identity

Being A Woman

/ Leiah Moser / 3 Comments

For me – and, I imagine, a lot of other trans women out there – the recent flurry of media attention around the appearance of Caitlyn Jenner in Vanity Fair has given rise to a whole complicated array of feelings, not the least of which may be longing for a time when everybody will finally stop talking about Caitlyn Jenner.

Partially, this is due to the way in which the discussion of Jenner’s transition in the media serves as a constant reminder of the painful dilemma which every trans woman with the audacity to want to live and be recognized as the gender she feels herself to be faces every day of her life: If she doesn’t “pass” – which is to say, essentially, if she doesn’t manage to live up to this society’s incredibly narrow and unforgiving standards of female attractiveness and feminine behavior enough to fly under the radar of those who would evaluate and pass judgment upon her femininity – then she is in constant danger of rejection, public scorn and even physical violence every time she walks out her front door. On the other hand, if she dresses or behaves in a way that comes across as too “stereotypically feminine,” or if she appears to take pleasure in any aspect of looking, acting or dressing in a feminine manner, then she opens herself to rejection and ridicule of another kind, this often coming from self-described feminists who, frankly, ought to know better.

If this dilemma sounds awfully familiar to cisgender women who at some point in their lives have had to deal with similar issues around body image and the toxic double standards of a society in which it is often just as unacceptable for women to be “too feminine” as it is for them to be “not feminine enough,” then it ought to give one pause, given that one of the many accusations which trans women find ourselves saddled with on a regular basis is precisely that we will never “count” as “real women” because we lack the “experiences” and “socialization” which constitute authentic female identity. Leaving aside the sheer blindness to cultural, racial, medical, economic and class differences inherent in the claim that that there is one unifying set of experiences which unambiguously establish one’s status as a woman, it is a source of constant amazement to me how comfortable certain people feel in making claims about the lived experience of others – especially when these claims are leveled for the purpose of invalidating the identities of an already marginalized group of people.

Frankly, I am tired of the debate about how to define womanhood – the standards in this debate are simply too prone to shift at a moment’s notice in any way necessary to support the preconceived notions of those for whom the invalidity of my identity is a foregone conclusion. Is it any wonder that trans people, faced with the constant, overwhelming pressure to justify themselves to a world which isn’t willing to accept them on any account, sometimes have recourse to simplistic explanations involving the brain or the notion of having been “born in the wrong body?”

The simple truth of the matter is that gender identity is an incredibly complicated phenomenon whose origins and nature have never been satisfactorily explained. Is gender physical? Neuro-chemical? Psychological? Cultural? Legal? Does it have its origins in our anatomy or our life experiences or in some mysterious realm of the spirit? If we are being truly honest with ourselves, the answer to all of these questions is an unqualified “maybe.” We simply don’t have the language to deal with something as complicated as identity with any degree of comprehensiveness. About the only concept that truly does it justice to gender identity is one which has sadly fallen out of favor in our hyper-materialist, over-medicalized society: the soul. It used to be that “a soul” was synonymous with “a person,” and the nature of a person’s soul was a deep, inner mystery shared between that person and the divine source from which it flowed. To presume to know another person’s soul required an incredible amount of time, patience and intimate closeness. In our efforts to reduce everything in the world to that which it is possible to analyze and critique in the space of an online journal article, I can’t help but feel that we’ve lost something along the way, something that would be tremendously useful in understanding gender.

In the absence of a clear understanding of everything that goes into making us who we are, all that I and people like me can do in the face of an unsympathetic world is to assert our experience – not some abstract, essentialist version of a unifying “male” or “female” experience, but the messy, concrete, lived experience of real people who know who we are, even if we can’t always show you the math of that equation in a way that would make sense to anyone but ourselves. And really, isn’t this inability to fully articulate the mystery of ourselves just another example of an experience with which all of us, no matter what our identity, can identify?

Stoning the outsider

/ Leiah Moser / Leave a comment

It’s a bit late, but here’s something I noticed in last week’s parsha (Emor) and in light of the monster of a post I did a couple of weeks ago about Jewish identity, I couldn’t resist writing about it.

