My grandparents founded a synagogue in a suburb of
Cleveland, Ohio. In the 1960s, the synagogue purchased and installed an organ.
Please know that this is odd, because you could never play an organ during
Shabbat services, not in any way that celebrates the Sabbath as intended. So,
what was the point? Being more like everyone else.
Then, they, and by they I mean the leadership – my
grandparents and the grandparents of many of the folks with whom I grew up who
referred to the synagogue as St. Urban’s as opposed to Suburban - suggested to
the Rabbi and the board that they change the Shabbat services to Sunday. Why?
Because then they could play golf with their buddies on Saturday. This was a
bit too far, even for a Reform synagogue, and the Rabbi vetoed it.
The point? Not sticking out. Or being Jewish in a
quiet way that does not draw attention to yourself, because to draw attention
to yourself is to show the world the broken and jumbled chaos that is at the
heart of Judaism, or Jews, or maybe just every person on the planet.
This leads me to the Pffermans. To Transparent. To the
theology of radical affirmation that Jill Soloway and their team have created.
Soloway quotes Rabbi Mordecai Finley to define the theology of Transparent: “He
defines G-d as an energy hovering between love, justice, truth and beauty—somewhere
between those four qualities is our search for spirituality.” That exact quote
shows up in the show, spoken by one of the characters. They are in search of
love and justice, truth and beauty, and that is what makes the show so painful
to watch. That, and how deeply, frighteningly out everyone is about being
Jewish and broken.
Secretly, most TV families are Jewish. You may not
know this, but in the same way that Jesus and the crew were Jewish and
Christianity seems to have forgotten about it, most of the shows we watched in
the heyday of network TV were about Jewish families, passing as “average,”
which translates as white, Christian, cisgendered, and heteronormative .
In one study, 59% of elite TV producers were Jewish
and in another over 50% of TV writers were Jewish. What we got on TV in our
1980s childhoods was an amalgam of Jewish feelings and ideas and experiences
grafted on to decidedly non-Jewish actors, plots, and lives. Why? Antisemitism.
Or the fear thereof. Jewish writers were scared to portray any kind of Jewish
life that could be open to interpretation by outsiders. Outside interpretations
of Judaism have a 2,000-year history of not working out so well for Jews. This
is like reminding people that Jesus and the Apostles were, with some
exceptions, Jewish. Somehow it is both true and impossible at the same time.
Enter Maura Pffeferman and her family of Jewish,
unlikeable, gender queer, trans, gay, sexual, intransigent, and messy humans
who are walking around in the world of Transparent, unabashedly being potential
Antisemitism poster children. I hate everyone in the show the way I hate my
family for being flawed and publicly unable to act in any other way than the
way they are. How can you show that to the neighbors? It violates the
agreed-upon need to keep our business to ourselves.
This is where I come out.
I converted to Christianity as an adult. Whatever
conversion means, and however it exists. It’s like the question of gender
identity at the heart of Transparent: there are just so many questions to which
we don’t know the answer, so let’s just live the question.
I can trace my feelings about Jesus back to Jesus
Christ Superstar and Godspell when I was in elementary school, and so I know it
was in there. However, this too is curious, since the fourth season of
Transparent centers around Jesus Christ Superstar, the music played by and
obsessed over by Jews, who know themselves as Jews. Which just goes to show
that no one really knows how any of this happens.
Stepping into Christianity just made me feel more
Jewish. It also allowed me to hear and see antisemitism up close and personal.
When someone refers to G-d for the 20th time as
Yahweh, and my skin crawls, because it is a basic lack of understanding of the
way Jews talk about G-d or use G-d’s names, I think about the way trans
activists talk about how no one messes up the gender pronouns of cisgendered
folks. No one ever calls me “he” by mistake. And yet, for trans folks this
happens even amongst friends who care and are supportive.
My version is hearing the Torah referred to as the Old
Testament. Let me tell you what it feels like when supportive friends co-opt
Judaism and use it to Christian ends while not seeing it for what it is—a world
unto itself filled with beauty, love, truth and justice. It feels like being on
the opposite side of a soundproof pane of glass yelling and gesticulating while
everyone on the other side is looking at you like a zoo animal. It feels like
being knifed in the leg by someone as they pass by on the street and they don’t
even look back.
I can’t be anything but Jewish in Christian circles
because to walk away from Judaism would mean allowing myself to be sucked into
the latent antisemitism of Christianity, and my body won’t let me do that. I
cry. I feel heat rising in my chest and arms. My ears ring. I may even secretly
think some of the things I hear—but that doesn’t mean I want to hear them from
Christians.
