Everyday Mystics Episode 2: The Real Thing
What if our deepest longing for love is also a longing for God? From a childhood encounter with the mysterious to an unexpected romance, Ayalon Eliach discovers that the search for human connection and the search for the Divine may not be two different journeys after all. In the second episode of Everyday Mystics, a story of loss, yearning, and second chances asks what it means to stop settling for something less than “The Real Thing.”
SHOW NOTES
[1] A little about Ayalon: Inspired by the Baal Shem Tov, Ayalon believes that individual, communal, and universal transformation all come through learning to unify seeming contradictions without erasing their differences—to embody ultimate oneness within real multiplicity, and connection in the midst of fragmentation.
At different points in his life, Ayalon was drawn to what seemed like mutually exclusive options: soul or body, intimacy or boundaries, particularism or universalism, tradition or progress, God or science, compassion or justice.
His search for ways to navigate these tensions has taken him through Orthodox yeshivot, Yale, Harvard Law School, the non-denominational Hebrew College Rabbinical School, the Shalom Hartman Institute, and more than 40 countries. But his deepest learning has come from putting inherited wisdom, especially Hasidic thought, into give-and-take conversation with everyday experience, particularly relationships and raising children. Through that conversation, he learned to see these apparent either/ors as both/ands.
At the Lippman Kanfer Foundation For Living Torah, where he serves as “Chief Idea Officer” , he brings this approach to his thought partnership, research, writing, and teaching, helping others access and apply Jewish wisdom in ways that transform themselves, their communities, and the larger world.
[2] We mention the Ezekiel's vision, with the line: וְהַחַיּ֖וֹת רָצ֣וֹא וָשׁ֑וֹב כְּמַרְאֵ֖ה הַבָּזָֽק
“the angels ran and returned like a flash of lightning”, the citation is: Ezekiel 1:14
[3] Hinge vs. Bumble: Ayalon mentions two different dating apps. Hinge anyone can comment or reach out to one another, but it needs to be about something specific in the prospective dates profile. Bumble requires the female candidate to reach out to the opposite gender first, and the match expires after 24 hours.
[4] Interested in learning more about Rebbe Nachman of Bretslov? This is a great article that talks through who he was and an overview on his writings and theories, here is a poetic connection between Ezekiel and the concept, and, he is best known for his creative moral stories, this is a cute animated version of one of his famous parables.
[5] We mention a line in the biblical book of Genesis. עַל־כֵּן֙ יַֽעֲזׇב־אִ֔ישׁ אֶת־אָבִ֖יו וְאֶת־אִמּ֑וֹ וְדָבַ֣ק בְּאִשְׁתּ֔וֹ וְהָי֖וּ לְבָשָׂ֥ר אֶחָֽד׃ “A person leaves their mother and father, cleaves to their partner, and the two become one flesh. Leaving and cleaving.” The citation is: Genesis 2:24
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Miriam: There’s an ancient Jewish idea that human intimacy can tell us something about Divine intimacy. Both in rabbinic and Kabbalistic teachings, the concept of mutual yearning, is often likened to gu’elah, a form of mystical redemption. In fact, the 16th century mystical work, the Zohar, instructs that the holy connection between lovers is so sacred, that it both activates and mirrors the flow of the Divine energies, specifically between the transcendent element of the Divine and the immanent element of the Divine, the Shechinah.
Searching for a kindred spirit that connects to your core, is not just a romanticized dream relegated to teenage girls who dot their i’s with little hearts. The search, finding, connection, and loss, is a sacred pursuit of spiritual consequence. Rebbe Nachman of Bretslov wrote an almost pathological amount about ratz v’shov, the run and return, like in Ezekiel’s vision where
וְהַחַיּ֖וֹת רָצ֣וֹא וָשׁ֑וֹב כְּמַרְאֵ֖ה הַבָּזָֽק “the angels ran and returned like a flash of lightning” we as humans, do this as a psychic rhythm. We run towards the ethereal, to God, and then we return with embodied practice. Channeling our highest moments, our passions, to support us in our lowest moments of deep yearning.
We are taught at a very young age that we must search to belong to someone, something, some purpose. That our longing to be known, to love and be loved, echoes an even deeper longing between humanity and the Divine.
For Ayalon, that idea isn’t just theological. It’s autobiographical. Long before he had language for his yearning, Ayalon was a little kid in Manhattan who wanted desperately to seek out a Shabbat angel, the presence of God, in an unlikely place. At roughly the same age, he asked his mom for help with a girl he had a crush on. For most of his life, Ayalon thought those were two different stories. This is the story of how they became one.
