Lilith a Re-Reading of Feminine Shadow
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LILITH A RE-READING OF FEMININE SHADOW BY OHAD EZRAHI AND MARC GAFNI Lilith Poem An Offering of Words in Honor of Lilith: Throw away All your begging bowls at God’s door, For I have heard the beloved Prefers sweet threatening shouts, Something of the order of: “Hey Beloved, My heart is a raging volcano Of love for you! You better start kissing me- Or Else!” -Hafiz The First Gate: Why Lilith? The following is a translation of the Hebrew Book, Lilith; A Re-Reading of Feminine Shadow, by Ohad Ezrahi and Marc Gafni, published in 2005. In regard to the nature of this partnership, see the note below. Ohad has written a note about this on his website, and it requires a response, which I offer below. Two caveats are in order. Within the book, the authors refer to two works that at the time the authors intended to complete together. At this point, it is likely that each of the authors may publish an independent version of these works. The two works are Personal Myth Essays and The Journey of Abraham. In the latter, very little work was done. In the former, 12 essays were developed in collaboration between the authors which began in 1999- 2000, and continued off and on until 2005. The final communication regarding this book was in 2006 and the project awaits appropriate completion. In that book are short essays on Laughter, Eros, The Masculine and the Feminine, Masculinity, Loneliness, Failure, Extremism, Nakedness, Dance, Nature, and more. The essays resulted from the collaborative Torah of Gafni and Ezrahi in the earlier period of their association. The Hebrew version of Lilith refers to these works and to the authors intentions in this regard in several places. As noted above it is highly probable that this work will be revised, updated and published independently by each of the authors. The book Lilith also contains references to several works of Marc Gafni which are not yet published, including a work on The Dance of Tears, The Dance of Laughter, a three-volume work on Unique Self, Non-Dual Humanism, and the Religious Theology of Mordechai Lainer of Izbica. This latter three-volume work has just been submitted for publication in June 2008. The Dance of Tears, which has been completed, is now undergoing revision and editing. A version of the The Dance of Laughter was written by Marc Gafni in 2001 and is currently being revised. The English version of Lilith will be published at the appropriate time. Marc Gafni supervised three English translations of Lilith, none of which in his view were fully adequate even as each of them made a valuable contribution to the process. This process took place simply because of time constraints. Marc Gafni is currently retranslating the book himself, and at some point, it will find its way into print in one or two editions. This book represents an integration of ideas from Marc Gafni and Ohad Ezrahi. At his request the first writer during the physical writing was Ohad. It was co-authored by them and published with intention as a shared book reflecting their partnership at the time and the shared intellectual content in the core of the book. This is reflected in the joint publishing of the book, the shared content, and the signed contracts with the publishers and dozens of extant letters between the authors during the process. For more info: www.marcgafni.com/authorship-lilith Chapter 1: Adam, Lilith, Eve and The Problem of Male Domination The voice of revelation in our time is the voice of women. Emerging from centuries of silence and being silenced, women’s voices are profoundly altering the landscape in every field of human endeavor. For all religious traditions that are encrusted with the legacy of patriarchy, there is a need on the part of women and men who support them to cut away the crust and find within each tradition a useable past that can support the feminist project of renewal from within. This book, like other recent works, is part of a large cultural endeavor to bring to light Jewish sources for valuing sexuality and for liberating women and men to relationships of equality with one another.1 Having found a deep, but buried vein of truth within the Jewish textual tradition that supports this goal, in both a profound and provocative fashion, we feel privileged to share it in this book with an audience of both scholars and seekers. The specific terrain that we will be mining is the issue of sexual desire and the problem of male domination of women, which come together as the twin consequences of sin in the Garden of Eden story. After confronting Adam and Eve with their trespass, God’s pronouncement to Eve is usually interpreted as a curse on all her female descendants. It can also be seen as etiology, explanations of how things came to be the way they are. It gives an origin for the pain of childbearing, an unavoidable biological fact. Yet it also offers an etiology for an altogether avoidable sociological fact, a husband’s domination of his wife, and in particular, of their sexual relations: “Yet your urge shall be for your husband/ And he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16).2 One way traditional interpreters have dealt with this verse is to see it as time-bound – that it is a curse not to be undone until the messianic era. There is “ample precedent,” however, as Rachel Adler has noted, “for reading Genesis 2 and 3 as an etiological tale about the hardships of human life rather than as a normative statement. The rabbinic tradition does not use the story as a source of legal proof-texts, nor is there any prohibition on alleviating its conditions…. However unhappy the world of patriarchy may be, it is unnecessary to conclude that it is God’s will that we inhabit it…The redemptive truth offered by this grim depiction is that patriarchal social relations construct a world that cries out to be mended. Yet mending is contingent upon the healing of gender relations.”4 Shifting the ground of the argument from narrative to law and ritual, we hear a similar cry from the leading exponent of feminism within the world of Jewish orthodoxy, Blu Greenberg: “Must we say that God’s eternal plan for the sexes was a hierarchy, one dominant and one subordinate sex as law and ritual define us?… Or can we say perhaps that the inequity is reflective of an undisputed socio-religious stance of ancient times?… Does the fact that long-standing sociological truth has been codified into halakhah oblige us to make an eternal principle out of an accident of history?”5 Ultimately, in order to heal gender relations within Judaism, changes need to take place in the areas of law and ritual — matters pertaining to women chained in marriage, women as interpreters of law, women as leaders of prayer communities — which will not be settled within the pages of a book, but only in communities of practice and belief. This book is based on a firm conviction that the stories we choose to tell and the holiness that we learn to find within them indeed have a powerful claim upon law- creating and law-maintaining communities. The stories that we tell create the world of meaning that we inhabit, what legal theorist Robert Cover has called a “nomos.” This nomic universe of meanings, values and rules, which is embedded in stories, is where we turn when we make or revise laws and choose to live them out in practice.6 It is no accident that Cover’s legal theories cite examples and precedents from Torah. Torah’s blend of stories and laws is indeed its unique form and contribution to Western discourse, unlike any other law code or narrative from the ancient world.6 Torah continues to be held sacred, precisely because within its laws are contained stories that hold compelling meaning for communities of contemporary Jews, whether or not they believe in the divine origin of Torah. The most powerful and oft-repeated examples are laws that demand social justice and relate this imperative to the experience of the Exodus: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of a stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 23:9). The great Hebrew poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik, put the relation between stories and law in this memorable way: “Halakah and aggadah are simply two that are one, two aspects of a single creation. The relationship between the two is like the relationship between action and physical form on the one hand and words on the other.” Bialik goes on to evoke more poetic nuances of the relationship: “Dreams are drawn to their interpretation, the will is drawn to action, thoughts to words, the flower to the fruit — and Aggadah to Halakhah. And yet, even the fruit contains within it the seed from which a new flower will emerge.”8 If we extend Bialik’s metaphor that aggadah is the flower and halakhah, the fruit, then this book can be regarded as the work of two pollinating bees, who travel from flower to flower — from Bible to midrash to Talmud to Zohar to Lurianic Kabbalah and Hasidut — and then deposit the nectar of each in the soil of our communal garden, out of which will grow, from these authentic seeds of Torah, a new fruit: that is, a new orientation to relations between the sexes.