I am grateful to the people who’ve helped me through this difficult, 2-month-long journey, among them: my parents for helping me navigate this country’s medical system, Noam who brought me food when I was sick, Miryam for lending me her father’s z”l walker, my parents again for driving me to Boston when I finally accepted I needed to see a doctor, and all the trans femmes who’ve shared their shitty HRT experiences online.

This Jewish new year I was called to slow down. The voice began softly – exhaustion from 8 hours of farming is practically part of the job description. It grew louder – a couple fits of hysterical crying seem normal enough for a girl going through puberty, like me. Louder – a hot flash at work, then nearly fainting. 3 days of bedrest, then louder – nearly faint again. Blood tests all negative. I had to quit my job. Louder – can’t stand up for Rosh haShanah amidah. It deafens me – I need to use a walker at Yom Kippur services; I am forbidden from fasting. I can’t hear anything but the call now. Slow down. Slow down. You need to slow your transition down.

Maybe a crash was the only way to get me to listen. When I got the results of my hormonal blood work on July 28, it was literally a birthday present. I was so excited that I dropped everything and ran to tell my coworkers: “My testosterone levels are nearly zero!” They were all happy that I was happy. I even told one cis female friend, joyously, that I had less T than she did. I remember saying, “It’s like I’m not even human!” Two months later, I could barely stay standing without holding onto something.

Humans need certain levels of both classes of sex hormones, estrogens and androgens, even after puberty. BMC’s HRT guidelines recommend for trans women T levels from 30 – 100 ng/dl; mine was 7. There are a lot of guidelines for trans health out there, many contradict each other, and all of them are based on unreliable research – but I have to start somewhere. I was also suffering from 7 of the most common side effects of the anti-androgen drug my doctor had prescribed, spironolactone. (Not counting the listed side effects of erectile dysfunction, breast enlargement “in men”, and decreased libido. Spiro is a drug meant to treat high blood pressure; its testosterone suppressing effects are incidental.) Yet my doctor thought it was “unlikely” that my near-zero T levels were unhealthy or that my HRT regimen was the cause of my debilitating fatigue.

I should say, before taking my anti-spiro rage any further, that there are plenty of trans femmes who are perfectly happy using that drug as an anti-androgen. One of my friends has been on the same dosage as I was – 200mg/day – for years with none of the fatigue that shook my life. A body’s hormonal needs and reactions are incredibly difficult to predict, since “sex” hormones are in relationship with every bodily system. I wasn’t put on spironolactone, or on 200mg/day of it, maliciously. But even though what happened to me was not a guaranteed outcome, it was a predictable one. Many trans femmes have suffered similar effects from “macro-dosing” spiro; my doctor should have discussed those potential negative effects with me, and once I reported my symptoms, should have identified my HRT dosage as a likely cause much faster. Instead, I had to do my own research and advocate for my own health.

To tell the truth, I knew the day I almost fainted at work that it was because my testosterone was so low from spironolactone. I even told my friends I thought that was what was going on. But it took me over a month, until I couldn’t leave the house without a walker, to do anything about it. I was in denial. I couldn’t admit, in my heart, that I need testosterone.

I have come to hate so much of myself. It was easy to turn away from masculinity. And then with medical transition, I also began to uproot maleness from myself. I cultivated an urgency, a desperate need to crush and cast away everything in me with the curse of man written on it. I’m supposed to pray twice a day, “Let there be no hope for what speaks against us, and let all the evil vanish instantly, and let all the enemies of Your people be cut down swiftly, and let the arrogant be swiftly uprooted, crushed, cast away, and humbled quickly and in our days. Blessed are you, haShem, Who breaks enemies and humbles the arrogant.” Unknowingly I directed that prayer against the masculinized voice that speaks against me; I yearned for my facial hair and my testicles to vanish instantly as if they are the evil. I raced to cut down my testosterone, since I believed it was my LORD’s enemy. In my heart I made maleness into an idol of hardness and violence; my hands burned with fire to reduce it to ashes, and in the end I was the one brought down and humbled.

I understand why I’ve come to treat maleness as evil, as the evil. It has caused me the greatest pain of my life. It is the root of my dysphoria: the panic attacks after not shaving for one day, the whiplash of moving to touch my vagina and being met with a penis, the dissociative breaks in reality that come when I sense that my gender, the fabric of my individuality, is fake. Maleness is the reason I repressed my beauty, my compassion, and my love beyond the reach of consciousness for 24 years.

Of course, maleness is only the superficial reason for my repression. I could have grown up in a world that wanted me to know that I’m trans. And it is true, on a high spiritual level, that gender is fake and the world of our experience isn’t the deepest reality. The pain of dysphoria might be an irreducible fact of my life, and being born “male” may be the cause of it – but the sacred instinct to heal wounds is different from the sinful pursuit of purity.

I said in my heart that I would be pure, cleansed of maleness, perfectly feminine. I thought my problem was the maleness itself that lives in me, and my solution was to scorch the earth it grows in. On Rosh haShanah, I finally heard the call to slow down. I stopped pushing myself beyond my limits, to stand when I couldn’t, to be at services when I had no energy to serve. On Yom Kippur I gave all my lifeforce to haShem; in the emptiness that followed, I accepted what I’d always known I would have to do to return to life. I would need to let go of the urge to destroy, and turn my heart to balance. I would need to welcome testosterone back into my body.

Humans need a balance of estrogens and androgens to be fully alive. When I chose to double my spiro dosage, I might have been seeking life, but I was choosing death. I hated the androgens themselves instead of the imbalance of estradiol and testosterone – and now I believe the severity of my condition was caused not only by low T but too low E as well. (Trans women’s estrogen levels should be at least 100pg/ml; mine were never above 80.) HaShem does not want me to be forever devoid of any aspect of Hir Creation; Ze wants the dance of the partnered energies of life in me. HaShem does not want purity; HaShem wants balance.

I was called this year to slow down, because the work of balancing moves with patience and constant, minute adjustments, but the work of destruction is unhearing and unrelenting. I have tended the fire that transition has been to me for the past 2 years – a wild, bright, all-consuming rush into the world as my full, living self. Now is the year of water, of filling the vessel I have come so far in creating, of sensing the shifts in the waves and trusting the wisdom of the flow. 2 years ago I got on a motorboat to escape poisoned waters, and now with them behind me the time has come to get into a kayak.

This is a year of letting go. My dysphoria has already gotten worse since lowering my spiro dose 2 weeks ago; weeds flourish during the release. But I let them grow, so that when the time comes to cut them down, their decomposition will nourish the soil sevenfold. It’s painful to see what my body does when I leave it alone even a little. But this is the rest of my life, and I want to be alive for it. Fuck the purity. I choose the dance.

