Hello, and welcome to Home to Her, the podcast that's dedicated to reclaiming the lost and stolen wisdom of the sacred feminine. I'm your host, Liz Kelley, and on each episode, we explore her stories and myths, her spiritual principles, and most importantly, what this wisdom has to offer us right now. Thanks for being here. Let's get started. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Hey everybody and welcome to the show. This is Liz joining you as usual from central Virginia and the unceded lands of the Monacan nation and I am so glad that you are here with me today. And as always, if you want to know whose native lands you might be residing on, go check out the map at native land. ca covers pretty much the entire world. And yeah, if you are interested in learning about. The Sacred Feminine. First of all, you're in the right place. I, this is my 99th episode that I'm recording. So exciting. So there's a pretty extensive back catalog of podcast episodes if you're new here that you can move through and hear from some really amazing people. And you know, if you want to learn from me, there's a few ways that you can do that. Go check out home2her. com. There's a lot of older articles that are out there that I've written. There's information about my book, Home to Her, Walking the Transformative Path of the Sacred Feminine. That's available pretty much wherever you buy your books. And it's also available on Audible, if you like to listen, if you'd like to listen to my voice, to me reading. And yeah, If you want to reach out to me and share your thoughts on this podcast, I would love that. I love hearing from you. Social media is a really good way to do that, but you can also send me an email through my website. All the social media handles are at home to her, but I'll put all of this in the show notes so you don't have to remember it, but I'd love to get your feedback. I'd love to get your ideas on episodes. So please do reach out. So I've got a repeat guest here and you guys know, I've, I've, if you've listened to the podcast for a while, this happens a few times. Some of the conversations are just so wildly rich and exciting and wonderful that I just know It's got to keep going. And my first conversation with this guest was definitely like that. So let me go ahead and introduce her to you right now. Joy Ladin is a widely published essayist and poet, literary scholar, and nationally known speaker on transgender issues. From 2003 to 2021, she held the David and Ruth Gotsman Chair in English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University. Her gender transition and return to teaching in 2008 made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Joy's experience of being poetically mentored by the Shekinah resulted in the completion of a book length sequence, Shekinah Speaks, published by Selva Obscura in spring 2022, which she joined me to speak about on this podcast in 2023. It's an amazing episode, so you should absolutely go back and listen to that if you haven't. She's also published several other books, including, most recently, a new book of poetry, Family, and Once Out of Nature, selected essays on the transformation of gender. She is the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for The Book of Anna. And she has two Lambda Literary Award finalists, Impersonation and Transmigration, as well as two works of creative nonfiction, National Jewish Book Award finalists, Through the Door of Life, A Jewish Journey Between Genders, and Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalists, Soul of the Stranger. reading God and Torah from a transgender perspective, the first book linked work of Jewish transtheology. And she is joining us today from her home in New York. Joy, I'm so glad you're back. Welcome. Welcome.

Thank you, Liz. I'm delighted to be back.

Yeah. So the, our first conversation, I'm going to go back and look, I think it was the first episode of 2023. And I just remember feeling so. incredibly fed and nourished by that conversation. And I think, you know, usually if you all have been listening for a while, you know that I usually start with people's background and spiritual journey, and we had such a beautiful and rich conversation about that on the first episode. So I definitely encourage you to go back and check that one out and I'll put it in the show notes. I think we might be a nice place to start. Joy, is, is, if you want to tell us a little bit about your most recent works, first of all, I'm very impressed that you had two books come out at the exact same time, that's quite impressive.

I know, it sounds really impressive, it makes me feel extremely productive and prolific, but, and, you know, we'll go with that, but anybody who's like you, who's put together a book knows that there's a long, long lead time. Writing, editing, copying, editing. Publishing, you know, it's, it, it takes a long time for a book to come together, and it really was a bit of a coincidence that these two books, both of which were accumulations, a collection of poetry and a collection of essays. So they're both accumulations of mostly earlier work, and they just happened to come together in a time where they could be published simultaneously by the same press. Which is very cool, but it makes me seem like somebody who just writes books at the drop of a hat. And that's not, that's not actually true.

I have heard that about poetry in particular, that sometimes the, you know, it, you could have poems reflected for, you know, in a particular book that had been written over a period of 10 years or something like that. Is that, is that true?

