from Jewish Social Studies Volume 4, Number 1

The Myth of Matriarchy in Recent Writings on Jewish Women's Spirituality

Jody Elizabeth Myers

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Numberless, the earth breeds
dangers, and the sober thought of fear.
The bending sea's arms swarm
with bitter, savage beasts.
Torches blossom to burn along
the high space between ground and sky.
Things fly, and things walk the earth.
Remember too
the storm and wrath of the whirlwind.

But who can recount all
the high daring in the will
of man, and in the stubborn hearts of women
the all-adventurous passions
that couple with man's overthrow.
The female force, the desperate
love crams its resisted way
on marriage and the dark embrace
of brute beasts, of mortal men.

-----Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers

Numerous societies throughout the world have preserved myths of an ancient matriarchy. These describe the original female rulers as abusive of power and ruling without mercy or justice. For this reason men rebelled against them and, with the blessing of the gods, were victorious at instituting patriarchal rule. Although social scientists have generally been aware of the distinctions between myth and historical reality, many women today in the feminist spirituality movement have eagerly embraced the notion of an archaic matriarchal era. They insist that the negativity toward women in the legends is a later male bias that contaminated an original and authentic women's oral tradition. The matriarchal era, they assert, was a peaceful, idyllic era of Goddess-centered or immanentist religions in tune with the Earth's natural rhythms. It was overthrown by men who established patriarchal religions and the violent and corrupt civilization of the past few thousand years. The revised matriarchal myth is a paradigmatic myth of an oppressed people. Practitioners of feminist spirituality seek to reestablish an era of harmony like the original one, and they try to foster an appreciation for women's innate and evolving wisdom. While some acknowledge the difference between myth and reality, all regard the concept of a primeval matriarchy as central to women's spirituality.¹

Revised myths of archaic matriarchy have appeared in contemporary Jewish women's writings. Jewish women rarely acknowledge their debt to non-Jewish spiritual feminists. This reluctance stems partly from the fact that some of the latter regularly point to Israelite religion as the patriarchal overthrower of matriarchy and Goddess-centered religions. Jewish women have taken offense at this accusation and have defended Judaism from its external detractors.² That done, they then grapple with the dilemma from within, trying to restore to Jewish history concrete data on the religious lives of ancient Jewish women. Because biblical (and later) editors were not interested in women's religiosity, they preserved only fragmented references to women's religious behaviors and beliefs, and they paid particular attention only to those who were unorthodox or evil. When Jewish women realize the extent of the loss that this represents, they conclude that there is some truth to the matriarchal myth: it was not that Jewish men and Yahweh destroyed matriarchy; rather, male authorities ignored or willfully suppressed Jewish women's religious traditions. Angered by their deprivation and sorely in need of female role models, modern Jewish women feel justified in producing their own stories of the matriarchs. They, unlike most of their non-Jewish peers, have a rich literary and folk tradition to mine.³ Like male exegetes, visionaries, and storytellers, they coax new life out of Jewish texts and conveniently ignore their cross-cultural borrowing.

There has been a tremendous increase in Jewish women's religious writings, and though much of it does not use the matriarchal myth as a paradigm, the matriarchal myth pulses through the new legends of Lilith, common motifs used in Rosh Hodesh rituals, and Shekhinah imagery in Orthodox Judaism. In these, Jewish women describe a time when women or female forces were respected for their multiple powers. Then: a fall from favor, a loss of women's presence or knowledge or honor, a spiritual emptiness. By "remembering" or reconstructing the lives of their mothers, modern Jewish women raise themselves out of the depressed place in which they find themselves and attempt to elevate the rest of Jewry along with them.

Three recurring themes appear throughout my analysis. First, this new Jewish women's literature is not necessarily feminist, if by feminist we mean a desire to transform or reject traditional gender categories.⁴ The authors dwell on and enhance women's religious options--creating or refurbishing a separate women's tradition figures in this enterprise--but they fit on a continuum that extends from radical feminism to a reconfigured conservatism, and some slide back and forth between positions. Second, the rituals are frequently constructed to serve therapeutic ends. Because the writers are intent upon helping women undo the damage to their sense of self-worth as people and as women, their works do not fit easily within the existing structure of communal prayer and theology. Third, because the matriarchal myth is structurally similar to the Jewish myth of exile and redemption, the authors easily integrate into their writings the symbols and language of messianism and Zionism. Similar dynamics exist, too: there are those who passively await salvation and those who advocate a more active cooperation with God in hastening the restoration of matriarchy; then there are those who leave God out of it and construe the challenge in naturalistic terms entirely.

Lilith

A semblance of a myth of an overthrown matriarchy appears in Jewish literature. On the basis of the discrepancy between the creation narrative in Genesis 1, in which God creates male and female simultaneously, and Genesis 2, which describes the creation of Adam and then Eve, oral traditions posited the creation of a woman prior to Eve. The first fully developed written tale appears in the Gaonic period midrash The Alphabet of Ben Sira. Its anonymous author identifies the first woman as Lilith, a name previously reserved for a demon. In this tale God forms Lilith and Adam out of the dust of the earth. On the basis of their identical origins, Lilith insists that she deserves full equality with Adam; specifically, she resists Adam's effort to place her beneath him during sexual intercourse. Angry at Adam's refusal to switch places, she utters God's name and is thus able to escape the Garden of Eden. God fails to draw her back and, after Adam complains that he has no helpmate, replaces her with the more submissive Eve. Lilith continues to exist eternally as a demon who kills newborn babies and sexually torments men--she seduces them in their dreams and causes nocturnal emissions, which produces further demons. Later versions of the Lilith legend describe her as the devil Samael's whoring wife, and it became customary in Jewish households to take protective measures against her evil incursions.⁵

This legend would have remained obscure to modern women but for the efforts of Jewish feminists to make visible women's presence in the religious tradition. The demonization of a woman whose initial "sin" was her desire for equality seemed tailor-made to awaken women to the injustice of their status in Judaism. From a feminist perspective, it was quite obvious that the tale of Lilith functioned to justify and explain male dominance and to frighten and coerce women into socially acceptable behavior. Judith Plaskow may have been the first to use Lilith as a rallying cry for Jewish feminism in 1972, but wider dissemination came in 1976 with Aviva Cantor's article in the opening issue of the first Jewish feminist journal, Lilith Magazine. Cantor does not claim that there had been an earlier, pro-Lilith legend. In a feminist twist on Zionist ideology, she attributes the myth to the curse of galut life: Jewish men, feeling emasculated by their exiled status, needed to differentiate themselves from the most powerless of all groups, Jewish women. Cantor points out that the explicit misogyny in the original Lilith story is useful for making Jewish women both angry and brave. Historiography here serves socio-political ends: Cantor argues that knowledge of the various permutations of the Lilith myth would show that Jewish culture was not divine but socially constructed, and Jewish women could reconstruct it without fear of retribution from Heaven. Cantor did not revise the Lilith myth, but she did argue that there was an essence to it that was free of male bias and closer to the Genesis story: the ideals of women's struggle for independence, courage in taking risks, and "commitment to the equality of woman and man based on their creation as equals by God."⁶

Since the 1970s, awareness of the Lilith legend has increased in Jewish circles, and many new versions have appeared. One of the most elaborate and influential was crafted by Lynn Gottlieb. Gottlieb was involved in Jewish feminism from its beginnings in the early 1970s. Within a few years she achieved notoriety as a woman preparing for private rabbinic ordination and as a performance artist specializing in creative and provocative Jewish storytelling. Since then she has continued to serve as a spiritual guide and storyteller. She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism (1995) is a summary of over two decades of her work. It weaves together her personal narrative, suggestions for creating one's own stories and ceremonies, and the text of performed stories, including her Lilith story.