…בִּפְרֹחַ רְשָׁעִים כְּמוֹ עֵשֶׂב וַיָּצִיצוּ כָּל־פֹּעֲלֵי אָוֶן לְהִשָּׁמְדָם עֲדֵי־עַד׃ וְאַתָּה מָרוֹם לְעֹלָם יְהוָה׃
צַדִּיק כַּתָּמָר יִפְרָח כְּאֶרֶז בַּלְּבָנוֹן יִשְׂגֶּה׃ שְׁתוּלִים בְּבֵית יְהוָה בְּחַצְרוֹת אֱלֹהֵינוּ יַפְרִיחוּ׃ עוֹד יְנוּבוּן בְּשֵׂיבָה דְּשֵׁנִים וְרַעֲנַנִּים יִהְיוּ׃ לְהַגִּיד כִּי־יָשָׁר יְהוָה צוּרִי וְלֹא־עלתה [עַוְלָתָה] בּוֹ׃

Though the wicked sprout like grass, though all evildoers blossom, it is only so that they may be destroyed forever. But You, O haShem, will remain on high forever…. The righteous will flourish like the palm tree, ze will grow tall like a cedar in Lebanon; planted in the House of haShem, they will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still bear fruit in old age, they will remain full of sap and vigor in order to declare that haShem is upright, my Rock, in Whom there is no injustice.

Psalm 92:8-9, 13-16 (trans. based on Rashar Hirsch)

Now that I’m seriously getting into it, I’m not happy with my gender. In fact, I feel worse about myself than I did when I started. What the hell!?

I feel worse about my voice now that I’m working on it. I feel worse about my body hair now that I usually shave it. A bad hair day really matters to me now. The Beatles were so wrong when they said, “I wouldn’t mind if I knew what I was missing.”

She’d watched her kids master these first small tasks with an application of effort that seemed superhuman, but of course it only amounted to being human, a story written in genes. First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver, 454

The thrill of new pleasures has passed and the hard work has begun. My high school voice teacher taught me the progression of learning any skill: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence. Conscious incompetence is the hardest stage. Whenever I see a trans woman in all her glory, I rejoice for her, and I feel a deep heaviness. There is so much work I need to do to become myself.

Transitioning is like realizing that the garden I’ve been cultivating my whole life isn’t nourishing me. I want the smell of tomato flowers, the buzz of the pollinators, the unpredictable little beauties that will make homes among the herbs – but for 23 years I’ve been putting all my energy into growing lettuce. So I tear out the ugly heads, and it feels so satisfying to be able to start afresh. And then, to soften the earth to receive the seeds I’ve had tucked away my whole life, I start digging. And this soil is full of rocks. And it’s so sandy it won’t hold water. And the pH is all wrong. Shit. The lettuce was no fun, but what’s really limiting my garden’s beauty is much harder to heal.

Easy enough to change my pronouns and give away my old clothes (thank God – these are not easy things for everyone). It was even pretty easy for me to come out to my family. All that ease in my transition is a huge blessing that not enough trans people have. But those are just weeds, things to be removed. The greater work is in cultivating what I do want. Starting HRT is like switching from synthetic fertilizer to compost. I have to learn how my plants need to be treated, and while they adjust to the change they’ll seem less healthy. Changing my voice is like trying to establish a fragile perennial. My facial hair and Adam’s apple are like rocks so heavy I could only remove them with a tractor. My childhood and adolescence without the education in being feminine that girls get, and the education I did receive in how to be a man, is like the sandy soil. I pretty much just have to deal with that, and plant what I can plant in the soil I’ve got.

All this is not the work of a week or a season; it is the labor of years. The weeds I uprooted so easily will surely return, and shifting the earth will uncover new ones. The produce my garden brings will vary from year to year. Slowly the health of the soil will grow, some perennials will take root and become easy, reliable sustenance. I’ll learn what annuals grow well and the best ways to cultivate them in my particular plot.

To be a gardener is to hope in the future. It is also to be anxious about it. I lose sleep worrying that the pumpkins I dreamed of growing just won’t get that big here, or that I’m a little too far north for my favorite herb to survive the winter – it’ll never have the chance to grow into its full potential. I could build a greenhouse, but it’s so expensive, and even if I can afford it, there are zoning laws about who gets to have greenhouses, and I’d have to apply for special permission from the town, show them evaluations from experts proving that, yes, I really do need this greenhouse… And lurking in the back of my mind through all my backbreaking work is the fear that, even if I manage to grow some fruit, I’ll offer it to my family, my friends, to anyone at all – and no one will want to eat it. Who likes weird food like mine anyway? And it’s a GMO!? Get it away from me!!

“Then how…do you men of science explain the generation of the original life on our earth?”
“Well, sir, that is very simple. We do not. What we admire about Redi’s experiment is the simplicity of its design. The hypothesis was that maggots derived directly from meat, without intervention of the fly and the egg. Remove the fly and egg from the meat, and the hypothesis is disproved by observed results.”
“I see. You concern yourselves with simple little questions, and satisfy yourselves with simple little answers.”
“Simple answers, bit by bit, lead to large truths.”

Unsheltered, 273

Transition is a dozen works-in-progress, a hundred daily struggles, the endless slings and arrows. Some days one thing is working and another isn’t. Sometimes it’s all cacophony and others it is the sweetest harmony. While I’m unearthing all the messiness, I am more chaotic and ugly to myself than I’ve ever been. Even on the good days, I’ve never felt so nakedly incomplete. Hunter Schafer and Natalie Wynn taunt me with their established passing charm. Will I ever get there? How many grains of sand make a heap?

If I’ve learned anything from being trans my whole life, it’s that that spiral never stops. I think I was around [Jules’] age when I started to understand that transitioning wasn’t this point A to point B sequence.

Hunter Schafer on Euphoria, “Part 2: Jules”

Gardens are never complete. In fact, to those who tend them, they make real the unending cycle of seasons. The point of a garden is not to produce consistently flawless tomatoes year-round; a garden exists to capture the best of each season in its time. My transition is not a process of transforming from man to woman. What I am really doing is learning for the first time how to capture the best of my soul’s seasons. And to struggle in the gap between winter and spring, when the world is awakening but the old harvest is nearly gone, is only natural.

Toxic Femininity.

For our purposes here, I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another…. To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. This means that femaleness, while it hurts only sometimes, is always bad for you.

Females by Andrea Long Chu, 11

I’ve never heard anyone talk about toxic femininity. With that quote Andrea Long Chu showed me that I’ve been doing it my whole life. I have always sacrificed my own needs to fulfill another’s desires, and I was proud of it. I valued my constant emotional availability, how I’d say yes without a thought, that I could adapt myself to meet anyone’s needs. I saw myself as an empty vessel eager to be filled with whatever personality I thought the other person wanted. I convinced myself that was what doing God’s work looked like.

It was my toxic femaleness that made me believe I was a man. I was a man because I had to be what everyone wanted. The force of every single person’s implicit desire for me to be male penetrated me so many times that I believed that I was one. I actually liked being penetrated by everyone’s desires until they came true in me. I loved being society’s kept woman.

But sometimes when I emptied myself out for another, I felt awful. It was like I was offering to carry a huge rock for the other person that I couldn’t actually lift. I convinced myself that feeling was wrong – that I should have enough space in myself to hold that rock. The truth is that I was never as empty as I wanted to be; something else was there that the desires of others were repressing.

Femaleness is…a universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness.

Females, 12

I’ve always felt subjected to the desires of others. What other people want has always affected me, often so deeply that I lose awareness of what I want. I even find comfort in the idea that I have no desires of my own – I have no true self – and that we’re all just resonating with the reflections of each other’s wishes and dreams. So when Chu declared that femaleness – the submission of your self to another’s desire – is the basic human condition, she affirmed that my femininity grants me my humanity.

