Aiden Pink writes Jan. 21, 2018:
Marc Gafni, the rabbi-turned-New Age guru who has been accused of sexually assaulting minors, appeared on the “Dr. Phil” television show on Friday to defend himself.
Gafni was largely unrepentant when pressed by host Phil McGraw on past allegations, including that he coerced and had sexual relations with minors. Gafni claimed that his actions were consensual and blown out of proportion, and that he had taken polygraph tests that proved his innocence.
Gafni claimed that he was subject to an “ongoing smear campaign” that was a “form of name rape.”
One of his alleged victims, Judy Mitzner, repeated her allegations on the show. She said that when she was 16 and a frequent visitor to Gafni’s house, the then-24-year-old rabbi touched her under her nightgown despite her protestations. According to her, Gafni then said that “this never happened and would never happen again.” But two days later, she said, Gafni appeared again wearing only a robe, eventually resulting in her touching him naked.
Gafni admitted to having “brief sexual contact that didn’t involve intercourse” with Mitzner, but claimed in his defense that he had taken a polygraph test that purported to show that she had asked her to sleep with him.
McGraw also brought up another of Gafni’s alleged victims, Sara Kabakov, who first shared her story in the Forward in 2016. Kabakov claimed that Gafni repeatedly molested her when she was 13 and he was 19.
According to her, Gafni, who would sometimes sleep in her brother’s room, “started coming into my room after I had fallen asleep, and waking me up. I remember clearly that when he tried to touch me, I pushed him away, repeatedly. I remember saying ‘No!’ over and over again. No one had talked to me about sexual abuse, but I remember knowing intuitively, with every cell of my body, that this was wrong.”
Gafni responded to McGraw that Kabakov’s claims where “absolutely and categorically not true.”
“I was madly in love with Sara,” Gafni said. “There was never any sense whatsoever..that there was any sense of coercion.”
“She was a child, Marc. What do you mean, you were in love with her?” McGraw responded. “You were a 19-year-old man and you’re saying you were in love with a 13-year-old child. Does that not fit in your ear wrong? That’s a felony!”
McGraw noted that more than 100 rabbis signed a petition urging organizations to “cut all financial and institutional ties” with Gafni. He responded that he was the subject of a smear campaign.
Gafni has recently worked as a tantric sex guru and New Age sage whose work was supported by the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods until reports about the scandals surrounding him resurfaced.
In December 2015 the New York Times runs a long profile of a rising spiritual teacher trailed by a troubled past. Marc Gafni (b. 1960) holds a doctorate from Oxford, a foreword from a famous philosopher, a shelf of award-winning books, and a movement that calls his teaching a path to enlightenment. The story recounts that two women have accused him of abusing them as teenagers in the 1980s, one of them a girl of thirteen when it began. Gafni answers in the press. She was, he says, “14 going on 35,” and he never forced her. The sentence carries a cosmology. Follow that cosmology to its root and you watch a man build a defense against death out of an accusation of rape and name the result love.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that man lives pinned between two terrors. The first is the terror of the body, the animal fact of decay, the knowledge that the creature who writes books and wins awards is also meat that will stop. The second is the terror of insignificance, the dread of counting for nothing, of leaving the earth as if you had never crossed it. Culture answers both at once. It hands every man a hero system, a set of roles and sacred values through which he can earn the feeling that his life has cosmic weight, that he will not simply rot and vanish. The hero system is how a mortal animal arranges to feel eternal. Becker called the project of authoring that eternal self the causa sui, the wish to be one’s own father, to give birth to oneself and so escape the parents, the body, the grave.
Gafni inherits both terrors. He is born in 1960 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Holocaust survivors. The death that hangs over the home is not the soft death of old age in America. It is the industrial death of the camps, the machinery built to subtract the Jew from the earth and leave no name. A boy raised in that shadow learns early that erasure is real and total, that a people can be unmade. The significance terror arrives with the same inheritance. To be a nobody, in such a home, is to side with the erasure. The cure is to count, to be marked, to leave something that the fire cannot reach.
