This is a guest post by Amy Gavel, Jewish Educator and coordinator of NOAZIM, Mount Zion Temple’s 20s/30s group.
After a nasty kidney stone a few years ago, I staffed the Mount Zion 11th grade trip to New York with a raging bladder infection. You may have noticed that public bathrooms in NYC are few and far between, and women’s restrooms always have a line. You may know a bladder infection can make finding a bathroom a matter of extreme urgency. In utter desperation, I often found myself noting, “oh, urinal” on my way into the first available stall and had frequent opportunity to recite asher yatzar, the blessing for after using the facilities. The experience was a dramatic reminder of the binary bathroom divide, and that in our culture there is a gender line we know we aren’t supposed to cross.
Written “for transgender . . .Jews,” allies, and “those for whom the very thought. . .is deeply disturbing,” an outstanding community of authors join together in Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community, edited by Noach Dzmura (North Atlantic Books, June 2010). I was lucky to have a copy provided to me for this review, but you can order it at www.amazon.com ($11.53) or walk into Common Good Books at 165 Western Ave in St. Paul where they have copies waiting for you.
I loved so many things about this book!
The structure
Divided into three sections Torah, Avodah, and G’milut Chasadim, each chapter opens with an intelligent introduction guiding the reader into the essays and bridging the topic and Jewish text. The editor’s note to each essay provides a linking thread. In the first section, we are invited to fulfill the mitzvah of G’milut Chasadim – acts of loving kindness – by reading with compassion. The Avodah section explores experiences of worship. At first feeling like slightly uncomfortable disorder, ending with Torah became the most fitting way to travel.
The Stories
Few things can bring me to tears but Kate Bornstein succeeded by sharing a single narrative moment in which she remembers her dying mother asking, “Who are you?” and answering truthfully, “I was her baby, I always would be. I told her I was her little boy, and the daughter she never had. I told her I loved her.” Her mother exclaimed, “That’s good. I didn’t want to lose any of you, ever.”
As a person born with all of the eggs my ovaries would ever hold, who became a girl and continues to become a woman in an ever-evolving revelatory process, I found deep resonance with Rachel Pollack’s response to the question “How can you claim to be a woman?” “We do not claim anything,” she wrote in her essay Abandonment to the Body’s Desire, “We know our gender as a revelation.”
From Eliron Hamburger’s essay, Lech Lecha I have a new understanding of Jewish text. To better understand the textual question “Where are you” in the binding of Isaac, the author returns to when Abraham is told lech lecha and concludes that “walking one’s path, authentically . . . .is the only assurance for teshuvah.” Lech lecha is commonly translated as “go forth.” Hamburger teaches another translation is “go toward you” – i.e. toward yourself – and shares, “I spent the first thirty-six years of my life being a Jew and the last ten years becoming Jewish.”
The Honesty
In addition to celebration and joy, Balancing on the Mechitza wrestles with the hard stuff. “According to the Torah, God has a deep aversion to the transgendered: “A woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear women’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord your God” (Deut. 22:5). Orthodox scholar Joy Ladin continues, “That was it. It didn’t matter if I cross-dressed or not. . . . The law in Deuteronomy wasn’t cutting me off from God; it was showing me that God and I had something in common. We could abhor me together.” (73) I found myself achingly hoping the miracle for which Ladin prayed would be granted.
The Challenge
When I arrived in the Torah section, I was ready for it. The editor’s own An Ancient Strategy for Managing Gender Ambiguity celebrated the way I encounter Jewish text and I reveled in the multiplicity of possible analyses. Then Rachel Biale’s Beyond the Binary Bubble offered specific examples of inclusive transitions, challenging me to think about the role I could have as a non-trans Jewish person to be midwife to that transformation. After all, my female self running through a door that wasn’t intended for me isn’t that different from climbing up on a mechitza and taking a fresh look at the Jewish world. Turns out, it’s an interesting view.
I hope you’ll read the book and join me.
(Photo: eco.monster)
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Fantastic review! I can’t wait to read this book.
I really want to read this! Especially the version with your highlighting and notes in the margins, but, I will get my own =) Lovely review!
Pride Festival in Minnesota was this past weekend and I find it so refreshing that so many varieties of people (even beyond their sexual orientation) can come together and get positive reinforcement — certainly not questioning or condemnation. I also saw myself, as an ally, much like you related with your bathroom story: as someone who could help pave the way for acceptance and celebration.
Wow! As a member of the GLBTQ community, it’s often assumed that I know the nuance of each of the letters. And yet, unsurprisingly to me, I don’t. I’m so excited to read a book that will open my eyes to so much more and in a Jewish way.
As a sidebar, I coincidentally met Eliron Hamburger when I was traveling in Greece. She and her partner had the same ferry ride from Mykonos to Santorini. My friend, Anna, and I spotted another pair of Jews in the ferry line and approached them. We had Shabbat dinner overlooking the Aegean sea together that Friday night, after requesting two candles for our table, much to the bemusement of the waiter.
Jared,
Awesome story!
What I love most about Kate’s mother’s response of not wanting to lose ‘any of you’ is that not only can we not (any of us) know all of the nuances of any identity (meaning that as we receive multiple invitations in our relationships with other people to know them we can choose to – or not to- better understand and appreciate those nuances in others), I think we are also in an ever-evolving revelatory process (as Rachel put it) to better understand our own.
Yup…this is postmodernist Judaism at it’s best.
According to an article at:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
“That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.”
Nachman,
I’ve been deciding since you commented whether or not to respond.
In an attempt to respectfully understand what reads to me as a contemptuous slam, are you suggesting that Judaism as explored in my review and perhaps in this book destabilizes other understandings of Judaism – including other understandings of Jewish identity and historical progress?
You have every right, and are invited, to disagree with any assertion or opinion I have. Maybe you don’t, maybe you are celebrating the post-modernist tendencies you see in this post. However, it sounds like there are negative intentions behind your comment, and if you are accusing me of being a post-modernist Jew in the philosophical sense . . . I’ll take it under consideration. Truthfully, I’m comfortable with a little instability now and then. Do I favor a little hyperreality on occasion to remind us that the world is ever more complex (as is asserted and discussed at length by Rabbi Akiva Tatz in “World Mask” although from a very different perspective than the book I reviewed here) than we so often assume? Yes. I do.
If I were certain, why would I wrestle?
Thank you for your comment.
I have to echo Amy’s initial question of whether examining gender roles in the context of Judaism destabilizes any of our other understandings of Jewish history, as I too have received a comment from Nachman (on my post about gender/sexual identity through the eyes of Judaism).
I think the instability post-modernism provides is crucial to understanding how we interact with one another on a human level. Not only that, it can allow us to examine whether historically held beliefs about societal roles are truly present in our holy texts, or whether we simply believe they persist because we’ve been taught constructs through our education.