#interdisciplinary

When I started writing this book, I realized that I wanted to read the Torah from a transgender rather than a transsexual perspective. My sense of kinship with the God I saw in the Torah didn’t grow out of feeling female despite having a male body; it grew out of my more general experience of not fitting into a world in which it is assumed that everyone is either and always male or female. That’s what “transgender” means in this book: having a sense of self that does not fit the traditional binary gender categories of male and female."

From the beginning of the book, when God orders him to “Go at once to Nineveh . . . and proclaim judgment upon it; for their wickedness has come before Me,” Jonah knows he is a prophet (Jon. 1:2). Jonah doesn’t ask why God chose him to deliver this message, or argue, as Moses does at the burning bush, that he isn’t qualified to do so. He just runs away, because, as he explains in the final chapter, he knows God won’t destroy Nineveh, no matter how wicked the people are: “That is why I fled . . . I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment” (4:2). Even as God tells him of God’s impending judgment, Jonah, as befits a prophet, already knows that God will spare them.

Jonah is so desperate to avoid being a prophet that he abandons whatever life he has been living and boards a ship to Tarshish. But as many transgender people know, when we flee from being who we are, we flee from life itself. While his ship is tossed by a God-sent storm, Jonah stays asleep in the hold of the heaving ship, in a slumber so deep that it overrides even his instinct for self-preservation. When the captain wakes him and tells him to “call upon your god” for deliverance, Jonah responds not with prayer but with a suicidal gesture, telling the sailors, “Heave me overboard, and the sea will calm down for you” (1:6, 12).

Why would Jonah respond this way? God sent the storm because he refused to go to Nineveh, so it would have made sense for Jonah to appease God’s anger by telling God he would do what God ordered him to do. Jonah’s self-destructive response reflects a psychological pattern that is all too familiar among transgender people: flee from yourself for as long as you can, and when you can no longer endure the internal and external storms, kill yourself for the sake of others, so you can avoid ever having to live as who you are. Jonah may have thought he was killing himself for the sake of the sailors, but the truth is that he is so desperate to avoid living as the prophet he is that he prefers not to live at all.

Transgender people often tell ourselves that suicide will resolve the conflict between our need to be, and not be, who we truly are. Our families, our communities, and our world will be better off without us, we think, and we, released from the shame of hiding and the terror of living as who we are, will finally be at peace. In Jonah’s case, this suicidal fantasy seems to come true: when Jonah is thrown overboard, the sea stops raging, and he sinks peacefully “into the depths, into the heart of the sea,” where he is “swallowed” by a “huge fish” (1:15, 2:3).

But Jonah, miraculously, doesn’t die. In the depths of the sea, in the belly of the fish, Jonah finds himself alone with the God he fled. God literally surrounds him, providing him with breath, warmth, and protection, sustaining his life in the midst of death.

In other words, Jonah’s flight from himself leads him simultaneously closer to death and closer to God. That spiritual paradox is at the heart of his story, and it was at the heart of the story of my life when I was living as a man I knew I wasn’t. Like Jonah, I was so desperate to avoid living as who I was that I eagerly chose death over life, despair over hope, isolation over human connection. Even in the midst of family and friends, I felt like I was alone at the bottom of the ocean. But I wasn’t alone: though suicidal depression swallowed me for decades, God was there, surrounding me, holding me, keeping me alive.

Even while Jonah is in the belly of the fish, he sees his miraculous deliverance as a turning point: “I sank to the base of the mountains; the bars of the earth closed upon me forever; yet You brought my life up from the pit, O LORD my God!” (2:7). Jonah is so grateful that God has saved him that when the fish vomits him out on shore, he overcomes his reluctance to present himself as a prophet and heads to Nineveh.

Unlike Jonah, I experienced God as preserving me in the depths rather than delivering me to life. God didn’t want me to live as who I really was, I told myself. God wanted me—and was helping me—to submerge my true self forever. That’s what love is, I told myself: pretending to be what others want you to be. Suffering in silence. Embracing loneliness. Giving up on joy.

