October | 2021 | eish zarah

Uhhh, so I’m just reading Shimshon/Samson in the Hebrew and this verse is very …. unexpectedly erotic femme-domme and boy howdy this is a weird insight that I had to share at 3 am!

“וַתָּ֙חֶל֙ ר֣וּחַ יְהֹוָ֔ה לְפַעֲמ֖“
“And the spirit of the Lord began to move him”
(usual translation)

The Ruach haShem– “spirit of the Lord” – has a feminine verb because Ruach is feminine. And that verb – חָלַל – is almost always pejorative, with a base meaning of bore or pierce, with eventual meanings of wound or profane something!

And פָּעַם – the last word of that phrase – is rooted etymologically in tapping and repetitive striking; also meaning thrust, push, or beat!

So with a little flair and alliteration we get:
“So the unFathomable [Femme] Flutter pricked, to prod him.”

ahem *blink blink* wow, ummm …

Torah is so wild y’all. I love it so much.

Won’t lie. I’m proud enough of some of the questions I raised here that I’m posting my rabbinical school homework here. Get ready for some academic-cool stuff about masculinity!

Fun fact: the amazing teacher of this class lets us also opt to write our own questions to the text. This is the first time I decided to do that, so both the question and the answer are mine.

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3. Potpourri Question: Stone’s queer reading reminds us that “passing” and “realness” also apply to the greater societal world and the lens we read it through when he states that David and Saul :
“… must show that they can ‘pass’ as ‘real’ kings in the eyes of Israel. And the criteria used to evaluate their competitive performances are inextricably intertwined, in 2 Samuel as in Paris Is Burning, with norms of gender.”
Despite this quote focusing on Saul and David’s legendary House Battle, this reading of passing and realness would also seem to apply to other characters in the narrative. Given Theide’s pull quote from Harding that Jonathan “is significant only insofar as what he does, and what is done to him, impacts on the more prominent stories of Saul and David” and also knowing the LGBTQ community focus on the David and Jonathan narrative, how can we shift the gaze of “passing” and “realness” back to those applying the terms. Are we communally “passing” David and Jonathon as members of our community? What does it mean to identify a generally-progressive sexual-minority community with someone who murdered, waged war, and committed sexual assault? Given Halperin’s history lesson that “homosexuality” is a recent human invention, can we “read” Jonathon and David without assimilating their relationship into the narrative of gayness?

(As a white queer person, I will not be focusing on an issue that would be better addressed by a person of color. Ergo, I won’t be addressing the complicated racial history of “passing” before it began to also describe gendered perceptions.)

The terms “passing” and “realness” come through a complicated lens of race and gender, through black people “passing” as white to escape racist brutality, through trans women’s perceived lack of “realness” by greater society and sometimes internalized. “Passing” and “Realness” can be phrases perceived as flippant pejoratives tossed between catty queens, but by using historically privileged Torah tales Stone reminds us that the business of being read in society is – indeed – a very serious business. One that David’s entire kingship relies upon. One which causes Jonathon’s potential kingship to crumble.

But modern uses of “passing” and “realness” do not center on whether a man thousands of years ago was perceived as kingly. They center on the liminal spaces between gender and race, whether someone is seen by greater society as their assumed presentation. Our modern readings of the Jonathan and David narrative – or non-narrative as Harding insists – center our modern ideas. As 20th century Americans raised to see homosocial activity in automatically homosexual terms and as 20th century members of the LGBTQ+ community, we understandably want our spiritual texts to have us in them, to have our lives present and presented as well. And yet, I feel we do a disservice to ourselves, our LGBTQ+ community, our spiritual texts, and even our connections to greater society in “reading” Jonathan and David through our modern lens.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The path of assimilation likewise. It is difficult in those bitter corners of my trans heart to not see these gay-lover readings of Jonathan and David in the same light as the gay push towards federal marriage protection … while federal employment safety was never on the table, while trans people can’t get basic medical care, while society murders our most vulnerable in a thousand different ways – from crushing to a thousand papercuts.
This is a “reading” born of the privilege of having only been othered on one axis, of being able to see yourself in the hero. It co-opts the assumed masculine normative – a false and easy construct we created – to refute history’s insistence that gay-ness is feminine … while throwing actual femmes under the bus. It is the same trauma-response assimilation to the western masculine image as the “New Jew” since Israel’s foundation, the move away from the pale nebbish to the muscular manly.

This isn’t to say the love and affection between David and Jonathan didn’t exist, that we shouldn’t discuss the erotic charge; even the Torah is firm there. But rather that our own society’s limiting of homosocial connection flattens the complexity of these characters. That our own society’s habit of flattening all heroes, of denying the hero’s yetzer ha’ra, allows us to ignore David’s heinous behavior. That our LGBTQ community’s own complex privilege intersections cause us to add ourselves into texts in ways that flatten our own people’s complexity. And that our trauma has caused parts of our community – both Jewish and gay – to assimilate to western masculinity in ways that we /must/ acknowledge and fight.