My Talk at Presser Shabbat

/ Leiah Moser / 3 Comments

I had an amazing experience this Shabbat speaking at Germantown Jewish Centre for Dorshei Derech’s Stefan Presser Memorial Shabbat.  The outflowing of warmth and support was simply amazing, and it was great to have my first experience talking publicly about this journey in such a safe environment. I really wish I could also post my partner Emily’s amazingly eloquent and heartfelt words, but I can’t because they were completely extemporaneous, which makes them all the more remarkable.

Stories don’t come easily to me. The fact of the matter is that only now, when I’m thirty years old, am I finally starting to learn how to tell stories about myself the way that most people seem to be able to do naturally. I’m used to hiding behind the words I use, holding them up up as a sort of mask, a surface I use to comment on the world while at the same time distancing myself from it. For me, words have been a survival mechanism and a safety blanket, a way to hide the fact of my profound disjointedness, to fill in the holes I feel within myself. These holes are many and various, but as far as I can see, they all seem to be bound up in the impossible conflict between what I need to in order to fulfill my responsibilities toward others and what this strange thing I call myself seems to need in order to survive.

The first gap I have trouble hurdling when I try to explain myself to others is that I did not grow up as a child with a strong sense of gendered identity. I didn’t play sports or go in for roughhousing, but I wasn’t into Barbie dolls, I didn’t play dress-up in my mother’s clothes, and the only princess I wanted to be like was Princess Leia from Star wars. I didn’t distinguish much between my male and female friends. My closest friends were always girls, but I always had more male friends than female, and if the boys sometimes seemed a little weird or I sometimes felt a bit more comfortable and emotionally secure playing with the girls, that didn’t seem so unusual. If it had occurred to anyone to ask me in second grade what I felt like on the inside, I probably would have told them “a robot,” and felt that answer made perfect sense.

In rather simple and obvious terms, what happened next was adolescence and puberty. My family moved from Athens, GA to Geneva, IL when I was in the middle of fourth grade, and suddenly finding myself in a new social environment forced me to wake up to the realities of living in a world where people were either male or female, whether they wanted to be or not. In Athens, I’d been permitted to go about life in my own quirky way, more or less insulated from the world around me by my tendency to get lost in worlds of my own imagination. Suddenly it had become very important to know the right way to act in order to “fit in,” and what I quickly discovered was that I didn’t.

At the same time, my body was starting to change, and that in itself came as something of a horrible shock. I imagine that many adolescents, once they’ve gotten over the initial awkwardness of puberty, learn to accept the changes they are going through with a certain amount of hopefulness as they find themselves maturing into the adults they are in the process of becoming. For me, the growing awareness of my developing body was like waking up to find oneself dressed in an ill-fitting set of clothes it is impossible to take off.

At some point or other in middle school I picked up the knowledge that some people are born intersexed and surgically modified at birth to conform with one gender or the other. For the longest time, I secretly believed that this is what had happened to me, because it was the only way I had of making sense of the overwhelming sense of wrongness my body gave me. I used to spend a great deal of time imagining being suddenly transformed into a girl. I’d walk through strategies in my head for dealing with having to exit the boy’s bathroom without being seen. Somehow in my mind this would always happen while I was in the bathroom at school, probably because of the sheer misery of anxiety public restrooms caused me and continue to cause me to this day.

Eventually the discomfort I felt settled into a kind of routine I thought I could live with. I told myself that the feelings I had around my body were probably completely normal for boys. I was convinced that all people born with male bodies were aware on a subconscious level that nature had played a terrible trick on them, and that this feeling was the real reason for all the sexism and misogyny in the world. I comforted myself that at least I was more aware of this than other “boys” and was therefore better able to control and mitigate the sense of resentment I felt at not being lucky enough to be born female. Sometimes I would console myself that in being “male” I was living up to a heavy but necessary responsibility that had been placed on me, and that perhaps in some future life I would be rewarded by being born a woman.

This was the attitude that got me through high school and college, and to be honest it’s almost scary how easily it translated into my new life when I converted to Judaism. I was not raised to believe in any kind of God, and I’m too avid a historian to believe in “Torah mi Sinai” as a matter of fact, but the language of religious obligation carried and still carries a great deal of resonance for me. The idea of a God who commands certain behaviors, not because they are necessary or even comprehensible from a human standpoint but for His own inscrutable reasons, makes a certain kind of sense when even your experience of your own body is of something unnatural imposed on you from the outside.