Year after year, when the ram’s horn blew on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, I wept, not because I was repenting of my sins, but because I knew that no matter how heartfelt my confessions, as long as I lived as a man, I would never feel grateful, or even truly alive. God could preserve my life in the depths of suicidal despair, but even God couldn’t deliver me from those depths until I did what Jonah did: accept that I had to live as who I truly was.

Despite his gratitude for God’s deliverance, Jonah still isn’t thrilled about being a prophet, which in his case means walking through Nineveh proclaiming, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (3:4). As Jonah no doubt knew, prophets often paid a heavy price for expressing God’s displeasure with the social order. Jeremiah was thrown into a pit; four hundred of Elijah’s fellow prophets were murdered. Though Jonah isn’t imprisoned or killed, his work as a prophet requires him to disrupt the community and challenge social norms by acting in ways that call unseemly attention to himself.

Like Jonah, I knew that I couldn’t live as who I was without being stared at, treated as an embarrassment or public menace, and risking the ridicule and violence that transgender people face every day. It was easy to imagine how I and those I loved might suffer if I dared to express my female gender identity, but what good, I wondered, could possibly come of living a truth that would mark me, publicly and permanently, as “other”?

That is Jonah’s question, too. Despite his firsthand knowledge of God’s plans, Jonah never understands what good comes of him living as a prophet, because, as he says at the end of the book, he always knew that God would be merciful whether or not he marched through Nineveh proclaiming that the city was going to be destroyed. But unlike Jonah, the people of Nineveh couldn’t hear God summoning them to change their lives. They needed to hear that message from a human throat, from a body they could see, from a person who not only saw things differently than they did but who was also willing to stand up, and stand out, as different. Jonah saved Nineveh—or rather, enabled Nineveh to save itself—by accepting the discomfort and the risk of being the prophet he was.

Most transgender people aren’t leaders, visionaries, or prophets. Some day, being transgender will be no harder to understand or accept than other ways of being human. When that day comes, we won’t have to won-der whether we should kill ourselves for the sake of others, or pretend to be other than who we are. We will face our human share of sorrow and struggle, and when we look to religious communities for help, we will know that the traditions that sustain, comfort, and guide others are there to sustain, comfort, and guide us, too.

But for most of us, that future is still a distant dream, and so transgender people daily face the kinds of choices Jonah faced: will we run away, sink into despair, throw ourselves into the sea, or will we live as who we are, even when that means being seen as different, disruptive, or a threat to social order?"

- pgs 4-7, the Soul of the Stranger by Joy Ladin

People keep asking me why I stopped performing as a DJ.

The answer is complicated enough that I usually just shrug and say “life happened,” which is technically true. But the real answer is that I think I accidentally lived out a country song.

A man broke my DJ equipment.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Actual gear. Which, if you are not rich, feels less like “equipment damage” and more like somebody taking a bat to your future self.

And honestly? That wasn’t even the only reason.

Part of it was political. Or social. Or emotional. I don’t even know what word fits anymore.

I got tired of feeling like I had to cosplay being Republican to exist comfortably in certain music spaces. Especially country spaces. Especially Southern spaces. Especially spaces where everyone keeps insisting music should be “apolitical” while also making it very clear which politics are acceptable.

The older I get, the less energy I have for pretending.

And lately I’ve been thinking a lot about detainees. About immigration. About incarceration. About how easy it is for people to stop seeing other humans as humans the second they become categorized correctly. It sits in the back of my mind constantly. I can’t really separate art from that feeling anymore. I can’t stand in a room and act emotionally untouched by the world just because there’s a kick drum playing.

And if I’m being even more honest: I also stopped DJing because I thought I sucked.

I could not watch my old videos without physically cringing.

I would see every awkward transition. Every weird moment. Every time I looked unsure of myself. Every set where I relied too much on “vibes” because technically I didn’t yet know what I was doing.

Today I watched some of those old videos again for the first time in a while.

And weirdly… I didn’t hate myself.

I could actually see the learning happening in real time.

