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A Festival of Binaries - Joy Ladin Quote
Contributed by Crystal Huff

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A Festival of Binaries - Joy Ladin Quote

For Jews who are observant, Passover requires a constant struggle to separate leavened from unleavened, inside from outside, permitted from forbidden.

The absolute distinctions we impose on our lives at Passover can be a comfort, even if they aren’t comfortable. At least we know what’s right and what’s wrong, what is inside and what is outside, and, most importantly—this, the Torah tells us is the whole point of Passover—who is us and who is them.

But the Torah reminds us that the binary distinctions Passover affirms as the basis of Jewish identity can also be weaponized: the Exodus only happens because a Pharaoh who “did not know Joseph” decided that no matter how long Jews lived in Egypt, and no matter how much they had contributed to the culture, there was an absolute distinction between Jews and Egyptians that made Jews untrustworthy, disloyal, dangerous. That distinction became the basis for our enslavement in Egypt, just as it has been the basis for anti-Semitic actions throughout history.

As a transgender Jew—a Jew whose gender doesn’t readily fit into the binary categories of male and female—I have always known that the binary distinctions on which we base identity can hurt as well as help, exclude as well as embrace, lead to oppression as well as liberation. Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t against these distinctions, or against the identities that were built upon them. For most of my life, I longed to have that kind of binary-based identity, longed to have a body that fit my female gender identity, longed to build a life as a woman, instead of always having to hide the fact that in a world where everyone was supposed to be either male or female, man or woman, I was somehow both, and neither.

But even as a child wishing for the kind of identity everyone else seemed to have, I noticed at Passover that the binary distinctions are hard to maintain. Passover is not only a festival that celebrates and enforces binary distinctions—it is also a festival that confronts us with our inability to make messy human reality conform to those distinctions. As maddening and uncomfortable as they can be, for me, the laws of Passover ensure that at least once a year, every observant Jew struggles with a condition of existence that transgender Jews live with and suffer from all the time: the fact that the binary distinctions on which Jews traditionally depend to define ourselves are unworkable simplifications of lives that are too complicated to fit within them. Most Jews do not identify as transgender, but like Joseph, the Egyptian Jew / Jewish Egyptian whose assimilation into Egyptian culture first brought our ancestors to Egypt, in one way or another, all of us are always more than either/or, this or that. This Passover, I hope you will join me in celebrating that.

This excerpt is from Dr. Joy Ladin’s essay, “Passover: Festival of Binaries.” Joy Ladin is the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution. She holds the David and Ruth Guttesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University and serves on the Keshet board.
haggadah Section: Maggid - Beginning

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