Tag Archives: Gender

Ki Tetzei, Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19

Deuteronomy/Devarim, Ki Tetzei, , , , , ,
Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/kiteitzei

To Wear is Human

By Rabbi Elliot Kukla and Reuben Zellman

For all those who have ever struggled with how to discipline children’s bad behavior, this
week’s parsha, Ki-Teitze, offers an easy answer: stone them to death! (Deut. 21:21)

Thankfully, Jews have recognized for over a thousand years that this is an unacceptable solution to a common problem. In fact, we learn in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 71a) that this apparent commandment of the Torah was never once carried out. Our Sages refused to understand this verse literally, as it conflicted with their understanding of the holiness of each and every human life.

With this scenario in mind, let us look at another verse in our parsha: “A man’s clothes should not be on a woman, and a man should not wear the apparel of a woman; for anyone who does these things, it is an abomination before God.” (Deut. 22:5) Just as classical Jewish scholars reinterpreted the commandment to stone to death rebellious children, they also read our portion’s apparent ban on “cross-dressing” to yield a much narrower prohibition.

The great medieval commentator Rashi explains that this verse is not simply forbidding
wearing the clothes of the “opposite gender.” Rashi writes that such dress is prohibited only when it will lead to adultery. Maimonides, a 12th century codifier of Jewish law, claims that this verse is actually intended to prohibit cross-dressing for the purposes of idol worship. (Sefer haMitzvot, Lo Taaseh 39-40) In other words, according to the classical scholars of our tradition, wearing clothes of “the wrong gender” is proscribed only when it is for the express purpose of causing harm to our relationship with our loved ones or with God. The prohibition that we learn from this verse is very specific: we must not misrepresent our true gender in order to cause harm. Otherwise, wearing clothing of another gender is not prohibited. The Talmud puts it most succinctly: v’ein kan toevah – “there is no abomination here.” (Babylonian Talmud, Nazir 59a-b)

So, what does this verse mean for us today? In order to understand it in our own context, we need to examine two questions: What does it mean to wear clothing of a gender we are not? And, what does it mean to cause harm?

Many people feel like their true gender is not (or is not only) the gender that was assigned to them at birth. The Torah is asking us not to misrepresent our gender, which we can understand as using external garments to conceal our inner selves. Unfortunately, many transgender and genderqueer people today feel forced to hide in exactly this way. In our society the penalty for expressing the fullness of a gender-variant identity is often severe and can include verbal, sexual, and physical abuse, employment discrimination, an inability to access education and health care and, sometimes, murder.

Gender rigidity does not just impact transgender and genderqueer people. It also harms the eight year-old boy who was suspended from school for wearing his ballet tutu to class in upstate New York, the flight attendant in Atlanta who sued her employer for firing her because of her refusal to wear make-up, and the butch lesbian who was shouted at and harassed in a “women’s” restroom in a synagogue in Los Angeles. Much of this mistreatment comes from those who insist that wearing the clothes of the “other gender” is wrong “because it says so in the Bible.”

Classical Jewish scholars do not accept such a justification for narrow-mindedness. Neither should we. Rather, we can flip mainstream understandings of our verse on their head and understand it as a positive mitzvah, a sacred obligation to present the fullness of our gender as authentically as possible. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to fulfill this mitzvah without endangering their life or livelihood, and the protection of human life always comes first in Judaism. However, the Torah wants us to be true to ourselves.

Next, we come to the second part of our prohibition: that we must not cover up our gender in order to cause harm. Transgender and genderqueer people who hide under the clothing of the gender they were assigned – rather than expressing themselves as they really are – suffer terrible harm. Rates of depression, suicide, and destructive self-medication are astronomical.

