered the back roads of Europe. Often―unrecognized―they would be thrown out of all places of culture and learned society. In being rejected and thrown out, they were (according to their own testimonies) able to redeem the sparks of the Shekinah in exile. The Hassidic master was the servant of the sacred feminine. He liberated her by being thrown out of the company of good men just as she was thrown out of masculine culture and society, driven as it was by greed, ignorance, and fear. I began to understand that here I was, wandering the back roads of Utah, invited to be―as I always was―in the tradition of the great rebbes whom I love and revere. But not merely in the public and obviously delicious ways that I had been allowed to serve before―at prayer service, giving talks on wisdom, and receiving and loving people, but also in the hidden and more brutal byways of life. I was being invited, in fact, demanded by God to redeem the sparks of the sacred feminine, in myself, in relationship, in Torah, and in culture. And as morning rolled into afternoon, I began to dance. Slowly at first, but gradually building into a sweet ecstasy the like of which I had never known. That Sunday I had occasion to speak to a beloved friend, Brother David Steindl–Rast. I told him the story of that Sabbath. He introduced me to a story about St. Francis of Assisi called Perfect Joy. A beautiful gift from a gorgeous man. And then when I felt thrown out of all places, St. Francis picked up my shattered heart and guided me to joy. Not always, but sometimes, and that was enough. Perfect joy according to Saint Francis of Assisi: How Saint Francis, walking one day with brother Leo, explained to him which things are perfect joy.One day in winter, as Saint Francis was going with Brother Leo from Perugia to Saint Mary of the Angels, and was suffering greatly from the cold, he called to Brother Leo, who was walking on before him, and said to him: “Brother Leo, if it were to please God that the Friars Minor should give, in all lands, a great example of holiness and edification, write down, and note carefully, that this would not be perfect joy.” A little further on, Saint Francis called to him a second time: “O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor were to make the lame to walk, if they should make straight the crooked, chase away demons, give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and, what is even a far greater work, if they should raise the dead after four days, write that this would not be perfect joy.” Shortly after, he cried out again: “O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor knew all languages; if they were versed in all science; if they could explain all Scripture; if they had the gift of prophecy, and could reveal, not only all future things, but likewise the secrets of all consciences and all souls, write that this would not be perfect joy.” After proceeding a few steps farther, he cried out again with a loud voice: “O Brother Leo, thou little lamb of God! If the Friars Minor could speak with the tongues of angels; if they could explain the course of the stars; if they knew the virtues of all plants; if all the treasures of the earth were revealed to them; if they were acquainted with the various qualities of all birds, of all fish, of all animals, of men, of trees, of stones, of roots, and of waters―write that this would not be perfect joy.” Shortly after, he cried out again: “O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor had the gift of preaching so as to convert all infidels to the faith of Christ, write that this would not be perfect joy.” Now when this manner of discourse had lasted for the space of two miles, Brother Leo wondered much within himself; and, questioning the saint, he said: “Father, I pray thee teach me wherein is perfect joy.” Saint Francis answered: “If, when we shall arrive at Saint Mary of the Angels, all drenched with rain and trembling with cold, all covered with mud and exhausted from hunger; if, when we knock at the convent gate, the porter should come angrily and ask us who we are; if, after we have told him, “We are two of the brethren,” he should answer angrily, “What ye say is not the truth; ye are but two impostors going about to deceive the world, and take away the alms of the poor; begone I say;” if then he should refuse to open to us, and leave us outside, exposed to the snow and rain, suffering from cold and hunger till nightfall―then, if we accept such injustice, such cruelty and such contempt with patience, without being ruffled and without murmuring, believing with humility and charity that the porter really knows us, and that it is God who maketh him to speak thus against us, write down, O Brother Leo, that this is perfect joy. And if we knock again, and the porter should come out in anger to drive us away with oaths and blows, as if we were vile impostors, saying, “Begone, miserable robbers! To the hospital, for here you shall neither eat nor sleep!” And if we accept all this with patience, with joy, and with charity, O Brother Leo, write that this indeed is perfect joy. And if, urged by cold and hunger, we knock again, calling to the porter and entreating him with many tears to open to us and give us shelter, for the love of God, and if he should come out more angry than before, exclaiming, “These are but importunate rascals, I will deal with them as they deserve;” and taking a knotted stick, he seizes us by the hood, throwing us on the ground, rolling us in the snow, and shall beat and wound us with the knots in the stick―if we bear all these injuries with patience and joy, thinking of the sufferings of our Blessed Lord, which we would share out of love for him, write, O Brother Leo, that here, finally, is perfect joy. And now, brother, listen to the conclusion. Above all the graces and all the gifts of the Holy Spirit which Christ grants to his friends, is the grace of overcoming oneself, and accepting willingly, out of love for Christ, all suffering, injury, discomfort and contempt; for in all other gifts of God we cannot glory, seeing they proceed not from ourselves but from God, according to the words of the Apostle, “What hast thou that thou hast not received from God? And if thou hast received it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?” But in the cross of tribulation and affliction we may glory, because, as the Apostle says again, “I will not glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Amen. Marc Gafni
The Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni: Part Ten
July 19, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com As I move forward, dear friends, I’d like to share a few final reflections about the last two years and the explosion that led up to it. For the past two years, I have not been able to go more than a short time without being overwhelmed by sharp pangs of pain, suffused with tears. I feel devastated anew each day by the radical and complete nature of certain betrayals. There is something so terrible and devastating about being betrayed by close friends; words cannot hold the immensity of the pain. One can, of course, only be betrayed by people one is certain could never betray one. It is only Judas, the most trusted and beloved of Jesus’ friends, who can betray him. Betrayal is intimately bound up with love and trust. Yet, paradoxically enough, it may be that we can be reborn only after having been betrayed. Perhaps it is only when all the cords we have attached to others are fully disentangled―when our mothers and fathers have abandoned us―that God can gather us up. I never had any idea that, even in the worst of circumstances, anyone could act as some people apparently did. I did not protect myself against them because I could not imagine that they would try to hurt me. I held my private life privately for fear it might be distorted, but never dreamed that the distortion might mean a shattering of a magnitude even vaguely similar to what took place. No part of me expected anything like what happened. Each time I think of it, a part of my heart is wounded, pierced, and stabbed anew. I experienced my death at the hands of those I loved a thousand times in my dreams, in the hallucinations of my waking hours, and in the indelibility of traumatized memory. Through all of it, but one prayer remained on my lips: God―do not take away my ability to love. God―do not make me bitter. Allow me to die into your arms and be reborn in your bosom, to do your will in love, in any and every way in which you command me. T.S. Eliot held my both my heart and my hand.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (East Coker, part III):I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth. You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.
Reading Psalms and the Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni
July 20, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com For me the way through the hardest of times of the last two years came from the book of Psalms. I tried meditation, taking refuge in the Buddha, as my colleague Genpo Roshi suggested. This was my path from May until July or August of 2006. I prayed. I had never been one for prayer. Mostly, because I loved to pray so much that when I would start I would so often fall into a kind of rapture that was hard for me to resist. So I denied myself―all too often―the gorgeous luxury of prayer. My feeling was that my life―in every waking and dreaming moment―was prayer. But at this time I began to pray again. But more than anything, I read psalms. By myself, in my apartment at night before I went to sleep, and when I could not sleep. With Dalit. And by myself again. I would read with tears streaming down my face, my heart screaming at the pain, at the injustice and betrayal even as I yearned for wholeness and embrace. To embrace every living thing. To embrace those who hurt me. To re-read the scripts where I had hurt my friends or let my students and supporters down through my naivete, mis-judgement or ambition. Who better then David understood Betrayal. Who better then David knew how to protest injustice even as he owned everything as being somehow a result of his own lack of wholeness. Who better then David knew how to reject the new age aphorisms of radical responsibility, rooted as they are in the denial of mystery and cleverly disguised hubris. Who better then David knew how to reject the easy platitudes of victimology and to claim his part in contribution system which created the palaces of his pain. David was my friend guiding me, confirming my own deepest held intuitions, holding me, giving me courage and audacity and gathering the torn shards of my shaterred heart. God in the second person. King David, in the subtle passages of power and complexity, agony and ecstasy, that make up Psalms understood me. More then anyone else I felt connected, loved, and understood by the energy of King David. He held me, gathered up my tears, and confirmed my very being. It was in David that I found the paradox of anger, outrage, and political perception brought together with broken heart, radical responsibility, grace, and hope. Reading Tehillim psalms almost every night in torrents of tears kept me alive and sane. ******** Slowly and gradually, the processes that I have engaged, the spiritual practices which guide my days, beautiful friends, and the gift of grace, have transmuted this pain. Slowly and gradually, I am emerging from a tunnel of such utter blackness and despair that I find it difficult to share or describe. Slowly and gradually, what initially looked like radical darkness is beginning to show faint glimmerings of light. What initially seemed to be utter slavery now reveals slivers of liberation and freedom. What was at first, for months on end, the most constricting and narrow of places is beginning to open, and I, once again but in a whole different way, begin to walk in the wide places. My soul yearns for the wide places. My life was for many years marked by victory after victory. The pleasure of accomplishment, loving, creativity, and manifestation were my chief joys. Surging forward in imitation of the divine explosion of creativity was the nobility which I sought to incarnate in the service of the divine. Then, in one fell swoop, my life was defeated. The only possible direction was inwards. A movement of radical contraction and recoil. Tzimtzum, in which all that I was holding needed to be let go. I was defeated by life. Yes Yes Yes became No No No. And in this defeat was the seed of new joy. I have been defeated by life and feel reborn in the very ashes of defeat. A man whose psychological work has been one of the touchstones on this journey, sent me a poem by Rilke sometime after I completed his “process.” Rilke has walked me through, and I am grateful. I have become the witness.
The Man WatchingI can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes that a storm is coming, and I hear the far-off fields say things I can’t bear without a friend, I can’t love without a sister. The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age: the landscape, like a line in the psalm book, is seriousness and weight and eternity. What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great! If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names. When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: when the wrestlers’ sinews grew long like metal strings, he felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music. Whoever was beaten by this Angel (who often simply declined the fight) went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand, that kneaded him as if to change his shape. Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings. posted by marc gafni
The Wounds of Love: A two year journey of pain, love and liberation: Marc Gafni
July 20, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com What I Have Done During the Past Two Years When a tragedy takes place, we seek to understand it. It is in understanding that we find some measure of comfort and safety. If we understand what happened, we can potentially avoid the tragedy next time around. If we understand the tragedy, we can extract meaning from the chaos, and depth and direction from what seems at first glance to be senseless carnage. We humans are condemned to the glory and pathos of meaning. Some two years ago a terrible tragedy took place in my life. A movement of teaching and spirit, which I had initiated in Israel, suddenly ended. The cause of the ending: complaints of sexual harassment, which were publicized in the Israeli media and the blogosphere. I first heard of the complaints when I stepped off an international flight into what can only be described as a cruelly orchestrated ambush. Thinking I was going to be picked up at the airport by my girlfriend, whom I loved and intended to marry, I was confronted instead by the report that complaints of sexual harassment had been filed by two people whom I knew well, and by a third person I had known some ten year earlier. I had no doubt that the complaints were false. And maybe they were never filed at all. I do know know and may never know what really happened or who said or did what. It has been blurred through the distorting prisms of press, egoic posturing, and fear. What is true? I had not sexually harassed anyone. I had not made any false promises of marriage or anything similar. I had not used my authority as an employer to explicitly, or in any implicit way, engage anyone sexually or gain sexual favors. It took months for me to discover, with the help of several friends who had been present, what had actually happened. Only slowly did I begin to understand who had initiated the process, who had encouraged it, and what persons came together to create the volatile combination that in one fell swoop ended almost a decade of virtually non-stop investment of heart love and life energy―effort of the kind necessary to create the movement. On that night and the weeks following, all was a blur of pain and tears. In a desire to stop the madness, I wrote a letter taking the responsibility for any and all sickness that had appeared in the system that I created upon myself. In the twenty-four months following, I engaged in three activities. First, a grief so intense and a pain so sharp that I will not attempt to describe it here overwhelmed me. Second, I looked carefully into the all-important question of Why. Why did this happen? What was it in me that allowed it to occur? How were my relationships flawed? I placed particular emphasis on finding out my own part in the contribution system that led to these events. Because of the l issues involved, I could have no direct contact with the parties themselves. So the weight of my process was an internal one. Part of this process was in formal settings, and part was in private spiritual practice with spiritual friends and teachers. Third, together with a group of friends and supporters, I gathered a team of professionals to bring together the necessary material to establish that the complaints reported in the media were categorically false. This process required almost 18 months of time and was fully successful. Now that this material is available, I prefer never to deploy it but rather to engage from a place of open heart in a healing process with the parties involved. Or as is sadly more likely to simply move on with my life and silently support everyone else in moving on with their lives. Unless absolutely necessary, I cannot see how reopening these issues would serve. If there is no choice, I will engage it, however, if we can avoid it and simply get on with constructive living and service, that seems immensely preferable for all concerned. These three processes have now ended. My energy and strength have slowly returned, thank God. I am now beginning a fourth process: To put on paper the teachings which have burned their way into my heart in the long days and longer nights of these past two years. The intensity of the pain took me to places I never dreamed possible. Let me state clearly at the outset that none of the teachings will mention specific people either directly or indirectly. Rather the teachings are about the broader and deeper issues that have emerged and clarified for me. Perspectives One of the key areas that became clear to me was that in any drama there are at least several different perspectives from which the events can be viewed. In Hebrew wisdom, we are fond of saying ‘Shivim Panim LeTorah.’ In my translation, which I will not elaborate on here, that means something like ‘Seventy Faces of Enlightenment.’ This means that if one can look at the same story in seventy different ways, fully inhabiting seventy different perspectives on the story, then one has moved an important step towards enlightened consciousness. The pivoting point that moves us from ego-centered personal consciousness to divine-centered enlightened consciousness is the ability to move with maximal fluidity between perspectives. The deep definition of idolatry in Hebrew wisdom is being locked in one particular value or view. In this story one can take many different perspectives. Holding all of the perspectives together begins to shed light on what happened. It begins to allow the full grace of the story to emerge in all of its meaning and magnificence. Becoming locked in only one perspective, on the other hand, darkens vision and usually leads to profoundly distorted and unethical actions in the world. In one of the books that I am currently preparing, I try to retell the story in ten different ways, each time from a radically different perspective. Each time the reader senses that he or she has grasped the story, the perspective shifts again. At the entrance to the Garden of Eden there is, according to tradition, a revolving sword of fire. The sword, which draws sharp distinctions and establishes right and wrong, is the archetype of the firmly entrenched perspective. In order for one to be able to enter the Garden, the sword of fire needs to be continually revolving: in short, constantly shifting perspectives are the entry ticket to the Edenic consciousness of enlightenment. In truth, this story is really just like every other significant and complex life story. By understanding the twenty-one possible perspectives, one may potentially obtain the twenty-one keys to enlightenment. You will notice that different systems and different people tend to focus on different perspectives, each one giving priority to a different view. A more enlightened view would be to hold all the perspectives together and to let a nuanced and compassionate view emerge from the integration. What is critical to note at the outset, however, is that not all perspectives are equal. There is clearly a hierarchy of perspectives. In some situations, for example, seventy five percent or more of the story is best explained from the injustice perspective. However, if one adopts only that perspective, one remains a victim. It is only in developing the other perspectives, through which one may have more power and influence, that one can begin to move from being a victim to a responsible player. While I will not list the perspectives here, I do discuss them briefly in my Dialogue with Dr. Cindy Golen and Sally Kempton, which is found in the Dialogues section of this site. Apologies That We All Might Owe Each Other Guided by a group of four spiritual friends who are all significant teachers in their own right, I have written letters of apology where appropriate and possible to anyone I feel I might have hurt in the course of my life. If I have not written you and you feel I should have, please contact me and we can discuss the matter. Anyone who feels that they might owe me such an apology is welcome to write me as well. There are some people with whom I would have liked to be in contact, however, once complaints were filed I was proscribed from making any contact with them. Guided by the best spiritual, psychological, and legal advice available, I have decided that it is time to move on. I have treated the events of the last two years as a death. I have engaged in full life review. I have engaged in a significant and serious process of internal reflection. I have lived in the pain and the regret daily. As well as in the joy, the gratitude, and the grace. My heart is open once again. I have made a commitment to more conventional boundaries. I have also made a commitment to transparency where appropriate about my personal life. Torah is flowing in my soul. Texts and chants burst from my being. I am filled with great love and desire to help people, to share the torah of liberation and grace with whoever wants to learn. I am filled with a burning desire to work with a group of friends in developing a new movement of social activism and political engagement, which will address three major issues. I will share in this regard at the appropriate time. I have pages and libraries of books welling up in me pleading to be put on the page. And Torah to share that dances in my heart. marc gafni
On Being a Spiritual Teacher or Spiritual Artist; On Changing my Name and the Hate Blogs of History: Part Two: Marc Gafni
July 21, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Truth be told, being a spiritual teacher or a spiritual artist in a particularly direct and open way is not at all easy. Your job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Depth is too easily dismissed as facile charisma. Primal jealousy breeds malice. And radical love and open heart will always be translated by some in ways that it is not intended. I have been teaching my whole life. The overwhelming relationship I have had with thousands of people has been wondrous, life affirming, profoundly loving, and beautiful. What a privilege for which I am grateful with every fiber of my being. And from the beginning of my path there were always a small group of people who responded negatively. Everything I did they interpreted negatively, through small eyes and small heart. And I am sure that parts of me which were not whole, which were distorted or not yet evolved or just plan off, served as a hook for their projections and critiques. I am a work in progress and I hope that I am evolving, refining, deepening, correcting, doing Teshuvah, returning to my most aligned self, every moment of every day. But the driving force was always a kind of primal malice. I am thankful to psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Berke who in personal conversation and in his published work helped me understand this dynamic in a far deeper way then I ever had. There were always more primal forces at play in these interactions then anyone would admit. Since malice can never truly be owned by the uninitiated, it goes by many more noble names. In the name of righteousness, nationalism, protecting women, perfecting society, all manner of evil is loosed in the world. There was, in the case of some teachers and colleagues and very occasionally in certain students, sometimes a sense that we were being nourished from the same soul root and somehow they felt that my nourishment was both undeserved and even worse, at their expense. The Veneer of civilization is very thin. When one is driven by primal malice, which one has no way of owning, one will say and do almost anything. Strangely the bearers of such malice are driven by a similar energy to the hate blogs. The difference is that the bearers of malice hide behind the veneer of respectability. However behind the scenes they work directly with the hate blogs in order to get the hate blogs to do there work for them. Some respectable folks have tried {unsuccessfully} to intimidate supporters and friends of mine by linking there names to hate blogs. Others have called up those who ran hate blogs, told them unspeakable lies, and then slunk back into the world of respectability, waiting for word that their hired character assassins, the suicide bombers of the Jewish community, aimed at the community itself, had done their dastardly deed. Let me share with you a few of the canards of the hate blogs just so you get a sense of the whole thing. 1) rumor has it that Gafni joined the sadomasochistic community in Salt Lake. 2) Rumor has it Gafni is now attracted to prepubescent children 3) Gafni is now going under the name Marc Israel 4) Gafni changed his name from Winiarz to Gafni “in order to hide his identity”. (The truth, by the way, is that Gafni hebraicized his name from Winiarz to Gafni, when he moved to Israel, like thousands of others have done – remember Barry who became Barrack – and that both names are mentioned on the author page of his book Soul Prints and in his other books as well as being mentioned in countless speeches and talks – not a great way to hide your identity – but then again truth or logic has nothing to do with the logic of hate blogs). 5) Gafni is dangerous to little boys and girls 6) Gafni is a confessed child molester or a confessed rapist Now while all of these canards come apparently from one particular source on the web, a source that once said on National Television that there is a national Jewish Satanic cult that murders babies, none the less, they are picked up by a web of like minded blogs and repeated without question. For the Jewish people throughout time to respond to the hate blogs of history by saying that these accusations are not true is to give them too much dignity. What are the Jews supposed to say…”No, we are not devils. No we do not molest and kill Christian children and suck their blood.” At a certain point, in a magnificent play of karma, the hate blogs, together with three or four other factors, created the hermeneutic prism which allowed natural mistakes which I made to be demonized, distorted, false claims to be reported or distorted in the press, and for all of this to coalesce in an absurdly serious sexual hysteria whose result was my spiritual murder. The great news however is that there is a lot to be said for being dead for two years. It is only in such radical pain and death that certain gifts can be received and life can be reborn. But that is all too intimate a conversation for now, so let us return to it at a another time if you will…. Back to our topic: How does one respond to the absurdity of hate blogs? If at all… This question comes up again and again in history. It’s most recent incarnation, as I have said above revolves around the Internet. On of the unacknowledged shadows of the Internet is the proliferation of hate speech. People hiding behind anonymity or the impersonal nature of blogging, have re-introduced the old and worn bigotry of hate speech, back into the center of culture. A blogger can say anything about anyone – For example, a website might say clearly or imply that Bill Clinton killed Vince Forster, his friend and staff member. Another blogger might repeat neo-Nazi canards about the “Jews sucking the blood of the world”. A third blogger might say as we have noted “Rabbi Gafni is attracted to pre-pubescent boys, a child molester, a confessed rapist or whatever sick fantasy the webmaster or mistress may have dreamed up or allowed to be published that day. In fact blogs of these last two natures not surprisingly link to each other. The hate blogs, which attack persons in the way I just described, are often linked to neo-Nazi and other hate sites. Not surprising at all. The core energy is the same. It involves latching on to natural characteristics of others, blowing them out of proportion and then demonizing them as the incarnation of abuse and evil. All of these are real examples of hate speech. Not rooted in the world of rational decency or fact, they cannot be responded to as such. For a host of reasons it is virtually impossible to file suit effectively for Internet libel. So what to do. 1) To ignore it. Definitely the best route. I have a friend who is a well-known spiritual teacher who was attacked with severe claims of abuse for many years. He is a tough teacher who calls people on their shadow and is, I am sure, imperfect himself. But the claims of abuse, which I asked him about directly, were far more understandable when he explained the depth and particulars of each relationship he had with the people making the complaints. Without that it was just out of context Internet libel that hurt him personally for many years. His response; Stay the course; stay focused on your mission and do not give any response to Internet abusers. Good Advice…. 2) To sue: Sometimes a possible route. 3) To Laugh – Always a good idea – something like, “No it is not true that I am a child molester, really I am into barnyard animals but shhh..Don’t tell anyone!” Or as a group of my woman friends suggested to me in laughter “We will start a website called “satisfied and speaking out.” Now laughter which points out the absurdity without getting drawn into the energy of hatred …that is really a good path and about that we will have to write more at another time…. ****** Posted by Marc Gafni
On Eros and Holiness, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part One: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com I just saw the movie Speed Racer. I want to thank Larry Wachowski and his brother for making the movie. You Rock! In an email or conversation I had with Larry some two years ago, he told me he had listened with his wonderful wife Karen to the DVD series of lectures that I gave at Naropa University one weekend called “On the Erotic and the Holy”. He said he was working on a new movie project in which he would incorporate some of those ideas into the movie. He did. He understood the teaching on a very deep level. He understood not because I taught it to him. He recognized the teaching because he already knew it. Luzatto, the wonderful kabbalist opens his major work by teaching us that, “All real teaching is but a reminder of what we already know”. But of course we already knew that. Larry returned the teaching of Eros to me in the movie Speed Racer. Not because he taught it to me, but because like Larry, I already knew it. But in reminding me of what I already know, filtered through the prism of his unique and open heart, he became my teacher this evening. And for that I am filled with gratitude. More then that; all of life is a unique teaching, designed in love to remind us of what we already know. Every single thing that happens to us in our lives, without exception, is only to remind us of what we already know. Except, of course, for the exceptions, which are to remind us of Mystery. Larry; I don’t know what happened at the Box Office. It is hard to beat the Matrix, you know. I saw the movie at the dollar theatre in Salt Lake City. If it did not bring down the box office it may be because Speed racer was a mystical movie in popular disguise. And people might have gotten lost – as we often do – in the disguise. The disguise was not the plot line. In the movie – the point was not the plot line which was simple and straightforward; rather Larry designed the movie as an evocation and invitation to Magic and Eros. To magic which is Eros and to Eros which is Magic. So thank you. Thank you Thank you. What a gift you gave us. Marc Gafni Please feel free to share your comments on info@marcgafni.com
On Eros and Holiness, Sanity, Speed Racer, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, the Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Two: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer is about teaching and transmission; Rex Racer, his father and mother and Trixie his girl friend since age seven or so are all Speed Racers teachers even as he is theirs. Speed Racer is about Eros. Not sex. Eros. It is about the Eros of the traditional family; It is about the Eros of Integrity. But most of all it is about the Eros of Aliveness in which the limited human being expands into his divine self. Speed Racer is about what it means to be alive. The meaning of life, not as theory but a lived experience. It is about the things that no one can take from you or from me. It is a mystical movie in the sense that it must be tasted and not merely watched or understood. Christian Theologian Thomas Aquinas and Kabbalist Isaac the Blind both wrote that the essence of the mystical was captured by the biblical David when he wrote Taste and See that God is Good. Speed Racer is about realizing your divine nature in the fullness of family, love, extreme danger, death, destruction, and rebirth. The plot is pretty simple even superficial. But that is because Larry did not want the plot to get in the way of the experience as it does so often in real life. There is a race car driver. Rex Racer. He races in order to race. He races in order to realize the pure gorgeousness of his divine being. When he races, he drives with more elegance, more beauty, and more grace then could possibly inhabit one skin encapsulated ego. He dies in the race only to be reborn into a different identity separated from his family and his brother. None the less he comes back to guide his younger brother, Speed Racer in the ways of the Erotic and the Ethical. When Rex or Speed Racer race they do not do so to compete with any other driver. When Speed racer races, he does not drive to win or be acclaimed. He drives Lishmah. Lishmah – a key word in ancient Hebrew wisdom means – “for it’s own sake”. It is the secret of liberation, of joy, of peace, and of courage – it is what can end suffering for every human being. Why do you eat ice cream? To bolster your ego, to fortify your fragile existence in samsara, in the world of illusion? to convince yourself that you exist? that you matter? that your life has meaning? Nope. You eat ice cream because in the moment of eating ice cream the world seems sane and good. You are fully present in the moment; You eat ice cream Lishmah, for it’s own sake. You eat exactly the amount of ice cream that you body can relish with dignity and grace and then you stop. This is of course completely different then eating ice cream from a place of desperation. Eating to cover up the emptiness instead of eating as an expression of the fullness of your being. Eating ice cream as a form of a- void –dance. When you eat to fill the emptiness you naturally eat way to often and way to much and you are never really satisfied. Emptiness is impossible to fill. You are not listening to the enlightenment which resides in your body which tells just when, how much and what to eat. As long as you eat as a form of pseudo eros- the dances of desperation we do to dance around the void – what I call, a-void –dance, you will need diet plan after diet plan and none of them will work. The second you give up screaming –I EXIST….and you let your fall into the depth of your being, you will wake up. You will know that you exist. You will no longer need to prove it. You can stop eating as way to dull the pain of your aloneness. You can stop eating as a substitute for love. You can stop to affirm your existence. Your existence and the value of your existence is the self-evident truth of your reality. For it is the truth of reality. You do not eat to exist. You Exist to Eat. Lishmah; For it’s own sake. It this simple moment of realization that will make you sane. Marc Gafni Share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On Eros and Holiness, Sanity, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Three: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer is about enlightenment realized in this world. In Buddhism this is the tenth Ox-Herding picture. In Hebrew wisdom it is Abraham after realization returning to the market place. At the moment of your realization you will become sane. And you will stop living like an insane person. Hebrew Wisdom teaches, “Any person who sins is insane”. To sin is to misperceive reality. {Do not have Talmud at my home here in Salt Lake, need to buy a set, but I think it is Talmud Sotah 4A.. If I remember wrong please write and let me know} No need for all the trauma and drama. We all sin. We all have moments of insanity when lose touch with what is really real. In those moments we sometimes hurt each other. And then we do it again. We forget what we already know about the structure of the self and the true nature of existence. Something in our heart closes and we become opaque to God. In Hebrew mysticism the goal is always Bittul. Literally that means nullification. Nullify the self. self-annihilation. Does not sound very attractive on the face of it. But writes an early mystic Rabbenu Nissim, some seven hundred years ago – and I am paraphrasing; “Bittul means to be –Shakuf = Transparent to God. For that is the truth of reality. When we are in Eros, and Speed Racer is all about Eros, we are transparent to God. That is why the crowds love him so much. He is a divine figure, a prophet and poet of Eros. Eros means being transparent God. Being transparent to God means… Living on the inside Participating in the yearning force of being Fullness of presence Radical Wholeness – where there is no separation between any part of reality- every part feels it’s place as part of the whole even as it retains it’s utter autonomy –and there is not contradiction – the paradox of whole plays out in the life of the human being in sacred laughter and joy. “There is no righteous person on the earth who does good and does not sin” writes King Solomon. And he knew. Eros is sanity. Eros heals sin. To be sane is to know reality. If I tell you I am the King of England. Oh my God, Gafni is insane you say. For he has lost touch with reality. That is to sin. Not to know yourself. Not to know your own reality. To somehow mis-identify yourself. Sin is the ultimate Identity crisis. It is to know your nature as a “part” but not to realize in your heart, in your mind, in your toenails, that the part, is a part of God. That in the Part is the Whole of God. “All Israel has a “part” of the world to come” writes one ancient text. Meaning – All those who are Israel- Israel speaks of three distinct experiences- Israel means three moments of God. The word Israel in the original Hebrew has three meanings! Shar El- those who see God, More then that; Those who See with God’s eyes To love is to see with God’s eyes. Yasahr El- those who live in direct and unmediated connection to God. To be Israel is to Source so much that you are not willing to let anything or anyone stand between you and Source. Shar El, those who struggle with God; who refuse to accept the easy aphorism of the old or new age; who seek the paradox and complexity that hold the simple truth. We can know re-read our ancient text. All Israel – that is every human being who is Israel, who sees with God’s eyes, who has not lost his knowledge that he is Source, who struggles with reality, reaching for paradox which is the name of God, in the name of God, as a manifestation of God, as God’s verb… Every human being who is Israel – realizes his Israel nature as soon as he knows That he or she is A PART of the “World To Come” – which in Hebrew mysticism means The Eternal world, the World of the Absolute, The World that is Always Becoming and Being, the world where being and becoming are One. The world in which the part and the whole are both separate and One. To know that I am, that You are part of the whole; to feel the whole move in you; move through you; animate you, penetrate you, receive you, speak from your throat {Zohar:The Shekinah speak though the voice of Moses} manifest in your smile, your tears your laughter- even as you maintain your autonomy and individuality as a unique and irreplaceable manifestation of divine joy and pleasure- that is what it means to be alive. That is what it means to live in Eros. That is the Messiah who is Speed Racer who is You. When you live from that place – you are Holiness. You are In what Plato called Eros. You are being and becoming as One. You are Speed Racer. You act in the world Lishmah. For it’s own sake. Marc Gafni Please share comments by emailing us at info@marcgafni.com
On Eros and Holiness, Sanity, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Four: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer Lives Lishmah; For its own Sake. Or in the second translation; Lishmah means – For the sake of the Name; You become a manifestation, a stunning, shimmering and glimmering diamond on the crown of God’s name. You become God’s name. For God’s name is the expression of every unique being – living their story – impressing their story on the lips of God, in divine kiss where giving and receiving are one, Eros, for it’s own sake –Lishmah, in the full aliveness and joy that is the birth right and natural state of every being. And if you live from that place, HaMakom, the place, then ultimately all of the posturing of power and pomposity, all of the corruptions in the leadership, all the failures of love, all of the duplicity, decadence and desperation of those who have betrayed and abandoned you no longer matter. Your heroic soul overcomes the hysterias of self-protection and contraction rooted in the hubris of the desperate and deluded self. Your heart expands and your re-member. You re-member who you are. Not merely in your mind. Not only in your heart. But in your body. In your toenails. The cowardice of those who betrayed you, those who were willing to leave to die in the streets does not matter. It does not matter if you might have gone to prison and been raped in the courtyard because you have been convicted on false complaints. These dreams of being raped in prison that haunted you – or is that me- that haunted for months evaporate into the grounded bliss of your self that has woken up to it’s true nature. Your true nature. My true nature. Teaches Isaac Chaver – 19th century mystic- Enter your true nature and you enter God. None of it matters. All of it matters. And it is all okay. You cannot go to prison because you are free. Fully free and Liberated. Song rises from your throat. You shatter all the prison cells of your soul. Your prayer rises and your song awakes the heavens that live in you. All of creation sings with you and through you even as you are the creator and all of creation at the same time. You forgive your betrayers even as you ask them to forgive you – for you realize together – that it is all all okay total good. The dance of desperation becomes the dance of eros. Simple compassion, loyalty, the private intimacy of a communication which is honest and true with a brother who betrayed you, left you to die, is enough to set your heart aflame with a fire so hot that it burns through all anger and hatred melts all of the walls and warms all the cold places in your heart in his heart as you realize that even the betrayal was an illusion. Yes the story matters. And so does forgiveness For we do not know the measure of our debt Nor the method of our atonement There simply is no separation. The Zohar, the canonical text of Hebrew wisdom writes- Sin is Separation. It is alienation from your true nature as a baby faced divine. Thank you Dante. God is beyond you. You –I –We fall on the ground fully prostrated in worship- faithful to all of the boundaries of the temple. And as we lay on the ground prostrated the spirit of the divine flows through raising us up to our feet, tall, proud with the pride of Source, fully alive, on fire, ecstatic, humble, living, loving and laughing with skillful means and open hearts through the pain. That is what it means to live for it’s own sake. To live for the Name. Lishmah. To live as the name. To look in the eyes of your lover- NO not merely your romantic partner – but in the eyes of the bus driver, the waiter, the postman- the persons who cuts you off in traffic – and cry out Oh God. Oh God… Oh God… Go Speed Racer. Go Speed Racer. Go Speed Racer Go… Marc Gafni Please feel free to share comments on info@marcgafni.com
On Eros, Speed Racer, Kabbalah, Why I Teach, Torah, Liberation, Humiliation and Humility, Non Duality, Part and Whole, The Holy of Holies and Thank You Larry. Part Five: Marc Gafni
July 23, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Speed Racer is Eros= Holiness= Sanity= Atonement= Joy Everyone has a place in life where they can be sane. That is the place where they know reality. Where part merges with whole in the fullness of presence, which wells up from the inside. This is Eros. This is Speed Racer. This is You and this is Me. Oh my God…. This is why I teach. I do not teach for fame and fortune. I do not teach for financial security. I do not teach to become embraced as a great wise man or profound and brilliant scholar and transmitter of the tradition. Although in more contracted moments each of these motivations has tried to find it’s way in and sometimes impacted the purity of a moment… But that has never been the core of it for me. And these two years –with their searing pain have purified something in me that thirty years on the mediation cushion – Which I would never do anyways☺ – Could never do. These two years stripped away much that was unnecessary and helped me hold core, not only in moments of ecstasy, but as part of an integrated and steadier realization of the Not me but I. I am the Lord your God. Humiliation has a way – if your surf it’s waves and do not drown- of becoming humility. Not self-abasement, which is but another strategy of hubris. But the humility in living the full audacity and courage of being transparent to God. I teach – because as I open the text and submit myself to it; the text of the great traditions, the text of torah, the text of the torah of life; If I am humble and open and in love…something happens. The me falls away and the texts –after checking to see if – I- am really present – begin to talk. In me. Through me. The I speaks. If I am willing to cry before I teach – then the tears cleanse the dross and the surface pain, opening up the palaces of realization, wisdom, insight, compassion, and joy. Sometimes… I can hear the Chassidic master whispering in my ear. I can feel the Talmudic master as his lips move and say torah – in complete unison with my lips. Every word becomes torah. Every word is chosen by the torah as it flows through me finding it’s way with a sure sense and song – completely beyond any ability, which resides in my skin encapsulated me ego. Sometimes.. As I begin to teach I can feel the room slowly fill up. A rabbi from the 14th century comes and sits in the back. A mystic from the 12 the century sits in the front row. Abraham Isaac and Jacob, Joseph, Rachel, Leah, Rebecca and Sarah find their places and smile as the teaching pours from me – the me which is not me, I, the self which is small and contracted falls away. The mind which is small expands to Big Mind- mochin de-gadlut and the heart which is closed opens and expands to Big heart – mochin de-gadult; and my heart is aflame as the heart of the spring which yearns towards its Source And in the yearning fully merges with Source. At some point in the story Speed Racer merges with his car. Hear O Israel. Listen to the Car. It will tell you.. The hills are alive with the sound of music… When one is in the fullness of Eros the animate and inanimate become whole and ultimate alienation between matter and spirit is overcome. Much as in the final scene in Larry’s movie Matrix Three, the Hero merges with the machine as he/we realize that there is truly no separation. All dualities are overcome. The text is no longer letters written on a page by men who have long died. The text is alive. It becomes a living breathing, pulsating organism. The separation between the reader of the text, the writer of the text, the inspiration that breathed the text into life, the words and even the very parchment is transcended and included; all become a seamless one. This is the hidden meaning – according a hidden kabalistic teaching of the Hebrew wisdom mantra – God Israel and Torah are One. Why I teach- whether as a rabbi, a spiritual teacher or spiritual artist it matters not at all… I teach because I am. I teach in order to teach. I teach because in teaching God breathes through me as he and she has inspired all the teachers in my lineage and in all the lineages. I teach for the same reason that I eat ice cream. Just because. JUST BECAUSE. For it’s own sake. Lishmah. For the sake of the name as an expression of the Name. Speed Racer. To live from the inside in the full wonder, true humility, radical amazement and holy audacity of realization. When I teach or paint words as a spiritual artist on the canvas of my life I am not better then you. It gives me no power over you. I am rather your servant, your friend, your brother and your sister. We do not need today more rabbis posturing and preening and powering and pushing, and pretending. We need not more spiritual teachers but more spiritual friends. Spiritual friends from whom we are willing to receive transmission. Spiritual friends that we will love even as they love us. We must stop all the trauma and drama. Trauma and drama are sometimes real, but all to often they are pseudo eros masquerading as piety, integrity and outrage. We need – all of us – to let go of the pathos of our selves in order to come INTO the full Power of our Selves. A spiritual friend is a spiritual teacher who becomes a spiritual artist when they renounce all power and live – truly live from the inside. For you see the essence of Art is Lishmah – for it’s own sake. For the sake of the Name. The true artist draws no distinction between his canvas and his life. His life is both his text and his canvas. From his life, from the particulars and concrete details of his unique and individual life he teaches. But only if he is willing to be utterly destroyed. To lose everything in order to find everything. To surrender into God even as he affirms his autonomy and acts with discernment and fierce grace on the stage of Samsara. In Hebrew we say that enlightenment is achieved when Ani- the small self – and Ayin, the no – thing nature of the Expanded self – realize their identity. When this happens you understand that you can enter the holy of holies at any time and any place. In the end it does not really matter where you teach. Whether on a stage to a thousand people or in an intimate circle of student’s Or in a casual conversation with a watier.. The holy of holies is everywhere. When Speed Racer races the last race of the movie he is in the holy of holies. He is in Zohar, in Eros, in Holiness. From that place of Eros – Fierce Grace is born. From that place of Eros, Ethics are born. From that place of Eros, in the teaching of the Zohar {Gen. 4a} God is born and reborn in the sacred play of hide and seek which God and Man stll play with each other. God hides because he desperately wants to be found. Man in search of God. God in search of Man Meet in Eros. This is the holy of holies. Marc Gafni Published on marcgafni.com Please feel free to leave comments on info@marcgafni.com ps. these five posts were written spontaneously very last night as tears streamed down my face. The voice of the “I” of love, channeled in human form wrote this note to myself. “I have also been crying all night…It is so much that we have been through, and there is still another year of work ahead.. I am tired and grateful and deeply sorrowful and grateful and humbled and wanting to walk the path of Love more fully. Thank you God for your gifts. Thank you God for the challenges you present to me.. Nothing about anything is bad…All good as they say”
Eros and Holiness: Marc Gafni: Part Nine: Feel free to start reading from here; the part numbers are only for those who want to follow the whole teaching all the way through…
July 24, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Epigrams below each capture the Dharma of Eros and Holiness. “Even as the trees that whisper round a Temple become soon as dear as the Temple’s self…” -John Keats “Expanded consciousness is when the Taste of the Bark is as the Taste of the Tree.” -Abraham Kuk Leshem Yichud kushdha brich- hu uShehinateh. May this be for the sake of uniting the masculine God with the feminine Goddess. -Kabbalistic Meditation Ma Yafit Uma Naamt Ahavavh Betanugim. How beautiful and how pleasurable when love and eros are together. -Song of Songs Eros and Holiness: A soul reaches heaven. Or at least she thinks its heaven. It is a magnificent banquet hall. The tables are arrayed with all manners of delicacies. The guests have forks and knives in hands, ready to feast. A bell rings to begin the meal. There is a flurry of movement and then, to her astonishment, she sees that the guests arms are bound straight, unable to bend at the elbows, unable to take fork to mouth to partake in the great repast. The mob of hungry souls fling the food about frantically, cursing their predicament, shrieking at each other. A terrifying scene. The soul hurries away from what she is sure must have been a glimpse of hell, only to arrive at yet another banquet hall, identically decked with tables of food and guests waiting to feast. A bell rings, there is a flurry of movement. Here too, the guests arms are bound straight, unable to bring food to their own mouths. But to the soul’s astonishment, she see no fury and frustration here. Rather, each guest with outstretched arms is gently feeding the guest seated across from them. The banquet hall brims with pleasure and peace. Heaven indeed. If there is any truth to the myth – and myths are always true – we are in hell. Competition is the reigning paradigm. Getting ahead is the direction of our lives. But there is no finish line. So we collapse somewhere along the path and wonder if it had to be this way. Life is a mess ..but it doesn’t have to be. It could be heaven. * I am a Kabbalist. And I am in pain. I am in pain because the world and therefore God is in pain 1. To shatter the narrowness of my egocentricity and to feel both the pain and joy of world/God is essential to my spiritual quest. Kabbalists refer to this consciousness as “participating in the pain of the Shehina in Exile”. Shehina, like Shakti for the Hindus, is the sensual feminine God Force. The God force is in pain. Seemingly unnecessary and self inflicted pain. The primary response to pain however cannot be one of apportioning blame – either to human beings or to God. Although at first blush both seem to be more that a little bit at fault. The essential response to pain must be loving and healing. So I offer you these writings on Eros and Holiness as a gift in love. I pray that it will be healing, refreshing and ultimately transformational. **** footnotes: fn. 1 This idea, which was extensively developed in Kabbalistic and Midrashic sources, is held by the Talmud and Midrash to have its origin in the Torah. In Isaiah 63:9 it is written ”In all their sufferings He was lo [not] afflicted. The Hebrew word lo is read with a vav meaning Him, rather than with an aleph, which would mean “is not”. The verse can therefore be read as “In all their sufferings, He, too, suffers”. Others derive this principle from the verse from Psalm 91:15: “I am with him in suffering”. See TB tractate Sotah 31a, and Ta’anit 16a, where two sages use these two verses as a basis for this idea. See also Midrash Rabba Bereshit 2:5, or Midrash Tanhuma Beshalah 28. Marc Gafni please feel free to leave comments at info@marcgafni.com
Letter to Friends that went out today sharing the website and my public perspective on where we are and where we need to go: Marc Gafni
