Jeliel
The Love that Generates
When does love cease to beget life and become the desire to possess the other?
In a garden in bloom at daybreak, where the water runs between the beds without holding anything back, Eisenheim sits before Jeliel, the second of the seventy-two Angels of the Kabbalah, guardian of the love that begets and of the wisdom of the affections. He does not come to ask for love, nor for company, nor for anyone’s heart. He comes to ask one single thing, and behind it he brings every affection he has ever held too tightly: where, in me, did love cease to beget life and begin to want to possess?
Out of that encounter is born a long contemplation on the virtue that men most celebrate and least understand — love — and on the four shadows that imitate it to perfection. Possession, which is born the instant the other ceases to be an end and becomes a means, and which loves with desperation and mistakes desperation for greatness. Jealousy, which is possession afraid, insatiable because it asks the impossible — the guarantee of a free heart — and which always produces the loss it fears. Sterile love, which remains wholly in the feeling and never crosses over into the act, taking its own emotion for the harvest. And desire disguised as love, the most universal of all, which wants the other as a good instead of wanting the good of the other, and which is at bottom an adoration that mistook its altar.
Jeliel answers as a luminous intelligence, servant of ELOHIM: it speaks only the truth, refuses all adoration, and returns every honour to the Source. It teaches that love does not fabricate, it reveals — it does not make of the other a work of its own, it makes the other more fully himself; that only he loves well who knows himself loved by God, because only he who is full can give without charging; and that to love without possessing is not to love less, but the only form of love the other can inhabit without suffocating. Because the love that begets life again is not a greater flame nor a more intense feeling — it is the same tenderness, with an open hand.
A literary, symbolic and initiatory work. There is here no evocation, rite, seal, operative psalm or formula — no answer of the angel is to be read as a method to be applied. The angel is not to be worshipped nor evoked: reverence belongs to God, and the angel is a messenger, not a destination. A faithful mirror, for whoever wishes to learn to love in truth.
Book II of the collection “Shemhamphorash — Interviews with the Seventy-Two Angels of the Kabbalah”.
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