#liberalandobservant

[egal-aboosta]

Hard to pick a favorite thing about Judaism or even dating Jewish but within traditionally minded Jewish dating one of my favorite things is on our basically 1st (or 3rd?) date (if you count platonically hanging out solo while friends) we’re already being supportive of each other’s future goals <3

[egal-aboosta]

Why another blog?

You’re probably thinking: “Chavera sheli, why another blog?!”

Yes. I’ve already got @hermione-walked-out-of-a-yeshiva, @jewish-education, and @ask-jumblr. Why a 4th blog then?

Because, apparently 4 wasn’t enough...

I’ve been wanting to post more about my own thoughts and get involved in jumblr shenanigans. But @jewish-education ended up too professional for that (it just started out as a blog for me to talk about teaching Hebrew school but then life and jumblr and oh well...I like it for what it is). On @ask-jumblr I’m a silent mod; I just post y’all’s asks (send some in!) not exactly a place for injecting my own thoughts/feelings. And while I’ve been using @hermione-walked-out-of-a-yeshiva for this, my serious posts get lost in a mountain of reblogged shit-posts. 

So, what is this blog for?

My own thoughts about Judaism, my personal life, and Judaism in my personal life. (Expect to see lots of #liberalandobservant and #just-ashkie-things)

A place to interact with jumblr without having to present all/most (all is damn near impossible!) Jewish sides like I do on @jewish-education

I might reblog a little from @jewish-education with what my own thoughts were when writing a post.

This blog won’t really have jumblr memes (unless I’m making them or I’m giving commentary on someone else’s perhaps??), those will stay on @hermione-walked-out-of-a-yeshiva or tagged as #fun on @jewish-education.

As with my other blogs, I’ll try to be clear about whether reblogs/comments/interactions are okay on a particular post. If things aren’t otherwise tagged, Jewish folks should feel free to chime in. Unless something is tagged or looks intracommunal, non-Jews can feel free too. And I’m still the same happy-to-answer-sincere-questions gal.

Does that make any sense?

[tikkun-halev]

chag sameach! #🕎 #jewishconvert #jewbychoice #liberalandobservant #chanukah (at Nashville, Tennessee) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq5ybm6hNFTqmkOQQ4hwavNcegT8NMPp8YxCH80/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=im4jueroxb76

[jewish-education]

Upside of pre-kashrut dietary restrictions: not like I could eat the food anyways.

[jewish-education]

Sometimes being Jewish feels like flying by the seat of my pants and hacking down woods to build a trail as I walk. But I love those moments when I need something, I ask, and something already exists and all I had to do was ask :) <3

#liberalandobservant

[jewish-education]

Elul 2018/5778

Shabbat shalom y’all!

The first Elul journal prompt will post at 9:00 PM tomorrow! Which is coincidentally when Elul starts :)

Elul is the month before Rosh Hashana, the start of the High Holidays (HHD). It’s a time of introspection and teshuva in preparation for Yom Kippur and the year ahead. Some people like to journal throughout Elul to help them collect their thoughts and guide their actions.

I’ll be posting journal prompts on the eve of each day of Elul. I’ll also be posting articles and other Elul/HHD/teshuva related content. There will be prompts for days that are Shabbat, but since the prompts are up here ahead of time, I trust y’all to sort things out if you need to. A huge thanks to @better-latke-than-never since about half of the prompts are from her Elul post last year!

I’ll be tagging prompts and other content as #Elul2018 and #Elul5778 (when I remember to...). I invite anyone to join in with these tags.

[chal-converts-archive]

Reflection on gendered dressing in tznius as a non-binary person:

I’ve noticed lately that I’m a lot less stressed about my daily attire than I once was. I was getting an outfit ready for the morning the other night and realized that it was just so . . . easy. I used to spend a lot of time figuring out what to wear. I was very concerned not just about looking appropriate and feeling comfortable, but about the more expressive side of outfitting, and not even just about being fashionable. I felt this enormous pressure to not just put on clothing in the morning, but to get in touch with some deeper, existential form of self so that I knew how to present myself.

This is very much a genderfluid problem.

The thing about it is that when you’re a trans person, your gender presentation – of which clothing is one of the most readily identifiable attributes – is heavily scrutinized. For men and women, this often turns into a policing of trans men’s masculinity and trans women’s femininity. Are they performing it Right? Do they ‘pass’? etc.

The questions for a non-binary person are related but different. For non-binaries, and in particular, non-binary people whose presentations fluctuate, putting on clothing isn’t just a functional necessity or even a fashion statement, but an incredibly deep expression of who they are and how they relate to their gender on any given day.

