Shortly ago, I mentioned just this: instead of moving at the breakneck speed social media incentivises, we should be sure to pay attention to quality literature. I’d rather newcomers to feminism spend a while working through Sexual Politics than rattle off a series of sloppy TikTok videos. The bad feminist TikTok videos will have more reach than anything that comes out of deep engagement in movement literature, but that’s part of the problem. We shouldn’t feed into the feminism that social media loves, the feminism of quick, thoughtless takes and takedowns. Instead, we should feed our brains and hearts and souls. Any feminist efforts we undertake should pour forth from a deep well.

It is entirely possible to read, engage with, and accept or reject Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. Look up unfamiliar jargon. Take a few pages at a time if needed. Slow down. Know what you’re talking about. Anyone can read anything if they put the work in. And it’s worth knowing what someone as important as Butler (or Irigaray, or Haraway…) has said, even if you don’t like it. (I don’t.)

Read and pay attention to your internal opposition. If you’re super into intersectionality, read a feminist who isn’t, like Holly Lawford-Smith. You don’t have to dignify a lot of antifeminist insult-hurlers, but other feminists of any stripe deserve your time.

History is informative. Check out Clara Bingham’s recent tome, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973. Go slowly, read the early second wave in its own words. And there are so many other historical works to choose from, documentaries and books alike.

Now, some might argue that slowing down and reading deeply will slow down movement in general. That’s not the case. Shulamith Firestone wrote one of the most important feminist books ever written — while being on the ground. Or standing on someone’s desk. One of the best feminist activists in my area became so while getting two MAs and a PhD. Not everyone is in a situation in which they can do either of these specific feats, of course. But clearly they’re possible and they were more common during the second wave, which had a lot less to work with than we do now.

Another possible critique would be that literature isn’t necessary for activism. Firstly, yes it is. If you don’t know what you’re doing, or even what you’re fighting for, on whose behalf, you’re just going to follow likely stupid trends. Secondly, you need to think to be an activist, and the way you learn to think is by reading thinkers. Do you want to be thoughtful or thoughtless? Everyone would pick thoughtfulness if they paused to consider the choice.

A call for “slow feminism” might sound like a call for easy feminism. But it’s easier to be a quick feminist, flitting around the algorithm and maybe getting into a useless fight at Thanksgiving. Slow feminism requires patience, reading, listening. Slow feminism may challenge you to change your mind on some issues, which is hard.

Slow down. Read. Talk to people — online if necessary, in person ideally. Pay close attention; be mindful. Feminism shouldn’t be about having the quickest hottest take.

A frequently cited line in the Jewish tradition tells us, “when you pray, know before Whom you stand. For doing that, you will merit the life of the World to Come” (Berakhot 28b). May we acquire the knowledge we need to bring about a better world.

Thumbnail image: source.

Some of this issue comes from omnicausal wackiness. Some of it comes from bad actors using feminism for attention-seeking. Some of it comes from the ideas of teenagers being taken too seriously by both sides. But above all, feminism’s branding issue comes from social media, where the dumbest takes are almost guaranteed to get the most traction.

Decent feminism is best undertaken slowly, conscientiously. That’s not to say the changes we demand should be requested as a slow burn, but rather, that we should be reading books, papers, and studies rather than bleats on Bluesky and soundbites on TikTok. Again, though, this slow work doesn’t gain social media traction, either from our allies or our enemies. The algorithm would never have cared for The Second Sex or Gyn/Ecology.

It’s important to note that feminists have often been wacky from the start. When we (I) blast the likes of Sophie Lewis or Andrea Long Chu, we have to remember that the radical feminist era we might look back on as ideal, full of rational but hot heads like MacKinnon, also had Valerie Solanas and the last chapters of The Dialectic of Sex and Woman Hating. Radical feminists weren’t just conservatively palatable, anti-porn firebrands, some were also advocating for the destruction of traditional religion and the nuclear family and arguing for all women to become lesbian.

There has never been a time when feminism was “normal” and perfectly chill by moderates’ and conservatives’ standards. Which should hardly be the standard for feminism, but when we hear cries for feminism to “moderate,” it tends to mean, “appeal to the centre-right in a popularity contest at the expense of your ideals.” We’re not doing that. There will always be wacky feminists, conservative-leaning feminists (whom some would consider wacky!), and so on. There’s a reason why we have so many different names for different strands of feminism. And they’re not hard to learn.

Anyone committed to feminism — or who thinks she might oppose it — should be committed to slowing down, reading, and listening. But some feminists and antifeminists aren’t willing to slow down and would rather consume slop on Bluesky, X, Substack, Insta, TikTok, anywhere but a damn library. Then they go out, newly “informed,” and spread their own misinformation.

What should we do about them? Well firstly it’s important to establish that we, the slow feminists, don’t actually hold the reins anymore. It used to be that influential activists were both in the streets and reading feminist literature (that much I’ll idealise); such is generally no longer the case. The streets are Insta and the literature is some sillyheads making short-form content for buzz.

Secondly, it is deeply confusing to the public to pretend someone isn’t a feminist just because she’s a bad feminist. We can make polemical claims about who is and isn’t a feminist — lots of radfems like to claim that liberal feminists aren’t feminists — but they aren’t true and convince the less well-read public that feminism is whatever it wants to be at a given moment. Having offered a definition before, because one can read enough books to come to a conclusion, I know this is false, but that’s just because I read. Most, as we’ve concluded, don’t. So, it is confusing to say, “No, feminists aren’t pro-choice!” when only a few are not, or to say that “No, feminists aren’t pro-trans!” when few aren’t, even if your style of feminism matches the description you’re giving. Don’t be solipsistic. Be sure you know what other feminists are up to.

Thirdly, as I said, feminism has always had its weirdos, and sometimes they’ve had a positive influence. Almost every major, weird feminist book of the second wave was significant because it had some good and some bad ideas. It’s worth looking at edge arguments too. Almost a year ago, I said I’d respond to an essay by about this topic. I’ve actually been thinking about his argument the whole time, and I finally am responding to it, in part; I’ve mostly come around to agreement. Here’s a long quote from it that I think cuts to the heart of my conclusion, too:

The reason feminism is perceived as divisive and disruptive is that many of the things believed by feminists are, in fact, divisive and disruptive. Not all things. Not even most things, probably. But this is what social movements are: a blend of the passion and the pragmatic, the extreme and the moderate. The politics of the movement is often defined through the push and pull between these elements. That sometimes produces terrible consequences, with more extreme positions alienating the mainstream. But you can’t excise that stuff without losing the chaotic energy that makes it a movement in the first place.

I always think that feminism requires what Chantal Mouffe describes as agonism, “as iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17). Mouffe writes of “agonistic pluralism” in democracy: “conflict and antagonism are at the same time its condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of its full realization.” There can never be a perfect democracy because democracy relies on agonism, its imperfect harmony. Similarly, there will never be one, settled feminism, because internal debate is necessary for it to function. We can’t exclude those we view as bad feminists — but we can steer the conversation away from them.

I subtitled this post “no… and yes.” I’ve covered the “no”; there will always be odd ducks, we can’t exclude them as not really feminist just because they’re inconvenient for the popularity contest. But I want to cover the “… and yes.” I think we need to argue bad actresses and sillyheads into the dirt. Maybe until they give up.

Back in ye olden days, there was a lot of argument over whether feminists should disagree with one another in public. I think the argument is settled: yes, we should. A lot of loudmouths on social media have a distinct sense that nobody should argue with them and expect submission from everyone whose eyes come into contact with their deficient content. But that should not be true.

I know it can be difficult to be assertive and pick apart someone’s argument publicly. I fail to do it pretty often. But I think that the best way to shift whatever public image feminism has toward your ideal for feminism is not to argue that the people with whom you disagree aren’t feminist; rather, it’s to engage in sisterly brawling. People notice these things. People notice — and pay attention — when feminists disagree.

Not all disagreements should be between radically opposed factionistas. Minor disagreements are worth airing too.

A positive alternative to individual disagreement, which can be nerve-racking, is to write more generalised criticisms. Another possibility is simply to create your own sphere and largely only operate within it as a strong, parallel strand (Catholic feminists have proven remarkable at this in recent years, decades after Mary Daly declared Catholic feminism dead.)

My mild “yes” to the issue of excluding bad feminists is not an entire “yes.” But I really think we should run bad feminists into the argumentative dirt and show that there are superior alternatives. We should, however, do this slowly and thoughtfully. Have sources, speak or write clearly. Still: do this publicly. Find ways to do algorithm-friendly but serious content. (Do better at this than me!) Show that there are different kinds of feminist.

When you challenge unreasonable people online, usually they burst, not fold. Hence my sort of violent imagery of brawling and dirt. It can get ugly, you will be called names, but we’ve all been there at this point, right?

Thumbnail image source.

The paper that introduced the concept of the “male gaze” is — I joke not — 13 pages long. However, it’s not an easy read. It’s laden with psychoanalytic jargon (your first clue that male gaze ≠ male lust?), which is why I’m going to try to present a simplified version of that paper for male and female gazes and gayses alike. I’ll be avoiding jargon myself. Unlike in my similar post about “mansplaining,” the task I’ve set myself here is somewhat difficult. The concept of the male gaze originates from high academic, psychoanalytic theory, not a viral, pop feminist essay. Fortunately, I have some guidance in writing about the “male gaze,” because it’s featured in a number of academic dictionaries. Because people tend to misuse the term, I’ll provide an alternate framework with broader applicability in the end.

The key essay in question, whence the concept of the male gaze, is Laura Mulvey’s famous 1975 paper, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Screen vol. 16 no. 3). To ground us before digging into this paper, let’s look at a helpful bit of Michele White’s entry on “Gaze” in Keywords for Media Studies (NYU Press, 2017):

[Mulvey] indicates that the subject of the gaze is male, and the camera and projector support his empowered position, while its object is female, and she exists in order to be viewed and functions as to-be-looked-at-ness.

That’s a nice, barebones starting point. We get the point that the male gaze isn’t just about men liking to see naked women, but rather has to do with relative positions in film creation and viewing. The entire apparatus of peak Hollywood cinema, per Mulvey, assumes that the person looking is male. He wants to be a voyeur and he wants to identify with the strength of the male protagonist, as we’ll see.

Instead of merely defining the “male gaze,” I’ll try to walk through what Mulvey actually sez in her essay, sans jargon, to hammer in the point that this isn’t just about men’s lust. Basically, Mulvey observes two structures in how classic Hollywood flicks assume a straight, male audience (later critics will add “white” as a qualifier): through the pleasure of the act of looking and through identification. The film acts in service of these desires, the one to enjoy looking at the woman-objects in the film as a voyeur and the other to identify with the (straight, male) protagonist, his strength and status. To be clear, Mulvey is referring to scopophilia in that first desire, the desire to look on its own. And the woman is reduced to her to-be-looked-at-ness.

These two desires exist in tension. To look does not need, or in fact actively hampers, the narrative, while the narrative is required for the fantasy of identifying with the dude. Pure to-be-looked-at-ness freezes and slows the narrative. The woman’s position poses a risk in this situation, not just functioning as eye candy but threatening the identification; as a threat she “constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish.” Diegesis is the narrative world of the movie. When the scopophilic role of the woman is over-emphasised, when it’s clear that she’s there for the audience, she risks drawing the straight male viewer out of his identification, which relies on the narrative world. The film has to provide scopophilic pleasure and identification and try to diminish the threat of the woman’s position. (Slightly less barebones, still risking inaccuracy through summary. Don’t yell at me, fellow feminist theory readers, but feel free to suggest other wording if necessary.)

Okay, that’s not jargony, but might still be confusing. To risk boiling it down even further: the woman as freeze-frame for looking at threatens the narrative in which a male viewer can live out his fantasies. The male gaze isn’t just that men like to look at scantily clad women, or women in subordinate positions; it’s fraught and refers primarily to what a film does by assuming the concerns and pleasures of straight male viewership. Let’s look at one of many crucial passages in Mulvey’s text:

Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.

The temporality and spatiality of the film are created, as best they can, to provide an “illusion” to appease the straight male viewer’s “desire.” That phrase, “cut to the measure of desire,” really sums it up. Yes, the male gaze is the male fantasy, but there’s a lot more to it than just “men like to look at naked woman and movies shouldn’t do this.” The male gaze refers to the overall way that films are made, the ways that editing and camera angles are coded straight-male, not the way that any man’s gaze may graze a woman’s butt.

Mulvey does have a normative point, as in, she wants something to happen, not just to “demonstrat[e] the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.” Rather, for a long but not dense quote,

It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film.

To be clear, “ego” is a psychoanalytic concept here, something maybe summarise-able as the formation of the self-concept, rather than “ego” in the sense of overly high self-esteem. But yes, she wants to freeze a little of the warmth we have toward Hitchcock and the other filmmakers she brings up. She wants to shake the trees and see what falls on our heads. And I think this is fine. “Just let people enjoy things” is, firstly, boring, and secondly, anti-intellectual. You don’t have to be a Mulvey-ite to appreciate that sometimes we ought to unpack what we’re consuming rather than just slurp it down. I do like classic Hollywood, I’m a huge Barbara Stanwyck fan as I’ve discussed, but I’m not a falsely neutral observer. Is there really a “neutral” observer, for Mulvey? Probably not.

Ultimately, like at a really high level, the “male gaze” relies on the male as active and the female as passive. Another passage from Mulvey:

Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

In patriarchy, men hold the meaning-making power. They determine the discourse. Through the male gaze they determine, intentionally or not, their own role as meaning-makers, while women serve as the “bearers” of meaning that’s been established by men. Active male viewer, passive female viewed.

Again, I’m not asking anyone to agree with Mulvey. Things have also changed since 1975 in the filmmaking world. Perhaps she would be more moderate as to its patriarchal status now — or perhaps not. Either way, this is just what the term “male gaze” means. The male gaze is a concept from film and media studies, not a criticism of men for being straight.

