Vayeira 5779 / 27 Oct 2018

What a world we are in.

I know many of you, like me, are feeling the weight of the activities of our president this week. In particular, the memo leak that the Times reported on last Sunday, about Trump’s anticipated proposals to make policy changes that will drastically impact transgender and gender non-conforming people, left me stunned. 

When Trump was elected two years ago, I got terrified about what his election would mean for trans people, and for queer people more generally. The anti-discrimination legislation that has protected us at the federal level does so only by interpretation, not because we are actually in protected classes. It’s only because of a read of Title IX that makes “sex discrimination” mean “gender discrimination” that has allowed there to be any federal anti-discrimination protections at all for transgender people. Not because there has been explicit support at the federal level for protecting us. Recent easements by the Obama administration, all by executive order, made things easier for a while. These, we knew were continent upon having a president who was interested in protecting trans people. This is part of why so many of us became so afraid with Trump’s election. What’s happening now, it’s what so many of us warned would happen two years ago. It doesn’t make it less shocking to live through, though. Especially with horrifying bylines like “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration,” the Times’ headline breaking the memo leak last Sunday.

It is possible that the federal administration can make policies that make our lives administratively difficult, impossible even.

But it is not possible that the federal administration can define us out of existence.

This week’s parsha is also full of terrible news. Parashat Vayeira includes: the incident at Sodom and Gomorrah, Abimelekh taking Sarah as wife when Abraham lies about who she is, the Akedah—the binding of Isaac, and Sarah’s expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael. To me, this parsha reads as textbook examples of how not to do things. Don’t sexually assault strangers. Don’t offer your daughters up to be raped instead. Don’t lie about who your beloved is. And don’t expel your slave who you forced to be a surrogate mother when you couldn’t be pregnant, now that you have your own child and are jealous of hers. Our ancestors don’t look good in these stories.

What do we do with texts like these? All too often it seems that the choices are: find a way to rationalize, reason, explain what is happening; or reject them out of hand. To rationalize, we look to history, to literary criticism, to contextualizing. We explain Sodom and Gomorrah as a polemic against the townspeople of Sodom, their rampant xenophobia, the horrible ways they treated visitors and strangers in their midst. Sefer haYashar, a 16th century midrash, for example, offers this as the reason that Sodom and Gomorrah were wiped out:

“…the Lord was enraged on account of [Sodom’s brutal treatment of two girls who fed visitors to Sodom] as also on account of all other acts of ‎wickedness practiced in Sodom. For they had abundance of food and they lived in peace and ‎security, and yet they would not give help to the needy and destitute, and their sins and their ‎crimes were enormous in the eyes of the Lord. And the Lord sent the three angels which were ‎in Abraham’s house to Sodom and all its cities, to destroy them.‎”

I love this midrash. That the claim being made in it is that it is an absolute value of Judaism to give abundantly and freely to those who need it, to ensure the safety and security of people who are most vulnerable, including and especially gerim, strangers, people travelling on the way or who have emigrated from one place to another. This midrash goes a far way towards dealing with homophobic misuses text of Sodom and Gomorrah. Except: we are still left with the reality that Lot offers his daughters up to be assaulted in place of the strangers he has welcomed in. Except: Lot’s daughters, after they escape, get their dad drunk and assault him so that they could bear children. The problems of the text are not gone. What do we do with a God who blazes fire and brimstone? What do we do with a God who commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? What do we do with the reality that Abraham and God stood aside while Sarah in a fit of jealousy demanded Hagar and Ishmael’s expulsion? 

What other way through these texts can we find? 

My teacher, Rabbi Sarra Lev, offers this: Much about how we engage with a text is determined by the kind of text that we understand it to be. By the genre of text we are working with. What are the rules of play for interpreting legal text? Poetry? Fiction? Different types of fiction—say romance vs horror? Each genre has its own rules. What happens if we expand our ideas of genre in interpreting Jewish texts—that here, the genre is not biblical text but instead, there are different kinds of genres within bible? And, in particular with the texts that challenge us most: what if we understand their genre to be a summons.