Yeah, in family, there are some poems that are not quite 10 years old, but there are a couple that go back to the mid 2010s. And, and then there are books that were written very close to the time when the book was completed because a lot of the book concerns and is informed by the my mother dying of dementia and other stuff. So it's a combination. Of an accumulation and also things that that were close to contemporary in a way that was quite unusual for me and it was personal in a way that was unusual because of growing up and spending most, so much of my life in the closet as a trans person writing autobiography, writing autobiographically In poetry really has been difficult for me to learn. I've said I plenty of times, but it's, it's usually distanced from the details of my life in a way that many of the poems in this book aren't, you know, they, they talk about things that actually happened in very specific ways. And I doesn't mean anybody other than myself. So it felt like a very risky. Book in that way, as my mother was dying, I was getting sicker becoming house bound and that's another strand that's in the book and the landlord thought that would be a good time to house. I've been living in for 9 years and so there were a lot of changes and things that were closing down and that that sense of things changing is it is part of the book and then another part of the, the idea of family. Is presented as an expanding set of concentric circles. So it starts from very, very close in and by the end of the book, there are poems about being, you know, thinking of America during the first Trump era as, as a family and about what it means to be, you know, part of the family of White Americans though so the, the book concludes with the autobiography of my whiteness, which is something that both separates me from some of the American family, but also because of the racial hierarchies that I and every other American is part of also connects me like that's an unfortunate way, but it's a way that our, the American family is organized. And writing about that enabled me to yeah, claim full membership, you know, with all the ambivalences. I don't know about you and your family, but I had a lot of ambivalences about my connection with my family. And that comes out from the micro level of my relationship with my mother to the macro level of my sense of being part of this country.

Hmm. Oh, I love that. Yes, I do. Well, ambivalence. I don't know. Yes, ambivalence about family, both at the, at that national level and the individual level. And I asked, as you were saying that I was thinking, Hmm, I find that there's a tendency for me to and I think I'm doing it intentionally to create a story and a narrative that makes sense to me that says this is why I am in this particular family. This is why I have landed here at this particular time on earth. And I'm kind of happy to say that it's a, it's a supportive story usually, you know, but but I've also, you know, it's, it's a, it's a story that makes sense to me in a positive and an affirming way. Like, ah, I ended up here in this configuration to learn and to experience these challenges and, and also. Could I be wrong about that? Of course. I have no idea. It helps me make sense and move through my days.

Yeah, it's not, you know, narratives are, I mean, they're the facts that we put into narratives. Those can be accurate or inaccurate, but there's nothing narrative that's built into reality itself. Like life doesn't unfold narratively. So it's always an act of imagination. And it's one that human beings can't help but engage in because Our, a lot of our minds, a lot of our consciousness is structured narratively. There was a philosopher named Daniel Dennett who wrote, in fact, that our sense of a self, of an I, that there, you know, that sense that you have, that you're the star of your story. Now, Liz is walking downstairs, right? That sense, according to Daniel Dennett, that we tell, we organize our life lives in terms of narrative, not in terms of stories, but just the sense of ongoing story. to produce the sense of I, to produce the sense that there actually is a coherent self that's living our lives, to create a center around which our brains can organize the myriad sensations and experiences that we have in relation to some kind of coherent standpoint. So he says, and I, this is borne out by the, my very amateur understanding of the structure of the brain and the way it works. Yeah, there's no there's no I in the brain. There's a bunch of different parts of the brain that are constantly saying things basically and telling our lives as an unfolding story enables us to take these multiple voices with the different perspectives that they're in charge of and organize them in ways that make sense to us. So yeah, I would say you taking that and saying, well, you know what, I'm going to give myself a sense of meaning and place in the world and and purpose by thinking of my life as a story. I think that that is a beautiful practice. One that comes naturally to us and that you don't have to worry. I think functional and dysfunctional is maybe a more important scale than true and false for the stories we tell about our lives.

Oh, I love that functional dysfunctional. Yes, because what is true and not and of course, if it's all narrative, then there, what is truth, you know, right? That's the, that gets very slippery. Okay, we're just riffing here now. So I'm like, okay, I didn't know we're going to go here. But okay, I have a question about that, then where and how do the boundaries of the body function and fit in? Do you think it's to the sense of I, you know, if there is no sense of I in the brain of like, this is me, but we still are in physical form that has It has limitations and boundaries and it separates me from you and me from this microphone and all of all the other things around me, right? I'm, I'm curious how that, that fits into it.

Well, our brains do do that. And, but, you know, we've both had children so we both know that infants don't have that. They don't actually know at first where they end and where someone else begins that's something that has to develop as their brains develop. But. I think one of the jobs of the brain is to map the body and, and tell us that each part of it is actually part of our body. So you have some people who experience a form of body dysmorphia. Well, there are many kinds of body dysmorphia where your brain is telling you that your body is something upsetting. Including, sometimes people feel their brains tell them that some part of them Is actually not them and people who suffer from this will sometimes go so far as to beg to have those parts of themselves removed because it's so upsetting to have what's not you made part, you know, part of you. So it's complicated. It is something that we that's not automatic. And I think we now know that bodies are not. boundaries, their eco, their ecologies, and their ecologies that are contiguous with and interchanging with other ecological systems. So all of that's very reassuring to me because the dissociation that went along with gender dysphoria and feeling that my body was wrong, which I think is that body mapping going off the rails there has made it hard for me to locate my sense of self in my body. So for a long time, for me, my sense of self was strongest. Like I couldn't talk to anybody who I felt actually knew me, so I could talk to myself. But you know, I'm disassociated, I'm traumatized, I'm young, so I don't actually understand things, and I'm kind of bonkers because all of this is too much for a kid. So talking to myself wasn't really a great way to stabilize my sense of self when I was young talking to God. was my way of doing it. And God, as you know, I experienced as not fitting gender the way I didn't fit gender. But only really when I was talking to God did I feel like, Oh, somebody else knows what I mean by I. And again, I don't know how it is for people who haven't gone through a blend of disorienting relations to self. But I think that being seen as who we are and feeling that we're being seen as who we are, really helps stabilize our sense of, sense of self. Not necessarily more than our bodies, but I don't know. Now that I'm sick, I can tell you my body is not a great way of defining. Oh, and what I am.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so many things coming up as I'm hearing you speak. And I want to go back to something that kind of popped up when you, when you started this, this thread here, and it was thinking about our first conversation and your relationship with the Shekhinah and your book, Shekhinah speaks which you, you said, you know, infants, we don't, they don't know their separation from anybody else. Right. And I, I was, what I thought of is like, oh, well, To me in reading that particular book of poetry, there was so much of to Shekhinah speaking to you, to me, to whoever is the reader, right? And almost in a way seeming like she's continuously reinforcing that idea of you think you're separate from me, but you're not. You think you are out here, you are another thing. There is no existence of, there is no me without you, or you without me, or however we would say that, right? And so

