The Woman Who Defeated Heaven

Angelic Arrogance

Elul sounds before breakfast. By the second blast I am already preparing a defence. Naturally. I am Netzakh, and I spend much of the year with Jewish books that respectable shelves once declined to keep. This month a scene preserved in Yalkut Shimoni, Genesis remez 44, probably from the lost Midrash Abkir, will not leave me alone. Two angels volunteer to prove us inferior. A woman ruins the demonstration. One angel ends upside down, crying toward the earth. By the time we reach confession, my best alibi has grown wings.

Rav Yosef’s students ask, “What is Azael?” His answer starts before anybody falls. Humanity has gone rotten, and Shemhazai and Azael remind G-d that they opposed the human experiment from the start. They warned Him. They have standards. They have also committed no sins of the flesh, which is a handsome record for creatures without flesh. Their first defiance is moral vanity. Self-righteousness has acquired wings.

גלוי וידוע לפני אם אתם שרויין בארץ היה שולט בכם יצר הרע והייתם קשים מבני אדם

“It is revealed and known before Me that if you dwelt on earth, the evil inclination would rule you, and you would be worse than human beings.”

I know this trick because I perform it. I condemn the appetite I have never had occasion to feel, rename lack of opportunity “discipline,” and admire my clean hands. The angels petition for an earthly posting. Let us live among the creatures, they say, and we will sanctify Your Name. Nu. Down they go.

They see human women. Lust arrives at once and observes no celestial rank. The yetzer hara exposes what their untested virtue was worth. Down here they learn that a heavenly résumé is no defense against desire.

The older Book of the Watchers records what their vanity costs everybody else. Its angels teach weapons, spells, root-cutting and the reading of celestial signs; Azael teaches adornment and the use of metals. Dark Prometheans, all of them. The gift of knowledge arrives already sharpened for war.

My first confession this Elul therefore comes before sex, sorcery or bloodshed. Ashamnu for every person I judged from the safety of not wanting what they wanted. The untempted angel mistook inexperience for holiness. I have done so too.

A woman sets the terms

Shemhazai sees Istahar and wants her. He has celestial strength, secret knowledge, and the confidence of a being whose kind has never needed a woman’s consent. Istahar gets no army and no rescuing patriarch. She gets one sentence.

איני שומעת לך עד שתלמדני שם המפורש שאתה עולה בו לרקיע בשעה שאתה זוכרהו

“I will not consent to you until you teach me the explicit Name by which you ascend to heaven when you invoke it.”

He tells her. Of course. The secret he guarded from humanity becomes negotiable the moment she asks for it. Istahar speaks the Name and rises. The midrash reports the result with almost comic restraint: לא קלקלה, she did not corrupt herself. G-d sets her among the seven stars of Kimah, the Pleiades.

The word “chastity” has spent centuries doing cheap police work against women, so let us be exact. Istahar is neither ignorant of desire nor frightened by the body. Under coercion, she keeps possession of her own. She listens long enough to learn where his vanity has left him stupid. A little seykhl defeats a great deal of muscle.

Mortal cleverness overcomes gods. She refuses him, pays attention, and lets his appetite betray the Name. That chastity is active; it gets her out. Shemhazai came down to possess a human body. The woman keeps her body, leaves him on earth, and enters the stars.

The mortal before whom angels bowed

Read 3 Enoch after the Yalkut. Uzza, Azza and Azael object when Enoch is raised because Enoch is human. G-d clothes that human in glory, places the Name upon him, and orders the objectors to bow. Chapter 12 calls Metatron “the Lesser YHWH,” drawing on Exodus 23:21, “My Name is in him.” The title is dangerous and the text fences it carefully. Metatron remains a servant of G-d.

The humiliation is exact. Angels who treated human flesh as the defect in creation must bow before a human bearing the Name. Their contempt returns as the evidence against them.

