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Jewish history

Lilith, Re-reading 3rd gate

November 9, 2009 by Rabi Ohad Ezrahi · Leave a Comment

THE THIRD GATE: UPPER LEAH AND THE WOMEN OF “BINAH”

CHAPTER 10: LEAH, THE SCHOLARLY WOMAN

In this gate we will look at how the Ari defines the unique nature of partzuf Leah. We will observe how, by sanctifying the image of partzuf Leah, the Ari facilitated bringing her shadow image – Lillith – back into the realm of holiness. He abstracted her human image and deified it in the world of Atzilut.

Unless we are specifically referring to the biblical narrative, whenever we speak about Leah, our meaning is the Leah of Atzilut, who is not a mortal woman but rather the connotation for a certain aspect of the Shechinah. There is a certain overlap between the two, since the human image of Leah penetrates into that of supernal Leah, which in turn affects lower Leah, and so on. In hasidic terminology, the human Leah merited to become a “chariot” or “vehicle” (merkavah) – for a certain aspect of the divine.¹ This receptacle was molded into the form lent it by Leah and, as such, it is named for her and characterized by her personality traits. In fact, every partzuf is a specific emanation of the divine lights perceptible to human beings, and the emanation’s form is molded according to the nature of the human receptacle. Jacob, Leah, and Rachel, are human archetypes, who represent different ways of perceiving God. For this reason, each divine emanation is created in the image of each of their modes of consciousness.

Leah is a complex partzuf in Lurianic Kabbalah. For example, R. Hayyim Vital, in his book Sha’ar HaMitzvot, presents a list of no less than eighteen different aspects of partzuf Leah and the minute differences between them. He admits that he cannot precisely remember how the Ari explained them all.² In our discussion, we will focus on the general characteristics of Leah within the partzuf of the Shechina, and specifically on those aspects which are connected to the identification of Leah, the wife whom Jacob hated, with Lilith, the wife whom Adam rejected.

First we will focus on the status conferred upon the two women, Rachel and Leah, in terms of where they are located in the world schema. They express two different faces of woman: one is more spiritual (Leah), the other more practical (Rachel);³ one possesses highly developed intellectual skills (Leah), while the other’s wisdom is more common sense and pragmatic (Rachel).

Illustration no. # (GET ILLUSTRATION) details the structure of the relationships between some of the partzufim of Atzilut. The two wives of Ze’eir Anpin, Rachel and Leah, the two faces of the Shechinah, are each pictured as having a different height in relation to her husband. Rachel, the main wife, has her feet on the same spot of ground as Jacob.⁴ Rachel’s head, however, is very low in relation to the height of Ze’eir Anpin’s head. Her back is attached to his, while her head only reaches his chest. In Kabbalistic thought, each partzuf receives sustenance from the partzuf above it. Thus, Ze’eir Anpin receives sustenance, called mohin (minds), from the partzufim above it, those of Hokhmah and Binah, which are also called Abba and Imma. Rachel receives her sustenance through Ze’eir Anpin. This means that, when Ze’eir Anpin receives his mohin, it comes together with those intended for his wife Rachel. He first feeds himself with his own mohin, and then, through a hole in the center of his chest, he transfers to Rachel the mohin intended for her. These are the mohin that give her life and sustain her inner core.

Leah, on the other hand, is standing tall. Her head touches the feet of partzuf Imma, while her own feet are positioned on Rachel’s head. This means that, in the diagram which describes the structure of the relationships in the world of Atzilut, Leah is portrayed as being on the same plane as Ze’eir Anpin, located between his chest and the top of his head. Unlike Rachel, Leah is not dependent on Ze’eir Anpin for receiving her mohin. She touches the bottom of partzuf Imma and can therefore receive sustenance from her directly.

Interpreting these symbols, we see that partzuf Rachel, Jacob’s modest and beloved wife, is the shorter of the two. “Short” in this case means spiritually small. Rachel lives on the practical side of life, with her feet firmly on the ground. Not an intellectual concerned with lofty, abstract ideas, she is the woman Jacob prefers. Rachel’s “head,” or her spiritual side – that which the Ari would call her “limb of consciousness” – reaches only as high as the chest of Ze’eir Anpin, which is the location of his heart, his emotional center. A woman whose thinking is closely tied to her heart, Rachel does not venture beyond this plane.⁵

Leah, on the other hand, is located “above.” Partzuf Leah is closely tied to Partzuf Tevunah (”Understanding”), which is above Ze’eir Anpin, so that her head is on the same level as Ze’eir’s. as a result, upper Leah is capable of deep thinking, deductive reasoning, and abstract contemplation. On the other hand, she is not in touch with the lower aspects of Ze’eir Anpin, the earthy, practical side of life. There, in the legs of Ze’eir Anpin, stands Rachel, who knows how to ground things.

In hasidic Kabbalah this difference in the position of the two images of the Shekhinah indicates two different types of souls. There are “Rachel souls,” practical and grounded in their nature, over against “Leah souls,” more contemplative and spiritual. Two such souls may arrive in the same generation, but they may also appear in successive generations, so that practically-minded eras in history are followed by spiritually-oriented epochs. R. Yitzchak Isaac of Homil, one of the most profound and original of the hasidic Kabbalists, used this teaching in his attempt to characterize the souls of the generation that entered the Land of Israel. R. Isaac understood that Jewish life in Israel would be radically different than the sort of Jewish life he was familiar with in the Diaspora. Diaspora Judaism, like the generation of the wilderness, could pre-occupy itself with lofty, abstract ideals, but an Israeli Judaism would need to find godliness in the earthy, practical, and the natural. R. Isaac based this fundamental distinction on the different positions of Rachel and Leah in relation to Ze’eir Anpin:

The partzuf of the wilderness generation [ = partzuf Leah] is that of a generation of knowledge, the knowledge of God’s glory (and its position) above the chest, (since) that is the place of the respiratory organs. These are spiritual forces, those of intelligence and understanding as related to hokhma, binah, and da’at…(however) the partzuf of the Shekhina of the generation that entered Israel, which is the main partzuf, is that of the Shechina which was present in the holy temple. It is the partzuf of Rachel, (which is located) beneath the chest, where the digestive organs are found, and they are not sensitive to the light and power of intelligence and understanding, since they are concerned primarily with survival and the preservation of life in an orderly and reasonable manner.⁶

Leah represents the higher woman who is capable of contending with a partner intellectually. The Zohar teaches us that it is Leah’s very superiority which causes Jacob to feel repulsed by her and to prefer Rachel. Threatened by an intellectual woman, he prefers to marry an earthy woman, whom he can more easily understand. At the same time, he turns the image of the woman who threatens him into an other, a demonic being – in the Zohar, the chief ally of the Great Demon himself.

We will later examine the correlation between the female figure who is perceived as a sexual threat, such as Lilith, and the female figure who is threatening because of her spiritual/intellectual talents. Leah embodies both threats. In the biblical narrative, she is a woman whose sexual urge is dominant. For this reason the Rabbis did not hesitate to call her a prostitute. In the Torah’s only description of her, we are told that “the eyes of Leah were soft” (Gen. 29:17).⁷ We will not be far from the truth if we interpret this “softness” as alluring, seductive, sensual, but also threatening and, therefore, understood by the tradition paradoxically as weak, repulsive and ugly.

For those shaped by patriarchy, it is easy to be repulsed, it seems, by women who openly express their sexual desire.⁸ It is very possible that Leah’s eyes broadcast her desire, rather than concealing it under some modest veil. In the Kabbalah, female desire is known as “female waters” (mayyin nukvin). These are the waters that moisten and vivify a woman whose yearning for a man is great. Prayer is conceived as the collective arousal of the female waters of all of Israel towards God. The great abundance that God showers on the earth in response to prayer is known as the “male waters,” (mayyin dichrin) i.e. male seed. Leah’s watery eyes symbolize the arousal of her female waters, and they threaten Jacob, just as they would threaten any man used to a certain set of patriarchal mores.

On the other hand, Leah is also sophisticated. She tricks Jacob into a life different from the one he had intended. She uses her head, and he, of course, does not appreciate it. In Lurianic Kabbalah, Leah’s resourcefulness links her to the sefirah of Binah, which is also Partzuf Imma. We can understand something of Jacob’s reaction to her based on this association. Rebekah, Jacob’s mother, was the first woman who, by her cunning and against his will, changed his life into that of a man pursued. She taught him to lie to his father Isaac, and she turned him into the character he is constantly trying to free himself from – that of his brother Esau. Jacob identifies Esau with the ugly, low-down and brutal. But Esau is Jacob’s shadow side and twin. Throughout his life Jacob wants to detach himself from this threatening, bestial figure. He wants to be able to say “I am Jacob, not Esau,” but Rebekah, whose name connects her to the more primal world of animals,⁹ forces him to put animal hides on his delicate skin, and to go to his father and say, “I am Esau, your first-born” (Gen. 27:19) Rebecca forces her younger son to identify with the primal animal side of his own nature against his better judgment. He does as she commands, but he does not internalize this action by allowing a place in which his own shadow side might be integrate. Jacob remains only Jacob, who needs to run far, far away from Esau, all the way to his mother’s home.

And there he meets another woman in whom he recognizes the same animal nature as that of his brother Esau. “(People) would say … the older one goes to the older one, the younger one to the younger one!”¹⁰ Those who knew of them felt that Leah was intended for Esau, because they both exposed their more primitive sides. Rachel, the modest one, was fitting for Jacob. Everyone thought so, except for Leah. She, like her aunt Rebecca, has an almost compulsive desire to bring out the primal – animal in Jacob. It is no wonder that, for Jacob, the figure of Ze’eir Anpin, Leah represents the partzuf of (Imma), his mother Rebecca.

CHAPTER 11: REBEKAH, THE GREAT MOTHER

Given the similarities between Rebecca and Leah in terms of their guile, it should come as no surprise that there are also parallels between them in matters pertaining to sexuality. At first glance, it would seem that no one was more chaste than Rebekah. The Torah testifies that she was a virgin: “The maiden was very beautiful, a virgin whom no man had known” (Gen 24:16). Rashi, following the lead of the midrash, comments that she was a “‘virgin’ – in the place of virginity; ‘whom no man had known’ – in an unnatural way. Since the daughters of the Canaanites would guard the place of their virginity but were wanton elsewhere, the Torah testifies that she (Rebekah) was completely pure.”¹¹

Although Rebekah seems to be the very soul and image of chastity, the rabbis of the midrash nevertheless find reason to suspect her of sexual promiscuity. The occasion for this midrash is the moment she fell off the camel,¹² upon first seeing Isaac (Gen. 24:64):

“And she fell off the camel” – since she saw that in the future Esau, the Wicked, would be born of her, she trembled and became as if “struck by wood,” and virginity blood came out of her…And when Isaac came to her, he found no sign of virginity, and suspected she had been with Eliezer. He said to her; “Where is (the sign of) your virginity?” She answered him: “When I fell off the camel I became as one struck by wood.” He said to her: “You speak falsely! It must be that Eliezer was with you!” She swore to him that he had never touched her. They went and found the piece of wood that was stained by blood, and Isaac immediately knew that she was pure.¹³

If the Rabbis needed to emphasize so markedly that Rebekah was a virgin, then there must have been some tale which they needed to discredit. Furthermore, Rebekah’s immediately covering her face with a veil after falling from the camel, elicits another suspicious comment: “There were two who covered themselves with a veil and gave birth to twins: Rebekah and Tamar. Rebekah, as it says: “So she took her veil and covered herself” (Gen, 24:65). Tamar, as it says: “So she…covered her face with a veil” (Gen.38:14). Again, we find that the Rabbis link Rebekah’s behavior at the moment of her encounter with Isaac with the behavior of Tamar, who disguised herself as a prostitute when she met her father-in-law, Judah.¹⁴

This all comes back to Jacob, upon meeting Leah in her parents’ house. According to the Zohar, she reminds him of something threatening, which is linked to the image of his mother:

“And God saw that Leah was despised” (Gen. 30:31): From here we see that a man hates his mother’s nakedness. A man can therefore be alone with his mother anywhere, and there is no need to worry. As the Sages have already remarked:¹⁵ “A son may be alone with his mother.” Everything was concealed from Jacob, because the higher world was not yet revealed (I:154b).¹⁶

Jacob’s hatred for Leah, according to the Zohar, stems from the deep fear a man has of his mother’s nakedness – presumably because of his very attraction to it.¹⁷ In Leah’s eyes, Jacob saw glimmers of Rebekah.

There cannot be a more radical yet fitting image for this doubling of the two women than that used by R. Hayyim Vital. Referring to the section of the Zohar quoted above, Vital analyses the architecture of the world of Atzilut and explains that if one knows the exact location of partzuf Leah in relation to partzuf Imma, then the sefirah of Yesod of both these partzufim connect at one and the same point. In Kabbalistic terminology, the sefirot of yesod represent the sexual organs of the male and the female,¹⁸ which indicates that (in so far as Jacob’s consciousness is concerned), the sexual organs of Leah and Rebecca are fused into “one womb.” Therefore, R. Hayyim Vital says, with Leah, Jacob feels the revulsion of incest.

And this is what is also written in the Zohar … on the verse “And God saw that Leah was despised” (Gen. 30: 31): From here we see that “a man hates his mother’s nakedness” (Zohar 1:154b), meaning that Leah emerges from the malkhut of Imma, who is Jacob’s mother… The conclusion is that the Yesod of Imma and the Yesod of Leah are connected together, so that they both become one womb to mate in… and this is the secret of “from here we know that a man hates his mother’s nakedness.” Nakedness means just that.¹⁹

He meets the taboo of his mother’s nakedness when he comes into Leah, for deep inside her womb is the womb of his mother Rebecca. A mother’s power to give of her goodness, to nourish, to love, and to encourage, but at the same time to withhold nurturing, to ignore, or to suffocate, transforms her from a simple mortal into a virtual goddess in the psyche of the dependent child. During the prolonged encounter between the child and the goddess who rears him, the child learns to attach great values to her. They are fraught with meaning and loaded with symbolical significance. Jung writes, “Many things which awaken admiration and a sense of the sacred can be symbols of the mother,” but adds, that mother-symbols may occasionally take on negative meanings, fraught with terror.²⁰

One of the most widespread symbols of the fearsome mother in primitive art is that of the spider.²¹ A small creature in itself, it has a web of information extending in all directions. From a distance, it can sense everything that is happening and quickly runs wherever it is most needed. The stereotypical image of the Jewish mother who always knows what is happening, shows up everywhere, pulls the strings behind every scene, and is involved with exaggerated and often smothering concern in her children’s lives, is well represented by the symbol of the spider.²¹

This description can help us to refocus on Rebekah, the great and fearsome mother in her son, Jacob’s, psyche. Rebekah manipulated and triangulated Jacob’s relationships with his brother and father, putting him through a humiliating ordeal that ended up threatening his life. We can easily see how her son would fear ever getting caught in the web of another assertive woman. For Jacob, loving Leah is returning to the stranglehold of his fearsome mother. So long as Jacob is incapable of rising above and beyond himself, or of transforming himself into “Israel,” then he is constantly running away from those parts of himself which he fears or cannot understand: his shadow and twin, Esau, and his mighty mother, Rebekah. \Given the power of these shadow projections in his psyche, it is inevitable that he would be revolted by Leah.

The significance of the higher level of femininity and divinity that Leah represents is unknown to Jacob. Leah is linked to the world of Binah, which is also the world of the supernal mother. Jacob, however, is only capable of understanding women who represent the sefirah of Malkhut, the world of Rachel – the revealed, lower world that we inhabit.

CHAPTER 12: SCHOLARSHIP AND SEXUALITY

Traditionally, Torah was seen as the exclusive preserve of men: study, in-depth analysis, and contemplation were considered male pursuits. There were very few women who managed to break out of their accustomed roles as child-raisers and home-keepers in order to enter the scholarly world.

The first to do so, or at least the first we know of, was Beruriah, the wife of R. Meir, who lived in the classic age of the Mishna (late 2nd century C.E.). Beruriah was a scholar with a rebellious attitude to the portion allotted to women by the rabbinic culture that surrounded her. Partly as a result of that attitude, she came to a tragic end, as we will discuss in more detail in the next chapter.

Hundreds of years were to pass until another woman attained the stature of Beruriah in the rabbinic world, and she too came to a bitter end. Hannah Rachel, known as the Maid of Ludmir, who remained single until forty, tried to function as a female hasidic rebbe.²² She was forced to forego both her position and her power due to pressure brought on her by the Rebbe of Tchernobel, who was a central spiritual authority in the hasidic world of that era.²³ The Rebbe of Tchernobel pressured her into marriage and into following the only acceptable path for daughters of Israel, regardless of how intellectual they might be.²⁴ However, Hannah Rachel’s marriage was not successful, and she was divorced from her husband three years later.

The unhappy careers of Beruriah and the Maid of Ludmir show that the male protectors of Jewish tradition saw any attempt made by a woman to penetrate the male world of study as deviant. A woman, it would seem, could not be a scholar, almost by definition, and, if she were a scholar, then there must be something abnormal about her. This attitude has been prevalent from talmudic times through the Kabbalah and Hasidism. The tragedy of the Maid of Ludmir indicates that a learned woman could not be considered sexually attractive as a woman and had to give up her learning and teaching in order to marry. In fact, Hannah of Ludmir wanted to remain a virgin. Similarly, Barbara Streisand, in the musical “Yentl,” plays the role of a woman who, in order to gain entry into the study hall, disguised herself as a male yeshiva student, and even became engaged to an attractive, young girl.

Of course, this denial of female sexuality wherever a woman shows intellectual interest, is as far from the truth as possible. It is unfortunately facilitated by the kabbalistic distinction that we have been exploring between two levels of femininity – higher femininity and lower femininity, or, in other parallel terms: mother and daughter, the concealed world and the revealed world, Leah and Rachel, Binah and Malkhut. We have heard that certain women who belong to the Habad sect and study Habad Hasidut, do not say the morning blessing, “Who has made me according to His will” like other Orthodox women, but rather “Who has not made me a woman,” as Orthodox men recite.²⁵ These scholarly Habad women are blessing the fact that they are not connected to the sefirah of Malkhut, but rather to Binah, which is also feminine, but not entirely so. The spiritual fulcrum of Habad is contemplation, i.e., increased attention to the sefirah of Binah as it operates in the human soul, which elevates its practitioners to a state in which they are encompassed by the light of the supernal Mother, the light of Binah. These women are therefore blessing the fact of their not being regular “Malkhut” women, but rather, contemplative “Binah” women, which is to say, not entirely feminine women. It is often stated in the Zohar that Imma (the partzuf of Binah) occasionally functions as a male.²⁶

The purported masculinity of a “Binah” woman does not in any way annul her sexual identity as a woman – quite the opposite. The masculinity of Binah is not a negation of female identity, but rather a way of expressing female assertiveness. A “Binah” woman is usually more active – or, in Kabbalistic language, more masculine – in her sexuality. What is called her “masculinity” is expressed through her willingness and courage to take an active and assertive part in her sexuality, just like a man. This assertiveness thus comes to reinforce her femaleness. While tradition has maintained a grudging respect for those women like Hana Rachel of Ludmir who understood that acceptance into the world of Binah was dependent on denying their sexuality, it has totally negated a woman who chooses to interpret her entering the world of Binah as an expression of female assertiveness. This latter case has been catalogued as threatening and demonic, like Lilith.

By demonizing the assertive female, men have controlled the gateways to knowledge and so safeguarded their a priori supremacy. A woman chooses between the world of knowledge and the world of feminine sexuality. If she chooses the world of knowledge, then she forfeits the latter. If she chooses the world of the senses then she may not enter the study-hall, lest she appear as a warped woman, the sister of Lilith. This is a perverse way of silencing women’s voices in the world of Torah learning. Once she has left behind her persona as Eve, she is forced to choose between identifying with the Adam or with the Snake, between scholarship and sexual identity.

This same dichotomy does not exist in the realm of male scholarship, though there is considerable tension around the issue. The study of Torah can itself be a means of sublimating erotic impulses through spiritual practice. We saw in the story of R. Hiyya and his wife who seduces him in the guise of a prostitute an example of an accomplished scholar who felt he had to renounce his sexual urge in order to lead a life of holiness. We intend to explore a few more sources, which will show that, unlike the standards which have been set for women, for men, there is a very strong link between eroticism and scholarship.

The following excerpt from Talmud is well-known, in which it is implied that greatness in Torah is intrinsically related to a strong sexual drive:

Abaye said: (The evil urge) tempts scholars more than anyone else. Like that story about Abaye, who heard a man say to a woman, Let us meet and go on our way together. Abaye said to himself, I will follow them and prevent them from sinning.

He followed them for three parsangs. When they reached a junction, he heard them say to one another: Our ways part (as they were from different townships), and we must separate, although it is very pleasant to walk together. Abaye said to himself: If it was me who was alone with that woman, I could never have stopped myself from sinning. When he got back, he leaned sadly on the doorpost. That old man (apparently Elijah) came and said to him: Whoever is greater than his colleague, also has a greater (yetzer).²⁷

The old man’s comforting words to Abaye became a common saying in the Torah world: “Whoever is greater than his colleague, also has a greater urge.” This saying cannot be examined apart from the context of Babylonian rabbinic culture, where it originated. Daniel Boyarin has shown, that, unlike their counterparts in Palestine, the Babylonian academies held up the ideal of “the married monk.”²⁸ The most famous example is R. Akiba, whose wife sent him away from home for twenty-four years, till he came back with 24,000 disciples. Torah was clearly “the other woman” in R. Akiba’s life. A less successful “married monk” is R. Hiyya, who was tortured by the inclination to sexuality, the yetzer that he had tried to suppress, and which came out of hiding when his wife dressed as a prostitute. So we can understand that what Elijah taught Abbaye was an important corrective to the competing ideal of married celibacy in that culture. “Whoever is greater than his colleague, also has a greater urge,” is not meant to give Torah scholars carte blanche for acting out their fantasies, but rather to help them attain a balanced acceptance of sexuality as fundamental to an integrated personality. Perhaps with some greater degree of self-acceptance of his own yetzer, Abaye would not have followed the couple so far down the road of his unacted desire.

Why then, should we assume any different of a scholarly woman? The woman scholar is equally incomplete as a human being without successfully integrating sexuality into her personality. R. Tzadok HaCohen of Lublin offers an account of what makes us uniquely human, based on what we make of our “urge:”

Man is primarily the passion in his heart, which is his advantage over the angels. This is what is called the “urge” – the evil urge and the good urge.²⁹ When he increases his desire to do good, it is good, and if not…As our Sages have stated, “Whoever is greater, his urge is also greater” (B. Sukkah 52a); the way a man is greater than his fellow man is only a function of how great his passion for good is, i.e. the good urge.”

Seen in the light of this critique, we can offer as a parallel to Elijah’s statement the following: “Whichever woman is greater than her colleague, also has a greater urge,” that is, for using her sexual passion toward good and holy ends.

Does spiritual greatness always imply intense passion? Surely we can identify situations in which the spiritual takes one beyond the temptations of the physical. Here are two such cases:

R. Gidel was accustomed to go and sit by the gates of the (women’s) bath house, and would say to them, This is how you should immerse yourselves, this is how you should immerse yourselves. The Sages said to him, Is his honor not afraid of the evil urge? He said to them, They are like pure (white) geese to me.³⁰

R. Aha would take the bride on his shoulders and dance (at weddings). The Sages said to him, Should we do the same?

He said to them, If they are like beams (of wood) to you – then L’hayyim! And if not, not.³¹

In these two interesting examples, the great sages share a dubious intimacy with women. In both instances, the sage justifies what are questionable practices to others through his subjectivity. He compares women to objects, like beams of wood or white geese, which do not awaken any degree of sexual desire in him. In these incidents, the Talmud presents an alternative conception of the great man. He is someone who has totally vanquished the evil urge. Hence, he is able to commit acts such as an ordinary man could not perform without becoming sexually aroused.³² In contrast, Abaye perceives himself trapped in the snare of seduction, much more so than the average man.

In our opinion, the case of Abaye is really no different than that of R. Gidel or R. Aha. What is different is the situation in which we find them. R. Aha carries the bride on his shoulders at a wedding dance, which is a time of great communal ecstasy. The erotic passion of his soul is thus elevated beyond the simple focus of a woman’s body. R. Aha was exactly like Abaye. Both were men with an unusually intense erotic charge. If this were not the case, R. Aha would probably have taken the bridegroom on his shoulders rather than the bride. His greatness and the greatness of his urge are expressed through his ability to rise to sublime heights in moments of ecstasy. He can go beyond the boundaries of permitted physical contact with women, because his spiritual ecstasy enables him to express the erotic passion in his soul while at the same time liberating him from any attachment to the body of the bride.

This is also the case for R. Gidel. He too is a great man with a great urge, and for this reason he chooses to go and see the women who are purifying themselves in the miqve. But, as we have already mentioned, his “urge” is no common urge, but rather, a “great” urge. His greatness is expressed in his seeing beyond a beautiful woman as a sexual object, and going from her to something more transcendent. If we pay close attention to the text we find that R. Gidel does not claim to be indifferent to the sight of the bathing women. Quite the opposite – he says that the women embody a most subtle form of beauty – that of pure white geese. Here, too, eroticism finds a different avenue of expression. It is at once elevated and at the same time sublimated into an aestheticism. Female beauty is reminiscent of the absolute beauty and purity of nature. This is the reason that R. Gidel has no fear of his evil urge, or rather, he suffers no anxiety about his inclinations, for he knows himself capable of appreciating beauty without allowing it to confound him.

Students of the Baal Shem Tov would almost certainly claim that R. Gidel saw divine beauty reflected in the bathing women, whose spark he elevated into its higher root in the Shekhinah. Here is how one of the Hasidic masters describes the meeting between R. Akiva and the beautiful Roman matron who tried to seduce him:

R. Akiva saw her beauty, which was the very essence of beauty. So he began to think to himself: Where did such grace and beauty come to this world from? Behold, all beauty and grace come from the Shekhinah, who is known as “the most beautiful among women…”³³

Of course, in order to experience things in this way, a man must first possess a highly developed aesthetic sense. Beauty spoke to R. Akiva, to R. Gidel, and to Abaye. “The greater a man is, the greater his urge is,” and the greatness with which it endows him is expressed through a heightened sensitivity to all dimensions of life, including the erotic. There is no reason why this should not also be true of women, such as Leah, for example.

In Kabbalistic literature, the study of Torah is in itself considered an erotic act: R. Eliezer Azcari, a sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed, compares the study of Torah and the relationship to one’s wife to the two wives of Jacob. The highest wife is the Torah, while second in line comes the wife of flesh and blood. R. Eliezer even emphasizes a man’s obligation to have sexual relations with each of his two wives, both the physical and the spiritual one:

“Her food, her clothing, and her times (onah) shall not be diminished” (Ex. 21:10). Her times (for sex) – this means the mind, as all the six days of the week (he should) cause his soul to cling to her, “that he might kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (Song of Songs 1:2). As it says in the Zohar, at midnight, when common people are with their second wife, this is the time when sages are with their first wife.³⁴

The erotic energy converted during the study of Torah into an experience of spiritual coupling is manifest in the rhythmic swaying familiar to us from times of study and prayer. This is mentioned in the writings of the school of the Gaon of Vilna: “And this is the movement of a person studying Torah, who is then called alive, as in the mystery of the living organ.”³⁵ Thus, we discover that the learning experience that is at the foundation of Torah scholarship is itself analogous to sexual union – and occasionally even more powerful than it.³⁶

The Talmud teaches us that scholars are people with strong sexual instincts, although they may sometimes be able to experience sexual ecstasy on a more abstract than physical plane. While the talmudic, kabbalistic and hasidic examples that we have brought are from the sphere that their authors knew best, namely, male sexuality and its sublimation in Torah study, there is no reason to conclude that the same arguments could not be applied to a woman who excels in her studies, or who reaches spiritual heights.

If, however, this potent energy is sensed only unconsciously, it may suffer social repression and so develop into a complex and a desire to prove just the opposite. Sometimes, when the scholar, male or female, senses their sexual passion to be greater than average, he or she might suffer profound anxiety or neuroses. Attempts may be made to deny this psychological fact, as seems to have been the case with R. Hiyya in our opening story. with Beruriah, R. Meir’s wife, and, hundreds of years later, with Rebbe Hannah, the Maid of Ludmir. We are calling this unfortunate state of affairs , to which we turn in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 12: BERURIAH

(NOTE TO OHAD AND MORDECHAI: Because Beruriah is such a flash-point for contemporary feminism, you’re going to lose your potential readers over your argument in this chapter. I have developed an alternative feminist context, in which to insert your reading so that it doesn’t crash land.)

Beruriah is known from a half-dozen or so stories scattered in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds and midrashic collections.³⁷ The story that gives the best flavor of the living women’s spirit, without any veil of either idealization or misogyny, is one in which she meets Rabbi Yose Ha-Gelili (”The Galiliean”), on the road. He asks her, “By which road shall we go to Lod?” And she replies, “Galilean fool! Did not the sages say, ‘Do not talk too much with a woman.’ You should have said, ‘By which to Lod?’”³⁸ She did not suffer fools or hypocrites gladly. Daughter and husband of rabbis, a woman with sharp rabbinic learning, known as someone who once learned three hundred traditions in one day from three hundred different masters,³⁹ she engages in learned argument with sages and apostates alike, but she is not accorded the status of either disciple or colleague. She is an anomaly in the rabbinic world.

The most famous story of Beruriah is also the most heartbreaking. It is told in the margins of another story about her husband, R. Meir, and her unnamed sister. R. Meir had gone to Rome at Beruriah’s request to redeem her sister from a brothel, to which the Romans had consigned her when they sentenced their father to death. At the end of the story, we are told that when Meir returned, he left for Babylonia, “because of the Beruriah incident.” That Beruriah incident is not narrated in the Talmud, but Rashi, in his marginal gloss to the Talmud, brings down the following tradition, whether folk or rabbinic we do not know:

“And some say because of the Beruriah incident:” One time she mocked what the sages said: “Women are frail of mind.” He (R. Meir, said to her: “By your life! in the end, you will admit that they are right!” He ordered one of his students to tempt her to sin. And he (the student) propositioned her for a long time, until she finally agreed. When the matter became known to her, she strangled herself, while R. Meir fled because of the disgrace.⁴⁰

This is the only instance known to us of Rashi’s bringing down a tradition that is not attested anywhere else. (THIS IS MY CLAIM – BUT IS IT TRUE?) We believe that this story was considered so horrific that it was suppressed in written form and only passed down orally, until Rashi wrote it down in the 11th century, about five hundred years after the closing of the talmudic text.

What makes the story so horrific, we believe, is R. Meir’s betrayal of Beruriah.⁴¹ A rabbinic sage was willing to have his wife violate the most sacred bonds of marriage and transgress the divine commandment against adultery in order to prove the validity of the sages’ words. What misplaced loyalty! A scholar of folklore has suggested that the story is entirely fictional, based on parallel legends circulating in the ancient world.⁴² If so, it may have been the sages’ way of killing off the threat that Beruriah, a learned woman, represented to their entire system.

We would now like to suggest another, perhaps even more controversial reading of the story, refocusing our attention on the rabbinic tradition over which Beruriah and Meir argue, namely, that “women are frail of mind.” In context, it is evident that “frailness of mind” signifies women’s inability to resist sexual temptation. Because of our sympathy for Beruriah as a victim of her husband’s machinations against her, it may be hard to acknowledge that Beruriah is her own worst enemy. She denies that she is capable of being seduced, as any average woman might be. She had sought a place among the intellectual elite of her time. In order to prove herself, she feels she needs to be a “man.” She needs to prove that the patriarchal construction of feminine characteristics, such as fickleness or “frailness of mind,” do not play any part in her psychological make-up.

Is Beruriah’s struggle personal or ideological? Is it an attempt to prove that she is unlike other daughters of Eve, who could be seduced by the alluring promises of the snake? Or is her mocking the sages’ teaching an attempt to create a precedent for how the world should rightly perceive her sex? Ironically, it is Beruriah’s very failure to overcome temptation – her “frailness of mind” – that boomerangs on her.

One way of reading the end of the story, Beruriah’s suicide, is to understand that her breaking point occurs at the moment when she is forced to admit her frailness to her husband. She did not commit suicide at the moment that the sexual act was over, as did R. Hiyya, who burned himself immediately upon sinning. If we read the talmudic phrase, “when it became known to her,” as “when it became known” [HL: CAN YOU FIND A DIFFERENCE OF VERSIONS among various Talmudic MS? OTHERWISE, THIS BLAMING THE VICTIM IS HARD TO JUSTIFY.] then the story shifts its meaning considerably. Rather than killing herself over Meir’s betrayal of her, she kills herself when the matter became public. Perhaps she was capable of coping with a sense of personal failure, but not with the publicized version. Coping with the shame of having her weakness revealed to her husband was more than Beruriah could endure, and she committed suicide.

What we see in the story is how a patriarchal construction of gender difference was internalized by Beruriah to the point of self-denial and complete psychological break-down. Her internalization of these mores caused her to feel the need to prove both to herself and to the world that a woman could be as scholarly as a man without falling into sexual impropriety. At the same time, the many stories about men and sexual temptation suggest that men’s sexual desire presented no hindrance to their joining the spiritual and intellectual elite. R. Akiva could chase up the date palm after a beautiful girl and not stand accused of “frailness of mind,” because male sexuality is no threat to the male world. Beruriah, standing closer to R. Hiyya in this regard, required an asexual passport into the world of scholarship, a passport that was a negation of her human nature. Tragically, no amount of proving herself sexually repressed could have gained Beruriah full admittance to the rabbinic elite.

The Biblical Leah, and her kabbalistic counterpart among the partzufim, did not fall victim to the Beruriah complex. Even though Leah, coming from the world of Binah, the highest “feminine” world, is related to a “masculine” mode of being, this did not render her susceptible to the Beruriah complex. Leah never tried to prove herself asexual. Quite the opposite. The Leah archetype joins together two wholly different orientations. On the one hand, Leah is an intellectual, i.e. from the sefirah of Binah, but on the other hand, she is the sexual agent in the story. Her loftiness and her spiritual independence lead her to demand the same rights afforded to men.

She refuses to internalize values constructed so as to restrict her freedom and her desires. The Ari thus limits the rule that “women have weak minds,” and argues that it applies primarily to the Rachel archetype. Leah’s mind, he comments, is not weak at all: “Only the mind (da’at) of Rachel is part of the mystery of ‘women have weak minds,’ as we have often explained.”⁴³

According to the Ari, the “weak mind” is characteristic of the lower female partzuf, whose mores and values men can easily understand. This is not the case with Leah. We have seen already how Leah initiates intimacy with Jacob – how just one look at her wet eyes is enough to disarm him both emotionally and sexually. Jacob realizes that the Leah archetype implies a spiritual, sexual and intellectual freedom, which threatens his status. He therefore tries to push this figure into the margins of society. From this orientation comes the midrash that Leah is first engaged to the much maligned older brother, Esau, and then she becomes the hated and rejected wife of the younger brother, Jacob. Her provocative behavior evokes the rabbis’ not so subtle suggestion that she may be a prostitute. The Ari took this one stage further and recognized in Leah the archetype of the greatest of all prostitutes – Lilith.

CHAPTER 14: DOUBT AND SEXUAL FAILING

In the name of the Baal Shem Tov: One should say the following poem before going to sleep. “Certain is His name, Certain is His fame” (Ha’vadai shmo, ken teheelato – and this is useful for chasing away demons, spirits, and Lilith from him who says it.⁴⁴

In hasidic tradition, this charm is attributed to the founder of the movement. Its purpose is to chase Lilith and her fellow demons away from a sleeping man, for they are liable to mock him in his sleep by arousing him with erotic dreams and sexual transgressions. The repeated words are meant to inspire confidence, conviction and certainty in whoever utters them before falling into the mysterious and uncertain world of sleep. “Certain is His name, certain is His fame” is a line taken from the liturgical poem “And all believe” (V’khol ma’aminim), recited during the Days of Awe. The significance is clear: doubt will turn illicit, whereas certainty can deliver us from every impropriety.

Lilith can grasp a person who suffers from doubt more readily than someone who has certainty. According to the hasidic masters, the Hebrew word for doubt, safek, has the same numerical value as Amalek (240). In Hasidism, Amalek is the internal enemy who causes nocturnal emissions (keri). Doubt cools (mekareret) a man’s attachment to the sacred, and so the fire in his soul gets channeled into less holy waters. Amalek is perceived in hasidic thought as the cause of both doubt and sexual arousal, which leads to spilling the seed.

Lilith represents longing for the “other woman,” with whom there can be no acceptable family tie, only an illicit connection. Lilith is the “forbidden fruit” that attracted Adam. This is why Lilith remains both seductive and dangerous. Eve, the legal wife, the housewife, the mother of children, is linked to certainty. She represents stability, continuity of the family dynasty, and the safe place one can always come home to. Lilith, on the other hand, is the unpredictable woman. She is the unknown, or doubt in its broadest sense. Hence, the charm of certainty “chases Lilith away,” because it imprints certitude and psychological stability on whoever utters it. It is like an Eastern mantra, which moves one from conscious to unconscious awareness. Thus it protects a person at the deepest levels – even in those parts of himself to which he has no direct access.

