Mystic and Lover: Marc Gafni

On the first day of the Intermediate days of the Feast of Tabernacles {Chol HaMoed Sukkot} according to the calendar of the land of Israel.

Akiva; Mystic and Lover

In the Kabbalistic tradition, the hebrew sage, Akiva is the penultimate lover. He is a poor shepherd who lived and walked in Israel only a few years after the death of Jesus. He witnessed the destruction of the Temple and understood deeply that the Temple was the axis of eros, and that eros is the essential force of attraction -the clasp upon the beaded necklace that holds the whole world together.

Akiva however initially learns of eros not from book or old wise masters. His life journey begins as a simple shepherd who passes his time in the fields playing his flute for his God and his sheep. He is beheld late one afternoon by Rachel, the beautiful daughter of Kalba Savua, patriarch of Jerusalem’s wealthiest aristocratic family. She sees him and she knows. Great love and passion is kindled. They marry against the fierce objections of her family. For marrying a simpleton she is disowned. But with love and eros as their spiritual masters, Akiva makes his way to the academy and emerges twelve years later as the greatest spiritual master the Hebrew tradition has ever known.

To all his disciples he makes clear: my true teacher is Rachel. Not just because, as is usually understood, she urges him to study for many years away from home in the academy; but because the love and eros they had between them were the greatest teachers of the spirit he ever had.

Indeed the kabbalists understand Rachel to refer both to the real woman who loved Akiva and as a metaphor for the Goddess, for the Shechina. So when the Temple falls, Akiva needs to make people understand that for all of its magnificence and even holiness, in the end it is but a symbol of something more: it is the symbol of eros.

marc gafni
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