An Interview with Joy Ladin on Shekinah Speaks and Gender Transition
Joy Ladin is an essayist and poet, literary scholar, and speaker on transgender issues. Shekhinah Speaks (selva oscura press) is her tenth book of poetry. Others include National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna; her new and selected poems, The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something; and Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration and Impersonation. She is also the author of a memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life; and a work of trans theology, The Soul of the Stranger. Her work has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, and a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Fellowship. She has been featured on a number of NPR programs, including an “On Being” with Krista Tippett interview that has been rebroadcast several times. Episodes of her online conversation series, “Containing Multitudes,” are available at JewishLive.org/multitudes; her writing is available at joyladin.wordpress.com.
Shekhinah Speaks is Joy’s latest poetry collection, and speaks to questions of gender, motherhood, identity, and politics through found texts from the Metropolitan magazine and the voice of Shekhinah, the female aspect of God in the Jewish tradition.
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Tiffany Troy: Would you describe the process of writing this collection?
Joy Ladin: In a way, this project began decades ago when I was struggling to find ways to express the experience of living with a hidden female gender identification without coming out as what we now call “transgender.” I realized that the Shekhinah – in Jewish mystical tradition, the immanent, female aspect of God who silently and invisibly dwells within each of us – was both a precise and safely obscure metaphor for my life-long sense of being female despite being born male. Like my female gender identification at the time, the divine Shekhinah is invisible and dwells within human bodies that do not reflect or express who she is, and persists no matter how little she is recognized or welcomed in the world.
In short, writing about the Shekhinah gave me camouflage for writing about myself. But these poems didn’t actually engage with the Shekhinah Herself as an aspect – or, more exactly, as a mode, a way of experiencing – God.
Decades later, long after gender transition, I started thinking about the Shekhinah again when I was invited to read at a Shekhinah symposium at UC Boulder. In addition to reading the early poems, I decided I wanted to write a few new ones, this time in the voice, the persona, of the Shekhinah. The poems were a lot of fun to write – I guess I’ve always wanted to play God – and well-received. I went back to them, planning to write more, after finishing The Soul of the Stranger, a book of trans theology, and immediately realized that though I still liked the poems, I could never write like that again. The theological work I had done gave me a keen awareness of idolatry – the human propensity for projecting our own ideas onto divinity, imagining God as a comforting reflection of our own desires, fears, loves and hatreds – and I recognized that that was what these poems had done. Rather than revealing or expressing the Shekhinah, they shrank Her down to fit my limitations, reducing Her to a mask or puppet through which I could express my own ideas.
This kind of idolatry has become devastatingly common in the versions of American Christianity that have fused with right-wing politics, and I was disgusted with myself for replicating it in poetry. I tried to abandon the project, but couldn’t. I was too hungry to hear the Shekhinah’s voice – Her real voice, not my puppet-version of it.
Jewish tradition doesn’t let Shekhinah speak, and I wanted to find out what a divine being who immersed in human existence would tell us about Herself, about how She sees us, about who we could be. More importantly, I was longing to hear what She was saying, is saying, to me and to each of us, at every moment of our lives.
My longing for the Shekhinah’s voice led me to the compositional method I use in the book. Since I didn’t want to put my words in the Shekhinah’s mouth, I realized that I needed to use words that weren’t mine, words through which a voice that wasn’t mine – Her voice – could emerge. Fortunately, I have had a lot of experience composing poems from language that isn’t mine. At the very beginning of transition, I wrote poems made out of language sampled from women’s magazines – that is, words written by and for women, which, I hoped, would give me access to the language of those who, unlike me, were born and raised female. I sampled and remixed words and phrases from magazine articles until a voice that seemed to be speaking to me (these poems adopted the second person that is so common in women’s magazines) began to emerge, and then I revised until the voice made sense and what it said rang true.
To find the Shekhinah’s voice, I sampled language from Biblical texts in which God speaks. The best poetic examples of this kind of certified God-language are found in late Isaiah, in the extraordinary poetry we find from chapter 40 on. But no matter how I mixed words I sampled from those chapters, nothing happened poetically — my drafts just sounded like incoherent bits of Isaiah.
