Esoteric Hebrew Tantra: Marc Gafni

posted by dr. gafni assistant

Akiva teaches – the song of song is a Mashal. Usually translated as allegory. Usually understood to mean – the song of passion and sensuality is but an allegory for the higher loves – particularly the love between God and Israel.

This reading however both mis-understands allegory and symbol -and as it is intended to do- hides the deeper esoteric teaching. As it well should.

That reading is but the cloak which allows Akiva to hide his truly radical esoteric doctrine. This doctrine is no less than the Secret of the Cherubs – the spring of enlightenment from which we have been sipping this entire chapter. When Akiva says that the Song of Songs is a mashal, he means not an allegory but a model. That is to say, the sexual story of the lovers in the Song of Songs is a model for the erotic. The erotic as we have seen is identical with the sacred itself. This is Akiva’s intent when he cries out with such passion and pathos that “the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies!”

This is not a casual metaphor affirming the importance of the book. It rather contains Akiva’s deepest mystical intention. The Holy of Holies in the Temple destroyed just a few years earlier was for Akiva and the people the personification of eros. The cherubs reminded the people that the sexual was the window to the sacred. The secret of the sexually intertwined cherubs atop the ark was, you remember, not that sex is the erotic and the holy but that sex models the erotic and the holy.

marc gafni
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