The Soul of the Stranger

Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective

Joy Ladin

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781512602937, 9781512600667
• eBook ISBN: 9781512602944
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another. Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah, a collection of ancient texts that assume human beings are either male or female, speaks both to practical transgender concerns, such as marginalization, and to the challenges of living without a body or social role that renders one intelligible to others—challenges that can help us understand a God who defies all human categories. These creative, evocative readings transform our understanding of the Torah's portrayals of God, humanity, and relationships between them.

INDEX

Note: page numbers followed by n refer to notes, with note number.

Abba, Rabbi, 59

Abraham: abandonment of father, 42–43, 43–44; author’s recognition of own experience in, 43–44, 72–73, 80–81, 107; banishment of Hagar and Ishmael, 52; child with maid Hagar, 46–47, 52; and circumcision as manhood-altering, 44–45, 51–52, 153–54n12; God as source of trans experience of, 42, 43, 46, 58; God’s appearance to, as traveler, 74–75, 161n12; God’s promise of offspring to, 76; rabbinic tales about, 161n11; relationship with God’s formless and human forms, 73, 74–75, 76–77, 161–62n14; and Sarah’s miraculous conception, 47, 48, 49–51; silence about God, 161n11; Torah’s silence on feelings of, 45–46; trans experiences of, 42–45, 107; unquestioning obedience to God, 73. See also Akedah; Sodom and Gomorrah, destruction of

acceptance of transgender persons: acceptance of gender-vs.-sex distinction and, 20; vs. intersex persons, 20; by religious institutions, increase in, 31–32; scriptural models for, 121, 136

acceptance of one’s identity, Book of Jonah as story about, 4–7

Adam and Eve: eating of Forbidden Fruit, 68–70, 71. See also Genesis creation story

adolescence, brief trans experiences in, 35–36

Akedah (God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac), 53–56; alternative readings of, 59; author’s identification with, 55–56; as entry into moral wilderness, 58; and God’s identity as unknowable, 82; and incomprehensibility of God, 63; Isaac’s experience of, 58–59, 157n29; and Isaac’s relationship with Abraham, 56; and Isaac’s relationship with God, 56–57, 157n30; and moral wilderness, maintaining human values in, 60; parallels to family sacrifice of LGBTQ persons, 55–56; as trans experience for Abraham, 53–54, 55, 157n27; as trans experience for Isaac, 55–57

Allen, Woody, 17–18

Ammi, Rabbi, 154–55n18

Annie Hall (film), 17–18

Ashkenazic rabbis, and kitniyot rules, 118

Auden, W. H., 93

Back to the Sources (Holtz), 10

Bettcher, Talia, 153n6

binaries: as convenient generalizations, 22–23; tendency to accumulate symbolic meanings, 22; use in Genesis creation story, 21–23, 27–28. See also gender identities, binary; Passover, binary distinctions asserted in

Bornstein, Kate, 31, 157n28

Butler, Judith, 150n2

census, US, invisibility of transgender persons in, 99–100

circumcision: of Abraham, as manhood-altering, 44–45, 51–52, 153–54n12; and Jewish identity, 167–68n22; as sign of Abraham’s manhood-altering covenant with God, 45

clergy, openly-transgender, 31–32

cross-dressing, Biblical prohibition on, 94–95, 97, 102, 105, 165n3, 165n8

Du Bois, W. E. B.: as activist, 171n8; experience as hyper-minority, 131–32, 134, 170n5, 171n6

Dzmura, Noach, 150n4

Elijah, God’s appearance to, 84

estrangement from community (hitgayer): adoption of ger (stranger) ident...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Shipwrecked with God
• One: The Genesis of Gender
• Two: Trans Experience in the Torah
• Three: Close Encounters with an Incomprehensible God
• Four: Reading between the Binaries
• Five: Knowing the Soul of the Stranger
• Notes
• Index