The Shechinah: The Feminine Divine Presence

Rabbi Ben Newman of the Neshamah Project Podcast interviews Rabbi Jill Hammer, Phd. on the topic of the Shechinah (the Divine Feminine Presence). The conversation ranges from Biblical images of the Shechinah to Rabbinic and Kabbalistic images. They discuss Sefer HaBahir, and Zohar.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Neshamah Project podcast where we explore spiritual tools for human thriving.

I'm Rabbi Ben Newman.

This week,

In honor of the Hebrew month of Nisan,

We will be discussing Shechinah,

The Divine Presence,

Also the Divine Feminine,

With a very special guest,

Rabbi Jill Hammer,

PhD.

She's the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York.

She's the co-founder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute.

And she's also the author of a number of books,

Including Return to the Place,

The Magic,

Meditation,

And Mystery of Sefer Yitzha,

And Under Torah,

An Earth-based Kabbalah of Dreaming.

Welcome,

Rabbi Jill Hammer,

PhD.

Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

So I'm going to begin by asking you the question that I've asked pretty much every scholar Kabbalist that I've had on this podcast,

Which is what brought you to study Jewish mysticism?

It probably started when my mother gave me a Hanukkah present when I was 16 or 17.

And the Hanukkah present was the 13-petaled rose by Adean Steinsaltz.

And if you're familiar with that book,

It's a very deceptively simple little poem about the basics of Kabbalah in a poetic mode,

Really not an explanatory mode,

But more of a poetic mode.

And I was really quite enamored of it.

It was a lovely book.

It spoke to something in me.

And that was probably the first language for Kabbalah I had.

And not too far separated from that in time,

I had the first Jewish catalog that was probably also a present.

And at the end of the Jewish catalog,

Reb Zalman gives a meditative exercise.

And that had a big impact on me.

Sort of the idea of kind of journeying in the imagination was very important for my later practice.

So those two things together were probably my start.

And I guess if I had to sort of factor a third thing,

And I would say that in my college years and later,

I was reading feminist theologians,

Some of whom were drawing on Kabbalah as a source,

Who were talking about Shekhinah or in some other way drawing on the ideas of Kabbalah as a source for their own theology.

So that sort of set me off and running.

And since then,

I've been interested in a variety of Jewish mystical texts and practices.

Beautiful.

Thank you for sharing.

And my second question I wanted to ask you,

Which I've also asked pretty much everybody who's been on my podcast,

Is how do you balance the academic study of Kabbalah?

I mean,

You're a scholar,

Right,

With your practical application of it and your use of it as a spiritual tool?

It's interesting that you ask.

When I wrote one of my recent books,

Return to the Place,

Which is a translation and commentary on Sefer Yetzirah,

Which is this ancient book of Jewish mysticism,

Very short,

Very cryptic,

Very interesting,

A book that has been a great source of practice for me because it has a lot of body centered,

Earth centered kinds of mystical approaches in it.

And when I began to create my commentary,

It was clear that it was going to be a hybrid,

That it was going to have a scholarly component where I tried to talk about where I thought the text might be coming from and what the words meant and what the influences appeared to be.

And a practice component that was going to talk about how to spiritually work with the text.

And a friend of mine said to me,

You wrote a platypus,

You know,

By which he meant,

You know,

You wrote a book that is neither one thing nor the other.

And that's true,

Although at least one scholar came to me later on and said,

I want to write something the way that you wrote Return to the Place,

You know,

With a practice component and a scholarly component,

Because usually those things are held separate,

Right?

People who do practice are separate from people who do scholarship,

But they don't feel separate to me,

Because for me,

The scholarship informs the practice.

You know,

If I don't understand the book,

You know,

I can't I can't make a reasonable guess of what the practice is inviting might be.

And I think that for me,

Without the without the practice piece,

The scholarship does not feel as meaningful because it doesn't feel as alive in the present.

So for me,

Those things go together,

Although I know that for many others,

They don't go together.

