Eros and Holiness: On the Evolution of Love: Part Twelve: Marc Gafni
marc gafni
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The footnotes shared in Eros and Holiness Post Eight require some explanation.
First, they are intended primarily for advanced Students.
Second, they are for the most part readable by anyone and will add a measure of depth to the seeker trying to enter and internalize in their practice this great path of sacred eros in everyday life.
Third, they were prepared in partnership Chevrutah with my partner Chevruta at Bayit Chadash.
I wrote the original version of Mystery of Love as a eight hundred page book.
We then published only a small part of it.
Our intention at the time of undertaking the footnote project, was to publish the entire manuscript with complete footnotes, a project which we began before the publication of Mystery of Love, which resulted in the excellent annotated primary source footnotes to Mystery of Love.
A side bar: The name of the book published by Simon and Schuster, Mystery of Love was chosen by my publisher/editor at the time. Great Editor – Bad Name.
The original name of the book was On the Erotic and the Holy. Better name and more accurate description of the content.
Fourth, Back to the footnotes and how them came into being and why they are important.
I wrote Mystery of Love from my deepest heart and gut. I had been thinking/feeling about the ideas in some for or another for twenty years.
The scholars page in Mystery of Love gives some of this history of it’s evolution in terms of ideas.
My thought was formed in the matrix of Kabbalistic, Biblical and Talmudic Sources.
The ideas however were not merely intellectual; they were formed through years of introspection and passionate exploration of Eros.
New Sacred Text, new Torah, is formed only when classical canonical text meets the text of sacred auto-biography and they merge {called Zivug in Kabbalah} in an seamless and integrated Union which the author himself cannot even fully tease apart.
{ that is a big sentence which I will god willing circle back to, in later posts and sharings}
Fifth, The book has been widely misunderstood by superficial readers even as it has been grasped more deeply than even the writer grasps it, by many depth readers.
“The opposite of the holy is the superficial.” teaches Mordechai Lainer of Izbica. Omek – Depth he says is Holy, while Gavan, superficial, is the vacuum of holiness which is filled with human striving apparently detached from its divine source.
Some of the book was written with Taam and Daat; meaning consciously and carefully.
Much of the book – its core intuitions were also Le’Ma’alah Me’tam Ve-Daaat; intuitive deeply felt understandings.
The book at its core is not a justification of the Libertine life as it has been sometimes mis-understood. Precisely the opposite; it is an impassioned unfold of the sacred vision of life in which the love, sex, eros and the mundane are in “right relationship”.
{My life has in one sense been a large experiment in Eros; most of which worked beautifully and some of which exploded the lab:)}.
The key to the book is Tantra- tan- to expand- the expansion of the erotic beyond the merely sexual – into every arena of our lives.
Without this tantric expansion, I believe ethics eros and holiness all collapse into the void of quiet and often ugly desperation.
We will address the profound relationship between the erotic and the ethical in later posts and teaching God willing.
May this work be a healing.
marc gafni
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