The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (3 page)

I did not want the hair, the earrings, the dress, the shoes (or the imaginary gay ridicule, though that only in retrospect). I did want the
tallis
. I knew exactly which one—richly embroidered, with lions of Judea in relief on the decorative part of the shawl and a muted rainbow in the stripes. I couldn’t describe it accurately in less than a page if you’ve never seen a
tallis;
if you have, you know exactly which one I mean. The point here is: that’s the one I wanted. I understood, from previous conversations and the experience of my friends, that it was my choice—that, and the invitations. That was it, but still. My choice.

Instead, I got a cream and silver
tallis,
perfectly nice, the silver thread a little gaudy, but basically not bad. Neutral is how I have thought of it, and it is—neutral for a girl, especially a girl whose mother quite rightly discerns that she is unlikely to add a bit of glitz to an outfit on her own. My mother was looking ahead in her mind’s eye to the photos, to me captured for posterity, photos that she would probably have to live with; maybe to future Rosh Hashanahs during which I would, of course, be glad. My mother, who has never owned or worn a
tallis
as far as I know. Twenty years later, the photos are in a lovely book that no one ever looks at, ever, and the photographic proofs are at home interleaved into my copy of
Bar Mitzvah Disco
, which I sometimes trot out for people who can’t quite believe I ever wore blue eye shadow, or a blue-and-purple-flowered dress with a lace neckline, or gold seashell earrings that hung from rounded posts, or my parents’ hopes about my femininity.

When I was first shown how to put on a
tallis,
it was by my old teacher Joe Yordan, a great teacher if perhaps a somewhat odd man. I have no idea how much his sense of mysticism influenced what he taught, but I remember him showing me how to pronounce the blessing,
Baruch Ata Adonai Elohaynu Melech haolam
asher kiddishanu b’mitzvota v’tzivanu l’hitatayf b’tzitzit,
and then pull the piece of cloth over my head and let it rest there for a long moment—a breath, he demonstrated, two full theatrical beats— before settling it on my shoulders. I remember that we practiced and practiced, and that my movements were somehow not quite correct. My Hebrew was flawless—my Hebrew was always flawless—but it was a lot of weeks before he deemed my mechanics appropriate. He would show me again and again, and I would imitate him with all the skill a short but devoted life in theater had honed, but still it wasn’t right. He would shake his head and sigh, and we would try again.

Again only in retrospect, it becomes clear to me that the
incorrectness
of my movements was gendered. Mr Yordan needed for me to perform a young woman’s gestures, and now when I replay the moment in my mind’s eye and think about the other bat mitzvah girls my age, they all did it the same way. Like grooming birds; a tender kiss each for the words
baruch
and
tzitzit,
a small motion of the arms, head ducking under the cloth and then up just in time for it to skim the tops of their heads. Elbows held close, chin slightly down, motions very restrained, they would wrap themselves in their
tallisim
in barely more space than they stood in (which, by the way, wasn’t much. They
all
had Laura Ashley dresses).

And me? I was doing what my father did. He had, at the time, a long and slim
tallis,
a prayer shawl of somewhat retiring character, which he wore with great pride and a big man’s motion. He pecked at the beginning and end of the blessing, quick and masculine, and then swirled it over his head in a movement that was in part commanding and also part kindergartener-learns-to-put-on-his-own-winter-jacket. He donned his
tallis
at full wingspan and with a kind of defiant pride, a post-World-War-II pride, a sense of himself as a Jew in a room of Jews. He would settle the
tallis
on his shoulders with a short tug, and when I was a kid I was amazed at the effect. My dad, my cranky overworked dad with his big head (a family trait) and mouthful of criticism suddenly looked . . . different. Calmer. When I was older, I would say that in his good suits (because, by then, he was wearing very good suits, tailored just right) and his
tallis
he looked like the king of a small but culturally rich nation. It remains true.

