I sat facing east, opposite the Torah ark. A conversation behind me is taking place between two men who I presumed to be Columbia students discussing the finances and politics of YU, rather loudly and audaciously, as students of both Columbia and Stern College trickle in and gradually find seats for themselves. Dr. Joy Ladin eventually enters the room holding a large cup of coffee and her shoulder bag, looking calm and composed, but shortly afterward looks at a student of hers seated next to me and mouths the words, “I’m so nervous.” I smile at this not only because it is endearing, but also because, as a past student of hers, Dr. Ladin never fails to impress me with her knowledge, compassion, and meaningful insights.
Dr. Ladin opens her talk about the relationship between her identities as a transgender woman and as a Jew, with several passages from her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders. Her voice carries the incredibly moving and personal words across the room, into the ears of young adults who listen intently and with compassion drawn on their faces. Dr. Ladin’s words describe the tremendous gratitude she feels to God as she learns how to live in her new body. She recounts the numerous ways her two identities have bled into each other; how the truths she learned about one identity helped form the other. To her, the two identities are intricately connected in allowing her to realize past and future changes on her continual life journey.
Dr. Ladin described feeling incredibly isolated as a child, different from everyone else: an outsider. I admired her strength as she reflected on feeling lost as a young person. To her younger self, Judaism helped her feel that her strangeness was normal, at least externally: Judaism’s rituals are unusual to the outsider, the garb forces one to identify as other. The only thing in Dr. Ladin’s early life that was equally strange was Judaism; thus she was led into God’s arms.
She said that many transgender people have felt that God was the only one who could truly understand and see their true selves. For Dr. Ladin, God was always real, always close; she could be herself with God. She joked that she sympathized with God as she read through the Torah, understanding the difficulty in trying to get people to love you for who you are. While she was stuck being uncomfortable in her own skin, she could be her true self with God. Her sense of true comfort, and maybe even relief, as she lived with God helped her to internalize the notion that Judaism is about feeling the presence of a living God and being aware of who God is.
For me, that is a dream: to feel the presence of God constantly as I move forward with my life.
Clothing: another source of pain, but eventually solace and relief. Dr. Ladin spoke about her first day as a professor at Reed College, when, at the urging of a fellow Jew, she wore a kippah in her classroom, marking her as the “other.” It was an expression of shame for her to wear something that she felt did not belong on her body. One day, her therapist asked her, ‘Why not take it off?’ This was her first act in moving towards becoming herself, letting go of who she wasn’t.
After Dr. Ladin came out on campus, the response was unexpected: students emailed her angrily demanding to know how she could be dishonest with them as they engaged in serious and honest conversations about literature, thought, and everything else. She expected outrage and rejection of her actual self, but students emailed her to tell her that the response from the university was unjustified and disrespectful, going against the values of Judaism by not treating Dr. Ladin with the dignity and respect that every human being deserves.
I teared up as I looked at her, my professor, and felt immense pride and gratitude that the past students of Stern College responded in this way. I was again moved when Dr. Ladin mentioned her lunch with a member of the administration, who, with tears rolling down her cheeks, had to tell Dr. Ladin that she would not be accepted.
Toward the end of her talk Dr. Ladin said the most profound thing: being Jewish is not a noun, not simply an identification; rather, it is a narrative, it is fluid; it is a collection of different identities. Judaism, she says, has taught her that the same is true about gender.
I think about the word ‘narrative’ and immediately my mind flies to the exit project that Dr. Ladin, in her Senior Expository Writing course, helped prepare me to write. The subject I chose was the plague narrative, but I was really writing about Moshe’s leadership narrative.
I later think about a study I recently participated about the ‘modern Jewish woman.’ One question that I had a difficult time answering was, have you ever felt like an “other,” and why? I answered by speaking about my year and a half in Israel, during which I was never fully (okay, barely) Israeli, and about my transition back into American society where I struggled to understand that my two identities, Jewish and American, could simultaneously be reconciled in some way, but also exist at odds with each other. It’s taken me almost four years to come to terms with this, and I am pretty much okay with how my narrative has and continues to unfold.
I now realize that my “other”-ness, like Moshe’s, like Dr. Ladin’s, is a narrative, a journey, a never-ending story. I look at the professor who taught me how to write about narrative and blink back tears.