In Gottlieb's free-form verse, God (personified as female) creates ex nihilo the earth, sky, sea, and a womb within the sea that generates Lilith. Lilith is a fiery-winged human whose natural habitat is the sky. She embraces all life, "not knowing where sky began and her own self ended." When she becomes lonely for someone like herself, God creates a man from the dust. But Adam is a creature of the earth and fearful of Lilith's wings of fire. The accommodating Lilith takes off her wings, and they share their stories. When Lilith misses her fiery wings and starts to retrieve them, Adam "forces her to the ground, / hoping to make her more like himself. / . . . Then Adam understood the power of his holding / forced himself down upon her." In her pained terror, Lilith sleeps and awakens as Eve, a subservient woman with no memory of her former self. God, saddened by Eve's servility, plants the tree of knowledge in the garden as a means of rectifying the loss. Eating the fruit gives each human a different lesson: Adam learns about death and bequeaths to women pain in childbirth, while Eve "left the garden with her master / mourning a self not quite remembered." The myth, like many Jewish rituals, closes with a plea for an end to exile and a request for redemption:

Lilith,
we are your children,
we are the changing generations.
Help us recover our wings of fire
so we can come together
woman and man
as intended by God
in the beginning of creation.⁷

Gottlieb's version of the matriarchal myth is a particularly pessimistic one: it is a tale of rape. Rape was the mode of woman's downfall, and the raping male remains unrepentant and unreformed. The primeval woman was naive and trusting, and her female replacement is a phantom of her former self--she is not even aware of the crime, suffering traumatic memory loss--and she remains with a man who abuses her. God is ineffectual, a mother-therapist with minimal healing capacities. Salvation can come only by responding to a weak memory of Lilith.

The theological assumptions of this Lilith tale are important to consider here. God is a rather irrelevant and impotent figure in this and other spiritual feminist writings.⁸ Radical feminist theory critiques and rejects the concept of a deity because it is intrinsically connected with hierarchy, exclusivity, and the concept of Otherness; these form the rationales for the creation and maintenance of gender categories that are oppressive of women. Feminists who are engaged in religion argue that the most appropriate and accurate representation of the sacred is as a non-theistic force that dwells within, a "life energy" immanent in the world. This immanent sacred force is best conveyed without anthropomorphism and without monism or dualism; instead, a plurality of images and metaphors best describes its manifestation within and through all life. However, many spiritual feminists allow the sacred to be conceptualized anthropomorphically as female, as Goddess or Goddesses, for these have a relationship with nature that is immanentist.⁹

Gottlieb is one of many Jewish feminists who accept and promote these principles of radical spiritual feminism. She does not conceive of Yahweh as transcendent God, or of the Shekhinah as his feminized divine mate who has been separated from him but longs to return to his embrace. Gottlieb rejects these as mere projections of stereotypic aspects of the male and female personae, and hence of little value. In their place, Gottlieb constructs images and tales of divine personalities who embody a mix of different strengths, interests, and temperaments. They serve as "spiritual paradigms and role models that help us value our wisdom, our fearlessness, our sexuality, and our public works."¹⁰ It is probably safe to say that Gottlieb is on the radical edge of Jewish feminism because of her graphic and extreme depictions of divinity. Her immanentist outlook is not at all unusual.

And here we have arrived at the point where the feminist political enterprise slides into a focus on personal health and well-being. A concept of immanence does not necessarily lead away from political action, but it has that tendency. If people do not believe in a transcendent God who commands them to obey or to shape the world, they are likelier to believe that they control their own destiny. They may feel compelled to immediately transform the world, or, if they perceive of themselves as damaged victims, they may feel that they have to first mold themselves into stronger beings. That process of reinvention may simply become the final objective. This is evident in Gottlieb's book when she explains the Lilith-like aspect of women's psyche and its curative potential:

Lilith is the shadowy side of our power, the power that has not yet been tamed and put to use in the service of our greatest personal gifts, whatever they may be. Lilith is a side of feminine power with which we must reckon. When she is repressed or dominated, she becomes desperate, enraged, and insane. When she is acknowledged and loved for her fire, she becomes a source for positive creation. Tracking our Lilith nature is the key to our spiritual understanding.¹¹

According to Gottlieb, women's "most sacred quest" is "the quest to wholeness of being." When people pray, then, they are talking to themselves, channeling energy to aspects of their beings that they want to activate, suppress, or modify; they are seeking "the missing pieces" of their psyche.¹² Religious ritual is about healing and psychic self-improvement, and its impact beyond one's immediate social circle is unclear. Since the early 1970s, feminists have been debating whether feminist spirituality is sufficiently political or encouraging of political activism and, if not, whether it is a betrayal of feminism. Gottlieb does not stake out a position in this quarrel, but it is clear that she is more concerned with individuals' spiritual consciousness than with broad, political movements.¹³

It seems that a reconstructed Lilith legend has only limited capacity as a basis for a positive matriarchal myth. First of all, it faces structural obstacles. It is difficult to integrate Lilith into the Torah when she is simply not there; acknowledging her would accentuate women's feelings that neither are they. Honoring this absent woman's independence, even using the relatively moderate adjectives suggested by Cantor, makes it more difficult to generate admiration for the mother of all life, Eve. Second, the Lilith legend reinforces the view of woman as victim and implies that her essential morality arises from her victimized status. This is the case in all matriarchal myths, but the Lilith version magnifies victimhood more than the others. The problems this raises for individual and communal consciousness are manifold.¹⁴ In its favor, though, one could argue that ritualized storytelling of victimization may be an effective therapeutic tool in a world in which people do abuse one another. This myth would have only transitional value; I would think that it is too negative to be the narrative foundation of one's individual or communal identity.

Finally, generating attractive qualities for Lilith poses a challenge. She can be refashioned as an independent woman who seeks equality, but the tale cannot exist without her disdain for men. Most men would find this tale insulting to them, and many women are likely to concur. The story of Lilith might be useful as a foundational myth for lesbian separatists who do not mind reinforcing bonds of sisterhood by slighting men.¹⁵ However, most women who are creating new liturgy, ritual, and exegesis seek a more positive tone and aspire to live within a harmonious mixed community. They are loathe to be labeled as man-haters, and they tend to avoid Lilith altogether.¹⁶

Rosh Hodesh

In the Rosh Hodesh literature that has been produced over the past few decades, the abrasive edges of the matriarchy myth have been blunted sufficiently to be incorporated into the new rituals of more moderate women. In 1972, a group of Jewish women in New York began to organize modern Rosh Hodesh celebrations, and variations on their ritual have since become a staple of Jewish women's spiritual expression. Two anthologies of Rosh Hodesh ceremonies have appeared, the first in 1986 (Penina V. Adelman's Miriam's Well: Rituals for Jewish Women Around the Year) and the second in 1996 (Celebrating the New Moon: A Rosh Chodesh Anthology, edited by Susan Berrin). Although both volumes reflect a mix of impulses that could be described as progressive and regressive, the more recent book evinces a major tilt toward the mainstream.

