SHEKINAH!

 - What we really need is to shed all the light that official language and reason of State can still offer us on that primordial experience of our wars in the Middle East, from whose silent darkness this damned mysticism of the death of worlds continues to emerge (.) -----, Kissinger said to Bill. --- The risk of using literature in politics (I commented to her) is that the Word, the Poetic Revelation, separates itself from what it reveals and acquires an autonomous consistency. The being manifested by literature separates itself from the thing revealed and interposes itself between it and men, like a Demon. Exactly as in that ''aggadah'' of the Talmud, in which the four rabbis enter the Pardes and have access to supreme knowledge. ''Ben Azzai looked at it and died; Ben Zoma looked at it and went mad; Aher cut the branches, and exiled the Shekinah from herself. Only Rabbi Akiba came out unharmed.'' The Shekinah, in Kabbalah, is the last of the ten Sephirot, the attributes of Divinity, its manifestation on earth... its Word. And when the Shekinah is exiled from itself, it loses its positive potency and becomes malevolent; the Kabbalists then say that it "sucks the bed of Evil." That is why I tell you: if we want to be the first citizens of a fourth-dimensional community, without presuppositions and without a State, we must learn to enter and leave unharmed the Paradise of Language, as Rabbi Akiba did.