[Bookwoman] The Coming of Lilith

[Lee Anne Phillips]

I'm reading a book, The Coming of Lilith*, by one of
those "fascinating women," Judith Plaskow, co-editor,
along with Carol P. Christ, of one of the most
significant spiritual and thealogical books to come
along in this century, or any other, Womanspirit Rising.  

Like that, this is a collection of essays, but many are
on a far more personal level. As it happens, many of
her experiences resonate in my own mind and heart,
since we were born into the same time and world.

She says in her introduction that she became a
feminist in 1969, her second year as a graduate
student in religious studies, the year Yale finally
permitted women to enroll in the undergraduate
college. There was a huge todo about this; they
hired a gynecologist for the campus medical
center, installed full-length mirrors in the ladies
rooms, and the New York Times ran a front page
story about this "historic moment." Some of the
female graduate students, who knew that women
had been attending classes as graduate students
for eighty years, wondered why it was that no
one had noticed them before.

They held a meeting, which Judith attended, and
there initiated a storytelling familiar to many of
you now, but completely foreign to those of our
generation, the story of "girls" who went to college
to become doctors, lawyers, and Rabbis, and became
doctor's wives, lawyer's wives, and Rabbi's wives,
the latter being exactly what Judith was at the time.

At one point, she reveals, she went home and wept
for half the night, feeling at 22 that she had wasted
her life.

I remember that reaction very well, since I'd had
the very same reaction some few years earlier. 

When you grow up in an oppressive environment,
it hardly seems noticeable. I saw the same TV shows
that Judith did, Perry Mason, The Jack Benny Show,
Your Show of Shows, and the one comfortable
commonality in all of these was that they portrayed
a stereotyped view of women, and quite often a
genial contempt toward women by all the men
who encountered them. Della Street was the
perfect secretary, but Paul Drake always referred
to her as "Beautiful" and tried to make a date,
which would been sexual harassment today.
Mary Livingstone was always slightly ditzy, as
was Imogene Coca, and the men wore the pants
in their collective families. "Woman driver," meaning
"terrible driver," and exhortations to the boys
to "buck up and be a man," and not to be a "sissy,"
were common, by which it was clearly understood
that women were emotional wrecks, "sob sisters,"
and "sisters" themselves were weak and ineffectual.

And then suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, the
scales fall from your eyes and nothing is the same
as it was. The Taming of the Shrew isn't all that
funny any more, "blonde jokes" fall flat, and "dizzy
dames" in general become repugnant caricatures
at which one becomes, first embarrassed, than
angry, and finally outraged.

You start noticing that, while men always "said"
"Ladies first" when one walked through doorways
in those days, in almost other things it was
"Ladies last." And then you start thinking.

In Judith's case, she started writing as well.
These essays span a period of more than
thirty years, and you can see her thinking
evolve from that original, existential sense
of deep loss, grieving, and alienation to full
engagement with the problems of the modern
world, from making sure that God-language
allows a tiny bit of room for women, to the
necessity of creating new law to address the
inequalities built into current society, whether
the "disadvantaged" people who can't agree
to the current shibboleth, have certain
genders, religions, skin colors, or ethnicities.

Since she is a Jew, her most compelling work,
for me at least, was Standing Again at Sinai:
Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, and
then The Coming of Lilith : Essays on Feminism,
Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003.

In this latter work she argues, among other
things, that Jewish Halacha needs to be
re-thought and re-worked to eliminate
the pervasive gender inequalities that
irritate, at least, many women, and make
the lives of some a living hell. She
demonstrates compellingly that almost
every Jewish woman can be disastrously
affected by what many see as the quaint 
foibles of the Ultra-Orthodox, and if not
her self, her children. Without a get, for
example, a religious -- as opposed to a civil --
divorce, one's children can be considered
"bastards" and placed at a distinct
disadvantage in later life, since one never
knows what life might bring.

She calls on Jewish men to refuse to take
part in demeaning sexist practices, like
refusing to allow women to be counted as
"real Jews" for the purpose of public prayer,
just as non-racist men and women no longer
snigger at racist jokes and walk away from
groups in which this behaviour is habitual.

It's only by marginalizing racism, by shunning
those who practice it, that society is gradually
weaning itself of our collective racist past,
and the same holds true for religious and
other sexisms.

She discusses the "continuing value of
Separatism," the futility of the "progressive"
Essentialist stance on homosexuality -- which
argues that gayness is "innate," like skin color
or other biological attributes -- in the face of
the clear truth that many people, perhaps
especially women, *choose* to become
homosexual after a lifetime spent "playing
for the other team," an idea popularized by
the famous slogan of the Seventies, "Any
Woman Can (become a lesbian)," which
argued for "political" lesbianism as an
antidote for both sexism and heterosexism.

She extends this idea to civil and human
rights in general; what does it mean that
one can forgive only those things which
one "can't help?" Is it that women, for
example, would be men if they possibly
could be, but lack some divine essence
that precludes this happy circumstance?

So to the progressive "excuse" for
homosexuality amounts to saying that,
of course, everyone would *prefer* to
be heterosexual (male, white) but those
unfortunate individuals who aren't deserve
our pity, so we ought to make reasonable
accommodations for them, as long as they
admit their disability.

