The Migrating Wound
The Jewish tradition has never doubted that the divine presence suffers. What it has never settled is where. This article tracks a single question across three millennia of texts: at each stage of the tradition, where is the suffering Shekhinah located, and what does that location say about the metaphysics of suffering itself? I follow the wound as it migrates: from the grammatical ambiguity of Isaiah 63:9, through the rabbinic Shekhinah who stands in the street with the exiles and above the head of the sick; into the Bahir, where she becomes a daughter sent away; to the Zohar, where she is fixed at the margin of holiness with the serpent at her rock; to Luria and Ibn Tabul, where she is scattered into the shells and her root of judgment pushed back before the contraction; to Nathan of Gaza, for whom she lies in the abyss of a light that has no thought; and finally to Jonathan Eibeschütz, in whose Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-‘Ayin the wound migrates all the way into infinity itself, so that there is no longer any outside in which to locate it. I then follow the countermovement: the Hasidic relocation of the Shekhinah into the human interior, the post-Holocaust relocation into the victim and into the God who cannot intervene, and the clinical relocation into the bedside. The argument is that these are not merely successive images but successive answers to a single problem, and that the most radical of them, Eibeschütz’s refusal to grant catastrophe an outside, is also the one with the sharpest consequence for the clinician. A medicine that has learned where the Shekhinah suffers cannot locate disease in a demonic elsewhere.