Eros and Holiness: Part Three – Marc Gafni
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Eros and Holiness: Part Three
The Great Dancer
The truly great dancer―like all lovers―flows with the fullness of being. She trusts the universe. She knows she will always fall right, so she allows herself to fall into the erotic rhythm of life. To do so, she must first empty herself to receive the flow. The word ‘dance’ in the original Hebrew is mehol. It has two virtually opposite meanings. Mehol is etymologically identical with the word hallul, which means empty. From here springs the Hebrew word mehila―forgiveness. Forgiveness comes from the ability to empty myself to receive the full wonder, complexity, and imperfection of another. Mehol however also means halah―fullness―used in the biblical myth texts to describe the erotic fullness of a pregnant woman.
Mehol, Hallul, Hallal = Dance, Empty, Full.
The dance of the Hebrew mysteries is the movement between emptiness and fullness, void and Eros, absence and Shechina. Modern day America is choreographed very differently. “Fulfillment at all costs” is our subconscious mantra, and it is marketed to us in a million packages. Fill the emptiness―in any way at any price. We are desperate. We are so pained by our emptiness that we can hardly distinguish between our desires. The natural result is that we fill up with much that is not true to ourselves. We seek fulfillment―full-fill-ment―in all the wrong places.
Pseudo-Eros
The mystics teach us that to access the erotics of being―the fullness of ourselves in every moment―we need to first linger in the emptiness for a time, to resist filling up the emptiness with quick hits of pseudo-eros. This is the secret of the dance. The movement between emptiness and fullness. “Dance me to the end of love.”
We live in an age in which we run from depth. The emptiness is so palpable and overwhelming that we would fill it at virtually any price. So we seek immediate gratification―a quick fix: a book, a drug, a relationship, a job―anything to fill the gaping hole in our wholeness. With a book, we read a few pages and if we don’t get a few quick hits of pseudo-eros, we move on to the next activity. We run desperately looking for the next watering hole that might fill up the yawning abyss we feel so deeply and try so hard to hide.
On the outside, our mad dashing about may look like dance―but really we are gasping for air. Picture the image of a bee in an airtight bottle. Seen from the outside the bee darts from side to side in ecstatic dance. On the inside, however, there is neither dance nor ecstasy. The bee is slowly dying. Suffocating. It was not meant to be this way. Life should not be a pathos-filled scramble for some snatches of authenticity in between the charades of emptiness. There is another way to dance.
Marc Gafni
