• This is literally an article about five Jewish women from the Five Towns and how they like to play mah-jongg. [NYT]

• The ethics of transgender dating in the Orthodox community. [NYT Magazine]

• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that investigating the planned mosque at Ground Zero would be un-American. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• That guy is totally wearing a Yom Kippur on his head! [Jezebel]

• Congratulations to Susan Cernerk and Robert Giampietro. Rob helped design our site! [NYT]

Some perverbs for the evening.

Joy Ladin’s third book of poetry, Transmigration, was published last month by Sheep Meadow Press.

Sha’ar Zahav, the siddur named for the San Francisco congregation that published it, and Siddur B’chol L’vavcha (“With All Your Heart”) from New York City’s Congregation Beth Simchat Torah were released this month, after 10 years of work on each, and are intended for Jews from all denominational backgrounds. What sets the two apart from each other can crudely be signified by their coastal affiliations; Sha’ar Zahav, hailing from California, has a more all-embracing hippie philosophy, while the CBST siddur is more efficient and academic in approach.

Siddur Sha’ar Zahav begins with new prayers, written by Rabbi Camille Shira Angel and her congregants, marking milestones absent from traditional prayer books. There are meditations “For the Partner of Someone in Gender Transition,” “For Letting Go of Having a Biological Child,” “For Taking an HIV Test,” and “For Questioning Sexuality.” Traditional prayers are edited to include both “masculine” and “feminine” language, and a few offer “feminist” language (referring to God as the “Well of life,” rather than “Ruler of the Universe,” which some see as patriarchal). It provides refreshingly metaphorical interpretations of prayers with controversial literal meanings, such as the Shema, which, the siddur notes, “articulates a theology of divine reward and punishment that many Jews do not accept,” and which the siddur suggests might be an ecological warning.

Sha’ar Zahav’s prayer for those who don’t believe in a traditional idea of God declares, “I invent my own religion”—a religion that honors “bones of calcium phosphate,” Albert Einstein, and composting. “I’m a believer, but the ‘Contemplation for the Nonbeliever’ is gorgeous,” Rabbi Angel said in an interview. “If someone can access these words because it says ‘this is for you,’ it doesn’t profane the religion as we’ve inherited it.” The siddur’s “Queer Amidah,” which remarks to God, “How queer of You to have created anything at all,” is intended more as a preparatory group reading, rather than a replacement for the traditional silent meditation, Angel said.

For the blessing recited before aliyot (when individuals are called up to sanctify the chanting of a portion of the Torah reading) , Sha’ar Zahav offers both masculine, plural, and non-gendered language for the honorees. (Because the CBST siddur offers only a Friday night service, it does not include any of the prayers surrounding the Torah reading, which takes place on Saturday mornings.)

Sha’ar also focuses on sexuality in its prayers, a result, Rabbi Angel said, of feminism’s embrace of the physical. “Whoever was the original male editorial board missed the opportunity to lift up bodies and different shapes and different abilities,” she said. “To only refer to the body [in ways like] ‘the blind shall not stumble,’ it’s like, lets honor the ripening of our bodies,” she says, referring to a prayer for the onset of puberty in Sha’ar Zahav. Angel sees the creation of the siddur in terms of childbirth. “Whatever the struggles were during pregnancy and delivery,” she says, “I’m like, lets start working on a machzor [high holiday prayer book].”

CBST’s B’chol L’vavcha, on the other hand is peppered with poems by Tony Kushner, Muriel Rukeyser, and Adrienne Rich, few of which directly address gay issues. The prayers switch between masculine and feminine language for God, aiming for balance. Its margins offer interesting factoids and notes—the KKK forbade members from singing “God Bless America” because it was written by the Jewish Irving Berlin and there’s a connection between the gay-pride flag, the Stonewall Riots, and the story of Noah, for whom God created a rainbow as a way to say “I will never destroy you again, and it’s now up to you to create a universe you can be proud of,” according to the siddur.

Where Sha’ar Zahav offers a separate women’s Amidah, CBST has made a subtler change, adding to the list of matriarchs the names of Bilhah and Zilpah, concubines of Jacob who gave birth to several of the men that would go on to form the tribes of Israel. “In our community there are so many parents who don’t have legal protections, but are loving parents of children,” explained Ayelet Cohen, the congregation’s associate rabbi.