That was my life for the longest time: Being what I wasn’t for the sake of those I couldn’t live without. It wasn’t all bad, by any means. I had a partner whom I loved. Eventually I found a new community and a new spiritual language in Judaism–a language and a community that inspired me enough to make me want to go to rabbinical school. But at the same time there was always that dissatisfaction at my center, that sense that unhappiness was an essential part of my life–which made me feel very confused sometimes, because one of the religious obligations which I understand myself to be commanded to observe requires that I take pleasure in my existence and in that of the world my creator has placed me in.

So what changed things? I’d like to say it was some profound spiritual insight, but in fact all it really took was meeting someone–one person–who had felt the same way I did and had been courageous enough to do something about it. I ask myself sometimes how it could be that something as simple as that could have been the catalyst for such a profound change. You can spend your entire life staring up at the sky and dreaming of flying, but so long as it remains completely outside the realm of possibility you can learn to live with the sadness, carry it with you wherever you go, always there but never acknowledged because you know if you mentioned it to your friends they’d simply laugh and assume you were joking. But then one day you see your first airplane and your whole life changes, because somewhere inside of you a tiny piece of that sadness is transmuted into a faint hope that, though you will never have wings, you may nevertheless someday get the chance to fly. And from that day on it will never be enough simply to live with that sadness anymore.

The situation I find myself in after coming out is that of having to constantly negotiate and renegotiate the terms between the tradition I’ve fallen in love with and the self that seems to be constantly threatening to spill over the boundaries within which that tradition operates. It is not so much the violation itself that I fear as the possibility of finding myself in a place where the tradition cannot support me nor I it. In seeking out the lesser-known corners of the Jewish tradition for language that seems to speak to my situation, I’m never entirely sure whether it’s the tradition’s boundaries I’m stretching or my own. And somewhere throughout the process, silently watching from the wings, is the God who made me in this particular way but then left me alone without comment to search for my own answer to what that means.

A recent incident may serve to illustrate what my dilemma looks like in practical terms. I was contacted by a local rabbi who operates a small, independent religious school for children. She wanted to put me in contact with a family that needed a tutor to teach their daughter Hebrew in preparation for her Bat Mitzvah. I sat down with the family and had a great interview. They seemed very happy with what I had to offer and we arranged for a date for the first lesson. This was the first job I’d ever managed to get as myself, and for a little while I felt super confident.

But then about a week after the interview I received a call from the rabbi who’d recommended me for the job. There was an issue–the daughter had asked the parents about the irregularities in my appearance, and whent hey’d talked to the rabbi about it she’d had to confirm that I was a trans-woman still in the process of transition. The mother called, we talked. She was more or less sympathetic to my situation, but felt like she had to balance my right to have my identity respected with her daughter’s desire to have a “female” teacher, someone who had had a “Bat Mitzvah rather than a Bar Mitzvah,” someone “she could look up to as a role model.” In the end, several days later, I received word that they wouldn’t be requiring my services after all.

I make no judgment about the validity of the mother’s concerns. Twelve years old is a delicate age, as I remember all to well. No one, especially not a child, should be forced into a situation that makes them genuinely emotionally uncomfortable. At the same time, this situation illustrates the kind of difficult balancing act I find myself in every day. I wanted to become a rabbi in order to make myself useful to my adopted people, to fill a necessary function and feel like I was one of the folks working to help keep Jewish communities tightly knit and alive to the wisdom of our traditions. In order to fulfill this function it is necessary for me to be truly present for those I live and work with. I don’t have the option of burying myself deep inside and going through life in an emotionally deadened state. But at the same time, being who I truly am is frequently distracting and often actively disruptive in the places where I am needed. It’s a dilemma I haven’t solved yet, and I don’t expect to any time soon.

My experiences being transgender in the Jewish community have been mixed. It has certainly been the case that throughout this process I have been the recipient of more acceptance and earnest goodwill than I ever would have dared to hope. I believe that many people, both here at the GJC and at the RRC, have been able to pick up on how happy I have been to be able to be more myself and have been ready to respect where I am on this journey. This is one place where the “live and let live” attitude of progressive Judaism has been an enormous benefit to me, which is ironic, as I always seem to find myself arguing for a more structured halachic approach.

The other side to this, however, is that while in itself permission to simply be who you are is an enormous gift that I have no intention of taking lightly, it is only part of the equation. Always in my life up to this point, being for others has meant giving up who I was in order to be who they needed me to be. Now, to draw on Rabbi Hillel, I have been slowly, painfully learning how to be for myself. What still eludes me is how to be for others *as* who I am.