Each and every soul is created in the multifaceted image of the Creator. When we try to conceal that uniqueness, we cause ourselves pain. And when we ask others to obscure themselves we cause them harm. The great majority of our parsha is concerned with the minute details of preventing harm. The lines before our verse, teach that if we see that someone’s donkey has fallen down, we are required to help that person lift the animal up. The verse immediately following, instructs us never to hurt a mother bird as we are collecting her eggs. And the very next verse commands us to build a guardrail around the roof of our houses, to prevent anyone from falling off . The verse about what to wear is nestled amongst mitzvot that guide us towards exquisite levels of empathy and gentleness towards all of creation.

As our Sages realized, a sacred tradition that command us not to cause pain to a single mother bird, must not be asking us to stone to death small children or conceal our true gender. Jewish tradition asks us to safeguard each unique being created in the image of God, by preventing harm. When we cover up our true souls and muffle our divine reflection under clothes that feel “wrong”, we are harming God’s creation. This is what our Torah prohibits!

Kukla, Elliot and Zellman, Reuben. "To Wear Is Human: Parshat Ki Tetze." TransTorah.org. (Viewed on September 6, 2014). http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/To_Wear_Is_Human.pdf

Sex and the Torah

By Akiva Yael

Sex saturates our Torah. So many of the stories central to our tradition thrive on sexuality, sensuality and straight eroticism. Entirely of her own volition, Sarah gives her handmaid, Hagar, to her husband for purposes of procreation. Lot’s daughters get their father drunk and seduce him. Onan resorts to the withdrawal method to avoid the risk of impregnating his late brother’s wife. Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and tricks her former father-in-law into marrying her. Potiphar’s wife attempts to seduce Joseph and then accuses him of rape when he rebuffs her advances. And Shir HaShirim was clearly intended for languid recitation under the enticing glow of a Spring moon, the scent of jasmine in the air.

Of course, our holy text devotes considerable space to delineating the prohibited and the permissible within the realm of sexuality. This week’s parshah, Ki Tetzei, addresses adultery, virginity, rape, the problem of favoring one wife over another, cult prostitution, divorce and family honor. Included in the mix is a rather fascinating step-by-step guide to taking captive a woman from a people a soldier has only just vanquished on the battlefield; as well as the parental responsibility to provide proof of a daughter’s virginity and the punishment of stoning.

The drama of human experience is clearly balanced by a strict framework of rules and regulations. What proved relevant for our people in ancient times, however, does not always resonate as well today. “But if the charge proves true, the girl was found not to have been a virgin, then the girl shall be brought out to the entrance of her father’s house, and the men of her town shall stone her to death; for she did a shameful thing in Israel, committing fornication while under her father’s authority. Thus you will sweep away evil from your midst” (Deuteronomy 22:20-21).

I’m grateful we’ve left the days of murdering women who’ve had premarital sex behind, but the portrayal of sex in 21st century American culture doesn’t make me feel much better. We’ve retained a relentless emphasis on virginity, placing a remarkably high social value on both having it and “losing” it. For heterosexual men, there seems to be a concurrent value based around “taking” virginity. Movies and television depict consensual sex as passionate and effortless – completely devoid of anxiety, awkwardness, and very real negotiations around contraception and sexually transmitted infections. We’re generally treated to a story about romance blossoming, or an encounter that is in some way new between two (or more) people. Typically, we are not offered a portrayal of mutual fulfillment within the context of a sustaining and committed relationship. Yet, many of us have chosen partnerships or are actively pursuing partnership. The chasm between sex in the Torah and sex in Hollywood is enormous and most of us seem settled somewhere in between.

For centuries, our sages have devoted tremendous attention to sex. Their philosophical musings, judgements and advice have created a concept of sex in Judaism that is both inherently positive and profoundly spiritual. Of course, Jewish law frames all such sex within the confines of marriage. But as the right to marry has yet to be extended to all American citizens, and because marriage for many of us is a state-sanctioned category rather than a religious one, I prefer to replace the “sex within marriage” ideal with the concept of sex within a committed relationship.

In Judaism, procreation is only one, and not the primary, purpose of sex. Indeed, sex is a means for two people to truly know one another in a way no one else can. In fact, the Hebrew word for sex between husband and wife in our Torah comes from the root “to know.” Sex can prove a portal to deep and enduring intimacy, both physically and emotionally. It is essential for establishing a strong and sustainable bond between people working to build a life together.