The charm might be thought of as an oxygen tank for those diving into the world of dreams, but who do not want to be spiritually awake to the unknown depths of their souls. They prefer to be spiritually asleep. In order to remain anchored during this sleep-state, such souls demand a safe place to which they can retreat and survive. On the other hand, when we do not experience this powerful inner need to fortify ourselves with words of certainty, then we may be feeling more secure in ourselves, in a place where doubt does not threaten us. When we are indeed spiritually awake, then we are capable of containing the dangers of uncertainty and profound doubt.⁴⁵Lilith represents the negative force threatening the sleeping, unconscious dreamer. Someone in a state of spiritual alertness is quite capable of integrating her. This is why the mantra of certainty “chases Lilith away” from a sleeping person, whereas a person who is awake does not need such a mantra.

Lilith, as we have said, causes sleeping people to loosen their grip on reality, fall into fantasy, and spill their seed. The first man in the Jewish tradition to spill his seed, and incur the wrath of God, was Er, Judah’s firstborn son. Er (in Hebrew, “awake”) is named after the waking state. We need to delve more deeply into the character of Er in order to better understand the connection between Lilith’s powers, which are characterized by sexual failing, and the fact of her connection to doubt and uncertainty.

In Genesis, we are told that Er was the husband of Tamar, but that “Er was displeasing to the LORD, and the LORD killed him.” It was a brother-in-law’s duty to marry his brother’s widow in order to produce offspring who would carry on the dead brother’s name. But Onan, the next brother in line, “knowing that his seed would not count as his, let it go to waste whenever he joined with his brother’s wife, so as not to provide offspring for his brother. What he did was displeasing to the LORD, and He took his life also” (Gen. 38:7-8) The Torah does not tell us the exact nature of Er’s sin, but, based on a comparison with his brother Onan, who spilled his seed on the earth and was killed, the Rabbis claimed that both brothers shared the same dishonorable trait. “Why did Er destroy his seed? So that she (Tamar) would not get pregnant, which might destroy her beauty.”⁴⁶ He doesn’t want his wife to get pregnant, because he does not want her to look worn-out and so cease to arouse him sexually. He associates pregnancy and birth with a lessening of sexual magnetism, and he wants to be constantly aroused.

Er’s name means that he constantly strives to keep awake. We might conclude that he fears sleep and the loss of control that sleep represents. He fears Lilith’s world, the unconscious world of nightmares and dreams, which might ignite erotic fires in other places over which he has no control.

The name Er also has another meaning, connected to the verb l’arair, to appeal or undermine. When one takes a legal case to the court of appeals, it means that there is some doubt as to the truth of the verdict. Thus, Er is awake as a skeptic. He does not accept things at face value. Such doubt jerks people awake. They start to ask questions. But it can also upset a person’s equilibrium, leading to feelings of inner exhaustion, apathy, and coldness. Then doubt becomes an obstacle and Lilith’s demonic powers take control.

So, Er is subject to Lilith on both counts – fear of the unconscious connected with sleep, and fear of uncertainty, connected with waking reality. His attempt to control Tamar by spilling his seed is a turning away from pregnancy and birth, which are characterized, according to the Mei HaShiloah, by their hiddenness and uncertainty:

For every birth comes only out of concealment and forgetfulness, just as no seed can grow unless it first decomposes in the ground and rots. So it is, too, with the drop of life that comes down from the brain – it cannot cause birth until it firsts materializes and becomes corporeal in human seed. For this is the moment when human consciousness stops and is forgotten. And, if a person would constantly maintain awareness and consciousness of his Creator, he could never come to the state of concealment and forgetfulness that allows birth to occur. Therefore Er….did not want to destroy this. This is the meaning of “he did not want to destroy her beauty.”⁴⁷

While the Mei haShiloah seeks to characterize Er as a religious seeker, we would suggest that Er wants to remain awake to reality, because he does not have a basic confidence in it. Instead of bravely entering the uncertainty of the night, as the Baal Shem Tov recommends, Er prefers to maintain his illusory stance of total consciousness and control. He attempts to create a situation in which Tamar will always remain an alluring virgin. By spilling his seed and completing neither the sexual act nor their bargain as husband and wife, he treats her essentially as the prostitute she will later impersonate.⁴⁸ This way, he never stops desiring her.

According to the Baal Shem Tov, to contend with his unconscious, man must dive into the world of dreams (albeit with an oxygen tank). Inner certitude – “Certain is His name, certain is His fame,” – does not contradict the mysterious. In fact, a person is enabled to dive more fully into himself or herself through such protection. Pay attention to the poem’s phrasing: “Certain is His name” – that is, the certainty is ascribed to the name; to name is to be certain. The certainty one needs to safely enter the world of the unconscious is contingent upon self-identity. I must first know my name if I am to step into the world of the unknown.⁴⁹ Only with such awareness can the forces inhabiting this world express themselves constructively, without injury. Then I will be capable of contending with Lilith in a positive way. I can also allow myself to encounter another, more subtle Lilith, than the one I am habituated to fearing.

The mantra of certainty can be used by any true student of the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings, as a small raft upon which to traverse the immense sea of the unconscious without drowning. This certainty within uncertainty is the real waking state – the ability to be both awake and in a state of reverie. The opposite direction is represented in the figure of Er, who turns out to be “evil,”⁵⁰ precisely because he is incapable of transforming bad into good. This is why he spills his seed and “gives birth to demons” – they are the demons in his soul, his unresolved fears. Er does not have the spiritual strength it takes to unveil the humanity that every demon conceals.

In his book, Mei HaShiloah, the Rebbe of Ishbitz teaches us that Er is the archetype of one who is afraid to enter uncertain situations, or, as he calls them, “doubts.” Jacob likewise, according to the Mei HaShiloah, was always trying to follow well-trodden paths in his spiritual life, in order to avoid the darkness of uncertainty. According to the Mei HaShiloah, the story of Er, comes to teach his grandfather Jacob, quite explicitly, what happens when you try to steer clear from all doubt:

“Jacob wanted to live peacefully” (REFERENCE)- this means that he wanted to stay away from any deed that would put him into a doubtful situation. This, however, is not the Holy Blessed One’s desire for this world. God therefore showed him – see who “shall issue from your loins” (Gen. 35:11), since he (Er) also guarded himself from any type of deed that brings loss, except that he did so on the physical plane…. for Jacob had the same lack as Er did, except that Jacob’s lack was in the service of God. He protected himself so as not to destroy the beauty of his service (of God).⁵¹

Just as Er was concerned about “destroying his wife’s beauty, so too, says the Mei HaShiloah, Jacob was concerned not to destroy the beauty of his spiritual service. The Mei HaShiloah goes on to connect such loss of beauty with “concealment and forgetfulness,” since in every birth experience, creativity and fertility are necessarily associated with “‘destruction of beauty’ – as we quoted above – “no seed can grow unless it first decomposes in the ground and rots.” Because Jacob fears the unknown in his own soul, he prefers certitude, although this is not necessarily God’s will for Jacob, which he could realize were he to contemplate the story of Er, his descendant.⁵²

According to the Zohar, it is for these very reasons that Jacob fears marrying Leah. Leah emanates uncertainty. He prefers, in the words of the Zohar, “to stay attached to what he understands”⁵³ – that is, Rachel, whose beauty symbolizes clarity of consciousness. Jacob’s aversion to Leah’s tender and mysterious eyes demonstrates his fear of the unknown. Entering the darkness of uncertainty implies leaving his housewife, Rachel, behind. Only by entering into the darkness can one know or understand Leah’s fertility and creativity; but this, the Zohar says, is precisely what frightens Jacob.

In this respect, the idea that both Leah and Lilith come from the sefirah of Binah is very significant. One of the most fascinating names the Zohar gives to Binah is “the place that stands in question.”⁵⁴ Binah challenges a person to study, investigate and ask questions. Hence, a person may savor their attachment to the Divine when faced with those ultimate questions which can never be answered.

The Zohar unequivocally maintains that the people of Israel was spiritually incapable of asking the questions that emerge from Binah. This inability caused them to seek out quick and easy answers, such as the golden calf.⁵⁵ Those who made the calf said: “This is your god O Israel.” The Zohar points out that the words “this” (eileh)⁵⁶ and “god” (elohim) have the same letters, and the two extra letters in elohim can be used to spell “who is this?” (mi eileh). The Zohar teaches us that, without the element of wonder, we are left only with conclusions. This is just like removing the two letters that form the word “mi” from “elohim,” so that we are left with the letters that create the word “eileh” – turning the unknown into the transparent – “eileh elohekha Yisrael” – this is your god, O Israel.”⁵⁷

When we cannot face the question that disturbs us, then each of our doubts becomes a devilish monster; “creating demons,” says the Kabbalah. Both Er and Jacob share in this dynamic; Er symbolizes fear of the unknown, and Jacob suffers deep anxiety when faced with unresolved questions. Following out the Ari’s suggestion that Leah is Lilith, we might say that Jacob’s impulse to run away from Leah’s taunts is what enables him to imagine her as the demonic figure of Lilith. He turns his doubts into unwanted strangers trespassing upon his soul, and these strangers are only entertained at night, in his dreams, when they become capricious and demonic. Because Leah symbolizes the uncertain quest for understanding, she belongs to the sefirah of Binah; the questions she asks really have no answers. Her provocative presence, and the uncertainty it intimates, causes Jacob great discomfort, for he cannot live under the sign of the question mark. He relates to the one who calls his attention to the unresolved expanses of his soul as a terrifying and demonic being.

CHAPTER 15: LEAH’S TEFILLIN

In the Lurianic writings, the figures of Rachel and Leah are linked to the mysteries of tefillin. Tefillin are composed of two “houses” – black leather boxes containing portions from the Torah. One “house” is worn on the left arm, facing the heart, while the other is worn on the top of the forehead, facing the brain. In rabbinic terminology, woman is also called a man’s “house” or “household,” so it is only natural that, in kabbalistic thought, the two houses of tefillin came to symbolize the two partzufim – Rachel and Leah. It is not difficult to guess how the two women are identified with the two houses: Rachel, the more practical and housewifely is identified with the arm tefillin, facing the heart, while Leah, the more intellectual, is associated with the head tefillin, facing the brain. Rachel is represented by the actual tefillin of the arm, the black box that has the portions from the Torah in it, while Leah is represented only by the knot formed by the two leather straps, which is shaped like the letter dalet.⁵⁸

This kabbalistic image is based upon two rabbinic sources: one maintains that God, also, wears tefillin;⁵⁹ the second relates to the dialogue in Exodus 33: 18-23 between Moses and God, in which Moses asks to see God’s face, but God will only allow him to see His back. Moses hides himself, at God’s command, in a cleft in the rock when the glory of God passes over. He does not gaze at the face of God, and only after God passes is it permissible for Moses to look upon his back. But the Rabbis, with their very literal approach, try to determine exactly what Moses saw when he looked upon God’s back. Their answer: “‘Then I will take My hand away and you will see My back’ – R. Hanna bar Bizna said in the name of R. Shimon Hasida: This teaches us that the Holy One, blessed be He, showed Moses the knot of the tefillin.”⁶⁰

If the Shekhinah in its lower aspect – Rachel – is the hand tefillin, but in its higher aspect – Leah – is the knot of the head tefillin, then we can say that the peak of Moses’s spiritual realization is the revelation of partzuf Leah. Hence, the aspect of the divine universe at which Moses arrives is Leah’s face in the Shekhinah. This is enormously significant. Given that Moses’ s seal is impressed on the entire Torah, the level of consciousness he achieves must then have tremendous influence on the Torah’s essential nature,⁶¹ as we will presently see.

According to the Zohar, Jacob did not merit to assimilate the higher Leah partzuf. He preferred to love Rachel, who was on a lower level (we recall that Rachel’s head only goes up to Leah’s feet),⁶² and more easily mastered by him. Leah was beyond his grasp and Jacob was afraid where he could not understand. Unlike Jacob, however, Moses merits attaining the level of Leah, according to R. Hayyim Vital.

And this is what the Rabbis said concerning the verse, “The effect (ekev in Heb., also means heel) of humility is fear of the LORD” (Prov. 22:4) – just as humility becomes a heel to her sandal, so fear becomes a crown for her head. For humility is the aspect of Leah. And since Moses achieved this and reached the fiftieth gate of Binah, he is called “very humble” (Num. 12:3), because he reached the place of Leah.⁶³

Leah expresses the character trait of humility, while Rachel expresses fear. In the Torah, Moses is regarded as the most humble of people, leading the Ari to conclude that Moses achieved the spiritual intuition of Leah – humility – which enabled him to receive the Torah. Moses perceived the partzuf Leah of the Godhead – the knot of God’s tefillin. He perceived higher feminine reality’s connection to the sacred, whereas Jacob could not. Jacob only sensed how fear and the sacred complement each other – how, in the words of Proverbs, “a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised” (Prov. 31:30) – but not how Leah, who demands equality and expression of the whole of her being, including her sexuality, could possibly belong to the sacred. For Jacob, Leah is far from humility, and closer to audacity, perhaps even to licentiousness.

In order to finally understand Leah, Jacob needed to experience a serious metamorphosis, including changing his name from Jacob to Israel. This name change reflects an archetypal process of transformation that the archetypal image of Jacob needs to undergo before it can face the spiritual challenge that Leah presents. “Because these (…aspects of partzuf Leah) were concealed, and were not revealed to Jacob before he was called Israel as we explained earlier. Only then (i.e., when he was named Israel) could he realize the entire partzuf of Ze’eir Anpin, as is well-known.”⁶⁴ The name “Jacob” represents only the diminished aspect of the masculine partzuf, while the name “Israel,” represents fullness, which is the mature figure of Ze’eir Anpin. This is why changing Jacob’s name to Israel enabled him to understand where he had formerly not been capable of understanding, and to accept Leah instead of rejecting and hating her.

In the Lurianic writings, it is Moses, the giver of the Torah, who sees the knot of God’s head tefillin, and receives spiritual enlightenment from this revelation of partzuf Leah. The revelation of the feminine received by Moses is that the real meaning of humility is to be truthful about who you are. When people fail to admit things about themselves, they become sly, the opposite of humility, which entails simplicity and straightforwardness. A humble person is capable of saying that he possesses positive qualities in the same direct way that he is capable of confessing his failings. This is why Moses was capable of writing all of his praises in the Torah, including the fact that he was “a very humble man, more so than any other man on earth” (Num. 12:3). This, too, was said simply, without craft, without hypocrisy, i.e. humbly. In the Babylonian Talmud, there is a list of many things that ceased to exist the day the Temple was destroyed, or the day a certain tzaddik died. The Talmud tells us that the amora R. Yosef said to the man who had quoted the mishna before him that he should not say “from the time that Rabbi died, humility was abolished,’ – since he, i.e. R. Yosef, still lived, and he is a humble person. The amora, R. Nahman, went on to say that people should not say that fear of God was also abolished, since he, R. Nachman, is still alive, and he fears God. R. Nahman of Breslov learns from this talmudic text that humility does not mean that I hide my merits. Quite the opposite – humility means my ability to accept my merits without being haughty about them, as Moses did.⁶⁵

Moses received the attribute of humility from partzuf Leah. This implies that Moses’s humility is connected to his ability to perceive the role of Leah within the divine image, and to recognize that, what Jacob saw as brazenness, was in fact her modesty. Leah was faithful enough to herself to seek out the proper place for herself in the world. Unfortunately, the society in which she functioned saw her as “someone who goes out,” like a prostitute.

We are arguing that patriarchy is forged in the image of Jacob. But Moses, in Lurianic Kabbalah, represents a different approach. He looks at Leah eye to eye. The root of Moses’s soul comes from partzuf Leah, and the highest level of his perception of the Divine is rooted in supernal Leah. He recognizes that Leah’s psychological vulnerability is an expression of great humility, and so his entire teachings are sealed with the image of her partzuf.⁶⁶ The Kabbalah sees Jacob and Moses as two separate beings symbolizing one essence. Jacob represents the external, while Moses (and Israel also) represents the internal: “Moses from the inside, Jacob from the outside.”⁶⁷

According to the Ari, the purpose of the Torah that Moses brought down from heaven was to bring the entire people to a sublime state, so that those insights Moses had merited to receive would become accessible to everyone. In the Lurianic writings, the “Torah of Moses” is read as an effort to bring society to a state in which Leah can wholly belong. Lilith became a demon only because she could not fit into Adam’s patriarchal paradise. The children of Israel in the generation of the wilderness were not so high as Moses as to be able to receive Leah-Lilith into the realm of the sacred. The general level of Israel, as the Ari explains, were souls from the lower, Rachel partzuf. Moses, however, heralds a new era. He has a message for a simplistic, patriarchal, Jacobic society, a message that is geared toward changing that society step by step in order that it reach a new state in which it can truly answer to its name – Israel. The Torah’s goal, conceived in this way, is to change the Jacobic world, to expand it, and make it more flexible – more Israeli. When this happens, Leah-Lilith will no longer be relegated to a state of separation and alienation, and she will no longer be perceived as a demon. She will be seen for what she is – an essential part of all women. As long as Lilith is playing the role of the demon, she is murderous and jealous, and she seeks to kill Eve’s children. The moment she is liberated, however, she no longer has any need to usurp Eve or Rachel’s place. On that day, all aspects of women’s experience will be fully expressed. and Lilith can return to the Garden of Eden.

We find an example of this of revaluing of Leah over Rachel in the writings of the Ari, where he offers his interpretation of the sin of the golden calf. The Torah tells us that, after the sin of the golden calf, God wanted to create a new people out of Moses. In the Kabbalah, “erasing the people” means destroying its root in the world of Atzilut, or, as the Ari puts it, “to abolish partzuf Rachel.” God wanted to establish a new people from partzuf Leah, who would be the spiritual descendants of Moses. However, it was Moses himself who halted this plan:

The intention of the Supreme Emanator was to annihilate the entire reality of the lower wife of Ze’eir Anpin – Rachel – and to make a new wife for Ze’eir Anpin out of the aspect of the higher Dalet – Leah – which would have ten complete sefirot. As the rabbis have already stated, this blessing was realized in Moses’s seed, as it says, ‘And the children of Rehavya were very many’ (I Chron. 23:17) – more than six hundred thousand.⁶⁸

But Moses did not want this, and God listened to him, and kept His word and the word of His servant Moses. Both (intentions) were realized. He did not destroy the lower Rachel, while higher Leah, which was at that time one solitary point, He developed into ten sefirot, making her a complete partzuf, but not bringing her back (to the) face to face (relationship). And this is the secret of ‘and you shall see My back’- this is the knot of the Tefillin that was fixed. However, “My face,” which means returning face to face with Ze’eir Anpin, must not be seen” (Ex. 3:23), this can not be.⁶⁹

Interpreting this quotation requires a review of human history until this time. At first, femininity belonged to the Leah partzuf, since Lilith, who is Leah, was the first Eve. Then Lilith flees, and the second Eve, who is also Rachel, becomes the mainstay of the household. Rachel is the dominant wife and Lilith is perceived as a demonic figure. Now, after the sin of the golden calf, God suggests turning back the course of history. He is prepared to erase partzuf Rachel, and build a new society based exclusively upon partzuf Leah. However, Leah herself (represented by her human counterpart, Moses), does not agree to this plan. Rather than the erasure of Rachel, she awaits a reunion with her sister and a healing of women’s divided self.

In the Zohar, the sin of the golden calf is associated with human beings’ inability to bear the spiritual state of questioning and uncertainty. Those who worshipped the calf said “eileh elohekha Yisrael” – “This is your god, o Israel” (Ex. 32:4), eliminating the letters mi from the word elohim, which is composed of the same letters as mi eleh (”who are these”)?⁷⁰ The ideal concept of the divine assumes uncertainty, thus making faith the human being’s facing of the Divine unknown. Divinity perplexes man, who constantly seeks to understand it with his rational mind. The sin of the golden calf is the attempt to escape from the unknown to the comforting bosom of the familiar – “This is your god, o Israel.”

In patriarchal society, the housewife, Eve or Rachel, will always be in the place that men deem fitting for her. She poses no threat. On the other hand, Leah, with her soft eyes, broadcasts threatening messages; facing her, a man must have courage to face the unknown, without needing to escape to the familiar bosom of that which he already knows. Rachel symbolizes the exact opposite – the need for boundedness and fortification in a revealed, and familiar universe.

With this Lurianic paradigm in mind, we can appreciate that religion itself can become an obstacle to a believer’s facing the unknown. This is why R. Tzadok HaCohen of Lublin maintains that the sin of the golden calf was an attempt to hide behind the commandments of the Torah and to make them into a statue and a graven image. If we take the Torah and see it as a closed system of familiar rules, which are not open to the Infinite, then we are making the Torah itself an idol:

For this is the entire Torah: that there should be no fence or known boundary, which is also called a statue and a picture…but…they wanted something tangible and accessible, and they therefore eliminated the face of the ox from the divine chariot – meaning that they made its picture tangible, making the observance of the commandments like the harnessing of an ox to its yoke, which becomes their primary focus, since they do not perceive anything deeper. And this need for a statue and a picture in order to grasp the Holy One or His Torah is idol worship. For just as God is infinite and has no end, so His Torah is infinite and has no end.⁷¹

In R. Tzadok’s remarkable refocusing, God wants a people who are constantly open to questions and to wonderment, which, like His Torah, is infinite and has no end. To make this point, R. Tzadok reverses the import of his talmudic source concerning ox-like observance of the commandments, where this was seen as a positive value. According to B. Avodah Zarah 5b: “It is taught from the House of Elijah: A person should always be towards the Torah as an ox to the yoke and an ass to its load.” But this is what R. Tzadok calls “making a calf out of Torah.”

It is our characterization of Leah as the higher partzuf of the Shekhinah – open to wonder and uncertainty – which has brought us to this point of understanding the role of Torah and faith in God’s unfolding plan. Now that we have become familiar with the characterization of Lilith in Jewish thought, and with the nature of the bond between her and Leah – both in the Torah, and as the higher partzuf of the Shekhinah – we need to answer a few questions that present themselves in the wake of our discussion: What is the meaning of the change from Jacob into Israel, and what is it that finally enables him to understand and accept Leah? What is the meaning of the change that Leah-Lilith undergoes, from a murderous, demonic, evil creature into someone who protects Rachel, as Moses did? How does the Ari think that the Torah manages to create the means by which Lilith will be liberated from her excommunicated state and returned to the circle of sacred legitimacy? These questions will be addressed in the next two gates, where we examine the processes leading to Lilith’s redemption, as they are described in both the Torah and Lurianic Kabbalah. The next gate will focus on dynamic processes rather than static situations. We will be looking at changes undergone by man, symbolized by Jacob, and also at changes undergone by woman. Through myriad reincarnations, woman gradually takes leave of her divided self and paves the way for her eventual redemption.

FOOTNOTES

1. Bereshit Rabba 47, 6: “Reish Lakish said: The patriarchs are the divine chariot.” See also in the Tanya, which was written by R. Shneur Zalman of Lyadi (Section one, chap. 39): “This is what is meant by the sages’ comment that the patriarchs are the divine chariot: that all their limbs were holy and separate from this world, and they were a vehicle for the Divine Will all the days of their lives.”

2. Sha’ar Hamitzvot, on the mitzvah of Shiluach Haken. See also Sha’ar HaKavanot, Discourses on the Amidah, 2, explanation of the word Eloheinu.

3. An interesting viewpoint on the conflict in the feminine soul between these two identities can be found in the myth of Eros and Psyche, specifically in the analysis of this myth by Erich Neumann. REFERENCE In the saga of Eros and Psyche, which describes the course of development of the female, Aphrodite gives Psyche four tasks. The first one is to clean a giant stack of seeds mixed with garbage. Aphrodite, who both fears and loathes Psyche, throws the following dart at her: “I cannot imagine how a repulsive handmaiden like yourself could ever allure her lovers, other than by working very hard and diligently, in order to satisfy their desires…” Erich Neumann approaches this myth using depth psychology, and he notes that “the conflict between Psyche and Aphrodite takes place within the domain of the feminine sphere”, and is no longer a “conflict between individuation….and female motherhood whose chains the individual seeks to free himself of.” The struggle between Psyche, who expresses a femininity that has developed to the point of equal consciousness, and Aphrodite, who wishes to imprison her within the borders established for woman in patriarchal society, is a conflict that takes place for all women. In our terms, between partzuf Rachel, which seeks to secure her position through the simple labor of her hands, and partzuf Leah and its shadow image – Lilith – which seeks to break out of the state of back-to-back relationships (which in the Psyche-Eros myth is expressed by intercourse in the dark, when it is forbidden for Psyche to see who her lover is), and to achieve equality in diversity, face to face.

4. Rachel, who was the housewife (akeret habayit – usually understood as the term for a barren wife) – was the mainstay (ikar) of Jacob’s household, as it says (Gen. 46:19) “the children of Rachel, the wife of Jacob” (Bamidbar Rabbah, 14, 7).

5. See for example Jesse Rapport’s book, Feminism and its Opponents, the chapter entitled “Women are Motivated by their Emotions,” p. 53. After serious hesitation, we decided to use the word “intellectual” to describe someone with mohin. We feel the need to clarify that in our opinion, modern language does not have a term with a meaning as rich as that of mohin in Lurianic Kabbalah. Mohin means the light intended for the brain. In Lurianic Kabbalah, in every world, level, configuration, or point of time, there is a slightly different definition of mohin. Notwithstanding, we have chosen the word “intellectual,” to describe abstract, conceptual, pure thinking.

6. R. Isaac of Homil, Chana Ariel (Berditchev 5678), Par’shat Va’etchanan, p.24

7. The Baal HaTurim, cited above, understands softness as love-talk. Soft words are words of love and kindness, so that “soft eyes” would imply eyes that express longing and desire for intimacy. The Baal Haturim, true to his usual form, is very terse. He leaves us to understand the meaning of his interpretation.

8. In her book Women Above, devoted to women’s sexual fantasies, Nancy Friday describes how the publishers originally reacted to her manuscript (pp. 15-17). At first they were very curious to see something usually not accessible to them. They later reacted aggressively, making comments like “I threw your book on the other side of the room,” or even, “I wanted to kill you.” She notes that female editors did not react any differently than male editors in terms of the hate they expressed towards the accounts of the real nature of women’s sexual fantasies.

9. If we re-arrange the order of the letters in her name, Rebecca comes from the root b”k”r” (cattle). On this association, see the Radak in his commentary on Jer. 46:21: “Like fattened bullocks – like calves waiting to be fattened up, so they sit and eat and drink…marbek, [like Rebecca], means fattening up…just as our Rabbis said, “they took her in for fattening up (ribka).” Rebecca is linked with animal life-force. She wants to impart this to her son Jacob, who is instinctively repulsed by this side of nature.

10. “That (people) would say: “This was the condition – the older one will go to the older one, the younger one will go to the younger one.” And she would cry and pray: “May it be your will that I not fall into the lot of a wicked man” (Bereshit Rabba 70, 16).

11. Bereshit Rabba, 60, 5: “Reish Lakish said: The daughters of idol worshippers guard the place of their virginity, and are wanton elsewhere. This one, however, was a virgin in both the place of her virginity, and no man had known her elsewhere.” The wantonness from which they are excluding her is anal intercourse.

12. The JPS translation of va-tipol as “alighted from the camel,” misses the drama in the moment.

13. Yalkut Shimoni, ?? entry 109; “Smitten by wood” is a talmudic way of describing a woman whose hymen was injured, as Rashi says in B.Ketubot 11a: “smitten by wood – that she was struck by wood in that place… (she and others like her) if they marry, they do not lose their ketubah,”, i.e. they are still considered virgins. It should be noted that according to the opinion of R. Shimon and R. Yossi in the Talmud, (B. Yevamot 60a), she who was struck by wood is not considered a total virgin, as the high priest, who is obligated to marry a virgin, cannot, in R. Shimon’s opinion marry her. The above-mentioned midrash concerning Rebecca’s virginity also enters into a halachic discussion about she who was struck by wood, and brings the opinion of the Rabbis who held that she who was struck by wood is not considered a virgin: “‘And the girl was exceedingly beautiful, a virgin…’ we learned: A maiden who was injured by wood receives a ketubah of two hundred, in R. Meir’s opinion. The Sages say that she receives one hundred. R. Hanina in the name of R. Eliezer says that R. Meir’s reasoning is (because it is written: ‘And no man knew her,’ (which implies) that if she was injured by wood, she is still a virgin. The Sages base their opinion (by emphasizing the word) ‘virgin’ – if her hymen was broken by a piece of wood, she is no longer a virgin.” (Bereshit Rabba, 60, 5). This is probably an echo of the midrashic tradition quoted in the Yalkut Shimoni which says that Rebecca was injured by wood.

14.In addition to the two points mentioned in this midrash, there are many other similarities between the cases of Rebecca and Tamar: 1. Both of them come from outside local family circles, that is, they are both “outsiders.” 2. They are both assertive: (Tamar initiates the encounter with Judah; Rebecca is responsible for Jacob’s deception of Isaac). 3. Both of them appear at critical points in the continuing saga of the Abraham/ Isaac/Jacob dynasty, and the story develops positively only because of their presence at the right place and at the right moment. 4. Both of them are described as seers, while the men do not see (Judah doesn’t see Tamar, but thinks she is a prostitute, while she sees straight into him. And when Isaac meets Rebecca, the events that occur are described subtly – Rebecca sees Isaac, but Isaac only sees camels: “And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at evening time, and he lifted up his eyes, and he saw camels coming. And Rebecca lifted up her eyes and saw Isaac” (Gen. 24:62-63). 5. Peretz and Zarach, Tamar’s twin children, are a recapitulation of the story of Jacob and Esau, Rebecca’s twin sons (or, to put it differently, reincarnations of them). Yair Zakovitch noted this point in his article, “The Heel of Jacob,” REFERENCE, and developed it according to his way of understanding. Zerah, who should have been the first-born, is similar to Esau in a few respects. For instance, the midwife ties a scarlet thread on Zerah’s hand (this is the reason he was named Zerah, which is derived from the word zrihat hashani, i.e. the rising scarlet), and Esau, too, was red (adom), as he is the father of Edom. Jacob, whom the dynasty develops from, is similar to Peretz, who broke forth (paratz) and unjustly took the birthright and went on to become the patriarch of the Judean dynasty.

15. Lit. “as the Sages awakened (our attention to)”. For more on the concept of awakening in the Zohar, see Melila Helner-Eshed, “That You Stir Not Up, nor Awake My Love, Until it Please – The Language of Awakening in the Zohar,” (forthcoming) REFERNCE. See also our later discussion of the mystery of Er, Judah’s firstborn.

16. The Zohar refers to M.Kiddushin (4:12), which says: “A man may (be alone in a room) with his mother, and with his daughter, and may sleep close to them. And if they are already grown up, she sleeps in her blanket and he sleeps in his.” The phrase, “a son may be alone with his mother,” does not appear in the mishna, but does in the Gemara (B.Kidushin 60b).

17. Nitzah Abarbanel, Eve and Lilith (pp. 14-15, and p. 41), touched on Freud’s analyses of the incest taboo and the Oedipus complex as the factor responsible for the schism between the two aspects of the female image: the loved one, and the one that is despised but desired. See our discussion in the introduction.

18. In the male body, the sefirah of Yesod symbolizes the genitals, and in a woman, it is the womb, as R. Hayyim Vital says elsewhere: (Etz Hayyim, Gate 1, Branch 5): “For in her, yesod is the womb, and the crown is her fleshy apple, which the Rabbis call “the lower part of the intestines.”

19. Etz Hayyim, Gate 38, chapter 2, second edition. In order to understand this subject in terms of the structure of the worlds, see the original, as we have summarized here.

20. C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, REFERENCE – check for quote pages 81-92.

21. Michah Ankuri, And This Forest Has No End, p. 199. Ankuri illustrates his point with an anecdote from his clinic:

A divorced man would occasionally tell me about a new relationship with a woman, and explain why he had left his previous girlfriend. In one of our conversations he said that he occasionally has feelings of pain and anxiety, accompanied by a hallucination of a huge spider which is holding him by his stomach with tremendous strength. (205. The anxiety and the hallucination that accompany it are the flip side of the Don Juan. He leaves the woman slightly before the spider embraces him with its hug of death. Behind the persona of the successful Don Juan there is a frightened man, whose weakness is fed by the power of the terrible woman (205). We highly recommend the chapter “Shekhina h and Malkhut,” in which Ankuri presents important guidelines for understanding the connection between Depth Psychology and the Kabbalah in the field of female symbolism.

22. Chana Rachel Werbermacher (b. Ludmir 1815 – d. Jerusalem 1892), the daughter of R. Moonish Werbermacher, a Tchnernobler Hasid, was known for her scholarship and extreme piety from the time she was a young girl. She wore tzitzit, and prayed wearing talit and tefillin. When her father died, she said kaddish in his memory and built a synagogue in Ludmir from the money she received from her inheritance. She would give discourses there from behind a curtain so as to conceal herself from her audience. The synagogue of the Maid of Ludmir existed until the time of the Holocaust. There are many legends concerning the figure of Chana Rachel which describe her as a miracle-worker, and many sought her out, including Rabbis and scholars. However, her unusual behavior outraged local Jewish leaders, and the Rebbe of Tchnernobel eventually persuaded her to marry at the age of forty. After that, the number of her followers decreased. In 1858, when she was 43 years old, she divorced her husband and emigrated to Israel. In Israel she continued to conduct a hasidic tish every Shabbat for the traditional third meal, and went to Rachel’s grave every New Moon together with a group of women. Yohanan Twersky (whose family name indicates that he comes from the Tchernobel dynasty) wrote a novel about her entitled “The Maid of Ludmir” (Mossad Bialik, no mention of publication date), and the Chan Theater produced a play written by Yossefa Even-Shoshan about her in the late nineties (see the Hasidic Encyclopedia, Mossad Harav Kook, vol. one, p. 627, and the footnotes, for more about her).

23. R. Aaron of Tchernobel is cited in The Hasidic Encyclopedia for pressuring her to stop acting like a hasidic rebbe. However, in Twersky’s novel (p. 70), R. Mordechai of Tchernobel, rather than R. Aaron, is credited.

24. Compare the career of Hana Hava Horodetsky of Tchernobel, the daughter of R. Mordechai Twersky of Tchnernobel, lived during almost the exact same years as the Maid of Ludmir (1810-1893). Surprisingly enough, she too is described in the Hasidic Encyclopedia as “having taught Torah interspersed with Kabbalistic teachings…both Hasidim and Hasidic Rebbes sought out her counsel…she received both pitka’ot (slips of paper with petitions and the name(s) of the petitioners that were traditionally given to Hasidic Rebbes) and pidyonot (monetary donations)…her father testified that the Holy Spirit was with her since birth, and her eight brothers said that she was as righteous as they were.” If it was R. Mordechai who refused to allow the Maid of Ludmir to function as a hasidic rebbe, then the fact that he himself had a daughter (Hana Hava) whose behavior was very similar to that of Hana Rachel of Ludmir throws a very interesting light on the story.

Hana Hava of Tchernobel was the mother of the Rebbe of Tulna, the founder of a well-known Hasidic dynasty. Chana Bracha Shapira, the mother of R. Kalonomus Kelmish of Piasetsna (the author of Hovat Hatalmidim, Bnei Machshava Tova, Eish Kodesh, etc.) was also a great scholar, wore tzitzit, and also received pitka’ot and pidyonot from Hasidim (see the Hasidic Encyclopedia, p. 626). See Nehemia Polen, translation of her autobiography (forthcoming grom JPS)

25. This “inverse blessing” is obviously not common practice in the Jewish world, and it can be assumed that the official Habad institutions would prefer to deny that such a practice exists at all.

The blessing “Who has not made me a woman” is also a thorn in the side of Orthoprax Rabbis sensitive to feminist issues. On the one hand, a blessing like this, which is part of the standard version of the prayers, cannot be changed or omitted according to the Orthodox tradition. On the other hand, they cannot accept it. One of us once heard from a certain Rabbi who claimed that when he says the blessing “Who has not made me a woman,” his intention is this: “I thank the Lord for not giving me feminine attributes as part of my nature. I am thankful for the opportunity I have received to work on myself spiritually in order that I merit to develop the female sides of my personality.” It is clear that as long as there is no inner model based on traditional sources that could offer a basic change in the way the new reality of women’s lives is dealt with, we will be treated to all kinds of silly apologetics of this kind. In our opinion, in Lurianic Kabbalah we find an alternative and dynamic model for understanding the possibilities of women in Jewish culture. In his discourse on the nesira, the myth of the original hermaphroditic creation of the human (man and woman created back to back and then separated) the Ari presents a diagram of a gradual process by which we can map and analyze all the stages in the development of women’s status. REFERENCE

In light of this, it seems that the present situation in which women say the blessing “Who has made me according to His will,” while men say the blessing “Who has not made me a woman,” is no longer acceptable. It is also very unjust, as this blessing contradicts what we said at the outset is the central divine revelation of our time, that of the female voice. It is clear that it is the task of the rabbinical establishment to right this wrong. As long as they procrastinate in doing so, it is incumbent on both men and women, as a sort of “positive commandment relevant to this time in history,” to bring pressure on the rabbinical establishment by every legitimate means. It is equally important that women claim their right to serve as rabbis, thereby becoming a part of the halakhic and Torah establishments, so that change will take place within the very fabric of this framework. Until that time, it is our halakhic opinion that a person who feels that, by saying this (possibly insulting) blessing, she is being dishonest to her basic tenets of belief should either omit the blessing “Who has not made me a woman” entirely, or find a creative re-phrasing. The Conservative movement has adopted the traditional form of the women’s blessing for both men and women: “who has made me according to your will.”