In order to get to that place, and in order to be the rabbi I need to be, it is vital to find a place for transgender identities that can live within Judaism, not simply as an exception falling within the range of tolerated difference, but growing out of our texts and traditions in an organic and essential way. For me, and for many transgender Jews like me who are active in the Jewish community, this is a project that we undertake every day out of necessity, but its eventual success depends just as much on the participation of people in communities like this one throughout the Jewish world.

What is it like?

/ Leiah Moser / 1 Comment

One of the purest, most honest, least judgmental questions I’ve been asked about my situation is, “What is it like?” In the short time that I have been more or less public and forthcoming about my gender identity, I have learned to cherish questions like this because of how blessedly free they are of the false assumption of knowledge. It’s hard to ask a question like this, difficult to muster the humility required to simply ask a question without simultaneously guarding ourself from the vulnerability of not-knowing by hedging it round with assumptions and presuppositions.

Questions like this truly represent the doorway into the realm of the ethical, by acknowledging the limits of the self and opening up a little corner of the shared space we call the world for the Other, a little patch of ground we do not lay claim to so that the they might find a home. In asking questions like this of others, we come ever so slightly to imitate God who, though theoretically commanding an unbounded perspective that embraces the universe in its totality without restriction, nevertheless makes space for hir creations by addressing them with the beautifully open-ended איכה–”Ayeka? Where are you?”

Story Time: L’Azazel, Part 1

/ Leiah Moser / Leave a comment

This is kind of a departure for me, but I’ve been working on this for a little while and wanted to post it somewhere for people to see. It’s an experiment in fiction-as-midrash based on the Torah readings for the High Holidays. More than that though, it’s a story about a goat.

You’ll have to excuse the expression, but I’m a goat. If I’ve got a name no-one’s ever told me what it is, but I know who I belong to. It’s branded on my side, seared in letters of pink, puckery scar tissue where the fur will never grow back: ”L’Azazel.” Which is to say, ”for Azazel.” Before all this happened I’d never heard of the lady personally, which isn’t all that surprising–your social circles are pretty limited when you’re a goat. In all my wandering since, I’ve never run into her, but if you do, you let her know she’s got a goat waiting for her if she cares to claim him. Personally I’ve got my doubts.

Hell, we all do. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about humans–and I mean no disrespect by this, some of my best friends are humans–it’s that each and and every one of them is deep-down crazy because they know they belong so someone who will never show up to claim them. You can feed me whatever line of pious bullshit you want, but you know in your heart of hearts that what keeps you up in the middle of the night is the fear that your owner is never gonna show up for you and when it’s all over you’re gonna find yourself stuck out in the wilderness all by yourself like an old lady on a bench, clutching a plastic shopping bag to her chest as the darkness falls around her, waiting for a bus that will never come.

There I go again. I didn’t used to talk like this when I was just your run-of-the-mill, every day, garden variety goat. I didn’t talk at all in fact. Goats don’t, as a rule. Don’t bother asking whether that’s because they can’t or because they just don’t feel the need. I’ve asked myself that question more than once and I don’t know the answer. To tell you the truth it’s getting harder and harder to remember what it was like being just a goat. I never used to think about things so much as I do now, and a lot has happened since then.

Back in those days I didn’t belong to anybody like I do now. For certain, some schmuck probably considered me his property–it’s hard to be a goat in this world without somebody laying claim to your furry behind. But the thing is, I never really knew anybody owned me, so as far as I was concerned, I was a self-made goat. We lived in the same house as the family of humans who cared for us, and ate much the same food, so we were more inclined to regard them as equals and family members than as owners and masters. We lived our lives and, in their own inscrutable way, they led theirs.

I lived in a herd with all my brothers and sisters. We spent most of our days wandering the pasture land looking for what to eat. When the sun was high up and the air got hot enough to rise in shimmering waves from the dry, dusty ground we would laze about in the shade of a terebinth or in the cleft of a rock. There were the humans too who spent their days with us–girls with dusky skin and long black hair who would go out with us at dawn and come back with us at night. Sometimes when we were resting in the afternoon one of them would lift her voice up in song, and it seemed like the whole world would go quiet, listening.

It wasn’t a bad life for a goat, and none of us knew anything else. In due time I probably would have been quietly slaughtered and ended up as some family’s festival meal, and that would have been the end of me–an unassuming end for an unassuming goat. But God, that old trickster, had another road laid out for me, a road that stretched all the way from the top of the mountain where the great temple stands down into the trackless wastes inhabited by no one but outlaws, dreamers and men of God, a road with no map but a name seared into my flank: L’Azazel.