Nevertheless, my imitation of his
tallis
-donning behaviors was all wrong. I only know it now, because I can see it in hindsight and through the lens of what I now understand about Mr Yordan (and teachers in general, and also Jews, and also gender). I can see the disconnect, unbridgeable and unholy. At the time I was red-faced and frustrated, unable to understand what the problem could possibly be. In retrospect it’s clear that this failure of behavior, of movement, was the same failure of my entire adolescence, wearing a different hat.

Truthfully, however, it must be said: if he had just told me to look more like a girl, I would have been able to save us both a lot of trouble. This was an instruction with which I was already familiar, and I had, by then, practiced with and gained a moderate amount of success at it (though, it also must be said, not so much success as all that). But either Mr Yordan didn’t realize that’s what he was asking or he somehow found the instruction odious; either way, he never asked that of me, just shook his head and showed me again, either unwilling to make the instruction explicit or unable to recognize the crux of the problem.

Regardless, I was always very attached to my
tallis
and, in the absence of specific instruction, probably went back to my tomboyish
tallis
-wrapping ways rather quickly, about which, after the bat mitzvah, I never heard another criticism. I don’t think my parents wanted to fight that battle in addition to all the others—clothes, hair, school, and the rest of it, in the midst of which they may not have even noticed the
tallis
. I was not in company of great numbers among my contemporaries in continuing to attend
Shabbos
services and study after my bat mitzvah was over; I suspect that my parents were so pleased to see me close in the fold of Judaism that the angle of my elbow as I wrapped myself in my prayer shawl was beyond, or possibly beneath, notice.

If anyone else at
shul
noticed, they didn’t say a word. Part of my experience as a gender-transgressive Jew was, and remains, in my family name and reputation. When we moved to Connecticut and joined our current temple, it was dying. I mean that literally; the elders of the
shul
were dying off or moving away, no young families were coming to take their place, and the building was crumbling around us. My family, along with a half-dozen others, worked tirelessly to turn the place around, holding fundraisers, firing the old rabbi (a mean man with no real
rachmones
and not much
sechel
either) and hiring a much better new one, scraping and painting and laying carpet and tile, teaching in the school. I worked alongside them starting when I was about eight years old and very earnest about it, setting up chairs and selling popcorn and scraping paint, and working in the kitchen with my father making platters every year to break our fast after Yom Kippur. So if anyone had anything to say about my problematically masculine
tallis
-wearing behaviors, they kept it to themselves.

Today, I accompany my family to
shul
for the High Holidays in a suit and tie, goatee trimmed and tidy, new
tallis
on my shoulders. My mother (Rabbi Search Committee, Building Committee, Board of Trustees) and my father (Ritual Committee, Building Capital Campaign, past Treasurer for seventeen years) introduce me (with an annually increasing note of insistence) as their daughter, Sharon, and it’s not my first name that matters in that moment but my last name, my family name. It’s the Bergman that trumps, that gives me the space to show up and be whatever gender of Jew I am. It’s the family name that sees me through, again, and anyone who might still call into question the gendered behaviors of a fellow Jew in a Reform synagogue probably doesn’t have the chutzpah to say it to me, a Bergman. So I sit with my family, in a whole row, with my folks and brother and grandmothers and cousins and, these days, my husband Ishai and sometimes even my ex-wife. I wear my
tallis
and hold hands with my relatives and kid around with my brother and cousins and help a grandmother up and down from her seat and, again, or maybe still, I am accepted for what I do, for having shown up at all.

Today, I Am a Man
(And Other Perorations of the Tranny Jewboy)

When the last (and best) of my great-uncles died, his youngest grandson, who was twelve at the time and almost six months to the day away from his bar mitzvah, cried inconsolably for three days. That’s what my mother told me after speaking to his father; that he barely ate and hardly slept, alternated between refusing to leave his room and refusing to be separated even by one room from the rest of his family until the end of the first day of
shiva
, the Jewish week of mourning. All he did was cry, she told me, and no one could comfort him; he missed his grandfather so much already.