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, I don't know, I'm like, where was I going with that? But I, that, that's sort of what sparked was that thinking of like, almost like a, a return of sorts of back to that, recognizing that the boundaries are false anyway. Like, and, and perhaps we're longing for that in our spiritual seeking as we move into maturity and adults. Yes.

I mean, as you were just saying, Shekhinah, I had, I think, talked about her melting binaries, but subsequently through a dialogue with a friend who's a marvelous theological thinker, I realized that it's more like she takes, she does to binaries what giving a half twist to a strip of paper. does to a strip of paper. When you do that and close a loop. So if you take a strip of paper and you run your fingers along it, it has two sides, right? Those sides never meet. If you give that paper one half twist and close the loop, it only has one side. As you run your finger along one side, it leads to the other, which totally freaked me out when I was a kid. I kept trying to figure out what had happened, but the Shekhinah likes to do that with all kinds of binaries and what she does with the I and you so that she wants to tell talk to us about who we are in ways where if we follow that along, we find ourselves on her side of the binary and she talks about herself in ways where if we follow that along, we find ourselves back at ourselves and on and on in an infinite loop because there are two sides. But, they run into each other in ways that binary thinking says that they can't and shouldn't. The divine human binary, the I U binary, the self other binary, inside outside. They're all of these ways that we simplify and organize our experience. And the Shekhinah is like, Oh, I know something fun we can do with that. This will be really interesting. If you think about male female binaries, the way they're often deployed. And I'm just going to reference kind of old fashioned, but a while ago, I was talking to a trans guy, right? So born female transition to living as a male. And he said, I always know when I forgotten to take my testosterone shot, it's a weekly injection. I was like, how could you forget to take your hormones? Life depends on that. But anyway, I always know I forgotten to do that because. When I walk into a room, I start thinking about how everybody else is feeling. And when I'm, you know, my testosterone level is up, I feel like I'm complete, I'm integral. I'm rooted in my sense of self rather than being a self dissolving into a series of relationships. And I was like, yeah, why, why do you want the integral self instead of their, right? It was, it was, it was classic. Like, we were really like our, we had. This kind of old fashioned gender binary relation, but so the Shekhinah, I think maybe in, in the gendered tradition of divinity, when you have a divinity who's identified with maleness and transcendence and power and all of those things, you have to have a divinity who is integral and separate. You can't really be powerful if you're not separate enough to exercise power, right? You can't be transcendent if we can't tell. what's you and what's not you. So I think it's, I don't, I think it's built into the tradition of using gender binaries to understand divinity. That's the way I would say it. Again, it's an act of imagination, ways of trying to feel close to a divinity that it's incomprehensible to us. It's within us, it surrounds us, it's beyond us, it constitutes us, all of these things, it's too much. It fries my brain. Sometimes when I have experience of this, you know, I'll have these moments where I'm like, I'm looking at the leaves, and suddenly I'm realizing that, okay, so the Shekhinah's in me, and the Shekhinah's in the leaves, and the Shekhinah's light shining on the leaves, and you know, I just do that a tiny bit. I'm stuck in a room, I'm looking out a single window, and my mind is blown very quickly by this. Intellectually, Shekhinah's everything, and there's a point of view and everything, and you know, it's like, I can say that. But actually experiencing that, my mind is, is is quite blown. And I think the Shekhinah delights in bringing us to that place. So what I would say is this female gendered concept, imminent concept of divinity tries to bring us to the places where those clear senses of boundedness and binaries, where they, they do lead to one another as opposed to being separate. Which is marvelous. And scary in one kind of way, and that transcendent, frequently male identified sense of divinity is marvelous and scary in a different kind of way. And both of them are just like fingernail bearings from the actual nature of divinity.