CBST has modified “Lecha Dodi,” a traditional song comparing God’s love to the love of a groom for his bride, to say instead “as a heart rejoices in love.” “It was very important to us that it fits the music,” said Cohen. Their siddur also modifies the prayer “Ma Tovu,” which celebrates the coming together of a community and traditionally only mentions brothers. “We already see versions that include women, but even that assumes a binary concept of gender,” Cohen said. “So we include a third line, that we are all gathered together.”

In addition to the Friday night service, B’chol L’vavcha also includes liturgy for the holiday cycle. There are also prayers for events like comings out, baby namings, and the formation of committed relationships. But the siddur is “conscious not to suggest a particular order that these things should happen in life,” Cohen said.

While both siddurim focus on inclusiveness, Sha’ar Zahav does so by including prayers to suit every variety of gender identity and every aspect of the gay experience. By contrast, B’chol L’vavcha by and large contains one version of each prayer, designed to suit as many people as possible. They both include sections honoring World AIDS Day and the Transgender Day of Remembrance, but while CBST marks these days with poems and readings by celebrated authors, Sha’ar Zahav creates traditionally formatted liturgy for the occasions.

Rabbis from both congregations reject the idea that there is anything divisive about having more than one gay-friendly siddur. “I don’t think that reflects anything new,” said Sharon Kleinbaum, the senior rabbi at CBST. “Synagogues throughout Jewish history have created siddurim that reflect their communities.”

Joy Ladin is a poet and a professor of English at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. For most of her life, though, she was known as Jay and her biological sex was the source of deepest unhappiness. A few years ago, Jay decided to start the process of becoming a woman, a move that caused additional wells of anguish as her marriage fell apart and she worried about how the world would receive her. Now out as a woman, Joy Ladin discusses her decision to transition, her relationship to God, and reactions from her Orthodox students.

While this surprised me for a moment, it didn’t affect my impression of Laura at all: it was just one more aspect of a very unusual person. Over time, I came to know another aspect; the way in which her dark and ironic sense of humor was coupled with a completely uncynical approach to spirituality. True to form, she had worked out her own way to pray.

Laura grew up in Rockland County, New York, one of four sons of a furrier father and teacher mother. She has been a musician and composer and an exhibiting art photographer, and is now a graduate student in social work at NYU.

I’ve long wondered how Laura’s thoughts on gender connect to her thoughts on faith. Also, as someone who once wrote a gentle satire of transgender narratives, I’ve wondered how someone with a nuanced and flexible view of spirituality came to make such a literal and irreversible decision to alter her body. Recently I had a chance to ask when I visited Laura at her home on a winding road outside of Nyack.

You’ve mentioned to me that your mother thought you might turn out to be a rabbi.

She always thought I had this teacherly quality. And when I was in my middle teens, post-bar mitzvah, I went on to get a confirmation—something most of my peers didn’t do. I think I was turning to religion because I had so much angst inside me, and it seemed like a path to meaning. I became active in the synagogue. I was involved in the Jewish youth group, I was volunteering to do various things. There were times when, for instance, the rabbi might be away for a week, and I would be the one who led the service in his place.

As a teenager?

Yeah, he would call me and say, “I’m going to be away for this weekend, and here’s the service,” and he would leave me some latitude within the traditional structure of Jewish worship. I was dating a girl who was a singer, and she used to sometimes be the cantor at the service. It was sort of sweet.

I think a lot of why I did all of that was because I was struggling with my coming of age—and issues like my gender, my sexuality, my relationship to other people, my feeling like there was something more to life than a lot of the paths that I saw.

What was your family like when you were growing up?

My parents are very traditional Jewish people—not in a deeply religious way, but in the guilt-and-Chinese-food kind of way. My mother is the only child of parents who made it out of Europe in the early part of the Holocaust. They were never in the camps, but the rest of my grandparents’ family was. My name came from a great aunt, Lore, who didn’t make it out; she was taken away and probably died in Auschwitz. Following Jewish custom my parents called me Lawrence after her.

As you grew up you didn’t remain as observant as when you were a teenager. What changed?

I think part of what ultimately soured me from organized religion is having gone to synagogue a lot, and seeing people say the prayers and know the prayers, but it didn’t seem like it was touching them in their heart. None of them understood Hebrew, and I never learned Hebrew. And yet I knew prayers in Hebrew. I felt like I was being more spiritual when I was sitting playing the piano than when I was in a synagogue saying words that I didn’t understand.

What do you think motivates people to recite prayers they don’t understand? Do you think that the thinking is: Well, if there is a God, and he is as scary and big and strong as he seems to be, I’d better say this prayer?