Welcome to Everyday Mystics, where we believe that the story of Moses awakening to his call through a burning bush that could not be consumed, is not just a one of a kind, once upon a time story, but rather a map for our own lives. Each of us has a story or stories of untold wonder that break and shape the humans we become. We call these people, everyday mystics. We tell stories of Jewish people who stumble across burning bushes and come away seeing Judaism differently. I’m Miriam Terlinchamp, and these are stories of the moments when the everyday becomes sacred, the familiar becomes mysterious, and Judaism becomes beautifully unbound.
When Ayalon was a kid, his bedroom was a closet. Not metaphorically. His parents, Ayalon, and his three siblings lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They'd carved the place up into as many rooms as they could. Ayalon's room was a large closet that had a door, which led to the fire escape. And in that door was a crack. Every Friday night, after his mother lit the Shabbat candles, Ayalon would go into that little room, close the door, and wait.
Ayalon: And there was this crack on the paint of the door that looked like something could fit through it. And not thinking, yes, I was thinking it, but feeling that every Friday at that time, the Shabbat angel would come through that door to greet me.
Miriam: Ayalon was maybe five or six years old. He didn't have a theology or specific language for what was happening. He just had the feeling that somewhere in the ordinary architecture of his life, a closet, a fire escape, a crack in some paint, there might be an opening. Something could come through.
Ayalon: That moment was true in so many other times of my life, not necessarily standing by a fireplace door, but of seeking connection with God through different moments and really different places and different forms of embodiment in some way, of trying to find the places where I could encounter on a visceral, emotional level God in in this world.
Miriam: But there was another longing developing at almost exactly the same time. This one was less mystical. There was this girl in his class…
Ayalon: I was really around the same age, maybe five or six, and I remember there was this girl in my class that I had a crush on. I mean, I was six years old. I don't even know what that meant at that time. And I asked my mom if I could give her a piece of jewelry. I think I thought that that was what you do if you like someone. I'm not sure where I got that idea from. I don't think I ever gave her the jewelry, but the reason it stands out is that from such a young age I remember really wanting to be in a relationship.
Miriam: A Shabbat angel coming through a crack in the door. A gift for a six-year-old crush. For most of Ayalon's life, those belonged to two different categories. One was about God. The other was about love. But they were both forms of deep yearning.
Ayalon: I know I've had yearning for connection to God and for connection to other people, particularly a romantic partner, from as long as I can remember. But one, I didn't see the connection between them. I didn't see that they were facets of the same thing, that my relationship, my romantic relationship is a fractal, is a part of my relationship with God.
Miriam: Ayalon really did want romantic love. His parents divorced when he was seven. Ayalon had already been married once but, in 2020, just a few weeks after his own divorce finalized, Ayalon did something he now admits was probably premature. He downloaded the dating app, Hinge.
Ayalon: So the year was 2020. I had just gotten divorced a few weeks earlier, and I was on the dating apps way too early after being fresh out of a divorce and being very raw. And I connected with this woman who I thought was absolutely beautiful and whose profile was just so far. It stood out so much more than any other profile I had come across, like hands down.
Miriam: Her name was Elisheva. One of the prompts on her profile asked where you might find her on an average Wednesday night. Ayalon doesn't remember the exact wording of her answer. But it was something like—
Ayalon: Deep in medieval like deep in texts of medieval Jewish mysticism or a 15-year-old's astrology blog. And I was like, wow, this woman, I gotta meet her.
Miriam: So they met. They went to a bookshop. They got ice cream. They grabbed something to eat. One stop turned into another, and another, because neither of them wanted the conversation to end.
Ayalon: And it was amazing. And it just felt so alive, so flowing.
Miriam: At the end of the night, Ayalon dropped Elisheva off at her apartment. And then he did two things. First, for reasons he still cannot fully explain, Ayalon blasts the Bruno Mars song “Marry You.”
Song clip: Marry You
Very John Cusack “Say Anything” of him. Second, he called his mother and said…
Ayalon: Wow, I just had this amazing first date and she has two kids. I'm not from her first marriage, I'm not sure what that means.
Miriam: Remember: this is a man who had just been through the trauma of divorce, everything was still fresh. So when his mother told him to settle down, it was reasonable advice. Just be cool. Take your time, Ayalon. He breathed. He slowed down. He listened. Then the world shut down due to the COVID epidemic. Ayalon and Elisheva texted occasionally, but it had been just one magical date, and bigger concerns were now on their minds. The communication faded. And nothing came of that date.
Ayalon: There were different moments when we were exchanging text messages at different times that we each were kind of hoping in some way, maybe this will something will come of this in s in some way. But looking back especially, it's so clear to both of us that we were both so unhealed from our previous marriages that we simply couldn't come together in the way we needed to at those times.
