The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective
In The Soul of the Stranger, Joy Ladin writes the first book to view Torah from a transgender perspective. Since transitioning in 2008, Ladin has been at the forefront of the struggle for transgender inclusion in Jewish communities. The Soul of the Stranger is an intimate and personal telling of how she relates to Torah and to God. The ultimate goal of this book is immense: to show through Torah that transgender Jews have a place in the community. She views her approach to this as traditional. “Like the rabbis, I believe that all interpretations, including those from this perspective, are already planted in the Torah, waiting for us to discover them, and like the rabbis, I believe that new interpretations add to rather than compete with traditional understandings.” (11) While the idea that the Torah contains multitudes is deeply traditional, insisting that transgender narratives, too, are in the Torah is deeply radical. Rather than constructing something new, Ladin looks to the Torah and says, “We, too, are in here.”
As a transgender Jew, I went into this book with a lot of expectations. I wanted something that would feel like an intimate in-group conversation. That is not what I found, and I actually think that is a strength of the book. There is something to be gained here from everyone, regardless of identity and depth of experience with transgender issues. While I find myself wanting more complexity, Ladin’s use of personal examples illuminates her transgender perspective in a way that someone unfamiliar with transgender issues, whether they are a not-yet-out youth or a concerned parent, can approach and understand the text. It is important to note, though, that this is her perspective. Ladin eloquently writes of her own experiences, but I wish there was more discussion on different transgender perspectives and how those different perspectives influence one’s reading of Torah. As a Jew-by-choice who transitioned in my early 20s, my relationship to Torah and Judaism is very different than Ladin’s as someone raised as a secular Jew who transitioned in middle age. While there is a lot of similarity in our experiences as well, our difference is also important.
As a transgender Jew, I went into this book with a lot of expectations. I wanted something that would feel like an intimate in-group conversation. That is not what I found, and I actually think that is a strength of the book.
Most of The Soul of the Stranger is Ladin teaching Torah and weaving in her personal stories to fill out the basic text. Her goal is different for each chapter, including negotiating Torah texts that seem to imply that there are only two genders, teaching the ways in which the patriarchs and matriarchs defied gender norms, and our difficulty relating to God (and people different from us). Her discussion of the patriarchs and matriarchs connects to Torah in a distinctly Jewish way. One of the examples she discusses is the binding of Isaac, a difficult text read every Rosh Hashanah and, by some Jews, every day. I shared this book with my rabbi and he said that Ladin’s treatment of the binding of Isaac changed how he will read that story. Ladin’s interpretation from a transgender perspective is unique and beautifully effective from multiple perspectives. Isaac, she teaches, is someone so bound to the idea of the man he is supposed to be that he is willing to die for it. Ladin teaches this as someone who was once willing to die as a man rather than transition, but I think we can all relate to this. The cost of living outside of the gender binary is great, whether you are transgender or simply a man who expresses feelings. I have known men throughout my life who are willing to suffer to maintain a gender image rather than living authentically. As a mental health professional, I think particularly of the men who refuse mental health treatment, seeing it as “weakness,” and go on to take their own lives. The example of Isaac makes this willingness to die for gender particularly stark, but it is something that happens every day.
The teaching I found most effective and relatable was about the book of Jonah. Jonah is the prophet who ended up in the belly of a whale trying to run away from God and his responsibilities as a prophet. I know the story well from contexts as varying as the Yom Kippur afternoon reading to a game based on Jonah running from God, and yet I never related to it. Ladin helped me realize that this is my story, too, and the story of most transgender people. “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.” (5) It has been almost a decade since I came out to myself as transgender, but I still remember that feeling so vividly, that it was better to die than live as who I am. I do not know any transgender people that have not spent at least some of their life running from their gender. That this experience is so common for transgender people shows how far we still have to go in terms of acceptance. It is not only a transgender experience, though. Ladin universalizes this—a tactic she uses often in the book. To all of us, Jonah teaches “the crisis of realizing that we must live what makes us different, or we cannot live at all.” (7) While I know this as a transgender person, I also know this as someone who spent time running away from my desire to become a rabbi out of fear of what I would need to give up in order to do that. I think all of us that have been faced by difficult decisions related to identity, whether personal or professional, can relate to Jonah’s flight from God.
