Friday, October 05, 2007

Breshit 5768: Who is Lillith?

This week we begin the story over again. As most know, the story begins with chaos and void, God says “let there be light” and there is light, then God takes seven days to create the rest of the world, ending with male and female created in God’s image. After all this work, God takes a well deserved and blessed Shabbos schluff. This is followed by the story of the first man, another version of why the animals were created to keep the man from being lonely, and finally with the creation of the woman. We then find out that one of these creatures is a little more wilily than the rest, and it isn’t the coyote. The snake convinces this woman, now named Eve, to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and in the resulting mess everyone is booted out of Eden. The snake ends up never wearing boots again, sometimes getting made into boots, and sometimes making its home in someone’s pair of boots. This gets followed by the Story of the first kids in this world, with Cain killing Abel. Eve has another son, Seth, and from him everyone is descended, though they are not very nice people.

I got good news and bad news, which might be good news for some. The good news is I finished my last final of my masters. The bad news I have no energy to write, so I’m digging up an oldie but a goodie. So in honor of the creation story, I ‘m going to give you the history of one particular character involved in Genesis 1 and 2 through folklore mostly: Lilith.

Lilith does not actually show up in Genesis, but her own genesis is here. We read in Genesis 1:27.

“So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female He created them.”

But we also read in Genesis 2:21-22

“And the Lord God made Adam fall into a deep sleep, and he slept; and He took one from his ribs, and closed up the flesh. Then he made the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, into a woman, and brought her to the man”.

The Talmudic rabbis were in a conundrum. How does one reconcile the differences between these two, making them separate in Genesis 1, then from one another from Genesis 2?

Genesis 1:23 continues

And Adam said, This time is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

Most people would take the “this time” to mean different than the animals that Adam named in the previous verses. But the Midrash Genesis Rabbah XVIII:4 takes it one step further. It introduces the idea of two women. The first was menstruating, and so upset Adam she had to be taken away. The second was Eve who was “this time”. Yet, from that other time, a legend arouse.

The only real biblical mention of Lilith is as a tawny owl, in Isaiah 34:14 one of the only things living, among other night birds, after an apocalypse destroying the enemies of Israel. She is otherwise not mentioned, though there have been archaeological finds of clay images of a woman with owl wings. In the Talmud, Nidah 24b in its rather clinical discussion of aborted fetuses talks about a fetus with wings as looking like a Lilith.

There were other legends of a whole class of demons named Liliths. The tractate Shabbat 151b warns not to sleep in a house alone or be seized by a Lilith. A Lilith would seduce men into nocturnal emissions and impregnate herself with these.

Her legend comes together with a rather strange book, The Alphabet of Ben Sira. The book is a series of folk tales heavily influenced by Midrash and Talmud. Written probably only two to three hundred years after the Talmud, around the 8th or 9th century CE. It was written in Islamic Persia by an unknown author. Given its rather absurd critique of Talmud, it may have been a parody written by bored Rabbis. I have an pet theory the Lillith part of the story of Ben Sira was actually a misogynist’s polemic against the Talmudic rulings of onah, the requirement for sexual satisfaction of one’s wife, which strongly favored women.

In the story, Ben Sira saves the son of Nebuchadnezzar by writing an amulet. Ben Sira explains to the king the story of Lilith. Lilith was Adam’s first wife.

After God created Adam, who was alone, He said, 'It is not good for man to be alone' (Genesis 2:18). He then created a woman for Adam, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.' But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air. Adam stood in prayer before his Creator: 'Sovereign of the universe!' he said, 'the woman you gave me has run away.' At once, the Holy One, blessed be He, sent these three angels to bring her back.

God dispatches three angels to bring her back, with a message. If she agrees to come back, then fine and good, but if she does not, a hundred of her children will be killed by the angels every day. Even with this threat she does not return to the garden, and the angels carry out the threat. In vengeance she now kills the children of Adam, the legend goes, for boys until their circumcisions and girls twenty days. But she can be stopped by writing an amulet with the name of the three angels.

Then Kabbalah and the Zohar add to the legend. She roams around particularly on Friday night, killing demons and epileptics created through immodest intercourse. She is still seducing men by the seaside, but she fled when Adam was given a soul in Genesis 2:7, not as Ben Sira claims, after. She cares for not only her own demonic children, but also those created by other seducing she-demons. Lilith, through much of her history, had been the seducer of men, the wife to the prince of demons, the nanny of demons, and the killer of human infants.