26. R. Hayyim Vital quotes the Zohar: “Supernal Mother (Imma Ila’ah) is called male, as is written in the Zohar parshat Vayechi”. (Sha’ar Mamarei Razal – tractate Shabbat).

27. B. Sukkah 52a, translated according to Rashi’s commentary.

28. Boyarin, Ch. 5, esp. 165-66.

29. Tzidkat haTzaddik letter 248. See also his Resesei Lailah. letter 13, and Poked Ikarrim, letter 6.

30. B. Berakhot 20a

31. B. Ketubot 17a

32. This is the way that the author of Sefer HaHinukh understood this story (mitzvah 188). He explains that we should not learn from these sages since “they, may their memories be blessed, were like angels, and were always occupied with the Torah and the commandments, and their intentions were as clear to everyone as the sun is bright, and they had no sense of evil in anything due to their intense devotion to the Torah and its commandments. We today, however, may not disregard even a small fence (which protects) these matters, but must rather respect all the distancing mechanisms which the Sages of blessed memory taught us.” The deification of the sages of earlier times is useful for the author of the Sefer HaHinukh, as it was for other rabbis, as a means of exempting these stories from the category of those teachings whose intention was to instruct the students to follow in their footsteps and to do as they did. Sefer HaHinukh and similar thinkers sought to present spiritual man as a being indifferent to sensuality. We would like to go down a different path. R. Tzaddok HaCohen of Lublin discusses this matter at length in his book Yisrael Kedoshim (entry 4, opening words “but”). He maintains that it is permissible for someone who is spiritually developed to decide for himself as to the degree of care he needs to exercise in erotic matters insofar as rabbinical decrees are concerned. King Solomon took more wives than he was permitted to, but his mistake, according to R. Tzaddok, was that he thought that he could do so even in relation to “that which was commanded in the Torah, which applies to all souls, and can never be superceded. This is not the case with rabbinical decrees, for they did not intend their edicts for a person who knows themselves” (see the entire source from R. Tzaddok, who chose to conceal his extremely profound opinion by scholarly debate and many references. In contrast, see Rabbi Y. Hankin’s article , REFER TO TITLE, Dayot no. 3, Feb. 1999, p. 15. He understands this issue differently than R. Tzaddok, seeing it as erotic indifference, which he also attributes to other authorities such as the Ritva and the Maharshal. The truth is that a simple study of their words shows that it is entirely unnecessary to understand them in this fashion. R. Tzaddok’s interpretation is much more complex.

33. R. Wolf of Zhitomer, a student of the Maggid of Mezeritch, in his work Or Hamaier, p. 16. For the expression “most beautiful among women,” see Song of Songs 1:8; 5:9; 6:1. This could be explained in the tradition of the Hassidic contemplative schools as follows: The Shekhinah is the element of beauty that is found amongst women. See also M. Idel, “The Beauty of Woman,” REFERENCE

We will later discuss the story of R. Akiva and the wife of Turnus Rufus, who became R. Akiva’s second wife (see B.Avodah Zarah 20a). According to Lurianic Kabbalah, R. Akiva’s first wife, who was named Rachel, was part of the Eve matrix, while the seductive Roman wife is part, of course, of the mystery of Lilith.

34. Sefer Haredim, entry 99. See also entry 98. The obligation to have sexual relations is derived in the Talmud from the word “times” in Ex. 21:10. See also Shulhan Arukh, Even HaEzer, No. 76, par. 1: “What are her times? Every man is obligated (to have sexual relations) at certain times according to his strength and according to his profession.” “The times for sages” is a talmudic expression which, in its original usage, referred to the frequency recommended for sexual relations between sages and their wives. As the Shulhan Arukh stipulates (there): ‘The time for Sages is once a week, and it is their custom to have sex every Friday night.:

5. Azcari’s use of the word “times” signifies that when one is obligated to be with the first wife, i.e. the Torah, then the “times” are observed intellectually, as spiritual union. Kissing is used as a metaphor for such spiritual union with the Torah. There may also be a sense that the mouth, the bodily organ which is used for study, is also responsible for union.

“The living organ” is the name used to describe the erect male penis in Jewish sources. The source is from Yahel Or, the Gaon of Vilna’s commentary on the Zohar (Vilna 5673, p. 18, column 2). See also Y. Liebes, “On Sabbateaism and its Kabbalah,” p. 351, footnote 202. The importance of this is its surprising similarity to the comment of the Maggid of Mezretch on the swaying movements of the body during religious practice, which he compares to mating with the Shechina. See also Liebes ibid. p. 99, and O. Ezrahi, “The Two Cherubs,” footnote 154.

36. As it says in Sefer Hasidim: “‘To love God’ (means) that the soul becomes full of love, and that love is connected to joy, and that joy chases away from his heart the pleasantries of the body and the pleasures of the world. And that joy is so strong and overpowering, that even (the pleasure of) a young man who has not been with his wife for many days, and is full of desire, and has intense gratification when he shoots out his seed like an arrow, is as nothing compared to the intensity of the power of the joy of the love of God.” Sefer Hasidim, No. 300

37. For a survey of the textual traditions, see David Goldblatt, “the Beruriah Traditions,” Journal of Jewish Studies 26 (1975), 68-86.

38. B. Eruvin 53b. The quote from the sages is from M. Avot 1:5, repeated in B. Nedarim 20a.

39. B. Pesahim 62b

40. Rashi on B.Avodah Zarah 18b; the tradition in question is from B. Kiddushin 80a.

41. See Rachel Adler, “The Virgin in the Brothel and Other Anomalies: Character and Context in the Legend of Beruriah,” Tikkun, vol. 3, no. 6, 28-32, 102-05.

42. A parallel Roman story about the stoic philosopher Secundus testing his mother’s virtue was in circulation in various European and Middle Eastern languages. For a description of this and other tales of faithful men and faithless wives, some couched, like this one, as a “chastity wager,” see Haim Schwartzbaum, Studies in Aggadah and Jewish Folklore (Jerusalem, 1983), 66-71, n. 38.

43. Sha’ar Hakavanot – Drushei HaAmidah (the second discourse, commentary on the word Eloheinu). In spite of what we said here, as is often the case with Lurianic Kabbalah, this rule concerning the weak mind of women is occasionally applicable to other partzufim which are expressions of the feminine, such as Supernal Mother: “During the repetition of the silent Prayer, they both (Ze’eir Anpin and Nukva) ascend into the sefirah of Binah in Imma, but not into her Da’at….the reason being that women’s minds (da’at) are weak and therefore bereft of da’at and they can therefore only ascend into the binah of Imma, as she comes from the sefirah of Gevurah of Arikh Anpin, as is well known” (Sha’ar HaKavannot – Drushei Rosh Hashanah, discourse 5).

44. Toldot Yaakov Yosef, Deut.; Keter Shem Tov 6; Sippurey Tzaddikim, Levov 5628, 11; Midrash Rivash Tov, vol. 1, 77.

45. We heard this interpretation from R. Yitzhak Ginsburg.

46. “Displeasing to the LORD” – like the evil of Onan, who spilled his seed. As it says concerning Onan, “and He took his life also” – the death of Onan was like the death of Er. And why did Er destroy his seed? So that she (Tamar) would not get pregnant, which might destroy her beauty.” Rashi, based on B. Yevamot 34b. In Jewish tradition, spilling seed is therefore associated with Er as it is with Onan (the source of the word “onanism,” which is also the word for masturbation in modern Hebrew).

47. Mei Hashiloah, volume one, parshat Vayeshev, source beginning with the words “Vayehi Er,” commenting on Rashi, ad locem, cited above.

48. On the connection between completing or not completing the act and prostitution, consider the Hebrew word gomer (finishes, stops) as the highly symbolic name of the prostitute that God commands the prophet Hosea to marry. This was a symbol of how Israel had been unfaithful to her husband, God, and the Midrash has a very apt comment on this incident: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said, What should I do with this old man? I will tell him to marry a prostitute who will bear him children of prostitutes, and then I will tell him to send her away. If he actually sends her away, I too will drive Israel away. Immediately (it says) “the LORD said to Hosea, Go and take a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom… So he went and married Gomer the daughter of Diblaim” (Hos. 1:2-3). Why was she called Gomer? Rav said, Because everyone finished (came) in her. “Bat Divlaim” – wicked slander (dibah) the daughter of wicked slander. Shumel said, Because everyone plowed her like a ?. R. Yohanan said, Because she was sweet to everyone like a cluster of figs (d’vila). (Yalkut Shimoni, Hosea 1, entry 515).

49. C. G. Jung has supplied us with an excellent example of this in his autobiography. He describes a series of experiences occurring deep within his unconscious, events that were so powerful that they threatened his very sanity. In order to enable himself to penetrate to the depths of his unconscious without being damaged, he had to establish a few basic, definite truths about himself. See Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, p. 181. REFERENCE: NO RELEVANT QUOTATION APPEARS ON THIS PAGE IN MY EDITION – HL).

50. Evil is ra in Hebrew, which is Er’s name spelled backwards.

51. Mei Hashiloah, volume one, parshat Vayeshev, source beginning with the words “Vayehi Er.”

52. As far as the Mei Hashiloah is concerned, the soul of Er derives directly from the mind of his grandfather Jacob. That which existed in the grandfather’s mind as a thought and state of awareness became transformed into a soul whose saga is realized in his descendants, and brings to the surface that which previously existed only in a latent state in the soul of Jacob. See the remainder of his comments there.

53. NEED ZOHAR REFERENCE.

54. Introduction to the Zohar, 1b.

55. Later we quote the Ari who says that God wanted to destroy the partzuf of Rachel after the sin of the Golden Calf, and rebuild the people from Moses’ seed, which belongs to the partzuf of Leah. In light of what we have developed here we can see that the sin of the golden calf can be ascribed to those who are incapable of living with doubt and questions. They are impatient, demand immediate answers, and want to return to the world of certainty as soon as possible. This is a psychological state characteristic of someone who comes from the partzuf of Rachel. This is why God wanted to erase them from the world of Atzilut after the sin of the golden calf. NEED REFERENCE>

56. Based on the verse in Isaiah 40:26: “Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who has created these things” (mi barah eileh). It is interesting to note that the first person in the Tanakh to use the two words “mi eileh” was Esau, when he encountered all of Jacob’s entourage (see Gen. 33:5). There was good reason for people to think that Leah, who comes from the sefirah of Binah, the place where the unknown can be studied, was right for Esau. He too asks, “who are these?,” while Jacob, at least until he is healed, is frightened of questions. Looking for definite answers, he prefers Rachel’s beauty.

57. See the Introduction to the Zohar, 1b

58. In Lurianic kabbalah, this tefillin is worn by the Ze’eir Anpin partzuf. This means that Leah, the aspect of the female experience that is connected to the female image of the mother (malkhut d’Imma), is present in the consciousness of the maturing son (da’at d’Ze’eir Anpin). As R. Chaim Vital explains:

But Leah is the concealed world (alma d’itcasya), as we have explained, which is the image of the Dalet in the knot of the head Tefillin. …since Leah emerged from the back of Ze’eir Anpin, i.e. from the malkhut of Imma which is in the Da’at of Ze’eir Anpin, this being the mystery of the (letter) dalet that is in the knot of the head tefillin

(Etz Hayyim, gate 38, chapter 2, second edition).

In the Sha’ar HaKavannot, four reasons for Leah being the secret of the letter dalet are presented: “[1] For this reason also she is called dalet: Since she emerges from in back of the four minds of Za’ir Anpin, which are four sections from the Torah (which are placed) in his head tfillin. [2] She is also called dalet because she is poor and destitute (dalat in Hebrew means the poor one), since she represents powerful judgment (dinin takifin), as she is the backside of Supernal Mother. [3] She is also called poor and destitute since she is not an entire partzuf like Rachel is, as she is only skin, being the mystery of the knot of the head tefillin, as previously mentioned. [4] This is also the reason that she is the large dalet (of the word echad, the last word of the shma). This is because the entire alphabet of the large letters (referring to all the enlarged letters that appear in the Tanach, e.g. the enlarged dalet in the word echad) is in Imma Ila’ah, and Leah is the backside of Emma Ila’ah, so she is therefore the large dalet.” Sha’ar HaKavannot, Discourses on the Kavannot of Kriyat Shma, Discourse no. 6, on the meaning of the word echad.

In Lurianic Kabbalah – Leah is only leather, skin, while Rachel has mohin – minds, a box full of sections of the Torah. At first glance, it would seem that Rachel has an intellectual advantage over Leah, but a closer reading of R. Hayyim Vital’s comments leads one to arrive at the opposite conclusion. R. Hayyim Vital deals with the difference between Rachel and Leah, in which Leah is considered to be “nothing more than skin:” “I have already told you about the two wives of Ze’eir Anpin, Leah and Rachel. Rachel was his true soul mate, because she is the mainstay of the house, the tenth of the ten sfirot of Atzilut. It therefore says that “Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah,” since Leah comes from the back of Malkhut of Imma, which fell together with Jacob, at the time of the Death of the Kings. And she is not really Ze’eir Anpin’s wife, only temporarily, like something borrowed. I have also told you that Leah does not take light for her mohin from the mohin of Ze’eir Anpin themselves, but rather from their garments, which are the (sefirot of) Netzah, Hod and Yesod of (partzuf) Imma. She is therefore the knot of the head tefillin, which is only leather, and she has no real portions of the Torah, as does Rachel, who is called the tefillin of the arm, and takes actual lights of mohin. Therefore, everywhere that it says leather refers to Leah, and in the Sha’ar Ruah HaKodesh I pointed this out on the verse “and after my skin is torn from this (my body)” REF, how the lights that go out to Leah have the same numerical value as the word or (=276)” (R. Hayyim Vital, Sha’ar HaPesukim, the Book of Job). Rachel does, in fact, get mohin, but they are the mohin of Ze’eir Anpin. The mohin of Ze’eir Anpin represent what he thinks, and what he thinks is that Rachel and everything she represents, is the right woman for him. This is why he loves her, because she is the housewife. Rachel’s mohin are indeed mohin, but they are mohin placed as tefillin on the arm, facing the heart, not the mind. In other words, Rachel’s mohin are both more pragmatic and more emotional. She is the housewife, so her wisdom is the wisdom of women, a practical wisdom that is part of her function as a woman according to the standards acceptable to Jacob, standards that do not threaten him. Leah may not be so practical (remember that her feet do not touch the “ground” of the World of Atzilut). She is positioned on a plane with the head of Ze’eir Anpin, tied to the thinking side itself, not only to its pragmatic side. Jacob, however, who is Ze’eir Anpin, does not make space for such a woman, so she cannot be his mohin, i.e. be his tefillin box. In spite of this, and possibly because of this, Leah receives her lights from the deep impression left in the soul of Ze’eir Anpin by the garments of his mohin, which he received from the partzuf of Imma-Binah. The concept of an educated, spiritual woman exists in his soul as a sort of inheritance received from above, from his mother (Rebecca), but these concepts only encase his own understanding, and he cannot accept them. It is equally difficult for him to accept Leah as a soul mate before he attains the level of Israel. (”The back of Malkhut of Imma, which fell together with Jacob, at the time of the Death of the Kings” refers to what Ze’eir Anpin can conceive of the ceaseless coupling of Abba and Emma. He understands what relates to him. The Death of the Kings, which is the mythic name for the breaking of the vessels in Lurianic Kabbalah, is sometimes in a person’s adolescent traumas. In Jacob’s biography this took place when he left his parent’s home and went to Aram Naharayim, to the house of Lavan HaArami. He leaves his mother Rebecca in a physical sense, but her character is deeply engraved in his soul print, as the archetype of the Great Mother. This archetypal engraving was earlier called the “back.” For a more extensive discussion of how Leah becomes the secret of the knot of the head tefillin, see Etz Hayyim, Sha’ar HaKlallim, chapter 12.

59. B. Berachot 6a: “R. Yitzhak said: How do we know that the Holy One, blessed be He, puts on Tefillin? As it says, ‘God has sworn by His right hand and the arm of His strength’ (REF). – ‘by His right hand’ – this is the Torah, as it says ‘From His right hand a fiery law was given to us’ (Deut. 33:2) and the arm of his strength – this is Tefillin, as it says ‘God will give strength to His people’ (Ps. 29:11)…R. Nahman bar Yitzhak said to R. Hiyya bar Avin, Those tefillin of the Master of the World, what is written in them? He answered him, ‘And who is like Your people Israel, one nation on earth II Sam. 7: 23)?’”

60. B. Menahot 35b. The rest of the quotation is also very interesting: “R. Yehuda said, The knot of the tefillin should be high up in order that Israel be above rather than below, and it should be towards the face, in order that Israel should be towards the face, not the back.” The parallel between the knot of the tefillin and the situation of Israel is evident from this comment, and it will suffice to say that the entire feminine partzuf, which includes both Rachel and Leah, is the partzuf of the Shekhinah, which is also called K’nesset Yisrael, the “congregation of Israel.” But what is the intention of the directive that this knot should be towards the face in order that Israel be towards the face rather than the back? Rashi, too, has some difficulty in explaining this, and suggests two ways of understanding it: “Towards the face – in the back of the neck, not on either side of the head. Another way of understanding: Towards the face – that the actual knot be inside and the shape of the dalet outside, as they said, ‘and their beauty shall be outside’ (REF). It is still rather difficult to understand the usage of front and back when describing Israel’s situation.

61. R. Isaac of Homil, the greatest thinker of the early masters of Habad Hasidut, points out in his book Hanah Ariel (Vayikra, 2a) that Moses’s personality had a definite effect on the Torah that he brought down from heaven. He comments on the following Midrash: “‘Write for you’ (Ex. 34:1; Deut. 10:1) – the ministering angels began to say to the Holy One blessed be He, You have given Moses permission to write whatever he wants! Because he will say to Israel, I have given you the Torah, I have written it and given it to you! God said to him, God forbid that Moses would do such a thing, and even if he were to do so, he is trustworthy, as it says, ‘Not so my servant Moses, in all my house he is faithful’ (Numb. 12:7). R. Isaac, who relies on an early Kabbalistic tract, the Sefer HaTemunah, explains why the Torah is called Torat Moshe (the Torah of Moses), even though the Rabbis said that ‘whoever says that even one verse of the Torah was written by Moses is a non-believer’ (REF). R. Isaac explains, “as it says in the Sefer HaTemunah, whatever God actually said to Moses cannot be fathomed by any living creature.” R. Isaac compares this to a minister in the king’s court, who has a much deeper understanding of the king’s intentions than do the other citizens, so he takes care of the country’s needs according to his understanding of the king’s will, even though the king did not go into the specific details of how he wants everything done. In order to explain the Midrash’s meaning when it says that, even if Moses were to have written ‘whatever he wants,’ it would have been fine with God, R. Isaac says: “even if (Moses’s) nature and inner order would have influenced him in any matter – he is still trustworthy, because the inner supreme will be actualized through his words, as is known concerning the matter of ‘both these and these are the words of the living God…’ (REF). The reader will note that R. Isaac is here minimizing the traditional gap between the Oral Torah and the Written Torah.

62. See illustration #REF and our discussion there.

63. Etz Hayyim, gate 38, chap. 2, second edition. According to the Talmud (B. Rosh Hashana 21b, B. Nedarim 38a), “Fifty gates of Understanding (Binah) were created in the world, and all of them were given to Moses except one, as it says, ‘You have made him a little les than divine’ (Ps. 8:6).”

R. Hayyim Vital’s words are a combination of two rabbinic sources: The first, from which the style is taken, is Y. Shabbat, 8b: “R. Yitzhak bar Elazar said: Just as wisdom (not fear) becomes a crown for her head, so humility becomes a heel for her sandal, as it says; ‘The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God’ (Ps. 111:10).. And it is also written: ‘The effect of humility is fear of the LORD’ (Prov. 22:4). See also Shir Hashirim Rabbah 1, 9. The second source, Tanhuma Bereshit REF?a, is the origin of at least some of the text, although it may be taken in the opposite sense: “….that the Torah’s sandal is humility and its crown is fear. Its sandal is humility as it says, ‘The effect of humility is fear of the LORD’ (Proverbs 22:4). And its crown is fear as it says, ‘The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the LORD” (Ps. 111:10). Both are attributed to Moses, as it says, ‘Now Moses was a very humble man’ (Num. 12:3). Fear as it says, ‘For he was afraid to look at God’” (Ex. 3:5).

64. Etz Hayyim, gate 38, chap. 2, second edition

65. Liqutey Moharan, first edition, 147, citing B. Sotah49b.

66. “And know, that our teacher Moses, of blessed memory, about whom it says in the Zohar that he reached the level of Binah, is from this Leah, which comes from the Malkhut of Binah and becomes the dalet, the knot of the Tfillin. And this is the mystery of ‘and you will see My back’ (Exod. 33:23), as the Rabbis said in the Talmud: ‘This teaches us that he showed him the knot of the eefillin.’ It also means to say, that Leah, whose place is where the knot of the tefillin is, sees the back of Ze’eir Anpin, since she stands with her face towards the back of Ze’eir Anpin, as we explained earlier. And Moses is therefore in Leah, as it says, “and you will see My back,” and this is understood (Etz Hayyim, gate 38, chap. 2, second edition). The meaning is that since Leah is positioned in a manner that does not allow her to see the face and only the back, and since Moses is part of this aspect of Leah, it is evident that he too only sees the back, and not the face.

67. Tiquney Zohar, 29b?. REF

68. R. Hayyim Vital is quoting B. Berachot 7a. “And R. Yohanan said in the name of R. Yossi: God does not take back any word that left His mouth with good intention, even if it was conditional. How do we know this? From Moses, as it says, ‘Leave Me alone, and I will destroy them, etc., and I will make you into a great nation.’ Even though Moses beseeched God (to forgive the people) and the decree was annulled, (God’s original intention) was still realized through Moses’s children, as it says (I Chron. 23:17), ‘The sons of Moses were Gershom and Eliezer, and the sons of Eliezer were Rehavya, the chief, etc., and the sons of Rehavya were very many,’ and R. Yosef said, More than six hundred thousand.

69. Etz Hayyim, gate 38, chap. 6, second edition. Until this juncture, Leah was only one point, the malkhut of Tvunah.

70. Zohar, Introduction to Bereshit, 2b. See our discussion above.

71. Divrei Sofrim – Liqutey Amarim, at the completion of the Shas, beginning with the words “v’yadua.” This is based on Shemot Rabba 42, 5: “And God said, I have certainly seen (Heb. ra’oh ra’iti) – God said to Moses, You see one seeing, and I see two seeings. You see them coming to Sinai and receiving My Torah, and I see that, after I came to Sinai to give them the Torah, and after I retun to My four beast chariot, they contemplate it and delete one of them and this angers Me, as it says ‘each of the four had the face of an ox on the left’ (Ez 1:10) and they anger Me through it, as it says, “And they exchanged their glory for the image of a bull” (Ps. 106: 20). R. Tzadok is reversing the import of the source concerning ox-like observance of the commandments. According to B. Avodah Zarah 5b: “It is taught from the House of Elijah: A person should always be towards the Torah as an ox to the yoke and an ass to its load.”

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Jewish history

Lillith; A Re-Reading of Feminine Shadow. 2nd Gate

November 9, 2009 by Rabi Ohad Ezrahi · 2 Comments

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THE SECOND GATE: LEAH IS LILLITH

CHAPTER 5: BIBLICAL FIGURES UNLOCK THE DIVINE

from the book by Ohad Ezrachi and Marc Gafni

Those who see Lillith as the first feminist are following in the footsteps of the Ari. For, in the writings of the Kabbalists who preceded the Ari, Lillith is not even a human being, but a foul (though very sexy) demon. The Ari, on the other hand, turned Lillith’s story into a saga spread out over the length and breadth of biblical and world history―a saga whose express goal is to witness Lillith’s return to paradise, and to her original status as the soulmate of Adam.

The starting place for this drama of tikkun is in the household of Jacob, which we have described above as an archetypal matrix within Kabbalah for discerning divine patterns in the events of the human world. In this chapter, we will deepen our understanding of these correspondences between human and divine. According to the Ari, the Godhead reveals itself through many faces, some masculine, some feminine, and some – the highest ones – are androgynous.¹ Some of these divine aspects are named after Jacob’s family and their history. In the language of early Kabbalah, the highest revelation of God is usually called Ze’eir Anpin, but the Ari often refers to Him as “Israel.” Alongside the central system of the sefirot, there is a lower, parallel image known as “Jacob.” Just as Jacob merited two names, which expressed two different levels of his existence, there are two levels of revelation of the divinity, or two types of divine personality systems – one, as it were, “Jacobic” and the other “Israelic.”

When attributing divine aspects to Jacob’s image, the Ari is following in the sages’ footsteps. In commenting on Genesis 33:20, they maintained that God called Jacob a ‘god:’

“R. Aha said in the name of R. Elazar; How do we know that the Holy One, blessed be He, called Jacob a “god?” As it says, “He called him El-elohe-yisrael, i.e. God, the god of Israel” (Gen. 33:20). If you were to claim that Jacob called the altar ‘god’ – it should have said, ‘Jacob called it ‘God…’ However, (the proper reading is) ‘He called Jacob god.” And who called him a god? The God of Israel!²

The Zohar continues this line of thought and comments: “The Holy One, blessed be He, called Jacob a god. He said to him: “I am God in the upper realms, and you are God in the lower realms.”³

We see then, how both the Rabbis and the Zohar speak of the deification of Jacob. The Ari, following the Zohar’s lead, interprets everything that happens in the house of Jacob as events occurring both in human time and in the divine world concurrently. Jacob’s wives and concubines must therefore play a corresponding role in the divine drama, and they too become expressions of the different aspects of the Shekhina. This viewpoint has deep roots in the rich imagery of the Zohar and in the literature of the early Kabbalah. In Zoharic literature, Abraham represents the sefirah of hesed, Isaac the sefirah of gevurah, and Jacob the sefirah of tiferet, which unites and combines the first two. The Ari, by making a transition from discussing the world of sefirot to a discussion about a world of partzufim, turned Jacob into a much more central figure than his ancestors, as all the lower six sefirot were united into one partzuf – that of Ze’eir Anpin, which is primarily characterized by Tiferet. This is the reason why there are no partzufim bearing the names of Abraham and Sarah or Isaac and Rebecca in Lurianic Kabbalah. Only Jacob and his extended family reflect the totality of the divine. This choice of Jacob as a representation of the forefathers can be found in the midrash on Bereshit: “The chosen one of the forefathers is Jacob, as it says, ‘For Jacob was chosen by God (CITE BIB. REF.)’”⁴
With this background, we can now begin to read and unpack the highly condensed, coded and symbolic language of the Zohar. In our example, Jacob will be mentioned explicitly, while Leah and Rachel are in the text only implicitly or allusively. They come into play through their associations with the higher and lower worlds, the sefirot of Binah and Malkhut. The higher world is called “who?” inviting wonder and questions. The lower world is called “this,” embodying the revealed face of the Shekhina. The presentation of these two worlds is suggested through the exegesis of a verse from Song of Songs:

“R. Shimon opened up (and said): ‘Who is this that looks out like the dawn, beautiful like the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners’ (Song of Songs 6:10)? ‘Who’ and ‘this’ – the mystery of two worlds which come together as one… ‘that looks out’ – when the two of them combine as one…Jacob, the complete one, sends love into the two worlds … if other people were to do so they would be incestuous both below and above; they would cause strife in the two worlds, as it is written, ‘Do not marry a woman as a rival to her sister’ (Lev. 18:18), as they will become as rivals to each other…”⁵

^{Jacob could marry two sisters, despite the prohibition from Leviticus, because it is necessary for his love to unite the upper and lower divine worlds, in the language of the Zohar, for the two to “combine as one.” The idea of Jacob marrying two sisters in violation of Leviticus and sending love into “the two worlds” collapses human events and Torah laws with divine realities. This mode of kabbalistic thinking is possible only because the concrete figures of the physical Jacob, Rachel and Leah, are interchangeable with the spiritual Jacob, Rachel and Leah, who represent various divine energies or sefirot. For the Ari, they represent Ze’eir Anpin and the two aspects of the Shekhina partzuf – the higher Shechina, Leah, and the lower Shekhina, Rachel.}

^{We may ask to what extent, in the Kabbalists’ eyes, Jacob and his wives were aware of themselves as a reflection of the divine countenance. Or, to put it differently: are we speaking of two parallel but separate systems functioning as different reflections of the same set of relationships – one heavenly and one earthly – or is there a crossing of the boundaries between these two orders?}

^{A partial answer to this question may be found in the words of the Maggid of Meziretch, the student of the Baal Shem Tov. He describes how it is possible, through inner meditation on the physical beauty of woman, to unite and become one with the beauty of the Shechina. In this context, the Maggid mentions Jacob, who sees Rachel and her physical beauty as a reflection of the splendor of the heavenly Rachel: “…that by seeing this Rachel, Jacob became attached to higher Rachel, as all of this lower Rachel’s beauty stems from that of the higher one.”}⁶

^{So we see how, in kabbalistic-hasidic thought, the constant movement between concrete biblical figures and their spiritual counterparts in the realm of the divine has what we might call a diagonal aspect as well. The physical Jacob draws a line of relationship not only to the Leah and Rachel who share the experiences of the material world with him, but also to the supernal Rachel and Leah, through the medium of his relationship with his concrete wives. Of course, this experience is mutual. Leah and Rachel, through their relationship with the physical Jacob, become connected with the divine Jacob.}

^{In the eyes of Kabbalah and Hasidut, the patriarchs and matriarchs were chariots for the divine and so it follows that the movements of their souls also reflected the events of the divine universe. It would be even more accurate to say that their soul movements not only reflected the higher course of events, but actually caused them. When Jacob was in an enlightened and open state of consciousness, known in kabbalistic language as mohin d’gadlut (expanded consciousness), Ze’eir Anpin of Atzilut would also receive mohin d’gadlut, and when he would fall into depression and limited consciousness, this would also be the case in the supernal world. We can deduce this from the teachings of the students of the Baal Shem Tov regarding each and every human being: “‘God is your shadow’ (Ps. 121:8) – this implies like a shadow. This means that

every movement a person makes below awakens the same above, meaning that the Holy One, blessed be He, parallels (people) with a similar movement.}⁷

^{If we look at the Biblical narrative through this lens, then a psychological analysis of the figures in the story of Jacob also sheds light on the events taking place in the internal world of the Godhead. In other words, the relationship of Jacob to his wives, and their relationships with each other, are keys by which it may be possible to unlock the Divine.}

^{CHAPTER 6: LEAH AND RACHEL – LILITH AND EVE}

^{In the Ari’s world of divine-human correspondences, the goal of tikkun is constantly in view: restoration of what had been broken by the shattering of the cosmic vessels and by the human fall from Eden. The inner dynamic of Scripture is a steady moving forward toward that end. In this light, we can approach his comments linking the primal family of Adam, Lilith and Eve with the later Israelite family of Jacob, Leah and Rachel:}

^{…and so we can understand the matter of Adam, who had two wives, one named Lilith and the other named Eve. Adam is in the image of Ze’eir Anpin, and Ze’eir Anpin has two females, Leah and Rachel … and, in fact, supernal first Eve [i.e. Lilith] is the aspect of Leah, and lower Eve is Rachel.}⁸

^{This is in accordance with the spirit of the Zohar, which sees Jacob as an improved version of the figure and story of Adam.}⁹^{Leah and Rachel, reflect the two faces of the Shekhinah, and they conduct a complex and changing system of relationships with the male partzuf Ze’eir Anpin, also known as Jacob. Notice how these two women are presented: Lilith, who returns in the figure of Leah, is both the first wife chronologically, and the first wife hierarchically, while Eve, who becomes Rachel, is positioned below Leah, towards the bottom of the world of Atzilut.}¹⁰^{The hierarchical positions of Leah and Rachel were already known to the Ari from the Zohar. It was the Ari’s innovation to link Leah, who is the higher face of the feminine divine, back to Lilith, and to link Rachel, who is the lower face of the feminine divine, back to Eve.}

^{Let us now return to the Zohar (I: 154a) to discover how it explains the fact that Jacob loved Rachel and despised Leah. Would it not be more fitting for Jacob to prefer his more spiritually elevated wife? In the Zohar, Leah reflects the higher world, which is also the concealed world.}¹¹^{Jacob, the Zohar says, did not willingly attach himself to hidden things, preferring that which was revealed. So he loved and clung to Rachel and was repulsed by Leah. “This is the secret of the verse, says the Zohar, ‘and he will cling to his wife’ (Gen 2:24).” Jacob can understand Rachel because her soul is laid bare before his eyes, and consequently she does not threaten him. Leah, however, is concealed, and Jacob cannot begin to fathom her.}

^{There are three steps to the Zohar’s argument. The first is a comment about the despised wife, “‘And God saw that Leah was despised’}¹²^{(Gen. 29:31). Why was she despised? We also know that the children of a despised wife are not virtuous, yet we find that all of Leah’s children were excellent, although it says ‘that Leah was despised.’” There is an assumption here that if one hated a given wife, one would think of another during intercourse. Such illicit fantasies made the intercourse improper and ought to produce, as the talmudic rabbis believed, deformed children.}¹³^{According to the rule of “the children of the despised one,” Jacob and Leah’s children should have been born evil and rebellious, if their lovemaking had been dependent only on their natural inclinations. Since they were born “excellent,” some other force must have been at work in their conception.}

^{At this point, the Zohar jumps to the second step in its argument, the secret of the Jubilee year, which is understood as a code name for the Sefirah Binah, to which Leah is connected. The essence of the argument is that the level of Jubilee, like Leah, is always hidden and is therefore not addressed directly as ‘you,’ but by the third person pronoun, ‘he.’}¹⁴^{The third step in the argument is that when Jacob slept with Leah, the text uses the pronoun “he,” not his name Jacob. The implication is that the hidden level called ‘he’ intervened in Jacob and Leah’s coupling.}¹⁵^{An even more radical interpretation would be that “He” slept with Leah, that is, God, through the medium of the concealed level of the higher world of the Jubilee, in order to draw a blessing from above for her children.}

^{Representing the hidden, Leah is from the world of freedom; and her uninhibited freedom threatens Jacob, just as Adam was threatened by the freedom Lilith demanded for herself in the Ben Sira story. It is little wonder that the Ari identified Leah, the wife Jacob rejected, with Lilith, the wife Adam rejected:}

^{“Because ‘the beauty of Jacob was like the beauty of Adam.’ Just as Adam had two wives, the first and second Eve, so Jacob had Leah and Rachel. The first Eve was the shell (qelippah) that covered the Leah of holiness. And because Jacob thought that she was similar to the first Eve, he did not want to marry her.”}¹⁶

^{Jacob, the Ari maintains, did not want to marry Leah because he sensed that she was an incarnation of Lilith. This is the real secret of why “Leah was despised.” Jacob thought that Leah should be given to Esau, just like the first Eve, Lilith the wicked, was the bride of Samael, who was considered the ministering angel of Esau. In the end, though, Jacob married her because of her prayers and tears.}¹⁷

^{The Ari continued a line of thought already extant in the Zohar in identifying Jacob’s family with Adam’s. The Ari’s claim that Leah is the Lilithian face of the feminine goes beyond any explicit arguments in the Zohar. As will be seen in the following chapters, an in-depth study of the biblical narrative and the rabbinic commentary on them leads us to make exactly the same claim.}

^{CHAPTER 7: THE MAGIC SQUARE OF THE HOUSE OF JACOB}

^{The Torah tells us that Jacob loved Rachel with all his heart. But did Rachel love Jacob? Did Rachel desire Jacob as he desired her? Nowhere in the Torah does it state otherwise. But there are two significant instances in which the Torah tells us that Rachel was willing to forego intimacy with Jacob. The first time was on their wedding night, when Laban deceived Jacob and put Leah, his firstborn daughter, in Jacob’s bed instead of Rachel. It is difficult to imagine that this could have occurred without Rachel’s knowledge or consent.}¹⁸^{The second time Rachel was willing to forego physical intimacy with Jacob took place a few years later. Reuven, Leah’s son, found mandrakes, an herb considered to increase a woman’s chances of pregnancy, in the field. She promises Leah one night with him in return for the mandrakes. Rachel is willing to temporarily forego intimacy with Jacob for the sake of that which she desires more than anything, children.}