The boy named Winiarz, Polish for vintner, becomes the rabbi named Gafni, from the Hebrew for the vine. The renaming is the causa sui in miniature. He fathers himself by language, plants himself in the soil of Israel, takes a name that grows. He gathers credentials the way another man gathers money. The doctorate from Oxford. The thesis on Mordechai Leiner of Izbica (1801-1854), the Hasidic master who taught that the deepest law lives below the written law, in the desire of the heart, and that a man who reaches that depth answers to God and not to the rule. Gafni reads his own warrant into the Izbicer. He takes Orthodox ordination from Shlomo Riskin (b. 1940). He takes Jewish Renewal ordination from Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924-2014). He builds Bayit Hadash in Jaffa. He hosts Tahat Gafno on Israeli television, trades scripture lines with a comedian, becomes a face the country knows. Each layer is another hedge against the grave. A man with this many names and titles and cameras cannot be subtracted. He has made himself too large to erase.
The doctrine forms around the same need. Gafni writes that the sexual is the supreme spiritual master. He builds a system he calls Eros, then outrageous love, then the Unique Self. The books carry the program. The Mystery of Love. Your Unique Self. Radical Kabbalah. A Return to Eros. The argument runs that religion lost its first fire, that the erotic current beneath all things is the divine current, and that the man who lives from that current lives larger than law, larger than the small self, larger than death. Becker would recognize the move at once. Sex, in Becker’s reading, is where the animal terror and the immortality wish meet, because the body that couples is the body that dies, and so men have always tried to turn the act that proves their creatureliness into the act that transcends it. Gafni does not bolt this onto Judaism from outside. He grows it from the Izbica root he chose at Oxford. The desire of the heart outranks the written rule. The man at the erotic depth answers to God alone. The doctrine and the warrant are one plant.
The teaching that makes Gafni feel eternal is the same teaching that reclassifies his crimes as sacraments. This is not lust dressed in theology after the fact. The theology is the form the lust takes. Eros defeats death and excuses the predation in a single stroke, because in the system there is no predation, only the current, only the master, only love arriving in its outrageous and lawless way. The girl is not a victim in this cosmology. She is a station on the path. That is why he can sit on a television set thirty years later and say she was 14 going on 35. Inside his hero system the sentence is doctrine.
This is the subtraction story, and Gafni tells two versions. The first is the one he speaks aloud. He is the man being erased. A smear campaign, run by rivals, strips him of ordination, of the center in Jaffa, of the television show, of the patrons, of the name. He posts a polygraph on his website to prove he is the one wronged. He writes for a men’s group about false facts that destroy lives. He casts every accuser as an instrument of his subtraction, every disavowal as another hand reaching to unmake him. For a man raised on erasure, persecution is the most familiar story available, and it has the further use of making him the hero of it. The second version he cannot speak, because his cosmology forbids him to see it. It is the girl the system removes from view. The hero system works by subtraction. It takes the thirteen-year-old out of the frame and leaves only the current, the love, the path. The two stories share the word. He fears his own erasure and performs the erasure of another, and the doctrine lets him feel righteous in both.
The persecution story finds its largest stage in 2018, on the set of Dr. Phil. He walks into a hero system not his own. Daytime television in America runs on a therapeutic creed, confession and accountability, the host as judge and healer, the studio audience as jury. Phil McGraw (b. 1950) holds that room the way Gafni once held the room in Jaffa. Gafni comes to perform his innocence inside a cosmology built to extract guilt.
Judy Mitzner tells her story first. She was sixteen, a girl who came often to the rabbi’s house, and he was twenty-four and her youth leader. She says he reached under her nightgown while she told him no, that he swore it would never happen again, that two days later he stood in her doorway in a robe. Gafni grants the contact and shrinks it to a phrase, brief, no intercourse, then reaches for the relic he carries everywhere, a polygraph he says proves the girl wanted him.
Then McGraw raises Sara Kabakov, thirteen when it began, and Gafni does the one thing his cosmology requires. He does not retreat to silence or to sorrow. He professes love. “I was madly in love with Sara,” he says, and insists there was never coercion.
McGraw will not let the word stand. She was a child, he says. You were a nineteen-year-old man saying you loved a thirteen-year-old child. That is a felony.
