The escape of the prophet Jonah and every transgender person to escape their destiny
Text by Joy Ladin* taken from his book "The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah From A Transgender Perspective"(The soul of the foreigner. Read God and the Torah from a transgender perspective), ed. Brandeis University Press (United States), 2018. Freely translated by the volunteers of the Gionata project
I was more than forty years old when I finally knew about the rabbis willing to accept me as a transgender Jew, but I felt the Jewish tradition speak to my life every afternoon of Yom Kippur, when the Jews traditionally read the book of Jonah. It is a story that every transgender person knows well: the story of someone desperate in an attempt to avoid living like the person who knows he is (in the case of Jonah, a prophet).
Since the beginning of the book, when God orders him: "He immediately goes to Ninive ... and proclaims the judgment on it, because their wickedness has come down to me" (Jonah 1: 2), Jonah knows he is a prophet. He does not ask God why he chose him to bring that message, nor does he discuss, as Moses do in front of the ardent rush, stating that he is not suitable for the task.
He simply escapes, because, as he explains in the last chapter, he knows that God will not destroy ninee, although the people are evil: "That's why I fled ... I know you are a merciful God and Clement, slow to anger, great in love, and that I desist from sending the ruin" (Jonah 4: 2). Even when God speaks to him of the imminent judgment, Jonah, as a true prophet, already knows that God will have pity of them.
Jonah is so desperate to be not a prophet who abandons the life he has always known and embarks on a ship directed to Tarshish. But, as many transgender people know, when we flee from ourselves, we flee from life itself.
While his ship is shaken by a storm sent by God, Giona sleeps in the hold, in a sleep so deep as to ignore the instinct of self -preservation. When the captain alarm him and tells him that he "invoke his God" for salvation, Jonah does not respond with a prayer, but with a suicidal gesture, telling the sailors: "Throw me into the sea, and the sea will calm down for you" (Jonah 1: 6, 12).
Why does Jonah react this way? God sent the storm because he refused to go to Nineveh, so he would have made sense to try to appease his divine anger promising to perform the mission.
But his self -destructive response reflects an all too familiar psychological scheme for transgender people: to escape themselves as long as possible, and when you can no longer bear the inner and external storm, choose to die for the good of others, in order to never have to live like who really is.
Giona may have thought of sacrificing himself for sailors, but the truth is that it is so desperate to avoid being a prophet that he preferred death to life.
Many transgender people are told that suicide will solve the conflict between the need to be and the fear of being what they are. We think that our families, our communities, the world will be better without us, and that we, freed from the shame of hiding and terror of living as we are, will finally find peace.
In the case of Jonah, this suicidal fantasy seems to be realized: when he is thrown into the sea, the storm subsides and he peacefully sink "into the abysses, in the heart of the sea", where he is "swallowed by a large fish" (Jonah 1:15, 2: 3).
But miraculously, Jonah does not die. In the abysses, in the belly of the fish, he finds himself only with the God from whom he had fled. God literally surrounds him, giving him breath, warmth and protection, supporting his life in the midst of death. In other words, Giona's escape by himself brings him simultaneously closer to death and closer to God.
This spiritual paradox is the heart of its history, and it was the heart of my life when I lived like a man I knew I was not.
Like Jonah, I was so desperate to not live like the person I really preferred to choose death rather than life, despair instead of hope, isolation instead of human connection. Also surrounded by family and friends, I felt like I was only on the bottom of the ocean.
But I was not alone: even if the suicidal depression swallowed me for decades, God was there, around me, to support me, to keep me alive. Even as he was in the belly of the fish, Jonah sees his salvation as a turning point: “I sink up to the bases of the mountains; The doors of the earth closed on me forever; Yet, you have traced my life from the pit, my Lord my God! " (Jonah 2: 7).
Jonah is so grateful to have been saved that, when the fish vomits it on the shore, she exceeds her reluctance to present itself as a prophet and heads for ninee. Unlike Jonah, I have never seen God as someone who was freeing me to really make me live. I told me that God didn't want me to live like who I was really. I told me that God wanted - and he was helping me - to submerge my true self forever. I convinced myself that love was this: pretending to be what others wanted me to be. Suffer in silence. Embrace loneliness. Give up joy.
Year after year, when the sound of the Shofar resonated to Yom Kippur, the day of the atonement, I cried. Not because I was confessing my sins, but because I knew that, however sincere my words were, until I had lived like a man, I could never have felt grateful, nor really alive. God could preserve me in the abysses of suicidal despair, but not God could not free me from those depths until I was doing what Giona had done: accept that I had to live like who I was really. [...]
* Joy LadinHe is an American poet and essayist, known for having been the first openly transgender teacher in an Orthodox Jewish institution. He has published twelve books, including the autobiography "Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Beteween Genders" (2012) and "The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from Acturender Perspective" (2018). His works explore issues related to gender identity and spirituality, offering a unique perspective that combines personal experience and literary analysis.
Original text:Introduction Shipwrecked with God
