Rising, After Weeping For the Shekhinah

Kabbalistic rites of a very different type are those in which the exile of the Shekhinah is dramatized and lamented. The markedly ascetic note and apocalyptic mood which entered into Kabbalism after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain were reflected in such rituals. The historical experience of the Jewish people merged indistinguishably with the mystical vision of a world in which the holy was locked in desperate struggle with the satanic. Everywhere and at every hour the simple and yet so infinitely profound fact of exile provided ground enough for lamentation, atonement, and asceticism. From this living experience there sprang a great wealth of rites. In the following I shall try to illustrate, by two striking examples, the emergence of these new rites that gave concrete expression to the myth of exile. Both were widely performed for centuries, and not a few learned Talmudists complained that simple believers, unversed in Rabbinical lore, devoted greater fervor and care to the performance of such rites that appealed directly to their feeling, than to fulfilling the commandments ofthe Torah.The first of these rites is the midnight lamentation, tikkun hatsoth. A Talmudist of the third century said: 'The night is divided into three watches, and in each watch sits the Holy One,blessed be He, and roars like a lion: Woe unto me who have destroyed my house and burned my temple and sent my children into exile among the Gentiles. ' Strange to say, almost a thousand years passed before this passage came to be reflected in ritual. Not until the eleventh century did Hai Gaon, head of a Talmudic academy in Babylonia, declare that pious men, vying with God, lament the destruction of the Temple in all three night watches. His father, Sherira Gaon, calls it a pious usage to rise at midnight and sing hymns and songs. Strange to say, he does not speak of lamentation. It was among the Kabbalists in Gerona, roughly inthe year 1260 (if, as I presume, the text to which we owe our information originated in Spain at this time), that a rite combining these two themes first came into existence. 'The Hasidimof the highest rank rise at night to sing hymns at every vigil; amid prayer and supplication they fling themselves on the ground, lie sobbing in the dust, shed floods of tears, acknowledge their transgression, and confess their sins.' Related to very different mythologems, the midnight vigil makes its appearance in numerous passages of the Zohar, and is describedas a Kabbalistic exercise. At midnight God enters Paradise to rejoice with the righteous. All the trees in Paradise burst into hymns. A wind rises from the north, a spark flies from the power of the north, the fire in God, which is the fire of the power of judgment, and strikes the Archangel Gabriel (who himself sprang from this power in God) under his wings. His cry awakens all the cocks at midnight. In other versions a north wind blowing from Paradise carries the spark to earth, where it strikes a cock directly under his wings, so causing cocks to crow at midnight. Then it is time for the pious to arise, as King David did in histime, and study the Torah until dawn, or, according to others, intone songs to the Shekhinah. For from midnight on the power of stern judgment, which governs the world in the evening, is broken, and this in the opinion of the Kabbalists explains why the spirits and demons are powerless after the first cock crow. In the Zohar these themes are already brought into relation with the exile of the Shekhinah. At midnight God remembers 'the hind that lies in the dust' and sheds two tears 'which burn more than all the fire in the world' and fall into the great sea. At this hour He breaks out in lamentations which shake all 390 worlds. That is why in the middle watch of the night the angels sing hymns of praise for only two hours and then fall silent. For these angels are named Avele Zion, those who lament for Zion -a highly remarkable transference of the name of a group of Jewish ascetics in the early Middle Ages to a class of angels. According to certain passages, all this seems to happen before the north wind rises in Paradise. At midnight the Shekhinah, who is in exile, sings songs and hymns to her spouse, and according to others a dialogue or even a hieros gamos is enacted between God and the Shekhinah. From all these rich conceptions, however, the Zohar does not develop a true rite of lamentation. It demands only that the mystics should keep vigil and join the throng of 'companions of the Shekhinah' through study and meditation on the mysteries of theTorah. There is still no mention of a ritual of lamentation over the exile. And though among the generations following the Zohar (1285 -90) we sometimes hear of pious vigils in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple, we still learn nothing of a set ritual relating specifically to the midnight hour.

