The Shekhinah

        

Where can we find a powerful image of the Divine feminine within Jewish sources? One name for Her which has been with us for centuries is the Shekhinah, the “dweller within.” In ancient times, the Shekhinah was a Talmudic word for the glory of God that rested on the mishkan (the mishkan was the Tabernacle, God’s sacred dwelling space in the wilderness (see Exodus 26-28). The Israelites saw the “glory of God” (kavod adonai) as tangible, powerful, and sacred, a pillar of fire or cloud guiding the Israelites through the wilderness.

According to the Talmud, the Shekhinah, the Indwelling, is the Divine that resides within the life of the world, dwelling on earth with the Jewish people and going into exile with them when they are exiled. While the traditional Jewish image of the transcendent God is male, in the kabbalah, that image has been accompanied by the feminine image of the Shekhinah—the inner glory of existence.

In the Zohar (a medieval mystical work), there are ten facets or sefirot of the Divine, and the Shekhinah (also known as malchut) is the tenth and final one, closest to the created world. She is a mystical embodiment of the feminine, earth-centered presence of God, and was also called the bride of God, the Sabbath, the Torah, the moon, the earth, and the apple orchard. Mysticism depicts the Shekhinah as female, but she can be both female and male. Two biblical figures who symbolize her are Rachel (wife of Jacob and mother of the Israelite nation) and David (shepherd, psalmist, and king of Israel). The Shekhinah rests on those who study, pray, visit the sick, welcome the new moon, welcome guests, give charity to the poor, dwell in the harvest booth called the sukkah, or perform other sacred activities.

The Shekhinah embodies joy, yet she is also a symbol of shared suffering and empathy, not only with a nation’s exile, but with all the hurts of the world. Mystics believe that in messianic times She will be reunited with her heavenly partner and that they will become one. Many Jewish poets of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have reclaimed her as a powerful feminine image of God.
Yet the Shekhinah as She is portrayed by Jewish sources is not a panacea for all that ails the way we look at God. Until recently kabbalists have considered Her the lowest and most inactive part of the Godhead, the last and least in a series of ten steps of creation.

The Shekhinah embodies traditional feminine traits like passivity and nurturing, and at the same time she is associated with death and darkness. These images, taken uncritically, can be damaging to women and to the male conception of the feminine. To discover the Shekhinah as the full embodiment of the feminine Divine, we must transform her from a stereotype into a living divinity who speaks to us in many different kinds of voices: mother and daughter, old and young, light and dark, compassion and anger, revelation and mystery.

We can rediscover the Shekhinah throughout Jewish text, throughout history, and throughout the natural world. God in the Bible is sometimes mother eagle and sometimes Holy Wisdom crying out in the streets. In the Talmud and midrash, the Divine is sometimes portrayed as a nursing mother or as the (female) twin of Israel. In the Zohar, there are multiple feminine God-images, such as Binah (understanding), also known as Immah Ilaah (the higher mother), who is called the womb and palace of creation, the fountain of understanding, the well of souls. Then there is Lilith, a mythic figure whom the tradition demonized but who for some is the embodiment of sexuality and freedom.

We also cannot forget that the images and stories of the Shekhinah are connected to traditions of the Divine feminine around the world, from the ancient goddess Inanna, who is described as a warrior for her people just as the Shekhinah is in the Zohar; to the Virgin Mary, who is an intercessor in matters of Divine judgment like the Shekhinah; to Kuan Yin of Asia, who embodies compassion for those who suffer, just as the Shekhinah does. Jews have been afraid to acknowledge the Shekhinah’s relationship to goddesses and goddess-like images because of the traditional Jewish prohibition against idolatry. Yet to deny our connection to the Divine feminine as it is expressed and loved by others is to deny our connection to the human, and feminine, religious experience, and to render invisible some of the sources of our own spirituality.

Today feminist theologians and earth-centered Jews have reclaimed the Shekhinah as a unified deity in her own right, dwelling within living things and the earth, seeking peace and promoting human connection, speaking through women as well as men, working through the neglected and invisible, promoting change and healing brokenness. She is the Goddess- an image of the forces of life and the mysteries of creation.

The Shekhinah, for some, is a reminder that there is no division between creation and divinity. The Shekhinah allows us to break through the exclusively male and hierarchical visions of God and imagine a God that changes as we change, that evokes nature as well as the supernatural. When we speak to the immanent Shekhinah, She speaks not to us, but through us, and through all the varied facets of the world.

Jill Hammer 

Rabbi, feminist and seeker.

At the Heart of the Labyrinth

We begin our journey into the labyrinth. There will be times when it seems as if we are merely retracing our steps, and other times when it is as if we are actually moving farther away from the centre and back towards the outer rim. But always, and in spite of what our senses appear at times to be telling us, we move inexorably closer and ever closer to the centre and what we might discover there.