July 24, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com A Public Letter send to people on my mailing list inviting them to look at our website. Hi Friend, Shalom Chaver I hope this note finds you well. First a technical note: I do not have a formal mailing list – my technical assistant took these names from my old computer so if you should not be on this list or do not want to receive these messages just let us know. I am concluding a long and painful retreat which has lasted more then two years. There has been much learning in this time, many tears and not a little bit of laughter. I am surrounded by wonderful friends and I am grateful to them for their love and support. It is now necessary for many reasons to end my retreat and return to my more active life. I invite you to visit my website marcgafni.com. It is straightforward and almost self explanatory. So just a very short word of explanation at this juncture. First there is a Hebrew and English section. However, since I do not yet have a good Hebrew translator on staff here in Salt Lake City. the bulk of the material is in English. On the left hand side you will see a list of tabs marking different sections of the website. In the articles section you will find twenty categories of articles which I invite to you read and enjoy. In the section aboutmarcgafni.com you will get a general view of the website. In the section re-imagine library you will get a general sense on what I am working on these days. On the home page you will find at the top, an article which appeared recently in Catalyst Magazine, an award winning US publication which will give you a general sense of my last two years. The article clears my name of some of the distortions and falsehoods that have circulated on the internet and in some press forums for the past couple of years. Like all press articles it is partial and incomplete, but the reporters captured at least some sense of the last two years. The article is available on the home page. As the writers indicate, they spend several months and reviewed hundreds of pages of primary source documentation in order to reach their conclusions. The writers had direct and indirect contact with representatives of all the voices in the story. On the home page as well, you will find a musical and poetic welcome to the site; Together the poem, the music and the words share the intention of the website. There is also a large section of recorded dialogues with different spiritual teachers -many of which i recorded in the last year. There is as well, a large section of free audio and video teachings plus a store marcgafni.com where you can buy a more extensive lecture series as well as find links which will enable you to order other books and a cd series. There is also a section called Controversy where I give my perspective on events of the last two years. I try to do so from a place of open heart, even as I feel the full pain of the wounds of love. It was written very carefully, together with a relatively large team of people from diverse backgrounds, which had input and guided the process. The words are precise and chosen carefully. I tried to share my perspective without demonizing anyone and without attacking anyone even as I speak for the first time on these issues and decisively refute the idea that I sexually harassed anyone or the like in Israel. At the same time I own my personal responsibility for my part in the contribution system that created these events. In this writing I try and demonstrate the move from the old thinking of “blame frame” in which we point the finger and demonize, making ourselves victims in order to let ourselves off the hook. This kind of thinking while occasionally having some validity is ultimately far too limited and partial to be transformative or healing. At the same time, the facile new age nonsense that suggests that we are the sole creators of our reality and that therefore we should take full responsibility for everything that happens to us is also inappropriate. This kind of thinking while occasionally having some validity is ultimately far too limited and partial to be transformative or healing. This position also seemingly noble is rooted in a dangerous hubris, in which we arrogate to ourselves complete power over our lives, a seductive view which soothes the gnawing fears which haunt human beings, but which is ethically corrosive at its core. A more appropriate position would seem to be the third way. The move from blame frame to contribution system. In a contribution system everyone needs to see what their part in creating the reality that unfolded and to take appropriate responsibility for their part in that system. This allows one to identify their correct responsibility and directs one to the only place where we really have power over our part – whether five percent or fifty – in the contribution system. At the same time we have fully prepared these two years on many levels and will not sit by silently if I am falsely attacked. We will respond fully and effectively on many levels. This much is demanded by my love of my children, friends students and myself. I am hugely appreciative to all of you who have written me since the website came up. Your letters and your words, now and over the last two years have meant so so much to me. My family, colleagues, and I are moving on with our lives. I just got off the phone with my son Yair who was standing at a bus stop in Be’er Sheva and he said to me what my son Eytan said to me only two weeks before. “Abba, this is enough. We need our Abba back. This must end already. We really need you at this time in our lives” I promised them to do whatever I could to end this chapter, learn its lessons, and move to a more constructive and evolved chapter in our lives. On the website I share that these two years have been like a death for me. Before death we do a life review. As I said on the website, I apologize with heart and soul to anyone who feels that I might have hurt them in this life time. I invite anyone who feels they have unfinished business with me to contact me. My heart is open. I give you my forgiveness for any way in which you may have hurt me and I implore your forgiveness for any way in which I may have hurt you. And it is forbidden – for all of us – to cry more than it hurts. Let’s – all of us – and me first, give up the demonization game, take back our projected shadows, and transform the insults of love into the wounds of love, learning all the time to practice keeping our heart open in the midst – not only the joy of eros, but also the pain of eros. I also thank the thousands of people in my life time that I have been privileged to help and to serve in large or small ways. It has been a huge privilege to serve you and to bring joy to your life. There is so much that needs to be done. So much hurt and pain and suffering in the world. We are Gods verbs. We are God’s language. We must live as love. We must be love. We must act to realize love and open hearted discipline and compassion in our world. The future of the World and according to the teachings of the kabbalists, the future of God, depends in no small part, on you and me. I will seek to embody the divine life force in every situation I encounter. I will try and teach and embody the torah of boundaries and when the torah demands the expansion boundaries as it sometimes does, I will try and embody that demand in a direct and transparent way. I pray that in my day to day life, in my sharing, in my writing, my action and my being, I will be aligned to the will of God and serve as a source of love and compassion to all those whom I encounter. And if I die sooner then I would like to, I want to leave in the world only my love. Yours, Marc Gafni please feel free to share a comment on info@marcgafni.com
A New Library: Marc Gafni
July 25, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Introduction: The following modest proposal was submitted to the board of the foundation as an outline of the library that the foundation would like to produce. The lead writer and teacher for this library is Mordechai Gafni who has been designated as the teacher in residence for the foundation. Mordechai {Marc} will be working in close collaboration with teachers from many traditions in teaching and writing this library. We pray that this library serves to open the heart of all people. There is a great need for creative Jewish thinking which will chart the next steps in Jewish Thought and Practice in a way that is both compelling, original and accessible. There is very little of this kind of writing and teaching in the contemporary Jewish community. Most of the writing available is of one of two kinds. The first kind is geared towards the Orthodox community, offering learned analysis and guidance in observing the law with little in the way of a spiritual response or framework with which to grapple with the unique and ultimate issues of our generation. Most of the writers in this genre are deeply disconnected with the pulse and tenor of the times and view the Western world as just another exile to be survived before the coming of Messiah. This literature is important and makes a valuable contribution, but at the same time many people are thirsting for something more. The second type of literature is fully of creativity and modern parlance, but it is not rooted in any significant way in the unique texts, practices and frameworks of Hebrew Wisdom. Most of the writers are actually unable to competently read a Jewish text in it’s original form and that is often readily apparent in the book. Often this kind of material is what someone once termed “Buddhism with a Tallit”. This literature is important and makes a valuable contribution, but at the same time many people are thirsting for something more. Our library will seek to transcend and include the unique strengths of each of these writing genres while avoiding their very significant weaknesses. In the following posts I will suggest a few names for the library and then after the sabbath, lay out the intended content. I look forward to your comments. with love marc gafni comments on info@marcgafni.com
Possible Names for our New Library: Marc Gafni
July 25, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Library or Series that we are suggesting might be called by any one of the following names: Next Steps Library {or Series} New Jewish Thought Library {or Series} Library of Evolutionary Kabbalah {or Series} Jewish Spirituality Library {or Series} Jewish Enlightenment Teachings Library {or Series} Or the Library might be framed as a “Reclaiming Judaism” Library {or series.} Re-Vision Library or Re-Visioning Series Re-Imagine Library Idra Library Library of Integral Judaism and Integral Kabbalah We plan and God Laughs my mum used to always say. But still we must reach. For a “man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?” with love, marc gafni shabbot shalom please share your ideas, comments and critique at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: Part Ten: Marc Gafni
July 26, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com I am a Kabbalist. And I am in pain. I am in pain because the world and therefore God is in pain1. To shatter the narrowness of my egocentricity and to feel both the pain and joy of world/God is essential to my spiritual quest. Kabbalists refer to this consciousness as “participating in the pain of the Shehina in Exile”. Shehina, like Shakti for the Hindus, is the sensual feminine God Force. The God force is in pain. Seemingly unnecessary and self inflicted pain. The primary response to pain however cannot be one of apportioning blame – either to human beings or to God. Although at first blush both seem to be more that a little bit at fault. The essential response to pain must be loving and healing. So I offer you this book as a gift in love. I pray that it will be healing, refreshing and ultimately transformational. ****** I want to share with you an ancient reality map rooted in a secret tradition of the Hebrew mystics. This spirit map has within it to be, both the balm to our pain and the gateway to our bliss. ****** Our pain is not caused by technology overdose, nor by communication problems; certainly it is not punishment because we were bad. All human beings, good and not so good, experience some endemic pain as part of their ongoing reality. Our suffering is caused by a misreading of our reality map, which prevents us from accessing the full joy that is our birthright. Ultimately the painful mess we are in is rooted in a failure of love. ****** Now when I say life is a mess I am not only referring to the major and minor wars that rage around the globe. I could mention that in the past century over one hundred million people have been deliberately killed in wars whose goals we have long since forgotten. Strange wars fought from places of smallness and fear. Wars in which countries go about brutally massacring each others children for a few years then have a conference where everyone smiles and it is called peace. It also might be worth remembering that that these wars that once seemed so distant to us have become much closer. Non loving and repressive regimes in Afghanistan have very direct and painful impact on morning coffee in Manhattan. Indeed as our planet shrinks we begin to awaken – even if initially it is only a political awakening – to that old mystical truth: we are interconnected with every other being on the planet. Yet all this is not the full measure of the pain I describe. ******* I am also not ‘merely’ referring to the policies of non loving and alienation that leave twenty million people a year dead of hunger and hunger related diseases. Nor am I focusing primarily on the fact that the families of those twenty million people cannot help but despise the United States. They see us, the Western world as evil. We have the wealth and means to feed every mouth on the planet. But we don’t. We choose to let them remain hungry.. To a starving person or their brother all the complex explanations of inaction, rooted in sophisticated realpolitik, simply do not wash. Nor should they. They know that starving people in the world is a function of one cause only; a failure of love. ******** Even however if we could somehow put aside the starvation and the wars- an even superficial view of our own society reveals that something is seriously askew. Not a detail problem but an essential flaw in the core story line of our culture. Every forty seconds someone kills themselves. This year upwards of one million people will experience a failure of love so intense and painful that they will violently end their lives. In the last 45 years suicide rates have increased by sixty percent world wide. Among the leaders are western democracies like Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland and of course the United States. ******* Suicide used to be largely limited to the elderly. People who had, at the end of their lives, looked back and been unable to make sense of their story. Not particularly comforting news because all of us want to, and most of us will, reach old age. The even more jolting news, however, is that the average age is going down. Suicide is now one of the three leading causes of death among those aged 15-44. Now of course it would be nice to dismiss this slightly unpleasant information with the thought that only crazy or severely depressed people commit suicide. Note, however, that for every actual suicide there are ten suicide attempts. Suicide attempts have increased in the last 45 years twenty times more – than “successful” suicides. ********* Add to this the easily inferred reality that for every person who attempts suicide there are a lot more people in just as much pain. Just as lonely – just as alienated and just as depressed. They simply are unable to do anything about it. So they live in limbo – suspended between hells – all the while maintaining the facade of normal and even successful lives. ******** Albert Camus once wrote “There is but one truly serious problem…judging whether or not, life is or is not worth living…”2 Tragically Camus, together with … answered the questions in the negative. The emptiness was to much to bear. He, like so many others could not find his way to the fullness of life. Marc Gafni comments are welcome on info@marcgafni.com
Original Sources for Parts Five, Six and Seven: Eros and Holiness:Marc Gafni:
July 26, 2008
posted by marc gafni on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com For an explanation about the nature of these notes and the nature of creating new spiritual thought in general particularly from ancient and sacred sources, see please Eros and Holiness: Post Ten: 1 This idea, which was extensively developed in Kabbalistic and Midrashic sources, is held by the Talmud and Midrash to have its origin in the Torah. In Isaiah 63:9 it is written :”In all their sufferings He was lo [not] afflicted. The Hebrew word lo is read with a vav meaning Him, rather than with an aleph, which would mean “is not”. The verse can therefore be read as “In all their sufferings, He, too, suffers”. Others derive this principle from the verse from Psalm 91:15: “I am with him in suffering”. See TB tractate Sotah 31a, and Ta’anit 16a, where two sages use these two verses as a basis for this idea. See also Midrash Rabba Bereshit 2:5, or Midrash Tanhuma Beshalah 28. For a more extensive treatment of the human obligation to participate in the pain of the Shehina, see Meir Eyal’s article on this subject (have any idea where this is? Should I have n search?) 2 The sense of human participation in the loss of erotic union of divinity, is beautifully expressed in the Zohar, vol. 3, p. 213b. “What is meant by “remembering Zion”? (This may be compared) to a man who had a beautiful and precious palace that marauders came and burned. Who is in pain? Is it not the master of the palace? Simalarly, the Shehina is in exile. Is not this the pain of the tzaddiq? (tzaddiq refers to the sfira of yesod)…When we remember Zion, we remember His pain over His union (with the Shehina, which has been lost).” 3 In the Zohar, the “code name” for the Shehina is “Knesset Yisrael”, the congregation or gathering of Israel – Shehina is the group soul – see also Ethics of the Fathers chap. 3 mishna 6. 4 This core idea is the subject of much of the present work, and will be developed and elaborated upon in its course. At this point I would note that I am not claiming that Shehina is always used in this manner. I am rather making a more limited claim that Shechina is sometimes used in Zoharic texts as a virtual synonym for the Greek idea of eros. For a more extensive treatment of this subject, see Y. Liebes’ classical article “Zohar and Eros”. 5 When Shehina is not with her Lover, she is called “desolate” or “dry”, void of growth, incapable of intimate sexual contact in which the feminine waters are aroused. This is an oft-repeated idea in the Zohar, and especially in Tiqunei Zohar. See, for example, Zohar vol. 1, p. 23b, or Tiqunei Zohar 58a, and 73b. In this state, her garments are those of the qlipot, (see footnote 99). 6 Another of the seemingly endless unfoldings of this Hebrew root is hillul – desecration. The connection between these two states that I suggest in this chapter is in fact a recurring theme in Tiqunei Zohar, where the term hilul Shabbat, desecration of the Sabbath, is interpreted as “desecrating her emptiness” (hilul, desecration, and halal, emptiness). The Sabbath is of course the Shehina, whom we have identified as Eros. See, for example, the comment on the biblical verse “Keep (protect) My Sabbaths” (Lev. 19:3): “Concerning whoever introduces a foreign presence in her emptiness, (making her into) public property, or as wine that was used for forbidden libations, or even as a prostitute, it is written (Numbers 19:13): “He has defiled the Sanctuary of the Lord, that soul shall be cut off from its people” (Tiqunei Zohar, p. 77b-78a). See also Tiqunei Zohar 24b. 7 Isaiah 54:1 and 66:8. 8 8 This echoes the Lurrianic idea of the “empty void” which was the first move of the Infinite preceding creation. This Void was created as a result of a “withdrawal” of all-encompassing Divinity into Itself, creating a space void of infinity, where the creation of finity could unfold. 9 Leonard Cohen, in his album “Various Positions”. 10 In the beginning of the Idra Rabba, one of the core sections of the Zohar, Rabbi Shimon asks the assembly: “How long are we to sit in the existence of one pillar?” (Zohar, vol. 3, p. 127b). There are many different interpretations as to the meaning of “one pillar”. One of them, based on various sources, identifies “pillar” as a phallic symbol, hence an expression of the Kabbalistic sefira of yesod, the seat of the sexual organs (see Y. Liebes, “The Messiah of the Zohar”, for a detailed discussion of this and other interpretations, along with relevant sourcing). If this is in fact the case, then we can understand R. Shimon’s cry as a call against Eros being limited to Yesod, the sexual. A careful reading of the Idras and the Sifra deTzniyuta sections of the Zohar indicates that for the Zohar, the meaning of creation in tikkun is Erotic Union. R. Shimon is therefore declaring that we should not view Erotic Union as being limited to sex. 11 “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, the word of God: I have placed My Torah within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be for them a God, and they will be for me as a people. And no longer will a man say to his comrade and to his brother, Know God, for they will all know Me, from the small to the great, this is the word of God. For I will forgive their sin and I will no longer remember their iniquity” (Jeremiah 31:64-65). 12 Zohar vol. 1, p. 116b. 13 A conflation of two verses: Song of Songs 2:5 and 3:1. I am following Me’or Ainayim, who also combines these two verses. See following footnote. 14 Me’or Ainayim, in the Anthology of Quotes (Liqutim). posted by marc gafni please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Love or Die: A Politics of Love: Eros and Holiness: Part Eleven:
July 27, 2008
marc gafni posted by marc gafni please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Path of Love One cannot be told that life is worth while –one must experience the love of living first hand. Yet so few people have an unmediated sense of the adequacy, dignity and worth of their lives. The sense that is so essential to making our lives a triumph. So many of us today are second hand consumers of second hand joy – never touching love or life directly. And when love fails their truly is nothing left to live for. For love – not the narrow romantic expressions of it – but love as it’s core is life itself. We have so much. Most of us have a roof over our heads, a thousand foods to choose from a day, all sorts of dress options for every season, a number of friends and of course, infinite varieties of entertainment available. Many of us have fulfilled the goals and objectives we have sought to achieve. Some even have realized far more than they thought possible. And yet it remains– the gnawing sense of emptiness that will not go away. We can ignore it – we can find a thousand ways to kill time hoping to fill or kill the emptiness. And yet we remain – at our core – unful-filled. What do you do when everything you always wanted isn’t enough? What do you do when you are surrounded by people and yet at the end of the day you still feel almost unbearably lonely? It comes then as no surprise that the leading cause of death – by far – is heart disease. Heart in Hebrew – the language of the mystics – is Lev. Lev is the Hebrew source for our English word- Love. Love is under attack- it is experiencing often fatal dis-ease. Heart Failure. The failures of love. We are confronted, personally and globally with a stark choice – Love or Die! It is that simple. Love is no longer a luxury – it is an absolute necessity for the survival of the individual and the planet. In the last half a century modern psychology has documented an age old truth. A fully nourished baby who is not held in loving arms will die. So too our world, personal and global – even with all the resources, intelligence and technology at our disposal- will die without being held in love. We must embrace a personal path with heart and a global politics of love. Eros. marc gafni please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: Part Thirteen: To Love is to Know REALITY: Marc Gafni
July 28, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com To Love is to Know REALITY. I wrote yesterday of the path of Love. {Eros and Holiness: Blog Post Nine; The Path of Love}. But what is love? Love is the inner reality of the universe when all else is stripped away. The lack of love is the source of all that creates evil in the universe. Evil results from the denial of love in all of it’s forms. Love is a denial of reality. To Love therefore is to know reality. The lover is the most realistic person around. And the lover sometimes also appears as dreamy eyed, wistful and star struck. Because sometime reality in it’s surface manifestation is unreal. We then need to wist, dream and passion, verbs all, in order to find our way back to what is real. This writing is in some sense a work of ideas. But it would be a mistake, unreal, to call it merely an intellectual work. It comes from the heart as much as from the head. Sometimes I thought so hard it hurt, at other times my heart danced with ecstasy, even touching on two occasions on what Buddhist and Hebrew mystics have termed enlightenment. At other times the pain was so radical and intense that I prayed for my own death. By the time you reach the end of these writings I hope you will have experienced a taste of enlightenment yourself. In tomorrow’s blog post I will write a word or two of what I mean by the word Enlightenment. A word that is frightening to many people but whose meaning is simple, direct and core to many important teachings in the Hebrew wisdom tradition, particularly those of my teacher Mordechai Lainer of Izbica.
Eros and Holiness: Part Fourteen: Life is a Recovery Movement: Marc Gafni:
July 28, 2008
Life is a Recovery Movement: Marc Gafni Published on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In reaching for the awakening of love we do well to bear in mind the teaching of mystical master Menachem Mendel of Kutz. Writing in eastern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, he offers an original deeply resonant re-reading of a biblical myth text. “These words which I command you this day should be on your hearts”. How do words sit on a heart? Do they not either enter in or stay outside? What could it means to have words sit “on the heart”? Answers the master, ‘When dealing in issues of heart – lev – love – one cannot force the heart’s opening.’ Love is mystery – the word mystery deriving originally from the Hebrew word Seter – meaning secret. The greatest secret, the most wondrous mystery, is the openings and closings of the heart. ‘The best we can hope to do – and that is a lot – is to place our words on the heart—and when the heart opens the words fall in.’ These writings are about truths deeper than logic and impenetrable by the limited tools of reason. The truths we seek to touch are not irrational but trans-rational, beyond the feeble grasp of the merely rational mind. They are about a knowing beyond knowing. Listen with all five senses but also with faculties beyond the five we usually employ. Listen with love. In the Hebrew language, the first letter of the alphabet is Aleph. Aleph is a love letter. The following three letters are Beit, Gimel and Dalet. In Hebrew, those three letters also form a word, “Beged,” meaning both clothing and betrayal. For we all know that there are two kinds of clothing. Occasionally we have clothes that really express who we are on the inside and that is good. But all too often clothes are a place in which we hide, betraying our truer selves. Betraying our Aleph, our silent places. And so it is with language. The first letter – the silent letter – is Aleph. It is the place beyond words and… And then comes Beit-Gimel-Dalet. And come they must, for language is magical. With language, the mystics tell us, our world was created. For as quantum physics teaches us, the core construct of our reality is information and language, the medium of information. And yet as you read these words, know that they point beyond themselves towards the Aleph. Towards the lover in you. Because of this, I will often speak directly to the knower in you relying always on the truth of two kabalistic koans. The first truth: ‘The words of truth are recognized’. Re –cognized. For in reality… we already know all truth. We recognize truth as one would a long lost lover. Biblical myth mystic Abraham Kuk teaches that life is not a journey but a return. Our goal is not perfect health but deep healing. All learning is not discovery – it is rather re-covery. Life is A Recovery Movement. Life is the movement towards Recovery. The second Koan: ‘Words that come from the heart enter the heart’. So open your hearts even as I open mine. And let us begin. Marc Gafni Published on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Liberation and Enlightenment: The Democratization of Enlightenment: Marc Gafni
July 29, 2008
Hebrew Wisdom as a Path to Liberation: Part One. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In yesterday’s post I mentioned the idea of enlightenment. The common wisdom is that enlightenment is not a Jewish idea. One example of many for this anti – enlightenment prejudice in Jewish circles might be author Rodger Kamenetz in his book who makes the blithe confident and wrong assertion, in his book Stalking Elijah, that enlightenment is not a Jewish term. Of course this is simply not true. R. Tzadok HaCchen from Lublin regularly uses the term HeArah –which is the literal Hebrew equivalent of enlightenment. Of course the word Zohar – the name of the 13th century locus classicus of Hebrew mysticism which unfolded from the soul of second century master Shimon Bar Yochai- could also be literally be translated as enlightenment. The great teaching of Hebrew wisdom is The Democratization of Enlightenment, what we call in Hebrew He’arah or Devekut. In this teaching Self Liberation or enlightenment or Devekut is not the province of the elite few but is a genuine option for every person. It is towards the re- activation of this Jewish Liberation Wisdom that are initiative is dedicated. In line with a great lineage of Hebrew wisdom masters, we read the Torah as a guidebook to liberation. We subscribe to the ancient Hebrew wisdom teaching that all ethical failure, is ultimately rooted in a failure of realization. The potential for realizing one’s true nature is the birth right of every human being. Every human being has the potential and possibility to realize their true nature as part of the God field and to act – compassionately and courageously – from the integrity of that realization. Because realization is the potential and possibility of every human being it is not merely an option but it is the very purpose and invitation of our lives. In the Jewish liberation tradition the words of the divine to Abraham, Lech Lecha; are literally translated to mean ,“Go to Your Self. Realize the your Divine self is “literally part of God”. Once the human beings solves the perpetual identity crisis by realizing his identity with Divine, he or she is able to act with courage, compassion, wisdom, responsibility and holy audacity. It is this courage and audacity of human action, which activates the indwelling Shekinah energy, that opens us to the realization of Liberation and Devekut, necessary to bring about the most evolved vision of Tikkun Olam, the healing and transformation of the world. The goal is not merely the liberation of the elite; When we understand the Torah as a handbook for the Liberation of every human being, we realize that the intention of Biblical ideal, of “Kingdom of Priests”- is no less then what we have called, The Democratization of Enlightenment. The Hebrew tradition is a four thousand year old transmitted lineage of Liberation. Beginning with Abraham Isaac Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, continuing to Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, David and Solomon, transmitted to the communities of elders, prophets, priests and sages, the inner transmission is one of liberation. From Akiva to Hillel to Judah the Prince, from Abulafia to Maimonides, Luria and Cordevero, Luzattto and Meir Ibn Gabbai, from the Gaon of Vilna to the Baal Shem Tov, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk and Mordechai Lainer of Izbica, to Menachem Mendel of Schneerson in our time. The tradition teaches that none of these people were perfect. Perfection and absolute piety is a tyrannical ideal that ultimately separates us from the divine. Toxic shame undermines the liberation process. All of these liberated figures were flawed, some dramatically so, at different times in their lives. In the words of the ancient teaching, “The Tzadik falls seven times and rises, the wicked falls and does not rise”. The ability to rise like a Phoenix from the fire and to transform human failing into human greatness is core to the shadow work of Hebrew Liberation technology. As the schools of Kutzk and Izbica taught, one’s unique flaw in transmuted into one’s unique gift and gorgeousness. We are all unique flames emerging from the same fire. It is in the realization of one’s authentic unique self that the human being merges with the God field. If one tries to round out the curves of a puzzle piece it cannot fit into the great puzzle of the Kosmos. It is only by highlighting the unique curvature of your self that your merge with the larger divine Self. What I would like to talk about later tonight in the next blog post is what exactly does enlightenment mean? And to clear up a rumor I heard going around that two and half years ago at a shabbot with Andrew Cohen, i proclaimed myself enlightened:) mmm…. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Enlightenment and Liberation: Part Two:Marc Gafni
July 29, 2008
Enlightenment and Liberation: Post Two: Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com So what is enlightenment? The answer of course is that anyone and everyone makes up there own definition…to such an extent that the word loses all meaning. I will share with you how I understand enlightenment based on the teachings of the Hebrew Wisdom Tradition. That is of course pretty important because once we establish, as we did in the last post, that enlightenment, of some form or another, is a major goal of Hebrew Wisdom practice, then it becomes more then helpful to know what it means. So here we go: Enlightenment is Peace. To be enlightened is to Be Peace and to Be Love. Shalom! Shalem…..to be whole. Jacob wrestles with the angel in the darkness of the night and wrestles his enlightenment from the shadows. This is expressed by Jacob coming to Shalem; the place of peace and wholeness. Peace of the Body Peace of the Mind Peace of Relationship and Community Peace with Spirit Peace of Emotions Peace with the World Peace with Structures of the Body Peace with Structures of Society To be enlightened is to be committed to act in a way which achieves peace in each of the distinct arenas of our lives. That does not mean that if you are enlightened you will necessarily accomplish peace in all these eight strata of living. Rather it means that you act in a way that is aligned to peace in each of these spheres. You must, yourself, Be Peace, {as the ancient Essenes liked to say it}, in all of these ways. Of course, sometimes in order to achieve peace you must first go to war. Peace is an integral value – it integrates the polarities and raises them to a higher level of integration and evolution. A second way to tell the same story, to answer the question of What is enlightenment, is to deploy Integral Thinking. Integral talk points out the simple truth that there are many different levels and lines on which we all develop. For example, there is a moral line of development as well as a physical motor line, an intellectual line, a social line, an emotional line etc. Each line of development is distinct. Now here is the key… One can be very advanced in one line and developmentally disabled in another line. For example: one might be a great peace activist, engaged always in activities for Shalom, And yet in one’s true center one may not be Peace at all. This kind of person is not holding enlightened consciousness. This kind of person may talk about freedom all the time but they are sadly not at all liberated. Rather they remain slaves to their fear, ego, pettiness and malice, almost always disguised as noble rhetoric and ethical integrity. Even while they talk peace they may behave in the most obnoxious of manners, bullying, mean-spirited, frothing at the mouth in a frenzy of words, self-righteousness and domination. We all know the archetype. This archetype may well be sincerely interested in peace in the world. In that line they are very developed. They may be willing to take enormous risks, on a conceptual level, to achieve peace with their enemies. These enemies may be people who have brutally murdered many of their own people. And this willingness to make peace may come from an evolved and noble place in the soul. {Or it may come from a callousness and contracted circle of caring which his egocentric at its core, but that is a separate conversation} But let’s assume for now that it indeed comes from a refined and evolved place in the person consciousness. That same person may be completely unwilling to make peace, or to even engage in dialogue with a person who was once their good friend and who did not do anything similar to the genuine evil perpetrated by there real enemies with whom they rush to make peace. How could this be? The answer: This person may very advanced on the line of development called peace with the world but retarded in the line of development called peace with community, with other or even peace with self. When it comes to their own life, disowned shadow, disassociated malice, fear, jealousy, and mean spiritedness may prevent all conversation, compassion, courage or integrity. The person is very advanced on in one line of development; “peace with the world” but very developmentally disabled in the “peace with self” line of development. The result is that the fear of being outshone, of having their legacy threatened, old neural pathways of jealousy and inadequacy may be triggered and the simply humanity that one extends to a friend may be crushed in a frenzy of domination and cruelty even though this very same person is willing to dialogue with all of the most vicious enemies who have done his people genuine harm and evil. The person is very developed in one line of development but regressed and even retarded in a second line. This is to be a slave. To be enlightened- meaning to be liberated, means to be as maximally evolved as possible at this moment in history in all levels of peace, or said differently, in all lines of development. Okay so that was part one… More depth on this later tonight or tomorrow. Big love to everyone… Interesting article on Being Open to Growth HERE Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: Part Fifteen: A Better Way to Dance: Marc Gafni:
July 30, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The Dancing Master A-Void-Dance Our lives are overflowing with The Void. You know the void. The big hole you feel inside. Sometimes it has hurt so much you can barely move. Usually it is a dull and throbbing pain. The background noise of most lives. We do everything we can to fill the Void. We even have a handy word for it: avoidance, to avoid the emptiness. A –void –dance. We develop the most elaborate dances you can imagine – never realizing – that it is all a-void –dance. That if we could but taste fullness a moment – the empty dances of addiction, power, violence and abusive sex would be transformed into the erotic dance of being. The dance with the Goddess Divine, whom the Hebrew mystics called the Shehina. The dance in which we all have a place. The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being – the fullness of ourselves in every moment – we need to first stay in the emptiness for a while. To resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo eros. This is the secret of dance. Dance me to the end of love. The best metaphor for this book is a dance whose goal is no less than to choreograph the ancient mystery of love. I hope to unfold for you a great and secret kabalistic path which shows you a way beyond the emptiness to the fullness of presence. The merciless rule of the market has undermined even the art of spiritual teaching. We live in age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification – the quick fix – a book a drug a relationship a job –anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. In a book you reads a few pages- If you don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo Eros you move on the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole which might fill up the gaping fissure we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide. We might seem on the outside to be dancing –but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an air tight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside however there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos filled scramble to grab some snatches of authenticity in between all the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: The Dancing Master: Part Sixteen: Marc Gafni
July 30, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share your comments on info@marcgafni.com The Dancing Master There is a wonderful story of Eros and love which I told my students at a special Kabbalistic ceremony the day before Cary and I were married. It is a story which hints at many of the truths we will play with in our journey together. It is about walking through the void. Every time we walk through and not around the void we come out stronger. Reports had reached a young Dalai Lama that a certain Master of Kung Fu was roaming the countryside of Tibet converting young men to the study of violence. Rumors even began circulating that this Master of Kung Fu was an incarnation of Shiva Natarajah, the Hindu God in his aspect of the Lord of the Dance of Destruction. The Dalai Lama decided to invite the Master for a visit. Pleased with the invitation, some weeks later the Master of Kung Fu strode into the Dalai Lama’s ceremonial hall. The Master of Kung Fu was stunning indeed, with thick blue black hair falling down over the shoulders of his black leather suit. “Your highness,” he began, “know that you are beautiful people. I wouldn’t think of doing you harm.” “When you want to harm,” asked the Dalai Lama, “what kind of harm can you do?” “Royal Highness, the best way to show you would be for you to stand here in front of me while I do a little dance. Though I can kill a dozen men instantly with this dance, have no fear. The Dalai Lama stood up and immediately felt as if a wind had blown flower petals across his body. He looked down but saw nothing. “You may process,” he told the Master of Kung Fu. “Proceed?” said the other, grinning jovially, “I’ve already finished. What you felt were my hands flicking across your body. If it please your Highness, this was a demonstration in slow motion, extremely slow motion, of the way I could have destroyed the organs of your body one by one.. I could have taken them all out during that one little dance.” “I know a master greater than you,” said the Dalai Lama. “Without wishing to offend your Highness, I doubt that very much.” “Yes, I have a champion who can best you,” insisted the boy king. “Let him challenge me, and if he bests me I shall leave Tibet forever.” “If he bests you, you shall have no need to leave Tibet.” The Dalai Lama clapped his hands, “Regent,” he said, “summon the Dancing Master. And while were waiting, lets have some tea.” The tea ceremony was just about over when the Regent returned with the Dancing Master. He was a wiry little fellow, half the size of the Master of Kung Fu and well past his prime. His legs were knotted with varicose veins and he was swollen at the elbows from arthritis. Nevertheless, his eyes were glittering merrily and he seemed eager for the challenge. The Master of Kung Fu did not mock his opponent. “My own guru,” he said, “was even smaller and older than you, yet I was unable to best him until last year. I could have finished him easily had I ever been able to touch him, but he moved too fast. Only last year did I finally catch him on the ear and destroy him, as I shall destroy you when you finally tire. To show that I know your methods and wont be tricked into exhausting my energy, I shall first let you strike me at will. Your frail little hands can do me no harm while I’m at full strength.” The two opponents faced off. The Master of Kung Fu was taking a jaunty, indifferent stance, tempting the other to attack. The old Dancing Master began to swirl very slowly, his robes wafting around his head. His arms stretched out and his hands fluttered like butterflies toward the eyes of his opponent. Their fingers settled gently for a moment upon the bushy eyebrows. The master of Kung Fu drew back in astonishment. He looked around the great hall. Everything was suddenly vibrant with rich hues of singing color. The faces of the monks were radiantly beautiful. It was as if his eyes had been washed clean for the first time. The fingers of the Dancing Master stroked the nose of the Master of Kung Fu and suddenly he could smell the pungent barley from a granary in the city far below. He could smell butter melting in the most fragrant of teas, as the Dalai Lama, incomparably beautiful, sipped tea and watched him calmly. A flicking of the Dancing Master’s foot at his genitals, and he was throbbing with desire. The sound of a woman singing through an open window filled him with exquisite yearning to draw her into his arms and caress her. He found himself removing his leather clothes until he stood naked before the Dancing Master, who was now assaulting him with joy at every touch. His body began to hum like a finely tuned instrument. He could hear the great long horns resounding in a thousand rooms of the Potala, praising creation. He opened his mouth and sang like a bird at sunrise. It seemed to him that he was possessed of many arms, legs, and hands, and all wanted to nurture the blossoming of life. The Master of Kung Fu began the most beautiful dance that had ever been seen in the great ceremonial hall of the Grand Potala. It lasted for three days and nights, during which time everyone in Tibet feasted and visitors crowded the doorways and galleries to watch. Only when he finally collapsed at the throne of the Dalai Lama did he realize that another body was lying beside him. The old Dancing Master had died of exertion while performing his final and most marvelous dance. But he had died happily, having found the disciple he had always yearned for. The new Dancing Master of Tibet took the frail corpse in his arms and, weeping with love, drew the last of its energy into his body. Never had he felt so strong. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share your comments on info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: The Great Dancer: Marc Gafni
July 31, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com side bar personal note before body of post: I am not a great dancer:) Grew up in Yeshiva, Orthodox Jewish School where dancing was kind of primitive even if wild and ecstatic. But the ability to trust the movement of the body in dance is something that is new to me. Recently I went dancing in Salt Lake City, with three friends. First time in my life. What a beautiful spiritual practice is dance. Total Gorgeous. The Great Dancer The truly great dancer is a great lover who flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is Mechol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mechol is etymologically identical with the word Challul which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word Mechila –forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the fullness of wonder, complexity and imperfection of another. Mechol however also means Chalah-fullness – used in the biblical myth text to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.5 Mechol =Dance. Dance, then, is the movement between emptiness and fullness. Modern day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra – marketed to us in a million packages. To fill the emptiness. In any way at any price. We are desperate. We can hardly distinguish between our desires we are so pained by our emptiness. The natural result is that we fill our selves with much which is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment – full-fill-ment – in all the wrong places. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Eros and Holiness: White Fire on Black Fire: A Journey of Love: Marc Gafni:
July 31, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com The White Spaces We are on a journey to Love. For as the Zohar writes ‘All the Paths (Shvilin) lead to the Temple of love’. Wherever you are, wherever you are standing or kneeling or crouching – the place where you are is on your path to love. Love requires Depth. Superficiality and love are antonyms. The search for depth requires effort that we are often afraid to expend. However I can promise you – in he name of all the great traditions of the spirit – the energy you invest in your own depth will come back to you a thousand fold. In this book I want to invite you to reach a little beyond what you thought you could do. How did Browning say it? “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.” The mystics say that the Torah (Biblical Myth Text) has two different strands. The first is the letters – the black spaces, what the Zohar calls the Black fire. These are the ideas and concepts that speak to the mind and psyche. The second strand however is the white letters. These are the white spaces between the words, what the Zohar calls the white fire. Remember what Mozart said – the music that makes a symphony great is the white spaces between the notes. So as we begin our journey to love I want you to know that I will do my best in the black fire. I have tried to make everything clear and accessible in a way that will help us both on our paths to love. But I want to invite you to enter not only the words of Black fire but also and especially the white fire. For is it in the white fire and that you taste the rawness of Eros and the sweetness of love for which your soul yearns. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – The White Fire of Eros: Let it open all the doors for you…
August 1, 2008
The White Fire of Eros: Let it open all the doors for you… marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com So as we begin our journey to love I want you to know that I will do my best in the black fire. I have tried to make everything clear and accessible in a way that will help us both on our paths to love. But I want to invite you to enter not only the words of Black fire but also and especially the white fire. For is it in the white fire and that you taste the rawness of Eros and the sweetness of love for which your soul yearns. The Berdichever Passport A White Fire story told by the Kabbalists: It happened in Eastern Europe in the mid 19th century. Wolfie had to travel to St. Petersburg and he was afraid. He knew it was a place which was not safe. And he did not have the papers he needed. But he needed to make the journey for his very life depended on it. He went to his teacher –the greater master Levi Isaac of Berdichev. Please –please he said help me and he poured out his woe. The master listened intently and then left room bidding him to wait. He could hear the master tears in the next room. When Levi Isaac returned he gave him a blank piece of paper still wet with tears. This will be your passport. Take it with you and it will open all the doors. Wolfie was not sure what to do – but he trusted his teacher. He took the paper and set out on his journey. When he arrived at the first border he was stopped by the guards. Shaking –knowing they could kill him on the spot he takes out the passport he has received form his the master Levi Isaac of Berdichev. They look down to examine it and then up at him again with the most intent of looks. He is about to faint. And one of the Guards begins to talk. “We had no idea it was you he said. We apologize for even stopping you at the border. What an honor it is to have you travel on our road. Please accept our apologies sir.” Well –you can imagine how absolutely shocked Wolfie was. Mumbling his thanks about to faint-this time from disbelief and joy he traveled on. Well, they got to the next border and pretty much the same thing happened. Only this time the guards were so overwhelmed that Wolfie was traveling their road that they gave him and escort of four white stallions. And so it went- at each border crossing he would show the blank piece of paper with the tears of his masters – his Berdichever passport. He arrived in St Petersburg traveling like a prince, with full escort and laden with Gifts. A story of mystery to be sure. Passports that open all the gates but not with words or letters. Not a tale of Black fire. A white empty space. The magic of the White Fire. As you read, I want to gently remind you that there are many borders you need to cross when you go on a true quest. There are many guards – internal and external who would block your way. This book –although filled with letters of black fire is really a Berdichever Passport. Let it open all the doors for you. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – EROS
August 1, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com EROS: O Taste and See The world is not with us enough O taste and see the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning if anything all that lives to the imagination’s tongue, grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince, living in the orchard and being hungry, and plucking the fruit.—Denise Levertov LOSS OF EROS Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of Passionate intensity Surely some revelation is at hand… W.B Yeats THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION WHILE THE WORST ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY MAN…WAY TOO MUCH TRAUMA AND DRAMA RELAX EVERYONE KEEP HEART OPEN GET A LIFE …. – Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni – CHERUBS IN THE TEMPLE
August 2, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments on info@marcgafni.com Imagine the scene: You walk into your local place of worship – church, synagogue, mosque, meditation center or whatever. The pastor or rabbi has apparently decided to redecorate while you were away on vacation. You find that he has installed atop the ark or altar a statue of sexually intertwined golden figures. In addition he positions another free standing set of sexually embraced figures among the pews. And just in case you missed the point, vivid pictures of these effigies adorn most of the sanctuary walls. I daresay that sexually open as we are, much as we affirm sexuality as a wonder and central good in our lives, the pastor’s contract would not be renewed. However, in the pastor’s defense, let me share with you a secret. These precise images were the central display in the archetype of all holy places – the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. The figures were called cherubs. The primary set was positioned in the center of the Temple, atop the Ark of the Covenant. According to Hebrew myth this spot is the earth’s epicenter, the axis mundi, the place where heaven and earth kiss. A second set of golden cherubs was freestanding and the rest were in pictographic form on the walls and even on some of the Temple vessels. These provocatively entwined cherubs were for the mystics the very key to the mystery of love, a mystery that lay at the heart of the Jerusalem Temple, a mystery that lays at the heart of all of our lives. – Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni – ILLUMINATION, CARE AND CAREFUL
August 2, 2008
marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The unraveling of this mystery of the Cherubs is the purpose of our journey together. It will require on your part patience, passion and care. Patience as we construct the intricate yet gorgeous scaffolding which will be required for us to reach higher than perhaps we have every reached before. Passion – because passion is the torch that will guide our steps on this hallowed ground of ancient texts. It is the balance between passion and patience which will allow us to receive this stunning wisdom tradition. And of course care, for no such sacred terrain can be tread without care. Z’herut’ – the Hebrew word for Careful – connotes much more than timid watchfulness, for its root word is ‘zohar’, which is no less than the name of the central Kabbalistic text. Zohar means ‘Illumination’. Suggests the wisdom of the original Hebrew –only through care can you come to illumination. Even for hallowed publishing goal of well read blog posts I cannot unfold the essence of it all in the first chapter. Foreplay is essential to mysticism. In this way that when we do finally enter the inner chambers we will be prepared to fully revel in the power and beauty of the wisdom that is there. Thus when touching this sacred body of wisdom may we be blessed with the venerable tools of patience, passion and a great illumined care. Let the mysteries begin!
Marc Gafni – MEN WHOSE NAME WAS LOVE
August 3, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Hebrew mysticism, beginning with Abraham, gave birth to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three religions in their pure forms are rooted in the Temple of Jerusalem. Hence the mythic power of the Christian Templars , the Islamic Dome of the Rock and the Hebrew Temple mount. Further, kabbalistic tradition tells of the sons of Abraham who in the book of Genesis are sent eastward, to the land of the Buddha. Abraham’s heirs, teach the Kabbalists, are the progenitors of Buddhism. There is even an old oral kabbalistic tradition which claims that the builder of the Temple, King Solomon, and the Buddha are, if not the same person, at least masters in the same sacred tradition. While historically inaccurate, it points to the deep spiritual affinity between Solomon’s teachings and those of the Buddha hundreds of years later. So the Hebrew Temple with her eternal flame is the source of the fire which sparked, and continues to light, so many of the pure wicks of the spirit which illuminate our world. But what is the great wisdom hidden in the Temple myth? What perennial message of the spirit does she yearn to share with us? And how can this message heal and transform us, our families and the widespread family of the world? The simple yet superficial answer is Love. Indeed, the Temple plans were drawn up by David and manifested by his son Yedidya, better known as Solomon. Both names, David and Yedidya, mean ‘Loved by the spirit’. These kings are the great lovers of biblical myth. They love greatly and are greatly loved, Solomon by God, the Queen of Sheba and a thousand wives; David by God, the people, Jonathan, and biblical myth readers throughout history. The Temple mystery was thus born and sired by men whose name was love.
Marc Gafni – RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
August 3, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Remember the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring Indiana Jones adventuring through the dusty Middle East in search of the Ark of the Covenant? Lives are lost, blood is let. One was tempted to ask why he shouldn’t just let the ark stay lost! The answer: the ark, perhaps more than any other earthly object, is of overwhelming mystical significance. The ark was an elegant container which held the original tablets on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments. Described in the sources as something akin to a spiritually creative, life giving nuclear reactor, it was lost when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed some 2,000 years ago (or perhaps we should say, 2400 years, since the ark was not in second temple) . It has been sought after – physically and metaphysically – ever since. The search for the ark is the original grail quest of Biblical myth. Jerusalem holds the secret. It is the cradle of three faiths, each today in its own way in desperate need of renewal and re-souling. At the center of Jerusalem stood the Temple built by Solomon and destroyed by the Greeks, then rebuilt by Ezra and destroyed by the Romans. A Temple that awaits rebuilding in our own inner lives, for the Temple in the Hebrew mystery tradition of the Kabbalah is not so much a place on earth as a powerful idea of the spirit . Those who have lost touch with the mystery kill each other today in order to control the Temple’s geographical site, a sad betrayal of the spirit which the Temple incarnated. The Temple myth is so powerful, so fertile and teeming with life, that it has given birth to virtually all the great systems of the spirit created by humanity. The essence of Hebrew mysticism lays hidden in the grain of the Temple’s wood and the folds of her curtains. The loss of the temple is considered by the biblical mystery tradition to be the greatest spiritual disaster in history. The re-building of the temple through the reclaiming of temple energy in our lives is the overarching goal of the entire biblical project. This is the desire which is expressed time and again in a thousand different ways in Hebrew ritual and liturgy. It is the idea that shaped all of the spiritual offspring of Hebrew religion- that is to say virtually all of civilization as we know it.
