The Divine, he explains, is made up of on tiny parts, all joined as one.
That’s also true of our relationships. Our feelings of belonging are made up of an endless series of tiny gestures: a smile in the morning, a question about our day, a warm “shabbat shalom.” As they put the Mishkan together, bit by bit, clasp by clasp, they are becoming Am Yisrael, the Jewish people.
To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music, it is a spring in one's step or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries, and hormones. It is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity.
I see now that...I was really deprived of an identity... I was not to others what I was to myself.
And if others' responses shifted, so did my own. The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming...
But it soon all came to feel only natural, so powerful are the effects of custom and environment.
הַכֹּ֥ל סָר֮ יַחְדָּ֪ו נֶ֫אֱלָ֥חוּ אֵ֤ין עֹֽשֵׂה־ט֑וֹב אֵ֝֗ין גַּם־אֶחָֽד׃
All have turned bad,
altogether foul;
there is none who does good,
not even one.
Becoming a "part" of an institution, which we can consider as the demand to share in it, or even have a share of it, hence requires not only that we inhabit its buildings, but also that we follow its line: we might start by saying "we"; by mourning its failures and rejoicing in its successes; by reading the documents that circulate within it, creating liens of communication; and by the chance encounters we have with those who share its grounds. Even when we are involved in critique, complaint, and opposition, or when we say "no" rather than "yes," we keep "it" at the center of attention, which aligns us with "it" and with others who share that alignment. To be recruited is not only to join but to sign up to a specific institution: to inhabit it by turning around as a return of its address.
The relationship between identification--wanting to be "like"--and alliance formation--who one sides with--is crucial. For me, a question that remains to be asked is: How does what I take to be "mine" make "me" in relation to "you"? I have already considered how families are about taking sides and how this demand "to side" requires putting other things aside. One of the questions that interests me here is how certain directions, as relations of proximity or nearness, become forms of social and political allegiance. The family requires us to "take sides," to give allegiance to its form by taking up a side, which is "its side." When we consider orientalism as a case of world making, which creates two sides and aligns them with bodies, then we can show how "siding" matters. To take my mother's side [as a mixed-race child] was also to "side" with whiteness and thus to make what was "brown" be on the "other side."
כאשר דבר השם עם ישראל פנים בפנים עשרת הדברות, וצוה אותם על ידי משה קצת מצות שהם כמו אבות למצותיה של תורה, כאשר הנהיגו רבותינו עם הגרים שבאים להתיהד (יבמות מז:), וישראל קבלו עליהם לעשות כל מה שיצום על ידו של משה, וכרת עמהם ברית על כל זה, מעתה הנה הם לו לעם והוא להם לאלקים כאשר התנה עמהם מתחלה ועתה אם שמוע תשמעו בקולי ושמרתם את בריתי והייתם לי סגולה (שמות י״ט:ה׳), ואמר ואתם תהיו לי ממלכת כהנים וגוי קדוש (שם יט ו), והנה הם קדושים ראוים שיהיה בהם מקדש להשרות שכינתו ביניהם ולכן צוה תחלה על דבר המשכן שיהיה לו בית בתוכם מקודש לשמו, ושם ידבר עם משה ויצוה את בני ישראל:
Now that G-d had told Israel face to face the Ten Commandments, and had further commanded them through Moses some of the precepts which are like general principles to the [individual] commandments of the Torah — in the same way that our Rabbis were accustomed to deal with strangers who come to be converted to the Jewish faith — and now that the Israelites accepted upon themselves to do all that He would command them through Moses and He made a covenant with them concerning all this, from now on they are His people and He is their G-d This is in accordance with the condition He made with them at the beginning: Now, therefore, if ye will indeed hearken unto My voice, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure, and He said further: and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. They are now holy, in that they are worthy that there be amongst them a Sanctuary through which He makes His Divine Glory dwell among them. Therefore He first commanded concerning the Tabernacle, so that He have amongst them a house dedicated to His name, from where He would speak with Moses and command the children of Israel...
Unless the LORD builds the house,
its builders labor in vain on it;
unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman keeps vigil in vain.