And here is how it all began:

One morning as the summer was drawing to a close my siblings and I were following the girls who watched over us down the narrow, winding path that led from little village on the hill down to the pasture land in the valley below. The sun was just beginning to crest over the hill when I looked up and there, standing in the village square waiting for us was a small group of men. Some of them I recognized from the village, from the house where we slept at night, in fact. There were others there too, though–men like I’d never seen before, tall and well-fed with sleek, luxuriantly oiled beards that cascaded down over their chests. They were dressed in long robes, and as we came up the path they seemed to be talking with the men from the village, scrawny and undernourished in comparison, who carried themselves with an air of anxious deference. At least I think I thought that–it’s really hard to say at this point what I was really capable of understanding at the time, and what I only recollected afterwards, when my mind had started to work in ways no ordinary goat’s could.

Rather than turn aside down the hill as we ordinarily would, the girls led us up to the little clump of men and brought us to a halt. We milled around in the early morning light, as nervous as our human owners, unsure what the reason was for this unwarranted delay in the daily routine. The servants walked among us at the direction of the tall men, examining my brothers one by one, opening the mouth of this one to get a better look at his teeth, prodding the flank of that one, carefully scrutinizing the belly of another. In the end, they singled me out along with one of my brothers and brought us before the great men, who nodded with approval. We had been found acceptable, though for what we couldn’t say. Instead we bleated sadly as we were driven away down the hill by the tall mens’ servants, separated from the herd and from everything we had known in our short lives.

Great sages have debated for centuries about the true significance of the temple sacrifices. I’ve had the opportunity to speak to a number of them, because great sages have a way of pissing off powerful men and being banished to live or die in the wilderness as their wisdom allows. Some have held that the sacrifice is nothing more or less than the food of God, and that as its flesh is consumed in flame it rises up in smoke as a pleasing odor before the Lord. Others have suggested that the very innocence of the animals offered up allows their sacrifice to serve as a meeting point between man and the divine, and that this is why predatory or unclean animals are never offered up. Still others assert that the animal itself is virtually irrelevant, but what really counts is its blood which, as the most potent and concentrated form of life, is necessary to cleanse the sanctuary of the taint of death generated by the sins of the people. In any case, if one thing is certain it’s that no one ever thought to consult the animals in question. Our willingness to be sacrificed, or at least our powerlessness to resist, is taken as a given.

My brother and I knew nothing of these things as we were loaded into a cart and set out on the long journey up to Jerusalem. Idly we munched on our fodder and watched the landscape slowly rumble past, completely ignorant of our fate or of the weighty significance that was to be placed, for a short time, between the horns of two simple goats. The road was hot and dusty and the wagon wheels creaked incessantly as we trundled along. The priests rode along in silence, mostly, maybe preoccupied with thoughts of sins to be atoned for in the solemn days ahead, maybe just tired of the journey and daydreaming of the comforts of home. The temple functionaries who accompanied them talked among themselves, occasionally breaking into snatches of song. First one would start and then others would join in, their voices harmonizing with the ease of long practice, sending the cliffs ringing all around us as the psalm rose heavenward.

The road wound steadily upward though the rocky hills of Judea. Occasionally we would pass a herd of goats grazing on the hillsides and my brother and I would lift up our voices in our own imitation of the Levites’ song, calling out to the strangers. Every so often one of them would raise their head and bleat in response, but for the most part they carried on grazing, unconcerned with what happened to a couple of goats from a different herd. At last, after hours of travelling without any change to break the monotony, we came around a bend and there looking down on us was the city, its walls shining golden in the rays of the setting sun.

A Letter to Colin

/ Leiah Moser / 5 Comments

Just a bit of teshuvah from the Yamim Noraim:

Dear Colin,

You know better than anyone how angry and resentful I get whenever anyone tries to suggest that we’re two different people. Imagine my surprise when, in this season of reflection and repairing personal relationships I found that the one person I really needed to talk with was you. To be honest, the real reason I get so angry when people talk about you as a different person is that I’m afraid what they’re saying is that they love you and they hate me because I’m the reason you’re going away. I feel bad that the people who love you are going to miss you, but I can’t help but feel resentful too. After all, I’ve been here all this time, watching them lavish this love and affection on you without even being aware I exist. It hasn’t been easy.

