No wait!

If Felix Guattari and Roy Wagner had an arm wrestling match, who would win? That’s a better question.

-Meyer Fortes, Introduction to The Segmentary Lineage Model Reconsidered

And so they look upon one another and make love, drawn into the genital “labyrinth of desire” that God created specially for them and obeying the “tacit commandments” engraved as a benediction in their very bodies, men and women avenge themselves upon their enemy, death. For to leave behind one’s own image — “drawn to the life in one’s child”  – is not to die

-Stephen Greenblatt, Fiction and Friction

During the Harry Benjamin symposium, I talk to other doctors besides Laub, and to psychologists, psychiatrists, even psychoanalysts, people who collectively have worked with a thousand transsexuals and their families, in the United States and in northern Europe. Among them is Dr. Leah Schaefer, who is a psychologist, a genetic female, and a past president of the Harry Benjamin Association, and has treated hundreds of people like Loren, James, Luis, and Lyle. She is small and rounded, the right kind of Mitteleuropa figure for full skirts, big belts, and a lace fichu at the neck. We meet at her Manhattan office, which is in her home and is itself homey, haimish — dried flowers, ceramic birds, carved boxes, family photographs, and a little sculpture of an Orthodox Jewish man studying Torah. I didn’t expect the mezuzah on the doorway, or that she would have spent twelve years singing professionally, or that we would end up talking about her closetful of shoes, talking with the same shared enthusiasm and tenderness you hear in the voices of boat enthusiasts, golfers, and transsexuals comparing surgical work

Maybe it is because I have just moved into a new house and have been putting together a lot of furniture purchased from Target, but this parshah read to me like instructions: Step 25: Fasten end of cords to frames which have been attached to ephod. Step 26: Attach 2 gold rings to ends of inner edge of breastpiece, facing ephod. Step 27: Attach 2 remaining gold rings two bottom of breastpiece. Run blue cord through breastpiece, securing breastpiece to ephod. They say that being Jewish is doing Jewish, and no place is this more true than in this parshah tetsaveh.

In the section of this parshah on priestly garments which we didn’t hear this morning, god instructs the priests to wear a crown which says ‘holy to the lord’ on. I imagine this to be a bit like wearing a tshirt that says “property of the dallas cowboys” or, perhaps, “use by 6/5/2010″. I mean they labeled the high priest. I guess I understand why. I mean after all in the desert this was all new to people — they had a lot to learn. There was probably someone with sticky notes writing ‘sorry — you can’t eat this anymore’ on all the newly-tref items in camp.

Speaking to Christian creationists who read the bible ‘literally’ Rabbi Johnathan Sacks pointed out that it takes god only 70 verses to create the entire universe, but 700 to create the ark. Which, then, is the more important topic? I like this parshah because it reminds us of the materiality and embodied nature of Judaism. A few weeks ago in church I sang a chant with the following lyrics: “be mindful lord of we who bear/the burden of the flesh we wear.” The burden of the flesh we wear: this image of pure souls trapped in prisons of corrupt flesh couldn’t be further from the world-affirming, world-embracing instruction book that is the torah. This is the religion where, when I asked my rabbi for advice before heading off to graduate school, he said “try to live at least a mile away from campus. That way you can walk to school and that will be your exercise”. Its the religion where, when Woody Allen asks his father if he’s no worried about the after life his father replies “when I die I’ll be unconscious. Why should I worry now for something I’ll be unconscious for later?” In a world for people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” this is the religion which produced Rabbi Sacks, who insists — and this is one of my favorite lines from him — “ritual is for the soul what exercise is for the body”.

In fact, if I had to sum up the fundamental message of Rabbinic Judaism it would be: “come for the temple, stay for the halakhah”. In these post-temple times some might be tempted to look askance at parshyot about sacrifices and semen and blood and breastpieces and wonder why they are relevant. They are relevant because Judaism is, temple or no, a religion that recognizes the fact that we are bodies, living in this world: that it matters what we eat and how we eat it, who we sleep with and when, that eating meat entails spilling blood, that the mind is part of the body, not its opposite. It recognizes that the world is a confusing place, full of difficult decisions to be made with imperfect knowledge in uncertain conditions. Luckily, as this parshat demonstrates, Judaism teaches us that the best thing about this often-confusing world is that instructions are included. Shabbat shalom.