6 - Kavod, Shekhinah, and Created Light

Summary

Introduction

THE TERM KAVOD OCCURS about a dozen times in the Torah in some sense or other of perceptible divine presence. Rabbinic literature tends to prefer the term shekhinah (from the root, sh-kh-n, to dwell) for what is apparently the same phenomenon. Heikhalot literature seems to place greater emphasis on kavod than on shekhinah, while later kabbalah does just the opposite, making shekhinah one of the sefirot (the ten hypostasized attributes or emanations by means of which the Infinite enters into relationship with the finite). Medieval Jewish philosophers such as Sa'adiah and Judah Halevi added a third term, ‘created light’, and took all three as synonyms. All of these literatures seem to agree on one thing: the terms kavod, shekhinah, and ‘created light’ all denote something in the ‘real world’. The terms are not simply metaphors or descriptions of the internal state of an individual undergoing a religious experience. But it is precisely in such a fashion, I will show here, that Maimonides understood the terms. Maimonides’ ‘non-ontological’ view of the terms kavod, shekhinah, and ‘created light’ is part and parcel of his campaign against proto-kabbalistic elements in Judaism.

In making this argument, I will be developing and expanding upon brief comments made by my late teacher, Steven S. Schwarzschild, who had argued that the term shekhinah should ‘be understood as a somewhat poetic, metaphoric name that classical Judaism has given to the idea of the functioning relationship between the transcendent God, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, humanity in general and the people of Israel in particular’. Schwarzschild contrasted this view with attempts at hypostasization, in which ‘shekhinah as a term of art for God's love, care, and nearness becomes a metaphysical (meta-physical) ontic entity that, if not actually a part, or aspect, of God, insinuates itself as an intermediary between God and humanity’. In a few brief sentences in his essay, he argued that Maimonides understood the term shekhinah as being figurative and metaphorical. Schwarzschild's interest was in making a normative claim about Judaism, and in showing, once again in his view, that the German philosopher Hermann Cohen had got things right and that matters often understood in metaphysical terms ought to be understood in regulative or moral terms.