The Cosmic Mobility of Our Divine Mothers: Binah and the Shekhinah
- Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli
- 1 day ago
- 12 min read
Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli on Who and What
To trip and fall through God, try this trick practiced by teenagers of yore: sneak out at three or four o’clock in the morning and lie down on the road, back to the asphalt.* One sees the stars, and the shock of it mixes explosively with the fear of oncoming cars to create a very physical vertigo, a sense of tumbling off the planet. Going by the vividness of their language, their confidence that they will be understood on a gut level, the sages of the Zohar had a similar practice, which they discuss in the section known as the Introduction. “Lift up your eyes and see who created these,” says R. Eleazar, quoting Isaiah 4:26. He pries open the verse with questions, and pours out some answers:
“Lift up your eyes” – to what place? To the place where all eyes hang. What place is that? The opening of the eyes. There you will come to know the Hidden Ancient One that can be asked about. “Created these” – and who is that? Who. That is the name of the upper edge of the heavens. Everything is in its power, and as it can be asked about, but the way is closed, not revealed, it is called Who. Higher than that, one cannot even ask. So that side of the heavens is called Who.
The fast flow of detail carries us with it into space, but rewinding, we see a description of upside-down vertigo. We start with our eyes resting on something, not yet registering what we see; that thing opens our eyes to an enormous vacuum of understanding which inhales us beyond the known constellations, beyond the existence of illumination, but not beyond ravenous wonder. Only here, at the edge of human comprehension, do we realize what we passed on our way out of orbit. R. Eleazar explains:
There is another place below, called What. What is the difference between this one and that one? When it comes to the primordial hidden one called Who, mortals can ask about it, and search, and look, and build awareness step by step until the end of all steps, and once you get there – What? What do you know, what did you see, what did you find? All is as hidden as before.
Readers of the Zohar know that it carefully hides the full depth of its meaning, “revealing one handbreadth and concealing two,” compelling its students to sweat like homicide detectives if they wish to piece together its clues. By matching the fingerprints of R. Eleazar’s passage to those elsewhere in the Zohar, we understand that Who and What are two aspects of God. The Zohar identifies many aspects of God, though it rarely names them outright. We will respect the clearance levels the Zohar builds into its text and refrain from the crude exhumation of esoteric information. It is enough to say that in the text above, Who is the aspect known as Binah (Understanding), God as mother of the cosmos. What is the Shekhinah, the Immanent, God as our mother.
It is important to R. Eleazar that we know we have two divine mothers: one near, one far. It is impossible to explain from the Binah side (Who) of the equation, though, mysteriously, we seem to be invited to try, step by futile step. R. Eleazar therefore solves from the Shekhinah side (What), imagining a conversation with the Jewish people:
I, What, am just like you. The situation you find yourself in is the same as it is, so to speak, up here. Just as now none of the Holy People come to you for sacred rites, I say to you that I too will not ascend, not until your pilgrims below ascend. And this should comfort you, that I am like you in every way. Now you sit in ruin, your brokenness as great as the sea, and if you say you cannot be healed: Who will heal you. Yes, that hidden element above on which all depends will heal you and lift you up.
Who, the mother above, heals. What, the mother below suffers. But the Zohar’s proffered comfort has an edge to it: it confronts us with the reality that the suffering of others soothes us. Further, we hear that healing is a kind of jump scare, unforeseeable, resisting relationship.
In life, one problem with suffering is that it too often drives a guilty wedge between us and the person who endures on our behalf. I think of the Holocaust survivor Menachem S., whose story is brought in the book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Menachem S. was five years old, interred in a labor camp with his parents, when a rumor went among the prisoners that the children in the camp were soon to be murdered. His mother, helping him over the fence, gave him a photo which had been taken for her student ID, and promised that she would find him and bring him home after the war. We can note that, counterintuitively, the near, human mother has now been separated from her son, and the far mother—a wish, an imaginative connection in the form of a photograph—is physically near. Laub writes,
In one of the gentile houses he stayed in (living on the papers of a child that had died), the family was in the habit of praying together every evening. When everybody knelt and prayed to the crucifix, the lady of the house, who may have suspected he was Jewish, was kind enough to allow him to pray to whomever he wished. The young boy would take out the photograph of his mother and pray to it, saying, “Mother, let this war be over and come and take me back as you promised.”
Though he was eventually miraculously reunited with both of his parents, his mother no longer looked like her photograph. To Menachem, his parents were strangers, “haggard and emaciated, in striped uniforms, with teeth hanging loose in their gums” whom he could not bring himself to address as his mother and father. The suffering of the near mother is terrifying and alien, even as it reveals what she endured to survive and reclaim her son. Laub adds that her return also vaporized the power of the photograph—the far mother. It is as if it was psychically impossible for Menachem to hold both at once. He illustrates a difficulty that many might have implementing the text into any sort of existential practice, though that is exactly what we are meant to do.