The collision is the scene. McGraw speaks the language of the civil sphere, where an adult and a child cannot love across that gap because the law and the body forbid it, where the only true name for the act is the crime. Gafni speaks the language of Eros, where the current runs above the law and love arrives where it will. Two hero systems meet under the lights and cannot translate. To McGraw, love between a grown man and a child is a contradiction that should make the ear flinch. To Gafni it is doctrine, the same doctrine that sells the books and fills the retreats. He cannot set it down on the set, because setting it down would not cost him an argument. It would cost him the self that does not die.
So he reaches past the accusers for the largest frame he has. The campaign against him, he says, is a smear, a form of name rape. The phrase tells you everything about the hero system under pressure. Charged with the rape of children, he claims the word rape for himself, for the wound done to his name. The name is the immortality project. To him the threat to the name is the violence in the room.
The center of all this is a single sacred value, and the value is Eros. Hold the word still and watch how it splits across the hero systems that surround Gafni, because the same syllable means a different thing in each, and means what it means only inside the world that holds it.
Take the Trappist in the abbey at dawn. For him eros is the longing that climbs toward God and burns away on the way up. He has given the body to silence and the bell. The current Gafni preaches is real to him, and he calls it desire, and he treats it as the rocket fuel of prayer, to be spent in adoration and never in the bed. Eros, for the monk, is the thing you offer back unconsumed. The man who acts on it has not reached the depth. He has fallen off the ladder.
Take the kallah teacher in a Jerusalem apartment, the woman who prepares Orthodox brides for marriage. Eros for her is holy and bounded together, sealed inside the laws of family purity, the count of days, the immersion, the return. The current runs strong in her teaching, stronger than the secular world guesses, but it runs through a channel of law, and the law is what makes it sacred rather than wild. Tell her that the man at the erotic depth answers to God and not to the rule and she will answer that the rule is how you reach God, that the banks are what make the river. Gafni’s reading of the Izbicer strikes her ear as the oldest heresy, the one that frees the appetite by calling it the soul.
Take the trauma clinician in a strip-mall office, the woman who sees, across the week, the grown children of men like Gafni. Eros for her is attachment, the bond that forms between bodies and minds, and its first law is the boundary. A thirteen-year-old cannot consent to a man, and the harm done is measurable in the nervous system years later, in the flinch, the dissociation, the broken trust that follows a child into middle age. Where Gafni hears a current she hears a wound. The same word names, for the teacher, a sacrament, and for the clinician, an injury with a clinical course.
Take the longevity founder in a glass office south of San Francisco, the man pouring a fortune into the literal defeat of death, the cold plunges, the blood panels, the supplements timed to the minute. Eros for him is not a path to eternity. It is an appetite to be optimized like the others, a lever for performance and bonding, a variable. He wants to beat death in the body, not in the symbol. He finds Gafni’s metaphysics quaint. He is solving the real problem. To him the rabbi is selling a story to people who lack the resources to buy the actual cure. Becker would tell both men they are doing the same thing in different currencies, that the founder’s clinic and the rabbi’s eros are two hero systems aimed at one terror, and that the founder’s literalism is its own vital lie.
Take the widow at the cemetery on the anniversary, the woman whose husband of forty years is under the stone. Eros for her is memory and fidelity, the love that does not end because the body ended, the proof she carries that a person can outlast death in another person’s keeping. She has no patience for outrageous love. Her love is the quiet kind that stays. If she heard Gafni’s doctrine she might think it the philosophy of a man who has never lost anyone and so has never learned what love is for.
And take the woman who was the girl. For her the word names the thing done to her at thirteen by a youth leader twice her age, the thing he later called a mutual expression of teenage love, the thing she has spent her life refusing to let him rename. When she reads that the sexual is the supreme spiritual master she reads the sentence of the man who used a child and built a religion on the right to do it. Her eros is the truth the whole apparatus exists to bury. She is the subtraction made flesh, the figure the cosmology removes so the path can stay clean. When she speaks she puts herself back in the frame, and that is why the system treats her speech as an attack. It is an attack. It attacks the erasure.
