This blog begins with an apology to those who subscribe and got emails with earlier versions that did not say what I meant to say. Apologies for yet another repeat- this is yet another updated version of an unfinished Torah that keeps continuing to evolve as I keep discarding old understandings that I slowly understand are not as real as they seemed when I first spoke them.
One week before my surgery, not yet fully out of my closet, it is perhaps not surprising that my thoughts are not fully formed. I have spent a lifetime repressing them. And yet, I am embarrassed by the imperfect ways that they are coming out, because I am not used to being seen in my imperfection… because I am not used to being seen. It feels wrong because it is new. But I had a teacher once tell me, feel the fear and do it anyway. I am forcing myself out and breathing through the discomfort of the shame (that I know is a weapon imposed upon me by propaganda and violence), because I know that the alternative is death. The old adage that we should not be surprised if the same mistakes keep leading us to the same problems, is a reminder that true change means trying new things, even if we are afraid we will fail, and even if we get judged or blamed by those who liked the status quo. And so, I keep trying to push my way out of the closet, and like the erosion of water against a rock, my Torah continues to push against the defenses of my unconscious to refine my thinking and help me see clearly.
I want to say: please delete your email with the old version. But perhaps you want to keep it because what I thought you would not want to read was in fact very meaningful. I don’t know. I know I have been touched by how many of you have reached out to me with your own stories- especially related to how hard it is to admit our imperfections. If I apply what I know from my years working in hospitals, I can remind myself that there is Torah (sacred Wisdom) in mistakes: it is an example of how we are all imperfect in a world that teaches us to be embarrassed of mistakes… that values perfection, and causes shame for all of us who are imperfect.
So, this blog is also an apology to everyone who knew me as Rabbi Nadia and who believe that I somehow failed them by changing into someone they don’t recognize. This blog post is also my best attempt to articulate what I know, as I learn how to authentically live into my Call to become who I am not yet. It is my attempt to affirm that saving lives is more important than being right- a message I first learned from my days working in hospitals and supporting health care workers as they learned to talk without shame about medical errors.
I have shame about my closet, because I live in a world that teaches that if I am not a cis-gendered neurotypical stereotypically abled and shaped heterosexual white Christian man with money and education and every other quality that is presented as normative, then I am deficient. Society teaches us shame about everything: how we look, how we smell, how we sound… everything. This leads us to buy products to disguise ourselves so that we buy products to make white and wealthy people (mostly men since women are not yet paid equally!) more money, while the rest of us compete for crumbs and feel bad in the process.
In protest of this shameful world that shames those who are simply trying to exist, by projecting their shame onto us, I am leaning into the Torah of shame today and in the process, pray to show that this shame is a strategy that has deathly consequences. I am sharing this imperfect version of me (today’s reflections) because I want to model the courage that I have learned from others who are also not perfect, but are brave enough to be authentic… it is because of their courage that I am learning how to find my voice and become me (for more on this: my newspaper coming out article). It is perhaps fitting that, in my pre-surgical dysphoria as my voice has not yet fully changed, that I am still not yet fully present into who I was created to be.
The reason that I need to share, and don’t want to wait until everything is perfect, is that hate is organizing across Canada, and the United States. I am struggling now, because of the ways that people don’t understand why this is so important and their prejudice has created a world where I did not feel safe to be true to myself. Gender-affirming care is life-saving care. For everyone who thinks that people should wait to become connected to their bodies, I offer my Torah of shame and death, so that it can help other live.
This is the Torah of Pikuach Nefesh for gender diverse people: this is the Jewish commandment to save lives at all costs. If people want to protect children: it begins with protecting their desire to be alive. In the last year, I feel like I jumped off a moving train to try to stay alive, even though it still does not all make sense. All I know is that my desire to die has ended, and I feel more alive than I knew was possible. This blog post is my attempt to transform the death grip of my gender closet into a Torah (teaching) that can be a tree of life for others: gender-affirming care is life-saving care. It is imperfect, as I am imperfect. I pray that as I do everything I can to jump into my shame and try to speak my truth, it helps others who struggle with this dynamic… be it because of gender, or sexuality, or neurodiversity or any of the other labels that society has taught us we should hide because of its bias.
Shame is the raw material of all closets. Instead of helping us be better and do better, shame causes most humans to hide, because we are trying to stay safe from those who use it as a weapon. Shaming and threatening strategies that blame and spread hate create a culture where no one feels safe, just like a bully in a room can cause everyone else to get quiet and try to avoid being a target. Shame keeps all humans from talking about their growing edges in a constructive way that can help us grow and learn from where we missed the mark (the TRUE meaning of the Hebrew word for sin). This is what High Holy Days are supposed to be. This is the real problem with our world: society has taught us to hide and blames us when we mess up… and we believe that we are somehow 100% responsible, because we don’t acknowledge the role that the system itself has played in teaching us the values and in setting up the context within which we exist and evolve.