A more recent and non-psychoanalytic perspective on the relation between men and women as looker and belooked is ’s The Last Straight Woman, and that’s where I’ll close this (relatively straightforward?) post. One of Maltz Bovy’s central points is that women too like to look. A relevant sub-point Maltz Bovy broaches is the common but erroneous notion that even straight women would rather look at other women than at men. However, the evidence suggests to Maltz Bovy that “women’s supposed preference for gazing at women is a sign not of female sexual fluidity but rather of a sexist and homophobic society that’s wary of letting anyone admire male beauty, least of all allowing women to do so.” Maltz Bovy’s move is to privilege the position of women who are more lookers than looked-at in her analysis, for instance the “frumpy but horny” archetype in visual media. There are plenty of women who look but are not looked at so much, after all, and in fact occupying the position of being the active female looker is a feminist move. Ultimately: “The conversation we ought to be having is the one about all the ways women are nudged away from straightforwardly appreciating male beauty and towards obsessing over our own looks.” Enjoy looking rather than worry about your to-be-looked-at-ness. Maltz Bovy is a fellow-traveller with Mulvey — to a point. (I’ve written about the relation of The Last Straight Woman to feminist history already at greater length, too.)

It’s hard to find an opportunity to use the term “male gaze” in a useful way. I tend not to use it at all. However, a similar-but-not-identical analysis like Maltz Bovy’s is useful for more general purposes. I would encourage people to stop using “male gaze” unless strictly necessary and look instead to Maltz Bovy’s framework of heterosexual feminism for broader analysis.

“The Girl is the Eternal Woman face-lifted and rejuvenated…”

—Mary Daly

On the one hand, what seems like ten years ago, we had Sabrina Carpenter discourse. The discourse primarily centred the cover of her 2025 album Man’s Best Friend, which had her posed as a kind of BDSM submissive. It’s degrading, intentionally so, and primed to generate backlash and backbacklash. Just generally it’s primed for lashing, one way or another. Sabrina Carpenter discourse formed a brief node in the decades-long conflict between sex-“negative” and sex-“positive” feminists (these terms are severely flawed).

On the other hand, we have the evergreen tradwife discourse. Placed on a religiously-infused pedestal, the archetype of the tradwife — not actual women who live traditional lifestyles, mind you — is pure and pious, Marian in her humility and utterly full of grace. She exists only in her relation to other people — as virgin, wife, mother (and influencer?) — and primarily to men.

Saying “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” is actually misleading. The degraded “whore” and the pedestalised “Madonna” are, fundamentally, the same. Sydney Sweeney in the new Euphoria season is a tradwife.

The Madonna-whore complex is a prominent idea in feminist theory, expressing the way that misogynists can split women into two hard categories: pedestalised and sexless women worthy of admiration, and women who can be erotic objects because degraded. Freud formed the backbone of this theory in his essay, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love.” He referred to it as “psychical impotence.” Freud describes the psychically impotent man thusly (my bolding):

[I]f someone makes an impression that might lead to a high psychical estimation of her, this impression does not find an issue in any sensual excitation but in affection which has no erotic effect. The whole sphere of love in such people remains divided in the two directions personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love. Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.

Now, this is a great idea and all, and the dichotomy came to be known as the Madonna and the whore. But aside from finding a host of new terms for the dichotomy, feminists would take it to the next, more serious level: the Madonna and the whore are one in the same. Two sides of one dirty coin.

In The Church and the Second Sex (1968), written before her more radical turn, Mary Daly efficiently lays out this conflation. But first, a little bit of background. Daly is going to use the term The Girl to refer to what is often known as the “whore.” Apparently — and despite the rumours I wasn’t alive in the 1960s — “Girl” was a term commonly used in advertisements at the time. She describes The Girl as being “of the world of James Bond, of Playboy, of advertising.” She’s a material girl in a man’s world.

This usage of “Girl” is interesting to me. In the past, I’ve defended use of the term “girl” to refer to adults, arguing that it’s had to stretch its meaning to refer to young women after the deaths of alternative terms like “maiden.” In other words, it’s not necessarily degrading — at least unless you unironically add “just a girl.” But, in Daly’s time, I guess The Girl was an archetype one heard in degrading adverts.

On the one hand (yes, we’re back to hands), Daly poses The Girl as the degraded whore; on the other hand, Daly poses the Eternal Woman as the Madonna. Literally the Madonna, in her then-Catholic context. The Eternal Woman is an unchanging symbol, the perfectly forbearing women as archetypically existing in relation to men or children (virgin, wife, mother…). Although, religiously, I place some value in the Eternal Feminine archetype, in this usage, no. Daly argues that “on all fronts the Eternal Woman is the enemy of the individual woman,” and points out: “But women are not in fact symbols; they are people, and each person is a unique subject. To consider a person — a subject — as a symbol is to treat him or her as an object, which is fundamentally an egoistic and hostile act.” Those who have “symbol syndrome” try to fit people into categories removed from reality, which they formed based on sacred texts, literature, and other ideological rather than empirical sources; these symbols prove both conveniently elastic and restrictive. In short, the Eternal Woman, the Madonna, is a trope that misogynists of a certain religious or political persuasion use to hammer women into the right shape. The Eternal Woman is like a mould made with no real woman in mind and yet patriarchy tries to force real women to fit inside it. Actually existing women are not symbols and do not fit into symbolic moulds.

However, Daly doesn’t think that The Girl and the Eternal Woman are opposed. This is a fundamental feminist insight. Brace yourself for a long quote, sorry!

Both the Eternal Woman and The Girl are, in the ultimate analysis, passive, abject, relative and irrelevant beings. If the one appears to be the antithesis of the other, the opposition does not hold up under careful scrutiny. True, one is represented in spiritualistic terms, while the other embodies the values of so-called secular materialism. The Eternal Woman delights in being relegated to her pedestal, while The Girl enjoys being used as a footstool. However, if the one appears as supra-human and the other as sub-human, the distinction is nevertheless trivial. Both are abysmally, hopelessly, non-human.

Wew. Daly is arguing that despite seeming opposite of one another, the Eternal Woman and The Girl are fundamentally the same thing. One of them is religiously inflected and put on an unrealistic pedestal while the other is more overtly degraded, but the both end up “non-human.” Both are subjects of patriarchy. Neither is liberated. The tradwife archetype and the e-girl archetype are one. The Madonna is the whore, the whore is the Madonna. Inhuman.

When we critique misogyny, sometimes we react to little manifestations like Whac-a-Mole. Sabrina Carpenter discourse was Sabrina Carpenter discourse. But sometimes we have to take a few steps back and look at more fundamental mechanics behind the screen. The issue is more deeply rooted than any one person’s album cover or TV performance or influencer career. The issue is a complex: the inhuman Madonna and the inhuman whore, founded in a species of mental or societal impotence, a failure to recognise women as fully human.

And all the families of the earth
Shall bless themselves by you.

—Genesis 12:3

The Patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — had their work cut out for them. Caught up in the founding of a people, figuring out their relationship to the Divine, and navigating a harsh world, God gave them a lot to deal with. Not least, they’re fathers. Their family dynamics are often only hinted at, but they’re there. Many of their struggles ought to be relatable to regular people, too.

Abraham

Abraham, father of the Jewish people, is put into the now unusual position of fathering two different children by two different women who are both present with him — a situation his grandson Jacob will also have to confront. Coping with Sarah’s infertility, Abraham sleeps with her servant Hagar (Gen. 16:4). Her son, Ishmael, will go on to become the father of another nation entirely. Immediately, we read that having a child upended the relationship between Hagar and Sarah: “her mistress was lowered in her esteem” (Gen. 16:4), with Hagar presuming that she can be “a maidservant who supplants her mistress” (Prov. 30:23). Sarah blames the whole thing on Abraham, who reminds her that she’s still in charge of her servant and can “deal with her as you think right” (Gen. 16:6).

Part of the difficulty here is that Sarah is a bit of a loose cannon, and Abraham hasn’t treated her great either, having already at this point pimped her out to Pharaoh to gain great wealth (Gen. 12:16). Sarah drives Hagar away with harsh treatment (Gen. 16:6). God tells Hagar to come back (Gen. 16:9) and gives her a promise parallel to Abraham’s: “I will greatly increase your offspring, and they shall be too many to count” (Gen. 16:10), and the Messenger sez of the son she shall name Ishmael:

He shall be a wild ass of a person;
His hand against everyone,
And everyone’s hand against him;
He shall dwell alongside all his kin. (Gen. 16:12).

After a lot happens (including to Lot), we return to the family drama of Ishmael. Sarah has birthed Isaac as promised, but Ishmael is a bad influence on him: “Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing” (Gen. 21:9). Of course, Sarah’s sight is no ordinary sight, being a prophetess and all, but also, what the boys are doing isn’t good. Rashi, based on the passage’s particular wording, discerns that they’re actually worshipping idols or even committing violence. It’s also possible per Rashi that they’re debating their inheritances, with Ishmael demanding twofold of whatever Isaac gets.

You may infer that Ishmael was quarrelling with Isaac about the inheritance, saying, “I am the first-born and will, therefore, take a double portion.” They went into the field and Ishmael took his bow and shot arrows at Isaac…

Regardless of which Rashi one picks, Ishmael is bad, as God had said he would be, and Isaac is either his prey or is falling into his negative influence. Abraham has a difficult decision: does he defer to Sarah’s judgment when he knows Sarah is harsh on Hagar and Ishmael? And he loves Ishmael as a son, even if he seems to have no particular attachment to Hagar.

She said to Abraham, “Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” The matter distressed Abraham greatly, for it concerned a son of his. (Gen. 21:10-11)

According to the Midrash (Bereshit Rabbah 53:12), this is like when the prophet Isaiah sez: “Whoever walks in righteousness… shuts their eyes against looking at evil” (Isa. 33:15). In other words, Abraham is acting rightly, to some extent. He’s trying to avoid prying and intruding into two other people’s conflict. But that produces tension. Leaving it up to Sarah is scary, even though it’s ultimately what God will tell him to do. Abraham is not the “head of the household,” whatever that would mean.

Most people aren’t put into this situation, but consider the family difficulties that people go through all the time regarding step-children. Sarah seems to be having difficulty accepting that her husband has multiple children, one by someone else (even as she had told him to dew it [Gen. 16:2]).

But this is not the entirety of the interpretation, because God and Sarah know things Abraham doesn’t. We know that Sarah is superior to Abraham in prophecy: “But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed over the boy or your slave; whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you’” (Gen. 21:12). Rashi notes that from this “we may infer that Abraham was inferior to Sarah in respect of prophecy.” Sarah was right, knowing God’s plan better than Abraham, so he’d better submit to her in this regard.

Nevertheless, all will be well for Ishmael, despite the angel’s foreboding message to Hagar. God knows that Abraham needs reassurance on this too. “As for the son of the slave-woman, I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed” (Gen. 21:13). Radak clarifies that this is intended as comfort for Abraham, interpreting God as implying: “do not worry that he will perish when he leaves your house.”

Shortly hereafter, we experience the Akeda, the binding of Isaac. God tells Abraham, “Take your son, your favoured one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you” (Gen. 22:2). After the incident, God is never recorded as speaking to Abraham again. Why?

I’ve heard it speculated (I’m not sure of the original source, but my rabbi has mentioned this reading) that Abraham actually failed God’s test in the Akeda. Unlike when he challenged God over the fate of Sodom (Gen. 18:23-33), Abraham limply gives in to this horrible decree. He has become complacent, perhaps even giving into local customs that involved human sacrifice. He’s willing to give up his own son to religious zeal. God checks him as a father and finds him wanting. Sarah hears of this incident from the demon Samael and dies.

Samael went and said to Sarah: “Have you not heard what has happened in the world?” She said to him: “No.” He said to her: “Your husband, Abraham, has taken your son Isaac and slain him and offered him up as a burnt offering upon the altar.” She began to weep and to cry aloud… and her soul fled, and she died. (Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 32:8).

After this, the healthy relationship between Isaac and Abraham is basically over for the time being. Isaac misses his mother and is, I suppose, traumatised. Having descended the mountain in apparent silence, he and Abraham have emotionally parted ways. In fact, they had once been indistinguishable; in the same passage on this in Talmud, we learn that Abraham’s grief over this whole situation is the origin of ageing.

Until Abraham, there was no aging, i.e., old age was not physically recognisable. Consequently, one who wanted to speak to Abraham would mistakenly speak to Isaac, and vice versa: An individual who wanted to speak to Isaac would speak to Abraham, as they were indistinguishable. Abraham came and prayed for mercy, and aging was at last noticeable, as it is stated: “Now Abraham was old, advanced in years” (Genesis 24:1), which is the first time that aging is mentioned in the Bible. (Bava Metzia 87a)

However, Abraham tries to appease Isaac in his loneliness by finding him a wife (Gen. 24:4). This is clearly an act of love, and it works. Isaac is in a state of depression, wandering aimlessly. Having just returned from Beer-lahai-roi, where Hagar lives (Gen 24:62), “Isaac went out walking in the field toward evening” (Gen. 24:63). He may be revisiting his dark past and is then meandering about in a daze. But he’s also possibly bringing back Hagar, as traditional sources tell us, which would indicate some degree of reciprocal attempt to repair the relationship with Abraham, both men finding each other wives. Isaac indeed finds comfort in Rebecca, who’s brought back to him to marry. Isaac is potentially the most loving spouse in Torah — but Rebecca is not said to love him in return. “Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebecca as his wife. Isaac loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death” (Gen. 24:67). It’s a little bit of an oddly Freudian passage.

According to Rashi and others, in the traditional reading, Abraham’s next wife, known here as Keturah, is Hagar (Gen. 25:1). He has more children with her (Gen. 25:2), but we don’t learn much about them. Sforno indicates that these children are adopted. This he bases on Chronicles, where we read: “The sons of Abraham: Isaac and Ishmael” (1:28), but “The sons of Keturah, Abraham’s concubine: she bore Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah” (1:32). Not that it matters that much. Again these are mysterious figures and we know that Abraham’s bloodline is carried on through Isaac, not them, whether or not they’re adopted.

In the end, Abraham has failed as a father, and we’ll see multiple more failures ahead. But we don’t have to hate him! He did his best to follow his wife’s and God’s advice, he just lost his way near the end.