Miriam: During the second winter of COVID, Ayalon went to live and work remotely on a small island in Mexico. Away from New York. away from the scenery of his loss. Away from the life he'd assumed he was supposed to be living. And there, away from so much, something about Ayalon’s longing changed. It didn't disappear. It became more precise.
Ayalon: For the first time in my life I felt that if I don't meet the most amazing person in the world, I would much rather not be in a relationship. And that had not been how I'd felt for most of my life.
Miriam: Ayalon is careful about this point. He doesn't believe we become enlightened by learning not to need other people. Actually, he believes almost the opposite.
Ayalon: I think we need to think we're here for a relationship. So the idea that we don't need a relationship is not true.
Miriam: The longing was just as intense. But now, it had come into focus.
Ayalon: The contours and the texture of my desire and my longing became sharper and clearer. And what it was I was yearning for, what it was I was hungry for became more visible to me. And once I had a taste, not that I had experienced yet, but once I knew where my desire, where my yearning, where my longing was pointing, I didn't want a fake second. I didn't want a second best. I didn't want something that approximated it. I wanted the real thing 'cause everything else felt fake and I would rather sit there in my yearning because even the yearning for it made it taste better and made clear that the other stuff was just not the real thing.
Miriam: And then, two and a half years after first trying to date, Ayalon was actually ready, and he downloaded a new dating app, Bumble. Among the thousands of people dating in New York City, a familiar face appeared. Elisheva. Again. They matched. Again.
Ayalon: And when I am on Bumble, the woman has to message first. At least it was that way then. I don't know if they've since changed the alg the way the app works. But she messaged me and she said, Hey, do you remember me?
Miriam: He did. They joke now about the algorithmic gods bringing them back together. Ayalon has another interpretation.
Ayalon: What it really felt like was that it was God working God's way through the algorithm to bring us together in a way that really defied logic.
Miriam: They scheduled what they now call their "second first date." Ayalon remembers walking down the block in Brooklyn towards the bar where they'd agreed to meet. And there she was, sitting outside, feet up on another chair, reading her phone. She looked up. And smiled.
Ayalon: I just thought she had such a gorgeous smile and it was something I saw in her pictures on her profile and it's something I remembered from the first time we met, but it was such a full smile. I I felt like it covered her whole face in the most beautiful way.
Miriam: Ayalon calls it radiance. At the time, it was simply something he felt in his body. Only later did he find the language to describe what he thought he was experiencing.
Ayalon: There was something about her smile. And something about her face and something about her energy that I felt on a nervous system level, on a soul level, on an embodied level, that yes, was represented by the smile and the features of it and all of those things. But that only scratches the surface of whatever it awakened in me.
Miriam: This time, the timing was different. They fell in love quickly. And a few months later, they reached a threshold. Elisheva had two sons. If this relationship was going to continue to grow, Ayalon needed to meet them. So on a Shabbat morning in Brooklyn, he went to Elisheva's apartment. The door cracked open.
Ayalon: So I walked through the door and the older boy right away started grilling me and asking me questions and trying to figure out who I was, and he was nine, turning ten, and he's brilliant. He is beyond smart.
Miriam: Ayalon doesn't remember the exact questions, and he refuses to invent them. But he remembers their seriousness.
Ayalon: There was something in the questions and the interrogation and the seriousness with which he was asking. That felt like love.
Miriam: Meanwhile, the younger boy had taken a different approach.
Ayalon: And then the younger boy was hiding underneath the dining room table and showing me how he could hang and swing from the table and showing me what he was able to do.
Miriam: One boy grilling him. The other hanging from the furniture. And somehow, Ayalon recognized both. He was a child of divorce too. He knew what it was to wonder about the new adult standing in your parent's home.
Ayalon: What was in the room both from the interrogation and from the hiding and the showing off that it was this dance of Hey, who are you? Can you handle our messy parts? Can you handle our show off put parts? Can you handle all of this?
Miriam: They went to the park for a picnic. A few hours turned into the entire day. Eventually they returned to the apartment and made Havdalah together. The sacred ritual of separating Shabbat from the rest of the week, from sacred to every day. And this relationship Ayalon thought he'd been searching for since he was six years old grew to encompass a new level of wholeness and love. Not just a woman. A family.There's a line in Genesis that Ayalon thinks about differently now.
עַל־כֵּן֙ יַֽעֲזׇב־אִ֔ישׁ אֶת־אָבִ֖יו וְאֶת־אִמּ֑וֹ וְדָבַ֣ק בְּאִשְׁתּ֔וֹ וְהָי֖וּ לְבָשָׂ֥ר אֶחָֽד׃
A person leaves their mother and father, cleaves to their partner, and the two become one flesh. Leaving and cleaving. Ratz v’Shov. For Ayalon, it's more than an explanation of how families are formed. It's a map of intimacy.