The lead article of Berrin's volume is a reprint of a 1976 article by Arlene Agus, one of the pioneers of the new ritual. Agus explains that a group of "religious feminists" had been exploring women's spirituality and women's role in Jewish ritual when they learned that Rosh Hodesh and its celebration had long been associated with Jewish women. According to Agus, the women were "seeking inclusion without revolution." They felt their discovery gave them greater credibility and leverage within the conservative Jewish community, as well as "valuable refutation of charges that feminism originated in non-Jewish, hence insidious, influences." The women that Agus was referring to celebrated the holiday in a manner that did not invade any man's space or violate any Jewish laws: the new ceremonies were held outside of the synagogue and used no halakhically restricted ritual objects, and they uttered no prayers requiring a minyan. Agus regarded their effort as a fulfillment of what Virginia Woolf called finding a "room of one's own." Agus's usage of this term actually inverts Woolf's intent: these women were not moving out to a room in which they could act without restraint from the upholders of traditional gender expectations. Instead, according to Agus, they were entering "a room that did not require leaving our homes within Judaism."¹⁷ According to Blu Greenberg, a spokesperson for Modern (or Centrist) Orthodoxy who wrote the foreword to the anthology, women have created a holiday that "does not make men feel pushed aside."¹⁸

The fuzzy lines between conservatism and feminism in Rosh Hodesh literature is evident in its use of the matriarchal myth. The matriarchal myth employed is rather mild, and because it is hidden within a metaphor of the moon, it is open to multiple interpretations. The version most often cited in Rosh Hodesh writings is a Talmudic midrash that tells that God originally created the sun and the moon the same size. The moon asks God whether it was wise to appoint two equal rulers. In response, God diminishes the moon's light. After the moon protests that this punishment is unwarranted, God concedes and promises that "the light of the moon shall become like the light of the sun" (Isaiah 30:26).¹⁹ Variations on this midrash--the moon receiving other compensations--can be found in a number of places in Talmudic and Gaonic era writings. The rabbis, like Isaiah, regarded the moon as a metaphor for the Jewish people, and its future brightening as a metaphor for the end of Exile.²⁰ They do not understand the moon as a metaphor for actual Jewish women.

There are solid reasons for understanding the moon as a metaphor for women, however. One of the most obvious is that the Hebrew word for moon (levana) is a female noun and the word for sun is male; another is the association of the moon with women's menses. So it is not surprising that this midrash appears to be a fixture in both anthologies. To be applied to women's lives, this midrash requires less work than the Lilith tale: no major reconstruction or allegation of a suppressed woman's tradition is necessary; it needs merely new interpretation. It is far less abrasive: the male sun cannot be blamed for the female moon's loss; the darkened moon enacts no revenge; and because God acknowledges his excessive severity and offers compensation, there is little room here for anger. Nevertheless, it still has the capacity to be an expression of a feminist conviction that women have not received what is due to them, and it could inspire them to demand what is rightfully theirs. The tale of the chastened moon could easily be interpreted as a wistful reference to the beginning of creation when male and female were valued equally, and a hope that this disparity would be rectified in the future.

Such an emphatic statement was made by Arthur I. Waskow in 1983 and published in Susannah Heschel's On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, an essay footnoted but not included in either Rosh Hodesh anthology. Waskow draws from the lunar metaphor the lesson that "not only women but also the symbols of women's spiritual experience will be restored to equality with men and their symbols." Echoing Herzl, he continues, "I think 'someday' is now, if we will make it so."²¹ Waskow calls for major changes in Jewish social life: he wants a feminist Judaism, one that involves fundamental changes of the same magnitude as occurred after the destruction of the First and Second Temples.²² The only comparable statement in Berrin's volume is in its sole critical essay, "Rosh Chodesh: A Feminist Critique and Reconstruction." The three authors voice their discomfort with many contemporary Rosh Hodesh celebrations. The moon midrash, they argue, promotes women's passivity by placing their salvation solely in God's control and in the distant future. Further, women's tacit acceptance of the myth's binary divisions reinforces the very societal attitudes that progressive women have been combatting (women vs. men, dark vs. light, small vs. large). In an effort to un-teach the moon midrash, the authors include in their ceremony a responsive reading of two choruses, one of women reciting the conservative version of the moon myth and the other chorus chanting a feminist retort.²³

Rosh Hodesh liturgies, however, tend not to be a vehicle for voicing grievances or calling for change. Perhaps lunar images simply cannot arouse radical action. Think of the moon's dependence, its inoffensive light, its changeable nature: is it at all surprising that these stereotypical feminine characteristics are found attractive to accommodating, compromise-seeking women? Whereas the first anthology of Rosh Hodesh ceremonies, Miriam's Well, could be considered ideologically radical in its religious expression (for example, many of its prayers are addressed to the Shekhinah), most of the pieces in Celebrating the New Moon are a celebration of women's distinctiveness, and the rare piece that calls for equality or restructuring of Judaism does so in the mildest of terms.²⁴

This is evident in the way Rosh Hodesh celebrants interpret the moon/matriarchal myth. The moon's diminished size and future restoration are understood in two ways, neither of which involve radical changes in women's social role or position within Judaism. The first understands the moon as a metaphor for women's moral behavior in a society that undervalues them. This is pegged to perhaps the most frequently cited text in modern Rosh Hodesh literature, a Talmudic midrash describing the behavior of the Israelite women during the episode of the Golden Calf. According to the midrash, panic spread through the camp when Moses did not return from the mountaintop, and the men hatched a plan to build an idol. Unlike the men, the women refused to engage in idolatry, and they would not donate their jewelry to the project. The midrash teaches that God acknowledged their virtue and bestowed upon them two rewards: the designation of Rosh Hodesh as a holiday for women, and "in the future they are destined to be renewed like the moon."²⁵ The nature and time of this future restoration is obscure in the original Hebrew--it is by no means clear that the exegete implies the growth of women's power in the next world, as some translators imply--and it remains unclear in the words of the women who cite it.²⁶ To them the essence of this story is the truth it conveys about Jewish women: they have taken courageous moral positions and have championed the good of their people and humanity, and while God has recognized their achievements, men have not.

