nasso: priesthood for the people
sholem aleichem,
Hello friends! Welcome to the end of another week (the plan is to be weekly again for Bamidbar). I hope you had a revelatory Shavuos (if that's your jam). I spent mine walking through the woods and attending ShavuotLIVE. I met a bright orange lizard (hi if you are reading this!) and had a surprising encounter with myself.
I also recently attended the Trans Halakha Project's workshop "Forging our own Derekh". Highly recommend. Trans people are creating Judaism in the open now and we're going to change the world.
On that note, I want to talk about a piece of Judaism that I really want to bring back to life in my Jewish spaces.
So let's go do a medium-close reading of Bamidbar 6:1-?. Translation slightly modified. Untranslated words interpreted below.
HaShem spoke to Moses saying:
speak to the children of Israel and say to them:
any אִישׁ אוֹ־אִשָּׁה that יַפְלִא vows a nazir vow to dedicate themself to haShem
איש או אשה: both men and women can speak a nazir vow (much more on this later)
יפלא: the meaning of this word is uncertain, but it has connotations of something extraordinary, marvelous, wondrous. This vow is not an ordinary vow!
The Zohar explains: this means that the one who spoke the nazir vow "hurried in this world" to sanctify themself with the sanctity of haShem. This is not asceticism that restricts experiences to seek an otherworldly spiritual existence. The nazir vow is about hurrying after haShem in this world. Creating something marvelous in this world.
I think of this frequently in relation to sobriety. The purpose of sobriety is not (as some would argue) to abstain from a substance or to reach for a life similar to those who were never addicted to anything. The purpose of sobriety is to reach for haShem in this world. It is to create something extraordinary and marvelous and sacred. Something extraordinary and marvelous and sacred that could not be otherwise experienced in this world except by someone who is sober.
More on this later. Let's continue with our verse.
[the nazir] shall abstain from wine and any other intoxicant; they shall not drink vinegar of wine or of any other intoxicant, neither shall they drink anything in which grapes have been steeped, and לֹא יֹאכֵל grapes fresh or dried
לא יאכל: no eating of grapes! Just as the kohanim do not drink wine as part of their holy status (Vayikra 10:19), so too the nazir should not. But the nazir goes a step further and does not even eat grapes! The Zohar explains: לאתפרשא מן דינא בכלא. This is to separate themself from judgement entirely.
We need a little bit more text in the room to understand this.
Throughout the term of their vow as nazir, no razor shall touch their head; it shall remain consecrated until the completion of their term as nazirite of haShem, שְׂעַר רֹאשׁוֹ being left to grow untrimmed.
שער ראשו: the hair of their head. The nazir also lets their hair grow. The Zohar explains: the nazir refrains from grapes in order to separate from judgement, which is an asepct of the left side of the sefiros. The hair does not originate from the left side of the sefiros, and therefore must be allowed to grow (full disclosure: the zohar is quite terse in this passage.)
The Zohar continues: the nazir must separate entirely from the left side, all their actions belonging to the right. Once again we have a powerful indication that the nazir vow is not about restriction or discipline: these belong to the left side.
All this is not to say (g-d forbid!) that the nazir vow cuts one off from an aspect of haShem. As the Omer teaches, each sefirah contains within it aspects of every other sefirah. The nazir experiences the other sefiros by acting only through the sefiros of the right side. It is through separation from the left side that the nazir finds the left side within the right side, a unification only achieved by division. (Am I a mystic yet?)
The hair is also grown, quite pragmatically, as a visible signal of the nazir's dedication. As Rabbi Yehuda ben Rav said: from the nazir's hair it is known that they are mamash holy, as it is written "his locks are wavy".
Let's be real about all of this tho. Is there anything queerer than growing or cutting your hair as a religious experience?
Too real! Onward!
כל ימי that they [the nazir] have set apart for haShem, they shall not go in where there is a dead person.
כל ימי: all the days. The nazir vow is not necessarily permanent: the nazir has set apart certain days.
This is one of the aspects of the nazir vow that people often claim undermines any comparison to sobriety, but I think that says more about how people doing "dry january" want to separate themselves from "alcoholics" than it does about the actual experience of sobriety. Most sober people I know are sober in periods -- sometimes very long, sometimes very short. When we say "one day at a time" we really fucking mean it. After all, we don't speak the number of the next day in the Omer until that day arrives.
Okay, some more:
Even if their father or mother, or their brother or sister should die, לא יטמא להם, since hair set apart for their God is upon their head
לא יטמא להם: the Nazir will not become impure even when a close family member dies. This is another case where the nazir is similar too, but even more stringent than, a kohen.
This is priesthood for the people. Like many, I've always been deeply uncomfortable with the kohanim. An all male, hereditary class with special access to haShem? Please, spare my anarchofeminist heart. But the nazir vow undermines this, letting anyone (women included!) have access to an even higher level of kedusha. And women did indeed become neziros in Jewish history. (In fact, Jill Hammer argues that men are given authority over female relatives' oaths in Bamidbar 30 precisely to undermine this......but you just can't stop women from hastening after haShem.)
all the days of their nazir vow they are קדש to haShem
קדש: holy, separate, sanctified. I just wanted to point out that every instance of these words in translation comes from this root, which I generally have a hard time translating in a way that captures its real essence.
So that's our text for the week! I hope you don't mind that I presented it in a different format than usual. We'll probably be back to normal next week.
But anyway the thing is, I want queer judaism to bring the nazir vow back. Not in its particulars, but in its essential purpose. I want to live in a Jewish community where I can take a nazir vow and abstain from certain activities and grow my hair and have everyone understand what I'm trying to do. I already think of sobriety as a naziritic practice; I want others to agree.
Also, I need social pressure to grow my hair out again. I'm too lazy.
Most crucially, I want to write a teshuvah that allows for a queer neo-nazirite to get an undercut but only if the shaved side is the left side. Any takers?
Correspondence Corner
Its been a while! But I received some comments on last week's newsletter. I responded to most of them personally (please email, by the way, if you have comments. I won't share them publicly unless you ask. But we can chat!) I did want to include this note from friend-of-the-tree Noach:
Wendy Brown writes that instead of understanding our identities as wholly constituted through our suffering ("wounded attachments") we might instead align ourselves with those who want and need what we want and need. The result: a queer futurity always on the horizon, to bring in Jose Munoz.
ken y'hi ratzon
good shabbos queers,
ada