The Hidden Thread: The Shekinah Never Left Iran
How the Jewish Divine Feminine Walked Out of Persia with the Exiles — and Forgot Where She Came From The Hidden Thread — Part 4 of 5 There is a word in Judaism that makes rabbis fall silent and mystics weep. Shekinah. It means "dwelling" or "settling" — from the Hebrew root sh-k-n , to dwell. But in the two thousand years since rabbinic literature first deployed the term, it has come to mean something far larger than its etymology: the manifest presence of God in the world . The divine immanence.
What this resource contributes
How the Jewish Divine Feminine Walked Out of Persia with the Exiles — and Forgot Where She Came From The Hidden Thread — Part 4 of 5 There is a word in Judaism that makes rabbis fall silent and mystics weep. Shekinah. It means "dwelling" or "settling" — from the Hebrew root sh-k-n , to dwell. But in the two thousand years since rabbinic literature first deployed the term, it has come to mean something far larger than its etymology: the manifest presence of God in the world . The divine immanence. The part of God that is not transcendent and unreachable but near and present — in the Temple, among the people, in the space between two scholars studying Torah, in the candlelight of Shabbat. And by the twelfth century, in the furnace of Jewish mysticism, the Shekinah had become something else entirely: the feminine face of God .
Topics and source signals
Primary sources detected
Gathas · Hebrew Bible