My world was in tatters, and much of the devastation had been at my hands.
I had lost my own respect, because I’d behaved abominably with someone I love. The person I had fallen for as my butch girlfriend had come out as a man, and it turned out that all the postmodern queer critical theory I spouted glibly actually reflected reality.
My identity really was the product of a discourse I did not write and could not control. We would step out in public and I was the girl on the guy’s arm. The public self I had built for decades was erased. I was being read as straight and there was nothing I could do about it.
Of course, I was far too politically advanced to object to my lover’s transition. I did, however, find occasion to object, loudly and at length to almost everything else—his conversation, his friends, the way he moved, his taste in food and the shit he watched on TV. I was being really mean and dishonest about why. Of course, he ended it.
Ashamed of how I had behaved with my lover’s transition, I went to summer camp.
Queer Camp was a yearly spiritual gathering in the New Mexico desert, fashioned by whomever showed up. It might include a Kali bonfire, a Beltain circle, Shabbat services, Buddhist meditation, erotic temples or an Episcopal mass.
Felipe, a two-spirit within the Jicarilla Apache tribe, was an important teacher at Q Camp. He lived at so many intersections: a tribally recognized two spirit who presented as a nelly man; a Native American who kept his ancestral tradition and also prayed with a Catholic brotherhood; a descendent on his mother’s side of bnei anusim, crypto-Jews who had fled the inquisition only to find it in Mexico, driving them underground with half-remembered remnants of secret traditions (candles on Friday evening, altars to Santa Esterica—Queen Esther, the closeted Jew), their origins almost forgotten.
I sought him out, and we talked. He asked me to attend the sweat lodge he was running as a ritual atonement, connecting it that way to my Jewish roots. Years before it happened, he told me I would be a rabbi.
At the time, I was an ordained Faery priestess, having passed the year and a day process of initiation. In my ACT UP world, Wicca was pretty much the official religion of the movement. Most of the people I knew well had altars in their homes with meaningful gemstones (blue for serenity, pink for love) and candles we burned to fix intentions and derive outcomes. I had been content as a Jewitch, happily syncretizing.
But I was not happy after my disgrace, and I was not content with the support I received from my spiritually libertarian pagan friends. They kept telling me to honor my rage. But I could not honor conduct that I found disgusting. I began turning back to the tradition of my mothers and fathers, the tracery of law and value that could hold me up and hold me back from the worst of my nature, the tradition that respected me enough to make ethical demands.
Two years later, I returned from another Q Camp quite changed.
I had made a sweet friend, a pretty tomboy with eyes like dark water. We agreed to stay in touch and sealed our intention with a ritual guided by a Yaqui witch who gave us temporary cuttings over our hearts. I chose the Hebrew letter shin for Shalom, peace; for Shema, listen.
Driving back to L.A., I felt so soft, so open. And it was almost Shabbat! I went directly to synagogue where services were over, but the congregation was still mingling. I sought out the lesbian rabbi who had become a teacher and friend.
Artlessly excited about my cutting, I pulled aside my shirt: “Look!” Proudly, I showed off the Jewish thing I’d done at queer camp.
Calmly, she observed, “Oh I see. Shin for Shema for Shalom.”
“Yes!”
Soon after, we had a talk.
The rabbi suggested it was time to stop straddling the margin and just commit. She said, “You know, Judaism is not only our texts and liturgy. There are tactile, sensual rituals—if you’re drawn to that sort of thing, why don’t you wrap tefillin?”
Tefillin are prayer devices made from black leather, two boxes containing scripture that one binds to one’s arm and forehead with straps. Excluding Shabbat and holy days, observant Jews wrap tefillin once a day. This practice was once exclusively for men. Now many of the rest of us are discovering the thrill of binding ourselves to God.
My rabbi suggested a Judaica store on L.A.’s Fairfax Avenue, packed with dusty candles, tallisim, yarmulkas, books, menorahs and many kitschy oil paintings of bearded old men and lily-faced boys at study or prayer.
The bearded proprietor nodded when he heard my request. Gravely, he asked who my rabbi was. I named my teacher, one of the outest of the out rabbis in L.A. His face bloomed into a smile: “Ah, Rabbi Denise. I trust her! I give you good price!”
And he did. He showed me how to wrap tefillin and threw in a prayerbook. He said, “If you do this every day, your life will change.”
He wasn’t wrong. When I I wrap my arm, I am tied to the Holy One’s embrace. When I encircle my head, I feel Her kiss. When I complete the process by wrapping my fingers, I say the ancient words, “I betroth you to Me forever, I betroth you to Me in righteousness and justice and in kindness and compassion; I betroth you to Me in faithfulness and you will know HaShem.”
These promises come from the book of the prophet Hosea in which God addresses the people Israel, designating them with female pronouns as God’s collective bride. (The story of Hosea himself and his Godly mandated marriage to Gomer, a woman who had either been a sex worker or simply active sexually, is one of Divine subversion and radical acceptance.)
For generations, Jewish men have married God with those words of betrothal, strapping themselves with tfilin into the holy embrace. Who is lover and who is beloved, addressed with Hebrew pronouns as you/she? And what happens to all these gender slippages when the person praying is female or nonbinary?
When I strap myself into that ever-changing web of discourse and obligation that is Judaism, I am reminded of something a wise working class butch said to me long ago:
“You can be as top as you want, but everybody bottoms for God.”