For the moment, let us pin his casefile next to that of R. Eleazar and allow the subconscious to get to work on this problem while we turn our attention to another issue, even more urgent: that a real-life example has revealed there is a deep pathos in the Zohar’s description of our two mothers. If we are to understand that there is an echo of these suffering and absent mothers built into the fabric of the cosmos itself, how are we able to bear it? Let us approach this question like R. Eleazar, by working on the more familiar, worldly side of the equation. The authors of Testimony are hardly wrong to understand Menachem’s story as a tragedy. When they go so far as to say it is absent a “happy ending,” I wonder if Menachem’s uninterviewed mother would have agreed. At a time when many of those children who survived were orphaned, her son had hope when he had no mother, and a mother when he had no hope.
Can we find that in the Zohar, the sweet in the bittersweet? It is time to return to the evidence board and review its mad proliferation of images. In the portrait R. Eleazar has sketched for us earlier, the Shekhinah does not seem upset. Perhaps we do not need to be overwrought on Her behalf after all, as She seems to know something humans don’t. Indeed, the text itself teases this: her speech to us, using the phrase “not until,” signals some kind of plan or vision of the future. We may be invited to trust her, rather than to protest the apparent injustice of a universe which necessitates her suffering.
Perhaps another thing What (Shekinah) knows that we do not is Who (Binah), the outer edge of the heavens. Is it a frustrating coincidence that mending and restoration come from an utterly imperceptible source? On the contrary, Zohar is rigging a common sentiment, we don’t know what’s good for us, with a high-voltage twist: that we cannot know what is good for us, that healing emerges from somewhere that cannot even be explored in imagination. Unknowing is itself a font of restoration. But to cultivate awareness of the unknown, even to orient our very being toward it while still respecting the borders of its void, is to allow wild mystery to catch us unawares. This is especially important when only wild mystery will save us. But is it possible to practice unknowing?
The Zohar, desperate always to find things out, can hardly be telling us that the secret of life is to abandon the pursuit of wisdom. But perhaps it is saying something about passive process—that to connect with the fullness of life, we need to be both relentlessly hungry and very still, even dead still. I ask your patience a moment as I throw before you a photograph. It is of rabbinical judges hooding themselves. This practice signals the formal beginning of a trial, and has to do with removing distraction, as the hood prevents looking to the left or right. Judicial hooding happened in the days when we wore toga-like garments, and might easily cast a fold of our cloaks around our heads without looking ridiculous. You, reader in the interrogation room, are obliged to confess some familiarity with this seemingly strange picture because, after all, it is only depicting in physical terms something you already intuit about focus. Engaging with a problem necessitates disconnection from the living free-flow of information all around you. Focus is a very controlled, partial death. But finding the right practice to enable wise focus seems to grow ever more complicated. Now that we have changed our robes for button-downs, hooding is no longer an elegant, or even culturally legible, option. What successor solution is possible in the degraded age of ill-fitting chinos?
The second Komarna rebbe has an idea, which he develops in his Zohar commentary, the Damesek Eliezer. He reminds his readers of the primordial light at the beginning of creation that, according to the Talmud, was so weirdly bright that people could use it to see everything on earth. Of course, having a light like that was dangerous, exploitable for violent and selfish ends, so it was hidden for the righteous in the World to Come. For the Zohar, that means it was hidden in Binah, our Who. Damesek Eliezer thinks it is still possible to hood oneself, not with cloth, but with this spiritual light. It might be a uniquely Hasidic trait to be so blithe about contradiction. Cloaking with light? Blinkering with vision? Perhaps a mystic can work with this koan, but can a judge?
Yes. Damesek Eliezer’s insight is that to see nothing is to see everything. That is, when making ourselves available to people in trouble, we must die to what we think we already know, and let infinite possibility blind us to our preconceptions. There is a telling consonance between rabbinic injunctions for judges to imagine themselves assailed by swords above and fires below, and later Lurianic meditations to be done before learning Torah, in which scholars inwardly enact their own executions by stoning, burning, decapitation, and strangulation. In both cases, the shock of envisioned violence is only a first step to burying the ego, which otherwise stands in the way of radical reception of the new.
Because conflict is everywhere we look, this advice is applicable to more than rabbinical judges. At the very least, everyone hears tales of grief, and everyone receives pleas for intervention. Indeed, given the desperate bids media makes for attention, it is almost impossible to go for a single day without many such pleas. But a person hooded in infinite possibility has become difficult to capture by a single narrative, and has become a better conduit for healing rather than reactivity.
