Torah that contains multitudes – including me

In a seminal work, Standing Again at Sinai, Judith Plaskow argues for a reading of Torah and an understanding of Jewish life to explicitly include women. Commenting on Moses’s preparation of the people for receiving the Torah (Exodus 19:15), she notes that Moses addresses the gathered community only as men. Women, she argues, were invisible at the moment of entry into the covenant, “in both grammar and substance,” and this invisibility is perpetuated through our tradition.

Plaskow’s work was to reclaim woman as a part of our text. While trans bodies are largely absent from classical Jewish texts, trans experience is not. Drawing on feminist models of midrashic reclamation, i find myself as a trans* Jew situated in our text not through anachronistic claims about identity, but through a rabbinic concept for a phenomenon that resists classification.

Plaskow wrote, “The Jewish community today is a community of women and men, and it has never been otherwise,” yet this must be modernized. The Jewish community today is a community of women and men and people of every gender and every sex, and it has never been otherwise. Trans* people have always existed, although the experience of trans* bodies is not recorded. It cannot possibly be, though, that trans* people cannot find themselves in Jewish texts at all. Transness is present across our canon through midrashic construction of rabbinic categorization.

Some trans* scholars have used terms like androginos and tumtum to speak of trans* experience but this erases the experience of intersex individuals, which is the way the terms were meant. Trans scholar, Max Strassfeld contends that they are not the only trans or intersex Jew drawn to texts relating to the experience of androginos as a source for visibility. Strassfeld is correct in the necessity of the intelligibility of trans* identities, yet coopting intersex identities in favor of trans*, genderqueer, and gender expansive individuals undermines the argument. Trans* bodies, and maybe especially nonbinary or gender queer bodies, are simply not in our classical texts. Intersex identities remain as unseen as trans identities in our current society and there cannot be erasure happening between already minoritized groups. 

Instead, drawing again from Plaskow, “we need to go behind our records and add to Torah, acknowledging that that is what we are doing,” and we also can, and even should, make use of the “playful, imaginative, and metaphoric” openings championed by feminists. With a lack of embodied experiences, trans* people can turn to concept, language, and metaphor to see themselves represented.

As a trans* individual, i am more than my body. i understand my personhood not only through my undefinable body but also, and maybe even more so, through my own intellectual understanding of myself. i am fully represented in our text through conceptions of transness. Exploring our texts to find the concepts that fully celebrate my identity is a joyful and rewarding experience that affirms my identity and situates it in Torah. 

One example of a concept in which my identity is present is plugta. The rabbis most often use plugta to introduce a controversy and the term can be found almost 700 times in the Talmudic canon. Sometimes it’s used to distinguish between two earlier sources or between rabbis, or to indicate that a rabbi is discussing all the disputed cases that are not the subject of a controversy. But, in a few rare instances (i know of three) out of the almost 700 instances, plugta is used to indicate that something has a distinction; something holds multitudes. 

In the rabbinic world, the rabbis thrived on creating categories to make sense of their domain. Sometimes this worked well, continuing, even today, to provide the scaffolding for our halakhic lives. In other instances, the categories defined may no longer hold or may be experienced as oppressive. In many instances, these categories helped to set the foundation for our society to move toward liberation, though whether we have fulfilled that, or not, is up for debate. As in the rabbinic age, categories are essential to the way we experience the world, and we learn them from a young age, beginning with simple categories such as boy/girl, or warm colors/cool colors. We learn that there are birds, land animals, and sea creatures, with easily recognizable features. And then along comes nature’s wildcard the platypus, which does not fit neatly into any category. It is for the instance of platypuses that the rabbis use plugta to mean, this is uncontainable; this has distinction; this is beyond classification or oversimplification. 

The platypus, though, does not offer me a way into finding myself in our canon in the same way the etrog does. The rabbis enter a discourse in which they are attempting to decide why a woman is betrothed through the term “ways” rather than “things.” (Kiddushin 2b-3a) At this point, we have learned that a woman can be betrothed three ways: through a document, through money, or through marital relations. At least two of these betrothal options appear to be “things,” documents and money, but marital relations seem to be more of a process than an item. 

Therefore, an earlier text, Mishnah Bikkurim 2:6, is brought to clarify. The Mishnah describes Rabban Gamliel, who argues that an etrog is legally categorized as a tree with regard to the fruit of the tree’s infancy, the fruit of its fourth-year, and the sabbatical year of agricultural rest, all of which are determined by when the tree blossoms, but the etrog resembles a vegetable in that its tithing is determined by the moment of harvest. The Gemara explains that this comparison emerges from the etrog’s pattern of growth, as it requires constant watering like a vegetable. 

At first, “ways” appears connected to the etrog’s mode of growth, however the passage continues by explaining another early text involving the distinction between domesticated and non-domesticated animals in which the term “ways” is also used for the rabbis to consider why “things” was not used instead. The distinctions presented in Mishnah Bikkurim 2:8(ff) do not concern growth, but describe the status of an animal as domesticated, wild, either, or both, based on the blood of the animal and what it is permitted to do. Finally, the text states, a bill of divorce is similar to a manumission document, both considered “ways.” (mGittin 1:4)

It is here where the rabbis declare, anywhere in which there is a distinction (a mixed category), teaches “ways,” and anywhere there is no distinction teaches “things.” To close the passage, Rabbi Eliezer affirms these terms as he states the etrog is similar to a tree in all ways and uses the word “things” because he does not hold that there is a distinction. Therefore, we can ultimately determine that when there are no distinctions, the appropriate term is “things.”

Plugta is the frame that cues the presence of something that is beyond simple categorization. The use of the term in this way constitutes less than one percent of its usage, which is also notable, as it is roughly the same percentage of people globally who publicly identify as nonbinary; of people who say, “I, like the etrog, cannot be so easily defined;” of people who proclaim “I am a little of this and a little of that and the system of putting my identity into a simple box does not and will not work.” The term plugta speaks perfectly into the queer world and it is one way in which i find myself, conceptually and intellectually present in the text. 

It may sound concerning, or even objectifying, to some, to identify oneself with a concept, or an object, yet, the experience of claiming this not-quite-fruit, not-quite-vegetable as mine has been life-giving, which is, as i see it, the highest aspiration of Torah. The fact that it is also possible to draw on a modern turn of phrase and understand myself, then, like the etrog, as “a little fruity” allows me to reclaim what was once a slur as a positive aspect of my identity.

The rabbis understood that some things cannot be neatly categorized and plugta names the reality that there are things (and even people) that exist beyond easy classification. Speaking to the trans* experience, this becomes not only a legal observation but a theological one. i do not need an embodied figure, or a modern vocabulary, to find trans identity in the Jewish canon. So, while plugta does not offer a perfect analogue for every trans* experience, it offers something queer on its own: a rabbinic acknowledgement that existence is sometimes multiple and irreducible. In (re)claiming that space, trans Jews do not stand outside Torah but reveal ourselves as having always been present within its multiplicities.