Post by Rabbi Neil on Jun 14, 2024 19:21:27 GMT
In our Tikkun Leil Shavuot on Tuesday, one of the topics that we addressed was whether or not Judaism, which traditionally has been heavily defined around a binary gendered social construct, can exist in a non-binary gendered construct. To clarify, sex is the biological or physiological characteristic of males and females, such as reproductive organs, chromosomes and hormones. Gender, on the other hand, is the socially constructed characteristics of men and women, such as social norms, roles and relationships. Gender is malleable and changes between societies. We know this simply by looking around the world. Our Western society uses two genders, because it’s based on Biblical ethics, while multiple societies around the world have more than two genders. For example, in American Samoa, there is a third gender of individuals who are male at birth but who explicitly embody both masculine and feminine gender traits. Among the sakalavas of Madagaskar, little boys thought to have a feminine appearance are raised as girls with long hair in decorative knots, pierced ears and arms, wrists and ankles adorned with many bracelets. In the indigenous Zapotec culture of Oaxaca, there’s a commonly third accepted category of gender known as muxes where some men live as women while others identify as more than one gender. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, the hijras are an officially recognized third gender who are neither completely male nor female. Among Native American tribes at the time of early European contact, there were well over 100 instances of diverse gender expression.
Torah saw things differently. In Torah’s theology, the human realm had to be differentiated into polar opposites – light and dark, kosher and unkosher, holy and profane, man and woman and the boundaries between them were seen to be Divinely ordained, universal truths from the moment of Creation when mixture and chaos was ordered by God to form our world. On the other hand, the Divine realm was seen to be one of mixture, where God had a plural name – Elohim – and where those who approached that realm could mix in ways that others could not, the most obvious example of which is that the priests could wear clothes of mixed fibers while the rest of the people could not. For the general populace, disorder meant impurity, while for the priests it was an avenue to the world of the limitless God.
The literature of the early Rabbis similarly tried to impose order on the world by placing all items within set categories, predominantly bipolar boundaries as inherited from the Torah. In a time when Rabbinic Judaism was clearly under pressure from external influences, the Rabbis considered the preservation of the very system of thought to be dependent on maintaining strong boundaries. As such, bipolar boundaries, particularly those located in body difference, became another tool protecting the Rabbis from loss of individual and social identity. The polar model of gender – either male or female – became not just a way to protect Judaism from assimilation, but also became a way of maintaining social order, particularly with men in positions of power and women not.
That differentiation in power could not be clearer than in the ritual of the Sotah, which comes from this week’s Torah portion. The Sotah is the woman who is suspected of adultery. There’s no evidence of adultery, it’s just that her husband suspects her. He brings her to the priest who, publicly, takes some holy water, puts it in a jar with some dirt from the floor, loosens her hair and forces her to drink. If she is guilty, bad things happen and if she is innocent, good things happen. The power differential from the gender boundary is clear – she is publicly humiliated and, importantly, the priest has social permission to put his hands on her and let her hair down in public, thereby embarrassing her. In Torah, men can be found guilty of adultery – in fact, Leviticus 20:10 is very clear that if a man commits adultery with another man’s wife, both the man and woman are put to death. But there is no corresponding ritual to the Sotah if a woman suspects her husband of committing adultery. Of course there isn’t, because the polar gender system was created for men by men. To prove the point, the Rabbis in the Mishnah took the violence of the Sotah ritual even further, saying that the priest rips her clothing until it exposes her chest before letting down her hair, although they add that if either her chest or her hair were attractive, he would not reveal them (Mishnah Sotah 1:5). Even the ritual that publicly humiliates women needs to be adapted to the needs of men, because if they found her attractive as she was publicly humiliated, they might be tempted to later commit adultery with her! The binary gender system is one that is derived from theology and which reinforces pre-existing unbalanced power structures.
This is one reason why it’s so important for us to recognize that gender is not be as simplistic as the Torah and Rabbis need it to be. The Rabbis were aware of individuals who challenged their binary gender system but could not accept that the system was wrong, so they instead tried to fit those whom they considered to be deviant to the system back into the system. But we don’t have to do that - we can instead develop the system. We can acknowledge the huge number of individuals around the world, including those in our community, who identify neither as male nor female. We can change our language, our prayers, our buildings, and can do so in a way that is authentically Jewish because Judaism has always adapted to its time. Judaism was, after all, once a cult of priests and animal sacrifice, and is now an egalitarian religion of prayer.
You may wonder, who are we to make the change? We are the outliers in the desert, we’re the people who can be creative with ritual… who need to be creative in ritual, to inspire others to change. We’re the community that can also affirm the practices of other communities, such as giving a choice of bar mitzvah for boys, bat mitzvah for girls and bet mitzvah for those who identify as neither. We’re the community that can stop more generations of Jews from feeling disqualified or like second-class citizens because of their gender because that’s what we’ve been trying to do for decades within the binary gender paradigm and now need to do outside it as well. We’re the community that knows of the mental harm that can often lead to physical self-harm that can come from forcing people into convenient theological or power-structure boxes where they don’t belong, and we’re the community that will do everything we can to stop that self-harm from happening. We’re the community that continues the tradition of reforming Judaism while keeping it strongly connected to our heritage without being beholden to it. We’re the people who when others say, “But that’s not Judaism,” are able to reply with pride, “Yes, it is, actually, because we’re doing it.” We’re the community that is intelligent enough, wise enough, sensitive enough, to create a community that celebrates those who understand gender is a binary construct at the same time as those who do not. And if we are not yet that community, we very quickly need to be.