Unlike walking a maze, which has a variety of alternative paths to follow, and which therefore so easily can lead us into disorienting confusion, a labyrinth, in spite of its many convolutions, has only one path which we may reliably and trustingly follow all the way to the centre. So in spite of its maze-like appearance it is still possible to trace a path from the entrance to the very centre in one continuous line, even though we at times must necessarily double back upon ourselves. The labyrinth is therefore also promising the one who walks it that the centre always will be reached, no matter how many twists and turns in the path might be involved.

So there is a clear difference between a labyrinth and a maze, even though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. The confusion which exists between the terms is perhaps understandable, given the story of the most famous labyrinth in history, the Labyrinth of Ancient Crete housing the dreaded Minotaur which, because of its many alternative passageways, was actually a maze!

This difference between a labyrinth and a maze asks a question of us: the question as to why, when the winding path of the labyrinth is so ultimately predictable in its destination, would we spend our time walking it at all? This question becomes even more pointed when we consider that various existing labyrinths, either carved in stone on a column in Lucca Cathedral in Italy, or inset into a floor in tiles as in the cathedral of Chartres, or even crafted into a landscape with stones or furrows of earth, have no actual ‘walls’ as such, but can readily be viewed by us in their totality.

These true labyrinths have no need for a confusing puzzle. The point is to follow the path itself, to walk or trace out with our fingertips that continuous line leading to the labyrinth’s mysterious heart. It is the sense of gathering energy, of being on the way to something, which is what matters. And just as the form of the Grail is said to change according to who is seeking it, what that ‘something’ is which lies at the centre of each labyrinth will vary according to who is tracing out the path.

For some the winding path will represent a journey which draws them ever inwards to a spiritual truth. For others it will serve as a renewal of vital earth energies, as a reinvigorating of the flow of subtle currents beneath their rhythmic steps. And for others it might express a desire to regain a lost contact, both with their ancient forebears who constructed the labyrinth and with the earth itself. So for our ancestors – and for us – to trace out our steps to the labyrinth’s centre may well bring the prospect of true peace and equanimity when we reach its heart.    

And When My Joy Was Born

And when my Joy was born I held it in my arms and stood on the house-top shouting: "Come ye, my neighbors, come and see, for Joy this day is born unto me. Come and behold the gladsome thing that laugheth on the sun."
But none of my neighbors came to look upon my Joy, and great was my astonishment.

And every day for seven moons I proclaimed my Joy from the house-top - and yet no one heeded me. And my Joy and I were alone, unsought and unvisited.

Then my Joy grew pale and weary because no other heart but mine held its loveliness and no other lips kissed its lips.
Then my Joy died of isolation.

And now I only remember my dead Joy and remembering my dead Sorrow.

But memory is an Autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more.

*

Kahlil Gibran

From: His Parables and Poems, 1918

Painting by Odilon Redon

Strength

In the old decks of cards known as the Tarot we come across a picture of a woman prising open the jaws of a shaggily-maned lion. In some decks the woman is alternatively shown tearing down the great columns of a building, and these two images – usually the one with the lion – still persist in decks which are produced today. The card is called ‘Strength’, and the woman certainly would need to be strong to accomplish either of these feats. What is consistent across the many Tarot decks in circulation is that the character is always a woman, and this woman always appears to be calm in her situation, accomplishing her feat of strength with little apparent effort.

The subject of Strength originally was one of the four Cardinal Virtues: those four vital qualities which it was considered essential to possess if we are to lead a virtuous life. The other three were Justice, Temperance (which we now would describe as ‘moderation’) and Prudence, and their inclusion in these old decks suggested that they were there partly for reasons of moral instruction.

But this idea of the quality of strength being expressed as physical strength, as we know so well from our own lives, is only part of the story. Casually opening the jaws of an obliging lion can seem like a minor feat when we are called upon to exert other kinds of strength which in their own ways are considerably more demanding of us than exerting mere physical strength. These other strengths can be the strength needed to cope when faced with some injustice, or the strength to shoulder personal loss, or the strength, both mental and physical, which we need to fight some form of illness or injury which might even be life-threatening in nature, or simply the strength which is needed to carry on when every circumstance seems to be against us.

Our inner strength might also be called upon when we need to cope with racial or other prejudices, or with restrictions, perhaps caused by social customs or religious practices, which forbid us to be who we truly are. We might even have to live our entire lives in such a situation, coping with the pressure of pretending to be someone other than our true selves, and with the inner strength needed in such situations going forever unrecognized and unacknowledged. In a situation in which discovery would mean being cut out of our own community, or even in the most extreme cases, actually risking losing our life, reserves of inner strength are necessary and even essential to carry us through our day-to-day existence.