Working in a hospital, and learning the idea of just culture to ensure safety and stop medical mistakes, I began to reflect upon how this applies to other contexts. What if we celebrating our mistakes as learning opportunities, instead of blaming humans for systemic problems? Learning about the importance of developing a “reporting culture” to unlearn blame, shame and guilt has been profound Torah for me. I am convinced that celebrating “good catches” will save our health care systems from burnout, and will also save lives in so many other ways, so I am forcing myself to keep unraveling my mistakes and talking about them, even though it feels terrifying and shameful. As a therapist, I know (intellectually) that tolerating discomfort is how we grow. As a former hospital leader, I know that diving deep into the lessons of our mistakes is how we create safety. As a rabbi who is in the middle of the “Ten Days of Awe” where we are commanded to go to people we have hurt over the past year, and try to apologize when possible, I understand the sacredness of this work. But as a human being living in a judgmental world, who keeps writing and editing and wants to delete my mistakes, I am left watching the concrete applications of this Torah in my life and in my psyche, with profound discomfort.
Colonization teaches us to hide our mistakes and that causes us to hide from ourselves and others… or blame… or otherwise cause harm. For more on how colonialism is connected to perfection and white-supremacy (and I want to clarify, all intersectional hatred), please read this. For me, the many factors that led me to believe that a closet would keep me safe are complex. I would not be alive were it not for my father having spent years of his life hidden, like Anne Frank. He and his mother were hidden by people who risked their lives to do what is right. While trauma had taught me focus on the role that hiding played in his safety, I now think of the courage of those who risked everything in the name of doing what was right. Having come this far in my own healing journey, I seek to do what I can to ensure that others stay alive. My hope is to pay it forward with this personal testimonial. This is the essence of the lessons I learned as a hospital administrator in our daily “safety huddles” as our entire hospital came together to learn from medical mistakes that we instinctively wanted to hide.
There are many different types of closets in this world that seeks to assign us labels. But, I believe that when we learn to see past these, we can create the raw material of the redemptive Torah that can become a Tree of Life. Fundamentally, the Call of the Spirit is to live a life of authenticity and love, and in the process, transform the world around us. For Jews, we believe that we were each created to be partners with G!d in completing the work of creation by trying to create justice wherever we see it lacking. Right now, during the Ten Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are especially tasked with this sacred responsibility. This is the moment when Jews are commanded to do a cheshbon hanefesh (a self-examination) and do teshuvah (make amends) and work toward healing forgiveness- of our expectations of ourselves and others and G!d. These are lovely words, but the reality of these words is that we have to force ourselves to tolerate the discomfort of our shame, to breathe… and to keep forging forward.
I chose the Hebrew name Nachshon because he was the one who dove deep into the waters, as the Children of Israel were escaping ancient Egyptian slavery (the rabbis understand that the name for Mitzrayim means narrow place: I now understand it to be a metaphor for the closet). Pharaoh and his army came running after them and they felt trapped. Moses started to pray. But Nachshon dove deep into the waters and kept moving forward. The rabbis teach that it was this act of moving forward even when it felt like he would drown and the waters had covered his mouth that ultimately caused the sea to part and freedom to be possible. The deeper message that I am now drawing from this is that I have to keep forcing myself to tolerate the discomfort if I want to grow. Things will not change if I keep doing the same thing. Healing begins when I try something different and learn to tolerate the discomfort of it feeling wrong… and remind myself that anything is worse than going back to the closet and living through an eleventh plague. Why was the final straw that led to Pharaoh relenting the death of the first born? Why does the Bible talk about “visiting the iniquity of the parents on the children”? There are lots of blaming answers that colonialism wants us to believe, but now I see that it is really about intergenerational trauma and the ways we perpetuate old patterns, even if we think that we have left them behind. True liberation means seeing clearly.