You know,

For me,

They they do.

I think the one other thing I would say about it is that there's a way to do practice in an uncritical way.

Right.

Where you're sort of accepting the mythic view of the book.

And that tends not to be my way.

You know,

I don't think the Zohar was written by Shimon bar Yochai,

For example.

You know,

That's just sort of not my way of approaching.

I don't think Sefer Yetzirah was written by Avraham.

You know,

That's not my way of approaching the book.

So I have to come at it from a different angle.

You know,

When I'm thinking about,

You know,

What is the spiritual value or authority of the text that I'm reading?

And in some ways,

It doesn't matter,

Right,

If Avraham wrote it or if,

You know,

Some,

You know,

Three different authors were edited together in the sixth century.

What matters more really is what's come down to us.

You know,

It's what we're encountering,

I think,

That matters.

So I'm not,

You know,

It doesn't bother me so much.

You know,

The questions about authorship or about authenticity.

So can we get into the study of Shekhinah a little bit?

Sure.

So when I teach about Shekhinah,

I usually start with the biblical texts,

Even though the word Shekhinah doesn't appear anywhere in the Torah.

The overarching idea of divine presence basically comes out of this Jewish struggle to mediate between the notion of an intangible God,

A God that who's,

You know,

Not doesn't have a body,

Doesn't,

You know,

You know,

Can't be sensed.

And the experience that sometimes we can sense the numinous,

Sometimes we have a sense that God is present,

That God is imminent.

How do you reconcile those two things?

And one of the ways that those two things are reconciled in the Bible is with this idea of the divine cloud.

It's usually called the kavod Adonai,

The glory of God,

Or it's called the Anan.

And that cloud is a tangible offshoot of or a tangible extrusion of the divine.

It is not perhaps itself the divine exactly.

But it is a an emanation of of the invisible divine in a tangible way.

And that's what the Bible calls kavod Adonai,

The glory of God,

Or the Anan,

The divine cloud.

And this divine cloud is particularly said to rest on the Mishkan,

On the tabernacle,

Which is this temple like portable shrine that the people are taking through the wilderness.

And,

You know,

When they dedicate it,

This cloud comes into the tabernacle and fills the whole place and nobody else can go in.

Right.

There's this tangible entry of the divine presence into the sanctuary.

And this is what the tradition later calls Shekhinah,

The indwelling,

Right,

That which dwells from the root Shekhin,

To dwell or to be neighborly,

Right,

To live near.

And so they take this word Mishkan,

Right,

Which means the place of dwelling,

And then they make it a different kind of noun,

Right,

Shekhinah,

Which is the dwelling or the indwelling.

And so in the time of the Talmud,

You begin to see this kavod Adonai spoken of as Shekhinah,

Right,

Or the Shekhinah.

It usually takes the article,

The Shekhinah,

Ha-Shekhinah,

Or Shekhinta.

And I'll just mention a couple of rabbinic texts about the Shekhinah.

You can see in these texts that they are struggling with how can God be tangible and not tangible.

And so they kind of do the split,

Right,

Where there's the main body of God,

Which is not tangible,

Right,

And this emanation,

Right,

That proceeds from the divine,

Which is tangible,

And which is God,

But also not exactly God.

So let's move from the biblical to the rabbinic view.

Where would you like to start with the rabbis?

I want to start actually with Numbers Rabbah 12.

6.

So this text is wondering about the question of the Mishkan.

Like,

How could it be that we say that the divine presence fills the Mishkan,

Where God is everywhere?

If God is everywhere,

It doesn't make sense to say that God filled the Mishkan.

God was already in the Mishkan and everywhere else,

Right?

So they say,

Like,

What is the thing like?

What can we compare this to?

How can we understand it?

It's like a cave on the shore of the sea,

Right?

The sea roars and the cave becomes filled.

So you can imagine this,

Right,

Sort of the beauty of the ocean,

Right,

Sort of rushing in,

Roaring into this cave,

Right,

And the majesty of that.