Let me point out here, that I am a preacher’s wife. A
cisgendered femme white lady from the Midwest with an Ivy League education and
a graduate degree who passes for straight, white, Christian, and whatever else
there is to pass as. This only makes it worse. The feeling that I cannot keep
my mouth shut. That the casual antisemitism I come up against needs to be
called out. That the breach is huge and needs to be bridged. I thought it would
be different than this. I’d read Paul, St. Augustine, you know, the converts,
and I thought something was supposed to be different.
Salvation did not make me not Jewish. Of course, it did not make Jesus not Jewish either. Nor the early Christians.
I was baptized during Easter Vigil, in a quiet dark
stone chapel which would have been romantic except a fanatical young guy had
fasted for reasons that are still not clear to me, and he fainted right before
the Holy Baptism part of the service. We had to turn the lights on and wait for
an ambulance to come and take him away. It took a while. I had time to
contemplate what I was doing, being presented to these people as a candidate
for being made new in Christ, inheriting Christ’s kingdom and the Kingdom of
G-d.
One of my evangelical friends said to me, in
preparation for baptism, “Don’t think this is going to solve everything.” It’s
like in AA when they tell you not to pull a geographic, because you will still
be you in the new place you go to avoid yourself. I knew I was trying to be
something new. A new version of myself, or maybe the old version of myself made
live. It is so hard to tell.
Salvation did not make me not Jewish. Of course, it
did not make Jesus not Jewish either. Nor the early Christians.
I don’t know what it’s like to watch Transparent,
which I love and which makes my skin crawl, if you are not Jewish, from a
family full of secrets that pass for boundaries, queer, and messed up. If you
are, it is like watching Madonna in the 1980s and saying, “Can you do that in
public? You can do that in public? Someone please tell me why we were always
embarrassed to do that in public?”
It’s necessary to watch. To have forgiveness, you have
to be yourself. Which is hard to sit still with when you see it on the
computer, in color, with music and sound, and all the feelings that brings up
about being Jewish, female, and alive.
I really wanted to be made new again when I became
Christian, and didn’t want to be the messy and broken me that walked around for
decades being a pain in the ass to the patriarchy while feeling like a kicked
dog. I wanted what they called “regeneration” in the early church. We don’t get
to be different people, but we do get forgiveness. An affirmation that who we
are is ok with Jesus and maybe it would be ok with us, too.
I floated around on that feeling of forgiveness for
the first few years I was Christian, hoping I could just stop there. I couldn’t.
I must have known it all along, that I could not just be hanging around on the
periphery of Christianity, enjoying the feeling of being in the right place.
Crying every time I went to church, and being flooded with relief,
self-acceptance, grace, and forgiveness.
Then, slowly I realized—that mess of my Jewish self
was my Christian self, and I don’t get to ditch it: I get to be that me in the
full light of grace and forgiveness. The celebration of self in Transparent,
unrepentant celebration of self is a relief. It is a relief and a call to
action and a kick in the butt.
There were no models for me in this transition from
Jewish me from Cleveland who thought Jesus was amazeballs and made me
misty-eyed to Christian me who thought Jesus was amazeballs and made me
misty-eyed. I knew no other converts. I didn’t believe in conversion as a
concept because it reeked of before and after pictures.
Was that enough? For a while.
A honeymoon period.
It ended because I kept running up against the
antisemitism in Christianity, this self-congratulatory relationship to Judaism
where Christianity is the natural and obvious moral evolution from the violence
and ugliness of Torah Judaism. Where Jesus saved us from being Jewish, thank
G-d, and Christians are the real people of Israel, the real inheritors of the
covenant.
I have had so many white Christian men mansplain
Judaism to me since I joined the fold. So many. The commonality is that they
are self-serving in their wrongness. Self-congratulatory in their smug
knowledge of the old, tired, played-out religion that Jesus left to become
Christian. I have a line I use when this happens. I say: “That is not what it’s
like from the inside.” Honestly, it doesn’t work.
When I am not at my best, when the darker angels of my
nature take over, I am speechless, furious, awash in epigenetic trauma, and
unable to do anything at all. I know that these folks who love Jesus don’t know
they hate Jews and don’t even understand that’s what’s going on. They are still
my people. Fellow travelers. Part of the Beloved Community that is the Kingdom
of G-d.
