"Money doesn't interest Eli Reifman anymore. He realized this three years ago, the night his house was broken into. The well-off businessman and his wife at the time returned home to discover that his watch collection had been stolen. A rare collection, one of the most impressive in the country. So valuable, says Reifman, that it could easily pay for a few people to travel around the world in style without any financial worries. At that moment, it dawned on Reifman that a change had occurred within him: He simply didn't care. Not even the slightest twinge over the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not that he couldn't have rebuilt the collection if he wanted to. The appeal just wasn't there anymore.
It's 10:15 on a Friday morning. Bar-Ilan University. A long line of cars crawls toward the Wohl Center parking lot. "Everyone's coming to hear Eli Reifman's lecture on kabbala," explains the driver to my left. Hundreds of people, well-dressed and in good spirits, have come from all over the country: Ashdod, Maccabim, Jerusalem, Mazkeret Batya. Reifman's parents and siblings also attend his talks regularly. In another 15 minutes, they'll all be watching the best show in town, as Reifman likes to call it. He receives no payment for the lectures. The proceeds from the entry fees - NIS 30 per person - are donated to needy families. .....
Reifman first got into kabbala 15 years ago, when he was 23. "I was fascinated by the power and the glory, by the control over one's fate. I was a kid who wanted to be Superman." He went to his business partner (of 18 years now), a religious man named Naftali Shani, and asked him about kabbala. Shani explained that in order to study kabbala one must first be learned in Torah, married and at least 40 years of age, and that anyway, it was forbidden.
"When I heard 'forbidden,'" says Reifman, "that's when I really got interested. I started reading. There are more than 3,000 writings in kabbala. I read about 2,000."
2,000?
"Well, some are only 10 pages long."
In the past two years, he has put together 30 different lectures with numerous quotes from the sources. About 3,000 people come to hear him every week - at Bar-Ilan University, Hebrew University, the Technion and the Interdisciplinary Center. The auditoriums are always full, and he has a waiting list for his upcoming courses. Reifman has also lectured before an audience of hundreds at the United Jewish Communities center in London. "
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