Virtual Reality is not Virtuous Reality:Marc Gafni: evoked by the New York Sunday Times essay aug. 3. 08. on the Dark Side of the Internet
August 3, 2008
Some brief notes written in Paris at four thirty in the morning on my way to Auschwitz with a group of twelve friends and my teacher…. My friend Mary who is a great corporate consultant, clinical therapist and highly accomplished business woman send me an article from today’s New York Tmes which she thought would interest me. I am writing a book about hate posts, slander and social murder on the, who runs them, who sits on their boards, who links to them, and how they are deployed by “respectable” folks {who use them much like respectable businessmen hire assassins and profit arms dealing even as they maintain their social veneer of decency}, how they are ignored by spiritual leaders and good men and women who simply look the other way because they are afraid of being attacked themselves and are to lost in their own spiritual entrepreneur ego games to be genuinely offended by the degradation of others who are not themselves or not necessary to their advancing in the world. So she thought I would be interested in the article. And I was. Thanks Mary! So here are some brief notes, which I wrote, down as fast as I could type this morning and am sharing with you unedited, although I did run the document through spell check:) Al Gore in a recent book became another in a long list of writers in the last decade or so. to extol the redemptive virtues of Virtual Reality, the Word Wide Web. And clearly there is much that is deserving of praise. Information, which can save lives and inform life, is available democratically on the Internet in a way that is unparalleled in human history. That is a big beautiful deal. Wow. Moreover the internet has the greatest potential in human history to expose the invisible lines of connection that naturally exist between people and peoples but up till know have been hard to see because of the challenges of distance and the alienation it naturally breeds. Internet allows for instant non-local communication around the planet thus showing the way to global unity and wholeness, which heretofore seemed impossible. Total Good. And yet the web has a profound and much ignored dark side, which can be no less destructive if we do not pay notice. The machinery of the Web has monstrous Frankenstein energy no less then it has potentially enlightened Messianic energy. The New York times article on trolling and the dark side of the web is important as a cautionary tale both about the nature of web, but more important it is a reminder in the context of the web, about the dark part of human nature that we do not want to see – and if we occasionally do see – we deny it, ignore it or dress it up in New Age pabulum. This morning’s story needs to be read together with another New York Times Magazine cover story at the end of May which tells the tale of a woman posting every manner of private information about her lover and friends on her blog, attaining celebrity in the destruction and degradation of others and all the while thinking that blogging is not subject to the laws of spiritual karma, ethical integrity, or just plain compassion and decency. There is this strange sense that because it is on the web, because you never see my your victim, the hurt and heartbreak you cause for him or her and his or her family never need to figure in my moral calculus; indeed there is no moral calculus; it is all somehow okay. You, the gossip or hate blogger, {there is however a huge moral difference between the two – sloppy thinking forgets the value of holistic hierarchy and rejects all hierarchy, it loses the art of distinctions which are the source of all relative wisdom- a gossip blogger is not a hate blogger } You rationalize to myself that you was just telling the truth, or you was just repeating what you heard, or that if you had not done it, someone else would have done it, or that your are somehow pious because you am exposing someone else’s clay feet – {ignore the fact that you really have no idea what your are talking about –have not talked to all sides, have not checked facts carefully if at all –and that if thought you would lose money for posting –or would somehow be penalized or shamed if you were not telling the truth – you would never post, shaming others however does not bother me at all, you cannot feel their pain. You are a hate blogger sociopath, a new brand of American man or woman} Somehow the internet because of it’s vast and impersonal nature – allows the worst elements of the mob to emerge as people act cruelly, faces hidden behind a flickering screen that gives the impotent the addictive thrill of potency and gives those who feel empty and dull the truly illusory and pathetic thrill of power that comes not from Eros and creative gesture, nor from service or authentic love – but which comes from the diabolic pleasure of the child who destroys the sandcastle of his sister to alleviate the momentary pain of his abandonment or frustration. The author tries to find the source for capricious Internet cruelty. Her conclusion which responds to this question, is something like, he hated his mother and father. Somehow we think today that if we can psychologize evil it become okay. She tells the story of Mitchell Henderson a young man, 13 years old who found life so painful that he took a gun to his head and killed himself. His classmates used his My Space page to build him a memorial, which would honor him. The Internet hordes, often referred to as trolls, found something funny about his death and for nearly 18 months defaced his grave on My Space, contacted his parent, aroused people to hurl bricks through their windows, along with every manner of cruel mockery of his death. What kind of person calls the mother of a boy who committed suicide, or writes notes to the mother on the Internet, which are cruel and mocking? The answer is of course –someone who has something terrible and demonic in them. We would like to think however that demons are extra terrestrials that sometimes walk among us seeking to suck our energy and passion for their nefarious and virulent ends. They are not. Demons are all to often, us ourselves. Demons exist in everyman and woman. The Internet with its lack of accountability, and the virtual inability to sue for damages, is like nighttime for the demonic in human beings; the human demonic abounds on the Internet, feeding of the fear, malice and emptiness whose dull glow illuminates the fiber optic cables. The demonic feeds human fear and ignorance and that most denied of human traits Malice. Dr. Joseph Berke is one of the great psychologists working in England today. Nearly seventy years old he came to England in 1965 to work with the legendary R.D. Laing. About a year ago after being viciously attacked on the internet, a well known Jewish leader privately send me a recommendation via spiritual teacher Jean Houston, that I go see Joe Berke who might do an evaluation of my inner state and the of the situation I found myself in. Berke is said to be both a great evaluator of human beings and complex human intersubjective dynamics, this is what he has done for forty years in the most demanding professional contexts. I did an extensive and intense evaluation with Dr. Joe, the result of which was his urging me in a formal eval letter and in many phone conversations, to return to a full life of spiritual teaching. He grasped in both spiritual and psychological terms the injustice that Karma has sent my way, particularly in the form of the psychic attack or false slanders on the Internet, which at the time I had no way to counter. {Thank god that has all changed and I have developed the resources both inner and outer to not only withstand the perfidy of the hate blog but also even to raise them into teaching, torah and dharma} I did not know it at the time but part of Joe’s life work is a study of Malice. {He has written and published dozens of academic articles and empirical studies on Malice as Motivation. His total great book. Malice Through the Looking Glass originally published as Tyranny of Malice collects a lot of this material.} Malice and Envy are according to Joe prime motivators of human behavior. People driven by fear, seek to destroy other people who they feel are somehow taking up space; space which they feel should be theirs. Luria goes on to say that we hate people –are driven to act with malice towards those who we feel our living our story more fully then we are. We feel that their abundance is at our expense. In an implied corollary of this teaching by Kabbalist Isaac Luria in the late 16th century, all great teachers have a small body of people, whom they have met at different stages of their life –who interpret everything they do through the lens of what we would call today, abuse. Sometimes they are right. We know all to well of corrupt teachers. But just as often they are wrong. They are projecting their own corruption on to the teacher. The dynamics are simple. The love or rigor of he teacher evokes his or her own shadow. The shadow is disowned and projected on the teacher who made them uncomfortable. Since the job of a teacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, an authentic teacher will always have to deal with this very real challenge. Or in a third teaching of the Kabbalah, the mob led by particularly wounded individuals, attacks people who incarnate life force. For the life force of certain individuals, leaders, teachers or artists, somehow indicts what they feel deep inside, is the emptiness and vacuity of their own lives. Wilhelm Reich termed this inner need to kill life force – The Murder of Christ – in a penetrating and disturbing book by the same name. All of this is part of what the kabbalists refer to as the Demonic quality in human beings. Milan Kundera quoted by Dr. Joe in his “off the charts blow away” book, Malice through the Looking Glass, points out something else about the nature of this demonic quality in human beings. It can never acknowledge itself. Malice always hides under the guise of more noble motivations. It refuses to see its own ugliness. This is the true source of the demonic. When folks are unable to own the complexity of their inner motivations, a recognition utterly necessary in order to enlighten and purify those very motivations, which when purified hold the key to greatness, then those motivations remain in the dark, festering in the shadows. Since viciousness festering in the shadows makes us profoundly uncomfortable we need to get it out of ourselves and direct it somewhere. This is the process that the ancients all described and Freud gave a name to; Projection. We project our shadow unto someone else, using someone who holds Shakhti and life force, often someone who is good and loving as the blank screen for our projection. What is the dynamic of shadow projection? We project shadow by finding what may well be legitimate weaknesses in the person; we are all wounded healers, we are all, at times in our lives less then whole, and our lack of wholeness sometimes hurts others and ourselves. It is often our own lack of wholeness which create the hooks for the shadow projections of our enemies. So while they need take their projections back we would do well to remove our hooks and replace them with open hearts. The rationalization most often offered by the trolls I have interviewed for the pain they inflict on people they have never met or spoken too, is that they are merely exposing human ugliness. There general metaphysical assumption about life. “All people are creeps”. The good person is the rare exception and even he –deep down- can be exposed as a creep. Naturally then, when the shadow projectors focus their poisonous projector on a person the goal is not to engage in conversation, which is honest, compassionate, balanced or healing. Rather their goal like that of the Internet trolls is defilement, defacing and demonizing. When we see demonization taking place –as Hitler’s demonization of the Jews fueled by hate blogs of European history, or the extreme right wing demonization of Clinton, with websites galore implying that he was somehow responsible for the death of Vince Foster as well as every other form of venal violation, or the extreme left wings demonization of George Bush implicitly compared to Hitler in websites all over the web, we know that the demonic in human beings is running amok. Demonization is the surest sign that the demonic in the demonizer is running the show. The demonic always stems from our inability to own the demonic in ourselves. Those demonic moments or impulses – which can only truly be met by laughter, which dissolves and heals them- are denied. We are frightened of our own face so we move to demonize defile and deface the other. Our own pathetic lack of life force is thus hidden from ourselves and others. In trying to bring down and destroy those who are truly lovers at the very core of our being we are desperately trying to cover up our own unlove. I am a Jew, a rabbi; a spiritual artist and someone who has been wrongly and terribly attacked by hate blogs on the web. Somehow spiritual people think you are not allowed to say that so clearly. Lighten up everyone. To much trauma and drama. Of course I can and should say that; Bearing false witness – the favored activity of hate blogs In discussing the nature of some of those people who stand behind the hate blogs the word which came up time and again was demonic. That is why I have deployed that word. Demons are not from some other world. The demonic is very much a part of us. For two years, I bore the attacks on my person in silence, went inward and tried to find an inner center of being that was not subject to any external force, whim or caprice. I understood in the depth of my pain, that somehow I had lived too much on the outside. That the only true path to enlightenment and liberation, which is the core goal of many schools of Kabbalah, was to go so deeply inside and realize my own love, goodness and the wonder of being, and to know that none of these could eever be taken from me. Along the way I had to encounter every manner of demon in my interior castle. Every manner of demon, which the hate blogs had foisted on me. I needed to find any source, any root of the distortions, make them conscious in the container of radical self love and rigorous inner work….. ….. until my interior castle was freed of unconscious shadow and literally sang out with joy the love of life, and my heart once again flowed with the yearning force of being, with the fullness of presence and with the wondrous wholeness of reality which lived in me humbly and consciously –even as it lives in every being, in every moment. And when you tear away the last veil you know with certainty that love is the foundation of human consciousness, that there really is nothing else. And that is our betrayal of love, which drives us insane with fear, fright greed and malice. For the reality of our existence is that we are all part of one pulsating and loving wholeness. It is only this realization which can heal our identity crisis which seeks to find relief of it’s own pathos by the destroying the identity of others. When we get up in the morning and we cannot answer with a resounding Yes, the question of our own existence then we begin the spiritual or physical murder of other to remind ourselves that we exist. Of course the murder might take place in words, in Internet posts, or in yellow journalism disguised as courage. This is what Kundera whom I cited above reminds us. Malice and envy can never admit of themselves. They are as the ancient Hebrew texts said of the evil inclination –the demonic in man-they are the “masters of disguise”. The worst manner of degradations are always hidden under some noble guise. We were protecting the state, the honor of the constitution, the fatherland, we are protecting the women, the feminine, and we are protecting the dignity of white American males of the purity of the Aryan race or America against communism…. I am as I write this morning in transit on my way to the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz Poland. I will be here for two weeks. I have come with a group of twelve friends and my spiritual mentor. We have come to spend two weeks praying and engaging in what is called in the Hassidic tradition, “freeing souls”; souls who have been trapped in this place of horror which bears witness to man’s extreme cruelty against his follow man. Of course we would like to believe that there was a small German Elite, which killed six million Jews, millions of Gypsies and caused the death of more then fifty million people. But as Daniel Golhagen reminded us in his book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, it was an entire people that participated in the Genocide either actively or by pretending it was not happening. It takes village to raise a child and it took an entire people, with the cooperation of haters all over Europe, from Poland to France to the Czech republic, to commit genocide and slowly gas to death over a million children as but the opening act of the horror show produced by human emptiness and unlove. In order for evil to triumph it is not enough for small bands of devils and demons in human form to do their dastardly deeds. Evil only triumphs, whether in Auschwitz or on the Internet, when hordes of human beings feed off of the pseudo-erotic charge it gives them and when good men and women look away and do nothing. The national enquirer which regularly engages in character assassination of the most vile kind, which deals out deathly doses of unlove, is read by millions of good Americans, standing at the counter picking up their groceries at Wal Mart. The national enquirer and other tabloids are carried by virtually all of the “all American apple pie super markets – and carried prominently and proudly. “Good people” own many of the supermarkets. The shoppers are certainly good people. So why is it that they all revel in reading what they know are at least partial and usually total lies about other people’s misfortune. It is this same black hole in human nature, this same tabloid mentality that has reproduced itself in the Internet in hate blogs of numerous kinds, all too often hiding under respectable garb, pushing a respectable and even important cause. Remember McCarthyism. Or it’s new American face in Sexual McCarthyism. But more about that in a moment. But first we must deal with a prior question. The Question!! What makes people dance and delight –in their most hidden heart – at the destruction of others? Why is the hidden cause of that uniquely human propensity for Murder? Social, spiritual or physical Murder is not an animal characteristic. It is rather the product of evolved consciousness. Animals kill for food, sometimes for aggression in defending their space or status necessary for survival. Of course the coyote kills. But not out of hatred. Ashley Montague reminds us that the coyote does not kill because he hates the rabbit but because he loves the rabbit, in the same way as Ken Wilber has pointed out, the human being loves ice cream. It is only the evolved and conscious human being, who kills, in the street, on the Internet and in cocktail conversation, out of hatred. Only the human being kills out of Malice and envy. The animal kingdom does not produce Iago. It is only human beings who build gas chambers. It is only major corporations who develop the gas for the gas chambers. It is only Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen who participate in developing the technology for the gas chambers. It is only the entire German Nation of Hitler Willing Executioners who either derives some vicarious pleasure in the betrayal of the Jews or simply through diabolical inactivity, looking away and occupying themselves with their own lives and goodness, allow it to happen. But why? But why? But why? Is it not true that the human being is evolved? Do we not know that spirit and body and mind are part of one greater whole? Can the human being evolve in body and mind and yet devolve in spirit? It is true that the heart of man is evil from your according to the biblical teachers. But this is only the untrained and closed heart of man. Can man not open his heart? Is man not also a baby faced divine who is but a little lower then God in the exalted song of the Psalmist. Is not the human being created in the image of God and according to the sages and mystics of every great system of insight and wisdom, is not man literally part of the divine him/herself. If this is all true then how can Auschwitz be built? What curse is there built into man’s evolution that can unleash such depravity? Where do the demons come from- for if we cannot answer this question –if man hates simply because he hates then there is little hope any of us at all. So here it is. All hatred – on the Interent and in Auschwitz, stems from man’s loss of personal identity. Man sense of self is unplugged and he goes haywire with viciousness. But if we can identity the source of man’s loss of identity; if we can trace hatred back to its source, then perhaps there might be some hope of healing. Same thing said differently: If love stands against fear then fear in it’s insidious and demonic power will always overcome love. But if fear itself, if hatred itself, is at it’s core love denied, love crushed and quashed, love ignored, love yearned for and unfulfilled, then perhaps just perhaps there is a hidden story of transcendence even in our evil which might yet be the source of our redemption –of our healing and transformation. So here it is. A great and hidden teaching. An esoteric teaching. Esoteric comes from the root Hebrew word seter. Seter means hidden, and Seter means Thanatos or destruction. Because this hidden teaching is both the full glory of the human being, of human Eros, and the hidden and most true understanding of what we have come to call Thanatos. The human urge for destruction. There are always two forces playing in the hearts and affairs of men. They have been given a thousand names by a thousand wise men and women – holders and teachers of the perennial philosophy but I will refer to them in their more recent incarnations with their ancient but modern names of Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the drive towards wholeness. Eros is the drive to uncover the deeper interconnectivity of the all with the all. Eros is in the great teaching of the perennial philosophy – the desire to reclaim the original wholeness of reality which was lost when the first fence was built –when the boundary –pink Floyd’s wall – between self and other was erected. Eros is the drive then, not towards Union, but towards Re-Union. Eros heals the disassociation and fragmentation which characterizes the thinking that gives birth to hatred, hate blogs, hate camps of death which gas children, all the while with the social and physical murders assured that they are somehow behaving righteously, acting to “protect the innocent helpless women of the third Reich {and the powerful women of modernity} from the Jewish molesters and sexual predators”. Eros shows up to heal this deadly illusion. It is the fullness of presence; it is living on the inside, is the recovery of prior wholeness; it is the participation in yearning force of being which reaches towards the love that is always and already is. The problem with Eros is that it is often frustrated. It cannot find original union. It feels the ache of no longer being awake. It is desperate, lovesick for the arms of the beloved. And in it’s desperation it is driven to addiction and drink. The addictions of Eros, what I like to call Pseudo Eros are the source of all evil. Desperation for love, paradoxically produces demonization, degradation and destruction. The temple was destroyed in the Jewish tradition because of causeless hatred. The temple-incarnated love built by David and Solomon the two great lovers whose very names in the original Hebrew mean love and wholeness. Yet the experience of true Eros and the wholeness in the temple also produced desperation when it was not available as a stable realization and inner experience. To stabilize the realization requires work and practice and human beings are lazy. So when the true love of existence is available and then disappears, then the pseudo Eros of hatred, causeless hatred rooted in our projections and fear –runs rampant and the temple is destroyed. When I cannot find true wholeness then I find refuge in the idolatrous Buddha of Pseudo Wholeness and Pseudo Eros. Those who practiced causeless hatred at the time of the second temple were of course not aware that this is what they were doing. Each was convinced that they were fighting the good fight, that their hatred was respectable because it was for a good cause. They were fighting those who were impure, those who were defiled. The fought for the pride of Judea, the integrity of the state or to protect the women and children from lurking dangers, which were really but their own distorted and degraded selves disassociated and projected outward on the face of the enemy – the face of the enemy who becomes the enemy only through the hiding of the divine face and the defacing of the divine image. So this is Eros and its clever but counterfeit companion, Pseudo Eros. Now Thanatos would seem to be the drive for destruction. But in reality it is not an independent drive. Thanatos is actually but Eros frustrated. Thanatos at its core seeks the destruction of all of the false boundaries that exist between people. Thanatos feels, intuits, and smells the clay feet of those would be prophets of Eros who are really but hawking the wares of pseudo Eros. Thanatos seeks destruction because at it’s core thanatos seeks to return to love – to remove the false boundaries that separate us form our delicious and deep need for mutual love, holding, compassion and forgiveness. Eros and Thanatos both express themselves as hatred as well. Thanatos by destroying all boundaries and seeking to evolve the world to essence. Thanatos by destroying all superficial and artificial distinctions. Eros in the form of Pseudo Eros. You see the great illusion of existence is the separate self. The skin encapsulated ego, that in the words of the kabala, says I am the king, I will rule by myself. Eros seeks the wholeness of the self. Thanatos destroys the false sense of separateness and the creations that support that false sense of self. In the loss of memory is the source of all evil. When we lose our memory of the once and future world then we are exiled from Eden. In this loss of memory we experience our very survival as dependent on the survival of our separate sense selves. So we build walls and castles and fortresses around this separate self-ego afraid that if we let go for but a moment we will be hurled into the ultimate devastation of eternal non-existence. It is those walls which are destroyed the catapult machines of Thanatos. But this feeling of alienation is sourced only in our separation from source. So it can only be healed in one way. It is only in saying I AM SOURCE in realizing I am sources that our cravings and strivings can be healed in the peace of I am –I am the lord your god. Read by the Abraham Kook, a kind of Jewish aurobindo, to mean- my true I, is the Lord your God, My true I, is I AM. I AM SOURCE. Any thing less then that realization of identity results in an identify crisis of massive and destructive proportions. When I lose site of the experience that I am –then I am, only if you are not. When I am not in the circle of Eros then I turn towards Pseudo Eros. And pseudo Eros at its core always manifests through me pretending to be in the circle by placing you outside of the circle. It is only in your being the enemy and the other that I can be the friend and the chosen one. My existence, lacking connection to source, no longer bathing in the radiance of my original face – is defiled and defaced, and can only be felt by violently demanding your non existence. It is only if I offer you up to death that I feel life. And this is the root of all manner of depredations. So…. If I can expose your clay feet and thereby justify my demonizing of you, then I can deny the demonic in me which rises from the gaping hole in my wholeness – which is more easily filled with the junk food of your destruction then with the sacred practice courage and discipline required for my evolution, which is but the recovery of my original face, the realization that I AM SOURCE. The journey Up and away from Eden. Beware of crusades and holy wars. Holy people rarely fight them. The most ulterior motive of all is the ulterior motive of piety. Wholes and Parts: Now it is true that in every cause there is some truth. In every attack there is some part, which is true, and it is that part which sustains the hatred. But the very act of hatred is in denying the whole. Hatred is always born when we deny reality. And reality is context. Reality is the knowledge –the sensual alive and carnal knowledge that every part is part of a greater whole. Te separate the part from the whole –to exile the part from the whole is to deface god and exile the Shekinah. The face of God which is true Eros and which pushes us to our evolution and pulls us to our wholeness. All evil is based on some partial truth, which has been made into a whole. The hater returns time and again to the root source of his evil which is usually some good value – torn from it’s larger context in a constellation of competing truth and values –and made into an absolute truth –an absolute perspective. It is the part denying it’s partness and saying in the language of the kabbalists Ana Emloch – I am whole and I will rule, that is the source of evil and human suffering. To return to love is to return to wholeness. Wholeness involves taking all the available parts –all of the perspectives – listening deeply to each of them –giving each one its deep truth and honor, and then creating peace, shalom – by integrating all of the perspectives into the most holistic possible hierarchy of action and truth. Shalom in Hebrew means whole or integral or peace. Peace is made with my enemy not my friend. My enemy who hates me – if I can hold his perspective for just enough time to feel into its root source which is always some frustration of love and dignity –always it is some way in which my existence makes my enemy feel that he does not exists – then from that place I can love my enemy and affirm his existence without giving up my truth and my integrity and from this place I can make love, I can make peace. The sure sign that behind the righteous cause is evil is the unwillingness to talk. Because in talking I risk feeling into the perspective of my enemy. To talk to face to face is already the end of defacing. So in refusing to talk I maintain my commitment to my enemies defacing and defilement. All to often I have seen peace activists who talk peace but are not peace. To make peace I must Be Peace. This was the teaching my friend Gabriel tells me, of the ancient Essenes. To Be peace I must own the demonic in my self – trace it to it’s root, and find the core sweetness at the root, which is the part – originally part of the whole, which holds a partial value and truth which has been distorted from it’s partness and is now disguised as a whole. All to often the peace maker will make peace with the enemies of his people – those who have massacred children and tortured prisoners and rapes and dismembered the elderly and weak- with those people he is wiling to sit and talk peace for they do not threaten his psychic structure, but with his brother whom he has kissed on the lips –but whose very life force and Eros – whose existence somehow makes him feel less special less alive, he refuses to talk! Great peace maker, Do you recognize malice and envy and primal jealousy or are you really convinced that you act justly and righteously? Are you ready to awake?.. for it is only that way that you will be redeemed of your ache which moves you to hatred, murder, and war even as you speak of peace, love, and prophetic justice Always the sure sign of malice and fear – cleverly disguised as righteousness, love and peace is the refusal to hear all the stories. To hear all the perspectives. To hear all of the sides of the issue and hold them all in love. When we reify one story –when we take one story as the dogmatic truth then we ignore all of the love and truths held in the other stories. Then even when we hear new facts we cannot climb down out trees blinded as we are by our cognitive dissonance, which at core is our inability to own the pettiness and smallness of our limited perspective, caused directly by the pain of our closed heart and the choking of our true nature. If we will speak to our obvious enemy, but will not speak to our brothers, then we are not healthy lovers but lost in the sickness of our hatreds, however well we have disguised them. We wallow in the partial truth of our experience, masturbate our hurt into a false god of war that guides us and drives us, losing our ability to make love with perspectives which emerge from the faces of god we have made other, and therefore unable to give birth to the god of higher integration and truth dying to be born Internet evil is in some respects similar to other evils. It is driven by the same Eros and Thanatos that drives all orgies of creativity, destruction, Eros and pseudo Eros. However it is also unique in several ways. The first is in the instant albeit pathetic gratification afforded by the power which one can wield on the internet. While power, much like a gourmet meal, generally requires years of effort and practice, the Internet is the greasy, non-nourishing fast food junkie of power. As is usually the case the most instantly available power is destructive and not creative. The second is the virtual absence of consequences. The third is the democratizations of great evil. Fourth is the unusual cruelty of expression. It used to be that you had to be in a position of genuine power to inflict profound hurt and suffering. Let’s look at one example citing in this morning’s times. Meagan Meir commits suicide. Her friend’s mother has made up a personality on the Internet who flirts with Meagan offering her love and then rejects her cruelly. This boy does not exist. It is the demonic in Lori Drew mother of Megan’s friend. Meagan commits suicide. As Daniel Solove points out there is little that one can do to prosecute. What about Meagan made Lori Drew feel less then whole? What about Meagan offended Loris daughter in such a way that she sought Meagan’s destruction. That she sought to inflict the cruelty of love withdrawn – that she sought to inflict pain on Meagan and reveled in that pain. I am sure there was some lack of wholeness in Meagan. Maybe she even caused Lori’s daughter great pain. But Lori became god’s helper and deemed it her right to inflict punishment and pain on Meagan. She took what might have been some part of Meagan, the part of Meagan she felt hurt her daughter, the part of Meagan that was not whole, took that part and made it into a whole and committed spiritual murder against Meagan in a way so cruel and brutal that Meagan killed herself. Again, Daniel Solove, author of the Future of Reputation, points out that this is not illegal. The law is not to be identified with justice or the good or god. The law which is by it nature general and impersonal all often allows for great cruelty and malice. This story shows Lori Drew a woman who is Meagan’s mother, who does not live with you, upon whom Meagan did not depend for her support, is able to enter Meagan’s life, cause enormous damage and pain, with no real culpability. A second example from this morning times. Jason Fortuny takes out an add, posts it on the Internet where he identifies himself as a woman. He/She then invites men to apply for the job as a Dom in sexual relationship. Please send picture and personal information he/ she asks. A hundred men write in to this private add. Jason published their names and pictures on the Internet. Some lose their jobs, others their loves and other perhaps the love of their children. Jason – another assistant to God is satisfied – he has exposed the sexual desires of these men, which he has deemed rapacious and make them pay. A very limited and partial truth about male sexuality is exposed and used to destroy men he did not know –whose complexity beauty and love and goodness he could not know. Jason disassociated from his own sexuality, perhaps from what was demonic in his own sexuality – demonizes and destroys… Like Lori, Jason is able to inflict great on harm on people he does not know. Like Lori he acts with apparent impunity. Like Lori Drew he is able to become a squatter in someone else’s virtual reality. The internet has also become the weapon choice for what I have come to refer too, following Alan Dershowtiz, as Sexual McCarthyism. Structurally Sexual McCarthyism is precisely parallel to its spiritual father, McCarthyism McCarthyism in person of Sen. Joe McCarthy and his minions, took a good value – the fight against communism- communism which killed 17 million collective farmers –communism which vies with Nazism as the most destructive evil in the history of man, communism which in the fifties in the united states rightly aroused fear and loathing – and used that fear of loathing for the petty purposes of his own vicious political ends, to attack and destroy and persecute, to be ulove and malice, all under the guise of a noble cause. Good men and women looked away because they were afraid that if they stood up for their falsely accused friends –they too be labeled as communists, attacked and blacklisted. Some of their friends may have made a mistake and attended a communist party meeting. Some may have flirted with communism and even joined the party, but McCarthy seized on their mistakes and used them to distort, defame, degrade and destroy. And all because Joe McCarthy himself was pathetically seeking to affirm his own existence through the spiritual and social murder of others –all of course disguised as the good fight and the good cause. Sexual McCarthyism operates the same way. It takes a good value, the fight against sexual abuse, something we all believe in heart and soul, it accesses our natural revulsion at child molestation, rape, human trafficking and sexual slavery etc. and uses them to commit it’s own terrible abuses. Hiding behind sexual purity many forms of vicious attack and maligning take place. It encourages sexual abuse, that is the abuse of sexuality through distorted and even false recounting of sexual relationships years and even decades after they took place, with the intent to defame and defile, all the while pretending like the true aim is to “protect future women against male predators”. The sexual McCarthyites themselves know this is not their true aim but it allows them to masquerade on the cover of piety and righteousness hoping to obscure the true pettiness and malevolence of their ends. When they attack they hide behind the cover of sexually correct talk but in fact it is almost never about sex. Troy is attacked ostensibly because Paris son of King Priam and prince of Troy had an affair with Helen wife of Menlaueus and Queen of Sparta. But an only slightly deeper read reveals something else entirely. Paris’s affair with Helen was the excuse but not the reason for the Trojan War. The difference between a reason and an excuse is that a reason is the cause of the event. Remove the reason, you will remove the cause and the event will not take place. An excuse is not a cause; it is a pseudo cause designed to hide or obscure the real cause –so remove the excuse and another excuse rises to take its place. Agamemnon brother of Menelaus King of Sparta wants to defeat Troy and it’s mighty king Priam and it’s great Hero Hector. He want to do so because it is his Atman Project, his desperate and pathetic bid for the immortality of the separate self of Agamemnon. This is his true reason; the ravings of his ego run wild and his demonic desire for conquest, war and destruction, which are for him the road to personal immortality. He cannot admit of these base desires for they are unseemly. He needs a noble cause and he needs to enlist this Brother Menelaus and the armies of Sparta. Along come Paris and Helen who fall in love or lust, it is not clear which, and Agamemnon has his pious excuse. The feminine has been violated. Sparta has been violated. “I must defend the women of Greece against the predation of the Trojans modeled by the violation of Helen by the Trojan Prince”. This however is not the reason for the Trojan war it is merely the excuse. Accuse a man of sexual sin; do not check the veracity of the accusation. After all, goes the dogma of what Prof. Daphne Pattai has derisively referred to as the Sexual Harassment Industry, after all “Women after always tell the truth about sex and certainly this is true of groups of women”. Deny feminine shadow because you have an agenda. You want someone out of the way. He takes up too much space. Take a part of him, the part that is not whole, that is a work in progress, exaggerate it, distort it, lie about it and make it all of whom he is. Distort his love and his goodness. Deny his integrity and the thousands of deeds of love and good that defined his waking hours. Use the virulence of virtual reality to erase his virtue. Bear false witness if your must. Try and insure that no one talks to him so that you can hold him prison in the hermeneutic prism of his hijacked virtue, hijacked by a carefully gathered group of the hurt and wounded who cry far more the it hearts seeking to seduce the power of their tears and alleged devestation, reify hurt which is normal in human relationships and turn it into blunt weapon, weave around him, deploying the Internet as your chief tool, the web of Maya and virtual illusion which darkens all that is light and prevents everyone and anyone from touching his essence directly or experiencing his integrity in the first person. Deploy vicious and virulent hate blogs; post it on the Internet as truth, without bothering to verify true of false. Let the hate blogs Internet serve as the tabloid of the Internet. Better yet let the Internet become the roman coliseum where good people are fed to lions to feed the trolling frenzy of the scandal starved crowds. The hate bloggers and websites are easily aroused. They feel alive in dealing death. By seeking to ruin people’s lives or work or relationships they are lifted from what is often the empty dis-ease truth of their lives, and filled with a pathetic sense of pseudo power. This pseudo power, manifests in the most sadistic impulses in the human being which send an aroused demonic thrill through their body. They are aroused and alive through their sadism and addicted to the almost sexual charge that it sends through them. Their sites are linked to neo Nazi sites and anti – Semitic sites because the both share in the same energy of hate. But do not just blame the hate sites or the gossip bloggers; The bloggers are but the suicide bombers of the respectable people who hide behind them, preening respectability while reeking of putrid cowardice. The respectable people go to synagogue and church, pray with fervor and concentration even as they, behind the scenes post their letters of hatred and revenge, filled with calumny and lies, on the hate sites or gossip blogs. I was talking recently with a blogger who had attacked me for years. In a strange twist of fate we have become friends. He has shown some genuine integrity and I have taken him deep into my confidence trusting his integrity as he has trusted mine. He has written many things about me that were not true in a long rambling essay written in 2004. At some point he responded to his own inner sense of integrity and offered to change all factual statements that were clearly false. I asked him; “Hey Tom, did you make all those things up?”. “No” he said, “a group of people told me those things”. Now all of those things were vicious lies that were verifiably false. My friend Tom went on to say that in the city he lives which is filled with Jews he is never invited for a Shabbat meal. My heart broke in a thousand pieces even as it filled with rage. I understood now what had happened. For the last ten years respectable people with axes to grind, primal malice to spare, holy wars to fight and damsels in distress to protect, had called my new friend tom and slandered me. My friend Tom at the time had a policy of just publishing whatever people told him. He has – like myself –evolved since then, we all evolve, and we all make mistakes and we are all works in progress. So I realized that all the lies he had published on the web were told to him by ostensibly respectable and god fearing men and women. Not dearth of Rabbis among them I am sure. They send him out to do the dirty work. To put his name, the name of his blog on the lies and on the line. Then they cast him out as disreputable and for ten years forgot to invite him for shabbot; after all they said my friend is a pornographer and gossip columnist. They, the respectable, sat and enjoyed their meals with there children for every shabot for those entire ten years even as my friend ate alone. A woman I once knew cries her eyes out as she prays even as she, through back channels posts a letter filled with slander and distortion on the hate blogs of the internet and then denies that she has anything to do with posting it. “I am respectable” she protests in feigned innocence and hurt. Who me? A group of rabbis, each with their own agenda work regularly with the hate blogs behind the scenes. They count on the hate blogs to do their dirty work for them while they keep their hands clean. In the end, my new friend has more decency and integrity then all of them. I am aware that who was using whom in this story, is unclear. Was he using them to make his blog popular with salacious details, whose only problem was that they were not true, or were they using him as their suicide bomber even as they maintained the veneer of home and respectability. Either way, the vehicle of hate that allowed them to do their dastardly deeds was the Internet. And none of this would matter if the Internet consumers did not go first to the gossip blogs like Gawker.com, driven by the vicarious pleasure of seeing people shamed and exposed, what Hebrew wisdom calls miniature murder, and then to the tabloid hate blogs and only much later to all the positive content of the web. The trolls feed the respectable people. The hate blogs are but the face we deny. The Nazis but the manifestation of European anti Semitism which has festered and exploded a thousand violent times and soaked the blood of European soil making it a fertile land to be plowed by holocaust and gas chambers. The holocaust is the rape and murder of millions of people by those who could get away with it. Internet violence is the name rape and spiritual murder of people who would not normally rape and murder but who do it because they feel that the Internet is a Free Pass Zone with no consequences. Because the internet name rapist and murderers feel like they can get away with it. The trolls are our face, which we deny While many come to Auschwitz inspired by the anti Semitic hate blogs of history, in future years it is completely reasonable to assume that virulent mobs will be stirred up and people burned and killed because the hatred stirred fomented and disseminated on the world wide web. And all this will be possible because good men and women will do nothing. Marc Gafni Posted by marc gafni Please leave comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – MYSTERY OF THE LOST ARK
August 4, 2008
Marc Gafni – MYSTERY OF THE LOST ARK Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com What is the secret of this ancient love hidden in the Temple’s origins? What is the mystery of the Lost Ark, crowned by her sexually intertwined cherubic lovers? Why is the mythic ark’s metaphorical recovery so absolutely crucial for our lives? Could this ancient and esoteric wisdom have something radically new and important to say about the love lost in our lives and the road to its recovery? In a word, can the cherubs lead us back to love? The Approach To understand the mystery of the Temple and what it has to teach us, we need to approach her more carefully. Indeed, the gradual approach towards the center is always the essential formula in the quest of the spirit. The Temple itself was built somewhat like an exquisite mandala. The mandala invites the gazer to pass through layer after layer of imagery before beholding its wondrous core. Similarly, we find that the Temple was a layered structure. The High Priest would ascend the great staircase to the outer Courtyard of Song, pass through the courtyard, into the chamber called the Holy, and from there into the inner most sanctum – the Holy of Holies. In this sanctum sanctorum of the Temple, behind fine brocaded curtains, stood the golden ark of the covenant. The ark contained within it the two tablets of stone upon which were carved the Ten Commandments. Magical lapidary tablets, sculpted by the God-gripped hand of Moses himself. Most essential though is that which rests atop the ark. Sitting perched aloft the ark are our two winged figures – the celebrated cherubs. Indeed, their cherubic faces have graced everything from the greatest works of art to countless covers of Hallmark cards. Yet here, according to the esoteric tradition, these images were not of the Hallmark variety. As we mentioned at the outset, these two cherubs were male and female, face to face, meurim zeh b’zeh – intertwined in sexual embrace. In the language of the Biblical source text the cherubs were, “As one embraced with his lover.” These carved creatures are the focal point, the epicenter of the mandala-like Temple space. They sit, like the guarded pupil of the eye, at the source of the sacred. That such provocatively sexual figurines would have such prominence in the Holy of Holies is mystery indeed. It is called by the Kabbalistic initiates the sod hakeruvim – the Secret of the cherubs. And though full initiation into this secret cannot be wholly transmitted in the pages of a book, together we can at least hint to its wonder and strive to scrutinize the inscrutable.
Marc Gafni – The Lion of Fire
August 4, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The best way to behold such mysteries is through the gleaming prism of story. Thus we begin with a spell-binding ancient text which sits at the core of the mystery tradition. This esoteric tale describes an extraordinary scene which takes place in Jerusalem in roughly 500 BCE, almost two centuries before Plato and Aristotle, The masters of the day were distressed. Adultery was spreading rampant as plagues among the people. The authorities were at a loss as to how to curb this powerful drive. Finally, driven to desperation, they began to pray. For three days, they fasted, weeping and pleading with God, “Let us slay the sexual drive before it slays us.” Finally God acquiesced. The masters then witnessed a lion of fire leap out from within the Temple’s Holy of Holies. A prophet among them identified the lion as the personification of the primal sexual drive. They sought to slay the lion of fire. But the result was that for three days thereafter the entire society ground to a standstill. Hens did not lay eggs, artists ceased creating, businesses faltered, and all spiritual activity came to a halt. Realizing that the sexual drive was about more than just sex, that it somehow echoed with the divine, the masters relented. They prayed that only its destructive shadow be removed, while retaining its creative force. Their request was denied on high with the insightful psychological response,“You cannot have only half a drive.” The greater the sacred power of a quality, the greater its shadow; the two are inseparable. So they prayed that the lion at least be weakened, and their prayer was granted. The lion, less potent but no less present, re-entered the Holy of Holies.
Marc Gafni – myth, magic and mystery
August 5, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The masters of the day were distressed. Adultery was spreading as rampant as plagues among the people. The authorities were at a loss as to how to curb this powerful drive. Finally, driven to desperation, they began to pray. For three days, they fasted, weeping and pleading with God, “Let us slay the sexual drive before it slays us.” Finally God acquiesced. The masters then witnessed a lion of fire leap out from within the Temple’s Holy of Holies. A prophet among them identified the lion as the personification of the primal sexual drive. They sought to slay the lion of fire. But the result was that for three days thereafter the entire society ground to a standstill. Hens did not lay eggs, artists ceased creating, businesses faltered, and all spiritual activity came to a halt. Realizing that the sexual drive was about more than just sex, that it somehow echoed with the divine, the masters relented. They prayed that only its destructive shadow be removed, while retaining its creative force. Their request was denied on high with the insightful psychological response,“You cannot have only half a drive.” The greater the sacred power of a quality, the greater its shadow; the two are inseparable. So they prayed that the lion at least be weakened, and their prayer was granted. The lion, less potent but no less present, re-entered the Holy of Holies. The text is alive with myth, magic and mystery. The most startling revelation is the radical claim of the text as to the originating place of the sexual drive. Why does this drive, personified as a lion of fire, emerge from the Temple’s Holy of Holies? Apparently this is its eternal abode. Thus, remarkably, the text is telling us that the seat and source of the sexual drive is none other than the Holy of Holies. In fact the Holy of Holies is often depicted in the mystical sources as the marriage bed. The tablets and the ark are depicted respectively as the phallus and the vagina. This sexual model of eros and the virtual identity between the erotic and the holy are perhaps the most vital and provocative insights of the kabbalists. They teach it implicitly in a thousand different ways in their writings. They would rarely say it overtly for fear the message would be misunderstood, leading to a kind of sexual anarchy which would bring in its wake the collapse of family. So the dominant impression we are left with is that while sex is good, as it is created by God, it is exceedingly dangerous and is to be handled with great caution. One gets the impression that the attendant dangers may even override the essential good. Thus, nothing as audacious as the secret of the cherubs was written about openly. And, yet, once you see it you realize it is there, subtly calling out, whispering from the folds of literally hundreds of texts.
Marc Gafni – SEX IN THE TEMPLE?
August 5, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Sex in the temple!? Sexually entwined cherubs atop the ark, and a fiery feline sexual drive living in the Holy of Holies? What are these mythic images trying to express? At first blush they seem to describe sex as a central preoccupation of the Holy of Holies, portraying the Temple as some kind of ancient Hebrew Playboy mansion. While Hebrew mysticism may wholeheartedly embrace a positive and healthy sexual ethic, one would not have thought that sex is the essence of the sacred!! The answer lies in the story itself. When the lion is subdued, the world does not wake up with just its sexual drive lobotomized. Rather, the world wakes up to an overwhelmingly dull and drive-less existence. The passionate engagement in all activity has suddenly withered and vanished. Whether it be in sex, art, work, or creativity, the thrill of existence is gone. Clearly, that fiery feline inhabitant of the Holy of Holies represents not merely sexuality. Rather, she is the incarnation of a more potent energy force. She is the embodiment of the Shechina. The Shechina is the feminine Divine. Her name means Indwelling Presence, ‘the one who dwells in you.’ She is presence, poetry, passion. She is the sustaining God force which runs through and wombs the world. A living mythic presence not wholly dissimilar to ‘the Force’, of Star Wars fame. She is the underlying erotic, sensual and loving force that knows our name and nurtures all being.
Marc Gafni – SHEKINAH, PRESENCE POETRY AND PASSION
August 6, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The Shechina is the feminine Divine. Her name means Indwelling Presence, ‘the one who dwells in you.’ She is presence, poetry, passion. She is the sustaining God force which runs through and wombs the world. A living mythic presence not wholly dissimilar to ‘the Force’, of Star Wars fame. She is the underlying erotic, sensual and loving force that knows our name and nurtures all being. Shechina captures an experience, a way of being in the world, for which we do not yet have an English word. For this is a way of being which we in the West are hard pressed to articulate. It is the experience of waking up in the morning full of utter joy for the arrival of the day. It is weeping over the splendor of the sunset or the scent of the ocean or the fragility of a newborn. It is a way of living in love. Indeed, it is one of the great failures of love that we do not possess such a word for this fully charged way of living. The main reason we lack a word for the type of love we will be exploring in this book, is that such an expanded notion of love is still so foreign to the fabric of our lives. Our vocabulary reflects our reality. Just as the Eskimo has an ample supply of words to describe different types of snow, a society infused with love would likewise have a menagerie of terms for different types of love. We should wonder over the paucity in the English language for our ‘terms of endearment.’
Marc Gafni – RECLAIMING EROS BEYOND THE SEXUAL
August 6, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Just as the Eskimo has an ample supply of words to describe different types of snow, a society infused with love would likewise have a menagerie of terms for different types of love. We should wonder over the paucity in the English language for our ‘terms of endearment’. Our best move in the English language is to turn towards the term Plato introduced in the Symposium: Eros. For Plato eros is love plus. It is precisely the kind of fully charged life experience which is evoked by the Hebrew term Shekhina. But over time the term Eros has been so narrowed and limited that it has lost most of its original intention. Usually when we hear the word erotic it evokes only the sexual. And although the sexual is a part of eros, it is only a limited part. The type of full Eros we will be describing in this book is way and beyond the merely sexual. Together we will work to reclaim this original meaning of eros, a meaning infused by its Hebrew counterpart Shechina. May the claiming of our erotic birthright in these pages in-form a richer and deeper life for ourselves, our loved ones and our communities.
Eros Not Sex / or The Faces of Eros – Marc Gafni
August 7, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Eros has many expressions. Each expression is hinted at in the temple mysteries. There are four faces of eros which, when taken together, form the essence of the Shechina experience. These four faces are the very stuff of eros. In this chapter we will explore the erotic understanding which forms the matrix of the secret of the cherubs and informs every arena of our existence. We will unmask the four face of eros and reveal why they are so vitally important for anyone who wants to experience the full joy, depth and aliveness of being. After we understand the eros which lays at the heart of the Temple mysteries we can then turn to answering our core question. If, as we shall show, the essence of the Temple – and of every journey of the spirit – is eros not sex, then why is sex such a prominent feature of the temple? It is in response to this question that in Chapter Three we will unpack the mystical secret of the cherubs. As we shall see, at the very heart of Hebrew tantra was a very precise and provocative understanding of the relationship between love, sex and eros. This understanding will open us up to a whole new understanding of our sexuality. This understanding will show us the way to erotically reweave the very fabric of our lives in more vivid patterns, sensual textures and brilliant hues.
Marc Gafni – The First face of Eros: On the Inside
August 7, 2008
The Interior Castle “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson The cherubs in the magical mystery of Temple myth were not stationary fixtures. No, these statues were expressive, emotive. They moved. When integrity and goodness ruled the land the cherubs were face to face. In these times the focal point of Shechina energy rested erotically, ecstatically, between the cherubs. When discord and evil held sway in the kingdom the cherubs turned from each other, appearing back to back instead of face to face. Back to back, the world was amiss, alienated, ruptured. Face to face, the world was harmonized, hopeful, embraced. Thus, face to face in biblical myth text is the most highly desirable state. It is the gem stone state of being, the jeweled summit of all creation. Face to face, to be fully explicit, is a state of eros. As we shall see, face to face means first and foremost, being on the inside. Indeed the God force said to rest between the cherubs in the Holy of Holies, the Shechina, is no less than the radically profound experience of being on the inside. Eros is aroused whenever we move so deeply into what we do, who we are with, or where we are, that its interiority stirs our heart and imagination. Being on the inside is of course not about a geographical place, but about a soul terrain, a place inside ourselves. Socrates writes at the end of the Phaedro, “Beloved Pan and all ye other Gods that haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the inward and outward man be at one.” For the Temple mystics, exile is when one’s inside and outside are not connected in the day to day of living. Or, said differently, exile is non-erotic living. The first, although by no means the only, problem with exile is that it is extraordinarily difficult. When I am not living from the inside, I am not living naturally. My choices, reactions and responses do not emerge spontaneously from what Teresa of Avila called one’s “interior castle”. I am not in the flow of my own life. Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore writes, “Where is the fountain that throws out these flowers in such a ceaseless flow of ecstasy?” Eros is to be in the flow of the fountain, what the Zohar calls in one of its evocative mantras, “The River of Light that flows from Eden.” Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
August 7, 2008
marc gafni published on marcgafni.com comments at info@marcgafni.com We are in Poland. The fellowship. We are here to witness. To give honor. To discern and live in the invisible lines of connection between us. And in that service to witness each other, to witness our teacher as he dances in the upper worlds. Our community is a crucible for witnessing. You are my witnesses says God. If you are my witnesses I am God. If you are not my witnesses I am not God. The witnesses and the witnesses are one. Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah all came to the world to remind us only of that. Tat Tvam Asi. Thou art that. You are. I am. The consciousness that I witness. Witnessing is deeply personal. The person, which lies under the personality. It is neither a series of complexes nor the wandering of monkey mind. It is the full resplendent glory of the unique authentic self daring to be present, in a moment-to-moment disclosure of its naked and unspeakable glory. The witness, that which is witnesses and the act of witnessing are one. We are grounded. Heart and Hara are one song of praise. The brain stem is relaxed and expanded as the right brain purrs it’s flowing contentment and left brain moves with agility and skill through on the path with heart. The heart is wide open, feeling, noticing, sharp alert and aware, yet gently soft and yielding. The group moves as one even as each member of the group holds the integrity of autonomy with bursts of aware personality occasionally lighting up our exchanges. The teacher is in the lead. He incarnates the light. Commands the column of light even as he moves in and out of his personality. An enlightened one with a California driver’s license. His teaching mirrors my teaching. His realization mirrors my realization. In the mirror I can see that he is true. In the mirror he reminds that I am true and invites me to live that truth. Beneath and through the trauma and pain. That is his gift. My teaching is his teaching. His teaching is my teaching. The teaching. God Is In You as You. Yet he commands the column of light. In this way he is far beyond me on the path. I joyfully submit to him as teacher in this way. I promise to learn from him this mastery. He promises to teach it to me. This is our contract and covenant. Wordless. It is understood. It is not personal at all. It is necessity. What is. Much of my personality was blown away and devastated to allow this simple necessity to be realized. I follow him on the path. I love our group. Not generally but personally. Each person. My personality is drawn to some more then others. But each one I love. Each person in the group, called by a different muse. Drawn by a distinct destiny of which some are not yet aware. There is a sense of urgency among us. Even as we laugh and play in the prayer of our journey. Each is Pulled by destiny’s personal address Yet we realize that we need each other. In the freedom of our love is community that holds us all. We are in the cemetery in Warsaw. We are here bearing gifts for Poland even as we know she bears gifts for us. We have come from Treblinka. We are on our way to Maidanek, Auschwitz. Our true goal however is Cracow. For their lies the pearl awaiting redemption. Krakow is the maiden of Europe, hidden from eyes of history by a cloak of invisibility. But for those with eyes to see. For the lovers it is clear. They know. For to love is to see with the eyes of God. We know. Our teacher is our eyes as we learn to see. On the way to Krakow is Lublin. You can see Lublin from the camp in Maidanek. Let no one claim not to have known. The name of the camps, and of the mystical masters named after their hamlets, mix with each other. Lublin, Treblinka Bialystok, Warsaw, Omshinov, Madianek, Slonim, Sobibor, Cracow and Auschwitz. We are in the cemetery in Warsaw. It is beautiful. There no other way to describe it. Magical sensual and alive. Two hundred and fifty thousand individual graves. The greatest of masters and their children and heirs. We do not come alone. We walk with the nine Lords of Palanque, with the wise men of Chaco. We carry greetings from masters of the new world to the masters of the old world. This part of our mission. Reb Chaim Solovetichik from Brisk, Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin known as the Netziv…whose words nourished and tantalized the first twenty five years of my adult life. Yeruchem son of the Rebbe of Kutzk, the two rebbes of Omshinov, The master of Modshitz…. The family and heirs of the all the great Polish Dynasties of Hassidism who knew how to dance in the upper worlds. The illustrious heads of the rabbinic court of Warsaw whose scholarship was only rivaled by their open heart and humility. The graves stones are infinite and everywhere, virtually on top of each other. But not in the open sun or in a barren field. No, not at all. The graveyard is grown over with greenery, plants, wild greenery and growth everywhere. As many tall trees as gravestones, the trees dancing together to create a canopy of life and living energy which holds in it’s bosom the stones. The stones and green, they caress each other, flow into each other, the lush wild ecstatic greenery and the wise irony of the headstones. One gets the feeling that when the graveyard is empty they whisper to each other in the nights. All of me wants sleep in the graveyard tonight to overhear their secrets but I know one must not intrude on their intimacy. And it is in the midst of this that we hear his call. I knew he was here. I was just not sure which one he was. We are walking on the path and he calls. My teacher veers off the path. Drawn to a small broken down hut like structure. It is in these structures that the headstones and graves of the mystical masters of Hassidism lay. It is the grave of the Rebbe of Slonim. Shmuel Wienberg of Slonim. My teacher is struck. A look of joy crosses his faith. His face lights up with pure presence. Shmuel of Slonim is fully present. Alive, radiating presence. My teacher stops. He approaches the headstone. Not tentatively. Naturally. In a kind of quiet ecstasy. He has met a friend. He recognized the master. He has been called. And in the recognition the master’s radiance is disclosed. “This master”, he turns to me for his name, “this master is the highest level of evolution possible for a human being”. “He moved beyond his limited humanity and become the perfect vessel for the divine. A grave is often a portal for the upper worlds. This is not the case in for this grave. This is the upper world. You are meeting God here at this moment.” The group listens. Everyone understands the importance of this moment. No one is asleep. “In the tradition we call this kind of realized master, A Merkava La-Shekinah. A chariot for the Shekinah”, I tell my teacher and the group. We look at each other. It is clear. The entire pilgrimage was realized in giving honor to this master. To God in human form. To Shmuel of Slonim in whom God is a Verb. To a man who so moved through his personality, that he became transparent to God. His will was the divine will. He tears the tears of God and his laughter the laughter of the upper worlds. When he made love with his wife, when he washed his hands in ritual blessings or received his students, the shekina and kudsha Brik hu, the divine masculine and feminine met in holy union. He has not left his world. He is fully present… even as he is lonely. He has been watching over the souls here. They are now all in his care. When the Nazis destroyed Warsaw, razing it to the ground in orgies of destruction, he stood watch at the gate of the cemetery and refuses to grant them entrance. Try as they might they could not move past him. The cemetery remained untouched, virginal in death. Protected by Shmuel of Slonim. We received his blessings. He had individual blessings for each of our group of twelve. We need the dead who are alive. It is from them we draw blessing. They need us because they need to be needed. It is through us that they have impact. In us the speak. Reb Shmuel was so delighted to see us. He had waited a very long time. He was pleased with our heart and hara practice. “It gives me hope” he said. He was overjoyed to see our teacher. “I knew your grandmother well,” he said to him. Your first teacher”. “She said you would come”. “I have waited for you a very long time”. “Thank you for taking care of Mordechai, I could almost hear him saying. We were not there for him when he grew up. He needed us but we could not come. I entrust him to your care. He is one of us but needs guidance now. Trust him”. “I know”, said our teacher. “I want you to give him your blessings now” Reb Shmuel Weinberg of Slonim”, and he did. They went on talking. I could not hear all of it. Some was not for my ears. I will wait till my teacher is ready to tell me. I did hear snatches however. “There is a living soul field. The souls know you are here. It is good. I need your help. I cannot watch over them but I cannot release them” Shmuel says to my teacher, tears steaming down his radiance. “I know” says the teacher. “I will do that for you”. They embrace. My teacher and Shmuel of Slonim. Long lost brothers, separated by so much and yet so totally natural and intimate with each other. “I have been looking for you” says my teacher in parting. “Thank you for calling to me. I will not stop. This is my promise to you”. And we go back to the main path, bathed in the radiance. Grateful. In quiet joy. It is enough. marc gafni posted on marcgafni.com comment at info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – MERGING WITH THE MOUNTAIN
August 8, 2008
There is a wonderful Zen story about two mountain climbers. The first, old and slightly bent, slowly makes his way up the mountain. The second, young and in good form, bounds past him, racing confidently to the summit. In late afternoon they meet again. The older man still climbs gently, step after step, towards the summit. The younger man lies exhausted, unable to move, at the side of the path. As they pass each the younger cries out to the older, “I don’t understand – What do you know that I don’t?” Responds the old man, eyes twinkling with compassion and laughter, “The difference between us is simple. You come to conquer the mountain but the mountain is stronger than you, so you are conquered. I come to merge with the mountain – so the mountain loves me and lifts me to her summit.” To merge is to traverse the chasm that separates object and subject. It is to become one with your reality, to be on the inside of the experience. Erotic living is living on the inside. The opposite of Eros is therefore alienation. To be alienated is to always feel that you are an outsider with no safe place to call home. The result of non-erotic living is always bad choices, betrayals and pain. I am not in the flow. I wind up always having to watch my back. I am on the outside – exiled from my inner castle. I have lost face. The face is the truest reflection of the erotic. To lose face is to become de-eroticized. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – TO SEE GOD IN YOUR FACE
August 8, 2008
There is a tale told of the Master Nahman Kossover. His mystical practice was to meditate on the divine name. It is said that when he taught he could actually see –reflected back to him- the divine name on the faces of his listeners. At some point Nachman fell on rough times and was forced to leave teaching and become a merchant. He was greatly saddened because he found it very difficult to fully concentrate on the divine name amidst the buy sell atmosphere of the market. Until he hit upon a solution. He hired an assistant to travel with him with no other job than to be present. When he would at the face of his assistant he would be reconnected with the name of God. Was the assistant particularly beautiful? I doubt it. The assistant was every man and every woman. You and me. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com
Freeing My soul from the Trauma of Death in Life is the same process as freeing Souls from a Traumatic Death: Marc Gafni on the road from Warsaw to Lublin:
August 9, 2008
Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Comments welcome on info@marcafni.com Today we were in Maidanek, Lublin and arrived for Shabbat in Krakow. About Maidanek Lublin after shabbot. A word before sundown. The purpose of our trip is to participate in an ancient spiritual technology of healing. The freeing of Souls. Some say this is why the Master Nachman went to Oman, the place of a great massacre. We know of certain tales of the Baal Shem Tov where the freeing of a trapped soul is the underlying spiritual plot in the story. To free souls, is what is referred to the by tradition as Chesed shel Emet. True Love. Totally real love. Total Good. One does not free soul in order to gain some advantage in this world from the souls. They are dead to the worlds of networking and skillful means. They contribute little to the life strategies of our egoic survival in all of its layers and disguises. To free souls is a Bodhisattva act of compassion. There are too few Bodhisattvas these days. The Dali Lama told me something a few years back, visiting him in at this home in Dharamsala, that really moved me. We always think that someone else should be the Bodhisattva. Never us. But paradoxically if I begin to view myself as a Bodhisattva then I might also be called to live as a Bodhisattva. To be a Bodhisattva is to live as a manifestation of compassion. It is the destiny of the Tzadkk, the esoteric master. And in the words of the biblical mantra, “my nation are all Tzadikim” – that is to say – “If not me then who and if not now then when”. We are on the road to Maidanek and Lublin. There is a sense that we are driving through kililng fields. One can sense the souls pushing on the bus from the sides of the roads. They have heard we are coming, informed by the living soul field and perhaps also by the special messenger of the great master Shmuel of Slonim with whom we had a dramatic meeting yesterday at the cemetery in Warsaw. We are in southeast Poland on the road from Warsaw to Lublin. This is the place of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that preceded the gas chambers of the Nazi Concentration camps. The consisted of trucks in which the gas exhaust was turned inside, in the flat storage space on the back of the truck. As many as thirty boys and girls could be stuffed screaming in terror into the back of such a van and slowly gassed to death. If the mobile units were out of gas on a particular day then the children, hundreds of them might be thrown alive into a ditch and buried, let to die the horrible death of slow suffocation amidst the bloodcurdling screams of fear and agony as the last breath of life were viciously squeezed from the young bodies. We stop the bus at a gas station, adjacent to a large filed where we can gather in a semi circle and clear the souls. We take our place as witnesses. The souls are cleared. There is a lot of joy on the bus limned with a serious and purposeful determination. Our hearts are open but we refuse to drown in the grief. We are here because this is where we need to be. Everyone knows themselves why this is so for them. We live under and behind our personalities. Never leaving them behind, just holding the personality lightly. No trauma, No Drama. No hope, No fear. The souls of the children remain trapped. Trapped in the unspeakable trauma of life. Death in horror is a moment of life. Being stuck in that trauma is not that different from being stuck in a moment- a moment in which the soul is murdered in life. What we normally refer to as psychological or spiritual trauma. Think about it for a second. If you suffer terrible abuse of whatever kind perhaps it is chronic the abuse of being falsely accused or name raped, perhaps it is the abuse of being horribly beaten by your mother, or violently raped by your father. {I talk here of genuine abuse, not the pseudo victim hood of those who cry far more then it hurts and desecrate their tears by deploying them in the most cynical fashion, as lethal weapons of abuse themselves}. The moment of intense pain in which the abuse occurs invades, violates and ruptures something of our connection to reality. We become alienated, often in an internally grisly sort of way, with the reality of love, which lies behind the veil and remains the true and ultimate nature of all that is. We lost touch with reality. We become insane. To be insane is to lost touch with reality. To forget the true nature of all things. Even if we appear to be perfectly functional, rational and well adjusted we are just beneath the surface- Insane. The veneer of civilization is very thin. To free a living being from trauma we need to re- ligare, to reweave the person’s soul back into the large field of being. To re-quilt their life force in seamless coat of the Kosmos, which is all, good, all love and all eros. When this happens the soul is able to continue its growth and evolution, which is the true pleasure of every soul. Life is for pleasure. The ultimate pleasure is the ultimate growth. Life is Growth is Pleasure. To free the souls of those who were traumatized in death, is emotionally and spiritually not that different from healing souls traumatized life. The greatest healing is to transmit to the soul the experience of profound heart and hara. Big Heart grounded in the full power and stability of the divine embrace. To clear a physical space of it’s trauma is in turn not that different from freeing souls. The one who does the clearing, supported by a group of witnesses relates to the land of physical structure needed to be cleared much the same as one would relate to a human or sentient being in need of a healing. It all depends of Love. We came to Poland to free souls. Knowing as well that according to the law of reciprocity, which governs spirit – in which giving is receiving and receiving is giving – that this would also free something in our souls. It all depends on Love. It is before shabbot. I have asked a friend to post this for me. Thank You. Shabbat Shalom
Marc Gafni – ON BETRAYAL
August 9, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The result of non-erotic living is always bad choices, betrayals and pain. I am not in the flow. I wind up always having to watch my back. I am on the outside – exiled from my inner castle. I have lost face. As Sufi Poet Rumi says so well: The real orchards and fruits are within the heart; the reflection of their beauty is falling upon this water and earth (the external world) all the deceived ones come to gaze on this reflection in the opinion that this is the place of Paradise. They are fleeing from the origins of the orchards; they are Making merry over a phantom.
