Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

7. Choosing Life - June 26, 2007

June 26, 2007 I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your seed may live. Deuteronomy 30:19 The answer to the problem of being human fits on one small stone. I’m looking at it now: a rounded triangle of Jerusalem stone, its bone whiteness streaked with browns and grays and veins that gleam pink when the sun strikes at the right angle. It’s gone through a lot, this stone. One of the corners has shattered, revealing the depthless crystal within. The surface is scored with scratches, lines, and curves so densely clustered they suggest a message in an ancient language. That’s the way it is with Jerusalem, a city and an idea inseparable from the damage it has endured and occasioned. Dina gave me this stone on a sunny Saturday spring morning in Manhattan. She had just returned from Israel. I had just returned from hours of walking from her West Village penthouse to the very bottom of Manhattan, the oldest part, where packed ferries make the circular pilgrimage to Ellis Island. 81 7 Choosing Life Dina had slept a few hours—she never sleeps more than a few hours—and was dancing in pajamas through her apartment, which, as usual, was filled with light. It was the morning after I had decided not to kill myself in her apartment. Fortunately, I didn’t tell her about that until after she gave me the present. It’s just a little thing, she told me, pulling a crumpled brown bag out of her duffle. It was heavier than I expected. I opened the paper slowly and found myself face to face with the gouged white face of the stone. There were letters painted on it, Hebrew letters, dusk blue outlined, scribal style, in black: u-va-charta ba-chayim. And therefore choose life. Underneath, in spidery black ink, was a Hebrew word I’d never seen. I sounded it out slowly to myself: L-j-o-ee. L’joee. To Joy. There it was, the name Annie had given me because, she said, it reflected the way she understood my transition: not as a radical transformation but as an internal adjustment, a shift at my heart as subtle and as crucial as the shift from the “a” in “Jay” to the “o” in “Joy.” It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, choosing life. That sounds strange. Our bodies are so predisposed toward living that they make it hard to experience life as a choice. We can’t stop breathing (believe me, I’ve tried); we can’t stop waking; no matter how convincingly our hearts break, they refuse to stop beating. Most of us second our bodies’ predilection for existence. The traditional Jewish birthday wish is “May you live to one hundred and twenty.” Christians believe that eternal life is the ultimate telos of human existence. The health of nations is measured by life expectancy, and medical science takes the extension of life as an axiomatic mission statement. But I’ve never wanted to live a long time. When I was a child, the idea that my tortured little consciousness might go on forever was a prospect of hell, not heaven. Though I often entertained grandiose fantasies of fame or accomplishment, I had no actual ambitions; I couldn’t imagine any future and didn’t especially want to. Part One: Who Will Be 82 I thought that in this, as in so much else, I was alone, something other (I was wildly ambivalent about whether otherness meant superiority or inferiority) than human. So it startled me when I arrived at the passage in the Torah in which the aged Moses, knowing he is about to die without entering the Promised Land, exhorts the children of Israel to choose life—which meant that he felt, as I did, that life was a difficult choice. It was a Saturday morning service. I was ten or eleven, sitting among the old, heavily accented, reflexively Orthodox men who made up the minyan of our synagogue. My parents weren’t religious—my father was an atheist, while my mother carried on Jewish traditions but was noncommittal about why she did so. In my Jewishness, too, I was a mutation. Judaism had always seemed to...