Erasing the Name

by David Chaim Smith

“Perception can be offered as a prayer, and the sense of transcendent perceptibility can be received as its sacrament. In this exchange En Sof is the main consideration, as its potency is expressed through you and as you. The named identity is what is erased. This portal to nowhere is love-in-itself. Loving as an action dissolves there. What remains is free.” “Erasing the Name” introduces the reader to a mode of devotional contemplation that invites the mind into immersive surrender within an all-consuming love of the divine mystery. The work builds esoteric knowledge (daat) through a maze of diagrams and poetic passages so what is gathered can be released within what Kabbalists call En Sof (the infinite). This opens a doorway that allows discursive consciousness to dissolve into the sublime expanse that fills and surrounds all phenomena.

108 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2025

About the author

David Chaim Smith was born in 1964 in Queens, New York. His early career was as a visual artist throughout the 1980s. In 1990 he began an immersion into the root sources of Alchemy and the Hermetic and Hebrew traditions of the Kabbalah. In 1996 he abandoned visual art for a total dedication to spiritual practice, from which came a unique blend of practical mysticism and creative innovation. This blend coalesced while working with an obscure thirteenth-century text called The Fountain of Wisdom, which he mapped out diagrammatically in notebooks during his ten-year hiatus from visual art. The resulting symbol vocabulary served as the basis for his 2006 return to art, generating the content for several books. He currently lives in the suburbs of New York City with his wife, Rachel.