Gender Explored

Afterword:

Joy Ladin, Torah In Transition - transtorah.org

Painful as it was, I grew up in the world of “male and female God created them,” a world in which gender was, and in many ways still is, essential to humanness. In this country, you can’t get a birth certificate, social security number, driver’s license, or passport without being allocated to the ranks of male or female – which means you can’t get a job, insurance coverage, the right to drive or rent a car or move across borders without taking your place, at least on paper, in the gender binary. In some public places, you can’t pee without identifying yourself as male or female. Thanks to sonograms, many babies are gendered even before they are born, and those who aren’t are labeled “male” or “female” the moment their pelvises see the light of day.

In this sense, as Genesis 1:27 suggests, gender is absolute; we aren’t treated as human until we take our places in the binary.

But as God and Adam discover in Genesis 2, gender is not only an image in which we are created; it is an image in which we create, and recreate, ourselves, through our relationships to one another. Even in the most rigidly gendered social arenas, gender is not absolute. The gender of an octogenarian has little in common with the gender of an adolescent. The gender of the young veiled bride is very different from the gender the same woman will express when she is a forty-something mother of three, and both are different from the gender she expresses when she is in hospital scrubs performing surgery. Gender is something we bring out of ourselves, shaping and reshaping it in response to changing needs for completeness, companionship and a place in the world.

Gender, then, is not a matter of bodies or even souls; as Adam recognizes when he first sees Eve, gender is a way of relating to others that enables us to feel like ourselves. To the extent that gender grows out of relationships, even within the categories of “male” and “female,” our genders are fluid, shifting in nuance and emphasis as we move in and out of contact with people we know and need in different ways. In other words, both accounts in Genesis are true; or rather, truth is what we get when we take both, contradictions and all, together. Gender is both a given of existence and a relationship driven process, an absolute template and a fluid mode of self-expression. And as I’ve discovered, both conceptions of gender have advantages, even for a transsexual.

Some of us may be created according to the male and female binary; I wasn’t. Like Adam, I’m a homemade creature. God didn’t create me in relation to a category; I had to be individually imagined, assembled, animated. Like Adam, I had to confront the loneliness of that individuality before I could find my place in the world, and like Adam, I have learned that what I needed to find that place was always within me.

As one study of child development points out, all of us learn to act like the gender we “are” by learning to avoid behaviors that are associated with genders we “aren’t.” This means that masculinity contains – indeed, is defined by – the femininity boys and men are taught not to express; all males internalize a femininity that, like Adam’s rib, can be brought out of our male identities and fashioned into new female selves. In this sense, I’m not approximating a femininity that isn’t mine; like my breasts’ ability to grow when exposed to estrogen, femininity has always been there, sleeping within me. Like Adam, I simply – simply! – had to cut myself open to give birth to the woman swaddled and smothered by my masculinity. Our tradition teaches us that we grow through reading Torah. But the Torah itself grows by being read, remains alive, fresh, startling and new, by becoming part of the lives blossoming and dying around it. As our Sages tell us, the Torah is our life, and the length of our days. All our days: gay, straight, male, female, trans, the days we first open our eyes to the world and the days we gaze our last upon it. The Torah’s roots stretch down to the depths of our being; its limbs stretch through us, toward the future. It is not only our right to read the Torah through our gay, lesbian, bi- and trans- lives; it is our obligation. The Torah’s life depends on ours.

A Blessing for Transitioning Genders

by Rabbi Elliot Kukla

Jewish sacred texts such as the Mishna, the Talmud, midrash and classical legal codes acknowledge the diversity of gender identities in our communities, despite the way that mainstream Jewish religious tradition has effaced the experiences of transgender, intersex and gender queer Jews. This blessing signals the holiness present in the moments of transitioning that transform Jewish lives and affirms the place of these moments within Jewish sacred tradition.

A Miracle and Two Rabbis in the Talmud

"There once was a man whose wife died and left him with an infant to suckle and he could not afford to pay a wet-nurse. A miracle occurred and he grew breasts like a woman's two breasts and he nursed his child. [A first Rabbi] Rav Yosef said: Come and see just how great this man is that such a miracle was performed for him! Abaye [another Rabbi] [argued]: On the contrary - how bad is this man that the order of nature was changed for him." -Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 53b

Rabbi Yohanan and Resh Laquish, Bava Metzia 84a:

Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai was one of the last remaining people to have seen the Second Temple before its destruction and is considered to be the father of modern rabbinical Judaism. He was said to be incredibly beautiful (and without a beard). Resh Laquish was a great Jewish warrior. He and R. Yochanan were chevruta (study partners) for many years. According to the Talmud, this is how they met.

One day Rabbi Yohanan

was swimming in the Jordan.

Resh Lakish saw him

and thought he was a woman.

He dug his spear into the Jordan and leaped to the other side of the Jordan.

R. Yohanan said to him: "This strength of yours - for Torah!"

Resh Lakish said to him: "This beauty of yours - for women!"

R. Yohanan said to him: "If you will repent, I will give you my sister, who is more beautiful than I."

Resh Lakish accepted the offer upon himself.

He then tried to jump back to bring his clothing - but he was not able to.

A Description of R. Yochanan's Beauty from Talmud, Bava Metzia 84b:

Rabbi Yohanan said: "I have survived from the beauty of Jerusalem".

One who wishes to see the beauty of Rabbi Yohanan should bring a brand new silver cup and fill it with the red seeds of the pomegranate and place around its rim a garland of red roses, and let him place it at the place where the sun meets the shade, and that vision is the beauty of Rabbi Yohanan.

Rabbi Yohanan did not have "splendor of the face" [i.e., a beard].

A Definition of the "Shekhina", Excerpted from Tel Shemesh

"Where can we find a powerful image of the Divine feminine within Jewish sources? One name for Her which has been with us for centuries is the Shekhinah, the “dweller within.” In ancient times, the Shekhinah was a Talmudic word for the glory of God that rested on the mishkan (the mishkan was the Tabernacle, God’s sacred dwelling space in the wilderness). (...)

According to the Talmud, the Shekhinah, the Indwelling, is the Divine that resides within the life of the world, dwelling on earth with the Jewish people and going into exile with them when they are exiled. While the traditional Jewish image of the transcendent God is male, in the kabbalah, that image has been accompanied by the feminine image of the Shekhinah—the inner glory of existence. (...)

The Shekhinah embodies joy, yet she is also a symbol of shared suffering and empathy, not only with a nation’s exile, but with all the hurts of the world. Mystics believe that in messianic times She will be reunited with her heavenly partner and that they will become one. Many Jewish poets of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have reclaimed her as a powerful feminine image of God."

On shabbat, the idea behind the Sabbath 'bride' is often connected to the Shekhina. As the bride enters, there is no longer a separation between Adonai and Shekhina. Here is the notion that during the Sabbath, the masculine and feminine energies of God blur and become one, without distinction, without end (ein sof).