Hello, Torah lovers! I recently had my first academic article published in the Journal of Jewish Ethics, which is very exciting. I am sending an excerpt here, of the introduction and one of the three main sections. If you would like, I am happy to share a PDF of the full article; just respond to this email and ask.
“גּן נעוּל אחִתי כָלּה…”
A garden locked is my own, my bride. —Shir Hashirim 4:12
The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies.
—Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public”
This article draws on queer theory to enrich our understanding of Hilchot Eruvin—i.e., the rabbinic laws of spatial boundaries as they apply to carrying objects on Shabbat. While many have thought about queerness and halakhah in conversation, this is—with some notable exceptions—typically about queerness as a “problem” to be solved in the halakhic system. The intervention I am offering is the use of queerness—queer experience, queer community, and queer thinking—not as an issue to resolve but as a resource for deepening our thinking on halakhah. This approach views the decades of work by both activists and theorists, laypeople and scholars, as a generative offering with which we can think.
Hilchot Eruvin offers us a realm of halakhah that is preoccupied with many of the same questions as queer theory: what is public and what is private? How do we distinguish between our own bodies and spaces and others’? Is the nature of our relationships with one another fixed, or does it shift? In focusing on the generative overlap between the concerns of Eruvin and those of queer theory, this paper works to both illuminate queer perspectives within the Rabbinic project and to challenge the assumption that halakhic texts are a body of work which fundamentally prop up heterosexuality. In offering queer readings of Hilchot Eruvin, I suggest that queer- ness can be found in halakhic structures and methods, and that engaging in questions of queerness within the Rabbinic and halakhic canons must move beyond texts which explicitly address sexuality.
This essay has three sections. The first explores the challenge that Eruvin and queer theory offer to an understanding of public and private as a rigid binary. The second explores texts that challenge us to move beyond the primacy of the nuclear family unit, and the third suggests that Eruvin can model a sexuality beyond simply penetrative intercourse.
Public and Private
The rabbinic system of Eruvin, which offers guidelines for physically and metaphysically combining different types of spaces to permit carrying within them on Shabbat, challenges the rigid binary of public and private, creating instead a nuanced continuum of different kinds of spaces. These gradations gesture beyond only the physical “public” and “private,” encouraging us to imagine beyond this binary the structures of power that are enforced by this stark distinction. By both describing and reifying a layered map of spaces beyond the dichotomy, eruvin illuminate the ways in which observant Jews, like queer people, do not fit comfortably into the world created by the powerful.
Charlotte Fonrobert, in her landmark article “Neighborhood as Ritual Space: The Case of the Rabbinic Eruv,” asserts that the system of Eruvin “operates as a ritualized socio-spatial framework for the rabbinic thinking about the interaction between domestic and by and large non-Jewish civic or public sphere.” (Fonrobert 2008). For Fonrobert, the rabbis use the discourse of the eruv to understand the relationship between the private domestic sphere, where Jews and Judaism can control their own space, and the Roman-dominated public sphere. The neighborhood, she argues, is an intermediate space, not as Jewishly controlled as the home but also not as completely outside of Jewish communal control as true public areas. “[T]he ritual system of the eruv,” asserts Fonrobert, functions “as a (rabbinic) theory of Jewish neighbor- hood, as a tool of ritualizing Jewish neighborhood, and perhaps not so much establishing rather than providing an affirmation and ritual formalization of the neighborhood” (Fonrobert 2008, 243). Eruvin helped the rabbis understand their place in the world, both literally and metaphorically.
Fonrobert’s work in understanding the theoretical grounding of rabbinic conceptualization of eruvin resonates strongly with explorations in the field of queer theory. Reading Fonrobert’s work alongside writing on queerness’s relationship to public and private—both in physical space and in the realm of ideas—illuminates how Eruvin as a system makes parallel theo- retical interventions to queer thinking. Queerness complicates the distinc- tion between public and private, just as Eruvin does. It also has necessitated the creation of spaces distinct from those seen by the powerful (straight) majority, just as eruvin function to create spaces that co-exist with—but are perhaps not seen by—the powerful non-Jewish majority.
