‘Did you meet the nice, young transgender rabbi?’
With the launch of Transtorah.org, which aims to help Jewish communities become welcoming for people “of all genders,” another movement toward greater Jewish diversity is on the march, based on ancient Jewish principles. As Reuben Zellman, a rabbinic intern at the San Francisco Reform synagogue Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, told the Forward, “Our sages talked about gender diversity in a much different way than we talk about it in contemporary America. They were, in some senses, much more open about what the range of human experience could really be.â€
One of the reasons the Judaism is so interesting to me is because of its diversity, and its general embrace of diversity as a value*. In this religion and this culture there is room for a multiplicity of beliefs, ideas, ethnicities, ideologies, and, yes, genders. We are a veritable rainforest (part of the reason, as in biology, that we are able to survive). Anyone who would seek to say, as an otherwise admirable editorial on the Gaza Conflict by Eboo Patel did ” If you’re Jewish, that story involves words like “security”, “terrorism”, and “right to exist”…and “If you’re Jewish, that means highlighting the number of Hamas rockets fired into Israel and the number of lives lost and disrupted in cities like Sderot,” is reducing Jewish ideas and experiences unfairly. How do these statements explain Brit Tzedek v’Shalom or even J Street? How do they explain Rabbi Yisroel Weiss and the other ultra-Orthodox in Neturei Karta, who, though a fringe in their own right, are passionate in their pleas for peace? The Jewish World is filled with people with a diversity of opinions on all things. We are a people skeptical of the binary, in gender, in war and peace, in anything. There are always many points of view and countless Jews are struggling desperately to include alternative points of view on the current crisis in the debate. The diversity of the Jewish world is one of its greatest strengths, and our long history of argument, evolution, adaptation, and creativity are great lessons to the rest of the world about how to get along, how to accept difference. Sadly, a war is an amazing way to sweep all those lessons away. After thousands of years of persecution, and especially after the Holocaust, I understand the trauma that demands any response to an attack on Jews be swift and violent, demonstrating that we are not weak and will not be marched to the gas chambers. But we have so much more to give humanity than our mere survival. I hope that this war, undertaken by a state acting in what it perceives as its best interests, does not become the apotheosis of Jewish experience. The discussion and inclusion of a transgendered rabbi is a far more valuable lesson in Jewish values than any military victory.
* Just to undo a bit of the idea of Jewish exceptionalism that I’ve set up, at least one Muslim nation is starting to embrace transgendered people in a religious context as well. And there are plenty of voices for a more progressive Islam.