I soon realized — it seems obvious now — that since the Shekhinah is female-identified, I needed to combine words from Isaiah with words from texts which, like those I sampled in my transition poems, were written by and for women. Though I had written many poems sampling Cosmo Girl, the now-defunct version of the magazine for teens, I had always avoided Cosmopolitan. The cover images scared me, and seemed to proclaim the magazine was solely devoted forms of sensuality and sexuality that weren’t relevant to a middle-aged trans woman like me. But a lot of the development of Shekhinah Speaks came in response to what felt like divine nudges, and I had the strong sense that I needed to overcome my qualms and look for language in Cosmopolitan.
I decided to run a test: I took a quote from Isaiah (“Sing out O barren one, who has not given birth”), went to the Cosmo website, and typed “barren” into the search bar. I didn’t expect anything to come up – who says “barren” these days? – but the very first search result was “Why This Woman is Proud to Be Called ‘The Pageant Queen Without a Uterus.’” Since the Shekhinah is known as “queen” and definitely doesn’t have a uterus, I considered this proof (and possibly divine confirmation) that mixing words from passages of Isaiah with words from Cosmo articles that in some way resonated with them would enable the Shekhinah’s voice to emerge.
I didn’t know what that voice would sound like, but my Ph.D. dissertation, a study of the emergence of modernist techniques in American poetry, had taught me the kind of language mixture – I call it “discourse fusion” – that I needed to achieve. Discourse fusion is a form of poetic language in which recognizably different discourses are fused together sufficiently to sound like a single voice, but in which meanings and perspectives are multiplied by still-recognizable differences between the source discourses. I give details about discourse fusion and other widely used but little discussed modernist techniques in Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry, which is available for free download on Academia.edu.
With discourse fusion as my goal, I kept mushing words and phrases from passages of Isaiah and resonating Cosmo articles until sentences started to form, and kept rearranging sentences until I heard a voice that wasn’t mine speaking to a singular human “you” that was meant to be each of us – including me. When I felt afraid of what those sentences were saying to me – afraid of how I was being seen, described, loved – I knew the Shekhinah’s voice was emerging.
Singing
Sing out O barren one, who has not given birth,
break out into song, shout for joy,
one who had no labor pains . . .
Isaiah 54:1
“Why This Woman Is Proud to Be Known as ‘The Pageant Queen Without a Uterus.’”
Before you were a fetus,
before you were an egg,
you were a song
I was already singing,
a promise
I’d already kept.
I stretch out your curtains,
strengthen your pegs,
make room inside you for the world
I created you to share. You
are my embryo
and I am your womb;
you’re my labor pains
and I’m the mother pushing you
to cry, to talk, to stand for something,
to stop being scared
of the joy
rising like waters in the days of Noah,
flooding your foundations,
crowning your head,
answering every question
I created you to ask.
Why you feel incomplete,
like a tiara without a pageant.
Why you mistake affliction for love
and love, my love,
for affliction.
Why you just start crying
when, for a moment, you hear me singing
the secret you forget you’re keeping: you
are the child of a queen.
Why it always feels like the first time to you,
the first shaking of your mountains,
the first bursting into flame,
the very first season
of your first reality show
on which a queen with a whirlwind
where a uterus should be
whose presence fills you with fear
keeps waiting for you
to say “I do”
to the love, my love,
that never stops singing
and follows you
everywhere.
Tiffany Troy: How did you structure this collection?
Joy Ladin: Each poem took a long time to finish, and until there were several, I couldn’t tell how one poem related to another, or what the structure of this book might be. Eventually, I realized that although to the Shekhinah, who exists outside of human time, all the poems were being spoken simultaneously, the sequence of each section reflects the unfolding of a different aspect of her relationship with the human you.
In the first section, “Revelation,” the Shekhinah is trying to get the human you to recognize that She is there and speaking. In the second section, “Ready,” the Shekhinah speaks to a human you who can hear Her, and tries to explain the nature of their relationship and what it requires of the human you: accepting being seen, known, and loved completely by the Shekhinah , and, in response, “burn[ing] for justice / as a garden burns for water” (“Come, Let Us Reason Together”). In the final section, “I Do,” the Shekhinah woos the human you, trying to make a lifelong commitment to Her – to Her – to assent to loving and being loved by Her by saying “I do.”
