#tzav

Puts Pesach cleaning into perspective in this week's #PieceofParasha on Tzav.

 Check out the full idea: Here

[This dəvar was originally given at Kolot Chayeinu on 20 Adar II, 5784. This transcript has been lightly revised with some staircase thoughts.]

Shabbat Shalom!

As a general rule, the Torah is written using a very restricted vocabulary. When two characters are talking, for example, we don't get verbs like "muttered", "mumbled", "shouted", or "whispered" — it's all just "said", "said", "said". One of the big exceptions is the lavish descriptions of priestly matters like the Mishkan and the Levitical paraphernalia. Suddenly, we have all these technical words for kinds of fabric, dyes, precious stones, and architectural features. The ordination of the priests in this week's parashah is no exception: Aharon doesn't just have "clothes", he has a special tunic, he has a frontlet, he has something called an "efod".

We know what some of these things looked like, but others remain somewhat mysterious, because no actual examples of them survive to the present day. This isn't altogether surprising — in general, not much clothing survives from the past. In part, this is because so much of it is made from materials less durable than ceramic or stone, but it's also because people wear clothes, and in doing so expose them to the ravages of time and the elements. This can easily distort our understanding of the past — it's easy to come away from a historical fashion exhibition with the impression that everyone in the past was skinny and fashionable, when really it's just that very skinny clothes are hard to hand down or alter for the next generation and very fashionable clothes tend to be worn once or twice, for a season at most, and then set aside instead of being worn again and again year after year. The constant exposure that comes with regular use takes its toll on clothes to the point that they disintegrate into nothing.

Exposure takes its toll on people, too. Outside of shul, I'm an artist (I make theatre), and from time to time, people will try to hire me with exposure instead of money. This happens so frequently that my friends have a stock joke response to such offers: "Work for exposure? But people die of exposure!"

That joke has been on my mind a lot these past few years whenever Trans Day of Visibility rolls around. On the whole, trans people have become increasingly visible in this country in the past few years, but that visibility hasn't been accompanied by increased support or protection. Instead, increasing visibility has come with increasing hostility, increasing attempts to punish and prevent trans existence. In this climate, being more visible feels an awful lot like being more exposed, with all the vulnerability to destruction that that entails. I've seen increasing numbers of my trans friends talk about visibility as a problem, as a trap.

In this way, Trans Day of Visibility feels like it's become one more day when we talk about trans suffering. And trans suffering has a visibility all of its own.

As I said, outside of shul, I make theatre. And I have found again and again that when producers talk about authentic trans plays, they have in mind plays about trans suffering. The plays that the mainstream theatre world is most excited about are plays where trans people, all in all, don't have a very good time.

And I don't like that.

I'm not going to stand up here and claim that living as a trans person is 100% uninterrupted peaches and cream, but my transsexual life is not defined by my suffering. And I don't want the world at large to get in the habit of equating transness with misery. I don't want people left with the impression that the only true transsexual is a suffering transsexual. I want people to be in the habit of imagining us happy, or at least as happy as anyone gets to be on stage or in the wider world.

And this brings me back to the roots of the day. Trans Day of Visibility was started in 2009 as a counterweight to Trans Day of Remembrance, the day when we remember our dead and mourn their untimely passing. Trans Day of Visibility was meant to be a foil to that, to be a day for celebrating trans joy, a day for lifting us up while we're still alive. And I think that that insistence on life, that full-throated affirmation that we belong here, in the world, as living people instead of memories, is worth holding on to, especially in a moment when so many people want us to disappear without a trace.

The lives we celebrate on this day don't have to be grand or earth shaping. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's quip that well-behaved women seldom make history is often taken as a feminist exhortation to make good trouble, but her original point was gentler and subtler than that. Her point was that lots of women in the past lived orderly lives, lives that leave little trace in the historical record. They weren't poets, they weren't politicians, they weren't activists or artists or great warriors. But they were still real people. Their lives still mattered. Their invisibility in the historical record shouldn't lead us to think of them with incurious apathy. For trans people, too, our lives shouldn't have to be big and splashy, to be especially visible, to matter, to be worth protecting.

On Trans Day of Visibility, I think about my friend Liz, who works in HR. Brian, a clerk in a small-town city hall. Jay, a night manager at the Ralph's. I want Trans Day of Visibility to be for them, too. I want a world where it doesn't take courage to be trans. I want a world where trans people can be boring.

And in a weird way, this brings us back to Tzav.

Leviticus — especially this part of Leviticus — is often called fly-over country. People rarely fight to give a drash on Tzav. But listen: I have this one trans friend. We were thrown together by circumstance — the same exhausting place at the same exhausting time — and we've stuck together since then. From time to time, we get coffee, and we don't talk about anything particularly deep or witty: the latest hijinks at our jobs, the health of various family members, the weather. But it's nice. I like seeing them. It's a reminder that we're both still here, and sometimes that's enough. With the world the way it is, it doesn't always feel like such a small achievement.

So I was reading the Torah portion for the week - Tzav. And in it God instructs Moses to anoint Aaron (his brother), and his sons as priests. There is a lot in this section about offerings, and the ritual of the anointing is pretty involved as well. And while all that is fascinating, I find myself focusing on the fact the it is Moses who gets to do this for his brother. I have been really relating to Moses’ humanity lately. He is so delightfully human, for better or worse. 

In this section Moses dresses his brother for the priesthood, in front of the whole community. Was he proud of his brother? Did the men shed tears of understanding how momentous this was? Were the sons nervous at this responsibility? Perhaps not. Perhaps they were stoic, attempting to be nothing but serious in front of everyone. But I sincerely hope not. 

This is the Torah rising, a gift, sin and guilt establishing peace.

Puts Pesach cleaning into perspective in this week's #PieceofParasha on Tzav.

 Check out the full idea: Here