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Heather Klein appears as Lilith in 'Lilith, the Night Demon in One Lewd Act' at the Osher Marin JCC. Photo by Betsy Kershner
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PRETTY MUCH everybody's heard the biblical story of creation, whether or not they grew up in a Judeo-Christian context. But they may or may not have noticed that God seems to have created woman twice.

In the book of Genesis, God creates humanity "male and female," and then later on in Genesis he creates Eve from Adam's rib. To account for this scriptural discrepancy grew the legend of Lilith, Adam's first wife, the one we don't like to talk about. But Veretski Pass and the San Francisco Choral Artists will be singing all about her in "Lilith, the Night Demon in One Lewd Act," a new folk opera by Joshua Horowitz that has its world premiere at Osher Marin JCC on May 1.

Soprano Heather Klein and bass Anthony Russell sing the parts of Lilith and Adam, with Yiddish expert Michael Wex as narrator.

"The story goes that Lilith refused to lie beneath Adam when they had intercourse, and they argued," Horowitz explains at his home in Berkeley.

"She becomes very angry and utters the forbidden name of God, and at that moment she grows wings, becomes a demon and flies off to the Red Sea, where she becomes a succubus, a type of demon that visits men in their dreams, and with their nocturnal emissions she creates demon children, at the rate of 100 per day," he says.

When God sent three angels after her, "She says, 'All right, I'll make a deal with you. I'm in charge of boys until their eighth day after birth, and girls until their 20th day. If there is an amulet against me, those children will be protected during that time, and I won't kill them or bring sickness upon them.' So that's the story. She never ate of the tree of knowledge, so she has eternal life. There's always a Lilith demon around, waiting to kill children," Horowitz says.

None of this is in the Bible, mind you.

The story of Lilith actually didn't develop until the Middle Ages.

"The Lilitu were a class of demons in Mesopotamia and Babylonia. There's one mention in the Torah, but it's as a demon. The first appearance of that story is in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, this medieval work from the eighth or 10th century," he says. "There's no full English translation, but I speak German and there's a German publication of the whole thing. The author of that book is writing the story as a satire about Midrash, the rabbinical commentaries on portions of the Bible that are otherwise inexplicable."

It was actually the amulets that started Horowitz looking at Lilith. He's part of Veretski Pass, a three-piece band that plays music from throughout Central Europe, led by his wife, violinist Cookie Segelstein.

"She wanted to do a project of superstitions, because her family's very superstitious," Horowitz recalls. "But setting superstitions to music is not an obvious thing. I found incantations and things like that, and they all pointed toward this one fact of Jewish life, which was the fear of infant mortality in childbirth. Names of God, different mystical symbols and things like that were all put on amulets, and these amulets were hung at the birthing beds of women. And a lot of them are against Lilith as a killer of children. Still today in orthodox communities, people believe she exists. We couldn't do this project in an orthodox community because it's too close to home."

Horowitz's approach to the material was very tongue-in-cheek. "I'm not superstitious at all, so I made fun of it, and in the score you'll hear it's very burlesque. But as I was working on it I realized this is really serious stuff. At that time child mortality was anywhere up to 40 percent. So I started to put myself in the mind-set of a 15th- or 12th-century Jew, so there's a mixture of medieval themes and motifs, and it kind of turns serious at the end."

Everything about the piece is a mixture, Horowitz says. "There're so many styles and languages that you as a listener are kind of confused emotionally, opened up in a way. There's English in it, and there's sex slang; there are Aramaic and Hebrew quotes. And there's a lot of Yiddish as well, which will be supertitled. There are bilingual puns where it sounds as if it's Hebrew or Latin but it's really English. There's minimalistic music, there's atonalism, there's folk music and medieval moments. There are pseudo-baroque, late-Romantic parts. There's a television theme in there. It's meant to be very kaleidoscopic," he says. "There are hardly more than 20 bars in any one style. Adam at one point sings an auctioneer's chant, because he's auctioning Lilith off as a sex slave to himself. He's the only one around; what else can you do?"

Some of the humor is pretty raunchy, but Horowitz says it's all in the source material. The libretto with illustrations by artist Phil Blank is laced with footnotes citing the references.

"I didn't make any of this stuff up," Horowitz says. "All the nasty sex stuff is the underbelly of Judaism that you don't hear much about. It's so postmodern, and I didn't even have to do anything. All you have to do is put the odd parts of Judaism in there, and you've got a bizarre, surrealistic text."



What: "Lilith, the Night Demon in One Lewd Act"
When: 7:30 p.m. May 1
Where: Hoytt Theater, Osher Marin JCC, 200 N. San Pedro Road, San Rafael
Admission: $30 to $49
Information: 444-8000;