And You Shall Live Through Them
by Miriam Saperstein
Achrei Mot and Kedoshim (read together this week as a double parsha) include violent ideologies towards trans, queer, and intersex people, and have been interpreted and used to justify violence against our bodies, minds, and spirits. I promise, as we go through and unpack how this text has been interpreted, I’m not going to end with our doom, but rather our brilliance, and disability justice is going to help us get there.
These two parshas contain what are sometimes called the “sexual purity laws.” These laws are invoked in the Jewish wedding liturgy, and inform menstruation related rituals. Alongside prohibitions against incest and bestiality, the sexual purity laws include the following infamous anti-sodomy verses:
In Parshas Achrei Mot it is written that “a man shall not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; it is a toevah (often translated as an abomination) (Leviticus 18:22).” In Parashas Kedoshim, this concept is expanded on. If this prohibition is broken, the two men must be put to death, retaining bloodguilt even after their murder (Leviticus 20:13).
These texts have been used to shame, prosecute and persecute, harm, oppress, limit, exclude, ostracize, kill, and otherwise diminish queer and trans people, our bodies, our relationships, our sexual agency, and are part of attempts to both pathologize and deny our history.
These lines are typically read as a prohibition of penetrative anal sex between anyone coercively assigned male at birth, and are invoked in ways that further the assumptions in the text. These verses assert a false and hierarchical gender binary for misogynistic ends, and are part of a patriarchal sex-essentialism project which erases the real diversity of genital formations and criminalizes relationships to those parts in anti-intersex and transmisogynistic ways.
So what do we do with this Torah?
One way queer people and others who make legal rulings have engaged with these verses is to try and follow the letter if not the spirit of the prohibition, stretching legal codes with teshuvot that allow for certain kinds of sex between men but not others, or that allow for cohabitation and domestic partnership without anal sex. Another way people have dealt with the discomfort of this text’s existence is to reinterpret it, saying it doesn’t really mean this, it actually means something else. Others take the approach that this text does say what it says and mean what it means but completely reject the premise of its legal or moral authority over their lives. Some separate morality from halachic obligation, maintaining that they are obligated to follow these verses, but prioritize their moral obligation to transgress the laws. Others relate to the Torah as both moral and legal authority, but choose to live as “sinners.” And there are those who reject halachic obligation completely, rejecting that legal and moral imperatives grounded in the bible have any bearing on how they are supposed to live their lives. There are so many ways we have lived with and through these texts, and the larger project of Halacha, as trans and queer people.
Personally, I believe that being a Jew in my historical and cultural context obligates me to be in relationship to Halacha, but that relationship can look like one of negation, adaptation, acceptance, or limitation of rabbinic suggestions. My obligation to engage leads me to investigate the artistic potential and historical material consequences of Jewish canonical texts such as the Bible.
I’m not going to argue for one authoritative way of relating to these verses, but rather suggest one method we might use to engage with this tradition while remaining whole. The technique draws from the introduction to the sexual purity laws, read through a disabled interpretive mode.
These purity laws are introduced with a reason. We don’t always get a reason for why G!d is commanding the Israelites to do something, but here we do: these laws set us apart from the culture of enslavement in Mitzrayim [1].
After we are given a reason, we get what could be read as a throwaway line, but there really aren’t those in this text, not if you’re creative and hungry for meaning or connection with the divine. And so I present, Leviticus 18:5:
וּשְׁמַרְתֶּ֤ם אֶת־חֻקֹּתַי֙ וְאֶת־מִשְׁפָּטַ֔י אֲשֶׁ֨ר יַעֲשֶׂ֥ה אֹתָ֛ם הָאָדָ֖ם וָחַ֣י בָּהֶ֑ם אֲנִ֖י ה׳׃
You shall keep My laws and My rules, by the pursuit of which human beings shall live: I am Hashem. (Adapted from the community translation on Sefaria)
With regards to the sexual purity laws, and all of Torah, we are instructed:
וָחַ֣י בָּהֶ֑ם
v’chai ba'hem
you shall live within them/through them
In the Talmud, the rabbis turn “v’chai ba’hem” into a central tenet of Jewish legal observance. When confronted with the choice to follow Jewish law or preserve human life, the rabbis don’t just encourage, but require that we choose life over law:
“How do we know that we can break Shabbat in order to save a life?…Rav Yehudah said in the name of Shmuel: “va-hai bahem”—you should “live through” the mitzvot, and not die through the mitzvot (Yoma 85, translation from Hadar Institute).”
