This Week In The World's Oldest Book Club: Your Belly is Goddess' House

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In this week’s Torah portion, Goddess and Moshah* are communing on top of Mount Sinai. Goddess is describing a portable sanctuary that She wants the people to build, a center for spiritual experience. It’s a pretty fantastical space: Acacia beams are held in place with silver sockets. Atop a wooden chest, two golden cherubs are locked in erotic embrace. The whole structure is covered in dolphin skins. And then, in the middle of all of the technical specifications for crafting this fantastical RV temple, Goddess says:

Asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’sochan

Make for Me a sanctuary and I will dwell within you. (Ex 25:28)

There’s a grammatical surprise in these words that delights the mystics. We’d expect the verse to say “Make for Me a sanctuary and I will dwell within IT,” but notice, instead, it reads “Make for Me a sanctuary and I will dwell within YOU.” ”

The mystics say that the turn of this verse, asserting that Goddess dwells within us, not within the elaborate gold and wood and leather structure of any sanctuary, synagogue, church, or mosque, is to let us know that we may build many sacred spaces—and those are important—but more than in any of those, the Divine dwells in the sanctuary of our individual mortal bodies. And not necessarily anchored in our radiant eyes or elegant fingers or sculpted muscles—the Sfas Emes, a 19th century chasidic master, says the Divine literally dwells within the dark and smelly hold of our intestines, within our kishkes.

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Now, maybe that’s an easy thing for some folks to hear, but for me, not so much.

Most of the time, I love and appreciate my body, but some of the time the violence I’ve survived can leave my body feeling like a site of danger, disgust, devastation. And as a nonbinary person, I’m sometimes frustrated by the gendered particularities of my body. Some days I’m in my female energy and I’m grateful for the ways my body expresses this, but most of the time I’m in my male energy and I long for surgery and testosterone to express that truth. I feel stuck in this complexity of my identity. It feels like I can’t win. All ways of the flesh fall short.

My partner Ben Ash (who is also nonbinary) says to me: The body is always a compromise. They say this with a lot of love. (Maybe Ben Ash is saying that Goddess dwells in the place of compromise, the place of imperfect good-enoughs?)

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I’m sitting at my desk in my dining room, writing to you. I pause for a moment. I put my palms on my belly. Join me?

Pause. Put your hands on your belly.

I take a deep breath into my belly and slowly exhale.

I give myself permission to feel the pain I have sometimes felt about my body. The feelings I’m sometimes ashamed of having felt. The feelings I tend to push away when they arise. Now, I welcome them into my belly that’s cradled by my hands.

Would you like to do the same? Are there physical or emotional or sexual wounds held by your body? Are there bodily limitations of health or ability or age that have been painful for you? Are there expectations of your body imposed by others or yourself that have chafed?

What comes up for you, when you welcome this in?

When all of that difficult jangled hurt is present for me, I tell myself, tell those difficult feelings:

V’shochanti bsochan

Goddess dwells within you

You, this imperfect, wounded body.

You, this body that contains multiplicity.

You, this frail and compromised flesh.

Goddess dwells within you.

You might say this to yourself, in your own words.

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We’re living through a time in which oligarchs, having seized our power, power that does not belong to them, are attacking so many of our bodies: Stripping women and folks with wombs of autonomy. Stripping folks with disabilities of their rights to equal access. Criminalizing trans bodies.

These oligarchs will pay for their crimes, in this world or the next.

Meanwhile, whatever happens next, we need to build sanctuaries for each other and for the world. And every step along the way, as we build these sanctuaries, let’s remind each other:

Goddess dwells within us.

Your human body is holy. So is mine.

Your human body is sacred. So is mine.

No oligarch poisoned by the sins of patriarchy, no matter how powerful, can alter that truth.

Goddess lives in each of our bellies.

May we build a world that reflects this truth back to us.

Ken teheye ritzona

May it be Her will

*I’m using the Toratah lens. Check out beittoratah.org for more.

Photo by Isabella Brasileiro de Menezes