But I still didn’t know how to tell when the book would be complete – after all, the Shekhinah never stops speaking! In the absence of a divine suggestion, I turned to an ancient teaching in Jewish mysticism, which holds that each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is a channel through which divine light is diffused into a different aspect of what we experience as material reality. Since there are twenty-two letters, I decided there should be twenty-two poems, though I wasn’t able to connect each poem to the mystical meaning of its corresponding letter.
After that, it didn’t take long to see that the book should consist of three sections of seven poems, and that both the sections and the poems within them should make sense as sequences.
Tiffany Troy: How does your first poem, “Fetus in Distress,” set up the rest of the collection that follows?
Joy Ladin: As I’m sure you noticed, the sections I just described only add up to twenty-one poems, while the Hebrew alphabet contains twenty-two. “Fetus in Distress” doesn’t belong to any of the sections. I see it as corresponding to aleph, the silent letter that begins the Hebrew alphabet, and which tradition holds represents what comes before the story of creation described in the first chapter of Genesis. It’s a poem that stands outside the process of relationship we see in the individual sections, describing, from the Shekhinah’s perspective, both what drives Her relationship with the human you and what stands in its way.
But unlike aleph, the Shekhinah in this poem is the opposite of silent. Words pour out of her as, addressing the human you from outside time and space, she offers a highly compressed glimpse of how she sees us. To her, we and our world are constantly being born out of Her, and our lives happen all at once. On the one hand, She is farther from the human you in this poem than at any other point in the book; on the other, She is urgently trying to give us everything She has to offer. She knows the human you can’t understand what She’s saying, that we can’t see ourselves the way she does, but She tries to speak in a way that will show us She is right here with us,
lingering among your acids,
tearing myself to shreds,
transfusing your suffering
with my glory,
you are with I am.
“Fetus in Distress” summarizes what the Shekhinah throughout the book: that who we are is inseparable from who She is, that our lives, which we experience as separate from Hers and shredded by time into separate moments, are suffused with Her presence. Though the Shekhinah doesn’t use the word in this poem, this is what She means by love.
Tiffany Troy: How did you channel Shekhinah in a new way?
Joy Ladin: I’m far from the only person who is into the Shekhinah – She’s an important figure for many devout Jews, for Jewish feminists and others who long for a richer way to conceive of God than patriarchal religion and language offer, and, I have learned, even for some Christians.
But my channeling of the Shekhinah is unusual in bringing together things have learned from realms of experience that are generally quite separate: personal spiritual experience, Jewish tradition, American poetry, and LGBTQ+ thinking and community. Shekhinah Speaks reflects a sense of the divine as a living, speaking presence that I have had since childhood and which I don’t share with most of the Jews I know. It combines that sense with an American poetic tradition in which, as I discuss in my essay, “You are Making Me Now: Writing God as a Contemporary American Poet,” religious skepticism has, at least since the early twentieth century, been part of the DNA. (That’s why when I read the poems at poetry events, people tend to laugh in relief at the pairing of Isaiah with Cosmopolitan – it feels like a familiar, comforting sort of heresy.) It combines those with elements of Jewish tradition – teachings about the Shekhinah, Biblical texts, etc. The Shekhinah’s voice also reflects aspects of LGBTQ+ experience, particularly the experience of trying to forge intimate relations with human beings who see us as utterly different, including the feelings of loneliness and shame and rage that accompany these efforts, and the faith in underlying and overarching connection despite those differences. You can hear those experiences both in the Shekhinah’s determination to forge a relationship with the human you, and in Her descriptions of how she knows the human you feels. ,
In other words, Shekhinah Speaks grows out of the nexus of my religious, trans, and poetic identities. One of my hopes is that these poems demonstrate that these ways of being human, so often pitted against one another, can together illuminate the existential challenges we share, and offer us resources for overcoming them.
But most of all, I hope every reader will be as grateful as I am to hear the Shekhinah say that however different or alone we feel, we are each home to divinity, that our fleeting, isolated individual selves grow out of Her constant, eternal I am.
Tiffany Troy: Shekhinah defines herself as both what she is and what she is not. How does the same tension play a role between the Book of Isaiah & the Cosmopolitan?