Yes. I have so many thoughts about this. How delightful that you can look out the window and experience what I think a lot of people need psychedelics to feel into, or some sort of altered experience, you know, I've got, I've got experience in both now. And so I can, you know, I know exactly what you mean. You look out the window and it's going to melt your brain. And then also, you know, the, the, the door opening of the, the psychedelic experience too, which is similar and just louder. I think that's been my personal experience. But it's, it's such a. it's kind of a mindfuck, isn't it? Because what I heard in that thread of conversation is, you know, you starting with your friend who is describing what it sounds like a legitimate biological experience of that is created by hormones, you know, like that's the real thing like, you know, when when You're not taking your testosterone. You're feeling more connected and that's like a thing that's present You In his body as a result, I assume that, tell me if I'm wrong, but the assumption is being born as female, right? So there's that piece of it that is like, well, that, that may be there. It sounds like that's there perhaps for a lot of people, like that's a real thing. And there's the, the complete like just melting of, of, Binary's on the other side, which is like, and, and, and it's, it's just an and, like, and it's all just wrapping around and bringing itself closer and closer. And I, so I'm trying to formulate a question here, but I think that I'm curious for you. You know, thinking about the Shekinah as like the, the guide or the, Is that how you see her? Is it even right to call her a her at this point? Like, but do you see her as sort of a guide to, to understanding and teasing apart some of this or holding the complexity of all of this? Like, and, and has that changed for you in the last couple years since we've talked?

