Torah Queeries

Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible

Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814741092
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Comentario bíblico

In the Jewish tradition, reading of the Torah follows a calendar cycle, with a specific portion assigned each week. These weekly portions, read aloud in synagogues around the world, have been subject to interpretation and commentary for centuries. Following on this ancient tradition, Torah Queeries brings together some of the world’s leading rabbis, scholars, and writers to interpret the Torah through a "bent lens". With commentaries on the fifty-four weekly Torah portions and six major Jewish holidays, the concise yet substantive writings collected here open up stimulating new insights and highlight previously neglected perspectives.

This incredibly rich collection unites the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight-allied writers, including some of the most central figures in contemporary American Judaism. All bring to the table unique methods of reading and interpreting that allow the Torah to speak to modern concerns of sexuality, identity, gender, and LGBT life. Torah Queeries offers cultural critique, social commentary, and a vision of community transformation, all done through biblical interpretation. Written to engage readers, draw them in, and, at times, provoke them, Torah Queeries examines topics as divergent as the Levitical sexual prohibitions, the experience of the Exodus, the rape of Dinah, the life of Joseph, and the ritual practices of the ancient Israelites. Most powerfully, the commentaries here chart a future of inclusion and social justice deeply rooted in the Jewish textual tradition.

A labor of intellectual rigor, social justice, and personal passions, Torah Queeries is an exciting and important contribution to the project of democratizing Jewish communities, and an essential guide to understanding the intersection of queerness and Jewishness.

PART I

BERESHIT

The Book of Genesis

ONE

Male and Female God Created Them

Parashat Bereshit (Genesis 1:1–6:8)

MARGARET MOERS WENIG

“And God created the human being b’tzalmo in. . . [God’s own] image” (Genesis 1:27a).¹ Perhaps no Biblical verse has meant more to gay people than this one. It confirms what LGBT people know in their hearts to be true: We too have been created in God’s image. We too deserve respect as God’s own handiwork. Our sexual orientation is part of creation’s original design. We are as much a reflection of God as any straight person may claim to be. We are entitled to as much dignity, as many rights, and as much happiness as any other child of God.

This verse has challenged readers of Torah to reconsider their views of homosexuality and the place of gay and lesbian people in civic and religious life.

But the challenges of this verse do not end there. For the assertion that God created human beings in the divine image comprises only half of the verse. The verse continues with an equally challenging second half: “male and female [God] created them” (Gen. 1:27b). This assertion is a challenge of a different kind, for its simple statement appears, at least on its surface, to fly in the face of what many know to be true: that gender and gender identity cannot be neatly divided into immutable categories of “male” and “female.”

Our Sages understood this complication as early as the 2nd century. The questions they asked and the questions we now ask lead us to a deeper understanding of the second half of this crucial verse.²

Challenge Number 1: Not All Human Beings
Were Created Wholly Male or Female

Among even those who do not take the words of Genesis literally, most people do place great stock in the notion that human beings are either male or female. On a birth certificate, a driver’s license, or a passport our society insists on knowing: is a person male or female? When we name a baby, call someone to the Torah as a bar or bat mitzvah, or write a ketubah (a Jewish wedding contract), we presume to know whether the infant, adolescent, or adult before us is male or female. Yet some scientists estimate that 1.7 percent of infants are born intersexed, with their chromosomes, internal reproductive organs, or external genitalia not consistently male or female but some combination of the two.

True stories:

“Beautiful. . .,” the doctor says. They place the baby on the mother’s stomach, clamp the cord and hand the father a pair of slim scissors to cut it. The next day the doctor comes in and sits down and speaks softly: “Your baby will be fine,” he says. The parents brace themselves. . . . “Somehow your baby’s genitals haven’t finished developing so we don’t know quite what sex it is. We’re going to run a couple of tests and we’ll know very soon. . . . It may be that some cosmetic surgery is required. But don’t worry. . . . This will be okay. We can solve this in just a few days. The sooner the better. . . .” This scene occurs about 2,000 times a year in hospitals all over America.³

At her birth, in suburban New Jersey, in 1956, baby Chase presented a case of “ambiguous genitalia.” Instead of a penis and testicles there was a somewhat vagina-like opening behind her urethra and a phallic structure of a size and shape that could be described as either an enlarged clitoris or a micro penis. After three days. . ., the doctors told Chase’s parents that their child should be reared as a boy. She was christened Charlie. But a year and a half later her parents. . . consulted. . . other. . . experts. They reassigned her as a girl. . . . Her parents changed her name. . . to Cheryl and the doctors removed her clitoris. Chase was raised without knowledge of her true birth status. She experienced childhood punctuated with mysterious unexplained surgeries and regular genital and rectal exams. She grew up confused about her sex. By age 19 Chase had done some of her own medical sleuthing and understood that she had been subjected to a clitorectomy as a child. . . . It took three years for her to find a physician willing to disclose medical records. . . then. . . Chase read that doctors had labeled her a true “hermaphrodite” a term that refers to people whose gonads possess both ovarian and testicular tissue.⁴

Challenge Number 2: Not All Human Beings Identify with the
Gender in Which They Appear to Have Been “Created”

Some people who are born with consistently male genes and anatomy or with consistently female genes and anatomy are convinced in their innermost hearts that they are not the gender they appear to be, and they choose to live as the opposite sex.