Like oh. That girl wasn’t embarrassing. She was practicing publicly.

Which is a very vulnerable thing to do.

I think I expected myself to emerge fully formed as some cool underground selector with perfect transitions and impeccable taste and effortless confidence. But when I look back now, I can see someone genuinely trying. Someone experimenting. Someone building taste. Someone figuring out rhythm and pacing and crowd energy and identity simultaneously.

Also — and this is important — I realized a lot of my “DJ practice” was never really about DJing.

I wanted to sing.

So much of my time was actually spent singing along to tracks, learning phrasing, studying melodies, listening to country music because I genuinely love it, learning emotional timing instead of technical timing.

I was developing my ear, just not always in the way I thought I was supposed to.

Now that I’ve been playing guitar and singing more seriously, something has shifted.

When I sit down to practice DJing now, I don’t need the decks to emotionally fulfill me. I’m not using them to become a singer secretly. I can focus on transitions. EQing. Structure. Momentum. Actual technique.

Not just vibe.

Ironically, learning another instrument made me less precious about DJing.

And better at it.

I think there’s this pressure in creative scenes to always appear ascending. Always booked. Always producing. Always visible. But sometimes your art form goes quiet because another part of you is trying to grow first.

Sometimes your equipment gets smashed.

Sometimes your heart does too.

Sometimes you spend a year listening to country music in a parking lot trying to understand your own life.

And sometimes you come back and realize you were never actually as terrible as you thought.

From these bases they would set out at stated seasons of the year on long peripatetic journeys, like strolling minstrels, delivering prophesies and messages from the dead in the villages through which they passed. The women known as Kumano-bikuni, for example, whose base was the Jippōin temple at Nachi and whom Kaempfer encountered in the course of his journey with the Dutch merchants from Nagasaki to Edo in 1692, were venerated as oracles all over the country. In the Edo district the women called ichiko were reported to travel great distances to make their seasonal calls, and near Osaka the women called Shinano-miko, with their base villages as far away as Nagano prefecture, were recalled as continuing their visits until the beginning of the Meiji period.

These activities were summarily suppressed, however, by a directive from the Meiji government in 1873. Anxious to promote the ‘enlightenment’ of the country in accordance with modern rational principles and determined at the same time to purge ‘pure’ Shinto of all that savoured of Buddhism or of ancient superstition, the government decreed that all miko who deluded the people by professing to deliver messages from the dead were henceforth forbidden to practise their calling. The following year an even sterner directive was issued to the same effect.

In theory this prohibition lasted until 1945, when General MacArthur’s Religious Bodies Law allowed the Japanese people for the first time for seventy years freedom to worship as they pleased, to form what religious bodies they pleased, and to carry on what religious activities they pleased. A good many miko, who had until then practised their calling only furtively and in secret, thereupon began to find their way back into the acknowledged life of the folk religion. The fact that they had survived at all, despite the legal prohibitions, bears witness to the strength of their position in rural Japan.

Today, thirty years later, their numbers are still more drastically depleted by the encroachments of modern life. Nevertheless, there still survive broadly four kinds of women who still practise the calling of shamanic medium. There are the blind mediums known as itako or ichiko who still act as mouthpieces for both kami and ghosts in the northern districts of the main island. There are mediums who serve in conjunction with an ascetic in the seasonal summoning of a kami in certain villages. Both these types we shall describe in later chapters. Neither, however, is thought to derive from the same shamanic lineage as the ancient sibyl described in the last chapter. The itako are thought to stem from some southerly, ‘Polynesian’ source, and the passive mediums, whose first appearance is recorded in the literature of the ninth century, are thought to have derived from certain occult practices of esoteric Buddhism.

A more convincing survival from the ancient miko is to be found in small numbers in the seven Izu islands. These women appear to be natural shamans of the same type as those found in the Ryūkyū islands and in Hokkaidō. They suffer from a neurotic complaint known as miko-ke, which culminates in a supernatural seizure. Thereafter they acquire a guardian spirit who enables them to serve the village by their powers of clairvoyance and possession."

