The Coming of Lilith: A Response

First, I want to say how very grateful I am to everyone who participated in this special section of the Journal, which began as a panel at the 2005 American Academy of Religion (AAR) meeting. It is a very powerful experience to hear aspects of my work reflected back at me and to feel a part of a community of thinkers and activists, both in the academy and in the world, which has enabled and sustained the work of all of us. I want to say a special thanks to Donna Berman not only for organizing the AAR panel but also for twisting my arm into putting together The Coming of Lilith and refusing to take no for an answer. Working on the book provided me an important opportunity to reflect on the development of my own thought and that of feminist theology more generally. I feel immensely privileged to have gone through graduate school at the historical moment when I could participate along with others in the creation of women's studies in religion as a field.

As I have thought about the issues I want to highlight from this special section, I am struck by two aspects of my early work that in some ways shed light both on its trajectory and on a number of the points the participants have raised. The first is the extraordinary optimism of "The Coming of Lilith," the title piece in the volume and my first effort at theological writing. Although I say in that essay that "the yeah, yeah experience"—the experience of women recognizing our commonality with other women—was not necessarily joyful, what emerges from the essay and especially the Lilith midrash is the tremendous excitement and feeling of possibility that was part of the initial questioning of women's roles in religion and society. As Carol Christ says, the essay reflects my experience of coming to selfhood in feminist community, an experience that is both the foundation of all my work, and as Rebecca Alpert points out, the place where I locate my sense of authority. More than thirty years later, I am amazed by my utter conviction that the women's revolution had the power to change the fabric of the world in which we live, that Eve and Lilith united could transform the garden and God. I certainly had no sense of the deeply entrenched nature of institutional power that Emily Neill addresses in her remarks.

I'm not sure what to call this conviction. The hubris of youth? Maybe Reinhold Niebuhr was right after all that pride is a universal human characteristic. But in some sense, I would see all my subsequent work as reflecting a process of coming to grips with the reality of ambiguity—the ambiguity of the women's movement, the ambiguity of all institutions, my own ambiguity, and the ambiguity of God. In raising the issue of Christian feminist anti-Judaism in the late 1970s, which Rebecca attributes partly to my awareness of Jews as victims, I was reacting to the deep shock of realizing that the bonds of sisterhood provided no protection against the mindless reiteration and reinforcement of a host of unequal power relations. When I said that Christian feminist anti-Judaism represents a profound failure of the feminist ethic, "a failure," in Mary Daly's words, "to lay claim to that part of the psyche that is then projected onto 'the Other,'" that was precisely the issue for me—I was confronting the blow to my initial naïveté about the transformative power of sisterhood.¹ My critiques have always seemed to me to follow logically from my initial commitment to feminist revolution. After all, we're all in this together, right? So, we want to be responsible to each other and to grapple with the ways in which we have failed to be responsible, right? Part of me still finds it difficult to relinquish that assumption.

The same year that I published "Christian Feminism and Anti-Judaism," Alice Walker's "One Child of One's Own" appeared in Ms.² This is the piece in...