Esoteric Reading of the Song of Songs: Part Two: Marc Gafni

That reading however 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 AkivaMark 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.

{Okay now the next couple of sentences are the new section in this blog}

The power of this idea does not fall with the destruction of the Temple. The fall of the Temple, insists Akiva, must not be the fall of eros. For every moment that engages life erotically, the Temple is rebuilt.

Moreover, Akiva reminds a people who have just been disempowered politically, in the end political power structures are but illusion. The human being is powerful because he/she — by living erotically- participates and creates the divine union- because human consciousness and action are the touchstone of God.

posted by marc gafni
on marcgafni.com
share comments below or on info@marcgafni.com