^{Tragically, what Rachel wants most of all, more than life itself,}¹⁹^{Leah already has, and in abundance. But Leah has her own tragedy. Leah desires Jacob, and she is willing to pay any price and to make almost any necessary sacrifice to taste of his love. She is prepared to get into his bed on the night of his wedding to her sister Rachel, even at the cost of the terrible shame that will certainly be her lot the following morning. Then, she is prepared to give Rachel her son’s fertility-enhancing mandrakes in order to gain another night with him.}

^{The Rabbis go into more detail to describe Leah’s embarrassment the morning after Laban’s deception of Jacob has been discovered:}

^{“And Laban gathered all the men of his town and made a party” (Gen. 29:22) – He gathered all the men of his town … and they were singing to Jacob and saying “Ha lia, ha lia” – she is Leah, she is Leah (hee Leah,}²⁰^{hee leah)…”}

^{In the evening they brought her to him, and extinguished the candles. Jacob said to them: “What is this?” They said to him: What did you think, that we are immodest}²¹^{like you?” All night long he called her “Rachel,” and she answered him. When morning came, “and behold she was Leah!” “Deceiver! Daughter of the deceiver! “he said to her. She said to him: Is there a scribe without students? Did your father not call you “Esau” and did you not answer him? So, too, you called me and I answered you…}²²

^{Leah’s answer embodies the rabbinic principle of “measure for measure.” Jacob, as the deceiver of his father and brother, got what he deserved, the daughter of a deceiver and a deceiving wife. As a soulmate of Jacob, Leah is prepared to undergo whatever humiliation may come for the sake of intimacy with him. Just imagine her torment! The memory of her wedding night with Jacob (when he believed he was with his beloved Rachel), must never have left Leah’s heart. She could not forget how ardently Jacob was capable of loving when he was really in love. She could not forget the night when Jacob thought she was her sister. That night set the standard for her expectations. Its memory must aggravate her sense of rejection, and intensify her desire to once again experience the fullness of Jacob’s love.}²³

^{Consider the names Leah chooses for her sons. They reveal that Leah regards childbearing as a means to an end. Her real aim in life is the love of Jacob. The Hebrew names of Leah’s children represent and express her desire for intimacy with their father: Maybe Jacob will love me because of the children I have born him (Reuven); maybe he will stop hating me (Shimon); maybe I will finally be joined with him (Levi). However, when Judah, the fourth son, is born, Leah experiences a sense of gratitude towards God and names her son for this profound awareness.}

^{The Rabbis were sensitive to this shift. They arrived at the conclusion that Leah had expected only three sons, by doing the simple arithmetic of dividing twelve sons amongst four mothers. Consequently, when her fourth son was born, she felt blessed with an unexpected gift,}²⁴^{and she stopped naming her children after her relationship with Jacob, and instead gave her fourth son a name describing her relationship with God. This spiritual independence in the naming must have greatly altered and influenced Leah’s relationship with her fourth son. We can surmise that Judah was the only one of Leah’s children to feel loved on his own merit from the time of his infancy. Woven into his brothers’ very names and identities was the idea that they were all means to an end, existing to bring their mother closer to their father, with what negative consequences for them we can only imagine. Reuven even brought mandrakes to his mother in the hope of winning her love! Judah, though, would have grown up with a secure identity, without the feeling that he had to win her affections. As an end unto himself, Judah could become a person in his own right, with his own relationship to God. He therefore goes on to become the father of the tribe that sires King David and the messianic line.}²⁵

^{The Ari’s conception of messianic times, as we have said, entails the emancipation of women. This liberation, which the Ari portrays within very precise parameters, is dependent on the healing of Lilith. The fact that Judah is born to Leah, is enormously significant, given the Ari’s suggestion that Leah is one of the central embodiments of Lilith in this cosmic drama. Judah is born when Leah first experiences liberation. R. Tzadok HaCohen of Lublin taught that such inner freedom can only be achieved when a person feels with her entire heart that she is no longer a pawn in someone else’s game.}²⁶^{Everyone has his or her individual story, but not everyone lives it. That is why, of all Leah’s sons, Judah is the most liberated. He was born at a moment of grace, when Leah was spiritually uplifted and gave thanks to God from the depths of her heart; in so doing, she enabled Judah to live his own story. Unfortunately, Leah’s liberated state does not last very long, and the children born to her after Judah are once again given names that reflect her hopes and expectations of meriting Jacob’s love.}

^{Leah’s behavior stands in marked contrast to that of Rachel. Rachel wants children, and she is prepared to forego her intimate connection with Jacob in order to obtain them. She even puts her maidservant Bilhah in his bed in order to be blessed with surrogate children through her. When Bilhah’s first son is born, Rachel says: “God has judged me, and also heard my voice, and has given me a son; she therefore called his name Dan” (Gen. 30:6).}

^{In reaction to the birth of Bilhah’s children, Leah also gives her maidservant Zilpah, to Jacob. However, while Rachel relates with indifference to the fact that her husband has been intimate with her maidservant, it is evident that, for Leah, this practice is very painful. After she gives Zilpah to Jacob, and they conceive a son, she claims that Jacob has betrayed her with Zilpah: “And Leah said Bagad (lit. betrayal, read as ba gad (fortune has come), and she called his name Gad” (Gen. 30:11). Similarly, when Leah gives birth to her fifth son, she names him Yissachar: “And Leah said, God has given me my reward for giving my maidservant to my husband, and she called his name Yissachar” (30:18), implying that giving her maidservant to Jacob was very difficult for Leah, and so she saw her fifth son as a reward for her self-sacrifice.}

^{When Joseph, Rachel’s yearned-for son, was finally born, his name expressed her desire to bear additional children. “And God remembered Rachel, and God heard her, and He opened her womb. And she conceived and gave birth to a son, and she said, ‘God has taken away my disgrace.’ And she called his name Yosef, saying, ‘May the Lord add another son to me’” (30:22-24). Again, it would seem that Rachel longs to be a mother much more than a wife: Even though she has a loving husband, without her own children Rachel feels humiliated. Only when she gives birth to a son is she reconciled within herself. Then, when her next son, Benjamin, is born, Rachel passes away, and is buried by the road to Bethlehem. This roadway is befitting for Rachel who symbolizes home and hearth (Bet – home; lechem – bread). Rachel is the goodly housewife who experiences fullness of the soul by raising children, while her husband manages his own spiritual life. This is why, even in biblical times, Rachel became the symbol of the gentle mother and protector of children, so much so that the prophet Jeremiah hears the cry of mourning for Israel in exile coming from her lips.}²⁷

^{We have called this pattern the magic square of the house of Jacob, which we can summarize as follows: Jacob wants Rachel, but Rachel wants children, which is exactly what Leah, her sister, has, but doesn’t really want, since she loves Jacob, who really loves Rachel, and so on and so forth.}

^{In Lurianic Kabbalah, when someone desires intimacy with another, it is said that he “faces” her. Or, when a relationship involves someone who desires less intimacy with the other, it is said that he “turns his back” on her. Turning one’s back on another person is to relate to another human being as though he or she were a means in service of some goal. In Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, this is called the I-it relationship. In contradistinction to the I-Thou or intersubjective relationship, the I-it relationship denotes subject-object relations.}²⁸^{Rachel (who wants children) relates to Jacob as an “it;” Jacob (who wants Rachel) relates to Leah as an “it;” and Leah (who wants Jacob) relates to her children as “it.” We can therefore say that Jacob faces Rachel, who turns her back on him, unlike Leah, who faces Jacob, who he turns his back on her. This analysis of the family dynamics of the house of Jacob helps us to appreciate the striking symbolic language of the Lurianic writings, in which Rachel stands back-to-back with Jacob and Leah stands face-to-back with him: “Rachel and Ze’eir Anpin}²⁹^{stand back to back. And Leah and Ze’eir Anpin stand with Leah’s face turned towards the back of Ze’eir Anpin.” What is being depicted is a level of alienation that needs to be overcome before face-to-faceness, true spiritual intimacy, can result.}

^{CHAPTER 8: THE PROSTITUTE}

^{Let us return to the story of the mandrakes. When Jacob comes home from the field in the evening, Leah went out to meet him, and said, “‘You are to sleep with me tonight, for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.’ And he lay with her that night” (Gen. 30: 16). There can be little doubt that Leah’s behavior in this case, sex for hire, borders on prostitution. One only need glance at the uproar this incident caused among the classic biblical commentators to realize just how problematic they found the story. They tend to act as apologists for Leah, claiming that nothing here can be understood in its simple sense. Leah’s intentions, they claim, were entirely for the sake of heaven.}³⁰

^{The Rabbis of the midrash, on the other hand, were quite willing to consider Leah’s behavior as that of a prostitute.}

^{“No woman is a prostitute unless her daughter is a prostitute also.” They said to him: “Does this mean that our mother Leah was a prostitute?” He said to them: “‘And Leah went out to meet him…’ She went out dressed up like a whore. It therefore follows: ‘And Dinah the daughter of Leah went out’”}³¹

^{What led the sages to the unpleasant conclusion that “our mother Leah was a prostitute” (which implies that we are all begotten of whoredom), is the fact that the Torah uses the word “going out” when describing how Leah approached Jacob and how Dinah approached the daughters of the land, just before she was raped by Shechem:}³²

^{“And Dinah the daughter of Leah went out” – was she not also the daughter of Jacob? The Torah associated her with her mother – just as Leah was “a woman who goes out”, so was Dinah. From where do we know this? As it says, “Leah went out to meet him.” The prophet Ezekiel said: “Behold, whoever uses proverbs will use this proverb against you, saying, Like mother, like daughter. You are the daughter of your mother…” (Eze. 16:44-45).}³³

^{The general context of the Exekiel verses, we recall, compares the kingdoms of Judah and Samaria to adulterous and whoring women, who intermarried and worshipped foreign gods. Dinah likewise “went out” to women who were not of her family and who, presumably, did not share her family’s theology and values. The connection between idolatry, sexual immorality and fear of the foreign were deeply connected in the biblical and rabbinic imagination.}

^{What did the rabbis mean by prostitution in the case of Leah and Dinah? In modern Hebrew, a prostitute is called a yatzanit, that is, one who “goes out,” – that is, we submit, goes out from herself. In order to understand what in the nature of prostitution links it to the concept of “going out,” we need to consider the idea that each and every one of us has his or her own “story” and that we can live either inside or outside that story. Spiritual prostitution occurs when a person looks for self-realization anywhere other than within — even if that other should happen to be the one and only beloved, as in the case of Leah with Jacob. If I “go out” from myself and try to become someone else, or to “be” through someone else, I am prostituting myself.}

^{Living inside a personal story, however, a person gains an original perspective on life, influenced by that individual’s unique character and by the environment he/she inhabits. Moreover, each person possesses a unique way of “reading” the script of his or her life. The people I encounter, the events and the physical fabric of my life create a text; which I am reading and interpolating simultaneously. As I navigate my way around life, I also interpret my movements. I make my next move based upon my understanding and interpretation of my previous move. Consciously and unconsciously, I am choosing a perspective and mode of interpretation for every event in which I take part. This is my personal legend. There is no other story quite like it.}³⁴

^{In an ideal situation, I discover meaning within my personal story, and I do not need to seek meaning elsewhere, in places which are foreign to me. But who among us has not been tempted to look for meaning outside of ourselves? Which of us has not turned our gaze vicariously towards another’s experience, in the hope of finding that which has not yet been found in our own domain? The hasidic movement has read God’s call to Abram, Lech Lechah – literally “go to you,” as a call to the inner quest, to go into your own story, to discover the meaning of your life: “When our father Abraham began to search after the source of his life,… God said to him, Lech Lecha, meaning Go to yourself! Because the truth is that all the things of this world cannot really be called life. The essence of life can only be found within.”}³⁵

^{Each of us is born unique, and each of us weaves a unique story in life. However, there are times when we are less inclined to accept our own destinies. When our self-esteem drops, we are accustomed to grasp for any straw lest we drown in our emptiness. In such a state, it is easy to abandon our own story and leech on to another’s tale. Thus, we become dependent on others; we look to justify our own existence through theirs. This is an addictive disposition: finding oneself outside of oneself, be it through drugs, food, sex, career, flattery, or occasionally even love. A sexual encounter occurring outside of a couple relationship, where members of the couple have strayed, is usually one in which there is a “going out” from the personal story, implying that such a relationship “has no story.”}³⁶^{There are parents who lack their own story and become addicted to their relationship with their children,}³⁷^{and there are students who become addicted to their teachers. There are famous rabbis, Hasidic masters, and all types of gurus who become addicted to the worship and adoration they evoke in their disciples.}³⁸^{In all these examples, a person abandons his own story and looks for an identity elsewhere.}

^{This analysis can provide a structural analogy to the case of prostitutive or promiscuous behaviour. Bereft of her own personal story, the prostitute attempts to fill the void with borrowed content from the story of others. She may be a young girl who was abused by “trusted” adults, and consequently gave up on herself and the adult world. Not understanding her trauma but seeking to reenact it, lacking in self-esteem, she seeks comfort in the temporary esteem strangers seem to have for her body. Her absent sense of spiritual worth is not really compensated by the transitory and illusory ego-fulfillment these strangers sometimes afford her. But she is paid and therefore convinces herself that if so many men desire her then she certainly must be worth something. She is a yatzanit, one who goes out of herself in order to find solace in the moments of pleasure that others experience through her body.}

^{Thus, prostitutive relationships attempt to find meaning through that which is foreign. If I prostitute myself, then I intentionally choose someone who has no real part in my story or my life. When I do not love myself or my story, then I am liable to evade my life by searching for situations whose otherness and strangeness comfort me precisely because they have nothing to do with me. Therefore I imagine that illicit encounters will sweeten the bitterness of my life with myself. This process of leaving myself and searching for my identity through an ephemeral connection with a complete stranger can occur in each and every one of us in subtle ways. Each of us is at times liable to fall into such a prostitution.}

^{Of course, not every departure from one’s personal story should be considered so negatively. Vicariousness is certainly a sign of dependence, and a lack of personal meaning in one’s life, but it is not necessarily evidence of the drive to prostitute oneself. Prostituting oneself is simply one possible result of such a dependence. When I depart from my own story and try to create an alternative story through the other, I will often try to attract him/her by externalizing things that have previously remained concealed in intimate chambers. I may try to seduce him/her to enter into relationship with me – a relationship by means of which I hope to find some self-esteem. I leave myself and attempt to form a pseudo-intimate connection with the other – to live vicariously through the stranger. This way, I give up on my own life.}³⁹

^{We have already discussed how Leah’s seeking to forge an identity through Jacob was a giving up on herself. She imagines that her life will have meaning only if she latches onto him. This is why she cries; this is why her eyes are “weak” or “soft.” This is why she is incapable of seeing her children as separate entities, rather than as means by which to measure the degree of her closeness to Jacob. In this respect, Leah, just like an addict, knows the heavy price she will pay the morning after, when Jacob discovers that she is not Rachel, but she cannot stop herself. Leah is addicted to Jacob and will pay for her habit, whatever it costs. This is the reason why the rabbis sense that, when Leah goes out to meet Jacob and says “You are to sleep with me tonight,” there is something in her brazen, yet dependent behavior reminiscent of a prostitute. The case of Dinah is more complicated, because her “going out” led to her being sexually assaulted by Shechem. In this case, the rabbis are willing to blame the victim, for her “going out” meant to them leaving behind the theology and morality of her people.}

^{Lilith, of course, is the archetype of the prostitute,}⁴⁰^{and our analysis fits her story as well. The moment Lilith runs away from Adam, she immediately sleeps with Samael, the Great Demon, to fill the vacuum of her life. She begins her long-term career as “the wife of harlotry,” and under that title drawn from Hosea 1:2, the Zohar locates her in Haran, Leah’s home town.}¹⁴^{When the angels come to look for her, after she has run away from Adam and taken up with Samael, “She said to them – My friends, I know that the reason God created me was so that I could make the newborns weak…”. She now has a satanic goal, but Lilith’s link to evil is not axiomatic. Her new and inauthentic life-story, prostitution, is a departure from her real story. Everything that happens to the Lilith archetype afterwards is directed towards one purpose – bringing her back to her real story, re-uniting her with Adam and liberating her once and for all.}

^{CHAPTER 9: THREE PATRIARCHAL IMAGES OF WOMAN}

^{Jacob had before him two sisters. According to Genesis, “Leah had weak eyes; Rachel was shapely and beautiful” (29:17). On the basis of this description, it is not hard to explain Jacob’s choice for the beautiful sister. The midrash explains Leah’s unattractiveness; her eyes were watery and tearful from crying, out of fear that she would have to marry Esau. At least one later commentator, however sees sexual yearning in the description of Leah’s eyes. Choosing the alternate translation, “soft,” rather than weak, the Baal Turim notes: “As it says – ‘Will he speak soft words to you” (Job 40:27). For she spoke softly to him, and, even so, he did not love her.”}⁴²^{Given this interpretation, why would Jacob not have loved Leah?}

^{We can evoke here three distinct archetypal images of woman in the male psyche: there is the virginal, demurely beautiful maiden – innocent, pure and holy, often presented as an image of the soul. And then comes the time for lovemaking, when woman loses her virginity – her innocence, her newness and, if virginity is seen as a sign of purity and holiness, then she loses these also. Sexual woman may be lauded, in the language of Song of Songs, as a “love-making doe,”}⁴³^{but she is also liable to be construed as seductive and dangerous, as we have seen in the Lilith myth. After the sexual stage comes woman as mother and housewife – the childbearing woman, the nursing mother who raises the children and is responsible for the organization of the entire family unit. At this stage, there is usually a correlation in the male psyche between the image of the woman who raises his children and his own mother. Woman as mother is no longer perceived as highly sexual. Later, with maturity, menopause and old age, this de-eroticism becomes even more pronounced. The grandmother is already perceived as a totally asexual being.}

^{We can give these three personae the following names: The Divine Virgin; The Loving Doe; The Mother of Children. The first and the third stages are usually sanctified by patriarchal society. However, the middle stage, in which woman expresses her sexuality, is not so revered. Man relates to this persona with a frenzy composed of desire and fear. At the time of passion, he calls her all sorts of affectionate names – loving doe, graceful roe, etc. – but when fear takes hold of him, he has an inherited store of derisive terms with which to degrade her.}

^{Within this patriarchal framework, woman is sanctified when she is simultaneously both virgin and mother. Mother Mary, for example, was successful in omitting the middle stage, which, in Catholic doctrine, is perceived as an aspect of the “original sin.” Mary went straight from being the divine virgin to becoming the mother of children, without getting tainted by sexuality on the way. The second stage, that of sexual woman, is played by a different Mary, Mary Magdelena, who, with Jesus’s help, escapes the trappings of original sin.}⁴⁴^{Woman’s sexual stage is such a great threat for the male that Tratolian, an African head of the church, called the female genitalia “the Devil’s gateway.”}⁴⁵

^{This three stage schema is helpful for understanding the relationships of Rachel, Leah and Jacob. According to our characterization of Rachel, she would have been happy to omit the middle stage, and go directly from being a beautiful virgin to her role as the mother of Jacob’s children.}⁴⁶^{As far as she is concerned, sexual intercourse is a necessary evil. Rachel is more than ready to forego this dubious delight, as exemplified by her exchange of a night with Jacob for fertility-enhancing mandrakes. For Leah, however, the sexual stage is critical.}⁴⁷^{And so, Jacob is terrified.}

^{To shed further light on these relationships, it will be helpful to return to the Lilith of the Ben Sira version:}

^{“When God created Adam and saw that he was alone in the world, He said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ He immediately created woman who, like him, was from the earth, called her name Lilith, and brought her to Adam. They immediately began to argue. He said, ‘You should lie underneath,’ and she said, ‘You should lie underneath, as both of us are equal and both of us were created from the earth.’ Neither one could convince the other.”}⁴⁸

^{Adam and Lilith begin to argue about sex immediately after being created. Lilith demands equal status, which is expressed in the sexual position she prefers. It frightens Adam, it threatens him – he prefers a woman created out of his rib – a number two, a faithful homebody, someone who will remain beneath him. This is also the case with Jacob: he prefers Rachel because she is unthreatening. In Rachel, Jacob finds holiness and purity, a feminine perfection uncomplicated by sexual desire.}

^{This is not the case with Leah. She asserts her sexuality and is not ashamed of it. She is an immediate threat to Jacob’s superior status. A woman who takes the initiative in intimate relations, as Leah does when she says “You are to sleep with me” – is symbolically saying to her partner that “you will be underneath” – you will be the passive one. This, of course, is a threat, but it is also very seductive. Such women symbolize forbidden passion, which are powerful, alluring and exciting, but which easily turn threatening, dangerous, and deadly.}

^{It sounds altogether like Lilith, the original femme fatale.}⁴⁹^{While they sleep, Lilith takes possession of men who are trying to maintain the sanctity of their relationship with chaste and modest wives. She excites them with erotic dreams of wild and forbidden sex, and impregnates herself from the seed they spill. She dominates them and they are powerless over her. She sucks from them their life-force without asking their consent. Essentially, she makes fools out of them.}⁵⁰^{Consequently, these men view her as satanic, impure, the soulmate of Samael, the Great Demon. This is why commentators had an intuition that Leah should marry Esau, the impulsive man of the field, the hunter who is closer to nature than to the confines of culture, whose entire body is covered by a mantle of hair that makes him seem animal-like and wild. Leah and Esau, in this view, deserve each other.}

^{Jacob, by contrast, is characterized as a “mild man” (Gen. 25:27) He prefers to avoid uncertain and doubtful situations.}⁵¹^{He would not have received his father Isaac’s blessings were it not for the courage of his mother Rebecca, who overcomes his doubts. it is totally in character that Jacob, who tries to avoid such tricky moments, clearly prefers Rachel to Leah.}

^{If Leah were in Rachel’s shoes, if she were the woman who was desired but barren, she would never have cried like Rachel: “Give me children, or I shall die” (Gen. 30:1). Leah would probably have been delighted to hear tender words of comfort from Jacob and would easily have foregone her desire for children.}⁵²^{But Leah, like Lilith, was destined to be the unwanted wife all of her life, pining away for a deeper connection with her man, a yearning which only pushes him further away. So, when the Ari maintains that, in Jacob’s eyes, Leah embodies Lilith, he is providing us with a provocative and fruitful reading of the biblical narrative.}

^FOOTNOTES

^{1. As R. Hayyim Vital says concerning the partzufim of Keter: “And you therefore see that Atik includes the (divine names) of 45 and 52 letters, and they are both male and female in one partzuf.” (Etz Hayyim, Gate 19, chap. 9, final edition).}

^{2. B. Megilla 18a.}

^{3. Zohar, I, 138a; free translation of the Aramaic.}

^{4. Bereishit Rabba ??? 76a.}

^{5. Zohar, NEED REFERENCE. to standard edition, (2:126b).On the two combining as one, the notes of the Nitzotzei Zohar comment that the word nishkafa is a combination of the two words, nishak peh, “the kiss of the mouth.”}

^{6. Maggid D’varav LeYaakov, Oppenherimer edition, pp. 29-30. For early kabbalistic sources for this approach, see Moshe Idel: The Beauty of Woman – On the History of Jewish Mysticism.”}

^{7. Degel Machane Efraim, Pareshat Behar, commentary on u-ve-chol. R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchov quotes this teaching in the name of the Baal Shem Tov, adding a moral emphasis: “And just as I heard in the name of the Baal Shem Tov on the verse (Psalms 121:5) ‘God is your shadow’ – just as when a living being stands in the light and his shadow echoes his movements, so it is as if He, blessed is He and blessed is His name, does the same above according to the actions of earthbound man. For example, if a man acts with kindness towards his fellow man, so God acts towards him.” Kedushat Levi – Discourses on Chanukah.}

^{8. Hayyim Vital, Etz Hayyim, gate 38, chapter 2, second edition.}

^{9. “The Beauty of Jacob was like the beauty of Adam” (Zohar 1:35b).}

^{10. “The secret of these things is the following: It is already known that the partzuf of Ze’eir Anpin has two women: Leah and Rachel, and they represent two aspects [...] because at the beginning man was created, and God took his rib and magnified it, and this was how woman was created. And from the chest (of Ze’eir Anpin) on up, which is a concealed place, is the place of Leah from the back side, and she is called alma d’itcasya (the world of concealment). R. Hayyim Vital, Etz Hayyim, gate 38, chap. 4, second edition.}

^{11. This is related to the general Zoharic conception of Binah as the “concealed world,” “a place which elicits questioning.” Anyone exposed to it will ask “who,” but ultimately, after descending from level to level, he/she reaches the other extreme known as “what,” and he/she is asked, “What did you seek? What did you find? Everything is still as mysterious as ever!” (Introduction to the Zohar, 1/b.). The very fact that the more personal question “who” is considered to be higher than conceptual queries whose nature is that of “what-ness” is a fascinating idea, representative of the mythological outlook characteristic of the Zoharic debate on the mystery of the Godhead. If we understand the “what” question not as a conceptual question of what (ma) is the essence (mahut) of the matter, but rather as a practical question of what needs to be done, and if we continue this line of thought, we can say that the “what” question relating to essence is the query being posed in the realm of chochma, above binah. It therefore follows that the proper order of the questions is what-who-what. What in chochma, who in binah, what in malkhut, which is also known as “lower chochma.” Again, however, the Zohar did not propose this approach, and as far as the Zohar is concerned, the most critical and relevant question is that concerning the personal figure of the Divinity – Who are You, God? This is the question that should be asked, even if one obtains no concrete result; (this section of the Zohar may have served as the basis of R. Y. D. Soleveitchik’s comments in his book “The Lonely Man of Faith,” p. 15, see there).}

^{12. The JPS translation here, “unloved,” does not capture the force of the Hebrew s’nuah. We will use “despised” throughout.}

^{13. “And do not stray after your hearts” – Rabbi learned from this verse that a man should not drink out of one cup while his eyes are straying to another. Ravina said that this is the case even with his two wives. “And I will purge out from you the rebels and those that have transgressed against Me” (Ez. 20:38). R. Levi said: “These are the children of nine attributes: the children of Osnat, Mashga’ach, the children of terror, the children of rape, the children of the despised one, the children of excommunication, the children of exchange, the children of strife, the children of drunkenness, the children of she who was driven away from the heart, the children of mixed seed, the children of audacity”.(B. Nedarim 22b.). In kabbalistic thought, there is a parallel tradition concerning Lilith, for which see appendix, n. #REFERENCE.}

^{14. “But certainly the Jubilee is always the hidden world, and nothing about it is revealed, and all its deeds were therefore concealed from Jacob. Come and see: The lower world is revealed, and it is the (place) where all begins to ascend, rung by rung. Just as Supernal Wisdom (Hokhma) is the beginning of all things, so too the lower world is also Hokhma, and is therefore also the beginning of all things. We therefore call it you,’ since it is the revealed Sabbatical year (shmita). And the higher world, the Jubilee (yovel), we call ‘him’(third person), since all its matters are concealed” (REF).}

^{Commentary: The sefirah of Hokhma is the beginning of the revelation of the divine world from above, just as Malkhut is the beginning from below (or in later Kabbalistic language: malkhut is chochma in the form of returning light). Malkhut occasionally receives characteristics of Hokhmah, which are different than those of supernal Hokhmah, and is usually called “lower Hokhmah”, or “the wisdom (Hokhmah) of (King) Solomon,” or “the wisdom (Hokhmah) of women” (see Proverbs 14:1: “The wisdom of women builds her house”) or Oral Torah. This idea of the daughter of the king, who is the shechinah, who is the reflection of the unique nature of Hokhmah, can already be found in Sefer HaBahir (Margoliot edition), paragraph 65.}

^{15. “The secret of this matter is that concerning Leah it is written: “And he slept with her on that night” (Gen. 30:16). He refers to the higher world, which is always concealed. Jacob did not willingly cling to anything concealed, he (preferred) only that which was revealed. This is the secret of the verse: “and he will cling to his wife” (Gen 2:24). REF.}

^{16. REF.}

^{17. This is according to the midrash in Bereshit Rabba, 70, 16, which is also quoted by Rashi in his commentary on the Torah: “‘And the eyes of Leah were soft’” – R. Yochanan’s translator translated it in this manner: ‘And the eyes of Leah were tender.’ He (R. Yochanan) said to him: “Your mother’s eyes were tender! What does “soft” mean? It means soft because of weeping. Because (people) would say: “This was the deal – the older one to the older one, the younger one to the younger one. And she (Leah) would cry and say; “May it be Your will that I not fall in the lot of the wicked one” (i.e. Esau). See further discussion of this point below.}

^{18. In midrash, the rabbis added that Rachel actually gave Leah the secret signs that she had made with Jacob so that they could identify each other in the dark: “And morning came, and behold it was Leah” (Gen. 29:25) – but at night it was not Leah, because Jacob had given certain signs to Rachel, but when Rachel saw that Leah was being taken to Jacob, she said, now my sister will be shamed. So she gave her those signs” (Rashi on Gen. 29:25, based on B. Megilla 13b). It should be noted that Rachel consciously agrees to Leah’s being substituted for her, and she doesn’t even hint to Jacob that anything is amiss. It is also interesting that the Targum Yonatan translated the verse thus: “And it was at morning time, and he looked at her, and behold she was Leah all of the night.” Leah is of the night (laila). This may possibly be an early hint of Leah’s later identification with Lilith, who is named for the night and the wailing (yilala).}

^{19. “Give me children, and if not, I will die” (Gen. 30:1); in the end, Rachel did die in childbirth, and takes comfort in the knowledge that her second child is also a son; see Gen. 35:17-18.}

^{20. The Midrash means to say that the townspeople were giving a hint to Jacob by singing a song about the deception: instead of singing la-la-la, ya-ba-ba, or the like, they sang “ha lia, ha lia.” Jacob did not get the hint.}

^{21. In the original Aramic, the word is dichrin “males,” but in Yefet and in Theodore-Albek’s edition of the midrash it says d’bzayon (disgraced). Irit Aminof, in her article “The Soft Eyes of Leah,” REFERENCE, translated it as “immodest,” and we have adopted her translation.}

^{22. Bereishit Rabba, 70:19; the last line is in accordance with the Theodor-Albek edition, p. 819.}

^{23. See Nechama Leibowitz, Studies in Bereishit, Parshat Vayetze. Thanks to Naomi Regan for calling our attention to this point. (***REFERENCE – if this is in one of her novels)}

^{24. “Since the mothers thought that they would each give birth to three sons, when Leah gave birth to her fourth son, she said, ‘This time I will thank the Lord.’ “(Bereshit Rabba, 71: 4).}

^{25. The intimate relationship between the house of David and God is clearly emphasized in the words of the prophet Nathan to David, which describe how God will act towards his son Solomon, who will reign after him: “I will be his father, and he will be my son. If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men and with the plagues of the children of man; but my love shall not depart from him, as I made it to depart from Saul, who I took away from before you” (II Sam. 7:14-15). It should be pointed out that, in Zoharic terminology, “plagues of the children of man”, with which God rebukes the house of David (and especially king Solomon) as a loving father chastises his children, are in fact the spirits of demons and Liliths, created by the spilling of man’s seed.}

^{26. “Just as a person must believe in the Holy One, blessed be He, so he must also believe in himself. This means (the belief) that God cares about him, and that (his actions) are not taking place in a void… he must believe that his soul emerges from the source of all life” (R. Tzadok Ha Cohen of Lublin, Tzidkat haTzaddik, entry 154.}

^{27. “Thus said the LORD: A Cry is heard in Ramah/ Wailing, bitter weeping/ Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted/ For her children, who are gone” (Jer. 31:15-16).}

^{28. Buber, I and Thou}

^{29. Sha’ar HaKavannot, Discourses on Pesach, discourse no. 4. We did not find in either the writings of the Ari or his students a description of a state in which the back of the Rachel partzuf faces the face of either the Jacob or Ze’eir Anpin partzuf.}

^{30. Sforno, the Italian Renaissance era commentator, makes the following comment: “In this story, which may seem disgraceful to those who find their own interpretations for the Torah, we are told how, for our patriarchs and matriarchs, intercourse was like it had been for Adam and his wife before the sin. Their intention was not at all for personal pleasure, but rather to bear chidden for the honor of their Maker and for His service. When our mothers gave their husbands additional wives, or this matter of the mandrakes, their intention was acceptable to God, and their prayers were therefore accepted…”And he lay with her that night”…willingly, when he saw how eager Leah was and how pure was her intention.” See also: Or HaChayyim ad locem.}

^{31. Bereshit Rabba, 80, 1, free translation of the Aramaic.}

^{32. “And Dinah the daughter of Leah that was born to Jacob went out to see the daughters of the land. And Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivvite, the prince of the land saw her, and he took her, and he raped her (Gen. 34:1-2).}

^{33. Tanchuma Vayislah chap. 7. We find a similar comment in the Talmud Yerushalmi (freely translated from the Aramaic): “What is the meaning (of the verse): ‘Behold, whoever uses proverbs will use this proverb against you, saying, Like mother, like daughter?’ Was our mother Leah a whore?, as it says, “And Dinah went out?” He said to him: Since it is written: “And Leah went out to meet him’, we learn one “going out” from the other.” NEED SOURCE FOR YERUSHALMI}

^{34. The opening sentence of Sefer Yetzirah states that the Holy One, blessed be He, created His world through sfr, sfr, and sfr. There are different opinions as to how these three forms of “sfr” should be punctuated, each lending a different hue to how the creation story should be understood. One of the most interesting interpretations, via Shai Agnon (NEED REFERENCE), is to read them this way: sefer, sofer, v’sippur – meaning that God created His world through a book, an author, and a story. There is a text, the book (sefer), there is an author (sofer), and there is a process by which this text is read so that it becomes a story (sippur). Let us attempt to understand this in relation to our present context, in which a person is asked to find themselves through their own story, rather than abandoning it for someone else’s story.}

^{Each soul has three “cumulative states:” 1. Before descending into the world, which is the primal state. 2. During physical existence in this world. 3. After death.}

^{In the primal state of the soul, she is seen as a letter in the supernal sefer Torah. Only after her descent into this plane of existence does the soul begin to tell her story (sippur) and to develop it, which she does by living it out. This implies that life itself is a process of developing and unfolding the data imprinted on the primal letter, which is the representation of the soul’s higher root. This leads to the conclusion that, after death, it becomes clear how an individual’s deeds were in fact a living commentary on that “letter” of the heavenly Torah. The totality of her life constituted the essentials of this Torah. It therefore follows that each person is an author (sofer), who wrote, by means of every choice he ever made, the commentary to the heavenly Torah scroll.}

^{There are very few people in whom we can identify this quality. Even fewer know it about themselves. Such people experience their lives as a theological exercise, like R. David of Lelov, who said that when the Messiah comes, the “Tractate of David of Lelov” will be studied, just as today we study the tractate of Baba Kama. This experience is not common to most of us other than in moments of deja vu, in which we sense that everything is happening exactly as it was written, as it must be, as it was intended to be. Can the story of my soul be told in only one way? In other words, is there only one, predetermined way by which I must unfold the meaning imbedded in my supernal letter? This is one of the meanings of the mystery of the transmigration of souls – the story is told a little differently each time, in order that a new light be shed on it each time anew. This shows that the divine text of the heavenly Torah, of which I am one letter, can be read in various manners. My entire life story is a suggestion of one possible reading.}

^{In terms of Beshtian Kabbalah, these three stages can be understood as the process of “surrender-separation-sweetening” in the mystery of the hashmal (see Keter Shem Tov, letter 28). For the implications of this teaching in the theological biography of R. Nachman, see O. Ezrahi, “The Descent into the Dark Hollow of Childhood,” (Hebrew) Dimui, NEED REFERENCE.}

^{A practical application of this line of thinking can be found in M. Gafni, Soul Prints.}

^{35. R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Ishbitz, Mei HaShiloah vol. 1, at he beginning of the section on Lech Lecha.}

^{36. A “couple relationship” does not necessarily imply marriage. A steady couple relationship without marriage, which we call “living together” (in early sources pilagshut, i.e. a relationship without chuppah and kiddushin), would not be considered “illicit” or “prostitution” by most halachic authorities: “What is considered ‘wives’ and what is considered ‘concubines’? R. Yehudah said in the name of Rav: Wives are with ketuba and kiddushin, concubines are without them.”. Both these categories are considered legitimate (B. Sanhedrin 21a.). The talmudic discussion is actually dealing with the wives and concubines of King David, while as regards a regular layman there is disagreement among the halachic authorities: Rambam holds that “a concubine is forbidden for a layman” (Hilchot Melachim 4:4) so, in his opinion, any sort of sexual encounter outside of marriage is similar to prostitution. However, many of the Rishonim and the Achronim disagree with him, as the Rama writes in a footnote in Shulhan Aruch: “If a man singles out a woman for his own, and she immerses herself in the ritual waters (miqve) for him, some say that this is permissible, as this is the concubine (pilegish) which is mentioned in the Torah (this is the opinion of the Ra’avad and some other authorities). Others maintain that it is forbidden and (he who disobeys) receives a lashing, as it says “There should not be a harlot among you” (Rambam, the Rosh, and the Tur). The reason provided by the Rosh and the Tur is that a single woman will be embarrassed to go the miqve, as everyone will know that she is having sexual relations with someone. This will cause her not to go, and to lie about it, so that she and her boyfriend will transgress the prohibition of sleeping together when the woman has not been purified from her menstrual blood. After all, in those times there was one miqve for the whole town, so everyone knew everything that was going on with everyone else. In our days, both the Rosh and the Tur would probably have agreed that it is preferable that an unmarried woman be allowed to go the miqve, so that she can have sexual relations with her partner in a state of purity.}

