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Gershom Scholem – On the Kabbalah and its symbolism - The feminine in God
Identifier
014909
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Gershom Scholem – On the Kabbalah and its symbolism
This discovery of a feminine element in God, which the Kabbalists tried to justify by gnostic exegesis, is of course one of the most significant steps they took.
Often regarded with the utmost misgiving by strictly Rabbinical, non-Kabbalistic Jews, often distorted into inoffensiveness by embarrassed Kabbalistic apologists, this mythical conception of the feminine principle of the Shekhinah as a providential guide of Creation achieved enormous popularity among the masses of the Jewish people, so showing that here the Kabbalists had uncovered one of the primordial religious impulses still latent in Judaism.