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84 6 The Ontic Metamorphosis of the Menstruating Shekhinah The correspondence between the terrestrial and the supernal menstruant is not merely biological. It also has a moral dimension. When pure, the Shekhinah promotes divine unity. When impure, she becomes a force of evil that must be banned, literally niddah, from the divine realm. That kabbalists understood that an aspect of the divine realm as evil was a response to a religious need—to explain the existence of evil in our world. However, that kabbalists constructed the myth of the menstruating Shekhinah out of largely peripheral traditions that demonized impurity—traditions in which the divine female would ontically change into an evil force by means of a quotidian female biological cycle—had dire consequences for women’s spirituality. For if the Shekhinah could suddenly change like “a revolving sword” from good to evil, it is inconceivable that terrestrial women could ever attain or sustain the purity necessary for divine union. The menstruating Shekhinah thus became a means of justifying women’s exclusion from divine pursuits. impurity in the sefirotic realm In the prophetic literature, impurity is used as metaphor for evil and sin. Impurity represents evil; purity, good. Kabbalists, however, did not rest with this essentially descriptive image. Rather, they took the image of impurity to a new level by infusing it with ontological status. Whereas in the Bible, Jerusalem may be compared to a menstruant because the city’s inhabitants are polluted by sin,1 in Kabbalah, Jerusalem, representing the Shekhinah, actually becomes a niddah. The metaphor becomes a myth.2 This shift may be attributed in part to the kabbalists’ dissatisfaction with the philosophical approach to the problem of evil. Believers in one benevolent God are perennially confronted with the existence of evil in the world. Metamorphosis of the Menstruating Shekhinah · 85 How could the ultimate Good “make peace and create evil?”3 The answers of kabbalists and neoplatonists were diametrically opposed. Whilephilosophersrejectedtherealityofevil,Castiliankabbalistsembraced it. Neoplatonists argued that as the final element in the chain of being, evil did not really exist: it was completely divorced from the divine realm. By contrast, the kabbalists employed the neoplatonic approach to a different end. Evil became an essential element within the emanative process of divine attributes known as the sefirot. Early kabbalists based their understanding of evil on the prophetic verse, “from the north shall evil break loose” (Jer. 1:14). That the evil, in the form of the Babylonian enemy, came from the north was a historical fact; the kabbalistic innovation lay in equating this evil with an aspect of God. Kabbalists believed that the Godhead was composed of ten knowable attributes and one, the Ain Sof, which lay beyond human cognition. Beginning with the earliest kabbalistic treatise, the Sefer ha-Bahir, we see evil located in the sefirah of Pah . ad (fear; Gevurah, or Judgment, in later Kabbalah).4 The kabbalistic perception of evil was enhanced through the symbolism of impurity. As early as the twelfth century, the Provençal kabbalist Isaac the Blind (1165–1235) had equated impurity with evil. He explained that “all things that come from the left side of God are dominated by impurity, as it is said, ‘from the north shall evil break loose’” (Jer. 1:14).5 Later, when Castilian kabbalists developed the notion of an independent realm of evil known as the sitra ah . ra (the other side), they enlarged upon the association between evil and impurity. The Zohar asserts that “just as there are levels and palaces on the side of holiness, so also on the side of impurity.”6 The sitra ah . ra became the side of impurity (sitra masava) that mirrors the holy sefirotic realm. Indeed , the Zohar identified impurity and evil to such an extent that it uses the terms sitra masava and sitra ah . ra interchangeably. Kabbalists do not only consign impurity to the realm of Judgment or the sitra ah . ra. As we have seen, Jewish law stipulated that one could become impure not only by means of one’s actual physical condition but also through proximity to a polluting source. Impurities were therefore graded according to degree. The highest grade of impurity, known as “the father of the fathers of impurity,” was corpse impurity and was followed by the nine remaining fathers : creeping things, carrion, semen, the waters of purification, sin offerings, the zavah, the niddah, the zav, and those subject to scale disease. Exposure to these fathers of impurity results in impurity...

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