According to the Arizal, the healing such a person can provide is not limited to other humans. Getting in touch with the far mother is something that can help the near one. In Shaar HaKavanot, his student, R. Hayim Vital, records a teaching that when humans eat, drink, bathe, and otherwise take care of themselves, they access Binah, and bring Her nourishing light to the wounded Shekhinah. The most sober, intellectual way to put this is that we are best able to help the world when we are refreshed. But to say so is thin skin over much blood. Beneath the dermis, we could notice the interesting emphasis on digestion, a completely unconscious and undirected process, elevated here above the realm of thought. Intuition cannot be acted upon directly to make what the rational mind conceives of as improvements; it needs to be nourished and given space to develop on its own time. And in the vena cava itself we can sense painful memories of asking our mothers how we can help them only to be told, "Oh sweetie, you are already doing the most helpful thing for me by being happy." In the moment, the instruction is infuriating, a dismissal, a kindness that feels as though it has made us into liars. Later, we understand.
But it is difficult to escape from an understanding of the two mothers that relies on winking Hasidism. Through the whole investigation, a current of nurture has run in one direction, hard against a current of death running backward. How, to return to Menachem’s problem, can we possibly follow both? The Medieval legal and mystical great, Ramban, famously alluded to a return to Binah as dying in his mother’s arms—this, with a tender and melancholy appetite. But his combination of extinction and ecstasy seems too sacred to unpack. It is enough that we immediately catch his meaning and feel it reverberate horribly deep down. Once he has pointed out that these paths are not opposites but relate to one another intimately, we can look for another figure to explain how it is possible to travel in two directions, and why we should do so.
I wonder if archetypical teenagers have another trick to teach in this regard. Teenagers who defy what is good for them, who stake their lives on things that hardly seem to matter and bend the whole of their will to its service, who run away and lie on the road in a half-serious, half-whimpering attempt to go existentially further than any vehicle can take them. In this personage, fearless generosity and trembling self-effacement are easy to recognize as halves of a singular beauty. The key is not to put an overly sober twist on things and use the intellect to brute-force either division (choosing between paths) or synthesis (realizing they are the same). Rather, the solution is to permit them to create a bicameral depth to life when and how they will. In fact, this teaching is prefigured elsewhere in the Introduction to the Zohar, which instructs us on how to drink wine to welcome the Sabbath. “The cup of blessing must rest on five fingers, no more,” it writes. By providing a strong, specific, and above all limited anchor for overt attention and human effort, the Zohar communicates the importance of a second hand, to which no instructions can be given, which cannot even be explicitly named in the text without impinging on the freedom it finds in being unnoticed by the wine-drinker.
The abandonment of attempts to micromanage dark matter, within the mind or without, was the key to receiving the healing of Who. We need what Keats called negative capability, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Perhaps the only needed modification is to go in both directions, near and far at once, with gentle caution, a controlled and attentive tumble into the stars. Cosmic mobility: that is exactly what the two-mother idea has to offer, and it is needed.
Damesek Eliezer thinks that, originally, the Zohar had no introduction, and that the material we find there is native to other parts of the composition. His guess as to why it was moved to the beginning is that it equips the reader with a deep reservoir of strength, so that it is possible to persist in one’s mystical studies despite “many trials which will seek to separate, God forbid, one from learning Zohar, and from trials by those persons who are mired in their physicality, the cynics of their generation, may the Merciful One preserve us.” He portrays the student of mysticism as a uniquely vulnerable figure rather than a capable adept, isolated, hardly elite in any conventional sense. Of course such a person needs (among other sources of comfort treated by the Introduction) maternal support. The double helping served by R. Eleazar takes it out of the realm of pure comfort, which would only enable complacency, a me-against-the-world mindset, and sets it whirling into an uncertainty which no longer paralyzes. It suspends us vertiginously between poles, so that we are stretched into a dynamic relationship with pain and relief, familiarity and alienation. It presses us to honour what is close and damaged at the same time we relax our control to permit renewal from the blindside. When suffering is only another aspect of intimacy, and death is only another aspect of renewal, danger no longer needs to trigger a siege mentality. Rather, the mind becomes like a constellation: broad but coherent, full of void and illumination, stable in its constant motion between the near and far.
Rabbi Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli learns and teaches at Yeshivat HaHakshava. Currently living in Queens, NYC, Lavery-Yisraeli is a writer, a Senior Editor at Marginalia, and an internationally exhibited visual artist. She can be reached at yonah.lavery@gmail.com.
*The content is for entertainment/informational purposes only. The statement is intended as, and should not be construed as, advice.