The questions that arise from this are equally intense. I once wrote this about it:

There are several feedback loops going on here. How I present myself is a balancing act between how I’m identifying at any given moment and how the outside world sees me (and all the social and safety issues related to it). How I choose to present my gender is a reflection of this; yet at the same time, the way I present myself subtly (or not-so-subtly) influences how I see myself, and absolutely influences how I am seen and treated by others. How I am treated also has a major effect on how I see myself, and therefore, how I present myself. Ultimately, my internal identity, my gender expression, and the way I am seen and gendered are so closely tied together as to be inseparable.

This used to be my everyday reality.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this put an immense amount of pressure on what is for most people an incredibly simple, daily act and ended up taking up a ton of mental and emotional energy. Nailing an outfit was definitely a high – the internal and the external really really match!! – but losing that game could make me dysphoric all day. I’d sometimes even take additional clothing with me for this reason, just in case. Traveling with me was terrible as I would overpack for every possible iteration and variation of self.

So to find myself in a situation where clothing is easy and looking nice and feeling comfortable is a relatively thoughtless task is just strange.

Basing my clothing choices on halacha rather than on something of deep, individual significance manages to both give me agency and take some away in order to achieve a balance that is harmonious. If I follow women’s halacha (which is generally what I do) then I wear skirts, period. Moreover, I wear long skirts and long-sleeve high-necked shirts. That removes any doubt in most people’s minds as to what sex I am. It also makes a lot of other gender-related and fashion-related decisions for me.

Skirts are seen as de facto dressier, and so I have a very easy time looking professional as well. Wearing more covering clothing (within reason) is incredibly practical I’ve found, and so the comfort and functionality aspects are also pretty much always there, too.

As a non-binary person with a very fluid presentation – or at least the capacity for such – I’ve found that making the personal choice to stick with halacha-based clothing choices takes away the pressure to make any kind of a statement about my gender. It’s not about my gender, which is non-binary and for which there is no halacha [yet!] Rather, it’s more like a uniform that I feel more of a moral compunction to wear, and it has nothing to do with how I feel about it.

Although I completely acknowledge that this could be incredibly unhealthy and toxic for many people, in my individual, personal situation, it removes a frustrating and spoons-draining aspect of my life, which frees up mental and emotional space for more worthy items. (The choice aspect of it is a critical component.) To that end, I give myself the latitude to dress however I want, and in so doing remove all but the most occasional need to present differently. On those days I do; the rest of the time, I don’t. It’s that simple.

I do not feel less non-binary for this. In fact, I feel freed from a weird sort of authenticity test that seems to be directed at non-binary people who sometimes or frequently present themselves in a feminine way. Part of why I used to feel such pressure to present in just the exact right way – down to the aesthetic – was because I was feeling an immense pressure to present as non-binary in a society that doesn’t yet really have a category for that.

What that works out to in practice is that non-binary people (especially those assigned female at birth) often feel pressured to present more masculine than they feel because the goal is androgyny – and androgyny is often just ~soft masculinity~ or queer masculinity 2.0. (I could go into a whole only somewhat related gender theory rant about this but will spare you.) In any event, I’m not masculine 99% of the time, and so it just doesn’t make sense for me to present in ways that – while I can certainly adapt to them over time – do not come naturally to me.

There’s also just something very materialistic and Western about clothing being the basis of one’s gender expression. My gender doesn’t change just because I put on pants, and it doesn’t stop being fluid just because I actively choose to present myself in one way. I end up expressing the variously gendered parts of my personality in different, and frankly healthier, ways now that it’s not tied to the clothes I put on my body.

So anyway I wear skirts and shells now and it’s been actively helpful for me, specifically as a non-binary person, despite what I’m sure some might see as internalized transphobia or whatever else.

[jewish-privilege]

To any and all of my Jewish LGBTQ* followers: you’re valid, your identity as a LGBTQ Jew is valid, and you are deserving of dignity. We were all made b’tzelem Elohim, in G!D’s image, and are all worthy of being treated and acknowledged fully with dignity and respect. No one, Jewish or gentile, can tell you cannot be both Jewish and LGBTQ due to their distorted view of what Judaism is and is not.

“Halakha is the wisdom of the application of the written word of the Torah to the life and history of the Jewish people. However, this wisdom and its implementation cannot be contained in any book. No written word can deal in advance with the innumerable situations, changes of circumstances, and new developments that normally occur in the history of men and nations. . . . The divine truth had to be poured into human vessels; it had to be ‘humanized.’ . . . The ‘humanization’ of the word of God requires that in applying Torah to the human condition, one takes into consideration human nature and its needs, human character and its problems, the human condition in its forever-fluctuating dimension…”

- Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits

*I’m using LGBTQ as a catch-all because I am a 90s kid and because I know a number of my followers read the q word as a slur.