Then, slowly I realized—that mess of my Jewish self was my Christian self, and I don’t get to ditch it: I get to be that me in the full light of grace and forgiveness.
In Christianity, I found a language for what I felt
when I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, I found words to set to
the lyric poetry theology operas that defined my inchoate feelings about the
intensity of loving G-d. I still love the energy hovering between love,
justice, truth and beauty – that G-d of the Jews, and don’t believe in them any
less than I ever did.
In fact, I believe that Jesus was the best
representative of that G-d that we can culturally imagine. I also found a
trajectory -- the idea that it was possible to love G-d and create a world
filled with that love. It’s possible in the here and now full-on disaster that
is being human.
I also found a surprising part in a very hegemonic
tradition. I had moments of feeling like I could be ”normal” and not Jewish.
Which I guess I could have if I had turned my back on my people. If I had a
slightly higher capacity for compartmentalization. But I don’t.
Following the Pffeferman’s through Israel and through
life, bold and bawdy and filled with sex and complexity and angst and pain and
redemption, is like reading an old diary. Or seeing a friend from high school
who says, “You were such a slut back in the 80s.”
The urge is to turn away, but turning away is not
grace. Turning away does not welcome G-d. As an adolescent, I learned to fake
an exterior that would be acceptable to the most average person I could ever
meet in Cleveland, Ohio. One in which it was necessary to be female without
being sexual. Jewish without being different.
Human without a dark pull towards G-d. Smart without
being threatening. Pretty without any hormones. Well dressed without drawing
any attention to myself.
None of that is possible on Transparent. An
impossibility that is grace. That is being regenerated into the death and
resurrection of Jesus where the moneylenders and the single women with money
and the folks who cast nets in the sea, and the Roman soldiers were all welcome.
That is the Christianity I found and love. That mess.
It is not an up and out strategy where I will escape anything. It is a down and
in strategy where I will need to face the antisemitism in my face all the time,
and the sexism and fear of women’s sexuality that religion seems to draw
strength from.
Maura Pffeferman sitting with Shelley at the table in
the back yard where they raised their kids singing, “everything’s alright, now,
everything’s fine” from Jesus Christ Superstar after four seasons of family
misery, upheaval, craziness, and tsuris (pain, difficulty).
That is a blessing.
When we think of what the Beloved Community looks
like, I’m afraid we think it will be a lot of well-behaved and thin exemplars
of a variety of ways humans show up, all of whom have beauty privilege,
confidence, humility, and glowing health while looking like the United Nations
of some Benetton ad consumerism.
I’m afraid that the prophetic theology of Transparent
tells us something different. The theology of Transparent tells us that the
Beloved Community will be a mess with bad haircuts, different bodies, a lot of
eye shadow, sweatpants, beards, bad taste in partners, annoying habits, sticky
situations, and will make poor choices and generally not represent well, and
basically piss us off and make us uncomfortable with ourselves and the way we
live our lives. There will be Jews being embarrassingly Jewish and Queers being
embarrassingly Queer and people doing gender in ways that are all over the
spectrum.
That is a blessing.
And a call to action.
Rabbi Mike Moskowitz, a very unlikely trans and queer
activist Ultra Orthodox rabbi described faith that way, as a call to action.
The writing, acting, producing on—and watching of—Transparent, are all acts of faith. Faith that it is okay
to be Jewish, to be female, to be queer, to be flawed, to live in a
non-normative body, to be a person of color, to be horrifically and beautifully
human.
The call to action is to re-imagine the Beloved
Community with real humans in it. To accept that we are those real humans, and
to know that it is not going to mean that I get to be a better version of
myself. I just get to be the nice Jewish girl from the Midwest who found Jesus
and tries to live the call of both the G-d of love, justice, truth, and beauty
and the G-d of grace and forgiveness.
The theology of Transparent is the call to be more
myself, out loud, and in person, all the time. Maura, in the end, is a
conglomeration of everything she has ever been, including all the privilege and
asshole-ness of her white-academic-man-self and her Maura
who-now-writes-about-oppression-self. We get to be all of ourselves.
I can be Jewy and messy, Christian and female, new and
old, loud about what worries me and quiet in my awe at where I am. Transparent
is a call to have faith and a refusal to make those less comfortable selves
disappear.
—Michelle Auerbach
note: After some consideration and discussion, the
editors and writer of this piece decided to opt for the spelling antisemitism,
while acknowledging that there is a lack of general consensus about this word,
both stylistically and politically.
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