I never tried to resist my toxic femaleness, which is what made me a man. Even at the beginning of my awakening I needed my friend’s permission to wear women’s clothing. I actually sat paralyzed in a dress for minutes, unable to take it off or really put it on, until Monica told me to enjoy it for now and worry about what it means later. If I still need that initial permission to dress up, then I carry it inside myself now. And the more I internalize those permissions to express my own desires, the more I can resist the desire-force of others. By clothing myself in the trappings of femininity, I am freeing myself of my toxic femaleness. Behaving more femininely allows me to actually be more masculine.

True Religion.

כל אשר-חפץ ה’ עשה: “Everything that God desired, God has made.” Do not read chafetz, desired; rather, chefetz. Everything that is a desire, God has made.

based on Tehillim 135:6

Is there such a thing as non-toxic femaleness? Whose desire can I submit to that won’t harm me by repressing my own desires? To surrender my being to the will of any other person is to put them on a pedestal, to idolize them – it is literal idol worship. So what’s a nice girl like me to do? I need someone to fill my vessel, but who has a rock to put in that won’t crush me, that will fit just right into my fragile glass frame?

Submission to another person’s desire in my life has created pain, confusion, and fragmentation. One word for submission in Arabic is islam. It’s related to words for sincerity, peace, and wholeness. Submission to God’s desire makes me whole. Hear me out.

I’m not talking about doing all 613 mitzvot. I don’t mean acting out other people’s desires for who I should be, even if those people are our Sages of blessed memory. I mean enacting God’s living desire for who I should be. And apparently, among other things, the Creator of all the universes wants me to be trans. I know because when I submit to that want, it doesn’t feel like repression. A rock is not being dropped on me; the Rock is lifting me up. Being feminine makes me feel more whole. It has made me more alive. And God desires life.

I’m thinking, because I’m a good Christian girl, of the theological concept of God’s love: that you don’t deserve it and yet there’s nothing you can do to get out of being loved. For many this is a comfort, the idea that God will love you no matter what. But what it really means is that the statements “God loves me” and “I exist” are equivalent. God’s love is nothing, the pure nothing, the facticity of existence. You are there and, because you are there, God loves you. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just the space in which your life unfolds: in God’s love, a pure predicateless position.

Andrea Long Chu on Desire, Weak Love, and Modern Trans Identity

I’m writing about Chu’s book and God’s desire, so I have to respond to her idea here. It sounds like she’s saying that God’s love is empty, so how could God want me to be trans or any other way? Chu explains that God’s love is contentless, that it is just a synonym for existence. Okay – if that’s true, what else is true? To paraphrase Hafiz, God’s love is the invitation to the party of life. But God doesn’t only want me to be at the party – God wants me to have fun while I’m here. God’s love and God’s desire are not the same thing. God’s love brought me to this world. God’s desire for me makes me trans.

Here’s a different way to look at it. Chu says, “You are there and, because you are there, God loves you.” But are you there in the way that a bored, suppressed woman is there while her wife fucks her, fantasizing of who she could have been and who she really wants to be with? Does her wife even know who it is she thinks she’s loving? That is to say, can God really love you if you aren’t fully there? Now that I’m fulfilling God’s desire for me – now that I’m being my “true self” – I feel more loved all the time. By my family, because I can show them my brightest fire. By my friends, because I can ask them for what I really want. By the trees and plants, because I can be tender with them and hug and kiss them without compromising my sexuality. Before, it was like I was partnered with God at the middle school dance: I didn’t know what to do, I was overwhelmed and unworthy, and I didn’t really want to be there anyway – but everyone’s watching, so I better pretend like I know how to dance. Now, on the best days, it’s like I’m at the wildest underground rave and God is the DJ. My whole being vibrates with the Creator’s music.

And even if a person has been calling and shouting out to God for an extremely long time and is still very, very distant, if you persist and persevere in the prayers and supplications, ultimately God will certainly answer you. And God will certainly and without any doubt genuinely bring you closer to God’s service, as long as you remain strong and courageous. This is as our Sages, of blessed memory, taught (Berakhot 32b) : Prayer requires encouragement, as it is written, “Hope to God! Be strong, and God will give you courage. And hope to God!” (Psalms 27:14). Rashi explains: And if your prayer is not accepted, go back and hope. And keep on doing this forever, “until God looks down from heaven and sees” (Lamentations 3:50).

Likutei Moharan

My transness is a submission to God’s desire. Taking hormones is the fulfillment of a commandment. But that knowledge doesn’t melt away my facial hair or feminize my voice; it doesn’t turn me into a woman or even let me pass as one. Most days recently it feels like God wants me to do impossible things. I have been shouting out to God for an extremely long time. For 24 years I was very, very distant – so distant that I didn’t know I was shouting, or that the yearnings in my heart were actually God’s. For a year and a half now I’ve been persisting in my prayers and supplications. I wear bras religiously. I practice my new voice three times a day. I shave away all my impure chest hair weekly. My observance is becoming more and more orthodox.

Has God answered me? The test is not whether I pass, since that is in the eyes of each person who beholds me. The real test is in whether I am toxically female – surrendering my value to the judgment of others – or whether I am wholly female, surrendering my judgments before the desire of God. Do my actions add to my courage, my ability to resist the force of others’ desires and submit to the dream God has for me? When my prayers to be wanted by others the way God wants me are not accepted, I go back and hope. And I will keep doing this forever, until God looks down from heaven and causes everyone else to see.

1.
For they bow down to vanity and emptiness, and they pray to a god who cannot save. (Aleinu)

To the degree that we are invisible we have a past that has condemned us to oblivion….As we enter into finite play–not playfully, but seriously–we come before an audience conscious that we bear the antititles of invisibility.

Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse, 72-73

When the stakes are high, it’s time to get serious. Over 350 trans people were murdered this year. Most trans people are still banned from military service in the US. British trans youth are now legally forbidden to consent to receive puberty blockers. We thought we had a foot in the door, but as it’s closing on us we suddenly realize — especially if we’re Black — that we aren’t risking stubbing a toe but losing our heads.

I am realizing the ways in which the wholeness of my being was stolen from me before I was born. For most of my life trans people bore “the antititles of invisibility.” I didn’t know transness was an option, for myself or anyone else. I remember a few moments from my childhood. At 4 years old I thought I could beat my 15 year old sister in arm wrestling because I was a boy and she was a girl; she proved me wrong. At 10 or 11 I would look at my body in the mirror before showering, tuck my penis behind my legs, and feel that that was how I was supposed to look; I even remember thinking that right up until the last second I was a girl, and then just when I was being born God decided I should be a boy. When I learned about intersex people in middle school, I dreamed to myself that I was one of them, that I’d had “gender-corrective” surgery to make me male. At some point I decided that I was a man and I had to deal with it. I stopped questioning, but I kept yearning, I kept suffering. I made excuses, fabricated rationales, soaked myself in sexual shame till my fingertips shriveled.

