136 CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-Create the World's First Woman,

Edited by ENID DAME, LILLY RIVLIN, and HENNY WENKART.
Introduction by Naomi Wolf. Northvale, New Jersey and Jerusalem:
Jason Aronson, Inc., 1998. xix + 415pp.

Reviewed by Michael Zank, Boston University

When I recently set about to constmct a course on Gender and Judaism,

I quickly honed in on Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct which
expressed what I at first found most interesting and most fascinating
about the topic: the apotheosis of the "sissy." In contrast to the ever
loathed Herrgott of my German mother tongue (known from curses
such as "Herrgottnochmal"), this view on the Jewish tradition
promised to sanctify what I knew was right: if God is male and the
human male is effeminate, then male-ness is a divine prerogative and
it's okay for men to be softies; a great angle for a course on gender
taught by a man, n 'est ce pas?
When I told my tmsty partner about this book and the idea I was
so excited about, all she said was this: "They've deprived us of a voice
of our own, and now they're even depriving us of the very traits of our
own sex?"-this made me pause. It also made me reconsider the
structure of my course. Instead of raising the perhaps akeady logocentric
question of the implications of (un-gendered or bi-gendered)
monotheism on human gender relations, I focused on the male
representation of the female voice and on women's discovery of their
own voices. If the aim is to look at the role of gender in the making of
Judaism, and at the role of Judaism in the making of gender, it is not
enough, so I understood, to read standard biblical texts for "women in
the Bible" under the assumption that the stories of Ruth, Deborah, and
Judith represent actual female voices. Instead, it may have taken women
until fairly recently to discover their own voices and make them heard.
Yet hi the contexts of a religion based on the authority of tradition
such as Judaism, where ancient text traditions supply the ever-
renewable source of meaning for the lives of modem readers, it is clearly
not enough to fmd your own voice. You must find your voice by using
traditional libretti. The feminist movement in Judaism has been well
aware of this constraint, and hence it is not per chance that, from its
inception and throughout, it latched on to the figure of Lilith.
Lilith is a traditional Jewish literary figure, yet a figure in the
margins, that is, in that place where-as the same Daniel Boyarin taught
us more thoroughly than anyone else-some of the most intriguing
symbols of this or any tradition may be found. Reading in the marghs,
woman, the ultimate marginalized and silenced representative of a
fundamentally family-oriented religion, found an echo of her silenced
voice: the echo of a tradition that was itself marginalized. Whatever
 REVIEWS 137

methodological concems one may raise about the retrieval of the

marginal that involves a switch betv^een margin and center and that
may be rooted in an act of creative eisegesis rather than hermeneutically
sound exegesis, the figure of Lilith will not go away. Yet instead of her
traditional garb of the wickedly arrogant child-killing witch she is
wearing the royal gown of First Woman.
The ambiguify inherent in this sudden rise to feminist dignify of a
marginal character out of little known medieval midrashic sources befits
the character of Lilith well. And the editors of the anthology of creative
reappropriations and recreations of this demonic, divine, and all-too-
human creature, Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, and Henny Wenkart, wisely
refiect this ambiguify in its very title. Which Lilithl
What Ahad Ha-am once wrote about the figure of Moses, namely
that the creation is formed in the image of its creator (i.e., in the case of
Moses, the creator is the prophetically inclined creative genius of the
ancient Israelite and Jewish authors who gave us the image of Moses
that is handed down in the literature created by them), is equally tme of
the figure of Lilith. With one decisive difference: whereas it is obvious
that Lilith greatly excites and stimulates the imagination of the
contemporary self-conscious feminist writer, authorial excitement at the
figure of Moses is entirely a matter of the past.
In Which Lilith?, as follows the subtitle of the collection,
"feminist writers re-create the world's first woman." This is a heady
task, indeed. Yet the authors go about it in the spirit of irreverance and
lightness that their patron saint inspires. At the same time, it should
not go urmientioned that the task, articulated and taken on from the
perspective of a group of women who are fighting for their place within
the competing ideologies and responsibilities of contemporary Judaism,
aims to meet the major criterion of a book speaking in eamest to a
fundamental issue of Jewish self-understanding: this criterion is the
concem for justice, for messianic change, and thus for the humanization
of both, the tradition in which it is rooted as well as the sociefy in
which it is to manifest itself Hence, like all good Jewish books, this is
a deeply human, a deeply humanistic one. Looking at Lilith awakens
the fiffy-three contributing authors to listen for and give expression to
the Lilith in themselves: a deeply human presence, not least because of
her being a hitherto repressed, demonized, and marginalized presence.
Most delightful perhaps about this collection is its complete
absence of censure on form: erotic poems stand next to classical sources
and their scholarly retrieval, which stand next to redemptively
humorous conversations between a young mother and her ovra mother
about the demon whose name the young mother bestowed on her child
instead of that of Sarah, Leah, Rachel, or another decent and accepted
heroine of Jewish lore. New versions of ancient creation hymns stand
next to defiantly modem expressions of alienation that are loath to even
138 CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

mention anything traditional. The Zohar is made to speak to Lilith, as

is the Babylonian Talmud, as is the Buddhist tradition. In all, Lilith
allows the authors to adumbrate a commonality that is unrestrained by
traditional symbols or by systematic concems, yet open to their use
where such is perceived as meaningful. And this, in the final analysis,
is what is both tmsettlhig about this array of sources as well as deeply
appropriate to its intention: in order for Jewish women to find and
articulate their own voice, they must invent it. With respect to this
invention, it is not the time of orderly and methodical expositions. It is
the time, as it were, before the creation that we find described in the
Book of Genesis, before the time of an orderly and hymnic procedure in
which day and night create an imperturbable rhythm affirmed by the
rational sector of the human experience. This is the time of the chaos
that precedes all order, restraint, routine, and reiteration. This is the
time of conftision over the morality that is so brilliantly set out in the
first few chapters of the Bible. This is the time of Lilith.