KNOCKING FROM THE INSIDE – Marc Gafni
August 10, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In the Hebrew mystical tradition, language is not the mere random designation of sounds and letters in a particular pattern . For the mystic, words are vital portals to meaning. Language is the spiritual DNA of reality. Thus when one root word is used for seemingly disparate ideas you can rest assured that these different ideas are in fact integrally related. So let’s watch for a moment as the magic of languages dances before us. The Hebrew term for the Holy of Holies is lefnie u’lefnim. Literally rendered into English this means ‘the inside of the inside’. This was not merely a reflection of the physical fact that it was the inner most point in the Temple. Indeed, teach the mystics, the opposite is true – it was situated in the inner most physical point in order to evoke the sense of interiority that is the very key to eros. In another architectural expression of this idea, the Temples of the Masonic order have doors which open only from the inside. One must insert their hand through an opening in the door to grasp the handle on the inside. The point – in order to open the portals to mystery, one must approach from the inside. What’s more, this opening was shaped like a heart. Eros – the yearning for the inside – is the essence of love. The Masonic order of course springs from the Templars, a monastic order of Christian mystics in Jerusalem who fell in love with and understood deeply the eros of the Temple. We keep knocking at the door until we remember that we are knocking from the inside. END
Marc Gafni – The Spell of Spelling – Panim
August 10, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The last post however was just for starters. Hold on, for the magic of language, the spell of spelling – has just begun. The Hebrew word for “inside,” panim, has two other meanings as well. The first not surprisingly, is face. Face is the place where my insides are revealed. There are forty five muscles in the face. Most of them unnecessary for the biological functioning of the face. Their major purpose it would seem is to express emotional depth and nuance. They are the muscles of the soul. Every muscle of the face reflects another nuance of depth and interiority. When I say, “I need to speak face to face,” I am in erotic need of an inside conversation. At this point all of the cell phones and sophisticated internet hook-ups won’t give me what I need, for while amazingly efficient and effective, they are non-erotic. True erotic conversations rarely happen on the Internet. The spell continues. There is a third meaning to the Hebrew root panim. In a slightly modified form it means ”before,” in the sense of appearing before God. Specifically, the biblical myth text in Leviticus tells of the Temple’s high priest – who on the biblical Yom Kippur, the Day of At-one-ment, appear Lifnei Hashem: ‘Before God’ . Read in the English this appears similar to a summons to appear “before” a judging court, generally not a joyous occasion. For the Hebrew mystics, however, rooted as they are in the magic and spells of language, it is an entirely different affair. Remember that all three English words, face, inside and before, share the same Hebrew root. The essence then of the day of at-one-ment then is not a commandment to appear ”before God” in the magistrate sense. It is rather an invitation to live on the inside of God’s face. Once the journey to God is finished, the infinite journey in God begins
Marc Gafni – Everyman’s Eros
August 11, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The eros experience is the province of mystics, artists and scholars. But not only. It awaits all of us in every arena of endeavor. Have you ever gone jogging? You get up not at all enthusiastic about running but somehow feeling obligated. You reluctantly get dressed and begin your route. Slowly the discomfort fades and you begin to enjoy yourself. You find yourself in the rhythm. And then, on good days, at some point you break through an invisible barrier and begin to fly. Ecstatic, you lose yourself in the wind. Your body, the earth, the wind, the rhythms of your pace, the sound of your feet, all merge into one. It is no longer accurate, even if but for the briefest of moments, to say “I am running.” Rather, you are the wind, you are running.
Marc Gafni – In Every Stitch
August 11, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com It was the middle of the 19th century . Heaven was joyous, hell was in an uproar, for it seems that one Hanoch the Shoemaker was about to usher in the Messiah. The Master of Rishin, tells the story to his disciples something like this, “Hanoch the shoemaker used to sit every day intent in the stitching of his leather shoes. It was known that with every stitch Hanoch was ‘meyached yichudim elyonim.’ That is, he was unifying higher unities. Now ‘yichudim’, my holy disciples, in Kabbalah always means ‘zivug’ (coupling). {Zivug is an ultimate erotic term. It refers not to the sexual person, but to the cosmic love affair between the masculine God presence and the feminine Shechina presence. A love affair brought about by human action.} Now the strange secret of the story, my holy community, is that Hanoch wasn’t doing anything which should have caused such ecstatic yichudim. He wasn’t fulfilling any religious commandment, he was engaged in no ritual or pious act. “Perhaps,” said one of the disciples, “he was meditating on a passage of Zohar as he stitched.” Another chimed in, “Perhaps he was doing the spiritual exercises of Luria’s Kabbalah which cause pleasure above?” “No, nothing of the sort,” replied the master. “Then what was he doing while he stitched?” pressed the disciples. “Nothing!” responded the master with a slight smile. “Hanoch was doing nothing…nothing other than being fully inside in every single stitch.” “Fully inside in every stitch?!” Duly impressed, the eager disciples now had another confusion. “So then, Master, why is it that the Messiah has not yet announced his arrival?” The master of Rishin sighed and said, “The force of evil discovered the cause and countered it. Sadly he seems to have gotten the best of our holy shoemaker.” “But how?” the crestfallen disciples asked. The reply, “With plenty of good business.” And so it was, rushing to fulfill his flood of orders, Hanoch became the busiest and most prosperous cobbler in the region, mindlessly producing shoe after cookie-cut shoe, and the Messiah still has not yet come.
Marc Gafni – Poetess, Prophetess and Priestess
August 12, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Eros is the birthright of everyman and everywoman. Though we may search long and hard for priests and prophets who can guide and counsel us, in the end we must return time and again to our own inner sanctum. There the priest and prophet we seek sleep in our depths, waiting to be stirred and finally woken. I will never forget one of my early dates with Cary. We were walking Jerusalem’s streets. It was late, the silence was luminous. It was one of those moments when intimacy lets you enter for a moment. I asked Cary, ‘What do you pray for, in your heart of hearts, what do you most want to be?’ She became very quiet, I could tell she was deciding whether or not she was ready to offer up her truest, most vulnerable, answer to me. We walked on. She started a sentence, but faltered, silent. Finally, mustering a whisper, she told me, “When I pray for who I most want to be…” glancing over at me uncertainly, “I pray…to be God’s poetess, prophetess and priestess.” Her sincerity was so precious, so deep. I knew she felt silly, her most inside place exposed. I also knew then this was the woman I would marry. Sadly as time went on I realized that it was not all that it seemed to be. But that is another story. Not for the blogs. I hope one day we will be able to work out how we hurt each other in our marriage and more significantly how we hurt each other after our marriage. One of the dangers of eros is the inability to face our own darkness. It is not all sweetness and light. Sometimes the desire to be a poetess is eros in pure form. And sometimes it is pseudo eros hiding a deep knowing fear that we are not the special one. And it was no less true that I was so caught up in my mission and my desire for the great partner, the great love, that I did not take care of Cary. She needed care and nourishing. I was distracted by the siren’s song. I betrayed her and in doing so betrayed Eros. That the betrayal was mutual and in the end, her mask dropped to reveal for a time not Kali but Kali in disheveled and distorted form, only makes me feel better when I am contracted. I wish her blessing.
Marc Gafni – GOD’S POETS
August 12, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com In our deepest erotic longings, so many of us do want to be God’s poets, God’s prophets and priests. Yet we are ashamed to admit it –sometimes even to ourselves. We fear to appear ridiculous or grandiose even in our own eyes. Yet the biblical myth insists that we are all priests and prophets in potential. We can all enter the Holy of Holies for it is within us. In contradistinction to the priestly class and prophetic elites of the ancient Near East, Biblical myth talks of a kingdom of priests and a people who are all prophets . Life itself is the only real Temple of the spirit. Eros is everywhere. Churches and synagogues are a pallid, even if important, compromise for our dis-enchanted age. The Zohar teaches that every erotic inside experience is a Shechina experience of the Holy of Holies. It is when we become one with the way,Mark when we have moved from the outside to the inside. It is in this sense that the Temple is called in Hebrew the Bayit. Bayit means, quite simply, Home . The holiest place in the world – is home. Eros is about coming home. We all live split off from our selves. We feel all too often like imposters in our own lives, wearing masks and wondering when, and if, it will ever start to feel like home. That is what it means to live on the outside.
Victim or Player: Marc Gafni
August 13, 2008
Victim or Player Auschwitz Birkenhau Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Share comments on info@marcgafni.com The dance of the subject and object, the movement between the two is the great and undulating dance of our lives. It is the perpetual dance between the victim and the player. If we are an object then we are acted upon and done to- we are not actors and doers. The larger mysteries of life are beyond our ability to fully grasp and we seek to find whatever subjectivity we can in the midst of the sometimes gracious and all to often cruel objectivity of human life. The tragic inadequacy of the being in object relation to the world is that we lose so much of our aliveness, not to mention our power and dignity. The object all to easily becomes the victim who ceases to be a player in his or her own destiny. Naturally then, when we wind up in places that hurt we blame drivers other then ourselves for the choice of our destination. While this has the advantage of perpetually reaffirming our innocence it has the shadow of forever confirming our impotence. For the price of innocence is impotence. If you are not part of the problem then you most certainly cannot be part of the solution. All that remains is escalating cycles of recrimination and demonization. And yet life is filled with realities in which one is in fact, a victim. I spend all of yesterday in Auschwitz-Birkdenhau, the extermination factory. It is a story I know well and have lived in the innermost cells of my body as long as breath has moved in me. But to see and walk through the women’s barracks, a place not fit for any sentient being, designed to degrade and crush all that is human and holy, is to be pierced by pain and sorrow so intense that it cannot find location in the garb of words. Victims who were reduced to objects. Yes, some of these men, women and children were able to retain their subjectivity, their humanity and to silently defy their objectifiers. Many,some say most, were not. What is clear however is that we owe them everything in their victimhood. It is not only Auschwitz however. We are sometimes, not often but sometimes, faced with oppression of terrible nature and consequence in our lives which at its core renders us victims; objects of a karma, or dehumanizing wave of hatred or negative energy that we can do little to stand against. We are victims. We are objectified, reduced and de-humanized. Often by the most respectable of people under the guise of the most noble of goals. In these situations as well there are places and pockets in it all, in which we can retain our humanity, our subjectivity. We can do this by holding on to our sanity and joy in face of the blackness insanity; we can do it by being love- by being love even in the face of fear and its fabrications. We might also be able to do so by identifying the ways in which we contributed to our own suffering. All this is not to excuse the torturer but to locate the locus of our own dignity and power. For it is only that which we have created, which might be a pivoting point for change and healing. At the same time we dare not over extend our subjectivity. This is the great mistake both of classical religion and contemporary New Age dogma. Both place the human being at the center of his or her own reality. Both gorgeously reject the stance of victimhood and demand that the human being accept responsibility for the circumstances of his life. In different ways they both loudly and proudly assert, “Your life is your creation”. In every moment you are creating or dis-creating the reality of your life. Do not cry more then it hurts. You think you are victim; perhaps – but now turn it around and realize that perhaps you are the predator and victimizer, a reality you have hidden from, in the dogged insistence on your victim status. Yet this seemingly noble teaching and world view is infected with hubris of enormous proportion. It is a denial of all humility and all mystery. It is the usurpation of the role of the creator, Prometheus unbound. In the desperate apotheosis of the subject, the object moment in human life and relations is heretically denied. We begin to blame the victim, desperately seeking his culpability in order to ward off our own vulnerability. We need the amulet of the guilty verdict of the sufferer to protect us from the fear that we might be the next of victim- objects of the mysterious and seemingly arbitrary working of cruel and capricious circumstance. We become callous and indifferent and invent every manner of reason to re-betray the betrayed; in the word of Wilihem Riech, to murder Christ again and again. It is only in embrace of the object and subject together that sacred union is realized and balance is achieved. It is the dance of the subject and object that integrity shows its face, ethical integrity, psychological integrity and spiritual integrity. It is in this context and with this backdrop in mind and heart, that I want to share with you a liberation moment of some two hours in duration which suffused my being yesterday morning before our trip to Auschwitz. In this liberation experience a space of insight was opened and I realized again what I already knew but this time from a deeper and more real place. The realization entered my body. It moved from being merely an intellectual position or even a heart murmur to being a fully embodied incarnate reality. More later… Marc Gafni Posted on marcgafni.com Share comments on info@marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – Coming Home
August 13, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Once a year in a spine tingling mystery rite the priest would enter the Holy of Holies. On this day, every person was forgiven . On this day, every person was to re-experience themselves in the depths of their own true innocence. For on the inside we are all innocent. This day is called in Biblical myth tradition Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement: At-One-Ment. The core erotic idea of the Bayit – the Temple – was that every person could and needs to access the Shechina experience . Every human being needs to live erotically in all facets of being. Every human being has a primary erotic need to move beyond the imposter into his or her own deepest place of oneness, oneness with themselves, their relationships, and their reality. The Zohar refers to the exile from one’s deepest self as alma depiruda, the world of separation . The most tragic separation is not from mother, not from community, but from self. The journey of a lifetime is to move from alma depiruda to alma deyichuda, from separation to oneness – At-one-ment. Love is the path back home. We are not talking about superficial love, not merely sexual love, but erotic love.
Marc Gafni – The litmus of an erotic lover
August 13, 2008
The litmus of an erotic lover is this: Does this person lead you back to your inner self? Are you able to share with him or her your most vulnerable, fledgling, faltering dreams? Every person has a Holy of Holies which, in those most intimate of times, we let another enter as the priest to worship at our altar. And in the gorgeous paradox of the spirit, by letting a lover enter we ourselves are let in as well. For when the Temple door is open and the lover enters, we ourselves trail behind. We gain uncommon access to our inner selves, a place which we alone are often unable to reach. The true lover always takes you home. As Emily Dickinson notes, Eden is that old fashioned house We dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode until we drive away Love lets us realize the Eden we are dwelling in every day. That is what it means to feel at home in your life, the greatest feeling in the world. Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com
Marc Gafni – Left Outside
August 14, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Much of modernity militates against the eros of being on the inside. Indeed, the whole psychological stance of fortifying the ego is about keeping people on the outside. Our way of thinking about this all was powerfully influenced by the work of the child psychologist Margaret Mahler. She taught that the primary goal of growing up and out of being a baby is to achieve what she termed individuation and separation. The healthy human baby’s journey must be towards ever ascending levels of autonomy and separateness. That mantra which rings at least partially true in the infant years is unfortunately taken as the mantra for our lives. We achieve every increasing levels of separateness and autonomy until we are at the top, all alone. Yes, we do need to reinforce the ego, but we also need to let the ego boundaries drop. It is the only way to let others, and sometimes even ourselves, inside. When psychology defines a person’s real self as ego then we begin to view the breakdown of ego as a breakdown in normality. We erect our fortress so high and so ‘healthy’ that no one, including ourselves, can get inside. And yet are not most of the great experiences we seek in life dependent on the ego breaking down? From falling in love to orgasm to spiritual connection, the most sought after experiences can happen only when the ego boundaries soften to allow entry to these welcome guests. When we spend our lives under the spell of the separate individuate mantra we block access to the Eros our souls so desperately crave. We all need lovers to let us in. They may be lovers, teachers, friends, students and hopefully parents. No one can survive on the outside.
IF YOU CAN HEAR YOURSELF TALKING SIT DOWN – Marc Gafni
August 14, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Teachers can take us home, but only if they teach from the inside. It is reported that Ziv Hirsch of Zhitomir, charismatic mystical master of the 19th century, would occasionally in the middle of his speech, sit down, abruptly ending his address in mid thought. When pressed for explanation he responded, “My master – the Maggid of Mezritch – taught me, ‘If when giving a sicha (spiritual lesson) you can hear yourself talking, sit down.’” In A Movable Feast, Hemingway remarks on the difference between his telling a story and the story telling itself. When he begins to tell the story, he knows it is time to quit for the day. This is a true echo of the temple tradition. Sit down when you can hear yourself speak
Marc Gafni – Eros & Zohar – Expanding our Limited Vocabulary Part 1
August 15, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com The word eros entered Western consciousness through Socrates’ best student. Plato, in his wonderful dialogue “The Symposium”, calls the inner state which we have been describing eros. To be a lover, implies Plato, is to passionately enter the inside of reality. Eros is love but not in the casual, pallid and sometimes anemic way we often talk of love. On the inside of things all is aflame. In Hebrew the term for Love is Ahavah, rooted in the word lahav – torch. Similarly the Hebrew word source for Love, Lev, meaning heart, is used in the sense of ‘Labat Eish’ – heart of fire . For lev – origin of the English word lava – is expressive of the sometimes volcanic heat that erupts from one’s inner depths when erotically engaged in any endeavor. Thus the Hebrew word Ahava and the Greek Eros enrich our limited (western) vocabulary of love. For vocabulary always reflects reality. We don’t have an English word for the type of fully expanded Eros we will be revealing in this book, because such expanded Eros is still so foreign to the fabric of our lives. Yet in Hebrew, there are a plethora of such words. The most important word which we have discussed at length is Shechina. There is also Ahavah, fiery love, as we just learned together.
Marc Gafni – EROS: PLATO AND THE ZOHAR PART 2
August 15, 2008
Marc Gafni posted on marcgafni.com please share comments at info@marcgafni.com Kabala scholar Yehuda Libes reminds us of a third word. He suggests that the word Zohar, the name of the great magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, is roughly synonymous with the Greek word eros. For the authors of the Zohar were not dry medieval scholastics; they were rather men of great passion and depth who believed that by entering the inside of the moment, the text, or the relationship, they could recreate and heal the world. Zohar, like eros, is powerful, intense and deep. It is the source of all creativity and pleasure. *B – Further, the Zohar masters understood Eros to be the essential goal of the spiritual journey. Often in Hebrew mystical texts the erotic is called a Messiah experience. For them Messiah was not a historical happening as much as an inner event. The Hebrew word for messiah derives from the root word Siach. Siach means no more and no less than ‘conversation’. The core of the Zohar text is basically a series of sacred conversations. The messiah, they taught, lingers whenever we so fully enter conversation that the boundaries of ego fall away and we are left only with the raw joy of fellowship. One of the most profound and difficult sections of the Zohar is called the Idra Rabba, the Great Gathering. Similar to the Symposium of Plato, it is the story of seven close friends came together for the holy fellowship. And like the Symposium, it is the passionate conversation and camaraderie of friends reveling in each other’s company as they search for depth which infused the gathering with Eros. In truth any conversation which is true, authentic and deep is erotic conversation. In the great gathering of the men of the Zohar, as in the Symposium, both the form and content is about Eros . The value of the gathering then is the gathering itself. It need not justify itself in terms of any other standard or value. When one is willing to let go of agendas, stop networking and enter the depth of conversation, then one is on the inside. When the other person’s talk is no longer merely the time to work out what I will say next, when deep listening becomes mutual, when words begin to flow and time stands still, when a few hours seems but a few minutes, then the Gods of Zohar and Eros have been invoked. When Diotima – the old wise woman in the Symposium – talks about Eros and Shimon Bar Yochai, hero of the Idra, talk about Zohar- clearly neither is referring to the narrow modern sense of sex. Rather, Zohar and Eros evoke a sense of merging with the flow of the moment, of moving from outside observer to passionate participant; Eros in the sense of being on the inside. Thus, “Zohar” is not merely the name of the work; it is an evocative word which seeks to capture glimmerings of Eros. The ultimate paradigm of identity between medium and message. Process and content merge in the word. The Zohar experience is the Erotic experience
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Marc Gafni -RECAPITULATION
August 17, 2008
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Let us take a moment to see the full beauty of where we’ve gone on our journey thus far. Till now we have understood that the Temple is the archetype of eros. We have understood eros, the Greek term for loving, as the experience of being on the inside. This is the name of the Temple’s Holy of Holies – lefnai lefnim – the inside of the inside, the face of all faces. The experience of Shechina – the sensual divine force which rests between the cherubs in the Holy of Holies – is the erotic experience. In fact the mystics often use the word Shechina as a synonym for eros.
Now lets add one dramatic step: The Hebrew word for Temple is Mikdash – literally translated as Holiness. If you put it all together it is radical, revolutionary and overwhelmingly relevant to our lives.
What it means is that the erotic and the holy are the same thing, or to put it in more mathematical form:
Eros = = Shechina = the Inside = Zohar = Holy.
Finally, we have a definition of holiness. So many people use the word holy but virtually no one knows what it really means. Ask someone for a definition and you will likely get a fuzzy, nebulous response which will leave you no richer than before. So here –at last- is a definition of holiness. To be holy is to be on the inside. The opposite of holiness therefore is not un-holiness or anti- holiness. It is not impurity or the demonic possession of the devil. The opposite of the holy is the superficial. Eros is about depth. Depth is an inside experience. It has its own unique nuance, texture and richness. The superficial is bland and common.
Holiness is eroticism. Sin is superficiality.
The Second Face of Eros: Fullness of Presence – Marc Gafni
August 17, 2008
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The second face of eros is the ‘fullness of presence’
. This is not a distinct and different quality but flows naturally and even overlaps with the erotic qualities of being on the inside. And yet it is not quite the same. Of course being on the inside requires the fullness of presence. But we can experience full presence even when we have not merged with the moment or crossed over to the inside. Full presence is about showing up. You can show up and be fully present in a conversation without necessarily losing yourself in the encounter’s flow. Full presence at work can mean that you derive joy, satisfaction and self worth from your vocation. It means you feel full and not empty.
Marc Gafni – SUN AUG 17
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
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When I would lead prayers at our retreat center overlooking the Sea of Galilee in Israel, we often do a face-to-face prayer. In this prayer, people sit in twos and read Psalms to one another. They each are singing praises to the God point in the other. Before we start the chanting, I ask each pair to look deeply into each other’s face. ”Begin by being wordlessly present for each other. Experience the full presence of another waiting for you.
At this point I would often tell a particular mystical tale which I love very much.
The Chassidim, adherents of a powerful kabbalistic myth movement which reached its apex in mid-nineteenth century, tell of a girl – Sarah – who had run away from home to a convent. Now convents are beautiful – for nuns, but not for Sarah. Everyone knew where she was, yet no one could persuade her to leave the convent and return home. Finally the distraught parents turned to the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name.
It is reported that the Baal Shem went and sat behind a tree not far from the convent. He brought with him no books , no ritual prayer objects, and only the bare amount of food necessary to sustain him. One day goes by, Sarah does not come. A second day – no sign of her. A third – no girl… But wait, the sun is setting – Sarah runs out, looks around and eventually finds her way to the master, sitting quietly behind his tree. They look at each other, wordlessly, and she goes back home, ultimately growing up to be one of the great holy women of her day.
Late in life she was asked what the Baal Shem did to make her leave the convent. She responded. ‘On the first day I felt him there, waiting, and I was angry with him. What right did he have?! On the second day I was no longer angry, just curious – who was he, and why is he waiting for me? But I was determined not to let him trap me with my own curiosity. On the third day I felt him waiting and I was engulfed by an overwhelming sense of love. I tried to resist it but my desire grew and grew until I could resist it no longer. And I ran outside to see his face.”
What a magnificent moment of eros!
Marc Gafni – SUN AUG 17 – Part 2
August 17, 2008
Marc Gafni
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To live erotically is to be fully present
to each other’s richness, complexity and ultimate grandeur. It is to fully wait for the other to appear. The Shechina in the Temple is termed the indwelling presence. The erotic is always the experience of full presence. The Shechina, say the mystics, is waiting for us to show up.
The Shechina is presence waiting for us to be present
. She is eros, standing outside of our window, waiting. Waiting for us to feel her presence. Waiting for us to be overwhelmed by her love. Waiting for us to run out and behold with wonder – her face.
How many people have come up to me after those uncommon sessions of looking into another’s face. They come in tears, in joy, in awe, each with a different story. But they all share a common theme. ‘First I felt uncomfortable. I kept shifting my gaze. Looking at her necklace, her earlobes, her hair, but it was so hard to look at her face. Finally, our eyes fell into sync. It was uncomfortable, but we kept at it. Eyes – brown, with freckles of color. A funny, imperfect face. And then suddenly, something gave. A rush of emotion. A moment of release into the other person’s gaze.’ Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, you never forget it.
Have you ever looked, but really looked, into another person’s face? Have you ever witnessed that moment when the soul comes rushing up from its inner chambers and opens wide the windows of the eyes to see you, seeing her? To greet you like the day light? This is the mystery of love, of the eyes and their eros.
Feel the face of your partner as a sculptor would his clay. Run your hands – erotically, not sexually- over the skin, the bone structure, and then look again deeply into the eyes. In the eros of face touched and felt, the God point of the other emerges and we are moved with full heart to sing praise.
Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions
August 18, 2008
Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions
Marc Gafni
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Eros is about feeling the fullness of being, the opposite of emptiness. Every human being has met emptiness; that feeling we experience in the late night, home alone or in the hotel room we return to after a long day’s work on a business trip. We enter the room and are often overwhelmed by intense feelings of emptiness. It makes me wonder if the originators of MTV had this in mind when they named their station something that sounds precisely like EmptyTV. For that’s what we do in the void. We flip on the cable or order up dinner and entertainment – anything to not stay in the emptiness. Indeed the sentence that I probably repeat to my students more than any other is “Life is what you do with your emptiness”.
Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions Part 2
August 18, 2008
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In our society which sadly defines human beings as consumers and not lovers, denial is the primary strategy for coping with emptiness. We are sold ful-fill-ment at every turn and in every guise. We buy buy buy, hoping that one of the hawked elixirs might finally full-fill us. And yet the emptiness lingers.
This is the great paradox of emptiness. The first relation to emptiness must not be to fill it but simply to be mindful of it. To notice the emptiness. The goal is to move beyond the void to the fullness of eros and Shechina. Yet, paradoxically, you can only access the fullness of being if you are willing to stay in the emptiness long enough to find your way. The path to eros is filled with detours to pseudo-eros, but they are all dead ends. When we are so desperate for fullness, when the emptiness hurts too much, these detours seduce us off the path, often spinning us to painful places we never wanted to go.
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, Spiritual Director
http://www.bayitchadash.org/staff.shtml Reb Gafni is the Rosh Bayit of Bayit Chadash. His primary affiliations include being a Visiting Fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and Senior Scholar at the Melitz Educational Institution. Additionally, Reb Gafni was a fellow at the Oriental Institute of Oxford University, he is currently completing the writing of a commentary on the Hasidic text “Mei Ha’Shiloach.” Reb Gafni serves as a contributing editor to the American Tikkun magazine, a bimonthly journal critiquing politics, culture and society from a Jewish perspective. He is also a contributing editor of Chayim Acherim, Israel’s leading spirituality magazine.
Marc Gafni
Marc Gafni
Together with colleagues, Reb Gafni is developing a new school of Jewish thought which is coming to be called “The School of Personal Myth”. This proposes a marked shift from national to personal myth as the center of Jewish consciousness. Reb Gafni is reformulating and extending the core constructs of Post-Lurianic thought in a modern Neo-Hasidic context. Also the host and creator of a highly acclaimed national Israeli television program on ethics and spirituality, Reb Gafni’s work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher: wise, deep, compassionate, accessible, and universal.
His English book, Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment was released by Pocket Books in 2001 and is accompanied by a national PBS Special of the same title. The book is a best seller and is now being translated into numerous languages. In Hebrew, his two volume set of New Jewish Thought -entitled Certainty and Uncertainty is published by Modan Publishers. Written in collaboration with Ohad Ezrachi, Lilith and Sacred Feminism is slated for release in 2005. The Mystery of Love was also recently released in English in the spring of 2003 by Atria books. Reb Gafni is married to Chaya Kaplan, his full partner in all endeavors, and he is the father of Eytan and Yair. Articles on Rabbi Gafni Cover of Maariv October 15, 2004 Read More More Marc Gafni As Spiritual Hero In Catalyst Magazine My July 3, 2008 Dialogue With R. Gafni My July 18-20, 2008 Weekend With R. Gafni For 30 years, Marc Winiarz (Gafni) has been on the cutting edge of Modern Orthodoxy. He’s been an incarnation of its twists and turns. Between 1977-85, Gafni seemed like the Second Coming of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin when Rabbi Riskin represented the cutting edge of Modern Orthodoxy. Then he was the Second Coming of Rav Yosef Soloveitchik. Then he was a West Bank settler in Israel and chief rabbi of his own town (Beit Tzufim). Then he was the Second Coming of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (in English-language radio broadcasts in Israel around 1992-1993). Then Marc got into Eastern thinking (Buddhism, Hinduism), the sacred feminine, and the integration of pagan energy with prophetic Judaism. And now he’s a spiritual artist. “I don’t know where to start,” says my friend Joe* (an acquaintance of Winiarz’s for about 30 years) July 4, 2008. “This guy is just so goddamn fascinating. A year doesn’t go by when he doesn’t do something outrageous. For the last 48 hours [since Gafni returned to public life with MarcGafni.com], I’ve been intoxicated.” Luke: “It was a great experience [meeting Marc Gafni in Salt Lake City July 3, 2008]. He’s a fascinating guy.” In 2008, Marc received his doctorate of Philosophy (with a speciality in Hebrew mysticism) from Oxford University. His Oxford advisor was Dr. Norman Solomon (a retired 73-year old Orthodox Jew) and his external supervisor was Dr. Moshe Idel (the successor to Gershom Scholem as the leading scholar on kabbalah). Marc Winiarz (sometimes mistakenly spelled “Winyarz”) was born in Pittsfield, Massachuestts in 1960 to an Orthodox family of Holocaust survivors. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio. “At age six or seven, I knew that I wanted to be a rabbi,” Marc told the March 4, 2004 issue of Haaretz. “Because I really loved the world of the book, which I’d known since I began learning at age three.” Luke to Marc: “I heard your mother stuck your head in an oven?” Marc: “I’ve heard that story also. Completely not true. My poor mother.” From 1973-1977, Marc went to Ohr Torah aka Manhattan Hebrew High School, which was overseen by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and run by Vancouver rabbi Pinchas Bak (who died on Purim 1977 at age 32). Marc Belzberg was Winiarz’s dorm counselor in high school. Belzberg (who came to Judaism through Rabbi Bak) adored Winiarz. Some source say he wanted Winiarz to marry his sister Lisa. Winiarz has been married three times. When he was 18, he was engaged to a woman he never married. At age 20, Marc married for the first time (to Shifra from Maine). It lasted two years. (Winiarz has a daughter from his first marriage named Rachel. When she became an adult, she went on a quest to find her father. Though they met once, they’ve never had a relationship.) Joe* emails July 4, 2008:
During those years (circa 1980), a group of YU kids, all post a year or two at the prestigious yeshivot in Israel, would spend their summers doing sort of social work/kiruv in troubled areas in Israel. The groups were in cities like Zefat, Migdal Haemek, and the Hatikva quarter of Tel Aviv. The leader of this program, then called “techiya” (renaissance), was R. Muskin, then a dorm counselor at YU. Gafni never did the program, nor did he spend time in the yeshivot, so in that sense he was always an outsider. However, the social organization that yeshiva and techiya volunteers founded, Chevrat Aliyah Toranit, a sort of elitist dating program, really, was the first Gafni coup. At some point, just about the time he married (his first wife Shifra, who did spend time in Israel and I think was on Techiya as well), he [gave some popular lectures for the] organisation [led by Shifra circa 1982], leading to quite a bit of resentment among the “in” crowd, and actually, shortly thereafter, the organisation disappeared.