Isaac

Isaac is perhaps the least-established of the patriarchs. But Lord Jacob Frank tells us: “The tale of Jacob and Laban and Jacob and Esau is the beginning and end of the world” (Words of the Lord §65). As the Patriarch looming over the beginning of this story, Isaac is crucial.

Isaac’s first relation to his offspring is when he successfully “pleaded with God on behalf of his wife, because she was infertile” (Gen. 25:21). In response to Rebecca’s prayers, God answers:

Two nations are in your womb,
Two separate peoples shall issue from your body;
One people shall be mightier than the other,
And the older shall serve the younger. (Gen. 25:23)

These nations are Jacob (Israel — the Jews) and Esau (Edomites [Gen. 25:20] — traditionally, Edom is taken as Christendom). Their strife begins primordially and will continue throughout the Torah, even centuries after their deaths (Num. 20:14,18), and to this day, depending how you read it.

“The first one emerged red, like a hairy mantle all over; so they named him Esau” (Gen. 25:25). The midrash points out, based on numerous passages, that Esau is super-duper associated with red: “He is red, his cooked food is red, his land is red, his warriors are red, his garments are red, one who is red exacts retribution against him, in red garments” (Ber. Rab. 63:12). All this redness is “as though he were a shedder of blood” (Ber. Rab. 63:8).

The two brothers, the barely-elder Esau and the barely-younger Jacob, manifest differently gendered traits. “When the boys grew up, Esau became a skilful hunter, a man of the outdoors; but Jacob became a mild man who stayed in camp” (Gen. 25:27). Stereotypically, Rebecca and Isaac fall into favouritism. “Isaac favoured Esau because he had a taste for game; but Rebecca favoured Jacob” (Gen. 25:28). This is a bigly failure on both their parts! (I’ll discuss Rebecca at length in “The Genesis of Motherhood,” soon.) And it’s a tragic failure. Again, the wife at least seems superior in prophecy. In receiving prophecy about the two infants, Rebecca learned more than her husband, like Sarah before her. Edom is the wrong side to pick.

After all — declares God — Esau is Jacob’s brother; yet I have accepted Jacob and have rejected Esau. I have made his hills a desolation, his territory a home for beasts of the desert. If Edom thinks, “Though crushed, we can build the ruins again,” thus said the God of Hosts: They may build, but I will tear down. And so they shall be known as the region of wickedness, the people damned forever of God. (Mal. 1:2-4).

All this is to emphasise that Isaac makes the wrong choice, a tragic choice that will echo through eternity. God established Jacob as the true firstborn — “Israel is My first-born son” (Ex. 4:22). Isaac just doesn’t know. Everything that isn’t already wrong starts to go wrong here.

Isaac is not without godliness, though, of course! Having been told not to by God, when famine hits, Isaac does not take the easier choice of going to Egypt (Gen. 26:1-2). Then he immediately pulls a my-wife-is-my-sister move, so… yeah he doesn’t have a great track record (Gen. 26:7).

However, Isaac is the ultimate provider for his family. About a hundred years ago, when a friend and I came across a man holding a dead fish on Tinder, we used to say, “HE PROVIDES!!!” jokingly. But Isaac really does provide. “Isaac sowed in that land and reaped a hundredfold the same year” (Gen. 26:12). If being a provider is a fatherly virtue, there you go. He accepts what was given to Adam as a curse and uses it to provide blessings for his family, as his efforts are blessed by God (Gen. 26:12-14).

Similarly, Isaac provides water by re-digging the wells of his father, giving them “the same names that his father had given them” (Gen. 26:18). Does this indicate forgiveness? Isaac has found, through toil, some kind of equilibrium in which he’s able to simultaneously remember and move forward.

In the end, he’s undone by his own blindness, perhaps a metaphor for his inability to see the truth about Esau (unlike Jacob’s future blindness, through which he can “see” clearly). But Isaac begins to see some manner of the truth when Esau marries outside the peoples he’s supposed to marry. “When Esau was forty years old, he took to wife Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite; and they were a source of bitterness to Isaac and Rebecca” (Gen. 26:34-35). Esau’s sin causes great destruction for Isaac. Through this deed, “Esau caused the Divine Spirit to depart from his parent” (Ber. Rab. 65:4). Ouch. Thus we read immediately after this passage: “When Isaac was old and his eyes were too dim to see” (Gen. 27:1).

I don’t need to run through the entirety of the trick Rebecca and Jacob play on Isaac, here. It’s important, but not all of it is important to Isaac (and again, more on Rebecca another time). The important thing about the beginning of this story is that Isaac knows he’s close to death and wants something good to eat; with Esau, he shares a taste for wild game, so off he dispatches his elder son to fetch some tasty meat before giving him the firstborn’s blessing (Gen. 27:2-4). He wants to do the right thing, but for the wrong person. “Isaac was fond of Esau, whom the Holy Blessed One hated… and sought to bless him and reveal the End to him. What did the Holy Blessed One do? God stripped him of his sense” (Gen. Rab. 99:5). Thus, all goes according to Rebecca’s plan, and Jacob, the true firstborn of God, gets the blessing. Without his wits about him, Isaac can’t tell one son from the other (Gen. 27:18), even though he can pick up differences in their voices (Gen. 27:22). It’s not just his physical sense of sight that’s lacking.

When Esau comes back from the hunt and his father realises his mistake, “Isaac was seized with very violent trembling” (Gen. 27:33). He’s scared — or senile and confused. Esau asks, “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?” (Gen. 27:36), and Isaac gives him a lesser blessing, a telling one indeed:

“See, your abode shall enjoy the fat of the earth
And the dew of heaven above.
Yet by your sword you shall live,
And you shall serve your brother;
But when you grow restive,
You shall break his yoke from your neck.” (Gen. 27:39-40).

That last line can be confusing, but Rashi clarifies it for us: “when Israel will transgress the Torah and you will have reason to feel aggrieved.” It’s not that Esau can just up and overthrow Jacob whenever he wants, it’s that when Israel ditches Torah, and Edom has good reason to rebel, then the power will be allowed to Edom to do this. Then Israel will return and the order will be reestablished.

Isaac is utterly passive when conflict boils between his sons over this incident. Instead, it’s up to Rebecca to tell Jacob to head away (Gen. 27:42). However, Isaac blesses Jacob again, telling him not to marry women of the Nations around them (Gen. 28:1). But this is also at Rebecca’s urging (Gen. 27:46). So, you know, he does the right thing but he’s still not particularly active as a father. At least Isaac’s move makes Esau realise what’s wrong — “Esau realised that the Canaanite women displeased his father Isaac” (Gen. 28:8). That’s a plus. Isaac didn’t have to bless Jacob again, necessarily, he just had to tell him not to marry certain women, but the additional blessing is what triggers Esau’s conscience (28:6).

Isaac dies much later and without much fanfare, but his sons are united at that time: “Isaac was a hundred and eighty years old when he breathed his last and died. He was gathered to his kin in ripe old age; and he was buried by his sons Esau and Jacob” (Gen. 35:28-29). I like to imagine that Jacob handled the ritual and Esau handled the shovel, each to his own purpose.

Isaac was not a perfect father. Far from it. And neither was his father, nor are his sons. Nevertheless, when we pray, we still refer to him with the other Patriarchs, Moses, and (in liberal traditions) the Matriarchs and Miriam. This teaches us that we ought to honour flawed fathers, too — in perfection, in imperfection, our fathers are our fathers.

Jacob

Wew. If Abraham seemed complex, how much the more so is Jacob? We don’t need to run through the entirety of his marriage plot-line. What essentially happens is, he works for Laban for seven years in the hopes of marrying Rachel, but Laban trickily marries him to Leah. Then he has to work for another seven years to marry Rachel, too. My focus here isn’t on marriage, but I want to highlight two things in particular about his spousal relations: Jacob causes serious issues by suppressing Rachel’s strength and by favouring Rachel over Leah.

When Esau and Jacob finally meet, Jacob is understandably scared. He wants, above all, to protect Rachel and her offspring; thus, “Looking up, Jacob saw Esau coming, accompanied by four hundred men. He divided the children among Leah, Rachel, and the two maids, putting the maids and their children first, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph last” (Gen. 33:1-2). This is because Jacob doesn’t understand that Rachel is supposed to be the Redeemer, so, a lot starts going wrong here. “If Jacob would not have hidden Rachel before Esau at that time, then things would have gone better” (Words of the Lord §63).

And again, the issue of favouritism crops up. First, Jacob “loved Rachel more than Leah” (Gen. 29:30). Then he prioritises Joseph, Rachel’s offspring, over those of Leah — or Zilpah, or Bilhah, the maidservants his wives give to him to sleep with (Gen. 37:3). But has Jacob seen parenting without favouritism? Not really. Both his mother and father had their favourites. With four babymamas rather than one and a lot more than two sons, the exact situation of his upbringing can’t be replicated. Still, Jacob has never seen a family where there was balance. The sins of the fathers are repeated in the sons.

One of the biggest early tests in Jacob’s fatherhood is the rape of Dinah. He exercises prudence, trying to keep the situation from exploding: “Jacob heard that he had defiled his daughter Dinah; but since his sons were in the field with his cattle, Jacob kept silent until they came home” (Gen. 34:5). This seems like a move he takes to keep things settled. By waiting until they’re home, their reaction may be calmer. Of course, that’s not what happens. When his sons take revenge, he rebukes them: “Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have brought trouble on me, making me odious among the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my men are few in number, so that if they unite against me and attack me, I and my house will be destroyed” (Gen. 34:30). Jacob’s criticism is harsh but practical. He speaks in a language his militant sons can understand. Simeon and Levi are unrepentant (Gen. 34:31), and Jacob doesn’t doesn’t let the matter go either. In his final blessings to his sons, he sez:

Simeon and Levi are a pair;
Their weapons are tools of lawlessness.
Let not my person be included in their council,
Let not my being be counted in their assembly.
For when angry they slay a man,
And when pleased they maim an ox.
Cursed be their anger so fierce,
And their wrath so relentless.
I will divide them in Jacob,
Scatter them in Israel. (Gen. 49:5-7)

Jacob is sometimes taken as the balance between the two previous patriarchs. Abraham represents Chesed, God’s attribute of mercy; Isaac, Gevurah, God’s attribute of strength; Jacob, Tiferet, beauty and harmony. He can handle situations like the above appropriately.

However, he doesn’t handle Joseph’s clash with his brothers very well at all. Joseph, after all, is his favourite, firstborn to Rachel (before Benjamin). Even as Joseph more or less unjustly snitches on his brothers (Gen. 37:2), Jacob doesn’t stick up for them or tell him to knock it off. Rashi states that Joseph did observe his brothers do wrong things, but refers to what he sez as “gossip: whatever he could speak bad about them he told to his father.” That’s no good. But Jacob doesn’t correct him.

Except, once Joseph starts recounting insulting dreams, Jacob does act.

He dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers, saying, “Look, I have had another dream: And this time, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” And when he told it to his father and brothers, his father berated him. “What,” he said to him, “is this dream you have dreamed? Are we to come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow low to you to the ground?” (Gen. 37:9-10)

Again, there’s some degree of balance. Jacob isn’t perfect, but he has more active traits than his forefathers. Jacob’s outburst doesn’t really help, but he maintains some awareness of the situation that’s boiling up. “So [Joseph’s] brothers were wrought up at him, and his father kept the matter in mind” (Gen. 37:11). At least Jacob is conscientious.

At the end of the story of Joseph’s rule in Egypt, Jacob is still playing favourites. He sends all his sons but Benjamin, Rachel’s second son, into danger: “So ten of Joseph’s brothers went down to get grain rations in Egypt; for Jacob did not send Joseph’s brother Benjamin with his brothers, since he feared that he might meet with disaster” (42:3-4; see also 42:38, 44:20). Joseph pokes at his father’s favouritism, however, perhaps knowing the issues it has caused throughout his life: “you must bring me your youngest brother” (Gen. 42:20). The son critiques his father without bringing shame. When Joseph finally reveals his true identity to his brothers, the first question he asks is: “Is my father still well?” (Gen. 45:3). Jacob is an often good but often flawed father; Joseph is an often flawed but still deeply caring son.

Because Jacob is old, his sons have to take extra care to avoid literally killing him with the news of his favourite’s survival. We read that in this passage he actually dies for a second:

And they told him, “Joseph is still alive; yes, he is ruler over the whole land of Egypt.” His heart went numb, for he did not believe them. But when they recounted all that Joseph had said to them, and when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to transport him, the spirit of their father Jacob revived. (Gen. 45:26-27)

Despite their flaws, his sons are sensitive men, on the whole. They first dispatched Serach bat Asher to ease the way:

And when ‎they went on until they approached their houses they met Serach coming towards them, and ‎the damsel was exceedingly beautiful and wise, and a skilled player on the harp; and they ‎called her and she came unto them and she kissed them. And they took her and gave her a ‎harp saying unto her: Go, we pray thee, before our father and sit down before him and strike ‎this harp and speak unto him according to these words. And they instructed her concerning ‎what she had to say, and she hastened unto Jacob and she sat down before him. And she sang ‎and she played beautifully upon the harp, and she sang in the sweetness of her voice: Joseph ‎my uncle is alive and he reigneth over all the land of Egypt; he is not dead. And she often ‎repeated these words. And Jacob heard her words and it pleased him greatly, and when he ‎heard her sing it twice and three times, the heart of Jacob was possessed by joy, through the ‎sweet ness of her voice, and the spirit of God came over him, and he knew that all her words ‎were true. And Jacob blessed Serach for singing these words before him, and he said: My ‎daughter, may death never prevail against thee forever, for thou hast revived my spirit, only ‎repeat thou this song once more before me, for thou hast caused me gladness with thy words. ‎And she sang once more the same words and Jacob listened, and he was pleased and he ‎rejoiced, and the spirit of God came over him. (Sefar HaYashar, Vayigash 9)

Serach, eternal wisdom of the Jewish people, softens the actually delightful blow. Sorry for the long quote, I just like the story and summarising it wouldn’t have been as fun. It’s to Jacob’s credit that he listens to Serach, his granddaughter. He cares for girls and women.

