Beshalaḥ and Time spirals / בשלח און צײַט־ספּיראַלן

This is a weekly series of frum, trans, anarchist parsha dvarim. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns or, worse, is Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make it more comfortable) and uses Torah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

Content note: Discussion of transphobia and fascism; mentions of Nazis, AIDS crisis, the genocide in Palestine, hunger

An appeal: My friend Areej and her family have finally been allowed to return home in Central Gaza after living in an IDP camp tent for months, but their house was partially destroyed by the bombing. If you can donate even $5, please do. May this be the start of a lasting and meaningful peace as we all rebuild and move toward a free Palestine.

This week, NYU Langone and Mt. Sinai hospitals in New York have completely halted healthcare for their trans patients under 19, capitulating to an Executive Order which threatened to end federal funding for institutions which provided trans youth care. The CDC has instructed its researchers to remove any newly banned terms from their work, including "gender", "LGBT", and "transsexual". Many federal websites on HIV/AIDS, trans issues, and climate change have gone dark, and others like the federal travel advisory website have dropped the T in LGBT. I'm trying to avoid the news because it makes me unproductive and sad; these are just the thing I've heard about organically. People are scared.

I fear that this attack on trans people is a distraction tactic: dozens of cruel Executive Orders are signed in rapid succession and we're left scrambling in reaction while something even more sinister—we don't know what, which by design—is brewing. Or maybe all the horrors are bald, fully revealed, and it's enough to overwhelm us with too many things to do, too much unconstitutional legislation to challenge, too many things to protest.

Parshas Beshalakh chronicles the parting of the Red Sea and the 40-year wandering b'midbar (in the wilderness). The Israelites sing of their deliverance while Miriam dances and plays the drum, but soon they face the immediate problems of hunger and thirst. Hashem provides water and the people grumble for food. Hashem provides manna and some of the people fail to obey instructions on how and when to gather it, so it goes rotten and full of maggots. Moishe worries about the viability of his leadership. We are instructed to hold Shabos: not to gather food nor cook nor travel. We will remain b'midbar for some time.

Time is something like a spiral. We are reliving the exodus. We are reliving the Nazis' early years: the first book burning of the Institüte für Sexualwissenschaft, the first (and at the time, only) center for trans healthcare and community. We are reliving the early AIDS crisis in the 1980s: Reagan refused to fund CDC research while millions died, and instead funded the racist mass incarceration event called the "War on Drugs" and increased American military meddling in the Middle East. I have spent so many hours imagining the lives of my ancestors through these times. It is an almost unbearable tragedy that I can never truly know what it was like to be a transfag Jewish anarchist in these eras of flourishing-and-death, but about the stresses of fascism I no longer have to imagine.