Knowing the Soul of the Stranger: Trans Identity, Religious Community, and Making a Place for God
Dr. Joy Ladin
Please join the Pacific School of Religion and the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion for a talk given by acclaimed author, poet and scholar Dr. Joy Ladin. She will present the annual Georgia Harkness Lecture.
Dr. Joy Ladin holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University. She is the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish university.
Professor Joy Ladin combines personal experience and biblical interpretation to explore how the perspectives of transgender people and other “hyper-minorities” – people seen as profoundly different from most members of their communities – can help us to understand the difficult relations between God and humanity that we see in much of the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the Book of Numbers, Professor Ladin argues that the recurring conflicts between the Israelites and the God enshrined at the center of their camp resemble those experienced by human hyper-minorities and their communities. Despite God’s centrality to the Israelites’ lives, God is always seen by the Israelite community, as different in ways that are often hard to accommodate or understand. From this perspective, God’s insistence that the Israelites identify with “strangers” (gerim, resident aliens and converts) – by remembering that they “know the soul of a stranger” and experienced estrangement in Egypt – offers a communal spiritual practice that helps us to make a place, in our communities and in our lives, for the ultimate stranger, God.