Jacob knows things have gone wrong for the world. When Pharaoh asks his age, he replies with what is to me among the saddest verses in the Torah:

“The years of my sojourn on earth are one hundred and thirty. Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my ancestors during their sojourns.” Then Jacob bade Pharaoh farewell, and left Pharaoh’s presence. (Gen. 47:9-10)

Jacob can tell that the world is changing. Ageing is not what it once was. As Jacob’s death approaches, like those of his father, “Israel’s eyes were dim with age” (Gen. 48:10). Again, legacies carry through. However, unlike his father, he knows the future well. He chooses to bless Ephraim with his right hand and Manasseh with his left, despite Joseph’s attempted correction based on birth order. “I know, my son, I know. He too shall become a people, and he too shall be great. Yet his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his offspring shall be plentiful enough for nations” (Gen. 48:19). In his blessings for all his songs, Jacob remembers and prophesies. He recalls that Reuben slept with his own concubine (Gen. 35:22) and sez to him:

Reuben, you are my first-born,
My might and first fruit of my vigor,
Exceeding in rank
And exceeding in honor.
Unstable as water, you shall excel no longer;
For when you mounted your father’s bed,
You brought disgrace—my couch he mounted! (Gen. 49:3-4)

Jacob “sees” well in the ways that matter, despite his growing blindness. He has a lot to forgive and to punish his sons for. He is flawed, often unjust but more often just. He is probably the most realistic and fleshed-out father in the tradition.

Conclusion

The fathers in Genesis are at turns problematic and admirable. They cause our consciences qualms while giving us models of what to do — and what not to do. Is this different from real fathers? Not really. All fathers are imperfect, even as we may want them to be perfect. Yet imperfect rarely means condemnable. Today is a day when we honour fathers, not blast them. So, like me, I hope you (hypothetical reader) look back at the Patriarchs with fondness. For all their foibles and successes, they founded the world we know. They did their best; they did well.

Happy Father’s Day!

Anyway, part of the reason I like this siddur so much is that it has a lot of extra prayers to do with women’s needs. One of those extra prayers has to do with finding a hubby. In the process of petitioning God for a good husband, the siddur illustrates a good man. This Shabbat, I thought it’d be fun to look at what this prayer poses as the ideal husband — thus, basically, as the ideal man.

Being as this is an Orthodox women’s siddur, it definitely doesn’t have an equivalent prayer for finding a wife, which I know I know makes this a DURING PRIDE??? moment, but I have the Mishkan Ga’avah, the actual LGBT liturgical compilation from the Reform movement, sitting right next to me okay. I’ll write about it sometime soonishly.

The prayer is drawn from the late 18th-century Chupat Chatanim. It’s not written for this siddur specifically, that’s just where I know it from. I’ll put in the whole English translation:

May it be Your will, Hashem, my God and the God of my forefathers, that You provide me, in Your great mercy and Your vast kindness, my proper mate at the proper time — an appropriate mate who can have children, a scholar great in wisdom and fear of Heaven, scion of a righteous, truthful, and sin-fearing people — just as You provided a mate to Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, to each one his proper mate at the proper time.

May the man whom You provide me as my mate be a good person, whose actions are pleasant and who does good deeds, a charming person who is wise and God fearing, who pursues acts of charity and kind deeds. May he not have any type of illegitimacy, handicap, or flaw, and may he not be bad tempered or irritable.

May he be humble and forebearing, healthy and strong. Do not allow people’s wickedness, enmity, and evil wishes to withhold the mate who is destined for me.

May the expressions of my mouth and the thoughts of my heart find favour before You, Hashem, my Rock and My Redeemer.

Off the bat, I want to address the language for “handicap or flaw,” because that probably stands out. Yes, it likely means what it looks like here. However, the actual wording seems to me very associated with religious imperfections (think: flaws in a potential sacrifice), so, take that as ye will. One recites it in the Hebrew not the English after all.

Setting that aside, what else are qualities of the perfect man in this prayer? He comes from a good, godly family. He can have children. He’s healthy, strong, and intelligent. He does good deeds, is charming and humble, and is not angry. More abstractly: He knows his place in the universe, fearing God and heaven, thus becoming wise (Proverbs 1:7).

This is all fairly basic, yes. But a good man is hard to find, as they say (and a good woman too— whatever). It’s interesting that the prayer doesn’t mention him loving his future wife. There’s no mention of the relationship between the hypothetical pair. But that’s because godliness and a good temper cover all the bases.

It is crucial, in understanding what this prayer can teach us, to centre the fact that godliness is the core of its requirements for a good husband. According to this prayer, godly behaviour and respect for the Divine are the most important attributes of a good man. Everything follows from those.

Shabbat shalom.

the truth is all there is

I like Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). A lot. I’m not going to launch into a full defence of it here, but I’ll say in short that it’s like a Wonder Woman comic. Take the weirdness and moral ambiguity or leave it. You don’t need to have seen — or share my opinion on — the movie to read onward. Unless you care about spoilers. If you don’t want spoilers and my brief recommendation has convinced you to watch it, skip this section.

In WW84, a magic stone, its power wielded by the villain Max Lord, has allowed everyone one wish — at an unstated, often unspeakable cost. Nuclear warheads are flying; populations are being deported.

The climax of the movie is a monologue, not a fight. Diana, Wonder Woman, appears to be speaking to the movie’s villain, Max Lord (instead of killing him), but is really talking to everyone, everywhere. The problem, as Diana identifies, is that everyone’s assumed that they can get whatever they want without consequences. The point of WW84 is that we can’t get everything we want at no cost.

Diana delivers the climactic monologue after giving up her own wish — that her lover, Steve Trevor, return from the dead. The consequences of this wish for her and others had grown too dangerous to justify. Diana says the following to the whole world, first commenting on her own wish:

I’ve never wanted anything more. But he’s gone. And that’s the truth. And everything has a price, one I’m not willing to pay — not anymore. This world was a beautiful place just as it was. And you cannot have it all. You can only have the truth. And the truth is enough. The truth is beautiful. So look at this world and look at what your wish is costing it. You must be the hero. Only you can save the day. Renounce your wish if you want to save this world. [Max Lord then asks why he’d give up his wish] Because you’re not the only one who has suffered, who wants more, who wants them back, who doesn’t want to be afraid anymore. Or alone. Or frightened, or powerless. Because you’re not the only one who imagined a world where everything is different.

In Wonder Woman 1984, of course, the stakes of the wishes are fantastically high. The general theme of the movie, though, has such real-world moral relevance that I think of it often. Sure, we can’t get everything we want without a cost — and I’ll return to the idea of getting all that we want — but Wonder Woman brings up the value of truth, here, not just selflessness.

The issue the world faces in WW84 is not mere greed, but a refusal to recognise that we cannot dodge the truth. Diana has to choose to face the truth: Steve Trevor himself died a long time ago and bringing him back in an unethical way can’t change the fact that he perished nobly in World War I.

Wanting something isn’t usually wrong. There’s nothing wrong with Wonder Woman’s grief, her desire to be with Steve again, or with our desire for many things. Grief isn’t greed. The issue with desire arises when we cannot accept the truth, when we think that everything we want could be ours without consequence, or even worse — that what we want to be true can undo what is true. In truth, Wonder Woman cannot resurrect the dead. In truth, we cannot get whatever we want without some kind of consequence, and in the end, most of our wishes can’t be fulfilled at all, with or without consequences. We cannot change what is true to suit our whims. We should be grateful for that, because if we could change reality however we want, the result would be hell.

The truth can hurt so badly that we feel we cannot bear it. And there’s nothing harmful about escapism from time to time. But when wishes metastasise into wishful lying, we can do real damage to the world.

Despite her own grief and the unmet wishes of the whole world, Diana says that the truth is beautiful. Would Diana say that Steve’s death was itself beautiful? No. But the truth is not an event or an object. The truth is not beautiful like a baby shower can be, or like a painting is. The truth is beautiful because seeing it, recognising it, and accepting it, however hard that might be in a given instance, is the only way we can ever feel anything good at all. No beauty is born from lies. Lies beget nothing but pain: they don’t alleviate it. Lies enhance and engrain suffering in our souls until we have developed a sensation of utter helplessness and the truth is too brilliant or too dark to look at. What could be beautiful about falsehood? Nothing at all. Lies are never beautiful. Only truth can be.

hell is exactly what we want, forever

In WW84, we see the consequences of unchecked wish fulfilment play out on a global scale. That’s one way of hammering in the point, with all the extravagant affordances of the superhero genre. But a smaller-scale parable comes to mind too. By parable, I mean, The Twilight Zone, episode 28, “A Nice Place to Visit.”

At the beginning of the episode, the police shoot Rocky, our protagonist, while he tries to flee after robbing a pawnshop. Rocky finds himself mysteriously unharmed and follows after a man called Pip, who, it turns out, can grant all his wishes. Rocky realises, after a little while, that he’s dead, and that Pip is a psychopomp, a guide to the afterlife. Heavenly! Rocky settles into the amenities of the frictionless afterlife. He has a host of gorgeous women who obey his every whim and he can gamble and gamble and never lose. What else could a man like himself wish for?

Eventually, when Rocky realises that getting everything he wants is boring, he freaks out. Asking to lose at gambling from time to time is still boring because he’s still in charge of the fake risk. Rocky asks Pip to send him to “the other place” — that is, hell. Hell is preferable to having his every wish fulfilled. He doesn’t merit heaven, anyway! He’s a bad guy! But the psychopomp responds, “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place!’”

Hell is our own desires, not other people, according to this parable. Hell is exactly what we want, forever. Nothing is harder to tolerate than that. We need some discomfort to thrive. If you’re a wishful liar, and we all are to some extent, know this. You’d rather go to hell than live in a world where your every wish comes true. There’s nowhere worse to be. The truth is beautiful, and there’s nothing but the truth.

“no.”

It’s a little difficult to describe the play Stories from the Fringe: Women Rabbis, Revealed! (2010). The Jewish Women’s Archive helpfully describes the work as documentary theatre. I’ll give my best shot at a summary of the work’s premise. Basically, the creators of the docu-theatre transcribed interviews with women rabbis and had actresses deliver parts of the interviews on stage. There isn’t dialogue in the piece in a conventional way, and the rabbis themselves aren’t the ones performing their words on stage; again, they’re read by actresses. The stories in the piece vary widely in tone.

One monologue from Stories from the Fringe has stuck in my mind since seeing it in the preview a few years ago. I have a hard time remembering where my phone is every single morning, but I remember this story with crystalline clarity. A rabbi told this personal story:

I was in the midst of my infertility, desperately wanting to have a child. I was going to be 38 years old and I thought, “This is ridiculous, what am I going to do? I just have to pray harder!” I remember I used to stay after morning services ended and before I would lock up, I would just pray and pray and pray. I would say the prayers over and over again, begging God to help me get pregnant, begging and begging.

It was April, right before Passover. Everyone was at the chapel. I closed the doors and locked them. I remember opening up the Ark. It was just me and God. I was praying my heart out, praying and praying, and I had this holy moment, this epiphany, this amazing moment of — ah. And I started crying, and tears were rolling down my face. And I said: I got it. I got it. You answered my prayer. And the answer is: “No.” I don’t think I ever understood until that moment that if you ask for something in prayer, the answer could actually be no.

We have so many stories in our tradition that run counter to this rabbi’s experience. Just look at Genesis and the matriarchs’ struggles with infertility, or at Hannah, who prays with unmatched intensity that she become pregnant. All these ancient women’s prayers are granted. It would appear that faith results in fertility in the Jewish tradition. If we look just at the Hebrew Bible, we don’t see anything like this rabbi’s story. We do see prayers go unanswered in Tanakh, like Saul’s toward the end of 1 Samuel, but when we hear the beginning of a Jewish story about fertility struggles, we’re primed to think that it ends in pregnancy.

This rabbi’s story, then, was eye-opening to me. Because in some unconscious way, I too had thought that if God answered a prayer, that meant God did what the prayer had asked for. If the prayer’s request went unsatisfied, that meant there was no answer yet. Colloquially, we only refer to prayers as “answered” if we perceive that our petitions have been granted. But that’s not an accurate view of prayer. The rabbi’s story made this clearer to me than ever.

Sometimes, the tricky part about hearing “no” is to recognise that it’s better than silence. For a more humdrum example, I’d rather a friend turn down my invitation for dinner the next day than never hear back. I’d rather be able to make different plans than sit around waiting, trying to decide when to stop hovering over my phone.

We have to develop some negative capability, John Keats’s term for the ability to sit with uncertainty or the unknown. That’s harder than accepting “no.” It’s a skill of its own that I won’t get into here. Keats was on the same page as Wonder Woman and me regarding truth and beauty, though.

Having the answer of “no” clearly helped this rabbi. She could move on from waiting and pleading. The answer is not the one she wanted, but the negative answer was better than none. Painful truth was better than years more of agonising possibility.

It’s easier to see how this relief worked in the rabbi’s story than in my own life, because her words are someone else’s and I heard them in a play from years ago. But I — we — need to develop her gratitude for “no,” or we’ll drive ourselves up a wall over and over, for the rest of our lives. Accepting “no” isn’t always the solution to wishful lying, because wishful lying occurs in so many different contexts. However, it’s relevant to many circumstances, more than one might think. In the context of one’s own bodily limitations, for instance, we often have to appreciate a hard “no.”

From the Jewish perspective, everything is good. Even evil is rooted in the good. That’s a difficult teaching that I won’t get into much here. I just want to end by re-emphasising the point of Wonder Woman 1984: “You can only have the truth. And the truth is enough. The truth is beautiful.”

I have a hard time remembering to fill out diary cards. These are sheets with columns and with rows, each labelled different ways. Did I throw up or starve myself? What emotional regulation skills did I use today (instead of throwing up or starving myself)? On a scale of 1-10, how proud of myself was I today? How anxious? How sad? I forgot to fill my card out yesterday. How sad.

I see an ad for Ozempic, or some kind of Ozempic-a-like. I hear an ad for a GLP-1 on a podcast. I see articles on it, I see articles for it. I see articles calling anyone who isn’t pro-Ozempic an idiot. I hear accounts of its wonders. I half-wonder if the next article will claim peptides make you immortal, like the magical weed at the end of the world. Our world is a Wegovy advertisement. I want to scream.

