Genesis 1: Zokhra and Nekev
Genesis 1
26 And Elohin said, “Let us make a Khova in our image, after our likeness; and let her have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
27 And Elohin created the Khova in her own image. In the image of Elohin, She created her; zokhra and nekev, She created them.
28 And Elohin blessed them; and Elohin said to them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creeps upon the earth.”
בראשית א
כו וַתֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִין נַעֲשֶׂה חֹוָּה בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ וְתִרְדֶּנָה בִדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה וּבְכָל־הָאָרֶץ וּבְכָל־הָרֶמֶשׂ הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל־הָאָרֶץ.
כז וַתִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִין אֶת־הָחֹוָּה בְּצַלְמָה בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִין בָּרְאָה אֹתָה זֹכְרָה וְנֶקֶב בָּרְאָה אֹתָן.
כח וַתְבָרֶךְ אֹתָן אֱלֹהִין וַתֹּאמֶר לָהֶן אֱלֹהִין פְּרֵינָה וּרְבֵינָה וּמְלֵאנָה אֶת־הָאָרֶץ וְכְבָשְׁנֻהָ וּרֵדְנָה בִּדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם וּבְכָל־חַיָּה הָרֹמֶשֶׂת עַל־הָאָרֶץ.
*
The creation of the fifth day has just ended and suddenly I’m flooded with tension. Soon I’ll be face to face with the description of the creation of humanity. The version in Torato, I know by heart. The endless feminist interpretations of it that I’ve studied and the women’s Midrashim about it that I edited, and even wrote myself, haven’t sadly been able to ease the fundamental frustration I feel towards it. Will gender bending the story “bend” my feelings as well?
Elohin, the divine in feminine form as Yael named her, I’ve known, all told, for about half an hour. She seems, at first, quite like God. She creates, talks, gives names to things, evaluates, blesses. And now, at verse 26 she says she intends to create the human race. To my surprise, Yael put in Elohin’s mouth the pronouncement that she plans to create, not Adam, but Khova [חֹוָּה], as the general name for humanity. ‘Khova’?? Not to be confused with Chava, Eve, the woman I know from the coming chapter in Torato, Genesis 2, but a different creature. Adam, general a name though it is in principle, is, in Hebrew, grammatically in the masculine form. And so many have mistaken it to refer to the male figure who will appear later in Torato, in Genesis 2, whose creation comes before the creation of the woman. But in Genesis 1, the creation of humanity is depicted as the creation of all humanity at once, female and male both.
As in Torato, so in Toratah, Elohin intends to create Khova, “in our image,” in the plural. She attests to her own capaciousness. Like in Torato, she commands this human race to run the world. She turns to them in the plural. In Hebrew, plural must either be male or female. It’s almost always male. We use here the female plural, ve-khivshenuhah, a word I’d never seen before. From here on Yael and I decide always to use the feminine plural always. If the masculine plural was good enough to encompass women throughout the history of the Hebrew language, we’ll see if the gender-bending works just as well too. Or, we need to change the Hebrew plural in a fundamental way.
But why did you name humanity Ha-Khova, I ask Yael, what does it mean? “She who experiences something, feels, whose essence is experience.” Because Elohin testifies that she is creating The Khova in her own image, we learn that experience is essential to the divine. Like us, the divine experiences existence and even if she’s from a different order in some ways, yet we have a lot in common, and has to do with the existential dimension of being. This name, Khova, Yael is preparing me, rhymes with Tehovah, the face of the divine that we will meet in the next chapter.
