New Age, Alternative,
Metaphysical Publication
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The Eros of Imagination

By Rabbi Marc Gafni

Rabbi Marc Gafni, author of Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment and his latest release, The Mystery of Love, is hailed as “an exciting new voice in Israeli and international religious life and spirituality.” The Rosh Bayit of Bayit Chadash, a national, spiritual community retreat center, Gafni is a Visiting Fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a Senior Scholar at the Melitz Educational Institutions. He teaches graduate seminars at Oxford University and, with colleagues, is developing a new school of Jewish thought referred to as “The School of Personal Myth.” His “Soul Prints” book became the subject of a PBS companion series that has taken the Jewish world by storm. -Editor

In Hebrew mysticism, Shechinah is the name for the feminine aspect of the 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. She is the underlying erotic, sensual, and loving force that knows our names and nurtures all beings.

Shechinah 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.

Our best move in 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 Shechinah.

Eros Imagined continued on next page