Shekhinah

Shekhinah, from a root meaning to dwell, names God's indwelling presence. The noun itself is rabbinic rather than biblical, but it gathers up biblical language: the glory that fills the tabernacle so that Moses cannot enter (Exodus 40:34-35) and the Temple so that the priests cannot stand to minister (1 Kings 8:10-11), and the promise "I will dwell among the children of Israel and be their God" (Exodus 29:45).

Rabbinic literature uses the term to speak of where God's presence rests and where it withdraws. It rests where ten gather for prayer, where judges judge honestly, where a person sits and studies Torah, and between a husband and wife at peace; it departs where there is bloodshed, idolatry or slander. Its most consequential development is the teaching that the Shekhinah accompanies Israel into exile and will return with them, "wherever they were exiled, the Shekhinah went with them" (Megillah 29a), which makes the divine presence a fellow-sufferer rather than a spectator of history.

In Kabbalah the term shifts decisively. Shekhinah becomes the tenth and lowest sefirah, Malkhut, and is consistently figured in feminine terms: the daughter, the bride, the Community of Israel, the moon that has no light of its own but receives. The exile of the Shekhinah is now the separation of this sefirah from the sixth, Tiferet, and the purpose of religious action becomes their reunion, stated directly in the Lurianic and Hasidic formula recited before performing a commandment, "for the sake of the union of the Holy One, blessed be He, and his Shekhinah."

That feminine figuration is contested in current discussion. Jewish feminist theologians have taken up the Shekhinah as a feminine image of the divine already present in the tradition's own vocabulary rather than imported into it. Others have cautioned that the kabbalistic Shekhinah is receptive, dependent and lowest in a hierarchical scheme, so that recovering it uncritically may carry the hierarchy along with it. Historians add a further caution: rabbinic usage looks in most cases like a way of speaking about God's presence rather than a distinct entity, and reading the later kabbalistic content back into the rabbinic texts is anachronistic.

The kabbalistic identification of the Shekhinah with the feminine, described in the main entry, produced one of the most widely practiced pieces of Jewish liturgy: the Friday evening service of Kabbalat Shabbat, welcoming the Sabbath.

Sixteenth-century Safed kabbalists, elaborating older rabbinic language that already spoke of the Sabbath as a queen and a bride, developed the practice of going out, sometimes literally into the fields surrounding the town, to welcome the incoming Sabbath as one would welcome a bride, identifying the Sabbath itself with the indwelling Shekhinah entering into closer union with the six weekday sefirot, chiefly Tiferet, that the kabbalistic scheme associates with the divine masculine. The custom's central hymn, Lecha Dodi, "Come, my beloved," composed by the Safed kabbalist Shlomo Alkabetz, addresses the Sabbath directly in the language of a bridegroom summoning his bride, and its refrain instructs the congregation to go out and greet her; many congregations still turn physically to face the synagogue entrance while singing it.

The imagery works on more than one level at once. On the level of the individual and the community, it figures the Sabbath as a beloved guest whose arrival changes the character of the day. On the kabbalistic level it enacts, weekly, in miniature, the larger reunion of the Shekhinah with the higher sefirot that Lurianic theology treats as the ultimate goal of all religious action, so that a widely practiced congregational custom, largely detached in most worshippers' minds from its technical kabbalistic background, carries that background inside it every week regardless of whether the person singing is aware of it.