[Avodah] schechinah in the west

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 12:08:47PM -0500, Zev Sero wrote:
: Eli Turkel wrote:
...
:> 2. What is west for me is east (or north or south) for someone else.
:> Thus, not putting certain types of activities to the west of the city may 
:> be to the east of some other city and vice-versa

: It's the direction, not some particular location....

I thought the Shechinah is in the West because evening comes there
first. Thus ma'arav. Our gemara (BB 25a) calls it "uriyah", which is
"west" in Farsi, also via the word for evening. But the Farsi version
is necessary for his word-play of "avir Kah". I therefore thought that
R' Avahu is saying that "imo Anokhi betzarah" is when Hashem is most
easily found. (Insert glurgy poem about footprints in the sand by Mary
Stevenson here.)

The Zohar (Bamidar 56) places Chessed and Gevurah in the south and north
respectively. Which makes sense, since a person properly ORIENTed would
be facing mizrach, so his yemin is toward teiman, and thus chessed as
well. Besides, the sun is always to the south of EY, and the north is
tzafun. Thus, south is more giving.

This is where the Zohar speaks of the west being the direction of the
Shechinah because it's Tif'eres, the synthesis of Chessed and Gevurah. The
east is Malkhus, another synthesis of left and right. Why this is east
and that west rather than the other way around is beyond me.

(BTW, ORIENTed is not an attempted pun. The concept of orientation gets
its root from a time when maps had east, the orient, on top.)

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             When a king dies, his power ends,
micha at aishdas.org        but when a prophet dies, his influence is just
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