There were no trans people in my life. The first time I heard of a transgender person was in some magazine story about a trans man who was pregnant. Actually one of our family friends is a trans woman, but we didn’t know that until a few years ago. (Look back at the two of us together in our different hidings, so that we couldn’t even see each other.) In college there was a trans woman two years ahead of me; I didn’t know her, and the meaning of her transness didn’t penetrate. I knew the definition of transgender, but I didn’t know what it meant. And it still never occurred to me that it was something I was allowed to be.

It’s strange to me that I could have known such a fundamental truth about myself and repressed it beyond consciousness. I have always invested huge amounts of my time and energy on Earth in self-reflection, evaluation, and growth. I should be humbled that for nearly a quarter-century I had no idea who I really was — really, that I didn’t let myself want the things I secretly knew I wanted. The desire came first, the identity followed. The fact that it took so long makes me doubt sometimes whether it’s real. I thought I was condemned to forever lose the game of gender/sexuality as a man, and I wasn’t allowed to compete as a woman. In Carse’s terms, I was invisible to the audience of myself.

Each of those roles comes, of course, with a script, one whose lines a person might easily spend a lifetime repeating, while intentionally forgetting, or repressing, the fact that it is but a learned script…. We feel the need, therefore, to prove to them that we are not what we think they think we are or, more precisely, that we were not who we think the audience thinks we were.

Finite and Infinite Games, 72-73

The game society offers to us is called “Passing.” These are the rules:

1. To play any other game, you must already be playing the game of Passing. If you are not playing Passing, you will suffer penalties or be banned from all other games.
2. You may Pass as either a Man or a Woman. This choice may be changed during play, but only once. Changing this choice is called Transitioning, and you will suffer several missed turns in order to Transition.
3. If you do not Pass, other players may choose to give you consolation points in the gender you have chosen. The most common form of consolation point is pronouns, but may also be given as compliments on earrings from cashiers, care reacts on Facebook, and so on.
4. The most points are gained by someone who Passes without seeming to have ever been the opposite gender. This is called Assimilation. Someone who has Assimilated has access to the widest range of other games. The status of Assimilation may be revoked at any time.

If we win, we erase our past. If we win, we were never trans, because admitting to being trans is a loss of points. You can tell that they feel that way, because they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, I never would have guessed!” Consolation points.

But we aren’t trans first and then enter the cis game of Passing. The cistriarchy is the water. Before I knew I was trans, I had internalized the rules of this gender-binary game. I have internalized that if I don’t play, I am not human. I have a dial now in my brain that immediately assigns everyone I see either the male or the female label. Destroying the dial, when it is reinforced a thousand times a day, is too hard for me. Right now I am practicing harm reduction strategies: I started by consciously switching the assignment. If I read someone as a man, in my head I call them a woman. That’s what I was doing with myself, tucked in the mirror as a preteen. The trick works; if it is only for a moment, that’s because I’ve practiced the other trick far more.

That minigame is still in the binary water, though. Level 2 is to call that “man” a woman, and then to call them human. When I first made nonbinary friends, I imagined everyone I knew as either on the Man side or the Woman side, with those friends floating in the middle. I had a hard time getting used to using their they/them pronouns; without that mental image, where they floated in the intermediary “they” category, it would have been even harder. Easier to say “them” and think “them” than say “them” while you’re still actually thinking “him.” The wildest part of playing Level 2 is that it actually worked. It is actually possible to see a human being and assign them not “Man” or “Woman” but “Human.” It’s even easier if I spend time around birds, cats, and dogs, as a reminder of all the other forms we could be.

I don’t wear women’s clothing because I’m a man trying to be a woman. I’m not taking hormones because I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body. I take estrogen for the same reason I wear floral print dresses: because I want to have fun. I want to play my own game, and I’m overjoyed — I am moved to tears — when I find someone who wants to play with me. “So are you a man or a woman?” Who told you that you are naked? Who taught you to ask that? Isn’t there a question you’re more interested in asking? I’m a human, and if you don’t know what that means, neither do I. Take it up with the One Who made us.

2.
Save us, Hashem our G-d, and bring us together from among the goyim! (Ps. 106)

The finite player’s interest is not in being healed, or made whole, but in being cured, or made functional. Healing restores me to play, curing restores me to competition in one or another game.
Physicians who cure must abstract persons into functions. They treat the illness, not the person….To be ill is to be dysfunctional; to be dysfunctional is to be unable to compete in one’s preferred contests.
…When I am healed I am restored to my center in a way that my freedom as a person is not compromised by my loss of functions. This means that the illness need not be eliminated before I can be healed. I am not free to the degree that I can overcome my infirmities, but only to the degree that I can put my infirmities into play. I am cured of my illness; I am healed with my illness.
…Healing, of course, has all the reciprocity of touching. Just as I cannot touch myself, I cannot heal myself. But healing requires no specialists, only those who can come to us out of their own center, and who are prepared to be healed themselves.

Finite and Infinite Games, 76-77

Three weeks ago I started a medical treatment called on the consent form “feminizing hormone therapy.” I feel that I need hormones to be trans all the time, not only when I’m wearing feminine clothing. I need my flesh to be marked. It’s like how, once upon a time, King David saw himself naked and had an existential crisis — how did he know he was Jewish without his kippah, his tzitzis, his black hat? But, thank G-d, he remembered that he was circumcised; that his Jewishness is sealed permanently in his body. I look at myself in the mirror and panic that there is nothing real to mark me as trans.

I’m trying to seal transness into my flesh in other ways, too. In March I got my ears pierced, and even though that’s less marked than it used to be, it meant I could wear my grandmother’s earrings. Soon I’ll be starting vocal physical therapy to feminize my voice. I expect that eventually my voice will comfort me more than my breasts will, because I will have worked for that voice and earned it. I paint my nails and shave my body. But if I don’t ascend — as they would have me think of it — to the level of gender-affirmation surgery, then maleness will always be sealed in my flesh together with femaleness. I will be incomplete, tainted, chimerical.

According to the cistriarchy’s rules, that means I’m losing. I am ill and choosing not to do everything I can to cure myself. But the question isn’t whether or not to play the game of gender; the question is, who is the audience I’m playing for? Am I playing gender for the bosses who might hire me and the deli boy who might call me “ma’am” when he gives me my sandwich? Am I playing for my cis friends? Am I playing for my trans family? Am I playing for my Jewish family? Am I playing for my G-d who redeemed me from Egypt and entrusted me with freedom? And doesn’t the audience change a little each night: who’s sleeping in the front row and who’s cheering in the back, who walks out at intermission and who gives me flowers at curtain call?

Carse is telling me that the opportunities the medical world is offering me will not make me whole. They might help me survive, but they will not heal me — they will not even cure me of dysphoria, which is their word for how we feel when we know we’ll never be able to play their game as well as them. But Carse is also telling me that I don’t need to be cured of dysphoria to be whole. I am whole when all of my imperfections are in play.

They want us to believe that transness is a way for us to play their game. My ancestors believed a similar lie: that they could assimilate into Whiteness and still be wholly Jewish. That assimilation would make them safe; that it meant their grandchildren would never have to suffer from antisemitism. They were wrong; my safety as a Jew will never be guaranteed by Whiteness or by any government. I can recover shards of my history, but I’ll never know how much I lost or gained in the trade they made.

Was it the same for my trans ancestors? Was there a moment when they erased themselves for the safety of assimilation? Did a genocide drive the survivors to self-erasure, like it drove my Jewish ancestors? However it happened, it meant that I grew up invisible to myself. I am not the only one.