^{Rabbi Arthur Waskow has opened a discussion on creating a sort of graded scale, rather than presenting a black and white picture of this matter. We could describe a continuum whose one extreme, the most desirable situation, is marriage – while the other extreme, the most repulsive, is rape. On this continuum relationships based on seduction and deception would be located very close to the rape-extreme, followed by prostitution in which the prostitute receives payment for a deed she does of her own free will. One-time sexual encounters occurring with the consent of both partners would obviously be better than prostitution, while deep friendship based on love and intimacy would be closest to the opposite extreme, where we have placed marriage. If we look at things this way, we see that, among the various sorts of relationships common between two unmarried people today, “living together,” which in Biblical language was called pilegesh (that is, plag isha – a “half-wife”), is a relatively positive institution. See Arthur Waskow, Down to Earth Judaism.}

^{See also an interview with Rabbi Arthur Green by O. Ezrahi, “Sold on Freedom,” in Chayyim Acheirim (Sept. 99): “In an era where people are getting married at ages 25-35, but are becoming sexually mature at 12-13, it is both difficult and undesirable to postpone sexual experience until marriage. It might be necessary to think up some sort of a ritual that would express a couple’s decision to begin living together even before marriage, some sort of an engagement ceremony, although the issue of a ceremony is secondary. The main point is to discover a basis for a loving and responsible relationship even before marriage. When I conduct a marriage ceremony for a couple I try to omit the blessing which says “He who forbade to us those we are engaged to, and permitted to us they who we married by means of huppah and kiddushin.” I think that today, when we know that the couple was probably living together for a few years before getting married, this is a total lie.”}

^{37. These parents often identify themselves as “X’s father” or “Y’s mother,” as if their identity was dependent on their children. Sisra’s mother has no personal name and is satisfied to be known as the mother of Sisra: (”She was watching from the window, and Sisra’s mother was crying…” (Judg. 5:28). When her son dies, she experiences total loss of identity. This may be the reason why her cry becomes a model of the type of cry that the shofar reproduces every Rosh Hashana (see B. Rosh Hashana 33b.). This is the cry of the shedding of false identities. Rosh Hashana is a new beginning, when we try to free ourselves of these addictions, and to touch our own living, vibrant, but threatening stories once again.}

^{38. R. Nahman of Breslov calls these teachers and Rabbis “famous lies.” See Liqutei Moharan 1 and 67.}

^{39. In studying “The Concept of Autonomy in the Female Experience,” in her book She Comes with Love (HEBREW?), Ariela Friedman quotes a study by the social psychologist Nitzah Yanai on the concept of autonomy as perceived by (ISRAELI?) women. According to the study’s conclusions, the concept of independence or autonomy is not defined by women as separation from the other and lack of dependence on him, but rather “as the capability of authentic expression… the capability to express oneself authentically in the framework of the connection with the other” (p.43). We are in total agreement with this concept of autonomy.}

^{40. Chaim Vital, Sha’ar HaPesukim, Pareshat Vayetze (??): “Any given prostitute is Lilith, because she was originally in Adam’s household, and then went out, and always abides in the desert, as is well known.}

^{41. Zohar, Vayetze (VOLUME?), 148a}

^{42. Baal HaTurim, ad locem.}

^{43. Song of Songs, REFERENCE}

^{44. Luke 7:37-50. Nicholas Kazantzakis wrote The Last Temptation of Christ about this sexually charged figure and the tribulations that she caused Jesus. In the Gospel of Luke, there is no identification of the “sinner woman” who washes Jesus’s feet, but according to the decision of Gregarious the Great, Mary Magdelena was identified both as this sinner woman and also as Miriam of Beth Anna (Luke10: 39-42). As a result, Mary Magdelena became the patron saint of those who repent.}

^{45. Shlomit Steinberg in “The Face of Temptation” (REFERENCE) quotes Anatole France who said to one of his students: “Everyone knew that hell exists, but its exact geographical location was unknown. Until one day, a brutal African church father revealed that the gates of hell are located in a very specific spot – between women’s legs.” A reference in Sefer HaChinuch (mitzvah 188) shows that Jewish sources also identified a “door to hell” in women. When he explains the commandment that forbids a person any intimate contact with sexually taboo persons, the author recommends to his son, for whom the book was written: “And if a man, when meeting a beautiful woman, will think that hell opens between her eyelashes, and whoever comes close to her will burn forever, and he focuses all his thoughts on similar images, she will not become a stumbling block for him.”}

^{46. This trait seems to have been passed on to Rachel’s chosen son, Joseph, who does not succumb to the sexual enticements of Potiphar’s wife in Egypt. Tradition has awarded him the title “Joseph the Tzaddik” (Righteous). Particularly in the opinion of the Kabbalists, maintaining sexual purity is considered the chief attribute of Joseph.}

^{47. This attribute also seems to be passed on among Leah’s descendants. Judah, Leah’s chosen son, lies with his daughter-in-law Tamar, who is disguised as a prostitute. Boaz, a dignitary of the tribe of Judah, gets into a dubious situation by marrying Ruth the Moabite. According to the midrash, Jesse, his grandson, intends to sleep with his Canaanite handmaiden but at the last minute she is replaced by his wife, and David is born. David has a sexual fall with Bathsheba, who gives birth to Solomon, whose many wives turn his heart, etc. The entire dynasty of the tribe of Judah, from whom the House of David and the Messiah emerge, place themselves in very questionable sexual relationships. This is dealt with at length in the hasidic literature, especially in Mei HaShiloah. It is noteworthy in this context that critical biblical scholarship attributes the second creation story, the one in which consciousness is achieved through the sin of eating from the tree of knowledge, to the J source, from the tribe of Judah. This source, it is argued, shows how good and evil are bound together and how it is that through evil, good is revealed. See Yisrael Knohl, The Many Faces of Monotheistic Faith (Hebrew) pp. 31-32.}

^{48. Eli Yassif, The Alphabet of ben Sirach}

^{49. Popular culture deals extensively with the dangerous and seductive woman. Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct” is one recent example of the misogynist tendency in this genre.}

^{50. See Kehillat Yaakov, written by a student of the Seer of Lublin, the entry on “Laughter.” He maintains, on the basis of a midrash and Rashi’s commentary on this verse, (WHICH VERSE?) that laughter in the Torah is mentioned in connection with the three cardinal sins, concerning which the law is “he should let himself be killed rather than transgress.” They are idol worship, murder, and incest. Idol worship, since it says concerning the golden calf, “and they rose to make merry;” murder, as it says (concerning David’s general, Joab), “Let the lads rise and make merry before us;” and incest, as it says (concerning Potiphar’s wife and Joseph), “They brought us a Hebrew man to laugh at me.” The author claims that these three sins cause damage to the first three sefirot – keter, chochma, and binah – and that is why they are so severe. The “laughter” of incest damages the sefirah of Binah, which is relevant to our study of Lilith, since Lilith, who is the kelippah of Leah, is the lowest level of Binah.}

^{51. See Mei Hashiloah, Pareshat Toldot, beginning “And Isaac loved Esau”, and Pareshat Vayeshev, beginning “And Er the firstborn son of Judah.” He describes Jacob as someone who does not want “to put himself in doubt, a theme that will be developed at greater length in the Fifth Gate.}

^{Compare Elkanah’s unsuccessful attempt to comfort the barren Hannah, who, like Rachel, values children, more than her husband’s love, for which, see I Sam 1:8.}

Filed Under: Articles, Books, The Teachings of Love
Tagged: Biblical comentary, Feminine, Jewish history, Kabala, masculine, Renewal of Judaism, Zivug

Jewish history

Lillith; A Re-Reading of Feminine Shadow. 1st Gate.

November 9, 2009 by Rabi Ohad Ezrahi · 1 Comment

The following is a translation of the Hebrew Book, Lillith; A Re-Reading of Feminine Shadow, Modan Publications 2005.

Note from the author regarding Mark Gafni and Lilith:

I thank Mark Gafni for his help in the process of writing, publishing and translating of this book.

I wrote this book in the late 90’s, when there was collaboration between us. Mark had contributed some main ideas to this book and we had discussed it all between us. At that time I knew nothing about the hidden side of Mark, that later was revealed by his community “Bayit Hashash”. Mark was accused of harassing and sexually abusing women in his community. Mark had escaped Israel immediately, not to face the law. I a letter he had sent to his community he admitted the accusations, said he is a sick man and that he is going for therapy. Unfortunately later, instead of doing so he started to try and claim that he is the victim of the situation… he then started to work very hard on how to present the facts so he can show himself in a pure light.

Personally – I do not believe him. I spoke in person with several of the women involved, and got pretty sure that they have a case (that prevents Mark from coming to Israel, in fear of the law).

Myself and other people who worked very close with Gafni feel the same, that he is not to be trusted, and telling the truth is not one of his main talents…

Yet – he is a brilliant man and in certain areas – can be a good friend too.

I am realizing today that Mark was lying to me in my face many many times regarding his sexual “practice” and other stuff (and not only to me… his wife at the time had expressed herself in an open letter as well and I will not repeat her words).

Because of that story I do not want to publish Lilith in English as a book with the names of the two of us on it. So – The sacred side of Lilith is again on a hold… who knows for how long….

I am very sorry that Lilith had fallen again into a not clean place, and that it has to do with sexual abuse and so forth. I feel it’s a Karmatic thing. The secret of Lilith is held again from the eyes of the world.

I wrote this book (every word of it – in the |Hebrew version!) and consulted with Gafni while writing it. I do take responsibility for not demanding stronger that it’ll be published as my book with a big “thank you” to Gafni. I did ask it once but he was very strongly thinking that it should be as a co-authored book and I – out of a mixture of friendship, not wanting to be fighting over rights and my own weakness – agreed.

The translation was done by several translators under the supervision of Mark and I hope it is good enough…

I hope that the deep secrets regarding the sacredness of Lilith and the Tikun of the dark sides of humanity regarding the fears of sexuality will be more available now.

Since I wrote the book around 10 years ago I got to understand several things even deeper, and I hope to be able to write them down in a book of itself. But for now -

Please enjoy the book.

Ohad Ezrahi, Nov 2009

————

THE FIRST GATE: WHY LILLITH?:

CHAPTER 1: ADAM, LILLITH, 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.

lilith 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.⁶It 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.

THE PROBLEM OF DOMINATION

“Domination… is a twisting of the bonds of love,”⁹ writes Jessica Benjamin in The Bonds of Love, a book that can help us think clearly about the psychodynamics of domination. Domination, she argues, goes hand in hand with dualistic thinking of all kinds. Based on Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that in the Western tradition “woman functions as man’s primary other, his opposite – playing nature to his reason, immanence to his transcendence, primordial oneness to his individuated separateness, and object to his subject,” Benjamin attempts to show that “gender polarity underlies such familiar dualisms as autonomy and dependency, and thus establishes the coordinates for the positions of master and slave” (7). Domination is, in other words, what she calls a “reversible relationship:” now one term in a dualism, then the other dominates.

Domination could not exist without fantasies of omnipotence, Benjamin claims, which are themselves rooted in a sense of lacking or absence at a person’s core. “This void is filled with fantasy material in which the other appears so dangerous or so weak — or both — that he [she] threatens the self and must be controlled. A vicious cycle begins: the more the other is subjugated, the less he [she] is experienced as a human subject and the more distance or violence the self must deploy against him [her]… By the same token, “the subjugated, whose acts and integrity are granted no recognition, may, even in the very act of emancipation, remain in love with the ideal of power that has been denied to them. Though they may reject the master’s right to dominion over them, they nevertheless do reject his personification of power. They simply reverse the terms and claim his rights as theirs.” The dominated, in these terms, is someone who nurses fantasies of turning the tables and becoming the dominator. The master and the slave, to use Hegel’s famous example, cannot exist without each other.

Love, however, cannot coexist with domination. Love and domination are not a reversible, dualistic pair. Love emerges only in an “intersubjective realm – that space in which the mutual recognition of subjects can compete with the reversible relationship of domination” (220). Mutual recognition between men and women has at long last been made possible by feminism, Benjamin claims, despite a widespread perception that it imposes barriers and antagonisms. Feminism “has allowed men and women to begin confronting the difficulties of recognizing an other, and to explore the painful longing for what lies on the other side of these difficulties” (224).

Benjamin’s perspective on domination and dualism offers a considerable challenge to our work and reminds us that while we are exploring the often dualist, hierarchical thought structures of kabbalah, we do not need to follow the path of essentialism, positing separate spheres for the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine.’ We are also challenged by Tania Modleski’s observation that frequently “male subjectivity works to appropriate ‘femininity’ while oppressing women.”¹⁰ This critique has a great deal of relevance to what we might call the patriarchal shell of Judaism. The goal of our project is to show the unrealized possibilities for both men and women within traditional Jewish thinking and to provide a framework for men and women’s mutual recognition of one another in the fullness of their shared humanity.

LILITH, THE SHADOW OF EVE

This analysis of domination allows us to bring the mythic figure of Lilith into play, for Lilith’s story emerges precisely out of a struggle over domination in marriage. The story of Lilith has been bubbling up in Jewish circles for perhaps four thousand years. We will deal with her story at length in Ch. 4, but our discussion will benefit from a brief introduction here.

Her roots are in Sumerian mythology, where she is a powerful goddess — pictured as a naked woman, winged and taloned, mounting a lion, flanked by owls — thought to be a harlot and vampire, never releasing her lovers or satisfying them either, a reflex of the Great Mother goddess who ruled early in human consciousness.¹¹ In the largely demythologized atmosphere of the Bible, she puts in a cameo appearance as possibly an owl among waste places (Isa. 34:14). In the rabbinic mind, she takes further shape as the first Eve, a figure that helps the rabbis to explain why there are two creation stories in Genesis. In the first is written, “Male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27), while in the second, more fleshed-out story, “the LORD God fashioned the rib that He had taken from the man into a woman” (Gen. 2:22). By the time that this second woman Eve, was created. the first woman, who was to become Lilith, had disappeared.

That disappearance is first explained in full in the10th century C.E. text, “The Alphabet of (Pseudo) Ben Sirah.” In this telling, Adam and Lilith were created at the same time, presumably with the possibility of equality between them. We first encounter them, however, locked in a marital struggle, emblematically represented as a quarrel over sexual positions. Adam insists that he is to be on top, signifying domination, but Lilith refuses and instead pronounces the secret name of God, which allows her to flee the garden. She ends up on the shores of the Red Sea, where she mates with the resident demons, producing legions of demon offspring. Adam, meanwhile, has complained to God of his loneliness, so God dispatches three angels to bring Lilith back to him. The angels extract from her the promise that she will not destroy the babies of women who, during child-birth, wear an amulet containing the names of the three angels. In effect, this story is an etiology for the magical practice of wearing this particular amulet to ward off the dangers inherent in child-birth and to the newborn.¹²

In later aggadah and folklore, Lilith, the demon is both a seducer of unwitting men, entering their nocturnal dreams to copulate with them and produce legions of demon-children and, at the same time, an evil witch, devouring their human offspring. In the Zohar, she is a highly charged sexual figure: within the human world, she is thought to be the Queen of Sheba and one of the two prostitutes who come to Solomon for judgment, and within the cosmic world of angels, demons and God, she functions as Queen of the Demons and, in the fallen world symbolized by the destruction of the Temple, she is “the slave woman,” consort to God, until the time of the Messiah, when God can reunite with the exiled feminine part of him. This lurid history, buried in kabbalistic books and unearthed by Gershom Scholem’s scholarship,¹³ was made popularly known in Raphael Patai’s book, The Hebrew Goddess, which told her story up to the Zohar and no further.¹⁴

As a mythic figure, Lilith satisfies an important need for both men and women. Jo Milgrom has offered a comprehensive analysis of Lilith’s powers and appeal: “She personifies the dark side of feminine creative and sexual powers. She is not a wife, but a seducer; she is not faithful, but promiscuous. Even though she produces life, she is a baby and mother killer. Thus, she personifies the fear that resides in all of us. For women, it is the fear that in bearing new life, they, the bearers may not survive, and/or, that the new life itself may not survive. The Siren, or Greek version of Lilith, is a threat to men, representing their fears: loss of potency, loss of the nurture and devotion of a wife, loss of progeny (hence, immortality…).” Milgrom adds that men fear her autonomy and assertive sexuality. As a projection screen, then, for the fears of both men and women, and their fears about each other’s sexuality, Lilith serves as a release valve for emotions that need to find concrete expression.

A generation of Jewish women who came of age with the second wave of twentieth-century feminism, have seen in her tragic story a reflection of their own disempowerment within Judaism and their desire to reclaim that power.¹⁵ What contemporary feminists have seized upon in Lilith is her powerful rebelliousness and autonomy, her wildness and sexual appetite. Lilith is the woman who says NO! to patriarchal domination and YES! to self-empowerment. There are limits to how far this view of Lilith can take contemporary feminists, however. It is helpful to apply our analysis of the psychodynamics of domination: as long as the dominator and dominated are both caught up in dualistic thinking, their relationship will be a continual see-saw of who’s on top, of master and slave. The dominator will objectify and depersonalize the dominated, in order to carry out the subjugation. In this spirit, Adam’s descendants demonize Lilith and exclude her from human company. And, as the subjugated partner, :Lilith seeks out new ways of gaining power over the other. As a demon, she lives out her own fantasies of omnipotence, primarily through unbridled sexuality and blood-lust. The myth, so construed, simply reproduces the problem of domination out of which it grew. Lilith chose autonomy and separation over wifely dependence, but her supposed gain was another form of subjugation — a life of loneliness and alienation, on the margins, consigned to the shadowy, dream-laden night.

It is a mistake to look at Lilith in isolation, for as a personification of assertive sexuality and autonomy, she represents only one pole of female experience. She is inexorably tied to Eve, her domestic sister and antagonist in the myth, who suffers patriarchal domination directly, even as she is man’s helper, doing all the hard work of keeping house, bringing up children and maintaining relationship under those conditions. Howard Schwartz has compared Eve and Lilith to the mermaid and the siren, two kinds of mythological creatures of the sea, the one helping sailors through the rocky shoals, the other luring them, entranced, to their deaths. To identify with the one at the expense of the other poses a danger for contemporary Jewish feminism, he claims. “The myths of Lilith and Eve cry out for recognition of their polar nature within a single woman, as do the myths of Jacob and Esau in every man…. To deny one side or the other is to deny the wholeness of the self.”¹⁶
One of the first feminist midrashim on Lilith sought to heal the rift between Lilith and Eve engendered by patriarchy. Judith Plaskow imagines Lilith coming back to the garden and finding Eve, who had not been created when she fled. Delighted with her new companion, Lilith helps Eve over the garden wall, so that they can head out into the world — hand in hand, to make friends with one another, as they leave Adam behind.¹⁷ This parable points toward a reunion of that which patriarchal man has driven apart, rather than his conquering and reincorporating the female into his realm.¹⁸ Jakov Lind, a Holocaust survivor, writes a parallel, but heterosexual story that focuses on Lilith’s and Eve’s integration in a single body and consciousness. With Eve gone on errands, Lilith returns to find Adam home alone. As she pledges to him her eternal love, Adam falls into her arms and takes her to bed. During this betrayal, Eve comes in, and seeing what is afoot, projects her soul into Lilith’s body. In the act of love-making, she speaks to Adam from the body of this new, unified Lilith-Eve consciousness and informs him that henceforth Lilith and Eve are one.¹⁹ These parables of integration, each from their different perspectives, point to the seeds of a new Lilith-Eve myth, which can move beyond the old dualities and demonization.

FREUDIAN AND JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVES

Freud’s way of looking at the polarity of Lilith-Eve stems from his anthropological speculations in Totem and Taboo. There, he posits that the defining moment in shifting from biological to cultural life. was when a man took a particular woman as his personal property. Freud sees that shift as giving rise to a split between the loved and pure woman and the sexual and desired woman, a dynamic he relates to both the incest taboo and the Oedipus complex.²⁰ The woman that man can have is beloved, wise, wifely — namely, Eve, but man’s sexual feelings for the woman that he cannot have also seek an outlet — namely, Lilith.²¹ This split between Eve and Lilith is a consequence, then, of the broken world of patriarchy, which is founded in the very idea of one sex possessing the other.

From the Jungian perspective, archetypes are pre-existent entities within human consciousness. The archetype of the Great Mother is represented in a variety of archetypal images, including Lilith and Eve. In Jung’s thought, the forces of the unconscious are always arrayed in polar configurations, presenting a positive side and a shadow side, figures compounded equally of fascination and fear. As the devouring, terrifying mother, Lilith, the baby-killer, confronts women with the shadow side of her archetype, while as the seductive, enticing beauty, she confronts men with her positive side or anima, the symbol of the opposite sex in the man’s psyche. (Eve, too, is associated with a polarity: the fecund mother of all living is the one through whom death and suffering come to the world.) When the shadow side of the archetype is suppressed culturally – expelled from the garden, as it were – it gets clothed in ever more destructive garb. But some part of the archetype will return and seek to be acknowledged and integrated. And in order to be integrated by human beings, it will clothe itself in positive human forms. As the terrifying shadow, it can never be integrated, but as the alluring anima, it participates in healing the human. This is how one Jungian analyst describes the process for Lilith:

“In psychological terms, this purely natural, instinctive anima attempts over and over again to approach a man i.e. to force her way into a consciousness that she feels should absorb her. Like numerous other anima figures which appear to us in myths, fairy tales and legends, such as the melusines, nymphs, sirens and ondines, Lilith also tries to associate with humans. Only in this way — that is, psychologically speaking, accepted by a receptive, steadfast consciousness, can she be ‘released,’ i.e. transformed.”²²

Getting sucked into a power struggle with this image will cut a man off from eros and his emotions. In this struggle, he risks getting lost in this realm — that is, losing his ego and being completely enslaved to the image. But there also exists the possibility that in a confrontation with the unconscious, the anima can be absorbed into the male consciousness and integrated with it — in Emma Jung’s words, “binding a man in the chains of love, that they may live in his world with him.”²³ In this way “the dark feminine” itself begins to change its character.

In the Zohar’s developments of the Lilith myth, the scale is tipped to the side of fear and loathing rather than to the side of fascination, which could lead to integrating the archetype back into human consciousness. The Zohar never escapes the downward dynamic of domination. But in Isaac Luria’s development of the myth, the scale tips notably in the other direction. Picking up on hints in the Zohar, Luria taught that after Lilith was banished from the garden, her soul was reincarnated in a long chain of notable women from Genesis onward. Her reincarnated soul is involved in two of the most horrific incidents narrated in the Torah – the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) and the murder of Cozbi and Zimri, while engaged in the act of intercourse (Numbers 25). These incidents cry out for explanation, and the Ari finds clues in the peregrinations of the soul of Lilith. It was the task of the men that these women married to reintegrate the banished feminine archetype into their consciousness. This working out of Lilith’s human destiny has been almost completely unavailable as a spiritual resource for contemporary men and women, as it has been buried in the untranslated arcana of Lurianic myth. We believe that it can contribute to the contemporary feminist project within Judaism. It is this book’s happy task to bring this long-buried ore to light.

CHAPTER 2: THE ARI’S MYTH

Isaac Luria (1534-72) is known in Jewish tradition as Ha-Ari, the Lion of Safed, an acronym for Ha-Elohi Rabbi Yitzhak, the “Divine” Rabbi Isaac, based on a reputation for saintliness that he gained during his lifetime. After a long period of secluded kabbalistic study in Egypt (which we might regard as his period of confrontation with myth and the unconscious), the Ari arrived in Safed, which was a flourishing center of Jewish mystical speculation, with such luminaries as Joseph Karo, Solomon Alkabetz, and Moses Cordovero in residence. The Ari’s period of teaching there was very brief: two to three years at most. But his impact has lasted for centuries. His reinterpretation of the doctrine of creation in the Zohar through the concepts of divine self-contraction (tzimtzum), the breaking of the vessels (shevirat ha-kelim) and restoration (tikkun) continues to dominate most popular thinking about Jewish mysticism. Both the messianism of Shabbetai Tzevi in the 17th century and the spreading of spiritual inwardness through Hasidism since the 18th century are impossible to imagine without the background of these Lurianic concepts. Likewise, when Jews today sees their actions as contributing to tikkun olam, or think of themselves as gathering sparks of holiness, they are living out concepts which were brought to life by the teachings of the Ari.²⁴

What are often called “the writings of the Ari” were actually written by his chief disciples, Rabbi Hayyim Vital and others. These writings are intricately detailed descriptions of the workings of the supernal worlds, written in a language that appears technical and extremely impersonal. There was, however, a deeply personal dimension to these speculations, stemming from the curiosity that the Ari and R. Hayyim Vital felt about the sources of their own souls. It follows therefore that a psychological reading is essential to understanding his meaning, and we will return to this line of thought after sketching the Ari’s essential doctrines.

First, a few caveats. For someone accustomed to viewing Judaism as a radical monotheistic faith, like Maimonides, who rejects any anthropomorphic image of God, it is not easy to accept the mythological orientation of Kabbalistic thought. The Kabbalah shifts without difficulty between the stories of the forefathers and those of the divine pantheon in the upper worlds. This does not entail any movement away from the monotheistic belief in divine unity. In fact, the Kabbalists allow themselves to use words which seem to imply change, form, and plurality in the Godhead, without feeling its unity in the least undermined.²⁵

It is easy for a reader new to Kabbalah to be put off by the terminology and the details of its cosmogony. It may be helpful to filter the material through the twin lenses of myth and symbol. Myth is a direct presentation of events in the divine world through narrative, while symbolic discourse presents unseen divine processes through mediating comparisons: natural images, human personalities etc. According to the mythic view, the Ari speaks of the divine realm directly, and aspires to an unequivocal, direct correspondence between his discourse and the reality he describes. Unlike the Zohar, which revels in an exfoliating symbolic language to illuminate the divine, the Ari erects a comprehensive edifice, defining concepts and connections that are only implicit in symbolic form in the Zohar.²⁶ According to the symbolic view, there is a continuity of method between the Zohar and the Ari, both of them describing divine processes through the medium of images and personification.²⁷

In the kabbalah that preceded the Ari, creation is understood as a progressive unfolding from the infinitude of Eyn-Sof (”the Endless One/the Never-Ending”) through a continuous process of emanation that ultimately leads to the world we know, in which divinity is clothed in material form. This emanation took place through ten sefirot, ten divine forces by which the Infinite One creates and maintains the four worlds that exist between Ein-Sof and us. These worlds are known as Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation) and Assiyah (Action). Each of these worlds is composed of ten sefirot, with many dynamic connections between them. As a vertical map replicated in each world between Ein Sof and us, they appear as follows: (FIND ILLUSTRATION)

Keter (Crown)
Hokhma (Wisdom)
Binah (Discernment)
Hesed (Love)
Gevurah/Din (Strength/Judgment)
Tiferet/Rahamim (Beauty/Compassion)
Netzah (Enduringness)
Hod (Majesty)
Yesod (Foundation/Generativity)
Malkhut (Sovereignty)

Where the Zohar saw continuity between the Eyn Sof and the emanated worlds, the Ari posited an enormous gulf between them. The Eyn Sof so filled creation that there was no room for anything but God. Creation could only take place through an act of divine self-contraction or self-limitation, which he called tzimtzum. Before tzimtzum, all the forces within God were in equilibrium, without any separation between them. But in the act of self-limitation, confusion occurred that required these forces to be reshuffled. In this process, Judgment (Din) and Love (Hesed), previously in balance, separated; this separation is seen as responsible for the origins of evil in our world.

God’s withdrawal left room for creative processes to emerge in the space left (mostly) vacant of divinity.²⁸ The first letter of the divine name descended into this space, creating “vessels” (kelim), which gradually assumed clearer and clearer shape as the “primordial human” (Adam Kadmon). Tremendous lights shone forth from the head of Adam Kadmon, creating further vessels. Each of the sefirot got a vessel of its own. While the vessels assigned to the upper three sefirot managed to contain the light that flowed into them, the light that struck the seven lower sefirot shattered them. This “breaking of the vesssels” (shevirat ha-kelim) was a cosmic catastrophe. Some of the light went back to its source, but the rest was hurled down and became concentrated in the vessels’ shells (kelippot), these being the substance of the dark forces in the universe, known as the Other Side (Sitra Ahra). Since that time, the kelippot, the world to which Lilith belongs, have challenged the hierarchy of the divine worlds.

At the same moment that the vessels broke, restoration, tikkun, began. The light that now issued from Adam Kadmon’s forehead began to reorganize the confusion, with the goal of creating structures more stable than the ten sefirot, in order to adequately contain the divine light. These new structures belonging to the world of Atzilut are called “countenances” (partzufim), which we can understand as archetypal personae. Each partzuf is a spiritual-divine figure, with an internal structure parallel to that of a human being, complete with head, torso, and arms. This corporeality expresses a crucial aspect of tikkun: “When light is given to the sefirot without any participation on their part, they shatter. It is only when they are rebuilt in the image of the human, which includes male and female… that they can endure.”²⁹ The partzufim not only receive divine light, but now give it as well, influencing each of the worlds below Adam Kadmon and helping to raise them from the places to which they had fallen during the breaking of the vessels.

This bold anthropomorphic language has roots in midrash and Zohar, like everything else in the Ari’s teachings. The Rabbis commented that, at the crossing of the Red Sea, God revealed Himself as a hero and a warrior. However, at the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, He appeared to be an old, hoary, white-haired sage:

“He said to them: “Do not see Me as these different forms, but I am the One from the sea, and I am the One from Sinai – ‘I am God your Lord.’”³⁰ We can think of the partzufim as a “divine comedy,” in which the One ineffable God chooses different personae, in order to communicate with humans. Towards every person, at each moment of his or her life, God’s essence and spiritual immanence is radiated through one of a number of figures with such human characteristics as age, color, sex etc. At the same time, The One is not really in any of them, but is infinite, formless, beyond thought, and beyond any verbal expression.

Each of these partzufim bears a relationship to the sefirot of Adam Kadmon, channeling the sefirotic light and using it in the drama of tikkun. Sefirah Keter is reformed as both Atik Yomin (”Ancient of Days”) and Arikh Anpin (”Long-faced One”), representing two faces of the least accessible Sefirah. The Sefirot Hokhmah and Binah become the partzufim of Abba (”Father’) and Imma (”Mother”). They help all the other emanated beings serve as givers and receivers of divine influx; their relationship is the archetype for intellectual and erotic union. From their coupling the partzuf of Ze’eir Anpin (”Short-Faced One”) is born. As Ze’eir Anpin is suckled and grows, he comes to comprise six of the lower sefirot (from Hesed to Tiferet). Eventually, he mates with the partzuf Nukba de-Ze’eir (”the female of Ze’eir”), a reformulation of the Sefirah Malkhut, representing his complementary feminine side. Here we list their central characteristics:

1) Atik Yomin – “Ancient of Days” – the highest partzuf of Keter. The wise old man whose wisdom is wondrous, hidden, and concealed. Lacking in sexual differentiation, absolutely androgynous.

2) Arikh Anpin – “Long-faced One” i.e. the indulgent or forebearing one – the lower partzuf of Keter. The wise old man, the grandfather, another androgynous figure.

3) Abba – “Daddy” – the partzuf of chochma, father figure.

4) Imma – “Mommy” – the partzuf of Binah, mother figure.

5) Ze’eir Anpin – “Short-Faced One” i.e. – the impatient or unindulgent one – the partzuf of the six lower sefirot. The attributes of the heart. The partzuf of the young male, the emotional, hero figure.

6) Nukba de Ze’eir- the female partzuf. The Shechina figure, the anima. Divided into: Leah – the upper female, and Rachel – the lower female.

In our discussion, we will focus primarily on the two lower partzufim, Ze’eir Anpin and Nukba, or, as they are called in the Zohar, “the Holy One, blessed be He, and his Shekhina (Kudsha brich hu u-shekhintai). Ze’eir Anpin is the most active in remediating the concentration of Judgment, which contributed to the original breaking of the vessels. The partzuf of Nukba, which represents the Shekhina, the female aspect of the Godhead, is the most dynamic partzuf in the divine world. The Shekhina ascends and descends, develops and decreases. She is divided into two secondary figures, Leah and Rachel, and also unites into one figure composed of them both at once. Her state depends on the state of the relationship between God and humanity, which directly impacts on the relationship between Ze’eir Anpin and his soul-mate. In other words, the partzufim cannot do the work of tikkun alone. The Zohar, upon which the Ari based his teachings, often calls the Shekhina by the names Leah and Rachel. It thus views the Biblical narrative as a microcosmic reflection of the divine dynamic taking place in the macrocosmic world of Atzilut. So too, the Ari often calls Ze’eir Anpin by the two names, Jacob and Israel. The network of relationships between Jacob and his two wives is therefore understood as an archetypal matrix that is played out both below in the human world and above in the divine world. This dynamic of correspondences will be central to the investigation in this book.

Before Adam’s sin, the relationship of Ze’eir Anpin and Nukba was “face-to-face,” but afterwards, it was transformed into a relationship of looking “back-to-back.” Adam’s soul was designed to have mended the break in the cosmos, but because of his failure, the task of mending has fallen to other human beings. The primary task of religious and contemplative activity (including the intercourse of husbands and wives) is to return the relationship of Ze’eir and Nuqba to one of “face-to-face.” As one scholar has put it, “sexual intimacy within the life of god is the paradigmatic expression of divine wholeness.”³¹ The coupling of Ze’eir Anpin and Nukba will facilitate the tikkun of the supernal lights that have been concealed in the upper partzufim, waiting to be revealed in the messianic age. Tikkun is both earthly and cosmic, the process by which Israel will be restored to its land and the Shekhinah to her partner, the Kadosh Barukh-hu.

REINCARNATION AND READING

One of God’s tools in effecting this transition from history to meta-history is transmigration of souls, also called metempsychosis or reincarnation (gilgul ha-neshamot). For the souls of the Jewish people, transmigration offers a gradual process of refinement, a means of repentance and ultimate entry into the Garden of Eden.³² As such, it is a solution to the problem of theodicy, helping to defer the problem of punishment for evil and reward for good actions to future lifetimes.

Equally important, it is used as a key to understanding “sacred history and the hidden dynamics within Scripture.”³³ The doctrine of gilgul has allowed kabbalistic interpreters to see in biblical and talmudic narrative patterns long chains of persons linked through the gilgul of one’s soul into another. Reincarnation is a means of bringing together separate events and personalities and connecting them psychologically. Thus, Adam’s soul migrated to David and ultimately to the Messiah, as is conveyed by his name, AD”M, seen as an acronym of the three names. The soul that failed at the task of tikkun is the same soul that will ultimately achieve it.³⁴ Similarly, the ten brothers who sold Joseph into slavery become the ten rabbinic martyrs who died at the hands of the Romans, and thereby expiate the earlier sin, which is itself a replication on the human level of the cosmic disaster mentioned in the midrash of the destruction of ten primeval worlds, understood by the Ari as a reference to the breaking of the cosmic vessels. The Ari refined and extended this way of reading the Bible and Jewish texts by adding a layer relating to the souls of himself and his companions. “The myth of the shattered vessels and their ultimate restoration was for the Ari not merely a theory about distant times and transcendent worlds, but something very much alive, revealed in the faces of those around him.”³⁵ In Lurianic kabbalah, no one has only one incarnation. He taught that each person was a conglomeration of different souls singularly united in any one individual. Hayyim Vital, for instance, listed tens of prior incarnations existing in his make-up, which were communicated to him by the Ari.³⁶

The Ari and his disciples were following in the tradition of Zoharic hermeneutics that regarded it as imperative for the interpreter of Bible to elevate the literal meaning (peshat) to the mystical level (sod) implicit within it. They were not reading their chosen meanings into the text; rather, they were finding in the text the meanings that had been hidden there and were waiting to be revealed. They understood that the esoteric meaning can be comprehended only through the literal and “the plain sense becomes comprehensible only when the mystical sense is revealed.”In Chaim Vital’s words, “the literal meaning of Scripture must be like the soul of Torah and its inwardness, for the body is the image of the soul.”³⁸ A grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, Moshe Chayyim Ephraim of Sudlikov called this “peshat ha-emet,’ the true meaning of Scripture. In this book, through the insights of midrash, Zohar, the Ari and his disciples, we too will be seeking to elucidate the deep peshat of the biblical narratives. Our discourse will sometimes proceed on two separate planes, the cosmic and the human, but will more often examine the literal level from the perspective of the esoteric meanings that tradition has found in it. We use the Ari’s theories of reincarnation and reading to come a deep truth about the flexibility of gender, as envisioned in the Jewish textual tradition. Part of the Ari’s greatness is expressed in his refusal to let Lilith fall by the wayside. His writings open up Jewish history to the divided woman, so that she might eventually reclaim her repressed sister, Lilith. The bulk of our book will follow out the destiny of Lilith, through her various incarnations until her ultimate return to the Garden of Eden. Building on an insight from the Zohar, the Ari saw Leah as Lilith’s reincarnation, just as he saw Rachel as Eve’s. In Jacob’s relationships to these two women and to his alter ego, Esau, who each signify aspects of the divine, we will follow an important thread of our story. We will also follow out from Leah, a chain of questing female souls bound together in their search for sexual fulfillment and equality with men, which includes Dinah, Tamar, Cozbi, Ruth, the mother of the messianic line, and the wife of the Roman consul, Turnus Rufus, who becomes the second wife of Rabbi Akiba. It is a story whose implications were not fully realized in the generation of the Ari, but, which we hope, can begin to be in our own.

