Falling in Love: Part Twenty Three: Marc Gafni

This blog post and all the Torah that I am hugely privileged to share in these days, weeks and months, I offer for the full healing of my son Eytan who just been in a bad car accident in Israel.

Thank God, though weak and bodily traumatized, he will walk out of this both literally and figuratively.

May all energy go now towards his healing.

For reasons that should not have been,I have missed all his army service. This is just one experience among many, which has been devastatingly painful for our family in the last period, of what is now almost three years.

By the grace of God this pain has pulled us even closer as a family, deepened our love for each other and opened our hearts in new ways. For this we are grateful. Our eyes as a family are not towards the past but towards the future. We revel and bask in the imagination of the simple joys of being together, visiting as a family in peace, safety and wildly ecstatic joy.

Leshem Yichud VeTikkun: for the sake of healing, integration and fixing.

Falling in Love: Part Twenty Three

What the Waters Teach

Frued called this state of being in love “regressive oceanic consciousness.”

For Hebrew mysticism, however, this state is progressive not regressive. I fully agree that the term “oceanic consciousness” is a wonderful of this mystical state.

“Oceanic consciousness” is referred to by mystics of all strains in the perennial philosophy as the reconstruction of a broken unity. Unio Mystica. One of the most common images in this mysticism was that of a drop of water in the ocean, which while distinct, is nonetheless completely merged with the ocean.

Let me suggest a second image;

Imagine a great basin of salt water, the salt fully dissolved in the liquid. In the heat of the day, large amounts of the water evaporates, leaving an array of salt formations scattered along the shore. These formations are fantastic and intricate. Like a city of small structures, each one is singular, unique, solid and exquisite. Then as the basin fills again with water, each of these singular formations gets swallowed up into the sea, losing themselves back into the water.

We are the same way.

We begin fully integrated, disintegrated, in the sea of life. The waters recede, allowing us to be born into the world as a singular structure with our own unique, intricate, form. Our day is done and we are washed back into the oneness of the water. And then the waves recede again and a new formation of self is revealed.

And then that formation is re-absorbed into the water…

Writes Isaac of Acre, “The soul will cleave…to the divine…and become as one entity… like the pouring of a jug of water into a running well.”

Or in the more erotic image of Schneur Zalman, when the human being reaches ecstasy, “He swallows God and God…swallows him.”

marc gafni
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