I cannot read this without placing Istahar beside Enoch. She speaks the Name and escapes an angel. He bears the Name until angels bow. Both stories answer contempt for the human creature with a human exalted inside heaven itself. Flesh receives no certificate of innocence. It receives the harder honour: holiness achieved while desire, fear and error remain possible.

The Yalkut turns the screw once more. Metatron carries the flood warning to Shemhazai. In the Hekhalot tradition he is Enoch, the mortal raised and clothed in a heavenly office. The angel who came down to prove humanity unworthy now hears judgment from the human who went up: his giant sons will die in the water. The names around Esther make the rhyme louder without proving a family tree: Esther and Ishtar, Mordecai and Marduk. In Esther 6, Haman must lead Mordecai through the street and proclaim the honour he wanted for himself. Here too arrogance is drafted into another creature’s elevation. Neither adversary intends the reversal. Both must serve it.

An angel begins pure by nature. A person must choose. Elul sides with the person.

Shemhazai hangs there still

After Istahar escapes, Shemhazai and Azael take wives. Their sons, Hiwa and Hiya, eat a thousand camels, a thousand horses, and a thousand oxen apiece each day. Even myth has noticed the grocery bill. Metatron warns Shemhazai that water is coming. His sons dream of a tablet nearly erased and an orchard cut down until one tree with three branches remains. Noah and his sons will live. Shemhazai’s children will not.

He weeps. Then the midrash gives him what the Enochic judgment does not:

שמחזאי חזר בתשובה ותלה עצמו בין שמים לארץ ראשו למטה ורגליו למעלה ועדיין הוא תלוי בתשובה

“Shemhazai returned in repentance and suspended himself between heaven and earth, his head below and his feet above, and he is still suspended in repentance.”

Nothing is repaired. The Flood comes. His sons die, and Azael goes on corrupting the world. The midrash nevertheless keeps one verb for Shemhazai: חזר, he returned. Then it keeps him inside the action. He is “still suspended in teshuvah.”

Upside down, he cannot pose as the creature he was. His feet point to the heaven he left. Tears cross his forehead and fall toward the earth he helped destroy. In the image I carry, one wing reaches up and one hangs low over the wounded ground. He saw the Name. It does not release him from consequence.

Repentance has no authority over yesterday. The victim remains injured and the dead stay dead. Teshuvah can turn the sinner, even if he must remain turned for the rest of his life. Shemhazai’s punishment and his repentance occupy the same posture. At last he faces what he did.

Elul without an alibi

By Elul I want an easy verdict: the guilty people below, the righteous above, and myself giving evidence. This midrash refuses the seating arrangement. Istahar reaches the stars from a place of danger. Shemhazai finds teshuvah only after falling beneath the humans he mocked. His remaining dignity begins when he stops arguing.

Rabbi Abbahu says in Berakhot 34b that the completely righteous cannot stand where ba’alei teshuvah stand. Shemhazai makes the saying physically alarming. The angel once stood above humankind. He can enter repentance only after surrendering that position. Istahar, whom he placed beneath himself, now shines above his feet.

When I beat my chest this year, I will try not to turn the rhythm into somebody else’s indictment. One quiet blow may be for Shemhazai. I excuse nothing he did. I ask G-d to receive a return after every excuse has failed. Mercy reserved for reversible damage would belong only to the lucky.

Master of teshuvah, remember Shemhazai,
who saw the Name and still fell,
who wept when judgment came,
and who has not ceased returning.
Receive the confession that cannot repair,
and teach us to turn before consequence
must turn us.

The shofar does not ask whether I can prove I stood above the sin. It asks whether I have stopped explaining.

Every time we look up at the heavens and see Kimah, the Pleiades, we can remember how chastity overcame gods. A mortal woman kept possession of herself, spoke the Name, and entered the stars. When we see Orion, later lore lets us remember Shemhazai, the one who saw the Name, suspended in teshuvah. He cannot undo the world he injured. He turns there still, neither absolved nor abandoned.Like us.