Zevi Slavin: ‘To be a mystic is to be human at its most raw’

What’s said in this shiur

The opening of this shiur, in 18Forty’s own words — taken from the captions, so names and Hebrew terms may be approximate.

Zevi Slavin, such a privilege and pleasure to be sitting with you here. We grew up together in Sydney, Australia, crossed paths in Jerusalem, Israel, and you founded Seekers of Unity, an incredible community that learns online about philosophy and different elements of mysticism across traditions. Thank you for being with us. Pleasure to be here with you Benji. So this communal platform is all about mysticism. But what is mysticism? That’s a great question and a challenging question to answer because for every scholar of mysticism there's another definition of mysticism. I've gravitated to two definitions, one more academic and scholarly and one more poetic. The academic one is that mysticism is comprised of three components. It is unitive experiences, unitive theories, and unitive practices. So moments in which we feel that the separation between ourselves and the world around us dissolves, softens, loosens, we feel an intimacy, a presence, a unity with all of being. That's unitive experiences. Unitive theories is trying to make sense of that experience through the tools of human narrative, through mythology, theology, history, philosophy, metaphysics. And then practices, the practices that we enact in order to precipitate those experiences, and also the way that we act in the world knowing what we know and having experienced what we experienced, so the ethics of mysticism are the practices. So experience, theory, and practice. That's a more academic definition. And for a more poetic definition, there's a wonderful scholar of mysticism, Evelyn Underhill. She was an Anglican scholar writing in the early 1900s, and she wrote that

Jump to a moment

1. 0:01Zevi Slavin, such a privilege and pleasure to be sitting with you here. We grew up…
2. 4:50which is maybe a bit of a softer word than God, as the totality of reality,…
3. 9:49masculine and what it means to be feminine from the perspective of the mystics to embody…
4. 15:13of divinity. But it's not a free choice that's arbitrary, it's a free choice that is…
5. 20:13specific family of mysticism. And that's the Hasidic tradition and within that, the Chabad Hasidic tradition.…
6. 25:33in its empowerment of the individual. In so many ways, Hasidism is modernity. From the perspective…
7. 30:17not true. The Vilna Gaon was one of the greatest kabbalists of his generation, bar none.…
8. 35:06agitation because that's what gives birth to the pearl deep, deep under water. So we're agitated…
9. 40:25So can you give an example of where this has come through as a relationship? Yeah,…
10. 45:21I think this very seamlessly ties into the themes that we've been discussing here. There's a…

Every second of this shiur plays inside FilteredTube — a filtered YouTube library where each video was reviewed against one written standard before it could appear. No ads, no comments, no autoplay into anything unapproved.