Joy Ladin: I love that you note that “Shekhinah defines herself as both what she is and what she is not” – She has to do both, because, on the one hand, as the Zohar says, “She is everything and everything is in Her,” and on the other hand, She has to create acknowledge and respect the difference between Her and the human you, because without that distance, there can’t be mutual relationship, true consent, full and reciprocal love.
As you suggest, that paradox is built into the fusion of the very different discourses of Isaiah and Cosmopolitan.The Isaiah language is sweeping, archetypal, dripping transcendence and grandeur; the Cosmo language is intimate, canny, rooted in the here-and-now facts of bodies and politics, oppression and misogyny, fashion and craving. We feel the jostling of those perspectives as Shekhinah speaks. Sometimes one dominates, sometimes the other, but ultimately, She defines Herself – She needs to define Herself – through both simultaneously.
Tiffany Troy: How do the ideas of womanhood, motherhood, the body, and haunting shape your collection?
Joy Ladin: In one sense, these ideas have been bound up with this collection from the first, because, as I said above, my interest in the Shekhinah has always been connected with my female gender identification and trans identity and experience. But over the decades, my way of thinking about the Shekhinah has shifted away from specifics of gender and bodies and more toward how the Skehinah’s relation to human categories and individual human lives can be understood through trans experiences of those things.
When I was living as a man, I thought of trans identity and experience only in terms of the conflict (that’s a polite word for it) between my female gender identification and my male body and social persona. What was most important to me then about the Shekhinah was that She was identified as female despite not having a body or physical or social presence, just like my gender identification.
But by the time I started on these poems, I understood trans experience more broadly, as encompassing any experience of slippage or tension between the ways we identify ourselves and the ways we are identified by others. I believe that sense of difference is constitutive of being human. That may sound extreme, but it is an idea you can find echoing throughout religious and philosophical tradition from Heraclitus, who said “Intelligence is a lonely stranger in the world,” to Buddhism’s emphasis on detachment from social identity to the nineteenth-century Hasidic master who said, “Anyone who doesn’t feel they are in exile isn’t really awake.”
The realization that the experience of difference I used to associate with being trans is something I share with everyone else (though non-trans people often find it easier to ignore or repress that experience) enabled me to imagine the Shekhinah (the word comes from the Hebrew verb “to dwell”) not as a projection of my personal situation as a trans person, but as a divine difference who dwells within and speaks intimately to each of us.
My expanded understanding of trans experience also helped me think through one of the most puzzling things about the Shekhinah: since divinity (at least in Jewish tradition) isn’t defined by a human body and thus can neither essentially “be” nor perform nor express a gender, why would the Shekhinah identify as female, and what can that identification possibly mean?
Those of course are questions people have often asked me: since I wasn’t born into or raised in a female body, why would I identify as female (not exactly a socially advantaged position), and what can my female gender identification possibly mean? Once I began living as myself – living as a woman – I had to ask those questions of myself, as I realized that despite my profound sense of female gender identification, I will never fit traditional, body-based binary gender definitions of “woman,” that those definitions will never contain all of me. Living as a woman wasn’t a manifestation of everything I am – it was a way of expressing some of who I am that puts me in relation to others. That can be problematic – there are many women who don’t want me to identify myself as one of them – but it is also what gender, basically, is for: to give us ways of identifying ourselves not just as idiosyncratic individuals but in relation to others.
And that, I think, is what the Shekhinah’s female gender identifications – Her references to Herself as mother, as queen, as lover – mean: they don’t express all of who She is (that is beyond the capacity of human language), they expressing aspects of Herself in ways that relate Her to the human you in terms human beings can understand.
As you can see from the Shekhinah’s constantly shifting self-identifications, She never identifies herself in any given way for long, never lets us confuse Her with the fleeting masks of gender drops and dons.
And as you can see from the constantly shifting ways She identifies the human you, she doesn’t confuse us with the human terms and categories that constitute our identities either: She sees us from the inside out, and from that perspective, while each of us is utterly individual, we are all basically the same.
By identifying us through the same flurry of perspectives and terms through which She identifies herself, the Shekhinah invites us to see ourselves as She sees us: as unbounded beings who use human terms to create relationships – to love and be love – but who are not, cannot be, be defined by them. To identify ourselves not just with a given gender, race, class, nationality, ethnicity and so on, but with Her overflowing, ecstatic I am.