I decided to become a rabbi to fight for a world where Love in all its forms was recognized as sacred and where justice and equity would prevail against any other Hitler/Amalek/Colonizing Power that sought to reassert itself. I then became a social worker, recognizing that my prayers needed to be accompanied by action: justice and healing work that must be grounded in intersectional equity. I have since come to understand that it is colonialism that separated out these different forms of Avodah (sacred healing work): I had to get different degrees to learn healing of body, mind, heart and spirit and structure… to pray with not just words but actions. I am still learning how to integrate all this into a new way of living into my Avodah/Calling. I am still (un)learning what I absorbed when i learned what I did, so that I can find my way back to the essence of who I was created to be…
For me, beginning to understand my “drag Torah” means unlearning what I told to believe, rather than what I knew was true. For example, a central area of my life’s research is on burnout, and yet, I did not understand the extent to which I was actually running on empty, because I did not know what it was like NOT to be trapped and asphyxiated in a closet of shame. I focused on work as a cause of burnout, instead of thinking holistically or reflecting on how my intersectional identities impacted everything I did or felt or even thought I knew. Colonialism teaches us that work is different from life. This caused me to believe that I could go into the closet in order to be a rabbi, because I felt like the world was barely ready for a lesbian rabbi, let alone a transgender rabbi. I thought that I could somehow parcel my identities and bargain with them like poker chips in the game of life. I believed I could do more good if I stayed hidden. Only now that I see the toll of that decision do I understand how very wrong I was.
Colonialism does not make space for diversity, and this is yet another example of this phenomenon. According to Judaism, work-life balance reflects a false binary. In Hebrew, work and worship are the same word: Avodah. The rabbis teach that the categories of work are the categories of building the Temple. From a Jewish perspective that is interpreted through a decolonizing lens, the problem with this world is that work has become empty and focused on productivity and output, rather than supporting the spiritual evolution of all living beings. My doctoral research was focused on burnout because I saw only burnout in the caring professions… because I was burning out in a world that focused on externals rather than on Spirit… a world that tried to keep me in a closet and assign a label/gender to me that was not really mine. I was masking my true self: this was the real burnout. Whether it is gender, or neurodiversity or any number of other biases that cause people to mask and hide their authentic self, this is at the core of the burnout of the world, or so I now understand. This is therefore my Calling as I now understand it: the Torah I want to share with others.
Unfortunately, I needed to move to the United States to study to become a rabbi. Or perhaps mercifully, I did this, because as much trauma as I experienced, I also learned about “safety culture principles” that I believe can make a huge difference here in unceded Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia. My first reaction was to say “unfortunately” because it was so painful, but now I say “mercifully” because of the Torah I learned there, however traumatic: I experienced unique trauma at the hands of immigration officers at the border who assaulted me because I did not look like the gender of my paperwork and they did not believe that I could be a rabbi. I was on over forty immigration visas because of the broken immigration system. I experienced more injustice and violence than I can begin to list here. People would be in shock that their rabbi, who had 18 years of university training and multiple degrees (because I needed to stay on a student visa) could be struggling like I did. I heard people say “the immigration problems should not impact a Canadian rabbi”. But they did.
The system is broken, and what hurts one person hurts everyone in unique ways. This is true for all injustices. It is a lie of colonialism that we are separate and somehow not impacting each other. These traumas combined with multiple other traumas to push me deep into a gender closet that made me try to convince myself that I could survive and do G!d’s work more effectively, if I stayed locked in the closet that I now think of as my drag name: Rabbi Nadia. Every day for decades, I would wake up and put on what I called “my drag rabbinic uniform”: female clothing and makeup and all the things that caused me further harm by causing me to dissociate from my body.
Because this is the problem: gender identity is not like sexual identity. Like every other safety issue, we need to reframe the way we think and talk about this issue. When we lump letters together because we are all being targeted by hate and need to fight back together, people think that being gay and being transgender are somehow similar. They are not. We figure out who we are as early as toddlers line up to go to the bathroom and get told they are in the wrong line by well-meaning preschool teachers who do not understand what they were not taught. This means that early, we learn trauma that manifests differently for different folks… For me, because of my neurodiversity and autism-spectrum differences (that includes sensory integration and interoception challenges) and (intergenerational and situational) traumas, and those like me, it taught us to further dissociate from our bodies… and the gut instincts that they try to teach us.
I watch the news and feel so terrified and depressed. I listen to people who have so much trauma watching hatred organize and begin to turn on themselves in despair. I see people who are fighting to stop children from accessing the support that they need to avoid the kind of traumas that will haunt me for the rest of my life. I think of those children I have known who never made it to adulthood because they did not understand what they were experiencing and felt so hopeless. Hate gives permission to others to bully and act in the violent ways that cause bashing and mass shootings. Hate is wrong. If people are trying to keep a human from living into their truth, that is wrong. If they know that the consequence of their “free” hate speech is that someone else will die, then that “free” speech comes at a high price. Especially when it is based upon dangerous lies. I feel committed to fight for those who are trying to survive in a world that has tried to erase our existence for generations. If on top of gender dysphoria, we experience trauma and/or are neurodivergent/autistic, then we have even more trouble understanding the messages our bodies are teaching us. When people tell us something different than what we know is true inside of us, then we learn to disavow that part of us to survive. This dissociation means that we are far more likely to get manipulated into ways that cause even worse harm.