True stories:

Lilly will never forget her seventh birthday party. The entire family gathered around to watch her blow out the candles. “Make a wish,” her mother urged her. . . . Lilly blurted out, “My wish is to grow a penis before my next birthday.”⁵

Many of these kids fall asleep at night praying, hoping, dreaming about waking up in the morning the “right” sex.⁶

Andy remembers contemplating suicide on a regular basis. “I had so much anger all through my growing-up years because of a situation that was not of my choosing. . . . My existence, my maleness, was a nightmare a purgatorial madness.”⁷

And some people who identify as male derive a profound sense of “peace,” “integration,” and pleasure from dressing as women. And yet they face ridicule and physical danger for doing so.

A true story:

“I openly cross-dressed at home from my teens on, and although my mother grudgingly tolerated it, she was adamant about not letting the neighbors find out.”⁸ Once he cut his hand and had to be rushed to the hospital before he could change out of the dress he usually wore around the house. His mother insisted that he enter and exit the car through the garage so that no neighbors would see him.⁹ “My mere presence was an embarrassment to her and she didn’t want to be seen with me although in the hospital she had no choice. On the way home as soon as we got to our street she insisted that I scoot down on the seat until she pulled the car into the garage. I became so nauseous with self-loathing that I collapsed on the kitchen floor in a fetal position and couldn’t move. I remember sobbing over and over: ‘I am a person, not a thing. I have value and worth.’”¹⁰

Challenge Number 3: What Should Parents or Society Do When a Person’s
Gender Does Not Fall Neatly into the Categories “Male” or “Female”?

“If a child is born with two X chromosomes, with oviducts, ovaries, and a uterus on the inside but with a penis and scrotum on the outside,”¹¹ should the parents raise this child as a boy or as a girl? Should a surgeon remove the child’s penis, open the scrotum to form two labia, and fashion a vagina that will have to be deepened through repeated surgeries as the child matures?¹² Or should the ovaries be removed so that at puberty this child with a penis does not develop breasts and a female form? Or should the child be allowed to grow up without sex-assignment surgery and be allowed to choose to identify as male, as female, or as neither?

How about an adult who had been born with XY chromosomes, undescended testes, and a vagina who developed breasts in puberty? And what of the person who has both an ovary and a testis or who has gonads with both ovarian and testicular tissue? Should a U.S. court consider this person a man or a woman? If 1.7 percent of the population is intersex, how absurd is it that the granting of marriage licenses is limited to couples that can be defined as a male and a female!

And what of a male-to-female transsexual: will the company she works for permit her to use the women’s bathroom? May she legally marry a man? What if she is pre-operative or has no intention of having sexual-reassignment surgery? Is this person a man or a woman? Who gets to decide: the person or the courts?

And what if the husband in a heterosexual marriage turns out to be genetically female or decides to live as a woman? If the couple wants to stay together, may their marriage remain a legal marriage in a state that does not yet permit same-sex couples to marry? If they are Jewish and decide to separate, will a bet din (a Jewish religious court) require a get (a Jewish divorce)?

Until a few years ago, an intersexed child born with XY chromosomes whose penis at birth was under one-and-a-half centimeters most likely would have been surgically assigned female, castrated, and raised as a girl. An intersexed child born with XY chromosomes whose penis was larger than one-and-a-half centimeters would have been raised as a boy.

What if an intersexed child is born to members of a Jewish congregation, and they ask their rabbi, “What can the Torah teach us about how to raise our child?” What would you want the rabbi to say? What would you say to a little boy in your congregation who insists on wearing girls’ clothes to religious school? What would you say to your own son?

Challenge Number 4: Do Genesis 1.27b and Others Prohibit Cross-
Dressing and Transitioning from Male to Female or from Female to Male?

Jewish tradition has long understood that gender is more complicated than simply “male and female” and that some people might want to cross-dress and that others may not identify with the gender assigned to them at birth.

