Today is Day 12 of the Omer Counting, and in so many ways, it reflects powerful lessons that resonate with my own journey out of my gender closet, and indeed, all of the colonial closets that teach us to hide our true self so that we can conform with this world. In many ways, this entire process is designed to help us become who we were created to be, and to let go of those aspects of ourself that are no longer serving us. We are asked to go through the same holidays and rituals and reflections every year, because every year, we are supposed to be changing and evolving. By looking back on where we were a year ago, we can begin to appreciate our journey, and this can further inform us as we continue to evolve into who we are becoming.
The Omer Counting Process: Kabbalah’s approach to healing
As I explained in previous blogs, during the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot, there are 49 different spiritual exercises that Jews are supposed to do to help heal themselves and be prepared to understand the revelation of Torah that is intended for each of us on Shavuot. While this holiday represents the revelation of Torah to us all, each of us will hear in it what we need to head in our own healing journey, if we have done the work ahead of time to prepare ourselves emotionally and spiritually. Here is a link to a good app that can help if you want to take the traditional approach and here is a link to the Facebook page where I post daily for the Omer counting. On this blog, I am only including those that feel especially significant to me in my reflection, or that I think may be helpful for others, or as requested by some of my followers.
The Kabbalistic tree of life has the top three Sefirot (Divine Emanations) that represent the ways that “chochmah” (wisdom) and “binah” (understanding) align to form “da’at” (knowledge), so that G!d’s Keter (brilliant Power) can shine through our ways of knowing and being. In a sense, this process reflects the emergence of consciousness or awareness of Self/self…. the true Torah that we must embrace at Sinai: the revelation of our own unconsciousness to understand how we are wired… what parts of us were we taught to hide and how do these hidden parts affect us? Internal Family Systems theory or psychosynthesis are some of the many possible therapeutic modalities for operationalizing the Kabbalistic call of integration of self into Self/Self into self…. or one can just journal and reflect.
The seven lower sefirot of the Kabbalistic tree: “hesed” (loving-kindness), “gevurah” (strength), “hod” (humility), “netzach” (endurance), “tiferet” (beauty), “yesod” (foundation/intimacy) and “malchut” (mastery/power) reflect the different qualities that can help or hinder the ways G!d is manifest in the world and in us. Each of these energy centers (sefirot) correspond to different emotions and aspects of ourself. If we are out of alignment in any of these areas, then our lives will reflect this imbalance. This is where our suffering manifests: the trauma gets blocked and our emotions get out of whack. We make decisions that are not conducive to G!d’s Love and Light flowing through us and into this world…
Becoming who we were created to be requires unlearning everything society taught us about who we are. I say this because our world is violent and unfair and in need of healing, so anything we absorb from this world must be filtered carefully. No less than a sponge gets wet if placed in a bowl of water, we must detox from this world. The daily spiritual practices can help, but the holidays are intended to help us, on an annual basis, continue to grow and reflect and evolve.
My personal reflection as I transition out of my gender closet
For myself, going through this practice as I transition from who I used to present to the world to my true self has been profound. It is so powerful, revelatory and disorienting to see the world through the eyes of someone else. Even if I am the same person, the decision to do what I needed to do to align my external and internal self means that other people perceive me differently. When I walk in the world, increasingly people relate to me as a white man versus a lifetime of being seen as female, with varying levels of gender conformity. It is an excellent exercise to be reminded of the spiritual teaching shared by religions the world over that we are not our bodies… despite how many decisions of this world relate to our bodies’ appearances. So many of the intersections in the intersectional wheel of power and privilege are related to our body and appearances.
There is a great (and similar) lesson about the fluid continuum of some of the intersectional silos of how colonization tries to separate us from each other: the story of supermodel Tyra Banks who puts on a “fat suit” and sees how different life would be for her if she were in a different body. If we could all go through life from the perspective of those around us we would have a very different world. Tyra was forced to confront her privilege as someone whose beauty has opened many doors for her. Poignantly, her experiment taught her compassion for those individuals whose appearance earns them scorn and contempt, and she has become a powerful advocate, speaking out against weight stigma in particular.
Similarly, suddenly going through the world as someone who presents as male is also very jarring. Walking through the street feels different. At some level, walking through the streets is an excellent litmus for how safe or unsafe one is. For me, when I think about my life, walking the streets felt different when I moved from Montreal to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to New York City to Kentucky… My power and privilege changes depending upon each location. After having been assaulted in Montreal for wearing a star of David, being in Jerusalem made me feel safe as a Jew. Sadly, it came at the expense of other people not feeling safe in that same city. And it also meant that I was less safe when I dressed in gender discordant ways (for example wearing a kippah/male head covering and a dress). Living in New York City’s diversity felt safe until September 11th which prompted me to move to Kentucky, where my gender expression felt especially unsafe. The complex interplay of context and intersectional oppression impacts each of us in unique ways.
