Giving in Love: Part Nineteen: Marc Gafni

Give To Them a Story

For those, who even after the last few blogs, are still unsatisfied and find it too painful to give in an undiscriminating way, I ask a simple question: how would you like to be a person asking for money on the street?

Much as we honor the holy beggar, it certainly is not the easiest way to make a living.

To be a lover, you have to engage in the spiritual practice of harchavat hadaat. Literally translated, this means the “expansion of consciousness.”

Taught by 19th century mystical master Nachman of Bratzlav, it involves widening your narrow field of vision to incorporate more of the other person’s story.

Say that someone smashes into your car from behind. You jump out of the car and furiously race to the door of the offending vehicle. Fuming, you open the door, see the other driver and exclaim, “MOM!!” Your anger cools in an instant because the faceless offender has recovered a personality. Mom! She has a story. When you open yourself up to her story, your feelings of love and empathy overcome your anger. You want to give and support her. You have been transformed into a lover.

So when you encounter the beggars on the streets of Jerusalem, you have to open your self to their stories. Imagine them as a relative, a child, or a person on their dying day, or a person on their birthday! Vision in a millisecond the imaginary details to their story. Allow them to have a face!

This is what it means to realize your enlightenment – you can have the deepest kensho in the world, realize what the Buddhists call emptiness – but if you cannot deeply feel the place of another – the pain and the joy…. then you are just lost in your narcissism – sadly frozen in the absolute. To learn that level of radical empathy is the true work of the divine human being who seeks realization or even just simple decency and integrity.

marc gafni
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