Following up on my most recent post about some different Jewish theoretical approaches to the issue of homosexuality, I would like to offer one or two thoughts on how Judaism approaches gender. Can we devise a modern Jewish theoretical framework for understanding and resolving issues posed to traditional Jewish thought and law by people who bend or break the gender boundaries?
The Torah itself doesn’t have very much to say directly about the issue of gender; the issue was taken up by the rabbis of the Talmud and the later commentators. However, the world of the Bible seems to have been one in which there was a rigid separation between the masculine and feminine worlds. Compare the matriarchs’ and patriarchs’ roles in Genesis, for example: the men are hunters and warriors, while the women are stay-at-home moms. This doesn’t mean, however, that the women are without power or influence. Sarah basically runs the household and expects Abraham to do as she wants, even up to expelling her maidservant Hagar, mother of Abraham’s son and Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael—an action condoned by God after Sarah proposes it (Gen. 21:9–14). Likewise, Rebekah schemes to get her husband Isaac to bless her favourite son Jacob rather than her husband’s favourite Esau (Gen. 27). And so on through the generations: the women scheme to get what they want, like some caricature of a Medea or an Eleanor of Aquitaine. (Also, the other way in which the women in Genesis are used is as passive sex objects to be fought over: Judah and Tamar in Gen. 38 or the famous case of Jacob’s daughter Dinah in Gen. 34, whose capture and rape leads to the decimation of an entire city.)
Yet there seems, at the same time, to be a very interesting privileging of the feminine within the narrative of the Book of Genesis. In each iterative generation, a variation on the same story is played out between the multiple sons of each patriarch, and the result is invariably that the younger, less “masculine” son emerges the victor. Abraham’s son Isaac “wanders in the fields to meditate by evening” (Gen. 24:63; all translations are my own). When Isaac’s wife Rebekah is pregnant with twins, she gets an oracle from God that says that “the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23), and indeed this is what happens. The firstborn, Esau, was “a cunning hunter, a man of the field, but Jacob was a simple man, a dweller in tents” (Gen. 25:27). Jacob schemes to get Esau to sell him his birthright (Gen. 25:29–34), a most unmasculine act in this context. He then further conspires with his mother, as mentioned above, to get Isaac to bless him and not his brother, referring to himself as “a smooth man” in contrast to the “hairy” Esau (Gen. 27:11), and the ruse succeeds. Jacob gives his favourite son Joseph, his second-youngest, a coat of many colours (Gen. 37:3). Joseph becomes known as a dreamer of dreams, especially dreams which prophesied his eventual ascendance over his older brothers, and he passive-aggressively relates these dreams to his brothers, which naturally pisses them off (Gen. 37:5–11). Eventually, his brothers get so angry that they cast him in a pit and then sell him into slavery, but eventually his dreamer’s skill resurfaces when he accurately interprets signs in the dreams of Pharaoh’s butler and baker (Gen. 40) and then in the dreams of Pharaoh himself (Gen. 41), and he works himself up in the end to become lord of all Egypt. Finally, capping off this theme through the generations, the eldest sons of Jacob do not receive their father’s blessing at the end of his life. Reuben gets cast out of the blessing because he “ascended [his] father’s bed” (Gen. 49:4), i.e. had sex with his father’s concubine Bilhah (Gen. 35:22). The next two eldest, Simeon and Levi, are castigated by Jacob because of their decimation of the town of Shechem after the rape of their sister Dinah, as mentioned above. Jacob curses them–a curse which is worth quoting in full, since it speaks to every theme under discussion here (Gen. 49:5–7):
שִׁמְע֥וֹן וְלֵוִ֖י אַחִ֑ים כְּלֵ֥י חָמָ֖ס מְכֵרֹֽתֵיהֶֽם׃ בְּסֹדָם֙ אַל־תָּבֹ֣א נַפְשִׁ֔י בִּקְהָלָ֖ם אַל־תֵּחַ֣ד כְּבֹדִ֑י כִּ֤י בְאַפָּם֙ הָ֣רְגוּ אִ֔ישׁ וּבִרְצֹנָ֖ם עִקְּרוּ־שֽׁוֹר׃ אָר֤וּר אַפָּם֙ כִּ֣י עָ֔ז וְעֶבְרָתָ֖ם כִּ֣י קָשָׁ֑תָה אֲחַלְּקֵ֣ם בְּיַֽעֲקֹ֔ב וַֽאֲפִיצֵ֖ם בְּיִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃
Simeon and Levi are brothers, weapons of violence are their trade. Let my soul not come into their council, let my glory not enter into their congregation; for in their anger they slew men, and in their willfulness they uprooted oxen. Cursed be their anger, for it was terrible, and their wrath, for it was severe. I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel.