Winiarz attended Yeshiva University for one semester around 1981. He attended Queens College for one semester. “I transferred all my credits to Edison College,” says Marc. “It’s one of those places that give you life credit. I got my degree from Edison College (circa 1985) so that my mom would be happy.” Winiarz ran an organization called JPSY (Jewish Public School Youth) circa 1983-1986. It was funded by such major Jewish philanthropists as Jeffrey Glick, Michael Steinhardt and Marc Belzberg. Winiarz was hired at JPSY by Ellen Lieberman (who is now married to South African rabbi Ian Azizolohof). When Ellen left on maternity leave, Gafni took over. He moved it from an organization with two full-time employees and a budget of $25,000 a year to ten full-time employees and a budget around $500,000 a year. He renamed it “The Jewish Youth Movement.” He’d walk into public schools and recruited Jewish kids for JPSY. Due to the equal access law promulgated by President Reagen, you could teach religion in public school at an after-school club. Marc: “I went into the New York City superintendent of schools and asked to develop this JPSY program. He turns his back to me in this swivel arm chair like he’s thinking, then swivels back to me and he says in yiddish, ‘A shaila’s trafe,’ which means, ‘Don’t ask, just go do it.’ As long as we weren’t proselytizing, we could do what we wanted. “We didn’t go in with a shofar. We would walk in and get a ton of pizza. We’d hire a guy who’d play Billy Joel music. Gerson Veroba. He played Billy Joel better than Billy Joel. We’d announce, ‘Billy Joel concert. Pizza. Judaism.’ All the Jewish kids would come. They were all embarrassed to be Jewish. “Our big thing was Jewish pride. It wasn’t content. It was just, ‘Be proud that you’re Jewish. Don’t slink around your public school.’” “I was a young, full of energy, arrogant. I thought I could do anything, solve anything, but I didn’t have any protection. I was a complete outsider from Columbus, Ohio. When NCSY was getting 40 public school kids to some its program, we were getting 400 kids to JPSY. We were threatening the outreach establishment. “I received a phone call from one of the leaders of NCSY at the time telling me as much in rather harsh terms. “I was the summer rabbi at Lincoln Square Synagogue. They had over a thousand people a week coming to synagogue. I was an out of control, loving, talented, committed to everyone, arrogant kid who didn’t send people thank you notes and didn’t play the political game and didn’t cozy up to the right people. “I’ve raised a million dollars for JPSY. So picture how people looked at me.” In 1984, Marc and his wife brought a 16-year old girl named Judy into their home. She later said that Marc came on to her. Marc: “Judy’s version of events is false. It is completely distorted in substance, fact and tone.” A polygraph test in 2007 supported Marc’s claims, according to MarcGafni.com. Judy told her story to Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He chose to believe Winiarz. Judy told one of her counselors in JPSY, Susan. Susan brought Judy to Rabbi Blau who put out the word that Winiarz was dangerous. I’m told by anti-Winiarz sources that an informal Beit Din was convenened in New York about Marc and Judy. That Winiarz was told to quit his job and move from New York to some unsuspecting community and make a new life (that was how these things were handled until recently). Marc: “This New York Beit Din story is a complete fabrication. The Judy encounter should’ve been dealt with and healed immediately. I kept running JPSY for a couple of years [after the Judy controversy].” Rabbi Yosef Blau’s wife Rivkah worked for R. Shlomo Riskin in the 1970s and early 1980s (she ran his girls’ high school). She frequently found it distressing and burned out twice. She and her husband appeared to have a tense relationship with R. Riskin (though they’ve all since buried the hatchet, and R. Blau has a son who works for R. Riskin). Marc Winiarz was R. Riskin’s poster boy. R. Riskin was trying to raise money to show that he could produce a new generation of rabbis. The first (and only in the United States?) guy R. Riskin ordained was Winiarz. Yeshiva University’s backbenchers were furious at R. Riskin for starting his own Hebrew high school (Ohr Torah). R. Riskin was talking about starting his own ordination program up the road from YU. R. Riskin was taking funding that used to go to YU. The guy who funded Ohr Torah was Max Stern of Stern College (the women’s branch of YU) fame. Rabbi Blau and Marc Winiarz had a confrontation in 1985 in a hallway on the third or fourth floor of YU. According to sources, the confrontation went like this: Marc. “Rabbi Blau, what are you doing? Are you crazy? Why haven’t you come to talk to me to heal this thing? You’re spreading stories that are not true.” Rabbi Blau says: “I’m going to get you.” Marc responds: “Why don’t you first take care of problems in your own home before you start throwing stones at other people?” I hear that Rabbi Blau then threw a punch at Marc and said, “I’ll bring you down.” On Oct. 12, 2004, R. Blau told me: “At one point, Mordechai came into my office and told me he’d get my wife. I was stern with him. He was threatening.” In July 2008, I ask Marc about all this. He replies: “This was a long time ago. I wish the Blaus well. I no longer live in their world. Perhaps one day in the future we will all be able to sit down like human beings and heal this.” In early 1986, Winiarz finished his term at JPSY. Marc: “I ended JPSY for a simple reason. A lot of people who do youth work does it between 18 and 26 and then you burn out.” Luke: “Weren’t you exiled to Boca? Wasn’t there a Beit Din convened?” Marc: “It never happened.” Luke: “So you went to Boca voluntarily?” Marc: “Of course. “It’s a natural transition. I went to Rabbi Kenny Hain, who was head of communal services at YU. I was ready to take a pulpit. He suggested Boca Raton.” The rabbi in Boca Raton before Winiarz was Mark Dratch, Rabbi Norman Lamm’s son-in-law. The congregation (Boca Raton Community Synagogue) had about 20 families. They’d been brutal to R. Dratch. One guy was particularly vicious — attorney Steve Marcus who was murdered in a gay bar ten years later. Rabbi Lamm came down to help his son-in-law. When he got up to speak, four people turned their chairs to face the wall. Nobody wanted to take the pulpit that R. Lamm had ostracized. Winiarz moved to Boca Raton around 1986. He did a great job in outreach. He was charismatic. The size of the congregation tripled. Marc ruffled feathers. Before the high holidays, he took out full page ads in the local Jewish newspaper that said, ‘Are you bored with impersonal and monotonous services? Come join Rabbi Marc.’ “The other rabbis in town were furious with me,” says Marc, “because they felt I was describing their congregation, which of course I was.” Marc took on other rabbis over the lack of rabbinic certification on the sale of meat. “The meat would be stamped kosher,” says Marc, “but the rabbis who were giving the kosher stamp never stopped by to check. It was completely corrupt. I got up in a meeting and said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe in kosher or not, people are trusting us that this is kosher.’ “They fluffed me off. I said I would publicly say this is a fraud, which I did. That did not get anyone happy there.” “The pope had come to South Florida. The local rabbis went. They kissed his ring. I felt it was wrong. The pope had been inappropriate vis-a-vis the Jews in Auschwitz, without acknowledging directly what had happened there. I published a long list of the Pope’s refusals to recognize the integrity of the Holocaust and papal responsibility for being silent during the Nazi regime. “With a group of other rabbis, we dressed in concentartion camp suits and blocked the pope’s motorcade. The other ecumenical rabbis were furious with me.” “Michael Dukakis was running for president. Jews were important voters. Florida is always a swing state. I announced I would hold a mock funeral for integrity in the Democratic party because of Dukakis’s affiliation with Jesse Jackson. I wrote an article called, ‘Hymietown is not the issue.’ Dennis Prager did something similar at the same time. I detailed Jackson’s record of significant anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. “I received death threats for this.” “To this day, I hear from people who say they were at the funeral. I never held it. But it became a legendary event.” “I was blocked from speaking venues for the next decade because of that. Jewish Democrats were absolutely furious.” Luke: “The other rabbis censured you for something?” Marc: “It was for one of these four things. I held a press conference where I held up the censure and said that this document is more precious to me than my ordination because it is a testament to my integrity. That didn’t make anyone very happy.” “The positions we took were ones of integrity… They were correct. There’s a way to take them and still honor the other rabbis in the community (better than I did). I hope that if I were to take those same positions today, it would be with more grace and less youthful impudence.” In Boca in 1986, Winiarz got to know a single wealthy 48-year old woman (not part of his shul) who turned him on to contemporary spirituality. She opened Marc up to music and art. “I knew philosophy like a yeshiva boy would,” says Marc. “I’d read Plato and Socrates and Nietzsche. I had never heard of Ram Dass. I’d never heard of New Thought. I’d never heard of anything that wasn’t a classic.” He read “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. “I never got into New Age thinking, but more the East-West meeting.” Winiarz built up the shul that Rabbi Kenneth Brander (a poor speaker but a straight arrow) inherited in 1987. Winiarz left the Boca Raton shul after 18 months. He says he clashed with the board on about ten different issues, none of which had to do with sex. Marc: “There was a sigificant disagreeent between the board and me over the direction of the synagogue. It was a question about who was running the synagogue — was it me or was it the board? There was a vote in the synagogue about whether I was to go on as the rabbi or not. There was a mediation between me and the synagogue after I left in which we signed a document that neither side felt the other had behaved inappropriately because there were rumors about that then. This [conflict] was about control of the synagogue. I was very controversial in town. The synagogue was much larger. I was not interested in having a fight over who controlled the synagogue. I withdrew without a fight and I started The Center for Jewish Living (CJL).” It was funded by Jerry Hahn, Lynn Kesselman and other laity (most of them from the synagogue Marc had just left). “It was less of a classical Orthodox synagogue and more of a community outreach center, closer to the vision of what Dennis would’ve created as a synagogue. I wanted a cutting edge creative experimental outreach synagogue.” “I wanted to stay in Boca and develop this. My wife Lisa was committed to moving to Israel and we had to make a decision. I felt that the Jewish destiny in the 20th Century was bound up in Israel. I wanted to be able to do what I taught. Like every good Modern Orthodox rabbi, I had been talking for years about the miracle of the modern state of Israel. Lisa and I felt hypocritical [living in the United States]. We had a wonderful opportunity there to do something significant.” They moved in the summer of 1989. Winiarz had been considering a career in public service in the United States, including a possible run for Congress. Luke: “Were you considering becoming a TV anchorman?” Marc: “No.” Luke: “Did you keep a scrapbook with all your press clippings?” Marc: “My secretary did.” Luke: “Were you looking for love?” Marc: “All of us want to love and all of us want to be loved. The question is — what do we do to get love. I hope that I and the rest of us do our best to get love by loving. Erich Fromm wrote about this in his book ‘The Art of Loving.’” When Winiarz moved to Israel in 1989, he Hebraized his name to “Mordecai Gafni.” “Winiarz” is short for “vineyard” which in Hebrew is “Gafni.” The Jewish settlement of Beit Tzufim (it is two miles east of the Israeli city of Kefar Sava) sent Winiarz a formal offer to be their rabbi for two years. He accepted. The contractor for the town was close to R. Riskin who connected Winiarz with him. In Israel, to become a rabbi of a city, it takes a lot of political savvy and support. If you wanted to become the rabbi of Jerusalem, you’d have to hire a PR firm and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and have major support in political places. Major Torah scholarship won’t be enough to make it happen. Rabbi Gafni gave ad hoc shiurim around the settler world. In 1991, Lisa and Marc decided to divorce. Marc met a 24-year old woman. “It was a sad tragic love story,” says Marc. “She was a singer. “In the Ma’ariv article, she said we had no physical relationship. I was never her counselor. She was going to Bar Ilan. “We fell in love. We had some intention to marry. She shared that with her mother. Her mother was very happy. Her mother shared it with her father and her father did indeed go berserk. That’s correct. He called me and said, ‘If you go out with my daughter, I’ll destroy you. I’ll work with Rabbi Blau to destroy you.’ “I told him that I was in love with his daughter and she was in love with me and this was our issue. I hung up the phone. “He moved aggressively to prevent his daughter from seeing me. There was a lot of trauma and drama for about four months. “We met at Bar Ilan about four months later. She said to me, ‘I’ll always love you.’ “Two months later, she got engaged to someone else. I believe she’s happily married.” “After my second, I wanted to leave the rabbinate. As a professional Jew, I didn’t have any sense of my own Judaism. I was so locked into the system, I couldn’t think clearly about what I believed. My whole move out of classical Orthodoxy happened during those years. The core of most of my books (such as Mystery of Love, Soul Prints, etc) emerged from those years. I spent three years (largely) without teaching. I took a vow of three years away from teaching so I could think.” “[Circa 1992,] Rabbi Riskin was interested in building affiliates on the Aish HaTorah model. “He had laity in Australia. We talked about the possibility of my going to Australia. I did a lecture tour there for 15 days (in Sydney). In the end, it didn’t come through. The funding to create the branch system didn’t come through.” Luke: “I heard that some people in Australia called some of your critics and that put a kabosh on your move to Australia.” Marc: “I don’t know anything about that.” R. Gafni has two kids from his second marriage (1984 -1991). He has no kids from his third marriage (to poet Cary Chaya Kaplan 1998-2005). In 1991, Marc Belzberg hired Mordy (they’d known each other from high school, Belzberg was a surrogate older brother for Winiarz) as a software salesman aka marketing director. Belzberg had a business partner, a wealthy lawyer baal teshuva who moved to Israel. “The company I was working for for three years was called MicroGuard. I was the marketing director. MicroGuard was owned by Marc’s venture capital firm, Belanet. MicroGuard didn’t make it.” Marc Belzberg made a connection between Winiarz and Yitzhak Shamir’s son and Israeli businessman and CEO of one of Mark’s companies and social activist (let’s-all-get-along). Gafni adopted many of Belzberg’s customs as he went from the Young Israel rabbi type to a Carlebachian to a bohemian. On Shabbat, Belzberg began wearing this long white smoking jacket that the Reb Arele Hasidim in Jerusalem wear on Shabbat. Then Gafni started wearing it too (he bought one for his third wedding in 1998) before transitioning to the Indian garb below. Marc: “You can take a normal sweet picture and make it look like a cult picture. We were lighting the Chanukkah candles. If you look at the picture, you’ll see no crazy people. Just straight middle-class secular Israelis who’d been disaffected from Judaism. Instead of having a menorah, we had eight big candles. Everyone held one. We went around and lit them. We always did things halakhicly (according to the law), but creatively. I was trying to create an alternative to the Indian Eastern street. This comes not from the rational side but from the mystical side.” Around 1993, Gafni helped start a political party in Israel called Derech HaShishi (The Third Way). It was Marc Belzberg’s money (in part) but Gafni was near the front of it. Yehuda HaRel ran the show. Marc Gafni got his master’s degree from Bar Ilan University circa 1993 in Jewish Philosophy. Around 1996, Marc began teaching a couple of courses for R. David Aaron’s Jerusalem program Isralight. After R. Gafni finished teaching a course at Isralight, he started dating a 23 year old former student. The relationship lasted 18 months. Some of R. Gafni’s critics tried to make this a story. The woman then wrote R. Gafni a letter saying there was nothing inappropriate about their relationship. R. David Aaron won’t speak about R. Gafni. They were never close. R. Gafni got a job with a group called Milah (Jerusalem Institute for Education, founded and funded by David Morrison and his wife Jo). Gafni became high profile in Jerusalem around 1998. (A source writes: “Milah was an adult education ulpan for Americans and ethiopians who finished the regular ulpan and were still not comfortable in Hebrew. Gafni used this role as head of the organization, not to teach Hebrew, but to teach his theories of Judaism and a parashat hashavua class.”) Marc: “I wanted to expand Milah to be something different. To be a teaching organization and outreach center. To teach spirituality and Torah in a much broader sense than the original mandate. “I was a poor administrator. At some point, David wanted to run Milah as he wanted to run it. As was his right. He basically took it back. David wrote me a letter saying there were no issues of financial impropriety. “David was right. We did not do a good job with administration. We had a different vision. We weren’t able to work it out. At the time, I didn’t have the skill to work with David appropriately. I wish him a complete blessing with running Milah.” Sources say David was under a lot of pressure from Gafni’s critics to fire him. Marc dated around from 1991-1998. “That’s when PAG started,” Marc jokes July 4, 2008. “Parents Against Gafni.” Marc Gafni has led more of a bohemian than a rabbinic lifestyle. Some of his supporters, such as Marc Belzberg (from the wealthy Canadian family) have said, “Yeah, Mordechai has a yetzer hora.” Luke: “Are you a Zelig for our time?” Marc: “No. Zelig means someone who doesn’t have depth or a personal center. He’s someone who shifts to please a crowd. My story is one of evolution and unfolding. Over the years, I’ve read and studied hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books. I’ve studied wide and broad in my own search for an authentic and living teaching. Naturally, I evolved beyond a narrow Orthodoxy to a much broader worldview. That was a hard walk.” Luke: “What does Mordecai Gafni the teacher today have in common with Marc Winiarz the teacher from 25 years ago?” Marc: “A passionate love of Judaism and its texts and practices. I remain committed to Hebrew practices. To miztvot. I remain in love with mitzvot. At the same time, the way I practice them has changed from when I was living in a narrow insular Orthodox mindset. My horizons have broadened. A number of important systems of thought I’ve engaged have challenged some of my original Jewish understandings.” Luke: “So what are the most important challenges?” Marc: “The particularity of the Jewish people. The notion that Judaism is the superior system. “The highly rigid vision of family and sexuality, which has great beauty and great shadow. “The shadow of the gorgeous Jewish ethical commitment is an enormous amount of self-righteous judgment, verbal violence and ugly ways of conflict. I’m strongly drawn to more holistic and inclusive ways of dealing with each other.” From The Jewish Week, Sept. 24, 2004: I first saw Mordecai Gafni at UCLA during Passover week 2002. He lectured for an hour. Gafni chatted with Dennis Prager afterwards. They appeared friendly. The next week, Gafni appeared on Prager’s radio show for half an hour to talk about his book The Mystery of Love. During the show, Prager seemed to shift his position on the book, concluding that it was important. Prager’s (former) wife Fran loved Gafni’s book The Mystery of Love, but Dennis had a harder time with it. Marc describes Mystery as his best book. From Publishers Weekly: “From the author of Soul Prints comes this book about the profound link between sex and spirituality. Gafni, a Kabbalah scholar, television host and rabbi, argues thoughtfully and thoroughly that the erotic and the holy are one and the same. If readers can get past the initial shock of Gafni’s claim that the cherubs on the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies were in fact locked in sexual embrace (a provocative suggestion supported by some Kabbalistic texts), then the book is sure to be a mind opener. Gafni writes: the secret of the cherubs is that sex is our spiritual guide. He carefully reclaims the word eros, broadening it from the narrow sexual meaning it has today to encompass a larger life force: eros is the source of all creativity and pleasure. In this context, eros is synonymous with the divine and the sacred. Sexuality (e.g., as portrayed in the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon) is a model for the larger concept of eros and holiness. Gafni meticulously builds on this central argument with generous helpings of parables and stories from mystical texts, observing that we often lead nonerotic (although not necessarily nonsexual) lives. He invites readers to learn to fill their emptiness with eros rather than its pale imitations. Those frustrated with the spare documentation of his argument can look forward to his upcoming two-volume scholarly work expanding on the material in this fascinating book.” The most important kabbalah expert in America, Professor Elliot Wolfson of New York University, blurbed the book: “[A] beautiful book that will undoubtedly inspire many people and perhaps even bring some healing to a desperately ill world.” An ex-girlfriend told me in 2002 that Soul Prints was the best book she’d read on Judaism. From Publishers Weekly: “Just as fingerprints are unique, so, too, says Rabbi Gafni, are soul prints: each human soul has an individual mark that it leaves behind on everyone it touches. Gafni, dean of the Merlitz Public Culture Center in Israel, weaves together autobiographical reflections with tips and exercises designed to help readers discover their soul prints and find fulfillment. Gafni begins with the premise that everyone is lonely and many people look for cures in places where they will never find them, such as sexual encounters. Many of the exercises in this splendid book are designed to help readers confront, and then cure, that loneliness. Gafni suggests that readers share what they learn while reading this book with a lonely person they know. Readers are then asked to make a “Soul Print box” that contains the things that are most important to them, and then to show the contents of that box to one other person. Gafni advocates the practice of random acts of kindness: “Bring happiness to one person each week, for no apparent reason.” His tremendous breadth distinguishes this volume from so many spiritualized self-help tomes. He draws on the fantasy novella Flatlands and the teachings of Talmudic rabbis, on psychologists and prophets. He tells his own stories and biblical stories. Though steeped in Jewish wisdom, this book will be accessible and helpful to readers of many faiths. Gafni occasionally states the obvious (as when he notes that if “after a long day of living your life, you feel as if you are on the verge of tears,” something might be amiss). But those few banalities can’t ruin this insightful book. (Mar.)Forecast: This book is being published in conjunction with a major PBS special by the same title, scheduled to air in early March; this should have a significant impact on book sales. Gafni will be doing a 10-city author tour later that month.” Prager was chummy with Gafni for years (until 2006 when Gafni’s Bayit Chadash scandal broke open and all the Jewish leaders such as rabbis Telushkin and Berman who’d been in his corner left him). They regularly greet each other with a hug. When Dennis sent his step-daughter Anya to Israel circa 1998, he asked Gafni to look after her. Like Shlomo Carlebach, Gafni feels a mission to hug everybody he can. Gafni had a three hour meeting with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin circa 1998. Gafni told his life story in a convincing fashion and Telushkin moved into his corner for the next eight years. Prager and Telushkin vouched for Gafni for many years (until 2006). (Joseph Telushkin began backing Gafni at the request of his friend, who had a romance with Gafni. Telushkin then turned against Gafni May 10, 2006 when she turned against Gafni.) Rabbi Telushkin wrote this cover blurb for Soul Prints: “A radical, profound, and important guide to enable each reader to find out why he is on earth — and what he can do to make sure that he actualizes the person he or she is meant to be.” In the Acknowledgements section of Soul Prints, Gafni calls Telushkin a “friend” and “colleague.” Though they were never close, Telushkin, a secondary sources guy (he writes popular books on Judaism but does little original scholarship), was impressed by Gafni’s abilities with primary sources. Many of Gafni’s followers say he’s a genius. This July 2008 article in Catalyst magazine promotes him as the hero of a spiritual epic. I would say Gafni knows more Torah than 99% of non-Orthodox Jews (and probably more than 90% of Orthodox Jews). Gafni’s been to yeshiva. He’s well read. He knows how to speak. He’s charismatic. Non-Orthodox Jews are dying for a guy like him. Rabbi Gafni and his other supporters, are convinced that there is a small group of people who are destroying his career. They are right. There is a small group of people (such Rabbi Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University) wanting to end his career as a religious leader. They pushed Gary Rosenblatt — Rabbi Blau’s longtime friend — to write that 2004 article in The Jewish Week. They’ve known or known of Gafni since around 1980 (though none of his detractors have had an ongoing close relationship with Gafni). They say Gafni is a dangerous man. On October 21, 2004, I left messages with rabbis Berman and Telushkin on their home phone numbers to talk about their defense of Gafni. They’ve yet to return my call. Though Gafni does develop his own ideas, his detractors love to point to his ability to take the ideas of others and restate them in a way that’s more compelling. When he was young (from about 1976 to 1989), Marc seemed like the second coming of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He was delivering Rabbi Riskin’s talks, word-for-word, better than Rabbi Riskin. Rabbi Riskin didn’t mind this. On the contrary, he was flattered to have a protege. Rabbi Riskin speaks personally, as if he is giving you some secret (with the way he uses his delivery and moves around the room). For a couple of years, Mordechai matched this style (though not the high-pitched voice). Winiarz wore a suit. His hair was short. He wore a white shirt. He looked like a respectable Young Israel Orthodox rabbi. “I never tried to be Rabbi Riskin,” Gafni tells me July 4, 2008. “For a time, I was his protege.” For years, Winiarz was fascinated by Rav Yosef Soloveitchik. Around 1986, Winiarz published in Daat (a scholarly publication out of Bar Ilan) the first annotated bibliography of the Rav’s works. “An annotated bibliography means you read everything,” says Gafni. “I read every word the man wrote. I was going to write my doctorate on Solveitchik. I have four huge boxes organizing his thought into different categories. I probably know his thought better than anybody else in the world today.” “I read voraciously. I’ve picked about ten thinkers in my life and done zibbug. It’s a spiritual and intellectual process where you completely merge with the thought of a thinker. I did that with about three or four Hasidic masters. The first person I did it with was Rav. Soloveitchik. You’re not so much studying their thought. You’re entering into their spiritual dept. You are intuitively in their field. “I lectured on him extensively for a period of time. I was madly in love with his thought. At a certain point, it didn’t quite do it for me. It was missing an emotional tenor, an emotional ecstasy, loving. It became too conceptual for me. “When I was like 17, I would hang out outside his apartment at YU and wait for him to come out so I could just see him. I was like a 17 year old in love with a baseball player. I was madly in love with him. “I wasn’t about becoming the next Soloveitchik. I was deeply reverentially in love with his thought and with him. I submitted my doctoral thesis proposal to write on him — ‘Kabbalah in the thought of Rabbi Soloveitchik.’ I wanted to show that underneath all the rational categories, he was actually a kabbalist. Whenever there was a clash between rational thought and kabbalistic thought, he used kabbalistic thought. That proposal was approved by Bar Ilan. In the end, I went in a different direction.” “My heart opened to Hasidism. It’s a normal development.” In 1989, Gafni moved into his Shlomo Carlebach phase. “I never had a relationship with Shlomo Carlebach,” says Gafni. “A bunch of his students and my students wanted us to meet. We had made up to meet several weeks after Simchat Torah, and he died just before.” Gafni’s third marriage was to Cary Chaya Kaplan (13 years younger than he, an Oxford graduate student who made an early decision to never have kids, they married circa 1998 and divorced circa 2005) lives in San Francisco while Winiarz lived in Israel until 2006. Cary Kaplan-Gafni attempted a PhD at Oxford’s Jewish Studies department (St Catherine’s) on the interpretation of Biblical figures in contemporary Jewish movements of renewal. Her supervisor was the same as Gafni’s — Dr. Norman Solomon. Cary didn’t cut it at Oxford and she moved on to a New Age school in San Francisco — the California Institute of Integral Studies. “My third marriage was not one of convenience,” Marc tells me in reaction to earlier versions of this posting. “I wanted to teach in Orthodox institutions. Blau (or people connected with him) would call up every institution and tell them not to have me. He was like Inspector Javert in Les Miserables (to use the description of Rabb Joseph Telushkin). Blau would call women I was going out with. Three women over a period of eight years — Rachel, Sharon and Chana. Each one I could’ve married. Each time, he called their parents. That’s how I made up the joke about Parents Against Gafni. It was so painful to me. “I was 37. Everyone I would try to go out with in Jerusalem would get a call from Blau or one of his minions. I met Chaya. She was fresh, beautiful. Not in the Blau influence. I was exhausted from going out. I got married way too fast.” Starting in 2004, R. Gafni started coming under public attack for his private life. “For most of my teaching career,” says Marc July 14, 2008, “I did not discuss my private life. Most rabbis don’t. “When asked about my private life, my first instinct was not to engage it. “When many false things were said about my private life, I had no choice but to address it directly, which I’ve done in full on my website (MarcGafni.com).” Luke: “You’re great at identifying people with money.” Marc: “You’re obviously saying that sarcastically, but any leader needs to be great at identifying funding sources.” Luke: “And what they believe, you believe and preach?” Marc: “That’s just made up. I don’t know where that came from.” Luke: “You did paid television in Israel?” Marc: “It was not paid television. I did several seasons. I made about 50 shows (“Under His Vine” in Hebrew). In Israel, you can’t buy a television show. This was on Channel 2, Israel’s key channel. Because they give you a small budget, Israeli TV on that budget looks like crap. So sometimes people raise extra money to do the show better. “During the situation, when busses were blowing up in Israel, how do you go on with your day? I called my rabbi friends and said, ‘We need to say something about this. Busses are blowing up and we are still talking about whether tuna fish is kosher.’ “No one moved on it. “At that point, there was a suggestion that I make a series of television spots, not to explain what happened, you can’t explain why a bus blows up, but to talk about it in a way that we can have a conversation about it. What are we doing here? Why are we in this country? How is it that we’re being responsible to our kids and yet endangering them? To have a spiritual conversation to give people the sense that Judaism is dealing with their lives. “I raised a bunch of money and we made for Channel 2 these spots and when terrorism would happen, they’d play this spot. “Those spots were paid for by me and by Israeli TV. We raised extra money to do them right. “The third set of spots were 25 spots I did that started the morning. They were on dance, creativity, tears, laughter. They were five minute spots. They’re going up on my website. You can’t buy spots. These were not infomercials. They were regular programming of Israeli TV. “Nobody paid for me to be on TV.” Since 2000, R. Gafni has publicly defined himself as post-denominational.
Morning News Pop/Rock
Los Angeles Times – August 18, 1987 http://jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2005/01/rabbi-mordechai-gafni-series-part-3.html#comments Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation’s press Entertainment Desk An Orthodox rabbi in Boca Raton, Fla., is reaching out to young people in an unorthodox way–with rock ‘n’ roll. Mordechai Winyarz, 26, paid New York songwriter Lenny Solomon $30,000 to write songs with contemporary Jewish themes and hired young Jewish musicians to perform and record an album for $12,000. The album, “Jewish Pride,” set for release Sept. 1, includes a rap song “Rappin’ Jewish” written by Danny Furst. A sample of the lyrics: La-die-doo, I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool Yeah, I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
Rabbi’s Rap Sings Praises of Judaism – Jewish Rap
Sun-Sentinel – August 28, 1987 By Carol Brzozowski, Staff Writer Imagine hearing a Jewish rap song to the beat of ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, boom, ch-ch boom. Imagine it played full blast from the stereos of the cars of Jewish teens as they cruise around town. An Orthodox rabbi from Boca Raton is content in imagining that. He helped to make the album on which the song appears. Imagine that! Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz, a freshly ordained transplant from New York and the first rabbi for the newly established Boca Raton Synagogue, is in the sanctuary, playing the music at full volume, making motions with his hands as if he were beating on drums. The album, Jewish Pride, is scheduled to be released on Tuesday in Palm Beach County and then in New York. ”This is going to have an impact!” he exclaimed. ”Take cantorial music and throw it out the window!” Later, Winyarz conceded that he liked cantorial music, but added that he thinks it cannot reach out to young Jews the way modern music can, if set to ”Jewish” lyrics. ”I like cantorial music, but it doesn’t express Jewish pride in the ’80s,” Winyarz said. ”Ritual expression is critical, but it’s not the end-all. If it doesn’t create a certain kind of person, a certain kind of society, then what is ritual for?” To know a bit about Winyarz’ history is to understand why an Orthodox rabbi would be backing a project to reach out to unaffiliated Jews through rock music. Winyarz, 26, was responsible for initiating an outreach into New York schools. He would walk into a school holding a shofar — the ram’s horn used in sacred services — and would recruit any Jewish child into his youth programs who recognized the shofar. He became the second rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue, leaving behind the program in New York after building it into a host of youth groups with a budget of $500,000. The album was done through the cooperation of JPSY, an acronym for Jewish Public School Youth, a program Winyarz initiated in New York. Winyarz and his small group of musicians scouted for young Jewish musicians to perform on the album.
The group worked six hours during the weekdays from midnight to 6 a.m. for two weeks at Eastside Sound Studio in New York.
In making the album, Winyarz convinced Lenny Solomon, an accountant, to go into Jewish rock music full time. ”His mother is real thrilled,” Winyarz said, tongue in cheek. Solomon has dropped his job to lead the organization’s musical outreach program. Not every song on Jewish Pride is the type that’s only understood when played full-blast from an oversized radio. Some have the traditional Hebrew folk music beat. Some talk of familiar themes in Judaism. Minyan Man is about a group of nine Jewish men in search of a 10th man to have a minyan, the ”quorum” needed to conduct Jewish worship. The title song is Jewish Pride. Winyarz said that the album is a pioneering one in Jewish music, and representatives of national Jewish music organizations say they can’t argue one way or another. Although he concedes that Jewish music has been ”updated” with every generation, the rabbi said the album is a first in its combination of a variety of modern styles and its use of Jewish messages for lyrics. He hopes it will start a trend such as the one Christians began in the 1960s with religious rock music, featuring such musicians as Randy Stonehill, Larry Norman and Amy Grant. Winyarz will introduce the album through Jewish cultural radio programs and in Jewish book and record stores, but he has his eyes set on secular radio as well. ”This is religious music, there’s no question about it,” Winyarz said of Jewish Pride. Jews’ pride in themselves is shrinking, Winyarz says. He said that many Jews are ”trying to be WASP-y” in an attempt to cover their Jewish heritage, following the cue of their parents who have done so in order to assimilate. ”We’re saying, ‘Don’t do that. Chuck it,”’ Winyarz said. ”The 11th commandment of a Jew in America has been, ‘Thou shalt melt (into the melting pot).’ ”We’ve … been comfortable in our Judaism and pay lip service to Judaism. Our direction is complete confrontation — in the most positive way.” Winyarz figures that confrontation is done best through music. The lyrics from Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz’ new Jewish rap song, Rappin’ Jewish, which is on his album Jewish Pride. ”La-die-do I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool Yeah I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool Ask me anything you want to but I will repeat I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
Got a son who’s a doctor, a daughter who’s a lawyer My wife teaches English and reads Tom Sawyer Each morning I sit at my breakfast table Eatin’ ‘filte fish with lox and bagels. I’m a Jewish man been all over the map That’s why I’m singing my Jewish rap Y’see I’ve been rappin’ since the age of three When my home boys rocked across the Red Sea. Chorus: Jewish Pride keeps ya going strong Makes our people last real long So don’t ignore what comes from inside Let it grow, ’cause it’s Jewish Pride.” Here Marc Gafni’s latest musical masterpiece here!
Live and Be Free (Hip Hop Remix)
In between appointments one day, at Marc Gafni’s home in Israel, which was also the center of the movement, a beautiful brother and musician, who often played with Marc Gafni at Sabbath prayer services in Tel Aviv, came in and said: “Hey, Rabbi, Say some Torah Dharma for this music disco CD I am doing. I want this to be heard in dance floors all over the world!” We did it in about twenty minutes, no planning, directly from the heart. And this is a piece of what spontaneously came out. The ancient teachers taught, “Words that come from the Heart, Enter the Heart.” Let It Be So. -Marc Gafni
Rabbi To Mark Papal Visit By Walking A Picket Line
by Dexter Filkins – Herald Staff Writer
The Miami Herald (FL) – September 10, 1987
When Pope John Paul II meets with Jewish leaders Friday, Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz will greet him, but not like everyone else. Instead of waving and cheering, the rabbi will shout and walk a picket line — in the uniform of a concentration camp survivor.
Winyarz, who will join 15 other rabbis in the Miami International Airport protest, has some questions for the pontiff, and he wants them answered:
Why did the pope meet with and praise Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, the former Nazi? Why was the Vatican silent during the Holocaust, when six million Jews perished? Why does the Vatican refuse to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel? Why did the pope embrace the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose group is dedicated to the destruction of Israel?
Winyarz said he is not angry; just suspicious, and driven.
“The pope is playing on both sides of the fence,” said Winyarz, 26, rabbi of the orthodox Boca Raton Synagogue. “This is not pope-bashing. I just want to know where he really stands.”
To find out, Winyarz and others will don concentration camp uniforms and get as close as they can to the pope when he lands. Tonight, the group will lecture on “the history of church anti- Semitism” outside the Omni Hotel, where the pope and several Catholic leaders will gather. And when Jewish leaders meet John Paul II Friday at the Cultural Arts Center, Winyarz will be outside.
“It is important that the Jewish leaders are there,” Winyarz said. “But it is just as important that we are there to let our leaders know that there is a constituency outside.”
To the rabbi, the pope is wading in murky moral waters. Past actions of the church and the pope, he said, raise the specter of anti-Semitism, and as the spiritual leader of 900 million Roman Catholics, the pope is obliged to put the questions to rest.
“(Yassar) Arafat’s methodology is killing women and children. Waldheim is a documented Nazi,” said Winyarz, whose mother survived the Holocaust. “What does that say when the pope welcomes these men and embraces them?”
For Winyarz, the heart of the matter is whether the church is anti-Semitic. On this, Winyarz is undecided, but he asserts that some actions — such as the Vatican’s refusal to recognize Israel — suggest that it is.
“The recognition of Israel is, I think, a theological problem,” Winyarz said. “The church used to teach that the Jews, as the killers of Christ, are condemned to eternal damnation.”
What could Pope John Paul do to placate Winyarz? Simple, said the rabbi:
Recognize Israel, repudiate Arafat and Waldheim and explain the Vatican’s behavior during the Holocaust.
Winyarz doesn’t think that will happen, but to him, the pope must know. The rabbi does not claim to speak for his congregation, but he is certain that many Jews share his views, and that he won’t be ostracized.
“We all have to take the path that our consciences dictate,” Winyarz said. “I don’t think my fellow Jews will be offended by that.”
“Never Again!’ Pope Says Holocaust Condemned in Talk to Jewish Leaders
Sun-Sentinel – September 12, 1987
By James D. Davis, Religion Editor
MIAMI — Pope John Paul II, in a major address on Catholic-Jewish relations, gave his clearest statement thus far that Jews were the primary targets of the Holocaust.
The pontiff, in a historic speech Friday to 175 national and South Florida Jewish leaders at the Center for the Fine Arts, passionately called the World War II Nazi slaughter a ”ruthless and inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish people … only because they were Jews.”
The remark was an apparent attempt to allay Jewish fears that the Vatican was trying to ”universalize” the Holocaust and play down its special victimization of Jews. Many Jews have voiced concern that such an approach might make Catholics less sensitive to anti-Semitism.
The statements were the ”first time any Vatican official has said it with such clarity,” said Burton Levinson, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, in a news conference afterward.
In his second summit-style meeting with Jewish leaders in a week and a half — the first was at Castel Gandolfo, his summer home in Italy — the pope pledged to have his church fight bigotry, teach positive Jewish images in Catholic schools, and explore the historical roots of anti-Semitism.
As for the Holocaust horrors, ”Never again!” he vowed, to spontaneous applause, the only time his address was so interrupted. The phrase has become a standard rallying cry for world Jewry.
The pope also defended Pope Pius XII, who reigned during World War II, against charges that he remained silent during the Holocaust.
Pope John Paul II said he was ”convinced that history will reveal more clearly and convincingly how deeply Pius XII felt the tragedy of the Jewish people, and how hard and effectively he worked to assist them.”
The pontiff spoke on a raised dais in the center, eye-level with Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, head of a group that keeps in touch with Vatican officials. It was a symbolic departure from the pope’s usual raised throne.
In his own talk, Waxman mentioned ”recent tendencies to obscure the fact that Jews were the major target of Nazi genocidal policies.” However, he also said Jewish-Catholic talks are ”one of this century’s most positive developments.”
The delegates were a cross-section of mainstream Jewry. They represented the Synagogue Council of America, an umbrella of most U.S. Jewish groups; and the interdenominational American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League.
The Catholic side included several Vatican cardinals, including its secretaries of state, education and interfaith relations. Also present were Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, and four American cardinals.
A small group of people demonstrated outside the Spanish-style center. The protesters, some wearing concentration camp garb, waved Israeli flags and placards with slogans such as ”Arafat, Waldheim, what next?”
The protest was over an audience granted by the pontiff on June 25 to Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who has denied accusations that he helped deport Jews and partisans when when he was a German army officer in World War II, and one granted in 1982 to Palestinian guerrilla leader Yasser Arafat.
In his address, the pope made no reference to the Waldheim affair, which Waxman said still causes ”pain and distress.” But the pontiff told reporters on the trip from Rome that it had been his duty to meet Waldheim, since he came ”as a president, democratically elected, of a people, of a nation.”
Although the pope said the Jewish people ”have a right to a homeland,” the delegates greeted with stony silence his assertion that this ”also applies to the Palestinian people, so many of whom remain homeless and refugees.” Delegates were only slightly more receptive when he mentioned the ”state of Israel,” with which the Vatican still has not exchanged ambassadors.
The response was warmer when the pontiff said that the suffering of Israel’s children reminds the church of its common bond with the Jewish people. It was a clear theological rationale for making Holocaust studies a Catholic priority.
The pope repeated his announcement of last week that he was planning a major document on the Holocaust. He also reminded the listeners of a Jewish-Catholic workshop on the significance of the Holocaust, set for December in Washington, D.C. He said it would explore ”religious and historical implications of the Shoah” for both faiths. ”Shoah,” which means ”destruction,” is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.
Rabbi Waxman’s talk was more specific, urging more attention to ”the Christian roots of anti-Semitism.” He said the Holocaust was the climax of centuries of bigotry ”for which Christian teachings bear a heavy responsibility.”
Waxman voiced Jewish concern at the lack of full Vatican diplomatic relations for Israel, a matter that many Jews take as a lack of Catholic understanding of what Israel means to them. The Jewish state often is called a last refuge for persecuted Jews worldwide.
”Obviously, the differences have not been resolved,” Waxman said. But he acknowledged a Vatican promise to keep in closer touch with Jewish leaders on actions that might affect them.
”We live in an historic moment. The last quarter-century has irreversibly changed the way we perceive and act towards each other,” Waxman said.
But even among the mainstream Jewish groups, there were signs of divisions. An Orthodox rabbinical group boycotted the Friday dialogue because the previous talks failed to mention the Holocaust and recognition of Israel.
The Orthodox group also forbade Synagogue Council president Gilbert Klaperman to read the main statement to the pope Friday. Waxman, a Conservative, got the job instead.
Klaperman came to the meeting, anyway, because ”I felt the process is important and that it must continue.” Saying that the church had specifically acknowledged Jewish anger, he said the dialogue now must get beyond that.
The New Orthodoxy: The New Rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue Expects to Make Waves
The name Mordechai Winyarz may not ring a bell in Palm Beach County yet.
But as the Orthodox rabbi settles into his new position as the first full-time rabbi for the Boca Raton Synagogue, he has hopes of being a ”clanging cymbal” for God.
Winyarz, 26, just may do that. If he were a Christian, his style would be called evangelical.
Winyarz immediately is forthright about his lifestyle, should there be any questions on the topic: ”I’ll be making about $40,000 to $44,000, I drive a 1984 Topaz and I own eight suits.”
Winyarz has come from New York to the fledgling Boca Raton Synagogue, the only Orthodox synagogue in Boca Raton, and one of three in Palm Beach county.
Its construction is the bloodline for the Orthodox body. Orthodox Jews walk to the synagogue on the Sabbath and its construction has made it easier for the Jews to worship.
”People were moving here because they knew we were here,” said Dr. Gary Lieber, a spokesman and founding member of the synagogue.
Just a few weeks into his position, Winyarz is making plans in an effort to get involved. He is constantly on the telephone, talking with religious and secular community leaders. On the drawing board is a plan for some type of ”demonstration” in regards to the papal visit.
”Judaism has got to be a moral and social force,” Winyarz said. ”Not just to make pronouncements, but to become involved.”
”We were looking for someone to shake the bushes, to make the synagogue a dynamic place,” Lieber said of the search for a rabbi. ”We’re looking to make the congregation the Jewish center in south county. With a mouthpiece like him, we want to let people know we’re here. We’ve essentially done the groundwork.”
Winyarz ambitiously speaks of a few of his plans, one of which is to create a national Jewish retreat center on the synagogue’s property.
”Why not?” he said. ”The assumption is that everything operates out of New York. (Studies show) there are 75,000 Jews in Palm Beach County.”
Yet South County Jewish Federation studies also show that the affiliation rate of local Jews is 13 percent, half the national average.
”Boca in general is extremely materialistic and completely self-involved,” Winyarz said in interpreting the statistics.
”Younger people come to Florida to escape and be unaffiliated.”
Winyarz said he doesn’t condemn the acquisition of material goods and adds that Hebrew scriptures show that God created the world and the world is to be enjoyed.
As a spiritual leader, Winyarz said he will attempt to guide his congregation into emphasizing aspects of life that transcend material goods.
”So you’ve got the Porsche, the pool and the boat. What happens when you die? What do you have then? What did life mean? There must be a purpose to life. Living a meaningful existence is more pleasurable than owning a Porsche.”
Thus, the synagogue becomes what he calls the ”pleasure center.”
Winyarz did not say how much membership in the synagogue will cost, but said, ”Any Jew can come to High Holy Days even if they can’t pay. And no Jew ever will be turned away for lack of funds — ever, ever.”
Although the Boca Raton synagogue structure is complete, Winyarz said there is still more work to do on the inside and the work that is being planned will introduce some new twists on established ideas.
For instance, men and women are seated separately in Orthodox synagogues and typically women are out of the sight of the men, either behind a screen or in the back of the synagogue.
Plans for Boca Raton Synagogue (the word ”Orthodox” is intentionally omitted) still separate men and women, but women are not out of sight. Structurally, the synagogue is in a semicircle, focusing on the center of worship: the Torah and the Eternal Light.
”There will be an opportunity within the synagogue context for women to express themselves in a public manner, which is completely within the (Hebrew) law,” Winyarz said. ”Men or women will be able to get up and give a talk about a religious issue.
”We will have orthodoxy with a small ‘o’ and Halakhah (Jewish law) with a capital ‘H.’ ”
He calls it the new Orthodoxy. Orthodox Judaism usually evokes the stereotypical image of long beards, curly sideburns and black coats — and a separation from the rest of society.
The ”new” Orthodox Jew is the upwardly mobile doctor, lawyer, stockbroker or other person integrally involved in society, yet set apart from others in similiar professions by a belief system that emphasizes religious law and spiritual values.
A prime example of that was Winyarz’s ”outreach” lectures on Wall Street. He once did a lecture on Wall Street called ”Jewish Sexual Ethics.” He also conducted lunchtime scripture studies in a prestigious Manhattan law firm.
Orthodox Judaism is attractive to young Jews, Winyarz said, because ”young people are looking for something that’s real. People intuitively sense that which is authentic and I think there’s a desperate yearning for authenticity.”
Winyarz is an example of the attractiveness of Orthodoxy to young Jews. He had become so immersed in it that by 23 he was teaching Bible at Yeshiva University.
”There’s nothing as exciting as traditional Judaism,” Winyarz said. He wants to turn what he feels is a stereotype of Orthodox Judaism from ”backward, anti-feminist, anti-science” to ”real exciting, progressive system of life.”
In New York, winyarz recruited young people by walking into public schools with a shofar (the administration did not know of his actions). Children who recognized the shofar — a ram’s horn used for ceremonies — were targeted as recruits for his Jewish Public School Youth Project. He turned his efforts into a string of clubs with a budget of $500,000.
If Winyarz initiates the project in Florida, he won’t be staging any press conferences.
”It would be difficult to do it in Florida schools,” he said. ”If I do it, I won’t announce it.”
Winyarz is critical of some other Jewish and non-Jewish religious groups (For instance, he asks, ”What’s Jewish about Reform Judaism?”) although he adds that he believes he will have a good working relationship with other clergy.
”I believe we have the most correct system,” he said of Orthodox Judaism. ”I believe there are moments of truth in others.”
The Rabbi Rocks
by Tracey Wong Briggs
USA Today – August 17, 1987
Rabbi Mordechai Winyarz of Boca Raton, Fla., has produced Jewish Pride, a rock album appealing to Jewish youth. The LP, set for USA-wide release Sept. 1, includes songs written by Lenny Solomon and performed by young Jewish musicians. Rappin’ Jewish, by Danny Furst, says: “La-die-doo, I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool/ Yeah, I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool/ Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat/ I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.”
Rabbi rolls out Jewish rock album
Associated Press/St. Petersburg Times – August 17, 1987
BOCA RATON – A 26-year-old rabbi is using rock ‘n’ roll to appeal to Jewish youth in a way they can understand.
Mordechai Winyarz, spiritual leader of the Boca Raton Community Synagogue, has produced what he calls the first Jewish rock ‘n’ roll album, set for national release Sept. 1.
I’m looking to create a revolution in Jewish life,he said. Music speaks to people. I want this to become a major outreach tool to bring young people back to Judaism.
The album, titled Jewish Pride, includes a danceable theme song of the same name, a ballad called Minyan Man and a rap song Rappin’ Jewish written by Danny Furst.
A sample of the lyrics:
La-die-doo, I’m a Jew ’cause I think it’s cool
Yeah, I eat kosher meat ’cause I ain’t no fool
Ask me anything you want to, but I will repeat
I say being Jewish makes me groove to the beat.
PBS Special – Soul Prints – Your Path to Fulfillment (DVD)
Starring Marc Gafni
Fox Lorber (Publisher) – April 10, 2001
http://dvd.idealo.com/prices/P20008840135K2.html
Soul Prints – Your Path to Fulfillment – MARC GAFNI 790658993808 Rabbi Marc Gafni compares a person’s individual spirit to the uniqueness of their fingerprint, dubbing the former a “soul print.” In this 73-minute lecture, he describes the principles and practical applications of his philosophy culled from his study of many religious and ethnic traditions. The essence is to better appreciate the life you have and redirect your energy in the parts that make you unhappy. He promises the viewer “access to the precise and gorgeous nature of your spirit,” suggesting exercises like making a list of the 10 most important things in your life. He offers mantras and stories from Buddhism, Russia, West Africa, and his own ministry–even singing a short “soul print song” a cappella. Much of his advice is common sense (If you treat the waiter badly, he will treat you badly), but he presents it in an energetic and inspiring manner. However, this PBS Special is interrupted so frequently with shots of an enthusiastically applauding audience that one might think he was selling a food preparation gadget rather than inner peace. Unfortunately, the effect is that of a hard sell for material that should speak for itself. –Kimberly Heinrichs
Publisher Fox Lorber
UPC 790658993808
Release 2001-04-10
Format DVD
Mpaa rating NR (Not Rated)
Primary Contributor Marc Gafni
The Erotic and the Ethical
By Mordechai Gafni
Tikkun Magazine – March/April 2003
WARNING: The following may be found offensive
The Temple of the ancient Israelites is the original Hebrew _expression of pagan consciousness. Now—as we will see later in this essay—the difference between Temple and pagan consciousness is very crucial. But it is a difference that is only important because of their profound similarity. Both the Temple and the pagan cults shared an intoxication with the feminine Goddess, symbol of sacred eros.
The relationship with the Goddess was not a hobby for the Israelites like modern religious affiliation often tends to be. It was an all-consuming desire to be on the inside, to feel the infinite fullness of reality in every moment and in every encounter—it was an attempt to fully experience eros. Because the ancients were so aware of the depth of reality, to live without being able to access the infinite in this erotic way was enormously painful. (For an example, read the story of the idolatrous King Menashe, as retold in the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 92A.)
The prophets of the Temple period opposed paganism with all of their ethical fire and passion. For them, it was inconceivable that the ecstatic and primal Temple experience, religiously powerful and important as it might be, should become primary. When eros overrode ethos, the prophet exploded in divine rage. In moments of clash, the prophet taught that the ethical always needed to trump the erotic.
Modern Judaism has developed from the ethical teachings of the prophets. In the process, however, we have overlooked the erotic, present in the pagan consciousness of the Temple service. We have forgotten the Goddess, a vital presence in the life of ancient Israel. Hebrew liturgy reflects the virtually inconsolable longing of the Hebrew spirit for the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. This longing is not a dream of proprietorship over this or that hill in Jerusalem. Indeed, ownership and holiness are mutually exclusive. Instead, it is a yearning to reclaim sacred eros as part of the fabric of our lives. And, in the way of the circle, our longing for eros is also a longing for ethos. All ethical breakdown emerges from a dearth of eros. When we are overwhelmed by an erotic vacuum, ethics collapse.
Both the vitality and metaphysics of a pagan eros were understood by Israeli mystic Abraham Kook to be essential to the reclaiming of a religious sensibility which reflected both the depth and need of modernity. It is in large part for this pagan sensibility that we yearn when we speak of the dream of a re-built Temple.
To find our way back to eros and the feminine, we must yearn back and forward to the Hebrew mystical tradition, whose masters kept these ideas alive in the form of esoteric tradition, practice and lore.
Eros
In the kabbalistic tradition, as in Plato, the erotic is not a mere synonym for the sexual, but an _expression of inner passion which sexuality models but does not begin to exhaust. In Hebrew myth and mysticism, eros has four faces. The first face of eros is being fully present on the inside, traversing the chasm that separates subject and object. To use the imagery of the Zohar, the magnum opus of Hebrew mysticism, eros is to be in the flow of “the river which swells forth from Eden,” the fountain of life; when I am not in the flow of my own life, I am not living naturally. The opposite of eros is alienation, the feeling that you are an outsider with no safe place to call home.
Kabbalah scholar Yehuda Libes suggests that the word “zohar” is roughly synonymous with the Greek word “eros.” The authors of the Zohar were not dry medieval scholastics; they were rather men of great passion and depth who believed that by entering the inside of the moment, the text, or the relationship, they could recreate and heal the world. Eros is aroused whenever we move so deeply into what we do, who we are with, or where we are, that its interiority stirs our heart and imagination. Shechinah, the Hebrew mystical term for the indwelling feminine presence of God, is no less than the erotic merged with the Holy. Shechinah is the radically profound experience of being on the inside.
The second face of eros is the “fullness of presence.” This is not a distinct and different quality from the first but flows naturally and even overlaps with the erotic quality of being on the inside. And yet it is not quite the same. Of course, being on the inside requires the fullness of presence. But we can experience full presence even when we have not merged with the moment or crossed over to the inside. Full presence is about showing up. You can show up and be fully present in a conversation without necessarily losing yourself in the encounter’s flow. Full presence at work can mean that you derive joy, satisfaction, and self worth from your vocation. It means you feel full and not empty.
To live erotically is to be fully present to each other’s richness, complexity, and ultimate grandeur. It is to fully wait for the other to appear. The Shechinah, say the mystics, is presence waiting for us to be present. She is eros, standing outside of our window, waiting. Waiting for us to run out and behold, with wonder, her face.
The third face of eros is desire. Eros is the yearning force of being. I yearn, therefore I am. As long as I am on the outside, I can ignore my deepest desires and stifle my longing. When I am on the inside, however, when I am fully present, I am able to access my yearning. For the Hebrew mystic, unlike his Buddhist or Greek cousins, desire and longing are sacred. To be cut off from the eros of yearning is to be left in the cold of non-existence. To yearn is to be aflame.
Depression is at its core the depression of desire. When we lose touch with our authentic desire, we become listless and apathetic. There is wonderful eros in desire. It is what connects us most powerfully with our own pulsating aliveness. Longing is a vital strand in the textured fabric of the erotic. It is of the essence of the Holy of Holies.
The fourth face of eros is the interconnectivity of being. Longing, desire, and tears remind us of the fourth strand in the erotic weave. They whisper to us that we are all interconnected. No human stands alone. The word “religion” traces its source to the Latin root ligare which, as we can hear in the word “ligament,” is about connectivity. Religion’s goal is to re-ligare—to reconnect us. Religion’s original intention was to take us to that inside place where we could indeed experience the essential interconnectivity of all reality. All of existence is one great quilt of being and we are all patches in its magnificent intertextured pattern.
Eros is what allows us to move past the feeling of isolation and separation and experience ourselves as part of the quilt. To sunder our connection to eros is therefore to sin. Sin is but the illusion of separation. Sin is not evil; it is merely tragic. Not only do we lose the source of life’s greatest pleasure, but we would undermine the building blocks of connection without which the world would ultimately collapse.
The Merging of Male and Female
One of the most obvious yet profound qualities that the sexual models for the erotic is the merging of the feminine and the masculine. The drive towards union between the female and the male is the essential underlying force that powers the universe. Although it is often expressed in the merging of man and woman, it is by no means limited to that _expression. For the Hebrew mystics, the sexual union of man and woman both models and participates in the more primal union of Shechinah (the Divine Feminine) and Tiferet (the Divine Masculine). Whether understood as Yin and Yang, as in Taoist thought, or Shiva and Shakti in Hindu mythology, masculine and feminine are different faces of the greater union, the force of divinity that courses through the cosmos and beyond. The kabbalistic archetype of the integrated male-female are the two cherubs, one male and one female, present in the Holy of Holies in the ancient Temple. Described in the Book of Kings and unpacked in the Babylonian Talmud, these golden cherubs were twined in sexual embrace. For the kabbalists, their integration is the highest erotic _expression of a healed world.
What is the difference between masculine and feminine?
The core cosmic intuition of Hebrew mystic Isaac Luria, later developed by mystics Isaac Chaver and Abraham Kook, offers a deceptively simple paradigm. Men are lines, “yosher” or “kav” and women are circles, “iggulim.” Or, more accurately, line is a masculine image and circle is a feminine _expression. Every man and woman is a unique interpenetration of line and circle.