The least compelling part of the book, for me, was her discussion of non-binary identities. I think that is because Ladin faces an immense challenge of finding examples in Torah that challenge binaries. A lot of Torah (and many forms of Judaism) is about binaries—kosher or not kosher, Jewish or not Jewish, leavened bread or matzah. Ladin puts the challenge to a fine point—“In the Torah, people who don’t fit binary gender categories are not just invisible, we are unimaginable.” (97) Even in this section, though, there were powerful examples. Using the laws of Passover, Ladin gives an explanation of the harm of enforced binaries. “The more strictly identity-defining binaries are enforced, the more anxiety they generate, because we know how easy it is to violate them and cut ourselves off from the communities that enforce them.” (119) Judge incorrectly if something is kosher for Passover and you risk cutting yourself off from the community. Live outside of the gender binary and you risk cutting yourself off from the community. As an observant transgender Jew, I find this example so compelling because it beautifully explains the anxiety in both of those experiences because they are so rigidly enforced. I think this example has incredible potential to explain that anxiety to my cisgender friends who may not have the experience of living outside of gender binaries, but do have the experience of frantically removing any trace of leavened bread from their house before Passover.
Isaac, she teaches, is someone so bound to the idea of the man he is supposed to be that he is willing to die for it. Ladin teaches this as someone who was once willing to die as a man rather than transition, but I think we can all relate to this. The cost of living outside of the gender binary is great, whether you are transgender or simply a man who expresses feelings.
One of the hopes I had for this book was that it would be an academic and theological exploration of Torah from a transgender perspective, something akin to Rachel Adler’s Engendering Judaism. That is not what Soul of the Stranger is. I think there is room for Ladin to explain her method in a more instructive way to enable others to approach Torah similarly, but that is not the approach of this book. The Soul of the Stranger is a deeply personal exploration of Ladin’s relationship to God and Torah. Viewed from that perspective rather than one of academic theology, this is a very successful book. Ladin’s discussions of God and her evolving relationship with God are some of the most powerful and vulnerable parts of the book. There are moments in the book where Ladin discusses her prayers to God to change her body and her feelings of punishment, but there are also moments where she talks about the immense comfort her feelings of kinship with God offered her. Many assume transgender people do not have a positive relationship with God. This book is a direct challenge to that assumption.
Overall, The Soul of the Stranger is a daring book. Ladin dares to speak as a transgender person, unapologetically, and assert that transgender people have a place in Judaism, whatever people may say and think. Her discussion in the chapter of hyper-minorities and W. E. B. Du Bois, an early twentieth-century Harvard-educated African American sociologist, exemplifies the boldness of this approach. Discussing Du Bois, Ladin says, “He says nothing about what it is like to be black in America or to be seen as a problem by them [white academics]. He has a place among them, but it is a tenuous place, a bubble defined by difference and maintained by silence. He isn’t sure, or perhaps is all too sure, whether he would still have a place among them if he spoke his mind.” (134) As Ladin discusses her professional experience at her university, keeping silent is a way to ensure a place in the community. “I fear that if I burst the bubble of silence … then I will no longer have a place in my community.” (135) Yet that is exactly what this book does. Ladin stands before the world with this book, refusing to be silent about how she understands God and Torah as a transgender woman. As someone who struggles with my own fears of “bursting the bubble of silence,” this book shows me that I can be open and still be in community. The Soul of the Stranger does not teach that lesson only to transgender Jews. Ladin is an example to everyone who fears living openly as themselves will cost them a place in their community. Whatever identities you hold, we all have something to learn from Ladin about living openly, boldly, and loving God while we do it.
