Your Body Is A Temple: On Fasting, Transition, and Corporeal Co-Creation

Content warning: The topics in the subtitle will be heavily discussed.

I remember the exact moment, many years ago, when I encountered this drash nestled in a corner of my prayer book. It was during Tisha b’Av Shacharis, the morning prayer, when I was at my yearly pilgrimage site for the fast day: A hilly, arid expanse in East Oakland known as King Estates.

While praying in a shady patch on those yellow-grassed hills—where the beauty of the Bay Area, its own history of colonial destruction, and a semi-mythical destroyed Jerusalem can all coexist at once—I read this addition from the morning Amidah in my Sefardi siddur:

יהִי רָצוֹן מִלְּפָנֶֽיךָ יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ וֵאלֹהֵי אֲבוֹתֵֽינוּ, שֶׁיְּהֵא מִעוּט חֶלְבֵּֽנוּ וְדָמֵֽינוּ הַמִּתְמָעֵט בְּתַעֲנִיתֵֽנוּ הַיּוֹם כַּחֵֽלֶב מֻנָּח עַל גַּבֵּי הַמִּזְבֵּֽחַ

May it be your will, our God and God of our Ancestors, that the lessening of our fat and blood during our fast today be like the fat left on the Altar

As someone who came to observance later in life, I had never before encountered this understanding of the meaning of a fast day. I was familiar with the idea that we fast as a form of self-abnegation, as a tool of spiritual focus, as a part of the pageantry of rehearsing our own death. I was taught the fraught nature of fasting from fat comrades, its strained relationship with disordered eating, and had learned about its life-affirming halachic limitations.

But I had never been confronted with the striking corporeal metaphor of a religion that was traditionally based on the sacrifice of fat at a temple, with fast days in remembrance of said temple where we sacrifice fat.

Through this lens, the idea that our bodies are temples stops being a kitschy affirmation from the modern world of “Wellness,” and becomes rooted in the vast panoply of meaning that our people’s Temple carries: Our body isn’t a temple in the way that we might be conscious of what type of food we consume, it is a temple because it is a site of Avoda, of service to our god.

The Temple is obviously a facet of our tradition replete with contradictions – it must be, since it is a limited space on earth, meant to contain (the essence of) our infinite, heavenly god. But out of these contradictions came the opportunity for direct compromise and collaboration. Hashem, who built the entire world for us to reside in, eventually needed us to build a temple for Her to reside in. She gave us the divine blueprints, we carved the stone (not with iron, god forbid, but a worm!) and in that way, Heaven allowed itself to become intercalated with Earth, so that Earth could hold a little more of Heaven.

Our bodies, as temples, are similar sites of divine-human cooperation. And this is not only evidenced in fast day halacha. In the broadest sense, Hashem gives us our physical forms, places in them a soul, and then it is upon us to steward both. As we move from infancy to consciousness to adulthood, our tradition gives us the blueprint for how to build a life filled with the divine. But while god is everywhere, and always ready to be with us, we ultimately have (the terrible blessing of) agency, and are required to engage in learning and practice to make our bodies sites for heavenly communion. Our body is a temple, not in that it is pure, but in that it is co-created.

This is the way that many trans Jews of this generation understand ourselves. The sanctity of our bodies does not imply their immutability. Rather, their sanctity davka arises from the creativity they invite and evidence. Rabbi Akiva puts it this way in a polemic, when corned by one of the arch-villains of Tisha b’Av, Turnus Rufus:

Turnus Rufus the Evil asked Rabbi Akiva: “Which is the more beautiful—God’s work or man’s? [Trying to catch him in a trap, whereby circumcision, as an edit on God’s creation would be proven illegitimate.]”

Rabbi Akiva replied: “Undoubtedly man’s work is the better, for while nature at God’s command supplies us only with the raw material, like wheat, human skill enables us to elaborate the same according to the requirements of art and good taste, and make bread.”

