Marc Gafni

Early career in Israel In 1988, Winiarz first worked as a rabbi in Boca Raton, Florida. and Hebraicized his name. Once in Israel, Mordechai Gafni served as rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Tzofim. He received Orthodox semikhah in 2004 from Rabbi Shlomo Riskin From 1999 to 2002, Gafni also hosted , a television program broadcast on Israel's Channel 2.

Gafni's teachings during this period have been described as integral or world spirituality, incorporating traditional religious studies with contemporary themes, aimed at spirituality for people who do not identify with one specific religion. Gafni described himself and his students as "dual citizens" of both their native traditional religion and the broader themes of "world spirituality". His 2003 book, Mystery of Love, advocated for a new set of teachings centered around eros, sexuality, and relationships.

Allegations of sexual assault In 2004, Gafni was accused by two women of sexual assaulting them during the 1980s when they were teenagers. In 2004, he acknowledged a nine-month relationship with a 14-year-old girl when he was 19. As a result of these allegations, Gafni returned his rabbinical ordination from Rabbi Shlomo Riskin to spare his former teacher "any further embarrassment" after Riskin expressed he wanted to revoke Gafni's ordination on the grounds that Gafni's theology had extended "beyond the bounds of Orthodoxy". Because of the allegations, and because Gafni fled the country to avoid prosecution, which closed within days. The Bayit Hadash co-founders and other prominent leaders expressed that they felt betrayed by how deeply Gafni had misled them as well as regret for having supported him. His rabbinical ordination by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was revoked, The Wisdom Council, , included members such as Gafni, Wilber, Tony Robbins, Warren Farrell, Lori Galperin, Sally Kempton. The co-chair of Center for World Spirituality was Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.

Gafni was a Scholar in Residence at the Integral Institute and the Director of the Integral Spiritual Experience but was asked to leave after allegations of sexual involvement with a student were raised. Integral Life, one of Gafni's promoters, deleted his contributions from its website and announced that it was distancing itself from him.

The board of directors of the Center for World Spirituality, issued a statement of "unequivocal support" for Gafni. Ken Wilber, after taking "a 90-day leave of absence", published a formal statement saying that he will "rejoin the Wisdom Council of The Center for World Spirituality", describing Gafni as a "gifted teacher" and a "genuine spiritual leader".

Radical Kabbalah and Your Unique Self Gafni wrote Radical Kabbalah, a two-volume work published by Integral Publishers in 2012. Zak Stein wrote a review of Radical Kabbalah in Integral Review calling it "a work that comes along once in a generation".

In 2012, Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment was published by Integral Publishers, with a foreword written by Ken Wilber, It won a 2012 USA Best Book Awards in Spirituality: General category.

Further allegations and repercussions In January 2016, Judy Mitzner said that she was one of two teenage girls whom Gafni allegedly molested in New York City in 1986. She reiterated those assertions on the Dr. Phil show of January 19, 2018, in which Gafni appeared. Mitzner was 16 and Gafni was 24 and he was her Jewish Youth Leader at the time.

Also in January 2016, a woman wrote that she was married to Gafni from 1999 to 2004 in an anonymous opinion piece in The Times of Israel. The article was in response to a New York Times article about Gafni the preceding week.

Within two weeks of the publication of the piece in The Times of Israel, Sara Kabakov revealed in The Forward that she was the other formerly unnamed teenage girl who had been abused by Gafni in the early 1980s, beginning when she was thirteen years old. Gafni commented, "she was 14 going on 35, and I never forced her." Afterwards, Kabakov responded to Gafni's comments and reiterated her assertion that the relationship was not consensual.

A number of new-age spiritual leaders, who had previously worked with and endorsed Gafni, publicly withdrew their support and wrote a public statement disavowing him, including Deepak Chopra, Joan Borysenko, Andrew Harvey, Jean Houston, and Stephen Dinan. Also in 2016, triggered in part by an article in the New York Times, as well as by a petition from over 100 rabbis denouncing Gafni, a group of Gafni's close former students published a public letter disavowing him as a teacher, accusing him of multiple forms of abuse, deceptions, and betrayals, and explaining why they consider him to be dangerous.

Protesters also targeted Whole Foods due to the involvement of its CEO, John Mackey, with Gafni. Gafni wrote: "This group of protestors, led by many of my competing adversaries, is using Mackey as a platform to continue their smear campaign designed to destroy my reputation and career." John Mackey rejected the demands that he should distance himself from Gafni with the following statement: "Loyalty and the presumption of innocence are important values to me, so I will not join those who are condemning him. I am, at once, presuming Marc's innocence and firmly standing against what he's accused of." In April 2016 it was learned that John Mackey had stepped down, as he had completed his role as chairman of the Center for Integral Wisdom board.

In February 2017, the National Coalition for Men published an article by Gafni in which he defended himself, calling the allegations "a long-standing smear campaign".

A Return to Eros In 2017, Gafni published A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive, co-authored with Kristina Kincaid.

Gafni expresses that "the sexual is the ultimate Spiritual Master" and has written "I was convinced from an early age that religion had lost what I believed must have been its original erotic vitality. I knew that the sexual, if liberated and ethically expressed, must somehow hold the mystery of return to the much larger-than-sexual Eros."

Zak Stein wrote an academic review of A Return to Eros, published under the title "Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern 'Return' to a Metaphysics of Eros" in the journal Integral Review. Stein writes: "At the heart of A Return to Eros is a new metaphysical narrative about love and sex." He has three children from his first marriages. in 1998. They divorced in August 2004. Gafni has been married for many years to his writing and teaching partner, Dr. Kristina Kincaid.

Publications