Feminine Beauty: Eros and Perception: Part V Marc Gafni

installation five in a series of blogs….

‘Greater is Receiving Guests’
Remember the hebrew wisdom practice I shared in an earlier blog? If you are in the middle of meditation — rapturously receiving the Divine Presence — and guests that need greeting beckon at the door, first greet your guests and then finish the meditation. Why? Because, the wisdom teaching instructs, “Greater is receiving guests than receiving the face of the Shehina.” In the last chapter we used this text to show the intial priority of the ethical (guests) over the erotic (Shehina).

Now let’s suggest a deeper reading. Greater is the receiving the Shehina in the face of your guest — than receiving the Shehina in meditation. Receiving the Shehina, suggests the teaching, is perceiving and receiving divine point of beauty that dwells in each person. Eros and Ethics become one.

Now back to Akiva; The master Akiva, is one of the important sources of our great understanding that Sex models Eros and love. Now Akiva takes us to the next step in defining what it really means to be a lover. Akiva teaches a simple if elegant truism. If sexual perception is so powerful, it must model something greater. It must model love. Love, teaches Akiva, is not merely an emotion that happens to you, love is a perception that allow you to see the inner gorgeousness — the Shehina — in the other. The highest Eros is love; Love is a perception of the infinite divine in other.

The idea is so radical that it is hidden even within the Hebrew texts themselves. In this passage we are not told of the outcome of the meeting between Ms. Turnus Rufus and the master Akiva. In a different passage however, we are told that they love and marry. Isaac Luria explicitly implies that this is a love that grows out of the power of sexual seeing transmuted into pure and deep love146. He makes the radical assertion that Ms. Turnus Rufus is an incarnation of Lillith; the provocatively sexual She Demon, of ancient Hebrew Myth. In the encounter with Akiva — both he and Lillith are transformed. Akiva is powerfully moved by the potent divine spark which burns in her Eros. He sees her. She feels seen. Ms. Turnus Rufus becomes Ms.. Akiva. Divorcing her husband, leaving the pomp of Rome behind, she marries Akiva, the first the man who really ‘saw’ her.

marc gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
share comments on info@marcgafni.com