That is a really great question. I think that, for me, there's something very anchoring about those female pronouns when thinking about the Shekhinah. She is not attached to them, right? She's not attached to any human terms. But, you know, if you have a child and you need to explain something to them, you need to explain it to them in terms they understand, right? There's nothing more important to your child than knowing you exist in relation to them, right? I would say who you are in yourself, in my experience, far less interesting to children than who you are in relation to them. And that's what our job as parents is to be in relation to them, and that's why it's so darn hard, because we are ourselves also, and there's a distance there. So I think the Shekhinah uses human terms, and particularly gender terms, because gender terms are our fundamental terms for intimate relationships. Right, so we have other, many other terms of relationship, like judge and that sort of thing, but it's gender terms that tell us who we're like and who we're different than. It's gender terms that many of us use to figure out who our possible romantic and sexual partners are. Right? It's gender terms that structure our intimate family relationships. It's all over because gender is where traditionally, and you know, people like me, that's why people like me can be such a problem for people who are who live binary gender in traditional body based ways. I'm not critiquing that, but somebody like me comes along and severs gender from the physical. One of the things that's so powerful about traditional binary gender is that it connects who you are with your body, with your physicality, the needs that go along with this whole web of relationships, so that just by knowing your own body, you find yourself in a complicated web of relationships to, theoretically, every other human being. That's a web that. You know, it becomes problematic to fit someone like me in that web, and if there's somebody who's non binary, it becomes even more problematic. But every human way of understanding everything has limits and holes and, and problems in it. It's not to say that, is not to say that there's something wrong with it. It's just to say that it's human. But, you know, if I were a divine being trying to figure out how to relate to creatures who are so much in their bodies, and who's relate to one another so intensely in terms of gender, I would want to use those terms. I wouldn't want to try to invent a whole new system of relationships, you know, like there's no way in which the God who's called king in traditional liturgies is actually a king, right? But we can, on Yom Kippur, they switch the word in the liturgy, it switches the word God In a number of places which in other words, the word that points to this beyondness that's incomprehensible and it switches to the word King because it saw that as a translation of divinity into more intimate human terms, you know, for Americans, you know, that's not really a source of intimacy thinking of God as King. If you're a secular American, there's all kinds of problems with that. But compared to an incomprehensible being, you can understand a King. Even if you're like. Nobody in relation to a king, like you don't have status, you're not a member of the court, you still have a relation to the king because you're a citizen of the kingdom. The king has obligations to you, you have obligations to the king, the king has a presence, you know, there's all kinds of ways that this metaphor empowers human beings to have a relationship with what's beyond us. And that's the way the Shekhinah uses gendered and, and other terms. And it certainly, it works that way for me. There is a way in which. Probably because of my female gender identification, but there's a way in which I feel I can allow for a closeness or accept this sort of disquieting closeness. Like, wait, where are you? You're in me? Are you around me? Are you, you know, like this kind of, that it's easier for me in those gendered terms. As I thought about this, as I, like, theologized it as opposed to working on the poems, I have found it, you know, the abstraction of the gender. It makes it hard for the gender part to function in the same way. And when I went back and I think I sent you the most recent writing that I've done on this trans Shekhinah, so I got a trans theology assignment and I hadn't been thinking about trans theology. I was very into it and the soul is a stranger and then I wasn't thinking about it because I was into the Shekhinah but okay, I'll try to do, look at the Shekhinah from a transtheological perspective. And that led me to the origins of the Shekhinah. The, this comes up in the early rabbinic period. So the early centuries CE, I think actually is part of the same crisis and creative eruption in Judaism that led to Christianity. I think both the idea of Jesus, an incarnated aspect of divinity, and the Shekhinah emerges to answer the question of, we're experiencing God as very far away, given the Roman domination of everything. And for me, this has a tremendous resonance with the way that I feel about the political situation in America. How can we feel close to God? Because when we look around the world. We don't see the power of God. We see the power of people who, to us, seem hard and cruel and amoral at best and often quite a bit worse than that. How can we locate divinity? How can we feel close to divinity in this world? How can we feel that the divine understands our lives and what we're going through? Because, in order to protect divinity from this world, so if you say, well, God's everything, God's the Romans who just killed a million Jews and exiled a million more that is problematic, right? And so now we're going to bless that God, right? So we want to, and if we say, well, you know, in the ancient world, you would say you can tell how powerful a God is by their political fortunes of the nations they're associated with. Well, that's not a good way of locating God. If the Romans have won everything. So I think the idea of God as transcendent and beyond becomes very important to secure the existence of a divinity. You want to have an outside to oppression. You want to say, well, okay, you may control my body, my soul, you may ravage my community, but there is that which is beyond you to which you are, as Isaiah says, a drop in the bucket. You know, when Isaiah says the nations are a drop in the bucket, that's the transcendent divinity. In Isaiah, in the biblical period, there isn't a distinction between transcendence and imminence. Isaiah describes God in terms that go all across that spectrum, and the Hebrew Bible does. But in this crisis, I think that there needed to be some kind of imminent sense of divinity to answer this question, because safeguarding God from history by imagining God as transcending history created this gulf people found hard to live with, particularly when they were I think both Jesus and Shekinah were responses to that. So when the rabbis start to imagine the Shekinah, the word is grammatically female. But to my great disappointment, 'cause as I say, I was very invested in the pronouns here in terms of my own idea of the Shekinah, the rabbis who are as patriarchal as you can imagine, you know, the rabbis of the Talmud, they're really not where you wanna look for innovations in terms of gender thinking. They don't care about the Shekinah's femaleness at all. They, they use the case endings and the, and the verbs. What they're interested in is the Shekinah is a way of understanding divine presence in the human realm and the way that they imagine the Shekinah. See, the first thing I would do if I was imagining the Shekinah, is I would say, well, where is the Shekinah and when is the Shekinah? And how does one relate to the Shekinah? What are the attributes of the Shekinah? How does the Shekinah relate to the other ways that we have of thinking? About divinity, right? These are all to me, logical questions and later Jewish tradition uses binary gender to answer a lot of those questions, right? The rabbis, for some reason, didn't care about this. So, you know, one rabbi answers the, you know, says the Shekhinah mostly lives in the east and then right after that, another rabbi says the Shekhinah mostly dwells in the west and another rabbi says, The Shekhinah is present whenever two people are talking about God. And another says, the Shekhinah left the world when the temple was destroyed. And another rabbi says, even after the temple was destroyed, the Shekhinah's presence continued to dwell there. And nobody says, wait a minute guys, all of these things can't be true. And there are many more. This is just a small selection. So in, that's what I ended up, the trans perspective ended up showing me was that for them, it was more important that the Shekhinah be in the aspect of divinity that can be in all kinds of relations to human realm and human experience simultaneously without any problem, like the transcendence. Sets up this binary or you're either out there or you're in here. That was not what they were interested in. They needed an idea of eminence that was more like the scale on a trombone slide, you know. You know, all up and down. And so that really, that's I think why they were not interested in gendering the Shafina, particularly because binary gender is about Identifying everyone in relation to everyone else and fixing those ideas of presence. So later Jewish mystics who were interested in that, they were interested in ontology and cosmology and how does the material world with its suffering and evil come out of this boundless being? You know, these are big questions. They start using binary gender to think about those processes and they put the gender in relation to other aspects of divinity. But, so the next Trans Shekhinah essay that I'm hoping to do is about the gendering of the Shekhinah, who kind of is incarnated by human beings into binary gender. So she's, you know, nominally female for a long time, but she's not really part of a binary gender system until the mystics come along and they inscribe her into it. Even when they do, and I think that one of the dangers of the way I was talking about her, the divine female. It makes it seem like this is a binary category right here, this way or that, the way my trans friend and I were talking. Well, you either feel like this with your hormones or you feel like that with your hormones. That is not the way they deal with the Shekhinah even after they gender her. There are multiple female divinity figures. There's the upper mother and the lower mother and there's the princess and the daughter and the lost princess and the the mother of wisdom and there's. A character I don't understand, but who sounds terrifying, called the Metrona, who often comes with armies. And, you know, in other words, they did not see just assigning the Shekhinah as female as homogenizing or simplifying the Shekhinah. Because they didn't see the female as homogenous or simplistic, the way binary gender encourages us to think about.

