To the extent that I experienced Judaism growing up, it was classic 80’s suburban Reform Judaism. We had Maxwell House seders and menorahs at home, and my religious education took place at a huge congregation across town from the non-Jewish suburb where I lived. This education involved a rabbi in robes, a choir behind a screen on the bimah, and a bat mitzvah where I learned to chant a few lines of Torah without learning what they meant. I am grateful to the teachers and rabbis and cantors who passed down these traditions, kept them alive in the desert of suburban Maryland, taught us the Hebrew alphabet, and declared me bat mitzvah in front of the scroll. But I burned with questions, and ached for direct contact with spiritual wisdom and exploration. I was looking for direct engagement with the sacred mysteries, not old stories about God, and so it did not occur to me to look in Judaism. Though I tasted a bit of holiness in the synagogue’s small side chapel, and felt the letters awakening something inside me, I primarily experienced the massive worship room and hectic Hebrew school classrooms as a vehicle for cultural transmission, not spiritual seeking. So I went looking elsewhere for Divinity, magic, mystery.

Not until years later, when life led me back to my Jewish heritage and I made a sort of pilgrimage to Jerusalem at age 21, did I learn that Judaism does indeed engage with the Divine directly - with the God of the Torah, and also with the darkest, most mystical forces. Now I look back and think, “Of course!”, but at the time I would have been shocked to hear that the tradition contained demonesses, amulets, and incantations. Perhaps my suburban rabbis knew these mysterious traditions, but also knew that most of their congregation was not ready to engage with them. More likely, as a side effect of integrating scientific knowledge with Torah and integrating Jews with mainstream American culture, the mystical tradition had been tossed out along with superstitions, strict observance of the commandments, and outdated ideas about a woman’s place.

When I first learned of Lilith, in a book on Jewish mysticism, I felt a thrill - as an artist and as a person. And I am not alone in my fascination. This winged demoness has continued to fly through the imaginations of women and men over cultures, centuries and continents. She has been feared as a demoness and celebrated as a symbol of female liberation and sexuality.

Politically, I love the contemporary trend of embracing and celebrating Lilith as a powerful woman, as many contemporary artists do; spiritually, I am equally drawn to the amulets that pregnant and birthing women used to protect themselves against her. In these older, superstitious cultures, Lilith gives a name and a form to the deep human fears - losing a baby, or losing a husband’s love. These fears are so deep precisely because of the strength of our love; they are the inverse measure of how precious life is, and how tenuous. Even at her most demonic, Lilith reflects back to us the sweetness of what we hold dear. The sexual, the familial, and the intensity of our responsibility to create and safeguard the next generation - all these twine together in her character.

When I wrote “We Are Androgynous,” I drew on the midrashic idea that Adam and Lilith (in her role as the First Eve) were created as halves of a whole, double-gendered body, described as “androgynos” in the original text’s Talmudic-Aramaic-via-Ancient-Greek.

In this telling, Lilith asserts herself to Adam as his equal. Adam, dismayed, complains to God that he cannot live with such a presumptuous woman, who thinks she is equal because she was created as part of the same being. God, sympathetic to Adam, banishes Lilith from the garden and starts over with the Eve. This time, God takes the woman from Adam’s rib (literally “side”), so that she will always know she is secondary.

“We Are Androgynous” draws on the story of Lilith and her banishment to consider love, the limitations and transcendence inherent in the human body, and the impossible-to-hold category of gender itself. Using a centuries-old instrument of the violin through the modern technology of the loop pedal echoes the mysterious swirling winds that seem to accompany Lilith through time. (If you don’t know what the loop pedal is, check out this live video.)

Like most modern progressive people, I conceive of romantic love not as a hierarchical relationship, but as the meeting of two equals. In this song, I imagine Lilith holding the same beliefs. After all, thinking she was equal to Adam was, in many interpretations, her original offense.

My Lilith is a proto-modern thinker about love, in whatever genders it manifests. My Lilith remembers being formed by the hands of God, just as Adam was. She may be banished from Eden, but she knows that one day, humans will once again believe in that first Edenic state of love, where she and Adam were two parts of a whole, distinct but equal, both shaped by the Divine. My Lilith looks forward to that day, but she has her boundaries; she will not return to the Garden before it comes.