Ayalon: The experience of loving one person as the partner, the being with which I construct my life and the ability to commit to each other in this never ending project of learning the next layer of growing together, of discovering each other, of building together, of repairing together, of healing together. The depth of that experience is so unlike any other relationship I have experienced at any other time. That I can't even begin to put it in words.
Miriam: A little less than a year after Ayalon first walked through the door and met Elisheva's sons, they were all together on a beach. It was their wedding day. The chuppah stood in the sand. Ayalon walked down the aisle with his mother. He wore a kittel, a white garment traditionally worn on Yom Kippur and, in some communities, at weddings. It evokes both burial shrouds and rebirth. He stood under the chuppah and waited. The music began.
Song clip: Wedding song from Ayalon’s wedding
Ayalon: The song that we have selected for the boys to walk down starts playing and my siblings and Elishheva's brother are singing the words to the song.
Miriam: The words come from a prayer traditionally associated with lighting of Shabbat candles. A prayer for children and grandchildren. For wisdom. For love of God. For lives that bring light into the world. And then Ayalon saw the boys.
Ayalon: And they start singing, and I see the boys walking down who I'd met a little less than a year earlier. And at that point, when I saw them walking down and looked at them in that place of the beach and feeling surrounded by that love and looking at them as they smiled and walked down the aisle. There was almost no moment of what does this lead to, even though it's a song about the future of raising children and grandchildren, because that was the moment.
Miriam: That was the moment. Not a promise that someday everything would come together. Not yearning for something somewhere else. The boys were walking towards him. He was standing beneath the chuppah. The ocean was behind him. And then Elisheva began walking down the aisle.
Ayalon: And then following that, Ellie Sheville walked down. And when she walked down, I saw her smile. And it was that same radiant smile that I had seen on the first date. And it was a sunny day, but it lit up everything.
Miriam: Ayalon remembers crying. He remembers the salt water from his tears reaching his mouth. He remembers the white kittel wrapped around him. And he remembers the feeling of being held… by the beach, by his family, and by God. For years, Ayalon thought of the desire for God and the desire for another person as separate longings. One belonged to Judaism, to God. The other belonged to romance. But his life with Elisheva and their children changed that.
Ayalon: The more I've connected to her, the more we've deepened our relationship, the more that relationship and who she is has helped me experience God and that she is my biggest and one of my biggest together with our our kids pathways to experiencing relationship with God and with with that divine energy in this world.
Miriam: Maybe this is what Ayalon had been reaching toward in that closet on the Upper West Side. The crack in the door. The Shabbat angel. The six-year-old boy wanting to give someone a gift. The man swiping through dating apps. The woman whose smile seemed to contain something larger than itself. The boys asking, in their own ways: Who are you? Can you handle all of this? Ayalon has a word from Hasidic thought for part of what happened to him along the way: bitul. It can be translated as nullification or cancellation, although he doesn't particularly like either word. For him, it means loosening the grip of the ego. Letting go of the attachments that tell us exactly who we have to be and what our lives have to look like. Not erasing the self, rather making the self available.
Ayalon: The more I was able to really not hang on to the attachments that I thought were so important to defining myself, the more I think I became open to God and to the mystery unfolding through me.
Miriam: That's the strange thing about yearning. It can feel like evidence of absence. A sign that the thing we want isn't really here. That all this magic isn’t real, we’ve made it up. But Ayalon has come to believe yearning itself may be a form of relationship. That the longing we feel for another person, for intimacy, for God, for the world to reach back toward us, isn't a distraction from spiritual life. It might be the very place spiritual life begins.
Ayalon: I really fundamentally believe that God yearns for that relationship with an even deeper pathos and feeling than what I yearn for because I'm just an echo of that deeper yearning that is so much more vast than my own.
Miriam: A crack in the door. A smile across a Brooklyn sidewalk. Two boys walking down an aisle. And the possibility that all along, Ayalon’s yearning for the divine was itself a response to the divine yearning for him.
Music Clip: Everyday Mystics theme music
Miriam: Big thanks to Ayalon for sharing his story. Ayalon Eliach, is the chief ideas officer at Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah. Thank you to our generous sponsors, Barbara and Mathew Loonin for making Everyday Mystics possible. Everyday Mystics is a production of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future, and part of the family of podcasts of Judaism Unbound, hosted by me, Miriam Terlinchamp, produced by Joey Taylor, sound engineering by Justin Newton, original podcast music by Ric Hordinski and art by Katie Kaestner. Check the show notes for more information on Ayalon and, as always, we'd love to hear from you. Please email us at hello@judaismunbound.com if you have an Everyday Mystics story that you’d like to share.
