Monthly Archives: February 2013

Ramchal on the Shechina in other writings

As we’d expect, Ramchal has a rather unique, poetic understanding of the Shechina in his other writings. He says at one point that “the first thing God wanted to occur in the world was universal governance, which is to say, His own interactions with the world, and His presence in it. This phenomenon is termed the ‘Shechina’”. He goes on to say there that that’s to say that “God is said to ‘dwell’ (shochein) among His created beings because He functions that way in the world” (Sefer Kinat Adonai Tzevaot). In other words, the idea of the Shechina is a representation of the process by which God comes into close and consequential contact with the world.

Elsewhere he says — somewhere along the same lines — that the term Shechina is a depiction of the “space” (or physical reality as we know it) in which the world exists, and in which He bestows upon it (Adir Bamarom p. 293). This also points to the intimacy he associated between the Shechina and God Himself, and with the world itself which the Shechina and God both envelope and interact with.

While these aren’t ways of identifying God Himself with the Shechina, they do underscore just how God and it function together, and how crucial the Shechina is to God’s plans. Let’s see next what he says about it here, in Klach.

(c) 2013 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

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AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.

The Zohar on the Shechina

The Zohar often depicts the Shechina as a passive, dependant “female”-figure who is without “color” or “light” (i.e., overt substance and strong definition) of her own, and who can thus act as a sort of selfless, malleable reflector of whatever enters her purview from above and to transmute it downward unobtrusively (see Zohar 1, 221a, 151b-152a; also see Eitz Chaim 6:5).

Thus, in relation to the Sephirot above it, the Shechina is of the lowest-rank, but in relation to the worlds below it is of the very highest order (1, 172a-b; 1, 159b-160a; also see Pardes 11:2 where Malchut is referred to as the world’s “architect”). It’s thus “female” in that it receives Divine flow from the active “male” Sephirot above her, but it then, ironically, transmits it in a “male” way to the lower phenomena under its purview

And it’s said to act as the foundation stone of the world (2, 222a-b), its house (1, 172a-b), its mother (3, 249a-b), as righteousness itself (2, 139b-140a), God’s own agent (2, 50b-51a), as the moon to God’s sun (1, 181a-b; 3, 45b, 248b), and as God’s queen (3, 69a),

We see, then, that the Kabbalists combined the nearness and approachability of the Shechina expressed above and its association with God Himself, as His very consort, partner, and intimate in the act of creation.

We’ll see what Ramchal said about this next.

(c) 2013 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

———————————————————-

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.

Why God Isn’t Mentioned in The Book of Esther: A Theory

A “theory” is a logical presumption about what’s going on behind the scenes to explain a continuing confusing phenomenon in the world. Some theories are mere guesses and some are educated guesses that are more likely to be true, though not necessarily so.

Suppose, for example, a friend and I found ourselves in a strange and foreign environment after travelling for a long time (and not knowing where we were going). “Where are we?” one of us would say. “I have a theory,” I might say. “Everyone around us seems to have Eastern features, they seem to be eating foods favored by Chinese people, and they seem to be engaged in Chinese practices. I’m thinking we must be in China.” So my theory would be that based on what we see all around us, we’d come to be in China in fact.

“Wait a minute,” my friend might say. “Maybe we’re in Chinatown in San Francisco?” After all, most people there have Eastern facial features, eat Chinese food, and are engaged in Chinese practices, too. “My theory is we’re in Chinatown” he says.

Well, both would be reasonable theories, except for the fact that no matter how far we went we couldn’t see a sign of anything that San Francisco is famous for. So it seems that my theory — that we were in China after all — is the more reasonable one. Besides, I happen to read Mandarin, and I read about everyday things that would be typical of life in China going on there day after day, so based on my expertise, my educated guess would be more conclusive, though not absolutely certain, since, who knows, maybe we were whisked off to Japan in an area where a whole swath of Chinese people lived and still spoke and wrote about home a lot. We were simply not privy to all we’d need to arrive at the absolute truth.

Along the same lines, suppose a large number of things were simply and entirely inexplicable in life, and a friend and I were trying to explain what lie behind them. “My theory is that what’s going on is all circumstantial and by chance,” my friend might say, “since that often happens”. I have a hunch that things aren’t so chancy, based on my studies and years of ruminations, and I offer the idea that there’s “someone” behind all of this who’s purposeful, omniscient, and omnipotent. I could be wrong, but I really believe that, so I’m sticking to it. My friend offers no other theories, and no one else knows for certain (since one would have to be omniscient himself to know after all), so we’re left in that position.

The holiday of “Purim” itself is named after the lots (purim in Akkadian) that were cast to determine the fate of the Jews (see Esther 3:7). As such, by not mentioning God it seems to offer proof for the theory that life — its political machinations, its causes and effects, its outcomes, etc. — is chancy, and is rooted in “the throw of the dice”. After all, there doesn’t seem to be a purposeful, omniscient, and omnipotent being anywhere to explain it.