At the very end of the parsha (Leviticus 24:10-23), there’s a narrative episode in which “one whose father was an Egyptian and whose mother was an Israelite” gets into a fight with “an Israelite.” The “son of an Israelite woman,” who isn’t actually identified except by the name of his mother, a woman named Shlomit of the tribe of Dan, utters God’s name “in blasphemy” and he’s taken into custody and brought before Moses.

The judgment that God hands down to Moses when he asks what to do about this situation is fascinating to say the least:

“Take the blasphemer outside the camp and let all those who were within hearing lay their hands upon his head, and let the whole community stone him. And to the Israelite people speak thus: Anyone who blasphemes his God shall bear his guilt. If he also pronounces the name HaSHEM, he shall be put to death. The whole community will stone him–stranger or citizen, if he has thus pronounced the name, he shall be put to death.” (Lev. 24:14-16)

I mean seriously, where to start with this? How about the way in which the story elides the question of whether the blasphemer is to be regarded as one of the community or as an outsider? To be sure, the story never actually says that the man isn’t considered an Israelite. And yet, he is never explicitly identified as an Israelite but only at one step removed from the people: the son of an Israelite mother, contrasted with the Israelite with whom he is fighting. Even God’s pronouncement maintains this ambiguity. On the one hand, the law of punishment that is passed down in response to this incident is for one “who blasphemes his God,” not simply God, nor the God of the Israelites, but his God, the God with whom he is in relationship. It seems this presumption of connection with the God of Israel would carry with it the assumption of membership in the kahal. But on the other hand,  the law finishes with the note that it applies to anyone, “stranger or citizen,” who has carelessly uttered the divine Name in blasphemy.

It’s hard to read this ambiguity as unintentional. Indeed, it is so carefully maintained throughout the episode that it seems to lie at the core of what this story meant to the one recording it. Why is it that the “half-Israelite” (as this passage is somewhat inaccurately translated in the JPS) is singled out? Is it, as a commentator in Etz Chayim suggests, that a child raised in a “dual heritage” household is less likely to have been brought up with a strong religious identity–and with the respect for the divine that would entail–and is thus more likely to blaspheme the name of God? It might be comforting to believe that, especially as it tends to confirm the prevailing narrative about the role of interfaith marriage as a corrosive influence on Jewish families and on the Jewish community as a whole.

But it’s important to remember that in the context of the narrative none of the Israelites were exactly coming from a place of strong religious upbringing. This was the generation, we must remember, who had themselves been suffering for their entire lives under the burden of Egyptian slavery, who had only recently been brought forth out of Egypt and who were still fully in the midst of the complicated, messy task of working out a collective national and spiritual identity. It’s hard to imagine a way in which belonging to a dual-parent household would make one any more likely to fail to respect God’s sanctity than anyone else in that crazy mixed up generation–which is also, just to be totally clear, our own generation.

Or is it, as I rather more think, that a “full Israelite”–that is, someone who is perceived by their fellows as a full member of the community, someone whose Jewish credentials are impeccable and whose Jewish identity goes unchallenged–is it that someone like this who might in an unguarded moment, caught up in the tension of perpetual wandering and the ungrounded existence of the midbar, lose control and utter words of blasphemy, but nevertheless somehow this fact might be overlooked by those around him, those who see their lives and their concerns mirrored in his, those who are not inclined to regard him as an “outsider,” perpetually under suspicion?

It could be that the blasphemer in the incident in question had to be an individual of dual parentage, because only a perceived “outsider” would be likely to be seized and brought before the authorities for what after all we might imagine to have been a relatively common shortcoming in that generation. If this is so, then God’s declaration that there be one law alike for a member of the tribe and for the outsider may be just, but is it fair? The ruling itself may be perfectly neutral in its formulation and yet it may be utterly impossible to find balance and fairness in its application.

