hey i think now might be the time to share this torah
---
this past summer at Svara Queer Talmud Camp 2018 - Walker Creek Ranch, me and 100+ other queer jews learned
that our tradition allows a sick person to eat on Yom Kippur
because taking care of your body and your life is a mitzvah greater than any other ritual
this is true even if 100 experts say "This person does not need to eat to be healthy/safe"
because if you *know* that you need to eat to be healthy or safe or alive
then there is NO OTHER EXPERTISE that exists
except our own expertise over ourselves
we get this learning from proverbs, chapter 14, which says
"lev yode'a marat naphsho"
"a heart knows its own bitterness"
[better than anyone else]
[above all other expertise]
[and should use that knowledge to take care of itself, because that's what god truly desires]
---
this is to a large extent the teaching of this talmud we learned over 5 days this summer
but, b"h, our torah is a living torah
and proverbs 14 continues on
and in the latter half of the same verse, it says that not only does a heart know its own bitterness, but
"b'simhato, lo yi't'arav zar"
"a stranger cannot swirl in its joy"
as in, not only is the bitterness of our heart subject to our own expertise
and no one else's
but the joy of our heart is subject to our own expertise
and no one else's
---
today, the trump administration is pretending to be the expert on the joy of my heart
today, the trump administration is looking at my heart, my fey, soft, gorgeous, holy girl heart
and telling me that actually, they know my joy better than i do
better than torah does
better than god
they are saying my heart is a boy's heart, that my joy is wrong and that i should make myself unhealthy and unsafe against my own knowing, and faith
if only they knew
that even if 100 experts told me i was a boy
even if an entire colonial gender system erased my people's soft, complex queerness
torah says:
i am a girl
a holy, holy, holy girl
with the OBLIGATION from my tradition to revel in the joy of that
even in the face of 100 "experts"
so, especially, in the face
of a small, angry, vindictive, man
---
rabbi Benay has always taught us that judaism is a conversation
and that each generation takes that conversation one step farther than the last
to keep our living torah vibrantly alive
so that it can continue to grow with us, for us, and for hashem
the rabbis of the talmud took a torah that said that "if you don't fast on yom kippur, you will be cut off from your people and god"
and looked at the neshama of our tradition and knew that, truly, holiness resided elsewhere
and ruled that we were experts over our own bitterness
maybe it was rabbi yohanan, or another soft, trans rabbi, 2000 years ago
but I'm sure that as they were rereading their radical torah, *they saw* the next verse in proverbs
knew what they were doing
they, and hashem, looked 2000 years in the future, and saw us, our need, this moment
and then took their torah as far as they could
and through their trust and bravery in each human being's self-knowing
we, in 2018, can call on that bravery, and say that
we are not only experts on our own bitterness
but our joy, too
your boy soul is a boy soul
your girl soul is a girl soul
your human soul is a human soul
revel in it, delight it in
just as god commanded
they cannot swirl in its joy
so they try to strip it from you
don't ever, ever
let them do that