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H U R Q A L Y A S Y N D I C A T E

Shechinatic History

post by Gur Dimei

“This is the mystery of “Ani first and Ani last” [...] that there is no creature of the creator but himself.”
~R’ Abraham Miguel Cardoso, Drush HaShechina

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History as a Body

History is the ongoing exhaustion of God’s inner life; the incessant birth of humanity from itself. Since Hegel we tend to think divinely about history, and historically about God. Hegel centers the ever-becoming of divine life around the fulfillment, the consummation, the activation. And as God is on an ongoing struggle to establish Himself, so does humanity beget itself again and again through the setting of the ages. The Godhead finds its identity through historical advancement. The movement of history is a movement of being-born, of organic self-activation. God’s advancing in history is parallel to His immanent activity within the seven revealed potencies, in the end of which there comes the perfect consummation of shechinatic existence.
If there was a field called “Jewish Historicism”, it would have described history as a body; more accurately, as a composite face (“Partzuf”). And the climax of shechinatic history would be the shechinatic forehead, in which the Desire Of All Desires, the most active potency, lives. History here is wholly a pile of organs, which complete one the other and are aroused one by another. The Desire Of All Desires, Ra’ava D’Ra’avin, is the time in which the Judgement is sweetened and the god is intoxicated with an always-intoxicating. The Shabbat, in which the time of Desire is aroused, is a time of divine intoxication. The world-shabbatical age is an ever-occuring celebration in which we mustn’t grieve and mustn’t be sad.
The shechinatic quest of the Godhead is in its being-established as a personality; in its turning into an ABSOLUTE NESHAMA, into a subject which is relating to himself and develops his innerly world. In the terminal Shabbat the Godhead becomes a perfect activity; a ripened, coagulated, assembled and all-gathering fullness. History is, as Hegel said, the “developing vitality” of absolute spirit. All world-history, the life of Israel over its ages, are a unique procedure of inner procession and self-gathering of that very world-neshama.
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The Secret of the Godhead in History

The World-Shabbat is the age of Shechinat HaOz, the Kingdom. In that age, the god and the world bear no separation and the grace is poured between them without cessation. This is the nuptial time of the Godhead, as an internalizing and self-gathered entity. The Shechina here is the ecstatic godhead, exteriorized into itself; the ripened and emotional; personalized and colorful godhead. The Age Of The Shechina is an age of world-ripenedness, of ever-ascending and self-conquering.
Jewish history as destined to be realized in the image of the perfect shechina is the ever-elevating of humanity, it is the infinite gifting and reaching-out of human life toward itself. The absolute Shechina interiorizes the judgements and overcomes them. The shechina is the active essence in god, and so also in history she is the completion and enforming of the church.