One word. Seven worlds. Each speaker certain that his eros is the true one, and each correct inside the hero system that gives the word its sense. Becker’s point is not that the values are merely relative. It is that men kill and die for these meanings, that the meanings feel like reality to the men who hold them, and that the holding is how each man arranges to feel that his life counts against the dark.
The transference runs in two directions. Becker described how men make heroes of the leaders who seem to have solved the death problem, how the disciple hands the guru the role of cosmic parent and feels safe inside the borrowed certainty. Gafni’s students do this. They give him the parent role, and in return he gives them the feeling that they are awakening, that their lives are touched by something that outlasts them. But the patrons do it too, and they have more to lose. The famous philosopher who writes the foreword has staked his own immortality project on a grand theory of everything, and Gafni is the charismatic proof that the theory produces saints. The grocery magnate who chairs the board has staked his on the idea that capitalism can carry a conscience, and Gafni supplies the spiritual depth the brand requires. When the accusations come, the philosopher takes a leave and returns to call Gafni a gifted teacher, a real spiritual leader. The magnate stands by him and says that loyalty and the presumption of innocence are values he holds. They are not only defending a friend. They are defending the structures that hold their own death at bay. To believe the worst about their friend is to crack the system that lets all of them feel eternal. So the subtraction becomes a group project. The crowd around the guru cannot afford to believe the accusations, because the truth would cost each of them his own arrangement against the dark. Only when the cost of staying flips, when the petitions and the lawsuits and the front pages make Gafni a liability to the immortality projects rather than an asset, do the patrons begin to peel away. The conscience arrives on the schedule of self-interest.
Gafni once wrote the truest sentence of his life (according to his critics, to his defenders the sentence was the ill-judged cry for help in a nasty situation). After he left Israel and the center closed he sent his congregation a letter and said that in these regards he was sick, that he needed help. The hero system could not hold the admission. A man who is sick is a creature, mortal and broken, the very thing the whole apparatus exists to deny. So the admission is withdrawn. The persecution story returns. The polygraph goes up. The new books come out. The movement reassembles under a new name, then another. Each rebuilding is the causa sui starting over, the man fathering himself again from the wreckage.
Without the withdrawn admission, he may not have produced the work he did over the past two decades and helped the people he helped. A man can be poison to one soul and a balm to another. The same man. Different results. We decide who we bring into our lives and who we hold close and defend.
Three coordinates close this.
The first concerns the doctrine and the deeds. They will never separate, because they were never two things. Anyone who hopes Gafni might keep the teaching and renounce the conduct misreads the plant. The eros that promises to defeat death is the same eros that could license harm, in addition to joy. A reckoning that leaves the metaphysics standing changes nothing, because the metaphysics is the engine. Watch whether any future rehabilitation touches the doctrine, or only the public relations around it. The doctrine is where the danger and salvation live.
The second concerns the patrons. Gafni’s hero system cannot run alone. It needs disciples to crown him and famous names to certify him, and it works on them by offering each a shortcut around his own death. The figure to watch is the accomplished man who needs the guru to be real, because his own eternity is wired to the guru’s. When such a man defends the indefensible and speaks of loyalty and presumption, he might be protecting a friend, and he might be protecting himself. The two motives wear the same words.
The third concerns the witness. One apparatus is built to glorify her and another to subtract her. Every time the woman who was the girl puts herself back in the frame and declines the rename, she does to the hero system the one thing it cannot survive, which is to be seen from outside. The cosmology calls this an attack and treats her as the aggressor. She is the aggressor, against the erasure, and the erasure is the crime. Watch where the culture places its sympathy when the next charismatic teacher offers a current that runs above the law. The placement tells you whose terror the culture serves.
From the perspective of 2026, Summer of ’42 is a movie about a heinous rape. It could not be made today. In 1971, it was a beautiful coming of age story.
