Marc Gafni – Eros & Zohar — Expanding our Limited Vocabulary Part 1

Marc Gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
please share comments at info@marcgafni.com

The word eros entered Western consciousness through Socrates’ best student. Plato, in his wonderful dialogue “The Symposium”, calls the inner state which we have been describing eros. To be a lover, implies Plato, is to passionately enter the inside of reality. Eros is love but not in the casual, pallid and sometimes anemic way we often talk of love. On the inside of things all is aflame.

In Hebrew the term for Love is Ahavah, rooted in the word lahav— torch. Similarly the Hebrew word source for Love, Lev, meaning heart, is used in the sense of ‘Labat Eish’- heart of fire.

For lev — origin of the English word lava – is expressive of the sometimes volcanic heat that erupts from one’s inner depths when erotically engaged in any endeavor.

Thus the Hebrew word Ahava and the Greek Eros enrich our limited (western) vocabulary of love. For vocabulary always reflects reality. We don’t have an English word for the type of fully expanded Eros we will be revealing in this book, because such expanded Eros is still so foreign to the fabric of our lives. Yet in Hebrew, there are a plethora of such words. The most important word which we have discussed at length is Shechina. There is also Ahavah, fiery love, as we just learned together.