It’s a cold Shabbat morning in December and I am standing vigil at the deathbed of Joseph.

I am not alone, but surrounded by members of the Taproot Community who have gathered for the week in Bolinas, California – Coast Miwok land, on the ocean, atop the Pacific Plate, on the other side of the world from Joseph’s Mitzrayim. We are bundled in jackets and blankets, each of us seared on one side by heat lamps like uneven toast. We sit on straw mats in a large, open tent and daven shacharit.

The Torah scroll is also down low, close to the Earth. We have a folding table – still folded – lying flat on a Persian rug. The tabletop is wrapped in fancy cloth and the Torah scroll relaxes gently upon it, draped by an oversized, ocean-blue tallit. Members of the cohort have been leading the morning prayer, and we are now approaching the Torah service and the close of the Book of Genesis.

My friend and teacher Rabbi Diane Elliot opens the Torah to offer the first aliyah. When we chanted this same parashah at the Taproot Gathering three years ago, she effected a tremendous tikkun by chanting Dinah back into the blessings Jacob offered his sons. This year, she is reading about the burial of Jacob in the Cave of Makhpelah. She shares a midrash that on that journey to Canaan with Jacob’s body, the caravan passed by the pit into which Joseph had, as a youth, been cast by his brothers. Rabbi Diane drashes about the necessity of returning to the places of our trauma in order for healing to happen. She chants and our hearts open to the pain we all carry. When she finishes, we breathe, and several members of the group offer some of the next reading, and some of the verses we offer communally, human-microphone style.

Then it is my turn to complete Joseph’s story.

If you know me or read my blog, you know that I have been in relationship with Joseph for years – wondering, puzzling, collecting the many hints in Torah that point to some queerness, some difference in Joseph’s gender. Oddities in the text that gravitate around Joseph’s looks, clothing, emotions, body, and social role. Turns of phrase that beg comparison between Joseph and various women of Torah. This has all been churning in my head for years, and a few weeks ago, to finally get some peace, I posted these ideas and insights as an article on my blog, called “Joseph’s Womb: Gender Complexity in the Story of Joseph.”

I have been in relationship with Joseph, I have thought and wondered and written and talked and taught. But I had never chanted any of it from Torah itself.

I approach the scroll and share some of the things I’ve observed about Joseph. I preview the reading I am about to do, foreshadowing the verse that tells us that the elderly Joseph’s great-grandchildren are born on his knees – a seeming reference to a birthing posture in which the laboring mother braces against the knees of another woman, presumably her senior in age or status. I explain how I see Joseph at the end of his life – no, at the end of their life – at last being fully at home in their gender, a gender that permits them to be in the birthing chamber with the women. This, just a chapter after the dying Jacob belatedly offers Joseph “the blessings of breast and womb.”

The Taproot members are the right group for this Torah. They are cultural healers and spiritual activists, queer or allies, most younger than me by at least a quarter century. Some of them identify and live as non-binary and use they/them pronouns in their daily life – a choice I too might have made if the option were available to me when I was younger. But I feel too old and creaky for that change now, no matter how well it would fit me. So I continue to wear my he/him pronouns like a frumpy, ill-fitting cardigan.

As I talk about Joseph, my eyes wander down to Joseph’s final words of Torah. Joseph offers a prophecy that God will one day remember the Children of Israel and bring them out of Egypt. When that happens, Joseph demands, v’ha’alitem et ‘atzmotai mizeh, “raise up my bones from here.”

I had never fully noticed that it doesn’t say, “carry my bones to the land of Canaan,” which would have limited its meaning to the geographic. Instead Joseph says, “raise up my bones,” without a specific destination identified.

The word for “bone,” etzem, has metaphoric meaning in Hebrew. It is not only a physical bone, but “essence,” “quality,” “substance,” or even “self.” Joseph’s command can be read as metaphorical: “lift up my selves.” Might Joseph be asking the Children of Israel – asking us – to raise up, to honor, to carry forward with us, their complex and multiple qualities. Their fullness. Their selves.

And that is what we are about to do, even if it has taken 4000 years and 7000 miles to make good on Joseph’s request. The group makes the Torah blessing. I chant the melodies I’d practiced – mahpach, pashta, katon. In my necktie and multi-colored Shabbat skirt, my pulse begins racing. I see how my whole life has led to this moment: my gender journey, my Jewish learning, my queer family, my wounds, my joys, my drag. All of it: preparation.

I reach the phrase about great-grandchildren being born on Joseph’s knees and I slap my own knees so that we are all together in that moment. When I reach the last verse, the verse in which Joseph dies, I invite the group to come closer, and they do. We are all on our knees, a tight circle surrounding the Torah as if at Joseph’s deathbed. We are Joseph’s family, the grandchildren birthed on Joseph’s knees. We stand vigil. I hold the Torah rollers and they are Joseph’s hands in mine.

My eyes are on the words of Torah. Then they are closed as blessing begins to pour out, that we might all be seen in our complexity. That all of our bones, our substance, our selves, should be lifted up. No part of us less worthy. Every bit of us tzelem Elohim – the image of the Divine. There is nothing else.

I feel my tears welling up. I hear weeping all around me – weeping at the death of Joseph, or weeping from grief at realizing that there are parts of ourselves that we had considered beneath blessing.

Silence falls. We sit, stunned, as one does after attending a death. One participant begins chanting a healing prayer, and we sing for Joseph’s healing and for our own. We have all been called to be here in this moment. To witness. To bless. To cry. To heal. Our prayers pour into Torah, back to Joseph. And we feel blessing pouring forward back to us.

We have raised up Joseph’s bones today, Joseph’s selves. We have raised them right out of the scroll and into our hearts and hands, right into the bright winter daylight of Bolinas. Chazak chazak v’nit’chazek, we say – the traditional words when completing a book of Torah. “Be strong, be strong, let us strengthen each other.” We dry our eyes, tuck some of Joseph’s sparkling and intricate selves into our pockets and our souls, and we look at each other again – aglow, open, knowing.

Click to Read "Joseph's Womb”

So much gratitude to the Taproot Gathering participants who held this container so fiercely: Adam, Ariel, Cara, David, Rabbi Diane, Emma, Hannah, Melissa, Noah, Oren, Rachel, Rachel, and Solace.