My love
washes her clothes in the water
of my tears
and spreads them out in the
sun of her
beauty. She has no need of
spring-water
- she has my two eyes;
not of the
sun – she has her own
radiance
–Judah Halevi
The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (Penguin Classics)
Judah Halevi (also Yehuda Halevi; Hebrew: יהודה הלוי; c. 1075 – 1141) was a
Spanish Jewish physician, poet and philosopher. He was born in Spain, either in
Toledo or Tudela[1], in 1075[2]
or 1086, and died shortly after arriving in the Land of Israel in 1141.
Halevi is considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets, celebrated both
for his religious and secular poems, many of which appear in present-day
liturgy. His greatest philosophical work was The Kuzari.
GNOSIS is based
not in the understanding of the mind but in the
sensibility of the heart. In its
ancient form, it was concerned with a
radical dualism that envisioned
an alien God who is transcendent to
this universe, over and against
the many gods and goddesses who are believed
to reside in and to exercise a
measure of control over the world we live in. The
transcendent God, also called “Spirit,”
is revealed through fragments of light that
exist in human beings and that
form a bridge between this world and the dwelling
place of the Most High, whose
realm is beyond the cosmos or any part of it
that we are capable of exploring
by rational (scientific) means. Only through
revelation or, to use the
contemporary term, intuition, is it possible for us to gain
access to gnosis. Thus it may be called “inner
wisdom.”
Gnosis speaks through
individuals, to each according to his or her own
nature. Paul’s letter to the
Corinthians (1 Cor. 12:8-10) puts it this way: “To one
is given through the Spirit the
utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance
of knowledge according to the
same Spirit, to another faith by the same
Spirit, to another gifts of
healing by the same Spirit, to another the working of
miracles, to another prophecy, to
another various kinds of tongues, to another
the interpretation of
tongues.”
The hidden river of gnosis is
part of the universal stream of ideas that runs
beneath the surface of human
consciousness. The intent of the ancient writers
as well as of our own
contemporary search for meaning springs from the same
source—namely, the desire to
liberate the sparks of divinity that have been
embedded in the natural world
from its beginning. These glimmer—sometimes
in the wisdom of old crones,
sometimes in the precocious questions of an innocent
child.
–June Singer
A Gnostic Book of Hours: Keys to Inner Wisdom
