the king’s daughter: the Shekhinah

One of the earliest and most influential figures of the Shekhinah in the Kabbalah: the divine feminine imagined as a king’s daughter — ‘good and pleasant and comely and perfect’ — married out and yet never cut off from her father. Continuing § 53 (the heh, the soul, within ‘gold’), the daughter is the heh-grade, the indwelling presence: in the developed system Malkhut, the tenth sefirah, the Shekhinah and divine bride. Her clothing ‘of gold brocade’ (Psalm 45:14) binds her to the gold (zahav) of §§ 52-53 — the Shekhinah adorned with the gold of Gevurah, the judgment that is her outer garment. Gershom Scholem read this parable as a decisive early stage in the emergence of the Shekhinah as an independent feminine potency within the godhead. Scholem, Gershom 1987

the window: the channel between Father and Daughter

The heart of the image. The king can neither dwell outside his house nor sit with his daughter without cease; so he sets a ‘window (chalon) between him and her,’ and through it father and daughter ‘join together’ whenever either has need. Sod: the window is the channel of the flow — of a piece with the gimel-channel that pours grace in §§ 17-20 and the spring that must be dug before the tree can stand in § 23 — the standing conduit between the transcendent Father (the higher grades) and the immanent Shekhinah, so that the union above and the presence below are never severed. Much of the theurgic life is the labor of keeping that window open.

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