And in a way we are so, limited by our, by our, our brains. Yes. But also the culture that we are in, like, it would make total sense to me. Like we, even if we don't want to be, or we think like we're bigger thinkers than, than us. You know, those that are locked into binary, that's the framework that we're operating within. So it makes sense to me that then the answer becomes like this, this polarity, this other side of the, you know, it looks like an either or situation and it's not. And, and as you were saying that, I'm thinking so for. For viewers, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see behind me, there's a painting on the wall and it kind of, it looks like a, a multifaceted crystal go back and listen to episode two or three of this podcast. It's actually a painting of my vagina. So there you go. But what I was thinking is it looks like a multifaceted crystal. It's got all these different colors. And what I was thinking is that you were saying that it's like, gosh, our understanding of divinity is like, We can't even talk in evolutionary terms. We're not evolving towards anything. It's like, now we're just observing this one little crystal aspect. We're like, Oh, I didn't see that before. Let's go really deep and look at that aspect. Let's like, let's, let's delve into that. And then, Oh, like, look at this one. And that's kind of what came up as you were talking about this. This historical reason for the transcendent God. I'm like, Oh, right. Like, so you would pull out that facet and go, well, God, yes. Like there's this piece of the divine that I didn't look at before. And so what I'm wondering, well, if that resonates with you or not, but that Like, where we are now, like, like, if we're this, if this facet of the Shekinah, or the Shekinah is a facet, either way, right? Like, I don't know. What and why we're looking at her now, and like, what does that mean for this particular

moment

of where we are in time?

Well, I think the Shekhinah, I experience her as laughing a lot. It's always been this very, her voice has always been very amused. When I was working on Shekhinah Speaks, I, the voice was very familiar to me and I realized that I had heard it without, Recognizing it, not just from the time that I was a child, always laughing, and laughing because it's outside of time, and seeing us as a whole. Because whenever, I don't know about you, but whenever I'm trying to relate to divinity, I mean, I was saying that, I'm looking out the window, like, this is a teeny little attempt at an experience of divinity, but it's bound by time and space. Yes. Right? And it's about What is, and I think that Shekhinah is not so much concerned with isness as with relationship. The Shekhinah is a, an aspect of divinity that wants to be in complete and total relationship with us. And there are a couple of sides of this. So one is the Shekinah is the aspect of divinity that's always with us. Whether the Shekhinah likes it or not, and another is the aspect of divinity that is responsive, very responsive, the presence or absence is responsive to our behavior. And the third is that the Shekhinah wants a consensual relationship. She wants us to. Not give in and say, well, you know, since you're the eminent aspect of a divinity, you're the ultimate peeping Tom. There's no way that I can conceal anything about myself from you. That's not the goal. The goal is for us to realize that we can, we can choose to share our subjectivities, our lives with the Shekhinah. Like, I try to remember to do that. I am Not been been finding this very, very difficult since the elections weaving back to your question. But you know, if I'm experiencing something good, I'll try to remember to say, Oh, you know, please enjoy this with me and so to try to enjoy it for two, because I feel like what are we good for, for God, if not, To offer human experiences, like why does divinity need humanity, if not to experience what humanity can experience. So I feel like the Shekhinah, when I'm doing that, I'm following the Shekhinah's prompt to stop thinking about, like, you're the Shekhinah, you know, I'm this, and we're that, and you know, all of this naming and identifying, and think about myself. As someone who can be in relationship with what is absolutely beyond me, and who is, that that's not a loss of myself. There are paths, spiritual paths, where that's the loss and dissolution of the self, but the Shekhinah delights in ourselves. So she doesn't want us to, I think, lose ourselves in her, because why create us, if that's the goal. So this becomes, as I said, I've been, in the current moment, I've I think like many, well, I'm just going to speak for trans and non binary folks but all of the groups who are in the line of fire, I would include women who are not enthusiastic about patriarchy in old fashioned forms. So a lot of Americans are in what I think is the line of fire of the incoming administration. So, I'm shocked. Shock has gone away, but the, the terror and the, anyway, I've reacted in my time honored survival mechanism from childhood with dissociation and I can't feel the presence of the Shekhinah if I can't feel.

Yeah.

