Shekinah Devi

AMIDST the thronging thousands at ‘Amritavarsham 50’ I met Rabbi Leah, a Jewish woman priest. She spoke of the downplayed feminine principle of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), spelt Shekinah or Shechinah. Since the 20th century there has been a movement amongst devout people to rediscover and honour Shekinah, who, I was told, represents God’s presence on earth, the “in-dwelling” grace and “the splendour of light”.

As a Hindu who always cries to Devi Ma for everything, big and small, obviously the consonances caught. And was Shekinah the same as Sakina in the Koran Sharief (48:4), who is “the supreme peace sent by Al-Lah to dwell in humanity”? In which case, I wanted to thank the angry Hindu who once emailed me: “You are anti-Hindu and anti-national. Change your name to Sakina”. It seems she was, though of course, Islam resists such personalised notions. Adding more honey to the oaten cake was the fact that Shekinah is the first goal of Jewish mystics who attempt to attain ‘devekut’. Devekut? I learnt that in Hebrew it means ‘cleaving’ or communion with God, from the Hebrew ‘davak’ (being devoted to God). Devekut is the ultimate step on the spiritual ladder achieved after understanding the lower-ranked ‘sefirot’ (emanations). Mind, Shekinah is believed to dwell more in Jews than in gentiles (and in those outside the Abrahamic faith, probably never!) and to be achieved properly after death rather than in life.

Similarly, though Magdalene was the last person to have seen Christ, western scholars say that her womanliness became a problem to later dogmatists. A sect called the Manichaens rejected sexuality and the Christian orthodoxy accepted their views. Hence Magdalene the total woman was put down and the Virgin, beloved anyway as the Mother, was upgraded to independent cult status though

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not part of the high trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. But as with Shekinah, modern people want to recover Magdalene’s lost status.

But consider the abject emotional dependence of Magdalene in the last temptation of Christ: “Rabbi, why do you talk to me about the future life? We are not men to have need of another, an eternal life, we are women, and for us one moment with the man we love is everlasting Paradise, one moment far from the man we love is everlasting hell. It is here on this earth that we women live out eternity”. How seductively written. And how utterly destructive for women. With Devi’s high festival just over amongst us, the cue is right to reflect on the in-dwelling emotional strength of both men and women as the true feminine principle of Divinity.