Before I knew a word of Hebrew, I learned about the Shekhinah (close-dwelling presence of God, associated with the feminine) from an Israeli college professor. I learned that Shekhinah was the part of God that is manifest in the world, God's consort. The Shekhinah became the symbol of all I was searching for because it represented what had been missing in my own life: A feminine Guide to the sacred; a Wise Woman; a Keeper of the Knowledge of Life and Death; a Homemaker. It seemed somehow more natural for me to focus on Shekhinah than on the Changing Woman of Navaho religion, one of my previous models of the divine Feminine, but I could not have articulated the reason.
— Penina V. Adelman, Lifecycles by Debra Orenstein, editor, Jane Rachel Litman, editor