Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [31]
The erotic metaphor has its greatest impact on the Judaism of the mystical tradition. The Kabbalists reread much of prior Judaism, enabled by a number of subtle changes in their understanding of long-established symbols.30 The oneness of God, for the Kabbalist, is dynamic and flowing rather than static and unmoved. Within this oneness is a series of ten graded manifestations, each representing another stage in the ongoing self-manifestation of the Deity. The tenth of these, called shekhinah (indwelling), kenesset yisra'el (assemblage of Israel), bride, queen, heavenly Jerusalem, and a host of other mostly female-associated names, is the inner divine resting place (hence “sabbath”) where all the divine energies are gathered before flowing forward to animate the “lower,” nondivine world. She is the bride, spouse, love object of the “male” aspect of divinity, the recharged blessed Holy One (now most identified with the “male” potencies tif'eret and yesod) of the old rabbinic tradition.
Kabbalah thus violates a seemingly essential part of the monotheistic revolution. Here the God of Israel has a consort, and the act of hieros gamos, the sacred marital union, takes place within the divine, rather than between the divine Spouse and His human beloved. Kabbalah may be described (like certain tendencies within Christian Trinitarian faith) as a religion of the love of God for God. We humans, the earthly manifestation of kenesset yisra'el, are both the offspring (souls are born of the upper union, as bodies are conceived by its earthly imitation) and the facilitators of the inner divine love match. Human actions have the power of arousing divine erotic energies in such a way that Bride and Bridegroom are turned toward one another, unite in sacred coitus, and thus renew the force of life and the fructification of all the lower worlds.
But while the mystics’ shekhinah is the consort or female fulfillment of “God,” the “blessed Holy One,” she is also depicted as the love object of Israel. We are her devotees, seeking to arouse her to love. Since Kabbalah originates in medieval Western Europe, a bit of chivalric image enters the tradition here. The Kabbalist sees himself as a sort of spiritual knight, giving himself to shekhinah, particularly as She suffers in exile, much as the knight gives himself to his lady and, more to the point, much as the medieval Western monk devoted himself to the mother of God, especially after the great Marian revival of the twelfth century. The figure of shekhinah owes much to the surrounding Catholic culture and its discovery of a female semidivine figure. The way in which this female configuration is poised precisely at the border between the divine and the lower worlds, serving as the conduit of divine grace and energy as it pours into this world and of human energy in prayer and devotion as they rise to unite with God is very much parallel to Christian depictions of Mary as the “mediatrix” between Christ and the Christian.31 A key difference remains between the traditions in that Judaism glorified neither celibacy nor virginity. Shekhinah is not the “virgin bride” of God but rather His Spouse in a fully sexualized way.
The erotic metaphor as a way of expressing the love and intimate bond between God and Israel has now been displaced by this reclaiming of the ancient hieros gamos myth, the union of male and female within the divine. While the Kabbalist's relationship to shekhinah is one of sonship and fealty, a measure of human romantic attachment to Her is also legitimized. We too may be described as lovers of shekhinah, in a menage that is considered entirely proper— indeed, as enabling fuller expression of our own love of God. In the Zohar, the key text of classical Kabbalah, the erotic metaphor is rampant; there is barely a page in the Zohar where the Song of Songs’ influence is not to be seen.