Let us know on RSVP if you’d like a ride from Boston area.
Passover second day afternoon conversation with author Joy Ladin. A collaborative presentation by Ruach HaYam, Beit Ahavah Reform Synagogue of Greater Northampton and the Queer Torah Havurah.
2:30 pm to 4:30 pm. 130 Pine St, Florence, MA.
Accessibility information: all gender/accessible bathrooms, entry ramp. Parking on site and in lot next door.
Joy will discuss her newest book The Soul of a Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, and treat us to readings from her as yet unpublished poetry on the speech of the Shekhinah. This will be a chance to hear Joy read and to engage her in conversation with our own thoughts and hearts. Kosher for Passover refreshments will follow, and an opportunity to share Joy’s books.
Joy describes her book as “an effort to heal the divide between traditional religious communities and the LGBTQ people who are often seen as a threat to religious traditions…[particularly important] in a time when LGBTQ rights are increasingly under attack in the name of “‘religious freedom.’” One way this works is that “The Torah speaks to transgender lives [and] transgender perspectives illuminate the Torah.” We will ask Joy to tell us how.
At this time of Passover, we think of the stranger, and of the splitting of the Sea. Joy writes, “Religious communities that treat openly transgender people… as strangers, should recall that God repeatedly commands the Israelites to remember their own experiences of being treated as strangers in the land of Egypt: to remember that they know – because God wants communities devoted to God to know – the soul of a stranger.” Furthermore, Joy sees “God as the one who brought me out of the depths of despair, who split the binary sea of gender and led me across on dry land, who made the impossible – me – a reality.”
We will ask Joy to talk about her assertion that “the covenant with Abraham is founded on Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob’s embrace of trans experience: their willingness to live outside the gender roles they were born to and become the kinds of people they were not supposed to be. By portraying trans experience as the foundation for covenant with Abraham, the Torah plants God’s recognition that people do not have to be what binary gender says we are at the heart of the Abrahamic religious tradition.”
Joy Ladin is the first openly transgender professor in an Orthodox institution. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University and has written 11 books including 9 books of poetry, her memoir, Though the Door of Life, and her latest book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective.