Shekhinah — Echo of the Absolute

As we have already said, the kabbalists hold that the two world-principles — Attraction and Expansion — are not equivalent. Attractiveness is regarded as a created quality, while Expansiveness is an attribute of the Absolute. At the same time, when the Light of the Absolute enters the Vessel of Creation, the Vessel acquires certain properties of the Light. This phenomenon — the form of the Absolute’s presence in the world — is called Shekhinah (‏שְׁכִינָה‏‎), Heb. “presence; dwelling; abiding.”

This is the “primary inner revelation of the Divine presence,” and it occurs precisely in the lower worlds.

The notion of the Shekhinah arose in Talmudic Judaism, where it roughly (though not entirely) corresponds to the Christian concepts of Sophia and the Holy Spirit.

The Shekhinah is regarded as the source of the created world and the power that sustains it. Through her the Divine light flows, preserving the created world. The image of light is one of the metaphors most frequently associated with the Shekhinah: “as the sun shines on the whole world, so the Shekhinah”. Just as the Moon radiates light reflected from the sun, the Shekhinah receives light from the higher Sefirot and radiates it upon the Earth.

The Shekhinah is the Divine power that normally reveals itself to prophets, although sometimes higher Divine forces may participate in that revelation. In this sense the Shekhinah is simultaneously the “Voice” of the Deity, drawing Creation toward rectification and Perfection, and the “Response” of the worlds to that Call. Accordingly, two aspects are distinguished within the Divine Presence, the Shekhinah — the descending, “calling” aspect, traditionally named the ‘Good’ (Mazal or Mezla), and the ascending, elevating aspect, named the ‘Truth’ (Emet).

Communion with the Shekhinah is also the mystic’s primary aim: to commune with the Divine forces. The term “Shekhinah” applies both to a person capable of perceiving her and to any phenomenon of the spiritual worlds. Thus one says that every phenomenon of the spiritual world has a “body” (the phenomenon itself) and a “soul” — the Shekhinah, the awareness of being God’s creation. According to kabbalistic notions, the original unity of the Absolute was broken at the beginning of Creation, and the masculine aspects of God were separated from the feminine principle, the Shekhinah.

Sometimes the Shekhinah is called the face or the wings of God. The Absolute, considered in terms of space and time as His presence — especially in an earthly context, when He sanctifies a place, a particular object, a person, or an entire people — is revealed as the Shekhinah. The descent of the Shekhinah upon a person and her dwelling among people were sometimes viewed as a division occurring within God Himself. God descends into the world and suffers with it. The book of the Zohar contains assertions that Moses lived while the Shekhinah had descended as if she were a wife and even abandoned his human wife for that reason. The kabbalist Shkatilla even maintained that the Shekhinah manifested on Earth in the guise of Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel.

Fearing accusations of polytheism, medieval Jewish philosophers (notably Maimonides and Judah Halevi) insisted that the Shekhinah does not possess divine essence, but is created by God and serves as intermediary between God and humankind.

Unlike the Talmudic jurists, who usually identified the Shekhinah with the Divine Presence or even with God Himself, the medieval Jewish philosophers sought to avoid anthropomorphism in interpreting the term and strove to show that it did not refer to God Himself or any part of His Essence, but to some independent entity created by God. Thus, according to their explanations, Moses and the prophets communicated not directly with God but with the Shekhinah.

Kabbalists, by contrast, made the concept of the Shekhinah the center of their mystical system. The Shekhinah — the spirit of Malkuth (the Lower Sefirah), the Princess, the Daughter, the Bride, Wisdom and the Word of God — is the tenth and most accessible of all the Sefirot. In this sense she is also a manifestation of the Divine “Wisdom” — Da’at — manifested in the worlds and in created things.

One common interpretation of the Shekhinah holds that she was dethroned by Lilith from her rightful position as Queen and now lives among humans, separated from God. “In the name of the union of the Holy and Blessed One and His Shekhinah” is one of the most popular formulas among kabbalists.

The idea of the Shekhinah’s exile as a result of a cosmic catastrophe and Adam’s fall acquired great importance in Lurianic Kabbalah. Reunification (and the overthrow of Lilith) must be achieved as the result of the Messiah’s activity.

Kabbalistic literature uses numerous and diverse symbols to express different aspects of the Shekhinah’s relation to the other Sefirot and her role as the principal field of battle between the forces of good and evil. The Shekhinah, being closer than the other Sefirot to the created world, is the chief object of satanic intrigues. It is the duty of man and the other Sefirot to protect the Shekhinah from the machinations of the forces of evil.

Christianity adopted a personal understanding of the Shekhinah and, by synthesizing and reworking the concepts of the Shekhinah and Greek Wisdom, developed its own concept of Divine Wisdom — Sophia. It is important to note that the Christian Divine Wisdom is not the same as the Sophia of the Gnostics, since the former is a more synthetic concept and includes both energy (which is close to the concept of the Shekhinah) and, properly speaking, Knowledge (which is analogous to the concept of Da’at or Epinoia). In Christianity, Wisdom in relation to God is His world-ordering will. This notion is close to the eastern concepts of Shakti — the primordial energy that, together with the Great Spirit (Shiva), constitutes the basis and true reality. She is described as an “artist,” who, according to the laws of the divine craft, constructs the world. She is born into the world “from the mouth of the Almighty,” being a direct and immediate offspring of the Absolute: “She is the breath of God’s power and the pure outpouring of the glory of the Almighty.”

A distinctive feature of Sophia is her feminine passivity combined with maternal fecundity, and her profound bond not only with the cosmos but with humanity, for whom she intercedes. If in relation to God Sophia is a passively conceiving womb, “a mirror of God’s glory,” then in relation to the world She is a builder, creating the world as a carpenter or architect assembles a house — an image of an inhabited and ordered world, walled against the boundless spaces of chaos; the house is one of the principal symbols of biblical Wisdom. Thus, in her relation to humanity Sophia is as fundamentally significant as she is in her relation to God.

In the early era of Christianity, the idea of Sophia closely resembled the image of Christ the Logos (the apostle Paul explicitly defines Jesus Christ as “the power of God and the wisdom of God”), and later to the Holy Spirit. Origen describes her as, on the one hand, “a bodiless being of manifold thoughts, embracing the logoi of the cosmic whole,” and on the other hand as “animated and as if alive.” The interpretation of virgin Sophia as a conceiving womb in relation to God led to a subsequent merging of her image with that of the Virgin Mary, whose purity and illumination bring meaning into the created world (equivalent to the coming of the Messiah), thereby imparting to it a certain “Sophian character.”

Thus, the concept of the Absolute’s presence in the world, expressed in the idea of the Shekhinah, reflects the widespread notion of the so-called immanent face of the Absolute, animating Nature. The pagan idea of Nature as the otherness of the Absolute thus finds its rebirth at the heights of monotheistic philosophy. The circle closes, and the Ouroboros bites its tail again.