I think some of it is that whole paternal thing: We’re afraid that God, the Father, is going to punish us for not doing the chores, not taking out the trash. I think some of it is that—especially in Judaism, especially with Reform Jews, especially in the Northeast of the United States—there’s this fear of letting the traditions die, especially after the Holocaust. How can we go through something so traumatic to our people and then let the traditions die?

I would hope people would be able to be introspective and sort of find their own inner peace. But that’s not really encouraged in our culture. And I think that’s kind of sad.

How did you arrive at your personal inner peace?

I was working at a corporate job that I couldn’t stand, doing market research. On the day of the winter solstice in 1998 I came home from work late. I was standing in the backyard, and I was desperate and miserable and depressed. And there was this huge full moon. So I just thought, “What the hell, might as well pray to the moon.” I did, I started calling to it for some kind of sign or some kind of message. Of course nothing happened. I mean, nothing was written in fire across the sky. So then I went to bed. I got up during the night, and on the way back from the bathroom I remember feeling all of the energy drain from my body. I passed out. I think of it as a near-death experience. I remember having a sort of vision and seeing the moon and the earth as if they were on a string, a continuum between the two. And between the moon and the earth were my physical body and my spiritual body, for lack of a better way to put it. And I really felt like I was seeing who I was.

For the couple months leading up to my surgery, I used to go outside, and I would light a candle, and I would sit there and I would just pray to the moon. I would meditate, and ask for good luck and protection and guidance, hoping that this was the right thing for me. Because this was surgery, this was the big shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment. Sometimes I’d say a Jewish prayer, sometimes I’d say a nonverbal prayer. The surgery happened in Montreal; the place where I stayed leading up to it and during recovery was this little island in the middle of the river. And on the island there were two houses and then some woods. I used to do walking meditation on the grounds. Also afterwards, although I wasn’t walking quite so well. Trust me, after that surgery it takes a while before you start walking comfortably.

I’m sure. Ow. Do you see a relationship between your teenage yearnings for meaning through Judaism and your decision to change your gender?

There was this Hindu mystic named Ramakrishna who lived in the mid-1800s. For a time he put aside his Hinduism totally and lived in each of the other major religions. His ultimate realization was that no matter what tradition he followed, he came to the same place of enlightenment; he felt he contacted the same spirit, the same God, the same whatever, regardless of what path he was following. Since no matter which path he followed they all led to the same enlightenment, he said that it didn’t really matter what path you followed. We tend to follow what path we’re born into. I had this epiphany one day where I sort of applied that to gender, and it’s like—living as a man or living as a woman, neither one has any more right or ability to find happiness. They’re just different ways of living.

Another thing that Ramakrishna says is that if you feel drawn to a different path, if it sort of suits your temperament, then why not change, because all the paths are heading in the same place anyway? Then I started thinking about that part of it in the context of gender, and for whatever reason I felt drawn to changing. There was no meant-to-be-ness about it. I saw a lot of different alternatives for my future, and this just seemed to be the one that fit the most.

“Why not change” is a very strong statement when it comes to having surgery to change your sex. I feel that gender is a spectrum, and sometimes I wonder why someone would do something as literal as take hormones and have surgery.

Laura Jacobs in 2004

I never know quite how to say this; I always struggle to find the words. You know, I was born male, I lived as a boy and then a man for most of my life, and in my late 20s I started to explore outside of just living as a man. Over the course of a couple years (or who knows how long, because where do you mark the beginning, and where do you mark the end?), I changed. Now I live as a woman, I am a woman; I’ve gone through the process of changing my gender.

I don’t so much like the words transgender and transsexual. And I don’t like the standard way people think about those words. I think a lot of people who use those words, and the way most people understand those who change their gender is, “I was always meant to be the other, I was born in the wrong body, some sort of mistake happened along the way, and I need to be fixed to make myself right.” In some ways my story fits that. I had questions about my gender going back to being five years old. I can remember even praying to God that I would wake up one day having been magically changed into a girl overnight. But in some ways my story doesn’t fit that. I made a choice about where to live on the spectrum. Even today I feel connected to both my masculinity and femininity, and that’s heresy to some trans people. I still feel I am both, as we all are.

How did your very traditional parents deal with the change you made?