CHAPTER 3: THE PROBLEMATICS OF EROS IN THE JEWISH TEXTUAL TRADITION

In this chapter, we take a look at two exemplary talmudic texts that problematize the issue of sexual desire and how it is expressed between men and women. The first is the voice of R. Shmuel bar Nahmani, a minority opinion in the Talmud, who gives voice to women’s sexual desire, which the majority preferred to leave voiceless. The second is the story of R. Hiyya and his wife, who impersonated a prostitute, in order to seduce her husband to resume sexual relations with her. These two voices will serve to inform our discussion throughout these pages.

Twice in the Talmud, in discussions of permitted sexual practices within marriage, we hear the following cited:

“Rav Shmuel the son of Nahmani said in the name of Rabbi Yohanan: Any man whose wife asks for sex will have children such as were unknown even in the generation of Moses, for in the generation of Moses, it is written, “Get yourself intelligent, wise and renowned men” (Deut. 1:16), and then it is written, “And I took as the heads of the tribes renowned and intelligent men” (Deut 1:16), but he could not find :wise men” [for the word "wise" was omitted in the second citation], but with regard to Leah it says, “Leah went out to meet him and said, ‘You are to sleep with me, for I have hired you’” (Gen. 30:16), and it says, “Of the children of Issachar [born from the union of Jacob and Leah] were acquainted with wisdom” (I Chron. 12:34).

Rabbi Shmuel Bar Nachmani’s tradition praises women who openly ask for sex. There is no greater praise than being likened to the generation of Moses. Yet, even in that generation, Moses did not find the wisdom he sought in the people, as is evidenced from the lack of the term wisdom when he appoints “renowned and intelligent men.” The inference from Leah’s behavior is that it was her very open expression of desire that produced wisdom in her children, which is validated by the verse from Chronicles. Both times that this view is quoted, however, the Talmud goes on to water it down with the objection that the woman is limited in her repertoire of sexual approaches. She can arouse him, but cannot request sex verbally. Daniel Boyarin, quoting these passages, has said: “The gender asymmetry is not so much, then, in the rights to sex, as in the rights to speech, who has control over the situation and who is ‘being taken care of.’”³⁹ This gender assymetry was codified in the halachah that prevents women from asking for sex, so as not to appear brazen.

The irony of what a woman must do so as not to appear brazen is not lost on the readers of the story of Rabbi Hiyya and his wife:

“Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashi was used to prostrating himself and uttering the following prayer: ‘May the all-merciful One deliver us from the evil inclination.’ One day his wife overheard him and she said to herself: ‘What is he talking about? He has abstained from being with me sexually for the past few years. Why is he saying such things?’”

Soon after, when he was studying Torah in his garden, his wife disguised herself in costume and walked past him, back and forth. “Who are you” he asked her. “I am Haruta, and I have returned today,” she replied. Then she propositioned him. She also requested of him, “Bring me that pomegranate, the one at the edge of the highest branch.” He scrambled up the tree and brought it to her.

When he later returned home, he found his wife lighting the fire. He entered, and got into it. “What is this?” she asked him. “Such and such happened to me today,” he answered her. “I was that woman,” she told him. He did not believe her, until she supplied evidence. He said to her, “At any rate, my intention was to sin.” For all his remaining days this righteous man suffered, until he finally died a peculiar death.⁴⁰

The woman, whose name is not known to us, appears in the story in two roles: one is her “real” identity, that of the Rabbi’s wife – chaste, pious and sexually abstinent. Her other identity is assumed – that of Haruta, the prostitute. Two faces of R. Hiyya are also revealed in this short story. One is his everyday personality, that of the sage, the ascetic and the scholar. The other side, sensual, adulterous and wild, is repressed. Unlike his wife, however, R. Hiyya does not take on a different identity in order to discover the hidden side of his personality. R. Hiyya, according to his own judgment, falls into temptation and sin, but he always remains Rabbi Hiyya. It is his wife who reveals the unexpected in her personality by masquerading as somebody else. She chooses a role that presents her as the exact opposite of the person whom others around her have always assumed she must be. It is she, however, who, though split in two, is able to relate to the incident with perfect equanimity, even a little humor. She arrives home and, as if nothing has happened, lights the oven to bake bread, whereas R. Hiyya arrives home in a spiritual tempest, tortured by his mammoth moral failing. In fact, because R. Hiyya could not overcome his evil inclination, he is unable to forgive himself for the rest of his life. The story ends with the hellish image of R. Hiyya getting into the hot oven and torturing himself “until he dies a peculiar death.”

R. Hiyya bar Ashi is a man whose ambition in life is to become holy. There is a tradition that a man on the path of righteousness should do beyond that which the halacha demands of him, and so he should deny himself even those things permissible to an ordinary man. In keeping with this tradition, it seems that R. Hiyya decided to lead a life of celibacy and so separated himself sexually from his wife. Although the Torah commands a man to fulfill the obligation of having relations with his wife (onah, which, according to the rabbinic interpretation, means that he must have intercourse with her a minimum number of times depending on his profession),⁴¹ the Rabbis decreed that, after giving birth to a son and a daughter, a woman can voluntarily forego her right to sexual relations with her husband and commit to a life of celibacy.⁴² It is possible that R. Hiyya exacted permission from his wife to end their sexual relations. From the evidence of the story, however, it is clear that she could not have consented with her whole heart. When R. Hiyya’s wife catches her husband praying each day to be saved from the evil inclination, she realizes that struggling or praying for celibacy is already not celibacy.⁴³ It is obvious to her that her husband still remembers and passionately yearns for the pleasures of the senses.

If, as the end of the story suggests, R. Hiyya’s wife had intended all along to change the nature of her relationship with her husband, then why does she go about it by such a devious route? Why not approach him directly, or why not try to lure him back into her wifely arms? Apparently, within the spiritual context of their relationship, such an alternative was out of the question. R. Hiyya and his wife are trapped in the confines of their own life choices.

Within the gender asymmetry of the halachah, she refrains from any dialogue unacceptable to the value system which they have internalized.

We can assume that, even if R. Hiyya’s wife had broached the subject with her husband, R. Hiyya is unlikely to have listened. He may have confessed to a certain ongoing attraction for the sensual world, but he probably would have maintained that this attraction was the very obstacle needing to be overcome. The woman in the story therefore knows herself to have no meaningful voice in her marriage.

MASKS AND TRUTH

It is only when R. Hiyya prostrates himself in prayer that he reveals his true face, shedding his mask of piety. When R. Hiyya takes off his mask, his wife is able to witness, albeit fleetingly, her husband’s face. And this is the very moment at which she chooses to wear a mask of her own. There can be no comparison between the woman’s mask and that of her husband. He masquerades as what he would really like to be but is not, whereas she disguises herself as what she in fact already is – a sensual woman – but is prevented from externalizing. His mask is his lie, while her mask reveals the truth. She could not find a voice when playing her role as R. Hiyya’s wife. Therefore, in order to disclose the other sides of themselves, this married couple need to deviate from their usual, prescribed modes of behavior. They need to masquerade.

R. Hiyya went to study Torah in his garden. He does not stay in his house, and he does not go to the study hall. An unusual setting is an invitation for unusual events. People often dream special dreams when not sleeping in their own beds. A change in physical location invites a change in the soul.

R. Hiyya’s wife disguises herself as a whore, “a well-known prostitute that lived in the city”⁴⁴ – Charuta. In talmudic Aramaic, charuta means the branch of a palm tree, a tree with erotic associations.⁴⁵ We see this in R. Hiyya’s youthful vigor in climbing the tree for the desired fruit, just as, in another story, R. Akiba climbs a palm tree toward Satan disguised as a beautiful girl.⁴⁶The letters of Charuta’s name in Hebrew spell out the word freedom, so subconsciously, these associations also cling to her actions. Note also that, through her actions, R. Hiyya’s unnamed wife gets a name and identity; she is no longer simply devaitu, “(the woman) of his house,”⁴⁷implying male possession and ownership. Ironically, she gains her freedom in the guise of a prostitute, a profession that toys with men’s ownership of women as being at best temporary and non-exclusive.

R. Hiyya is incapable of perceiving his wife’s erotic nature, but he is more than willing to recognize these features in Haruta the prostitute. What is more, the prostitute costume is so perfect that R. Hiyya bar Ashi does not recognise his own wife parading before him so seductively. Though there are places in the tradition that claim that not looking at one’s wife is a mark of extreme piety,⁴⁸ his failure to recognize her strains credulity in a story drawn from domestic life. The only way to account for it is to acknowledge the degree to which R. Hiyya is estranged from intimacy with his wife.

For R. Hiyya, his fall is a total collapse. It is as if his whole life has been a failure, and he cannot forgive himself. He finds no way to fan the fires sweeping his soul, except by entering into the heat of the same hot oven that had been lit by his wife upon returning home to her everyday life (as if nothing spectacular had happened). After succumbing to Haruta, R.Hiyya finds his wife by the hearth, ready to bake bread, which is itself a figure for her housewifely devotion and, elsewhere in the Bible, for sexual relations.⁴⁹ When she begins to knead the dough and heat up the oven, it is as if she is humorously making a transference from the sexual act to a symbol for it.

In our story, R. Hiyya’s wife has a far greater ability to integrate sexuality into her personality than her husband, for whom desire is unwholesome and deserving of severe punishment. While she is forced into a masquerade to satisfy her desires, she is not unduly distressed by the meaning of the sexual act itself. On the other hand, he chooses to repress his sexual desire so much that when he surrenders to it, he is inconsolable and unforgiving, especially towards himself.

The voice of R. Shmuel bar Nahmani and the story of R. Hiyya and his wife each in their own way define the problematic nature of eros in post-biblical Jewish thought. While women’s sexual pleasure is affirmed, their desire is seen as threatening, and as a result they are deprived of a voice in their own sexuality. They are set up to be dominated. Some husbands can choose to take care of their wives’ sexual needs, while others choose to evade this issue through avoiding sexual desire altogether, until the woman sees to it that it can be avoided no longer. These are the dynamics of desire in a fallen, patriarchal world that the Lurianic interpretation of Lilith and her destiny seek to overturn.

CHAPTER 4: LILITH INCARNATE

In this chapter we deal with the pre-Lurianic Lilith, the demon incarnate, whose story was briefly told in our first chapter. By looking at elements from the mythological and Jewish traditions that culminate in the (Pseudo) Ben Sira story and which are then elaborated further in early Jewish mysticism, we aim to present here a composite, though not exhaustive portrait of the demonic woman who comes to represent men’s fears and anxieties about sexuality in the pre-modern period. The problematics of eros in Jewish men’s consciousness are writ large, as we shall see, in this mythological depiction of Lilith.

ROOTS

In the Bible, Lilith is first mentioned in the book of Isaiah in a section prophesying how a settled city will become a desolate hill:

Thorns shall grow up in its palaces,
Nettles and briers in its stronghold.
It shall be a home of jackals,
An abode of ostriches.
Wildcats shall meet hyenas,
Goat-demons shall greet each other;
There too the Lilith shall repose
And find herself a resting place.

It is clear that the Lilith finds a place of rest amidst human ruins, but what exactly is the Lilith – beast, bird or demon? The classical Jewish commentaries are divided over this point. Targum Yonatan and Rashi maintain that we are dealing with a species of demon who likes to frequent ruins. Radak admits that Lilith may be a demon, but also raises the possibility that it may be a beast who “screams at night, or a bird who flies at night.” He notes that the root of the word Lilith can be found in two other words – one is laylah (night), with which it has a phonetic resemblance, another is the word y’lala (howl). Hence, he postulates that this animal is not only active at night-time, but also “screams at night.” Biblical scholar, S. R. Driver, argues that the Lilith is a bird of the night who flies in a circular fashion. Drawing a link to the root lili or luli, indicating the circular motion of a storm, he connects it to the Sumerian storm spirit.⁵¹ This circular motion is embodied in the biblical lul, signifying a spiral staircase.⁵²

Most contemporary scholars agree that the Lilith is a devil. Lilith already appears as a she-demon in the Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumeria, 1800-1700 B.C.), where the story is told of a mythological tree “by whose trunk the maiden Lilith built her house.”⁵³ She is the female counterpart to Lillu in the Sumerian “King List,” and is believed by scholars to be both a harlot and a vampire.⁵⁴ In ancient Sumerian, lil signifies a spirit or a storm, in both concrete and mythological contexts. According to Yehezkel Kaufmann, the Lilith is the spirit of ruins. Only at a later stage did the word Lil become associated with the Semitic word for night (laylah), so that the storm-demons were additionally identified with the demons of the night.⁵⁵ Another possible source for Lilith is the root lalu or lulu. In the extensive library of King Asurbanipal there are thousands of tablets, many of which are full of conjurations whose purpose is the exorcism of various demons. The Babylonian she-devil, Lilith, usually appears as a member of a demonic triad including Lilu, Lilitu, and Ardath-Lili. The Akkadians, who adopted the Sumerian pantheon, often translated the names of gods into their own Semitic language. In Akkadian, Lalu implies plenty or excess, while lulu signifies lust and promiscuity.⁵⁶ This adds two additional character traits that might be ascribed to Lilith: a sense of ever-increasing abundance which can lead to greed, and the desire for this abundance, which may devolve into lust and promiscuity.⁵⁷

We like to link this dimension of Lilith to the Hebrew word holalut, meaning folly or madness, with an entire system of related associations.⁵⁸ Rashi claims that holalut implies something mixed up or muddled⁵⁹. This is also the sense in which it is used in the Mishna, where holalut indicates a state of consciousness characterized by chaos and confusion – possibly connected to the spiral movement we earlier linked to the Sumerian roots of lil, or lilu. The name Lilith associates these turbulent features with the rebellious woman who brings her inner turmoil into the lives of those who fall under her spell.

To summarize, then, we can list the following traits as ramifications of the name Lilith:

• night (leila)
• howling (y’lala)
• demonic spirit (lil)
• storm (lil)
• circular movement (lil, lul)
• spiral ascension (luli)
• abundance and excess (lalu)
• lust, promiscuity, and debauchery (lulu)

RABBINIC INTERPRETATION & FANTASY

When a rabbinic storyteller in 9th century Babylonia gave the name Lilith to the first woman on earth, he was building on this web of associations. Before that, she was called by the rabbis of the midrash, “the first Eve.” They came to this idea as an interpretation of the verse in Genesis: “male and female He created them” (1: 27).⁶⁰ The literal interpretation of this verse indicates that male and female were created simultaneously, both receiving the name “Adam.” Thus, the first Eve was created together with Adam from the earth (Heb. adamah), without partiality to either one. In one version of this interpretation, Adam and the “first Eve” were created back-to-back and later separated, paralleling the legend Plato tells in The Symposium of an originally hermaphroditic and thus androgynous creature.⁶¹ But “the first Eve returned to her ground”⁶² – because, in one midrash, God despairs of her bloody secretions⁶³ – and another needed to be created, which explains the account in Genesis 2 of woman created from man’s rib. This second creation story is the source of rabbinic sources on preferred sexual positions for men and women, the focus of the debate in the Lilith story. The rabbis say each should face toward where he or she was created: “the man toward the earth, the woman toward the man.”⁶⁴

In addition to the midrashic first Eve, a demonic Lilith is named in the Talmud. “R. Hanina said: It is forbidden to sleep in a house alone. Whoever sleeps in a house alone is liable to be taken hold of by Lilith.”⁶⁵ Adam and Eve were also at-risk to these same nocturnal forces. After Cain killed Abel, they are said to have been chaste for 130 years to avoid producing further offspring who might kill one another, but during this time their sexuality was not completely dormant. They were attacked at night by lilin and lilot, male and female succubi, who seized hold of them and drew out their sperm and eggs in order to give birth to demon children.⁶⁶ These midrashic traditions draw attention to the biblical account of “divine beings cohabiting with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring” (Gen. 6: 2). The idea of a deep spiritual charge in sexuality, which can easily be turned toward the demonic, will be extensively developed in the Zohar and other works of early Jewish mysticism.

For the rabbis of the Talmud, the distinguishing features of the she-devil, Lilith, were her wild, long hair and wings. Women’s hair as a symbol of their sexuality was deeply problematic for the talmudic rabbis. According to the Talmud, “the hair of a woman is like nakedness.”⁶⁷ The Talmud’s discussion of the curses pronounced upon Eve mentions women’s long hair among them. In the opinion of the sages, long hair recalls the hair of the demon Lilith: “she grows long hair like Lilith, she crouches when urinating (Rashi: like an animal), and becomes a cushion for her husband (Rashi: because he is on top during intercourse).” In the same passage, commenting on the phrase that a woman is cursed in being “dressed as a mourner,” Rashi notes that a woman is embarrassed to go outside with wild hair.”⁶⁸ This entire train of thought views woman as an object, (a “cushion for her husband”), bestial (”she urinates like an animal”), and seemingly malevolent (”she grows long hair like Lilith”). These images evidence a deep revulsion toward women on the physical level. Whether or not women were embarrassed by their physical beings, it is clear that male, patriarchal culture was embarrassed by something untamable and unfathomable about women’s sexuality, which was associated with being wild and hairy, like an animal. The Babylonian Lilith was ready at hand as a cultural icon who concretized and gave shape to these rabbinic fears.

THE LILITH MYTH IS BORN

In the tenth century in Babylonia, these two discrete rabbinic traditions – that of a midrashic “first Eve” who made a brief appearance in Adam’s life and was then gone, and that of a Babylonian she-devil who seduces men with her wanton ways and appearance – were fused in a single story. In that juxtaposition, the myth of Lilith was born. The story is still midrashic insofar as it accounts for the creation of a “first Eve,” but it goes far beyond the realm of midrash as it develops its central figures into a literary construct closer to a short story.⁶⁹ The anonymous story-teller took the pseudonym “Ben Sira,” after the 1st century c.e. apocryphal writer of proverbs and parables. The book is currently extant in over a hundred manuscripts, has been published many times, and translated into Yiddish, Persian, and Arabic.⁷⁰ No doubt, a great part of the appeal was the frankly sexual way in which the author told his scandalous tales:

When God created Adam and saw that he was alone in this universe, God said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone’ (Gen. 2: 18). He immediately created a woman for him, who was taken from the earth, like he had been. He called her name Lilith, and brought her to Adam. They both immediately began to quarrel. This one (Adam) said, ‘You should lie underneath me,’ and this one (Lilith) said, ‘You lie underneath me, as we were both created equally, and we both are of the earth.’

Neither of them could convince the other.

When Lilith saw that this was the case, she pronounced God’s ineffable name, flew into the air, and ran away. Adam immediately beseeched God in prayer, saying: Master of the Universe! This woman You gave me has already run away. The Holy One, blessed be He, immediately sent three angels, and He said to them: Go bring Lilith back home! If she so desires, she will come (back home). If not, do not bring her against her will.”

These three angels went immediately…and found her in the sea, in the place where the Egyptians would drown in the future. They took her and said to her, ‘If you come with us, then all is well, and if not, we will drown you in the sea.’

She said to them, ‘My friends, I know that the reason God created me was so that I could weaken the newborns until they are eight days old. From the day they are born until they are eight days old, I have power over them. From eight days onward I have no more power over male babies, but if it is a female, I have power over it for twelve days.”

They said to her: If you don’t come back with us, we will drown you in the sea!

She said to them: I cannot go back, because it is written in the Torah: ‘Then the first husband who divorced her shall not take her to wife again, since she has been defiled” (Deut. 24:4), and I have already slept with the Great Demon.⁷¹

They said to her: We will not leave you be until you agree that one hundred of your children die every day.”

At this point in the story, the angels explain to her that Jewish women will write out amulets, saying “Out Lilith!” and that they will inscribe the names of the three angels, Sanoy, Sansenoy and Semangalaf,⁷² to prevent Lilith from harming the mothers and newborns (a practice continued in some circles to this day). Lilith realizes that her power has indeed been circumscribed and that some of her demonic children must die every day. Despite this, she does not go back with the angels.

The first point to remark in the story is that Lilith asks “to lie on top,” that is, not to be subordinate in her ability to express sexual desire during intercourse with Adam.⁷³ Adam perceives her request as a threat. He would rather destroy the peace in the Garden of Eden than allow his wife to realize her desire. He fears losing control. What Lilith has requested not only threatens his authority in the marriage, but it also disturbs his sense of mastery in all areas of life. He thus prefers a model of the family in which he alone is given the right and the power to decide how desire should be expressed. So conceived, his wife’s function is essentially passive, since it precludes any desire on her part. Adam decides when and how much sexual activity will take place between them. If Lilith demands her own sexual voice, she upsets Adam’s emotional balance, and this in turn threatens everything in his world. Such a woman is deemed devious and demonic.

In the confrontation with Adam, Lilith stands up to unreasonable domination. She knows that she and Adam have been created equally, and she will not tolerate being controlled by her equal partner. In the confrontation with the angels, she uses her knowledge of Torah to foil their errand. The angels themselves are portrayed as compromising their mission, for God told them explicitly not to force Lilith’s hand. Like Milton’s Lucifer, she concludes that it is better to be a demon at the Red Sea, than a slave in Eden. All of this indicates that the author of this midrashic short story seems to have a hidden sympathy for the problematic and even tragic figure he has created. At least one feminist author has suggested that there was an original women’s folktale embedded in this story, which was turned by a male author into an anti-feminist fable.⁷⁴ The misogynist element enters the tale in Lilith’s transformation into a baby-killing demon, who is hell-bent on destroying the progeny of Adam and Eve and their descendants. This demonization of the threatening feminine is carried much further in the medieval elaborations of the Lilith legend.

LILITH’S CAREER AS A DEMONESS

Daniel Boyarin has argued that “a change took place in Jewish gender ideology in the early Middle Ages – a change that resulted in a much more essentialized notion of women as dangerous and threatening.”⁷⁵ We can see this in the revision of the Lilith story by a commentary on the Zohar. The Midrash HaNe’elam on Zohar Hadash cannot bear the thought that Adam and his first wife were both created equally from the earth. If they had both been created from the same elements, they should have reacted similarly to life’s challenges, and both would have resisted the importuning of the serpent equally. It therefore maintains that woman was not created from the earth, but rather from its refuse and dregs, while the inner quality of the earth that Adam was created from was good. This is how the commentator explains why she became identified with the damaging force rather than Adam”

“R. Yitzhak said in the name of Rav: Adam and his soul-mate were created together. As it is written, ‘Male and female He created them.’ And then He took her from his back, and prepared her, and brought her to Adam. As it is written, ‘He took one of his ribs” (Gen. 2:21) R. Yehoshua said: This is the first Eve, who was taken from him. She is the one who does damage to people. As it is written: ‘And He took one of his ribs’ – this means He took (away) the first woman, because she was a damaging spirit. ‘And closed up the flesh at that spot’ (literally, ‘underneath her,’ i. e. instead of her) – meaning that he brought a different one instead of her. Rava said: This one (the second Eve) was made of flesh and bones, while the other one (the first Eve, Lilith), was not. And what then was she? R. Yitzhak said: The filth of the earth and its dregs.”⁷⁶

In this misogynist, essentialized version, Lilith was created from the earth’s pollution. In this reading, she was meant to be a demon from the start. Thus, it is natural that she be matched up with demon husbands. Already in texts prior to the Zohar, Lilith appears as the bride of the Great Demon, who is named Samael. As the literature develops, Lilith splits into two – Big Lilith and Little Lilith, in order to accommodate several husbands. She is Samael’s bride in the realm of the supernal kelippot, and on earth, she is the bride of the King of Demons, Ashmodai, who is known in many legends as a great antagonist of King Solomon.⁷⁷

In addition to these demonic husbands, Lilith attaches herself to Adam and to other men when they are asleep. She arouses them with erotic dreams, copulates with them and steals their semen in order to impregnate herself. From this human seed, Lilith begets demons, evil spirits, and other malevolent beings, all of whom take great pleasure in causing vexation to humans, including the death of their infants.⁷⁸

The Zohar supplies some details about how Lilith goes about seducing men by virtue of her unreserved sexuality. She spares no pains in making herself up for these trysts, like the married adulteress described in Proverbs:>

“Her hair is well cared-for, red as roses;
her face is pale, and blushes.
Six earrings has she on her ears,
fine cloths of Egypt cover her thighs.
All the earth’s hosts are before her mouth, ready and expectant.
Her tongue is a sharp sword, her words soft like oil,
her lips are beautiful, red as the rose, sweeter than any sweetness.>
She wears clothes of royal purple,
adorned with forty less one pieces of jewelry.
The fool is engaged by her and drinks from her cup of wine,
commits adultery with her, and is led astray.”⁷⁹

The Zohar goes on to say that, after the fool has fallen asleep in the whore’s bed, she will ascend to the heavens and testify against him. When she returns to the bed and he wakes up from his sleep, he wants her again. She then takes off the guise of the alluring woman and stands before him in the form of a male warrior, sword in hand and ready for battle: “She takes off her adornments and turns into a stern man, standing before him dressed in fiery attire.”⁸⁰ Lilith undresses to reveal her manhood, which is presented as if this were her true identity. Lilith’s complex nature thus encompasses both the seductive feminine and the aggressive masculine.

She/he is also a figure whose human characteristics are combined with bestial, wild elements. In another description of Lilith, her entire body is covered by long hair, though her head is smooth, like a goat, whose head has short, smooth hair and whose body hair is long and droopy.⁸¹ In this version, Lilith is imagined as a totally wild female creature, akin to a primal Neanderthal woman, half-ape, half-human, the absolute essence of primordial and prehistoric wildness. Or, she is like the terrifying winged harpy, the monstrous woman of Greek mythology. Lilith symbolizes the essence of female nature before culture stepped in to civilize it. She is free of any cultural code, and she is therefore both threatening and attractive at the same time.

Precisely because of this duality, Lilith could gain great power over men’s moral character, through their sexual nature. Here is what R. Eliezer Azcari has to say about Lilith’s demonic vices: “Sometimes a person has fantasies about either men or women, and has a seminal emission during the day, or in a dream at night caused by Lilith, who appears to this sinner as either a man or a woman.”⁸² In his interpretation, R. Eliezer Azcari follows the lead of the Zohar concerning Lilith and her entourage. Men who sleep alone are teased and enticed by one of the female demons, like Na’amah, for example:

“… Until Na’amah came, and because of her beauty, the sons of God erred after her…for she goes and wanders in the night, passing through the world, mocking men, causing them nocturnal emissions. Wherever there are men sleeping at home alone, (she) is with them, grabbing hold of them and clinging to them, taking their longings, and begetting their seed.”⁸³

Lilith takes on the form of different demonic apparitions to excite men as they dream. She lies behind the sexual fantasies of masturbation and, for R. Eliezer Azcari, it makes no difference whatsoever whether the dream occurs during sleep or waking. It also makes no difference whether it is a heterosexual or a homosexual fantasy, for Lilith can appear to men as a man.⁸⁴Lilith dons the dress of every forbidden passion.

Their anxiety about masturbation was so great that the Kabbalists believed that Lilith and her host became pregnant from drops of male seed spilt during dreams or erotic daydreaming, which then spawned all sorts of wicked demons. R. Hayyim Vital describes this process:

“…And that soul is drawn to her (to Lilith), and then the power of a damaging spirit which is born of that wife of harlotry unites with her, and it becomes one body for that soul. So it is that he who spills his seed in vain causes those drops of semen from which the future souls of his sons would have been born to become intermingled with the Sitra Ahra, where they receive bodies who were fashioned from the side of the Snake, the wife of harlotry.”⁸⁵

This process is equally at work if the father’s imagination is preoccupied with forbidden erotic fantasies during intercourse with his wife. The baby conceived at that moment will be given over to Lilith and vulnerable to her and her host at birth. According to the kabbalistic view, a man who sanctifies himself at the time of intercourse spares his children the dangerous encounter with Lilith: “Lilith has no power over the children of a man who sanctifies himself at the time of intercourse. The triad of angels known as Sanoy, Sansanoy, and Semangalaf watch over the child so that she cannot harm him/her.”⁸⁶

Lilith’s demonic sexuality not only imperils men. Women’s erotic dreams and fantasies are also the work of demons.⁸⁷ These are usually male demons affecting the souls of women in much the same manner as their female counterparts. Male demons cause women’s illicit sexual fantasies, which are regarded as “nocturnal emissions.” These demons can impregnate a woman and possess the souls of her children. A hasidic spiritual manual advises women who have had such evil dreams to bathe in the mikveh to purify themselves and protect their unborn children.⁸⁸Other sources maintain that those male demons who seduce and sleep with dreaming women are themselves born from the fornication of the she-devil Na’ama, who gives pleasure to sleeping men by causing wet dreams. She uses these men to impregnate herself and then issues male demons. According to the Kabbalist R. Shlomo Algazi, although Na’ama gives birth to these demons, it is their spiritual mother, Lilith, who rears them. If man awakes from his sleep full of sexual desire and makes love with his wife as a result of that passion, then the child born will be enslaved to Lilith. The child is rightfully hers, because the man’s desire during intercourse had been for Lilith and not for his chaste wife, a daughter of Eve.⁸⁹

According to an early kabbalistic tradition, among the victims of Lilith’s host we find none other than King David. A thirteenth- century manuscript, from the school of R. Solomon ben Adret, tells of a she-devil by the name of Igrat bat Mahlat, a member of Lilith’s circle of demons, who entered into David’s dream fantasies while he was sleeping in the desert. She caused him to spill his seed and with it subsequently gave birth to the king of demons – Ashmodai.⁹⁰

Perhaps it is their very lack of corporeal reality that provokes demons like Lilith, Na’amah, Igrat and Ashmodai to operate parasitically upon the body and soul of humans – through human psychology. In sixteenth-century Safed, R. Eliahu de Vidas explained:

“Whenever a man defiles himself through sin, through evil passion, (he) sleeps with Lilith. All the passions of the world come from Lilith, because Samael, who is a on a very subtle level of existence, does not have a way of taking hold of man, who is material. He therefore sends his woman, who is more physical…And these are all metaphors, just like King Solomon, of blessed memory, compared material possessions and worldly pleasures, (which draw their energy from Lilith), to a whore, as it says: “A woman comes toward him/ Dressed like a harlot, with set purpose.” (Proverbs 7:10).⁹¹

While hasidic folklore does portray Lilith as an actual demon, against whom there is an herbal remedy,⁹² Hasidism’s unique contribution is to understand the mythical demonology of the Kabbalah psychologically. While Samael, Lilith and their host may lay siege to human beings from the outside, they also represent, in the kabbalistic-hasidic tradition, the dark forces inside the human psyche – our unconscious drives and impulses. In such works of R. Tzaddok HaCohen of Lublin as “The Conversations of Demons” and “The Conversations of Servicing Angels,” his discussion of these angels and demons is almost exclusively concerned with the nature of the human soul. In another work, R. Tzaddok offers his interpretation of the talmudic injunction against sleeping in a house alone:

“He who sleeps in a house alone is taken hold of by Lilith” – the meaning is that he has a nocturnal emission, which is what the wife of harlotry seeks and desires…This means that this desire envelops man when he sleeps. Because of the powerful passion (he experiences) in his dream, he has a nocturnal emission. During his sleep, he has no conscious intention of overcoming his passion by means of his wisdom, so this desire is free to act upon him.”⁹³

Lilith’s hold on man is thus the illusion (Heb. achizat einayim, lit. “the holding of the eyes”) of forbidden desires in dreams. Now it becomes clear why Lilith tends to take her hold of men while they are sleeping “alone in a house.” Sleeping alone, away from society, facilitates the breakthrough of forbidden passions and deviancy can gain entry into consciousness.⁹⁴

When men lose control over their sexual desires, they feel that women pose a serious threat to their self-mastery. The dread which they experience causes them to have nightmares of a realm of dark, unfathomable beings. The Lilith myth incorporates masculine fears of the sensual, licentious woman who, because she possesses man during his sleep, is also making a mockery of him. As a projection from the world of men’s unconscious fears, this archetypal image becomes hardened into the eternal enemy of civilized men and women.

In her book, A Different Voice, Carol Gilligan argues that masculine thinking is characterised by its patterns of control.⁹⁵ Consider, for example, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, after which the relationship between the man and the woman hinges upon God’s curse of Eve – “And he shall rule over you.” Accordingly, men’s losing control to women is ominous and appears, mistakenly, as a violation of the divine order. The Zohar interprets the verse “My people’s rulers are babes,/ It is governed by women” (Isaiah 3:12), as describing a situation in which demonic, evil-minded women, are sent from Lilith to rule over Israel:

“Whenever men are found guilty before the Holy One, blessed be He, as we have previously explained, those women from above (who come) from the side of strict judgment, will in the future rule over them from the side of strict judgment, as it is written: ‘My people’s rulers are babes, It is governed by women.’ Women most certainly rule over them, and they are called ‘the bright blade of a revolving sword,’ not that they are the revolving sword, but they are rather the blade of that sword which is called “the sword that shall avenge my covenant, the ’sword of God, full of blood.’⁹⁶

Lilith and her host threaten to topple male supremacy. The moment women gain power, patriarchal man sees the demonic coming into play. Indeed it would seem that, for a man raised in this system of thought, an assertive woman cannot be other than a demon.

In this chapter, we have explored some of Lilith’s salient character traits. Her persona has been forged out of two separate sources – that of the rebellious woman who demands equality, and that of the murderous demon, who kills babies and rapes men while they sleep. Lilith’s figure is contrasted with other constructions of woman. Eve, as the chief example, represents the opposite pole: a woman who accepts male dominance and whose power lies in childbearing, in family stability, and in chastity. The Ari sought to re-unite the two wives of Adam, i.e. the two faces of the female archetype – Lilith and Eve – in order to end the schizophrenia of women’s condition and thereby reconcile these two faces into one complete feminine whole. As we move on to the Second Gate we will encounter that “strange and wonderful metamorphosis,” as Isaiah Tishy puts it, of our mother Leah, the wife of Jacob, transformed into Lilith.⁹⁷

FOOTNOTES

1.Boyarin, Biale, Adler, Plaskow, Blu Greenberg

2. Wherever possible we have quoted from the NJPS translation of the Hebrew Bible. For a number of citations where we are explicating rabbinic midrash, a more literal translation has been necessary, and we have substituted our own. B.Eruvin 100b, Rav Yitzhak bar Avdimi enumerates ten curses upon Eve. On the messianic overturning of these curses, see Luria, Sefer Hagilgulim, chap. 23: And this is the curse of “and he shall rule over you”… and after woman is freed of this cursem when “death is destroyed forever” (Isa. 25:8), she will be “her husband’s crown” (Prov. 12:4). Understand this well.” Shabetai Tzvi, who saw himself as the Messiah, is quoted as saying: “Woe unto you, poor women, who, because of Eve’s sin, must give birth with pain, and you are subjugated to your husbands, and everything you do is dependent upon their approval;” Happy are you, that I have come to the world, to make you free and happy like your husbands, for I have come to do away with the sin of Adam. ” (Gershom Scholem, Shabbatai Tzevi, p. 327).

3. B.Eruvin 100b, Rav Yitzhak bar Avdimi enumerates ten curses upon Eve. On the messianic overturning of these curses, see Luria, Sefer Hagilgulim, chap. 23: And this is the curse of “and he shall rule over you”… and after woman is freed of this cursem when “death is destroyed forever” (Isa. 25:8), she will be “her husband’s crown” (Prov. 12:4). Understand this well.” Shabetai Tzvi, who saw himself as the Messiah, is quoted as saying: “Woe unto you, poor women, who, because of Eve’s sin, must give birth with pain, and you are subjugated to your husbands, and everything you do is dependent upon their approval;” Happy are you, that I have come to the world, to make you free and happy like your husbands, for I have come to do away with the sin of Adam. ” (Gershom Scholem, Shabbatai Tzevi, p. 327).

4. Adler, Engendering Judaism, p. 124. Adler notes the possible exception of Berachot 61a, that men shouldn’t walk behind women, because they were created first.

5. Blu Greenberg, On Women and Judaism, p. 45.

6. Robert M. Cover, “The Supreme Court 1982 Term, Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review, 97 (1983), pp. 4ff.

