The Meaning of Friendship: Marc Gafni

Anything less than this erotic experience may well destroy our planet. We abuse each other personally. Nations mass murder other nations. We rape the environment and allow twenty million people to die of hunger or related diseases a year. The simple and essential cause is a lack of Eros. We desperately need to feel like we are on the inside but we don’t. So we settle for pseudo Eros. We pretend like we are in the inside by placing others on the outside. We do not feel embraced in the real Eros of love so we grasp for the pseudo Eros of fear, war, and obsessive consumption.

Do You Know What I Need?

Teaches Isaac Luria, the great kabbalist writing in 16th century Safed said, “All evil is a failure of love and all love is a failure of eros. I can only hurt you if I feel that you are not connected to me. Would the hand stab the foot to take revenge?” Love for Luria 8735, is in its very essence, the erotic re-aligning with all of being.

It always starts, however, not with all of being but with a friend that you already know.

The master Moshe Leib of Sassov said he never knew what it meant to be a lover until he learned it from a drunkard. It happened that the master was in a tavern and overheard a dialogue between two men deep in their drink. One was professing how much he loved the other, but the other argued that that this was not so.

“Ivan,” he cried, “believe me when I tell you, I love you more dearly than anything in the world.”
“Not so, Igor,” Ivan replied. “You don’t really love me at all.”
Igor gulped down a glass of vodka. The tears streamed down his face. “I swear Ivan, I love you with all my heart,” he wept.
Ivan shook his head. “Igor, if you really do love me, tell me why I am not satisfied in my life. If you really loved me you would know what I desire.” With this, Igor was silent. This time Ivan was the one who cried.

All the faces of Eros show themselves in the tale. Inter-connectivity, desire, being on the inside and the fullness of presence. If you really love me then we are deeply connected. You hear the deepest desires of my soul because their melodies resonate in your soul as well. You learn to hear my soul’s music by being fully present in our encounter. Moreover you are radically empathetic to my needs. Radical empathy comes when the fullness of presence engenders a great yearning to move beyond the alienation that separates us. It is this feeling of emptiness and loneliness that propel you to shatter the ego boundaries that alienate us and enter the inside of my story. You are my erotic lover.

marc gafni
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