I know none of this is your fault. You didn’t ask to be the one born on the outside, any more than I asked to be the one born on the inside. It was hard work, but you put on a brave face and did what you thought you had to do, even if you didn’t always know why. What those people who are angry with me don’t realize is that without me, you’d never have been with them for as long as you were. They didn’t know, and couldn’t understand, what a terrible, frightening place the world was for you. They didn’t realize that all the love and attention in the world wasn’t enough to fill the big, empty space inside you that seemed to be getting bigger every day, no matter what you did. They weren’t there all those times when the only thing holding you back from throwing yourself over the edge was me and my stubborn determination to be born.

I know it hurt sometimes to have to go on living just because you happened to have been born with me inside you, but I hope it wasn’t all bad. I hope that because of me you may have experienced a little of the joy and excitement about life that was so difficult for you to feel. I hope you’ll be happier being a part of me than I was being a part of you.

Most of all I hope we can let bygones be bygones. I know things haven’t always been so great between us. There have been times when you’ve tried to get rid of me. Please believe me when I tell you than I don’t resent you for it. That said, now that things are changing we need to settle our differences and move on. As difficult as it may be for both of us to accept it, neither of us can live without the other, and I’m not sure about you, but *I want to live*.

Please try not to worry too much about the people who loved you. I realize that for much of your life the only thing that kept you going was your concern about how they would feel if you were gone. Those are admirable feelings, and they really do reflect the best of what you had to give. But I promise–I love them too, just as much as you did. After all, wasn’t I there all along, helping you take care of them when you didn’t know what to do? I know they’ll miss you, but in time they’ll come to understand why you had to step aside to let me out into the light. Some of them may even learn to be proud of you for the courage it took to do something like that. In the end, I hope there will be a time when they will recognize the best of what you were in me. I know I’ll try my best to make that so.

In conclusion, my strange conjoined brother, I want you to know that whatever your failings, I forgive you for them. How could I do otherwise? They are mine too. But more than that, I want you to know I love you. There have been times I wouldn’t have been able to say that, but now, this year, on Yom Kippur, I find that I can, and I give my thanks to God for that gift. I wish you all the peace that was never yours.

Sincerely,

Leiah

A Proper Name

/ Leiah Moser / Leave a comment

Nouns are interesting. Grammar tells us there are essentially two different kinds of noun. A common noun refers to a class of things, such that multiple distinct things can share the same noun without contradiction. A proper noun, on the other hand, has a single, unique referent–the same name can’t refer to more than one person. One strange effect of this is that even if two people seem to share the same, in a certain sense their names are not the same, even though they sound and appear identical. When I’m talking about Emily, my partner, it is clear that I cannot simultaneously be talking about Emily, my good friend. By saying “Emily,” I have to be talking about one or the other–or about some different Emily altogether. I cannot use “Emily” to refer indeterminately to any of the people I know who share that name.

I have an idea that if God can be said to use language at all, then for God all nouns must be proper nouns, because a being with complete knowledge of every individual part of creation would have no need to group individual things into categories. Each thing would be known intimately and distinctly, as just what it is.

Deciding on a name for yourself is one of the most significant experiences a person can have. What adds to the solemnity of the process is the realization that you are making a decision about yourself that most people never get to make. Nearly all of us go through their lives with the names given to them by parents. If their name changes at all, it is usually through an external process that doesn’t really have much to do with them. Many women still take their husbands’ last names when they marry, but it wasn’t so long ago that in formal situations at least the effects of marriage on a woman’s name were even more extreme. Recently I saw a document in a museum addressed something like “to Mrs. Robert Smith, Sr.” Reading that made me sad. Here was a person who had her own, personal name so completely buried beneath her relationships with the men in her life that all that was left was the “Mrs.”

In contrast, it has been my privilege to choose a new name for myself not once in my life, but twice–an embarrassment of riches to be sure. The first time was when I converted to Judaism and had to choose a Hebrew name. I never really went by that name except when I was being called to the Torah, but I do remember thinking long and hard before deciding. It was one of the hardest choices involved in my conversion. Nevertheless, I was always haunted by the sense that I had somehow missed an opportunity in choosing my Hebrew name, that I had been tested and in some way too subtle to articulate had failed.

The decision to begin transitioning felt like a chance to make up for a missed opportunity–for many missed opportunities, to be honest. The one thing I was determined on was that the name I chose would be mine, personal and proper, in Hebrew and English. In the end I settled on Leiah, and there is a kind of rightness in that decision that makes me feel confident, that crystallizes my sense of myself in a way that all good names should.

The decision process behind “Leiah” is as murky as my own idiosyncratic spelling of the name apparently is to many people. For the record, my name is pronounced “Lay-uh,” just like the two literary women it’s based on.