7. David Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant

8. “Halakhah and Aggadah,” in The Complete Works of C.N. Bialik, (Tel Aviv: D’vir, 1947), p. 207; Gordon Tucker draws the connection between Cover and Bialik in “The Sayings of the Wise are like Goads: An Appreciation of the Works of Robert Cover,” Conservative Judaism (REF), pp.21-22.

9. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (1988)

10. Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Post-Feminist” Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 7.

11. Jo Milgrom, “Some Second Thoughts about Adam’s First Wife,” in Genesis 1-3 in the History of Exegesis: Intrigure in the Garden, ed. Gregory Allen Robbins; see also Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype

12. See Eli Yassif, The Stories of Ben Sira in the Middle Ages (Hebrew), pp. 63ff.

13. Scholem, Kabbalah, 356-61.

14. Patai (1967), 180-225.

15. See the anthology, Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Recreate the World’s First Woman (1998), and the magazine, Lilith, which has been promoting a feminist Jewish agenda since 1976.

16. Howard Schwartz, Reimagining the Bible,: The Storytelling of the Rabbis, p. 65.

17. Plaskow, :the Coming of Lilith,” in Ruether, ed., Religion and Sexism

18. This comment draws upon the language of Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and the Self (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 11-15.

19. Jakov Lind, from The Stove and Other Stories (1986), 59-61. Freud, Totem and Taboo

20. Freud, Totem and Taboo

21. Nitzah Abarbanel, Eve and Lilith (Hebrew), p. 15.

22. Siegmund Hurwits, Lilith: The First Eve: Historical and Psychological Aspects of the Dark Feminine

23. Emma Jung, :The Anima as an Elemental Being,” in Animus and Anima, p. 46

24. Look up David Biale book (Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counterhistory)?

25. For a survey of the continuities between kabbalah and earlier versions of the Jewish myth, see Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Messianism, Ch. 1; on the development of the theological continuum stretching from Assyrian and Canaanite paganism to highly developed Kabbalistic myth, see O. Ezrahi, “On the Theology of King Solomon” (Hebrew), Hayyim Acheirim, REFERENCE.

26. This is the view of Yehuda Liebes, “Myth vs. Symbol in the Zohar and in Lurianic kabbalah,” 225-26.

27. Our summary is based on Gershom Scholem’s scholarship on Lurianic kabbalah, which is spread throughout his writings: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, On Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, On the Mystical Shape of the Gohea. Perhaps the most accessible and succinct version is found in the volume, Kabbalah (1974), a reprinting of all Scholem’s essays from the Encyclopedia Judaica. See especially, pp. 128-44.

28. There was a thin film of divinity left, the reshimu, which is compared to “the drops of oil that remain in a vessel after it has been emptied.” Scholem, Kabbalah, 130. Liebes argues that Scholem has overemphasized the idea of a vacuum. Rather, he sees that the light of the Infinite returned to fill the empty space and that out of this light came the created worlds, which are not qualitatively different from the essence of the infinite itself, except in intensity and clarity. “Myth vs. Symbol in the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah,” p. 227.

29. Aryeh Kaplan, Inner Space, p. 92.

30. Pesikta de Rav Kahana 12, 24. See also Shemot Rabbah 28:5. This is the Lurianic comment on the midrash: “This is how you should understand Chazal’s comment that at the Red Sea God appeared to them in the form of a young man with a black beard, like a warrior full of zeal, ready to engage the Egyptians and drown them in the sea; and at the giving of the Torah on Shavuot He seemed like an old man whose beard is white as snow. In fact, the beard of Ze’eir Anpin is black as a raven…and at the time of the giving of the Torah, on Shavuot, it ascends up into the beard of Arich Anpin, where it becomes white. This is the reason why He appeared to them then as an old man dressed in white at that time…” Sha’ar HaKavannot – discourses on the holiday of Shavuot, no. 1.

31. Lawrence Fine, “Purifying the Body in the Name of the Soul: The Problem of the Body in Sixteenth Century Kabbalah” in Eilberg-Schwartz, ed. People of the Body, p. 130.

32. Rachel Elior, “The Doctrine of Transmigration in Galya Raza”

33. Scholem, “Gilgul: the Transmigration of Souls” in On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 212

34. Scholem, Gilgul, 214

35. Liebes, “Myth vs. Symbol,” 227.

36. See Liebes, “The Two Ewes of the Doe” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, Vol. 10, ppp. 114-16.

37. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Beautiful Maiden Without Eyes: peshat and Sod in Zoharic hermeneutics”

38. Sha’ar haHaqdamot, quoted in Wolfson, p. 187.

39. Boyarin, p. 129.

40. B. Shabbat 36a.

41. For the scholar, this minimum was once a week. M. Ketubot

42. NEED FOOTNOTE ON RABBINIC DECREE.

43. On the evil inclination being understood generally as sexuality, see the comprehensive survey by F.C. Porter, “The Yetzer Hara: A Study in the Jewish Doctrine of Sin,” in Biblical and Semitic Studies: Critical and Historical Essays by the Members of the Semitic and Biblical Faculty of Yale University (N.Y.: Scribner’s, 1901).

44. Rashi, ad locem./

45. Rashi on B. Sukkah 32a: “Charuta: a palm branch which has become stiff, like the branches of other trees.”

46. NEED TO FIND SOURCE. See also Midrash Tehillim on Ps. 92 on the date palm’s desire for its mate as an emblem of Israel’s desire for the Holy One.

47. See B. Yoma 2a on the definition of household implying one’s wife. Yet, see Shulhan Aruch, Even HaEzer 33,7, for citation of a pietist who claimed that he had never looked at his own wife, “as he had turned his heart away from vanity.” See also Midrah Tanhuma Lech Lecha 5 on Gen 12:1, Abraham’s comment to Sarah “Now I know that you are a beautiful woman,” implying that he had not previously looked at her.

48. See Gen, 39:6: Potphar “left all that he had in Joseph’s hand… save the bread that he ate,” and Rashi ad locem. “‘Save the bread’ – meaning his wife, but the Torah speaks in a clean language.” See also Proverbs See B. Yoma 2a on the definition of household implying one’s wife. Yet, see Shulhan Aruch, Even HaEzer 33,7, for citation of a pietist who claimed that he had never looked at his own wife, “as he had turned his heart away from vanity.” See also Midrah Tanhuma Lech Lecha 5 on Gen 12:1, Abraham’s comment to Sarah “Now I know that you are a beautiful woman,” implying that he had not previously looked at her.

49. See Gen, 39:6: Potphar “left all that he had in Joseph’s hand… save the bread that he ate,” and Rashi ad locem. “‘Save the bread’ – meaning his wife, but the Torah speaks in a clean language.” See also Proverbs 30:20, where sex is called food: “So is the way of an adulterous woman,; she eats and wipes her mouth and says, I have done nothing wrong.”

50. See Ruth Caldron, “The Secondary Figure as an Archetype in the Aggadic Literature in the Babylonian Talmud” (Master’s Thesis, Hebrew University), for a discussion of this story as an example of how women and men react differently to sexual failure.

51. Driver, “Lilith,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 1959, pp. 56-57. He does not identify the biblical lilit with the night raptor owl presently known as a lilit (Strix aluco), but with the night bird called tahmas (Caprimulgus), in English, Goat sucker or Night jar. In fact, the tahmas flies at night in circular movements. It is often seen flying around goats and other animals in order to eat the insects usually found near such animals. See Animals and Plants of Israel, published by the Society for the Protection of Nature and the Ministry of Defense 1986, Birds, p. 294.

52. See I Kings 6:8. Rashi: “lulim – the Targum Yonatan says: a spiral…which means a stone construction with stairs. One who walks up this is like someone encircling a pillar, which ascends higher and higher, but it does not need a slope like a ladder, as its circumference is already inclined.”

This verse comes directly after the verse which tells us that the Temple was built without the usage of metal tools: “And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone that was made ready before it was brought there; so that there was neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was being built.” This became one of the focuses for discussion in ancient Jewish demonology, since there is a Talmudic legend (B. Gittin 68), whose source is in The Testament of Solomon (first to third centuries A.D.), which discusses Solomon’s complicated relations with Ashmadai the King of Demons. Solomon called him to help with the construction of the Temple. In the Talmudic version, Ashmadai is asked to help find the shamir – a special worm that can drill into stones and cut them without any need of metal tools. If we further examine Solomon’s ties with the world of demons, we find that commentators from the Targum Yonatan on Job until the middle ages, identified the Queen of Sheba as an embodiment of Lilith (see Scholem, New Topics…).

53. Ancient Near Eastern Texts, REF.

54. Jo Milgrom, NEED PAGE.

55. Y. Kaufmann, The History of the Faith of Israel, Bialik, Jerusalem, and Dvir, Tel Aviv, 5736, vol. 1, p. 428.

56. See Pintel, REF (Hebrew), the chapter on The Babylonian Lilith.

57. Building on the theme of lust, R. Tzaddok HaCohen of Lublin attempts to link the two approaches – demon and animal/bird. He asserts that every spiritual entity has its terrestrial counterpart. The damage that these demons cause, he says, is very concrete, so the demon or evil spirit is named after the type of damage which he or she causes. The Lilith, then is a female animal “common to the country of Sabea (in Africa), in which, because of its airs, sexual lust is very strong. And the nature of this animal… is great lust, demanding and grabbing any male beast.” This, on the “natural” side. On the spiritual side, it is also called “the power of the wife of harlotry in the world.” The ancient “theory of the airs” assumes that every place has a special quality in its air. This quality, be it good or bad, passes into the souls of those who live there. The Rabbis said that the air of Israel makes one wise (Baba Batra 158/b), while R. Zaddok thinks the air of Africa causes unbearable lust and passion. See Dover Tzedek, 4, the entry beginning with the word u-vakasha.

58. Holalut must certainly be an expression of the negative aspect of the word hallel (praise) which may also be related to hilat (a halo) of light. As it says, “the light shining” (yahel) (Job 31: 26) or “When his lamp shone (behilo) over my head (Job 29: 3). Kabbalists and Hasidim have noted this in their discourses on the significance of praise (hallel); see REF.

The Rabbis commented that the letter heh can be interchanged with the letter het (hallel – challel), so that kodesh hilulim (holy for praise-giving) mentioned in Leviticus 19:24 can also be read kodesh chilulim (holy for secularizing or desecrating), in the case of taking that which was designated as ma’aser sheni (the second category of tithes, which was to be eaten in Jerusalem) and freeing it of its holiness by redeeming it with money (see B. Berahot 35a). If we have already taken Lilith from holalut to hilul, and from hilul to chilul (desecration), then we have gone a significant distance. There is also challal (a dead person). Lilith’s soul is also the seat of emptiness, which seeks fulfillment through revenge. Pregnancy is also linked to this root, since a pregnant woman is called hallah – “Zion travailed (hallah) and at once bore her children!” (Isa. 66: 8). We have gone from the two-letter combination l”l to ch”l, which can both be found in the word challel. In this analysis, we have used “gates” of two letters as does the Sefer Yetzira – not confining ourselves only to three-letter roots, which were imported into Hebrew in the middle ages from Arabic grammar. The linguistic gate ch’l takes us even further, to the mystery of dance (machol), forgiveness (mechila), and challal (space).

59. The verse “Wanton (or foolish) men (holalim) cannot endure in your sight” (Psalms 5: 6) is interpreted by Rashi: holalim – foolish ones, and in the language of the mishna ‘mixed ones’ (see B. Sanhedrin 42a). This is also how the concept of holalut was explained in Kohelet 7: 25 “and foolishness is madness.” There Rashi comments: holalut is foolishness and confusion. Elsewhere in Kohelet, it says “His talk begins as silliness and ends as disastrous madness” (10: 13) – “confusion and something which is mixed up” (Rashi).

60. See Gershom Scholem, Elements of the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (Hebrew), p. 386, on how the Lilith legend reads the difference between the two creation stories in a new manner. [WHERE POSSIBLE - YOU"LL WANT TO FIND ENGLISH REFERENCES FOR SCHOLEM & OTHERS AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH.]

61. NEED REF

62. Bereishit Rabbah 22, 7

63. See Bereishit Rabbah 17, 7: “In the beginning He created her, but saw her full of secretions and blood flowing out of her. So he returned and created her a second time.”

64. B. Niddah 31b.

65. B. Shabbat 151b. As we find suggested in the Will of R. Eliezer HaGadol: “My son, do not sleep alone at night in any house, for in these circumstances Lilith is liable to cause damage. And if she takes hold of a man or a baby, she takes them out of the world” (Para. 54). Later authorities took this view to be law, as we find in the Mishna Berurah, Orakh Hayyim, chap. 239, sub-chapter 9: “Our sages of blessed memory have stated that whoever sleeps in a house alone, meaning at night, is taken hold of by Lilith, and house means even a room.” The Zohar interprets “alone in a house” to mean “a house alone” – i.e. to sleep in a house which itself is alone, i.e. an isolated house in a field. “Whoever is alone in a house, whether it be day or night, in a solitary house – especially at night. What is meant by alone? Isolated from other houses, or someone walking alone at night, might also be hurt” (Zohar III, 45a.). See also the references brought by the Nitzotzei Zohar, there.

66. REF.

67. REF. – THIS WAS IN YOUR FN. #76, unattributed.

68. B. Eruvin 100b. The full text of this passage is based on a word-by-word interpretation of Gen. 3: 16: “Eve was cursed with ten curses, as it is written, “And to the woman He said, ‘I will make most severe’ (alt. ‘I will greatly multiply’): this is the two drops (sorts) of blood, one being that of menstruation, and the other that of virginity; ‘Your pangs’ – this is the pain of raising children; ‘in childbearing’ – this is the pain of pregnancy; ‘in pain shall you bear children’ – this is self-evident; Yet your urge shall be for your husband’ – this teaches us that the woman longs for her husband (Rashi: ‘desires intercourse’) when he travels; “and he shall rule over you” – this teaches us that the woman asks (for sex) in her heart, while the man demands it verbally.

So far, we have only numbered seven curses!

When R. Dimi came back from Babylon, he said (i.e., numbered three additional curses): she was dressed like a mourner, excommunicated from the society of man, and imprisoned in jail” (Rashi: imprisoned in jail – ‘it is honorable for the daughter of the king to remain inside.’)

69. See G. Scholem, “Elements of the Kabbalah and its Symbolism,” p. 386, on this legend and how it reads the difference between the two creation stories in a new manner.

70. A scientific version of the book, including extensive debate on its structure and history was published by Eli Yassif, The Ben Sira Fables from the Middle Ages (Hebrew), Magnes Press, 5745. For the text of the story, see pp.

71. However, according to the halakha, only if the divorced woman married another man is it forbidden for her to go back to her first husband. If she was divorced, and someone else slept with her without marriage, she is permitted to her first husband. See Me’oray Or, (a alphabetically arranged collection of definitions of Kabbalistic terms compiled by R. Meir Paporos, one of the authors of the Lurianic corpus) in which Lilith is presented as an archetype of a divorced woman: “A divorced woman is known as Lilith, who was divorced from holiness and became the wife of another man, an other man” (the letter Gimmel, entry 25).

72. Reuven Margoliot, Malakhey Elyon, p. 236, suggests that the name Sansanoy may be derived from sansenay (the boughs of) the date palm, mentioned in the Song of Songs (7:9) “Let me climb the palm,/ Let me take hold of its branches (sansenav)”. We discussed the sexual connotations of the date tree in relation to several Talmudic stories in Ch. 3. In the Zohar, vol. 2, in the Haichalot d’kedusha 251a., there is a similar name of an angel – Sansanaya – who is appointed over one of the gates of the Fourth Hall. There is another angel facing him on the left side, with the same name – “And he is responsible for the askara disease which attacks babies.” The severe throat disease known as askara in often identified in the Zohar with Lilith, the killer of babies. It is therefore reasonable to assume that we are talking about the same angel, the one who is appointed over Lilith, and is known as Sansanaya in the Zohar, and Sansanoy in the Alphabet of ben Sira. Semangalaf is a self-referential name, meaning the symbol is engraved.

73. In Tractate Kallah (chapter one), we find the following sentence: “If he is underneath and she is on top, he is seized by shaking. If he is on top and she is underneath, this is the way of human beings. If both of them were as one, this is the way of the stubborn.” According to ben Sira, what is called in the Talmud “the way of the sons of Adam (man)” is the only position acceptable to Adam, their father. It is possible that this fragment was the basis of the Ben Sira story. It is interesting to note that if someone uses the position that Lilith prefers, “shaking seizes him” (Heb. ochazat-hu avit). Compare B. Shabbat 151b, quoted above, about someone who sleeps in a house alone at night and is “taken hold of by Lilith” (Heb. ochazat-hu Lilit). This entire section addresses itself to the man – he is the one who uses her – has sex with her. The woman is not a partner to this halakha, which defines “the way of the sons of Adam.”

74. See Aviva Cantor, “Lilith, the Woman Who Would Be a Jew,” in Which Lilith, p. 19.

75. Boyarin, p. 193. For a more nuanced view, see David Biale, Ch. 3-5.

76. REF. to where in the ZOHAR.

77. On the two Liliths, see Ma’amar HaAtzilut HaSmalit (Treatise on the Emanation of the Left Side). On the development of the figure of Samael in the Hebrew sources, and on the difference between him and the “king of the Jewish demons,”Ashmodai, see, once again, Idit Pintel, G. Scholem, “New Elements,” page 165, and Joseph Dan, ” Samael, Lilith and the Concept of Evil in the Early Kabbalah,” Essential Papers on Jewish Mysticism.

78. In the Zohar, Lilith is commonly identified as the spiritual force causing the disease of askara, a fatal throat disease in infancy.

79. Zohar, II, 148a, in the Sitrey Torah section. In Zoharic thought, red hair is identified with the root of din, strict judgment, whose color is red. The number of Lilith’s pieces of jewelry – forty less one – is connected to the forty curses with which creation was cursed, the same as the number of lashes that the sinner receives – forty minus one (lamed tet, or la”t like the Aramaic word latia, which means curse). The Zohar, in the section on Parshat Behukotai (114b – 115a), also links this to the number of plagues that the Holy One, blessed be He, smites the sinning people with. He does so by means of thirty nine appointed officers who fly through the universe, descend to the “pit of the great abyss, get empowered there, surface, and smite the earth as punishment for the sins of man.”

This entire description is a paraphrase of the description of the adulterous woman found in Proverbs 7: 16-23: “‘I have decked my couch with covers/ Of dyed Egyptian linen;/ I have sprinkled my bed/ With myrrh, aloes and cinnamon./ Let us drink our fill of love till morning;/ Let us delight in amorous embrace./ For the man of the house is away./ He is off on a distant journey./ He took his bag of money with him/ And will return only at mid-month.’/ She sways him with her eloquence,/Turns him aside with her smooth talk./ Thoughtlessly he follows her,/ Like an ox going to the slaughter,/ Like a fool to the stocks for punishment–/ Until the arrow pierces his liver./ He is like a bird rushing into a trap,/ Not knowing his life is at stake.” This passage on the stormy licentious woman can be juxtaposed to the chaste “woman of valor” in Proverbs 31, as a parade example of the dichotomy in women’s images in patriarchal culture, which is central to this book’s argument.

80. Zohar, II, 148a, in the Sitrey Torah section. SAME PAGE REFERENCE?

81. “That group known as lilin are covered by hair from head to foot…Lilith has hair on her body but not on her head…just like a goat whose entire body is covered by hair while his head is smooth.” See Emek HaMelekh, Sha’ar Raisha d’Zaya, Ch. 30, p. 42b. See also the encyclopedia, Reuven Margoliot, Malakhey Elyon, p. 235, footnote 3. See also the Ner Mitzvah commentary on Sefer HaMitzvot Hagadol, (Saloniki 5570), the chapter on “The Ways of the Amorites,” p. 215b., and see Margoliot there.

82. AZCARI REF

83. Zohar, I, 19b. In the original there is a linguistic shift from the singular to the plural. We should therefore have translated this as “they mock men, and they beget their seed.” In order to create a unified sentence, we presented it in the singular. It is possible that this vagueness is intentional, in order to emphasize that we are not talking about one she-demon in particular, but rather about all of Lilith’s host (asksara).

The reference to the “sons of God” connects Na’amah to the beautiful daughters of man, whose beauty was so appealing to angels before the flood. The Zohar connects Na’amah to the sister of Tuval-Cain. However, in the midrash brought in the Yalkut Shimoni, this beauty is attributed to a woman by the name of Istahar. According to the midrash, Istahar refused to sin with these fallen angels and she escaped back to the heavens by means of the ineffable divine name: “Shamhazai (one of the angels) immediately saw a maiden by the name of Istahar. She found favor in his eyes, and he requested that she obey him. She answered him ‘I will not obey you until you teach me the ineffable divine name by which you ascend into the firmament when you pronounce it.’ He taught her the Name. She then pronounced it, ascended into the heaven, and did not defile herself. The Holy One, blessed He, said to her: ‘Since you did not succumb to sin, go, and take a place among these seven stars, in order that you be remembered forever. She was given a place in (a constellation). When Shamchazai and Azael saw this, they married women and begat Hewa and Hiya (sounds made when sighing)” (Yalkut Shimoni Bereshit, 6 – remez 44). In contrast to Na’ama, who apparently did whore with the sons of God, Istahar refrained from this temptation. What is common to them both is the transformation into a heavenly being, although Na’ama becomes the mother of demons while Istahar becomes a star in the heavens. Elsewhere, the Yalkut Shimoni quotes a tradition that identifies Queen Esther with the Babylonian Ishtar and the planet Venus: “R. Nehemia said; Her name was Haddasah. Why was she called Esther? Because the idol worshippers called her Ishtar, like the planet Venus.”(ibid., Esther 2, remez 1053). CHECK: SHOULD IT BE ISHTAR THROUGHOUT?

84. Lilith’s ability to also appear as a male is mentioned in the Zohar in another context: In the section called Sitrei Torah on Parshat Va-yetze, (I, 148a), there is a description of how Lilith dresses up and seduces man into having sex with her. As he sleeps peacefully, she ascends up to the heavens to prosecute him, receives permission from the heavenly court, and comes back to his bed. Then “that fool awakes and thinks to play with her like before, and she takes off her clothes, and is transformed into a valiant warrior facing him, wearing a terrifying and fiery armor, causing bone and soul to tremble…”

85. R. Hayyim Vital, Sha’ar HaKavanot, D’rushei Ha-laylah, discourse no. 7.

86. See Kehillat Ya’akov, the entry on “Death of Children.” This Kabbalistic writer distinguishes between someone who on the one hand, did not sanctify himself at the time of intercourse, but on the other hand also did not “defile himself” by forbidden thoughts. The dead child of the first sort of person is not totally in Lilith’s hands – she can only possess his dead body, while his soul is saved by the angelic triad. This is not the case with the son of the second sort of person, whose soul is also in Lilith’s clutches. It is interesting to note that the angels who save the child’s soul are also regarded by this author to be human-like incarnations of pure thought patterns that occur in the human psyche: Malakhey HaSharet (servicing angels) is a name for man’s intellectual powers, being the pure thought in man.”(entry on “angels”).
On the sanctification of intercourse, see also Ezrahi, “Two Cherubs” (Hebrew), pp. 32-33.

87.It seems that the meditations proscribed for the Sh’ma which is recited before going to sleep are also effective against these demons! The Kabbalist and Halachic authority, R. Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad, in his book Ben Ish Hai (First Year Lectures, Parshat Pekudey), recommends that women, too, recite the Sh’ma, in order to heal the souls that were taken captive by the forces of uncleanness because of the sin of their having spilled their seed in vain, which refers to their erotic waters of desire: “Reading the sh’ma is efficacious for a woman also, for the seed that she expels due to the great degree of arousal awakened in her.”

88. R. Eliezer Tzvi of Komarno, Hanhagot HaTzadikim, letter dalet. The parentheses appear in the original:

“When a woman, God forbid, has an evil dream, which is her nocturnal emission, just like a man, as it written (Zohar, Bereshit 54b):

‘When a man dreams, female spirits come and make merry with him, and get sexually aroused by him, and afterwards give birth. These are called ‘the affliction of mortals’ and they take on human forms, and they have no hair on their heads. Concerning this matter it is written in relation to King Solomon: “I will chastise him with the rod of men, and the affliction of mortals” (II Sam. 7:14). In the same fashion, there are sometimes even male spirits that come to the women of the world, become impregnated from them, and give birth to spirits, and they are all called ‘the affliction of mortals.’ In the same fashion, there are even (instances) of male spirits that come to the women of the world, become impregnated from them, and give birth to spirits. And they are all called ‘the affliction of mortals.’”

Therefore, a woman who has had this experience should immediately purify herself in the mikveh, because the external forces and the kelippot may take hold of her children and kill them in terrible ways. Even if she is already pregnant, and the male spirits come to her, there can be no doubt that damage will be done to her unborn baby. But if she immerses herself in the purifying waters after such an evil dream, then the kelippot no longer have power to harm either her children or her unborn babies.”

On the phrase “laugh with him,” the Aramaic is v’hayekhin ima, lit. “They smile with him.” We think “laugh with him” is a better translation, as the Zohar is echoing biblical laughter, with its erotic connotations. For an extensive treatment of the subject of laughter in the Torah and its erotic context, see M. Gafni, “The Dance of Laughter.” (English?), Forthcoming. For a limited treatment see Gafni, Non Dual Humanism vol. 1 of 3 chapter on Laughter in the Zohar.

89. In the book Meu’lefet Sapeerim (the nineteenth day), the author, R. Sholomo Algasi, writes the following: “Concerning the matter of the sister of Tuval-Cain, Na’ama: “The heavenly angels went astray after her, and spirits and devils were born of her. They are suspended in the air and reveal things to people. Until this day, Na’ama’s abode is in the Mediterranean Sea. She comes out at night, warms herself on sleeping men’s bodies and clings to them, and from that passion she becomes pregnant, eventually giving birth to spirits. Now these spirits that she expels come to women at night in order to give birth to spirits from them. All of them then go to Lilith, and she raises them. Then Lilith goes out into the world and sees peoples’ babies, and attaches herself to them in order to kill them… These babies, which Lilith has the power to kill, (are brought into the world in this fashion:) When a man sees Na’ama in his dreams, and desires to sleep with her, and he wakes up and has sex with his wife, but his real intention is to be with the figure that he saw in his sleep, then the son that will be born is familiar to Lilith, (since) he came from her sphere.” (See Marrot HaTzovot by R. David ben Yehuda ha-Hasid of the fourteenth century, parshat Ahare Mot).

90. “One night, David was sleeping in his camp in the dessert, and Igrat copulated with him in his dream. He had a seminal emission, and she became impregnated, and gave birth to Adad. When he was asked what his name was, he answered, ‘My name is Ad, Ad is my name (shmi Ad, Ad shmi)’. They called his name Ashmadai, this is Ashmadai, the King of the Devils, who threw King Solomon off his throne and sat on it in his place.” From a kabbalistic anthology from the school of the Rashba, MS Parma de Rossi 1221, f. 285a, quoted by Scholem, New Elements, p. 172.

In a Kabbalistic manuscript from the fifteenth-sixteenth century we find a tradition concerning the various preferences of the mothers of the demons when choosing a human mate: “Igrat bat Mahlat and all her company do not cling in their dreams to anyone other than the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not to Ishmael and not to Esau. All the others attach themselves to all the other nations of men” (Sasson ms. 56 pp. 128-137, quoted by Scholem in “New Elements,” pp. 173-174). Igrat prefers Jews (in spite of her connection to Ishmaelite genealogy, and maybe because of it). Igrat hits the jackpot in her search after Jewish seed, and she manages to get the very best – the seed of King David, who was sleeping innocently in the desert. She bore him Ashmadai, the King of the Demons.

The son to whom the text refers is Hadad the Edomite, the enemy of King Solomon: “So the LORD raised up an adversary against Solomon, against Solomon, the Edomite Hadad, who was of the royal family of Edom” (I Kings11:14). The author claims that Hadad and Adad are one and the same. Hadad is said to be of the king’s seed, and our text comments that Hadad was born from the seed (that was spilled in vain) of King David. This is why two of David’s sons, Solomon who was born of Batsheeba, and Adad-Ashmadai who was born of the she-demon Igrat, became enemies who were competing over the inheritance of the kingdom.

In addition to Igrat, there are three other “Queens of the Demons,” whose initials form the acronym Alman (Me’orot Natan, by R. Meir Paparos, letter dalet, entry dalet, and “Spirits” in Margoliot, Malakhey Elyon, p. 205). They are Igrat, Lilith, Mahlat, and Na’ama.

In the Babylonian Talmud, the she-devil named Igrat is already clearly linked to men’s fear of women’s strength: In B. Pesahim (111b – 112a), there is a tradition according to which someone who sees two women sitting facing each other on either side of the road, can assume that they are involved with sorcery. The Talmud recommends that he exercise caution and recite a special spell: (Igrat azlat asya blosya mitqatla bakhek kabel). In this spell, Igrat’s name is combined with the names of other demons, whose power can be deflected by this spell (see also Bamidbar Rabbah 12, 3). We know the name of a woman by the name of Mahlat from the Bible – this is Mahlat, the daughter of Ishmael, whom Esau married (Gen. 28: 9). We have no information that she had a daughter by the name of Igrat. However, one of the commentators on the Zohar (R. Sholom Lavi, the author of Ketem Paz), brings an interesting tradition about the birth of Igrat: “I found writings in which I read that a master of sorcery left Egypt in order to do solitary meditation in the desert. He came upon a cave, in which an ancient book was hidden. He studied its wisdom, to the point that no one excelled him among all of Egypt’s sorcerers. They say that he had a daughter, and she also learned wisdom and sorcery. When Ishmael went to the Wilderness of Paran, he took her as his wife. She led Ishmael astray by her magic, until Abraham his father came and took him away from her. She, however, was pregnant, and she gave birth to an exceedingly beautiful daughter. And they say that there is a demon by the name of Agartiel who is in charge of that desert, and he was drawn to this maiden, and she bore him a daughter. And her mother called her name Igrat, after her father the demon. She is none other than Igrat the daughter of Mahlat the daughter of Ishmael, who leads a host of tens of thousands of damaging angels” (see Margoliot, Malakhey Elyon, p. 204).

It is possible that there is a connection between the kabbalistic demonology that crystallized around the figure of Mahlat the daughter of Ishmael and the historical fact, emphasized by Yitzhak Baer, that there was a widespread phenomenon of sexual liaisons between Spanish Jews of the thirteenth century and Muslim girls, who were called “the daughters of Ishmael.” See Y. Baer, “Researches and Essays in Jewish History” (Hebrew), chapters 13-14. It is not far-fetched to assume that Jewish men, who had young Moslem girls working as maidservants in their houses, had erotic dreams about “the daughter of Ishmael.” If so, the demonic figure that developed in the Kabbalah around the figure of Mahlat the daughter of Ishmael could have been an expression of both fear and forbidden desire. The comments of R. Todros Abulafia, the head of the community of Toledo, who was also a great kabbalist, prove that this was a common phenomenon, and was perceived, at least by this kabbalist, as a threat to the future of Jewish souls. “…It would be fitting to excommunicate…any son of Israel who has relations with a Ishmaelite…and anyone who knows that his friend had relations with an Ishmaelite…for it is not fitting for Israel, who is a holy people, to defile their seed in the bowels of strangers, and to bear children for idol worship. It is therefore fitting for every Jew who is zealous for God to do away with this abomination” (Baer, p. 291). The section of the Zohar known as the Raya Mehemna is full of disdain and insults for children born of illicit relationships, which the author refers to as the “mixed multitudes.” And the Raya Mehemna (fn. 111) identifies such handmaidens with Mahlat bat Yishmael; “He who plants his seed in (the body of) a handmaiden, Mahlat bat Yishmael, or in the daughter of a foreign god, who is evil, darkness, etc.”

91. Reshit Hokhmah, The Gate of Fear, Ch. 8.

92. See Buber, Legends of the Hasidim (p. 159, Schoken 1979): “There was a man who was possessed by Lilith, and he came to Neschiz to beg R. Mordechai that he release him from her clutches. The master sensed in his heart that this man was on his way to him, and he ordered that in the evening, all the doors of the city’s houses be closed, and no one should allow him to enter their abode. When the man arrived in the town at night, he could not find anywhere to lodge, so he was forced to sleep on a pile of hay.

Lilith immediately came to him and said, ‘Come down to me from the hay pile.’ The man asked: ‘Why are you demanding this of me? You always used to come to me.’

‘In the hay pile that you are lying on,’ she said, ‘there is a certain herb that prevents me from coming close to you.’

‘Do you know which one it is?’ he asked, ‘I will throw it out and then you can come to me.’

He stood up and showed her herb after herb, until she said, ‘That’s the one.’ He immediately tied it to his chest and was delivered from her.” We have not yet found any other evidence of an herb that was used as a folk remedy against Lilith.

93. Dover Tzedek, the letter “dalet.”

94. Concerning sleeping “alone in a house,” it is worthwhile to note a Jewish magical text from the fifteenth century which is quoted by G. Scholem in his article “New Chapters Concerning Ashmodai and Lilith” (p. 175). The author of the said magical text intends to consciously take advantage of Lilith’s nature. He appeals to Igrat bat Mahlat, one of the sexual she-devils who belongs to Lilith’s entourage, and enjoins her, i.e. compels her, to appear before him in the form of a maiden that he desires, a beautiful girl whom he can be with only in his flights of imagination: “I adjure you O Igrat bat Mahlat, queen of demons…that you send me plonit the daughter of plonit, one of the beautiful maidens that accompany you…and there is need of a solitary room, and a bed, and white clothes, clean, very clean…and the wise will understand (on their own).” Concerning the subject of adjuring the forces of Lilith for the sake of supplying beautiful women for human pleasure, G. Scholem (pp. 170-171) quotes interesting testimonies about how the Queen of Sheba and her handmaidens were brought for this purpose (she, too, is considered to be one of the embodiments of Lilith in many sources). Here is one of the testimonies: “…it is possible to bring beautiful women, and even the Queen of Sheba, and they walk daintily and prettily.”

Going in an opposite direction, we find a directive in the writings of R. Hayyim Vital to sleep “alone in a house” as one of the conditions for a question asked in a dream: “…and he should be alone in a house, in a place where no person can wake him up, and then his question will be answered during sleep..” (Sha’arey Kedushah, section 4, the end of Gate Aleph).

95. Carol Gilligan, REF.

96.

97. In his book The Doctrine of Evil and the Kelippah in Lurianic Kabbalah (Hebrew), p. 81. Tishbi noticed the subject and its inherent fecundity, but suffices himself with a short quote from Gate 38 of Etz Hayyim, and does not really attempt to lock horns with this “strange and wondrous metamorphosis.”

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Jewish history

Rabbis and Witches

June 22, 2009 by Rabi Ohad Ezrahi · Leave a Comment

Rabbis and Witches

A class by Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi (Israel, 2006)

(This class was given in Tel Aviv, as a part of the series of lectures about Main Characters in Jewish Mysticism. It was transcribed by Michal Gilo, and translated by Reb J.)

Our class today is devoted to two figures that were active during the period of the Hasmoneans: the first is Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach, and the second is Choni haMaagal. We’ll first orient ourselves to that specific time in history before going in depth into these figures and their stories.

In the previous lessons we spoke about Alexander the Great having conquered the entire Middle East, from Persia all the way to Egypt. But he died young at age 31 and his vast empire was divided among his heirs: the Antigonid Empire based in Greece; the Seleucid Empire based in Mesopotamia and Persia, and the Ptolemaic Kingdom based in Egypt and Palestine. We also spoke about the interesting ideas of Shimon haTzaddik regarding beauty and holiness, and how according to legend, he met Alexander the Great.

And we also spoke about the rebellion of the Hasmoneans, who routed the Greeks and established an independent kingdom. A monarchy was thus restored to Israel, but it was not that of a scion of the House of David, but rather, Shimon the Hasmonean, who was the high priest, was crowned king. This turn of events was a thorn in the eyes of the Jewish sages, who believed in the division of power. It is not ideal, according to the Torah, for a high priest to also serve as king. A high priest must serve as a high priest, and a king must rule as a king. But the Hasmonean kings were not interested in sharing power, many of them also holding positions of priestly power. Nevertheless, one of them—Yochanan Hurkenus, or Yochanan the High Priest—was considered a holy man and even a prophet. The Talmud attributes to him the holy spirit, and Josephus Flavius attributes to him prophecy.

Eventually, the throne reached the hands of Yanai. Besides being king, Yanai was also a high priest, following the Hasmonean tradition. But the sages had not made peace with this phenomenon. The special problem for Yanai, though, was that during his reign, the leading sage was none other than his own brother-in-law, Shimon ben Shetach, his wife Shlomtzion’s younger brother. This means that at that time, heading the rabbinical high court was a great sage who held opinions unacceptable to the priesthood and the ruling family. Eventually, King Yanai got sick of these rabbinical sages, and as irritated kings are wont to do to those who oppose them, he ordered to have them all slaughtered. Whoever could, such as the sage Rabbi Yehoshua ben Prachyah, fled to Egpyt. Meanwhile, though, Queen Shlomtzion hid her younger brother until the king’s “crisis” passed, at which time he decided to reconcile with the rabbinical sages, whom the masses generally supported.

