Hassidism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Dr Marc Gafni discusses the verse in Songs of Songs, “It’s Insides are Lined with Love” in volume one of his Radical Kabbalah. (See Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, Vol. 1 pp. 120-123) which talks about what is described there as a Hasidic expression of Acosmic Humanism, or what he also refers to in that writing as Nondual Humanism, grounded in the reality of love between divinity and humanity– and interconnecting all of reality– all participating in the same current of One Love, One Breath and One Eros.
These ideas are grounded in Gafni’s, The Mystery of Love, Simon and Schuster, 2003, and the thirty pages of primary source footnotes prepared by Gafni and Avraham Leader to that volume. The Mystery of Love is the volume we are sharing here. It is perhaps worth noting that these readings in The Mystery of Love were recognized and well received in both the world of Kabbalah scholarship and the leading edges of the mainstream and Neo-Hasidic worlds of Hebrew wisdom. This is crucial, because it validates the readings in The Mystery of Love as being original and even brilliant but non eccentric. Rather, in The Mystery of Love Gafni is uncovering and sharing a crucial esoteric lodestone in the Hebrew wisdom lineage.
In this regard, therefore, it is worth noting that Gafni discussed this volume and its general parameters in 2002 with Moshe Idel, one of his thesis advisors and a leading scholar of Kabbalah at the Bar Ilan Library, Oxford University. Idel enthusiastically validated Gafni’s direction and readings in general terms - Eros as the animating force of Cosmos in which we participate, as well as sharing with Gafni that he was working in a parallel direction. Idel published his magisterial expression of this core notion of Its Insides are Lined with Love, under the title Kabbalah and Eros, Yale University Press, 2005.
Another leading Kabbalah scholar, Eliot Wolfson, who Gafni did not know personally, also contacted Gafni after stumbling across a copy of the book, (after the first hardback edition was published before the paperback) expressing appreciation for textual readings, and generously added an approbation to the paperback work calling it “A beautiful book that will undoubtedly inspire many people and perhaps even bring some healing to a desperately ill world”.
Kabbalah scholar Daniel Abrams wrote about the book, “…an important book which unpacks with depth, power and clarity and important strain in Kabbalistic thought. [Gafni’s] original readings engage and provoke both scholar and layman alike.”
Zalman Shalomi Schachter the founder and Rebbe of the Neo-Hassidic Jewish renewal movement wrote, “Reb Mordechai Gafni’s torah on love and eros is l’eyla u’layla, the highest of the high. Everyone needs to hear it.”
From the leadership of the educational community, Irwin Kula, president of the Jewish Federation Center for Learning and Leadership, which serves the mainstream leadership of the American Jewish community, called it a “tour de force.”
Peter Pitzele, founder of Bibliodrama, on the faculty of Jewish Theological seminary, called it “an act of ecstatic scholarship. Reb Gafni comes among us a dancing ecstatic sage”.
Leading mainstream author Rabbi Joseph Teluskin called it radical and profound, with similar approbations from Noam Zion of the Shalom Hartman Institute, Rabbi Bradely Shavit Artson of the University of Judaism, Rabbi Roly Matolon of the leading-edge Congregation Kehillat Jeshurun in New York.
All of these approbations appear in the book itself.
A related set of ideas (which however bypassed the relationship of the Erotic to the sexual, and with a somewhat different set of sources) was written by Arthur Green published as an essay called “Judaism as a Path of Love,” published in Judaism for the World, Reflections on God, Life and Love, Yale University Press, 2020.
Leading Kabbalah Scholar Yehuda Liebes and his student Melila Eshed Helner extending his work, are similarly crucial voices in the Interior Sciences of this tradition, in establishing this set of what Gafni calls, first principles and first values, which sees Eros as the motivational architecture of reality.
The point of this information about the reception of these ideas in Gafni’s work and the other key writers, is that this reading, while striking and original, is not idiosyncratic; but rather an accurate reading of the mystery tradition of one of the great traditions of Interior Science. A more advance version of some of these ideas was published by Gafni and Kincaid in 2016 with a mainstream publisher under the title A Return to Eros that was reviewed extensively in the academic journal, Integral Review by Dr. Zachary Stein in an article entitled, “Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern ‘Return’ to a Metaphysics of Eros.” Stein has called Gafni’s work, the kind that comes along “once in a generation”. He saw Gafni and Kincaid’s A Return to Eros as a seminal expression of the kind of new thinking that is so urgently needed in this time between worlds that we all now live in. Dr. Gafni, along with a brilliant circle of close colleagues and students, is now completing a new set of works which are the next stage in unfolding of the new world view of Cosmo-Erotic Humanism.
A public presentation of core ideas in The Mystery of Love, is available on CD; The Erotic and the Holy is available here. https://centerforintegralwisdom.org/media-store/product/the-erotic-and-the-holy-workshop/
This abstract was written by Jamie Long, a student and colleague of Dr. Gafni, who has taken responsibility for on the responsibility for managing his Academia.edu page.