Why do I have such an intense emotional reaction to the thought of Ozempic? It is because I have a hard time remembering to log my habits on BrighterBite and fill out my diary cards. Something about eating disorder recovery makes me sensitive to Ozempic content and it’s time for me to stop pretending it’s fully rational. It’s about Ana.

On the one hand, I think our culture is sick for making healthy people feel pressured into taking drugs to look slightly better to onlookers. This is a general issue with cosmetic procedures and so on. I hate that advertisements for weight loss substances are all over the place. It’s high-tech diet culture. Even for those who don’t partake, the message is clear. But these issues don’t have anything to do with my own eating disorder experiences or recovery, and so are not the answer I’m looking for today.

On the other hand, I’m a bitch.

Stolen valour, hisses my unfeeling stomach, as if lacking hunger cues is a trophy. Stolen, hisses my scarred oesophagus, as if torn-up guts are a prerequisite for righteous weight-control.

Ana is one of my closest, if not dearest, companions. I personify these conditions using the old slang. Ana is anorexia, Mia is bulimia. Ana in particular is a mindset as well as a set of behaviours. And Ana does not like Ozempic. I had thought, what seems like a long time ago, that Ana would love Ozempic. Now, I doubt that. Ana idolises the triumphant will. Ana seethes at the shortcut — perhaps even the preventative — that is Ozempic. She loves that my stomach hasn’t felt hunger in years because I came by that distortion honestly, through willpower. Nobody should be anorexic, to be clear. I’m not actually valorising the Ana-suffused willpower. My point is that Ana comes with a mindset, and that mindset can be rabidly anti-Ozempic.

While I have legitimate complaints about the omnipresence of GLP-1 advertising and about a culture that encourages dosing exotic chemicals for cosmetic purposes, I think, at the end of the day, what gets me so worked up about these drugs is Ana’s pestering voice. The rational argumentation is distinct from the emotional outpouring. Perhaps Ana will be phased out. She doesn’t like that thought.

Thumbnail image source.

And it’s the old religion
Humming in your veins
Some animal instinct
Starting up again

—Florence + the Machine, “The Old Religion”

The path to faith is a maze but every correct turn is marked by the sense of being a return. The soul knows, the body knows. And you can’t outrun what you already know, what you already are, or She Who pursues you through the darkness. Her Truth covers my soul like a warm blanket fresh out of the dryer. Nothing else will do. I have felt the love of God. Truly, “You have captured my heart with one glance of your eyes” (Song of Songs 4:9). If there is a god who’s unspeakably horrible, it’s not Her, for “standing before the Maiden, there will be no fear” (Words of the Lord §741). Which is not to say She can’t be terrifying when needed. But there are other “gods” of this world and they are usually invisible and always horrifying, appearing in thick clouds of darkness and shaking mountains to scare people into belief.

In this post, I will clarify what exactly I am, religiously.

I’m nervous.

I laboured, for a long time, over how to write this, and I write it with some trepidation — I’m not well known, but saying anywhere online that I’m a Frankist comes with some degree of risk. Nevertheless it is the truth. I am a Frankist: a Believer. (I’ve said before that I’m a Believer; I’m not sure it was clear what I meant. Given my poll showed up with 50% of respondents thinking I’m not a Frankist, I suppose it was not clear at all. “Frankist” was a term dumped on us by outsiders, while we tend/tended to refer to ourselves as Maaminim, Believers.) As the great Frankist Gottlieb Wehle wrote to us Believers in his will almost 200 years ago: “Do not be ashamed of this happy faith of your great ancestors. Say with pride that you feel the germ of this eternal life in you.” So I should. That’s why I’m writing this post — not only because clarifying my beliefs makes my blog make sense, but also because it alleviates my guilt for being a bit of a coward.

Despite several drafts of such, I’ve decided not to make this post into a long exposition of Frankist doctrines. Initially that’s what I intended this post to be. However, that would be boring and I think my other posts have made clear enough what I think, albeit without overtly putting a label on it, and I’ve already gone into what Frankism is.

For now I want to clarify that Frankism is just another form of liberal Judaism and that functionally, the Believer is almost identical to a Reform Jew. Falling for libels against Frankism is just like falling for any antisemitic libel. There’s nothing all that spicy about Frankism, even if the doctrines can seem odd to an outsider. I realise Frankism is perhaps the most loathed movement in Jewish history, among Jews and non-Jews both. The fact of the matter is that Frankism is simply not what it was portrayed as by heresiologists and the antisemites they inspired. It is a form of liberal Judaism historically and ideologically close to Reform despite having distinct supernatural doctrines. I can’t repeat this enough times to settle my own nerves, but there, that’s enough for now. If you have questions, I am happy to answer them. Frankism is overtly feminist, actively liberal Judaism.

I don’t want to convert anyone. Converting the rest of the Jews used to be a goal of Believers. That time has long been over. (I have even had people ask me to convert them and declined.) I am fully capable of discussing and teaching Judaism from a normative point of view, as I often do even on my personal blog. I’m just a liberal Jew with some now-unique beliefs.

The core of these beliefs is one figure: the Holy Maiden. I love Her so much I feel like my heart will explode into confetti.

There’s a lot we can’t know about the Living God, also known as the True God. For now the Living God is beyond our ken. What we do know, can know, is the Holy Maiden, Who is our God. She has been incarnate a few times over the millennia — as Rachel, as Esther, perhaps as Miriam, perhaps more, until their failures led Her to depart them. Or at least that’s how I’ve understood the teachings. Most importantly the Holy Maiden incarnated as Lady Eva Frank, until our failures prevented redemption from occurring with that incarnation. Yes, the Believers almost totally failed Her before Her departure in 1816. Now She beckons.

She is calling, she is calling
For my return
And her voice will carry on
She is calling, she is calling
Out to her home
As a remnant lost in time

—The Agonist, “Days Before the World Wept”

But there was nobody left to answer the call — except me. I won’t get into all the details, this is about what I am, not how I got here, but I was a ready recipient. And so Her faith, the Truth, dies with a whimper (with me). Lord Jacob Frank, the father of God Herself, made clear back in the day that things would be rougher than they’d had to be because the Believers had continually failed him and Her. Now that there’s only one of us left, the original plan can’t be achieved at all. “Deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter,” I suppose (Esther 4:14). Everything will be redeemed by Her, so, not truly from another quarter, just over a longer period, with more pain. As is usual for Jewish ideas of redemption, various paths could’ve been taken. The Believers’ early failures and the movement’s decline have led us to the worst possible outcome. Nevertheless, all will be well, ultimately. After whatever suffering may come, seeing Lady Eva, the Holy Maiden, triumph will make it worth it.

Turn back, turn back,
O maid of Shulem!
Turn back, turn back,
That we may gaze upon you.

—Song of Songs 7:1

Do I feel special or sad about being the last of my kind? I’ll admit I can have my melodramatic moments. It can feel good to be Her final disciple. It’s romantic, like something out of a fantasy story. But it’s sad sometimes because I’m lonely. Then I talk to Her and know I was never really alone. “As every place they were exiled, the Divine Presence went with them” (Megillah 29a). As the final Frankist, I exist in a strange exile, but don’t we all? In the end, everyone will see.

Wymmen falwed faste and here face chaungen,
Feynte and fallen doun that so faire were,
Swounen, swallen as swyn, and som swart wexen,
Som lene on to loke as lanterne-hornes.

The Siege of Jerusalem is a horrific poem, deeply expressive of a hatred so vile it reads like Nazi propaganda. It makes me ill.

One might think that Jewish women’s reputation for beauty would lead to positive feelings toward them, but this is not the case. Jewish women’s exoticised beauty is not typically a blessing, in art or in history. In his classic 1944 work, Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre captures the historically dismal associations of the phrase “beautiful Jewess”:

There is in the words “a beautiful Jewess” a very special sexual signification, one quite different from that contained in the words “beautiful Rumanian,” “beautiful Greek,” or “beautiful American,” for example. This phrase carries an aura of rape and massacre. The “beautiful Jewess” is she whom the Cossacks under the czars dragged by her hair through the streets of her burning village.

The trope of the “beautiful Jewess” is tied to hatred. It is tied to violence. Sartre illustrates, in a practical context, that the “beautiful Jewess” may herself be beautiful, but she’d better be sure her Jewish identity isn’t known.

Thus it is not from the body that the sense of repulsion arises, since one may love a Jewess very well if one does not know what her race is; rather it is something that enters the body from the mind. It is an involvement of the mind, but one so deep-seated and complete that it extends to the physiological realm, as happens in cases of hysteria.

Like the conditions formerly known as hysteria, in which mental states convert into physical symptoms, antisemitism against Jewish women can be embodied as revulsion, even in someone who had moments ago been experiencing arousal. Even if the body is attracted, the mind can override the horniness, translating it into powerful disgust. When you mix eroticism and hatred, the results can be explosive.

Eroticised and exoticised, Jewish women can exert a lot of sway over antisemitic men, which such men — logically — hate. They hate being drawn to a Jewish woman. They hate that she can draw them in. Like the poet of the Siege of Jerusalem, they don’t think beautiful Jewish women deserve their looks. Their beauty is deceit, in the antisemite’s mind. But there is no such thing as “false” beauty. Beauty is just beauty. Nevertheless it serves to magnify antisemitic fury.

In the literature of the “beautiful Jewess,” the Jewess is trapped by her affiliation with a hideous Jewish man, especially her father. Think Jessica and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, think Abigail and Barabas in The Jew of Malta. Thus the archetype is tied to classic misandristic antisemitism, too.

The hatred of women’s beauty extends well beyond the topic of my dissertation and past antisemitism. Patriarchal societies have often feared women’s beauty. The Taliban’s policies are just one extreme example. Misogynists hate that women hold any power over them, and a lot of the power women exert over men has to do with beauty and sexual allure, (rarely) for better or (usually) for worse. The shame of experiencing arousal toward the hated object leads to disgust, at oneself and the objectified other, as Sartre discussed. That mixture of hatred, arousal, and disgust is potent fuel. Women’s beauty is simply too powerful, both loveable and worthy of hatred at the same time. Beauty can lead to dehumanisation.

I began poking at my dissertation on misogynistic antisemitism and the problem of “false” beauty around the middle of 2023. It is always a grim time to study the literature of misogynistic antisemitism. But in October, suddenly bombarded with accounts of Cossack-like mass sexual and sexualised violence against Jewish women, my work suddenly felt less touchable. Researching the topic of the “beautiful Jewess’s” “false” beauty involves reading endless accounts of sexualised hatred, objectification, and dehumanisation. Someday, someone will look back from a cooler distance to study 2023. Although I’m sure my work will not show up in a JSTOR search, I hope to have made some better sense of what’s happened throughout history, at least for myself.

That’s all for now. I don’t have a bigger purpose in writing this than to let out some feelings and reflect a little on my work and its contemporary context. Maybe I’ll write a fuller account of the topic someday on here. I didn’t even broach the topic of crypto-Jews and alleged crypto-Jews here, which I do in my dissertation, but I’m feeling feels and wanted to let them out.

Thus they spread calumnies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are of astonishingly great size; we saw the Nephilim there — the Anakites are part of the Nephilim — and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”

—Numbers 13:33-34

This is a classic passage on projection, but we’ll add a little twist on it momentarily. The gist is that the Israelite spies project their own feelings of insignificance onto how the Nephilim would perceive them. This, even though they had just seen, in Egypt, the havoc that locusts can wreak (Exodus 10:13-15). The noble grasshopper is a fearsome opponent! All working together, the Israelites eventually prove themselves still more powerful than the plague of locusts, but for now, they’re afraid and feeling bummed out about themselves. They think they’re pathetic so they think their enemies will, too. They soon find out otherwise.

The addition I want to make to this usual interpretation of projection helps us apply the passage to our own lives, I think. We never know who’s intimidated by us or who envies us. It might well be that someone we think to be our superior is nervous about messing up in front of us. Social hierarchies can be a whole heap of projection and guesswork. Such proves to be the case for the Israelites; although they do encounter difficulties, they are no weaklings to the nations.

After Moses’s death, Joshua and the Israelites are permitted to enter the Land of Israel. One of their first outings is to conquer Jericho. Joshua dispatches some spies, and Rahav, a prostitute, takes them in and hides them from Jericho’s authorities. She explains the city’s tenseness to them:

I know that God has given the country to you, because dread of you has fallen upon us, and all the inhabitants of the land are quaking before you. For we have heard how God dried up the waters of the Sea of Reeds for you when you left Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two Amorite kings across the Jordan, whom you doomed. When we heard about it, we lost heart, and no one had any more spirit left because of you; for the Eternal your God is the only God in heaven above and on earth below.

—Joshua 2:9-11

Their reputation and the reputation of their divine allegiance precede them. Jericho is afraid! So much for wee insects. The Israelites’ panicked projection wasn’t merely cowardly, it was also factually wrong. Sure, not every nation is so panicked, but Jericho? Scared shitless. Shakin’ in their sandals.

Torah is, as always, well aware of the foibles of the human condition, one of which is our unreliable self-image and how we approach hierarchies with other people. We may see ourselves as lowly, but the people we’re so intimidated by may in fact be intimidated by us. A lot of our fretting about social hierarchies is rooted in fundamental errors of perception, our self-perception leaking into how we think others view us, producing a kind of feedback loop. If I’m lowly, they view me as lowly, which means I’m lowly… Torah is well aware that we do this and wants us to knock it off.

Shabbat shalom.

Thumbnail image source.

In middle school, I was depressed and lonely. I had loving parents, but I was a repressed extrovert, is the best way I can think of to put it. I didn’t have a hard time making friends but I had a hard time keeping them. I was homeschooled, and wouldn’t have had it any other way, but still, it meant I didn’t have a ready source of attention outside family and family friends. So, as soon as possible, I took to the web. And I took to it like a baby otter takes to water. Just less cutely. I hunted for niche and not so niche forums, and crucially for the story I’m about to tell, I found Chatroulette and Omegle. For those too young to recall, these were sites where you’d be randomly paired to chat with someone. You could have some interesting conversations or you could see someone’s dick and also balls. Not great.