Although Idel rejected Scholem’s postulation of a gap between rabbinic and mystical Judaism, some of his students subtly retain some core assumptions what one might describe as the Zionist reading of Kabbalah. In this context one should recall the growing closeness between scholarly and popular readings of Kabbalah in contemporary Israel, as the latter, especially when influenced by Zionism, often take anomian or even antinomian forms. Yet this very closeness should serve as a caveat to forestall projection of contemporary Kabbalistic views on earlier generations, as the growing distance from the nomian world is precisely a marker of the disjunction between twentieth-century Kabbalah and the pre-Zionist era. This discussion of the Israeli context of scholarly attitudes to the nomian does not of course preclude yet broader contexts, which include the influence of Protestant attitudes in the general study of mysticism, as well as the growing influence of New Age spirituality, which is usually characterized by a move away from nomian structures.

Idel himself did much to establish the importance of the performance of the commandments in Kabbalistic life. However, his restriction of such statements and experiences to the theosophical-theurgical stream, though possibly correct, may lead certain scholars to underrate the centrality of the nomian in Jewish mystical life. The views of Hasidism generated by some of Idel’s students move us even further from an appreciation of the nexus between mysticism and the nomian, as a result of very strong, and in my view unwarranted, interpretative moves. For example, Margolin’s account of interiorization has admirably highlighted an important theme of Hasidic discourse. Yet at the same time it somewhat obscures the centrality of the social dimension including external and normative activity in this movement, although Margolin does critique the excessive stress that some scholars placed on anomian aspects of Hasidism. Yet more broadly put, Margolin’s attempt to create a strong continuity between pre-Hasidic and Hasidic forms of “interiorization,” some of which go back to very early sources, runs the risk of detaching the Hasidic movement from its social, as well as historical, context through overemphasis on this theme. Though the present book shows that I am by no means averse to following the longue durée at times, I feel that I have balanced such speculations with a focus on the discontinuity between Hasidism and earlier developments, as well as the larger connection to modernity discussed below.

The clearest instance of the denomianizing tendency can be found in the studies of Kauffman, which represent the most updated and wide-ranging study of Hasidic anomian and antinomian attitudes at present and thus should be discussed at some length. Kauffman has shown that in some Hasidic texts, worship of God in mundane activity, a form of anomian mysticism, is accorded an status equal to the performance of the commandments; however, she did not sufficiently stress that the former is an extension of the latter, rather than supplanting it, as Margolin has correctly pointed out. Kauffman went a step further in citing a second-generation text that appears to accord a superior role to the “hidden” worship within mundane activity over the “revealed” worship within the performance of the commandments. However, here her analysis is unconvincing. First, this advantage extends to a certain erotic aspect—the superiority of “hidden love” over “open love”—and is not presented as a blanket statement. Second, the version of this text that she herself describes as clearer, speaks explicitly of revealed and hidden commandments, thus supporting the reading of worship in mundane activity as an extension of nomian activity. And finally, the examples cited in the text to support the latter claim are all drawn from tefillin and other ritual frames.

In any case, Kauffman herself describes these statements as few and far between. Her claims that fear of their radical implications led to this circumspection and that one can generalize from such rare pronouncements to the “totality” of the discourse of the masters who made them are speculative at best. Indeed, the models of mundane activity as facilitating ritual activity, as constantly connected to one of the mitzvot, or even as uplifted by the commandments (and thus dependent on them for spiritual value) are prevalent in far more texts that Kauffman cites. In my mind, it is these statements that are representative of Hasidic discourse, to the extent that one may generalize about this multifaceted movement. I believe that the following text by Epstein can be seen as at least representing the position of the school of the Seer: “The main thing is to exert oneself in the worship of God, day and night, in Torah and prayer . . . and afterwards when he does so in truth and in faith, then he reaches the level in which all of his material deeds, such as eating and drinking and other things are also a great worship so as to extract the holy sparks . . . but not every person attains this, only after great effort and after long periods of worship of God, then he receives from heaven this gift that his material occupations are also a great worship and he performs great yihudim in them.” This model is close to that of Luzzatto: worship in mundane activity is a passive product of nomian exertion.