Contemporary women who accept this tenet regard Rosh Hodesh as a badge of honor and an occasion to celebrate their accomplishments. Rosh Hodesh ceremonies do not consistently and uniformly convey a single ideology. In print, each Rosh Hodesh anthology contains an amazing range and variety of material geared toward Jews of all outlooks and levels of observance (from those who utter traditional prayers to those who address the Shekhinah). A basic part of a typical ceremony is the recital of stories and thumbnail sketches of noble Jewish women of the distant and recent past: biblical heroines, clever women mentioned in the Talmud, pious women who stoically observed "women's mitzvot" under adverse conditions, resistance fighters, scientists, labor unionists, inventors, Zionists, and so on, and these are frequently combined within a single service. Ordinary or nameless Jewish women who lovingly raise their children to be Jews are also given much praise. From their inception, Rosh Hodesh celebrations were spiritual celebrations that occurred outside a denominational framework (unlike the havura, they have not been absorbed into synagogues), and it is part of their culture to be resolutely inclusive. This principle of openness is characteristic of feminist rituals in general: a central value is a process in which the participants shape the ceremony to suit their needs, and this process is often more important than the final form.²⁷

The Rosh Hodesh ceremony, then, is both a healing and a consciousness-raising event. This tends to limit its pool of participants. Rosh Hodesh gatherings may be an organized group of peers and attendance is "by invitation only," or they may be more public, even aiming to be inclusive and announce that men and boys are welcome. In actual practice, though, the new Rosh Hodesh ceremonies are just for women. The rejuvenation of a separate women's religious expression does not seem to be a problem. On the contrary, many are pleased to have been rewarded "their own room," and they are not inclined to notice that it is but slight compensation for the noble behavior that they recount.²⁸

The second way of understanding the moon's diminished light and its future restoration is as a reference to "women's wisdom," that is, women's intuitive knowledge of and connection to the natural world. The notion of a distinctive women's wisdom is a central tenet of non-Jewish spiritual feminism, and it clearly has been adopted by many Jewish women as well. A recurring theme in the Rosh Hodesh literature is that because of their physical connection to the moon, manifest in their monthly menses, women know--in ways that men simply cannot--that life moves in cycles, with periods of waxing and waning, and never suffers absolute loss.²⁹ Most of the ceremonies' references to the moon revolve around this theme: women thank God or the moon for reminding them of this life-affirming truth. For example, here is a short poem by Nancy Lee Gossells, "Pale Moon," which is suggested for a ceremony:

Pale moon
ever coming and going,
lighting and fading
rhythmic flowing
signal of new time and changing seasons,
awaken in us
the mystery of beginnings and endings,
of lives renewed.
Awaken us to the beauty of endless cycles,
visible signs of God's eternal love.³⁰

This highlighting of endless cycles is a departure from the matriarchal myth's linear and progressive journey. Perhaps the infinite repetition of cycles is more convincing a metaphor for history? Perhaps it is more reassuring in these destructive times.

Yet the association of women with the moon can also allow women to closely identify with Judaism's messianic promise, certainly a linear salvic concept. Following the older interpretive tradition, the Rosh Hodesh liturgists liken the moon's cycles to the Jewish people's vicissitudes in exile. Contemplating the moon gives them hope in the Jewish future and inspiration to repair the world. More frequent than this call to action, however, is an identification of women with the stereotypical martyred images of the Jew: woman and Jew are scorned by the world, loyal to God even in adversity, expelled from one home, settling in another. Women, who are "others" for men, are the quintessential Jews. All of the poems and prayers in Berrin's volume, though, end on an optimistic note. Ultimately, the moon will be restored, the Jewish people will be redeemed, and Jewish women's honor will increase and their authority expand.³¹

Some of the writers in Berrin's volume suggest that women used to know ways of healing, alleviating pain, protecting loved ones, and restoring social and natural harmony.³² This is a theme within non- Jewish spiritual feminism, and there, as in the Jewish context, it permits another transformation of the matriarchal myth: the moon losing its light is likened to women's loss of their womanly knowledge. The Jewish women, however, do not claim that their loss occurred in the ancient period with the domination of men over women. Rather, women's loss transpired with the advent of modernity. Until that time there was an oral transmission of women's wisdom from mother to daughter. With modernity, women rejected the older values of faith and vulnerability and women's connections to nature. Women cut themselves off from the folk tradition, or were torn away from it by migration and industrialization.³³ Remnants of it can be discerned in "tkhines" literature, in Jewish cultures less tainted by modernity (Ethiopian and Mizrahi customs), and in the traces preserved in Jewish literature.³⁴ Women who evoke this theme lovingly remember aged grandmothers, aunts, and women of earlier generations, and there is much praise for motherhood; but their biological mothers are not present. Matia Rania Angelou, in "New Moon of the Daughters: Rosh Chodesh Tevet," asks women to light eight flames for various women or types of women who have inspired them. After the first five flames are lit to women in the distant past, in Nazi-controlled Europe, and in pre-modern Ethiopia, she continues:

Light the sixth flame for grandmothers
who taught us how to be women.
And the seventh one for all of us
who strive to discover the truth in the darkness.
The eight, as yet unlit, is for our unborn daughters,
the light and hope of the future. (158)

There is a generation of women missing in the chain of tradition: the participants' mothers. Apparently they did not bequeath wisdom to their daughters and are unable to be role models for them.

Even though the Rosh Hodesh writings surveyed here do not critique existing institutions, the authors are not content with the way things are. They identify and address two major dilemmas: their feeling that their contributions are unappreciated, and their conviction that their collective or innate women's wisdom must be recognized and nurtured. Yet, confronting these problems in a women-only setting means that women are not availing themselves of the leverage of a collective voice in changing attitudes, gender relations, education, and so on. They would rather shine soothingly and not intensively--like the moon, waxing and waning so as to avoid a harsh glare. Forging bonds with other women is the actual objective, not to become like men, like the sun.

The Shekhinah

Orthodox women writers are well aware of the above literature and have constructed their own, competing versions of the matriarchal myth. My comments here are based on major works by Orthodox women to the right of Blu Greenberg: Tamar Frankiel's The Voice of Sarah: Feminine Spirituality and Traditional Judaism (1990), Tehilla Abramov's The Secret of Jewish Femininity (1988), and a number of anthologies on Jewish womanhood.³⁵ Recently two major works have been published: To Be a Jewish Woman, by Lisa Aiken, and Total Immersion: A Mikvah Anthology, edited by Rivkah Slonim.³⁶ A considerable portion of this writing is sponsored by the Habad movement (Lubavitcher Hasidism). Of all the subdivisions of Orthodoxy, it is the most focused on outreach (promoting Judaism to Jews), is the most willing to creatively address modern theological challenges to Judaism, and is still propelled by a messianic ideology that gives some attention to women's role in the redemptive process. Two matriarchal myths have been developed within this literature. The first focuses on the inner workings of divinity, and it is connected to women through the niddah laws. The second is a reworked Eve-Lilith narrative, and this is used as a model of gender relations.

Descriptions of the inner workings of divinity abound in Jewish mystical literature.³⁷ The Orthodox women highlight one particular version that they have learned from their rabbis' and teachers' direct study of the texts. According to these teachings, the unknowable essence of God (the ein sof, infinite) is beyond human comprehension. However, God wanted to be in relationship, and this necessitated creating a realm outside of himself--although nothing is entirely outside of God. The ein sof emanated divinity downward, creating revealed divinity and the lower, material world. Revealed divinity is depicted as ten serot, symbols for the constituent elements of God's being. They can be approached through prayer and meditation. Tiferet, beauty, is the sixth serah and is understood as the harmonizing principle of all the serot. It is imagined as male, and its most common name is "The Holy One, Blessed Be He." The last serah, which is the most evident to us, is called Malkhut, kingdom, or Shekhinah, God's presence. Although it is through the Shekhinah that human beings actually perceive God, this serah is described as having no content of its own; she is an empty vessel that can only be filled with divine abundance by being nourished by the higher serot. Shekhinah is described with a number of images, most of them female: princess, daughter, queen, mother, community of Israel, moon, and others. She and The Holy One, Blessed Be He are described as lovers, but their relationship is tense. They are often torn apart; under proper conditions they are in perfect unity, which means that the female is embraced and subsumed by the male.