When we think of ourselves as sparks of divinity, we must think of sex as the uniting of one divine spark with another. The resultant blaze is completely unique, unreplicable with anyone else. And if we are all drops in the ocean of infinity, uniting with another moves us slightly closer to God. In our tradition, sex is holy and within the context of mutual love, respect and commitment, it’s considered a mitzvah.

Unfortunately, from our Puritan heritage and perhaps other religious traditions, Americans have inherited negative and unhealthy attitudes towards sex. In Judaism, sex is not shameful. Neither is it a casual game or a weapon. The pleasure of both partners is paramount and God is thought to be present with those united in love. It’s as far from stoning adulterers as it is from summer blockbusters.

This week’s parshah is a great opportunity to think about our own sexuality and attitudes towards sex. Write a sexual identity manifesto, explore yourself or explore a partner. Contrast the experience of feeling connected to a partner and the sense of divine connection. Consider finding divinity solo. And always know that where there is love, respect and pleasure, so too there is God.

Yael, Akiva. "Sex Saturates Our Torah: Parshah Ki Tetzei." PunkTorah.org. (Viewed on September 6, 2014). http://punktorah.org/sex-saturates-our-torah-parshah-ki-tetzei/

Tazria, Leviticus 12:1-13:59

Tazria, , , ,
Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/tazria

Life, Death, and Impurity

By Rabbi Lauren Eichler Berkun

My spiritual and intellectual journey as a teacher of Torah began with the purity system in Leviticus.

Perhaps this was a strange place to begin my life’s passion — exploring genital discharges, corpse contamination and leprosy. However, the study of biblical purity laws yielded for me a profound appreciation for the beauty and wisdom of our tradition.

As a young feminist college student, I discovered that the ancient Jewish laws of menstrual impurity were not an example of gender discrimination or blood taboo. Rather, the Torah teaches that all genital discharges, female and male, are sources of tumah (ritual impurity).These laws are part of a broader symbolic system, which highlights the power of confronting mortality and the subsequent need to ritualize the reaffirmation of life.

Many scholars concur that life/death symbolism is the underlying principle behind the biblical purity system. According to this theory, one becomes impure upon contact with death or with the loss of potential life. Indeed, the greatest source of impurity is a human corpse (Numbers 19). Leprosy, a scaly white skin disease which made one look like a corpse (see Numbers 12:12), is another severe form of impurity. Genital fluids, which represent the loss of generative material from the font of life, also cause impurity (Leviticus 15).

According to biblical theology, God is the Source of Life. The God of Israel embodies life, and only the living can praise God (Psalms115). Therefore, our encounters with death or symbolic reminders of death momentarily remove us from the life-affirming rituals of God’s abode in the Temple. Only after a symbolic rebirth through immersion in the “living waters” of the mikveh (ritual bath) could one return to a state of purity.

For many years, I have relished any opportunity to teach about the biblical purity system and the powerful purification ritual of the mikveh. However, year after year, I am challenged by the most paradoxical case of impurity in Leviticus. Parashat Tazria declares that a mother becomes impure following childbirth:

“When a woman at childbirth bears a male, she shall be impure seven days … she shall remain in a state of blood purification for thirty-three days … if she bears a female, she shall be impure two weeks …and she shall remain in a state of blood purification for sixty-six days” (Leviticus 12:2-5).

Why would a mother contract impurity upon bringing new life into the world if impurity is the result of the symbolic forces of death? Furthermore, why would a mother’s period of impurity double upon the birth of a female child?

Each time I read Leviticus Chapter 12, I consider the available responses to these persistent questions. There are several compelling suggestions. First, childbirth in the ancient Near East was fraught with danger to the mother and high infant morality rates. Thus, every childbirth was an encounter with potential death. Secondly, the pregnant woman is a vessel of abundant life. Following delivery, the mother experiences a loss of this powerful presence of life within. Her discharge of life leaves a void and creates the ritual necessity for purification. While neither of these answers perfectly reconciles the impurity of childbirth within the symbolic system, they both address the experience of childbirth as a nexus point between life and death.

