96 — ’TIS BETTER TO BLEED
In a published dialogue between a well-known Buddhist teacher and me (Marc), the teacher challenged me persistently on this issue of desire. “After all,” he said, “if you give up the desire for life, then death will not be horrifying and painful.”
“No,” I responded. “If I give up the desire for life, I will already be dead.” Since the debate took place in a kitchen in Jerusalem, I picked up a knife. “If I took this knife and cut my arm, would it bleed?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Now, what if, with the same knife, I cut my hair? No blood. Why? Because the cells in my hair are dead. And dead cells do not bleed.”
Part of the Eros of longing is to experience pain as well as joy. That is why biblical mystics viewed the inability to grieve and weep as a sign of great spiritual illness.
“From the day the temple was destroyed, all the gates are closed; the gates of tears are not closed.” So reads a fifth-century Hebrew wisdom text. The Eros of tears, an inevitable corollary of longing and desire, is the way back to the Eros of the temple, to the inside, and to a full sense of your own aliveness. Nachman of Bratslav, an erotic master of the inside, writes, “A human being is like an onion: strip away layer after layer, and all that remains are the tears.” To reach the inner recesses of a thing, one must be willing to weep.
THE YEARNING FORCE OF BEING
The mystical tradition tells of time portals, each capable of accessing different regions of our interior castle. The mystical masters understood that the temple of Eros was built not in space but in time. The Sabbath — a temple in time — is patterned in its spiritual blueprint after the temple in Jerusalem. The axis mundi of the Sabbath, its Holy of Holies, takes place near dusk as the Sabbath ebbs away into sunset. In the tradition, this is the time of tears. Not crying in response to personal sorrow but tears that well up from the yearning force of being. This was when the disciples would gather around the master’s table and sing songs of longing, often well into the night. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner called this “liminal time,” the time between the cracks when all the gates are open. Here is one of the tradition’s tales of Eros:
It is near dusk as the Sabbath ebbs away. The disciples are gathered. The master Levi Isaac of Berditchev, holiest teacher, rises to speak. He wants to explain to his disciples not the wonder of creation or the mystery of the chariot, but merely that God is the inside of the inside, the erotic life force of the universe, and that therefore every person’s life matters.
He begins his discourse with an elegant teaching from the Talmud demonstrating the reality of God. “Do you understand?” he queries.
“No,” they answer . . . heads hanging.
He then takes them on a dance of light, intricately weaving the mysteries of the Zohar, which illuminate God’s presence in the world. “Do you understand?” he asks again.
“No,” they answer . . . heads low.
In desperation he begins to tell stories, tales revealing great mysteries. “Now do you understand?” he asks.
“No,” they answer, heads still hanging.
So he becomes quiet and begins to sing a melody of yearning, of longing, of pining. For a few moments he sings alone, then one and then another joins in, until they become one voice. Yearning. Pining. Longing. Levi Isaac did not need to ask again. They raised their heads. They understood.
— An excerpt from the book “A Return to Eros” by Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid
