Torah, Transgender People and Truth

One hates to give a provocateur the negative attention he seeks, but sometimes there’s no help for it.  For example, when said provocateur occupies the space that hosts one’s blog.

Mr. Denis Prager chose to launch a coded attack, based on a false premise, against a colleague for whom I have great respect, Rabbi Becky Silverstein, who has emerged as an important teacher and leader in the Southern California Jewish community, and against Rabbi Silverstein’s congregation. (I can’t bring myself to link to the offending article, but you can find this bit of clickbait easily enough.)

It is certainly true that Rabbi Silverstein identifies with the transgender community and that he is supported and respected by his congregation at the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. Here’s what is not true (a quote from Mr. Prager’s article): “How many non-Orthodox Jews, when deciding what position to take on an issue, say: “Before deciding, I first want to know what the Torah says”? Undoubtedly very few.”

This is slanderous nonsense.  We who are engaged, although not Orthodox, Jews want very much to know and act on what Torah says.  Of course, by Torah, we do not simply mean the written Torah, the five books contained in a Torah scroll. We mean the entirety of our Bible, the Tanakh. We mean the oral Torah, our Talmud, on which our tradition is based– Judaism is a Talmudic, not a Biblical tradition. We mean the centuries of commentary and rulings, from the great medieval philosophers to the scholars of today. We mean the divrei Torah from each of our bnei mitzvah students. We mean the living, breathing tradition of engaging with our texts—the trace of encounters between the human and the Divine—and applying them to the worlds in which we live.

So, coming from a rabbinic tradition, many of us are interested to find out how many gender attributions one finds discussed in the Talmud. Here is a comprehensive list prepared by my brilliant former chavruta Rabbi Elliot Kukla.  The rabbis did acknowledge male and female. They also noted that some people combine what are called male and female characteristics (the androgynous) and some people are what we might call intersexed (the tumtum). They note that some people who are designated female sport some masculinities (the Aylonit.  Thanks with all my heart, HaShem, for those folks especially). And so on.
Our rabbis and sages knew the written Torah by memory better than any of us. They know that the first thing we learn about ourselves in Bereshit/Genesis is that we are created in the image of God and that זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה, בָּרָא אֹתָם (male and female God created it (the human).

(Incidentally, there is no punctuation in a Torah scroll, and the rabbis teach us to read associatively, anti-literally and anti-linearly, to find, in re-punctuation and even re-voweling (changing the tenses and cases of words), new meanings.  Thus, we can read legitimately: “In the image of God, God created it (the human): male and female.”)

The rabbis who founded Judaism knew this text. They also looked at the world. They could see empirically, that “man” and “woman” is an inadequate menu of choices for describing the variety of human beings. in Mishnah Bikkurim, Chapter Four, for example, we find an extended discussion about the androgynous and the tumtum. We learn from Rabbi Yose that the androgynous is a creature unique unto itself—a particular creation of the Holy one—and the tumtum, the intersexed person,  is, for some purposes regarded to be like a man and, for other purposes, regarded to be like a woman.

Why did the rabbis designate people with such categories? Were they naming them to be shunned or condemned? Not at all. Having looked at the real world, at how human beings actually are, they used the brains God gave them. They understood that people combine male and female in different mixtures. They also, as persons of their time and place, lived within and reinscribed, patriarchal social norms. Men had some responsibilities, women had others. Everyone had a place in the community. Therefore, the responsibilities, the place within the community, for the androgynous and the tumtum, had to be defined clearly as well—not to shame them, but to include them. They simply had to be accounted for to insure that they were not left out.

My dear friend and teacher, Rabbi Doctor Rachel Adler, likes to remind me, in the name of Rabbi Doctor Sarra Lev, that these Talmudic designations were based on ancient Greek science and, therefore, are perhaps not adequate for today’s understanding. That may be. After all, the Aristotelian cosmology on which the rabbis base much of their astronomic understanding certainly does not stand. To me, the lesson we can derive from our rabbis’ example is this: They knew Torah and lived by Torah and they also applied the best scientific thinking of their own time to the world as they observed it.

Judaism today is greatly enriched by the participation and leadership of Jews for whom the gender they were assigned at birth is not one that their soul can, uncritically, live with. Such Jews are teaching us all to make Torah, to apply our vital, living tradition to the world in which we live. They are our leaders and our friends, and I am proud to know and learn from them.