I would like to believe that this is what is hidden in the stipulation that those who were witness to the blasphemy “lay there hands on his head” before he can be put to death. In calling forth those responsible for making the accusation, in forcing them to come to terms with what they were involved in, God was implicitly making room for those involved to back out, to reconsider their motives for singling out the outsider. It is significant, I think that this crucial moment is not included in the coda to the episode:

And they took the blasphemer outside the camp and pelted him with stones. The Israelites did as the Lord commanded Moses. (Lev. 24:23)

The crucial moment of responsibility, of reconsideration, is not included, and in this way a deep ambiguity is introduced into the chapter’s closing coda–“The Israelites did as the Lord commanded Moses.” This hint of irony carries with it an implicit commentary on the ethical failure of those who allowed the man known only as the “son of an Israelite woman” to be stoned, and a warning to us to be more careful about whom within our communities we choose to designate as “the outsider.”

What the heck is up with Jewish identity?

/ Leiah Moser / 3 Comments

One of the ways I sometimes get myself through the tough times working my way through rabbinical school is to imagine the kind of community I’d like to help build as a rabbi. Recently, the thing that has been coming up in my rabbinical fantasy land is this: I imagine that in the community I will help to build, the one question you will never hear is “Are you Jewish?”

Does this mean that as a rabbi I don’t care whether my congregants are Jewish or not? Maybe. It’s complicated–just as complicated as the question of who is or is not a Jew in this time of increasing diversity within the sometimes nebulous cloud of communities we call “Judaism,” and of increasing distance between Judaism’s different movements and denominations. During the centuries when Jewish communities were tight knit and generally segregated by law from the majority populations around them it was probably relatively easy to maintain a shared understanding of who was and was not Jewish. This was partly because of the relative uniformity of halachah between communities compared to our day, and partly due to the fact that what with the Jews being a frequently despised and often persecuted minority, no one in their right mind would claim to be Jewish who wasn’t.

In our day however, a number of changes have taken place that have resulted in a situation where it is increasingly difficult for us to all agree on who is Jewish and who is not. For one thing, emancipation, assimilation and the general reduction in the social stigma attached to Jewishness have caused the number of marriages between Jewish people and non-Jewish people to skyrocket. A quick glance at the website of the Jewish Federations of North America yields the figure of 47% of Jewish marriages since 1996 having been to a non-Jewish partner. I make no claims for the accuracy of this particular figure, but the “problem of intermarriage” has certainly been looming large in Jewish circles for the better part of the last several generations, and the trend doesn’t seem to be set to reverse itself anytime soon.

“The problem of intermarriage”–let’s take a moment to pay attention to that language. Precisely what does that problem consist of? The problem, as it is generally understood, is both sociological and halachic. Halachically, the disapproval of intermarriage has been enshrined in the tradition since at least the time of Ezra the Scribe during the construction of the Second Temple. Furthermore, the traditionally accepted halachah establishing who is to be regarded as Jewish considers the offspring of any non-Jewish woman, regardless of her husband’s status, to be non-Jewish. This fact has resulted (if you’ll forgive me a little fuzzy math) in the children of roughly one quarter of the couples involving at least one Jewish partner in the US to not be recognized as Jewish within those segments of the Jewish community who have not seen fit to reevaluate halachah, or abandon it completely.

This refusal to recognize the children of Jewish parents as Jews, grounded in traditional Jewish law, is frequently backed up by the sociological argument that couples involving a non-Jewish partner are less likely to raise their children within the Jewish tradition, and that non-Jewish parents are likely to teach their children their own faith to the exclusion of Judaism, resulting in the gradual disappearance of the Jewish people due to assimilation. Such arguments fail to take into account the much more complicated situation on the ground, in which parents who are both perfectly “Jewish” according to the halachah frequently raise their children in an environment devoid of any but the barest traces of connection to the Jewish condition, and in which in mixed couples, it is frequently the non-Jewish partner who insists on their children learning about the tradition over the apathy or even opposition of the Jewish partner. At any rate, this argument certainly fails to make a case for what good we may expect to derive from depriving children who certainly regard themselves as Jewish of public acceptance and recognition within the community.

A different, but related issue is that of conversion. Used to be when a prospective convert came to a rabbi, the rabbi would feel duty-bound to make at least a token effort to scare them off saying, “Do you not know that we Jews are a persecuted people, driven from place to place with no home to call our own? Why then are you seeking to join us?” Nowadays though, if anyone is still old-fashioned enough to do the old “sending the prospective convert away three times” routine, the arguments at least are getting a bit threadbare. Historically there have probably never been fewer disadvantages to becoming a Jew, unless you count the obligation to spend at least an hour each week feeling nervous about the future of the Jewish people.