Another example is Kauffman’s antinomian reading of the teachings of the Seer of Lublin: she cites his reinterpretation of the antinomian Talmudic adage, “A sin performed for its own sake is superior to a mitzva performed for extraneous reasons,” as referring to willingness to risk the appearance of a possibility of sin. This move, which actually minimizes the antinomian implications of the original statement, is seen by her as advocating the over-stepping of normative boundaries. She gives a similar interpretation to a parallel text that calls on the lover of God to reject the obstruction of the Evil Impulse—which tempts the worshipper to recall moments of sin—and instead let go of such self-accusatory recollection. In both cases, the Seer’s deliberate effort to stop short of the boundaries of the law is read in a transgressive mode (albeit restricted to the Tzaddiq, and rare in earlier generations of Hasidism, as Kauffman herself points out), which is actually absent from the texts. This is not to say that there are no mildly antinomian elements in the doctrine of the Seer, as in the willingness to overstep the regular prayer times, which became a trademark of his renegade student, the Holy Jew; however, on careful analysis they do not warrant describing this theme as a “key issue” in his writing, or seeing anomian activity as a further extension of an antinomian mode, as Kauffman speculates.

In opposing such readings, this chapter supports the claims of Elliot Wolfson that “an element shared by the diverse range of kabbalists is the nomian framework in which the mystical impulse takes shape,” and that “it is valid to view the eidetic form of . . . meditational exercises and the consequent paranormal states of consciousness that ensue therefrom as essentially nomian in character.” Besides the specific Jewish import of the ideas raised here, there are also broader implications for the study of mysticism.

The nomian, ritual, textual, and other cultural determinations of trance experience point towards trance being a step in a graduated path, which is in turn embedded in the general religious life of the practitioner."

[...]

From a psychological point of view, the sukka should be seen not merely as the construction of a ritual object or space but as a “transitional space,” to use the parlance of Winnicottian psychoanalysis, which can evoke an ambience conducive for trance and accompanying fiery transformations.

Just as in the transitional space the mother is present yet not impinging, the sukka holds the intensity of the Holy Day of Yom Kippur in a manner that is less total, and thus may be extended to an entire week. This understanding of the sukka can assist us in conceptualizing seemingly contradictory approaches found in Hasidism: R. Shlomo of Karlin’s practice of not exiting the sukka for the entire festival should be opposed to the following hypernomian claim by R. Hayyim of Tzanz, according to which its potency extends even if one is not physically present in the sukka: “Even if one does not perform [the commandment of] the sukka in actuality, as in when one is exempt, in any case one sits in the shade of the holiness of the sukka . . . the sukka and the shadow of holiness resides upon us, even when one is not actually under the sukka, it is still named one’s sukka . . . for the obligation is not to actually sit, and if one is distressed, he is exempt yet he is as one who sits in the sukka.” Finally, one should consider the mystical role of the concluding festival of the cycle, Shmini ʿAtzeret. Epstein describes it as a time in which the Tzaddiqim are able to uplift the souls of those who assemble in their presence in the holiday in a passive and easy manner, thus reflecting the cumulative effect of the entire month as well as the need to move back to a less intense mode."

I believe that there is room for investigating these differing psychic rhythms in light of recent advances in understanding the role of waves and “circadian rhythms” in the transformative effects of trance and related therapeutic contexts, as well as discussions of rhythm and tempo in ritual theory. One should at least briefly mention the role played by melodies (nigunim) and dance in the creation of the ambience of Hasidic gatherings and the resultant collective trance experience. One may extend the recent conceptualizations of music as communication and posit that music served to transmit trance states. One might say that just as the shamanic mode is predicated on movement through inner space, trance is first and foremost a movement through inner time, which at times overlaps with ritual time. In these terms, the very progression of hypnotic technique can be seen as creating the “timeline” for this movement."