Perception is Love: Marc Gafni

Someone once said that reading the Bible in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. To touch the mystery of Hebrew mysticism, you need to touch your lips to the original words themselves. The key word describing the spiritual work in the temple ritual is ra’ah, meaning “seeing” or “perception.”

For the biblical mystics the word is alive — pregnant with meaning and history. When they wanted to understand the layers of an idea, they would look for the key word most associated with the concept and from there proceed. In our case the key word is ‘ra’ah.’ The mystics trace the biography of the word ra’ah to its point of origin and travel along with it for part of its journey.

The first stop on the journey in search of the secret of ra’ah is a meeting with Abraham, the nomad mystic warrior of the book of Genesis.

Why Abraham, you ask?

Because the only person in the biblical myth who is described as a lover of the spirit is Abraham. “Abraham the Lover is his appellation,” the prophet Isaiah says of him. And now that we understand that Love is a perception, we are not at all surprised that the key verb used to describe his life is none other than ra’ah. But let us see what this word of perception means in order to really know what it means to be a lover.

marc gafni
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