Reflections from Hannah Szabó

Reflections from Hannah Szabó
Whole in Body, Whole in Spirit

Thank you, Rabbi Buchdahl, and Shabbat Shalom all.

This is the first shabbat I’ve attended at Central, but stepping into this particular place, at this particular time, feels like a return.

It is a return to the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, which was the architectural model for Central. My Hungarian Jewish father attended university classes around the corner from Dohány, and today his mother, a Holocaust survivor, lives a short walk from the iconic Moorish sanctuary.

And it is a return to the first Shabbat of April when, three years ago this weekend, my maternal grandfather, Rabbi Everett Gendler, died at the age of ninety-three. In his final months, he and my grandmother Mary would tune into Central’s live-streamed services, and on his last night, he listened to the evening service from this very bima.

It feels so powerful to enter Shabbat by stepping at this time into this place that refracts both sides of my family’s history.

But now I want to bring you to another place and time. Imagine yourself tucked away in the hills of the Berkshires, at the Union for Reform Judaism’s Eisner Camp, on a summer Friday night 12 years ago.

All week long, the campgrounds bustled with energy as campers sprinted from archery to jewelry-making — but on Fridays, the grounds were deserted. Inside the cabins at the top of the hill, campers showered and cleaned with feverish intensity. As the sun began to set, a sea of kids clad in white descended from their cabins. Each side of camp — boys and girls —would then usher in the sabbath through kabbalat shabbat singing circles — boys on the basketball court, girls in the hockey pavilion.

I adored Eisner, and treasured the rhythm of living a communal life guided by ritual — living on “Jewish time,” as we called it. But camp was also the place where I experienced some of the hardest moments of my childhood. I was assigned male at birth, but I have always expressed myself in feminine ways. When playing Mario Kart with my cousins, I always chose to be the pink-dress-clad Princess Peach. In a self portrait I drew at age five, I wear an orange skirt, my hair in long, thick braids. These things made me feel like me. At my progressive elementary school and my supportive synagogue in Connecticut, I presented myself exactly as I wanted. And at camp, it was no different.

Except — it was. On those afternoons when campers got ready for shabbat, I would gaze at myself at the bathroom mirror, hairbrush in hand, with no one to plait my long hair into beautiful braids. Standing among the boys at kabbalat shabbat, I found myself preoccupied by this feeling that drew me away from the ritual.

It wasn’t just that I wanted to be with my friends on the girls' side. More than social isolation, I felt like I was isolated from myself. You might have heard trans people describe themselves through the language of feeling “trapped” or “born in the wrong body.” I want to try another way of articulating exactly how I felt in front of that mirror.

This week’s torah portion, Vayikra, details a set of instructions for animal sacrifices that could make a butcher faint — let alone a third-generation vegetarian like myself! One word jumps out from the carnage, repeated over and over throughout the portion: that sacrifices must be tamim. Tamim is typically translated here as “unblemished” or “whole.” But elsewhere in the Torah, the word refers to wholeness not in body but in soul, like when Noah is described as tzaddik tamim — “a wholehearted man.” And this same word, tamim, also means “integrity” or “truth,” as in the well-known Hebrew phrase urim ve tumim, “Light and Truth.”

These etymological connections between bodily form, oneness of spirit, and religious truth are no accident. Vayikra reminds us that wholeness in soul is intimately connected to wholeness in body, and that form must be complete for spirit to be true.

This encapsulates some of the complex feelings I encountered that summer at camp. I felt incomplete, un-whole. I felt un-truthful to myself in the sex I was born into, and in the direction I knew it would take me in as adolescence loomed. Being confronted with gender-segregated spaces and rituals at camp was an essential part of how I came to know myself as a trans person — yet I was afraid of sharing how I was feeling out loud, at the risk of losing camp. At this time, Eisner had no accommodations for someone like me. But I needed to live as my true self.

When I returned home from camp in 2013, I began the process of transitioning. That fall, after a series of conversations, my camp director, Louis Bordman, decided Eisner was ready to welcome their first transgender camper. I returned to camp the next summer as Hannah. From the moment I stepped into a cabin on the other side of camp, I felt welcomed — not just by every single bunkmate, but by each of their parents. That summer, I sported braids every shabbat.

In the years that followed, being trans became an almost incidental part of my life. When I graduated to a new school and started seventh grade, I was just another girl who spent her weekends at sleepovers baking cookies and watching rom-coms. In high school, I was a girl who led an improv group and grew to love computer programming; in college, I became a young woman who hosted a late-night radio show and co-organized an intergenerational Jewish Women’s Conference. Because of the supportive communities I existed within, I didn’t have to spend any of my energy fighting for acceptance.

My story is just one episode in a long history of the Reform Jewish movement leading the way — honoring tradition while broadening its scope to be ever more welcoming. When Eisner accepted me in the girls bunk in 2013, they were the first religious sleepaway camp in the country to allow a trans child to live in the bunk of their affirmed gender. Haaretz reported the news with the headline “Campfires, Marshmallows and Acceptance: How Summer Camp Brought a Transgender Revolution.”

But acceptance alone is not enough. I have been able to live as my true self not only because of the places I came into my identity but also the time. When I transitioned, I had access to comprehensive medical care that made it possible for me, my family and my doctors to make informed and difficult choices about my body, choices that allowed me to become whole, to become tamim. Had I been born a decade later, I realize I may not have had this choice. Total bans on hormone blockers — now a reality in some twenty states — force trans kids to live with the distressing, irreversible changes brought on by their biological sex. My life — and my body — would be unrecognizably different were this care denied to me until I was eighteen.

As more heart-sinking policies pass, I feel betrayed by people who know me personally, who have allowed themselves to be swept up by simplistic talking points. I feel like my identity has been involuntarily pushed into the center of the political fray, like my very existence has been made controversial. Sweeping attempts to single out and exclude trans people from public institutions will not cause us to disappear; but they will make us feared, hated and misunderstood.

This brings me back to Hungary. Five years ago, they passed a bill that prohibits any sort of legal recognition for trans Hungarians. My own status as a Hungarian citizen has been challenged, as a pair of conflicting principles prevent me from either renewing my original passport or acquiring a new one with the current information. Here, in America, since January 20, the federal government will only issue passports that record a citizen’s biological sex at birth. If I renewed my passport today, it would read male. It is staggering to think that my identity may no longer be protected or even recognized in either country of which I am a citizen.

These attacks against trans kids are not just political moves in a culture war — they are direct attacks against your neighbors, your cabinmates, your fellow congregants. I invite you to join in creating a future in which all trans kids can have the kind of childhood I was so fortunate to have, for a future in which all children have the opportunity to become tamim – whole in body and whole in spirit.

Shabbat shalom.