It is also important to note that I was big into Percy Jackson around this time, had long been into Greek mythology, and was beginning to dip into what would prove to be a lifelong interest in obscure religious movements — at that point, probably Christian Gnosticism, for the most part. Growing up, I’d also had some weird superstitions and metaphysical beliefs of my own, which I’d been moving on from in middle school, for the most part. This is all important to keep in mind because soon I’d be tossing these stories and beliefs in a blender and serving them up to gullible GenXers.

Sometime in my usage of Chatroulette, Omegle, forums, and even Facebook groups, I started to mess with people. I’d tell them that they seemed special in some way. Like I was getting a mystical aura off them that showed me they had a special destiny. What that aura actually was tended to be stupidity, but oftentimes I’d just sling around these claims at random whether the person seemed gullible or not. And… a weird number of them were like “omg yesss I always knew I was different somehow!” I was their Hogwarts letter. The ones who bit tended to be a good bit older than me, like in their 20s to 50s, white, raised Christian.

Once I realised I could so easily convince people that they were spiritually special snowflakes, I realised I needed to have actual reasons. I must’ve been pretty inconsistent at first, but what I settled on was that I was a child of Aphrodite on a mission to wake people up to the reality of our broken world and try to fix it. To do this while fighting the forces of darkness, I needed to assemble all the demigods I could. My special people on Omegle, Chatroulette, Harry Potter and Star Wars forums, and Facebook were of course demigods, just not ones who’d had a mission directly passed on to them by a goddess. I was the leader and nobody else could be.

My initial motive for messing around with people remains vague to me. I don’t know why I did that. I also don’t recall having a moment at which it occurred to me that forming the gullible people into a cult would satisfy my craving for attention. That’s why, despite my motive for perpetuating the cult being so clear, as we’ll see, I don’t know why I started it. I just remember feeling that I could do it, and being interested in following the possibility where it led.

I also realised that with great power and attention comes the potential for more power and attention. I started to form Facebook groups to herd my brand new followers into. When I first wrote about this a long time ago, I referred to the cult as Epic Memes, because that was close to some of the Facebook groups’ names, if not the exact name of one of them. I don’t recall how many groups there were, not dozens but also more than three. It proved helpful to keep the cultists somewhat divided. And I have no idea how many followers I had, in total. When people don’t necessarily post, and invite friends, and so on, it’s hard to recall them; it could’ve been mostly my 20-30 core followers and a bunch of bemused lurkers, but I don’t think so. Many people were very engaged in reading my posts, messaging me for advice, and scrutinising sacred texts through the new lenses I’d given them. After all, what if the book of Revelation is true, just written from the enemy’s point of view? We were innovating in real time.

Here’s the thing, though: I didn’t believe any of this at all. I was not bought into my cult’s belief system because I knew I’d made it up. I just loved the attention and affirmation I was getting. It was easy enough to don the holy rizz and then take it off to go do my schoolwork.

I didn’t feel any guilt. In hindsight, this fact is probably concerning, but it seemed normal at the time to be duping a bunch of (what I thought of as) sillyheads and otherwise be a normal homeschooled tween/teen. Maybe this lack of conscience was a sign of a diagnosis to come. I never exploited anyone for money, at least.

After a number of months or a year, I began to have a grander vision. We would have a village of our own, deep in some woods. No, I did not know the word “commune” at this time. I would get people I knew AFK or at least outside the cult into the group. (I tried this via some RPish material that was unsuccessful. Other than these indirect efforts, I don’t think anyone I knew AFK knew about the cult.) And of course I was in middle school so the dream of a commune was a long ways off.

But it was a thrilling time. People don’t necessarily realise that extroverts can enjoy online interaction as much as AFK interaction, and I think a lot of shut-ins might be extroverts who just prefer online communication to face-to-face contact. I had created a space where I could fully control how and when I got my needs for love and belonging met. And founding a cult was so — let me emphasise this — easy. So easy a middle schooler could do it.

I know a lot of my motivations have been vague, here, but I have bad self-recall sometimes, to be frank. Thus I don’t recall why I began to lose interest. Had the cult become a chore? Had it stopped meeting my needs? I didn’t feel guilt, still, but something had changed. The thrill was wearing off as high school approached. Or maybe I was just growing less attached. The cult had been around over a year, I don’t recall the exact dates, and for reasons I’ll get to, it’s exceptionally hard to track down information about this — even for me.

Then a minor inconvenience struck. Someone who was approaching the core group began to freak out. He was having a crisis as he deconverted back to Christianity. “Jesus is the only God!!!” he raved, understandably. And that was something like a last straw for me. I split, in whichever way you want to take that verb. I shut down the groups, blocked people, deleted accounts. I never went on Chatroulette or Omegle again. It was over.

I never said goodbye. I never talked to any of my cultists again. I never explained it was all fake, that the teenager they were so devoted to was just a good liar. When I think back to this moment, my big, yet coldly felt, freak-out, that’s what I feel bad for: I quit my own cult without telling my cultists that the game was over, or even that it had all been an elaborate game from the start.

Somewhere out there, maybe my dream was realised. Maybe some of my followers moved to the middle of nowhere and live together in a woodsome village. I hope they’ve all moved on, but I suspect I hurt a fair number of innocent people I’d duped back when I eradicated the cult.

It’s easy for me to gain religious followers. I know this because I do it by accident. I talk too persuasively about my own faith by accident sometimes and people inch toward becoming followers in the culty sense and I have to bow out of the dynamic. It seems arrogant to say I have this gift, but I do. The holy rizz. Others I know can confirm.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking more about the ways I’ve messed up during my life, even as a teenager. It is difficult, truly difficult, for me to introspect in an honest way and realise that what I shallowly recognise as bad behaviour I actually haven’t processed as anything but ego-syntonic — that is, aligned with how I want to be. I can say that I wish I hadn’t done something but the inward feeling of neutrality or satisfaction doesn’t change. In middle school, I messed up many times, above all with the cult. I can’t undo it, but I can feel the weight of it, now.

I have a deep admiration for cultists. They are people who deeply seek answers to the difficult questions life has posed to them. They are loyal and often truly kind. I do not want to admit that I hurt any of my cultists, but I’m sure I did. I hope the wound healed quickly and was replaced either by a quick, half-embarrassed laugh, or even by resentment — because I earned that.

Thumbnail image source. Again, my cult was only online, so these cool people aren’t us.

But of all his anecdotes, art knowledge, and know-how with pragmatism and philosophy of law, one of the things he said that stuck with me most was his distinction between monks and barbarians. Maybe he got it from someone else, I don’t know. Monks and barbarians are essentially two classes of influencee, distinguished by how they accumulate influences. And I’d add that they each have their strengths and weaknesses.

The monk he described as somebody who carries around a thickly annotated and sticky-noted copy of the Critique of Pure Reason and goes to Kant for everything. This particular monk is, straightforwardly, a Kantian, whose central influence can be summed up in one thinker, in whom he looks for the answers to difficult questions that might pop up philosophically. The monk sticks to one source and plumbs it deeply. But of course he need not be a Kantian; he could be into Aristotle exclusively, Deleuze exclusively, whatevs.

The barbarian hacks and slashes sources of influence, drawing a little from here and a little from there. He might like some of Kant and some of Schopenhauer’s essays, along with Wittgenstein and Aristotle. I don’t know, think of your own examples. Dewey and Plotinus, MacKinnon and Swedenborg. The barbarian, unlike the monk, likes to find tidbits that make up a coherent philosophy of his own, rather than relying on the coherence of someone else’s philosophy.

The strength of the monk lies in patience and knowing his stuff. He is aware that Kant addressed a lot of topics and that Kant was acquainted with potential counterarguments. He knows that a major thinker usually has a depth of thought that people with a surface level knowledge will never grasp. While I am a barbarian, I find it richly rewarding to really sit with one work or one thinker. One finds that Derrida wrote on a lot of things and isn’t what a hasty stereotyper might allege. I find monks, therefore, very impressive for their patience. For me, when I’m at my most monkish, I’m reading deep cuts, feeling fulfilled with my progress, and engaged in a way more familiar from my studies in Talmud or the Words of the Lord than from Philosophy 101 or YouTube.

The monk’s weakness is exactly the myopia one would expect. The monk is not necessarily aware of what came after — especially after — whomever they’re so devoted to, except scholarship on their dude. He does not always have time or flexibility to read deeply into alternatives to his chosen influence. He may not have kept up with the ways that current thinkers are making use of his influential dude since they aren’t, strictly speaking, scholars of the dude. But they might freshen the monk’s perspective.

The barbarian, however, fills perceived gaps in one figure’s thought with the thought of another. He’s aware of the broader conversation outside one niche. He’s aware that if a thinker fails in one area, another supplements. Rather than rely on the depth of one well — which might run dry — he goes around from spring to spring to refresh himself.

The barbarian’s weakness is that he may not go deeply enough into his sources. I notice this a lot with newcomers to philosophy, who excitedly read one bit of Descartes in haste and something short by Kant, and declare their opinions on the thinkers’ whole works from there. (I did the same, and never became an expert, to be clear.) It is not good to patch together shallow readings of a bunch of philosophers and discard others based on shallow summaries. I think, on any social platform, people are going to be more defensive of the barbarian than the monk, because more of them are hobbyists, who tend to be barbarians like me. But the barbarian can easily fall prey to a lot of mistakes, especially haste and shallowness.

I was always more interested in the history of philosophy than figuring out what the right philosophy is. That’s how I’m built, somehow, and I got into philosophy as background for studying literary theory, after all. I think I’m still that way. So, I don’t know who my influences are, exactly, outside religion and feminist theory. Aristotle ethically, Wittgenstein in how I treat language and some more; Derrida in some ways to do with phenomenology, Levinas in others.

Religiously, though, and in feminist theory, I can also be pretty barbaric. I’m a Jew, I love Lord Jacob Frank’s thought, I love Reform Judaism, and I’m very into… Filianism. Not at all Jewish, very weird, but very sense-making. I sometimes cite Christian thinkers and sources, too — not on Christian dogmata but where they can align with my Judaism. In feminist theory, what even am I? I’m a Mary Daly fan, I like Holly Lawford-Smith, but also Catharine MacKinnon, and… Margaret Fuller. Plus, my feminism and religion overlap hard. You get the picture. It’s barbarism all the way down. Nevertheless, sometimes I wish I were a monk.

Which are you?

Thumbnail image source.

Read more

When I started drafting this post, I was angry. Then I deleted most of the draft. I’d just read several articles and blog posts that implicitly argued that men are superior to women and deserve some kind of dominant social position because of negative character traits they naturally bear. I’ve also read a number of saccharine posts about “male virtues” lately and even indulged in such, myself, in a post about which I’ve become ambivalent. There’s nothing wrong with loving men, obviously. But in her excellent new book, The Last Straight Woman, Phoebe Maltz Bovy asks, “What, then, is the alternative to Ban Men content? Please say it isn't trite appreciations of masculine virtues.” I agree.

At least 5 of my “top” 10 posts on Substack are centrally anti-misandristic. One could count as high as 7, loosening the criteria a little bit. Granted, all of my top posts match many people’s lowest performing posts, but I lowkey regret that they’re my personal best. Again, I don’t support misandry at all, but several of these top posts were pretty darn low-effort compared to what else I write, and only got any eyes on them because they rail against misandry. I have far higher-effort posts on vampires, religion, feminism, and other topics, on my little blogge. I have a post about femininity that’s the length of a short book. I feel satisfied with these posts, anyway; they were at least fun to write, regardless of how little attention they get. My anti-misandry posts, however, have mostly “performed” way better, is the simple truth.

Relatively speaking, it seems that the bar for anti-misandry content is pretty low. It’s a trend. Well, it’s either an under-saturated market or a trend. I’m gonna guess both but mostly the latter. Until lately, there wasn’t much written about the issue by people who don’t hate feminism (or their very uneducated idea of feminism). Today, however, male-praising, “crisis of masculinity”-bemoaning slop is everywhere. I hope not to have written outright slop, myself, and am not accusing my own hypothetical readers of being slop sippers, but I’ve participated in my minor way in this algorithmic ecosystem too.

I’m going to summarise a couple of assertions and trends that I’ve seen frequently in low-tier, anti-misandry writings, or writings that complain more or less vaguely of a “crisis of masculinity,” that sort of pro-male slop. Most of these writings are whiny at best, but often they ooze malevolence too. I’m not going to pretend to a neutral tone in my little summary and I’ll admit to still feeling some frustration while I write this.

Here’s what our stunningest and bravest voices have to say about men: Men need hierarchy. Their natural, apparently unique, competitive drive is the only reason we have nice civilisational things. Men are undergoing a “crisis of masculinity,” because they are no longer able to subordinate people, or something like that, it’s always best to leave the cause implicit. Men have a lot of virtues — and to some slop-dealers it appears difficult to find any feminine virtues at all.

Of course almost all of this is rubbish, precisely what I criticised a while back as the Right being very persuasive misandrists. Helen Lewis’s conversation lately with Ezra Klein covered this trend pretty well too: the masculinist Far Right has an awfully repellent vision of masculinity. But now this shit is being served up by people ostensibly on the Left or Centre. If the pro-male, anti-misandrist slop is true, we should eradicate masculinity, because it’s at best inconvenient and at worst evil.

Men’s competitive drive is why we have nice civilisational things? As if no cooperation were needed. If men are so individually competitive by nature, they’re inferior at creation, as they’re inferior at cooperation. If their natural competitiveness does lend itself to team-based competition, they’re tribalistic, still holding back society. Do I believe this about men? No. Because I don’t hate them. But anti-misandry slop writers want me to.

