How Should We Read Our Past?

Is it a foreign country? Or is it something we ought to make familiar because it is ours?

[UPDATE: I revised the title of this post immediately after publication, because I had stupidly forgotten to change it before sending.]

This past weekend, The New York Times ran a piece of a type guaranteed to irritate me. In it, Rabbi Elliot Kukla argued that the modern assumption that traditional religion recognized only two genders—corresponding to two sexes, male and female—is ahistorical, ignorant and incorrect. In fact, he says, ancient Judaism, like many other premodern cultures, recognized the existence of people who didn’t fit the male/female binary, and incorporated that understanding into Jewish law and teaching from the beginning. Since they did, so can we—indeed, not only can we, we must, because to do otherwise is to repress and deny the existence of real people, with terrible consequences for mental health and basic justice.

I’m not interested in debating the question of transgenderism in contemporary law and society at this time; that’s not really my bailiwick, and I also don’t have anything particularly distinctive to say on the subject. But Judaism is my bailiwick (though I am not a rabbi), as is the study of history (though I am not a historian), and the reasons for my irritation lie there rather than in any thoughts or feelings I have about contemporary transgender issues. So I want to talk about why the piece irritated me, and then double back on myself and question whether I should be irritated, or whether I should appreciate the effort more than I do.

What’s irritating about the piece to me is that it implicitly encourages the reader to conflate modern and ancient understandings of sex and gender in way that I find deeply false to the premodern world. Start with a very basic question: did the ancient rabbis recognize that some people didn’t fit neatly into the categories of “male” and “female?” Absolutely. But the closest modern analog to the various categories they are talking about—androgynus, tumtum, aylonit and saris—are what in modern parlance we would call “intersex.” That is too say, they’re talking about people whose physical characteristics diverge from the norm for men and women: people born with two kinds of genitalia or no visible genitalia, or people who do not develop normal secondary sex characteristics.

These were a puzzle for the rabbis because sexual dimorphism was incredibly fundamental to them. I’m not even just talking about gender roles here; menstrual blood, for example, is a huge topic in rabbinic law. But the puzzle is precisely that: about law. That’s what they were interested in understanding: how someone who exhibits these unusual physical characteristics should be treated, whether according to the law of how men are treated, or the law of how women are treated, or some combination. There’s no scope for “choice” or “personal identity” here; the rabbis are trying to answer what they saw as a matter of objective fact with legal consequences.

(As an aside, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s nothing spiritual or mystical about rabbinic musings on people in these sex or gender categories. But that’s nothing special about these categories; the rabbis found spiritual and mystical things to say about just about anything. There’s a whole section of biblical law about what you have to do if your house gets leprosy. The rabbis had a field day with that. The way they did mysticism, in other words, is also quite different from what we moderns do; it’s not about what’s “deeply meaningful” to us and more about demonstrating the incredible fecundity of the text itself. I’ll come back to this.)

Now, these ancient legal discussions are still relevant in our era, inasmuch as they can provide guidance to contemporary Orthodox rabbis on how they should treat Jews who have chosen to become one of these categories through medical intervention. Indeed, one of the ancient categories themselves, the saris, includes eunuchs, boys who were castrated on purpose or by accident. The question of whether it is permissible (from an Orthodox Jewish perspective) to make such a choice is a separate matter, but once such a choice has been made—to take cross-sex hormones, have surgery, etc.—I can easily imagine Orthodox rabbis relying on these ancient precedents to decide how to treat such a person—to decide, for example, whether they can be counted as part of a minyan or whether they can wear women’s clothing. But that, again, wouldn’t be a matter of choice or personal identity; it would be (from a rabbinic perspective) an objective legal determination.

That, at any rate, is how I read the relevant texts; I’m very open to being corrected by someone more familiar with them than I am.

When I say all of the foregoing, of course, talking about what the rabbis were doing, how they understood these categories, I’m making an assumption, namely, that what we want to do is understand those texts as they were understood by those who wrote them, which is to say: that we’re being historians. We may fail to achieve that goal, but that’s our goal, and part of the rationale for having that goal in the first place is to recover the strangeness of the past, to learn how different it is from the present. That’s important for its own sake, I would argue, in that it adds to the sum of human knowledge—but it is also important because we may thereby come to appreciate better how contingent the present is, how its truths are not eternal, but only seem so to us, now.

Is that the only way to relate to the past, though? Actually, no. While on the one hand it is valuable to understand the strangeness of the past, and thereby understand the contingency of our own practices and beliefs, by the same token we also want to feel connected to the past, like it isn’t so completely alien from us. We want to feel like we belong to it in the same way that we want to feel like we belong to our families (and with the same ambivalence). And we want to feel like the future will not see us as completely alien either.

The rabbis understood that. They were traditionalists first (often very creative ones) and historians second at best. They could read their own ancient texts—the books of the Torah, prophets and other canonical biblical books—with a view to understanding their plain meaning, and they did so, doing their best with the philological and other tools they had to hand. But they also lived in their present, a world that had to deal with contingencies radically different from those that their forebears faced (starting with the fact that the center of their forebears’ religion—the Jerusalem temple—was in ruins). And to that end, the knew how to read those same sacred texts in an entirely different spirit, with a view to shedding light on problems wildly far afield from the plain meaning of the text. That’s what it means to be tradents, people carrying on a tradition, and it’s a very different way of reading from how a historian reads.

There’s a famous aggadah in which Moses, preparing for his death, is fretting about whether he will be forgotten, and so God lets him see a yeshivah where students are studying Talmud. Moses is completely bewildered by what they are saying, until they come to the point where they trace the provenance of the teaching they are studying, and he learns that it was passed down to this rabbi from that rabbi from this other rabbi, back and back and back in a chain that stretches all the way back to Moses. And with this Moses is reassured. Even though he has no idea of the teaching they are promulgating, the fact that it is traced back to him gives him comfort.

So is that what Rabbi Kulka is doing? Is he saying: “we who believe in modern gender ideology do not have to make a radical break with the past; we can still find ways to bind ourselves to our ancestors by reading their own writings on intersex individuals creatively?” I’m not sure. I feel like he’s actually engaged in a hybrid of the two activities, the tradent and the historian, which is what bothers me. He’s claiming that an ancient understanding is analogous to a modern one when, really, all he cares about is that it provides a precedent for our modern understanding—a very different matter. Precedent is quite malleable in the right hands, and that can be a good thing. But the point of citing precedent is to find a justification in the past for an action in the present. It’s a form of motivated reasoning, and it serves the noble function of providing present action with a kind of legitimacy. But because it is a kind of motivated reasoning, it’s not necessarily a good guide to an actual understanding of the past. And that’s where I think Rabbi Kukla’s own text is slippery.

If his only real argument is “understandings of sex and gender are not perfectly rigid across time and space” then the rabbi is correct. But it does not follow that they are perfectly malleable and, more to the point, it does follow that we should anticipate that our own understandings will be just as subject to revision as those of the past. But I think he’s saying more. I think he’s saying “the past was more enlightened than we give it credit for, and I understand them better than the dogmatists. The ancients saw many of the same things we see, and we should feel confident in saying we see them.” And so we should—but by the same token, we should also recognize that even when they saw the same things, they saw them very differently than we do. That should temper our willingness to cite their authority as some kind of absolute sanction for our own notions. And it should also make us not more confident in our own wisdom, but more humble.