Stranger Souls (W5)

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Part One, in groups (~30 minutes)

BEFORE YOU START READING
Take a sec to get to know your hevrutah (study partner):
Suggested ice-breaker: What about you reminds you of your parents?

Also, the passages are quite long today. I don't expect y'all to get through all of them, I just couldn't bear cutting any of them.

The Soul of the Stranger
by Joy Ladin
p. 63-64
[Joy Ladin, when she was in 4th grade, had a close friend named Wendy whom she wanted to 'come out' to, but she neither knew what 'coming out' was, nor how to explain what there was to 'come out' about.]

But even if I could have explained the difference between gender and gender identity and physical sex, telling Wendy that I was a transsexual wouldn’t have been the same as showing her that I was a girl like her. In fact, I would have been revealing that not only wasn’t I like her, but I wasn’t like anyone either of us knew: I was different in ways that made me other than male or female, boy or girl, something that didn’t make sense in the terms that defined her and everyone else we knew. If I let her keep seeing me as a boy, I could continue being her best friend, but if I didn’t, I was sure our friendship would be over. If Wendy realized how strange I was, she would see me as a stranger...as someone who, though I didn’t know the word then, was what I would now call queer. I knew only one other person who was queer, and that person—God—was much, much queerer than I was.

...But though in many ways I felt closer to God than to Wendy, God and I didn’t have much in common. I had a body that concealed who I was; God had no body at all....

...I made no sense in terms of binary gender; God made no sense in human terms at all.

The Soul of the Stranger
by Joy Ladin
p. 69-70
...If we take this portrayal of God literally, it raises significant theological problems. How could the God who two chapters before created the universe be noisily and blindly wandering through a tiny part of that creation?
...the Torah, Maimonides says, deliberately presents God in humanizing terms that make God accessible to everyone, even the most unsophisticated...I didn’t see the Torah as trying to make God seem human. The Torah doesn’t describe God as moving noisily in the Garden; it tells us that that is how Eve and Adam perceived God. As Genesis 3:7 makes clear, after eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve identify themselves with their bodies in a new way: their nakedness suddenly makes them feel exposed and ashamed, leading them to cover their genitals and to believe that hiding their bodies among the trees will hide them from God. They not only identify themselves with their bodies; as I noticed when I read this passage as a child, they think the same way about God, perceiving God as moving like a person with a body from one place to another, and being unable to find them through the trees.
Just as I let Wendy see me as a boy because she couldn’t see me any other way, I saw God as playing along with Eve and Adam in this scene, asking “Where are you?” as though God, like them, could only be in one place at a time, and couldn’t know where they were until they showed themselves. God, I thought, was doing what I did every day: pretending to have a body to be close to people who needed to imagine God as being like them in order to realize that God was there, in the little patch of space and time to which human beings defined by human bodies are limited. But even as I condescended to Eve and Adam’s need to think of God as being like them, as Maimonides and my father no doubt would have told me, I was doing the same thing, reading God’s acceptance of their need to perceive God in physical terms as a sign that God and I felt the same combination of love, loneliness, and despair. Both God and I, I thought, could only be close to human beings by pretending to be what we weren’t, masking ourselves in human terms that made us visible to others by hiding who we really were.

The Soul of the Stranger
by Joy Ladin
p. 73

From the moment God—invisible, bodiless, and nameless—tells Abraham to leave his father’s house, Abraham recognizes and responds to God without trying to understand or identify God in human terms. He doesn’t ask God for a name or proof of God’s power or authority, nor, as Adam and Eve do in the Garden, does he try to locate God in time and space or imagine God’s voice as coming from a body. He listens to and obeys a God he cannot see or comprehend, a God who has no religion, no presence in myth or history, no previous connection with his family, a God who tells him to do things that make no sense—abandon his father, uproot his wife, trade the man he has been for whatever it is the God he follows into the wilderness is summoning him to become—in return for a reward that makes no sense: blessings that will be showered on the distant descendants of children that Abraham, in his seventies, has not yet fathered. But Abraham, like Maimonides’s ideal philosopher, does not try to make sense of God: he silently accepts whatever God is and does whatever God says.
Abraham’s willingness to accept a God who makes no sense in human terms is the basis for his relationship with God...

The Soul of the Stranger
by Joy Ladin
74-75
Although Jewish tradition understands the three men Abraham sees as angels, the first sentence tells us that it is God, not other divine beings, who appears to Abraham here. God appears in human drag, clothed so perfectly in human terms—flesh, bone, time, space, gender, and actual clothing—that Abraham, who recognized God from the moment God first spoke to him, thinks he is seeing men who, as his offers of hospitality make clear, have human feelings, frailties, and needs. For most of my life, I thought that human terms were always imposed on God by human beings, and that God suffers them as a concession to human limitations. But in this scene, it is clear that as in the scene where Moses sees God’s back, God chooses to present in human terms, because Abraham, from the first, has been ready and willing to relate to God without them. God’s appearance in human drag enables Abraham to interact with God with an intimacy and ease that would otherwise be impossible, as we see when Abraham offers God hospitality.

But as this scene suggests, when God presents completely in human terms, God cannot be recognized as God, just as I am usually not recognized as transgender when I present myself to strangers as a woman. God seems content to be seen as human by Abraham here, just as I am happy to have those I interact with in passing see me as a woman who was born and raised female. But if I want others to really know me, I need them to see me not as someone who fits binary definitions of female but as someone whose gender cannot be completely understood in binary terms. Similarly, as we see in this scene, in order for human beings to recognize God as God, God needs to appear in ways that do not completely fit human terms.

—end of texts—

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Comfort Animal
by Joy Ladin
listen here
Comfort, comfort my people ...
—Isaiah 40:1
Here's Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About Getting an Emotional Support Animal
—Cosmopolitan
A voice says, “Your punishment has ended.”
You never listen to that voice. You really suck
at being comforted.
Another voice says, “Cry.”
That voice always gets your attention,
keeps you thinking
about withered flowers and withering grass
and all the ways you’re like them.
Hard to argue with that.
Death tramples you, an un-housebroken pet
trailing prints and broken stems,
pooping anxiety, PTSD, depression.
It’s better to be animal than vegetable
but best of all is to be spirit
flying first or maybe business class
with your emotional support animal, your body,
curled in your lap, soaring with you
above the sense of loss you’ve mistaken
for the closest to God you can get.
You want to cry? Cry about that.
Who do you think created
the animals to whom you turn for comfort,
dogs, miniature horses, monkeys, ferrets,
hungers you know how to feed,
fears you know how to quiet?
I form them, fur them,
it’s my warmth radiating from their bodies,
my love that answers
the love you lavish upon them.
Your deserts and desolations
are highways I travel,
smoothing your broken places,
arranging stars and constellations
to light your wilderness.
Sometimes I play the shepherd;
sometimes I play the lamb;
sometimes I appear as death,
which makes it hard to remember
that I am the one who assembled your atoms,
who crowned your dust with consciousness.
I take you everywhere,
which is why, wherever you go, I’m there,
keeping you hydrated, stroking your hair,
laughing when you chase your tail,
gathering you to my invisible breasts
more tenderly than any mother.
You’re right—you never asked for this. I’m the reason
your valleys are being lifted up,
the source of your life laid bare.
Mine is the voice that decrees—
that begs—your anguish to end.
When you suffer, I suffer.
Comfort me
by being comforted.