By the time I heard the story, over dinner with my parents a few weeks later, that cousin—the soccer star, the effortless charmer—was feeling better. On the third night of crying, he came down to the kitchen and helped himself to a huge plate of food, ate it all, killed some bad guys with his brother on one of their video-game systems, and then went to bed and slept twelve hours. After hearing the whole story, I commented, between bites of spinach salad: “Very Jewish.”

My parents, who pretty much only get gender theory when I bring them some, looked puzzled. I swallowed and explained that I found it very Jewish to be hearing this story, told with great sympathy by my mother and his father, about a teenaged boy who cried for three days. About a teenaged boy who was
allowed
to cry, for three days, without reproach. Whose tears were explained with the sentence “Ezra and his grandfather were so close,” and were only explained, not excused or erased.

I started to see understanding in my father’s forehead, but my mother wasn’t following yet, because she was never on the receiving end of the Boys Don’t Cry experience. I admit that I forgot who I was talking to for a minute, and started sketching out a list of ways in which this was culturally anomalous within the standard North American, gendered culture. Teenaged boys are not allowed to show that kind of emotion, they’re not rewarded for being demonstrably close with their families; usually they’re derided as sissies or faggots for their “weakness” as evidenced through crying over a loss. Approval of men showing an emotion that isn’t anger is a Jewish cultural value, I explained. So is the idea that being close to one’s family is a quality of manhood.

(Please note that I am not suggesting that this or any other value is singular to Jews. When I talk about Jewish masculinity and enumerate its values, I am not suggesting that no other cultural group values these same things, nor that all Jews do so without exception. As ever, I am reporting and extrapolating from my experience of Jewish life.)

But let us acknowledge: in the vast landscape of American masculinity, from the Marlboro Man to Barry Bonds, Jewish men are not all visible in the same ways. We have the stereotype of the brainy Jewboy, the physician or accountant, who spent some portion of his boyhood learning to use his textbooks to ward off kicks. And while certainly there are exceptions, I am not the first to note that Jewish men, culturally long shut out from the kind of expressions of masculinity that define a more mainstream North American manliness, have created our own standards that depend more on academic achievement than athletic success, that favor being well-attired over being commercially attractive. Jewish men do not typically hunt, fish, shoot, drink, or fix cars; nor do they use force or even the threat of force to exert (or imply) dominance to get their way. However much this may be about class, it is also about the legacy of culture: Jews have historically not been permitted to compete openly with the culture of the ruling class in its own areas of achievement. In the thousands of years during which this has been true, we have adapted and come to value other qualities: intellect, skill at argument or debate, being bound to the family, storytelling (and, especially, good comic timing), and a certain sartorial flair, among others.

There are exceptions, of course. My father played football and lacrosse in college and used to drive an eighteen-wheeler; we have a family friend who is a total car gearhead and carries (and knows how to use!) a handgun. But my father’s also the one who taught me the make-a-bunny-puppet-out-of-your-napkin trick for amusing small babies, and the guy with the handgun adores his family with an exuberance that is wonderful to watch and is also not, let us just say, prone to exerting much dominance over his wife.

But these exceptions lead us inexorably back to the rules. And in the rules, the advantages of Jewish heritage to the gender-nonconforming become clear. In the process of becoming a man, whether from boyhood or from some other gendered location, we model ourselves on the men around us. When we have good role models, we ape them, and when we don’t, we take on the masculine characteristics we see modeled around us. Some of them are based on the actual behaviors of real men, and some on the cultural ideals of manhood we see or remember from childhood. My young cousin, on the brink of manhood, will always be influenced by his grandfather’s tender and engaged love of him, and he will also be shaped by the events surrounding his grandfather’s death: that for three days, his father, uncles, and cousins gave him space to grieve, and that no one ever suggested, even once, that his emotional reaction was incompatible with his movement into manhood. That his brother and boy cousin, as well as his sister (all still children), also witnessed this will also bear out. When they are grown and faced with loss, none of them will think that their tears of grief, or the process of healing from them, are the exclusive province of femininity.