And the sea doesn't lack anything.

In other words,

The sea doesn't get smaller,

Right,

Because it enters the cave.

And then they say this is the way it is with the Shekhinah.

The sacred shrine becomes full of the Ziv HaShekhinah,

The radiance of the Shekhinah.

But the world doesn't lack the presence.

And they're using this image to convey that there is a rushing of the Shekhinah into the sanctuary.

But the Shekhinah doesn't get smaller,

Right,

But there's a majesty,

Right,

To the strength of the entry into the Mishkan.

Now,

There's a way that this analogy doesn't make sense,

Right,

Because the cave is actually empty of the sea until the sea comes in,

Right?

But the divine presence is everywhere.

So they're kind of fudging it,

Right,

In their explanation.

But they're also giving you a sense of the power of it,

Right,

That there's this vast thing called the sea,

Right?

And we know the sea is much bigger than this little extrusion that comes into this cave.

And yet there's something incredibly majestic and powerful when we see that happen.

And so they're trying to convey,

I think,

The feeling,

Right,

You know,

What it means to feel that God has suddenly become present,

Even though we know God is present everywhere.

But there's something about the feeling where God becomes extra present in a particular place.

There's a human experience of God's presence that is that God isn't always present.

That even though God is always present,

Right,

We have the experience of absence and presence and absence and presence.

And then we find some places to be more full of divine energy than others and sometimes to be more full of divine energy than others.

But the truth is that it's everywhere at all times.

I guess that brings us back to the Mishkan,

Right?

Why did they even have to build the Mishkan?

Right.

This is exactly the problem,

Right,

Is that if you have a God who lives everywhere and has no tangibility,

Why would you need a sacred space?

But people,

Of course,

Do need sacred spaces.

And they do have a sense of the tangibility of the divine.

So how do you mediate those two opposing truths?

And that's what they're trying to explain in this passage.

So do you want to take us to the next text?

So what I'd like to turn to now is the Talmud Shabbat 12b.

There are a number of places in the Talmud where the Talmud discusses where the Shekhinah dwells or where the Shekhinah comes.

And the Shekhinah comes when you're studying Torah,

And the Shekhinah comes when you have a minion,

And the Shekhinah comes when there's a beti in doing judgment,

And the Shekhinah comes when you're doing tzedakah,

Right,

And all these ways that the Shekhinah becomes present.

Which is this kind of metaphysical reward you get for doing mitzvot and community,

Right,

Is that the Shekhinah kind of arrives and is present for those things.

And there's a response from God,

There's kind of a showing up that God does in response to these sacred acts that humans are doing.

One of my favorites is this text,

Shabbat 12b.

It says,

One who enters to visit a sick person should not sit on the bed,

And should not sit on a chair,

But rather should mitatef,

Should wrap up at a talit and sit before the person on the floor.

And why should they do this kind of odd thing?

Because Shekhinah is above the sick person's head.

And then they provide a proof text,

But this is a really interesting text,

Right,

That the Shekhinah is actually visiting the sick person.

And if we visit the sick person,

We should assume the Shekhinah is tangibly there,

So much so that we actually have to sit in a way that is respectful to the physical presence of the Shekhinah that's there.

So is it that you feel the Shekhinah more when you're visiting a sick person?

I'm not even sure it's about feeling,

Right,

Because it really isn't about the experience of the visitor.

It really is about the sick person and the Shekhinah having a moment,

Right,

And if you go and visit,

You have to respect that,

Right,

You have to sit in such a way that you acknowledge the presence of the Shekhinah.

So you might be right that this text is talking about the feeling that we have,

Right,

In a room with someone who's suffering.

But the way that the text is expressing it is that the Shekhinah is physically present.

So you have to be respectful,

Right?

You can't sit at the level of the Shekhinah,

Right?

That would be rude.

So there is this sense of the embodiment.

So Shekhinah is literally there.

Right,

Right.

