Who is Serenaded on Friday Night: the Woman of the House, or the Divine Presence?

After the invitation to the angels to bless the household, and before kiddush is recited and the family sits down to the Friday-night meal, the prayer book offers a song praising the ideal woman. Known as Eyshet Ḥayil, or “woman of valor,” the song is organized as an alphabetical acrostic (i.e., each verse starts with a new letter, in alphabetical order), and is in fact the concluding passage of the biblical book of Proverbs (31:10-31).

But why should the woman of the house be serenaded on Friday night—if that’s whom the song is really addressed to?

The scholar and educator Rabbi Issachar Jacobson (1901-1972) begins his magisterial discussion of this poem with a quotation from an earlier commentary on Jewish liturgy by the German Orthodox scholar Abraham Berliner (1833-1915). According to Berliner, “the poem was not placed in the prayer book—as is today erroneously supposed—to greet the housewife who governs the home with a Sabbath blessing.” Instead, Berliner endorses the opinion of the kabbalists, who believe the poem to be addressed to the Divine Presence, the Sh’khinah—conceived as God’s feminine aspect.