on the third day before the Revelation at Sinai, the people Israel were told my Moses to prepare for their encounter with the divine. The mountain was off limits. They were instructed to do their laundry. And, Moses added, ‘Do not touch a woman’ – which is commonly understood as ‘no sex’. Moses is delivering God’s instructions here, but he added the no sex rule – it was not in the original divine plan. Why? commentators differ in how they read this, but the basic bottom line is that in order to really access this sacred sense of one with the creator – the urge to merge with another human being is to be turned off, sublimated, channeled into the greater merge. In the Judaic vocabulary ‘knoweldge’ – ‘da’at’ is the word used for intercourse, as well as the word used to describe the mystical move towards meeting the maker – encountering the mystery that is God. Abstinence, in this case, is a device to attain greater knowledge of intimacy.
So on this day 47 I will follow Moses’ instructions. I want to not only not have sex these next three days, which shouldn’t really be a problem as I’m on the road, and super busy and don’t have lovers lined up, sadly, in each city on the West Coast – I want to not even think about it. I want to check myself when I do and sublimate the thought, the urge, the desire – acknowledge it for what it is a- a deep wanting to be one with other, one with the totality of being, a wanting for the pleasures of intimacy – and breath it in, and savor the sensation, and save it.
This 50 day count to live the lover has taken me up and down the roller coaster of contemplation about what love is and what i’d want it to be, and the physical desires have mingled with lofty concepts and all is love. Now, almost there, its time for the fine-focus within. Today is Hod of Malchut – the Awe within the majestic sense of being in the here and now, knowing, intimately, that the love making has begun and never ended and will be again and that love is all there is, in its many many forms.
The sabbath ends in San Francisco and I will celebrate with friends at the Reboot Dawn event, and learn, and count with all of them,publicly, just before midnight, from 1-47, and breath and pause and be, briefly, as one. Hopefully, some truths will be revealed tonight, in perfectly private intimate detail. 3 to go.