I was actually just going to talk briefly about the way the Shekhinah appears in Echar Abba and Lamentations Rabba,

Where the Shekhinah appears much more as a personalized figure than she does in these sources that we've just talked about,

Right,

Where we're really talking about some kind of cloud.

But in Echar Abba,

The Shekhinah is much more like a person,

Right?

And,

You know,

When the enemies are coming into the sanctuary,

You know,

She's sort of hiding in the sanctuary and trying to stay there and then eventually being driven out.

And then she goes into exile with her people,

Right?

And she goes with the children and she goes with the,

You know,

With the elders.

And she mourns because,

You know,

She's been chased out of her home.

So there's a much more personalized sense of who the Shekhinah is.

And then you get that in spades when you get to the Kabbalah.

And the Shekhinah is the bride.

And her union with the Holy One is depicted as a marriage or it's depicted as a parent-child relationship in certain cases.

Yeah,

I'm also thinking about Rachel crying for her children.

Right.

Is that Jeremiah,

I think?

Yeah,

31,

I think.

Yeah.

In fact,

That's probably where some of the images of the Shekhinah come from,

Is from that text about Rachel weeping for her children.

Right.

This kind of proto-typical mother of the people,

Right,

Who's weeping.

This is a classic Near East,

Ancient Near Eastern image as the weeping mother,

Right,

Whose tears redeem the one that she's weeping over.

So that's Isis and Horus and that's Sirtur and Dumuzi.

Like there are multiple stories about the weeping of the mother and the kind of the metaphysical significance of that.

And that quintessentially is Jesus and Mary,

Right,

That trope gets picked up by Christianity.

But it also very much fits with the Shekhinah and the people Israel,

Right,

Who are her children.

And it's really kind of the same mythic image.

But in a Jewish context and in a Jewish context,

It actually allows for a psychological split.

Because Echa is assuming that it's God who is punishing the people.

God is angry with the people.

The people haven't been loyal.

God is punishing them.

So that's a very scary image.

And the Shekhinah is not really in that camp.

The Shekhinah is witnessing the people,

Is suffering with them,

Is defending them,

Is in exile with them.

So there is a part of God that they can turn to,

Right,

That is not angry with them.

That is not the author of this exile.

But who is with them in the exile.

So it plays a very important psychological role,

I think,

In the development.

It's a need of the Jewish people to have a divine aspect who is in solidarity with them in this very difficult experience of exile.

As we started to get into Kabbalah,

I just wanted to mention this idea of Shekhinah as a tree.

As I had a whole discussion with Professor Yossi Chayes in Shvat about the tree in the Sefer HaBahir.

Do you have anything to say about that?

Right.

The Sefer HaBahir basically says that.

It basically says the tree is Shekhinah.

Now,

The Kabbalah doesn't really go that way.

They really have a more complex idea of what the tree is.

But the Sefer HaBahir,

I think,

Understands the tree as the growth of Shekhinah.

God says,

I planted this tree and it takes care of everyone and nurtures everyone.

And I think that Sefer HaBahir means the Shekhinah when it talks about the Yilan,

About the tree.

So let's dive into Sefer HaBahir.

What would you like to teach from Sefer HaBahir?

So the piece that I'd like to teach from Sefer HaBahir,

Which is this 12th century text from Provence,

That is an early Kabbalistic text.

In Sefer HaBahir,

The Shekhinah is often described as God's daughter.

Now,

In the Zohar,

That happens also,

But it's more common for the Shekhinah to be described as God's partner,

As God's wife.

But here,

We often hear of the Shekhinah as God's daughter.

And these passages are really valuable for understanding the fundamental idea of the Shekhinah,

Because they're basically talking about the Shekhinah as a mediatrix,

Like as a portal between God and the world.

That Shekhinah is the airlock,

Almost,

That allows the divine to communicate safely with human beings.

So this is Sefer HaBahir 54.

So it's asking,

What is the thing like,

Offering this analogy.

And saying,

So the king used to have a good,

Pleasant,

Beautiful,

Perfect daughter.