It took Covid to liberate me from this gender uniform. Behind a computer screen, no longer wearing clothing that dissociated me, my neurodivergent and gender dysphoric self suddenly got to breathe a little bit… Despite its challenges, for me, Covid gave me the ability to work remotely… which led me back north of the colonial border where I had equal rights, and free health care that would pay for gender affirming care. I was liberated from the conversionary practices that functioned to keep me in my closet. I was able to begin to transition to my true self that I now know as Nachshon. I now go by “Naj” as my translated border name for those who have difficulty pronouncing the Hebrew name. At first I wanted to create a new website and fully transition but after much prayerful reflection, I have decided to keep this website, and to not turn the page on my closet entirely, but rather focus on talking about my journey out of the closet as the “drag Torah” that I pray can help others see their own path to healing and becoming more authentically themselves. Rather than erase my trauma, my Judaism teaches me to transform everything into Torah… including my experience in drag. I am drawing upon the lessons I learned as a hospital leader, working with multiple hospitals to transform our culture of reporting mistakes into safety, and to create “just culture” that recognizes that mistakes are not personal failures, but rather opportunities to (un)learn and evolve,
I have come to understand that drag is just one of the many ways that colonialism harms us all: queerphobia is a strategy of colonialism, and specifically transphobia is a tool that seeks to erase those cultures that recognize more than two genders, including Judaism that has been asserting for over two thousand years that there are at least 8 genders. We are wired in far more complex ways than the simple binary labels that have been printed out for us by society. Healing from this wound and (un)learning the assumptions that I was taught and that were reinforced by systemic policies that also terrorized everyone around me was profoundly transformational and life-saving. I am still working on healing and transitioning. I am also committed to helping everyone else, as best I can, and as an expression of my commitment to serve the One Who is Greater Than All Words or Religions: The Source of Infinite Love that finite humans have sought to limit in order to use empty words from a book endorsed as “organized religion” as a prooftext for colonial harm.
I am so grateful for the life-saving decolonizing Torah I began to learn when I arrived in unceded Mi’kma’ki from Indigenous social workers, Elders and social workers from settler descent who were committed to decolonizing themselves, their practice and this shared world they had inherited. By putting this together with the life-saving Torah I learned in hospitals in the United States, I began to understand that the Torah of my closet was a Torah of shame that. While the details of our closet are different across intersectional identities, we are actually more similar than colonial powers wanted us to recognize and this means that we can apply the same principles from one context (hospital safety culture) to another (truth and reconciliation). Colonization works by creating silos and teaching us to hate one another and using shame to keep us quiet, while also exhausting us until our trauma causes us to burn out.
This blog is now my attempt to translate… to those who knew me as Rabbi Nadia… the truths I am learning as I excavate myself from the closet. Colonization has many closets. This blog will continue to explore these and my rabbinate will continue to strive to find ways to bring healing and reconciliation to all of us who are impacted by this incarnation of hateful propaganda masquerading as virtue and that my tradition calls Amalek and idolatry.
This is why I am deeply committed to Decolonizing Judaism, and doing what I can to work to support the decolonization of faith and Turtle Island… This is also how I am trying to dedicate my life’s work as a social worker. My goal is to turn everything I do into Avodah: to translate my Torah into this world so as to make a sanctuary for others who, like me, are struggling. Sometimes I get it right, and often I don’t. Colonialism teaches perfectionism (which is an idol that focuses upon the shiny gold of externals). Judaism teaches about the healing of the broken tablets that Moses broke in his own neurodiverse frustration at his inability to communicate clearly and be heard and understood by those around him. The gold that ought to be the fruit of our work/Avodah, is the gold of Kintsugi (the healing gold of G!d’s Love and Torah which helps us put pieces back together from the shattered tablets that were left for us by the previous generation’s trauma), that was repressed and put into a closet (aron means both closet and ark). That is a powerful insight to me as I think about the Holy of Holies: the ark which is also a closet of the unconscious… when we open the gates of the ark to look for Torah, there we will find a sacred healing.
May this start to the Jewish new year inspire each of us to do whatever we can to turn the challenges of this world and of our lives into a Torah of justice, compassion and healing blessings for all people. May we find the courage to lean into our mistakes, and breathe through the shame and discomfort of our human frailties, in order to find the learning that can save us… and save others. May all that is broken become whole, and may we learn to recognize the sacredness of even the most shattered of tablets..
Emerging Torah as Rabbi Nachshon emerges 