This should have been my first post. The paragraphs below are the foundation of my identity as both a Queer person and a Jew. It is my intellectual frame-work for the journey that envelopes me.
Why Queer: I know that the term queer turns many people off. But, for me, and others, it provides a broad inclusive umbrella under which all sexual/gender misfits can find a shelter from the stormy tendencies our culture has to work within a binary of gender and gender roles.
Who is Queer: As a graduate student I argued that Queer people are those whose sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other means of being, is a transgression of the inherited patriarchal laws that govern our interactions and evaluate our worth; Queer people are those who are strange, and set apart because body, mind, and soul cannot find enough room in the House of Patriarchy to live authentically.
Patriarchy literally means “beginnings in the father.” This social, intellectual, and political reality is a tricky one. Its purpose and power is to build a pyramid in which the “standard form” is the pinnacle; all else are sub-standard, and thus experience challenges to their humanity – humanness. In our culture, the standard setter is (at least for now) Anglo-European Heterosexual maleness. This does not mean that white, heterosexual men are evil– rather it simply means that men– in our particular context white men– benefit from a social order that assumes their lives and experience to be normative for all human beings. And While, one could argue that “other” groups have made significant advancements in our society, perhaps challenging my assertion, I would argue that maleness and whiteness and definitely Heterosexuality reign supreme in identifying “normal” experience and ultimately “humanness.” This assertion is not meant to demonize individuals or groups– it is rather, meant to draw our collective attention to the system that ultimately enslaves us all–that challenge our worth as human beings, based on an unattainable standard of masculinity.
Playing “operation” as a child, I wondered why there was only always a man’s body; my mother told me “The man’s body is the basic body women have a lot of extra’s like a womb and breast…” I always assumed this to be true, at least as I operated with this assumption in my teens and even into my first year of college. It was not an assumption that I felt informed my interactions with or feelings towards women. But I later realized that operating with this assumption actually did inform my interactions, beliefs, and feelings towards women. I was not a woman-hater, but I had not yet realized that I was privileged simply for having been born male (of course my worth is challenged because I am gay, and consequently unable to live in the House of Patriarchy).
Did you know…that women’s bodies are ACTUALLY the norm? In the womb, we all begin as women. In fact there are, for men, ghosts of this reality that manifest in physical “scars” on the genitalia. There is a long seam where once lived a Vagina. True Story!
If we assume, as I have argued, that White-Heterosexual-Maleness is normative or more specifically the standard by which all human forms are evaluated, then we can assume, as I do, that there are LOTS of queer forms. Of particular interested to me, is Sexual queerness. It is a queerness of sexuality that I mean to identify when I refer to Queer people, even though, intellectually, I have a much broader working definition of queerness.
The Torah and Me: When we (people of faith, Jewish or Christian) encounter our sacred texts, we bring with us our experience. It is of the utmost importance for us to be aware of this; we cannot avoid it. But, I think, while being mindful of the lenses through which we read, we should also be careful to read the text critically, and to seek from it an original meaning for those for whom the text was initially intend. While it is true that we cannot avoid our context, it is also true that we should not superimpose our context onto the passage of scripture.
When I encounter Torah or other sacred texts, my encounter is as a Queer person. Actually I encounter the text with various experiences, identities, and values; cultural, religious, geographical and political. Every fiber of my being influences my reading, and encourages my curiosity.
Queer eye for the… Torah : There are three major stories in Genesis that appear close together, and as I read it, give us an insight into what it meant and means to be Jewish; and what values we attribute to G-d.
Chapter 10 of Genesis completes the Noah story cycle. G-d, who destroyed the earth, commanded Noah and his sons to multiply and fill the earth, and apparently they were happy to oblige G-d. At the end of Chapter 10, the descendants of Noah have multiplied and live in various regions with various languages.
Something unknown to us, and the biblical story-teller, happens to the world. Perhaps we can speculate as to its placement in the Torah, and thus the motives the Editors might have had, but ultimately what we learn is largely (unsatisfactorily so) left to our imagination. In chapter 11 the story of a tower is told: The Tower of Babel. Some how, everyone now had only one language– and a common project; whatever diversity G-d intended for humanity, was undone.
Surprisingly short, this story is only 9 verses long, yet it is one of the better known story of the Torah. The story ends with G-d re-establishing a multitude of languages and scattering humanity over the face of the earth.
The completion of the story of Babel sets the stage for a new way that G-d will do business with humanity. After Babel, the reader is drawn into another story– not just a general story of humanity and earth (after all up to chapter 11, the text is about humanity; a specific Jewish identity has yet to surface).
As Chapter 11 of Genesis concludes, a new story begins. Abram, whose ancestry is described after the story of Babel, will become a new hero, and an important link to the rest of the Torah.
In chapter 12, Abram encounters G-d. Abram is commanded to leave his father’s house and begin a new journey: Abram will father a great nation. Eventually Abram becomes Abraham, and he and Sarai (who becomes Sarah), parent a people who will become known as Jews.
It is curious to me that G-d did not tell Abraham that he would establish monotheism, or cultivate a religious practice; the rubric of religion and cultic ritual does not appear until after the Exodus. Furthermore I cannot ignore the placement of Abraham and Sarah’s introduction to the stage of Genesis. It seems to me, that reading the text carefully, that G-d has decided that G-d will preserve diversity by creating a new people; that G-d’s intentions for humanity have been un-done again and again, and that finally G-d seeks to preserve difference by setting apart a nation.
A Righteous and Queer Nation: Queer means strange or different = other. The definition of the project G-d is endeavoring to begin with Abram and Sarai is queer. G-d seeks to establish a strange people, who will be set apart from all other nations.
This is what is means to be a Jew and a Queer Jew for me: I am the bearer of a great mantel of particular strangeness. I am not, as a Jew, a member of the broader religious culture. I am not, because of my sexual orientation and embodiment, a resident of the house in which I was born; Patriarchy. The mantel I bear is anti-assimilationist, rich in culture and heavy burden because of history’s cruelty to different people. Had I lived more than 60 years ago, I would have been a doubly targeted by the Nazis, for being both gay and Jewish. It is a heavy, beautiful mantel, and it is one I must carry for myself, my people and for G-d.
G-d says to the Jewish people in Parsha Kedoshim “You shall be Holy for I, HaShem, am Holy…” (Leviticus 19). One does not have to do too much with the definition of Holiness (set apart, strange, unique) to find that the work queer might be used as a synonym. And so it is, for me at least, that G-d sought to establish a people, set apart, to be a testimony to G-d’s intentions for creation. G-d sought to establish a nation; a righteous and Queer nation.
torahqueer 