All of these various kinds of strengths are strengths which we need to cope with one situation or another. But there is another strength which is more positive, and which is still a mental and emotional strength rather than a physical one. This is the strength which flows from empowerment, from the power which we give ourselves. This is the strength which we have to stand up and to make a choice. We might be faced with the choice either of continuing to see ourselves as the victim in a situation, or to own that situation and declare ourselves its master. We are the boss, but sometimes it might be all too easy to forget that, and to let a situation be the boss of us instead. To take back this power, to claim it for ourselves, is what ‘empowerment’ truly means, and in this age when it seems that at last the tide is turning, and women can claim back rights which have for so long been forced to stay in the shadows, true strength is manifesting.

And the lion? Perhaps the ‘king of beasts’ always was more obliging and more friendly than we had imagined. Perhaps, had we just asked him, he might have opened his mouth for us! 

Painting: Una and the Lion by Briton Rivière

My Strength Is Trust

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

*

Hermann Hesse 
From his 1920 Collection of Fragments, Wandering, Notes and Sketches

"Go Home and Fetch Your Mirrors."

Miriam said to her disciples: "Go home and fetch your mirrors."

The women did not understand this strange request, but they hastened to follow Miriam's request. Each went to her tent to find the mirror that she looked into when she braided her hair or painted her eyes. Some opened carved chests of olive wood given to them by their mothers. Some unwrapped bundles of rags. Some begged from neighbor women or from grandmothers. Some brought two or three mirrors so that others could share. Soon all came back to Miriam's tent, carrying the precious bronze circles. The firelight reflected in the many mirrors made the tent blaze like a palace of light. 

Then Miriam told the women to look into their mirrors.

"What do you see?"she asked.

"I see myself," each woman answered. 

"I see my eyes, which reveal my soul. 

I see my mouth, which speaks and sings. 

I see that I am different from anyone else."

"Each of you is made in the image of God," Miriam explained. "Your soul and your speech are like God's, and your body is God's dwelling place. Each of you embodies the divine Presence in a different way. When you look into your mirror, you see a woman, but you also see the Divine image. If a man were to look into your mirror, he would see a man, but he would also see God. This is what the Torah means when it says: 'God created the adam in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.' God is like the mirror: God remains the same but reflects each of our images differently, men and women, young and old. This is why, when we study together, we can reveal different facets of the Torah to each other. Each of us is a different reflection of the One."

Excerpt from: 

"The Mirrors" Sisters at Sinai, 

New Tales of Biblical Women, 

by 

Rabbi Jill Hammer

*

Artwork: Wisdom Woman by Carrie Ferraro 

To you, my reader of Sophia's Mirror

To you, my reader of Sophia's Mirror, whether you are a loyal return visitor or whether you perhaps are here for the first time: I am of course aware that my posts over the last several months have been sporadic and rather brief when compared with my previous posts, and I have at times included writings by others. This all has to do with personal health issues which have had to be coped with, and this in turn has meant for me personally that I have had to address new and unfamiliar limitations regarding how much I can do and what I can manage.

I will nevertheless continue to post what and when I am able to. My warm thanks to my regular readers for their patience, and my wish is that all my visitors will still find something of interest in my previous posts.

*

Emma

Drawing, study by Edward Burne-Jones

Traveler, There Is No Path

Traveler, there is No Path

Everything passes on and everything remains,

But our lot is to pass on,

To go on making paths,

Paths across the sea.

I never sought glory,

Nor to leave my song

In the memory of man;

I love those subtle worlds,

Weightless and graceful,

As bubbles of soap.

I like to watch as they paint themselves

In sunlight and scarlet, floating

Beneath the blue sky, trembling

Suddenly then popping…

I never sought glory.

Traveler, your footprints

Are the path and nothing more;

Traveler, there is no path,

The path is made by walking.

By walking the path is made

And when you look back

You’ll see a road

Never to be trodden again.

Traveler, there is no path,

Only trails across the sea…

Some time past in that place

Where today
the forests are dressed in mourning

A poet was heard to cry

“Traveler, there is no path,

The path is made by walking…”

Beat by beat, verse by verse…

The poet died far from home.

He lies beneath the dust of a neighboring land.

As he walked away he was seen to weep.

“Traveler, there is no path,

The path is made by walking…”

Beat by beat, verse by verse…

When the goldfinch cannot sing,

When the poet is a pilgrim,

When prayer will do us no good.

“Traveler, there is no path,

The path is made by walking…”

Beat by beat, verse by verse.

*

 Antonio Machado, Border of a Dream: Selected Poems

Painting: Sir Galahad's Vision Of The Holy Grail by Sir Joseph Noel Paton.

