language

Protest as Prayer (Part 11): God’s Language

May 22, 2012 at 1:05 pm by Marc Gafni Leave a Comment

By Marc Gafni

This post is continued from Part 10.

The Zohar writes that the Shechina is called “I”. This is a particularly dramatic way of expressing the idea that the Shechina speaks through the human voice. This means that whenever a person finds their voice on the deepest level, they are finding the voice of the Shechina. The human cry to God “Please be King” is also God crying out through the same voice, “Please I am trapped — bound in chains — free me and let me be King.”

God’s voice and our voice are one. The language of God is man.

Precisely the same spiritual dynamic is at play when the human being cries out in question, in protest and even in rage against the evil and suffering that so defines our reality. The question is not against God. The question Is God. God is speaking through his creatures. The cry of question is the Shechina in exile crying out for redemption. Our question, rage and protest are our ‘participation in’ and ‘expression of’ the cry of the Shechina.

We allow God’s voice to resound in ours when we refuse to accept facile solutions to the great question of human suffering and instead cry out in protest and anger. This is the deepest meaning of the Zohar’s declaration — “the shechina which is called I.” God’s voice and the human voice merge into one. Our protest is God’s protest. Our rage is divine rage. In some mysterious sense our question is God’s question.

Now we can finally understand the hidden implication of a seemingly straightforward teaching in the Zohar.

The teaching – ‘When texts refer to God as the King — Hamelech — reference is being made to the upper three sefirot.’ At first blush this is a typical Zoharic statement which identifies each Biblical name of God with a different sefirah or set of sefirot. That is, until we remember what Luria taught us – that the word Ayeh, where, as in ‘where is God,’ also refers to the upper three SefIrot. Then we have to add our understanding, based on a close reading of mystical sources, that the cry “Hamelech’ is the merging of human and divine voice in a plea for redemption.

I would suggest that Luria’s source for the poignant cry of Ayeh as the three upper sefirot is indeed this Zoharic teaching about Hamelech. The Zohar, far from being innocent, supports our radical understanding of the Hamelech of High Holy Days liturgy as being not a statement but rather a question, a plea — God, Hamelech, where are you, Ayeh?

This means that God’s title itself, Hamelech, expresses not only certainty, but also the question. This last radical notion can be sourced in bold relief in a Zoharic teaching in Genesis. There the mystical text points out that the divine name Elohim is made up of two distinct Hebrew words — Eleh and Mee (Eloh-eem). The first three letters spell ‘eleh’ –- which means ‘this’, and the last two letters spell ‘Mee’ – which means ‘who’. ‘Eleh – this,’ indicates knowledge and clarity, while ‘Mee – who’ is a question, expressing the uncertainty rooted in the divine name Itself.

The divine dances between the Judah Moment of certainty and the Israel Moment of question…. And we dance along with it.

Photo Credit: chany14

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Featured Tagged With: god, kabbalah, language, prayer

Daily Wisdom: The Imagination

April 23, 2012 at 12:46 pm by Marc Gafni 1 Comment

By Marc Gafni

From my book, The Mystery of Love:

Sex models the erotic, but it does not exhaust the erotic. One of the core qualities of the erotic is imagination. The Zohar, the magnus opus of Hebrew mysticism, says explicitly in many places, “Shechina is imagination.”

In Common usage “imagination” is implicitly considered to mean “unreal.” Indeed unreal and imaginary are virtual synonyms. To undermine the reality of an antagonist’s claim we say it is “a figment of his imagination.” In marked contrast, the Hebrew mystics held imagination to be very real. Indeed 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. But the imagination is our prophet, bringing us the word of the Divine, which speaks both through us and from beyond us. This is what the biblical mystic Hosea meant when he exclaimed their God said, “By the hands of my prophets I am imagined.”

Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney

Filed Under: Daily Wisdom, Featured, Love, Sex & Ethics, Shadow & Psyche Tagged With: erotic, imagination, language, mysticism, reality, sex, shechina, unreality, zohar

Could uniqueness become extinct? Lessons from monkey faces

April 14, 2012 at 1:10 pm by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

One of the most interesting puzzles of science today is to be found in primatology research. Primate researchers have been stymied to explain why the faces of monkeys are so amazingly, disconcertingly unique. Could the answer to this riddle lead us into greater understanding of the significance of human uniqueness and all of culture?

A recent report on io9 explains:

New World Monkeys are the strangest-looking primates on Earth and they all look nothing like each other, from the bald-headed, demon-like Uakari to the lion-maned golden marmoset to the massively mustachioed emperor tamarin up top. What’s behind this insane variety?

That’s the question UCLA researcher Michael Alfaro set out to answer that question. The monkeys of Central and South America represent a truly staggering amount of facial diversity, with many species like the emperor tamarin sporting truly epic facial hair. But it’s unlikely that all these monkeys evolved such bizarre appearances just to amuse us so what’s really going on here?

Alfaro and his team realized the monkeys’ faces weren’t the only thing that had unusually strong variation. The social structure of the different species also varied greatly, with some living almost completely solitary existences while others lived in huge populations of a hundred or more….

They discovered that the monkeys with the most complex faces tended to live by themselves, while those who lived in groups tended to have plain faces. Another factor behind facial diversity seems to be the proximity of other species. When lots of different monkey species live in close quarters, they will tend to have much more complicated faces than more isolated species.

The study has implications for understanding culture, the report suggests:

Our species, generally speaking, has quite simple, bare faces, and of course we’ve also evolved what is arguably the most sophisticated system of communication in our planet’s history. Language itself might never have emerged if we were lion-maned or hugely-mustached or even polka-dotted basically, anything that would have kept our ancestors from producing crisp, clear facial expressions.

via Why are monkeys’ faces all so bizarrely different?.

Uniqueness itself, in a biological sense, is an evolutionary emergent. And as culture evolves, we know that some of the ways uniqueness emerges become more or less prominent. If highly distinctive, unique faces may become more a thing of the past, what is to stop a massive homogenization of culture in the future?

These are questions worth asking in an age in which the leading, most prolific and influential enlightenment teachings (but not Marc Gafni’s Unique Self teaching) encourage a sort of radically undifferentiated sort of realization. Is spiritual uniqueness itself something that could become extinct unless we preserve and cultivate it?