But now we are waking up, earlier and earlier in each generation. As we become anew more visible, the cistriarchy is using the same strategies: assimilate and play our game, or live impoverished, be internal refugees, die. The stakes are high. For me the choice is usually between an easy life or a full one. For others the choice is food, shelter, and family or life on the brink of death. So many trans asylum seekers have chosen their wholeness over their physical safety; I am in awe of them.

Even writing about that choice, I lose my sense of play; living it, actually feeling threatened because of my difference, all the more so. It is an act of gradual bravery — a pot of slow-boiled chutzpah tzimmes — to play the infinite game of healing while playing with the finite game of curing. To become trans while pretending to pass. To be human while playing along with the game of boy or girl. And to remind others that they are also only playing.

Sexuality is not a bounded phenomenon but a horizonal phenomenon for infinite players. One can never say, therefore, that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celibate, or adulterous, or faithful — because each of these definitions has to do with boundaries, with circumscribed areas and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned not with power but with vision.
…What they learn [when they play with others] is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the genius of their own actions, to be whole.

Finite and Infinite Games, 83

Finite games have an ending and a winner. Players of infinite games play so that the game can continue unending. I resist the cistriarchal narrative that tells me I need to beat the game of gender and win the prize of womanhood in order to be whole. I do not play my gender; I play with my gender, so that others can play too. I am trans. My gender is infinite.

Where are the people I can play with? After millenia of exile and diaspora, can we find each other again? Without you all this is only words on a screen — alone, I am not whole, not infinite, not trans. With you, we can realize our fullness. I dream of building trans Jerusalem. Will you dream with me? Will you play with me, my people? I need you.

---

_{Credit to my dear friend Simcha for introducing me to the term “cistriarchy.”}

This post contains major spoilers for the miniseries Unorthodox and minor ones for the show Euphoria.

Sometimes I wish that I could change
But not for me, for you
So we could be together forever

“When I Needed You” by Carly Rae Jepsen

Last night, instead of shaving my face before bed like I normally do, I cried in the bathroom for 20 minutes. I couldn’t look at myself, at my braided hair, my stubbly cheeks, the bra on my flat chest. Why was last night different from all other nights (well, not all other nights)? Two things: I’d just watched Unorthodox, the new Netflix miniseries about Esty, a young woman who runs away from her husband, Yanky, and the haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) community she was raised in. And the day before last was Trans Day of Visibility. I can’t fully explain the crying, but in those 20 minutes I realized that I saw in Esty and Yanky two different models for understanding my own queerness.

The briefest possible version of my story so far: Until about a year ago I’d been living and imagining myself as a straight, cisgender man. About ten months ago, on the radical program Achvat Amim I had my heart broken open and gave myself permission to begin exploring my gender/sexuality. I tentatively started wearing things like skirts, dresses, and headscarves (a strong marker of femininity in many Jewish communities). Seven months ago I started using they/them pronouns and wearing makeup on Shabbat. A month later I told my parents what I could about my gender identity. A week ago my sister gave me some of her old bras. And here we are.

But you should know…I’m not like the other girls.

Esty, Unorthodox

I’m not arguing that Esty’s “coming out” journey makes her a member of the queer community (heck, most of the plot happens because she runs away when she sees her mom kissing a person who reads female). Still, the reasons she tries to leave behind the way she had been living strike me as one possible model for understanding the reasons behind my own journey of leaving behind a gender/sexuality I’d identified as for most of my life.

Esty never really explains why she left the haredi Williamsburg community. We can glean plenty of justifications for it–people see her as an orphan, she’s forced to suffer nightly trying to “start a family,” she’s pressured to give up the one outlet she has to express herself…–but all she has to say about it is, “God wanted too much from me.” Esty feels that she isn’t the way she’s “supposed” to be; she knows she’s not like the other girls. Esty is different. It’s an identity, and you can’t explain identity. It just is.

The rope of tension between her difference and the life that forces her to suppress it finally snaps, and she runs away, trying to leave that life behind. She struggles, but once she’s finally allowed to live into her identity, she discovers her own voice and the beautiful, holy song inside her bursts into the world (breaking, by the way, a major taboo in haredi communities). I could understand myself as being like Esty–that all those years I suppressed my true gender/sexuality identity, so much so that all I could say about myself was that I was different (the word I usually used was “weird”). But then, once I finally saw other ways of living, I couldn’t take the pain anymore and let my unique voice be heard.

I think the received story in our discourse on “coming out” and gender/sexuality identity is basically Esty’s story as I’ve told it here. It’s about true identity, about not hiding, about being your real self, which, after all, deep down you always were. A lot of people express their own comings out and transitions like that, and I believe them. My own lived experience is that when I start talking in terms of true identity and real self, I’m usually coming from a place of defensiveness and putting up walls. Words can be true and strategic at the same time; the strategy of true identity is that you can’t argue with it without ending the conversation.

I can be different too. You don’t believe me? [Yanky cuts off his peyos.] How about now?

Yanky, Unorthodox

I could also understand myself as being like Yanky. In the climax of his character arc, he makes a last-ditch attempt to get Esty to come back to him–he cuts off his peyos (hair by your temples that men are never supposed to cut) to prove to Esty that he can be different too. Of course, it doesn’t work. Esty knows what Carly Rae’s talking about when she sings, “Sometimes I wish that I could change/But not for me, for you/So we could be together forever/But I know I know that I won’t change for you.” Yanky can change his appearance all he likes, can suffer for it as much as he can bear (imagine what the Williamsburgers will say when they see he’s got no peyos), but he won’t really change, not in himself. It’ll just be to keep Esty, and he knows that. So she rejects him for the last time.

Sometimes I feel like a Yanky who’s managed to get a little farther. I haven’t made all these changes in my gender expression for my own sake. Aren’t I claiming queerness just so I can, as one friend warned me at the beginning of my journey, “hang out with the cool kids?” Sometimes I think, “Oh my God, what the fuck am I doing to myself??” In those moments it feels like I have a choice about my gender/sexuality, and gender/sexuality is not something you’re supposed to have a choice about. So I feel like a fraud, like I’m lying not just to others but to myself. It’s so hard to tell sometimes if I’m just pretending.

There’s another way I could read Yanky’s story onto mine: I’ve made all these outward changes, I don’t use he/him pronouns anymore, but deep down what’s really changed? I was socialized as a man, and no matter how I dress or how I act I’m still a man. Those are the moments when I most wish for hormones or gender-affirmative surgeries–it would be something real to hold onto, something I could never take off. (Other moments I don’t feel like I need those things at all.)

I wonder what Yanky would have done if Esty’d somehow said yes. Would he have kept shedding haredi norms to please his wife? (That would be a real role reversal: now he’s the one who has to give up who he is to keep the marriage going.) I wonder if all those external changes would eventually lead to a shift inside of Yanky, if he might actually grow to become a different kind of person through a path of pretending. Is it even possible for something like that to happen?