Nevertheless, the increasing proliferation of Jewish movements and denominations, many of whom do not recognize conversions performed by some or all of the others, has made the whole idea of conversion so confusing that in a few circles, particularly Orthodox communities in the Diaspora, the solution has been simply to declare a moratorium on conversions performed outside the state of Israel. Even in Israel, however, as recently as a couple of years ago the chief rabbinate declared the conversions performed by a certain rabbi, going back several decades, to be invalid, retroactively undoing the conversions of who knows how many people who’d been going about their lives secure in the knowledge that they were members of the Jewish people.

This is of course ignoring the often-overlooked issue of race in Jewish communities. Regardless of their personal journey or family history, it is a common experience for Jews of color and others who don’t quite fit the stereotypically white, Ashkenazi, middle class pattern seen as the “norm” in our communities to walk into a synagogue and immediately find themselves singled out and subjected to prying and impertinent questions about the origins and authenticity of their Jewishness. Organizations such as B’chol Lashon and Jews In All Hues are doing amazing work in making the voices of non-white, non-European Jews heard, and in in helping “welcoming” Jewish communities to understand how much work remains to be done to combat underlying racism, but for a great deal of the Jewish world this remains a highly under-examined issue.

All of these factors and more add up to creat a situation in which Jewish belonging has been growing increasingly contentious over the years. The effect this has had on the lives of people who identify as Jewish but regularly come into contact with others who don’t accept that identity can be profoundly difficult emotionally, as well as putting a strain on families and communities that tends to lead to further disengagement from Judaism in a time when synagogue membership and other traditional measures of Jewish involvement are at an all-time low.

The only solution, so far as I can see, lies in radically redefining what it means to be a Jew, along with the role of non-Jewish people within the Jewish communities in which we live and serve. We must acknowledge once and for all that the old frameworks for establishing Jewish identity, geared for a world in which close-knit, mostly exclusive, ethnic communities were the norm, are simply inadequate for dealing with a world in which most Jews do not simply live in two civilizations, as the Reconstructionists would have it, but within a diverse, interconnected web of ethnic, national, religious, economic, cultural and sub-cultural identities which may shift in relative importance from day to day and throughout an individual’s life. In this world, the maintenance between rigid boundaries between Jews and non-Jews is not only outdated, it is actively harmful and downright nonsensical. Harmful, because it virtually ensures that there will be some for whom Jewishness is an important part of their identity who will be denied recognition and acceptance, and nonsensical because it fails to accurately describe any of our lives as we are actually living them.

I am not arguing against the importance of conversion as a ceremony marking the adoption of an “outsider” into the Jewish community. I’m saying that such a ceremony makes little sense for a person who already regards themselves as Jewish and who may already be an active member of a Jewish community. To take a ceremony meant to welcome a foreigner into our midst and force it to apply to a person who has been brought up among us is a perversion of the meaning of the ceremony, both for the converts who undergo it out of choice and for the self-identified Jews who are forced to undergo it out of some misplaced impulse to strive for maximum exactitude in establishing exactly who is “in” and who is “out.”

At the same time, we need to do a better job of recognizing and including non-Jewish partners and other members of the “mixed multitude” who form an important and vital part of our communities. Rather than hold these people at arms length as uncomfortable reminders of our failure to adhere to our ancestors’ rigid ethnic boundaries, we ought to reach out to them, making a place for them, both ritually and organizationally, within our communities.

So I guess the answer to whether I care whether my congregants are Jewish or not is a qualified “no,” if by “Jewish” we mean “people who are halachically recognized as Jewish.” There just seem to be so many more important things to base a community on than an outmoded set of boundary markers delineating a community that was never nearly as coherent as its mythology sometimes makes it out to me. I believe passionately in Jewish values and in the power of our tradition to help us build communities of engaged, ethically aware human beings. To use a metaphor sometimes employed by Rabbi Irwin Kula, I see Judaism as a repository for a kind of spiritual technology meant to help mold ourselves and our world to be in more perfect harmony with each other and with the divine. As a rabbi, I see it as my duty to help others access that rich technology and use it responsibly. The vision I feel we should uphold for the future is of an active Judaism, one where the focus is on what we do rather than who we are. In the end, our real community is made up of those who share that vision and wish as we do to see it fulfilled.