Thus, from the first to the final generation of the Abrahamic family in the Book of Genesis, the theme is complete: the elder—associated with hunting, warfare, destruction, and sexual desire and retribution—loses out to the more feminine younger. We will return to these characters and their apparently (somewhat) fluid conceptions of gender roles later.
There are only a few times when the Torah directly comments on gender in a legal context. We cannot address them all here, but we should note one of the most obvious: the deuteronomistic prohibition against cross-dressing (Deut. 22:5):
לֹֽא־יִהְיֶ֤ה כְלִי־גֶ֨בֶר֙ עַל־אִשָּׁ֔ה וְלֹֽא־יִלְבַּ֥שׁ גֶּ֖בֶר שִׂמְלַ֣ת אִשָּׁ֑ה כִּ֧י תֽוֹעֲבַ֛ת יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ כָּל־עֹ֥שֵׂה אֵֽלֶּה׃
The apparel of a man shall not be upon a woman, and a man shall not wear a woman’s garment, for anyone who does these is an abomination to the Lord your God.
Note that the same word is used here—to‘evah, “abomination”—as is used both times the Torah condemns homosexuality (Lev. 18:22 and 20:13). The word means something like an infraction against the natural order of the world—idolatry is also described in this language—and is one of the worst possible categories of transgression. It is not really clear where this prohibition comes from, and the context does not help since it is presented entirely on its own in a section that is a general collection of miscellaneous laws. One traditional Jewish interpretation of this law is that cross-dressing might somehow lead to promiscuity and adultery (an apparently serious variant on the “it might lead to mixed dancing” punch line). But recent scholarship has suggested that ritual cross-dressing might have been a part of pagan worship, especially pertaining to fertility rituals—we know that temple prostitution was part of such ritual worship—so this prohibition might be understood as a further way of distinguishing Yahwist religion from everything that everybody else in the ancient Near East did.
Whatever the reason behind it, the Torah’s specific prohibition against cross-dressing serves to sharpen the boundary between masculine and feminine. But as we have already seen, this boundary seems to have been less rigid the further back in time we go: in Genesis femininity seems to be rewarded in certain kinds of men, while the Deuteronomist seems to want to draw sharper distinctions. (Without going into the documentary hypothesis at great length, it is probable that most of Genesis is centuries older than most, if not all, of Deuteronomy.) And if we go even further back to the first story of creation (J source) in Genesis, we find that the act of the creation of human beings itself is presented as much more blended and harmonious between genders than it would later become (Gen. 1:27):
וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם׃
God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.
Note the somewhat awkward shifting of pronouns and referents: this does not appear to be as stark a separation of masculine and feminine as is found in the other, later (E source) more famous story of creation, when God takes a side (or rib) from Adam and fashions it into a woman for his companionship (Gen. 2:20–24). Instead, the Genesis 1 initial creation of male and female together, in the same body (depending on how you read the text), speaks to a blending of boundaries—or at least to a time when those boundaries were more fluid than they are made later by other people and other laws. (Compare the deuteronomistic separation of masculine and feminine to other deuteronomistic laws pertaining to the strict separation of certain kinds of mixtures in planting one’s field and in constructing one’s garments, at Deut. 22:9–11.)
