If ever there were a Jewish holiday custom-made to the specifications of a gender variant Jew, the Days of Awe would have to be it/them. The Days of Awe are the ten days bordered by Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. They are not a discrete event, rather, they are ten days of liminality – betweenness – within which we prepare ourselves for our closest encounter with the Infinite this side of death. Sounds like transition to me, nu? This holiday rings, shouts, nay, this celebration of liminality blasts forth, bleats, laments and exults with the shofar call of transformation. I hearby dub them instead the Days of AWESOME! Wake up! The shofar says, for:

This is the holiday that recognizes

Even the gender invariant

May be intentionally reconstructed

May have the benefit of masculine, feminine and

That which lies between and beyond

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Recognize who you are

Know what you have been this past year

Die

To your shortcomings

Then think yourself

From one image of G-d to another.

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Take a firm grip on the tree

Of your own life and

Hold on with your clutching fingertips

To the illusion you embody

A fruit of that tree, you

Hang over the depths

Of your own abyss

And work within

To bear the darkness

For the potential

The gestation

It offers

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Then let go

Fall and fly

And laugh for yichud*

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May your Days of Awe lead you toward peace with your Finites and with your Infinites. As a result of your Awesome Transformation, may you be Made of Awesome in the coming year.

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• yichud- unification, often used to refer to the unification of the male and female aspects of the Divine

Noach Dzmura is the editor of an anthology (due to be released in Summer 2009) about the encounter of transgender bodies and identities with Jewish ritual and social space. Since March of 2008 he has edited Jewish Mosaic’s Torah Queeries. A recent graduate of the Richard S Dinner Center for Jewish Studies of the Graduate Theological Union, Mr Dzmura is an independent researcher, an information- and instructional- design consultant, a teacher and a writer. Noach maintains a website for transgender Jews here and has been published in Sh’ma, the Jewish Chronicle (UK) and Zeek: A Journal of Jewish Thought and Culture. He has taught at recent events sponsored by Nehirim: A Spiritual Initiative for GLBT Jews. He is a founding member of a community initiative to identify and act to fulfill the needs of the transgender Jewish community in the Bay Area, co-sponsored with the Progressive Jewish Alliance, Jewish Mosaic, and the San Francisco Jewish Federation’s GLBT Alliance.

This is incredible. I always enjoy your posts. :)