Pornography: The Exile of the Shekinah: A scholarly note for those readers who Care about such things: Marc Gafni

My interpretation of the Tantric nature of seeing and its transmutation into loving – in the last set of blogs – derives from three primary sources in my study.

First — a reading of primary sources — both biblical and mystical — in which the sexual sense of vision seems to hold out a more expansive vista of the spirit.

Second – a spiritual psychological survey of the contemporary situation in which the erotic gazing has been exiled into pornography; this is the exile of the Shehina in our day.

Third through a combination of speculation and meditation.

Finally, late in this process a friend referred me to Eliot Wolfson’s work, Through a Speculum that Shines; Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. Wolfson’s work was a wonderful validation of my core readings and intuitions.

It also introduced me to a host of other texts, both printed and manuscript, to which I either had no access to or had not seen. Wolfson documents extensively the praxis of sexual erotic gazing at the divine — in the form of meditation or visualization as a major practice which may lie at the heart of several different Jewish mystical schools. For the interested reader see in Wolfson pp 43,44, 101-.104, 286,7 336-7.

What is critical to note at this juncture is that there are clearly different schools with regard to visionary praxis; those that view it as important and possible. Those that forbid on the grounds of it being to dangerous and those that deem it impossible other then in very narrow circumstance such as the moment of death.

Wolsfon does not deal with Vision as an essential part of the secret of the Cherubs in the way we suggest in these blogs and in an extended study I hope to publish.

Our essential suggestion is that sexual seeing is a door to a more expanded love and Eros which is purely non sexual.

The motif of vision begins and concludes the biblical narrative. Beginning with God saw as a recurrent refrain of the creation story and concluding with “In the eyes of all Israel” as the finale.

marc gafni
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