ln Safed the picture changes. The memory of a half-forgotten observance combined with the Zoharic conceptions of midnight and of the exiled Shekhinah to create a new rite symbolizing the experience of the Jews of that generation. The strange part of it is that these 'rites of exile' should have arisen in Palestine and not in the countries of the Diaspora. The Kabbalists who in the middle of the sixteenth century came to Safed from all over the world, in the intention of founding a 'community of holy men,' carried with them this acute consciousness of exile and gave it perfect ritual expression in the very place where they expected the process ofMessianic redemption to begin. Concerning Abraham Halevi Berukhim, one of the most active members of this group, we read that 'always at the midnight hour he ran through the streets of Safed, weeping and crying out: Arise in God's name, for the Shekhinah is in exile, the house of our sanctuary is burned, and Israel is in great distress. He wailed outside the windows of the learned and did not desist until he saw that they had arisen from their sleep.' It might be added that this mystic, who at the wailing wall in Jerusalem beheld a vision of the Shekhinah, clad in black and weeping and lamenting, was looked upon by his companions in Safed as an incarnation of the Prophet Jeremiah, or at least as a spark from his soul.

In Isaac Luria's group this observance was given set forms. The Lurianic midnight rite has two parts, the 'rite for Rachel' and the 'rite for Leah.' For according to this Kabbalah, Rachel and Leah are two aspects of the Shekhinah, the one exiled from God and lamenting,the other in her perpetually repeated reunion with her Lord. Consequently the tikkun Rachel, or 'rite for Rachel,' was the true rite of lamentation. In observing it, men 'participate in the suffering of the Shekhinah' and bewail not their own afflictions, but the one affliction that really counts in the world, namely, the exile of the Shekhinah. The mystic, then, should rise and dress at midnight; he should go to the door and stand near the doorpost, remove his shoes and veil his head. Weeping, he should then take ashes from the hearth and lay them on his forehead, on the spot where in the morning the tefilin, the phylacteries, are applied. Then he should bow his head and rub his eyes in the dust on the ground, just as the Shekhinahherself, the 'Beautiful One without eyes,' lies in the dust. Then he recites a set liturgy composed of Psalm 137 : '(By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept'), Psalm 79 ('0 God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled'), the last chapter of Lamentations, and certain special laments written in Safed and Jerusalem. Five of these songs became an almost invariable feature of this ritual. Then the 'rite for Leah' is performed; here the emphasis is no longer on exile but on the promise of redemption. Messianic Psalms are recited and a long hymn, in the form of a dialogue between God and the mystical Community of Israel, is sung. In this hymn, written by Hayim Kohen of Aleppo, a student of Vital, the Shekhinah complains about her exile, and God paints the prospect of redemption in glowing colors. To each stanza of promise, the Shekhinah replies with a stanza of lamentation. Even the unlearned, the Kabbalists held, should perform this rite, for the 'time from midnight to morning is a time of grace, and a ray of this grace falls upon him even in the daytime.' After these two parts of the ritual a third was recommended, the 'rite for the soul,' tikkun ha-nefesh, in which the adept concentrated on the idea of uniting God and the Shekhinah with every single organ of his body, 'so that thy body may become a chariot for the Shekhinah. '

After the great Messianic outbursts of 1665-6 this rite became a subject of dispute between the Sabbatians and their adversaries. The Sabbatians declared, though with varying degrees of radicalism, that the rite for Rachel had become obsolete now that the Shekhinah was on her way home from exile. To mourn for her now was like mourning on the Sabbath day. Accordingly they performed only the second part of the ritual, the rite for Leah, expressive of Messianic hopes. Certain pious men, who had grave reservations about the Sabbatian movement and could not accept the omission of the lament, performed this rite, but remained standing or seated in their customary place inside the room, instead of sitting by the door. Orthodox Kabbalists continued to insist on careful observance of the ritual of lamentation.

("Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists", On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism)