Today's Torah portion opens with the ritual implications of childbirth: "When a woman gives birth to a male..." The miracle of birth, that human beings can produce life together is itself a significant religious event, often the closest a person comes to feeling God's presence in an immediate and overwhelming way. That kind of miracle, poised on the border between life and death, divine and human, makes us question the basic assumptions of what it means to be human: what does it mean to be a man or a woman?
In the world of scholarship, a raging debate argues whether or not the emotional and temperamental differences between men and women are culturally induced, the result of years of social conditioning and imposition, or the natural expression of innate distinctions. Eloquent scholars, armed with extensive documentation and evidence, support both positions with passion.
Some insist that men and women are different at their core. That, due to hormonal and biological traits, women are more gentle, caring, nurturing, and private, whereas men are naturally aggressive, competitive, and playful. Women automatically translate feelings into words, and rely on lengthy discussions of feelings, moods, and perceptions to cultivate a sense of intimacy and closeness. Men, on the contrary, don't discuss their feelings, preferring instead to show feelings through deeds and moods. Women get together to talk; men gather to play.
While not denying the reality of many of these differences, those who argue the impact of society on behavior insist that we don't really know what differences are natural or not because all children are raised with social expectations of what gender imposes. Perhaps those differences are innate, but it is also likely that their "universal" existence is due to the pervasive roles considered masculine and feminine.
Jewish tradition provides an interesting meditation on this issue. Looking at the verse on childbirth, Midrash Va-Yikra Rabbah records the thought of Rabbi Samuel ben Nahman, that "when the Holy Blessed One created the first human, God created a hermaphrodite (fully male and female)."
Rabbi Levi goes on to expand on his colleagues insight: "When the Adam, (the first person) was created, God made Adam with two body-fronts, and then sawed the creature in two, so that two bodies resulted, one for the male and one for the female." According to this provocative midrash, the original state of the human being was both male and female, fully at home as both masculine and as feminine. What a remarkable idea!
In the beginning (not only of the world, but at the beginning of every human life) we are potentially both male and female. Only in the course of our development, as a species and as a fetus, do we gradually assume the distinct and exclusive identification with a particular gender.
In fact, that process of gender identification continues throughout one's lifetime, as the notions of what is male and female shift and alter across the years. But this midrash also hints at something more profound than simply recapitulating our origins. It alludes to the notion that all human beings, in our ideal state, are not just one or the other, but in important ways are still both.
In our core, we have room to express the fullest range of human responses and emotions--both the nurturing which we define as feminine and the drive we consider masculine, both the reliance on words to communicate feelings and the ability to savor silence in a loved one's company. By adhering rigidly to either a masculine or a feminine self-definition, we chop ourselves in half--denying a significant part of our own longings, development, and possibility. Rather than struggling to reduce our souls to the severed half which remains, we might direct our energy, as Judaism does in so many other areas, to hastening the advent of the messianic utopia.
In the realm of social justice, that means restoring the primal harmony symbolized by the Garden of Eden. In the depths of personal expression and gender identity, it may mean reclaiming our severed half--learning from the men and women with whom we share our lives how to allow our soul to blossom and infuse the full range of human potential.
Shabbat Shalom.