I’m going to get the embarrassing part of this out of the way first and admit that one of the sources of my name is in fact Princess Leia, the character from Star Wars. It has never been a well-hidden secret that I am a complete geek, and I’ll own up to that. In my defense, Leia was one of my feminine role models growing up. Strong, confident, much more intelligent and self-possessed than any of the men around her, she was everything I would have liked to be. When I was growing up there were precious few depictions of strong, capable female characters in media targeted at kids, and Leia stands out to me for that reason.

The other source of my name, of course, is the biblical matriarch, Leah (which in English I have trouble not reading as “Lee-uh,” but I digress). I’ve always felt that of all the women of Genesis, Leah really doesn’t get the kind of respect she deserves. Married to Jacob solely because of a deception carried out by her father, who didn’t want to see the younger sister married before the elder, Leah is the epitome of what the bible calls “the unloved wife.” The names she gives her children speak to the deep yearning she felt for the love and recognition of her husband, who despite the broad and rather public hints never seems to have been able or willing to see her as anything other than an afterthought. The historical irony is that despite our tendency to forget about her in favor of her more charismatic sister, she, not Rachel, is theoretically the mother of the Jewish people, as after the conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel, the two remaining tribes–Judah and Levi–were both descendents of Leah.

Of course, neither of these names–Leia or Leah–is mine. For all that it sounds the same, my own name is different, singular as all proper nouns are, something uniquely mine. This, and the fact that it is something I have chosen for myself, make it precious to me. It’s a good name, and I have the feeling that as long as I treat it well, it will do the same for me.

Shmoneh Esrei Part 1: Avot v’Imahot

/ Leiah Moser / 2 Comments

Welcome to part 1 of my current pet project for the remainder of the summer, which is to go through each of 19 blessings of the Shmoneh Esrei and explore what kind of interesting things they have to tell us about the God they are directed toward. One of the neat aspects of the civilizational approach (see my previous posts on Reconstructionism) is that it throws into sharp relief one of the fundamental aspects of Judaism: that rather than upholding a single, coherent theology Judaism embraces an eclectic array of theological perspectives (often differing in emphasis, occasionally mutually exclusive), drawn from across the vast expanse of Jewish history. While from a certain point of view this can make it difficult to identify what, if anything, Judaism has to teach us about God, from another perspective it gives us an incredibly flexible toolkit for encountering a reality which by definition exceeds the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. Any truly Jewish attempt to understand the divine must begin with the humble admission of our inability to fully grasp the infinite.

With that in mind, let’s begin with the Avot v’Imahot. What’s really interesting about this blessing, and what makes it particularly appropriate that it should come first, is how it is at the same time so old and so new. Of all the alterations made to the Amidah in liberal siddurim, the most universally accepted is the addition of the names of the matriarchs–Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah–to the traditional patriarchal list of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This fairly simple addition is indicative of one of the most significant shifts in the Jewish community to occur in modern times: the slow, painful and hard-fought struggle of women to claim recognition as full members of the Jewish people, on an equal footing with men and with an equal stake in the ongoing evolution of our religious civilization. This struggle has made itself felt in all aspects of Jewish life, from the question of who can serve as leaders in communal organizations to differing resources and expectations in the religious education of children. As Judith Plaskow points out in Standing Again At Sinai, one of the areas which it has been necessary for women to reclaim for themselve has been that of history, which in the Jewish world as in most other societies has been up to recently almost exclusively a male-dominated discourse reflecting male concerns, in which women enter only peripherally as the objects of male desire, anxiety and control.

The Avot v’Imahot exemplifies this assertion by Jewish women of the right not to be erased from the historical narrative of their people by inscribing the matriarchs alongside the patriarchs in this traditional affirmation of the relationship between God and Israel. I’m some respects, the Avot may represent one of the earliest strata of Jewish theology, reflecting as it does a basically tribal world view in which God may indeed be the transcendent creator of worlds, adon olamim, but the significance of this idea is nevertheless eclipsed by the more local concern of the individual relationship between a particular god and that god’s particular people.

Rather than beginning with the more standard formula which emphasizes both God’s status as our god (eloheinu) and as “king of the world” (melech ha’olam), the Avot begins more simply by blessing God as “our god, and the god of our fathers (and mothers).” This perspective, also in evidence in different places throughout the Tanakh, is less concerned with the idea with God’s universal sovereignty than it is with the notion of God as elohei Yisrael, the God of Israel, whom we can rely upon for blessing and support on account of the covenant struck between that god and our ancestors. The omission in this context of the names of the matriarchs has always been significant because it reflected the patriarchal understanding of that covenant that saw it as a relationship between God and the privileged society of Jewish males, with women playing only a peripheral role if that.