(Midrash Tanchuma, Tazria 5, paraphrased in the Jewish Enyclopedia, edited)

I take R’ Akiva’s rejoinder as rhetorical—he was pushing back on a Roman tyrant. But at the end of the day, when he points at wheat and bread to compare them, we must know that the artful human-made bread cannot exist without the miraculous wheat of the divine. Taking these truths together: When I edit my body with estrogen, practice, skillful clothing, and surgery, it is to complete the work of God, and embody my essence as a woman, from the raw material of the trans body Hashem gave me. Hannah Maya, a dear SVARA/Shel Maala-nik, puts it this way in her well-loved prayer on hormones in the (one day soon, please god, to be published) Tefillat Trans:

Blessed are You, o Lord our G-d, Spirit of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the vine, who brings forth grain from the earth, who leaves it to us to make the wine and bread, and so invites us to share in the act of creation. (p.33)

R’ Akiva can then be understood to accept this premise, and push it even further, encouraging us to revel in the fact that our work not only completes Hashem’s, but beautifies it! If my body is a site of worship, he would say, it should embody that role not only with the ritual minimum, but with a healthy dollop of hiddur mitzva, beautification of the obligation. My makeup then becomes embroidery on the curtains of ark. My earrings like cherubim, my curves those of the arches and columns that signal the earthly presence of the divine. Beautification of self takes on the religious significance and imperative of beautification of Temple. This isn’t a way that all trans people interact with their bodies, but as I sat on the sun-soaked rocks of Kings Estate, it’s how I felt under the itinerant shadows of the soaring birds.

To tie us back into the fast day with which we began, and end with some love for people who fast in non-normative ways, I’ll name the halachic undercurrent to this drash developed by my dear friend Lexi Kohanski. She writes in her now (trans/Jewish-)famous exploration of Tamim Tihyeh, or “Be Whole”: Gender transition is a mitzvah for trans Jews. The source of her reasoning, in short, is that gender assigned at birth is a form of idolatry. And for Jews who know that they are trans, it is incumbent upon us to use the tools available to us to transition, so that we don’t subvert God’s will (our transness) to the will of augurers (those who assigned us our genders at birth).

Understanding our bodies as sites of Temple service can strengthen and heighten the stakes for this emerging mitzva. As horrendous as it was to watch throughout our history as our holy sites were usurped by empires to serve their foreign gods, we should similarly shudder at the idea of our bodies being usurped for such terrible aims.

For those of us who can and do fast from food on Tisha b’Av, Yom Kippur (which also evidences this concept in its liturgy) and other fast days, we should ensure that we are not sacrificing on to anyone but the divine. The altar of, for example, arrogance at one’s strength to withstand a day without food, is a false one. We must make sure to revel in that miracle that, without even an intervening high priest or edifice, we can offer sacrifice to the god who is holding our grief and our desire for teshuva and return.

For those who cannot fast in such a way, they shouldn’t. An offering of fat towards a socially imposed body-image or disordered style of eating (often imposed by the same augurers that yoke us with false genders!), is not only non-ideal, it is idolatrous. Our bodies are constantly enacted upon by the world around us, and we should understand them as religious and political arenas that we have to defend against the worlds of deathly heresy and colony. And more than defend them, we should understand it as binding to beautify them and make them fit residences for us and the divine to revel in.

As the Torah says in Vayikra:

כּל־חֵלֶב לַה’

All fat is the Lord’s
Leviticus 3:16

All fat is Hashem’s, on your body, off your body. Rearranged, removed, and added through hormones or medical interventions. All fat is Hashem’s, both as a warning against offering it to others, and as an enjoinder to make the material of our body the most fittingly divine it can be

As I navigate a body that isn’t fat (but which is policed by the BMI and some family members as if it is), and a body that is trans, I hope to hold the pain at the idea of losing my temple’s sanctity this Tisha b’Av, and jealously guard and delight in its holiness. May all your efforts to do the same be, as my siddur says, לכַפֵּר בּוֹ כָּל־חַטֹּאתֵֽינוּ, not for the enactment of any transgression, but only for the cleansing of our own and others’ previous wrongdoing.