How does this set of text describe God's queerness?
כו וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים, נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ; וְיִרְדּוּ בִדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם, וּבַבְּהֵמָה וּבְכָל-הָאָרֶץ, וּבְכָל-הָרֶמֶשׂ, הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל-הָאָרֶץ. כז וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת-הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ, בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ: זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה, בָּרָא אֹתָם.
(26) And God said: ‘Let us make a person in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’ (27) And God created a person in God's own image, in the image of God, God created it; male through female created them.
We are queer children of a queer God – and by “we,” I mean the Jewish people. When queer Jews read Torah as our own, we help all Jews recognize and reclaim our heritage of radical queerness, rekindling the flame of desire that led our mothers and fathers to abandon known norms for wilderness, and follow God through a land unsown toward a future founded on the principle that being true to God requires being true to ourselves” (7).
Standing before You
God of all that is
we remember
that before You created the heavens and the earth
You were One
and all was one.
Before You separated light from dark,
making day and night
You were One
and time was one.
Before You divided the waters above from the waters beneath,
You were One
and space was one.
And we remember
that before You created male and female in Your image
You were One
and we were one....
א וַיֹּאמֶר יי אֶל-אַבְרָם, לֶךְ-לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ, אֶל-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ.
(1) Now God said to Abram: ‘Go, for yourself, from your land, and from your birthplace, and from your father's (ancestral) home, to the land that I will show you.
When we recognize God's queerness in the Torah, and the queerness built into the foundation of Jewish history, we see that the very exile from conventional roles and categories that can make being queer so painful can also so make being queer a profoundly spiritual path. To become who we are, each of us has had to follow God's first command to Abraham – we have had to lech l'cha, to go to our truest selves, even when that required us to “go forth” from our families, homes, from the heteronormative lives and assumptions we inherited, for the sake of futures we couldn't yet imagine. (3)
Queerness…has a temporal dimension—as anyone knows whose desire has been branded as “arrested development” or dismissed as “just a phase”—and, concomitantly and crucially, as I hope to show, temporal experiences can render you queer. By ‘queer’ I thus don’t mean only “gay” or “homosexual.”…And I don’t mean just “odd” or “different,” though there’s inevitably some of that here, too. In my theorizing of temporality I explore forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with the ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that engage heterogeneous temporalities or that precipitate out of time altogether—forms of being that I shall argue are queer by virtue of their particular engagements with time. (4)
יג וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה אֶל-הָאֱלֹהִים, הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי בָא אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, וְאָמַרְתִּי לָהֶם, אֱלֹהֵי אֲבוֹתֵיכֶם שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם; וְאָמְרוּ-לִי מַה-שְּׁמוֹ, מָה אֹמַר אֲלֵהֶם.
יד וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים אֶל-מֹשֶׁה, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה; וַיֹּאמֶר, כֹּה תֹאמַר לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, אֶהְיֶה, שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם.
טו וַיֹּאמֶר עוֹד אֱלֹהִים אֶל-מֹשֶׁה, כֹּה-תֹאמַר אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, יי אֱלֹהֵי אֲבֹתֵיכֶם אֱלֹהֵי אַבְרָהָם אֱלֹהֵי יִצְחָק וֵאלֹהֵי יַעֲקֹב, שְׁלָחַנִי אֲלֵיכֶם; זֶה-שְּׁמִי לְעֹלָם, וְזֶה זִכְרִי לְדֹר דֹּר.
(13) And Moses said to God: ‘Behold, when I come to the children of Israel, and say to them: The God of your ancestors sent me to you; and they say to me: What is God's name? what shall I say unto them?’
(14) And God said to Moses: ‘I AM THAT I AM’; and God said: ‘Thus you shall say to the children of Israel: I AM sent me to you.’ (15) And God said to Moses: ‘Thus shall you say to the children of Israel: YHVH, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, sent me to you; this is My name for ever, and this is My memorial unto all generations.
God was the first representation I had ever seen of someone who wasn't male or female. This was the 1960s. There was no Laverne Cox, no Caitlin Jenner, no TV shows or movies featuring trans characters. I lived in fear that my failure to fit categories of male and female would be discovered, but God was famous and widely admired, even though, according to the Torah, the genderless, disembodied God suffered from some of the same social problems that I did: being invisible to or misunderstood by human beings.
Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative…[Queer] describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. (62)
ד שְׁמַע, יִשְׂרָאֵל: יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ, יי אֶחָד.
(4) HEAR, O ISRAEL: YHVH IS OUR GOD, YHVH IS ONE.
“But the Torah doesn't traffic in binary thinking: God is One, simultaneously the ordainer of sacred norms, and absolutely queer, because beyond human conception…” (5).
"Queer" is the erasing or deconstructing of boundaries, particularly with respect to essentialist or fixed binary categories of sexuality and gender.