For me, as I think back on it, each move was very impactful, and indeed, my move in 2002, from New York to Kentucky, contributed to my deciding that the world was not ready for a transgender rabbi, and my “choosing” to go back into the gender closet, at least “for a few years”. Alas, this decision was a slippery slope that lasted twenty years. Trying to pass as cisgender led me to experiencing a variety of conversion “therapy” practices such as being given pills to remove the naturally occurring testosterone in my body, and being given estrogen to try to increase the female hormones in my body. These were incredibly harmful practices that did very bad things to my brain, and they are illegal in Canada, but sadly still way too common elsewhere. To learn more about Canada’s efforts to ban “conversion therapy” which is the ways that colonization’s illusion of a gender binary is perpetrated upon those of us who are intersex or gender-diverse, please click here. That website represents some of the work that I am grateful to now be able to support as I now try to protect other people from experiencing some of what I did, and to hopefully save lives. I share all this because the world still does not have enough stories like mine, and I believe that visibility is key to education and saving lives. I share all this because so many of you, my readers, have shared with me your own stories and I understand that raising awareness is urgently needed.
Seeing on the other side of the closet door
I often describe the experience of coming out of my gender closet as suddenly being given glasses after a lifetime of things being blurry. I see and understand everything so very differently- in myself and in the world. For as long as I can remember, I have known that I am not the gender I was assigned at birth. I have many memories of refusing to believe that I was female and writing letters to G!d and Santa (I wanted to cover all my bases!) begging that I not grow up female. But I did not have any language or representation for my experiences until I was in my late teens and met someone else who identified as transgender. This began my coming out journey, that was thwarted by transphobia in multiple violent, traumatizing and ethically problematic ways. All of this reflects the world that I lived in, decades ago, before more education and awareness had happened, and why I am so grateful that more children are now able to have access to knowledge and education earlier so that they can be spared some of the profound and enduring trauma that so many of us experienced.
So, here I am, mercifully and finally, beginning to transition after a lifetime of being seen as someone different than me. It is a beautiful experience of euphoria and liberation: like breathing oxygen after a lifetime of being under water. It is grounding to finally be in the right body, just like putting on glasses to correct poor vision is transformative. G!d may have created me with eyes that have myopia and astigmatism but thankfully glasses have helped me to see. I was also born with asthma, but mercifully, asthma medication was invented so that I can still be alive today, despite some very scary asthma attacks in my youth. The idea that “G!d doesn’t make mistakes” is not a Jewish idea and it is a pretty harmful one, in my therapeutic estimation. While G!d may be perfect, everything that is in this universe is finite and limited. Medicine can help or hurt people: it is a power that can be lifegiving or lethal.
As I transition and suddenly see everything more clearly, it is also putting into focus some of this world’s gender injustices, because I am seeing them in a new way. Behaviors that I had learned to tune out are now visible because they feel new or different. For example, suddenly, the people who I used to be scared of (because I have been gay bashed and assaulted) are giving me fist bumps and calling me buddy, and the people who used to be coded as “safe” look at me with fear or distrust. I have even noticed female-presenting people cross the street if they see me coming at a distance. Had I not experienced life as myself, I might experience these behaviors in ways that would make me upset. I might take it personally, but instead, I feel compassion, because I understand at a visceral level.
I am suddenly accessing privileges I did not understand I lacked, while losing the solidarity of the oppressed. The solidarity of the oppressed is how I think of the look of recognition and allyship that almost every butch lesbian gives each other as they navigate through a world that hates them. I have been told by folks who are oppressed according to other intersectional biases that there is a similar recognition that sometimes happens for them too. But the fluidity of the gender transition, like Tyra’s fat suit, allows me to observe the difference in a stark way that makes it clear. To suddenly see the people I learned to see as similar to me look at me with resentment, while the people I learned to see as potentially violent and transphobic now give me fist bumps is jarring in ways that I did not expect. I have had people who transition the other way tell me that the reverse is true: there is even a joke for those assigned male at birth who transition to womanhood that “you know you have transitioned successfully when you get treated poorly”.
While this is NOT why one transitions, it does provide one with a new vantage point. It is the reason for my assertion that queering is redeeming: when we come out of our closets, there is redemptive power in the learning that results. We see the world more clearly: in broad strokes and more close up. The people we think will support us are often not the ones who do, and we begin to understand that the ideas we had about safety were actually incredibly unsafe. Indeed, hiding our true self does not lead to emotional safety for anyone, and it is certainly a recipe for a lot of extra complications. Facing our fears and coming out despite all that we will lose requires a strength that enables us to tolerate the shame and blame that we will be forced to endure by a world that judges us harshly. But we do it because the alternative is a life that is unbearable, and because doing so is joyful and lifegiving in ways that I never even understood. And the learning that comes from this is profoundly healing and redemptive.