In the section above, Rav Yehudah is giving over a principle that uses Leviticus 18:5 as a proof text for a central principle in Jewish legal observance. This principle, “Pikuach Nefesh” (Sanctity of a Life) dictates that one is obligated to transgress any law in service of saving their own or someone else’s life.
If one accepts the premise that being Jewish means having a relationship to Torah, the rabbis understand we have a choice: We can live by the Torah or die by the Torah. They implore us to choose life, commanding us to sacrifice our purity and go against obligation in order to save others lives. Torah, to the rabbis, is the source of life, bringing us into holiness, which is inherent in life. No purity is more important than living.
Often, the Torah of Pikuach Nefesh comes through our bodies, their insistence on living, their inconvenient, frustrating, and life-altering symptoms. It can be hard to listen.
When I got sick(er), I was in denial, I pushed my body to anti-genocide protests until I could barely get up to go to the bathroom, trying to stay up all night for Shavuot to receive Torah, and needing to sleep for most of a month. My body was giving me an urgent physical imperative to cease all work—frequently unable to think, listen to music, have conversations, move my limbs except in the most urgent of situations, every exertion mandated a long recovery, meaning months in my bed. Through the mentorship of my disabled loved ones and teachers, I re-learned that accepting my new physical reality was the only way I would be able to heal, whatever that meant. I sometimes still choose to ignore my body and this inevitably makes me sicker. But I am learning to accept when I physically can’t do something, to give up the short term denial for something harder and more satisfying: rest that allows for some amount of modified activity afterwards. Writing and receiving visitors from bed, sitting when I want to run, putting my feet up on the bus so I can think clearly when I reach the destination. Engaging with what is actually there (and not the body I had before) means I can actually make art and see friends, and celebrate holidays and build a life. By acknowledging what is really there, I am able to make informed choices about how to use my limited energy. By denying that a limiting factor is my energy, I get sicker, choosing stagnation, confusion about why I feel ill, and ultimately harming my ability to produce energy in my body. Denial is a move towards death. I think there’s a lot to unpack around fear of death and how it relates to disabled people’s bodies, but right now it feels meaningful to choose what is life-giving to me. I want to live and I will find a way to do it through facing my sickness, the ways it disables me and forces me to adapt.
As you might imagine, I also advocate for facing what is limiting and sickening in our relationship to Torah. What is really there is there. What the text makes us feel is real. What is written and what violence it has been used to justify is just as real as all the beauty we can find in the text. Even if we want to make Torah into something new and liberatory, even if we want to find a way to live with it as it tells us to live, we have to also “live through it.” The rabbis' insistence on transgressing the law to save a life reminds us that rote obedience is not what is commanded, and not what is needed in this moment, in our disabled or otherwise fragile and ever-changing bodies. We have received this tradition, and come from this spiritual lineage. Whether or not we accept it, it was brought here, to us. How can we encounter what is and let it transform how we live our lives, prioritize our time, express our needs and fight for our place in the world? Facing the Torah of the disabled body and the Torah of the text requires a capacity to feel, to grieve and be angry, to assert agency and ask for help. Engaging in that process also means we are more alive. Grounded in our own agency to choose life, we can be as big and needy and slow and weird and uncomfortable as the divinity within us calls for.
[1] This is a footnote in homage to those of us who are often relegated to margin, offhand mention, not deemed scary or real enough to upset heteropatriarchy. Shoutout to the lesbians! Mishneh Torah uses this differentiation from the culture of Mitzrayim to prohibit “nashim mesolelot” or women who scissor. In case there were any doubts we have been doing it for millenia, we made it into the canon of rabbinic texts.
Miriam Saperstein is a Philly-based artist with a deep love for disabled access-artistry, water-oriented rituals, and hanging out on the porch. Recent collaborations have included curating a touch-based art exhibit in West Philly as part of the collective Hook&Loop and teaching critical map-making with the Desert Writing Lab at Bulk Space in Detroit. Their work has been exhibited at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center and the William Way LGBT Community Center and published in Syllabus, smoke and mold, and BathHouse. Find them online at miriamsaperstein.com.
