The Lighting of Sabbath Candles and Women’s Mystical Piety

Shifrah bat Joseph, living in Posen (Poznan), wrote the tekhine known as Imre Shifrah (The Words of Shifrah), which includes kabbalistic thoughts on Sabbath candle lighting. The work is a fascinating and relatively rare recorded instance of female spiritual piety, let alone one so saturated with kabbalistic meaning and symbolism. The literature of tekhines, written in Yiddish, in contrast to the typical composition in the holy tongue of Hebrew by male authors, offers a precious glimpse into an otherwise neglected world of women’s religious practice, in this case kabbalistic practice. Shifrah bat Joseph clearly articulates that the two candles lit by women are meant to correlate to the two souls that a Jew carries during sacred Sabbath time. She speaks of intentional theurgic ritual practice in which the lighting of the candles is meant to stimulate the downflow and presence of the shekhinah, and to “awaken great arousal in the upper world.” Shifrah also emphasizes the importance of sincere intentionality, or kavvanah, which she characterizes as the imperative “to kindle [them] with joy and with wholeheartedness, because it is in honor of the Shekhinah and in honor of the Sabbath and in honor of the extra [Sabbath] soul.” This remarkable manifestation of female knowledge of kabbalistic content, and the articulation of the significance of women’s ritual practice in a kabbalistic key, reveals that such knowledge was more porous across gender divides than is often assumed.