Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/joyladin/)
The annual reading of the names of those murdered in the past year for being transgender is a somber reminder that the US is dangerous place for trans people – particularly trans women and trans people of color. But the once- or twice-a-week murders we memorialize represent a small fraction of verbal and physical violence trans people experience on a daily basis.
Reflecting on her own coming-out experience at Yeshiva University, Joy Ladin speaks out in support of Professor Adam Ackley, the theologian who was just fired from Christian Azusa Pacific University after coming out as transgender. There is no verse in the Bible in which God says, “Thou shalt not employ a transgender professor,” and religious organization who act against such people only do so out of fear: fear of difference, fear of the unknown, and fear of losing money.
Americans rarely elect presidents whose talents warrant their high office, but when, as in 2008, we do, we paradoxically ensure that they will fall short of the potential with which we fell in love when we voted them in. Whatever their strengths or accomplishments, presidents are judged them harshly and caricatured savagely. That is their role in our political and psychological economy: to represent fantasies of absolute power that we mercilessly, relentlessly puncture. We doom our presidents to fail our greatest hopes than risk empowering tyrants who fulfill our worst fears.
When the Gaza war began in November 2012, American Jews’ lack of an embracing moral language, a language that could acknowledge all viewpoints, sufferings, terrors, humanity, became painfully obvious. To speak of the civilians dying in Gaza was, to many American Jews, to attack Israel and deny its legitimate rights to exist and defend itself from missiles. We seemed to have no language in which we could speak both of Israeli families huddling in bomb shelters as far north as Jerusalem and children crawling through Gaza rubble. Indeed, to judge by the anguished, enraged Facebook and Twitter exchanges I saw, we didn’t even have a language in which we could acknowledge and address the feelings and perspectives boiling among American Jews.
God is infinite, and each of us encounters different faces of God, and God needs us – each of us – to make our experience of God visible in the world. Without you, the truth of God that only you can know will be lost. God speaks to us through the language of necessity – what we need to do to live. Think of your body – it tells you when you need to eat, to breathe, to lie down and rise up. Your soul also tells you what you need to do to live; it’s telling you now.
For many years, as the frenzy of last-minute Passover preparations gave way to the countdown to the first seder, I would find myself thinking ever more fondly of that first sprig of salt-water dipped parsley. I was hungry. Though I didn’t come from an observant family, I chose to observe the Fast of the First-Born – a special fast for first-born males (in some communities, the fast is observed by both genders) commemorating the fact that when God jump-started the Exodus by slaying all the Egyptian first-born males, those of the children of Israel were spared. No one else I knew kept the fast, but the moment I read about it, I knew that it was mitzvah I had to add to my intermittent observance. My mother had had a miscarriage before I was born – a male fetus whose life I obscurely felt I had usurped.
As the popular revolt in Egypt surges toward an uncertain future, world leaders, particularly in the U.S. and Israel, are expressing fears about what democracy in Egypt might bring. Those anxieties make it abundantly clear that, contrary to popular American political rhetoric, promoting democracy around the world is not an absolute American value. American-interest-friendly dictators often seem to serve American interests more than the uncertainty and instability of democracy. Like many progressives, I am disappointed – when I’m not appalled – by the gulf between the short-term realpolitik of American diplomacy and American democratic ideals. But the public hand-wringing over whether the U.S. should support the democratic revolution in Egypt gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we really feel about democracy – not as an abstract universal value, but as a down-to-earth process of picking policies and leaders.
It was easy for the Left to be smug during the debate over violence in political discourse that opened up in the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. The days when violent discourse – and violence – were most popular on the Left are decades behind us, while the Right seems to be constantly ratcheting up the level of verbal violence. But we don’t have to draw crosshairs over opponents’ faces to turn them, rather than their ideas, into targets. Violent rhetoric may or may not spark acts of violence – but there is no doubt that targeting individuals rather than ideas snarls the debate on which democracy depends, and weakens the connection between progressive ideas and the generous, embracing notion of humanity in which they are rooted. I learned the importance of speaking respectfully of and with those with whom I violently disagree from the most conservative people I’ve ever known personally: the students at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University who had visceral objections to my return to teaching as an openly transgender faculty member.