Soul Gender, Transmigration, and Embodied Resurrection (Part 2)
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| Male, female, and
"indeterminate" option on German forms. [*] Image from http://www.dw.de |
Two months ago, I pointed out that recent legislation in Germany and the U.S. that allowed for flexibility of gender assignment had caused some concern among certain Protestant groups about gender, the soul, and the afterlife.[*] At least one theologian (Joel Furches) argued that “a person’s gender as an essential quality of their very nature,” was inextricably tied to their soul, and hence could not be changed ("Gender Identity and the Resurrection from the Dead"). Soul gendering also appears in American Judaism, but traditional Jewish versions of the afterlife complicates the story of “mind/body unity” told by Furches. Last time, I looked at a few early examples of the gendering of the soul and resurrection.
In this month's post, I address how the Jewish concept of transmigration differs from the picture of soul gender put forth by Furches by reviewing recent Jewish American writings about soul gender and souls that have moved across the gender divide. Of the theologians, theorists, and activists I address in this post, all appear to agree that in the Jewish tradition, the gender of one's body and soul need not match, though the thinkers vary widely on what this disparity means and why it occurs. While I address both print and digital formulations of soul gender in Judaism, I am particularly interested in how religious groups use the Internet either as a Utopian site of "ongoing transformation" or--alternatively--for setting limits to changes in our understanding of the intersection of gender and religion.
Several contemporary theologians and scholars of religious studies have taken up the issue of soul gender and transmigration in Judaism; some of the most vocal theologians have emerged out of transgender movement. As the Reform Judaism Magazine notes, one of the great shifts in the past several years is the emergence of a new generation of transgender rabbis. In a series of profiles in the Forward, some of the leaders of this new generation explore the ways that they have created community and new rituals. The Internet can play a key role in religious change. As Lisa Nakamura and others have argued, the Internet is a space where race and gender "happen" and are made (Cybertype xi-xii; Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet). While some scholars have proposed that online discourses are often divorced from the "real world," several transgender rabbis have reclaimed the Internet as a creative space to build community and awareness for how Judaism can nourish the transgender community. Grassroots organizations such as Jewish Transitions (begun by Noach Dzmura and Jhos Singer) and Keshet have expressly embraced the Internet productive form of outreach education and community support. Transgender rabbis and communities have made excellent use of the new forms emerging out of the Internet to help create community and trace the progress of the soul. Rather than writing spiritual autobiographies in isolation, rabbis who use blogs and facebook connect to a culture of assent (thumbs up, thumbs down) in which transforming one's self becomes in part a communal endeavor. Moreover by making spiritual autobiography an emergent story, rabbis also allow their own life stories to model transformation in real time and thus to connect virtual and actual communities. (Here I am thinking in part of the powerful blog, Planting Rainbows by Rabba Emily Aviva Kapor.) Digital spiritual autobiographies of becoming challenge the basic premise made by Furches and others that people are born with a “mind/body unity." Rather they reveal how by reinventing or reclaiming Jewish ritual, practitioners can make Judaism a powerful spiritual force for helping bring about self unification.
Transgender rabbis are not the only Jewish theologians who use the Internet as a thought space for creating Jewish readings of gender and the soul. Dr. Michael Laitman of the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education and Research Institute provides direction on kabbalistic readings of soul gender. "The soul does have a specific gender: male or female," he explains, and "men and women have different kinds of souls," though "the souls of men are neither better nor worse than those of women." For Laitman like Furches (and unlike transgender theorists), embodied gender is stable: "In our [physical] world, the body is fixed and retains its gender – male or female." Yet, Laitman disagrees that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the body's gender and soul gender. Moreover, a person may have different genders of their soul within their lifetime: "A Kabbalist who climbs the spiritual ladder alternates between the masculine part of the vessel and the feminine part. Consequently, at one time the Kabbalist has a masculine soul and at another time, a feminine soul." These claims interest me, as they suggest that for Laitman the gendered portion of the soul is not the essential self, a hypothesis that we will see comes under attack by other contemporary Jewish thinkers.
Chabad.org has also reflected on the issue of “trans-gender soul travels." Like Laitman, the author of these posts notes that soul and body gender need not be unified since sometimes"the soul that is within the female body is not feminine, but male." Yet, whereas Laitman sees the soul's gender transmigrations as part of kabbalists' normal spiritual ascent, the writers at Chabad.org argue that such instances are "anomalous cases" and that the disconnects between physical and spiritual are "a result of sin" and have negative repercussions on the physical procreative potential of the body. Despite their difference of options, both Laitman and Chabad.org make less use of the communal and innovative function of the Internet than some of the transgendered rabbis profiled by the Forward. Laitman's drash, for example, appears as static pages and does not provide a space for comments, forwarding, posting to facebook, or "liking." While Chabad.org's pages do allow for comments, sharing, and facebook-liking, comments that are posted go unanswered, thereby downplaying the notion of dialogue. On November 27, 2011 for example, one anonymous commenter noted, "I don't understand how this [post? information?] would help me as a bisexual male to ''correct'' my situation?" Not only can people not "like" or "dislike" the comment (or respond without Chabad.org's consent), there was no response by Chabad.org to this or any of the other comments. Even within the Internet's potentially dialogical format, dialogue and assent are limited.
Recent online formulation of gender and the transmigration of the soul are complemented by print formulations by scholars of religion, some of whom are also leaders of the transgendered Jewish community. Elliott R. Wolfson's work has been particularly influential on the subject of gender and the kabbalah; for example, his book Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination
--> (NY: Fordham UP, 2005) and his article, “On Becoming Female: Crossing the Gender Boundaries in Kallabistic Ritual and Myth,” in
Though my female self is nothing
if not a performance, for me, gender is more than performance. If it weren’t, then someone like me, raised
as a male, perceived as a male, and consciously performing as male, would
simply be male; my lifelong sense that there was a true female self
behind my make mask would be a delusion (47).
Yet, despite her insistence upon her soul’s
inherent gender, Ladin does not see the body and the soul as
inherently united. In insisting on the lack of mind-body unity, Ladin's account contradicts Furches' claims, but corresponds to kabbalist reading by Laitman and others. Indeed her experience tells her a body and soul need not share a gender: her prior male
body was a façade, disconnected from her true soul self. As she explains, “A body is there, but it’s
not yours” (42). The disconnect between soul gender and the body’s birthed
gender causes a painful gender dysphoria; thus to change physical genders so
that her soul and body genders match is to “become myself” (29). That is, unlike Laitman and Furches she rejects the proposal that "body is fixed and retains its gender – male or female." As a transsexual, Ladin finds, “When I look
in the mirror, I see someone who has begun to resemble—me” (3). That said, Ladin is extremely conscious that
her choice to express her female inner self may not be received well by God.
Indeed, her constant struggle with and for God runs throughout the book. As much as she seeks acceptance by friends
and family members and recognition of her true self, so too does she ultimately
hope that God—unlike her earthly father—will not reject her. The mirroring of here relationship with her
earthly spouse and that with her heavenly spouse and between her earthly
parents and her heavenly parents is one of the book's great richnesses. While religion runs throughout the book,
religious studies scholars may be particularly rewarded by chapter 13, “The God
Thing,” which would make a great addition to syllabus on religion in American
life.
I want to end on a personal note. When I bought the copy of Transmigration, I ordered a used copy online, quite frankly because it was cheaper, and I was on a budget. When it arrived I discovered the title page had been signed by the author (a boon!), perhaps at a poetry reading for the first owner?
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