What we people of faith believe, though — based on the thinking and ruminations of the best of us, to say nothing of direct revelation — is that the best theory of all behind everything that happens here is in fact the existence of just such a Being, God, who, while hidden, is still behind it all. So while not offering that theory itself the Book of Esther was included in Tanach to underscore the idea that God does indeed control life’s machinations, and that belief in Him is in fact the most viable theory of all.

(c) 2013 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

———————————————————-

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.

Shechina (3)

Oftentimes, the term Shechina is used in the tradition simply as an alternative term for God Himself, as when the Talmud asks about the verse “Follow (the ways of) God your Lord” (Deuteronomy 13:5), “is it possible for a man to follow (the ways of) the Shechina?” (Sotah 14a). Thus, that notion and the statements to the effect that the Shechina is in all places (Baba Battra 25a), and that just as the sun radiates throughout the world so does the Shechina (Sanhedrin 39a) seem to indicate that the term Shechina was oftentimes used to play-down the idea that God was restricted to any one sphere.

The term is also used in connection with the experience of God’s presence to an extreme degree as before the thorn bush in which Moses caught sight of Him, at Mount Sinai and the Tabernacle where everyone encountered His presence, and at the first Temple (see Shabbat 67a, Sotah 5a, Yoma 9b, and Shemot Rabbah 34:1), as well as the Shechina being in our midst in exile (Megillah 29a) or even in our impure state (Yoma 56b). And that, too, seems to align the term Shechina with God’s omnipresence.

But unlike the above rabbinic insights, the early Jewish philosophers were concerned with avoiding any possible anthropomorphic interpretations of the term, and went to great lengths to point out that the Shechina doesn’t refer to God Himself but rather to an independent entity that He’d created.

According to Saadiah Gaon, the term Shechina is identical with God’s “glory”, which served as an intermediary between God and man during the prophetic experience. Thus, he maintained that when Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was shown the Shechina, and when the prophets “saw” God they actually saw the Shechina (Emunot v’De’ot 2:10).

According to R’ Yehuda Halevi there are two aspects of the Shechina: the visible one, that ceased to appear in our midst with the destruction of the Holy Temple and the cessation of prophecy, but which will return with the coming of the Moshiach (Kuzari, 2:20, 23; 3:23); and the invisible Shechina, which has never disappeared and is instead “with every virtuous Jew with a pure heart and an upright mind” (ibid., 5:23). He thus managed to equate the Shechina with God and to remove it from Him at one at the same time.

And like Saadiah, Rambam also identifies the Shechina with God’s glory at a certain point (Moreh Nevuchim 1:21), yet also identified the Shechina with God Himself at another point (Ibid. 1:28).

Let’s see how the Zohar, the Kabbalists, and Ramchal himself defined the term.

(c) 2013 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

———————————————————-

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.

Shechina (2)

Thus, drawing on sources that they never cited, the very early Onkelos (c. 35–120 CE) interpolated the term in his Aramaic translation of many Torah verses. “May God … dwell in the tents of Shem” (Genesis 9:27) becomes “May God cause His Shechina to dwell in the dwelling places of Shem”; “And they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst” (Exodus 25:8) becomes “… I will cause My Shechina to dwell among them”; and “But only to the place which God your Lord will choose from all your tribes, to set His Name there; you shall inquire after His dwelling and come there” (Deuteronomy 12:5) becomes “But unto the place which God your Lord will chose His Shechina to dwell there, even to the House of His Shechina… ”. And the even earlier Yonatan Ben Uzziel (ca. 450 B.C.E.) translated “Holy, holy, holy is God Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”” (Isaiah 6:3) as “… holy in the highest and exalted heavens is the House of His Shechina, holy upon the earth is the work of His might, holy forever… the whole earth is full of the brightness of His Glory”.

(c) 2013 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

———————————————————-

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.

The Shechina (1)

But this process was accomplished through the agency of Malchut, Ramchal goes on to say here in Petach 52. And he immediately ties it in to the Shechina in his own comments here (which Malchut is often equated with). So we’ll now discuss the concept of the Shechina in various classical works and then from Ramchal’s perspective.

The term Shechina itself, which doesn’t appear anywhere in Tanach refers to “that which dwells,” and is derived from the verb shachen or shachan, “to dwell” or “reside”.

The impetus to provide a term for God’s presence — which is at bottom the meaning of Shechina — was the problem of just where to locate God. If He’s said to dwell in the Tabernacle or the Holy Temple (see Exodus 25:22, Leviticus 16:2, 2 Samuel 6:2, etc.) and to also be “the God of heaven” (Ezra 6:10, etc.), while it’s nonetheless true that “ the whole earth is full of His glory” (Isaiah 6:3), then just where is He?

The answer of course is that all are true, but that’s not all a simple concept to get across, as His existing in lofty places seems befitting to His glorious being, while His dwelling in the muck and mire, if you will, seems to demean Him. Yet the latter allows for our coming in contact with Him in the sorts of ways we’d need to in order to worship Him and draw close to Him which are the bedrocks of the religious life. So let’s see how earlier sages dealt with his dilemma.

(c) 2013 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

———————————————————-

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.

