Parashat Sh’lah
Dvar Torah on the occasion of Pride Shabbat June 13, 2026
This commentary on Torah portion, Sh’lach [Numbers 13:1-15:41] includes bits from essays by Joy Ladin, one of her poems, and my thoughts connecting them all. For those who may not know, Dr. Joy Ladin is a widely published essayist and poet, literary scholar, and nationally known speaker on transgender issues. From 2003 to 2021 she held the David and Ruth Gottesman chair in English at Stern college for women of Yeshiva University where she was the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution.
In 2014, Dr. Ladin wrote the following:
Wherever we travel in the Jewish world, we can see the positive effects of efforts to bring human laws, lives, and communities into line with divine standards of justice and loving-kindness. But those who don’t fit communal norms know the downside of this ideal: its tendency to cast an aura of sanctity over flawed and even oppressive social structures and to frame efforts to make communal norms more inclusive as threats to the essence and existence of the community….
The emphasis on sacred normativity in Judaism and the Jewish community harms those, like LGBTQ Jews, who don’t fit established norms. It also harms the Torah by obscuring the queerness on which its moral and spiritual vitality depend.
There is a deeply disturbing tale found in our Torah portion at Numbers 15:32-36 [see at end], which we interpret here through the lens of Dr. Ladin’s essay. The story of a man who gathers sticks on Shabbat. He is stoned to death by the community, who have sequestered the man and asked Moses and Aaron for guidance. God tells Moses that the man must be stoned to death. Is this an example of “sacred normativity… harming those, like LGBTQ Jews, who don’t fit established norms”? The wood gatherer may not have been able to observe Shabbat for any number of reasons. Perhaps he was simply cold, or desperately in need of selling a few sticks of firewood to buy food for his family. Perhaps he did not know about the Shabbat laws. And even if none of those were sufficient to excuse him from Shabbat observance, surely death is a horrific punishment. I am not overlooking the fact that the community stoned the woodcutter at the behest of the Divine, but note that in other instances Moses takes it upon himself to plead with God on behalf of humanity. As ordinary mortals, we can at the very least work to improve human interactions. In this case the community did not have to imprison the man to begin with. They could have worked to make the communal norms less restrictive; could have reached out to understand and to help.
The gender binary is one of society’s norms, often (mis-) portrayed as “sacred” and certainly of harm to “LGBTQ Jews, who don’t fit established norms.” In an essay dated 2013, Dr. Ladin writes specifically about what she calls “the idol of the gender binary” and suggests what may be required to shatter that idol.
My gender is a mudhole, a willful remixing of physical and human nature that defies separation into neat categories like male and female, natural and artificial, challenging the idea that those categories are mutually exclusive, that we can clearly, conclusively, distinguish them at all. That perhaps is why some react so violently to people like me. We are mirrors in which they see the artificiality of the natural binary of male and female, its incompleteness, its inadequacy, the contradictions it simplifies…
Trans inclusion in religious communities lags far behind the still-contested inclusion of gay and lesbian people… Inclusion of transgender people, however, will require not only tolerance and accommodation from religious traditions; it will require profound theological and spiritual growth.
The work of disentangling religious conceptions of God from what was long seen as the “natural” domination of women by men has taken generations, and is still far from complete. But even religious communities that have renounced patriarchal gender hierarchy still struggle to conceive of God or humanity or the divine image Genesis tells us we share in terms that transcend, or expand, or blur, or destabilize, or otherwise escape the gender binary…. To truly include transgender people within Abrahamic religious traditions, we have to shatter the idol of the gender binary and face the truth that trans people embody: the gender binary represents neither the nature of nature, the nature of humanity, nor the nature of God.
However radical this may seem in terms of religious belief, practice and community, this truth is as down-to-earth as my mudhole, where, without fuss or fanfare, binary human categories collide, collapse, and coalesce into more capacious, messier forms; where bullfrogs thrum amphibious hymns under gliding great blue herons; where someone who lives as a woman after a lifetime as a male whispers “Thank you, thank you, thank you” to a God who knows all about human gender and couldn’t care less.