Instead of obsessing over categories,
she says, maybe we ought to examine
the categories themselves and start being
suspicious of where these taxonomies
came from and whether they reflect a
reality that even exists today

Much of Jewish law was codified during
a period of exile and subordination to
"foreign" rulers based in Persia (modern
Iran), Rome, and the many nations of the
Diaspora. In societies in which the Jewish
elite had no temporal power, might they
not have gone a little overboard on the
few areas they *could* control, their
religious lives and, of course, their women?

She points out that the Megillah, for example,
the Book of Esther, condemns Vashti**, a
woman who acted much as any self-respecting
woman might when asked to perform a naughty
little dance for her husband's drunken friends,
and praises Esther who subordinates herself
to her cousin. And yet she saves the day mostly
by ignoring his bad advice. The book is filled
with male wish fulfillment, some of it profoundly
disturbing; it's not enough to save the people
from destruction, the putative "victims" have
to embark on a vicious killing spree, The
useless Cousin Mordechai is widely praised
as a hero and a genius, the villain of the piece
is hung with all his relatives, and the only
thing lacking is a good explosion or two. Of
course, in real life, no such thing transpired.

So too, the Torah hysteria over (male)
homosexuality isn't precisely mirrored
in actual Jewish law. Lesbians are pretty
much ignored, although there are hints,
even in Torah,  that this sort of thing was
not unknown, and the Rabbis firmly declared
that, whatever the Torah "sin" might be for
men, it "wasn't a problem for Jews," which
seems a little odd when one realizes that Jewish
religious schools of the ancient world were
same sex pressure cookers, where young boys
up to men of all ages sat, ate, and slept
cheek and jowl with each other for years
at a time. Do the texts mean, "Jews don't
do that?" or do they mean that the Rabbis
winked at "human weakness" in this regard?

The Rabbis are, in fact, notorious for winking
at the strict letter of the law when it might
be disruptive of community life, but Plaskow
argues that it's time, and past time, to examine
their justifications out in the open instead of
sweeping them under the carpet, or back into
the closet, whichever metaphor one prefers.

Allowing nontraditional sexual choices, including
defying the expectation that women will happily
stay home to bear and raise "the children, to
be ignored marginalizes those that make such
choices, and allowing "tradition," specifically
appeals to religious texts, to dominate the
argument is dishonest, because the appellants
are rarely called to task on their inconsistencies.

*Everybody* ignores those parts of their "Holy
Book" that they don't like, yet are resentful
when they are brought to task for it and
typically beg off the question of why this rule
applies while that rule doesn't by saying,
essentially, "that's just the way it is," an
appeal to a status quo that has created, and
is creating, widespread injustice.

In the end, Plaskow is pursuing an injunction
laid down in Torah, which ought to inform
our view of every other rule, in every other
context, "Tzedek, tzedek tirdof," "Justice,
justice you will pursue." The Rabbis explain
the duplication of the word "justice" by saying
that it's not enough to pursue one's own
ideas of justice, which might have selfish roots;
you have to pursue justice for everyone
involved in a given situation, taking into
account their own individual viewpoint.

Would that this were so.

Cheers,

Lee Anne
---------------------------------------
* Lilith is Adam's first wife, according to Jewish legend,
   who was emboldened by the fact that she was
   created at the same time as Adam, and out of
   the same stuff to rebel against his "natural"
   authority, especially in regard to having sex in
   the "missionary" position, for which she was
   severely punished by being turned into a
   demoness with long hair and wings. She is
   unique in Catholic doctrine as well, because,
   having flown from the Garden of Eden before
   the putative "fall," she is untouched by "original sin."
   She's also pretty darned smart, since she escapes
   from the Garden and Adam's domination by
   pronouncing the true name of God, which
   Adam doesn't know. She wreaks her revenge on
   the ur-abuser, Adam, by sucking the life out
   of boy babies in infancy. She evidently leaves
   girl babies alone, a proto-feminist Separatist,
   the real founder of Valerie Solanas' SCUM, so
   some people still refuse to cut a male baby's
   hair until he's three years old, in hopes that
   Lilith will mistake him for a girl. Those wily
   women will get you every time, eh Adam?

** Vashti is a Persian name meaning either
    "Beautiful" or "Good," essentially the same
    name as that of Vashishta, the famous Vedic
    sage who gave his name to Yoga Vashishta,
    one of the earliest Vedic scriptures. Interestingly,
    from a modern perspective, is that the Rabbis
    explained Vashti's reluctance to dance naked
    before the assembled guests as being due to
    having miraculously been transformed by
    having a penis affixed where her female parts
    had been formerly, which was a metaphor for
    bold independence far too shocking and risqué
    for any but the most hardened male mind, so
    the offending words were censored in some
    editions of the Talmud, even to this day.
    In Louis Ginzberg's compendium of Talmudic
    tales -- usually called "midrash" -- The Legends
    of the Jews, for example, the passage does
    appear, but only in the footnotes, and in Latin.
    It's to laugh.