According to the kabbalists, the material, lower world was created as an emanation of divinity, and so it is a mirror image of the divine, upper world. The exile of Shekhinah from The Holy One, Blessed Be He corresponds to the exile of the Jews from their land and the Temple service. Reuniting Shekhinah with him would create perfect harmony on earth: health, happiness, peace, and ultimately the messianic redemption. The Torah's commandments are understood as tools to repair the divine rift; when the Jew performs a commandment with the proper intention of unifying the Shekhinah with her husband, this is a step in the direction of creating perfect harmony in the upper and lower worlds.

This divine narrative fits the paradigm of the matriarchal myth. Like the other matriarchal myths, this describes a time when the female force was integrated into divinity. Then came a fall from favor, a gap between male and female, a spiritual loss. While outside of Orthodox circles some women remember Lilith and others contemplate a brightened moon, these Jews bring salvation by being mindful of the Shekhinah and the rest of the serot. Although the focus of the narrative is on the female, and divinity is imagined partly in female terms, there is no ideal here of equality of the male and female within God. Rather, the feminine aspect of divinity is embraced and enveloped by the masculine.

Because Orthodox women do not study kabbalistic texts, their access to those that describe divinity in this fashion must be through lectures given by men. One can rarely find in their writings as detailed a description of the inner workings of divine as above.³⁸ Combined with their lack of expertise and their acceptance of the notion that this type of knowledge is beyond them is the awareness, perhaps, that kabbalistic explanations needlessly complicate the process of outreach. Yet, in each of the Habad women's anthologies (from 1981 and 1984) and in Total Immersion there is at least one article written by a woman explaining the relevant kabbalistic symbols. The purpose of these explanations is not to enable women to ritually utter the mystical meditations during their mitzvot, but to give them a deeper understanding of the beauty of the niddah laws that are being so distorted by contemporary Jews.³⁹

The commandment of niddah, euphemistically called the family purity laws, is an intricate system in which a married woman ceases all physical contact with her husband immediately prior to her menstrual period, when she enters the state of niddah. During this time all touching is prohibited, the couple must avoid handing objects to one another, must sleep in separate beds, and must avoid behavior that could tempt them into physical or sexual relations. They resume contact seven days after her menses have ceased, after she undergoes a ritual immersion in a mikvah and is declared to be "kosher," t. When women do not typically experience vaginal discharges, for example during pregnancy and after menopause, there are no such restrictions on marital sex.

The women who explain the mystical effect of observing the family purity laws focus on the Shekhinah, or the serah Malkhut. They compare this empty vessel of a serah with women. They do not find the comparison offensive; on the contrary, they note that the vessel's very hollowness enables it to be filled with the awesome emanations of the ein sof. This emphasis on the value of nothingness is distinctive to Habad Hasidic thought. Habad teachings that nullification, bitul, is an indispensable aspect of divine creativity. Only through nullification can the multiplicity of the finite world be dissolved and become part of the infinite, divine unity.⁴⁰ Here is how Shimona Krengel describes it:

The Zohar teaches that malchut "has nothing of its own." It merely receives from the upper serot just as the moon reflects the light of the sun. Yet in this absence of any independent existence, it parallels the true nothingness of G-d. It is through receiving that malchut becomes elevated to its source above the serot of prior influence.⁴¹

Here the diminished light of the moon is not a problem, as some of the Rosh Hodesh celebrants claim, but a privileged and superior status. Men are similar to The Holy One, Blessed Be He, but women are like the ein sof, the unknowable and higher essence of God.

The authors make numerous connections between divinity and women's lives. They insist that niddah should not be understood in materialistic terms as pollution but as a stage in a process. Niddah or tumah (impurity) denotes the absence of holiness, but that lack is the essential precondition to the presence of holiness. The greater the tumah, the greater the potential amount of holiness. One particularly sophisticated author, Susan Handelman, locates niddah as a process within God, tying it explicitly to the moon and to the exilic process:

A woman's body, of course, also follows a monthly cycle, and Chasidut illumines a deeper correspondence between the cycle of Niddah and the moon. . . . As the Talmud states, when the Jews were exiled, the Shechinah, the "indwelling presence" of God, went into exile with them. And as the Tzemach Tzedek points out, the Hebrew letters of the word Niddah also mean Nod Heh-- "God wanders;" He is in exile with the Jews. Hence the reunion of the sun and the moon on Rosh Chodesh reflects the union of man and woman and of God and the Jewish people, whose relationship is compared to that of husband and wife.⁴²

Women literally embody this journey from absence to effulgence of holiness during their times of niddah and ovulation. The appearance of the new moon at Rosh Hodesh is a visible reminder of their role in the divine life cycle. Like Shekhinah joyfully welcoming The Holy One, Blessed Be He after a long absence, these women are privileged to be "filled up" by a male: by his sexual organ, by his seed, and by the new life that grows in their bodies. Both women and the moon are symbolic of the Jew in exile awaiting and preparing for the messianic redemption.

Until the final redemption, though, both women and the moon get a taste of paradise in their marital love. The writers say very plainly that sexual relations for the sole purpose of physical gratification (even with one's beloved spouse) is, at best, merely adequate and, at worst, base behavior.⁴³ The sex act becomes a spiritual and "higher" experience, however, when the couple is aware that their union has a parallel in the upper world. It is clear that, for some, this knowledge enhances sexual excitement. As one woman puts it, "There is a sexual ménage à trois at the heart of Judaism: husband, wife, and God." She also explains that the family purity laws enable Jewish men and women to "realize a potent and dynamic sexual identity." In an interesting twist on the Zionist negation of Galut, she writes, "A return to the salubrious practices of Judaism can help Jews overcome the psychological ravages of the Diaspora on a Jew's sense of self, which is so deeply grounded in sexuality."⁴⁴

Some Orthodox spokeswomen, though, connect the holiness of the divine union to reproduction. Krengel's description blurs the distinction between the unity of male and female within divinity and the intercourse of the married couple: "Unity occurs when both giver and receiver are ready to assume their roles. The Zohar says that precisely through the union of Male and Female, the essence is revealed. Birth and creation arise out of bitul and receiving."⁴⁵ Lisa Aiken puts it this way:

Physical intimacy between a husband and wife is metaphysically understood to parallel the male and female attributes of God. . . . God gave some part of these attributes to us so that we can imitate Him in our creative capacities. Through sexual intimacy, a husband and wife can create a child with God as their partner.⁴⁶

Both Krengel and Aiken imply that the only really sanctified sex is sexual intercourse that is intended for procreation. While this argument is certainly supportive of women while they are trying to conceive, it is not that helpful at other times.