We close with this thought. A mudhole is not a hell-hole. Stoning a wood gatherer is a hell-hole of “sacred normativity,” from which nothing good can come. A mudhole, however, is a nutrient rich locus of evolving life where nature gifts us thrumming bullfrogs and great blue herons; with messy and capricious human categories. Our mudhole leads us to the wild freedom expressed in Joy Ladin’s poem “Wild Genders.”
WILD GENDERS
Deep in the gendered restaurant, wild genders sing.
The gendered waitress gushes over carrot soup with garlic.
Sturdily gendered middle-aged men
shift in sturdy leather-backed chairs, generously gendered women
smile gorgeously gendered smiles
as though wild genders weren’t singing
like coyotes in the distance.
Wild animals make a forest of every situation,
even animals like us who pretend we’re domesticated,
sit up straight in gendered restaurants,
sweating among sweating water glasses.
Draped in domesticating binary folds,
the wild skin of gender
radiates hunger, loneliness, desire.
Our legs are the roots of gender’s forest,
our trunks its trunks,
our crotches its crotches,
our humanity the wildest animal of all
hunting among its branches.
—————————————————————————————————
Ladin, Joy. “Both Wilderness and Promised Land: How Torah Grows When Read Through LGBTQ Eyes.” Tikkun 29, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 17–20.
Ladin, Joy “Once out of Nature: Reflections on Body, Soul, Gender and God” (2013) in Once out of Nature, Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender (2024)
Ladin, Joy, “Wild Genders” in The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something (2017)
Num 15:32-36 [Everett Fox translation via Sefaria]
Now when the Children of Israel were in the wilderness,
they found a man picking wood on the Sabbath day.
They brought him near, those who found him picking wood,
to Moshe and to Aharon, and to the entire community;
they put him under guard,
for it had not been clarified what should be done to him.
YHWH said to Moshe:
The man is to be put to death, yes, death;
pelt him with stones, the entire community, outside the camp!
So they brought him, the entire community, outside the camp,
and they pelted him with stones, so that he died,
as YHWH had commanded Moshe.
וַיִּהְי֥וּ בְנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בַּמִּדְבָּ֑ר וַֽיִּמְצְא֗וּ אִ֛ישׁ מְקֹשֵׁ֥שׁ עֵצִ֖ים בְּי֥וֹם הַשַּׁבָּֽת׃
וַיַּקְרִ֣יבוּ אֹת֔וֹ הַמֹּצְאִ֥ים אֹת֖וֹ מְקֹשֵׁ֣שׁ עֵצִ֑ים אֶל־מֹשֶׁה֙ וְאֶֽל־אַהֲרֹ֔ן וְאֶ֖ל כׇּל־הָעֵדָֽה׃
וַיַּנִּ֥יחוּ אֹת֖וֹ בַּמִּשְׁמָ֑ר כִּ֚י לֹ֣א פֹרַ֔שׁ מַה־יֵּעָשֶׂ֖ה לֽוֹ׃ {ס}
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מ֥וֹת יוּמַ֖ת הָאִ֑ישׁ רָג֨וֹם אֹת֤וֹ בָֽאֲבָנִים֙ כׇּל־הָ֣עֵדָ֔ה מִח֖וּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶֽה׃
וַיֹּצִ֨יאוּ אֹת֜וֹ כׇּל־הָעֵדָ֗ה אֶל־מִחוּץ֙ לַֽמַּחֲנֶ֔ה וַיִּרְגְּמ֥וּ אֹת֛וֹ בָּאֲבָנִ֖ים וַיָּמֹ֑ת כַּאֲשֶׁ֛ר צִוָּ֥ה יְהֹוָ֖ה אֶת־מֹשֶֽׁה׃ {פ}