Fonrobert points out that the nature of the physical boundary-markers necessitated within Hilchot Eruvin is such that it is likely that they are noticeable only by those who care about the system and are relatively inconspicuous to those who do not:
The nature of the urban space is imagined as such that no one else (outside the Jewish community rabbinically defined) would care about the presence of some boundary markers, especially if they are inconspicuous to all but those who would know what to look for (i.e. Jews who care about the institution of an eruv). In this reading, the rabbis opted for marking their presence in the urban fabric of the late antique world (whether that be Roman Palestine or later the Persian Empire) inconspicuously, almost in the mode of tricksters. (Fonrobert 2008, 257)
The built elements of the eruv, then, are there only for those who know to look for them. They coexist with the “urban fabric of the ancient world” but are not noticeable for those who are not invested in the system of the eruv. In this way, the eruv operates as part of the formation of what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner call a “counterpublic.” In their important article “Sex in Public,” Berlant and Warner write,
Making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counterpublic—an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation. (Berlant and Warner 1998, 558)
In other words, a queer world necessitates the creation of a new form of relationship, one which is not related to the home or the public sphere. The “counterpublic” exists simultaneously with the more powerful and exposed public, and it is accessible by those who have the context to enter it.
Eruvin, then, are part of the creation of a counterpublic, building a world that coexists with the dominant one while challenging it. In the context of rabbinic Jewish communities as a minority in colonized spaces, be that Roman Palestine or Sasanian Persia, the eruv as imagined by the rabbis provides a Jewish realm that is both visible and invisible. For those who do see the eruv-bound space, it is defined by the standards of Jewish law, a system of thought and being counter to the dominant system around it.
This is emphasized by Fonrobert’s characterization of the rabbis as acting “almost in the mode of tricksters.” The trickster has been characterized as a queer figure; as Jacob Glazier puts it,
The trickster is particularly apropos for a discussion of gender
and sexuality in regards to queerness because of its almost always ambiguous or polymorphous gender and sexuality (e.g., transgendered, intersexed), and its political animality or incessant thrust toward transgressing sexual and erotic cultural taboos in a way that is uncanny, perverse, flamboyant and unsettled— i.e., queer. (Glazier 2014, 28)
The rabbis, then, as they engage in their subversive—and perhaps even transgressive—project of creating their own Jewish, halakhic space under the noses of the dominant population, are tricksters, and are therefore engaging with queerness. While the taboos the rabbis are transgressing in this case are not necessarily those of the erotic, they nevertheless are challenging the standard built world that they live in.
Understood through the lens of the counterpublic, Eruvin asks us to imagine what challenges an eruv-defined space can offer to dominant and powerful ways of being. Berlant and Warner write:
The queer project we imagine is not just to destigmatize those average intimacies [ANH: for example, the heterosexual couple form], not just to give access to the sentimentality of the couple for persons of the same sex, and definitely not to certify as properly private the personal lives of gays and lesbians. Rather, it is to support forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity. (Berlant and Warner 1998, 558.)
Queer modes of being, for Berlant and Warner, should not merely involve reappropriating heterosexual modes of being and capitalist understandings of property and ownership (and thereby of the public and private). Building out the counterpublic, rather, must involve challenging what we understand to be “public” and “private” and thereby creating new forms of access to freedom, joy, and power.
In reading Fonrobert through the lens of the queer counterpublic, we learn that the rabbinic project of troubling public and private through the system of Eruvin can itself be understood as queer and ideological. The eruv creates territories that are neither public nor private, that are built around alternative understandings of space and ownership. To understand the eruv as a queer project is to read communities who use eruvin as themselves building queer space, defined broadly. Eruv-bound communities, then, are in some ways experiencing queerness in their very existence. Troubling the physical spaces of public and private can be an opening into troubling the concepts ideologically.