I think that this might be one reason why two spirit folks in Indigenous communities were always seen as being wise teachers and healers. If we live in a world that socializes men to be from Mars and women to be from Venus, then I believe that having someone who has been to both planets could be the key to bridging the divides that are at the heart of so much injustice and divisiveness, just like I believe that interfaith and interracial marriages can heal our world by reminding us that Love is stronger than any ambivalence. Seeing from more than one perspective can teach us humility and compassion for others, and help us to remember that our truest Self is the Self that transcends all labels and in whose Image we are all created. Once we see that G!d is inside each of us and all around us, our world will finally flow together the way it should. This is why the work of every spiritual teacher is to help us become “awakened” or “enlightened” or conscious. Everything else falls into place, just like if we are tuning an instrument, when we adjust ourselves, G!d’s vibrations will flow through us in healing ways…
Fundamentally, being on both sides of the gender dividing line/glass ceiling gives me a vantage point that I am just starting to experience. It makes therefore for an interesting start to reflecting upon this week’s quality of “gevurah” which is translated as strength and traditionally associated with masculinity. Even though I have not been raised or socialized as a man, I am being experienced as such by people. I may not see myself as strong, but others see me as such. The gap between how one sees oneself and how others see us reflects the gap that tends to be at the root of many miscommunications in this world. For me, this means that I have the experience of unearned privilege even as I continue to reel from a lifetime of being misgendered or experiencing diverse forms of gender violence. This also means that I have a new power: the ability to begin to decolonize gender by dismantling the false binaries that colonization taught us. To learn more about how gender and sexuality became colonial weapons, please click here. To learn more about how Judaism’s genders have been colonized, click here.
I could look at the power I do not have (or did not always have) and say: I am still oppressed in my brain, or I could acknowledge that I now have new power now that I can choose to use in one way or another. I think that this is part of how power and strength works: we may not realize the intersectional power and privilege we have because we are still reeling from the other intersectional ways that we lack power or our early memories of powerlessness. Sadly, this keeps us locked in the past and unable to own our current power. as I think about it, my failing to recognize the power I now have as someone who presents as masculine is similar to my failing to recognize the power that Israel has now because 85 years ago we Jews were powerless to stop the rise of Nazism. Trauma locks us into the past: every adult has an inner child who is still reeling from an early trauma (or several). Those traumas haunt us when we don’t tend to them: they can surprise us or manifest in less healthy ways until we recognize that they are in the past. Because the body/the limbic system holds trauma, it takes special somatic therapy to learn to release the ways in which our bodies keep us from living in the present. To learn more, click here.
Learning to live in the present moment
Recognizing our power and positionality feels scary for many of us because it feels like it invalidates our struggles. Because our colonial world ensures that no one ever feels safe, it therefore feels unsafe to acknowledge this. As a result, we argue over the past and what we think did or did not happen, or worry about the future, rather than staying focused in what is true right now in the moment. But I am realizing that it is really important to acknowledge our current power, because when we have power we have responsibilities that we did not have when we were powerless. For example, my same expression of anger will be experienced differently by someone else, depending upon which gender they assign to me. Angry men are experienced differently than angry women in our current social order, in large part because of our binary understanding of gender that forces people on the gender continuum to try to conform with binary extremes. To understand the connection of toxic masculinity, gender-based violence and the colonial construction of a false gender binary, click here.
I may not have healed from being powerless, but I am no longer that person in the eyes of those I encounter today. This means, I either need to update my idea of who I am, quickly, or I will be responding in ways that are disconnected from the current moment. If I am not careful, I can unintentionally cause harm to someone else by missing my new found power. I believe that it is the responsibility of everyone who is born in a safer room to open the doors to that room for those still searching for safety. There is a lot of complicated feelings that get in the way of our capacity to recognize our strength and power. For that reason, both strength (gevurah) and power (malchut) are central to the spiritual recalibration that can ensure that our other spiritual qualities can mediate them, such as compassion or humility. If these are not tempered and integrated, then strength can become violence and power can become destructive, while compassion can become codependency and humility can become shame.
As humans raised in an abusive/colonial world, we are taught to see the world through a pathologizing/deficit model: what is wrong or missing, versus a strengths-based approach. But gratitude for the present is actually the gateway to a humility that strengthens us: if we experienced early trauma, we might feel haunted by those memories. But if we can recognize that the past is over, we can work to let go of its influence on the present. This is why the Hebrew word for gratitude “hodayah” is related to humility “hod”: our gratitude for the present can ground us so we can acknowledge our power in ways that keep us humble, which is to say, in ways that reduce risk or harm. Knowing the power I have means using it judiciously or with restraint, which are actually other translations for “gevurah” (strength). This week, the spiritual task is to reflect upon strength from many different perspectives, which is not necessarily a very comfortable task. We may think about times we have used our power ineffectiveness and/or unintentionally caused harm. Admitting this and learning from it requires true strength.