So, may God help us to be that compassionate, wise, intelligent, authentically Jewish community that thinks outside of the previously assumed paradigms so that we can reform Judaism with pride, with love, and with the blessing of our tradition. May such be God’s will, and let us say, Amen.
Torah saw things differently. In Torah’s theology, the human realm had to be differentiated into polar opposites – light and dark, kosher and unkosher, holy and profane, man and woman and the boundaries between them were seen to be Divinely ordained, universal truths from the moment of Creation when mixture and chaos was ordered by God to form our world. On the other hand, the Divine realm was seen to be one of mixture, where God had a plural name – Elohim – and where those who approached that realm could mix in ways that others could not, the most obvious example of which is that the priests could wear clothes of mixed fibers while the rest of the people could not. For the general populace, disorder meant impurity, while for the priests it was an avenue to the world of the limitless God.
The literature of the early Rabbis similarly tried to impose order on the world by placing all items within set categories, predominantly bipolar boundaries as inherited from the Torah. In a time when Rabbinic Judaism was clearly under pressure from external influences, the Rabbis considered the preservation of the very system of thought to be dependent on maintaining strong boundaries. As such, bipolar boundaries, particularly those located in body difference, became another tool protecting the Rabbis from loss of individual and social identity. The polar model of gender – either male or female – became not just a way to protect Judaism from assimilation, but also became a way of maintaining social order, particularly with men in positions of power and women not.
That differentiation in power could not be clearer than in the ritual of the Sotah, which comes from this week’s Torah portion. The Sotah is the woman who is suspected of adultery. There’s no evidence of adultery, it’s just that her husband suspects her. He brings her to the priest who, publicly, takes some holy water, puts it in a jar with some dirt from the floor, loosens her hair and forces her to drink. If she is guilty, bad things happen and if she is innocent, good things happen. The power differential from the gender boundary is clear – she is publicly humiliated and, importantly, the priest has social permission to put his hands on her and let her hair down in public, thereby embarrassing her. In Torah, men can be found guilty of adultery – in fact, Leviticus 20:10 is very clear that if a man commits adultery with another man’s wife, both the man and woman are put to death. But there is no corresponding ritual to the Sotah if a woman suspects her husband of committing adultery. Of course there isn’t, because the polar gender system was created for men by men. To prove the point, the Rabbis in the Mishnah took the violence of the Sotah ritual even further, saying that the priest rips her clothing until it exposes her chest before letting down her hair, although they add that if either her chest or her hair were attractive, he would not reveal them (Mishnah Sotah 1:5). Even the ritual that publicly humiliates women needs to be adapted to the needs of men, because if they found her attractive as she was publicly humiliated, they might be tempted to later commit adultery with her! The binary gender system is one that is derived from theology and which reinforces pre-existing unbalanced power structures.
This is one reason why it’s so important for us to recognize that gender is not be as simplistic as the Torah and Rabbis need it to be. The Rabbis were aware of individuals who challenged their binary gender system but could not accept that the system was wrong, so they instead tried to fit those whom they considered to be deviant to the system back into the system. But we don’t have to do that - we can instead develop the system. We can acknowledge the huge number of individuals around the world, including those in our community, who identify neither as male nor female. We can change our language, our prayers, our buildings, and can do so in a way that is authentically Jewish because Judaism has always adapted to its time. Judaism was, after all, once a cult of priests and animal sacrifice, and is now an egalitarian religion of prayer.
You may wonder, who are we to make the change? We are the outliers in the desert, we’re the people who can be creative with ritual… who need to be creative in ritual, to inspire others to change. We’re the community that can also affirm the practices of other communities, such as giving a choice of bar mitzvah for boys, bat mitzvah for girls and bet mitzvah for those who identify as neither. We’re the community that can stop more generations of Jews from feeling disqualified or like second-class citizens because of their gender because that’s what we’ve been trying to do for decades within the binary gender paradigm and now need to do outside it as well. We’re the community that knows of the mental harm that can often lead to physical self-harm that can come from forcing people into convenient theological or power-structure boxes where they don’t belong, and we’re the community that will do everything we can to stop that self-harm from happening. We’re the community that continues the tradition of reforming Judaism while keeping it strongly connected to our heritage without being beholden to it. We’re the people who when others say, “But that’s not Judaism,” are able to reply with pride, “Yes, it is, actually, because we’re doing it.” We’re the community that is intelligent enough, wise enough, sensitive enough, to create a community that celebrates those who understand gender is a binary construct at the same time as those who do not. And if we are not yet that community, we very quickly need to be.
So, may God help us to be that compassionate, wise, intelligent, authentically Jewish community that thinks outside of the previously assumed paradigms so that we can reform Judaism with pride, with love, and with the blessing of our tradition. May such be God’s will, and let us say, Amen.