The Lower Seven (6)

Imma overcame this with her “sweetness”, i.e., her ability to mitigate harsh judgments. For at one point, Zeir Anpin and Imma are said to have “married” [1] and to have come to work in tandem on various levels. As a result, Ramchal adds in his comments, though “Zeir Anpin is intrinsically aligned with (harsh) judgment, Imma granted it a share of her intrinsic power of mitigation” when they were combined, and Zeir Anpin became more sympathetic, so to speak [2].

And indeed when judgment subsides, “sorrow” passes and “brotherly love” comes into play after all, in potential [3]. In fact, that’s actually why Imma enters there, i.e., into Zeir Anpin in the world of Tikkun: in order to foster this sort of “brotherly love” among its Sephirot.

But didn’t we learn above that the source of the harsh makeup of Zeir Anpin is Imma’s own judgment element? What was it then in Imma that enabled it to be more sympathetic itself rather than harsh? Ramchal pointed out that it had been Imma’s five Gevurot that provided Zeir Anpin with its judgment aspect; thus it was Imma’s five Chassadim (kindness aspects) that granted Zeir Anpin its new kindness. For there are two “sides” — two poles — to Imma, as it has (five elements of) Chessed and (five of) Gevurah, as Ar”i points out [4].

Notes:

[1]       See Eitz ChaimSha’ar HaMochin ch. 1).

[2]       In his comments here Ramchal ties this in once again with the various mochin of Zeir Anpin, as when it’s “immature” and experiences what we’d term “small-mindedness” as opposed to when it’s “mature” and to experience “large-mindedness” so to speak. As he explains it there, “In the stage of immaturity, only the external aspect of this aspect of Imma is granted Zeir Anpin…. But as Zeir Anpin attains mental maturity, its (trait of harsh) judgment becomes more mitigated”. See note 7 above as well as Petachim 128-129.

[3]       See Petach 123 and Ramchal’s comments there as well as Klallim Rishonim 23.

[4]       See Eitz Chaim 9:1 for a discussion of the five gevurot and 5 chassadim.

(c) 2013 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

———————————————————-

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.

The Lower Seven (5)

Along other lines, we’re taught that there are two overarching forms of interaction: attraction and repulsion or, in Kabbalistic terminology, Chessed (kindness) and Gevurah (judgment). There are very many points in between, of course, which are all brought about through the “middle pillar” that lies between these two extreme poles, but that will be explained at another point.

In any event, were told that “by its nature, Chessed is like a welcoming right arm” that reaches out to embrace. “So when it reigns” at any given point in the world, “created beings behave toward each another fraternally and smile at each other”, literally and figuratively. Contrarily, by its nature “Gevurah distains and rejects”, so when it reigns at any given point, “faces express anger, and everything is weighed down with sadness”, literally and figuratively, Ramchal says in his comments to Petach 52.

As such, as he expresses it in Petach 52 itself, because of its, i.e., judgment’s, makeup each light, i.e., each of the six Sephirot of Chessed, Gevurah, Tipheret, Netzach, Hod, and Yesod, came to exist separately rather than together with the others. For by nature judgment doesn’t exhibit “brotherly love” but rather “sorrow” and “severity” so to speak, and is thus inclined toward encouraging separateness rather than unity.

The point of the matter is that separateness, distain, rejection and the like would have held sway over the world, but they didn’t, thanks to Imma as we’ll see.

(c) 2013 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

———————————————————-

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.

The Lower Seven (4)

While Erich Anpin governs through kindness and allows for mitigation, “mitigation can be removed from Zeir Anpin”, our subject of concern, “leaving (harsh) judgment in (its stead, and in) full force, which can (even) cause total devastation, God forbid”.

The point of the matter here is that this judgment-aspect of Zeir Anpin derives from Imma and its own judgment-aspects specifically. And that’s because while “the root of judgments lies above (Imma), it isn’t clearly discernible there, given that kindness holds sway there“. It’s just that “when it reaches (the) Yesod (aspect) of Imma, it reaches a level where it can be revealed’’.

That’s to say that Zeir Anpin’s judgment derives from a very high point, but it only becomes manifest from a lower point — from Imma (“even though Imma isn’t intrinsically connected to judgment” Ramchal adds in his comments) — because that’s the point at which it can manifest itself.

It’s clear then that while harsh judgment (and rah, its this-word “partner-in-crime” one might say) doesn’t manifest itself in the higher reaches, it’s still and all derived from there and expresses itself here. It’s thus analogous to the way lower emotions express themselves in the body while originating in the mind: as when anger, for example, expresses itself in pursed lips, squinted eyes, dilated nostrils and the like, while actually being rooted in one’s thoughts and attitudes.

(c) 2013 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org

———————————————————-

AT LONG LAST! Rabbi Feldman’s translation of Maimonides’ “Eight Chapters” is available here at a discount.

You can still purchase a copy of Rabbi Feldman’s translation of “The Gates of Repentance” here at a discount as well.

Rabbi Yaakov Feldman has also translated and commented upon “The Path of the Just” and “The Duties of the Heart” (Jason Aronson Publishers).

Rabbi Feldman also offers two free e-mail classes on www.torah.org entitled “Spiritual Excellence” and “Ramchal”.