The Yanky model as I’ve set it out here is one of pure action, of external acts that don’t originate from (or penetrate into) the true self. It’s the opposite of the Esty model, where all her “queer” actions can only be understood as coming from a deep place of inner truth. In those 20 minutes of crying in the bathroom, maybe I felt like I needed to choose between the two. A lot of the pain came from the fact that Yanky is a man and Esty is a woman. Am I reaching for a truth inside myself that I only wish was there? How can I ever even know? What’s the truth about me, what’s real? Reality broke down for me in that bathroom.

You might have noticed I’ve spent most of this post setting up a rigid binary and then torturing myself trying to fit into one or the other. To borrow a phrase from Rabbi Benay Lappe, let me present an option 3:

“I remember walking out of Sears with my first pair of heels in my backpack, and my heart was fucking racing. And I got home, I went straight to my room, locked the door, put them on, and…and it just felt like I was collecting herbs or making potions in order to up my mana, you know? Like it started with that, and then it was clothes and then it was makeup and eventually hormones. Um… I just kind of kept leveling up.”

“So, what level are you at now?”

“I don’t know. But I definitely haven’t reached my full power. […] But my relationship to men is weird. In my head it’s like, if I can conquer men, then I can conquer femininity. […] But it’s not like I even want to conquer it, it’s like I wanna fucking obliterate it and then move on to the next level. […] I don’t really know what that means or looks like, but I want it.”

Jules and Anna, Euphoria Episode 7 “The Trials and Tribulations of Trying to Pee While Depressed”

Jules is a trans highschooler in the series Euphoria, and the way she tells her queer story here is totally outside Yanky and Esty’s discourse of true identity. You might have expected her to say something like, “I put those heels on and I just knew in that moment that this was who I am.” Instead she tells this weird story about how femininity to her is magic power; she’s not expressing more and more of her real self or who she is inside–she’s gaining levels! It makes me think of how in Dungeons & Dragons, you start off as one class (say, a barbarian), but you can choose to put levels into a different class (say, a sorcerer), and you can put so many levels into your new class that your original class basically doesn’t matter anymore. You’ll always have the abilities and the drawbacks of that first class, but your wizard skills are so much more powerful that you don’t need to use your barbarian ones. (You can also lean into both classes, and you can have more than two classes!) It’s not that Jules’ journey is false to her identity–it’s that for Jules identity isn’t a thing. She’s not a trans person, she’s a trans magician.

I would love to wrap all this up with an uplifting, affirming statement: that in moments of getting wrapped up in questions of identity, labels, and searching for the true self, I can remember that there is no true self, that I am who I am and can wear what I want to wear and be how I want to be. And if that means I’m queer, trans, nonbinary, then whatever, great! These words matter, though, in a real way. Yes, identity and labels act to divide us; but we can’t “all just be people,” because division means not only separateness but diversity, and as a Jew I hold that the amazing diversity of humanity must be honored and protected.

Where does that leave me in my journey, in my understanding of my journey? Sort of like Esty, I’m following an impulse I don’t really understand and leaping into a world I had never experienced, only heard about until recently. Sort of like Jules, I don’t know what it’s going to look like, and (not “but,” and) I want it. And sort of like Yanky, I’m going to need to grow my hair out again.

This dvar Torah, reprinted here with permission, was written for Torat Tzedek-Torah of Justice. Each week Torat Tzedek shares a teaching on human rights from the Torah portion; this week I am their guest author. Read founder Rabbi Arik Ascherman’s divrei Torah here and follow on Facebook for updates from our work in the field.

It takes just six verses in the Torah for the Israelites to transition from being free people to a nation of slaves. We read that Pharaoh fears their numbers, sets taskmasters over them, and forces them to build his cities. When the Israelite population keeps increasing, the Egyptians impose even harsher labors on them, until their lives become nothing but bitterness. And just like that, they are enslaved for generations.

But it cannot be so simple. A large community–better resourced than many Egyptians, whose ancestor was equivalent to Pharaoh himself–not only gives up their own freedom, but becomes subject to systematic, hereditary enslavement within one generation? Without resistance? It is almost inconceivable, yet throughout human history it has happened and it continues to happen. So what can this parasha teach us when we ask the questions: What makes possible the transition from freedom to enslavement? What does the process of systematic oppression that leads to slavery look like? And once we can imagine slavery, what possibilities do we have for imagining freedom?

The shift that opens the possibility for enslavement is that “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph” (Ex. 1:8). Imagine a president being elected who didn’t know who Martin Luther King, Jr. was! But it’s easier to imagine a president acting as if they didn’t know who he was, as if that history hadn’t happened and left its impact. This is Talmudic rabbi Shmuel’s understanding of the verse: that Pharaoh became willfully ignorant and began passing new laws irreconcilable with the historical relationship between Egyptians and Israelites (Sotah 11a). The key condition that made the enslavement of the Israelites possible was a radical denial of the reality of the past.

The texture of Pharaoh’s denial consists in the erasure of complexity in the Egyptian-Israelite relationship; he replaces that complex reality with a simple narrative of us versus them. “And he said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground'” (Ex. 1:9-10). The Israelites are no longer connected with Joseph–who saved Egypt from starvation, consolidated Pharaoh’s power, and actually enslaved the Egyptian peasantry–and their ancestral shepherding traditions; now they are only foreigners, threats, potential enemies. The goal was to reduce complex, inherently free people into vectors of fear and threat. Only when human beings are flattened (oppress comes from the Latin “to press down”) into objects does it become possible to strip them of their freedom.

In most commentaries Pharaoh is the source of this oppressive flattening, but one commentary, Midrash Tanchuma, imagines it as an Egyptian mass movement. “Was it not Pharaoh? Rather, the Egyptians cried out: ‘Come, let us attack this nation.’ ‘You fools,’ he said to them, ‘we have survived only because of them, how dare we attack them now? Were it not for Joseph, we would not be alive.’ When he refused to carry out their request, they removed him from his throne for three months until he promised them: ‘I am with you in all you do.’ Then they restored him to his throne. That is why it is written: And now there arose a new king” (Shemot 5).

Why the role reversal? Perhaps because of course Pharaoh remembers Joseph, who “gained possession of all the farm land of Egypt for Pharaoh” (Gen. 47:20), instituted a tithing system, and populated Egypt’s cities. The other side of the coin is that of course the Egyptian peasantry would want to erase the memory of Joseph, who enslaved them, removed them from their ancestral lands, and made them pay heavy taxes. (The Sefer haYashar even says that the Israelites instigated the Egyptians’ reaction by murdering 200 of them in cold blood–not that that justifies enslavement.) This part of the complex Egyptian-Israelite history is often erased in our own traditions; restoring it, so that our Judaism contains us as both victims and oppressors at different times, can be a tikkun and a guard against how the Egyptians reacted to their enslavement–by enslaving the Israelites. (They even shut down the government to get what they wanted.)

Whether the denial of the past started with Pharaoh or the Egyptian peasantry, we need to ask what actions were taken to strip the Israelites of their freedom. In fact, why were they enslaved at all, instead of murdered outright? The medieval commentator Ramban explains, “Pharaoh and his advisers did not decide to smite them with the sword, because that would be a great betrayal, to smite a nation that has come to the land on the command of the first king. Even the common people wouldn’t give consent to the king to do such a crime, for he advises with them, and additionally the nation of Israel was numerous and mighty and would fight back in a great war.” They avoid outright slaughter because it would “go too far” for the Egyptians and because of the costs of war–essentially, because war is too nakedly violent. Pharaoh realizes that he needs to “deal shrewdly” with the Israelites, so that the violence of making a person into an object is not as shockingly abrupt as murder, but still just as effective. (If you are met with the argument that the State of Israel is actually showing mercy to the Palestinians by not using all its military might to obliterate them, I would quote them this Ramban.)

