The Story of Exile and Home: Finding the Divine Feminine

I ran into the Shechinah at the Kotel. She began as an abstract concept, prayers nestled in the cracks of the stone, before she stepped out to stand behind me as a physical weight—a vast, indwelling power that made herself small enough to fit into the crowded space. Women upon women were crammed shoulder to shoulder as I made my way closer to the wall, telling myself I’m just going to touch it. Yet when I reached the barrier, I hungered for something more. I pressed my head, my stomach, and my chest flat against the stone, my hands gripping the Wall as if expecting it to turn into warm flesh. The prayers that once seemed so distant suddenly filled my head, and there, for one of the first times, I found myself feeling truly Jewish. With this newfound comfort, I prepared to depart, but I found myself enclosed by the hands of the woman behind me, her arms arced over my shoulders. I could see her palms pressed to the stone just above my head in a desperate attempt to touch the Wall that draws every collective of women to its face. To be cast into this side of the partition is its own quiet exile, a segregated shoreline where the displaced gather to weep. Yet there I was caught in the press of the holy. Locked between the immovable stone and her trembling weight, it was confinement of pure skin and grace.

This intersection between the human and the Divine is exactly what Rabbi Irwin Keller explores in his poem, Shechinah, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Written for Malkhut Sheb'Tiferet, the 21st day of the Counting of the Omer, the piece reflects on the moment the Divine Feminine is expressed through Tiferet: the world of balance, truth, and beauty. It is understood that to find the Shechinah in a crowd, like I did at the Kotel, is to witness the truth of Tiferet; that the Divine dwells within the simple architecture of living. 

The origin of Shechinah comes from the Hebrew root שכן, meaning “to dwell.” Within the book of Deuteronomy, the use of the word dwell refers to the Divine name within the Israelite temple, "And so it will be in the place where the Eternal your God chooses his name to dwell," (12:11; 14:23; 16:2, 6, 11; 26:2). The use of God’s name molds into the idea of God’s presence “dwelling,” something a little different than God’s being itself. The rabbis consider the dwelling of God’s presence famously in Pirket Avot 3:6, where the Shechinah becomes present between two people studying together. The Shechinah is further understood in BT Megillah 29a, where it is a presence that will follow the Jewish people even when in exile from the promised land of Israel. The Shechinah is viewed as a power that holds people together, the strength of Jewish communities. The word continues to appear in Jewish liturgy, though it is not specifically defined as feminine until the development of Jewish mysticism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 

Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism, defines the Shechinah by its distinctively feminine qualities. The Zohar, the foundational text of Kabbalah, compares the Shechinah to a mother, sister, daughter, and bride. The Shechinah also characterizes the cloud that led the Israelites during their journey through the desert; here is where the Shechinah takes on the maternal presence that guided the Israelites out of exile. Kabbalah expands on the idea of Shechinah and is rooted in the belief that the divine holds feminine as well as masculine characteristics, known as the yesod. Kabbalah maintains that there are ten divine qualities, called sefirot, which describe the Divine’s essence. Because the Shechinah is represented by malchut(kingship), the bottom sefirah closest to our physical world, she is the portal through which we experience the Divine in nature and in one another. Kabbalistic tradition teaches that these divine polarities are brought into harmony through human action, prayer, and ethical living.

In the twentieth century, Jewish feminists seized these Kabbalistic ideas of a gendered God to fuel a movement toward a solely feminine divine. They aimed to reinvent the Shechinah’s agency, moving her to a form of active power, beyond the bottom of the Sefirot and beyond her male counterpart. As Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb wrote in her 1995 feminist tract She Who Dwells Within, “Just as Shekinah has been in exile, so Jewish women have been in exile.” 

For the Jewish feminist movement, the historical suppression of the feminine was not just a social injustice; it was a rupture in the divine fabric itself. This shift reflects what scholar Gershom Scholem identified as a “deep-seated religious need.” Scholem argued that the incorporation of the Sefirot by the rabbis, despite the challenge creating humanlike traits for God posed to the transcendentness of God, was proof that humans yearn for a relatable, multifaceted Divine. 

The Divine Feminine answers that same yearning, bridging the gap between the ancient stone of the Kotel and the soft, breathing reality of our lives. Even though I sought her in a moment of exile at the Kotel, standing behind a physical barrier between the masculine and the feminine, the Shechinah did not stay behind the wall. She followed me. She refused to be a relic or prisoner of a specific geography, proving her true nature is not found in stillness but in movement, the kinetic energy of human care and survival. 

The Shechinah is still present in my life, manifesting in the mundane architecture of my own survival. I find her in the rhythmic certainty of my own breath and in the fierce, protective embrace of the women who held me when the world feels wide and cold. In the moments where I close my eyes, thanking Her for the little things, She sits in my mind as a woman, as the softness of my loving mother. The creation of the Shechinah as a presence found within study, within community, within the aimless wandering of the Israelites, creates a God that is found within ourselves. This is the nature of the Indwelling; the same power big enough to guide an Israelite nation through a trackless desert out of exile is small enough to fit in a room, and vast enough to make a house a home. By reclaiming the Shechinah, I am not only adding a feminine pronoun or naming the matriarchs in our prayers; I am ending the exile of my own soul, finally inviting the Mother to sit at a table that has been prepared over centuries.