Many defenses have been devised against Lilith. One is the ultimate general-purpose demon amulet: the mezuzah. In the Targum to the Song of Songs, written at about the same time frame as Ben Sira, there is line that directly states that mezuzot repel demons. There are also many specific defenses. Lilith cannot stand the color red, so red ribbons or threads worn by infants, or tied to their cribs also repels her. The most powerful, however, is as Ben Sira noted, the amulet with the names of the three angels SNVY, SNSNVY, and SMNGLVF. One famous version found in the magic book Sefer Raziel includes 2 different sets of pictures of the three angels, and the words “Adam and Eve - outside Lilith!”

But in the 20th century, everything changed with the women’s rights movement. Jewish women, as they looked in the texts for an archetype to describe their new identities, had trouble. Given that most, if not all, of the texts are written by men, it became near impossible to find in the Torah or Talmud an archetype for the feminist Jewish woman. This would be someone who could control her own destiny, not be in subservience to her husband. The only one who fits that bill in all of Jewish folklore is the Lilith of Ben Sira, who not only was an equal creature to Adam, but really wanted to be on top every once and a while. But changing at least a thousand, if not more, years of tradition of Lilith as a demon have not been easy. The issue becomes an emotional one, as I’ve learned first hand. One of the worst arguments I ever got myself into was into what really is the identity of Lilith.

The feminist Lilith is one that embodies certain now-noble qualities: gender equality and independence. But the demon is still to be feared, the loss of an infant, one that I was all too aware of as my now 3 year old, but prematurely born niece and nephew grew in strength. We still see the defenses against Lilith as part of tradition, as mothers and grandmothers tie red ribbons to their newborns, and make sure the mezuzah is kosher in the baby’s room.

For me all the stories of Lilith ring true. She is the demon who seduces men and kills babies. She is the independent archetype. She most importantly is story, and how we describe her is how she becomes. We cannot destroy tradition, and the demon will be with us forever, a battle fought at every child’s birth. But we can begin to temper her, to make her a different character in Myth. I've often described her not in Ben Sira’s view that she was arguing with Adam about who’s on top, but in a more tragic manner. Adam actually raped and abused her, because he did not know any better. Adam had not eaten of the tree of knowledge yet. While we tend to think he learned evil from the fruit, he also learned what is good, and where restraint is necessary. Adam’s and Eve’s first act after eating of the fruit was not an evil one but one of modesty, they covered themselves. So before eating, it was in his capability to do evil without even knowing it. And that is what happened to Lilith. She seemed to know better and made a choice of a tragic life instead of an abusive husband.

Lilith is a side character to the creation stories we read this week, something added millennia later to stories that didn’t quite fit together. I cannot write about Lilith without writing about Adam’s second wife, Eve. While many theologians from many religions want to saddle her with bringing evil in the world, some actually claiming she literally birthed it, I like to think she brought something else. As Adam said “this one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” and in time man will leave his parents and become “one flesh” with his wife. She never made it as the feminist archetype, since she seems to be the subservient one. She is dependent on Adam. But Adam sees things differently. While Lilith and Adam did not work out, it’s because they were too independent from each other - they could never see the other’s view, nor do anything for the other. They could never share. But Adam and Eve have the potential not just for dependence, but interdependence - to once again be one flesh, two sides of the same being united and sharing into a stronger whole. Independence is great but being part of a bigger whole is more. Not until Eve is Adam happy.

While Lilith might be re-written as the archetype of independence, maybe we need to also begin to re-write the story of Eve. Some feminists and Kabbalists have re-written the story where eve and Lilith are now buddies, and Lilith advises Eve. In some of the misogynist Kabbalah versions, Some think Lilith was the snake, or the serpent was Lillith’s 2nd husband, and there was more than talk. Other more modern stories make sure Eve does not fall into the same traps as Lilith when it comes to Adam.

But maybe the next step is not just independence, but interdependence. Adam and Eve are not individual archetypes, but a single one, the first true couple who actually could live together for the rest of their lives. We aspire to this at weddings and the seven days afterwards when the blessing is read “ Gladden the joyful companions and lovers as you gladdened your creation in the Garden of Eden in ancient times.” We find joy in that connection, a joy found no where else, and a relationship like nothing else. Lilith may have been a beginning, but like Eve, our futures belong with completing ourselves and each other.

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