The kabbalistic identification of the Shekhinah with the feminine, described in the main entry, produced one of the most widely practiced pieces of Jewish liturgy: the Friday evening service of Kabbalat Shabbat, welcoming the Sabbath.
Sixteenth-century Safed kabbalists, elaborating older rabbinic language that already spoke of the Sabbath as a queen and a bride, developed the practice of going out, sometimes literally into the fields surrounding the town, to welcome the incoming Sabbath as one would welcome a bride, identifying the Sabbath itself with the indwelling Shekhinah entering into closer union with the six weekday sefirot, chiefly Tiferet, that the kabbalistic scheme associates with the divine masculine. The custom's central hymn, Lecha Dodi, "Come, my beloved," composed by the Safed kabbalist Shlomo Alkabetz, addresses the Sabbath directly in the language of a bridegroom summoning his bride, and its refrain instructs the congregation to go out and greet her; many congregations still turn physically to face the synagogue entrance while singing it.
The imagery works on more than one level at once. On the level of the individual and the community, it figures the Sabbath as a beloved guest whose arrival changes the character of the day. On the kabbalistic level it enacts, weekly, in miniature, the larger reunion of the Shekhinah with the higher sefirot that Lurianic theology treats as the ultimate goal of all religious action, so that a widely practiced congregational custom, largely detached in most worshippers' minds from its technical kabbalistic background, carries that background inside it every week regardless of whether the person singing is aware of it.