In the earliest moments of my transition before my physical features had shifted and scars decorated my chest, I cherished my monthly niddah immersions as a sacred, liminal space of pure, unadorned encounter. In my stripped-down state, I appeared to the mikvah lady like anyone else—a body that looked similar to and different from the hundreds of other bodies she has seen immersing after menstruation. But after my three dunks when I would head back to the prep room and start to re-adorn, I began to recognize myself more and more with each layer. Fully dressed, I would look in the mirror and see me. Each of these moments—be it naked and unadorned or fully clothed—reflect different aspects of who we are, reflecting distinct elements of our true selves. But which is more real, more us?

The Jewish mystical notion of hitlabshut, “enclothement,” offers us spiritual language to explore the distinctions between the world’s—and our—external and internal manifestations, understanding outer layers of all we encounter as a levush, a “garment,” that surrounds an inner holiness or Divine spirit. The world itself—along with everything in it—is understood as G!d’s levush, as Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) teaches :

…in truth, even in all the concealments—even in a concealment within a concealment—HaShem is certainly enclothed (mLuBaSh) there as well. Indeed, there is nothing that is without the life force of HaShem, since without G!d’s life force it could not exist. Therefore, HaShem is certainly enclothed in all words, and all deeds, and all thoughts, kivyachol (“as much as it is possible to say so”). [1]

In this frame, to encounter the world is to meet G!d enclothed, but not directly. As presented here, levush implies the concealment and hiddenness of a truly partial encounter. But if we put this in conversation with trans narratives and theories of gender performativity, we discover ways in which levush functions not just for concealment but ultimately for revelation and co-creation, as well.

Our gendered selves—and thus our fuller selves—are often constituted specifically through our levush– our clothing, our behaviors, and the external layers of self that we embody and add to our bodies as we become whole. We can thus turn to trans and queer theorists, who explore the nuances of ‘enclothement’ in their own disciplines, to enhance our understanding of one significant and profound way our tradition understands hitlabshut: the notion of the Torah as G!d’s clothing.

The Torah as G!d’s Clothing

A foundational text that expresses the notion of Torah itself as G!d’s levush is found in the Zohar (13th c), which likely contains more references to hitlabshut than any other mystical text. Here, the text’s imagined author, the 2nd century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, is provoked by the misunderstandings of his generation about the purpose of Torah:

Rabbi Shimon [bar Yohai] said: Woe to the person who says that Torah relays mere stories and ordinary words! If this were so, we could compose a torah in our time from ordinary stories in simple language and it would be greater than those. If the Torah came to relay ordinary things, even rulers of the [present] world would have books of even greater merit. If so, let us follow them and make a torah from their stories! [2]

R’ Shimon’s contemporaries critique the Torah, noticing that the text is left wanting when compared to great stories produced by other cultures and communities. They recognize that reading Torah from start to finish does not provide the same compelling narrative flow as other stories; were I to hold the Torah’s epic up against, say, The Lord of the Rings, it would be hard to make a great case for Torah’s superiority. R’ Shimon is dismayed by this, and rebukes such people for misunderstanding Torah entirely. Woe to these people!, he says, for they are so confused about what the Torah is that they try to read it for the plot! 

What we are reading when we’re reading Torah is not the stories at all—there is an essence underneath that we can touch, if only we can get beyond the levush:

When she [the Torah] descended into this world, if she did not dress in the garments of this world, the world could not endure. Hence, the story of the Torah is the garment (levush) of Torah. Whoever thinks that this garment is the Torah mamash and not another thing -- may his spirit deflate! And he will have no portion in the world to come, for David said: “Open my eyes, so I can see wonders from your Torah” (Tehillim 119:18)—what is beneath the garment of Torah.

The stories that we encounter as we’re reading Torah are Torah’s levush—the external garment in which a deeper essence is wrapped. Had Torah entered into the world in her raw form, there would be no way we could digest or comprehend it. The Torah’s stories, words, and letters themselves make it possible for us to absorb Torah at all. Because Torah’s true essence is enclothed in an external garment—what we actually encounter as “Torah”—we, and the world, can endure it.

Centuries later, R’ Tzadok haKohen of Lublin (1823-1900) builds on this argument, writing that, “it is only through that which is written that it is possible to comprehend the vitality [of G!d], as it is hidden in the midst of the written word.” R’ Tzadok argues that the words of Torah are the levush, and while the Zohar describes Torah as the clothing for a primordial, essential Torah underneath, R’ Tzadok imagines that Torah comes to dress G!d’s vitality itself:

For these writings are the bodily enclothement for the words of G!d - just as a person’s body dresses its nefesh, which is ruhaniyut [the spiritual essence] and a piece of Divinity - for it is not possible to comprehend the naked form in this world, but through the bodily enclothement [the soul] can be comprehended. 

