Jewish and Transgender
A former Orthodox Jew’s journey to getting right with herself and God
By Shelby Hartman
Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these 40 years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.
– Deuteronomy 8:2
In 1971, Yiscah Smith stepped off the plane in Israel for the first time as a 20-year-old man from Long Island, New York, named Jeffrey. He knew very little about Judaism. In fact, he didn’t even know why he was there.
Forty years later, after a gender transition and just before turning 60, Smith returned to Israel as an Orthodox Jewish woman named Yiscah. This time, she had no need to contemplate her next move. She headed straight to the Western Wall in Jerusalem to finally join her fellow women in prayer.
“At the moment when my feet touched the women’s space for the first time in my life, nothing I had ever done until that moment felt as natural and right,” Smith said.
Then, she approached the wall.
“Shivers ran through my body, as the tears fell, and as I uttered words of gratitude and praise, I knew in the deepest recesses of my very being, in the marrow of my existence, that my transition was God’s loving and compassionate expression of bringing me back home — to Him, to myself, and to my spiritual center,” she writes in her memoir, “Forty Years In The Wilderness: My Journey To Authentic Living.”
Smith’s journey has been one of reconciling her transgender and Jewish identities. At times, they supported one another. At other times, she thought she would have to choose between two fundamental parts of herself, destined to an incomplete existence. She now travels the world inspiring others to live what she calls an “authentic life.” Smith compares her four decades living in the wrong body to the Jews who were sentenced to roam aimlessly through the desert, holding onto a promise from God that they would someday be rewarded for their agony with a home.
We all live “in the closet” at various points, she said earlier this year in Los Angeles at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the world’s first LGBT synagogue. Smith has become a force for inclusivity in the Jewish community, but her message is a universal one: Listen to your voice. Only you know if you’re being honest with yourself and others about who you are.
This notion of “authenticity,” that we all are unique individuals with our own paths, is relatively new in the history of Western intellectual thought. It became popular during the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Previously, a “sincere” person was someone who followed expectations. Then, the concept of an inner self emerged. Society was perceived as a collection of individuals, each of whom had a personal set of beliefs, desires, and characteristics.
The power that the concept of authenticity has over the way people perceive their lives has only continued to grow. According to philosophers Charles Taylor and Alessandro Ferrara, we are now living in the age of authenticity. Taylor writes in “Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity,” “Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.”
This concept inspired Smith to make dramatic changes to her life. It was, she says, the only way she could get right with God. Yet, she acknowledges there is no word for authenticity in the Torah. “There is another word that is in the text and that is ‘truth’ or emet in Hebrew,” she said. “It’s part of the Shabbat prayer that we say: ‘to be with you in service and in truth.’”
Before her gender transition, Smith married a woman and had six children in eight years. They lived as an Orthodox Jewish family in an apartment in the Old City of Jerusalem. Smith became somewhat of a celebrity in their Jewish community. Every Friday night their family would host lively, intimate Shabbat dinners where Smith would offer passionate lessons about ancient Jewish texts. All the while she hated herself for preaching the importance of truth while lying about who she was: a woman in a man’s body.
It was January 1991 and the Persian Gulf War was in full swing. The United States was preparing to lead 34 countries, the largest coalition since World War II, into Kuwait to end the Iraqi occupation. When Saddam Hussein fired the first missile into Israel and the conflict got closer and closer to home, Smith felt it was a metaphor for her life. “No gas mask, no safe room, and no amount of preparation could have protected me from this onslaught seeking to destroy me, and by extension, my family,” Smith writes in her memoir. She says she was her “own personal Saddam Hussein.”
Smith came out as gay, divorced her wife, and moved to the progressive Israeli city of Tel Aviv. She didn’t yet have the courage to come out as a transgender heterosexual woman.
Lies and agony continued.
After a rabbi in Jerusalem ostracized her for coming out as gay, she no longer felt there was a place for her in the Jewish community. She moved to Manhattan and became a feminine man in the LGBT nightlife scene, completely rejecting religion.
Smith says it would take her several years to realize that “The rabbis are imperfect, they’re human. God is perfect.” This is ultimately how she managed to reconcile her gender-identity dysphoria and Judaism despite continued prejudice in some ultra-Orthodox communities.
In the Torah, there’s one Jewish law that supersedes all the others. It’s called pikuach nefesh and it means that a person does not have to follow the commandments if doing so will lead to his or her death. This is the passage Smith refers to when explaining why she believes God approves of her transition.
Pikuach nefesh is also the law referred to by some rabbis and LGBT activists trying to interpret Jewish text to accommodate members of the community who don’t fall neatly into the categories of heterosexual male and female. According to a study done by UCLA’s Williams Institute in 2014, more than 40 percent of transgender people have tried to commit suicide.
Smith was never suicidal, but she was severely lonely and unfulfilled. “I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t go on. And I knew the only way to go on was to get a gender transition,” she said via video chat from her apartment in the eclectic Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot. She looked like an elegant woman one might encounter at an art gallery with short brown hair, funky sterling rings on almost every finger, and a simple camel-colored sweater.