Women influenced by Habad are likely to note that the act of immersing oneself in a mikvah is equivalent to bitul. They are fond of quoting the Lubavitcher Rebbe's teaching that the Hebrew letters for bitul are the same as those for tevilah, immersion.⁴⁷ This is how Chana Silberstein, a contributor to Total Immersion, explains it:

Indeed, the notion of tevilah is nullifying ourselves before our Beloved God, immersing oneself totally beneath the purifying waters. Not even a hair may remain above the surface of the water. When we immerse in the mikvah, we lose all sense of ourselves. Beneath the waters, our lives are momentarily suspended. We exist and we do not exist at the same time. We are like a fetus within the mother, totally dependent, without even a breath of air to sustain us. When we are beneath those waters, we relinquish our very being to its essence. We are connected to God by an invisible strand--the bond of our absolute devotion--and that bond sustains us.⁴⁸

The self-sacrifice that occurs during the immersion process is raised to a great ideal in Total Immersion. It contains numerous stories in the "Memories and Tales" section describing women undergoing great risks to immerse themselves in the mikvah during Nazi persecution, under Soviet oppression, and in city lakes, wells, and streams.⁴⁹

Finally, a woman's withdrawal into niddah is testimony to her value. Pollution is not within her, but in the public, male-dominated sphere. That public sphere is full of compromise, contamination, and impurity. This argument is used in defense of a woman's withdrawal from physical contact with her husband as well as to explain the customary prohibitions on a public role for women in the Jewish community. She is likened to a priceless jewel that must be kept from the polluting and corrosive atmosphere outside, or a precious king's daughter who is protectively secluded inside her father's court.⁵⁰ Like the Shekhinah reunited with The Holy One, Blessed Be He, these images describe true harmony and wholeness as the result of the loss of female independence, when she has been encompassed by the stronger male force.

Another subversion of the matriarchal myth appears in To Be a Jewish Woman by Aiken, an Orthodox clinical psychologist and an author and public speaker who addresses Jewish topics. Aiken draws her insights from rabbinic commentaries, contemporary oral teachings, and psychology. Her book begins with a creation narrative in which God continually reshapes and realigns humans to achieve full compatibility. First God created Adam from the dust of the earth as an androgynous being. Although self-sufficient physically, s/he was emotionally bereft: there was no one with whom to have a relationship. Full emotional and physical satisfaction was possible only when God split Adam into constituent and distinctive male and female parts. Each separate being--now Adam (he) and Eve (she)--needed the other to correct their inborn shortcomings. Aiken explains:

[H]er existence helps him conquer his arrogance and hubris by motivating him to channel his greatness toward the service of God, rather than serving his ego and personal desires. By creating the woman as a "helper against him," God endowed her with the ability to evaluate the correctness of her husband's actions and be a spiritual advisor to him.⁵¹

While Aiken does not specify woman's shortcomings, she insists that she, too, needs her husband to act as "spiritual advisor." In the following passage, she lays out what she imagines are the essential differences between men and women that were unchanged since creation:

Men's natures predispose them to ridding the world of negativity, such as eradicating people who do evil by fighting them, uprooting injustice, and so on. Women, on the other hand, are more predisposed to nurturing and to creating a home. Women help men develop their connections and rootedness with the world around them. Whereas men may want to rid the world of what is negative, women's primary desire is to nurture and contribute that which is positive.⁵²

Yet, she describes the first sin that led to the expulsion from Eden as a consequence of each character acting in a manner contrary to their innate predispositions. Eve ate the forbidden fruit because she desired knowledge, power, creativity, and independence from God; Adam complied with her suggestion to eat the fruit because he was emotionally attached to her and fearful of being abandoned. Because of their sin, God modified the conditions of life, their bodies, and their emotional traits so that each was in even greater need of the other for perfection. For example, Eve's awareness of the importance of nurturing was enhanced. This was linked to another change that Aiken finds quite salutary: the new Eve lost her original sexual forthrightness. She writes:

This . . . reflects God's awareness, based on Eve's actions, that a sexually outgoing personality would not be conducive for a woman's spiritual growth. Therefore, He made these changes so that the new woman would be more perfect than Eve was initially. A woman must make her husband desire her sexually by properly directing her nurturing. Metaphysically, this corrects Eve's mistake.⁵³

Thus, while a woman might long for the era of the Garden of Eden because, according to Aiken's sources, childbirth occurred instantly and painlessly after every act of sexual intercourse, she would be pleased that her post-Eden modest and bashful temperament was superior.

It is at this juncture that Lilith is drawn into the narrative. Aiken rejects the legitimacy of the Lilith stories, maintaining that they were composed by sectarian Jews who were repudiated by the rabbis and died out aeons ago. However, she finds the Lilith story useful to illustrate the necessity of proper gender relations and their connection to divinity. According to Aiken, Lilith should be understood as misdirected sexual energy. Lilith's sin was "to refuse to channel her sexuality in a way that could elevate the union of a man and a woman." Aiken does not supply details here, but she is referring to both sexual positions and gender relations. Lilith was not complying with God's will that the union of a husband and wife is reflective of divinity. Specifically, the man must mirror The Holy One, Blessed Be He, and the woman should emulate the Shekhinah:

We should not learn from the Lilith story that women must be helpless and powerless in order for Judaism to give us credence. Rather, a woman must be receptive to God's immanence and her husband's giving in order to create a Divine Image within their marital relationship. When she is prepared to emulate the Divine Presence, she can complement man's purpose for existing. Only when they each appropriate their respective roles can they fulll God's purpose in creating them.⁵⁴

A woman finds her true self by allowing God and her husband to give to her and making herself a "receptacle" for them.⁵⁵

The major point of the Orthodox women's writings is that women following what the authors call Torah-true Judaism are not now and were never oppressed. They simply have a different role and purpose than men in Judaism. One of the basic philosophical constructs of Orthodoxy is essentialism: the belief that men and women have separate, distinct essences that are rooted in their biology and cannot be changed or overcome. All issues connected to gender ensue from this.

According to the authors, women's obligations are of equal value to men's, if not greater. God prizes their religious lives, and their religious observance has a direct bearing on the spiritual as well as the actual physical health of the Jewish people. Orthodox women cannot relate to a matriarchal myth that laments a decline in women's power vis-à-vis men and looks forward to change. They believe that no woman would feel the need to act like a man once she understands that her lesser number of commandments and the private sphere of her ritual is more satisfying to her and is a testimony to her spiritual superiority over men. Like women to their left, the Orthodox writers do recognize a deficiency in Jewish women's self-esteem, a spiritual hunger, and a lack of pride in Jewish womanhood and the accomplishments of Jewish women. However, they do not find the source of this in God or the rabbis or Jewish men. They locate the problem in women's ignorance of and misconceptions about Judaism. The solution is to teach women Judaism better. Feminism can be mined for this: women who need a lot of personal space, independence from men, and a feeling of empowerment can enjoy the twelve days of the month in which they determine their husbands must leave them alone. They can have this as well as motherhood and the protecting embrace of a husband and the confidence that they are on a spiritual par with divinity. They can have it all within the existing socio-religious framework of Orthodoxy.

* * *

All of these novel ways of evoking an ancient matriarchy are attempts to forge convincing rationales for committing to Judaism in the modern era when it is under attack. The matriarchal myth is attractive to Jewish women across the religious spectrum. Radical feminists recover the matriarch Lilith in order to affirm women's oppression while offering a mode of healing through a spiritual sisterhood rooted in the rich symbolism of the ancient past. Rosh Hodesh celebrants utilize lunar imagery to celebrate women without intruding upon the realm and dominance of men. Orthodox women summon an array of matriarchal images that confer a spiritual nobility upon their bodily cycles and their submissiveness--just those aspects of Jewish womanhood reviled by, respectively, men and feminists.

Despite the differences in outward appearances, these myths share a common weakness. While they flatter women, they ultimately infantalize them. It is clear that despite its ancient roots, the matriarchal myth does not allow women to fully come of age.