The Charged Room: Marc Gafni and the Manufacture of Charisma
Begin in the room, because the room does the work. A weeknight in Jaffa near the turn of the century. Forty people sit on cushions in a hall called Bayit Hadash, the new home, the lights are low, and someone has a hand drum. They have come for the rabbi. When Marc Gafni (b. 1960) walks in he does not lecture. He pulls the attention of the room onto one point, himself, and then he hands it back to the people as feeling. The drum finds a pulse. Voices climb and drop together. An hour in, the bodies in the hall breathe near the same rhythm, and a man who came in tired leaves at midnight lit up, sure of things, larger than he was when he arrived. He will come back next week for more of that. He has tasted something the office and the marriage no longer give him.
Randall Collins (b. 1941) built a sociology to explain that room. He took it from Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), who watched tribal assemblies and saw that when bodies gather, fix on one thing, and share a mood, they throw off a heat he called collective effervescence, and they walk away believing in gods. Collins stripped the tribal dress and found the same engine running in a courtroom, on a sales floor, in a bedroom, at a rally. He named the parts. Bodies in one place. A barrier that marks who belongs and who does not. A focus of attention that everyone shares and everyone knows they share. A common mood that rises as the bodies fall into rhythm. When the parts lock, the gathering produces four things. It binds the group. It loads certain objects with the sacred, a flag, a name, a face. It arms the members with anger toward anyone who profanes those objects. And it pours into each body what Collins calls emotional energy, the confidence and warmth and drive that a good ritual leaves in a man and a bad one drains out of him.
Emotional energy is the currency of Collins’s world. Men move through the day from encounter to encounter, and they steer toward the ones that fill them and away from the ones that empty them. Each man carries his charge and his sacred symbols into the next room and spends them there. This is the chain in interaction ritual chains. A life is a sequence of rooms, and a man is rich or poor in the one currency that moves him.
Max Weber (1864-1920) called charisma a gift of grace, an extraordinary quality that sets a man apart and makes others follow. Collins moved the gift out of the man. Charisma is not a thing stored inside the leader. It is a position in a ritual. The charismatic is the man who stands at the focal point of high-energy gatherings often enough that the energy of the crowd collects on him and the crowd reads the glow as his own. He is an energy star, and the star is made by the assembly, recharged each time the room fills. Take away the room and the light goes out. Here is the first thing Collins tells us about Gafni. His charisma is a product, not a gift. He is good at building rooms.
Read his life as a sequence of rooms he learned to charge. As a young man he runs Jewish youth clubs, the small assemblies where a leader practices holding a circle of attention. He takes the pulpit in Boca Raton, then a settlement in the West Bank, then the hall in Jaffa. The Israeli television show, Tahat Gafno, gives him a thinner kind of room. Collins held that bodily presence is the strong form and the broadcast a weak one, because the screen cannot return the crowd’s energy to itself the way a hall can. Gafni used the weak room to feed the strong one. The face the country saw on Channel 2 drew strangers to Jaffa, where the real heat lived. Television was the doorway. The hall was the furnace.
The retreat is the hottest room he builds. A weekend or a week, a group sealed from the outside world, sleep and food and silence set by the schedule, the focus held on the teacher hour after hour with no competing pull. The retreat makes more emotional energy per hour than the weekly hall, because the barrier is total and the rhythm never breaks. By the time the integral movement takes him in, the famous philosopher writing the foreword and the famous CEO chairing the board, Gafni has spent thirty years learning how to run the assembly that leaves a roomful of accomplished adults feeling they have touched the source of their own lives. The sacred object loaded by all that focus is Gafni, or the doctrine with his face on it, the Eros, the Unique Self. The crowd believes the charge belongs to him. Collins says the crowd made it and hung it on him.
Now the private room. Collins treats sexual contact as an interaction ritual of its own, two bodies in the tightest co-presence there is, the mutual focus, a rhythm that builds and breaks, and a charge of solidarity and symbol left behind. The trouble according to the dominant ethos is that the ritual runs on a current the male leader controls (the men in these stories might say that the leader was the one with the most sexual power and the greatest freedom of choice, and that was not him). Collins separated power rituals from status rituals. In a power ritual the one who gives the orders takes on energy and the one who takes them loses it. Gafni’s encounters are power rituals dressed as communion and your view on who has the power in these rituals depends on where you stand. You might argue he is the sole source of the energy that the disciple has come to need, and in the sealed room he is the giver of every order. The disciple arrives already drained toward dependence by months of the public rooms, already taught that the rabbi is the door to the only feeling that lifts her. At that peak the capacity to refuse runs lowest, because refusal means exile from the source of emotional life. This is where Collins locates the abuse, at the top of the energy, where the follower has the least power to say no. That’s the only socially acceptable analysis. There might be more valid and more challenging ones that don’t separate teachers and disciples into the powerful and the powerless.