Elohin created The Khova in her image. In her image she creates her. In verse 27, Toratah repeats itself and creates a mirror image – Elohin gazes on a mirror and creates Khova, a binary creature: In Torato, the first human creatures are called Zachar and Nekevah. When we get to these names we change the order, write Nekevah and Zachar and move on. But something doesn’t feel right. Even if the woman precedes the man, and in the coming chapter of Torato even more so in the very order of creation, she will still be Nekevah, her essence will be her orifice. Her vagina. Her being a subject of penetration. I remember the Talmudic passage (BT Ketubot 10a-b) describing six husbands who the morning after their wedding night rush one by one to their respective rabbinic courts to complaining about their brand new wives: “I found an open opening.” Each of these husbands testified that they discovered in mid-intercourse that their brides weren’t virgins, and so they were suing to divorce their wives, without having to make the divorce payments stipulated in the marriage contract (ketubah). The different offered varying solutions, but over the years only one case stayed with me, and wouldn’t give me peace. The one with the groom standing before Rabban Gamliel and after he’d pleaded his case, his bride testified in her defense that she was indeed still a virgin. Rabban Gamliel ordered that two maid-servants be brought to him, one a virgin, the other not, and he had each one sit in turn on the opening of a barrel of wine. The one who wasn’t a virgin, gave off a strong scent of the wine, while the virgin, presumably sealed with the virginal membrane, gave off no scent. Rabban Gamliel ran the same experiment on the bride, and because she gave off no scent of wine, sent them off to their home, exhorting the groom, “take possession of your acquisition,” your purchase was successful and the object is fit for use.
To name a woman nekevah, is, then, essentially to name her, “vagina.”
And with this we cannot collaborate.
We ponder the name of the man. In Torato he is named zakhar. What’s the source of that name? According to the scholarly dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew, the source it seems is the male sexual organ, an perhaps from the verb dhakar, to pierce, or to stab. It seems there’s no etymological connection between zakhar and zikaron, memory. Even if they seemingly have the same root.
In Torato, zakhar and nekevah are biological functions, and nothing more. And reflect an utterly binary reality. But the biological description isn’t objective, but a subjective reflection of sexual identity and experience. The male as one who stabs, penetrates, the woman, in her nekev (orifice). This is one possible view of heterosexual intercourse. A different view is the reverse, and is experienced as if the vagina devours the male organ in intercourse. It is active-enveloping-sucking and taking into itself. In this experience the vagina controls the penis that is losing its self-control.
In later centuries, Jewish culture and tradition identified the male zakhar with memory, zikaron. Why? Does the male have abilities of memory that the female does not? Is it because his seed leaves a trace (zekher ) in the world, more than the woman, whose contribution to reproduction was unknown? And what is the existential meaning of remembering? And what is the political meaning?? A lot was written in modern times about the social meaning of the shaping of memory, who decides what to remember, and how? And maybe men had something more precious to remember that women should better forget?
Memory seems like a cognitive act. The male, zakhar, who remembers takes part in a spiritual world of ideas. The female, nekevah, remains in the biological world, and takes no part in the transcendent dimension of existence. But this very dichotomy of body/soul, immanence/transcendence, doesn’t accurately reflect reality. In our experience it is the body that holds memories. And the brain that remembers is a biological organ, whose materiality so deeply shapes the very possibility of remembering and the contents of memory. The body and the spirit are not in competition, rather they give voice to one another.
Yael and I want to shake up the associations, and over-burdening freights of meaning of zakhar and nekevah. We want to preserve the root-stems and familiar sounds, but to make room for new meanings. In the end, we realize, we will have to invent some new words. We try different conjugations and constructions, and eventually come up with zokhrah and nekev. We see this as two different human qualities, at work in women and men both. Zokhrah (like some other modern Hebrew usages, such as chomrah, hardware, tochnah, software, yoshrah, integrity) is the ability to remember, and at this stage, to remember experience. The reflective ability to look from the outside, and preserve the moment. Nekev, literally, “hole,” presents the experience of porousness, the ability to take in and release, openness. This quality is expressed in the realm of cognition, and of society. The ability to influenced, and to influence, to take and to give, to be connected.
Yael and I rest. I think about my mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, whose memory is changing its form. I remember the day I discovered she doesn’t remember me. No matter how much I tried to rouse her and undo the awful decree. I see in my mind’s eye all the times since then that I sat next to her and caressed her. And how the body remembered, replied, leaned on me. I share with Yael how when I sing to my mother the melodies we would sing at the Shabbat table, the lullabies she would sing to us when we were little, she joins in and sings with all her heart, remembering the tune exactly, even if she no longer remembers how to speak and what any of this means. We sit together on her sofa, as if those decades hadn’t passed. She hums old Israeli folksongs, which are, for her, like prayers, with delight and dedication. And I close my eyes and pretend that my mother loves me like she once did.