But what happens when an entire generation of sages disappears from the world and only one is left? What happens is—and it is important to pay attention to this point—that the one surviving is the one who transmits the tradition. At that time, the Oral Torah was still that—oral, and not formally written down. So since most of the sages were murdered, Shimon ben Shetach became one of the major transmitters through whom the tradition of the Oral Torah was passed down all the way to us.

Now, Shimon ben Shetach was a very interesting figure, and a far from simple one. He was not the only survivor, but among the few. Throughout the history of the transmission of the Oral Torah, there have been a few key figures through whom the majority of the tradition was passed down. One of them was Shimon ben Shetach, who as said, was a complex character.

The story of our focus today, though, is his relationship to women, and to the feminine principle in general. Shimon ben Shetach was know to be the one who hanged eighty witches—this was the single case of witch-hunting in Jewish history.

Let us try and understand what this says about his relationship to women in general and to witches in specific, and what it says about his relationship to the world of magic and mysticism in general. Is there any connection, and if so, what?

Some credit

Let us preface our discussion by giving some “credit” to Shimon ben Shetach. Before we judge him negatively for hanging the witches, I would like to show a complete picture of his character. One of the unique innovations of Shimon ben Shetach is the ketubah—the marriage contract—as it is formulated till this day. He was the one who instituted that the financial obligation of a husband to his wife takes precedence over all his other financial obligations. If a husband has no money, the courts can sell his house, and “even the shirt on his back” to meet those obligations. This was Shimon ben Shetach’s ordination, and till this very day it influences peoples’ lives in a very practical way. From this perspective, if we would ask what his attitude to women was, we would say that he certainly cared for them and for their welfare.

Besides the ketubah, Shimon ben Shetach also made another very important institution: the halakhic law that circumstantial evidence is not accepted in Jewish courts.

Today, civil courts do not follow this practice, but the Talmud quotes Shimon ben Shetach as saying: “I once saw someone running with a knife after another person and they both entered into a house. I ran after them and saw that one of them was just killed and the other was standing with the knife in his hand. I said to him, ‘There are only I and you here, so it is probable that you have killed him and not I, but I will not judge you in court, for in order to be judged in court there must be two witnesses. Therefore, may God judge you.”

The Talmud then concludes, “A snake came along and bit him, and he died.”

It was Shimon ben Shetach himself who instituted this practice of not accepting circumstantial evidence. The purpose was to prevent an innocent person being put to death. Only two witnesses can testify in court. As we will later see, this did not help him to prevent an innocent person being put to death, and in fact caused him great personal harm.

Another institution of Shimon ben Shetach was the law of obligatory education. All the way back then, the first century before the Common Era, Shimon ben Shetach initiated a practice that every Jewish community meticulously keeps till this day: children must begin their educational training by the age of six, whether with a private teacher or in a school. This institution of his took hold already during his time and has been typical of Jewish communities throughout history. Each community established an educational system that was provided for free for those who could not afford it, such as orphans. It was the community’s responsibility to see to it that all children would receive an education, no matter whether they came from wealthy or poor families, or were orphans.

Judging the king

Here is another story about Shimon ben Shetach’s character: One of King Yanai’s slaves had murdered someone. Shimon ben Shetach said to the sages, “Get hold of him and we’ll pass judgment on him.” But Jewish law is that when a slave has committed a crime, his master must also come before the courts. So they sent a messenger to the king asking him to bring his slave into court. When Yanai sent along the slave by himself, Shimon sent another message to him saying, “You must come too!” The king arrived at court and sat down. Shimon then said to him, “King Yanai! Stand up while we testify against you. Not before us are you standing, but before the One Who created the world.” Now remember, King Yanai was Shimon’s brother-in-law who had murdered all the sages, yet Shimon was undaunted and not afraid of him. But the king says, “I will do not as you say, but as your colleagues say,” implying that Shimon always opposed him.

The Talmud then relates, “The king looked to his right, and they all hid their faces towards the ground. He looked to his left, and they too hid their faces towards the ground.” The sages feared the king’s anger. So Simon ben Shetach says to them, “You are making calculations. May the Master of Calculations exact punishment from you.” In other words, he was telling them, “If you are moved to action by your personal interests, you are incapable of being faithful to the truth.” The Talmud concludes that the angel Gabriel came and struck them down to the ground and they died. Henceforth, “a king neither judges nor is judged” became the practice in the rabbinical courts.

This was Shimon ben Shetach. He was undaunted by anything and was as straight as a ruler. But apropos, we see that miracles happened in his honor, such as the snake biting the man whom Shimon had said should be judged by heaven, and the angel Gavriel coming to put to death the sages who were not being faithful to their positions in court.

Returning the Arab’s stone

Yet another story the Talmud tells about Shimon ben Shetach is that he earned a living from working in textiles. Rather than support himself from the rabbinate, he insisted on working for his own sustenance and not taking a penny from the communal coffers. His students, though, seeing how much time and effort he was putting in to make his business rounds on foot, insisted on purchasing for him a donkey. On their way bringing it to him, they found a precious stone in the donkey’s sack. They came and told their master excitedly: “Rebbe! God has given you a gift! You’ll never have to work again!” But Shimon said: “Does the owner of the donkey know that there was a precious stone there?” “Obviously not,” his students answered. “If so, go and return the stone to its owner.” When the students returned it, the owner, who was by the way an Arab, said, “Blessed be the God of Shimon ben Shetach!”

So the picture we have of Shimon ben Shetach until here is: “Let the law carve a hole through the mountain.” This approach was characteristic of him. At the same time, he was an honest person, did not show preference to anyone, nor could he be bought with money. From his perspective, justice was the most important thing. He did not even give special treatment for the royal family, and neither was he lenient with himself. He served God altruistically and was as straight as a ruler, and I am not using that last phrase lightly. If we try to characterize types of people empowered by the energy of yosher/straightness, as opposed to people empowered by the energy of igulim/circles, Shimon ben Shetach stands out as a typical example of yosher.

Straight and Circular – Igulim ve’Yosher

The kabbalah of the Ari speaks about two types of spiritual lights/energies that bring our reality into existence: straight light and circular light. They are two spiritual entities that are completely different. In the kabbalah, we consider the straight light as a masculine function, whereas the circular light is considered a feminine quality. Hence, for example, linear thinking is masculine. Of course, both men and women possess both straight and circular light, for in each of us are both masculine and feminine energies, but straightness is a distinctive masculine energy, whereas circularity is a distinctive feminine energy.

Simon ben Shetach was typically masculine—sharp, for better or worse. Linear thinking of the yosher type is a categorical type of thinking. When a yosher person thinks about justice, he does not take this ethical principle lightly. He does not look to find compromises, to be lenient, to round corners, to understand the accused or simply to bridge a gap between litigants—these are more feminine and “round” qualities. His thinking is categorical. Clearly, such thinking—rational, linear—dose not allow for any magical phenomena.

Magic

Magic does not fit into a linear perception of the world. On the contrary: When do we call something “magic”? When you expect a certain chain of cause and effect to happen, and something entirely unexpected takes place, without any evident cause having brought it about. For instance, when Rabbi Eliezer, several generations later, taught Rabbi Akiva to fill a field with squash with some specific words and then to cause them to disappear—this was magic. Magic is specifically something that contradicts our linear thinking. Since it is not rational, it unravels the threads of our thought patterns that seduce us into thinking that the world is ruled by logic. Every time something non-rational happens, we call it a miracle, a wonder, or magic.

True magicians do not know themselves how they produce their magic, but they feel obligated to believe in wonders, to live in wonder, and to believe in the “magic” that exists in the world. A true magician only knows that if he makes a certain potion according to a certain formula, the result will be something “magical.” So he believes in the power of magic, in the power of wonder, in the wondrous nature of existence, but he also knows that he must fully concentrate on and be completely present to what he is doing, for the process demands the best of his spiritual powers.

The prophets whom we have spoken about—Elijah and Elisha, for example—what characterized them? Elijah had a spiritual role to play within the strata of the royal government of the Kingdom of Israel. He rebuked the king—he rebuked Ahab and Jezebel and maneuvered their downfall, then arranging at the end of his life to have Yehu crowned in their stead. The very role of a scriptural prophet is to rebuke the masses, though he also rebukes the rulers. But besides this, he is also a miracle worker. Most of the stories connected with Elijah and Elisha are miracle stories.

The split of the prophet role

What happened, though, during the period about which we are talking was that the role of the scriptural prophet became split into two: During the period of the prophets, the prophet held two roles: on the one hand, a man of ethics and justice who rebukes the people and the king, and on the other hand, a wonder worker who heals and brings rain. But during the period under our discussion, these two roles were split between two different types of people: the man of God, on the one hand, the miracle worker, and on the other hand, the man of justice and ethics who rebukes. Shimon ben Shetach was a man of uprightness, justice and rebuke, while the miracle worker of his time was Choni haMaagal.

The following story appears in several places, both in the Mishnah and in the Talmud. I read it from the Talmud, since the text there goes into more detail.

Choni and the circle יוד בעיגולים

“The rabbis taught: The month of Adar once passed and rain had not come.” Spring had officially arrived and there had been no rain during the winter. It was a drought year. In ancient times, this meant that people would die of hunger and thirst. The wells were empty and there was nothing to drink or anything with which to water the fields. “[Choni haMaagal] drew a circle in the ground and stood in it.” A circle —remember the circular energy we spoke about above? And Choni’s very name was haMaagal, from the Hebrew root of igul, a circle. In any event, Choni was following in the footsteps of the prophet Habakkuk, who also drew a circle around himself and refused to leave it until God answered him, as our sages comment on Habakkuk’s saying, “I will remain on this station of mine and will stand in this bastion.” Our sages say that this was an ancient tradition. When you want to beg for something urgently, you say to God, “I will not leave this circle until You fulfill my request,” and of course, you must be willing to keep your side of the bargain…

So Choni said to God, “God! I am not moving from here until you have mercy on Your children.” Choni swears that he will not move, and someone like Choni will keep his word. He is willing to die in the circle if rain does not come. He has undertaken an unconditional obligation. He says to God: “Your children have approached me, for I am like a member of Your household.” Being that the case, they are all relying on him.

The Talmud continues: “It began to drizzle. [Choni's] students said, ‘We have seen You, but may we not die!’” This is an interesting phrase. The verse says elsewhere, “Man shall not see Me and live,” for finite Man cannot maintain his selfhood in the conscious presence of the Infinite. So, as they beheld Choni interacting with God in such an intimate way, they were experiencing themselves the presence of God, and they therefore say, “May we not die!” But they also tell him that this drizzle is as if God is saying: “OK, I’ll give you these two and a half drops of rain just so that you are able to leave your circle.” Choni responds by saying to God: “This is NOT what I asked for! I want rain to fill the wells, pits and caverns!” Rain began to come down in torrents, the Talmud tells, until each and every drop was big enough to fill buckets. “We have seen You, but don’t let us die!” his students call out. It seemed as if the rains were coming to destroy the world”. So again Choni says to God: “This is NOT what I asked for! I want rain of goodwill, blessing and bounty.” And the Talmud concludes, “The rain began to fall as needed.”

Choni haMaagal was working with God to achieve something in proper proportion, and he demands exactness. He is also audacious, what in Chassidic texts is referred to as holy chutzpah. He demands of God that the rains be exactly as needed, not more than enough and not too little. But the Talmud continues to tell us that the rain fell in such quantities that the people had to walk up to the Temple Mount, since the lower areas were all flooded. So the people came and said to Choni: “Rebbe! Just as you prayed for rain to come, pray now for it to stop.”

“I have a tradition,” he answered them, “that one does not pray to halt an abundance of bounty.” But he advises them to bring an ox as a thanksgiving offering. When they brought it into the Temple, Choni lays his two hands upon it, as was the sacrificial procedure to rest one’s weight on the animal, thereby transferring one’s karma to it. He says, “God! Your people Israel whom You took out of Egypt can bear neither too much good or too much suffering. May it be Your will that the rains stop and that there be plenty in the world.” And the Talmud concludes that the rains immediately stopped and the sun came out.

This was Choni and his magical practices. So let’s try now and get a picture of his character. We see that he possessed this holy chutzpah, and that he was very close to God—”a member of His household.” He was also very popular with the people as a miracle worker. Certainly, after this incident in which he literally saved the people from starvation, his popularity must have skyrocketed. But just then, Shimon ben Shetach sends him a message: “If you were not Choni, I would put you into excommunication,” in other words, if Choni was not who he was. Why? Because he acted with chutzpah towards God. From Shimon’s perspective, one does not argue with God. But Choni had a “circular” nature, rather than a straight one like Shimon’s, so he does not accept the drought and he argues with God.

Censorising the holy magician

But even more importantly: Choni is a magician. He is able to cause wonders. He is a holy magician who was involved in practical magic. Since this story reaches us via the Talmud, we must take into consideration the likelihood that it was censored. This is not a story that reaches us via the channels of the mystics, but specifically via the channel of the classical rabbinical literature. Therefore, though the Talmud cites this story, there is a high probability that certain magical details were omitted due to censoring. The Talmud attenuates the importance of the magical aspect of this story. The only thing we know about Choni’s practices is that he made a circle around himself and swore that he would not leave it. So he also uses oaths. In short, we see that he has specific techniques. And the Talmud adds that these practices were ancient, since the times of the prophets.

But Shimon ben Shetach does not approve of this way of action. From his point of view, if you pray and rain doesn’t come, just accept it. But Choni follows the ways of the prophets of old and succeeds in bringing rain. He opens the gates of heaven because he possesses the keys of rain. Elsewhere, the Talmud states that the prophet Elijah also possessed the keys of rain.

Shimon also says to Choni, “But what can I do that you are like a son kvetching before his father.” That is, as if Choni were a spoiled child saying to God, “Wash me with warm water. No! That’s too hot! Add some cold water. No! That’s too cold! Add some hot water.” In parent-child relations there are no rules of justice. The very relationship is beyond any rules. Such behavior is acceptable from a child as part of his charm, and that is legitimate. So Shimon tells Choni that he is like such a child to God, nudging to be pampered with candies and sweets.

And who was it that declared himself a son of God just two generations later? Jesus! And the Christian Church makes a big fuss over him. But Jesus was part of certain school of spiritual thought, a link in the tradition of the “early chassidim” who were able to cause miracles and saw themselves as the sons of God, albeit not exclusively. Choni actually meant, “We are all Your children, but I am especially close to You.”

But Shimon says that despite Choni’s being like a son to God and having a special relationship with Him, nevertheless, “I would put you into excommunication,” because the practice of magic and arguing with God is not according to my liking, even when it is for the people’s benefit, and even when it is successful.

This insight that the double role of the prophet became split during the period we are discussing I would like to cite in the name of Professor Ephraim Elimelekh Orbach.

During this period under our discussion, there was an entire school of spiritual practice called, “the early chassidim,” who were not masters in the rabbinical law. The Talmud relates several miracles stories about him, but not one single law in his name. Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa, mentioned later in that Talmudic passage about Choni haMaagal, was also part of that school. The school of these early chassidim was involved in magic and wonder working, and in attaining a bonding of the soul with God, what in the chassidut of the Baal Shem Tov was called, deveykut. Attaining this deveykut/bonding with God is what interested the schools of the early and the later chassidim. Such a relationship opened the door to miracles, since it meant that the linear and banal world that we see is not all there is. Wonders can take place at any time and place. A flower—the “flower” of the Shekhinah/Divine presence—can suddenly open. Existence is rich, because God, the Omnipresent, is not “Out There,” but here! The close relationship with Him is like that of a son with his father—informal.

On the other hand, there was another school of thought—that of the rabbinical sages—based upon the halakhic law. While the first school of thought belonged to the “circular” way of thinking, this latter school of thought belonged to the linear/straight way of thinking, of masculine ethics and meticulousness—a “Let the law carve a hole in the mountain” mentality. The people of this school were straight and good, but their thinking was very linear.

So what was united in the prophets became split into two personalities in later times. With the spiritual downslide of the generations, these two directions—the wondrous and the practical—became split into two separate schools of thought. The cause of this development within the Jewish people was the difference between the First Temple and the Second Temple—prophecy existed during the First, but disappeared during the Second. This is how the rabbinical sages saw it. The Babylonian exile created a different paradigm of Judaism—the era of Scriptures was over. A period in history had come to a close, at least as far as mainstream Judaism was concerned.

But the early chassidim did not see things that way. However, since the rabbinical sages did, and they were the ones who shaped normative Judaism for the coming generations, this marginalized the chassidim.

In order to illustrate this, I now cite the conclusion of the Talmudic story of Choni haMaagal, who slept for seventy years.

Immediately after the story of the rain, the Talmud relates that Choni was always bothered by a verse in Psalms, “When God returns the exiles of Zion, we will be like dreamers.” The simple meaning of this is that when the people returned from Babylon, the entire exile seemed like a dream. Now, the Babylonian exile was seventy years, as known, so Choni asked himself, “What does this mean? Can someone sleep for seventy years?” One day, Choni was walking along and he passed someone planting a carob tree. In answer to Choni’s questioning him why he is planting a tree that takes seventy years to bear edible fruit, the man answers that he is planting it for his descendants, just as his forebears planted for him. Choni then has a bite to eat, lies down underneath the carob tree and falls asleep. And he sleeps for seventy years. Upon awakening, Choni sees someone eating from that carob tree that he had seen planted seventy years earlier. Choni asks, ‘”Are you the one who planted it. “No,” he answers. “I am his grandson.” Realizing that he has slept for seventy years, Choni proceeds into town to ask after his son, but is told that he has already died, but that his grandson is still alive. Telling them that he himself is Choni, they do not believe him. So Choni makes his way to the beit midrash [study hall], where people are in heated discussion on a Talmudic subject. Then he hears them say, “Ay! When Choni was still alive, he would enter the beit midrash and the matter would become clear as day.” “I am Choni!” he says, but no one believed him, and may have even ridiculed him. Frustrated, Choni goes out and begs mercy of God to take his life.

What is the Talmud trying to tell us here? It seems that the Talmud is trying to say with this story, “Choni! Your time has passed! Have you not noticed that there was a Babylonian exile? You are just like a person who slept through the seventy years of exile and upon awakening thinks that nothing has happened, that nothing has changed. Do you think that you can continue to live as if in biblical times? Don’t you realize that the world has changed!” Choni continues to beg, “Recognize me! I am still here!” But the Talmud tells him, “You are going around making miracles as if you were a prophet before the exile. But we have undergone a paradigm shift, and your time has passed.”

This is why the Talmud brings this story of Choni’s sleeping for seventy years immediately after the story of his bringing rain, and Shimon ben Shetach’s dissatisfaction about Choni’s ways. This was the critique of the rabbinical sages who compiled the Talmud—a critique against the Choni “circular” personality. History had changed, the rabbis argued. We are not living any longer during the times of the prophets!

To the sages’ credit, though, they did not omit the story altogether. They preserved differing opinions within their own tradition. All types of stories can be found in the rabbinical tradition, even stories of ways and ideas that differed from the ways and ideas of the sages.

Now we turn to the story of Shimon ben Shetach’s great witch hunting, a sad story however we look at it.

A certain tax collector, a ruthless person who collected taxes for the government and reported evaders to them, had died. That very same day, a great rabbi had also died in the same town, and the entire townspeople gathered to give him his last honor. Thus, going in the same direction were the funeral processions of the great rabbi accompanied by all the townspeople and that of the tax collector accompanied by his family. As they both reach the cemetery outside of town, a band of marauders attacks. All present from both processions flee for their lives, leaving behind both bodies. One student of the deceased rabbi, though, hides in the field, not wanting to abandon his beloved teacher. Eventually, everyone returns, each group to bury its dead. But for some reason, the two bodies are exchanged, and the townspeople take the body of the tax collector to bury in great honor. The student who had never left and was aware of the mistake cries out, “No! You’re making a mistake!” But no one pays him any attention, and the great rabbi is buried in the plot of the tax collector.

The student is extremely upset. What had his great teacher done to receive such a disgrace, and what had the tax collector done to receive such honor? That night, his teacher appears to him in a dream and tells him, “Don’t worry. Come and I will show you the honor I have been given in Gan Eden and the punishment that the tax collector is suffering in hell.” He shows his student how the hinge of the door of hell is swinging on the tax collector’s ear. The rabbi then explains to his student: I once heard a Torah student being dishonored and I did not protest. Therefore, I was punished. The tax collector, though, once prepared a meal for the governor, and when the governor did not come, he distributed the food to the poor. For this, he was rewarded.”

“How long will the tax collector suffer this punishment?” the student asks. “Until Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach dies and takes his place,” the sage answers. The student was shocked to hear this, but the rabbi explains, “Because there are Jewish witches in Ashkelon and Rabbi Shimon is doing nothing to stop them!”

This is how the story appears in the Babylonian Talmud, according to Rashi. However, an earlier source and version of this story appears in the Palestinian Talmud. There is a slight difference in that version. There, the issue held against Rabbi Shimon, according to the sage who appeared in a dream to his student, was that he had promised to uproot witches but had not done so. “When I will be appointed head of the court, I will put anyone involved in witchcraft to death!” Rabbi Shimon is quoted as saying. Yet, despite being appointed, he had not made good on his promise (it seems that even then, elected public officials did not keep their promises…).

Anyway, this student went and told Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach about the dream. What did Rabbi Shimon do? He immediately gathers eighty young and strong men on that rainy day, hands each one a large jug with a garment stuffed inside each one of them, and instructs them to keep the jugs upside down over their heads, to keep the clothes dry. Allotting one young man for each witch, he instructs them, “When you enter, each one of you must lift one of the witches off the ground. This will render them impotent.” So we see that when a witch is not touching the ground, she is unable to do any witchcraft. This is a very interesting concept that we will speak about shortly.

Rabbi Shimon leads the young men to the witches’ cave in Ashkelon, leaves them outside and enters alone. “Who are you?” they ask him. “I am a witch, like you, and I have come to exchange secrets,” he answers. “How did you get here on such a rainy day?” they ask. “I walked between the raindrops,” he replies, implying that he did this with magical powers. “Let us show each other what we can do,” he says. So one of them utters a magic word and some bread immediately appears, a second utters another word and a different type of food spontaneously appears, and a third one utters yet a different word and wine appears. “So now,” they ask him, “what can you do?” “I have a special type of magic,” he says. “If I whistle twice, a young man will immediately appear for each one of you to give you a good time.” “Yes! Yes! Please bring them!” they all say enthusiastically. Rabbi Shimon had prearranged with the young men that with the first whistle they remove the dry garment from the jug and change into it, and with the second whistle they enter. Shimon whistles to them, they change into their dry clothes, and presto, like magic!—as least as far as the witches see—eighty young and virile men are after them. Each young man then sweeps one of the witches off her feet and carries her away to be hanged.

But there is a short and tragic continuation to the story. The families of the witches were very upset. Two of them came to court and testified falsely against Rabbi Shimon’s son, bringing the death penalty upon him. As he was being brought out to be stoned to death, he says, “If I have sinned, may my death atone for me, but if I have not sinned, may the responsibility be on the neck of the witnesses.” The witnesses hear this, and shuddering, begin to have regrets. They tell the judges that they had testified falsely out of anger towards Rabbi Shimon for putting their relatives to death. But Jewish law does not allow witnesses to retract their testimony, and the young man is put to death.

So Rabbi Shimon does not get off lightly from this story. He who had instituted to rely solely on two witnesses as the test of absolute truth, rather than even blatant circumstantial evidence, is forced to accept the testimony of two false witnesses who had fabricated their story so well as to pass the rabbi’s interrogations, and to allow his own son to be put to death.

There is great depth in this story. Shimon wants things to be as clear as day, rather than leaving them to the clouds of doubt. Therefore, he rules to pass judgment only upon the testimony of two witnesses. He is afraid of mistakenly incriminating an innocent man with circumstantial evidence, so he relies only on the interrogation of witnesses. But in the end, his own son is put to death following the guidelines that he felt were impeccable—two witnesses, two false witnesses who had come to avenge Shimon’s putting their relatives to death. In effect, it was the feminine principle that avenged itself from Rabbi Shimon—from him and his linear thinking which he so zealously followed. The circular people avenged themselves from the man of straight lines.

But let us return to the main point. Why does the Talmud make a point of stating that these were female witches? Because witchcraft is a classic example of the feminine principle, of something connected with women. In fact, the Talmud states elsewhere, “Most women are witches,” and, “One who takes many wives just increases witchcraft [in his home].” And this despite the fact that Scriptures and the Talmud are filled with stories of male witches, such as the magicians of Egypt and Babylon. Throughout Scriptures there is only mention of two female witches—Saul’s necromancer who brought up Samuel, and Queen Jezebel.

But on the other hand, the Biblical verse instructing to put witches to death speaks about the witch in the feminine. Why is this? The Talmud explains as said, because most women are witches. This is masculine thinking. The feminine world is a mystery to men, incomprehensible. What do women talk to each other about so much? What is the secret of feminine charm? Why do they drive men crazy so often? There is surely some witchcraft involved here…

One of the Jewish grammaticians of the Middle Ages, though—Rabbi Yonah ibn Janach—offers another explanation for the feminine form of the word witch in the verse. He says: the word in its feminine form is the proper noun for witchcraft and magic. He cites other Hebrew nouns like this that are gender neutral even though the words themselves are in the feminine form. In fact, elsewhere in Scriptures we find an explicit verse stating that the prohibition to practice magic and witchcraft relates equally to men and women. It is the Talmud, though, that states that generally speaking, most of those who practice witchcraft are women.

The truth is, as I said earlier, it is men who think that this is what women do. When men are involved in magic, that’s OK, but when women do things that men do not understand—that’s witchcraft and frightening. Everything women do together in their own company is perceived by men as a mystery. Birth and death are connected with the feminine principle, and is perceived as frightening. A woman is mysterious in a man’s eyes. This is the source of misogyny, the hatred of women arising from the fear of them. Every man originally emerges from a woman, but slowly and over time comes to identify himself as something different, while a woman grows to identify herself with her mother.

In all myths, in all dreams, in the depths of human psychology, mystery is connected with the feminine. Or in other words, woman symbolizes mystery. The soul is seen as feminine. All the five levels of the soul in the kabbalah are feminine words—nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah, yechidah.

The feminine perception of reality is “circular.” A circle is cyclic, and this perception is connected with nature. Woman is “naturally” connected with the nature of reality much more than man. The monthly menstrual cycle parallels the cyclic orbit of the moon. In modern times, when artificial light illuminates our nights, women do not experience this connection. But when people lived closer to nature, underneath the light of the moon, they directly experienced the connection between their own cycles and that of the moon. In those days, women generally began menstruating with the new moon and began their ovulation with the full moon. Those who deviated from this were the exceptions. And the Festivals were dependent upon the cycle of the moon to set the months of the Jewish calendar. In fact, the moon itself is seen in Jewish tradition as being a feminine entity.

Woman thus experiences nature within her very own body. Woman is nature, cyclicity, life and death. In men’s consciousness, the womb is the place from where one comes and to where one returns. Male consciousness is involved, consciously and unconsciously, with returning there. And he ultimately returns to the earth, another symbol of femininity.

The grave is itself a sort of womb, in which one is sown like a seed and from which one grows, entering the grave with death and reemerging in reincarnation for another cycle of life. Therefore, the Talmud refers to the womb with the Hebrew word that means a grave. The womb is the source of life, but ultimately also the symbol of its end. This is a cycle. Woman is also connected with the earth, the earth is circular and connected with the kabbalistic sefirah of Malkhut, the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of the Divine. We can now understand why Shimon ben Shetach said that in order to dominate a woman, one must separate her from the ground.

I don’t know if those women in Ashkelon were really witches, and even if they were, if they were really doing anything harmful to anyone, but one thing is clear: they were a threat to Shimon ben Shetach’s world. For the masculine world, these women who celebrated in a cave in nature, and perhaps may have possessed some magical talents, were a source of fear. Their connection to nature was intimidating for male consciousness. Nature is foreign to male consciousness. Male consciousness feels out of place in the natural world. Therefore, for man, the natural world is something with and in which to do something—to “conquer nature.” Circular—feminine—consciousness, on the other hand, is just to be. To celebrate what is. From this perspective, we are nature. We are the cyclicity of nature. Therefore, religions with masculine consciousness aspire to be freed from the consciousness of life and death. This is quintessential masculine religion.

On the other hand, consciousness of love is quintessentially feminine. Those who worshiped the Great Mother gods did not sit around and meditate in search of freedom from the material world. Rather, their rituals were conducted in the forest, with good food and wine. They were celebrations of life and death. Celebrating cyclicity is feminine worship. But when men created institutional religions, they did so out of a base of fear of being trapped in that very cyclicity of life and death, of being trapped in nature, which for man is one big trap. So man is always asking himself, “Am I trapped or am I free?”

Man seeks to be free in every way. If he is a spiritual person, he will seek freedom by means of meditation. If he is a rational person, he will seek to master nature by means of scientific studies, rather than be mastered by it. Therefore, the basic effort of science during the twentieth century has been a search to establish all of existence on one principle. This is symbolized by the penis—a single pillar upon which the world can stand. The goal of masculine consciousness is to minimize chaos. The natural world is chaotic. Things just happen. Especially for women—it seems that something exciting is always happening to them. The world as such is an embodiment of the Shekhinah—the Great Mother. Things happen in this world that confuse a man, and as a man, one wants to make things simple, so after a woman has finished relating to her husband an entire drama, the husband bluntly says, “OK, darling, this is what you should do…”

To live in the cycle is to experience the drama of life, involvedness with life, a celebration of the emotions. Sometimes I am sad and sometimes I am happy. That’s the way it is, and it’s fun! It’s exciting for the feminine consciousness. But for the man, it is threatening. He always wants to solve problems, to take control of the situation. He feels safe only when things are resolved. But for the woman, the resolution is only a lull from life, for her excitement is to be involved in life’s drama. That is how she experiences that she exists.

Woman is nature. The kabbalah states that in Hebrew, “Nature”—haTeva—is numerically equivalent to Elohim, the feminine Name of God, in contrast to YHVH. Nature itself is perceived as circular in the kabbalah. Therefore, planet earth is round, the cosmos is seen as round, as the stars are round. Some even say that time is circular. Everything in the natural world is circular. In fact, the Talmud states that there is no thing in nature that is square. The only phenomenon in existence that is linear is consciousness. There is nothing in the objective world that is straight. Shimon ben Shetach represents linear thought, and therefore, for him, the circular is threatening. So he says to Choni, “If you were not Choni, I would put you into excommunication.” (From one of the listeners: If he had been Chanah rather than Choni, Shimon would not have been chonen her—pardoned her.)

What is interesting in Shimon’s world view is that in order to control a woman, one must separate her from the earth. On a deep level, this symbolizes how men seek to control women—by separating them from nature in all ways. How have men accomplished this? Most women you meet today are detached from their own natures. The tampon industry, for instance, is a male statement that women must conduct themselves “normally”—that is, like a man, who does not have a period. And if you must, hide it, so no one sees! That is considered nowadays, “normal.” Society teaches young girls to deny the basic cyclic nature of their femininity, telling them, “Be a man!” Therefore, 99% of the artificial skeletons used to teach the human body in biology classes are masculine in form. To be human is to be a man. There may be specific incidences of females, but men are representative of humanity.

And let’s be honest. If they were to bring in here right now a female skeleton to study it as a human body, we would automatically think with surprise, Why are they bringing in a female skeleton? For man, woman is just an exceptional case of the human species, and is not seen as truly half of what it means to be human.

But man’s job is not to fear the feminine, but to pass through that fear and to learn to know that way of being, as well. Every man fears the Great Mother. The question is only if one is aware of it or not, if one has gone past that fear or not. One must pass through it and come out on the other side. To reach a place where one can celebrate the feminine within, and to understand that one has therewith entered into the Great Mother—the Shekhinah, Who embodies everything: everything that one is, and everything in the environment. Everyone possesses a consciousness that is embodied within the Great Mother, within the material world, within the physical body that is entirely sensual. We are contained within the Shekhinah that gives birth to us into the world, and consumes us as Mother Earth when we die. It happens to everyone. So we fear Her. But our task is not to escape from the world, but to enlighten it. Not to flee from a woman, but to enlighten her and make her happy. Not to flee from the Shekhinah, but to conjugate with Her. Therefore, the witches were happy when Shimon ben Shetach told them that he would bring them eighty young and virile men who would lift them off their feet. That is what a woman wants—a man with charm who knows how to lift her. But to do so, a man must indeed be able to “walk through the raindrops”—not to become soaked by her emotional storms, but to approach her filled with humor. And rather than hanging them—to elevate them!

With permission from the soul of Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach, who has certainly undergone great transformation since then, I would like to say that it seems that he had a psychological problem with the fact that his life was saved by his older sister, Queen Shlomtzion. He owed his life to a woman in a very personal way, over and above being born to woman. In the depths of his personality, he develops a fear of this power of the feminine over life. And when it came to the witches, this fear became an enmity.

But together with this, let us remember that it was Shimon who instituted the ketubah to protect the woman. He did not hate women, but he hated witches.

Now I would like to reveal another layer: We spoke earlier about the educational system that Shimon instituted as obligatory. This was only meant for boys. And the woman that Rabbi Shimon protects is the woman who has bought into the male story, the woman who has legally entered into a contractual relationship with a man, relinquishing to him ownership of her body, relinquishing her sexual freedom to her husband. In vulgar terms, the ketubah says: “I will support you, feed you, take care of you, have intimate relations with you, but you must not have relations with any other man. I can take other women as wives or concubines”—until Rabbeynu Gershom came along—”but if you sleep with any other man, you will be put to death.” And even after Rabbeynu Gershom’s ban on polygamy, any man taking an extra wife is not treated as having committed a major crime. The traditional Jewish marital contract is based upon the husband’s ownership of the wife’s sexuality. This was the woman for whom Rabbi Shimon was concerned. Such a woman is not involved in witchcraft… A woman who has forgone her personal freedom and entered into a deal that has made her a legitimate member of male society. “If you accept these conventions,” the ketubah says, “then we will take care of you, honor you, and mortgage your husband’s possessions for your financial benefit.”

How shall I now end this class on a happy note?

Let’s go back to the stormy and rainy day on which Rabbi Shimon went to visit the witches. A storm represents that the Great Mother is storming now. The weather symbolizes Mother Earth’s current state of being.

If we enter into the minds of these witches, the men’s coming in dry on a stormy day is a wonderful fantasy—a woman’s “wet dream.” That is what they most want: that someone will come to them on a stormy day—a day when they are feeling overcast, weepy and stormy—and be able to remain dry. A woman says to herself about such a man: “He is not running away from me. He has come to meet me where I am. He is not moved by my storms. He is not afraid. He is not hiding. He even invites me to play with him—’I will bring you young and virile men…’”

This is what a woman is always saying without words: “When I am stormy, surprise me with your magic! You be the greater magician than I!” This is what all “witches” really want…

So we conclude now with a blessing for our times, when witches have begun again to celebrate: I wish for all of us that Choni haMaagal and Shimon ben Shetach reunite. If I had to choose between them, I would choose the academy of Choni, but I feel that this split is part of Judaism’s illness—the illness we call, “exile,” an illness from which we must heal. Part of our work today is to reincorporate the circle into the line, and to reestablish conjugation between them.

The time has come to throw an evening for rabbis and witches…

Filed Under: Articles, Judaism Renewal, Misc.
Tagged: circles, Feminine, Jewish history, Kabala, Renewal of Judaism, witchcraft

The Garden – The School of Love in Radical Kabbala

March 2010
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Slideshow

Jewish history

Lilith, Re-reading 3rd gate

Jewish history

Lillith; A Re-Reading of Feminine Shadow. 2nd Gate

CHAPTER 6: LEAH AND RACHEL – LILITH AND EVE

CHAPTER 7: THE MAGIC SQUARE OF THE HOUSE OF JACOB

CHAPTER 8: THE PROSTITUTE

CHAPTER 9: THREE PATRIARCHAL IMAGES OF WOMAN

FOOTNOTES

Jewish history

Lillith; A Re-Reading of Feminine Shadow. 1st Gate.

FREUDIAN AND JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER 2: THE ARI’S MYTH

REINCARNATION AND READING

CHAPTER 3: THE PROBLEMATICS OF EROS IN THE JEWISH TEXTUAL TRADITION

MASKS AND TRUTH

CHAPTER 4: LILITH INCARNATE

ROOTS

RABBINIC INTERPRETATION & FANTASY

THE LILITH MYTH IS BORN

LILITH’S CAREER AS A DEMONESS

FOOTNOTES

Jewish history

Rabbis and Witches

Rabbis and Witches

^{CHAPTER 6: LEAH AND RACHEL – LILITH AND EVE}

^{CHAPTER 7: THE MAGIC SQUARE OF THE HOUSE OF JACOB}

^{CHAPTER 8: THE PROSTITUTE}

^{CHAPTER 9: THREE PATRIARCHAL IMAGES OF WOMAN}

^FOOTNOTES