Editorial notes: This is one of Shai’s longest essays, written in seven instalments, six within a period of just ten days in 2016 (from 13th October to 23rd October 2016) and the seventh, a year later, on August 31 2017. Reflecting on Shai’s complete collection of writings, this can be seen, perhaps, as the zenith and culmination of his intellectual journey. As he was writing this essay he was...
Editorial notes: These reflections are about the quest to find underlying enduring meaning in the transitory experiences and events that make up our lives and constitute our world. It suggests that there is no such underlying enduring meaning, at least none accessible to us. But there can be crucial turning points in which we are surprised by experiences that transcend what we thought were the...
Editorial notes: The title suggests that a person who is unable to speak (such as a seeker for truth or reality or God who cannot articulate just what is being sought nor where it resides), nevertheless emits a deep prayer that “echoes” and thus can be heard in some sense. The text of this essay is that prayer. “Part 1” is unclear. “Part 2” is more comprehensible. “The Book of the Spirit Ladder”...
Editorial notes: Shai opens this essay on how life and beauty (symbolised in the term “lilacs”) can be produced out of what looks at first like mere dead materiality (“dead soil”) with what looks like a claim to have had a mystical experience of God. He terms that experience as “How I solved the theocratic paradox in trans-noumenal space” – “trans-noumenal space” refers to the infinite...
Editorial notes: This is a meditation on the Shema, and the nature of love. It is pointed out that, as Midrashic commentators say, the reference in the Shema to loving God with all one’s hearts (plural) signifies both with the good and the bad impulse, etc., bringing the evil urge into conformity with the good urge and directed to God. Within the fleshly and worldly is the spiritual and heavenly...
Editorial notes: The worldly focus of Torah teaches that daily life on earth, with all its trivialities, trials and difficulties, is the realm that is given to us to sanctify and raise up. So, the path to the sublime leads through things we mistakenly take to be ordinary and even obstacles. Suffering really can elevate one to deeper wisdom. Each situation is actually a gateway to God, when seen...
Editorial notes: This essay offers a meditation on the meaning of the festivals, and especially of course Shavuot. Since Shai merely alludes in passing to Rashi’s interpretations, Midrashic accounts, and Kabbalistic teachings, any fuller explanation even of some of his allusions must be longer than his account [EZ*]. *Many thanks to Dr. Evan Zuesse for providing the commentary for this essay...
Editorial notes: This meditation is too self-coded and allusive, playing with letters and word hints in a distinctive fashion, for it to be fully comprehensible. But it seems to be referring to the self’s ability to either create its own world and project itself onto others as a self-centered form of communication (Lot is the example, as if the house in which he dwelt included in his mind those...
Editorial notes: Reflections about drug (and love) experiences, in which emotions and feelings are analysed (“Hacking”) that are intensely felt but too changing and formless (as in “chariot mysticism”) to give reliable solid information; “to be studied but not believed; or Hacking the chariot of fire.” The reflections are deeply introspective. They relate to the levels and qualities of the...
Editorial notes: This commentary on the Shema makes reference to the ten sephirot, the underlying spiritual modalities structuring the divine image or “Tree of Life” on which the universe is designed according to the Kabbalah. These sephirotic powers are merely implicit and potential in the highest realm of infinity that is the source of all lower worlds, but are given more and more material form...