So I'm trying to turn it off because it's a self protection mechanism that actually And maybe it did help protect me in some way when I was a kid, but I was a tiny child trying to protect myself, so it's not surprising that it turns out to be dysfunctional when I'm an adult. I'm trying to turn it off because I don't think I can go through this period without being able to answer the question, where is the presence of divinity in my life, in this world? So, the very same crisis that I see the rabbis in the early centuries A common era as as experiencing. And when I was working on Trans Shekhinah, as you can see, that's unlike, it's the opposite of Shekhinah Speaks. It's, it's an essay. It's intellectual, it's not experiential, which I felt bad about, but it was something that I could do in this state of not feeling. But I also felt urgent, I thought, and it's more important. And ever to do this work that helps people connect with the imminent aspect of divinity, which is traditionally in this binary system, gendered female because I think a lot of people will be having this question of, yeah, where can I find divinity in a world that's where power has come to be occupied by people like this divinity, just somewhere out there. Where I'm a drop, I'm part of the drop in the bucket that this nation is. Well, that's comforting in one way and it's kind of sucky in another way. Yes. Right? So I feel like I personally need to do this work and understand the Shekhinah in her many incarnations, which I didn't know when I wrote Shekhinah Speaks, that she is an evolving, that our relation to the Shekhinah and ways of imagining her and conceiving her Keep changing and evolving in relation to our our needs. That feels quite urgent for me personally, and I feel like hopefully for other people, and it's an example of something larger that I think I don't have a thing against institutionalized religions in themselves. They're like every other institutions, they do horrible things, they do wonderful things, you know but something that I think that they can't help, but do. When you institutionalize ideas of divinity, which religions kind of do, is you weaken people's connection to their own theological imagination. Putting it that way is too abstract a theology, I mean, we've been, you know, that's an area of study, it's abstract. This is not abstract. We can't have a relationship with divinity in any way, the divine feminine, the divine masculine, any way, without exercising our imagination. Because again, divinity is It's just everything all at once, and way too much for our mind to process if we want to have a relationship. We need to exercise our agency and our imagination and say, well, how am I going to relate to this? What aspect of divinity do I want to relate to? That becomes idolatry if we say, and therefore, God is X or God is Y. That's idolatry. We say, really, the human terms I've come up with for God, my act of imagination, my I have revealed God's essence and I'm not willing to see anything about God other than what fits in my little box. That's idolatry. But I don't think we can have a relationship just the way young children can have a relationship with their parents without just focusing on the parent aspect of their parents and ignoring the complexity and messiness of the human beings. You know, your three year old doesn't, really does not want to see your complexity and messiness. They can't handle it, right? And I think that, so they just, they imagine you as being all mommy. So I think that institutionalized religions often alienate us from that power that we have to set the terms for our relationship with divinity, to imagine those terms in ways that we need to feel close to divinity, not to say what God is. But to say how we can let God in

in a way, this is calling to mind what we were talking about at the very beginning, and it's not exactly the same, but about creating story or right that we create for ourselves, like that's going to be supportive and nurturing and what's also coming up. I'm pretty sure this came up for me during our first conversation, but I don't think I said it on the recording. I think I told you later, but I'll, I'll share it here too, is the first time I did mushrooms and how I had this incredible sense of like, I had a very Alice in Wonderland sense of like, I remember saying to my friends that I was doing this with, I'm like, there's nobody in charge. There's no one in charge. There's no one in charge, which is actually quite terrifying to me. It all just felt like, like, Just sort of insanity and and and in that I was kind of reaching for where is she? Where is this divine feminine that I have come to know and that's nurturing and that has supported me and held me So much in all of these challenging transitions in my life over the last 10 years. Where is she? Where did she go? And the The, the answer that I got was that the vastness of it, it's just, it's fucking laughable that I would ever think that I could grasp it. Like I, I can't, like you said, fingernails, I would say like a cell of a fingernail. That's how it felt like it was. And so of course to my limited, if not altered state, but still my limited state, it looked like chaos. It looked like just crazy town to me, but that I had found. The aspect of divinity in that, you know, kind of the way that I experienced the divine feminine. I'm touching my necklace cause I've got, you know, that I experienced Mary is kind of a cosmic void, like something much bigger than what the Christian church has given us. But that I had found her because that's what I needed in this lifetime to, to, that's the, what, Was the healing aspect of her that was holding me that could meet me where I was. I'm feeling very emotional as I'm sharing this with you. So interesting. I'm like tearing up a little bit, but then I needed her. That's what I needed in this lifetime. And that's what she's giving me. That's what divinity was, was meeting me there in that space. It's like a, almost like a co created relationship of sorts. Yeah.

Yes.

And yet of course she's like this big giant thing that I will never, it's not even a she, like it's a thing that is so big and giant and cosmic that I can't even remotely attempt to, to get to the fullness of it, nor should I even try, like what's, that's not even the point.

Divine human relationships are always human relationships. God is always limited by the terms of human relationships. Just the way, if you have a cat. Your relationship with your cat is always limited by the terms the cat sets. Yes. And so God needed you, you know, I mean I'm imagining divinity as, well the Shekhinah, I don't know about divinity in general, but the Shekhinah I think values so much our needs, our desperations our cries because that is emotionally, we, we are opening the door to relationship or setting the terms to relationship. We're, we're, we're, we're giving one of the sadnesses for me of my children growing up was I reached a point where I couldn't just take care of their needs. Yeah, they didn't have needs that I could just take care of. Yes. And I project that onto divinity of like, Oh, wonderful. Liz, you have a need for me that I can take care of. Because one thing I can always give you is my presence. Yeah. Because my presence is always with you.

Yeah. I love that. And I'm, I don't know, Joy, I'm still like, cause we're, I know we're almost out of time. I just feel like we can just set a recorder up and well, we, you know, One of us is going to run out of energy sooner or later, I would imagine. So we need to take break, but you just keep the dialogue going for hours for me, but I'm, I'm wanting to, like, I kind of want to circle back and we've, we've been dancing around it, but the back to that question of like, and what now, like, here we have the Shekhinah, here we have this shit show of where we are, like what now? And even now could be literally right now. Like what feels. Present and important, you know, in this moment.

