The Woman's Question and the Demoness in the Forest

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The Man Who Thought He Was Above the Rest

He walked up to her in the open street and made his proposition as though her yes were already his, a thing he had come to collect. He was a man who believed the ordinary rules bent around him. Other men strained against their appetites and lost. He was cut from finer cloth, or so he had decided, and finer cloth does not tear.

The woman did not scream. She did not slap him or run. She looked at him and asked one small thing. "Where will you go?" To him it sounded like a woman arranging a where and a when, asking which room and which hour she should come to. He heard consent in it. He gave her a place. He gave her a time. He went home lit with his own cleverness, sure the world had bent around him again.

The Question That Turned the Snare Around

But the woman went nowhere near that appointed room. She went to the man's own house, and she found his wife, and she told her everything. The street. The hour. The proposition. The room where he would be waiting in the dark for a stranger.

The wife listened to all of it without a word, this catalog of her husband's scheming laid out in her own doorway by the woman he had reached for. She did not weep and she did not go to shame him in the street. She thought it through the way he never had. Then she decided to keep the appointment herself.

The Wife Who Kept the Appointment

She went in the stranger's place, into the dark room where her husband waited, and he never once suspected the trade. He took the woman he had schemed to reach, or believed he did, and only when the lamp came up did he see the face across from him in the tangled bed. His own wife. The partner he already had, keeping the appointment the stranger had thrown away.

Shame fell on him like a roof caving in. He wanted to die. He had reached so hard for the forbidden and closed his hand on nothing that was not already his.

His wife did not rage at him. She said, "You ate from your own bread and drank from your own cup." Then she named the true sickness. "What brought this down on you? Your pride. You thought yourself above other men. Be like all men." Not the appetite. The arrogance. He had forgotten he was only one more ish, one more man, prone to every hunger that binds the rest.

A Light Off the Forest Path

Centuries later the tempter stopped waiting to be approached and went hunting instead, and the man she chose was among the holiest of his age.

Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk, years before the world called him a tzaddik, was a young scholar who studied day and night and walked the same forest path home. One night a light flickered through the trees where no light had ever burned. He stepped off the path and went toward it.

He found a cottage he had never seen standing there before. Through the window he saw a woman, her hair long and black and loose, a thin gown, watching for him. He knew at once he should not be near this place, and he turned to go. The door swung open. "Reb Melekh, wait," she called. "Please, come in."

He hesitated. He went in. She shut the door behind him and stood close. "I have seen you pass through this forest many times," she said, "and I have hoped you would come to me. I bathed in the spring today. I am clean. The sin would be slight, and the pleasure would be great." Then she let the gown fall.

The Name the Demoness Could Not Say

She had come armed with more than her body. She had law. A married man and an unmarried woman, she reasoned, carried no sentence of death between them. The verse that kills is written for another man's wife, and she belonged to no one. A slight sin. Barely a sin at all. She made the arithmetic sound almost pious.

And she called him Melekh. Never his whole name. Reb Melekh, again and again, because his name opened with Eli, "my God," and that was a word her mouth could not shape. Lilith can bathe and perfume herself, can reason and undress and quote the law, but she cannot say "my God." The God who filled the forest was already in the room, folded inside the two letters she kept clipping off the front of his name.

Elimelekh struggled. The tale says he wrestled the way Jacob once wrestled the angel at the ford, his whole body in the grip of it, and he could not think his way free. She had out-argued him. Reason had failed. He could only refuse. From somewhere under his ribs he tore loose a single word. "No."

The cottage was gone. The woman was gone. The spring, the thin gown, the long black hair, all of it gone. Rabbi Elimelekh stood alone on the cold forest floor in the dark, and around his feet the ground glittered with glowworms, small dim lights where the great warm light had burned a moment before.