UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
BY MICHAEL SCHULSON JANUARY 5, 2016
Over the holidays, the New York Times ran a punishing profile of Marc Gafni, an ex-rabbi who reinvented himself as a New Age spiritual leader.
A founder of the Center for Integral Wisdom and organizer of the Success 3.0 Summit, Gafni has built a New Age brand around two trademark concepts—Unique Self and Outrageous Love—which, like much of “Integral Theory,” seems to draw from psychotherapy, Eastern and Western religious traditions, and philosophy. Or as his website’s biography puts it, “[Gafni] teaches on the cutting edge of philosophy in the West, helping to evolve a new ‘dharma,’ or meta-theory of Integral meaning that is helping to re-shape key pivoting points in consciousness and culture.”
There’s also reason to believe that Gafni is a sexual predator. At the Times, religion journalist Mark Oppenheimer (a friend and mentor of mine) lays out the allegations in detail, which include assault, statutory rape, emotional abuse, and exploitation of the counselor-student power dynamic. “My personal opinion is that Marc Gafni has a pathology,” Rabbi David Ingber, a former associate of Gafni’s, told me.
Because Gafni writes books about crying and makes statements about “love intelligence and love beauty,” it’s easy to read his story as a straightforward tale of hypocrisy: a spiritual leader pledges universal love, even as he assaults girls and manipulates his followers. Cue the disgust.
That’s not an inaccurate read, but what’s so striking here is that none of the allegations are new. Scandal has followed Gafni for years. The most serious allegation—repeated, nonconsensual sexual contact with a middle school-aged girl, when Gafni was 19 and 20—happened years before he became a New Age leader. (Gafni has said that the encounters were consensual, and that the girl was “14 going on 35”).
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