It is this understanding of covenant which made it possible throughout much of Jewish history to regard the all-important realms of religious ritual and Torah study as the sole prerogative and responsibility of men, with the self-reinforcing result that men have historically had sole access to the language and symbolic vocabulary for describing God. By establishing a place for the matriarchs alongside the patriarchs in this ritual affirmation of covenental continuity, Jewish women have asserted their right to have a voice in the ongoing evolution of our collective understanding of that covenant.

The basic theological truth contained in this blessing therefore is that all our understanding of God ultimately arises out of our own experience, that before we can say anything else about God we must first understand hir as our God. Even this intensely personal experience, however, does not arise in a vaccum. We come into ourselves through the medium of a family and a community into which we are born, and we are shaped by the historical experiences of our people just as surely as we are influenced by our own experiences. Thus, before looking at the role God has played in our own lives we must first acknowledge the role God has played in the lives of those who have come before us, and in the life of the community of which we are a part, understood in the broadest possible sense.

New Series: the Shmoneh Esrei

/ Leiah Moser / Leave a comment

So I’ve got this thing about language and the truth–I like them to correspond. One of the most frustrating experiences of my life was when I was in second grade and they made us take this standardized test. One of the questions had three pictures–a dog, a boy and a potato–and asked you which one had eyes but couldn’t see. Of course, you probably know the answer they wanted me to give, but I had not yet been initiated into the more bizarre and illogical quirks of the English language, so I spent several long and frustrating minutes wrestling with the problem before declaring, under protest, that the dog must be blind. I’m pretty sure that when I eventually found out that potatoes have “eyes” it just made me more angry, not less.

Which is all to say that I get very emotionally invested in words and how they’re used. That’s why I think that one of the best ways to understand what we believe about God is to pay close attention to what we say about hir. Of all the Jewish texts, I think the siddur is really the most fascinating to study because of the way it assembles bits and pieces of the tradition from all over the place into a collection of things we say about God collectively, on a regular basis, over and over and over again.

I want to focus on the Shmoneh Esrei (so named because it had eighteen blessings before they added a nineteenth) because it exemplifies some basic themes you find throughout the siddur. First, what it has to say about God is very functional. The Amidah isn’t concerned with speculating about what kind of a thing God is, so much as focusing on the things God does. This is either very pragmatic, or deeply insightful, or both if you like. Reading what the Shmoneh Esrei has to say about God makes me think of the theology of the Rambam (Moses Maimonides), who claimed that we can’t really say or know anything about God because our concepts are all formulated to handle the finite things we encounter in this world and aren’t built to handle the infinite and transcendent. The only things we can really know about God are A.) What God is not and B.) What God does.

I thought it would be interesting then to go through the Shmoneh Esrei blessing by blessing and think about what each one is saying about God and our relationship to hir. This isn’t necessarily to say that you have to believe everything (or anything) the Amidah has to say about God in order to find meaning in reciting it each day. But if you, like me, happen to think of God as a transcendent and incomprehensible reality that nevertheless has an effect on our lives that can only be described in the language of relationship and concern, then this exercize might be an interesting model for thinking about what that means for you.

