Mistranslation. For someone raised without religion I am intensely interested in this bible story.
Maybe it started here. When, a few years ago, my dear friend, Judith Rose, handed me a key. My brilliant friend, the creator of Vital Movement, this embodied dancer, the teacher of the Mystery Salon . . . Judith is always giving me ancient artifacts. Strange, secret keys made of fire and history, language and mystery.
I received the key. I slid it into my pocket, tagging it: Important. I will need this one day.
Today is that day.
Yesterday, I wrote about my second life - about escaping the paradigms we inherited from our parents. I wrote about figuring out a life that includes a cottage by a lake.
That post emerged after two long weeks of work - on a project that’s been rumbling under the surface of my life like a seed, beginning to take root.
Stirring things up for a long long time now.
Like that key
Judith told me that in the beginning — and I mean, literally, in the beginning of the first book of Genesis, there is a mistranslation. A single word - erroneously interpreted or deliberated misstated - which, by that error changed the world.
The Hebrew word is tsela — צֵלָע. It doesn’t mean rib. It means side.
In Genesis 1:27, the first human is created zachar u’nekevah — male and female — simultaneously. One being. A wholeness. A moment later, in Genesis 2:21, God takes the tsela from one side and builds the other. Not a rib extracted from a man. A side separated from the other side of a whole. The same word — tsela — is used elsewhere in the Torah to describe the side of the Ark of the Covenant, the side of the Tabernacle. An architectural term. A structural half.
In the original text, this was not the surgical removal of a rib to be fashioned into a woman. But a single being, divided at the midline. Kind of like the first cell division of a fertilized ovum. Male and female fused together - and life begins.
This single word, mistranslated (deliberately or unintentionally) literally mistranslated women from half of a whole to afterthought. A companion, fashioned from a rib. A wound in the side of men.
It made one half of the world primary and the other half, secondary.
Taking a sphere and flattening it into a diagram.
Mistranslating a circle into a pyramid.
Creating, out of the vast generosity of this world, a hierarchy.
This wasn’t just a mistake. It was a Shanda. A word my Jewish grandmother used to describe things that should never have happened. Things that bring dishonor, disgrace not just to the person who did it but to everyone connected to them.
From the Yiddish shande — it means shame, disgrace, scandal. In Yiddish, the word shand is used as “shame” is used in English. And, taking it further, a shande far di kinder — literally, a disgrace for the children or a shanda far di goyim — a disgrace before the nations. Something so shameful it embarrasses the whole community in front of outsiders.
The mistranslation of tsela is a not just an error. It’s a disgrace that fell on the children. On all the children. For thousands of years. A single word bent, and every daughter born after it inherited the shame of being secondary, derived, an afterthought fashioned from a bone while a man slept.
Shande far di kinder. A disgrace for the children. How strange that the very same word has been used to police behavior. Don’t make a shanda. Don’t bring shame on us. Don’t be visible in the wrong way. Don’t leave the marriage. Don’t say the thing out loud.
Oddly, mysteriously, mythically - in the gap between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 - another woman appears. The actual first woman - she emerged before Eve.
Lilith. The one made simultaneously, side by side, from the same earth. The one who refused to let a man place himself OVER her and escaped the hierarchy. As a result, she is banished and condemned for all time. Mistranslated into a demon who eats children. A shanda.
The very mechanism of shame that shanda describes is the same mechanism the mistranslation installed. You are secondary. You are derived. If you refuse that — if you’re Lilith, if you fly away — you become the shanda yourself. The disgrace. The demon.
So the word cuts both ways. The mistranslation is a shanda. And the system it built uses shanda as its enforcement tool. And all of us are left to choose: Am I Lilith, refusing the yoke of living ‘underneath’ a man? Am I Eve, tempting a man into the “terrible” sin of knowledge? Am I a whore? A virgin?
Or am I something else entirely? Something that has nothing to do with how my actions are perceived by men?
This isn't ancient history, this is the air that we breathe.
You and I. They and them.
Everyone. All over the world.
This is the origin of the collapse and the renewal.
This is the story our entire culture is built upon.
A shanda. A lie of mistranslation. A disgrace.
Look, we don’t need to solve the world our parents gave us. We just need to name what they lived through and make something better. We need to make it less personal: We were born inside of a system that never worked. Not for most of us.
We need, also, to make it more personal. I am not trying to leave a marriage. I am trying to leave the patriarchy — a system that oppresses. I am trying to enter the culture of giving, not getting. Of circles, not pyramids.
I am working on a series of six memoirs, under the secret title (just for me) of The eye/the I. It’s about tracking the gaze of the other. And then, dropping that project. And beginning to track something different. Something interior. As if the eye, turned inward becomes, not a watcher but a listener. Listening for the pulsation of the one emerging inside of the one that was always there, holding all the churning and turbulence of the I, trying to be seen.
Her.
I heard her when my left brain got hurt for a moment. After the stroke, when ‘he’ was sleeping. She spoke. I recognized her voice. She was always there - always here. He appears inside of her. She is the sky. He is a a star. She is the deep. He hovers over, looking for her.
I’m not saying the whole creation is inside my head.
On the other hand, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
Yesterday's blog was so ... wow. More on it later. This one, though.... That mistranslation is huge. What does a woman look like who is not being seductive, not dressing/performing for the gaze of men or in competition with other women? Who is being only her full, true self, regardless of her relationships? Can she stay in a marriage if the institution itself is based on patriarchy, unless she understands and chooses the full import of the alchemical marriage and its much deeper implications? How much of it depends on whether the husband is a true partner or just the beneficiary of an oppressive system?
It’s a blessing to understand this. And coincidentally (?) the same theme I heard last week from a priest in the Christian Community. You and Judith are both treasures and bring light to this world. Thank you.