Rather, Pharaoh’s strategy is to abuse systems normally considered acceptable to gradually enslave the Israelites. Ramban continues, “Rather he advised that they should act cleverly so that Israel should not feel that he is acting out of hate, and therefore he levied a tax on them, for it is common for foreigners to pay a tax to the king, as is seen by Solomon (Kings 1, 9:21).” (By tax Ramban means compulsory labor, similar to the corvée which was levied in many countries in place of monetary payments.) In the Talmud, the school of Rabbi Elazar imagines a different strategy of normalizing slavery: by Pharaoh enslaving himself. “The school of Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, taught: This teaches that at first they brought a brick mold and they hung it on the neck of Pharaoh [to create the appearance that he was also participating in the labor]. And with regard to each and every Jew who said to the Egyptians: I am a delicate person [and I cannot participate in the labor], they said to him: Are you at all more of a delicate person than Pharaoh!?” Of course, Pharaoh is still free to desist from the work, and he ensures that the Israelites are not.

The midrash calls this tactic of oppression–abusing accepted systems–b’fe rakh, “with gentle speech.” Once the Israelites agree willingly to the labor, Pharaoh gradually reduces their pay and institutionalizes their labor as compulsory. Now future generations of Israelites will be born into slavery, and the work the parents remember being paid to do will be nothing but senseless oppression to the children. But it is hard to imagine how something like this could actually happen–wouldn’t the Israelites revolt? Resist? Rebel?

A possible explanation lies in Italian rabbi Sforno’s commentary that the Israelites “volunteered to accept as a form of taxation to build these storage cities for Pharaoh to prove their loyalty to Egypt.” Now we can add dual loyalty to Egypt’s tactics of oppression, along with oppressive flattening and b’fe rakh. The recent detentions of Iranian-Americans at the U.S. border show that accusations of dual loyalty can be used against all minorities, not only Jews.

Torah imagines the process of enslavement as a strange combination of gradual elision of society’s moral boundaries along with abrupt institutionalization of oppressive systems. The tactics of oppression the Egyptians used included mass movements; flattening of people into objects through warmongering and fear; erasure of history; the “gentle speech” of using acceptable, legal systems as avenues for criminal actions; and classically antisemitic tropes such as accusations of dual loyalty.

I’ve suggested the Egyptians’ tactics have parallels in our time. It has happened before, it has happened far more recently than the Egyptians’ enslavement of the Israelites, it is happening now, and the seeds of it will always lie in the ground of our societies, waiting to sprout. The Torah has armed us with this (hi)story so that we can recognize the emergence of systems that we know can lead to slavery, so that we can fight them before they entrench themselves so deeply that four or more generations are stripped of their freedom. Does that fight look like plagues? Like drowning our oppressors in the ocean? Like marching through impassable waters to freedom, and never going back?

While those are critical questions, I’d like to attempt an answer at a different one. We’ve seen what the shape of slavery looks like in the Torah–so what does the shape of freedom look like? What, in the eyes of Torah, are we fighting for?

When we say freedom, we often mean “the ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want.” This idea of freedom, like all ideas, has a specific history. David Graeber argues in his book Debt that in Roman law, “there was no intrinsic difference between private property and political power–at least, insofar as that power was based in violence. …When Medieval political theorists spoke of ‘liberty,’ they were normally referring to a lord’s right to do whatever he wanted within his own domains. …This is a tradition that assumes that liberty is essentially the right to do what one likes with one’s own property.” Graeber suggests that this conception of freedom carries the potential for slavery as its sitra achra, its shadow side: “…Formal slavery has been eliminated, but (as anyone who works from nine to five can testify) the idea that you can alienate your liberty, at least temporarily, endures.” In fact, we are not so far away from slavery as we might imagine. (Remember how Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites by paying them less and less?) This Roman-European-capitalist understanding of freedom is emphatically not the Torah’s.

When the Israelites cross the Sea of Reeds into freedom, does that mean that they suddenly plunged into a world of anarchy restrained by enlightened self-interest? No–the Israelites become truly free at Sinai, when they accept the Torah, its laws, its customs, its community. Jewish theologian and activist A. J. Heschel, in The Insecurity of Freedom, explains, ” The first thing [the Jews were] told is: You can’t let yourself go; get into harness, carry the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven. [They were] told to bear loads of responsibility.” Freedom in the Torah does not mean setting up the self as an idol to worship. It is not even a “thing” to possess; rather, “it comes about in moments of transcending the self as an act of spiritual ecstasy, of stepping out of the confining framework of routine reflexive concerns.” Freedom is not something we have; it is something we enact in moments like the Revelation at Sinai, where we move beyond the chains that bind us and dedicate ourselves to the ties that bind us together.

And God said, It is too slight a thing that you should be My servant to raise up the tribes of Ya῾aqov, and to restore the preserved of Yisra᾽el: I will also make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may be to the end of the earth.

Isaiah 49:6

[W]e cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates [them]self, but rather that human beings in communion liberate each other.

Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Found in this article.

Heschel proclaims, “Freedom can only endure as a vision.” What is the Torah’s vision of freedom? What does the Torah imagine freedom looking like? It looks like a strong community bound together not by self-centered interests, but by the mission to make the world a sacred space. There is no individual freedom in the Torah. Moshe was not free in Midian; neither was Aharon when he left his people to meet his brother in the wilderness. The only liberation that the Torah envisions is collective. It is based in shared history, in generational culture, in a common purpose. And the light of liberation is not meant to shine only on us, the Jews, or on any limited group of people. Our mission is to spread liberation until the whole world shines with freedom–speedily and in our days. Shabbat shalom.

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֵלַ֗י עֲוֺ֨ן בֵּֽית־יִשְׂרָאֵ֤ל וִֽיהוּדָה֙ גָּדוֹל֙ בִּמְאֹ֣ד מְאֹ֔ד וַתִּמָּלֵ֤א הָאָ֙רֶץ֙ דָּמִ֔ים וְהָעִ֖יר מָלְאָ֣ה מֻטֶּ֑ה כִּ֣י אָמְר֗וּ עָזַ֤ב ה’ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ וְאֵ֥ין ה’ רֹאֶֽה׃ וְגַ֨ם־אֲנִ֔י לֹא־תָח֥וֹס עֵינִ֖י וְלֹ֣א אֶחְמֹ֑ל דַּרְכָּ֖ם בְּרֹאשָׁ֥ם נָתָֽתִּי׃

Then said he to me, “The iniquity of the house of Yisra᾽el and Yehuda is exceedingly great, and the land is full of blood, and the city full of injustice: for they say, God has forsaken the land, and God sees not. And as for me, my eye shall not spare, nor will I have pity, but I will bring their ways upon their heads.”

