Who Has Created These?: The Gaze Toward She-Who-Is-Hidden

 Mi — Who? Elah — These? The Divine as Question and Gaze

The Zohar begins with Rabbi Eleazar's call:

"Lift up your eyes on high, and see — Who has created These?"

This passage resonates with Levinas’s view that God comes to us as a question. The Face of the Other is not a resolution, but a summons, a demand. In Levinas's ethics, the infinite enters into the finite through the encounter — not through grasping, but through exposure, vulnerability, response.

So too, in the Zohar, God as Miis not a graspable “What” but an unreachable “Who.” The gaze into heaven becomes the ethical gaze into the Face — and that Face is female, hidden, and demanding responsibility.

The Divine Mirror and the Marian Yes

The Zohar says:

“To that place (the Divine Mirror) to which all eyes are lifted…”

In Luisa Piccarreta's mystical writings, Mary is not merely the first disciple — she is the first to live in the Divine Will, entirely united with it. She is the Mirror in whom Mi (Who) is answered by a Fiat — a yes that reflects the Infinite back to Itself through a finite, created soul.

Thus, the Zohar's Elah is not simply a feminine noun. She is a metaphysical event — Fiat, Hineni, Amen. The hidden God becomes manifest in a woman’s gaze, in a mother’s womb, in a girl’s Yes.

Atika Kadisha — The Ancient Hidden One and the Fiat of Time

The Zohar calls this source the Atika Kadisha, the Ancient Hidden One.
It is not yet revealed, and yet all comes forth from it. It is the "one from the end of heaven," the mystery of the Cherubim who faced one another over the Ark — an image deeply beloved by St. Lawrence of Brindisi, who taught that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus form an eternal Trinitarian echo— the “Incarnational Circle” in Eternity.

In Luisa’s writings, this Atika becomes the Eternal Fiat, the primeval yes from which all created wills must return and enter again. It is a circle of love, not a line of fate.

For Rebbe Nachman, this "Who" (Mi) becomes the place of brokenness and yearning. We do not yet seeElah fully. We weep for Her. We sing to Her. We wander the forests and the ruins with Her absence echoing in us. But even there — even in the She-Who-Is-Not-Yet-Revealed— there is joy. "There is no despair in the world," he says, because even the absence of the Goddess is filled with longing, and longing itself is Divine.

Levinas and the Ethics of Shekhinah

Levinas would caution us against mythologizing the Other. The Face — even the Divine Face — is not a concept, nor a system. It is a demand to respond, especially to the widow, the orphan, the poor — all those in whom Elah weeps and waits.

Thus, we read the Zohar not as theological speculation but as an ethical apocalypse.

The “end of heaven” (ketzeh ha-shamayim) is not spatial, but relational: it is where God withdraws so that love might exist, so that justice might begin.

The hidden Goddess, She-Who-Is-Asked (Sha-Elah), is not an idol — but the invitation to responsibility. She lives in the Face of the one who cannot repay you. She lives in the soul who says Yes to the Fiat when everything seems lost.

So now we may return to to my sacred dialogue (on another blog post) — Levinas, Luisa, Rebbe Nachman, and Our Lady — and see them standing around this mystery:

• Levinas, facing Mi, hears the silent command to love.

• Luisa, receiving Elah, becomes the echo of the Divine Fiat.

• Rebbe Nachman, longing for Sha-Elah, dances in the broken joy of a world yet to be healed.

• Our Lady, the true Ark, cradles the hidden Atika in her arms.

And perhaps, in the center of this circle, the Zohar itself stands — not as book, but as burning bush, whispering:

Lift your eyes.
See the Face.
Respond to the Who.
Birth the These.