Notes

I want to thank my colleagues, Jane Litman and Elizabeth Say, for their generous counsel, encouragement, and critical reading of the drafts of this essay. The final version benefited from the suggestions of the Faculty/Graduate Student Colloquium of the Jewish Studies Program at Stanford University.

1 Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (New York, 1993), is the best introduction and survey of this phenomenon. For an anthology of representative writings, see Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement (New York, 1982).

2 Early on, Jewish feminists regarded this as another weapon in the Christian or secular anti-Judaic arsenal. See Judith Plaskow, "Blaming the Jews for the Birth of Patriarchy," and Annette Daum, "Blaming Jews for the Death of the Goddess," in Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, Evelyn Torton Beck, ed.(Watertown, Mass., 1982), 250-54, 255-64; Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York, 1992).

3 Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess, chap. 4, esp. 74-82, describes the sometimes bitter debate within feminist spirituality circles over the ethics of appropriating elements from other cultures, with or without their permission. Cross-cultural borrowing has been necessary for many white spiritual feminists because they perceive their own cultural heritage as so spiritually impoverished. Jewish spiritual feminists do not have to wrestle with this problem. According to Eller, though, Jewish women in the movement have been quick to criticize their non-Jewish sisters for borrowing Jewish elements.

4 Feminism is not a monolithic ideology, as this paper will illustrate, but I employ this definition here in order to highlight the myth's function as a tool of change or reaffirmation of present social-religious relations.

5 Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, 1968), vol. 1, 65-66, and other citations in vol. 7, 289.

6 Reprinted in Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader (New York, 1983), 40-50. Judith Plaskow's reconstruction of the Lilith legend can be found in Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne Ashton, eds., Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality: A Sourcebook (Boston, 1992),215-16.

7 Lynn Gottlieb, She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism (New York, 1995), 73-78. The performed version of her Lilith tale, according to Gottlieb, is not as somber as this. She does not provide details, except to note that over the years it has become rather bawdy as she has turned Lilith into a lusty creature who likes to alarm people by speaking explicitly about sexual matters.

8 Even in the Lilith story from The Alphabet of Ben Sira, God is impotent. In this medieval midrash, the non-material dimension of life is imagined as a realm filled with a multitude of forces (demons, angels) outside of God himself who are ever-present within the material world and wreak havoc or bestow blessings upon it. God is not perceived as a hegemonic, all-powerful deity. This conception of reality approximates immanentism, the theological construct that Gottlieb employs, and so it is not surprising that both portray God as ineffectual.

9 Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (New York, 1989), part 2, 93-170; Spretnak, The Politics of Women's Spirituality, xvi-xix, and the essay by Starhawk in that volume, "Consciousness, Politics, and Magic," 172-84.

10 Gottlieb, She Who Dwells Within, 36. It is clear that Gottlieb is speaking directly to women, although she does not say this explicitly.

11 Ibid., 73.

12 Ibid., 38-39. In the book's epilogue, Gottlieb writes of her growing ability to depict Shekhinah in almost demonic terms, as Dragonwoman, an unfettered deity modeled on the mythic water serpent Leviathan. Unlike Leviathan, Shekhinah cannot die, Gottlieb explains: "She was, is, and will be. When she is welcomed in the light of day, Dragonwoman, like Lilith, haunts the shadows and whispers in our dreams: 'Remember me'" (226).

13 Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess, 185-91, succinctly outlines the major issues and the current absence of explicit tension: "If a consensus has been reached between political and spiritual feminists, it is not that spirituality is political, but that it is not a clear and present danger to the feminist cause. It may or may not help, but it probably does not hurt, either."

14 It is useful here to remember Joan Bamberger's warning about women's use of a revised matriarchal myth: "As long as she is content to remain either goddess or child, she cannot be expected to shoulder her share of community burdens as the co-equal of man." See Joan Bamberger, "The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society," in Women, Culture, and Society, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. (Stanford, 1974), 280.

15 Plaskow's version of the Lilith tale (see note 6), in which Eve and the exiled Lilith become good friends, with Lilith serving as Eve's mentor, has received wide dissemination. It is understood in two ways: as a model of sisterhood between radical and moderate Jewish feminists, and as a foundational myth of lesbianism.

16 The popular anthologizer of Jewish folklore, Nathan Ausubel, already in 1948 called Lilith "a militant feminist" in his A Treasury of Jewish Folklore (New York, 1948 [reissued in 1975]), 593.

17 Arlene Agus, "Examining Rosh Hodesh: An Analysis of the Holiday and Its Textual Sources," in Celebrating the New Moon: A Rosh Chodesh Anthology, Susan Berrin, ed. (Northvale, N.J., 1996), 4. I thank Jane Litman for pointing out Agus's recasting of "a room of one's own."

18 Ibid., xvii.

19 This midrash is repeated at least a dozen times in Celebrating the New Moon, and the reader is referred to its source in the Babylonian Talmud, Hullin 60b.

20 Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 5, fn. 100, 34-35. According to Ginzberg, other versions of the moon midrash teach that the moon was compensated for her reduced size in several ways, including: the Jews would calculate the calendar by her, the moon would rule by night and appear sometimes in the day as well, an atonement sacrifice would be mandated monthly on the day of the new moon, and the moon would be a metaphor for righteous Jews. It did not seem to bother the rabbis, nor do the women who cite this midrash notice, that Isaiah, in the remainder of his sentence, also mentions the brightening of the sun to seven times its present intensity.

21 Arthur Waskow, "Feminist Judaism: Restoration of the Moon," in Heschel, On Being a Jewish Feminist, 264.

22 Ibid., 265.

23 Jane Litman, Judith Glass, and Simone Wallace, "Rosh Chodesh: A Feminist Critique and Reconstruction," in Berrin, Celebrating the New Moon, 23-32.

24 For example, Bonna Devora Haberman's "Nashot HaKotel: Women in Jerusalem Celebrate Rosh Chodesh" is a first-hand description of the violence committed against women's organized prayer at the Wall. She deals quite gently with the refusal of different Israel organizations (secular, religious, police, Supreme Court, etc.) to protect the women's physical safety and civil rights.

25 This is how the text "she-hen atidot le-hithadesh kemotah" is translated, although there are other possibilities. The midrash is found in Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, chapter 45.

26 Agus, for example, explains: "Just as that star will be elevated in size and brilliance without becoming identical to the sun, women will ascend in function and status without becoming identical to men" ("Examining Rosh Hodesh," 6). This is still rather vague.

27 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York, 1990), 67.

28 One of the assumptions of the midrash (and of rabbinic Judaism) is that pious Jewish women are grateful for the gift of Rosh Hodesh. Indeed, the modern women who cite this story acknowledge it as a lovely gesture; after all, when rabbinic authorities describe Rosh Hodesh as a women's holiday, they exhort women to take a break from onerous labor like laundry. Yet, the authors who quote these rabbinic texts (some of the sources are quoted in Agus, "Examining Rosh Hadesh," 6-8, and in that same volume's contribution by Leah Novick, "The History of Rosh Chodesh and Its Evolution as a Woman's Holiday," 17-20) do not comment on the missing corollary: the rabbis do not urge men to do women's work on Rosh Hodesh in order that women may truly have a holiday. In fact, the rabbis did not mandate any actual work prohibitions for women "so as not to embarrass the men." It is not surprising that in these same texts the rabbis repeatedly lament that too many women neglected to rest on the holiday. It is possible that the reason the liturgists overlook the disparity between women's exemplary behavior and God's modest reward is their sense of validation through the words of the rabbinic exegete. Only the three feminist critics in Berrin's volume are unimpressed. They are aware that real honor in Jewish life comes with the addition of commandments, especially those in the communal domain, and, they argue, "Justice would suggest that woman's loyalty be rewarded with priestly power and leadership." See Litman, Glass, and Wallace, "Rosh Chodesh," 24.