Ezekiel 9:9-10

As I was lying down on a rocky hillside overlooking the Jordan Valley, hiding from the Israeli military police, I asked myself: Does the land punish those who commit injustice upon it? Does the earth care who eats from its abundance? And when I heard the illegal settlers of Malakhei haShalom calling their sheepdog on the ridge above me, I answered: Not today, not in Rashash.

Rashash is a Bedouin village in occupied Palestine. They live in the shadow of an Israeli army base and an illegal outpost called Malakhei haShalom (“The Angels of Peace”). Shepherding is their livelihood and heritage, and, like many farmers in the US, they live on the edge of ruin. Yet before they invited Torat Tzedek and Taayush to accompany them in the fields, they would see the settlers watching them from the hill above Rashash and stay home. And now the settlers are getting increasingly aggressive in forcing them into smaller and smaller grazing areas.

First of all – these acts of terror are wrong no matter what the socioeconomic condition of Rashash is. But still, it’s hard to understand how significant they are without some background. Raising grass-fed goats and sheep is not a niche marketing tool for these shepherds; it is the only way they can afford to keep their way of life. The less grass their flocks eat, the more they need to spend on grain. Eventually it will get too expensive, and they’ll have to sell their animals and move to a city to make a living. And that is exactly what the settlers (and their funders) want – to cleanse the land of the Bedouin and seize it for themselves.

We’re there now almost every day, at the shepherd’s invitation, to accompany them. We have three goals: to document the violence, to intervene non-violently, and to be in solidarity with the village. We are also preparing to bring a case to the Israeli High Court trying to secure basic protections for Palestinian shepherds in the Jordan Valley. Meanwhile we’re doing what we can to help the shepherds stay on the land.

So how did I end up alone on a hill in occupied Palestine hiding from the military police? Today the settlers, mounted on horses, used a boombox blasting bad Israeli pop music to drive the Bedouin’s flocks far out into the field. If you saw how the goats run down hills to get away from the sound, you’d understand how violent this tactic is. After Arik and Guy grabbed the horse’s reins (watch the video!), Moshe, the settler on the horse, dismounted and ran after the flock with the boombox. I ran after him and failed to grab the boombox or stop him from driving the goats way up the other side of the valley. So when the police arrived – after at least an hour, and exactly when the violence was over – I was far away with Mousa, the shepherd. He kept going, and I turned back to rejoin the other activists when I saw the police on the ridge above me. I had nothing to tell them, and I didn’t want to risk them logging my presence in a conflict zone – so I ducked down and waited for them to leave.

Back in Rashash the sheikh treated us to a lunch of scrambled eggs, tomatoes, bread, and fresh olive oil. The shepherds who were brave enough to take their flocks out were probably eating a similar lunch in the hills, over an hour away. As we ate, I asked why the settlers had suddenly gotten so aggressive – when I left five months ago, they weren’t nearly this bad. Any explanation we can give for the settlers’ behavior is at best informed guesswork, but we think that they have financial backers (how else could they afford their horses, their well-trained sheepdogs, their ATV?) who are demanding results – meaning clear progress toward their goal of seizing the land and driving the Bedouin out. Not only do they have violence, the army, the police, and tacit state policy on their side, but they also have money. (Donate to Torat Tzedek to tip the scales.)

אֶשָּׂ֣א עֵ֭ינַי אֶל־הֶהָרִ֑ים מֵ֝אַ֗יִן יָבֹ֥א עֶזְרִֽי׃

I lift up my eyes to the hills – where will my help come from?

Psalm 121:1

I’ve left so many unasked and unanswered questions in my story. How did the Bedouin villagers come to Rashash? Why is an illegal – according to Israel – outpost allowed next to an army base? What is the status of the land the settlers are trying to occupy from the shepherds? How does what’s happening in Rashash and other Bedouin communities in the West Bank fit into the history of Palestinian oppression and occupation? Why is the balance of power so horrifically twisted in favor of crime and injustice? And where does salvation come from?

עֶ֭זְרִי מֵעִ֣ם ה’ עֹ֝שֵׂ֗ה שָׁמַ֥יִם וָאָֽרֶץ׃

My help comes from God, the Creator of heaven and earth.

Psalm 121:2

I don’t need to know the answer to that last question. Where it seems like God isn’t watching, that is where we need to be. To paraphrase Ezekiel, “They say that God isn’t looking. Who’s to say? But me – I am not sparing my eyes from injustice.” So I’ll be back tomorrow, and every day that Rashash requests our presence, and I will bear witness.

A prayer for those hidden from view.
The land holds us, supports us, and remembers us. May the Earth that connects us all help us sense the suffering of those we cannot see. May the blood shed out of our view rise up in clouds higher than borders; may that blood wet our cheeks in rain that erases boundaries. May our actions stem from gratitude for these rains, and not from shame that we were under our roofs, dry and hiding.

שִׁ֗יר הַֽמַּ֫עֲל֥וֹת בְּשׁ֣וּב יְ֭הוָה אֶת־שִׁיבַ֣ת צִיּ֑וֹן הָ֝יִ֗ינוּ כְּחֹלְמִֽים׃
A song of ascents — When God restored our return to Zion, we were like dreamers.

Tehilim 126:1

I’ve been waiting in an Israeli police station in occupied Palestine for three hours. The officer who, five months ago, would have deported me if I weren’t an American Jew, just clocked out of work. Meanwhile, above the Jordan Valley, the Bedouin shepherds of Rashash are living in the shadow of an army base and an illegal Israeli outpost; they might be eating dinner now, or taking their flocks out for a second watering. Here, officers are storing their AK-47s and wishing each other “Shabbat shalom,” laughing, eager to go home for the weekend. Suddenly Rabbi Arik Ascherman is handing me his phone, getting handcuffed, and mouthing at me to take a picture of his arrest. It’s my third day back in the Land.

When I was in Jerusalem this spring, we would sometimes ask Palestinians what action they want us to take. Their answer was always, “Tell people what is happening here. Tell our story.” This blog is my effort to enact that request. For the short time I’m back in the Land, I’ll be posting stories of life under the Israeli military occupation of Palestine. I will tell them through my own lens, with my own interpretations, but I intend to center the narratives of occupied lives, not my own experiences. Where possible, I’ll link to action items so that you can follow up on each post.

As I write this, an Israeli human rights activist is being held overnight in a police station in occupied Palestine. In Issawiya – a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, on the Palestinian side of the Green Line – Palestinian youths are defying a curfew and their house arrest orders, protesting police violence. In nearby Silwan, thanks to the JNF, families are being evicted from their homes, to be replaced by Israeli settlers. A coalition of activists from the US, Israel, and Palestine are preparing for an action in the South Hebron Hills, running scenarios and reviewing rights if arrested. It feels like this land is on fire, and God knows there’s not enough water to go around.

Asking where to start is the wrong question. The work is already happening, the movements are already here – so ask instead, “How do I join? How do I become part of the continuing?” I’m hoping that a good place to begin answering that question is here, with stories. Let’s see where they take us, what dreams they let us dream, what new worlds we can imagine into being.

A prayer: We were once children brimming with wild possibility. May we be led out from a place of despair and blessed to return to a place of dreaming. May we all be restored to that place, in this world, speedily, and in our days. Bless those who are already dreamers for showing us the way, and bless those who are newly dreaming for showing us that return is possible!