Let us look at the nature of a circle. Circles are characterized by suppleness, intimacy, egalitarian sensibility, connection, and communication. The feminine circle is defined by relatedness. It surrounds, embraces and envelopes. It is a symbol of intimacy, loyalty, and a capacity to forgive and renew. The circle moves round and round, in a constant flow of re-newal, re-membering, and re-cognition. It always comes home again
Already it is clear to us that a circle is naturally erotic. In a circle, everyone can see each other. In Luria’s language, everyone is face to face. There is intimacy in circle.
The masculine line is far more rigid than the circle. Judgment and distinction are natural line functions. With a line, there is a clear hierarchy. One is either higher on the line or lower. If people are moving in the same direction on a line, then they will not be face to face. Instead, they will be face-to-back or back-to-face. A line signals a clear lack of intimacy. A line is forward moving, goal-oriented, directed, and focused. It spends a lot more time looking ahead than looking around. The line’s natural movement is to thrust forward.
Luria writes, “Every world of world and every detail of detail in every world of world is made up of these two principles, circles and lines.” Lines and circles in various permutations and balances are the DNA of spiritual reality. It is the unique blending of their energies that gives contour, character, and depth to every unit of reality. It is a blending in which neither the circle nor the line ever disappears. Each is fully absorbed in the bliss of merging with other while never losing its own integrity.
Does the union of masculine and feminine mean that, after total integration, gender will dissolve as an issue? That a kind of transvestite existentialism is the kabbalistic dream of an evolved world? Well, yes … and absolutely not.
There is a core paradigm in Hebrew mystical sources and many other traditions which provides a clear reality map for the integration of circle and line. It is a trinity of stages.
Simple (Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water)
Complex (Enlightenment)
Simple (After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water)
The linchpin of the idea is that the third stage and the first, although externally similar, are really worlds apart. For stage three deeply integrates the new consciousness of stage two. So while the simplicity of stage one might be naïve, superficial, and even irresponsible, the simplicity of stage three is deep, wise, and responsible. In the reality map of eros, level one is the natural eros of the circle. Level two is the line, which occasionally opposes and even overrides certain circle manifestations. Level three is the return to a higher eros, where circle and line interpenetrate, yielding a sensual symphony of flowing spirit and precise form, unimaginable in the initial erotic offering of level one.
Lines and circles, the masculine and the feminine, are cosmic principles whose roots are in our souls. Neither New Age spirituality (circle) or the old religious Orthodoxies (lines) alone have within them the power to heal our souls and our planet. It is only a deeper erotic vision unpacked from both, the paradox of holding lines and circles together as one that can heal us.
We need to fully embrace the truth of the line, then roundly challenge it with circle consciousness, only to re-embrace the line from a more supple and rounded place. Similarly, we need to rejoice in the circle, only to bisect it with the power of the line and then re-turn again to the circle. This is the trinity paradigm in which level two rejects level one, only to be transcended and absorbed by level three, which is always an evolved version of level one. Circle, line, circle. Line, circle, line.
We begin in the middle—in the glory of the circle.
The Power of the Circle
Phallic line consciousness has proved impotent for so many of us. It has not given birth to the reality for which we dreamed. We have competed, failed, and succeeded. Yet we have found the process debilitating and the prize woefully insufficient. Even if we’ve “gotten” what we were always supposed to want, we have realized that it isn’t enough.
On the most personal level, the rat race of line consciousness has failed us. The radical focus on our place in the hierarchy has exhausted us. For many years we have ignored Lily Tomlin’s truism: “Even if you finish first, you are still a rat.”
On the global level, line consciousness has failed us as well. We live on the edge of unprecedented ecological disaster. The imbalanced Genesis Chapter One ethics of “fill the earth and conquer” is not innocent in this. The ecological disaster is driven by corporations who take advantage of the core emptiness in the heart of the West, by feeding it with an obscene overabundance of goods and foods. Corporations driven by line consciousness form the crux of our world’s economy. These corporations are sadly driven by basically only one desire: that of accumulating maximal power through maximal profit. Unhappily, the natural result of this posture is a virtual rape of the environment for the sake of climbing higher on the line’s ladder. Tragically, it is the line consciousness of probably not more than 10,000 people (nice people) that is having this devastating impact on the world’s environment.
The driving force behind the corporate ethos is fear of emptiness. When we lose the sense of the world being divine and full of meaning, we risk falling into the void—we “lose touch” with our own essential self-worth and value. So we learn a-void-dance, doing everything we can to deny the lurking emptiness. In order to stifle those voices we work hard at producing and climbing in the line world. Somehow, the eros of productivity and competition give our lives a veneer of meaning, at least until a crisis when our vulnerability is exposed and we plummet into the void.
It is only by raising a new generation on the eros of the circle that we can hope to truly effect a transformation in the world. Only by unpacking and internalizing our erotic experiences of interconnectivity, interiority, and the fullness of being can we move towards healing and change. This is the call of circle consciousness. This is the ethos of redeemed paganism. This is Temple consciousness.
Temple Consciousness
The Jerusalem Temple is the place where the Shechinah dwells between the cherubs. The Shechinah is known in the kabbalistic sources as the great feminine. She is mother, daughter, and lover. She is the force that allows the human being to feel at home in the world. The Temple is the place of eros; it is the experience of being on the inside.
The biblical story is based on the line. In this account, the world is God’s place. God’s relationship to world is that of father, king, or even husband. In biblical myth, God creates world outside of Himself, even as he dwells in world. For the pagan and the Temple mystic, however, the world is not God’s place; instead, God is the place of the world. To be in Temple consciousness is to be in God. Eros pure and simple.
This shift in consciousness is hidden within the folds of biblical myth text. The central biblical term which describes Temple consciousness is “lifnei hashem,” usually translated as “before God,” (as in “standing before God”). A closer reading, however, yields the hidden eros in the term. The word “lifnei” derives from the Hebrew word “pnimi” meaning “inside,” the first face of eros.
This same Hebrew word for “inside,” and “before” has a third meaning as well. The third meaning is “face,” “panim.” Face is the place where my insides are revealed. There are forty-five muscles in the face, most of them unnecessary for the biological functioning of the face. Their major purpose is to express emotional depth and nuance. They are the muscles of the soul. When I say, “I need to speak face to face,” I am in erotic need of an inside conversation.
All three English words, “face,” “inside,” and “before,” share the same Hebrew root. The essence then of the biblical Temple phrase “lifnei Hashem,” before God, is not a commandment to appear “before God” in the magistrate sense. It is an invitation to enter the inside of God’s face.
To be on the inside of God is precisely the vision of the pagan circle.
It was paganism which understood well the primal human need to feel at home in the world. The erotic pagan imagination was able to uncover divinity in every nook and cranny of existence. For the pagan, there was an understanding that the Goddess is “on every hill and under every tree.” For the pagan, the hills were literally alive with the sound of music. Nature is the music of divinity undressed to the human ear. Every hill, brook, tree, and blade of grass was invested with its own divine muse.
In the ancient world the tree in particular, in all of its lush sensuality, was a primary manifestation of the erotic Goddess. The central symbol of much of the ancient pagan cult in biblical Canaan was the Ashera tree, symbol of the Goddess Ashera incarnate. Unadulterated paganism is the eros of level one circle consciousness.
It is clear from the biblical record itself that Ashera worship was the norm in ancient Judah and Israel. Occasionally, someone would intervene. King Josiah attempted the most radical reform, after finding a new book—very possibly the book of Deuteronomy—that explicitly prohibited having an Ashera tree in the precincts of the Temple. The discovery of this “new book” is the greatest indication that there were many Ashera trees in the temple. New texts only emerge to outlaw popular practice. Josiah’s goal was to fully obliterate the Ashera goddess’ presence. Only a few years after his death, however, the Ashera was back in the Temple once more.
No one could deny the people their goddess. A careful reading of the biblical sources reveals that of the 370 years which Solomon’s temple stood in Jerusalem, for at least 236 of those years—two-thirds of the time—the statue of Ashera was present in the Temple. Her worship was not some underground cult, but part of what was understood to be the legitimate Hebrew spirit itself.
Ashera, who began as a foreign interloper, became, in Raphael Patai’s phrase, a beloved “Hebrew Goddess.” She was worshipped openly and with great joy as part of the official religion by kings, the court, the priesthood and most of the people. She was opposed only by a few prophets crying against her and even then only at relatively long intervals. Indeed, the erotic passion for the Goddess was so essential to the people’s spirit that when the great reformer Elijah challenged the pagan god Baal, Ashera’s son, he pointedly avoided challenging Ashera. The text in Kings tell of 400 prophets of Ashera and 450 prophets of Baal who eat at the table of the Queen Jezebel, wife of Ahab. Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal but somehow doesn’t touch the prophets of Ashera. The Ashera has become too much of a Hebrew Goddess to be challenged even by Elijah.
The pagan Goddess was not viewed by Solomon or the people as a compromise of the Hebrew spirit. On the contrary, she was experienced as an organic deepening of the Hebrew spirit. In the pagan world, as we have noted, the Goddess erotically merged with her male counterpart. Hieros gamos—the marriage the God and Goddess. Ashera has divine intercourse with El, notably the very name of the Hebrew god! Her daughter, Astarte, copulates with Baal, her brother. This marriage of the gods—symbolizing the mythical merging of the primal masculine and feminine—brings blessing and joy to the world.
The Hebrew version of this Heiros Gamos—marriage of divine principles—was personified in the union of the biblical male God with the Goddess Ashera. We know from relatively recent archaeological excavations that many people served the Biblical male God image and the Ashera together. One of the most fascinating finds is that of Kuntillat Ajrud in the northeastern Sinai desert. Two storage jars were found, and one of them carried the inscription (in anthropologist Raphael Patai’s translation) “Amarayhu says to my Lord … may you be blessed by Yah-weh and his Ashera.”
There is evidence that the worship of Ashera extended even into the Holy of Holies. Pattai supports our intuition that the two cherubs intertwined in sexual union in the Holy of Holies are an evolved _expression of the Hebrew-pagan marriage between the biblical Yah-weh and pagan Ashera. That is to say, the spirit of biblical text, which rejected some of the essential dimensions of paganism, nevertheless accepted the core feminine erotic principle that powered paganism and recognized the essential need to integrate it with the masculine principle. So Ashera was transmuted into the female cherub in erotic union with the male cherub. While the prophets rejected the Ashera they embraced the cherubs. Indeed, biblical prophecy taught that the space between the sexually entwined cherubs was the source of prophecy.
The erotic and pagan nature of the female cherub was clearly apparent to the wisdom masters of Babylon. They understood that the cherubs were the Hebrew embrace of the sacred moment in paganism and thought it essential to the Hebrew spirit. In a post-Temple world where survival depended on the Law, the wisdom masters were not willing or able to openly embrace the pagan moment in Temple consciousness. So, in a classical literary device, they placed in the mouths of foreign interlopers their profound perception of the cherubs as purified expressions of the pagan archetype. The Babylonian Talmud in Yoma 54b tells us that when the Temple was conquered and Nebuchadnezzar’s army sees the cherubs, the Jewish religion was immediately cheapened in their eyes. “Said Reish Lakish: When the foreigners entered the temple and saw the cherubs sexually intertwined they took them out to the market place. Israel whose blessing is blessing and curse is curse—is this what they were engaged in?” A parallel text in the Midrash (Lamentations Raba, 9) is more explicit in relating the cherubs to paganism. The Babylonians were sure that the Cherubs were pagan Gods and the Jews had laid claim to a more pure faith: “Ammonites and Moabites entered the holy of holies and found the two cherubs. They … paraded them around the streets of Jerusalem … did you not say that this nation does not worship idols? See what we have found. What they were serving.”
The cherubs atop the ark went underground after the destruction of the Temples. However, they re-appear in public consciousness centuries later as the masculine and feminine _expression of the divine in the kabbalistic books of the Bahir, the Zohar, and in virtually every subsequent kabbalistic text. This divine pair are called Malchut and Tiferet, Shechinah and Tiferet, and a host of other appellations. They reach their apex in kabbalistic consciousness in the mystical works of Isaac Luria and his one-time teacher, Moses Cordovero. In Isaac Luria’s graphic and daring vision, the world is not formed by a forward-thrusting male movement which creates outside of itself. Quite the contrary—Divinity creates within itself a sacred void in the form of a circle. This is the creation not of the masculine God but of the Goddess, of the Shechinah! This is the Great Circle of Creation.
In Luria’s vision, all of being is within the womb of the Goddess. Life is born not by expelling the baby, but by making room for offspring within the Goddess’ eternal womb. Nature is not outside of the Goddess but instead is a daughter _expression of the divine. Luria’s teacher, Moses Cordovero, was even clearer about the identity of this Goddess. In a passing comment in one of his works he says explicitly, “Malchut (Shechinah) is Ashera.” Cordevero’s statement emerges from a powerful and radical passage in the Zohar (Vol. 1, 49A) which suggests that the altar in the Temple itself was an Ashera tree!! The deep intention of the Zohar is not that this was an actual Ashera tree. Rather the Zohar is teaching that the Temple was deeply connected to the primal power of the sacred Ashera Goddess.
So we have come full circle. The Canaanite pagan Ashera has been reclaimed as a Hebrew Goddess. Primal circle consciousness has been rewoven into the rich fabric of a resurgent Hebrew myth.
Sod HaYichud
If the circle is so wonderful, why not live in circle consciousness and just jettison the jagged and cutting line once and for all? Why not simply return to the Goddess?
The answer is that the circle alone is not sufficient. Indeed, followers of both the biblical line and the mystical path have been quick to point out that the circle not integrated by the line not only lacks integrity, but is a primary ontological cause of evil. Master Nachman of Bratzlav writes that the source of evil in the world is the primal chalal reik, the empty void. The chalal reik is a circle image drawn from Lurianic Kabbalah which has not yet been penetrated by the kav, the line.
We are used to viewing the source of evil as being somehow external to man. Both capitalists and communists of the last century insisted that market conditions and economic opportunity were the prime cause for evil. Others blame evil on parents, schools, television violence or handguns. Many varieties of religion have long spoken about a Satan or tempter force that moves men to “the dark side.” The common denominator is the location of evil somewhere outside the human being. If that is true, then we only have to fix that external system and everything will be okay. Economic reform, social engineering, gun control, parent education, school reform, are all potential messiahs.
While all those may be good things, the core premise of Hebrew myth is that none of them will prevent evil. Biblical mysticism has an entirely different view of the human being. Evil comes from the failure to integrate the feminine circle and masculine line. This is called in Kabbalah Sod HaYichud, the secret of the union. More accurately it means the secret of the integration which is no more and no less than the secret of the cherubs. This is our life’s work: to achieve full eros through the deep integration of our circles and lines. Or to say it differently, we need to move from the eros of the first level circle, which is pre-line, to the eros of the third level circle, which is transline. To confuse the two would be to fall prey to the pre/trans fallacy which so often marks contemporary New Age philosophies. To know how to move to third level circle eros we must expose the shadow of the first level pagan circle from the perspective of the prophetic line.
The Closed Circle and History
Intellectual historian Yehezkel Kaufman is correct in reminding us that the opposition to paganism—the opposition to pure circle consciousness—may well be the singularly most important theme of the entire Hebrew biblical project. The prophets exposed the two great shadows of pagan circle thinking. The first shadow stems precisely from its circle nature! The pagan myth believed as an absolute given of reality in the great wheel of Being. Mircea Eliade’s great work The Myth of Eternal Return is probably the best modern statement of this powerful cyclical motif which is shot through all pagan reality maps. The problem with the cycle, however, as Buddha already pointed out, is that it is a trap. The circle is by very definition not open, but closed. There is no way out. It is to this circle consciousness that the wisdom masters referred when they said, “Until the Exodus no slave had ever succeeded in leaving Egypt.” In the pagan circle consciousness of Egypt, no one could ever leave his or her place. You were born into your circle and destined to go round and round within it.
In contrast to the stasis of the circle, the line of evolution—beginning with the gradual unfolding of creation from simple to complex in the Genesis creation story—is essential to the biblical spirit. Biblical myth in the story of the Exodus introduces line consciousness into the mind and heart stream of the world. It is the creation of the very ideas of history, progress, and therefore hope. Love desires growth, healing, and transformation. For the circle to exist without being bisected by the line would be the greatest failure of love.
In biblical myth consciousness the story of the Exodus is the story of the second great escape from the tyranny of the circle. The first great escape is the story of the first Hebrew, Abraham. In fact, it is precisely Abraham’s ability to make the great escape from the circle that makes him the first Hebrew, for the very word “Hebrew” (Ivri) means the “one who crossed over.” The line consciousness of Abraham introduces to the world the notion of journey. The clear implication, against virtually all of pagan thought, is that you can actually go someplace. Line consciousness is history. The idea of a plot, suspense, and ultimate resolution introduced by the Hebrews and so engrained in us today was unknown to the circle consciousness of the pagan.
In Hebrew, there is no word for “history”; instead, the word is zachor—remember. Not accidentally, zachor in Hebrew has a second meaning: the masculine. His-story is a function of line consciousness, the masculine thrusting-forward property of the spirit. It is biblical mysticism that gives birth to the notion of tikkun olam, “the world’s fixing”—which a very close reading of Isaac Luria’s works reveals to mean the evolving and healing of all consciousness—human and divine. It is only when the journey to God is over that the journey in God begins.
What we are talking about is much more than the evolution of humankind. It was the kabbalists who introduced the idea of an evolving divine consciousness. The unfolding of divine consciousness is not a purely intra-divine process. The great privilege of being a human being is that we participate in the evolution and healing of God. The Zohar, in Vol 1 Genesis 4A, even imagines the human being as a creator of God. It is the evolution of the human spirit that catalyzes the evolution of God. As biblical mystic Zecharia says, “On that day [in the future] God will be one and his name will be one.” When God and man meet in an evolutionary embrace, redemption is achieved. In the words of Nikos Kazantzaikos, “We are the saviors of God.”
This is the great messianic idea, the climax of all history and evolution. “Messiah” in biblical mysticism is more than a person. It is a destination which we arrive at after the long and often arduous journey. It is the hope and the vision of a better tomorrow. It is the possibility of possibility.
Until this shaft of the line cut across human consciousness, human existence was fundamentally determined. All that happened was thought to be revealed in the astrological wisdom of the stars in their heavenly cycles, or in the guts of animals when you killed them. The key was that there was “nothing new under the sun.”
The freedom implied in line consciousness means not only that a slave people can throw off the shackles of the oppressor. It also means that each of us can throw off the shackles of our own personal taskmasters. There is no greater slave master than the idea that yesterday determines today. This is precisely the shadow of circle consciousness. The line sets us free. It pierces the circular bubble, shattering the “realities” that want to hold us back and keep us down.
God and Nature
We now come to the second great shadow of pagan circle consciousness. The pagan insisted that divinity was in trees and in all of nature. But the essential biblical idea is that God is also beyond nature. God is the creator of nature and therefore not trapped within it. Biblical myth therefore opens with the Genesis story, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The powerful and revolutionary implication is that God is not merely nature. Unlike the Greek, Roman, pagan, or Buddhist pantheons, biblical myth insists on a God who is both within and infinitely beyond the circle, radically immanent as well as transcendent.
When we say that God is infinitely beyond trees, we are also saying that if you can connect to God, God can free you from the ensnaring web of nature. The notion that a human being is created in the image of God means for the Hebrew mystic that a person has it within them to reach beyond the natural to the moral.
The reason this is so critical is because in biblical consciousness, the loving God’s primary demand is ethical behavior. The single most important _expression of love—and the most important principle of Hebrew ethics—is how we treat each other, not how we think about each other. Sixteenth-century master Aron of Barcelona wrote, “A person is formed by their actions.” Treat a person lovingly and you will love them in the end. Love a person passionately and treat them unethically and you will be alienated from them in the end. Paradoxically, there is no eros without ethics.
Ethical behavior always requires that we be able to act against our primal instinctive natures. We must be able to step out of the level one pagan circle and become response-able for actions, able to respond to and control our instinctive nature. If we were part of nature, then clearly we could not be expected to ever control or direct our nature. We are both part of nature, and parting from nature. It is only because of this paradox that we are capable of self-control. Of course, it is giving up control which is essential in the classic frameworks of circle consciousness. Sex and emotionally vulnerable relationships are two good examples. Giving up control, however, is only possible in the context of a safe environment created by people who can be trusted to exercise self-control. The circle integrates with the line to foster the integrity of higher eros, a level three circle.
Circle consciousness claims that people are naturally the best that they can be. The problem, argues the circle, is not goodness but alienation, and in circle consciousness the greatest evil is to be cut off, distant, disenchanted, out of the circle. Line consciousness disagrees with the circle and says that people are potentially good but not naturally good. In biblical myth people are born innocent, but they are not born good. The most important act of love, according to the Hebrew gospel, is to develop a training system for goodness. For biblical myth the belief that people are naturally the best that they can be is not only wrong but destructive. If people were naturally good, then evil would be the result of some set of external forces. Here we return to the idea of Sod HaYichud, the secret of union. Biblical myth, then as now, says no to this thinking. Hebrew gospel teaches that only the control and refinement of our internal nature, the integration of line with circle, can bring the good.
There is, however, a second critical reason why the line-driven ethical prophet does not experience God as being exclusively in nature. If God were in nature and not beyond Nature, then Nature would be our source of ethics. It is clear though that, for all of her splendor in reflecting a pale cast of divine beauty, nature is amoral. The law of nature is nearly always that the strong kill the weak. Social services, hospitals, help for the disabled are all profoundly “unnatural,” at least according to the law of nature in the non-human world. In fact, the hospital is a direct corollary of line and not (first level) circle consciousness. The morality of the line insists that those higher on the line—that is to say stronger and with more means—take care of those lower on the line. This is the faith and God experience of the prophets.
The Prophet & the Pagan
Let’s frame the clash between circle and line in the most striking possible terms.
The prophet, the hero of the Hebrew bible, represents ethics, the line. The pagan, hero of the ancient world into which biblical thought was born, represents eros, the circle. The clash between the prophet and the pagan—the circle and the line—is in the end the clash between the erotic and the ethical. (That is to say, between first level circle eros and second level line ethics.)
Having said that, I want to make a radical claim—which, as is often the case, is patently obvious once you see it. On the essential interpretation of reality, the prophet actually was closer to circle consciousness than to line consciousness. The difference was that the pagan was a first stage circle archetype and the prophet a third stage circle archetype.
The prophet’s line _expression is a necessary corrective response to the pagan consciousness that dominated the world at the time. The prophet saw his role to be overturning a pagan ethic which was bound up with so much cruelty. For example, built into the pagan ritual are demands for parents to burn their children as a sacrifice to the gods. “They have set their pagan abominations in my house … to burn their sons and daughters in fire.” (Jeremiah 7:30, 31) The burning of children was not the exception in pagan worship. Rather it was the model of the pagan idea that erotic abandonment to the God must, by its very definition, overrun all intuitive human ethical boundaries.
In the picture of the prophet as a social reformer, it is, however, too easy to lose sight that, at core, he was an erotic mystic. The prophet is actually the archetype of the feminine. The “most beautiful among women,” according to King Solomon, are the prophets. The phrase is drawn from Canticles, King Solomon’s love song to the erotic Shechinah, whose deep essence is modeled, but never exhausted, by the sexual.
Yes, the prophet insisted that nature was not all of God, yet he experienced with all his being that God was all of nature. Even as he decried the pagan claim that identified God with the Ashera tree, he knew and rejoiced in the truth that God was fully present and accessible “on every hill and under every tree.” God was not only reflected in nature as the external creator. God was fully present in nature—in the words of the later mystics, mamash, meaning literally—”actually,” for real, not just in metaphor or symbol. The words of later Hebrew mystics capture accurately prophetic consciousness. Schneur Zalman of Liadi writes that “Trees and stones are mamash divine.” Nachman of Bratzlav told his disciples that “Every blade of grass has its own (divine) song.”
It is critical to understand that God is paradoxically within and beyond. Dennis Prager, generally a brilliant polemicist for the core intuitions of biblical religion, dismisses any possibility of a mainstream Jewish position which embraces pantheism in his “Is God in Trees.” However the overwhelming majority of classical Jewish thinkers in the past 500 years have categorically refused to choose between pantheism and monotheism. To give but one example, Abraham Kook consistently and intentionally embraces a paradoxical dialectic between pantheism and monotheism throughout his writings, so much so that in his letters he refuses to term Judaism as monotheistic (Orot Hakodesh Vol. 3 pp. 399).
The goal of the prophet is integration. The erotic and ethical, the line and circle, must merge. This is the secret of the cherubs and the model of the sexual.
What the prophet and the pagan respectively incarnate, however, is made manifest when the erotic and the ethical clash. An oft-quoted line from Jung, modern heir to the pagan myth tradition, is the best summation I have ever heard of the pagan position: “I’d rather be whole than good.” For the pagan, the alienation from divinity is so palpable and painful that it must be overcome at all costs, even if ethics are the price. This is where the balanced scales start precariously to slip. It was Jung who was sadly seduced by the pagan Goddess Ashera into a flirtation with Nazism, that menacing shadow of eros which horrifically darkened our world just a few short decades ago.
The prophet always responds, “I’d like to be whole. Indeed I yearn to be whole. But if I have to choose, I’d rather be good than whole.” It is for this reason that the prophet is the great critic of the pagan consciousness intrinsic to the Temple experience. The erotic fulfillment of the Temple experience was all too often a replacement for the kind of direct ethical action which could heal the world. It is the widow and the orphan, the vulnerable and the dispossessed, who must be the primary concern of the homo religious, according to the prophets. Thus Isaiah declaims:
I do not want your multitude of sacrifices
I delight not in the blood of bullocks or goats or rams.
Do not come to seek my face …
as you trample my courts of justice …
your hands are full of blood …
wash yourselves, make yourselves clean …
cease your evil doings … seek fair judgment,
argue the case of the widow and the orphan …
Zion will be redeemed
by justice and … integrity.
For Isaiah, the ecstatic pagan service of the Temple, with its blood sacrifices, has led Israelites to forget the ethical imperative to feed the hungry and clothe the poor. Isaiah refuses to allow eros to trump ethos.
Rebuilding Temple Consciousness
In my spiritual community of Bayit Chadash in the hills around Israel’s Sea of Galilee, we are committed to reclaiming the spark of sacred paganism. We return to the pagan when we practice deep ecology, because for the pagan “Love your mother” means not only your human biological mother, but mother earth who nurtures you, balances you, and grounds you in her embrace. We reclaim the pagan in meditation, ecstatic service and passionate love of the Shechinah in all of her myriad manifestations. It is in large part for this pagan sensibility that we yearn when we speak of the dream of a re-built Temple.
The Temple in its ideal state was supposed to manifest the third stage circle moment in Hebrew consciousness. What the prophets realized, however, was that the people had not incorporated second stage line consciousness. The erotic was overrunning the ethical. In principle, however, the Temple was meant to be a balance between line and circle, erotic and ethical.
Only a short distance from the seat of eros—the holy of holies with her sexually intertwined cherubs—was the lishkat hagazit, the room of hewn stone. This was the Chamber of Justice whose passionate concern was the ethical—the creation of a just society. On the face of it, its sensibilities seem far removed from the erotic motifs of the sensual and the sacred that permeated the Temple’s aura. What, after all, do ethics and eros have to do with each other?
The answer is—everything. In the short run we can train people through behaviorist ritual, social engineering, and a good deal of guilt to behave ethically. However, in the final analysis, non-erotic ethics will always collapse under the weight of contracts and contacts it cannot fulfill. The Room of Hewn Stone must necessarily be housed in the eroticized temple in order for its ethics to truly thrive.
In the end all ethical failure is a violation of eros—your own or someone else’s. Ethics without eros cannot hold. Ethics which are not rooted in eros ultimately fall … apart. We yearn for eros. By exiling God from nature and secularizing the sexual, we condemn ourselves to emptiness and vacuity. Ethical collapse always occurs when we are overwhelmed by our emptiness. The failure of ethics is always rooted in a failure of eros. When we talk only about a God giving rules that run counter to our nature, the rules cannot hold. The eros of our nature will always overrun them. But if we come to understand that ethics is an erotic _expression of our deeper divinity, we are truly moved to the ethical. For at that point we realize that the ethical is an _expression of our deepest selves, a response to the call of our own voice. Ethics, to be compelling and powerful, must be an _expression of our erotic divine nature and not a contradiction to it. So when the prophets insist that God and the God within us is beyond nature, and can therefore act ethically against nature, they are referring only to our first nature, not to our deeper second nature. Our deeper nature is God.
At the same time that ethics cannot live without eros, eros cannot live without ethics. The erotic dies without the ethical. The circle cannot survive without the line.
Circle consciousness rejects the non-bi-sected circle not only as ethically flawed but as ontologically inadequate and existentially unsatisfying.
Humanity is life become aware of itself. It is this very self-awareness that moves us from the harmony of the natural to the tension of the confronted. We are at once part of nature, subject to her laws, even as we are free, confronting, controlling, and healing nature. The human being is the only creature in nature whose very existence poses a problem to itself. It is a problem from which we cannot escape. Living our merely natural circle life is both impossible and boring to us. It is this sense of boredom, even ennui, which makes us feel alienated, evicted from paradise. We are moved both by reason and soul to struggle endlessly not only with questions of the techne, of how and what, but also with the mysterious why and ultimately we long to see the Who!
The divinity of humanity—that which makes us not only within but also beyond nature—is precisely what assures that nature alone will not ful-fill. Line consciousness suggests that a non-accomplished person can never be satisfied. We require for our psychic-spiritual wholeness the pursuit of a goal. Meditation is insufficient for bliss. But not just any goal will do.
The goal must be an ethical one; an ambition that promises the greater good. Without such an objective, we ultimately get lost in our ennui and overwhelmed by our emptiness. The circle is incapable of captivating us by herself.
Eros always needs to in-corporate ethics. What this points to is that the good is not only an ethical need, it is an erotic need as well. At the same time, all ethical collapse is caused by un-ful-filled eros.
The modern mystic who understood this best was Abraham Kook.
Morality not guided by the sacred is not deep,
and does not enter into the inwardness of the soul; …
Such a weak morality
does not have the power to guide …
the polis, the human community,
to penetrate to the depth of the soul
and to transform the heart
of universal man and of individual man
from stone to flesh.
There is no alternative plan for humanity
other than that it be guided by the erotic morality….
It is the same Kook who refused to term Judaism a monotheistic religion, believing as he did that strains of purified pagan pantheism were essential to the essence of Hebrew religion. The prophet in us needs to reclaim holy paganism. The pagan within must be open to hearing the call of the prophet. When the prophet and pagan meet, the Temple of the heart will be rebuilt.
Post-Orthodoxy Journey
By Neri Livneh
Haaretz – March 4, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/401222.html
CORRECTION: In “What is the question?” (Haaretz Magazine, March 5, 2004) Rabbi Mordechai Gafni should have been described as being 43 years old, married for the third time, and due to complete his doctorate at the end of the year.
“We’ve forgotten the Ela [the Goddess],” says Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, founder of Bayit Chadash, a community that aspires to be a new stream in Judaism, and, in his words, “to restore the spark of holy paganism.” Judaism was once an erotic religion, he argues, in the sense that the Divinity had two experiential sides or dimensions: a male side called “God” and a female side called “Shekhina,” the Goddess. The sense of the Divinity is achieved by a fusing of the two elements, as between a man and a woman, yin and yang, Shakti and Shiva. In the Temple, the Holy of Holies, there were two cherubim – male and female. To kabbalists, the blending of the divine male, called “Tiferet” and the divine female, called “Shekhina,” a unity described in the Babylonian Talmud in reference to the cherubim on the Holy Ark, represents the Divine Power. Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook described the fusing of these two elements as the combination of a (male) straight line with a (female) circle.
To Gafni, the line without a circle represents Ethos without Eros, i.e., rational life, without emotion, disconnected from Mother Earth and from natural impulse. The circle without the line represents an immersion in the erotic or spiritual, as in New Age practices. The fusion of the line and the circle represents Eros purified by the encounter with the rational and ethical foundation – a desirable encounter that is necessary for the building of the “Bayit Chadash” (“new home”) or the new Judaism.
“Orthodox Judaism developed out of the ethical teachings of the Prophets, who tried to obscure the Eros for the sake of nurturing the Ethos,” he says. This is how we’ve gotten the ultra-Orthodox Judaism that we’re familiar with, a religion that tries to suppress the impulse and whose rabbis are supposed to supply absolute truths and answers to every question. Gafni, who calls himself “post-Orthodox,” takes an opposite view of what religiosity ought to mean: “To me, the religious duty is to ask questions. I think it smacks of great arrogance to give pat answers to ultimate issues.”
Gafni is not an anonymous personality by any means. His Channel 2 television program, “Tahat Gafno,” attracted many viewers. He says that thousands of people have attended his community’s encounters. He also writes a regular column in the magazine Hayim Aherim and has published five books in the United States in recent years. One of them, “Soul Prints,” will soon appear in Hebrew translation, with an introduction by the religious poet Admiel Kosman. Gafni’s television show is due back for a new season, and he recently finished taping segments for the Keshet broadcasting network “about the situation and questions related to the situation – for Keshet to use on days when there is a terror attack.”
In addition to his rabbinical ordination, he also holds a Ph.D. from Oxford. And no, he says, he is not at all inclined to become a guru. He says that he’s as far from New Age as he is from Reform Judaism. His “new Orthodoxy” does not offer any breaks when it comes to observance of the 613 commandments, or mitzvot. What makes him unique are the additions he makes to Judaism, the changes of emphasis, the way he relates it to modern life and the special focus he puts on commandments related to human dignity and love of fellow human beings. He also invites non-Jews to the Shabbat weekends he runs at the Bayit Chadash center in Poriya, overlooking Lake Kinneret. He officiates at same-sex marriages, and sees feminism and equality for women as key Jewish values. He plans to ordain women as rabbis and women in his community can be called up to the Torah. Every blessing in the community’s prayer book and every blessing recited at community ceremonies open, as usual, with “Baruch ata adonai eloheinu” and then continues with “ve’berukha at hashekhina” (“And blessed art thou, the Shekhina”). “I’m not talking about Judaism-lite, like the Reform or the settlers,” says Gafni. “I’m talking about whole Judaism that has both Ethos and Eros, both faith and a full life, both male and female.”
Gafni divides his time between the new Bayit Chadash center in Jaffa, where this conversation took place, and the older center in Poriya – and between Israel and the U.S. He is 42, married to Chaya (his second wife), and father of three children from his previous marriage. He radiates warmth, and is not the type of rabbi who is reluctant to shake a woman’s hand. On the contrary, he does not shy away from physical contact. “Someone who wanted to study with me said, `I have a problem with you. I’ve heard that you love women.’ As if loving women is a bad thing. I told him that I’m very happy that I’m a loving person and also that I love women. I think love is a very important thing.”
He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to a family of Holocaust survivors that lived an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. “At age six or seven, I knew that I wanted to be a rabbi,” he relates. “Because I really oved the world of the book, which I’d known since I began learning at age 3.” He went to a yeshiva high school in New York, then to Yeshiva University. He also took courses at Queens College and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy (“I majored in Sartre, Heidegger and Nietzsche”). At the same time, he also set up a network of Jewish clubs within the New York public school system, to draw in Jewish youth that had left the synagogue and Judaism behind.
After being ordained as a rabbi, he moved to Florida and served as the rabbi of South Palm Beach. Then, at age 29, he decided that it was time to make aliyah. “To me, the Divine call of our generation was to participate in the destiny of the Jewish people in our generation, and that’s hard to do from Florida,” he says.
What happens in Israel will either shape or answer an essential question: “Is Judaism a relevant and important instrument in the symphony of the spirit of the modern world? Or is it just another fundamentalist approach that does not grapple with this generation in a substantial way? Of course, I’d prefer for us to develop a Judaism that has relevance and contributes to life in our era.”
New look at kashrut
Gafni describes his main occupation as “clarifying the issue of the place and contribution of the Jewish instrument in the world symphony of the spirit.” To this end, he participates in discussions with a group of philosophers and “international sages,” as he calls them, who conduct a dialogue, by means of e-mail, on theological and philosophical subjects. One member of this group is philosopher Ken Wilbur, whom Gafni calls “the Aristotle of our time.” “We examine Judaism’s place and contribution, starting with the premise that there is no competition between religions,” he says. “It’s not the old idea of seeking to prove that Judaism is better than other religions. That outlook has to be uprooted.”
Another question he addresses is the purpose of Judaism. “The standard argument is a circular one – that Judaism must be preserved so that Jews will be preserved so that they will preserve Judaism. If the whole purpose of Judaism is merely the survival of people as Jews without any ethical or spiritual content, then Judaism is essentially a kind of `enlightened racism.’ In my opinion, the answer to the question of what is the purpose of Judaism has to come from questions about the essence of Judaism. The question that all the big rabbis are concerned with now – whether the tuna is a kosher fish or not – is not, in my view, an essential Jewish question. An essential Jewish question is a question that shapes life.”
His transition from Orthodox to post-Orthodox began even before he received his rabbinical ordination. “We were studying `The Letter of Rav Shrira Gaon,’ and in it he says that everything that happens in the world is for the sake of the Jewish people. I asked the rabbi a simple question: When a couple in China, on a beautiful moonlit night, feels a great physical attraction to each other and makes love – are they also making love for the sake of the Jewish people? The rabbi said, `Indirectly, yes.’ That’s when I realized that there was something twisted in this Jewish outlook that is incapable of seeing anything that happens in the world as distinct from it, but instead sees everything as somehow enslaved to the needs of Judaism. To me, that means that as a Jew you cannot see the Other, and I don’t accept that.”
Gafni sees the world as rich and varied and ever-changing. “The classic Jewish outlook tries to freeze everything in order to fit the changes to its needs, instead of fitting itself to the needs of the world,” he says. “I thought that it was necessary to seek a new Jewish outlook that would try to deal with our place in this world and in this generation. For example, the matter of kashrut. I don’t give myself any breaks in terms of kashrut, but I have a different understanding of the meaning of kashrut than the standard one.”
In speaking of kashrut, Gafni includes ecological and humanistic considerations with the halakhic [Jewish legal] system: “Meat is considered kosher if it comes from a kosher animal that has been slaughtered according to Jewish law. Everyone knows this, and that suffices for them. But I say, let’s ask another question: A goose that is slaughtered in accordance with Jewish law is kosher according to the classical outlook, but is the fact that it was cruelly fattened in such a way that its entire internal system was wrecked of no significance? How can that not detract from its kashrut? Or if the vegetable that we eat was previously sprayed with a substance that harms the soil and poisons the groundwater, can it be kosher?”
And he adds another, social consideration: “What I mean to say is that there needs to be kashrut not only in the accepted halakhic sense, but also `eco-kashrut.’ Judaism must also be expressed in concern for the world and for life, for ecology in other words. And another question: If someone eats food that was grown by people employed in slave conditions at starvation wages, how can it be kosher?”
You’re adding a moral dimension to kashrut.
“Yes, and not just to the kashrut of food. I’m saying that we have to find the kashrut in every aspect of human life. For example, I need to check into my mutual fund and make sure that I’m not investing in the world of globalization that is impoverishing people and companies.”
What else do you consider an essential Jewish question?
“For example, how do I see my world: Do I divide the world into the enlightened and the primitive, the secular and the religious, the Jews and the goyim, or is my world more complex than that – one in which no one possesses the absolute truth, in which each one contributes something to the symphony of the spirit and in which everyone must ask himself questions. In my view, the most essential part of the spiritual quest has to be doubt – to begin every effort to understand something not from the classical Jewish starting point that says either I or my rabbi has the right answers to all the questions, but to cast doubt on all the answers, and from this point to begin asking questions.”
Male and female He created them
Another essential question on Gafni’s mind is where the feminine voice has disappeared to in Judaism. This question, he says, is especially urgent in this generation, in which the feminine voice has great importance. “The Orthodox public is so worried about `kol be’isha erva’ (the provocativeness of a woman’s voice) that it also doesn’t listen to the Bat-Kol (the Heavenly Voice) and erases the Goddess.”
What exactly is the connection between God and the Goddess?
“First of all, these are two different elements of one Divine essence. The masculine God creates the world outside of himself and the feminine Goddess creates the world within herself. The masculine God is rational, judgmental, ethical. The Goddess is more giving, more encompassing, more accepting. I don’t advocate annulling the masculine God, but there has to be a holy mating. Meaning, a combination of the male and the female – in experience, in prayer, in equality. And all this isn’t my own personal invention, it comes from the sources of Jewish thought, from the Talmud and the kabbala and Jewish mysticism.”
What do you have against neo-liberalism?
“That’s another essential question. We live in a world today in which no one truly lives solely in his own place – economically, ecologically or culturally. But what happens is that in the New Age world, which is all superficiality, and in the academic world, which is completely disconnected from life, and also in the world of intellectualism, there is no real discussion of globalization and its meaning for the life of the spirit, government and economics. This discussion has to take place, and that’s what we’re trying to do in Bayit Chadash.”
Is Bayit Chadash a group of `sages’ conducting a discussion, or it is a type of Jewish community?
“Both. Bayit Chadash is comprised of several parts. First of all, it’s a spiritual-cultural stream that currently has about 2,500 adherents and aspires to be a new stream in Judaism. There’s the aspect of the community, which is built on the model of the Buddhist community, or the way the Hasidic community was built once upon a time. The original Hasidic community wasn’t in the community center: A person would go to his rabbi a few times a year or a month, or every Shabbat. In our community, there are people who come a few times a year for Shabbat and there are those who come for the festivals and those who come every week or every few days and study in our Beit Midrash or take a class.
“In the inner circle of the community, there is our ordination program and our leadership program. I decided that we have to ordain people for the rabbinate and we currently have 17 men and women in our program. In our leadership program, we try to train people for social leadership. Outside of this inner circle, there is the public, cultural circle, which is composed of our activities in the media.”
What is pleasure?
People who have been to Gafni’s center in Poriya and to the new center in Jaffa describe Shabbat there as an especially pleasurable experience. “I had seen Rabbi Gafni on television and read his articles in Hayim Aherim, and I was intrigued,” says Ziv Barnea, a student in the rabbinical ordination program. “I come from a Marxist, very non-religious background. I went to the Bayit Chadash center in Poriya and discovered that I’d come to a warm and accepting and interesting place. Gafni greeted me and hugged me and also said it was an honor for him to meet me. He’s a very warm and loving and loved man, and on the other hand, has no pretensions at all of being a guru.
“One hundred and sixty people came that Shabbat. I kept coming for weekend retreats and there was usually a big crowd. I take my children and my wife there, too. One Shabbat, my wife was called up to the Torah and this had tremendous meaning for me, because the value of equality is something that has very great meaning in my life: equality between men and women, between Jews and Muslims, between straights and gays. Gafni applies this in his life, too. His wife, Chaya, is his equal partner in leading the community. She gives classes and workshops.”
Bayit Chadash is registered as a nonprofit organization and also has a center in New York. Gafni is the director-general of the NPO and when he is abroad, Rabbi Avraham Leader, who also grew up in America, substitutes for him at Bayit Chadash.
The organization pays a salary to several teachers and a director. Money to fund the centers comes from fees paid for lessons and – primarily – from contributions raised by Friends of Bayit Chadash, which operates in Israel and the United States.
“I don’t make my money from religion,” says Gafni. “Most of what I earn comes from lectures abroad and from my books.” He lectures, among other places, at the Harvard University business school and teaches several times a year at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. “And even though they’re Reform there, they accept me as an Orthodox rabbi,” he says.
“Judaism needs to be liberated from all the religious establishments. The establishments are a desecration of God’s name. If buses have to travel on Shabbat for the non-Orthodox majority, then there should be buses. And if the needs of this majority require civil marriages, then there should be civil marriages. And if gays and lesbians want to live together in love, then there should be marriages between them. Only if we throw off all the shackles of the religious establishment will Judaism be able to freely contend in the ideological market without cloaking itself in a mantle of establishment-based superiority. Tommy Lapid is always saying `no.’ I agree with most of his `nos.’ The problem is: What does he say `yes’ to?”
And what do you say?
“I say: The security of the State of Israel depends on our ability to recount a narrative that the country’s non-Orthodox majority will feel a part of. If there is no such narrative, then you can make one kind of fence or another, set borders here or there, and it won’t work. Because what will be inside the borders? This, by the way, is a very Zionist and not a right-wing thesis. Now, in order to search for this narrative, you need seriousness first of all. New Age populism and kabbala centers won’t help. The insularity of the yeshiva world and the alienation of the academic world won’t help either. And another thing, we have to create the kind of philosophy in which a person feels that he is developing and growing in his inner spiritual and ethical world, that he is on an inner journey.
“The kabbalists say that the primary ideal in life is pleasure. But what is pleasure? Pleasure is to develop. Today, the Orthodox Jewish world has become a kind of gym or training program where a person marks off pluses and minuses on a card and calculates how many pluses he needs to check off in order to get to heaven. I’ve done such and such mitzvot – okay, I’ve completed my quota. It’s a rigid approach that doesn’t contribute a lot to one’s inner life, and we need to return to the inner view that says that Judaism is a journey that can be expressed in many areas outside of religion: culture, science, you name it.”
You’re opposed to the rabbinical establishment and yet you ordain rabbis yourself?
“Yes, but a different type of rabbi. They won’t be rabbis whose job is to give halakhic answers. In Orthodox Judaism, the rabbi serves as a kind of alter-ego whose role is to underscore the imperfection of anyone who isn’t the rabbi. I say that anyone looking for this kind of rabbi should not come to me. I’ve made and am making a lot of mistakes in life. A rabbi has to be a person who genuinely loves people, who loves the Torah and is a person who has courage and is not just another kind of political person. He has to be outside the establishment and outside the political system and must be capable of admitting mistakes.
“I tell my people that I fall down and pick myself up every day. I’m no better than anyone else. But if you want to go on a spiritual journey together with me, then let’s do it. The whole philosophy of Bayit Chadash is that the rabbi is not a guru, the rabbi is essentially the community as a whole. Our philosophy is a kind of new Hasidism. We’re the successors of the Ba’al Shem Tov in this sense. Naturally, I’m aware that this approach is threatening to all the traditional approaches.”
Gafni may not want to be a guru, but he has not shown any special reluctance to establish a Hasidic-style court. A picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe – “when he was still young and modest” – in other words, before he was crowned as the Messiah by his admirers – adorns the wall of his study. The approach of Bayit Chadash could reopen the war between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, if it comes to be perceived as a real threat to Orthodox Judaism. The Hasidim of the Ba’al Shem Tov were accused by the Mitnagdim of engaging in a form of paganism, and the emphasis that Gafni places on the existence of the Goddess and her importance certainly could invite such accusations.
It’s not that hard to see the study methods at Bayit Chadash as a kind of almost idolatrous cult. Gafni himself described this in an article he wrote for Hayim Aherim: “In the Bayit Chadash spiritual community, located at Poriya overlooking Lake Kinneret, we are committed, in the spirit of Rav Kook’s teachings, to restoring the spark of holy paganism. We return to the pagan when we reconnect to Mother Earth … We restore the pagan in meditation, in ecstatic rituals and in passionate love of the Shekhina in her many manifestations. According to the kabbalist Cordovero, we yearn for the consciousness of this Goddess, when we speak of the dream of rebuilding the Temple.”n
Gafni: “I’m not talking about Judaism-lite, like the Reform or the settlers. I’m talking about whole Judaism that has both Ethos and Eros.”
Integral Naked
An Introduction to Integral Kabbalah: Study, Prayer, and Meditation.
Rabbi Marc Gafni and Ken Wilber
Kabbalah—the mystical branch of Judaism—is concerned with the ultimate knowledge of God. In this series of clips from a gathering in Boulder, Rabbi Marc Gafni and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—the world’s foremost proponents of Integral Kabbalah—discuss with Ken three of the main practices within their tradition that constitute the means of this knowledge: Study, Prayer, and Meditation.
In this introductory clip, Ken sets the context by noting that in the world’s great spiritual traditions, the process of God-realization is often divided into three stages: ethics, meditation, and nondual awareness. The second stage, meditation, can be understood to have a variety of forms, one of which is study. According to Gafni and Zalman, “study” is not merely cognitive book-learning, but ecstatic surrender to the Divine via union with a sacred text.
Rabbi Marc (Mordechai) Gafni has emerged as an exciting new voice in Israeli and international religious life and spirituality.
