About this Event
For millennia, mystics have turned to sacred song and chant as spiritual technology through which the finite body awakens to the Infinite. Kabbalists and Sufis, across the ages, have beckoned us to this threshold: to a human experience of the soul that transcends time and space, to a place of unity where bodies, ideologies, and nation state borders fall away—and only the boundless radiance of love remains. We might call this place the mytsical tavern.
Umer and Ariel will take us into these two, intertweaving mystical traditions -- Umer sharing devotional Sufi music coming from 14th Century Qawwali tradition and Ariel offering original chants from Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Creation), the earliest known Jewish mystical text (with most scholars dating it to about the 2nd century in Iraq or Syria). But according to Jewish legend, the book was written by none other than the biblical Abraham, the forefather of both Judaism and Islam.
In the words of the poet Rumi:
“All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
And I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
But who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this Pr*son for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That’s fine with us. Every morning
We glow and in the evening we glow again.”
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, United States
USD 0.00