So too with the words of G!d, that they are comprehended through the enclothement of the written word, and through the form of the letters that enable us to comprehend, and it is in this way that the vitality of G!d is in them. [3]

Whether we describe this essence as a primordial Torah as the Zohar does, or as G!d’s vitality in R’ Tzadok’s case, both texts agree: it is not possible to comprehend the naked form, but through enclothement it is possible to understand and be understood.

Is the Levush “Real” or Not?

But if, as the Zohar and R’ Tzadok claim, our Torah is levush—a clothing that enabled us to absorb G!d’s vitality when revelation was given—then what are we encountering when we learn Torah? Were Torah given in another moment, would its garment be different, adapted to be more comprehensible to those who received it so that they could understand it more effectively? To what extent does clothing help us express something inherent, as opposed to simply helping us digest the people and things in front of us? 

To add nuance to these questions, we turn to two contemporary sages—Judith Butler and Julia Serano, each offering a picture of what levush can be. In their 1993 work, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Butler writes:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms…This iterability implies that ‘‘performance’’ is not a singular ‘‘act’’ or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. [4]

What Butler describes as “performativity” is the constant process that humans engage in related to our gendered selves: there is an expanse of who we are that gets constrained and controlled by the world around us, and the way we externalize who we are is constituted by the ways we can be understood by those around us. This then acts back upon us: these manifestations become who we are, and shape what lives within the levush. 

For Butler, the way we express ourselves and our gendered experiences—our levush—is coercively determined by the norms of society and the ways in which people understand us. In this model, the levush does not represent something inherent or essential about who we are; instead, the levush is a constrained container that is created through coercion in a particular context.

If we apply Judith Butler to texts like the Zohar and R’ Tzadok haKohen who see the Torah as levush for G!d’s vitality and essence, it means, Torah, then, is the result of G!d’s performativity; G!d’s act of revelation is similarly an attempt to become comprehensible to the surrounding world through a constrained, compelled expression. The Torah that we have is simply the outcome of this coercive act, something that G!d was coerced into giving, kivyachol, as we all are coerced into performing outer manifestations constrained by our context. And just as there is little inherent in our performances, there may be little inherent in Torah: it tells us less about G!d’s Essence than about the contextual moment in which this constrained revelation was given. Thus when we encounter Torah, we are not meeting an authentic manifestation of G!d, but a reflection of the Torah’s coerced context. 

When Torah is painful or hurts me, the idea of levush through Butler’s frame helps me remain connected: if Torah is a reflection of a certain context, I can read it as just that—an outfit that made sense in another moment.

Offering a frame for a more essential role of G!dself in revelation is Julia Serano, who writes the following in her 2010 essay, “Performance Piece:”

Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let's talk about the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn't feel like drag when you're a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn't feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn't feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity, and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours. Let's stop trying to deconstruct gender into nonexistence, and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable, varied, profound, and intricate. So don't you dare dismiss my gender as construct, drag, or performance. My gender is a work of non-fiction. [5]

For Serano, our levush helps us convey something essential about who we are. While it may be constrained in various ways, it is not a construct, it is real. And while this is not the same as gender essentialist reads that assume and enforce a collapse between sexed and gendered experiences, Serano offers us a pathway to understand levush: the inherent, expansive parts of who we are that cannot instinctively be communicated in words that can be expressed, and when we express them and they “fit,” we are communicating something very real. When we express who we are through our outer garments, we are not doing something merely contextually coercive, [6] we are manifesting deep and profound aspects of who we are through our levush. For Serano, the levush is a container for some of the most essential aspects of who we are.

If we see the Torah as G!d’s levush as articulated by Serano, we understand that every time we learn Torah we meet some aspect of G!d that is essential. As we encounter the levush, which expresses something essential, we get to hear G!d tell us something about who G!d truly is through the levush that we are learning. Any time we are encountering Torah, we are encountering G!d’s authentic self, dressed up, in the most authentic G!d-ly clothes that could possibly be. G!d says to us about Torah, My levush is a work of nonfiction.

Serano and Butler offer us permission to choose: by having both of these teachings in conversation with our texts about G!d’s hitlabshut in Torah, we get to inhabit each of these worlds when they feel true—appreciating Torah as reflection of revelation’s context and understanding Torah as a manifestation of G!d’s truest self. Sometimes Torah hurts us, and we need to claim Butler’s recognition of Torah as contextual, coerced expression rather than a display of G!d’s true self. Other times, I learn something that helps me feel like I’m sitting with the Divine and Serano’s reading helps me understand how that can be so. While the texts and moments in which we evoke them may vary for each of us, these two frames offer poles and perspectives that, when articulated consciously, can add nuance to our interpretive relationships with and towards Torah, and, I hope, can help us understand something true and powerful about what revelation might mean as it is redacted through the levush of queer and trans experiences.

As we learn the levush of Torah, may it help us to feel as though we are touching G!d, and that, as the Tanya teaches, “the King hugs us with His arm, which is Torah, even if it is an arm clothed in His clothing.” [7]