In light of recent events, I have contemplated another possible explanation for the impurity of childbirth. In a haunting discussion about instability in the Middle East and the vulnerable state of world affairs, a colleague described the frightening experience of bringing a child into this world: “While I feel great joy in creating a new life,” he remarked,”I also know that I have created a new potential for death.” Every human being will die. Each birth brings another fragile, mortal being into the universe. In our precarious world, this reality quickly comes into sharp focus.

Herein lies one explanation for the double period of impurity following the birth of a female child. The baby girl embodies the potential to one day bear another new life. Each life that is brought into the world will also bring another death. Therefore, the Torah marks the birth of a girl, a future holy vessel for the creation of life, as fraught with twice the amount “death symbolism.”

Perhaps the laws of Leviticus Chapter 12 respond to the conflicting emotions of any new parent. A new birth brings joy and trepidation, awe and fear. A new parent has faith in the potential for life, yet dreads the possibility of death. The biblical purity system proclaims that our confrontations with the temporal nature of life leave a deep spiritual imprint–from conception to birth to illness to death. At every stage in life, we acknowledge and ritualize our encounters with death. Then we embrace and immerse in life anew.

Eichler Berkun, Lauren. "Life, Death, and Impurity." MyJewishLearning.org. (Viewed on March 29, 2014). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/tazria_jts.shtml?p=0

The Unbearable Lightness of Childbirth

By Rabbi Malka Drucker

What’s a feminist to do with the opening verses of this portion: “And Adonai spoke to Moses, saying, speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a woman (conceives and) gives birth to a boy: then she shall be unclean seven days…and when the period of her purification is over, for a son, or for a daughter, she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt offering, and a young pigeon, or a turtle dove, for a sin offering, to the opening of the meeting tent of the congregation to the priest.” (Italics mine.) Furthermore, the period of purification is twice as long for a girl baby.

According to the text, then, giving birth, no matter how one translates tamah, creates defilement or impurity, and furthermore it also requires a forgiveness of sin. Nehama Leibowitz calls the laws of purity concerning childbirth the “most perplexing phenomenon” of all such laws. If the first commandment is to procreate, why is the mother fulfilling the mitzvah made unclean? Abravanel flatly states that the mother certainly doesn’t need to bring a sin-offering, because she committed no iniquity.

So the meaning must lie deeper. Midrash Rabbah hints at it by its indirect response to the opening verses. R. Abba b. Kahana waxes lyric at the miracle of pregnancy and childbearing: “In the usual way, if a person holds a bag of money with the opening downwards, do not the coins scatter? Now the embryo has its abode in the mother’s womb, but the Holy One, blessed be God, guards it that it shall not fall out and die. Is this not a matter for praise?” He also goes on to remark that nature has placed udders where the womb is, but a woman “has her breasts in a beautiful part of her body, and her baby sucks at a dignified place.” Other rabbis remarked that the mother never expels the child after eating, and that menstrual blood is alchemically turned to milk for nursing. Furthermore, in utero the baby absorbs food through the navel, exactly what it needs, no matter what the mother eats, and it never needs to defecate. Finally, R. Aihu remarks on another aspect of God’s presence. When the baby is born and “full of ordure and all manner of nauseous substances,” everyone kisses and hugs the baby anyway, especially if it’s a male.