And he wanted to marry her.

He married her to a royal prince.

So the prince is going to be the people.

And he gives her all kinds of wonderful things.

He gives her clothing and he gives her a crown and he gives her jewels.

And then the book asks a strange question.

He says,

The book says,

Is it possible for the king to dwell without his daughter?

Is that possible?

And the book says,

No,

Right?

You should say it's not possible for the king to be without his daughter.

Is it possible for him to always be with her?

Also no.

So this is the articulation of the problem,

Right?

Is the Shekhinah part of God or not part of God?

So what does this king do?

He has a dilemma.

He doesn't ever want to leave his daughter,

But he also has to leave his daughter.

Well,

He can place a window between them.

He can place a window between him and her.

And then whenever the father needs the daughter,

The daughter needs the father.

They can come together through the window.

So there's this image of the window that the Shekhinah has this window into the other world.

And only she has access to this window.

And by implication,

This means that when humans want to be in connection with God,

We really can't directly contact the transcendent,

But we can contact this imminent being,

An entity that proceeds from God.

And that entity will provide us with a window to the transcendent.

And I like to think of her as like Mediatrix,

The one who mediates.

And Mary's also called the Mediatrix.

So that's interesting.

There is some parallel there.

So I find this really beautiful,

This idea of the window,

That the Bat Melech,

She has this.

So there's another text that fills this out a little bit more and is talking about the 32 paths,

Which are a concept in Sefer Yetzirah,

That there are 32 paths between God and the world.

And again,

Asks sort of to tell the parable,

Like,

What is this like?

And says that there was a king and he was in the innermost of many chambers.

There were 32 of these chambers and each chamber there was a path.

And here it asks another kind of rhetorical question.

Should the king bring everyone into the royal chambers through these paths?

No,

The king shouldn't do that.

Should the king reveal his jewels and his tapestries and his hidden things and his precious things?

No,

It wouldn't be good for the king to do that.

So what does the king do?

He touches the daughter and he includes all of these paths,

All of these ornaments,

All of these beautiful things in her and in her garments.

And anyone who wants to go inside should look at the daughter.

So,

Again,

It's like there are these hidden treasures in the transcendent realm.

And it's not proper or more likely it's not possible for the king to make these treasures accessible to mortal beings.

And the only way he can do that is by giving her these treasures and she can then provide them to the mortal realm.

Now,

You can see how this overlaps with her being the Torah.

One of the manifestations of the Shekhinah is the Torah.

So that's a way that we get to receive God's gifts.

The Shekhinah is a manifestation of Shabbat,

Shabbat is a manifestation of the Shekhinah.

So that's a way that we get to receive these divine gifts.

But we can't get them directly from the transcendent,

From what the Zohar would call the insof,

The higher realms.

We can only get them through the Shekhinah.

So this gives her a tremendous power.

And interestingly,

It also replicates this instant Near Eastern idea about women,

Which is that they are liminal.

Right.

Because unlike men,

Women can go between families.

They can start in one family and end up in another family.

So they have a liminal quality.

And we actually see this manifesting in the Shekhinah.

Right.

That she because she can marry the physical world and still is connected to the immaterial world.

All right.

She is she has access to this liminality.

Beautiful.

And and,

You know,

I was going to ask you,

This begs the question,

Right?

What's the what's the way that we can gaze at this Shekhinah that has the 32 paths within her?

And you sort of answered that already by saying by practicing Torah study,

By doing Shabbat.

And so in a way,

I feel like you're saying that Shekhinah is the practice.

That's exactly what the Baal Shem Tov says.

Shekhinah,

He had to feel.

Shekhinah is prayer.

Right.

She is the embodiment of the prayer.

Yeah,

I think that I mean,

I think it's also more complicated than that.

But I think that that's right.

I think that she's embodied in the practice.

And they're probably also talking about mystical experience.

Right.

