Reading Torah from a Trans Perspective: An Interview with Joy Ladin
Aug. 26, 2016
By Nora Smolonksy
Before she had language to understand herself as a transgender person, Joy Ladin did not feel represented or at ease in the physical world she inhabited. While reading the Torah as a child, Ladin found solace in God, who also did not fit the gender binary. "I felt God all around me and God didn't have a body, so God didn't have gender. Neither of us had a body that represented us in the human world, neither of us could fit into this world that is divided into male or female."
Ladin's sense that her relationship with God and trans identity were intertwined inspired her to write the first book-length work of Jewish transgender theology, tentatively titled, "I Am What I Will Be: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective." While transgender identities are often seen as opposing or "queering" religious traditions, Ladin's work explores how Jewish theology and Torah look when we take "trans identities as statistically unusual, but otherwise normal forms of being human." Ladin’'s book consists of a collection of personal essays that ask how this understanding of trans identities as normal "changes our understanding of humanity, and opens up new ways of understanding God."
Ladin received a 2015 HBI Research Award which funds innovative research and art on Jews and gender. I had the opportunity to meet her through the HBI Gilda Slifka Summer Internship, where Ladin talked to the interns about her work and experiences as a transgender person in the Jewish academic world. After our conversation, Ladin kindly spoke with me one on one and told me about her upcoming book.
While others may find it strange to read the Torah from a trans perspective, Ladin, who started reading the Torah as a child, says that is the only way she has ever read it. Despite the lack of representation of trans perspectives in Jewish theology as she was developing her understanding of the Torah, Ladin has never allowed traditional interpretations to negate her own. "While I learn from traditional commentaries, I've never let myself feel closed off by those commentaries. I can't grant them the authority to invalidate my experience, because then they would invalidate me completely. Jewish tradition doesn't acknowledge that people like me exist."
When confronted with opposing commentaries while writing her book, however, Ladin found herself forced to work through the complexities they present. While working on a chapter about "how people can have relationships with God when those relationships are based on human terms that do not fit God," Ladin examined Maimonides' commentary, "Guide for the Perplexed," which deeply challenged her own assumptions. "I couldn’t ignore Maimonides, and I couldn't accept him either. If you read him, you think people can't have any relationship with God. I knew that I did have a relationship with God and that other people did, too. By the time Maimonides was done with me, I realized there are many kinds of divine human relationships, even as depicted in the Torah, that are not constrained by human terms." Thus, while Ladin does not feel that tradition includes her understanding of the Torah and God, she has found that her understanding grows through engaging with it.
Ladin's sense that God has no gender seems to be contradicted by the Torah's gendering of God as male. Though Maimonides does not explicitly discuss gender, Ladin says "he shows us that whenever we use human language to represent things, whatever we talk about is infected by all of the assumptions that are built into language." From this perspective, it makes sense that the Torah would use male pronouns in relation to God, not because God is male, but because Biblical Hebrew associates maleness with status and power. "The culture that the Torah was written from is a culture where the best things are gendered male. If God is being described in a culture that is patriarchal, God will be described in male terms to show that God is at the top of the cultural hierarchy."
Ladin sees her work as growing out of feminist and trans theology. Feminist theologians highlight the damage done by associating God with patriarchy and the gender binary, and show that rethinking gender opens new ways to rethink God.
"A lot of trans rethinking of Judaism has often focused on practical questions such as how Jewish tradition can include trans Jews, and extend to serve the needs of trans Jews, such as rituals for things like gender transition. Trans Jewish scholars have brought attention to aspects of Jewish tradition that open the way to non-binary understanding of gender."
Ladin's theology does not tackle such questions, but focuses on the Torah's presentation of God. In her book, Ladin intends to "demonstrate that trans Jews can engage with the Torah and Jewish tradition from a trans perspective without fighting for our right to do so — without excuses, without apologies, without any justification other than the fact that we are human, we are Jews, and we are here."
Ladin hopes that her book will inspire more people to read the Torah, that it will show that Torah "has room for everybody." She also hopes this book will encourage others to have personal relationship with God. "I've met many Jews who are deeply committed to Judaism, but Judaism as they've experienced it doesn't have God in it, or it has a God who's abstract or hard to think about, not a God who's really a living presence."
While she seeks to impact others with her book, the act of writing is in itself a personal triumph for Ladin, who after dealing with serious illness realized that writing "a book about relating to God as a living presence who doesn't fit into human categories" was one of her life goals. "I am writing this book for other people, but I am also writing it for God. When somebody gets you through so much and keeps you company when you’re otherwise completely alone, you owe them."
Nora Smolonsky was an HBI Gilda Slifka intern and a recent graduate of Concordia University.
Joy Ladin, the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University, is the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. "I Am What I Will Be: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective" is expected to be published by Brandeis University Press HBI Series on Jewish Women in spring 2018.