Beyond Time and Space: Love Poems by Jewrotica’s Leon
EM: What sparked your interest in Kabbalah and mysticism (including other religions’ mystical sects)?
I always yearned for more than surface Judaism, or surface anything for that matter. I had been brought up and trained in the world of the intellectual and the world of the physical but I wanted more. I wanted to feel, to be touched, to experience the ‘beyond’. It took many years before I was ready to meet the right teachers who would guide me into the other worlds.
Leon: Kabbalah is the garment of the Jewish mystical tradition, Sufism is the mystical garment of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism have theirs. They are like individual paths up the same mountain to the same peak. They encompass similar language and symbology. They are attempts to describe similar experiences in the upper realms.
EM: What draws you to the divine feminine?
Leon: In Kabbalah the Divine feminine – the Shekhina – is the aspect of the Divine that indwells (shachen) in this world. She is the source of creativity in the human realm, procreativity in nature. She is the cause for the fertility of the earth to bring forth. She is the bridge between ourselves and the upper spheres. So it is not so much that I am ‘drawn to the Divine feminine’, it is the fact that the Divine feminine is all around and I am responding to her call. This is at the core of my poetry even though many of the poems are explicitly about the sexual arousal between lovers, implicitly they are about the arousal of the Divine feminine to conjoin with the Divine masculine in the higher spheres.
EM: Who are your influences – poetic, mystic, Jewish literature, etc.?
Leon: As I wrote in the introduction to Beyond Time and Space, the Song of Songs, Rumi and the other mystical love poets are all heavy influences. To this list I want to add the love poems of e.e. cummings, Pablo Neruda and Ted Hughes which are amazingly erotic but, in my view less spiritual. But to tell you the truth, these poems just flowed through me as miraculously and naturally as making love.
EM: What is the significance of onion soup?
Leon: I love onion soup. I love making onion soup. I love the slow process of cooking the onions, of watching them turn sweet and yielding, of sweating, and releasing their fragrances. I love that moment when my lover tastes her first spoonful and sighs and smiles in delight. It is so much of this world and yet is such a wonderful metaphor for making love.
The same is true of the tree roots that I photographed for the front cover. They are just roots but look how beautiful they are, their curves, and twists and turns, and texture, and interlacing, and hugging, and loving.
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