The Pit and the Pillar

והעמד דבר על בוריו

Over 20 years ago, early in my college experience, I made my first trek to New Orleans with young friends and no chaperones. Despite having spent my teenage years only an hour from the city, I had never been without supervision and my prudish teenage existence couldn’t imagine a reason I would want to. Art museums and restaurants, my main interests still when traveling, are not the kinds of things young adults have to hide. But there were unknowns bubbling up and I suddenly felt New Orleans on my own terms would be worthwhile.

So away I went, with not a word to my parents, for a weekend to New Orleans with new theatre friends. We ended up in a little occult shop a block or two off the river on Dumaine and I was intensely uncomfortable. What now I could label “social anxiety” just felt like terror and dread, the wish to shrink into the cracks and teleport back to the safety of the known. As my acquaintances chatted crystals and herbs, I pretended to peruse the books. Giving myself some background busy work was originally a facade – the cases full of witchy grimoire, tarot decks, and herbal guides were too foreign for my self-described “logical” self.

Finally I spied some Latin, a language I had taken through high school. Excited to have a real focus, my eyes wondered over titles and onto what I knew was Hebrew. A lighter blue cover caught my eye. Something about the phrase ‘in practice and theory’ pulled innate curiosity. I like theory. I love the idea.

I became the owner of Aryeh Kaplan’s translation of Sefer Yetzirah and proceeded to be completely confused, bewildered, and floored by it – my first truly Jewish book.

— — — –

Recently I began a summer chevruta reading Sefer Yetzirah with a rabbinical school friend. It’s been years since I sat at the feet of this book, my oldest Jewish teacher. It’s certainly the first time my Hebrew is good enough to figure out the verb form possibilities.

And so I began picking my way through ….

and I landed on this, the later half of 1:4:

“והעמד דבר על בוריו”

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s translation brings us “Make [each] thing stand on its essence.”
But without the vowels I did something rather literal, but telling. Instead of translating “והעמד” as a verb, I saw it as a noun, an amud – a pillar, a standing thing. And not recognizing the word for clarity or essence, I saw the word bor – pit.

“The pillar of a thing stands upon its pits.”

— — — –

GRAMMAR and ETYMOLOGY

והעמד דבר על בוריו
Make a thing stand on its …
The pillar of a thing is upon its …

In tracking down the roots, I turned to Jastrow and to Brown-Driver-Briggs, classics for Jewish dictionary and lexicon needs.

בּוֹרִי – certainty, evidence, assertion.
– YT. Sot. I, 16ᵈ עמדי על בורייך stand by thy assertion (be not intimidated).
– Gen. R. s. 70 מעמידין אותו על בוריו they establish it (the law) on its strength, i.e. arrive at a final decision. [Jastrow]
– – from בּוּר … verb make clear, clear up, explain [Brown Driver Briggs]

בּוֹר m. (rarely fem.) pit, cistern
– often = בְּאֵר. Eruv. II, 4 contrad. to בְּאֵר, v. ib. 18ᵃ ב׳ מכונסין … באר מים חיים.
– B. Bath. 64ᵃ ב׳ בחפירה bor means a pit or well gained by mere digging (without masonry) [Jastrow]
– – verb to be empty, waste, uncultivated.

בּוֹרָי f. , pl. בּוֹרָאוֹת ,בּוֹרָייוֹת trees which fail to thrive after transplantation.
– B. Bat. 95ᵃ מקבל עליו עשר ב׳ למאה Ms. H. a. Ar. (ed. בורייות, בוריות, Ms. M. טראות לסאה corr. acc.) [Jastrow]

— — — –

The first time Torah brings us the word pit “בור“, it is just after Yoseph’s heart-breaking and coat-rending assault by their brothers. Thrown into a dry cistern as their siblings openly discuss murder and violence, this is the first of many literal and metaphorical ‘pits’ in Yoseph’s life. In a shadow of childhood trauma, they refer to their later imprisonment as a bor – בּוֹר – pit. And being enslaved to Potipher, unable to consent or refuse sexual advances – especially after the gendered violence undertones of the dream coat attack – is its own pit, though unnamed as such. Yoseph exists within the realm of “pit” for years, a literal manifestation of their post trauma existence.

Yet, Yoseph is also known kabbalistically as yesod, the phallic pillar; as tzaddik, the righteous one. And somehow Yoseph does make a pillar, an upstanding life, in that constricted land and narrowed existence.

But the pillars of Yoseph were only created by those pits. Yoseph’s worldly power comes from the trauma and times that propelled them into unexpected Egyptian leadership. Yoseph’s humility and righteousness come from the lean times between beloved home and diaspora power. And Yoseph’s greatest pillar – their ability to reconnect family once Yehudah finally stands in protective stead for Benyamin – is a direct outgrowth of that past harm. Their fear for their only full sibling, the games played to test the brothers’ patience, and their ultimate willingness to vulnerably reveal their true self – a trait that brought childhood near-death – are all skills and emotions drawn from the pit that created the pattern.

— — — –

In that little overwhelming shop there was someone who didn’t exist yet. Did I buy the book out of anxiety? Politeness? Curiosity? Like many moments, it was each of them and possibly none. I admittedly can’t remember the inner workings of that person’s mind anymore. And yet, hineni. There too, I am somehow – a future ghost, disjointed and peering dimly at this mysterious seed planted in unlikely places.

