Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

and when Rechele went to confide in him, he greeted her “withoutstretched arms”31 in God’s name. She is taken, possessed,surrounded; at first, “ [a] bright red flow surrounded her;flames seemed to overwhelm the house. . . ”32 She answersthe voices the way a man might, remembering as she doessome biblical text that, as a woman, she should not know, andso she mimics it, as if a legitimate messenger of God wouldcome to her, a woman; a delusion that shows implicitly the corruptionof the visitation. Visited a whole night by the voice, leftin a swoon, in the morning she rose and washed, as after a sexact, “rinsing her breasts and thighs as though performing a ritual.”33 She runs to the synagogue in such a state of possessionand ecstasy, to Reb Gedaliya, making the relationship betweenthem a public one; and in a state of sexual and religious transport,an ecstasy, she interprets passages of the Bible. The sexact between them virtually takes place in public but it is renderedas religion:Reb Gedaliya bent over R echele, listening to the voice andtrem bling with fear; his body had to be supported by twostrong men, for his legs had failed him, and he shook as withfever. O n ly when Rechele lay as though dead, did RebGedaliya gesture for a prayer shawl to cover her face. T hen hebore her in his arms to the dais. 34Then he carried her to an anteroom, and public celebrationbegan, with men and women dancing, kissing, embracing, invarious states of undress; and “ the curtain of the Ark was hungon poles as a kind of canopy and borne aloft over the heads ofReb Gedaliya and Rechele. ”35He took her to his house to live;and possessed her. She was a prophet, enshrined in a special