A Room for Every Body

By Jonah Rank

 

Deciding between their synagogues’ men’s and women’s restrooms has not always been easy for Meir Hoberman and Emily Aviva Kapor. The former did not grow up as a boy, and the latter did not grow up as a girl.

For many Jews, there is no question whether one is a woman or a man: the matter was resolved long before our b’rit milah or baby naming ceremony. But not all of us are so lucky to be born feeling like our body matches who we are on the inside.

Imagine a girl on the day of her bat mitzvah ceremony, listening to the rabbi talk about the Jewish woman he hopes she’ll become, while feeling embarrassedly aware of the body of the man she wants to be 13 years from now. Alternatively, a bar mitzvah boy might be haunted by the question of whether the community would still accept him if it knew that the adult he wants to grow up to be is a woman.

As Conservative Jews, we need to validate and welcome the transsexual and transgender Jews who are—or want to become—part of our communities. Meir and Emily Aviva are only two examples of Jews who grew up in Conservative synagogues, only to find that, later in life, the communities who understood them best were not Conservative.

The first step we must take to welcoming people is understanding who they are and the issues they confront. For instance, when teenagers live with their parents, there is often little done to change the body of a girl into the body of a boy—or vice versa. Sex reassignment surgery is very expensive, and the hormone treatments that one must take to change from one sex to the other may be physically harmful. Consider a teenager in this situation
and how emotionally tumultuous it must be to live a life as neither a man nor a woman—or just to know that you were born as the wrong person.

Many people who know that they were born into the wrong body never undergo all of the medical procedures that would finally affirm the totality of the man or woman they want to be. The process of transitioning from one sex to another can be expensive, psychologically hurtful, or even physically harmful. Whatever the case, we need to be attentive to the needs of Jews who don’t fit the identities of male and female or who are on the path of transitioning from one sort of identity into another.

In fact, Jewish texts demonstrate time and again that the idea of transition is at the core of Jewish identity. Ivri, the Hebrew word for “a Hebrew person,” literally means “one who is passing,” or “one who is transitioning.” Our father was a wandering Aramean. His offspring—our Biblical ancestors—were always passing between the Land of Israel and the Land of Egypt, or passing along the River Jordan. The ivri has always been defined by a life in transition.

Transition also is the essence of our God. We say “Adonai,” meaning “My Master,” but we actually don’t know for certain how to pronounce God’s four-letter Hebrew name of yod-heh-vav-heh. According to the Biblical scholar William Albright, if we “correctly” pronounce the name (yah-veh, he says), the name means, “God Makes Into Being,” or “God Makes … Become.” God’s very name is The Cause of Transition.

Both God and the Hebrew people are entities of transition. We are a people guided by our processes of transitioning, of passing through different phases, and of becoming.

Not only are we a people of transition, we are made in the image of God—a God who transcends gender. In the Kabbalah of the Zohar, God’s celestial body includes a male sexual organ (Yesod) as well as a female womb (Binah). The God of the Hebrew Bible offers the Jews motherly comfort in Isaiah (66:13), and that same God offers to hold the people Israel like a father tightly holds his son (Deuteronomy 1:31). God is simultaneously Shekhinah, a female “Presence,” and Melekh, our “King.”

Our God must be a god of no gender or of all genders. And so too are we, in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), a people of all gender or no gender at all. We are ivri. We are passing. We are Becoming.

Not all of us are transsexual, not all of us are transgender, and not all of us have met transsexual or transgender Jews. Yet more and more of each of these kinds of Jews are searching for a spiritual home in a community of other ivriyim (“Hebrews,” or “people in transition”), all wandering in search of meaning and joy, tradition and God.

“Make Me a sanctuary so that I may dwell there,” God tells the Children of Israel (Exodus 25:8). Together, you and I can work towards making our communities sacred spaces for every Jew who, like God, transcends or is transitioning between identities. We can make every sanctuary a room for every body.

Jonah Rank is in his third year of Rabbinical School at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is a musician, a writer, and a co-founder of Jewish Eyes On The Arts, and the secretary of Siddur Lev Shalem, the Rabbinical Assembly’s forthcoming siddur for Shabbat and Festivals. Special thanks to Noach Dzmura, Meir Hoberman and Emily Aviva Kapor for help with this blog post.

An alternative version of this post, including ideas of how to create spaces for transsexual and transgender Jews, is online at this link.