“Have the people of Israel build me a holy sanctuary so I can live among them. You must build this Tabernacle and its furnishings exactly according to the pattern I will show you. - Exodus 25:88-9
Shekhinah (שכינה) is the presence or manifestation of God which has descended to "dwell" among humanity. The term never appears in the Hebrew Bible; later rabbis used the word when speaking of God dwelling either in the Tabernacle or amongst the people of Israel. The root of the word means "dwelling".
Of the principal names of God, it is the only one that is of the feminine gender in Hebrew grammar. Some believe that this was the name of a female counterpart of God, but this is unlikely as the name is always mentioned in conjunction with an article (e.g.: "the Shekhina descended and dwelt among them" or "He removed Himself and His Shekhina from their midst"). This kind of usage does not occur in Semitic languages in conjunction with proper names. The term, however, may not be a name, as it may merely describe the presence of God, and not God Himself.
Shekhinah (Hebrew: שְׁכִינָה, Modern: Šəḵīna, Tiberian: Šeḵīnā)1 is the English transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning "dwelling" or "settling" and denotes the presence of God in a place. This concept is found in Judaism and the Torah, as mentioned in Exodus 25:8.
Shekinah in Exile
“The Shekinah in exile..... the Presence of God within creation. She is waiting to be found by the wandering soul who roams the earth, blindly seeking for fulfillment. She is bound in a castle and writes a letter in deep grief for she is alone, and like the soul is waiting to be found and unite. Her letter is written with her tears and given in trust to the wind (ruach) so that the soul may one day receive this letter and return.....” - Mike Bais
Shekhinah comes from shakhan — "to dwell, to abide." She is the indwelling of God. The Holy Spirit is also famously and explicitly the indwelling Spirit — "know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you" (1 Cor 3:16); "the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you" (Rom 8:11).
God's interior presence as opposed to God's transcendent otherness. Both are the answer to the same theological problem: how is the One who is utterly beyond also intimately within?
Feminine. Shekhinah is grammatically and theologically feminine. So is Ruach — the Hebrew word for Spirit. So is Ruha in Aramaic, the language Jesus actually spoke. The earliest Christian tradition outside Jerusalem — the Syriac, deeply Semitic, very close to Jesus's own world — called the Holy Spirit Ruha and treated her as Mother. The Odes of Solomon, the Acts of Thomas, and the Gospel of the Hebrews all do this explicitly.
The Gospel of the Hebrews even has Jesus saying "my Mother, the Holy Spirit, took me by one of my hairs and carried me to Mount Tabor." This was lost in the Greco-Latin tradition, where Pneuma is grammatically neuter and Spiritus grammatically masculine, and the feminine vanished from Christian pneumatology. But the original Hebraic-Semitic stratum is unambiguous. The Spirit was originally She.
The Comforter / Paraclete. Jesus promises the paraklētos — the One who comes alongside. The Shekhinah is precisely the One who comes alongside — into Babylon, into the diaspora, into every exile.
"wherever they were exiled, the Shekhinah went into exile with them." The Comforter is the Shekhinah translated into Greek with the gender marker dropped.
Tabernacle and Pentecost. The Shekhinah descends as cloud and fire onto the Tabernacle (Exodus 40:34–38) and onto Solomon's Temple (1 Kings 8:10–11).
At Pentecost the same fire descends — but now onto the disciples. The Tabernacle has been internalized. The temple is now the human body, the gathered ekklesia. This is what makes Pentecost a profoundly Jewish event: it is the Shekhinah resuming her dwelling — but in a portable, interiorized, incarnated temple. Same fire. Different temple. "Don't you know your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?" (1 Cor 6:19).
The Shekhinah, who dwelt in the stone temple, now dwells in the temple of flesh. The fire over the Mercy Seat between the cherubim becomes the fire on the apostles' heads.
The Pillar of Cloud and Fire. The Shekhinah leads Israel through the wilderness — cloud by day, fire by night. The Holy Spirit is "a Voice and Guide through a far country." The function is identical: the Presence that goes into the exile with the exiles, leading them home.
Wisdom. Hokhmah, Sophia, the feminine Wisdom of Proverbs 8 and the Wisdom of Solomon, was absorbed into Christian pneumatology very early. The Russian Sophiologists — Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov — built an entire theology around the explicit identification of Sophia, Shekhinah, Holy Spirit, Mary, and the Church as facets of the same divine feminine reality. This tradition has been theologically contested within Orthodoxy, but it is a serious and ancient identification.
If Shekhinah and Holy Spirit are one, the Kabbalistic drama maps directly onto the Christic:
- The Shekhinah's exile from Tiferet (the masculine divine) is the Spirit's separation from Christ-Logos in the dream of separation.
- Adam driving out et — the Shekhinah — is humanity's loss of the Spirit at the Fall.
- The wandering Shekhinah accompanying her children in exile is the Holy Spirit poured out on every flesh, indwelling every soul of the wandering.
- The reunion of Shekhinah and Tiferet at the redemption is the Wedding of the Lamb in Revelation 19, the hieros gamos at the end of the Story.
- Pentecost is the first return of the Shekhinah; the Eschaton is the full return.
The Shekhinah in Exile and The Holy Spirit - their unification is itself the unification of Israel and the Church, of Hebrew mysticism and Christian mysticism, of the Old Story and the New.
ACIM gives the Holy Spirit a very particular role: the bridge between the dreaming mind and the awakened mind, the memory of God within the dream, the One who "abides in the part of your mind that is part of the Christ Mind." This is exactly the Shekhinah's role in the Kabbalah: the Presence that descends into the exile with the exiles, who never abandons the dreaming children, who waits within the dream as the rope of return.
The Holy Spirit of the Course is a Hebraic Shekhinah translated into the language of the Christ-Mind.