Fonrobert writes that in the system of the eruv that “neighborhood is turned into an essential communal buffer-zone between exposure to the public world of the non-Jewish world which is the space of the other(s), and the Jewish household which tugs Jewish practice sagely between its four walls. It is the neighborhood where rabbinic Judaism claims a place of its own” (Fonrobert 2008, 258). In other words, the legal world crafted by Hilchot Eruvin is an attempt to build a space where the Jewish community can “fit,” where there is not struggle or tension against the public, dominant power of the colonizer. What this illuminates is that in most spaces, rabbinic Jews or rabbis, at least, felt a lack of comfort.
The feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes that
comfort is about the fit between body and object: my comfortable chair may be awkward for you, with your differently-shaped body... To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins. One fits, and by fitting, the surfaces of bodies disappear from view. The disappearance of the surface is instructive: in feelings of comfort, bodies extend into spaces, and spaces extend into bodies. The sinking feeling involves a seamless space, or a space where you can’t see the “stitches” between bodies. (Ahmed 2004, 148)
The ease between one’s body and one’s physical environment that Ahmed describes as characteristic of comfort is part of what the rabbis—and halakhic communities—are seeking to create with the eruv. On a literal level, the ability to carry that the eruv creates makes it “hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins,” as a person can simply walk out of the house carrying what they need. Without an eruv, the observant Jew must scrutinize their person for even a spare tissue in a pocket, differentiating sharply between their body and the world around it.
In a symbolic sense, too, the eruv creates comfort. In Fonrobert’s words, “It is the neighborhood where rabbinic Judaism claims a place of its own.” It delineates a community of similar people, or, in a world that is not Jewish, similarly othered people. Ahmed’s writing further illuminates how the dominant power structures build a world that is not comfortable for those on the margins:
Heteronormativity functions as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape. Those spaces are lived as comfortable as they allow bodies to fit in; the surfaces of social space are already impressed upon by the shape of such bodies (like a chair that acquires its shape by the repetition of some bodies inhabiting it: we can almost see the shape of bodies as “impressions” on the surface). The impressions acquired by surfaces function as traces of bodies. We can even see this process in social spaces. As Gill Valentine has argued, the “heterosexualisation” of public spaces such as streets is naturalised by the repetition of different forms of heterosexual conduct (images on billboards, music played, displays of heterosexual intimacy and so on), a process which goes unnoticed by heterosexual subjects (Valentine 1996:149). The surfaces of social as well as bodily space “record” the repetition of acts, and the passing by of some bodies and not others. (Ahmed 2004, 148)
The social and public world, per Ahmed, is built for the comfort of some bodies and experiences and not others. The eruv, through this lens, is an attempt to carve out a corner of the world for the comfort of Jewish bodies; in doing so, it illuminates that the world at large is not a place of comfort.
The system of Eruvin encourages acknowledgment that we don’t fit smoothly into the world around us. We are always challenging it, reshaping it, trying to understand it in a way that works. The eruv is a counterpublic, creating a semi-visible alternative world, and it is a space that attempts to build comfort and in doing so illuminates the ways in which the world at large is fundamentally not a space of comfort.
Eruvin makes us feel queerer in relation to the world around us. It high- lights the ways in which halakhah-observant Jews both are and opt into being the other, making us fit less easily into a comfortable majority. We move through the world not quite fitting, attempting to sit in chairs already shaped by others’ bodies. Eruvin both crafts queer spaces and creates spaces that are more comfortable, a real and conceptual space made for those who are not in power.
And that is the end of Section 1 of the article! Sections 2 and 3 (plus a Methods section!) are great, in my own biased opinion, and I am happy to share the full PDF.
As always, financial support for my work in the form of a paid subscription helps me have the time and space to write and teach Torah!
I'm having a hard time parsing this article because I do not understand what exactly queerness is. It seems amorphous. Can you explain? Thanks.