Later Jews in the Rabbinic period would extend the male/female physical dichotomy, which is taken as a given in the Torah, apparently with the knowledge of the existence of intersex people and people with ambiguous genitalia. The Talmud refers to two categories other than male and female: tumtum (apparently someone without defined male or female genitalia) and androgynous (a Greek loanword meaning “man-woman” but probably being used to cover all other cases of intersexuality or genital ambiguity). The individual cases and references to these two categories are too numerous and complicated to digest here; I would refer anybody interested to this paper, written from a modern Orthodox perspective, for its exhaustive references (even though its medical knowledge is somewhat lacking). However, the basic point is this: there are many different opinions throughout the Talmud and the later commentators as to the legal status of both the tumtum and the androgynous. Are they obligated to observe all the laws? Which of the laws might constitute an undue hardship for them? Since primary qualification on observance of the laws is traditionally broken down by sex—women are not required to observe positive, time-bound commandments, for example—where do these categories fit into this structure? Suffice it to say the question is extremely complicated and by no means closed, especially as medical and scientific knowledge continue to advance.
The category of “transgender” is a relatively new one as far as the social history of our civilization is concerned. Until very recently, it was not possible for an individual actually to change his or her sex, and Jewish law has not really caught up with this fact yet. The sharp distinction between male and female that we started to see in Deuteronomy is partially a manifestation of an underlying fact about Jewish law and the Hebrew language work: there is no “neuter” grammatical gender, as there is in, say, Greek and Latin, and consequently there is no way to refer to anybody as anything other than, say, the “son” or “daughter” of another individual. Neither is there any mytho-historical tradition about transgender individuals in a Jewish context, as there is with other cultures: again, the Greeks (Tiresias, especially) come to mind—as do the Romans, but to a lesser extent—nevertheless, if you’ve never read Catullus 63, his poem “about a young boy who joins a goddess cult and castrates himself”, as a friend of mine once summarized it, you ought to do so at some point. At any rate, there’s nothing comparable to any of this in the Judaic tradition: to an extent, as I have already pointed out, the language won’t even really allow for it.
So where does that leave us, really? I think it leaves us in a somewhat odd place, different to where the discussion of homosexuality left us. There, at least we have a theoretical framework for conceiving the modern understanding of homosexuality in a Judaic context. But here, I’m not sure that we have an equivalent framework. What with the four categories already in existence in Jewish law—male, female, tumtum, and androgynous—you’d think there would be adequate resources to attack this question. But I’m not convinced that this is the case. Much of what is written in the Talmud and later commentators about the tumtum and androgynous is focussed on trying to determine whether they’re “really” male or “really” female for the purposes of specific laws (e.g. an androgynous is considered to be “really” male for the purposes of observance of positive time-bound commandments). While this approach may be able to be made to work for some people, I feel that it is fundamentally flawed because it only appears to recognize two “real” categories and attempts to fit, as far as possible, any aberrations into these categories. And I don’t feel that this is the right framework from which to approach the transgender category: the question of “is such an individual ‘really’ male or ‘really’ female” seems to me ill-posed at best and downright discriminatory and essentialist at worst.
What is needed, I think, is nothing less than a radical reexamination of gender categories. The rabbis of the Talmud knew that the world contained more gender types than could be accounted for simply under Torah law. Today, we know that there are even more gender types than that. But, as I said, I believe we can do better than approaching this problem on the level of determining whether any given individual is “really” male or “really” female. In this, we might do well to go back and have a hard look at our earliest roots—the people of Genesis—whom the Bible presents as playing, to an extent, with some preconceived notions of gender in their society. A critical reevaluation of gender is the only thing that will be able to bring about a framework for dealing with the question of transgender people in a positive manner.
A good framework for attacking this question does not really exist yet. It will be up to our generation to set the stage so that future generations will be able to know that they belong to a Jewish world that recognizes and understands them—and ultimately, inshallah, to a Jewish world that respects and loves them.