As a genre, a summons would be a text that calls us to engagement and action. With a summons, we have to place ourselves as having equal moral standing in relation to the text: our own ethical values and standards rise up to meet the problems of the text. And from that clash of ethical worlds is an invitation to engagement and action. I don’t have to choose to rationalize or reject. I can choose to fight, and use that fight to propel me to further action in this world. That is the summons. A call to engagement and action to the reader, out of the problems of the text.

What happens if we understand the text of Sodom and Gomorrah as a summons, then? We might feel outrage at how the people of Sodom treat the stranger. Outrage at how our ancestor, Lot, treated his daughters in offering them to be assaulted by the townspeople. Outrage at Lot’s wife being turned to salt because she looked back. And outrage at how Lot’s daughters assaulted Lot after it was all done. 

From this outrage, what do we do? What are we summoned to?

• To care for the people who are most vulnerable in our world. To fight for them. To protect them. 
• To fight against and protect everyone from sexual violence. To not see daughters and wives as objects to sacrifice to protect other people or values. To know that we have to fight to keep everyone safe, together.
• To look back. To feel compassion, even if we are trying to get out of a bad situation ourselves. To know that we can’t cut ourselves off from the humanity of people who are suffering, even when they might have harmed others.
• To never let our jealousy take over. To act in a way that makes it clear that no person is disposable, no matter how we are feeling. That it is never okay to exile someone from our world because we are uncomfortable with them. That our own sense of risk or contingency does not justify pushing others out.

This is what treating the text as a summons gets us: it summons us to articulate our beliefs, which move us to act in different ways than our text shows us. 

The leaked memo, too, is a summons. How will we act to preserve and protect the lives and livelihoods of transgender and gender non-conforming people in this country? Not just inclusion in making a full range of bathroom options and using the correct pronouns and names for people in local communities. These things are absolutely necessary, yes. But they are not the same as justice for trans people. Justice looks like being able to walk freely down the street without worrying about assault or harassment. Justice looks like knowing that we can get housing and jobs without concern that a hiring team will reject us only because of our gender identity or appearance. Justice looks like knowing we can get and afford the healthcare we need, including gender-related medical interventions like hormones, surgery, and hair removal, to be in bodies that we can live with and in. Like having identity documentation that matches our identities and presentations. Like not having administrative barriers from the federal government or from insurance because our identity documentation doesn’t match all the time. Like knowing we won’t be picked up by the police for “walking while trans,” as happens to many trans people of color. Like not having to be housed with a gender we don’t identify with in institutional settings. Like having more than two choices for gender. And on and on.

That leaked memo is a summons to us all to prevent the proposed policy changes from happening. But more than that, is a summons to us all to do everything we can to defend trans people, and to act for and uphold trans justice, no matter what the federal government is doing. To work for state and city policy changes, to fight for our community members, to show up for trans people every day. 

As exhausted as you might be—and I know I for one am very exhausted at the amount of work there is to do—I hope that you will see this week for the summons that it is. A call to not forget trans and gender non-conforming people in the big-picture work we are doing. To not stop and inclusion practices in local communities, but to make sure you are fighting for trans justice at local and national levels. To make sure that the olam haba, the world to come, you are building is one in which trans people can live and thrive. To recommit to the thing I know you know so well already, which is that nobody is free ‘til everybody is free. I know we at Kolot are working for this. That so many of us here are working every day in ways big and small to make a country that is fighting for the livelihoods of everyone who lives here. We come to shul for respite from and to be energized for the work of this world. I am beyond grateful for this community, which in so many ways makes the pains of this world easier to manage. I know that I am never alone. That here and elsewhere I have people who have my back, who need a world that I can fit in as much as I need that world. 

To other trans and gender non-conforming people here today, a special note: you are essential, and you are beloved. This world can do what it is doing, and it will. There is a never-ending store of ways the world gets us down and tells us that we are not the brilliant gems that we are. Hold each other up. Strengthen each other. Be kind and loving to yourselves. This world needs you in it. I need you in this world. Fight when you can fight, rest when you need to rest, and know: even though we are told non-stop that we are but dust and ashes, the truth is the other side of the coin. This world was created for you.