That,

You know,

Gazing at the daughter,

You know,

Also means,

You know,

A kind of mystical experience,

You know,

Of meditation,

Of of contemplation.

And you have that all the time.

Right.

So back to that same paradox that she's absent sometimes and she's present sometimes,

Even though the divine is always present.

She's the way that we can feel that presence.

Right.

Right.

Exactly.

Beautiful.

Do you want to take us to a Zohar quote?

So I'll look at a couple of Zohar quotes.

So here's a very classic Zohar quote.

And so Zohar,

This 13th century text from Spain that includes many,

Many of the ideas of the Kabbalah.

And the Zohar conceives of the relationship between the Shekhinah and the divine as actually a much more complex relationship in which the Shekhinah is one of 10 divine personalities.

And she has different relationships with these different divine personalities.

One of those personalities is her spouse,

Sort of the center of the tree of life,

Tiferet,

The holy one of blessing is her spouse.

And then the Chochmah,

The Abba is her father and Binah,

The Ima is her mother.

So there's a whole familial metaphor happening.

But let me focus for a moment on the marital metaphor.

So the Zohar is talking about Friday night,

Is talking about the Shabbat and says that night,

That night is the joy of the queen with the king and they're uniting.

And they're uniting is actually a very explicit word.

Like it really means to,

You know,

To have sex.

That the Shekhinah is in a physical erotic intimacy with the masculine aspect of the divine.

And it's because of this mystical uniting that is happening among aspects of the Godhead in the hidden world,

That it is proper on Shabbat,

On Arab Shabbat,

That those who are really aware of the secrets of the universe,

You know,

Know that this is a special night to have erotic intimacy because you are reflecting the intimacy that the divine aspects are having with each other right up in these hidden realms.

And for the Zohar,

It's very important for humans to be always enacting what's happening in the other realm,

Like particularly in a positive way,

Because that primes the pump.

It's kind of invites this positive interaction to go on happening.

So that's,

You know,

That's one of the,

You know,

One of these kinds of interactions.

And here's another one.

So this one is in Zohar 148a,

Where they're talking about the practice of Shabbat candles.

And it talks about how the Shabbat candles were given to the Neshe Amakadisha,

The women of the holy people,

To light.

And then it gives the Talmudic reason for this,

Which is not a nice reason,

Which is that it's because Eve put out the candle of the world.

Eve brought death into the world and therefore women light Shabbat candles.

That's awful.

It's a misogynist thing to say.

And they say,

Well,

That's all right,

But we have another explanation.

And they say it's because the shelter of peace that we receive on Shabbat is the Matronita.

The Matronita is a word for Shekhinah.

And the Shabbat in its kind of shelter of peace embodies the Shekhinah,

The Matronita,

And the souls that are the candles on high are dwelling in her.

So it's this beautiful image of the Shekhinah as a kind of womb or a home space.

All of the souls are living inside her.

This is a way that the Zohar understands the other world,

Is that the Shekhinah is housing,

Basically,

For the souls.

They live inside her.

And it's in the role of the Matronita that people light.

And because they are lighting,

The mother gives Sabbath souls to her children.

So because the people are lighting these candles,

The candles above,

Which are these extra souls,

Come down into the people.

So again,

We have this theme here of the human action,

Which is precipitating action or supporting action in the divine and is imitating the divine.

So the women are being the Shekhinah on earth and lighting the Shabbat candles.

The Shekhinah is lighting her candles right up in the heavenly realms.

So here we see the Shekhinah as a kind of mother of the house sort of figure here.

It seems like also a divine conduit in a similar way,

That there's a connection to the numinous through her.

Yes,

Right.

And right through the candle lighting and also through her.

And elsewhere,

They talk about that on Shabbat,

The Shekhinah is spreading her wings over the people.

Or on Sukkot,

Through the Sukkah,

She's spreading her wings over the people and protecting them.

Now,

There are fierce images of the Shekhinah also,

Where she's a warrior and she's got shields in her hair and she's swallowing up mountains.