What does it mean to have an identity?

/ Leiah Moser / Leave a comment

Forgive me if I’m about to get a little abstract. If you are the kind of person who runs for the hills whenever philosophy starts to rear its lovely head, then you might want to start slipping into your running shoes. But it seems recently like I’ve been doing nothing but talk about identity of one kind or another. So I thought that it might be worthwhile to take a little time to ask the question, what does it mean to have an identity?

Identity Model

As I see it, the structure of identity is basically twofold, consisting of an internal and an external face. The internal aspect of identity boils down to the way I see myself, or want to see myself–both the way we are and the way we feel we ought to be both play an important role in how we perceive ourselves.

On its other face, identity has an external component consisting of social confirmation, recognition and–frequently–enforcement. We might want to claim that this aspect of social recognition is strictly speaking external to identity, that a person is what they are because of what they are, not because of how other people perceive or recognize that fact. But the fact remains that an identity is not merely something internal and self-defined–it is also a social reality that affects the roles we take on and the way we relate to the people around us.

It might be easy at this point to get caught up in the question of which side of this internal/external divide is more, for want of a better word, “real,” more “original” than the other. The truth is that my own understanding of who I am tends to affect the way others see me, just as the way others see me has a huge effect on the way I see myself. From the moment we come into this world we are surrounded by doctors, parents, governmental institutions and what have you, all already defining who we are from the outside based on critera that we’ll only come to understand much later, if at all. At the same time, as we grow and mature we begin to have a greater and greater role to play in maintaining and shaping our identity, and while the values that inform us in this task certainly come at least in part from outside of ourselves, the ways in which we adapt, select and prioritize these values seem to be quite unique to the individual, arising from some obscure inner place we can only label with such vague terms as “inherent psychological makeup” or “soul.”

Even so, the highly individual ways in which we come to understand our own natures and roles in the world do not exist in a vaccuum. A big part of the way in which we form our own identities is by observing those around us and identifying others we experience to be like ourselves. This process of identification–of feeling a heightened sense of kinship with certain others and seeking to have that kinship recognized–is extremely important to the way our own inner sense of identity comes to find itself. This is why being refused the connection that comes with having our sense of who we are recognized and supported can be so emotionally crushing–without the ability to connect with others who share important aspects of our own identity it becomes virtually impossible for that identity to grow and flourish.

The practical upshot of this is that neither aspect of a person’s identity is indepenedent from the other. They influence one another in a variety of complex ways. This complexity is only increased by the fact that we never have just a single identity, but multiple identities that overlap and interact as well: gender, religion, national citizinship, ethnic background, community, economic class, etc., etc., etc.

The field on which all these interactions meet and play out is that of presentation. Presentation is what we call the amalgamation of external signs and behaviors with which we “play out” our identities in the world around us. It can include everything from the clothes we wear to the language we use, from how we interact with different kinds of people to what we eat. Presentation represents the meeting point between our internal sense of self and the way others understand us and expect us to behave.

How this all plays out depends to a large degree on the individual and their relationship to the social environment in which they find themselves. In some ways, my own sense of identity and the perceptions and expectations of those around me will coincide, in which case presentation serves as a shared medium/network of meanings that I and those around me use to interact.

In other ways, my own sense of who I am may differ from the way others understand me, sometimes to an extreme degree. In these cases, my presentation ends up becoming a battleground on which I strive to have my understanding of who I am recognized while others strive to make me acknowledge their perception of me and abandon my own.

In the preceeding paragraphs I’ve attempted to lay out in general terms a few ideas about what it means to have an identity as a human being. If all this comes across as somewhat abstract and academic, I hope that it will nevertheless help to serve as a kind of framework for some of what I want to write about some of the specific areas of identity that have had a serious impact on my life, namely gender and Jewishness. My hope is that this framework will help to hold up the ways in which what I want to say about identity in these two areas is more closely related than it might otherwise seem.