The miraculous and the absurd

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I’m going to be grasping at straws for a little while tonight, because what I really want to talk about is something that lies so close to the core of me that it exists on a level that’s too fine for me to grasp. It’s like talking about what happens on the quantum level, where simply to observe an event is to change it, so that we are forever frustrated in our search for understanding. What I really want to talk about, though, are two ways of looking at the world, which for lack of better words to describe them I’m going to call the miraculous and the absurd.
I’m not going to be all modernist and claim that these are the only two possible ways of looking at the world, because that would be silly. I do however feel strongly that when it comes to me personally, they are the only options available. For me, if not for the rest of humanity, the world is either miraculous or it is absurd. There is no third choice.
What these two points of view share in common is that they both acknowledge that the world in which I find myself is much bigger, stranger and more complex than I am capable of understanding (I’m tempted to say, bigger than a human mind is capable of understanding, but I don’t want to get hung up on trying to make my experience valid for everybody–you can tell, right?). This doesn’t mean I’m skeptical about human knowledge, per se. I’m a strong believer in science as a set of tools for discovering more about our universe and how it works. What it does mean is that I’m skeptical that we will ever run out of things to discover. Even if we somehow were able to bring our picture of the world completely up to date, to completely define the world as it exists at this very moment, I think it’s quite likely that something completely new and unprecedented would pop up in short order to throw the whole thing into confusion once more. In other words, I have a deep and abiding faith in the universe’s ability to surprise us.
The way I see it, there are basically two ways to respond to a universe with an infinite capacity to confuse and astound us. One is to react with a deep sense of fear and anxiety at the uncertainty and instability of life, an anxiety that can ultimately only be held at bay by adopting a stoic fatalism, the iron-willed determination not to rely too much on anything or anyone. This is the perspective I call the absurd. The other possibility is to respond with wonder and amazement, to reach out to embrace the world in all its strangeness, to open onself to the sense of possibility and transformation inherent in a world in which the most amazing things are happening all the time. This is what I call a sense of the miraculous.
The thing is, these perspectives aren’t in disagreement over the facts. They basically agree in their picture of what the world looks like. The difference lies in how they choose to emotionally respond to those facts. There’s a story told of Rabbi Bunim of P’shiskha that he used to say that everyone should carry around two pieces of paper with them, once in each pocket. On one is written “I am dust and ashes.” On the other, “The world was made for me.” The trick is knowing when to look at one pice of paper and when to look at the other. For me at least, the journey of life has been all about learning how to leave the “dust and ashes” paper in its pocket and reach for the “world was made for me” paper more often. When I confuse my friends by telling them I believe in a personal and transcendent God, this is more or less the practical, emotional content of that belief–that the sheer craziness of life is evidence, not of our separation and alienation from the incomprehensible “everything,” but of our deep connection and kinship with it, and that by making ourselves open to that connection, by turning aside when we see that bush burning in the wilderness, we can become active partners in the divine becoming that’s happening all around us.

Ten reasons why being trans is like being a ger tzedek

/ Leiah Moser / 9 Comments

Why being trans is an awful lot like being a convert to Judaism:

  1. “I feel like this is what I’ve always been, even if I’ve only discovered it now.” Many people who convert to Judaism do so out of a sense that they were born with a Jewish soul and that only now are they finally coming home. Being trans is also all about that uncomfortable separation between your truest soul and the outward circumstances of your birth.
  2. Enculturation: Needing to work your butt off to pick up the incredibly basic social and cultural cues of your new peer group, things that seem to “come naturally” to most because of how thoroughly they’ve been socialized from an early age. That nagging sense of regret for your “lost” childhood. Feeling secretly jealous of people who were “born that way” because of how easy they make it look.
  3. It’s really impolite to ask: Once someone has gone through the conversion process, they are considered totally Jewish in all respects and it is a mitzvah not to refer to their “convert” status unless they bring it up for some reason. It should really be the same way with trans folk.
  4. Body modification as a way of bringing your outward form into harmony with your identity: Brit Milah, ’nuff said.
  5. Your parents’ utter shock and disbelief when you come out to them.
  6. The difficulty of getting people who’ve known you a long time to recognize and accept your new identity: Whether it’s going by a different set of pronouns or getting it through peoples’ heads that you just don’t celebrate Christmas or eat pork chops any more, it’s always an uphill struggle.
  7. The weird looks you get from your friends when you take such unabashed delight in things they tend to see as a hassle. “I just don’t understand why anyone would enjoy shaving their legs!” “What do you mean you had fun kashering your kitchen!?”
  8. Designated Ambassador Status. As a convert to Judaism, chances are you’re the only Jew your old friends or family know, and it is therefore your job to speak for all Jews, everywhere. As a trans person, chances are you’re the only trans person your old friends or family know, and it is therefore your job to speak for all trans folk, everywhere. Oi.
  9. The lack of comprehension from a lot of people who assumed the only way to have an identity is to have it assigned to you at birth. “I didn’t even know it was possible to convert to Judaism, I thought you had to be born into it!”
  10. The immense and indescribable sense of relief you feel when you realize you are finally home and at peace with yourself.

What if the Shema were written by Doctor Seuss?

/ Leiah Moser / 3 Comments

And you shall love the Lord your God
With all the heart inside you
With every breath that you may breathe
And all you have beside you.
Take these words I teach you now
And keep them close to heart
Teach them intently to your kids
That they may grow up smart
Talk about them with your friends
When you sit at home
And speak them proudly on the road
Wherever you may roam
Lie down with them, so that you may
Wake with them on your lips
Bind them fast upon your hand
And ‘tween your eyes affix
These words that they may be a sign
To you for evermore–
Inscribe these words upon your gates
And write them on your doors!