So these kind of domestic images.

The Kali image.

I don't want to give the impression that she's only this kind of nice mother figure.

There are lots of ways that they look at the Shekhinah and sometimes she's quite terrifying.

But they describe her as mother,

As house,

As bride,

All these things.

And also as garden.

She's also the orchard.

She's called the Holy Apple Orchard.

So she's also the garden where souls grow,

Which I think is a really beautiful image.

But she's also Baba Yaga.

Yes,

Absolutely.

So I wanted to bring one more piece from the Zohar,

Which I really love,

Which this is in Zohar 224b,

Which talks about the creation of the human being.

And it talks about both the Shekhinah and her mother.

Her mother is this hidden aspect of the divine feminine called the Ima Ila'ah,

The supernal mother,

Also called Bina.

And this text says that when the Holy One of Blessing created Adam's body,

It was made from the Afra Miktashat Dilatata,

From the earth of the earthly temple.

Now that's code because the Zohar often speaks in code.

That's code for the Shekhinah.

She's the earth of the earthly temple.

And she's called the earth because she is the embodiment of divinity in the physical world.

She actually is literally the body of the world.

There are a number of texts that say this.

The Shekhinah is the body of the world.

She provides the substance of the world through her being.

But Adam's soul was given to him from the earth of the celestial temple.

So I love this,

The earth of the celestial temple.

So it still has this wonderful embodied sense.

So what is the earth of the celestial temple?

That's Bina.

The soul comes from the heavenly mother,

Sort of this hidden celestial mother.

And the body comes from the Shekhinah,

Who's the manifest mother,

Who's the tangible divine feminine.

So I've always been really intrigued by this,

That we are an amalgam of earth from these two sources,

Earthly earth and heavenly earth.

Let's come in for a landing.

Is there something you'd like to bring out as a last text?

I think I want to say something about Shekhinah and the contemporary world.

Because these images are all very,

Very powerful,

And they also require some working with,

Because they are coming out of a context in which it's still mostly men who are studying the mystical texts and thinking about it from their perspective.

And so,

For example,

The Shekhinah is often portrayed as a passive entity.

She is like a pool into which all the waters flow.

But she doesn't have anything of her own.

But that's not how contemporary feminists talk about Shekhinah.

Where someone like Rabbi Leonovic is writing about the Shekhinah.

That text may be in the background,

But there's definitely a much more sense of active celebration.

That this is not just the mirror of the masculine aspect of God.

But there's a tangibility,

But also a wholeness to the Shekhinah.

She's not missing anything.

I think that notion of exile,

Which is so important to the Kabbalah in its classical form,

Is spoken of differently in contemporary feminist mystical views of the divine feminine.

Because there's much more of a sense of the Shekhinah's wholeness and presence in the physical world in a way that is right the way it is.

Not broken,

But right exactly the way it is.

And I think it's important to note that as people work with these images and more diverse people and readers are added to that mix.

These images are going to go on evolving.

They're not going to stay the same as the classical Kabbalah.

There's going to continue to be evolution of Shekhinah as a fundamental way the Jews encountered the divine.

Amazing.

And is there anything more you'd like to say?

The story isn't over.

Even in my lifetime,

I began with these very exciting feminist images of the Shekhinah.

And today people are saying things that I did not necessarily imagine that they would say when I began this journey years ago.

There's a whole new sense of the exploding the gender binary.

There's all kinds of new insights.

And I'm sure that will continue.

Beautiful.

Well,

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much.

It has been my pleasure to get to talk with you about this.

Thank you to Rabbi Jill Hammer,

PhD.

It was an amazing conversation.

We'll continue our study for the rest of this month of Nisan on the idea of Shekhinah.

The text sheets are available in the description of the podcast in PDF format.

Until next time,

This has been the Neshama Project podcast.

I'm Rabbi Ben Newman.

Take care.

Reviews

Shalom. Thank you so much. I have read Jill’s books and to hear her on Insight made me smile from ear to ear. !