Initially they really struggled. They didn’t understand. It was a shock to them. But one of the things that they said on the day that I told them was that they didn’t want to lose me as their child, that I was still their child. That impressed me. I brought them to my therapist a few times, and that helped a little bit, but didn’t really. Then I referred them to another therapist who specializes in LGBT stuff, and they sort of clicked with her a little bit, but then sort of didn’t. And so I turned to their rabbi, who I hadn’t had contact with in a million years—the same rabbi I used to sub for when I was a teenager. I said to him, here’s some of what I’m going through, and can you help us? He was kind of shocked, but he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

My parents were more comfortable talking to their rabbi. After one of the conversations we all had, he got on to some Reform rabbi Internet news group, Rabbi-Net or something, and sent an email around saying, “I have this person in my congregation who’s going through this change, and is there anybody out there who can help me?” A female rabbi from San Francisco responded. She had a trans son, meaning a daughter who became a man. The child was around my age, and went from Laura to Larry. Our rabbi put my mother in touch with her. Here was a woman who was a rabbi, so it was an authority figure, and was about my mother’s age, had a child who was about my age, who went from Laura to Larry, and it was a little too much for my mother to turn away from. The woman rabbi said, I had a daughter, now I have a son, and I love my son. Yeah, it was hard losing my daughter, but I’ve gained this wonderful son, and we’re closer than ever. After that it all just shifted.

You told me in an email you’d been hesitant to have this conversation because you’d recently been in the throes of an existential crisis. You said you were wondering what the meaning of it all was.

All the hopes and the dreams that I had when I was young, so many of them didn’t come true. Some of them did. I just kept coming back to the futility of life. It’s kind of ironic: Here I am working as a therapist trying to help people find meaning in life, and I still struggle with finding meaning in my own. What I’ve been thinking lately is that sometimes what it comes down to is that maybe the meaning is what we make of life. Maybe life is about the exploration of life.

Do you think that’s why you’ve wound up becoming a therapist and not a rabbi? The two are related, but when you’re a therapist and you’re confronted with these existential questions all the time, you’re not really expected to provide theological answers.

I’m more of a guide, which I think was what clergy used to be. In spite of the fact that my mother thought I might become one, part of the reason I never wanted to be a rabbi is that I find a lot of organized religions to be very limiting. I think it’s also that in some ways living in the angst is kind of a healthy place to be, as much as it’s not always the easiest place to be.

This breezy etiology comes after more than an hour of watching Bree pretend that her parents are dead and that she’s a Church Lady of the sort Dana Carvey once parodied. So why, in a film already overloaded with secrets, make Bree half-Jewish? Well, there are opportunities for cheap jokes—”Shalom Yisrael,” says Bree’s wise-cracking sister after her son Toby makes grace at the dinner table—as well as quick characterizations. Dad—dotty, shlumpy, cowed by his wife—may as well have been shipped in from Portnoy’s Complaint and sprinkled with toilet humor.

We’re not meant to take Mom’s verdict at face value, but these mixed roots read as a schematic choice, an obvious metaphor for the in-betweenness that has plagued Stanley/Bree’s life. Mom, volume set somewhere between Everybody Loves Raymond and “No More Wire Hangers!,” follows up her diagnosis by berating her child for never making a commitment—after ten years of college without a degree, why should a sex change be any different? Or for that matter, a religion? It’s a weirdly retrograde moment for a movie that claims to be progressive, as though gender identification and religious orientation were comparable, and as though both were conscious choices rather than psychological imperatives or matters of faith.

Somewhere between New York to Los Angeles, 17-year-old Toby half-mockingly buys Bree a baseball cap that says I’M PROUD TO BE A CHRISTIAN. Bree, when we first meet her, doesn’t sound proud to be anything—when asked if she’s happy, Bree tells a shrink, “Yes… I mean, no… I mean, I will be.” By the time Bree leaves the Bible Belt, however, she sounds almost evangelical. “My body may be a work in progress, but there is nothing wrong with my soul,” Bree tells Toby in one of the film’s few moments of moralizing. “Jesus made me this way for a reason, so I could suffer and be reborn as he was.” Sure enough, by the movie’s end, Bree, having had the surgery, has placed a small Christmas tree in her apartment, and it seems her covenant with her father’s faith has gone the way of its mark. Has Bree been born again in more ways than one? That’s one transformation writer-director Duncan Tucker hasn’t thought through.

In Tucker’s defense, Bree’s true background does magnify the gaping hole where Toby’s identity should be. In the car, he tells Bree he’s descended from Native Americans. How disappointing to discover that he’s actually one-quarter Jewish.