`

parsha ki teitzei

14 September 2024

CN for sexual violence and (trans)misogyny, mentions of war and death

crossdressing

לֹא־יִהְיֶ֤ה כְלִי־גֶ֙בֶר֙ עַל־אִשָּׁ֔ה וְלֹא־יִלְבַּ֥שׁ גֶּ֖בֶר שִׂמְלַ֣ת אִשָּׁ֑ה כִּ֧י תוֹעֲבַ֛ת יי אֱלֹקֶ֖יךָ כׇּל־עֹ֥שֵׂה אֵֽלֶּה׃

A woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear woman’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to your God יי.

it's a pretty famous line and on first glance it sucks and on the next million glances it sucks too. this is a heavy line and one that is not easy to grapple with. this post will not necessarily alieviate that so much as heap additional heaviness upon it. but i found some context in the commentaries which surprised and challenged me, and I wanted to share.

before i get any further

there are obvious workarounds to this verse if you wanna go that way, starting with "what even is wo/man's apparel" and ending perhaps with "what even is a wo/man," potentially making a detour through "trans women are women, trans men are men, and nonbinary people are (in many but not all cases) neither" or even "this seems by phrasing to maybe be an offense between Gd and human, not between human and human, and therefore not prosecutable." another obvious out is that there is no such thing as woman's clothing or men's clothing; if a woman is wearing clothing, it is women's clothing, because it belongs to a woman, and if a man is wearing it, it becomes men's clothing, etc.

however! i am not so foolish as to pretend that i don't understand that this line is really talking about socially normative gender and the fact that gender does not cohere without socialization, without divisions and language and violence and loss. the way one dresses has, from at least the writing of our pasuk forward, been one of the primary fronts in that battle throughout history. as we will see shortly, it is in fact this social fabric of gender --- and battles over it --- which the traditional commentators have largely taken as their subject.

rishonim

Our verse, with the prohibition on crossdressing, is fairly near the start of the parsha, and is preceded by some laws on taking captives of war as wives (yikes), what to do when a man's firstborn is born to his less-favored wife (yikes), and the procedure for stoning a wayward son (yikes!) among other things. The rishonim I read interpreted all of these verses as continuous temporally and causally, starting with the captive wife and treating all the unfortunate situations that are mentioned next as *caused* by this act. Here's Rabbeinu Bahya (in translation from Sefaria):

The next paragraph [after the POW as a wife stuff . . .] which describes a situation in the home of someone who has two wives one of whom he loves whereas he harbours hostile feelings towards the other, teaches that the Torah did not easily agree to permitting the אשת יפת תאר to the Jewish soldier, seeing it foresaw that introducing her into the soldier’s household was likely to result in friction in that home. Had it not been the Torah’s wish to help the soldier sublimate his carnal lust for that woman, the Torah would not have done so, seeing the chances that her husband will eventually hate such a woman are statistically quite high. Moreover, if he has a son from her, the chances that the son will become a delinquent are not insignificant. This is why the paragraph about such a delinquent follows in short order.

R' Bahya continues with a proof-text from the life of King David and comparisons to other warnings in Tanakh, and ends with a banger of a line:

The sum total of the moral/ethical teaching of these verses is that even marriages which are permitted by the Torah are not necessarily suitable unions. The marriages to prisoners of war are a prime example of such unions.

The logic here is about power and contempt --- that unions which are made from power-over (eg, killing someone's family, taking them captive, and then marrying them) are likely to lead to disdain or disfavor (of that person and of their children), which will lead to the children themselves causing violence and pain out of that suffering they've been handed (of their parent's disdain). I don't think it's much of a stretch to read the husband's disdain of his captive wife and her children as misplaced self disgust --- that once the thrill of taking control over her life and body has worn off, she serves as an unwelcome reminder of his cruelty and greed. I was grateful for the clear discomfort on R' Bahya's part towards these quite-discomforting sections of text. particularly the emphasis on the generational consequences of disdain feel relevant as we get to the crossdressing prohibition. (There are several verses in between but I'm skipping ahead!)

crossdressing for real this time

Chizkiah ben Manoach, who seems to be a 13th century French commentator with a personal philosophy around not citing his sources, has the following on the verse itself, potentially sourced from Ibn Ezra:

“a woman must not wear men’s clothing;” it is an act of disgrace and sexual provocation. Having taken note of this law, Yael, the Kenite woman who killed Sisera, the general who had commanded the army of the Canaanite King Jabin of Chatzor, did not use weapons used by male soldiers, such as arrows or a sword when doing so, but took a tent pin. (Judges, 4:21) This paragraph has been written immediately after those dealing with women and warfare, in order to remind us that warfare is something reserved for men, not women. When men go out to war they are likely to encounter situations making promiscuity a great temptation. They are therefore warned not to add to such temptation by dressing up as women.

Which is ALL really interesting. It's seen immediately that crossdressing is super hot and might lead to fun (prohibited) sex, which is quite correct lol. But it's also really interesting that a tent pin is considered a woman's weapon, for symbolic reasons around domesticity and the private sphere as well as practical questions of halaxa --- what are the other permitted womens' weapons!? AFAIK Jewish women throughout history are rarely associated with the domestic/private sphere as strongly as their Muslim and Christian counterparts--- if the men are studying constantly, someone's gotta run the family business. The phrasing here seems to indicate that it's just that a tent pin isn't automatically associated with socially male activities, as arrows/swords seem to be. But that's tantamount to an acknowledgement that gender is socially constructed --- if swords become associated with women, are they then permitted? ( But then how would this ever happen, if they're already not permitted to Jewish women?)

And then there's the lines at the end about men "add[ing] to such temptation" by dressing up as women, which can be read as potential references to sex work and rape as well as consensual and recreational sex between "men." The ambiguity of the line reflects to my mind a hesitance to put any of these acts (variously encouraged or prohibited acts to my intended audience, but universally forbidden under traditional halacha) explicitly into language. There's a key understanding here that war seems to undo gender, that one of the risks of war is an association with a breakdown in gender and sexual roles as well as sexual ethics. And a taboo around bringing those violent breakdowns of already-violent divisions into language.

gender under duress

The throughline of our commentators offers a warning: war tends to violently transform gender and sexual norms. We've seen an example of the horrors of this in the parsha, with the Torah's deep ambivalence, extended by R' Bahya, about taking women prisoners of war as wives. But we can also see this in the discomfort with women picking up arms, or men (in their terms) crossdressing as women to have sex. And we can also see it more recently in American history --- the combination of women entering the workforce during WWII, men and women living more sex-segregated lives for several years, and the resultant economic boom transformed the sexual culture of the United States and produced *both* the widespread adoption of bourgeois sexual norms among certain strata of the working class, and the seeds of sexual liberationist movements. Modern history offers too a relentless litany of more violent and horrific ruptures in sexual morals. I find myself sharing our commentators' reluctance to bring these acts directly into language.

if there is an open question for me from all this, it is perhaps not in the question of whether war breaks down the fabric of gender (how could it not?), but rather whether and how the breakdown of gender itself is a war. There's a sense in the commentators that crossdressing itself might lead to all of the awful things which in fact are the direct products of war itself. It is important to reject this confluence and name the use of force as actual culprit in these horrors. But the perhaps too-strong coupling of war and crossdressing in the rishonim displays a profound sense of how vulnerable social fabric and gendered norms are, how quickly they can shift and twist. There is no escaping a social world formed, as tradition would have it, of a violent and pleasurable relationship between language and loss. Leaning into --- rather than disavowing or concealing --- the ways in which language and sociality are inherently violent opens up space to understand our world more fully, and grasp the sweetness in the pain.