With the women of Bayit Hadash and the student at the integral retreat, that is the dominant narrative, the leader converting accumulated ritual power into private extraction. With the children it is not a ritual between persons at all, and the frame, used with honesty, refuses to pretend otherwise. Sara Kabakov was thirteen and Judy Mitzner sixteen. A child (and who is classified as a child and who is classified as an adult with agency depends upon time and place, the same act is a crime in one state and legal in another state) cannot enter a ritual as an equal partner who shares in the solidarity it throws off. There is one body drawing energy from another body that has no standing to leave. Gafni’s doctrine relabels this as the peak shared ritual, the outrageous love, the madly-in-love he still claimed on national television. The relabeling is the crime laundered into a sacrament. Collins might say the encounter produced solidarity for one man and injury for the child, and the talk of mutual love is the energy star describing the room as if the drained party had volunteered her own draining.
The career runs as a chain because Gafni produces energy, excitement and accusation everywhere he goes and the dominant narrative of what happens comes from those with the most power. A scandal does to an assembly what a profanation does to a sacred object. The charge collapses. The hall in Jaffa empties within days when the accusations land. The energy that filled it does not transfer to the accused. It curdles into the moral anger Collins predicts, the righteous fury of a group that has watched its sacred object defiled, turned now against the man who turns out to be the defiler. So Gafni does the only thing his trade allows. He moves. Orthodox Israel to the integral world in California, the integral world to a tantric school, each relocation a search for a fresh room full of people who need him, a crowd that can still load him with the sacred. The doctorate, the books, the awards, the foreword travel with him as portable symbols he carries into the next assembly to seed the charge. The chain is not a figure of speech in his case. It is the sequence of rooms he keeps finding as the old ones turn on him.
A reasonable man asks why a serious philosopher takes a ninety-day leave over the accusations and then returns to call Gafni a gifted teacher and a real spiritual leader. A reasonable man asks why a billionaire grocer stands by him and speaks of loyalty and the presumption of innocence while protesters mass outside his stores. The answer is not that these men weighed the evidence and found it wanting. The answer is that they have sat in the room. The room gave them a charge that no document can match, a feeling of access to depth and significance wired to the face of the man at the focal point. Evidence is propositional. It arrives as words on a page and competes for belief. Emotional energy arrives in the body and competes for nothing, because it is already installed. When the philosopher reads the accusations he is reading against the memory of the gathering, and the gathering wins, because the gathering is what made the sacred object he is now asked to throw away. To drop Gafni is to call the charge in his own body a fraud. Few men will do that on the strength of a newspaper.
The disavowals come, in the end, and Collins explains their timing too. They arrive when a rival assembly grows hotter than Gafni’s. The Times article, the petition signed by more than a hundred rabbis, the protests at the grocery store, the public letter from the former students, these are interaction rituals rewarding power, a counter-crowd building its own charge and its own sacred object, the protection of the abused. When that counter-assembly runs hotter than the rooms Gafni can still fill, standing near him starts to drain a man rather than fill him. The famous names that endorsed him read the shift in the only currency they track, and they leave, and they tell themselves it was conscience. Some of it is. The schedule is emotional energy.
What to watch is the next room. Collins predicts that a charismatic survives exactly as long as he can build fresh high-energy assemblies faster than scandal can poison the old ones. The man holds his standing not by winning the argument about his past, which he cannot win, but by finding the room where the argument has not yet arrived and lighting it up before the story and the power catches him. The whole of his future runs along that edge, the race between the next crowd and the reach of power. The teaching about Eros is real to the people in the room because the room is real and the charge is real and the body does not lie about what it felt. The harm is also real to some, and it lives in the same place the charge does, at the top of the ritual, in the sealed room, where there are no cameras and no objective record.