“One thing I’ve seen in my own life and in other people’s lives a lot, is the way in which coming out often makes people recognize how important Judaism is to them,” said Rabbi Lisa Edwards of Beth Chayim Chadasim. “Once you start integrating into your true self, all these disparate parts of who you are flow together better.” Edwards and her partner Tracy Moore have been LGBT activists in Los Angeles for more than two decades.
Jews have been encouraged to question the meaning of Jewish law and adapt it to their own lives for as long as the religion has existed. “There isn’t any one view of any of this,” Edwards said. “I think that fact is what helps a lot of us who are more liberal in our viewpoints.”
The tradition of interpretation in Judaism has helped some Reform communities to be at the forefront of the LGBT movement since the 70s. Israel is also arguably ahead of America when it comes to transgender equality, allowing people with gender identity dysphoria to serve in the military and subsidizing gender reassignment surgery as a part of the country’s universal healthcare system.
But the same flexibility in Jewish law that allows people to make the religion their own leads to an endless debate about God’s intentions. Some Orthodox Jewish communities believe the last rabbis granted the right to interpret these ancient texts did so in the Talmud written between 200 C.E. and 500 C.E. Others believe that the meaning of these texts evolves constantly with the passage of time, particularly as modernity presents problems that did not exist in the past.
Typically, when a Jew is looking for an interpretation of a law, they go to their rabbi seeking a reading that takes their circumstances into account. This is why Eshel, an organization founded in 2010 to promote LGBT inclusivity in Orthodox Jewish communities, is educating rabbis around the country about gender identity dysphoria. If rabbis realize that being transgender is not a choice, they’re more likely to interpret the Halakha, or collective body of Jewish laws, in a way that allows congregants to participate in the synagogue as their identified genders. In 2015, Eshel interviewed 33 Orthodox rabbis in the United States to assess their inclusivity.
“It’s very hard because there’s a lot in Judaism that has to do with the body,” said Eshel Executive Director Miryam Kabakov. “Someone in a male body has a whole other list of obligations. When someone transitions, the question is, ‘Do we now treat them as male or female?’”
The only commandment in the Torah that explicitly addresses gender ambiguity prohibits cross-dressing. In the book of Deuteronomy 22:5 it says, “A woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear women’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord your God.”
Some rabbis believe that a person will always be the gender assigned at birth. Thus, even if the person is fully transitioned, they would be violating the law. This was the Torah portion that most troubled Joy Ladin. In 2006 she came out as transgender, the first tenured professor to do so at Yeshiva University, the oldest Jewish educational institution in America.
Ladin recalls being overwhelmed with guilt as a child when she would sneak up to the attic and try on her sister’s old clothing. As she got older, her life was affirmed by the nuance and malleability of the Torah. Like Yiscah Smith, she came to believe that being a woman was her God-given destiny. “If we didn’t insist that the Torah speak to our deepest needs, confusions, anguishes, the Torah would wither into something like the Code of Hammurabi — a text written by and for those who died millennia before us, a piece of archaeology rather than what our tradition calls it: a tree of life whose roots nourish the endlessly ramifying limbs and leaves of our individual lives,” Ladin writes in an article about how her transition influenced the way she reads Jewish text.
The same year Ladin came out, Elliot Kukla became the first transgender rabbi ordained by a Reform community. Over the last 10 years there’s been an increase in the number of rabbinical schools that admit transgender students. Still, there are many questions and disagreements about how transgender identity plays out in the synagogue.
Prior to Smith’s transition, one of the hardest parts of going to temple was being forced to stand on the wrong side of the mechitza, the wall that divides the female and male congregants. It was a physical representation of the barrier between who she was and how she was perceived.
Some ultra-Orthodox communities still will not allow her in their synagogue, let alone on the women’s side of the mechitza. They’re not transphobic, Smith insists, they’re just afraid of “the other.” In particular, ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews, who came from Central and Eastern Europe, live rigid lives in insular communities out of fear, she theorizes. “I believe now the Ashkenazi world, to a degree, is still suffering trauma from the European experience, from one institutionalized anti-Semitic policy after the next,” she said. “This does something to people. It erodes trust.”
In order to love others, Smith says, people must first start with themselves. It’s a cliché, but she knows it’s true from experience. Her vision? “I want to wake up to a world where everyone is so busy trying to figure themselves out that they begin to embrace the other.”
For now, Smith and other transgender Jews are fueling progress merely by their presence. More and more rabbis, inside and outside Orthodox communities, are committing themselves to learning about gender dysphoria so they can help their transgender congregants on their journeys.
And Smith’s journey is not over either. It never will be, she says. But at least for now, she’s out of the wilderness. After 40 years, she’s found herself, she’s found God, and she’s found a home in Jerusalem.
Shelby Hartman is PrimeMind’s associate editor. Follow her on Twitter.
Featured Image By Julien Menichini from Paris, France (Western Wall — Jerusalem) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wiki Commons
