Leore Sachs-Shmueli SHEKHINAH AND THE REVIVAL OF FEMININE GOD LANGUAGE I Prayer itself has the power to establish the space of the address—to create, to open it. And in a way it does not only create an “I” who has the power to address, but also the addressee (Jacques Derrida, Body of Prayer, p. 35) In recent years, the image of Shekhinah has been revived in both aca- demic research and in practical Judaism, in theological discourse as well as in contemporary prayers, liturgics, and rituals. There is a growing interest in Jewish culture in the image of Shekhinah as a feminine complementary or substitute for the more widespread images of God. 1 This quest for the image of Shekhinah grew as theological sen- sitivity to gender aspects of the images of God brought many feminists to feel uncomfortable with more traditional and patriarchal images of God as king, father, and Lord. These movements have created a fem- inist Jewish theology that engages in the debate about the proper ap- proach to a feminine deity, traditional masculine attributes, and the option of reconstructing a Deity with no gender. As well as the theological doctrines, these movements have created several poetic prayers that could be viewed as modern Jewish feminist liturgy. This realm of poetic prayers reveals and reconstructs new types of relations between wo/man subjects and God in the realm of Jewish communities. I would like to suggest viewing this poetry as speech acts or performative language, which reconstructs a feminine mystical God- Language, borrowing terms from kabbalistic tradition and altering them dramatically to accommodate the sensitivities of modern women and their spiritual quests. Shekhinah is a Hebrew term, grammatically feminine, originally used in the rabbinic literature to refer to God’s presence in the world. In the medieval Kabbalah, Shekhinah became a central aspect of doi:10.1093/mj/kjz016 ß The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mj/article-abstract/39/3/347/5571523 by guest on 20 September 2019