In addition to teaching graduate seminars on mysticism at Oxford University in England, R’Gafni is the founder and head of Bayit Chadash. Overlooking Israel’s Sea of Galilee, Bayit Chadash is an international spiritual community retreat center committed to Jewish renaissance.
Additionally, Gafni is the host and creator of a highly acclaimed national Israeli television program on ethics and spirituality. The show, with hundreds of thousands of viewers, has become an important weaver of the Israeli spirit.
Besides contributing to a number of American journals, R’Gafni is a contributing editor to Chayim Acherim, Israel’s leading spirituality magazine.
An acknowledged master of the ancient texts as well as the texts of the heart, Gafni has published three works of Jewish thought in Hebrew.
Gafni’s work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher and spiritual master: wise, compassionate, accessible, and universal.
Along with Gafni’s two English-written books listed below, a two-volume work with extensive primary source footnotes, entitled The Erotic and the Holy, is soon to be published.
Gafni’s written work in English includes:
Soul Prints
Gafni’s fourth book, written for a broader English-speaking public, was the subject of a National PBS Special. The book hit the bestseller list, has been translated into numerous languages, and was chosen for the prestigious Napra Nautilus Award for the Best Spirituality Book of 2001. It will be re-released shortly, with an extensive section of primary source footnotes drawn from the Kabbalistic tradition.
The Mystery of Love
Gafni’s latest—highly acclaimed.
Rabbi Marc has appeared on Integral Naked:
A Prayer for Malka · 4/12/2004
Your Own Letter in the Torah · 4/5/2004
A Second Person Relationship to God · 3/29/2004
A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self. Part 2. · 3/29/2004
The Ultimate Erotic Act · 2/16/2004
A Political Pilgrimage to Your Highest Self. Part 1. · 12/22/2003
When the Rabbi Met Lilith
by Rabbi Marc Gafni
Monday July 11, 9:00 am ET
TEL AVIV, Israel, July 11 /PRNewswire/ — Last month, a riveting and controversial text was published by Modan Publishing House in Israel. Together, Rabbi Mordechai (Marc) Gafni and Rabbi Ohad Ezrachi co-authored the book, Who is afraid of Lilith? Rereading the Kabbalah of the Feminine Shadow.
It was met with shock by many readers, as it takes a radical path to understand the fullness of Lilith. Lilith is the mythological figure of the Jewish tradition embodying the fears of men towards the perception of a sexually liberated temptress. Most books focus solely on Lilith’s shadow aspects. This book, though, includes the process of Lilith’s redemption through a re-examination of Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalistic sources. The authors recognize not only the problematic aspects of Lilith, but are also attuned to her essential spiritual quality.
The book begins with a scholarly examination of the Lilith character and myth, then turns to other female figures of the Hebrew Bible which represent her many aspects, each one through her own unique story.
Society is used to hearing feminist literature only through the female voice. This book offers the much-needed perspective of the male feminist viewpoint. Hearing the male feminist voice, especially that of a rabbi, is a direct rectification of the past when male rabbinic voices originally created the demonization of Lilith. The book has been published in Hebrew, and the English translation of this modern mystical text should be released soon.
For more details please visit www.marcgafni.com
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, Director of Bayit Chadash, has emerged as an exciting voice in Israeli and international religious life and spirituality. Rabbi Gafni’s work has deservedly earned him the reputation as a modern philosopher and spiritual teacher: wise, compassionate, inspired, and universal.
Ohad Ezrahi, the Rabbi and the founder of Hamakom spiritual community.
Ohad’s path goes through nature, Zen, years of learning Torah and Kabala in the ultra-orthodox Hassidic communities in Jerusalem, teaching Kabala in the Yeshiva world, “graduating” from orthodoxy and being one of the leading figures in the renaissance of Jewish liberal spirituality in Israel.
Bayit Chadash is a spiritual community in Israel, focused on reclaiming inner Eros and the wonder of Hebrew wisdom as an essential and vital guiding source in the service of human spiritual evolution and physical survival. For further details on Bayit Chadash activities in Israel or abroad, please email zvi@bayitchadash.org or call us at +972-3-683-972. Visit us online at www.bayitchadash.org
Wisdom Chair – Jewish Studies at Stephen S. Wise Temple (Los Angeles, CA)
http://www.sswt.org/@wise/0904/@wise0904.pdf
The Chair will be held by Rabbi Mordechai (Marc) Gafni who over the last tow years has become a beloved part of our Stephen S. Wise Temple community.
Rabbi Gafni is the Dean of the Bayit Chadash Community and Think Tank in Israel, an Oxford Scholar, and important new voice in spirit in the international community, as well as the author of a growinglibrary of both new Jewish Thought and best selling volumes on Modern Jewish Spirituality.
Rabbi Gafni will be in residence at Stephen S. Wise Temple for three months between Septemeber 2004 and July 2005.
Visit One: September 11 -22, 2004
The Dance of Laughter and Tears; Towards a Vision of New Jewish Spirituality
Visit Two: October 31 – November 12, 2004
The Mystery of Love
Visit Three: February 23 – March 8, 2004
The Mystery of Love – The Next Level
Visit Four: May 1 – June 14, 2005
The Psychology of Judaism Through the Prism of the Book of Genesis
Herscher: Gafni Still Welcome in L.A.
by Julie Gruenbaum Fax, Religion Editor
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles – October 1, 2004
(see sidebar to right of reprinted Jewish Week article)
Rabbi Eli Herscher has an emphatic answer to Gary Rosenblatt’s question about when persistent “rumors and allegations” add up to a story: They don’t.
Herscher, senior rabbi at Stephen S. Wise Temple, says The New York Jewish Week and The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles have stepped from responsible journalism to outright lashon hara, or gossip, by printing and reprinting an article that looks into alleged sexual abuse by Rabbi Mordechai Gafni.
Gafni has become an important part of the Reform congregation’s educational program as a frequent scholar-in-residence, and Herscher has no plans to break off a burgeoning relationship based on allegations he says are unfounded and malicious.
“`Rumors and allegations’ are not going to be the basis for bringing down one of the great Jewish teachers of this generation,” Herscher said.
But Herscher may have to watch his back legally.
“If the congregation brings him out now with full knowledge of these allegations, and if something were to happen now, they may have culpability,” said Anthony DeMarco of the Beverly Hills law firm Kiesel, Boucher and Larson, which is handling 300 abuse cases for victims in the Catholic church and serves as liaison counsel for all such cases in Southern California.
But Herscher hasn’t found any substance to the rumors he said he personally checked out after Gafni himself brought the issue up soon after they met.
The article, Herscher points out, brings up incidents alleged to have occurred more than 25 years ago, when Gafni was 19, and even those are based on allegations that have never been proven and that Gafni denies.
The fact that the alleged cases are 25 years old does not mean they shouldn’t be acted upon, Demarco said.
“What we find in childhood sexual abuse is there is a latency period for when people come forward, and that is why years will go by until these kids finally speak out,” Demarco said. Often adults speak out when their own children reach the age they were when they were abused.
Rosenblatt, once nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is one of the most respected editors in Jewish journalism. He printed the story, based on more than 50 interviews over several years, after months of deliberation.
Herscher takes The Jewish Week to task for implying that Gafni has admitted to wrongdoing or done teshuvah, or repentence, for specific incidents.
For instance, Rosenblatt says that Gafni has done teshuvah by agreeing not to work with children, to do private counseling or to be alone with a woman.
But Herscher said he discussed those self-imposed ground rules with Gafni, and it was clear to him that Gafni was not trying to avoid temptation, but only trying to preclude even the appearance of wrongdoing, given the rumors that have haunted him for two decades.
“There are people who could be learning with him and being counseled by him who don’t have that opportunity,” Herscher said.
Herscher has invited Gafni to teach frequently over the last two years at Stephen S. Wise. This past Rosh Hashanah, 1,000 people came to hear him even on the second day — traditionally a low-attendance day at Reform congregations — and hundreds more came to evening lectures during the week.
Gafni’s appearance on Rosh Hashanah kicked off his tenure holding the newly created wisdom chair of Jewish studies at Stephen S. Wise, where he will be returning to teach this year for two weeks in November, two weeks in March and six weeks in May and June.
“Rabbi Gafni has inspired people who might have never been engaged in serious Jewish learning were it not for him,” Herscher said. “I’ve seen him move them, challenge them, uplift them and have been amazed at his greatness as a teacher.”
None of that, Herscher said, would matter if Gafni were, in fact, an abusive man.
“There would be one reason and one reason only to publish such an article, and that would be if factual evidence, and not allegation and innuendo, determined that Rabbi Gafni was in some way a danger,” he said.
Attorney Demarco said he has seen this response before — that priests confronted with allegations about their colleagues are often unwilling to believe that fellow men of God could have committed such crimes.
Gafni’s support is coming from a list of prominent rabbis, including ethicist Joseph Telushkin and Modern Orthodox scholar Saul Berman.
Among his supporters in Israel is Rabbi Daniel Landes, director of the Pardes Institute, who led the upstairs minyan at Beth Jacob in Beverly Hills and Congregation B’nai David-Judea in Pico-Robertson.
Although Landes has never worked professionally with Gafni, the two have been acquainted since Landes moved to Israel nine years ago. Landes officiated when Gafni and his third wife married a few years ago.
When Landes first befriended Gafni, people approached him to let him know Gafni was the subject of persistent rumors. Landes chose not to believe hearsay and tracked the stories back down the grapevine until he got to the sources. He spoke to three women in Israel.
“Their response was, `Why are people telling such stories? They’re just not true,’” Landes said in a phone interview from Jerusalem. He did not investigate any of the cases alleged to have happened in the United States 25 years ago.
Herscher thinks the public’s eagerness to unearth and believe such stories goes back to years’ worth of people not believing victims of abuse.
“What has happened now, I fear, is that the pendulum has swung the other way, so that when there is an accusation there is an assumption that the accused is in fact guilty,” Herscher said.
Herscher said that now it is even more important to continue to support Gafni and bring him to Los Angeles to teach.
“Rabbi Gafni coming to teach here makes a deeply important Jewish statement — that if rumors and allegations and innuendo are allowed to destroy someone who only wants to teach, Jewishly, that is tragic.”
Rabbi Marc Gafni & Andrew Cohen
Enlightenment, Evolution, and the Future of Judaism
January 1, 2005
http://www.wie.org/unbound/media.asp?ifr=ra&id=50
Enlightenment, Evolution, and the Future of Judaism Rabbi Marc Gafni is not your average Rabbi. He’s an unorthodox Orthodox Rabbi, a passionate Kabbalist, a popular Israeli television host, and the founder of Bayit Chadash, an international spiritual community and retreat center committed to Jewish renaissance. Yet no matter how far from the established order he may travel, Gafni never loses sight of those most basic Judaic tenets: pray to God and live a moral, ethical, and generous life, because this life is the one that matters most!
In this videotaped conversation between two spiritual masters, Andrew’s original conception of an evolutionary enlightenment engages with Rabbi Gafni’s soul-level understanding of Judaism’s timeless mystical teachings. Together, these two free-thinkers propel an enduring ancient tradition into the exhilarating and uncharted terrain of the future.
Why am I not a Buddhist?
By Gil Kopatch
Haaretz – June 2, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/583841.html
Both Moses and Buddha grew up without a mother’s love and apparently longed for it all their lives. Buddha was orphaned at an early age; the infant Moses got a one-way ticket for a Nile cruise. Both of them grew up in palaces as pampered princes. Both of them ventured out of the royal hothouse and were astounded to encounter the suffering of their fellows. Both of them turned to meditation for many years – Buddha under a tree, Moses in the wilderness of Midian.
So much for the similarities between these two spiritual giants. But what are the differences? And if there are no differences, why am I not a Buddhist?
I decide to pay a two-week visit to India. To find myself with alacrity. And to return as enlightened – and as delighted – as possible.
The king-god
On the day after Pesach, at 6 A.M., I pick up Rabbi Mordechai Marc Gafni from his beit midrash (house of study) in Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood. The rabbi is impossible to categorize. He is certainly not Reform. He is committed to Jewish law, but could not be considered classically Orthodox. He’s spontaneous, ecstatic, profound, filled with joy – and embraces and loves everyone he meets. Gafni is among the most important of the new generation of religious leaders in Israel today, a profound teacher and thinker, a serious scholar and an original philosopher who addresses and provokes both mind and heart. He is much more of an Eastern-style spiritual master, a kind of Jewish Bodhisattva, than an establishment rabbi. Together with fellow scholar Avraham Leader and businessman Jacob Nir David, he founded Bayit Chadash (literally, New Home), a new national spiritual movement, which includes a research center and rabbinic certification program, and appeals to people who are dissatisfied with the world of the religious establishment. Many of his students are former India backpackers, who are now yuppies and part of the mainstream of contemporary Israeli society. The rabbi is also my good friend and partner on a Channel 2 program about the weekly Torah reading, in which he usually explains and I usually nod.
A few weeks earlier, he told me about a dialogue he had intended to hold with a friend he met at a meeting of clerics in Rome and asked if I wanted to be the moderator. His friend’s name? Tenzin Gyatso, better known as the Dalai Lama – the great ocean of compassion, guardian of the white lotus, who looks down with mercy.
According to the tradition, the 14th Dalai Lama, who will turn 70 on July 6, is the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama and, in fact, of all those who preceded him. He is a Bodhisattva – a soul who, because of his love and compassion, does not seek liberation from the cycle of human suffering, but remains within it in order to help others end their suffering. The Dalai Lama is the political as well as the religious leader of the Tibetan nation, and for his struggle to hold a peaceful dialogue with China, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He is admired around the world and is sought out by Hollywood’s top stars. For his believers, who call him “Kundun,” he is more than the pope for Catholics: He is the king-god. He himself has said that he is “simply a human being and, incidentally, a Tibetan who chooses to be a Buddhist monk.”
On the flight to Jordan, from where we will proceed to Delhi, are three Israeli Buddhists who are going on a pilgrimage to Dharamsala, the city in northern India where the Dalai Lama’s temple is located. Rabbi Gafni immediately invites them to a kabbalat Shabbat (the ceremony welcoming the Sabbath) that he is planning to hold there. They recoil. It sounds too Jewish. They don’t need it. They are already very spiritual without that; they have already done Vipassana and they have incense and everything.
“Rabbi, why the Dalai Lama? Why now?” I ask him.
“Today Tibetan Buddhism is flowering in the Western world,” he replies, “and therefore a Jerusalem-Tibet conversation is the spiritual dialogue of the generation. Just as in the past there was the Greece-Jerusalem conversation through Maimonides, who dialogued with Aristotle in his writings.”
And why Buddhism?
Gafni: “Tibetan Buddhism is, in certain dimensions, very close to some forms of kabbala [Jewish mysticism]. Both kabbala and Buddhism share some common language that speaks to the heart of the modern seeker.”
But isn’t it true that there is no god in Buddhism?
“It is true that the term `God’ in Buddhism is different from our understanding according to biblical Judaism. It is not the God of the Bible who speaks in a thunderous voice and reprimands everyone. They do not have an external God who is above nature. He is not external to creation, but is interiorized. From this point of view, Buddhism is close to Hasidism – in terms of the internal work, the work you do on yourself, from which emerges your relationship to the world around you.”
It’s clear to you, is it not, that all the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] rabbis will assail you for meeting with idol worshipers?
“Anyone who says that simply does not understand Buddhism; he is speaking from ignorance. The Buddha was a human being, he is not God, and therefore it is clear that his statue is also not God, but only a symbol. So there is no idol worship here.”
Travel as thriller
Our hotel is situated in a good neighborhood of New Delhi, meaning that people do not live on the street, but in grimy, neglected apartments. Connaught Place, one of the most magnificent of the city’s squares, looks like Kikar Hamedina in Tel Aviv and more especially like “Bread Square,” the former protest site of the poor and homeless there. My fastidiousness surges. My only nourishment is nuts and hermetically sealed water.
At night we tour Old Delhi. It’s not crowded here at night, only 7.3 Indians per square meter. All of whom are wandering the street in groups. No one suffers from loneliness here. In the West people feel alone in villas; here they sleep two-three to a porter’s wagon and don’t look especially sad. It’s hard to find an Indian depressive who is hooked on Prozac or its ilk. They don’t have the leisure for that.
Carpets of people are sleeping on the traffic islands. The drivers of the three-wheeled cabs sleep in their vehicles. It’s astonishing, the balance that is needed to sleep on the seat of a bicycle.
The next day we set out in the most expensive taxi we could find; the important thing is just to get out of here. Traveling on the roads of India is like being in a thriller. You watch the developments on the road with disbelief, waiting for the catharsis that will purge you of your fear. It’s a terrific movie. Anything can happen. Driving against the traffic, veering out of the way a split second before a bicycle holding an entire family splatters all over you.
To the drivers’ credit, they obviously feel their car. They probably live in it. The car is part of their body and they behave on the highway as on the street, in a state of patient, moderate, smiling chaos. Not that there are no accidents. Here and there we see overturned buses along the road. But they, too, are accepted with equanimity.
Many of the vehicles sport a sign saying “Honk, please.” In driving there is nothing like the sense of hearing. In Israel every honk can send the honkee out of his car and spark a blood-drenched incident. Here it’s a happy thing – people merrily honk at one another. You could mistakenly think that driving here is an ear-splitting experience until you realize that honking is like saying “hello.”
At a “workers’” restaurant by the roadside we are careful not to enter the stinking pit called a “lavatory.” A large indifferent bull strides in. Guess who’s coming to dinner. They feed it fresh chapati and in response it oozes a lot of spittle and strolls off, languidly escorted by an entourage of 200 flies.
Our driver Pablo, an Indian hunk who looks like singer Eyal Golan, travels this road every day for 13 straight hours. His favorite god, he says, is Ganesh, the mischievous Hindu god with the head of an elephant. Ganesh is the most popular god in India. He is responsible for pranks and intrigues.
We crossed the rich state of Punjab and the poor state of Uttar Pradesh and we arrive in the north, in the state of Hiamachal Pradesh, the paradise of India. The weather is far more pleasant. Which is to say, the air moves. In Delhi it’s different: There the mosquitoes hold the air between their teeth.
We start to climb the Himalayas. Pablo is very tired – he hasn’t slept in three days. Rabbi Gafni encourages him with sacred songs and some tunes by Simon and Garfunkel, too. Pablo has never heard of them but he wakes up, no doubt also aided by the light massage the rabbi applies to his shoulders.
The road bends sharply and the turns begin. Dharamsala is at an altitude of 2,000 meters. High, but still only considered to be at the foothills of the Himalayas. The turns are terribly sharp. Good thing it’s been dark for some time. That way we don’t see the potholes or the abyss alongside the road.
At 3 A.M. we reach upper Dharamsala. After the Dalai Lama fled from the Chinese and made his way stealthily across the Himalayas on the back of a yak, the Indian government granted him political asylum and this village, Macleod Ganj, adjacent to Dharamsala. Here, like our Yohanan Ben Zakkai, he reinvigorated the Tibetan people and its culture after the terrible destruction.
The Chinese killed more than one million Tibetans and destroyed some 6,000 monasteries. Holocaust is something else we have in common with them.
Your original face
Already during the tour of Macleod Ganj in the morning I was ripped off by shoe-shining Rajasthani kids. The rabbi hinted that I should upgrade my appearance before going to see the Bodhisattva of compassion. So I abandoned my shoes to the kids. They asked for 350 rupees, which is about NIS 35. I paid them a month’s salary without haggling and got a serious scolding from the owner of a Tibetan store, who said I was spoiling the young generation. Fortunately it’s Rajasthani youth, not Tibetan, so there isn’t much to spoil.
There is tension between the different communities in the village. The Tibetans are angry at the Indians and call them slothful, while the Indians are vexed by the industrious Tibetans. They arrived only 50 years ago and already have developed the village and made it one of the major tourist centers of India. It’s a small village, with a population of 6,000, of whom about 1,000 are Israelis.
There are three lanes in the village and they all lead upward. The homes snake their way up the side of a green hill and on the rooftops are cafes with a view that makes your heart go pitter-pat. In front of the central house of worship are cylinders on which are drawn colorful verses of prayer. When you turn them they create a kind of mantra, which is delivered to the ears of the universe.
There are fine restaurants in Macleod Ganj. Italian, Japanese, Korean and of course Tibetan and Israeli. True, the lanes are narrow and the cows crap, but it is clean here, the air is clear and the water fresh, direct from the Himalayas. It rains twice a day and the drops are heavy.
The Israelis are concentrated in the neighboring villages of Dharamkot and Bhagsu, which are less crowded. The view is a lot better there, too, but the monkeys are more impertinent. Surprisingly, most of the Israelis here have a busy schedule. A meditation course in the morning, followed immediately by a massage lesson, then cooking and drumming. They don’t have time for shanti (total tranquillity) here – that they reserve for Israel.
The next day it was pretty clear that the hawks were looking for food. Because we are situated on the edge of an abyss, they fly pretty much at eye level, just meters from me. Today we have a meeting with Tenzin Geyche Tethong, the secretary of the Tibetan government, about the rules of protocol and the content of the meeting with the Dalai Lama.
Rabbi Gafni wears his special Hasidic garb. The Tibetan government has a special minister in charge of robes and they attribute great significance to this. We don’t want to foment a diplomatic scandal because of mistaken fashion considerations.
In the government compound soldiers are playing badminton. There is a great splash of flowers here and their aroma accompanies us to the bureau. The secretary, formal but smiling, waxes enthusiastic over the rabbi’s Hasidic robe. “The Dalai Lama is in the middle of writing a book,” he says, “but he loves Rabbi Gafni and has specially made time for him. He has an interest in being in contact with the Israeli community. You are our neighbors here and we should get to know you.”
He asks about the Israelis, why there are so many of them here. Rabbi Gafni replies that they feel a deep connection to the spirit of the place, perhaps because both the Tibetans and the Jews have suffered oppression and sought to maintain their identity in difficult conditions of exile. I ask why the Tibetans are always laughing. His eyes lighting up, he replies: “The original face of people, beneath all the masks, is a smiling face.”
Amen.
The encounter
The Tsuglagkhang compound, the Dalai Lama’s official residence, is a few minutes’ walk from the center of the village. The morning of the meeting, a Friday, finds the rabbi in good spirits. He takes bills out of his pocket and distributes them to the lepers of the neighborhood. They smile, happy with their lot.
In the Namgyal temple, Tibetan monks are conducting a lively argument. They clap their hands vigorously to emphasize a solid point and snort mockingly to disparage their adversary’s argument. Just like the hair-splitting debates that took place in the plaza of our Temple.
The conference room contains luxurious low sofas and silkscreen prints on the wall. Even though this is supposed to be an intimate encounter, a few Israelis who were born again in Indian ashrams have managed to infiltrate the gathering. They are on the verge of a mild orgasm at the meeting with their God.
The Dalai Lama enters. He has nice eyes, his presence is pleasant, that is clear. He and Rabbi Gafni embrace, bow to each other and place cheek by cheek, showing more affection than what is customary. Both the rabbi and the Dalai Lama laugh heartily; indeed, they seem to share a great love for laughter.
After the greetings the rabbi reminds the Dalai Lama that he gave His Holiness his skullcap in Rome. “I hope you still have it,” he says. The Dalai Lama nods in affirmation. “I hope that one day it will be useful to me when I visit Jerusalem or Jewish institutions,” he says in English, and laughs.
Following are some excerpts from the conversation.
“I represent not only Gafni, but the Jewish tradition,” the rabbi said, “and I want to thank you for receiving us in your home. The subject we want to talk to you about is how the world of the spirit can have a practical influence and change the very real world of politics and economics.”
Dalai Lama: “That is a good subject. It is very important.”
Gafni, with a smile: “That is why I brought Gil with me – he’s the Richard Gere of Israel [Gere is active in the movement to free Tibet], because he gets better ratings than I do.”
“Your Holiness,” I said, “I have a few questions that are bothering me. My first question is what love is, actually. And how do we teach people to love in a practical way?”
Dalai Lama: “I cannot say what the exact meaning of love is. But when I use that word, it means that something is very precious to me. I feel not only closeness, but also caring and respect. For example, I love my watch but there are no relations of closeness between us, we do not share the same experiences. Love is for people who have the same experience as mine – feelings, pain, pleasure. That is why we should respect others, because they are part of myself.
“We learn our first experience of love from our mother,” he continued. “The infant wants to be close to its mother. Sometimes, unfortunately, there are unwanted children, but in general the mother sees the baby as part of her body. That is the height of closeness. This feeling is essential in reality for survival. This feeling becomes an important part of our life and it continues until our death. All the spiritual concepts speak about this being the most important feeling.”
Gafni: “I want to offer from the kabbala a comment on the words of wisdom of His Holiness.”
Dalai Lama: “So I can learn, very good!”
Gafni: “To learn from the tradition of our forefathers. The kabbala says that love, at its core, is not an emotion, but a perception, a way of seeing the world. The emotion then wells up from the perception. Once we understand that, we can train a perception, and we can also train ourselves to be lovers. Love is to see with the eyes of God. To love someone is to see them in their highest, most beautiful place. To love someone is to perceive their infinite specialness, with that divinity. The model for love in this sense is the way the mother sees her child. Even if the baby grows up and falls, the mother will always hold that at his core, he is beautiful and holy, and divine. This is why in Hebrew mysticism we call God `shaddai’ – it is the divine breast of the mother who nourishes us all. And because we are all part of God. We are all divine miniatures. So we all have the ability to be lovers, that is, to access our divine perception and see others with the eyes of God.”
The Dalai Lama was impressed: “Beautiful! The idea that love is a type of seeing, that it is possible to train it, is a good idea. It is hard to train a feeling, but sight is easier. We are all creatures of God. God is everlasting love. If I love God, I have to maintain a loving feeling toward all creatures, who are part of God. These feelings should be cultivated by logic, by meditation – there are methods for doing that. What is certain is that even people who do not have an interest in religion need a warm heart. A warm heart leads to inner quiet and to a tranquil and meaningful life. If the parents grow up in this atmosphere, they will educate their children accordingly. And that is the right way to change humanity.”
“If all the religions talk about love of mankind and compassion,” I asked, “how is it that so much hatred and wars are the fruit of religious education?”
The Dalai Lama laughed. “Religion has a big umbrella and under it you can do what you want,” he said. “The spiritual tradition represents good values for the long range. When people are in a desperate situation, their emotions become more negative. When anger is strong, the long-range considerations are forgotten. Therefore it is easier to believe in the values of the spirit when you have a comfortable life, but the wisdom is to do that during hardships.
“There are people who use religion for political or financial purposes and manipulate human belief. In Northern Ireland, for example. The naive people have stronger feelings and it is easier to work them up. That is why certain conflicts in history happened because of religion. But if you look closely you will see that the real considerations were different.
“The fundamentalist believes only in his religion and is afflicted with lack of knowledge and lack of esteem for the other traditions. He feels sincerely that he is serving God – and destroys and lays waste. The method to dissolve this is by means of talks between the traditions. Knowledge should be increased. Harmony should be created between the faiths. I was in Jerusalem twice, not only as a tourist but as a pilgrim, and I spoke with Jews and Muslims and Christians. Despite the different philosophy, they all carry the same idea. A message of love, compassion, forgiveness and self-meaning. That is why I feel more contact is needed. More dialogue. I have friends from all religions. If I am ever exiled from here, I will have somewhere to go.”
Gafni: “The most important idea I want to share with you is about why people who are deeply religious can behave in a terrible way. In what I call integral kabbala, and in modern integral thought, we say there are stages and states. States mean that which I achieve and lose – like an altered state or mystical state. A stage is a permanent achievement; I have developed to a particular stage of achievement and I do not lose it. In moral development, there are four major stages: egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric (feeling care and compassion for all people), and also the stage of being compassionate for all living beings and not only human beings.
“Now here is the deep idea. All states, mystical ones included, are interpreted through the prism of stages. If I am at one level – let’s say, egocentric – and I have a mystical experience, I might think I am Jesus. If I am at the ethnocentric stage, then I might think that only my people is holy … The secret is that all states are interpreted through the prism of stages, one’s moral stage of development. Therefore, even people who reach genuine mystical states can behave in morally reprehensible ways.”
The Dalai Lama listened carefully, nodding, seemingly excited to hear this new wisdom.
Gil: “Politicians and businessmen only want to be in control all the time, whereas one of the principles of the spirit is precisely to give up control. How is it possible to combine the two?”
Dalai Lama: “The success of the modern economy depends on other elements, such as clients. A good politician is usually voted into office in elections, so he depends on people. Therefore, they are not actually in control. Politics and the economy need a great many people. Religion, in the end, is the business of one person. Religion depends on the individual.
“If your belief is clean, if you have a healthy and true motivation, all your actions can be constructive, filled with compassion and beneficial to the world. It does not matter what your profession is – politician, scientist or teacher. If your motivation is to be self-centered, then every religion becomes dirty and destructive. All human activity depends on the individual who does it. Therefore, religion has an important role. To instill values in those who make the economy and the politics, to change the way of thinking toward compassion and love.
“Not long ago we had a state meeting with the government of India. And one of the country’s most important ministers was there, too. Humbly he said that he is a politician and therefore does not have enough spiritual knowledge. I said to him that a person who is a public figure needs religion more than someone who lives alone in a remote place. Someone like that does not cause much harm even if he goes crazy [laughs loudly]. But the leaders, if they are not mentally balanced, if their brain is complicated and sophisticated, but their heart is poor and wretched, that has serious implications” (laughs in satisfaction).
Sexuality and divinity
Gil: “Let’s talk about sexuality in Buddhism and kabbala.”
Gafni: “I want to offer from Jerusalem a scientific method of how religion can teach the individual change. Because I do not have the courage to speak in my name, I ask all the angels and sages to speak through me and they will do it better than I can by myself.”
The Dalai Lama listens attentively. Gafni concentrates silently for a few seconds and continues:
“In the Temple in Jerusalem, above the Holy Ark, were pictures of two angels. They were embracing in a kind of sexual tantric yoga posture. In the kabbala we call this `the secret of the Cherubim.’ The secret is that one of the ways to teach personal transformation and love is through using the principles of sexuality as a spiritual model. Why? Because sexuality illustrates all the principles of religion.
“For example, giving up control, which Gil asked about. In sex it is not good to be always in control. Sex works only if we are willing at times to give up control. So sexuality exemplifies a spiritual principle. There is also another element in kabbala, which is called `the secret of the kisses.’ Let’s say I go to the bank and ask the teller to record that I as though deposited money. He will look at me as though I am crazy. In this world, after all, either you take or you receive. But in sexuality, giving and receiving are collapsed into one. So the sexual models the holy, the holy way of living.”
The Dalai Lama was a bit surprised by what seemed to be a new approach, but listened carefully.
Gafni: “Another spiritual thing that is illustrated by the sexual: to do something for its own sake, not in order to gain some other advantage extraneous to itself. Sex according to the kabbala is meditation of the ordinary person. Because sexuality is for the thing itself. These are but examples of a core kabbalistic idea. The kabbala says that sexuality, which the whole world is afraid of, actually incorporates astounding spiritual principles that should be applied as the model for living in all the nonsexual areas of life.”
The Dalai Lama laughs appreciatively. He bursts with laughter. It takes him time to calm down. Sex is something that Tibetan monks of his level are not supposed to take an interest in.
Dalai Lama: “It’s complicated. Sex is mainly a matter of culture. That is its main role in nature. We cannot say that there is any religious meaning in it. Animals do it and we cannot say that they are religious.”
Gafni: “But animals have a soul, too. You see? I am a good Buddhist.”
Dalai Lama (laughing): “In the Indian tradition there may be something similar to what you are saying. But in Buddhism it is different. All the internal feelings and the sexual feelings are related to `internal air,’ and we have to control this internal air, the movement of this internal energy. We use the sexual organs to create movement, to make the energy flow, not for the purpose of culture, but to achieve a deeper experience of consciousness. And then the sexual energy melts away. Only trained people are capable of this.
“Good and proper sexual relations are a way to get close to one another,” he adds. “but they are also the source of a problem. You are happy for a few months and then the problems come up.”
“There seems to be a lot of energy in envy, in ego and in violence,” I ask, “and the energy to do well by others is far less powerful. Is it possible to learn how to channel the energy of evil toward the doing of good?”
Dalai Lama: “That is very clear. A negative feeling creates energy immediately. So negative feelings are stronger than positive ones. Through training, positive feelings can also give energy. Compassion, for example, by training one’s thinking, can give endless energy. But it is not easy. You need a sharp mind and a developed consciousness to make these distinctions.”
Gafni: “There is the story about the founder of Hasidism who was approached because an infant had fallen ill, and instead of going to 10 righteous men, he asked 10 thieves to pray for him. All the Jews were angry with him, and he said, `The gates of heaven are locked and only a thief knows how to pick the locks of heaven.’ Maybe that means that we need the highest level of consciousness to access the energy of the thief in us in order to storm heaven.”
The Dalai Lama laughs and stamps his feet. “God is nice,” he says, “and he may be especially nice to the sinners. That is very true.”
The rabbi takes out the fabric he bought in the market the day before, orange silk cloth such as the Tibetan monks use. He asked an Israeli woman named Idit to sew tzitzit (ritual fringes) in each corner and then he had a totally kosher tallit (prayer shawl). With much grace and decorum, he presents it to the Dalai Lama.
“Ho!” the Dalai Lama calls out, moved. “This is wonderful Jewish-Tibetan merger. How wonderful.” After the rabbi explains its kabbalistic meaning to a very attentive Dalai Lama, he wraps himself in it, chortling delightedly. Then he gives us white silk scarves, as is the custom when parting – and gets a skullcap. He and the rabbi embrace and their love for each other is felt by everyone. Everyone bows to the Dalai Lama; he bows in return and leaves.
I was caught in the garden. Suddenly the Dalai Lama emerged from behind me, wearing the skullcap and prayer shawl, on the way to his next meeting. “I am a Tibetan Jew! A Tibetan Jew!” Pleased as punch he was.
The differences
The rumor of the visit spread through the foothills of the Himalayas. Dozens of Israelis, young people in search of serenity, arrive for the kabbalat Shabbat at the Hotel OM (symbol of the presence of the universal in the individual). On the porch, which seemed to be suspended in mid-air between the tops of green pine trees, Rabbi Gafni – warmly greeted by many travelers who knew him from Israel – succeeds in creating a moving experience for them, in part thanks to India, which has milked the Zionism out of them. During “Shir Lama’alot” (Song of Degrees), they all lift their eyes to the snowcapped peaks, knowing whence their help shall come.
In our last conversation en route to the airport, I talk with the rabbi again about the differences. Buddha said: Elimination of suffering is all. Suffering is my identification with this world. And this world perishes. The more I am attached to this world, the more I suffer. It is better to sit under the tree, concentrate on one’s breathing, do stretching exercises and not identify too much.
Moses, in contrast, foments a political and cultural revolution that is called the Exodus from Egypt. He is a political activist. He operates in this world, influences history, repairs reality and not just one’s personal karma.
And there is another difference: What a beautiful land it turned out to be for Moses here. Only when you get back from India do you see it. The streets here are so clean. I feel like getting out of the car and licking the road. Allenby Street never looked so polished. The houses are so white. The dogs are so sated and the flies are so lonely. More power to a sense of perspective. More power to Moses. More power to the Israel Defense Forces.
Faith and Values on TV – Marc Gafni
STILL THINKING ABOUT
Rabbi Marc Gafni
Naomi’s New Morning – May 17, 2006
http://www.newmorningtv.tv/rabbimarcgafni.jsp
“We all have a box, and in that box is our stuff, it’s our things, and it’s not our degrees and it’s not our status, and it’s not our job and it’s not our piety, and it’s not our religiosity, and it’s none of our credits in the world.
It’s our fears, our hopes, our dreams, our pathologies, our unique silliness, it’s the stuff that we are. That’s the stuff that I wanna call with you, not our finger print, but our soul print.
We have a soul print. And “the inability to share my soul print with another human being is the definition of loneliness.” That’s what loneliness means. My soul print is the DNA of my soul. My soul print is the unique, swirls and curves that make up my infinite specialness and uniqueness. Right, that box that I carry around with me, that’s who I am in the world.”
“What is love? Love is not an emotion at its core. The core of loving is to perceive the infinite specialness in another human being. Love is a perception. I perceive your infinite specialness. I see you at your highest. I experience your soul print.
All right, love is – is to see with God’s eyes. To see with God’s eyes means to see you at your highest. I’m packed and I’m folded by your very being in my presence, your soul print comes to the fore, I see you soul print and I identify you with that soul print. I know that’s who you really are.
Right, love is a soul print vocation. Now, not just love. When you think deeply, all that we look for in the world – joy is a soul print vocation. product of actively and passionately pursuing some other activity.
To be joyous means that I can only attain joy as the by-product of the pursuit of something else and that something else can only be ultimately to live my story. To live my soul print in the world.
So why are there lonely people? (claps) OK let’s learn. Well, A: there are lonely people because there’s no one available to receive those people’s soul print. I need someone to receive my soul print, what gets in the way, in our world, of soul print receiving? What gets in the way? The first thing that gets in the way is labels. Labels prevent me from seeing you as you are.
The second I lock someone into a label, I no longer am able to see them with God’s eyes. The essence of soul print receiving is to go on a journey where I can receive the [Hebrew] right the deep soul print self of other.”
A disgraced American rabbi with a tangled history of alleged sexual misdeeds is relaunching his career as a spiritual mentor and backtracking from an apparent confession he signed two years ago
Marc Gafni, left, visits with author Luke Ford in Salt Lake City on July 3, 2008
NEW YORK (JTA) — A disgraced American rabbi with a tangled history of alleged sexual misdeeds is relaunching his career as a spiritual mentor and backtracking from an apparent confession he signed two years ago.
Rabbi Mordechai Gafni acknowledged his “sickness” in 2006 after several students at his Israeli institute claimed they were lured into sexual liaisons through deception and psychological manipulation. For decades Gafni had been dogged by claims he engaged in improper sexual activities, including allegations that he molested two teenage girls.
Now Gafni is back with a new Web site that directly challenges the claims against him.
Based in Salt Lake City, Gafni, now known as Marc, is a practitioner of a Kabbalah-inspired philosophy called evolutionary spirituality.
In a statement on the controversy posted to his Web site, Gafni said the relationships he engaged in while in Israel were all “mutual and consensual,” broke no laws and did not involve an abuse of authority.
He said the letter he wrote was misunderstood to be a confession that he acted improperly.
“I believed that writing the letter would, in some measure, end the attacks, and give me time to heal and think things through,” Gafni wrote on his site, MarcGafni.com.
Gafni did not respond to requests for an interview.
A former Orthodox rabbi and later a leading figure in the Jewish Renewal movement, Gafni first gained attention in 2004 when The New York Jewish Week reported on longstanding accusations against him.
Gafni told the newspaper that one of the girls was troubled and had made up the story, but he did acknowledge a sexual relationship with the other girl when he was a 19-year-old rabbinical student.
“I was a stupid kid and we were in love,” Gafni told The Jewish Week. “She was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her.”
In response to The Jewish Week’s reporting, several prominent rabbis — including Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Arthur Green, Joseph Telushkin, Saul Berman, Tirzah Firestone and Arthur Waskow — rallied to Gafni’s defense, saying the evidence of impropriety was not convincing.
Two years later, after the news broke in Israel, several of those same rabbis backtracked, arguing that the new accusations were different from the old ones.
Waskow recently told JTA that he has reviewed the material on Gafni’s Web site and still sees “nothing whatsoever to change my mind about the wisdom of the decision that several organizations made two years ago that he should not continue to teach under their auspices.”
A section of Gafni’s new site dedicated to the controversy includes letters on his behalf from several spiritual leaders, attorneys and counselors, as well as the report of a forensic psychologist who administered a polygraph test.
Several references to e-mails and instant messages between Gafni and the Israeli women that supposedly prove the nature of their relationships were not exploitative. The correspondence is not available on the site.
“In each of these relationships, as is usually the case between men and women, there were complex power dynamics in which each side had power and vulnerability,” Gafni wrote regarding the Israel controversy. “While I never promised exclusivity to any, in retrospect I see I did fail to recognize two things. First, that my non-exclusivity might in itself be experienced as hurtful. Secondly, that these involvements themselves, and particularly the lack of transparency around them, might be experienced as painful or problematic.”
Gafni’s Web site is filled with allusions to his problems and explanations.
“Marc Gafni struggled with the question of whether to teach conventional spiritual wisdom in a conventional spiritual context, or to follow a more post-conventional style of teaching and living,” his biography says. “This tension brought great dynamism to his work, but also caused some dissonance.”
Now the biography says that Gafni will focus on “intense inner spiritual and psychological reflection on the course of his life” and “partnering with social activist leaders to create a new, grass-roots human rights movement.”
“While Marc Gafni will continue teaching, he wishes to do so as a spiritual `artist’ rather than as a rabbi, guru, or formal teacher,” the Web site says.
One of Gafni’s defenders is Rabbi Gershon Winkler, a New Mexico rabbi who runs Walking Stick, an organization that combines Jewish teachings with Native American wisdom.
“Do I believe that the women here experienced pain? Yes I do,” Winkler wrote in a letter posted on Gafni’s site. “Do I know that this is not a story of abuse of sexual harassment as it was reported in public forums? I am sure it is not. Do I believe that the pain caused by all of us to Rabbi Gafni far exceeds the pain that anyone else can claim to have experienced? Absolutely.”
In the letter, Winkler acknowledged that he fathered a child with a student, carried on several “intimate relationships” with students over the years and said he is currently in a relationship with two women.
Many in the Jewish Renewal leadership, he asserted, have engaged in similar sexual behavior, including some who are now critics of Gafni.
Waskow, one of the leading figures in the Renewal movement, rejected that line of argument.
“If there were, years and years ago, people in this or any other movement who did behave in ways that we would now find ethically prohibited, it was precisely because of the experience of the pain and emotional disasters and spiritual disasters created by that kind of behavior that we adopted the ethical rules that now apply,” Waskow said.
“Maybe some of that did take place, but we grew enough to decide this was not a good idea,” he said. “What he’s describing as hypocrisy is a shift over a 25-year period of time in which our movement and people in our movement grew considerably.”
Winkler told JTA that he believes it is wrong to insist on an “across-the-board” ban on sexual relationships involving rabbis and followers, teachers and students, and counselors and patients.
Gafni, he added, is a victim of sexual McCarthyism.
“I think it’s extreme,” Winkler said. “I think it’s a sexual ethic that’s made out of paranoia.”
International Jewish Liberation School
Under the Auspices of the Tree of Life Foundation
A 501(c)3 Religious Not-for-Profit Corporation
As a Division of the Human School of Living Arts
We Celebrate the Founding Of
The International Jewish Liberation School (IJLS)
* What
* Who
* When
* Message from Rebbe Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
* Message from Rebbe Marc Gafni, Ph.D.
* Course Components
* Registration and Price
The International Jewish Liberation School is grateful and delighted to offer a training course in Liberation (Deveikut, God-Merging) based on the principles and practices of Hebrew Wisdom.
Our school is a reactivation of this great and lost Hebrew Liberation wisdom. This school is dedicated to sharing the great mission of Hebrew wisdom; the Democratization of Enlightenment (which is called in Hebrew wisdom sources Deveikut or He’arah). In this teaching Deveikut (Self-Liberation) is not the province of the great masters, but a genuine option for every person. The potential for realizing one’s true nature is the birthright of every human being. Every human being has the potential and possibility to realize their true nature as part of the God field and to act – compassionately and courageously – from the integrity of that realization.
Because realization is the potential and possibility of every human being it is not merely an option but it is the very purpose and invitation of our lives. In line with the four-thousand year lineage of Hebrew wisdom masters, we use the Torah as a guidebook to liberation. Once we understand the Torah as a handbook for the Liberation of every human being, we realize that the intention of the Biblical ideal, of “Kingdom of Priests”- is no less then what we have called, The Democratization of Enlightenment.
Why is this so overwhelmingly important to us? Because we subscribe to the hidden corollary of Hebrew Liberation teaching…that all ethical failure is ultimately rooted in a failure of realization.
A core practice of Hebrew wisdom is called Mitzvah. Although Mitzvah is usually translated as commandment, the Hebrew mystics also read it as being related to the word Tzavtah, meaning intimacy. Mitzvah is the path of intimacy in which the skin-encapsulated ego expands to include all that exists. At the level of Liberation, Mitzvah acts as a channel to draw down the light (shefa) and activate the divine flow of life.
Particularly, we see Shabbat as a day spiritual renewal and Liberation in which the primary mitzvah is creating a quiet mind to receive the higher energies of Liberation. In this context Shabbat is integral to the teachings of Jewish Liberation. In the Jewish liberation tradition, the words of the divine to Abraham, “Lech Lecha,” are literally translated to mean, “Go to Your Self. Realize that your Divine self is “literally part of God.” Once the human beings solves the perpetual identity crisis by realizing his identity with Divine, he or she is able to act with courage, compassion, wisdom, responsibility and holy audacity. It is this courage and audacity of human action, which supports the activation of the indwelling Shekhinah energy that opens us to the experiential awareness of Deveikut. It is this awareness, which naturally manifests the most evolved vision of Tikkun Olam (the healing and transformation of the world).
The International Jewish Liberation School’s course honors, receives, and transmits the four thousand year-old Hebrew lineage of Liberation. Beginning with Abraham Isaac Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah; continuing to Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, David and Solomon; transmitted to the communities of elders, prophets, priests and sages, there has been an energetic transmission of deveikut (liberation). The lineage transmission includes some of the most wondrous illuminated beings to walk the earth, including Akiva, Judah the Prince, Abulafia, Maimonides, Cordovero, Yitzchak Luria, Chaim Luzatto, Meir Ibn Gabbai, the Gaon of Vilna, the Baal Shem Tov, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, Mordechai Laine of Izbica, Rav Shalom Sharabi, Rav Yehuda Fatima, Ben Ish Hai, Menachem Mendel of Schneerson and Rav Kaduri in modern times.
A remarkable and powerful teaching of this tradition and modern times is that none of these people were perfect. Perfection and absolute piety is a tyrannical ideal that ultimately separates us from the divine. Toxic shame undermines the deveikut (Liberation) process. All of these liberated figures were flawed, some dramatically so, at different times in their lives. In the words of the ancient teaching, “The Tzadik falls seven times and rises, the wicked falls and does not rise.” The ability to rise like a Phoenix from the fire and to transform human failing into human greatness is core to the shadow work of Hebrew Liberation technology. As the schools of Kutzk and Izbica taught, one’s unique flaw is transmuted into one’s unique gift and gorgeousness. We are all unique flames emerging from the same fire. It is in the realization of one’s authentic unique self that the human being merges with the God field. If one tries to round out the curves of a puzzle piece it cannot fit into the great puzzle of the Kosmos. It is only by highlighting the unique curvature of your self that your merge with the larger divine Self.
Who
The International Jewish Liberation School is co-led by Rebbe Gabriel Cousens, M.D and Rebbe Marc Gafni, Ph.D.
When
Opening Week
The opening week of the Jewish Liberation School will be six nights, seven days, between Dec. 24-30, 2008. This week will be our first annual “open for all” study/ practice/ meditation intensive focused on touching into the eternal joy and internal glimpse of Jewish Liberation.
Annual Summer Course
The annual IJLS One-Year Course will start every summer, approximately in the middle two weeks of August. The length will be 13 nights and 14 days, and continue throughout the year via live video telecasts. In 2009 it will be August 9-23.
For registration and information, please contact the Tree of Life at 520-394-2520 x201.
Why Rebbe Gabriel Cousens, MD, is Co-creating the International Jewish Liberation School, and Gabriel’s Bio
In 1983 on the fortieth day of a fast, while spending the last 3 days on little or no water and meditating 9 hours or more a day, Gabriel dissolved into the nothing in deep deveikut; about ready to leave the physical body as one can only stay in this state of inner dissolvement for 72 hours without leaving more permanently, a chasmal voice strongly spoke out that Gabriel was to return to his roots and serve Am Israel. Somewhat surprised at this assignment, yet surrendered to it, Gabriel began the deep journey into mystical Judaism. Raised as a reform Jew and as one who attended the North Shore Congregation of Israel in Glenco, Illinois from kindergarten through 10th grade and scoring the highest graduating grades out of 300 people, there was a strong feeling that he knew nothing about Judaism. But had a deep feeling for it, which was supported by the local conservative Rabbi Lippis, who had pushed Gabriel hard from the age of 11 to become a rabbi. The truth at the time was that, although drawn to what he strongly suggested, Gabriel was more interested in playing football than studying Hebrew, as football spiritually turned him on and he had known he would become a doctor since the age of four.