29 In Berrin, Celebrating the New Moon, see Susan Berrin, "The Moon as Life's Cycle," 159-60; Judith Rose, "A New Moon/Full Moon Meditation," 193-94; Vicki Hollander, "Rosh Chodesh Sh'vat," 172-73. (Hollander does not claim that this talent is unique to women.)

30 In Berrin, Celebrating the New Moon, 169.

31 Exile themes are particularly strong in the following poetic readings: Vicki Hollander, "Rosh Chodesh Nisan," 174-75; Ruth Brin, "The New Moon (Pinchas--Numbers 28:1, 11)," 161-62; Matia Rania Angelou, "New Moon of the Daughters: Rosh Chodesh Tevet," 157-58. See also Blu Greenberg's comments on messianism and optimism, xiv.

32 See Geela-Rayzel Raphael, "Red Moon Magic," 187-88, and Penina Adelman, "The Origins of Rosh Chodesh: A Midrash," 153-55. Adelman's midrash includes the view, apparently widespread in feminist spiritual circles, that ancient women knew how to coordinate their bodies so that menstruation began at the new moon, when they would withdraw from male society and celebrate in the wilderness with other women in the waxing lunar light.

33 See Greenberg's comments in the foreword, xv.

34 Novick, "The History of Rosh Chodesh," 18-19.

35 This section builds upon an article I co-authored with Jane Rachel Litman, "The Secret of Jewish Femininity: Hiddenness, Power, and Physicality in the Theology of Orthodox Women in the Contemporary World," in Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, T. M. Rudavsky, ed. (New York, 1995).

36 Lisa Aiken, To Be a Jewish Woman (Northvale, N.J., 1992), and Rivkah Slonim, ed., Total Immersion: A Mikvah Anthology (Northvale, N.J., 1996).

37 For this explanation I am indebted to the clear language of Lawrence Fine, "Kabbalistic Texts," in Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, Barry Holtz, ed. (New York, 1984), 318-29.

38 The most explicit I have found is Shimona Krengel, "Exploring the Hidden," Wellsprings (Shevat-Adar 5750/February-March 1990).

39 Susan Handelman, who would not be likely to be deterred by restrictive conceptions of women's intellectual abilities, wrote a explanation of the mystical process from the perspective of a devotee of Habad Hasidism. Her "Tumah and Taharah: Mystical Insights" has appeared in slightly different forms in two anthologies on women's issues, in 1981 and 1984, and was reprinted in Total Immersion. The article was clearly in response to feminist attacks on the family purity laws, and is likely a response to "Tum'ah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings" by Rachel Adler, reprinted in The Jewish Woman: Critical Perspectives, Elizabeth Koltun, ed. (New York, 1976), 63-71. Adler's article is actually quite positive toward the family purity laws, though she acknowledges, in response to the editor's critical comments, serious problems in the ways that the rabbis and Jewish men deal with them.

40 Rachel Elior, "HaBaD: The Contemplative Ascent to God," in Jewish Spirituality: From the Sixteenth Century Revival to the Present, Arthur Green, ed. (New York, 1989), 167, points out that this emphasis on nullification was already a part of its teachings in the eighteenth century. Awareness of this doctrine is apparently widespread within the movement, because the last Lubavitcher Rebbe explained the purpose of the Exile as the necessary nullification before the advent of the messianic redemption (see Handelman, "Tumah and Taharah: Mystical Insights," 30).

41 Krengel, "Exploring the Hidden," 7.

42 Handelman, "Tumah and Taharah: Mystical Insights," 24.

43 One of the male contributors to Slonim, Total Immersion, writes of this process from what he claims is a male perspective. Daniel Lapin reports of a number of men who feel revulsion toward sexual intercourse. One was bothered by the image of man as a "taker" who sexually engages with women merely for his own sexual gratification (121). He became committed to observing the family purity laws because they made him feel that "the rhythm of intimacy is to be established not chiefly by desire from within, but by an objective and holy external source, [and] the husband can reclaim his proper role as giver." To him, "Mikvah completely contradicted feminism's angry denunciation of the husband as a sexual predator." Another man, a confirmed bachelor, decided to look for a bride after learning of the family purity laws. Lapin explains, "The gift of Mikvah, for example, is far more valuable to the husband than the wife. To her, a physical relationship with her husband is already imbued with a conscious awareness of its life-giving potential. The husband's entire spiritual self-esteem therefore depends upon some affirmation that he is not merely engaging in a ridiculously animalistic act. The awareness that his wife has come to him from the mikvah provides that precious assurance" (122).

44 Gila Berkowitz, "Loving Jewishly," in Slonim, Total Immersion, 3, 11. She explains the first quote on p. 4: "[Judaism] models human sexuality on a divine template: the consummation of the relationship between Israel the Bride and God the Bridegroom. Sanctified by the Torah, the union between man and woman exalts each spiritually and makes their bond a common bond with God." Many promoters of the family purity laws, like Berkowitz, emphasize that observant Jews report greater than average sexual satisfaction and engage in sex with greater frequency than others, but I think there is also a recognition here that visualizing the sexual coupling of Shekhinah and The Holy One, Blessed Be He adds to the erotic excitement of the married couple.

45 Krengel, "Exploring the Hidden," 7.

46 Aiken, To Be a Jewish Woman, 161.

47 Chana Silberstein, "God Is in the Details," in Slonim, Total Immersion, 41; Handelman, "Tumah and Taharah: Mystical Insights," 28.

48 Silberstein, "God Is in the Details," 41.

49 On braving S.S. arrests, see Shimon Huberband, "In Nazi-Occupied Europe"; in the cold mountain lakes of Sweden, see Yaffa Zager, "Mikvah Swedish Style"; risking shark attacks, see Helene Storch, "Dipping in Aruba"; in the Siberian winter, see Naomi Futerfas, "No Sacrice Too Great"; in frozen Nordic lands, see Chana Sharfstein, "In Scandinavia: The Cruise"; in a New Mexico freezing winter, see Chana Katz, "Santa Fe"; in the Bochnia Ghetto under Nazi rule, see Yaffa Eliach, "To Return in Purity"; in the freezing waters of Tashkent, see Freida Sossonko, "Sossonko: Out of the Depths."

50 Psalms 45:14, kol kevudah bat melekh penimah (the king's daughter is all glorious within), is understood by rabbinic tradition "to justify excluding women from public life, restricting their dress, and stressing that women's sole legitimate sphere of activity is within the home" (Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut, Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue [Philadelphia, 1992], xxii).

51 Aiken, To Be a Jewish Woman, 11-12.

52 Ibid., 14.

53 Ibid., 20.

54 Ibid., 25.

55 Ibid.