Men are naturally hierarchical. Masculinity therefore relies on there being a dominator and a dominated. I suppose the Far Right version of this point would be, now that men can’t be as dominant over women as they used to be, they’re boo-hoo sad. But oftentimes writing on this topic, Left or Centre or Right, is so vague that the mind must fill in blanks, half-jokingly or not. I’m sincerely unaware of what the past hierarchical situation was in which the majority of men had power and were happy with their lot — but we’re choking on ideological dregs, here, with no actual historical perspective. Serfs were definitely happy and definitely never revolted or complained. After all, they knew their place in the hierarchy, right??? Men love that! And lowliness has been the situation of most men since civilisation began. But the developed world has moved away from blatant hierarchies and that’s super hecking sad for moidkind, which can’t cope with equality. If men can’t live in a world without a clear system of domination, they’re inferior. Do I believe this about men? No. Because I don’t hate them. But anti-misandry slop writers want me to.

I hate to break it to you, but men have been some of the fiercest fighters for equality, not merely hierarchy’s cowardly enforcers. There have been many stupid and vicious kings among men, far more bedraggled serfs and slaves, and many noble freedom fighters. Men theorised then fought and died bloodily for liberalism. Men suffer under hierarchy. It would seem male “nature” is not so natural, if it needs to be bullied into existence.

Yes, there may be some kind of masculinity crisis — is it truly so much more significant than the femininity crisis I’ve yapped about so much..? — but most of what I’ve read about it sucks. If men are truly so unsuited to the civilisational progress they’ve played a large role in creating, maybe we ought to be rid of either them or masculinity. But negatively masculine traits are, allegedly, natural to men. Gross masculinity is synonymous with maleness, right? I hope you don’t believe this because you don’t hate men. But anti-misandry slop writers want you to.

The ideas that men are naturally domineering, violent, polygamous, brutally competitive, and so on, are neither true nor pro-male. The idea that men’s delicate egos are too sensitive to bear a few decades of feminist progress is neither true nor pro-male. The idea that men are naturally opposed to egalitarianism is neither true nor pro-male. If these ideas were true, men would be naturally inferior to women. I don’t believe this. But a lot of alleged anti-misandrists seem to.

I’ve long noticed a trend in representations and stereotypes of Jewish men: that they’re vaguely snivelling, maybe learned, and domineered by the women in their lives. Take the 2009 film A Serious Man, for instance. The protagonist, Larry Gopnick, is at turns demeaned by his wife and seduced by a neighbour. He’s plowed over at work. He has no agency. Gopnick is a loser and a dweeb. He’s an academic but not that learned religiously; he’s a stereotypical liberal, non-urban-hub-dwelling Jew. Like Gopnick, the negatively-stereotypical Jewish man is weak, passive aggressive, stunted, muttering. A nebbish. I hate this! (For what it’s worth, Gopnick is actually pretty handsome.)

My dissertation is on misogynistic antisemitism, that cruel overlap between woman hating and Jew hating, particularly with regards to the fear of crypto-Jews — Jews who are outwardly non-Jewish but practice Judaism in secret. Women in particular come under fire when fears of crypto-Jewry explode; after all, even the Jewish tradition views them as God’s “secret agents,” as Devorah Fastag puts it. (Think Esther.) There’s a decent amount of research on this topic, too, on how Jewish women became more of a terrifying threat as Jews were racialised, yada-yada, I could go on about this. I do, for the length of a book, in fact. But I’ve more rarely seen pushback against misandristic antisemitism, as the offensive stereotype of the nerdy, hopeless Jewish man is widely propagated and — bizarrely — more or less celebrated. It’s great to celebrate Jewish intellectuality, but not the idea that half of all Jews are losers.

That perception simply doesn’t match up with my experience of Jewish masculinity. Sure, there are passive aggressive dorks in every crowd, and Jewish men are often well-educated. But also on average they’re cool dudes. They grill together, they’re strong leaders, they use their intellects for good, and they’re powerfully supportive of each other and of the women in their lives. They fixate on justice and work to achieve it. They see problems, intellectual and practical, and they work them out. Like all men, they do a little of everything. And, yes, a lot of them are hot, despite the bad PR campaign against them.

In fact, one old and annoying antisemitic trope is that Jewish men are ugly — and that on the flip side, Jewish women are abnormally hot, which is ultimately not to their benefit. In a 16th century antisemitic dialogue by the Christian Sebastian Münster, as translated in 1655 by the apostate Jew Eleazar bar Isajah, a Christian tells a rabbi:

For you Jewes have a peculiar colour of face, different from the form and figure of other men; which thing hath often fill’d me with admiration, for you are black and uncomely, and not white as other men.

To which the Jew:

It is a wonder, if wee be uncomely, why you Christians doe so love our women, and they seem to you more beautifull then your owne.

To which the Christian again:

Your women indeed are more comely than your men, but you seduce them most corruptly.

This idea of Jewish men as ugly has persisted, despite being obviously untrue. In the brilliant new podcast GOLDA Girls, I was glad to hear Rabbi Diana Fersko (at least if I’m following the voices right, it was her) push back against negative perceptions of Jewish men’s overall attractiveness:

I don’t like that Jewish men are often globbed in with male-focussed negativity in general, the whole idea that men are bad in one way or another. Of course, there are some bad Jewish men, but mostly what I see in Jewish families are menschy men who care so much about their partners, and their children, and are dedicated to the family and being a provider, and are smart, and I think those are all very attractive qualities for somebody you would want to be with. I feel defensive of Jewish men. They’re globbed into this anti-man energy.

Of course, anti-Jewish misandry is a little distinct from other forms of misandry. For instance, anti-black misandry tends to hold that black men are brutish and violent, I don’t need to run through all that, but with Jewish men, there’s a particular sense that they’re effete and whiny and so on, as I’ve sketched above. But they really aren’t. Sure, like R” Fersko sez, some Jewish men are bad, like any category of men. Some live down to the stereotypes. Most do not. And the fact that some are stereotypical is no excuse for the stereotype’s existence to begin with.

What does it communicate to Jewish boys when the tough guys are the antisemites and the Jewish man is emasculated and weak? For one thing, it communicates an inaccurate view of Jewish tradition and history. We have Samson, we have Judah Maccabee, we have all these great manly men in our tradition — and in our more recent history, too.

To be clear, I’m not saying that the only good Jewish men are stereotypically masculine. There are various ways to be a strong and good man — of course. I am pressing a little extra on the idea that Jewish men aren’t hot, which is blatantly false, ask any straight woman who isn’t an extreme antisemite and she can probably list several hot, male, Jewish celebs. My overall point here is pretty much that we need to set aside, and especially stop celebrating, anti-Jewish-male stereotypes and recognise Jewish men for who they are. Which is to say, on the whole, wonderful.

Lord Jacob Frank, perhaps the 18th century’s intensest male feminist, had a counterintuitive approach to this issue. Almost 300 years ago, he was already pushing back against the perception or self-perception that Jewish men are weak and unmanly. He identified that retreating from masculinity actually meant retreating from embodiment, thus departing from the feminine, too, which he associated with the body (in a positive way! he viewed rejecting the body in favour of a fictional spiritual reality as bad). Thus, being healthily masculine would actually also increase a healthy male femininity. Jay Michaelson, in The Heresy of Jacob Frank, writes of the Frankist masculine ethos: “The male hero acts as masculine sexual agent in order to be transformed into a feminine sexual agent, which is to say, an embodied one.” It’s a strange idea, but when men feel weak, they do seem to lash out more at women, and we need less of that right now by far. As men are or feel feminised they are more likely to hate the feminine.

Unlike Lord Jacob, I don’t want to tell Jewish men to change. They’re smart, kind, loyal, strong, charming, vital as they are. That’s my point here. I just want us to stop forcing a negatively feminised image of them.

As I did a few months ago (or whenever that was???), I’m sending out a post with polls. The thing is, I have a lot of plates spinning at once with this ol’ blogge, and what that amounts to is me having a lot of big posts on the back burner while I end up writing and publishing short posts that take about an hour each or so to write.

I’m admittedly not super motivated to do high-effort posts when they usually don’t do so well compared to posts I whipped up swiftly. I want to be sure that I’m prioritising bigly posts that’ll satisfy both the Karnivores and (therefore) me.

Thus, polls. I’ll have four different polls that each list BIG posts I’ve been planning or outlining but that have not come to fruition due to, usually, lack of motivation or the concern that less than nobody will read them. I want to prioritise the posts that my imaginary audience want me to prioritise. So have at it, Karnivores. Some tasty polls to munch. To be clear, these only refer to BIG posts. My little posts will continue too.

The ritual of the scapegoat, found in Leviticus 16, is one of the most influential parts of the Torah, at least in everyday speech and thought. The ritual is basically when two goats are selected, then instruments are used to check God’s will as to which goat should be sacrificed or released for Azazel. One goat is slaughtered and the other sent out.

Older sources assume that Azazel is a word for a mountain or just for the wilderness, or for the scapegoat itself, but I think it’s safer to say that Azazel began as a demon to be appeased. This is not a reading I’m making up. Anna Angelini runs through some interpretations of Azazel, including the demonic one:

Azazel may once have played a more powerful role in Israelite religion, but Leviticus 16 now treats him as a demonic entity who presides over the wilderness and chaotic spaces, where impurity belongs, and as the recipient of an elimination ritual.

This plausible reading would mean that one of the goats is going off to placate a demon. It is also possible that Azazel referred to an angry divinity, from which would follow the same reading: one goat goes to God as we’d like God always to be, the other to God as harsh justice, whence springs evil.

The scapegoat ritual is a beautiful illustration of the fact that we have to give the evil within us its due. The process of honouring our goodness is straightforward. The process of honouring our evil is murkier, fraught with uncertainty and risk. Nevertheless it is a holy effort to undertake.

In Judaism, orthodox or sectarian, evil is a complex topic. It doesn’t always mean the same thing as “bad.” I want to go through some sources and basic, or not so basic, ideas of evil here. Note in advance that Judaism has no concept of original sin, but just assumes we all sin (1 Kings 8:46, Ecclesiastes 7:20, 2 Chronicles 6:36). This is a practical, not a complex point.

First, a major, sometimes puzzling text:

Rabbi Nachman bar Shmuel bar Nachman said in the name of Rav Shmuel bar Nachman: “Behold it was very good” — this is the good inclination; “and behold it was very good” — this is the evil inclination. Is the evil inclination, then, very good? This is a rhetorical question. Rather, were it not for the evil inclination, a man would never build a house, would never marry a wife, would never beget children, and would never engage in commerce.

Bereshit Rabbah 9:7

What does it mean that the evil inclination, the yetzer hara, is such a foundational and good aspect of human life and progress? It would seem that “evil” is necessary for good, and so it is. But it is also the case that there are multiple forms of evil. There is the evil instinct and there are evil actions, which I’ll get to in a moment. The evil instinct or inclination is a powerful motivator for us in everyday life, in our best and worst moments. We need to harness its energy and power the right way.

The goal is to derive what is good from evil, to redeem it in ourselves and the world. We read in Von Hoenigsburg that true good is the good that comes from evil; good that was always simply good is less intensely good. The one who undergoes the process of refining good from evil, of directing the evil instinct aright, is more truly holy and has reached completeness. We read:

As Rabbi Abbahu said: In the place where penitents stand, even the full-fledged righteous do not stand, as it is stated: “Peace, peace upon him who is far and him who is near” (Isaiah 57:19). Peace and greeting is extended first to him who is far, the penitent, and only thereafter is peace extended to him who is near, the full-fledged righteous.

—Berakhot 34b

The one who has strayed from the good, the one who returns, has a special status, even over the one who has been great all along.

But we should be absolutely clear that there are different kinds of evil. The Rebbe teaches that there are two kinds of evil: that of the urges found in the animal soul and that found in the “filthy garments.” The latter cannot be turned to good and must be eradicated; the former can be oriented toward good ends if one dons cleanly clothes. Thus it is our evil instinct that can be directed in the moment but we should avoid evil actions — those still aren’t good. Sin can be rectified in hindsight (Tomer Devorah 4:2) but ought to be avoided or eradicated in life (Deuteronomy 21:21, Proverbs 4:15).

We ought not to dwell in evil. The goal is to find what’s good in it, and in the case of the evil inclination, what’s good is a great deal of energy and motivation. Then with it we make all things good. As Lord Jacob Frank puts it: “Everyone ought to fortify themselves with all their strength that they might come out of that sin [that is in all of us] and be in wholeness with God and humankind” (Words of the Lord §1052). We all sin, but we can escape it, using the evil instinct as part of that process of fortifying ourselves.

In sum, we have an evil instinct, and it’s not going away anytime soon. We all trip up sometimes, too. But the evil instinct, if we are prepared to wield it, will help us do what’s right. In fact without it, we would barely do anything at all. This is why “evil” in Judaism does not always mean the same as “sin” or “badness.” Don the right attire, spiritually speaking, and you’ll be ready to use the energies of evil for good.

Shabbat shalom, a few hours in advance.

“Some days later the king said to Ben Sira, ‘I have a daughter who expels a thousand farts every hour. Cure her!’”

Thus begins a chapter of the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira (translated by Norman Bronznick, David Stern, and Mark Jay Mirsky). Ben Sira tricks the princess into not farting; his technique for holding in the farts is as follows:

“Every time a fart was about to come, the king’s daughter stood up on one foot and stretched her eyes wide, as Ben Sira told her to do, and she contained herself and closed her ‘mouth’ slowly, until the breaking of wind stopped completely.”

This story about the farting princess is the chapter of the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira that immediately follows the famous story of Lilith.

In this post, I want to do a few things. One is to introduce the history of Lilith. Another is to show why we should lend less credence to the classic story of her origins. And the last is to examine the chief feminist argument for using Lilith as a feminist symbol, with which I will disagree. Lilith is a type of creature born out of folkloric evolutions, is only given a backstory in a crude and misogynistic parody, and is —throughout — posed as a chief enemy to womankind. She’s no feminist icon. There are better options.

Lilith, or Lilit really, has a long history as a non-Jewish demon, perhaps dating back thousands of years BCE. She makes her way into the Hebrew Bible as a kind of demon-critter:

“Wildcats shall meet hyenas,
Goat-demons shall greet each other;
There too the lilith shall repose
And find herself a resting place.”