A major boost in his spiritual life happened at the age of 16 his older brother, with whom he was extremely close, was killed in an auto accident. Although many rabbis came to console his family, no one could speak to the meaning of death. Gabriel realized, at that time, that a sign that he had found his spiritual teacher was that that association would have to give him a direct apperception of the answer to this question. For the next two years he spent many long hours in his brother’s room contemplating and meditating while he symbolically reconstructed life by building a heart lung machine, which ended up winning the state science fair in 1959. After Amherst College, where he played out his football karma as the captain of an undefeated Amherst football team and was picked as all-new England guard and middle line backer and was elected into the National Football hall of fame as one of 11 All-American Scholar Athletes, he went on to Columbia Medical School to begin his doctor dharma. He did vaguely connect with Abraham Joshua Heschel at JTS, but missed the rest of the New York Jewish experience. He could not seem to find a place in the Jewish world and became interested in the Essenes, the Kabbalah, and Kundalini. In 1975, at the age of 33 when he received Shaktipat (the equivalent of Smicha l’Shefa, or Haniha) from the liberated being Swami Muktananda and received a direct knowledge of the answer to his question about death, he and gave up everything in the outer world to become an intense yogi meditating 6 hours per day, chanting 4.5 hours, and servings as a holistic physician for the thousands of yogis traveling with Sw. Muktananda, living in primarily in India, South Fallsburg, Oakland, and Santa Monica for seven years. The last 3.5 years were spent daily with Sw. Muktananda, without any break. In addition he took on a close “guru uncle” relationship with Sw. Prakashananda, the first person acknowledged by Sw. Muktananda as liberated in 1969.
At the end of the seven-years, at the age of 40, he was declared liberated by Sw. Prakashananda three times: once in front of a group of his devotees; once in front of his 12 year old son in Praskashananda’s ashram. These first two times Gabriel thought Prakashananda simply was testing; but the third time he made it intensely clear that it was the truth. He then spent a day in private instructing Gabriel about the meaning of Liberation and the dharma of it; making it clear that although Gabriel was the only liberated Western person in his lineage as a successor, his path may be in his original spiritual roots. A few weeks later Gabriel was acknowledged as liberated by Sw. Muktananda, who also empowered him to be a vehicle of grace for Shaktipat. A few days later, Sw. Muktananda left his body. It was a dramatic and beautiful end to a most intense and profound cycle. The next year, in 1983 Gabriel began the forty day fast that had the surprise redirection back into Judaism by what appeared to be a Divine, but not sought after, command.
Attempting to move into Judaism at best was strange. He became Bar Mitzvah’ed at the age of 44 under the direction of Rabbi Hanan Sills and the training of Irv Newman. Reuven and Yehudit Goldfarb attended the ceremony in Petaluma California. Irv, who was in his late 70’s, cried for the first time ever at a Bar Mitzvah as he was so touched by what he thought was the most profound one he had ever attended.
After that, Gabriel tried to explain Kundalini, Liberation, Shaktipat, and non-dual awareness to five of his Rabbi friends, and no one had a clue what he was talking about. Finally he got referred to Rabbi Gershon Winkler, who also did not know what Gabriel was talking about, but felt open enough to try and find a language in Hebrew to translate these yogic terms and experiences into Hebrew. Over time Gershon became Gabriel’s rabbinic mentor, and over the past eleven years has guided him in preparation to become a Rabbi. Although he first met Shlomo Carlebach in 1979, after 1983 Gabriel also became one of Rebbe Shlomo Carlebach’s physicians and spent many wonderful personal hours with him and was greatly inspired by his profundity He was a great soul.
In 1993 Gabriel founded the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Patagonia, AZ, and also the Tree of Life Foundation, a religious 501c3. In 1996, after a 21-day water fast, on the 21st day, Gabriel was initiated with the hagiya of the Tetragrammatron in which these letters became burning symbols that permeated every aspect of Gabriel’s being. It was after this that he began speaking in the third person to more formally acknowledge that although he traveled in the body-mind complex, it was not who he was. This, he later found out, was similar to Reb Zusha and Reb Meir of Premishlan, who both also spoke in the third person. Gabriel also began to study Shamanic Judaism with Gershon, and after one joint Native American-Jewish conference with Gershon, Gabriel became a 4-year sundancer and was adapted into the Lakota Tribe as a clan chief, for bravery as he was the only one to go without any food or water for the three years of Sundance in the hot Nevada desert and stand attached to the Tree for four days from sunrise to sunset. Later Gabriel became head of the Spirit Dance, which is a universal dance for world peace, which we now do at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center and Foundation (a non-profit religious corporation in Patagonia, AZ, and in Israel through our Tree of Light Foundation. In 2001, Gershon ordained Gabriel as a pastoral rabbi, which is one who is empowered to do all the ceremonies and holidays, but not one who was ready to interpret the Halachah. Inspired by Gershon and other Kabbalistic masters Gabriel deepened his studies of the Kabbalah, which he actually lightly began in 1970’s and more seriously began in 1983. He also began living a modern orthodox lifestyle and has been Shomer Shabbat for about 12 years. Somewhere in this process Gabriel was directed to Aliyah in Israel and is now an Israeli citizen and has been teaching, creating Shamanic Shabbats, running spiritual fasting retreats, and teaching live foods in Israel since 2004.
It was during a big Israeli retreat, Lev Tahor, where he co-led a Shabbat with Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, that they met and became instant brothers. Mordechai was the first Rabbi who deeply understood the Jewish Liberation Theology that Gabriel was talking about. Their bond of mutual understanding and commitment was to awaken the ancient teaching and lineage of Jewish Liberation that began with Avraham Avinu, with “Lech Lecha,” as the first liberated Jew; followed by Yitzchak as the second liberated Jew in the lineage. Over time Marc and Gabriel began serious dialogue of their individual and eventually joint vision to create a Jewish Liberation School, which is now manifesting. Gabriel deeply appreciates Mark’s deep Jewish mystical wisdom and philosophical knowledge (the philosophical Kabbalah), which is sparked, inspired and powered by his active Ruach HaKodesh. What Gabriel brings to the teachings are his 27 years as a liberated Shaktipat master; his experiential knowledge of the how to help people build a foundation for the total whole person liberation and the ethical process of Jewish Liberation (almost continuous deveikut) to manifest. Although the author of ten books on nutrition, peace, and spirituality, his book Spiritual Nutrition: Six Foundations for Spiritual Life gives the best synthesis of his yogic revelations into the Jewish-Kabbalistic experience. It is clear to Gabriel that he had to go into the realm of Yogic Liberation in order to see the Torah as a manual for Jewish Liberation. Presently he is writing a book on the Torah as a manual for Jewish Liberation, interpreting each parasha from that perspective. Though he enjoys the three levels of Kabbalah and will be teaching some of the fundamentals of Jewish healing and to the Ma’aseh Bereshit (magical-practical Kabbalah) as well as of the Ma’aseh Merkava Kabbalah (mystical Kabbalah), his deep love is the Torah, which is the practical foundation for Jewish Liberation from his point of view. He is strongly inspired by Rabbi Akiba and the Baal Shem Tov, whom he considers great Jewish liberated beings. Mordechai and Gabriel are deeply inspired and committed to reactive this most profound aspect and lineage of the great Jewish Way of Deveikut. We joyously invite you to join us in this incredible unfolding and undertaking.
Shalom,
Gabriel
Why is Rabbi Marc Gafni, Ph.D., Co-Creating the International Jewish Liberation School, and Marc’s Bio
To answer this question on would have to enquire of Marc’s background from an intellectual, emotional, spiritual, psychological, karmic, physical, social, familial and biographical perspective. Each would require its own essay and only an integration of the entire essay would yield some glimmering of an answer to this question. One answer, which transcends all of the above, is the Hebrew word. Kachah: Meaning: Just Because. The word Kachah in Hebrew is made of Hebrew letters which the Baal Shem Tov teaches are the acronym for Keter Kol Ha-ketarim. The crown of all crowns. Crown is the luminous divine essence or divine story called in Hebrew Keter, which is the highest reason, the highest will, the highest mystery on the border of the infinite. Just Because.
If however this does not fully satisfy you, then Marc will share you a personal reason; a reason that is personal and transpersonal in the sense that the latter transcends and includes the former. Marc feels that to consistently hold a deep and profound recognition of the true nature of the self and the true nature of reality one must at least taste liberated consciousness. This taste of liberated consciousness must then be integrated with intense shadow work, ethical practice, physical practice, eating practice, and social and spiritual artistry. Each of these is a separate track of service which we will address unpack and unfold in the International Jewish Liberation School. In Marc’s understanding this is the core teaching of Hebrew wisdom. Hebrew wisdom at its core is an enlightenment teaching; a Liberation teaching designed to gift the experience of enlightened and liberated consciousness to the largest amount of people with the greatest possible depth. This is what Marc has referred to as the Democratization of Enlightenment. This was a core theme in Marc’s teaching and his writing on Mordechai Lainer of Izbica. It is a teaching which reflects the idea of evolutionary enlightenment core the teachings of the Kabbalah of Luria which receive pristine formulation in the Torah and Dharma of Avraham Isaac HaKohen Kuk. It is this teaching on the evolutionary edge- the teaching that Liberation is both a potential, a promise and the birthright of every individual that lies at the core of Marc’s teaching.
Marc discussed this idea in depth with Moshe Idel and Ken Wilber in two dialogues in 2005 and 2006. At around the same time Marc and Gabriel met and led a sabot at a retreat in Israel. There was a deep and profound mutual recognition and love born on that Shabbat. Marc recognized the depth of Gabriel’s practice and liberated core. Marc also recognized the areas of spiritual practice that Gabriel had developed in this incarnation, which had not been available to Marc, and Gabriel did the same with Marc. Gabriel and Marc then lost contact as Marc went through his painful trial by fire. Gabriel and Marc reconnected and did a process of deep internal work around Marc’s trial by fire. Marc also joined Gershon in becoming a mentor, studying with Gabriel to prepare him for the next stage in the Rabbinate even as Gabriel became Marc’s mentor in psychological and healing work which helped Marc move through the pain towards a place of transmutation and transformation. In this cauldron of non-dual reality, where earth and heaven kisses, where the relative and the absolute revealed their oneness, the vision of the Liberation school was born in love. This is the personal / transpersonal story.
A deeper glimpse at Rabbi Kuk and his teaching of Evolutionary Kabbalah as a ground to our intention in the International Jewish Liberation School brings us to R. Kuk’s principle of Evolutionary Enlightenment [the phrase "Evolutionary Enlightenment" is a precise translation of R. Kuk's phrase in his works Lights of Holiness]. Thirty years ago I became seriously interested in the writing of Abraham Kuk. Kuk was a great Kabbalist and revolutionary thinker who lived a paradoxically and often beautifully conservative lifestyle. In my recent work on Mordechai Lainer of Izbica, who is in many ways my teacher, I began to realize that a number of the key ideas expressed in the Izbica lineage had direct and clear influence on Kuk. One of the most important of such ideas is what R. Kuk calls explicitly in the Hebrew “evolutionary enlightenment”. As I studied more over the years I realized two things. First, the Evolutionary motif was core to Kuk’s entire experience as well as to his conceptual vision of the ultimate nature of reality. Second, I realized that this idea was far from limited to Kuk. In fact it is the single most important idea in Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah. And finally I have– together with students friends and study partners, traced this idea backwards to the very foundational sources of the Kabbalah. Kabbalah is the opposite of Adavaita. Kabbalah is evolutionary spirituality.
What does it all mean? It is very simple. One view of reality suggests that the way to perfection is what the philosopher Lovejoy called the ascending path. One needs to leave the world of flux and change and enter into the world of eternal and unchanging form, which ultimately gives way to unchanging formlessness. . It is there and only there that redemption can be achieved. It is only by leaving behind the fluidity and instability of reality in all of its expression of chaos and uncertainty that we may achieve any measure of stability safety and ultimately realize bliss and perfection. A second view of reality makes an almost diametrically opposed claim. This school champions what Lovejoy called the descending path. This is a very different way indeed. In this understanding redemption is to be found in the constantly changing and transforming nature of concrete reality which in its ever-dynamic dance sings the praise of spirit in motion.
Monotheistic religion is usually identified with the first view. More pagan orientations in both their ancient and moderns expression are more readily identified with the second view.
Kabbalah forges a more integral view by embracing the primal intuition of spirit held in each of these experiences and conceptions of world. One expression of divinity is the splendid order of eternal forms, which transcend the mad confusion of samsara: the world of truth which transcends the world of lies.
And yet the eternal divine, which is one, incarnates and manifests in the world of plurality. Moreover this manifestation and incarnation of the one in the many, of the infinite in the finite, is not merely an expression of divinity; it is the divine invitation to its own great unfolding. For Luria, reality is spirit. Spirit is absolute eternal and unchanging. And yet –as all of us have experienced in our own mystical initiation, reality—which is spirit—is evolving no less then it is absolute. God – reality – ultimate spirit is both ever-present and already always the ground of all being even as spirit evolves through her incarnation in form. This, for the Kabbalist, is the evolutionary meaning of Nagargun’s reading of the Heart Sutra’s: Emptiness is Form and Form is Emptiness. All is one; God is one—meaning, explain the Kabbalists, God will be One. Reality will be integrated and unified in an obvious tapestry of gorgeous interconnectivity and wholeness when we –baby faced divine incarnation of the godhead realizes God’s evolution. In the words of Nikos Kazanzakis, cited by at least on Luria Scholar to explain the essence of Lurianic Kabbalah, “We are the saviors of God”.
What is Evolutionary Kabbalah? Evolutionary Kabbalah deploys the most advanced wisdom available in the world today from all of the great traditions as well as from the hard and soft sciences, in order to understand, evolve and apply the principles of Kabbalah to contemporary life.
Marc Gafni Bio
Marc Gafni is a cutting edge, gentle and provocative spiritual teacher, as well as an author and television personality, a mediator, an iconoclast, a lover of people, troublemaker, and corporate consultant. Marc is the author of seven books including the National Best Seller Soul Prints which won the prestigious Napra award for best spirituality book of 2001. It was a main selection of the One Spirit Book Club, and the Amazon.com best book in the Jewish thought category in 2001. This book was also made into a National PBS special and an audio series by Sounds True recordings. Soul Prints is published by Simon and Schuster. Marc’s second major English language book, also published by Simon and Schuster is The Mystery of Love. Beautifully written, it unpacks an esoteric Kabbalistic tradition, which teaches of the profound relationship between the sexual, the erotic and the sacred. Mystery of Love was met with much critical acclaim and was also made an audio series called The Erotic and the Holy, published by Sounds True.
Marc has been successfully involved in manifesting and leading spiritual context, including seminars, learning communities, training programs and spiritual movements since he was in his early twenties. He has struggled his whole life between his ability and desire to teach conventional spiritual wisdom and in conventional spiritual contexts, and his post-conventional styles of teaching and being. This tension has created the gorgeousness of much of his work and has caused some significant dissonance over the years. His commitment for the future is to be fully present and committed in the post conventional contexts in which he manifests and teaches. Marc is currently the director of a private foundation dedicated to producing a great library of teaching on the human spirit with real implications for creating a better world for all of the children and grandchildren on our planet.
There are several stages in the unfolding study and teaching path of Marc Gafni. In the first stage of his career, he was an Orthodox progressive Rabbi teaching Talmud Kabbalah and Biblical thought deep within the Orthodox fundamentalist world in Israel and in the United States. In the United States, Marc taught at Yeshiva University, serving congregations both as scholar in residence and Rabbi. He founded an outreach movement in the New York and Long Island Public schools. Eventually, Marc moved to Israel where he served as a Rabbi and taught classical Hebrew wisdom in the form of Talmud, Kabbalah and Biblical psychology. In this stage, he wrote two Hebrew books. The first, A Certain Spirit, re-defines the idea of faith from the old notion of the “dogma is true” to a more radical and profound idea that “I am true”. In his second book during this period, An Uncertain Spirit, Marc challenged the age old idea that spirit could provide certainty or explain suffering, and he taught the spiritual path of dancing with the uncertainty as the realization of highest human potential. In this stage, he also began to explore the spiritual path of laughter and tears. He also began to read bible through the prism of what he called biblical myth or the biblical archetypes. This work became the basis for the National Television shows that Marc created, wrote, and hosted for several years on National Israeli Television.
In the second stage of his study and teaching, Marc shifted much of his focus to the teaching of Hassidism and particularly, to a little known Kabbalistic lineage, which taught the idea of what Marc, has termed the Unique Self. This idea has been incorporated into the Integral Seminars of Ken Wilber and the Big Mind Process of Genpo Roshi and the teaching of many other spiritual teachers who were exposed to Marc’s teaching through the Integral Institute. The Unique Self is an important foil and paradoxical complement to the classic Buddhist teaching of No Self. Marc’s teaching seeks the integration of these two seemingly disparate moments of realization. Emerging from the Hassidic teaching on Unique Self is the bestseller, Soul Prints, which was released in many languages. He also wrote a two volume 1200-page work on Non Dual Humanism, and it’s expression as Unique Self. A small part of this work was submitted as a doctoral dissertation to Oxford University. These two volumes are now being prepared for publication as a project of the Foundation.
In the third stage of work, Marc turned his heart and attention to the Nature of the Erotic. In particular he taught of the interrelationship between the erotic, the sexual, and the sacred. Marc’s basic teaching was to unpack the four faces of Eros that underlie all evolved reality. He then moved to unpack the deep nature of the sexual as the model of living in Eros in all of the non-sexual dimensions of living. The first book to emerge from this study was the book: Mystery of Love and the Sounds True Audio series on The Erotic and the Holy. Marc is currently preparing for publication and more extended treatment of this topic to be released on the title The Erotic and the Holy.
In the fourth stage of inquiry, Marc shifted his focus to the psychological and spiritual “Shadow teachings” which he saw as being an esoteric strain within the Hebrew wisdom tradition. In this work, Marc sought to evolve the understanding of Shadow beyond Jung’s conception and to connect Shadow-work with the non-dual teachings of Kabbalah as well as with the Unique Self teaching. In this teaching Marc identified three distinct primary forms of shadow, which included not only one’s hidden dark side, but also one’s distorted Unique Self and Unrealized divinity. A book of these teachings is currently under preparation.
Next, in the fifth stage, Marc focused his attention and love on the nature of enlightenment. In some groundbreaking dialogues with Ken Wilber, Moshe Idel, Andrew Cohen, Jean Houston, the Dalai Llama, and Byron Katie. Marc introduced the radical hermeneutic that all of Hebrew wisdom maybe be properly understood as an enlightenment tradition. Moreover, he showed that the most important single Kabbalistic idea which lies at the heart of Luria’s Kabbalah is what Abraham Kuk called Evolutionary Enlightenment. The goal of the tradition in Gafni’s understanding was to achieve maximal depth for maximal span- that is enlightenment is not just for the elite but seeks the democratization of enlightenment. Marc Gafni and a number of other leading spiritual teachers are now preparing a series of books called The Spiritually Incorrect Series on on Postmodern Enlightenment Teachings. In this work, they will also address the enlightened relationship of the masculine and the feminine in the postmodern world. In this fifth phase Marc engaged in a series of recorded dialogues with World Thought leaders including his Holiness the Dali Lama, Ram Dass Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, Michael Beckwith, Bill Ury, Don Beck, Father Thomas Keating and Jean Houston. During this phase, emerging out of some fifteen dialogues with Ken Wilber, Marc presented two lecture series entitled Integral Judaism and Integral Kabbalah which now being prepared as two separate books.
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The course has four components:
1. The actual two-week course, whose content is described below.
2. Ten video yihiduts during the year after the summer course. Each will be on a different topic which will be open to participants and graduates of the Liberation School.
3. Creation of small sub communities formed for study, practice and support.
4. 2008 Winter Opening Kick-Off Week
In 2009 and onward, the Winter Program will be a gathering, a time to get re-inspired, and to continue to deepen, for graduates of the International Jewish Liberation School. Graduates will be invited to attend the winter retreat and to re-attend summer intensive annually.
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Annual Winter Week Intensive:
The annual winter week intensive will weave together ecstatic study in the method of the ancient study hall, cleansing, mitzvah and Shabbat practice, meditation, chanting, prayer, dance, and sacred community. Texts studied and deployed will include, Mystical, Kabbalistic, Hassidic, Talmudic and Torah.
Topic for Year One: The Liberation of the Masculine and the Feminine
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Annual Summer Two-Week Liberation Course:
Jewish Liberation is Whole Person Liberation. The summer Liberation Course is therefore designed around what we have called the Seven Levels of Shalom {Peace} through which one becomes Shalem; A Whole Human Being. It includes: Peace with the Body, Peace with the Mind, Peace with the Family, Peace with the Community, Peace with all Cultures, Peace with the Earth, Peace with God.
In the ancient Hebrew tradition of Spiritual Fasting, the first week includes a seven day green juice fast, haniha meditation, prayer, some Ophanim and yoga, and Liberation studies and philosophy, and kabbalat Shabbat.
The second week includes: Principles and practices of Hebrew Liberation: Jewish Liberation Philosophy, Inspired Sacred Text Study, Meditation, Prayer, Service, Kabbalat Shabbat, Spiritual Nutrition for Powerful and Effective Prayer and Meditation, Ophanim (the yoga and energetics of the Aleph-Bet of the Hebrew Letters Hebrew Song and dance, Kabbalah Study, and development of midot by exploring psycho-spiritual development including: Unique Self and levels of Shadow, and the Liberation understanding that the “Personality Is A Case Of Mistaken Identity”.
The International Jewish Liberation School is sponsored by the Tree of Life Foundation, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit foundation, under the Division of the Human School of Living Arts (HSLA). The International Jewish Liberation School is currently confirming its accreditation applicable to a 2-year Master’s Degree in Jewish Liberation
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Masters Academic Degree:
The International Jewish Libeation School is currently confirming its accreditation applicable to a two-year master’s degree in Jewish Liberation.
Those participating in the Liberation School who wish to receive a master’s degree are required to come to attend two consecutive December programs, the Summer Jewish Liberation School, the ten monthly sichot (teaching sessions), and write a master thesis supervised by Rebbe Cousens and Rebbe Gafni.
Those who do not want to pursue the master track are not required to come to the second winter intensive or to write a masters thesis.
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Registration and Price
To register for the IJLS programs, please book your limited space at 1-520-394-2520 x. 201.
by Jeff Bell and Greta DeJong
Catalyst Magazine – July 2008
Marc Gafni could well turn out to be the hero of a spiritual epic—or, at least, a psychosexual whodunit blockbuster.
A rabbi and a Biblical scholar with several published books and a recently approved doctoral dissertation from Oxford, Gafni presently lives in Salt Lake City. (He anonymously authored “Spiritually Incorrect,” an occasional column that appeared last year in CATALYST.) He came to the new Zion two years ago from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he led a large, vibrant movement of Jews who lived on the alternative edge, beyond the fringes of organized religion. Perhaps too close to that edge, where dangerous things can happen—and for Gafni, they did.
Talking with people about Gafni, a certain pattern emerges: Here’s a guy you’ve hung out with, watching TV and knocking back almond crunch, someone who calls up in the middle of the day and talks your head off, someone who has the usual knotty relational history. He’s a friend of yours, a normal, somewhat eccentric guy. Then, little by little you realize that there’s something kind of, well, saintly about him.
Stories about Gafni’s actions lean toward the saintly as well: People say they have seen him go out of his way to bring estranged friends together. They’ve seen him take an entire room full of people through a journey of laughter and tears. They’ve felt an atmosphere around him so affectionate and wild that it sparks off energy most haven’t felt since childhood. They’ve heard him speaking about God and human responsibility and what it means to take care of others with a wisdom and nuance that makes them search their souls.
And even wilder—they know he is the subject of Internet stories that paint him as a guy who “harasses” women, a “sexual predator.”
Everything you observe and intuit about him says “Really good person.” The Internet gossip sites say “Really bad person.” Then you get to see hundreds of documents proving the Internet stories run the gamut from distortion to out-and-out lies, reflecting all the most shadowy sides of the blogosphere. It begins to occur to you that something deep is going on here.
On the surface, it’s a common story: A coalition of women accuse a charismatic spiritual leader of sexual misconduct. The stories sound convincing. It must be true. The leader falls.
Examine the evidence in this case, and you see something quite different: Years of recovered email and instant messages from the women involved, some as recent as three weeks before complaints were filed, flatly contradict their own stories. The messages show that every one of the women was quite enthusiastically involved with Gafni on her own initiative. What happened that caused them to band together and file complaints of harassment? And what caused their complaints to do so much damage? Spiritual politics, “victim feminism,” Gafni’s human complexities, and the Internet.
The more you get to know Gafni, the more you suspect he is being put through an epic spiritual test, what we might call the Test of Slander. It’s actually part of the biography of countless other teachers whose lives didn’t fit the “normal” social pattern and who ended up redefining a spiritual tradition. Gafni’s story is still in process. Perhaps 25 years from now it will be told as a saga of purification, trial by fire and, hopefully, ultimate liberation.
In the meantime, Gafni—this larger-than-life presence tucked into the compact body of a playful 47-year—old is living more or less anonymously in Salt Lake City.
The story we’re about to tell has certain all too familiar elements: one more example of how, in the Internet age, false accusations can become as established as fact, and how a gifted teacher with an anti-establishment bent and a bohemian lifestyle can find his private life subjected to what legal scholar Allen Dershowitz called “sexual McCarthyism.”
Rabbi Gafni—author of seven books, including the best-selling “Soul Prints,” and a popular lecturer and workshop leader—was founder of Bayit Hadash, an alternative spiritual movement in Israel. The organization held retreats, classes and massive services, often gathering hundreds of enthusiasts for Gafni’s celebratory Sabbath services, which included music, chanting and dancing. His lectures and classes on Jewish texts, and on the interface between spirituality, ethics, sexuality and what Western moral philosophers have called “the good life,” were not only widely attended, but had brought thousands of disaffected young Jews back into conversation with their tradition.
“Rabbi Gafni was doing something that had not been done in modern Israel,” says Dr. Gabriel Cousens, who attended his teachings in Israel. “He was presenting the traditional Jewish teachings in a way that revealed not only the mystical experience embedded in the tradition, but also offered a powerful experience of ecstasy and community. Most importantly, however, he was the first modern Jewish teacher I met who taught that Judaism was at its core a path to liberation.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1960, educated in a yeshiva (a Jewish religious high school), Gafni began teaching in the Orthodox community around New York City. From his early days as an apprentice rabbi and youth group leader, Gafni had a gift for bringing together the spiritual with the secular, working with people who wouldn’t normally talk to each other, and creating communities. He was known as a passionately committed teacher. He spent time as a rabbi in Florida, tripling the size of a young congregation. Then he moved with his second wife and two children to Israel, where he was rabbi in a settlement on the border of the West Bank. In the ’90s, he emerged as a popular public teacher in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv, writing books, lecturing to packed houses, and appearing at conferences and spiritual venues in the United States and Europe.
Gafni hosted a weekly hour-long national TV show in Israel for several years. In the U.S., he led crowded workshops on the alternative Jewish and spiritual scene. He taught around the world, including appearances at important synagogues and the Harvard Negotiation Project. When terrorists blew up school buses in Israel, he presented a series of spots on national television urging people to hold on to their humanity in the face of horror. He has recorded dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Byron Katie, Ken Wilber and other spiritual and philosophical leaders. “Soul Prints” was a best-seller in this country, won the prestigious NAPRA Nautilus award as the best spirituality book of 2001 and was made into a PBS special.
And in a conservative society, he supported gay rights and the ordination of women. His teaching pointed out the presence of a hidden goddess element in the Jewish religion, and called for the re-emergence of the feminine in spirituality.
A career like this tends to arouse envy—even, or perhaps especially, in spiritual communities. “People would complain that Gafni took up too much space,” says Gershon Winkler, himself an important Jewish teacher and author of many books, including “The Magic of the Ordinary.” “After he fell, one guy told me that he was actually relieved, because some of Gafni’s people now came to him.” There appears to have been a cadre of colleagues, older teachers and even a few students who wanted him out of the way.
Gafni’s main vulnerability was his counter-cultural and often bohemian lifestyle. Throughout his career, Gafni had several love affairs outside of marriage. “I tried to push the boundaries of what was possible. I experimented,” Gafni admits. “I sometimes chose a moment of love over other loyalties. Sometimes I was right, sometimes dead wrong. Where I was wrong, I’ve tried to ask forgiveness.”
During the period following his divorce from his third wife, his lovers included a few women who had worked with him in his community, taught with him, or served on the board of his organization. “I was working literally 24/7, teaching and traveling around the clock,” he says. “It seemed natural to be involved with people who were part of my circle. At the time, in my hubris, disguised even from myself, it felt to me that there wasn’t a moment free for anything like normal dating or personal life.”
He says he kept these relationships private, not because they seemed inappropriate or “wrong,” but because, like many people in his position, he preferred not to have his personal life the subject of gossip or attack.
One lover wrote after their relationship was over: “It’s easy to love you and it has been beautiful to discover you, to feel you, to explore you.” And added, “I’m grateful that we touched each other on this path.” She then thanked him for being in “full intention and clarity” in their relationship and honoring her “sacred autonomy.”
This woman would later file a complaint on the advice of a lawyer, saying that Gafni had promised to marry her to gain sexual relations—–a felony in Israel, where they lived. This claim, and the claim that Gafni somehow manipulated her, is refuted by both the tone and content of literally hundreds of her emails to him.
In 2005, Ha’Aretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, ran a glowing article on Gafni’s work, stressing his belief that the feminine godhead and the softer, more erotic aspects of spirituality need to be restored to contemporary Judaism. The article was widely quoted, causing an incendiary reaction among rabbis in the Orthodox community. Traditionalists who felt threatened by his influence and provocative personal style objected to his stress on the goddess in Judaism, and some of Gafni’s former teachers and colleagues denounced him for promoting “pagan Judaism.” The Wikipedia entry on Gafni credits him—or accuses, it depends on how you read it—with leading the movement to bring eros back into Judaism.
At about that time, and some say as a direct result of the Ha’Aretz spread, a rabbi who had clashed with Gafni in his youth gave a story about him to the proprietor of a website devoted to outing Jewish clerics alleged to be sexual predators. The site collects rumors, innuendos and complaints about rabbis, some of whom are undoubtedly people who indeed abused their position. But the site is also known for its maliciousness, venomous language, and for mixing fact with outright fiction.
The site’s proprietor is Vicki Polin, who in 1989, under the name Rachel, presented herself on national daytime television as the survivor of a Jewish satanic cult which sacrificed babies. She claims to have sacrificed—that is, murdered—at least one baby herself. She considers it her mission in life to report those whom she calls “Jewish abusers.” Ironically, the site so evokes the energy of anti-Semitic hate sites that several such hate sites link to hers.
In Gafni’s case, the stories described two relationships, one when Gafni was 19, the other a one-time encounter when he was 24. Gafni insists neither involved more then petting, and that both were mutually engaged. Couched in the hate-speech style that has become so familiar in the blogosphere, the stories called Gafni a “known predator” who had “molested young women” and included purportedly first-person interviews with both of these women by Luke Ford, a former pornographer and a gossip columnist for the porn industry. Gafni’s version of these events is supported by two polygraph tests administered by Dr. Gordon Barland, one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
The stories on the website make no attempt to distinguish fact from rumor, distorted memory, or skewed interpretation of events. Polin and Ford painted a teenage romance between 19-year-old Gafni and his 14-year-old girlfriend as “child molestation,” and among other things, accused him of changing his name to avoid his past. (In fact, Gafni had followed the common custom of hebraicizing his name when he moved to Israel, and always referred to his family name in his books and other publications.) All of this forms the complex background for what happened next.
On an evening in May 2006, Gafni landed in Tel Aviv after a 10-hour flight returning from a teaching trip to the United States. He expected to be met at the plane by his girlfriend.
As his plane touched down, he dialed the number of his program director to discuss logistics of a workshop scheduled for the next day. Instead he heard an unidentified feminine voice screeching, “You are finished! Go to [a certain lawyer's office in Tel Aviv] at midnight, or go to jail.” Gafni thought he had the wrong number. He called again. The same message. He began to tremble as he realized that something terrible was going on. Over the next several hours, he began to piece things together. A former personal assistant, who had been threatening the organization with legal action over back pay, and who over the previous year had sent him dozens of abusive emails, had gotten together with another woman to discuss Gafni. They discovered that Gafni had been intimately involved with both of them. We can’t know what exactly motivated them from there. We do know what they did: They went to the Tel Aviv police and filed a complaint.
Sexual harassment laws have given women much-needed legal protection and gone a long way to support civil treatment of women everywhere. But when a woman tells the story of a sexual encounter and claims harassment, the man—guilty or innocent—will likely be in deep trouble if he does not have physical proof to the contrary. The woman doesn’t even have to seek legal redress—the complaint alone can sometimes be enough to get a professor or executive reprimanded or even fired. To complicate matters for the man, in Israel, unlike anywhere else, sexual harassment is a criminal offense.
The women told the police that Gafni had, in one case, used his authority as an employer, and in the other, promised marriage to persuade her to have sex with him. They convinced other women, whom they discovered had been involved with Gafni over the years, to sign their affadavit. In fact, none of the women had been either employees or students of Gafni at the time the relationships began.
By the time Gafni arrived in Israel that night, the women had convinced his co-teacher, as well as key members of his staff, that they needed protection, and cited others as possible victims. Members of the community were prevented from speaking to Gafni by the women, who claimed that he was a danger to the community.
Gafni says no one asked for his side of the story or checked any facts with him. “It was like a weird dream. I had never sexually harassed anyone. I had proof. I went to my computer for the emails I’d exchanged with these women—there were tons of them.”
To his shock, a key batch of relevant emails and other correspondence between himself and one of the complainants—his former assistant—were gone. They had been erased from his computer.
Worse than a weird dream, it was now a nightmare. He had no way of refuting the complaints. By this time, the story had been leaked to the Jewish press. Though many people in his community felt that Gafni was being railroaded, hysteria prevailed. Without consulting Rabbi Gafni, without cross-questioning the complainants or checking into their motives, a chain reaction was set in motion which resulted in the dissolution of Gafni’s movement. Several newspapers published sensational articles chronicling Gafni’s “downfall.” One reported (falsely) that he had been accused of rape. Another (again, falsely) claimed that he had made promises to marry five women. Within a few days, Gafni’s teaching work and the organization to which he had dedicated his life had been discredited and destroyed.
A group of Salt Lake attorneys helped Gafni recover the deleted data from his computer and then carefully review his correspondence with the women. “There is not a credible basis for legal action against [Gafni],” writes attorney Fredrick Thaler of Ray, Quinney Nebeker, a Salt Lake law firm, in a letter posted on Gafni’s website. “The complaints have no merit,” writes Charlotte Miller, who also served as Gafni’s legal council.
However, like the many commentators who assumed that the accusations against the Duke lacrosse team were true, people moved to distance themselves from him immediately.
According to feminist writers such as Dafna Pattai, Cathy Young, Laura Kipnis and Bell Hooks, the key reason for this distancing is fear. In a culture where truth is less important than perception, people are afraid to be associated with someone accused of sexual misconduct, even when they know the accusations are untrue. Associates fear liability, or being perceived as not protecting the ostensible victims—two consequences of defending the accused in a culture that assumes that women or groups of women always tell the truth about sexual harassment.
This belief persists despite data to the contrary, including the recent collapse of the case against the Duke lacrosse players, not to mention the historic experience of black men lynched because a white woman interpreted a casual glance as sexual harassment.
Feminist writers such as Laura Kipnis and Cristina Hoff Summers have written extensively to expose this kind of “victim feminism”: a stance which assumes that in situations of this sort, the woman is always a helpless victim of male desire.
“His best friends basically left him for dead,” says Gershon Winkler.
Gafni felt he had no choice but to return to the United States to think through what he should do. In the pain and sorrow of those first few days, he decided that as the creator of the organization which had turned on him, he should take on himself responsibility for the dysfunctions that had led to the situation. He wrote a public letter claiming all spiritual responsibility for what had happened. Accepting the advice of a friend and mentor, he took personal responsibility for the “sickness” behind what had happened and volunteered to seek treatment. This seemed, at the time of trauma and confusion, to be the only way to defuse the growing frenzy. Without the missing emails, he had no proof of his innocence, and at that time he had no idea the disappeared computer files would be restored.
Gafni refused any interviews and for the next two years maintained public silence, allowing the stories that were circulating to stand as “truth.” In the meantime, he began an intensive formal process of self-examination and inner work.
It was about this time that Gafni came to Salt Lake City at the invitation of a friend and teaching colleague, mediator and Zen teacher Diane Hamilton and her husband, former Utah chief justice Michael Zimmerman. Gafni was living quietly in a small home in Sugar House. Soon after we met, he told us about a pivotal event that had shown him both the depths of his fall, and the painful but spiritually profound path to turning the pain into compassion.
He had gone several times to Sabbath dinners at the house of a local family, mainly for the sake of experiencing community. One night, the host took him aside. “One of our guests read the Internet and says she can’t sit at the table with you. I know it’s not true, but she thinks you are a child molester,” he told Gafni. “I have to ask you to leave and not come back. I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.”
Gafni realized that he—who just six months before would have been an honored guest at such a gathering—was in essence a pariah. “I was stunned at first to realize that people were looking at me through the lens of a hate site, and couldn’t see who I am,” he said. “That night, I was up all night, meditating about it, awash in agonized tears. Suddenly, in the midst of my grief, this profound feeling of joy came over me. In Hebrew wisdom, we speak of how the divine feminine, the Shekhinah, has been exiled by God, and lives as hidden sparks inside human souls. I realized that I was participating in the pain of the exiled Shekhinah, the sorrow of the divine feminine thrown out of the kingdom. I, like her, was wrongly exiled and sat in dust and ashes. We were together. As I realized this, my heart became so ecstatic that I began to dance.
“Then I remembered the hidden teaching about the old Hassidic masters. These famous rabbis would sometimes discard their robes and wander as beggars through the villages of Western Europe, knocking on the doors of wealthy devotees. Invariably, they would be thrown out by people who, if they had seen them in full regalia, would have honored them.
“It all fit together for me then.
“I had spent my life seeking after the goddess, trying to return the feminine to her place…and that in some extreme sense the Shekhinah was testing my love, and she had hurt me because in some sense I hadn’t seen something about her. These relationships had hurt women I loved. Even while she was hurting me, she was embracing me. And I was here on the back roads of Utah to discover something about the divine feminine so that I might speak of her in new ways. I danced in real ecstasy for hours on end.”
Gafni later shared the incident with his friend, Brother David Stendl-Rast, who was reminded of an anecdote about Saint Francis: A disciple once asked, “What would be for you the most perfect joy?” Francis replied that for him, perfect joy would be to seek shelter in a house, be rejected and thrown out, and left to lie in the mud with the dogs.
Gafni says this teaching, which might have seemed wildly extreme and weird to him previously, actually described the profound spiritual opportunity that he had begun to see in this moment of his life. So along with examining his part in what he called the “contribution system” that had created this situation, and the qualities in himself that needed to change, Gafni also began a powerful inner journey into the subtleties of the masculine-feminine relationship.
“Sexuality creates wounds—sometimes mortal ones,” he writes in an unpublished essay called “The Wounds of Love.” “But if we learn to live wide open even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy.”
Along with his inner work, Gafni began collecting documentary evidence to prove the falsity of the claims against him. He took polygraph tests with internationally recognized polygraph expert Gordon Barland which fully supported his assertion that the relationships with these women had been mutual, and had not resulted from any deception or inappropriate deployment of power on Gafni’s part.
He underwent an extensive psychological evaluation with three independent evaluators. Their conclusions and his own were summarized by by Paul J. Goodberg, M.A.: “I am convinced that Rabbi Gafni never abusively hurt or exploited anyone. He is completely reputable.”
Ray, Quinney Nebeker turned his computer over to PeakSpan, LLC, a Salt Lake data recovery firm, which recovered valuable information and proved data had been intentionally removed.
“Of course, I regret with all my heart that anyone experienced hurt through their relationship with me. And, remember what Bono sings? `We hurt each other and we do it again.’ The key is what we do with our hurt,” Gafni says. “But what I most deeply regret is that I allowed myself to jeopardize the work we were doing by engaging in these relationships. I believed that what we were doing was sharing love, and that therefore there was nothing ethically, and certainly not legally, wrong. I still believe that. But I also recognize that a spiritual teacher has to hold strong boundaries around his personal life. Even mutual relationships with powerful and autonomous women are a problem for a public teacher. Moreover, in retrospect, our relationship did not serve the highest growth of these women; it endangered our movement and let down my supporters, friends and partners. In that sense—although I was unconscious of it at the time—they were unethical relationships and I regret that deeply.”
But even by Israel’s strict standard, in no way did he break the law.
Gafni has contracts for several new books and is beginning to teach again. He has been invited to create and host a documentary movie that uses the frame of his story to look into contemporary sexual and spiritual politics, and how rumor, innuendo and hysteria can destroy a life. And to show how a life can be rebuilt in love without bitterness. Most of all, he seems committed to helping foster a social justice movement that works to end genocide, human trafficking and sexual slavery in the world. Gafni seems determined not to attack his accusers, unless they leave him with no choice, but rather to facilitate healing.
“It is the challenge of the spiritual practitioner,” says Diane Musho Hamilton, “and especially that of a teacher, to become intimate with the processes of life and death, of destruction and of transformation. In this way, everything that arises, whether it appears as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unjust, is regarded as the path. To walk it requires great fearlessness, an abundance of compassion, a willingness to accept blame, and the offering of forgiveness.”
Sally Kempton, a former journalist, leading spiritual teacher and second wave feminist was asked what good might come from this story. She responded, “Marc has gone through a deep evolution. He will be an even deeper, better teacher in the second half of his life than he was in the first. The question is, can the people involved move from victimhood to power and responsibility? If they can, then Marc, the women, and all the shadowy players behind the scenes, will offer us great hope for healing in our world.”
The third act of this drama has yet to be written. Can this spiritual teacher come back from the dead? The answer is most likely “yes,” due to Gafni’s unflagging persistence. Did the obloquy and ignominy of the last two years break his spirit? No, though it has left some scars. Yet, throughout the whole of this nightmare, in circumstances that could easily, and forgivably, break the spirit of nearly any other person, Gafni has managed to hold onto his chronic optimism and genuine love for humanity.
Jeff Bell is a writer, part-time indie filmmaker, musician, wonk and political consultant. He is the former Democratic National Committee communications director for Utah and former president of the Children’s Justice Corps. Greta deJong is editor and publisher of CATALYST. For more about Marc Gafni, visit www.marcgafni.com
by Jeff Bell
Catalist Magazine – July, 2008
The nexus of the Gafni story would appear to be women falsely claiming victim status, bent on exacting some form of retribution which, in their view, matched the suffering at having not obtained exclusivity to Gafni and his affections. That is the center and the catalyst of Gafni’s current nightmare. But it is, by no means, the whole of the problem.
Without the women who filed complaints against Marc Gafni, there would certainly be no story, at least not a story of this depth and magnitude. But without the Internet, and a few “move ahead at any cost” bloggers, the story would have faded away.
What has both haunted and hunted Gafni is the relative ease at which rumors and lies have been mixed with more accurate information to paint a picture of Gafni as evil and predatory. Blogs index on the search engines far faster than then traditional websites do. Repeat a phrase or a name, over and over again, link it to other blogs, stories and other articles, and it jumps to the top of the search results in a short amount of time.
Take a moment and think about search engine results. The majority of Internet users look no deeper than the first couple of pages of their search results. Top searches have a false weight of authority that can easily lead a reader to unconsciously lend credibility where none should exist.
The strange union of self-proclaimed advocate for The Awareness Center, Vicki Polin, and porn industry gossip blogger Luke Ford and their mutual effort to assail the reputation of Rabbi Gafni, and to continue those attacks despite the lack of anything new to write about, is bizarre at best and nefarious at worst.
A vocal member of the Memory Recovery Movement, which ruined thousands of lives in the 1980s, Vicki Polin has wrapped a skein of respectability around herself that, when viewed through the prism of her attacks on Gafni, seems patently false and hypocritical.
Polin maintains that she is the child of Satanic Jews who raped her on a regular basis and made her eat her own babies. She now claims to be a victim’s advocate; but her advocacy seems to have taken all the aspects of vigilante misanthrope, and the power of the blog is her weapon. Polin has a singular focus to not only expose, but to destroy the life and reputation of whatever person that falls into her sights, regardless of facts. Any Google search on her name serves up a fairly even return of Polin’s attacks on rabbinical leaders, and pages written by victims of Polin’s tactics.
Luke Ford has made a living as one of the world’s foremost porn industry gossip columnists and, over the years, has owned and operated several different sites full of lewd pictures, stories and first person familiarity with the adult film industry. Ford also has an alter ego in which he calls himself “Luke Ford: your moral leader,” and represents himself as a beacon of decency and Jewish activism.
Somehow, Ford and Polin have become compatriots and often work together in boosting their ratings. The cross-indexing between these two and their blogs has, most especially in the area of posts about Gafni and other Jewish leaders, helped push them further and further upward until, for the last two years, they’ve had ownership of the first page of most engines when their targets’ names were searched.
What emerges on the Internet is a false image, based on rumor, presented as fact; all in opposition of the axiom “innocent until proven guilty.”
What makes Gafni’s story so interesting to me is not so much that, with hundreds of pages of evidence that exonerate him from these false allegations, he can clear his name in a fair-minded setting, but, on the Internet, it will take him years of exhaustive effort and money to balance his innocence against the two-year head start of those who claim he’s guilty.
Despite the potential to harm, blogging is the quintessential and idyllic evolution of American and international freedom of expression. The growing influence of blogs and bloggers over the last handful of years speaks volumes about dissatisfaction with the media and generic culture. There also seems to be a need, sometimes nearing addiction, for mass distribution of self-expression held by these exhibitionists of the written word. The acceptance as “meaningful” granted to them by their own ever-expanding membership roster fuels the rapid growth of this amateur medium.
I wrote my first blog post in 1996; long before, in time measured by Internet standards, the word “weblog” or “blog” was universally known and accepted into the mainstream lexicon. At the time, some were calling the very public self-publishing of one’s own opinions, criticisms, thoughts and life stories to the Internet a “vanity page,” an “online journal.”
My early posts were mostly lengthy, often ranting missives about politics with a lot of time, effort and kilobytes dumped into the 1996 Presidential race. It wasn’t long before I received calls, during political primary season, from two different Republican campaigns asking who I was, who I worked for and what my website was about. They didn’t like my analysis and they wanted me to stop.
These two different campaign representatives could not wrap their heads around the idea that I was just a guy, sitting in his Denver basement, self-publishing his opinions and analysis on the field of Republican candidates fighting for the GOP nomination. While the number of readers I had at the time would be laughable by today’s standards, in 1996 it was enough to garner the attention of two presidential nomination campaigns.
There is power in the written word and that power is intensified when any person, from any background, can release those words, unfettered and unregulated, into the world for anyone to digest.
Telling the truth, no matter how partisan your opinion, is an awesome responsibility, if you choose to view it that way. As the community of bloggers and online journalists continues to grow, so, too, do the numbers of the nefarious, the deluded and the predatory. For every handful of personal, political, entertainment or technology blogs online, whatever their motivation may be, there are always some who use their writing for some form of gain at the expense of others. That would appear to be the case regarding Gafni.
Reputation has always been a fragile thing, but the future of reputation is uncertain. Blogs have emerged as a quick, cheap and anonymous means of mass communication that can be used to further an agenda, talk about politics, share pictures of your family picnic or a weapon to destroy someone else’s life. Things on the Internet never go away. Once you’ve been dragged through the mud, no matter how innocent you may be, somewhere, on the Internet, you’re guilty forever.
Jeff Bell is the author of JMBell.org, one of the highest rated political blogs in Utah.