Well, I have, I don't think I've devalued the transcendent aspect of divinity that much exactly, but one part of it I never got, which is the idea of the fear of God that felt very patriarchal and damaging. But just the other day I was thinking, you know, I am consumed by this fear of these people who are not worthy of being afraid of no matter how much power they wield. I am making myself so small to be afraid of them and suddenly I thought, Oh, right. That's what the fear of God gives you. It says there's only one being to be afraid of, right? Human beings can mess with you. They can hurt you. They can screw you up. They can break your heart, but there's only one being to be afraid of. And fortunately that's a being, you know, who sustains and loves and creates us, right? So. It's a complicated relationship. It's a Godzilla meets Bambi relationship, right? That's where the fear of God comes from. Like, oh my, right? Overwhelming. So that is one thing that I feel like I'm learning, but the Shekhinah is giving me something else, which is, yeah, I don't think I'm making it through if I can't continue to find divinity in my life, in myself, in the world around me. You know, not in the political order. I, I honestly, I think that the idea of democracy, it's an enlightenment invention. It's a secularizing invention. It's not a place to look for God one way or the other. But, One of the things that authoritarianism does is it wants all of us to feel devalued. It wants all of us to feel insignificant. It wants all of us to feel like there are people who matter and we are not them. You know, for us to become as like the the spies who went into the land of Canaan said we were like grasshoppers in our own eyes. And I think that to survive psychically and spiritually. We need to not be grasshoppers, we need to not feel like grasshoppers, we need to not give in to the, to that kind of fear, and the humiliation, and the trolling, and the thing, the triggering, all this stuff that's done to put us into these to trigger these responses, and for me, locating the presence of divinity, remembering the presence of divinity, remembering that it doesn't matter who won the last election, stars are still stars, The universe is still the universe, Earth is still Earth, Humanity is still Humanity, right? And the Shekhinah is still here with us. And there's nothing that we're about to go through where she is not going to be here with us, reminding us that, yeah, we are tied together by an by a binary warping umbilical cord such that we're being nourished by her and we are giving her a place to dwell. All of that is outside any of the control of these petty dictators.

Yeah, I just, I love that you said that so much because you just sparked a really, you know, poignant memory in me, which is 2016. And, you know, I certainly didn't think that Hillary was a bad person. Perfect candidate in any way, but I was so very excited about the idea of finally my gosh we're gonna have a female president even if she's mediocre, like how wonderful like to just to experience it and I remember watching the election returns with my nasty woman cocktail in hand because you know my now ex husband and I were so confident that you know she was gonna win and just watching the returns and Realizing just with that sinking feeling that this was the end Not that a very different outcome was, was headed our way. And I remember at some point we turned off the TV and we looked at each other and we're just like, Oh my God. Oh, oh my God. You know, we're thinking about our, you know, the time my kids were two and five. I think it just was like, what this is just, they're in preschool. This goes against like literally everything you teach preschoolers about how to treat people. You know, like we just elected somebody who doesn't even understand the basic rules that we're teaching two and three year olds. You know, like, what are we gonna say? And it, and I, and I was like, you know what? Let's go outside. Let's go outside. It's California. So we could do that. And we went and we sat outside and we stared up at the night sky and the stars were just beautiful. And it was this clear, perfect night. And it was exactly what you're saying, which is that there was something else. There's something else beyond the TV box and the people and the, you know, the, the shit show that was yet to come. And, you know, all of the, the imagined shit show that was in our heads, like there was something, there was something else. Existed beyond that. And so I'm so grateful for you bringing that memory back to me because it was so comforting. And

true, it has the advantage of actually being true.

Yeah,

you know, the Shekinah wants us to remember we have the power to access the presence of divinity, because divinity is always with us waiting to be recognized longing to recognize.

Yeah. Well, I don't want to end this conversation and yet it is that time. And it just, it's just so, it's so beautiful. I've been, I've been contemplating different ideas about power. And so just even you using those, that language, like more to come on that listeners, cause it's emerging for me right now. But joy, just such a deep, deep gratitude for you as always and being in conversation with you. It's such a blessing. Thank you for making the time to be here.

You're so welcome. And those feelings. Just like last time, those feelings of gratitude are, are so mutual. Thank you so much for, for being in this conversation with me and for being a place where conversations like this can happen.

Yeah, oh gosh, it's so my pleasure. And what I'm wanting to say to you listeners is y'all, we are, we are lucky not in all ways, but in some ways, and in this way to live in this time and to be able to be part of dialogues like this. And and I'm lucky to get to, you know, my, 99th episode to get to do this and to also know that you're out there and you're listening and you care and you want to tune in. It is such a gift. I can't even tell you. So just, just big gratitude all the way around. And you know, until I talk to you again, take such good care. Of yourselves and I'll, I'll be back with you

soon.

Home to Her is hosted by me, Liz Kelley. You can visit me online at hometoher. com, where you can find show notes and other episodes. You can read articles about the Sacred Feminine, and you'll also find a link to join the Home to Her Facebook group for lots more discussion and exploration of Her. You can also follow me on Instagram, at home to her, to keep up to date with the latest episodes. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you back here soon.