Ki Tetsei and Gender

Women's Commentary on Deut. 22:5

"The prohibition on cross-dressing is not explained, except to note that it is abhorrent to God. This rule perhaps was intended to prevent unacceptable sexual practices or pagan cultic practices. More likely, it aims to maintain gender boundaries, analogous to the laws against forbidden mixtures in [Deuteronomy] 22:9-11, thus preventing confusion about the public presentation of a person's gender identity." -The Torah: A Women's Commentary

A Miracle and Two Rabbis in the Talmud

"There once was a man whose wife died and left him with an infant to suckle and he could not afford to pay a wet-nurse. A miracle occurred and he grew breasts like a woman's two breasts and he nursed his child. [A first Rabbi] Rav Yosef said: Come and see just how great this man is that such a miracle was performed for him! Abaye [another Rabbi] [argued]: On the contrary - how bad is this man that the order of nature was changed for him." -Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 53b

Rabbi Yohanan and Resh Laquish, Bava Metzia 84a:

Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai was one of the last remaining people to have seen the Second Temple before its destruction and is considered to be the father of modern rabbinical Judaism. He was said to be incredibly beautiful (and without a beard). Resh Laquish was a great Jewish warrior. He and R. Yochanan were chevruta (study partners) for many years. According to the Talmud, this is how they met.

One day Rabbi Yohanan

was swimming in the Jordan.

Resh Lakish saw him

and thought he was a woman.

He dug his spear into the Jordan and leaped to the other side of the Jordan.

R. Yohanan said to him: "This strength of yours - for Torah!"

Resh Lakish said to him: "This beauty of yours - for women!"

R. Yohanan said to him: "If you will repent, I will give you my sister, who is more beautiful than I."

Resh Lakish accepted the offer upon himself.

He then tried to jump back to bring his clothing - but he was not able to.

A Description of R. Yochanan's Beauty from Talmud, Bava Metzia 84b:

Rabbi Yohanan said: "I have survived from the beauty of Jerusalem".

One who wishes to see the beauty of Rabbi Yohanan should bring a brand new silver cup and fill it with the red seeds of the pomegranate and place around its rim a garland of red roses, and let him place it at the place where the sun meets the shade, and that vision is the beauty of Rabbi Yohanan.

Rabbi Yohanan did not have "splendor of the face" [i.e., a beard].

Deuteronomy 22:5 According to Rashi (Nazir 59)

A man’s attire shall not be on a woman: making her appear like a man, thereby enabling her to go among men, for this can only be for the [purpose of] adultery. —

nor may a man wear a woman’s garment: to go and abide among women. Another explanation: [In addition to not wearing a woman’s garment,] a man must also not remove his pubic hair or the hair of his armpits [for this is a practice exclusive to women].

because… is an abomination: The Torah forbids only [the wearing of] clothes that would lead to abomination [i.e., immoral and illicit behavior].

- Chabad.org

On Rashi's commentary, excerpted from 'To Wear is Human' by Rabbi Elliot Kukla and Reuben Zellman, 2006:

The great medieval commentator Rashi explains that this verse is not simply forbidding wearing the clothes of the “opposite gender.” Rashi writes that such dress is prohibited only when it will lead to adultery. Maimonides, a 12th century codifier of Jewish law, claims that this verse is actually intended to prohibit cross-dressing for the purposes of idol worship. (Sefer haMitzvot, Lo Taaseh 39-40) In other words, according to the classical scholars of our tradition, wearing clothes of “the wrong gender” is proscribed only when it is for the express purpose of causing harm to our relationship with our loved ones or with God. The prohibition that we learn from this verse is very specific: we must not misrepresent our true gender in order to cause harm. Otherwise, wearing clothing of another gender is not prohibited. The Talmud puts it most succinctly: v’ein kan toevah – “there is no abomination here.”

Excerpt from "To Wear Is Human: Parshat Ki Teitze" by Rabbi Elliot Kukla and Reuben Zellman, 2006

"The prohibition (Deut. 22:5) that we learn from this verse is very specific: we must not misrepresent our true gender in order to cause harm. Otherwise, wearing clothing of another gender is not prohibited. The Talmud puts it most succinctly: v’ein kan toevah – “there is no abomination here.” So, what does this verse mean for us today? In order to understand it in our own context, we need to examine two questions: What does it mean to wear clothing of a gender we are not? And, what does it mean to cause harm?

Many people feel like their true gender is not (or is not only) the gender that was assigned to them at birth. The Torah is asking us not to misrepresent our gender, which we can understand as using external garments to conceal our inner selves. Unfortunately, many transgender and genderqueer people today feel forced to hide in exactly this way. In our society the penalty for expressing the fullness of a gender-variant identity is often severe and can include verbal, sexual, and physical abuse, employment discrimination, an inability to access education and health care and, sometimes, murder.(...)

Classical Jewish scholars do not accept such a justifi cation for narrow-mindedness. (...) Rather, we can flip mainstream understandings of our verse on their head and understand it as a positive mitzvah, a sacred obligation to present the fullness of our gender as authentically as possible. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to fulfill this mitzvah without endangering their life or livelihood, and the protection of human life always comes first in Judaism. However, the Torah wants us to be true to ourselves.

Next, we come to the second part of our prohibition: that we must not cover up our gender in order to cause harm. Transgender and genderqueer people who hide under the clothing of the gender they were assigned – rather than expressing themselves as they really are – suffer terrible harm. Rates of depression, suicide, and destructive self-medication are astronomical. Each and every soul is created in the multifaceted image of the Creator. When we try to conceal that uniqueness, we cause ourselves pain.

Jewish tradition asks us to safeguard each unique being created in the image of God, by preventing harm. When we cover up our true souls and muffle our divine reflection under clothes that feel “wrong”, we are harming God’s creation. This is what our Torah prohibits!"

A Definition of the "Shekhina", Excerpted from Tel Shemesh

"Where can we find a powerful image of the Divine feminine within Jewish sources? One name for Her which has been with us for centuries is the Shekhinah, the “dweller within.” In ancient times, the Shekhinah was a Talmudic word for the glory of God that rested on the mishkan (the mishkan was the Tabernacle, God’s sacred dwelling space in the wilderness). (...)

According to the Talmud, the Shekhinah, the Indwelling, is the Divine that resides within the life of the world, dwelling on earth with the Jewish people and going into exile with them when they are exiled. While the traditional Jewish image of the transcendent God is male, in the kabbalah, that image has been accompanied by the feminine image of the Shekhinah—the inner glory of existence. (...)

The Shekhinah embodies joy, yet she is also a symbol of shared suffering and empathy, not only with a nation’s exile, but with all the hurts of the world. Mystics believe that in messianic times She will be reunited with her heavenly partner and that they will become one. Many Jewish poets of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have reclaimed her as a powerful feminine image of God."

On shabbat, the idea behind the Sabbath 'bride' is often connected to the Shekhina. As the bride enters, there is no longer a separation between Adonai and Shekhina. Here is the notion that during the Sabbath, the masculine and feminine energies of God blur and become one, without distinction, without end (ein sof).