TAMAR’S BLOG
Shalom! My name is Tamar Biala. I joined Yael for the editing of the second draft of Toratah (תורתה), the gender-bent Torah. Nearly all my life I’ve been preoccupied with Torah study, but never, of course, in quite this way, and this work moves me deeply.
In this blog I’m describing moments of revelation, when the gender-reversal revealed to me new existential possibilities, spiritual or ethical, for humanity, the divine and the ties between them. These posts also explore moments of crisis and disappointment from the times when the new version retains injustices that I cannot bear.
This work invokes in me memories and challenges me to see myself and reality differently that I am used to. I am very grateful.
Your encounter with Toratah will likely invoke in you thoughts and feelings different from mine. I’d be glad if you’d like to share them with us in the comments.
*
As Yael and I work on the regendering of Song of Songs, we wonder what new turn in the story of the Song this will open. We are curious how the depictions of different bodily limbs’ beauty will sound when attributed to the body of the opposite gender; how will the brief dramatic scenes sound when experienced by the “other,” gender-wise. We also wonder - if we choose to examine the regendered Song as an allegory to relations between the Divinity and the nation, what theology will emerge, when the Divinity is the woman and the nation is the man.
When we translate into English the punishment that Tehovah imposes on Kina, drifting and wandering (na’a ve-nada) you will be on the land (Gen. 4:12) for an instant we read it as na’a ve-nidda, “drifting and bleeding.”
Na’a ve-nada means to drift back and forth in the land, in the world, without rest or a home. Na’a ve-nida means to drift back and forth while bleeding your period, which till now hasn’t been mentioned, and maybe is created by Tehova only now.
Turning the prophet Elisha to the prophetess Elatish’i [my Goddess, answer me] moves me much less than turning the Great Woman of Shunem to the Great Man of Shunem. The prophetess Elatish’i (and her maidservant Gechazit) are perhaps lacking in our canon, “women of Elohin,” possessed of superpowers, and exemplifying new horizons of spiritual possibilities, but reversing the Great Woman of Shumen, a woman so human, whose “superpowers'' are emotional and moral, into another human man is for me a frustrating process.
Toratah’s V’Tikra (Leviticus) chapter 18’s incest laws, and the laws regarding rape of Toratah’s Devarim (Deuteronomy) 22, deal with sexual pathologies. Here, women are no longer victims of incest and rape, but with the vanishing of the horror of victimhood the horror of being the victimizer takes its place.
The cell phone sends me a notification of a new message in the WhatsApp group of my extended family on my father’s side. I tense up. It’s May 2021 and by now the third week of “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” Israel’s military confrontation with Hamas. The messages firing in the family WhatsApp group divide into two. In my heart, at least, everyone else is on one side, and I am on the other.
“Pleasure-fluid” is not mentioned in Torato. When we look for a parallel to Torato’s shikhvat zera’, (semen, literally “lying of seed”) again we find ourselves inventing a new term, this time, for the range of fluids issued from a woman’s body when she is sexually aroused. With pleasure we called them ‘shikhvat oneg,’ pleasure-fluid.
After the birth, Elohin calms down. In Her maternal mercies, She goes back to caring for her children. She dresses The Chovah and her Man with skin coverings. If only she could cover with the skin of an elephant, and not this skin, so easily penetrated by pain. “Skin coverings,” in Hebrew are kutnot ‘or, and the word ‘or is another Hebrew word that contains something and its opposite: Blindness, and wakefulness. Elohin doesn’t choose for us between these two states of consciousness. It’s us who will choose whether to eat from the trees and expand our consciousness in the physical and spiritual worlds in which we don’t have enough protection or control.
A female raven and a male dove, that Nochah sent from the ark. Why did I resist and feel such discomfort at this minor, nearly meaningless, change? Changing the female dove and male raven, yonah and orev, from Torato, to a male dove, yon and a female raven, orevet? And why are we changing the animals’ genders anyway, I’m trying to remember? Because they aren’t “just the background.” The animals are also characters in the story, and changing them can open a door to new insights into the story.
Who are these cousins, of Nadvah and Imihi, summoned to carry away their corpses? Do they also have childhood memories of endless hours of playing, together with Nadvah and Imihi? That they’d play again and again? Did they also bake challah together, do arts and crafts and plait each other’s braids?
When Sahar gets in touch with his feminine side, Emrahama, in turn, is demanded of by Elohin, we fear, to circumcise her foreskin. “My covenant will be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant,” (17: 13) Elohin says, and we try to understand just what the hell She is talking about.
The next verse works beautifully with the melody, but something else doesn’t. Tehovah, a woman warrior, Tehovah is Her name. Tehovah, the what, exactly? “A woman warrior??” I tell Yael, I find it problematic and I’m uncomfortable with this. But this is what written, she insists, and anyway, you’re only noticing this now? What about the Flood? And all the Plagues? And the drowning of the woman warriors of Metzarim running for their lives? Isn’t She a warrior?
The creation of the fifth day has just ended and suddenly I’m flooded with tension. Soon I’ll be face to face with the description of the creation of humanity. The version in Torato, I know by heart. The endless feminist interpretations of it that I’ve studied and the women’s Midrashim about it that I edited, and even wrote myself, haven’t sadly been able to ease the fundamental frustration I feel towards it.. Will gender bending the story “bend” my feelings as well?
Titzchak brings Marbek to the tent of her father, Sahar. And there she loves him. It took sixty-six verses for this chapter to reach this moment of connection between Titzchak and Marbek. The bond between them is described in one brief phrase, the last verse: “Titzchak loved him, and thus found comfort after her father’s death.”
Today we dive again into the rituals of the priestesses, and start chapter 12 with the offering of the sacrifices of the….man who gives birth. We knew this would come. That we would have to deal in Sefer Va-Tikra, with defilements and purifications of different biological phenomena, of women and men. But the effects of the reversals that we create surprise us too.
Yael and I imagine a struggle of two women, of a woman with herself, a woman who’s both human and divine, a struggle both physical and spiritual. And the woman doesn’t let go until she gets a blessing, an affirmation of a change she went through, a commitment to her new perspective. Taacov’s name changes to…Tisraelah. I’m a little surprised by the name
The next time I open my mouth, I find myself speaking with enthusiasm in praise of divinity. I grasp the story of the building of the tower as another step in the separation process between the mother and the daughters. This step is rooted in the crisis that humanity undergoes when she realizes the distance, and longs for her mother, and tries, by building the tower to return and cling to Her. Goddess, like a lioness whose cubs are climbing on and over her, pushes them off her, away, teaching them independence, and their own abilities. Though the separation pains Goddess, she overcomes, and take action. She at once becomes a role model for me – I, the mother, who so fears the day my daughters will leave the nest and I’ll have to organize my heart anew, to redirect it, from scratch, towards life.