I was already living in a pit, something in my teenage years had set off a fortress around my heart. Was it the destruction of my childhood and its home by Hurricane Andrew? The latent gender complications that were already at the fore despite desperate ignoring? Just the act of being a teenager in this world that mocks young adults existences while creating the circumstances that make the experience? I felt limited, folded in, and always shadowed by subconscious rejection. I had lost connection to my assigned gender and my assigned religion, but I hadn’t realized the relationship was over.

How could I? When the topography doesn’t fit, it all seems potholes and pits. When its always been the water you breath, you can’t tell you’re submerged.

— — — –

There is a moment after the brothers strip Yoseph, some commentators say naked, and toss them into an empty well. Immediately after the most blatantly violent verse, the brothers sit to eat together, unconcerned by their assault. It is only over a decade later as Benjamin’s fate seems uncertainly entangled with the strange Egyptian vizier [Yoseph], that something bubbles up from their subconscious. The brothers state some kind of blame for their actions.

Each says to the other:
“אֲשֵׁמִ֣ים ׀ אֲנַ֘חְנוּ֮ עַל־אָחִ֒ינוּ֒ אֲשֶׁ֨ר רָאִ֜ינוּ צָרַ֥ת נַפְשׁ֛וֹ בְּהִתְחַֽנְנ֥וֹ אֵלֵ֖ינוּ וְלֹ֣א שָׁמָ֑עְנוּ”
“Guilty we are upon our sibling who, we saw their distressed soul in their begging and we did not hear.”

They saw the cruelty directly before them, but somehow blocked ears from hearing the pain.

Friends, how many everyday cruelties are we painfully inured to? Walking through the world involves hardening the heart to not weep at steeled eyes and stoppered ears, our houseless neighbors, the suffocating cemented earth. Walking the paths of our hearts sometimes involves its own reflexive hardening, armoring up against outside threats and inner hurt. In that store long ago I was so unaware I couldn’t even sense my own torment, crying out in silent lonely wails towards a wall of books.

Beloveds, what pits are these traumas built on? Was the root of the brothers’ overwhelming hatred also rooted in the site of Yesod, in the gender complications of Yoseph’s being? How much was the familial system that set them against each other, the left over burden of extended genology and trauma, the favoritism of Yaacov? How much of my hurt and complication also arrived from those fraught places?

Comrades, what are the pits this oppressive system is built on? Rugged individualism and its pits of isolation, seflish-ness, lack of communal care. The pillar of monetary wealth, classicism that brings poverty for most and riches for few. Xenophobia that becomes systemic racism, a place of pain for outsiders turned site of perpetual trauma for black and brown people. Patriarchy that disallows weakness and emotions. The pillar of “sound mind and body,” – even the belief that the mind and body are split – the ableism that underpins it all, that refuses to see none of us are fully sound under this traumatic system.

It is these systems my heart, my mind, my whole being were beginning the struggle against as a young adult, unmoored and alone. It is these systems we all bump against and are forced to build our lives around. It is these systems that have us believe Yoseph, our gorgeously gendered ancestor shaded by the Olam habBa of gender beyond binary, is somehow only a mystical phallus.

Yoseph, the master of both pillar and pit, the site of Yesod.
Yoseph who curled their hair and lifted their foot, who penciled their eyes and had their princess coat torn off at 17 years of age.
Yoseph, tzaddik katamar. Yoseph the righteous one likened to a date tree which the Bahir reminds “every date palm includes both male and female.”
Yoseph the ancestor mystically set on symbolic sephirot’s genitals; whose father – on his deathbed – blessed them with blessings of breast and womb.

What is gender and sex but the pit and the pillar, another system falsely built on the lie that this fake binary wasn’t one and the same in utero? What is Yoseph but the ancestor built to break the false idol of gender hierarchy?

— — — –

I spent years entombed in the mentality of the bor. And I can feel its insistent gravity in hard times. Standing eight feet below sea level on dry ground in New Orleans I was in a pit. I /was/ the pit, my whole being was subsumed by this miasma of gendered expectation – overclouded by class and race and ableism. I longed for a ladder, a tossed rope, a branch to pull. Instead I realized my gender was not the pit, the system was. I was no longer glaring up to get out, but down at what I stood upon. Suddenly, slowly, years and years of all at once, the pits of my life have been built into a pillar, a place of identity I can stand in and support others from.

So after all that work and all that time, the last quarter of Sefer Yetzirah 1:4 tells us what happens next, the outcome of standing upon clarity/essence/pit.

“השב יוצר על מכונו”
Return The Creator upon Their Base

Gender variance comes to undo a pit humans placed on themselves long ago and one we keep reifying.
Yoseph, from their myths to their kabbalistic metaphor, will always return haShem to Their Base because haShem can not be encompassed by finite gender and neither could this holy ancestor.
All trans people in doing the great work of our lives – each of us with every new hair style and eyeliner and lifted foot; with each binder and bra; each pill and shot; each name we try on, throwing it over us in blessing like a tallis; with every clarification of our essence and each rectification of harmful systems – we return divine aspects to their rightful righteous base.

Happy Pride and much love to you all. Thank you for the part of the divinity you bring into the world. You are a holy and beautiful being.