Although it appears as though Parashat Ki Tetse, discussed later in this book, prohibits a woman from wearing kli gever (man’s apparel) and a man from wearing simlat isha (women’s clothing),¹³ there is, in fact, extensive debate in rabbinic literature about the meaning of this prohibition.¹⁴

Parashat Emor prohibits offering as a sacrifice any animal with a blemish including bruised, crushed, broken, or cut testicles.¹⁵ The words lo takrivu l’Adonai (Don’t sacrifice [such an animal] to God) are followed by u’vartzechem lo taasu (And in your Land, do not do [this]). The rabbis extended the Biblical prohibition against animal castration to human castration, but the Babylonian Talmud asks whether this prohibits only direct castration or sterilization by medicinal potion as well.¹⁶

Although liberal poskim (rabbinic authorities offering decisions in Jewish legal matters) permit sex-reassignment surgery for the mental health of the adult requesting it, most orthodox poskim prohibit it l’hatchilah (before the fact).¹⁷ However, b’diavad (after the fact), even orthodox poskim have to address the status of a post-op transsexual: Can an Orthodox male-to-female (M to F) be married as a woman?¹⁸ Can an Orthodox M to F give an ex-wife a get. Is a get even necessary?¹⁹ Are Orthodox men permitted to listen to an M to F sing, or would that violate the prohibition against hearing a woman’s voice (kol isha)?²⁰

The responsa reflect a surprisingly diverse range of answers.²¹ Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg (a posek in Israel who has written volumes of responsa especially on medical issues) has even suggested thanking God for a sex change.²²

A Response to Some of the Challenges Posed by Genesis 1:27b:
Our Sages Were Well Aware of Gender Diversity in Human Kind

Rabbinic tradition, which obsessively separated men and women and assigned distinct roles to each, was remarkably appreciative of the fact that some people do not fit neatly into one category or another. Chapter 4 of Mishnah Bikkurim²³ discusses the androginos, about whom it says,

Yesh bo drachim shaveh l’anashim.
Yesh bo drachim shaveh l’nashim.
Yesh bo drachim shaveh l’anashim ul’nashim.
Yesh bo drachim shaveh lo l’anashim vlo l’nashim.

(There are [legal] ways he is [treated] like men.
There are ways he is like women.
There are ways in which he is like men and women.
There are ways he is like neither men nor women.)

For Rabbi Yose, the androginos belongs in none of the above categories but is bifney atzmo hu, a human being “unto itself.”

Our tradition knows not only of the androginos (a hermaphrodite with both male and female sexual organs) but also of the tumtum (with hidden or undeveloped genitals), the aylonit (a masculine or infertile woman), and the saris (a feminine or infertile man).²⁴ So prevalent are these terms in tannaitic and amoraic literature that in the Encyclopedia Talmudit, the list of citations of aylonit fills five and a half columns, citations of androginos fill eleven columns, and citations of tumtum fill sixty-six columns, or thirty-three pages.

Aggadic literature imagines the main male character of the Purim story, Mordechai, suckling Esther when no wet nurse could be found²⁵ and imagines God changing the gender of a child even “on the birthing stool.”²⁶ It imagines that when God first created “them” male and female, the creation known as “Adam” was one creature both male and female.²⁷ To the saris “who holds fast to the covenant,” Isaiah promises “a place in God’s house and yad vashem, a monument and a name, better than sons or daughters, an everlasting name which shall not perish.”²⁸ Can we imagine a place in the Jewish community, in our synagogues and seminaries, for the intersexed and the transgendered?²⁹

The Mishnah anticipated in its discussion of the androginos what scientists now understand nearly two millennia later. There are not two but five sexes, argues Anne Fausto-Sterling, an embryologist at Brown University. “In addition to males and females [there are]. . . true hermaphrodites born with a testes [sic] and an ovary [and those] born with testes and some aspect of female genitalia and. . . [those] born with ovaries and some aspect of male genitalia. . . . While male and female stand on the extreme ends of a biological continuum, there are many other bodies. . . that. . . mix together anatomical components conventionally attributed to both males and females.”³⁰ Some scientists now speculate that the brain is actually the dominant sex organ in the body.³¹ Add nonbiological factors into the mix of gender-shaping influences and you may find a chromosomal, hormonal, and genital male with a female gender identity.

Rereading Genesis 1:27b

“Zachar u’nikevah bara otam.” Read not “God³² created every single human being as either male or female” but “God created some humans male, some female, some who appear male but know themselves to be female, others who appear female but know themselves to be male, and others still who bear a mix of male and female characteristics.” “Zachar u’nikeva” is, I believe, a merism, a common Biblical figure of speech in which a whole is alluded to by some of its parts. When the Biblical text says, “There was evening, there was morning, the first day,” it means, of course, that there was evening, there was dawn, there was morning, there was noon time, there was afternoon, there was dusk in the first day. “Evening and morning” are used to encompass all the times of day, all the qualities of light that would be found over the course of one day. So, too, in the case of Genesis 1.27b, the whole diverse panoply of genders and gender ...