Many years ago when I was living in a Cave house in Spain as a dedicated solitary on extended retreat, it occurred to me that my contemplative practice needed some sort of hermit community.
In 2006, I decided to form an online community of Jewish Contemplatives and that group was the principal audience of this “Jewish Contemplatives” website. At the same time, Christine Gilbert introduced me to the writings of Professor Paul Fenton on R. Abraham ben HaRambam.
Over the years that followed, I slowly discovered the writings
of his Maimuni decendants and of the group that we now call the "Jewish-Sufis" or “The Mediaeval Egyptian
Hasidim”. I realised that the Jewish-Sufi
movement that R. Abraham led was promoting
the same
kind of solitary contemplative practice
I had been describing in my book “The
Cave of the Heart/
Kuntres Maarat Ha-Lev”—a book which was written in 2005 but which was only
published recently in 2022.
In a nutshell—This Mediaeval Egyptian Jewish group believed
that Khalwa/Hitbodedut was the key
to preparing Israel for the return of prophecy—and the path by which a contemplative might
receive the kind of inspirational gnosis that we might call devekut through Gilui Eliyahu.
Professor Fenton describes Khalwa
when he writes: “the term not only
designates the physical retreat and the ritual technique but also the ensuing
spiritual state, a sort of "evacuation of the physical senses" or
"vacuity of the mind."
It is precisely this state that I was describing in
Kuntres Maarat HaLev.
oooOooo
So here we are in 2025 and once again I am attempting to form a community of Jewish Contemplatives that responds to the call to engage in receptive contemplative prayer..... the call I first made in Kuntres Maarat HaLev.
The first stage of that process was to (somewhat brazenly) found a
new Sufi Tariqa (in 2022) to promote the
renewal and development of the
work begun by the Egyptian
Hasidim. This group is called Tariqa Eliyahu. The
second stage was to form a physical group in my own city of Safed. This
experiment began in the summer of 2024.
I am writing this post with one
very pressing aim.
There are approximately one thousand five-hundred members who have read and supported this Jewish Contemplatives website and its Facebook group for many years.
I would now like to ask you to support our work in Tariqa Eliyahu as well, and to do that in three ways to extend our visibility online:
(1) by joining the Tariqa’s public group on Facebook which you can find HERE
(2) by checking out the Tariqa’s own website which you can find HERE
(3) by remembering us and our mission in your prayers.
May Hashem grant success to the work of our hands
Nachman Davies
Safed
February 5 2025