She Is Known By Many Names

She is known by many names and many images, and has appeared in different epochs of time, to people across the world, in exactly the shapes and images the soul would most readily understand her, apprehend her, be able to embrace her and be embraced by her.

She wears a thousand names, thousands of skin tones, thousands of costumes to represent her being patroness of deserts, mountains, stars, streams, and oceans. If there are more than six billion people on earth, then thereby she comes to us in literally six billions of images. Yet at her center is only one great Immaculate Heart.

She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart. She encourages humans to remain multi-lingual; fluent in the languages of dreams, passion, and poetry. She whispers from night dreams, she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman’s soul a coarse hair and muddy footprints. These fill women with longing to find her, free her, and love her.

She is ideas, feelings, urges, and memory. She has been lost and half forgotten for a long, long time. She is the source, the light, the night, the dark, and daybreak. She is the smell of good mud and the back leg of the fox. The birds which tell us secrets belong to her. She is the voice that says, ‘This way, this way.'

We are the proof of this ineffable female numen. Our existence parallels hers.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD



Drawing: Madonna by Rogier van der Weyden (1400-1464)

Could It Be?

                             

Gazing towards the heavens

on a midsummer, star-scattered night

I wondered...

Could it be

that it is not just light

that springs from this land of stars

but life itself?

Could it be

that these pulsing beams of light

are bearers of life's essence

which fills all of space?

Could it then not be

that this life

seeds the whole universe

so that our Mother the Earth

and every star above

swims in a vast cosmic ocean?

Could it be that cosmic waves

of lights and tides and currents

stretch themselves

from star to star?

And that this cosmic life

is the inspiring force

in all the universe...

..an eternal act of creation..

an eternal breaking on the shores

of our coastline world

How inexhaustible

how inescapable then

is the urge to manifest!

I stood there in this starry night

on the shore of space

and in the deepest reverence

it dawned on me

that life is compelled to create

in its striving for completeness.

Words of Gold

In the early 19th-century, in Petelia in southern Italy, a small cylinder-shaped amulet was unearthed together with its gold chain. When the amulet was opened it was found to contain a tiny rolled-up plate of pure gold which, when flattened out, was no larger in size than a matchbox (above, shown approximately twice size). On the plate was inscribed a text, which turned out to be the oldest known text which we have, and one of the very few to survive, of the Orphic mysteries of Ancient Greece. 

We know so very little about these ancient mystery schools. The initiates guarded their secrets well, and we must guess what most of their teachings were about. The Petelia Tablet, as it has become known, lifts a small corner of the veil with which time has covered these teachings, but as with the few surviving fragments which we have of the poetry of Sappho, even this small leaf of gold is enough to hint at the intense beauty and poetry of those mysterious teachings.

‘Orphic’ we know comes from the name of the Ancient Greek poet and musician Orpheus, an immensely popular figure in stories of the time, the best-known today of which is the story of his journey to the Underworld in a bid to be reunited with his deceased love Eurydice. To defy Death itself to regain a lost loved one is a powerful theme to which any age can relate, which probably accounts for the enduring fascination of this story. Orpheus also appears in the story of Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. In this story Orpheus takes on the role of Odysseus before him to outwit the Sirens, for when Jason and his crew approach the island of the Sirens, it is Orpheus who takes up his lyre and drowns the Sirens’ alluring song with his enchanting music, allowing the ship to sail safely onwards.

This is the central character of the Orphic mysteries: a character who is both poet, musician and daring adventurer, both in this world and in other unknown realms beyond. Orpheus, like many larger-than-life cultural heroes, exists somewhere between myth and folklore, and his presence apparently was powerful enough to have a mystery school founded in his name. So what does the Petelia Tablet actually tell us? What can we learn from these few brief lines of ancient text rescued from the earth? When translated from its original Ancient Greek, it begins by warning us (that is: the deceased thirsting soul) not to drink from a specific spring in Hades, but instead to seek another to quench our thirst from the Lake of Memory. But, we are warned, the guardians are nearby, and to them we must say:

“I am a child of Earth and the starry Heavens;

But my race is of Heaven alone; and this you know yourselves.

I am parched with thirst and I perish; but give me quickly

refreshing water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.”

The fragmentary text then closes by reassuring us that the guardians of the Underworld will then allow us to drink from this divine spring, after which we may celebrate with the souls of other heroes. More text would have followed, but this is as much as has survived for us to read. Even this much leaves more than enough room for wondering. Are we being told that our soul is originally from Heaven, that the text is describing a mere metaphor? Or more profoundly, is the Petelia Tablet telling us a great secret: that we originally come from the stars? We might be both of Earth and Heaven, but our race – humankind – is originally from Heaven alone. Looked at in this way the text could not be more specific, and all that we can do is ponder these words of gold, and gaze up at the stars and wonder.