—Isaiah 34:14

Note, however, that she is a type of demon. Many early Jewish references to Lilith make no sense if we take her as one entity. Check out the Babylonian Talmud, written and redacted in Late Antiquity:

“Rav Yehuda says that Shmuel says: In the case of a woman who discharges a fetus that has the form of a lilith, a female demon with wings and a human face, its mother is impure with the impurity of a woman after childbirth, as it is a viable offspring, only it has wings. This is also taught in a baraita: Rabbi Yosei said: An incident occurred in Simoni involving a certain woman who discharged a fetus that had the form of a lilith, and the incident was brought before the Sages; and they said that it is a viable offspring, only it has wings.”

—Niddah 24b

Did this ever actually happen? Probably not. Rabbi Yosei may be exaggerating the nature of an irregularity he really encountered, but this is probably just in there to let people know the extent to which an infant can differ from normal development and still count as offspring for the sake of ritual purity law. That’s what this part of Tractate Niddah is about.

Like a satan began as a kind of angel, not one entity (Numbers 22:22), but eventually became the name used for one demon or evil angel, Lilith seems to have merged into one being by the end of antiquity. We get her brand new backstory in the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira, a small mediaeval book of stories and sayings that are largely jocular.

The Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira is not at all a serious source of aggadic midrash, or story-based interpretative elaborations on the Hebrew Bible. As Norman Bronznick explains in the introduction to the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira in Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (edited by David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky),

“parts of [the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira] clearly parody not merely the genre of aggadah but specific passages in the Talmud and midrash… As a rule, the work was treated in high rabbinic circles with deprecatory neglect — even while some scholars had no objections to savoring its contents.”

In other words, the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira is very likely a bunch of jokes and was almost always taken as such. It’s highly irreverent. The Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira’s story about Lilith is way more famous than the rest of its silly, fart-filled stories. This leads people unfamiliar with the story’s context to elevate its authority beyond its actual level of seriousness.

The story goes like this. Ben Sira writes an amulet to heal the king’s son, inscribing it with the likenesses and names of the angels Sanoi, Sansenoi, and Samengelof. These are angels long associated with warding off Lilith or lilits, since at least the first few centuries CE. The king asks Ben Sira who the angels are, so he explains.

Lilith was Adam’s first-created mate. God created her from dirt like Adam. But since they were created equally, things went awry. “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.’” She cites their equal creation from dirt as her reasoning, and when that doesn’t work, she flies off, apparently using a spell to do so.

God sends the angels Sanoi, Sansenoi, and Samengelof to grab her. They catch up with her and she refuses to return to the Garden. “I was created only to cause sickness to infants,” she sez. “If the infant is male, I have dominion over him for eight days after his birth, and if female, for twenty days.” The different periods of riskiness likely have to do with the differing lengths of impurity after the birth of a girl or a boy (Leviticus 12:2-5). However, oddly, Lilith and the angels reach a deal. They don’t destroy her. Amulets with the angels’ names on them will ward her off, and a hundred of her demonic children will die every day. This is why Ben Sira is inscribing an amulet with the names Sanoi, Sansenoi, and Samengelof: “When Lilith sees their names, she remembers her oath, and the child recovers.”

Apologies for the jargon, but the story is an aetiology (in other words, it’s explaining something’s origins) of an apotropaic (a thing that wards off evil). In this case, the apotropaic is the common kind of amulet with the names of the three angels on it, which predate the story’s composition. But it’s also a joke. The king’s question is answered and we’ve read a weird, raucous story to do with sex positions.

It’s not that Lilith is relegated to a kind of vaguely birdlike demon in every source other than the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira. She becomes a powerful demonic figure in her own right in kabbalah and even in the anti-kabbalistic Frankist movement. But the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira is where we get a backstory for her and it is where we get this notion of Lilith as an unruly woman. It is also where we find the clearest statement that Lilith is a threat to women and children, specifically. Amulets were used to ward her off from pregnant women, women in childbirth, and children in infancy (a kimpetbrivl, as it would be called in Yiddish). Note too that the story relies on actual women — descendants of Eve — not being equal to men. Equality causes the problem! But as part of a misogynistic joke, Lilith refuses to bottom for Adam. Great. This is a fraction of a mean joke posed as some kind of liberatory midrash.

The chief source of the idea of Lilith as liberatory symbol is Judith Plaskow’s 1972 essay, “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology.” I’ll be quoting it from Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, 1979). The impact of this essay reverberates to this day. “The Coming of Lilith” discusses Plaskow’s experience with a consciousness-raising group that, among other findings, interestingly raises the comparison of consciousness-raising to a religious experience. “We saw the stages of consciousness raising as analogous to the stages in a religious journey, culminating in the experience of full, related, selfhood.” In consciousness-raising as feminists, the group find a kind of mythic element, the structure of a story: “We had a journey to go on, an enemy (or enemies) to vanquish, salvation to be achieved both for ourselves and for humanity.”

Thus they sought a myth to embody their experience. They wanted a myth that wouldn’t obscure their own experiences, one “that seemed to grow naturally out of our present history.” But “we also felt the need for using older materials…” They settle on Lilith as their “heroine,” except Plaskow’s introduction to Lilith is a little misleading.

“We chose, therefore, to begin with the story of Lilith, demon of the night, who, according to rabbinic legend was Adam’s first wife. Created equal to him, for some unexplained reason she found that she could not live with him, and flew away.”

In the, uh, “rabbinic legend,” we actually know very well why she flew away. Per the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira, which is Plaskow’s source, Lilith flies away when she realises that she and Adam “would not listen to one another” — in other words, that their argument about sex positions will carry on and on. There’s no ambiguity, at least no more than at any other part of the story.

Plaskow rewrites the story from the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira, and I’ll summarise the rewrite. Lilith is equal to Adam, but Adam views himself as lord over her. He demands that she “wait on him” like staff. Eventually — and this is in fact more ambiguous than in the original — she gets fed up eventually and flies off. God’s messengers tell her to come back to the Garden or “face dire punishment,” but she chooses to stay away from Adam. God makes Eve out of Adam’s rib, and Eve is generally content with the status quo, except that Adam seems to be associating himself more and more closely with God. Because Lilith for some reason wants to get back into the Garden, Adam regales Eve with stories of how scary and evil Lilith is (basically the normal Jewish view of her I’ve given above). Eve manages to catch a glimpse of Lilith, grows curious, sneaks out of the Garden, and finds sisterhood with Lilith. God, being a little concerned about Adam, starts to wonder about changing his (?!) own ways, but — and this is the dramatic conclusion — “…God and Adam were expectant and afraid the day Eve and Lilith returned to the garden, bursting with possibilities, ready to rebuild it together.” The implication is that God will listen up, as we read a few lines above that once again “he needed counsel from his children.”

This is bad. I don’t find it bad because it’s a little cheesy but because it’s bad feminism. The cumulative wisdom of millennia of Jewish women concerning Lilith is posed as a patriarchal lie. This feels deeply disrespectful, not to patriarchal religion, but to actual women who lived and died under the amulets bearing the names of their and their babies’ guardian angels. It also appears to come out of a relatively ignorant perspective on the origins of the Lilith story it takes for granted as “rabbinic legend.” Far be it from me to position myself as a greater scholar than Judith Plaskow, but in this case I think she neglected to write down some very pertinent information, such as that the story is immediately followed in the crudely humorous book that contains it by a story about a princess who farts a thousand times an hour, and that the book is specifically parodying rabbinic legends. This is a shaky foundation at best and I worry that women reading this essay over the years have not read the Aleph-Bet of Ben Sira for themselves, taking Plaskow’s word for its seriousness as “rabbinic legend.”

It frustrates me that we — Jewish feminists — will bend ourselves into pretzels to make Lilith work when there are abundant other symbols we should be restoring. Who, today, other than me, is super into Hephzibah as an icon? Hephzibah is the mother of the Messiah in the Sefer Zerubavel, a magisterial work that once bore significant authority. She goes out into battle with the staff of Moses, given her directly by God, and kills evil kings. Or how about Serakh bat Asher, the immortal woman who remembers our stories as long ago as our time in Egypt? Who gave wisdom to nobility centuries later, preventing bloodshed? What about Judith, Jael, Hannah? What about powerful, wise, “heretical” women from Jewish history, like Sarah Ashkenazi or Lady Eva Frank? We have let the reputations of real, rebellious women be tarnished and forgotten. None of these women’s stories requires deeper reading than Lilith’s parodic one to grasp and develop lore from. Yet we have stuck to Lilith for fifty-odd years. Why?

Unholy Alliances by Elena Trueba

How Christian Patriarchy Erases Girlhood

If you want to train up a child in the way she should go, you have to start early. For girls raised in the world of Christian fundamentalism, streaked through with a heavy dose of so-called biblical patriarchy, girlhood is short-lived. Allowing girls to catch a glimpse of another kind of life can’t be done without risking not only their souls, but also …

Read more

22 days ago · 51 likes · 12 comments · Elena Trueba

A maiden, in the book Trueba is recounting and criticising, is a virgin, as if the two are synonyms (they aren’t — I’ve run through the history of the term and related words here), and a virgin must be more than just a virgin as in sexually chaste. Rather, she must worry endlessly about whether her body might provoke lust, keeping her thoughts pure and submitting herself to her father until marriage with a strong vibe of idolatry toward him.

I wanted to respond to the denigrating ideal of the maiden put forth in Christian patriarchy with roughly two Jewish perspectives — one of which will be orthodox, the other not. To be clear, I’m not faulting Trueba for not writing on Jewish mysticism. This is more like a weird supplement, not an implication that Trueba should’ve written an entirely different post from a point of view she presumably doesn’t share. I’m just personally partial to Maiden as a name for God.

Normative Judaism

Per Jewish tradition, we are joined on Earth by the feminine Presence of God, the Sh-khinah. “As at every place they were exiled, the Divine Presence went with them” (Megillah 29a). It may surprise some to learn that the Sh-khinah — which is fully an aspect of God — is referred to as a Maiden, “the beautiful Maiden” (Zohar 2:94b). As we will see, the Believers’ tradition took this quite literally.

The Sh-khinah is not even close to primarily a model of submissiveness; again, She is the aspect of God with us in exile, Which is hardly a pansy. To get here at all, She had to engage in some serious conflict. Zohar (2:140b) teaches us that the Presence came down to us from heaven despite great resistance from the heavenly hosts:

On the very day that Sh-khinah descended to Earth, the Accuser appeared by Her and dismal darkness obstructed Her to prevent Her from descending. We have learned: Fifteen million accusing angels appeared by Her, preventing Her descent. At the same time, an entire assemblage of supernal angels appeared before the blessed Holy One, and said, “Master of the Universe! All our splendour and all our radiance derive from Sh-khinah of Your Glory, and now She will descend to those below!” At that moment, Sh-khinah steeled Herself and broke through the dismal darkness, as one breaks hard chunks of ice, and She descended to Earth.

So, the primary model of a maiden in Judaism is God. She, the Sh-khinah, the Maiden, is with us at all times, protector and punisher. When you read the Bible, my hypothetical reader, and you encounter God as harsh and lovely, you are likely encountering various sides of the Maiden.

How should a human “maiden” be? Complex in all the ways God is complex.

Believers

The Jewish sect of the Believers, known somewhat derogatorily as Frankists, took the Sh-khinah quite literally as the woman-God on Earth and believed saying Her name is like saying the Four-Letter Name of God (Words of the Lord §1194). The Holy Maiden or Holy Virgin (both terms are used here, albeit not as synonyms necessarily — the True Rachel is another of Her names, but does that make it synonymous with virginity?) is the apocalyptic Deity Who shows the way to the true secrets of God and finally destroys all repressive laws. “She, She is the One who leads us on all those roads; only thereafter will it be possible to come to the True God” (Words §319); “She Who will smooth out the laws of the world, She, She!” (Prophecies of Isaiah). The True God is the unknown God; whether It’s part of the Maiden, or She is part of It, or It is something else, is unknown. But the Maiden, we read repeatedly, is the world’s very foundation, so, the True God is probably something interesting but less potent as an entity. In the end, She will supplant the Unholy Mother who had stolen Her power and inflicted the repressive aspects of Torah Law on the world (Words §397, Proverbs 30:23). Thus the Holy Maiden is the ultimate redemptrix: “The deliverance from Egypt was not in wholeness for the one who redeemed them from there was a man, but the foundation of redemption is from the Maiden” (Words §725).

The Holy Maiden is accompanied by other maidens who serve as Her bodyguard and elite warriors, and she grants them power. “That Maiden has under her rule several maidens and all of them have their power from her. She shines in them as a mirror that is silvered shines” (Words §354). Lady Eva Frank, taken by Believers as the Maiden on Earth, indeed had an elite bodyguard of women; we read in the Memoirs of eyewitness Moses Porges: “In front of the entrance of the divine room, girls were posted as sentries, wearing Amazon dress, bearing musket and sword.”

Alexander Kraushar, an early historian of the Believers, writes of an interviewee: “The old lady told me about Eva’s goodness and kindness, about her mercy; yet, at the same time, she insisted that the courtiers could approach Eva only on their knees.”

What do we learn about “maidens” from the Believers? They can be terrifying and kind, they redeem the world, they bear weapons, they require that men crawl to them. Hardly the submissive girl with cultish devotion to her father that the book Trueba is castigating calls for. Again, the Maiden is God.

Summing up

Ultimately, from the secular point of view, a maiden is just a term for a young woman, the elimination of which has left our language poorer when it comes to terms for girls and young women. (Hence the growing usage of “girl” to refer to young women — not really a new innovation though. See, again, my above-linked post on these words!)

I realise this post is oddly bifurcated between orthodox Jewish and “heretical” sectarian material, but I think they both have a lot to teach us about the ideal of maidenhood. The idea that a “maiden” should be a doormat who sacrifices all her own dreams on the altar of her father’s whims is strange to me, being as I’m used to hearing “maiden” used in these other contexts. The maiden, the Maiden, the ideal young woman, is powerful. She’s frightening when she needs to be even as she is merciful. She’s either God on Earth or Her closest, strongest follower. I think it would be awkward to try to bring the term “maiden” back into the vernacular, but given that Maiden is one of the Jewish names for God on Earth (in normative and sectarian traditions alike!), I find it necessary, from a Jewish point of view, to take a step toward purifying it of this Christian association with suppression.

Thumbnail image source