There is nothing ambivalent in our tradition about the birth of a child: It’s pure, cosmic joy that joins heaven and earth, because the Talmud tells us that every child has three parents. It is the most important event in Jewish life, so amazing that the one most intimately connected, the one giving birth, is transformed by it. The mother has come as close to the life/death nexus as anyone can, and both she and the newborn are in a temporarily separate place from the rest of the world. The reason the mother brings a dove for her sin-offering is because the dove is a symbol of homesickness. As the dove returns to the nest, so all who are kept from the sanctuary return to the “nest.” Leibowitz concludes that bearing new life makes the mother brilliantly aware of the greatness of God and at the same time, her own insignificance. She cites Isaiah’s amazement at witnessing the vision of God “sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up and God’s train filled the Temple.” (6, 1) His reaction was one of inadequacy: “I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.”(Ibid. 6, 5)

The creative process tests boundaries. The world begins with God giving birth to the world; When we give birth, we create a world, too. Women live the primal creation in childbirth, yet few have added their oral Torah to how they understand a text that suggests something negative and perhaps dangerous about their experience.

Like the rabbis, when I carried my first child I was filled with astonishment that within me, a being of heart, soul and might was growing, eating, and maybe dreaming. And then, with the help of months of prenatal training, I rode the birth contractions with my son, and hours later, we met face to face in wonder. The midrash says, “In this world a woman bears children with pain, but of the Time to Come [see] what is written! Before she will travail, she will have brought forth; before her pain will come, she will have been delivered of a man-child.”(Isaiah, 66,7)

Maybe the pain isn’t only physical, but emotional. I look at my child; I’m a writer with no words for the first look at him. I look at my husband and male doctor and cannot tell them what this is, who I am now. I can’t even make eye contact with them, because I feel so sorry that they cannot experience this. And I’m feeling inchoate sadness that seems to be connected to the separation caused by my baby’s birth. We are now in a less intimate relationship. I’m embarrassed by my negativity. I remember that the rabbis understood the sin-offering to be for screaming between labor pains that we will never submit to our husbands again. Maybe I should make a sin-offering for my strange regret. That I am feeling so much paradox cannot be talked about with anyone, because I, like Isaiah, feel powerless in the presence of God.

The baby comes home, we fall asleep together, and I imagine him and me as one, not quite separated yet. He and I know something together, we’re bonded. I imagine myself in ancient Israel, having given birth with the assistance of the women in my village. We are left alone much of the time. I know to stay away from the community and I’m grateful, because I cannot tell you where I’ve been, that my whole life is now different, I am no one now except mother. Wife, daughter, sister, friend, I’ll be those again, but not yet. This baby and I are in love, and we know no one else. Maybe we stay outside the community like lovers do, and maybe I have to sacrifice something, make an offering for the sin of my temporary obsession and abandonment of everyone else.

The community is always like a little city that keeps itself centered, to be inclusive of its members. When a woman gives birth, she is in an altered state. For seven days, she keeps herself separate with her son, fourteen days with her daughter. The rabbis understood seven days for the boy so that the circumcision can take place on the eighth day. Most commentaries understand the doubling of time for the girl to be acknowledgment that the baby herself is a potential giver of birth and therefore doubly powerful: more time is needed to absorb the meaning. Neither mourners nor birth givers enter the Temple because they will unbalance the community which practices business as usual. The community provides stability and familiarity. Its very nature threatens those who have been brought closest to God by giving birth or those who feel disconnected from life and its source through death. Our liturgy provides a way for us to journey together towards God, yet the service doesn’t include these two extremes.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, when asked what it meant to believe in God, answered, “To have radical amazement.” Prayer, ritual, study and reaching out to each other are the whetstone for awakening radical amazement. Rather than reading this text narrowly as primitive, maybe misogynistic, and irrelevant to our moment, I suggest that it may be the opposite. In a time when women give birth on Monday, go home Tuesday and have a dinner party Thursday, Tazria gives us permission to enter the fluid, deep transcendence that giving birth offers us. A child is born, a woman becomes a joyful mother, and God is never so near. We are invited to withdraw briefly from the chatter and flow of everyday life to shake our heads and exclaim, “God is in this place and I’m staying here for a while!”

Drucker, Malka. "Parshat Tazria: The Unbearable Lightness of Childbirth." (Viewed on March 28, 2014). http://www.malkadrucker.com/birth.html