Our world trains us to not be grounded in the present moment, although gratitude and mindfulness practices can help us begin to do this. Still, we often focus on ways we still feel powerless or our memories of our earlier challenges, or we can accept our current reality and align ourselves to it. for me, as I come into myself and begin to notice the power I have when people perceive me as male, I am having to recalibrate myself in profound ways. Because staying tethered to reality ensures healthier outcomes, I am learning to let go of the past. Embracing unearned privilege causes me to feel embarrassed at the unfairness. That is a profoundly uncomfortable: most people are wired to avoid uncomfortable feelings, so sitting in this discomfort is the opportunity for deep healing and unlearning. Learning to tolerate our shame or discomfort is the mark of true healing, and the work that this requires reflects the exact spiritual practice of today’s Omer counting.
Today is the 12th day of the Omer: integrating strength and humility
Today is the 12th day of the Omer counting as we continue to reflect upon the Sefirot, which are the spiritual qualities by which G!d’s Energy flows through us and into this world. This week’s theme is “gevurah” or strength. Our world has misunderstood what true strength is: we might think it is about physical strength or authority or about being right. But Kabbalah/spiritual wisdom understands that “hod” or humility is a necessary ingredient. Humility requires being able to tolerate the discomfort of admitting our imperfections/human limitations in a world that taught us shame if we are wrong or if we lose. We can’t get better without understanding how and why we messed up. We were created to complete the work of creation: this means repair what is broken. From a Kabbalistic perspective, that begins with us because we are the vessels for how G!d flows through the world.
True strength is not being scared of/needing to avoid the discomfort of our shame in order to admit when we are wrong or rise up to do the wiser or more compassionate response when the world flings its judgment or accusations upon us. We are trained to debate and we live in a litigious society that makes admitting fault seem dangerous, but today’s spiritual integration exercise invites us to consider a different way forward. This is also the necessary internal spiritual work for Truth, Reconciliation and Restorative Justice: being able to recognize our complicity in supporting the current intersectional injustices of our world. Recognizing our own imperfections leads to a resilience against shame that can be truly liberating for others but also for ourselves that no longer need to try so hard to explain ourselves and for others.
The Hebrew word for “hod” or humility is actually related to the word Jew (yehudi), thanksgiving (hodayah), acknowledgment (hoda’ah), confession (vidui), and glory (hod). One might have been confused as to how glory, confession and humility are connected, until we recognize the strength needed to make a vidui/confession. Gratitude is a grounding practice that helps us feel safe enough to be vulnerable and take accountability for the ways in which we are not yet perfect. Being honest about ourselves requires acceptance and a faith that we are always growing and becoming someone new: it requires staring at the present unflinchingly, not looking at the past for justification or the future for theoretical calculations. The capacity to tolerate shame might very well be the spiritual practice that could heal our world… shame and compassion are related in ways that are not well understood because when we talk about humility we do so in shaming ways. But what if instead, we celebrated those brave enough to admit that they got things wrong and are now willing to learn and do things better?
Today, as we are called to integrate “gevurah” (strength) with “hod” (humility): let us reflect upon the ways in which true strength requires sitting in the discomfort of our imperfection and understanding that this recognition is the foundation for a better future for us all. Let us decolonize our idea of strength to understand that vulnerability/humility is an important part of embracing our humanity. Acknowledging our human limitations is one of the most courageous spiritual practices we can do. May we stare at ourselves unflinchingly in the mirror and recognize our truest self and the Self that seeks to emanate through us and into this world. May we embrace the present and do what we can to heal the past so that our world can finally become one where we can recognize the Divine Sparks of Light that are present in each of us.
And may we not fear: may we not fear our strength and may we not fear our discomfort. May we learn to trust that we are stronger than anything that we are ashamed about: if there is anything that coming out can teach the world it is this truth. That which we are afraid to admit can haunt us, and once we face our fears, we realize that we are stronger than we imagined. This is deeply liberating. Life is short and precious: choosing to live it fully, authentically and in ways that are grounded in the present tense is definitely the best way to live it. I am only sorry that it took me so long to understand that. I write now to let folks know: it gets better! In the wise words of Rebbe Nachman: V’ha’ikar lo l’fached clal (the most important thing is to not be afraid). Here is a song with these wise words set to music… may it guide us to a less scary world, because more of us will finally face our fears and stop letting them control us. May strength and humility guide us to faith and compassion.
Emerging Torah as Rabbi Nachshon emerges 